Hip Hop Hits Sung Wonderfully in Sign Language: Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” & More

in Language Lessons, Music | June 5th, 2015

The first time I went to see David Sedaris read some of his hilar­i­ous essays live, I end­ed up laugh­ing much more than I expect­ed. By luck of seat­ing, I found myself at the right of the stage, fac­ing his sign lan­guage inter­preter. She didn’t just quick­ly parse what he said. No, she also became a sort of dou­ble act with the author, throw­ing her whole body and facial expres­sions into mak­ing Sedaris’ prose sing. Espe­cial­ly when he came to some sex­u­al idiom or turn of phrase, we all became aware of the audience’s gaze shift­ing right­ward to see what his sign­er would do. (The won­drous Inter­net has not revealed her name–possibly one of our read­ers knows.)

That’s a pre­am­ble to say that the lat­est YouTube sen­sa­tion above, Shel­by Mitchus­son, who signs her way through Eminem’s “Lose Your­self,” should come as no sur­prise to those who have encoun­tered such live­ly inter­pre­ta­tion, turn­ing lan­guage for the deaf into a per­for­mance art. Mitchus­son admits she’s still a begin­ner, but her 3 mil­lion views says she has made fans of the deaf and hear­ing alike. (And for once the YouTube com­ments don’t make you sad for human­i­ty.)

But Mitchusson’s “hit” leads to a whole world of Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage (ASL) stars once you jump down the YouTube rab­bit hole. Just over a year ago, Jim­my Kim­mel had on three ASL inter­preters to com­pete in a rap bat­tle to Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yel­low” which you can see below.

One of them, the pink-haired Amber Gal­loway Gal­lego, had her own time in the viral video lime­light back in 2013. Her spir­it­ed ver­sions of Snoop Lion, Kendrick Lamar, and oth­ers dur­ing Lol­la­palooza earned her many Inter­net views, no doubt for her las­civ­i­ous per­for­mance of rap and r’n’b’s smut­ti­est lyrics. She even received cov­er­age in Rolling Stone, where the San Anto­nio, TX native tells sto­ries of sign­ing “Baby Got Back” at a bar­be­cue at the begin­ning of her career. Her YouTube chan­nel fea­tures her own ver­sions of all the cur­rent pop hits (Tay­lor Swift, Car­ly Rae Jepsen) and clas­sics (The Human League, Celine Dion).

The his­to­ry of sign lan­guage is long and deep, with a rough guess at 137 rec­og­nized ver­sions around the globe, accord­ing to Eth­no­logue. (But as deaf com­mu­ni­ties often devel­op their own dialects, it’s hard to tell.)

And the Inter­net, specif­i­cal­ly YouTube–along with the beat-heavy genre of hip hop–has brought a sub­cul­ture into the main­stream, some­thing that years of advo­ca­cy by deaf groups could­n’t quite man­age to do. Thanks again, Inter­net!

You can find some online ASL lessons here, or in our meta col­lec­tion of Free Lan­guage Lessons.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

Helen Keller & Annie Sul­li­van Appear Togeth­er in Mov­ing 1930 News­reel

Baba Brinkman: The Rap Guide to Evo­lu­tion

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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10 Million Years of Evolution Visualized in an Elegant, 5‑Foot Long Infographic from 1931

in Education, Science | June 4th, 2015

Click here to see the entire his­tom­ap in large, zoomable, for­mat.

The ear­ly decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry belonged to Cecil B. DeMille and his epic films both Bib­li­cal and clas­si­cal: The Ten Com­mand­ments, Cleopa­tra, Sam­son and Delilah. The grand scale of these pseu­do-his­to­ries required the most up-to-date cin­e­mat­ic inven­tion of the day, and the most impe­r­i­al vision, one lat­er decades looked upon rather cyn­i­cal­ly. But just as the epic has roared back with a vengeance—with tech­no­log­i­cal feats that make The Great­est Show on Earth look like com­mu­ni­ty theater—so anoth­er medi­um of ambi­tious scope once pop­u­lar between the wars has made a reap­pear­ance: the his­tor­i­cal info­graph­ic, or as it was called back then, the “histomap”—5‑foot long visu­al his­to­ries of a vari­ety of dis­ci­plines.

As with film, infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy has advanced to such a degree to make this ear­ly means of con­dens­ing huge amounts of data per­haps seem quaint. But if we imag­ine a world pre-inter­net, when the prospect of visu­al­iz­ing a sub­ject as com­plex as, say, evo­lu­tion, would be daunt­ing indeed, we might just find the his­tom­ap as impres­sive a means of con­vey­ing infor­ma­tion as its ear­ly read­ers did. These huge graphs of big ideas, writes Rebec­ca Onion at Slate, fit “with a trend in non­fic­tion book pub­lish­ing of the 1920s and 1930s: the ‘out­line,’ in which large sub­jects (the his­to­ry of the world! every school of phi­los­o­phy! All of mod­ern physics!) were dis­tilled into a form com­pre­hen­si­ble to the most une­d­u­cat­ed lay­man.”

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured that 1931 “His­to­ry of the World!” his­tom­ap, an impres­sive con­dens­ing of 4000 years of human activ­i­ty. The evo­lu­tion graph­ic you see here, also from 1931 and “arranged” by John B. Sparks, is equal­ly impres­sive, and speaks to the times in ways that DeMille’s Bible movies did as well. Bear in mind that the Scopes Mon­key Tri­al had only con­clud­ed six years ear­li­er, and the country—as it is again today—was hot­ly divid­ed over the sub­ject rep­re­sent­ed here. Nonethe­less, Sparks and pub­lish­er Rand McNal­ly game­ly pre­sent­ed this “Sto­ry of the Emer­gence and Pro­gres­sion of Life” with con­fi­dent pre­ci­sion and with­out apol­o­gy.

I couldn’t begin to tell you how the sci­ence here has aged, though some of it, I’d sus­pect, not par­tic­u­lar­ly well. In any case, the form of this ele­gant data map, with its grace­ful lines of descent flow­ing down the page like mag­ma, com­ple­ments its con­tent. Rather than pre­sent­ing the the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion as a for­gone con­clu­sion or belief, Sparks’ graph­ic lays out all of the evi­dence, and fits it togeth­er neat­ly and com­pre­hen­sive­ly. Some mod­ern evo­lu­tion info­graph­ics sur­pass the visu­al appeal, but not the lev­el of sci­en­tif­ic detail shown here. Oth­ers reduce the sci­ence, and the design, to the lev­el of over­sim­pli­fied ide­ol­o­gy. And though we may have enough his­tor­i­cal dis­tance to make info­graph­ic­ss of hun­dreds of years of evo­lu­tion­ary thought, it may seem that the tech­nol­o­gy of the evo­lu­tion info­graph­ic may not have advanced as much as we might expect.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4000 Years of His­to­ry Dis­played in a 5‑Foot-Long “His­tom­ap” (Ear­ly Info­graph­ic) From 1931

6,000 Years of His­to­ry Visu­al­ized in a 23-Foot-Long Time­line of World His­to­ry, Cre­at­ed in 1871

Watch 570 Mil­lion Years of Evo­lu­tion on Earth in 60 Sec­onds

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Art of The Black Panthers: A Short Documentary on the Revolutionary Artist Emory Douglas

in Art, History | June 4th, 2015

Known as the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Artist by his fel­low Black Pan­thers and offi­cial­ly titled their Min­is­ter of Cul­ture, Emory Dou­glas pro­vid­ed the strik­ing visu­als and designed the lay­out to the news­pa­per that bore the organization’s name when it pre­miered in 1967. In this short but insight­ful doc­u­men­tary by the out­fit known as Dress Code, Dou­glas looks back at his time with Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P. New­ton and the oth­er Pan­thers dur­ing that most tumul­tuous decade and a half.

Dou­glas reminds us that San Fran­cis­co was seg­re­gat­ed just as much as the South dur­ing the ear­li­er part of the 20th cen­tu­ry and that police bru­tal­i­ty was, well, just like today, but with­out cell phone cam­eras. Iron­i­cal­ly, it was because Dou­glas went to juve­nile deten­tion (he first got arrest­ed at 13 years old) that he learned screen­print­ing in the print shop there, prim­ing him to help Cleaver start up the The Black Pan­ther news­pa­per in his apart­ment.

Dou­glas’ graph­ic design style was born from necessity–thick black lines did not let col­or seep out as much in the print­ing, and talk­ing about col­or, he could only afford one or two. Pro­fes­sor Colette Gaiter called Dou­glas the “Nor­man Rock­well of the ghet­to,” afford­ing the poor and oppressed a nor­mal­cy in its depic­tions usu­al­ly giv­en to the mid­dle class. And although pigs had sym­bol­ized pow­er, greed and cor­rup­tion long before Dou­glas was born, it was his depic­tion of cops and oth­er author­i­ty fig­ures as anthro­po­mor­phic swine that has stuck with us to this day.

At its height, The Black Pan­ther news­pa­per had a week­ly cir­cu­la­tion of 400,000, but in the ear­ly ‘80s, Dou­glas stepped down as design­er. He has nev­er stopped work­ing for social jus­tice and by the 2000s, his huge body of work began to tour gal­leries and muse­ums, admired for its tech­nique and beau­ty, along with its mes­sage.

A cri­tique of Dress Code’s doc­u­men­tary is that it only affords us sliv­ers of Dou­glas’ art–zoomed in and ani­mat­ed.

This oth­er doc from a 2008 stu­dio vis­it pro­vides a bit more con­text, and for those who would like to see the art along­side the essays, calls to action, and col­lages in the orig­i­nal issues, there are plen­ty of them scanned online for you to read.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kick­start the The­atri­cal Release of the First Com­pre­hen­sive Black Pan­ther Par­ty Doc­u­men­tary

Mal­colm X, Debat­ing at Oxford, Quotes Shakespeare’s Ham­let (1964)

Wattstax Doc­u­ments the “Black Wood­stock” Con­cert Held 7 Years After the Watts Riots (1973)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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New Jorge Luis Borges-Inspired Project Will Test Whether Robots Can Appreciate Poetry

in Poetry, Technology | June 4th, 2015

Jorge Luis Borges, as any read­er of his sto­ries knows, had a lot of ideas. Some of his ideas must have seemed pret­ty fan­tas­ti­cal when he wrote sto­ries around them from the 1920s to the 1950s. But their myth­ic qual­i­ties have made them endure, and now Borges’ imag­i­na­tive, tech­nol­o­gy-rich 21st-cen­tu­ry fans have start­ed to put their philo­soph­i­cal spec­u­la­tions into prac­tice: you may remem­ber, for instance, the online Library of Babel, ulti­mate­ly to con­tain every pos­si­ble 410-page book, which we fea­tured in April.

borges robot poetry

Borges also came up with intrigu­ing and then-untestable notions about, in the words of Vice’s Daniel Ober­haus, “the impor­tance of metaphor and its lim­it­less pos­si­bil­i­ties in lan­guage. Borges the­o­rized [lis­ten above] that despite these bound­less pos­si­bil­i­ties for poet­ic lan­guage, there were nev­er­the­less dis­tinct pat­terns of metaphors that kept crop­ping up — a favorite exam­ple of his being the metaphor­i­cal equiv­a­lence of ‘stars’ and ‘eyes.’ ” Now a site called Poet­ry for Robots, a joint effort between Neo­log­ic, Web­vi­sions, and The Cen­ter for Sci­ence and the Imag­i­na­tion at Ari­zona State Uni­ver­si­ty, “seeks to put Borges’ the­o­ry to the test, ask­ing on their web­site whether it is pos­si­ble to teach machines the poet­ic qual­i­ty of human lan­guage.”

Poetry Robot

“What if we used poet­ry and metaphor as meta­da­ta?” asks Poet­ry for Robots’ front page. “Would a search for ‘eyes’ return images of stars?” To find out, the site has begun crowd­sourc­ing poet­ry from its users, who they’ve asked to sub­mit pieces of verse (150 char­ac­ters or few­er) prompt­ed by a series of images post­ed there: you can write your poet­ry in response to the open ocean, an urban land­scape, a cap­puc­ci­no, paths diverg­ing in a wood, or 117 oth­er actu­al images meant to draw out tex­tu­al imagery.

Then comes the test: can com­put­ers learn to make the same poet­ic asso­ci­a­tions humans do between word and image, image and word? If the Bor­ge­sian vision of metaphors exist­ing in pat­terns holds true, then they will — com­put­ers per­form few tasks bet­ter than pat­tern recog­ni­tion, after all. This could lead not just to, say, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence that can com­pose and even appre­ci­ate poet­ry, but poet­ic-lan­guage search engines —  a deeply artis­tic exten­sion of the seem­ing­ly frus­trat­ed nat­ur­al-lan­guage search engine efforts pio­neered by the likes of Ask Jeeves.

And if none of that works out, we’ll still have wit­nessed a fas­ci­nat­ing thought exper­i­ment, just like Borges’ sto­ries them­selves. The writer’s orig­i­nal thoughts on the sub­ject will cer­tain­ly remain com­pelling, and you can hear them in his 1967–8 Har­vard lec­tures on poet­ry (from where the clip above came) that we first fea­tured here a few years back. Who knows — they might even give lit­er­a­ture-inclined com­put­er sci­ence stu­dents, or com­put­er sci­ence-inclined lit­er­a­ture stu­dents, the idea for their next big project.

via Vice

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Nor­ton Lec­tures On Poet­ry (And Every­thing Else Lit­er­ary)

Vis­it The Online Library of Babel: New Web Site Turns Borges’ “Library of Babel” Into a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Per­son­al Library

“Borges: Pro­file of a Writer” Presents the Life and Writ­ings of Argentina’s Favorite Son, Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Nor­ton Lec­tures On Poet­ry (And Every­thing Else Lit­er­ary)

Jorge Luis Borges’ Favorite Short Sto­ries (Read 7 Free Online)

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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My First Time: Paris Review Video Series Features Writers Talking About Getting Started as Writers

in Creativity, Literature | June 4th, 2015

Do you spend your days sweat­ing blood over a lap­top, work­ing on a nov­el or poem or screen­play that always seems to fall short of the bril­liant ver­sion that is in your head? Are you ter­ri­fied that if you don’t squeeze out a first nov­el that will instant­ly make you the toast of the New York lit­er­ary estab­lish­ment you will be an abject fail­ure? Do you feel com­pelled to work on a book but are still plagued with the slow cor­ro­sive drip of doubt? Well, take heart. Every­one feels like that when he or she starts out.

The Paris Review, one of the most impor­tant lit­er­ary mag­a­zines around, made its name with long, in-depth inter­views with lit­er­ary fig­ures. Now they are launch­ing a video series called “My First Time,” where they inter­view authors, car­toon­ists and play­wrights about the begin­ning of their careers.

“This is a chance to see how suc­cess­ful authors got their start, in their own words,” as the Paris Review’s Dan Piepen­bring writes. “It’s a por­trait of the artist as a begin­ner and a look at the cre­ative process, in all its joy, abjec­tion, delu­sion, and eupho­ria.”

It’s strange­ly com­fort­ing to watch these peo­ple talk about strug­gling with all the psy­cho­log­i­cal crap that con­fronts any­one who has the audac­i­ty to try to cre­ate. They suc­ceed­ed. Maybe you can too.

Above is the trail­er for the series and low­er down are inter­views with author J. Robert Lennon, car­toon­ist Gabrielle Bell and play­wright Bran­den Jacobs-Jenk­ins.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Paris Review Inter­views Now Online

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

H.P. Love­craft High­lights the 20 “Types of Mis­takes” Young Writ­ers Make

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

 

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The Staggering Human Cost of World War II Visualized in a Creative, New Animated Documentary

in Animation, History | June 3rd, 2015

“More peo­ple died in World War II than any oth­er war in his­to­ry,” explains Neil Hal­lo­ran in The Fall­en of World War II. In his 15-minute film, Hal­lo­ran uses inno­v­a­tive data visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques to put the human cost of WW II into per­spec­tive, show­ing how some 70 mil­lion lives were lost with­in civil­ian and mil­i­tary pop­u­la­tions across Europe and Asia, from 1939 to 1945. As one com­menter put it, “One mil­lion, six mil­lion, sev­en­ty mil­lion. Spo­ken or writ­ten, these num­bers become … incom­pre­hen­si­ble. Pre­sent­ed graph­i­cal­ly, they hit clos­er to the heart. As the Sovi­et loss­es climbed, I thought my brows­er had become frozen. Sure­ly the top of the col­umn must have been reached by now, I thought.” He’s refer­ring to the stag­ger­ing num­ber of Sovi­ets who died fight­ing the Nazis. If you fast for­ward to the 6‑minute mark above, you can see what he means.

The video comes accom­pa­nied by an inter­ac­tive web­site, where users can “pause dur­ing key moments to inter­act with the charts and dig deep­er into the num­bers.” To use this inter­ac­tive web­site, you will need a fair­ly new com­put­er and a mod­ern brows­er.

You can con­tribute mon­ey and sup­port the ongo­ing Fall­en of World War II project here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es

Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945

31 Rolls of Film Tak­en by a World War II Sol­dier Get Dis­cov­ered & Devel­oped Before Your Eyes

Dra­mat­ic Col­or Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

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Watch 1920s “City Symphonies” Starring the Great Cities of the World: From New York to Berlin to São Paulo

in Film | June 3rd, 2015

Cities as we know them came into being when they indus­tri­al­ized in the 19th cen­tu­ry. Film as we know it came into being when its own indus­try devel­oped in the 20th. And so film came into its own in an era when cities around the world had become the most fas­ci­nat­ing places going. It makes sense, then, that ear­ly motion pic­tures — even the very ear­li­est, in the form of the Lumière broth­ers’ shots of the streets of 1980s Lyon — often took cities as their sub­jects.

“The 1920s were a key decade in the devel­op­ment of cities,” writes urban car­tog­ra­ph­er and explor­er Eric Bright­well. Not only did that era see the begin­ning of the preser­va­tion move­ment, “built around the notion that archi­tec­ture and his­to­ry were some­times as worth pre­serv­ing as wilder­ness and nature,” but “the 1920 cen­sus revealed that for the first time more Amer­i­cans lived in cities than the coun­try. Le Cor­busier began writ­ing his series, ‘1925 Expo: Arts Déco,’ and Art Deco soon became one of the archi­tec­tur­al styles most close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with high-ris­es.”

Bright­well adds that “the 1920s also gave rise to the city sym­pho­ny.” They’ve been loose­ly defined “as a poet­ic, exper­i­men­tal doc­u­men­tary that presents a por­trait of dai­ly life with­in a city while attempt­ing to cap­ture some­thing of the city’s spir­it.”

Some impor­tant exam­ples with­in the genre include films such as Paul Strand and Charles Sheel­er’s short Man­hat­ta (1921), Alber­to Cav­al­can­ti’s Rien que les heures (1926) on Paris, Wal­ter Ruttman­n’s Berlin: Die Sin­fonie der Großs­tadt (1927), André Sauvage’s Études sur Paris (1928), Dzi­ga Ver­tov’s Man With a Movie Cam­era (1929), Adal­ber­to Keme­ny and Rudolf Rex Lustig’s São Paulo, Sin­fo­nia da Metró­pole (1929), and Alexan­der Ham­mid’s Bezúčel­ná procház­ka (1930). (Even fic­tion films of the era took notice of the new urban con­di­tion in a big way; see, to name one obvi­ous exam­ple, Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis.)

These films, each of a slight­ly dif­fer­ent and some­times more than slight­ly exper­i­men­tal form, do indeed cap­ture the sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty that only a city can give off. Alas, the next eighty years of the 20th century—a time when even some of the great­est metrop­o­lis­es would suf­fer pop­u­la­tion exo­dus, free­way-build­ing, and “urban renew­al” in all its forms—wouldn’t treat cities very well. But they’ve now made a come­back, sig­naled by the much-dis­cussed fact that, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, more human beings every­where live in cities than not. Maybe this new era of cities will bring about a new era of city sym­phonies. If so, its film­mak­ers will cer­tain­ly have a rich tra­di­tion to work with.


Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Dzi­ga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Cam­era, the 8th Best Film Ever Made

Paris Through Pen­tax: Short Film Lets You See a Great City Through a Dif­fer­ent Lens

A Drone’s Eye View of Los Ange­les, New York, Lon­don, Bangkok & Mex­i­co City

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Lon­don Mashed Up: Footage of the City from 1924 Lay­ered Onto Footage from 2013

Dra­mat­ic Col­or Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Animated Franz Kafka Rock Opera

in Literature, Music, Random | June 3rd, 2015

“The Franz Kaf­ka Rock Opera” comes from Sea­son 1 of a 1999 video series called Home Movies. In this episode, we find the char­ac­ter Dwayne writ­ing a rock opera based on Kafka’s famous novel­la The Meta­mor­pho­sis. It’s not Tom­my or Quadrophe­nia — two of the great­est rock operas ever made. But it does, true to form, fea­ture lyrics and song. You can watch a seg­ment of the rock opera above.

· Kaf­ka Song #1: Intro­duc­tion
He is Franz Kaf­ka!
Franz Kaf­ka!
Be care­ful if you get him pissed…
Franz! Franz Kaf­ka!
He’ll smite you with metaphor fists!
Writ­ing all he can, he’s just a man
A war­rior of words tak­ing a stand
He is Franz Kaf­ka!
Spo­ken: Oh look, but there he is, what will he say?
I’m a lone­ly German…a lone­ly Ger­man from Prague!
Kaf­ka! Kaf­ka! Kaf­ka!

· Kaf­ka Song #2: Turn­ing into a bug
I don’t know what’s wrong with me I think I’m turn­ing into a bug
I see dou­ble what I see I think I’m turn­ing into a bug
I ain’t got no self-esteem I think I’m turn­ing into a bug
Bet you fifty dol­lars I’m a man, I’m a schol­ar and I’m turn­ing into a bug
Mom­ma like a dad­dy like a baby like a baby like I’ll turn into a bug
Yeah! Yeah!
He is Franz Kaf­ka!

· Kaf­ka Song #3: Liv­ing like a bug ain’t easy
Liv­ing like a bug ain’t easy
My old clothes don’t seem to fit me
I got lit­tle tiny bug feet
I don’t real­ly know what bugs eat
Don’t want no one step­ping on me
Now I’m sym­pa­thiz­ing with fleas
Liv­ing like a bug ain’t easy…

· Kaf­ka Song #4: End­ing
Spo­ken: Wel­come to heav­en Franz! My name is God! I think you’re going to like it here!
He is Franz Kaf­ka!

· Louis, Louis End Rap
Well, I’m, cur­ing dis­ease
Help­ing blind peo­ple read
Don’t drink that milk with­out talk­ing to me (Oh yeah!)
I’m sav­ing those who can’t see with their eyes
Don’t mess with me you’ll get pas­teur­ized!
Yeah! Come on! Come on! Louis Louis in the house! Break it down!
(Jason does a human beat­box)

· Kaf­ka End Song
Right now he can
He’s just a man
A war­rior of words
Tak­ing a stand
He grew up very poor
He’s steel, it’s to the core
Born in 1883 died in 1924
He is Franz Kaf­ka!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Four Franz Kaf­ka Ani­ma­tions: Enjoy Cre­ative Ani­mat­ed Shorts from Poland, Japan, Rus­sia & Cana­da

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Let­ters

Vladimir Nabokov Makes Edi­to­r­i­al Tweaks to Franz Kafka’s Novel­la The Meta­mor­pho­sis

The Art of Franz Kaf­ka: Draw­ings from 1907–1917

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13-Year-Old Jimmy Page Plays Guitar on TV in 1957, an Early Moment in His Spectacular Career

in Music | June 3rd, 2015

These days, most of our pop stars seem to come pre-print­ed from child-star fac­to­ries, their looks and sound care­ful­ly craft­ed for max­i­mum appeal. But every gen­er­a­tion has its child stars, espe­cial­ly since the advent of radio and tele­vi­sion, and many greats of the past got their start as kids, even if they made their way in a more indi­vid­u­al­ized fash­ion. Elvis made his first pub­lic appear­ance onstage at a state fair at ten years of age, fol­lowed by a local radio appear­ance when he was twelve. Ste­vie Won­der made his pub­lic debut on TV at age twelve, show­ing off his har­mon­i­ca skills at the Apol­lo the­ater and on the Ed Sul­li­van Show. And Jim­my Page—he of Yard­birds and Led Zep­pelin fame—first caught the public’s eye as the thir­teen-year old mem­ber of a skif­fle band on the BBC’s All Your Own in 1957. See the shy, fresh-faced young “James Page” above.

Page dis­cuss­es with the show’s host Huw Whel­don not just his musi­cal ambi­tions, but his aca­d­e­m­ic ones, specif­i­cal­ly his inter­est in find­ing a cure for can­cer, “if it isn’t cov­ered by then.” Page stuck with his bio­log­i­cal research, for a while, then went to art school for two years. But through it all there was the gui­tar, his true pas­sion and life’s work. By 1963, Page was work­ing full time as a ses­sion gui­tarist and seemed eager to dis­cuss his new career in the recent­ly re-dis­cov­ered tele­vi­sion inter­view above. It was at this point, as he recount­ed to jour­nal­ist Steven Rosen in 1977, that he reached a “cross­roads,” as he called it: “is it an art career or is it going to be music?”

Page obvi­ous­ly sort­ed out it out quick­ly. He may not have cured can­cer, but he did re-invent rock and roll. Last year saw the pub­li­ca­tion of Jim­my Page by Jim­my Page, a 512-page auto­bi­og­ra­phy in pho­tographs, each one cho­sen by Page him­self. His ear­ly teenage skif­fle and ses­sion years are cov­ered, all the way through his 2012 recep­tion at the White House, and every­thing in-between. In Novem­ber of 2014, Page sat down with super­star pop artist Jeff Koons at New York’s 92nd Street Y to dis­cuss the book and his life­long love of the gui­tar, includ­ing that “very embar­rass­ing” 1957 TV appear­ance. “When you’ve had a whole life­time full of music,” Page says, “there are cer­tain things that sort of come up and haunt you, and that is one of them… but it’s got a charm about it.” Indeed it does, and there are cer­tain­ly worse things that could haunt an artist of Page’s stature. See Page and Koons’ full con­ver­sa­tion above, and watch Page dis­cuss his “auto­bi­og­ra­phy with pho­tographs” below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jim­my Page Tells the Sto­ry of “Stair­way to Heav­en”: How the Most Played Rock Song Came To Be

Jim­my Page Gives Com­mence­ment Address at Berklee; Stu­dents Per­form Led Zep Clas­sics for Him

Jim­my Page and Robert Plant Reunite in Exot­ic Mar­rakesh, 1994

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Gustav Machatý’s Erotikon (1929) & Ekstase (1933): Cinema’s Earliest Explorations of Women’s Sensuality

in Film | June 3rd, 2015

Czech cin­e­ma gained inter­na­tion­al acclaim in the 1960s with films like Close­ly Watched Trains (1966) and The Fireman’s Ball (1967) – movies that con­flat­ed the polit­i­cal with the sex­u­al in ways that were as inno­v­a­tive as they were sub­ver­sive. Much of the fuel of this New Wave of Czech film was the utter absur­di­ty of the Com­mu­nist rule and the hor­rors inflict­ed by the Nazis. Yet beneath that, there’s some­thing with­in Czech cul­ture that seems nat­u­ral­ly skep­ti­cal of author­i­ty. Franz Kaf­ka was a native of Prague, after all. And one of the most beloved books in the Czech lan­guage is Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Sol­dier Šve­jk (1923), a fre­quent­ly hilar­i­ous satire on the idio­cy of war.

The works of Czech film­mak­er Gus­tav Machatý weren’t overt­ly polit­i­cal yet they were still very sub­ver­sive. At a time when the bat­tles for uni­ver­sal suf­frage was still a recent mem­o­ry, Machatý had the audac­i­ty to show women as sex­u­al­ly autonomous beings.

Born in Prague in 1901, Machatý went to Hol­ly­wood at a young age and report­ed­ly appren­ticed under D. W. Grif­fith and Erich von Stro­heim. When he returned to his home coun­try, he start­ed mak­ing movies.

Machatý’s third fea­ture and final silent movie was Erotikon (1929), a sto­ry about a coun­try girl seduced by an upper-class cad only to get preg­nant and ostra­cized by her vil­lage. The film recalls F.W. Mur­nau in his empha­sis on faces and his expres­sion­is­tic use of the cam­era. This is per­haps most clear­ly seen in the scene above where the girl sur­ren­ders to her slick para­mour and dis­cov­ers sex­u­al bliss. The cam­era spins around as she writhes on the bed. Show­ing female sex­u­al­i­ty frankly was dar­ing at that time. Women in movies by D. W. Grif­fith and Char­lie Chap­lin were chaste and pure. They received male appetites, per­haps, but were not sub­ject to ani­mal­is­tic urges them­selves.

Four years lat­er, Machatý went even fur­ther with his movie Ekstase (1933). Ear­ly in the movie, we see the lumi­nous­ly beau­ti­ful Hedy Lamarr skin­ny-dip­ping in a pond. When her horse runs off with her clothes, she run naked over hill and dale to catch it. A bit lat­er in the movie, in a scene that recalls Erotikon, she has an earth-shat­ter­ing orgasm thanks to the strap­ping young work­er who finds her horse. Ekstase might not be the first non-porno­graph­ic film to have nude scenes but it was cer­tain­ly one of the first. And it was def­i­nite­ly the first film to clear­ly show a female orgasm.

The movie was an inter­na­tion­al sen­sa­tion. It received raves at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val only to be denied a prize because the Vat­i­can object­ed. Worse, it couldn’t get a prop­er release in the US. First Ekstase was seized by U.S. Cus­toms as pornog­ra­phy. Then, when it final­ly cleared that hur­dle, the movie ran afoul of Hollywood’s self-cen­sor­ing Hays Code. Ekstase only man­aged to screen in a hand­ful of inde­pen­dent the­aters in 1940, sev­en years after it first came out.

Nonethe­less, the noto­ri­ety of the movie turned Hedy Lamarr into a star and soon she was star­ring oppo­site Hol­ly­wood icons like Jim­my Stew­art and Clark Gable. (And just in case you thought that Lamarr was just a pret­ty face, she also co-invent­ed and patent­ed tech­nol­o­gy dur­ing WWII that laid the ground­work for things like Wi-Fi.)

Machatý had less suc­cess. As the threat of Nazism loomed, he fled back to Hol­ly­wood and end­ed up being an uncred­it­ed direc­tor for such stu­dio films as The Good Earth and Madame X. He spent the last part of his life teach­ing film at the Munich Film School before dying in 1963.

You can watch the entire­ty of Erotikon below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fritz Lang’s M: Watch the Restored Ver­sion of the Clas­sic 1931 Film

Kafka’s Famous Char­ac­ter Gre­gor Sam­sa Meets Dr. Seuss in a Great Radio Play

Broke­back Before Broke­back: The First Same-Sex Kiss in Cin­e­ma (1927)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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David Bowie Launches His Acting Career in the Avant-Garde Play Pierrot in Turquoise (1967)

in Music, Theatre | June 2nd, 2015

We’ve post­ed plen­ty here from David Bowie the singer, which stands to rea­son, giv­en his promi­nence in the set of all pos­si­ble David Bowies. But rock-and-rol­l’s best-known shapeshifter has worked in oth­er fields as well: a huge num­ber of peo­ple love Bowie the singer, of course, but Bowie the actor has also accrued devot­ed fans of his own. Many con­tin­ue to dis­cov­er him through such “cult clas­sic” films as Nico­las Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth and Nag­isa Oshi­ma’s Mer­ry Christ­mas, Mr. Lawrence. Here, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured his turns along­side Ricky Ger­vais and as Bertolt Brecht’s Baal. Plen­ty of suc­cess­ful musi­cians start up high-pro­file side careers as actors, but Bowie the actor got his break before Bowie the singer did.

“With hind­sight, you can see where his career was going,” writes Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Paul Gal­lagher, “but by 1967, the teenager’s first record­ing career had come to a halt after the release of his odd­ment Laugh­ing Gnome after which, Bowie didn’t release a record for anoth­er two years.” Hav­ing stud­ied under Lind­say Kemp, Bowie placed him­self well to appear in the famed Eng­lish mime’s 1967 pro­duc­tion of Pier­rot in Turquoise or, The Look­ing Glass Mur­ders. Bowie did­n’t just act in it, but also wrote and per­formed its music. You can watch sev­er­al clips of a 1969 pro­duc­tion of the show cap­tured by Scot­tish tele­vi­sion, includ­ing the songs “Columbine,” “The Mir­ror,” and “Three­pen­ny Pier­rot.” (This Youtube playlist rounds up all the Bowie music from the show avail­able.)

As much work as the young Bowie took on for Pier­rot in Turquoise, he did­n’t star in it. The title role of the Com­me­dia del­l’Arte’s beloved sad clown went to Kemp him­self, though in 1976, Bowie declared him­self as play­ing it in his career as a whole, through all his var­i­ous per­son­ae: “I’m Pier­rot. I’m Every­man. What I’m doing is the­atre, and only the­atre. What you see on stage isn’t sin­is­ter. It’s pure clown. I’m using myself as a can­vas and try­ing to paint the truth of our time.” So we per­haps can’t speak of “Bowie the singer” and “Bowie the actor” after all — if they were insep­a­ra­ble back then, sure­ly they’ve always been. And if Zig­gy Star­dust (in whose con­certs Kemp per­formed) does­n’t count as the­atre, what does?

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ricky Ger­vais Cre­ates Out­landish Com­e­dy with David Bowie

David Bowie Stars in a Clas­sic Per­for­mance of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal (1982)

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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