F for Fake: Orson Welles’ Short Film & Trailer That Was Never Released in America

in Film | December 19th, 2014

Ask Orson Welles enthu­si­asts to name the film­mak­er’s mas­ter­piece, and most will, of course, name Cit­i­zen Kane. While Welles’ very first fea­ture film may lay cred­i­ble claim to the title of not just the finest in his oeu­vre but the finest film ever made, a grow­ing minor­i­ty of dis­senters have, in recent years, plumped for his last: 1974’s F for Fake. Too truth­ful to call a fic­tion film and too filled with lies to call a doc­u­men­tary, it brings togeth­er such seem­ing­ly dis­parate themes as author­ship, authen­tic­i­ty, art forgery, archi­tec­ture, and girl-watch­ing into what Welles him­self thought of as “a new kind of film,” but which cinephiles might now con­sid­er an “essay film,” a form exem­pli­fied by the works of, to name a well-known pro­po­nent, La jetee and Sans soleil direc­tor Chris Mark­er.

Alas, Welles revealed F for Fake in 1974 to an unready world: audi­ences did­n’t quite under­stand it, and what dis­trib­u­tors showed inter­est in buy­ing it did­n’t quite offer enough mon­ey. The fea­ture final­ly came out in Amer­i­ca in 1976, and for the occa­sion Welles put togeth­er the nine-minute “trail­er,” nev­er actu­al­ly screened in a the­ater, at the top of the post, a short essay film in and of itself pos­sessed of a sim­i­lar style to but con­sist­ing of no footage from the full-length F for Fake. As with the pic­ture to which it osten­si­bly offers a pre­view, Welles made it in col­lab­o­ra­tion with B‑movie cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Gary Graver and his girl­friend Oja Kodar — the one you see pos­ing with the tiger — hop­ing to tan­ta­lize with a sug­ges­tion of the dance of truth and fal­si­ty the film does around such sto­ried fig­ures as Pablo Picas­so, Howard Hugh­es, and infa­mous art forg­er Elmyr de Hory.

In the clip after that, you can hear film­mak­er (and some­thing of a Boswell for Welles) Peter Bog­danovich briefly dis­cuss the ori­gin of F for Fake as well as the film’s sheer unusu­al­ness. “My favorite moment is when he talks about Chartres, this extra­or­di­nary cathe­dral of Chartres which nobody knows who designed, how its author­ship is anony­mous and he con­nects that to the whole idea of author­ship and fak­ery.” That sequence from the full movie appears just above; just below, have anoth­er taste in the form of one of its pas­sages on Picas­so, fea­tur­ing Kojar as the artist’s osten­si­ble for­mer mis­tress. Seem strange? Take Bog­danovich’s words to heart: “If you get on the film’s wave­length and lis­ten to what he’s say­ing and what what he’s doing, it’s riv­et­ing. It takes you along through the rhythm of the cut­ting, and of Orson­’s per­son­al­i­ty. If you fight it, and you expect it to be a lin­ear kind of thing, then you’re not going to enjoy it.”

You can find more short films by Orson Welles in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Eight Inter­views of Orson Welles by Film­mak­er Peter Bog­danovich (1969–1972)

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

Dis­cov­er the Lost Films of Orson Welles

Orson Welles Tells Some Damn Good Sto­ries in the Orson Welles’ Sketch Book (1955)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How William S. Burroughs Used the Cut-Up Technique to Shut Down London’s First Espresso Bar (1972)

in Creativity, Film, Literature | December 19th, 2014

As we’ve not­ed before, the Eng­lish cof­fee­house has served as a stag­ing ground for rad­i­cal, some­times rev­o­lu­tion­ary social change. Cer­tain­ly this was the case dur­ing the Enlight­en­ment, as it was with the salons in France. And yet, by the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry it seems, cof­fee shops in Lon­don had grown scarcer and more hum­drum. That is until 1953 when the Moka Bar, the UK’s first Ital­ian espres­so bar, opened in Soho. On his blog The Great Wen, Peter Watts describes its arrival as “a momen­tous event”:

London’s first prop­er cof­fee shop—one equipped with a Gag­gia cof­fee machine—opened at 29 Frith Street. This was a place where teenagers too young for pubs could come and gath­er, and it is said by some that the intro­duc­tion of this cof­fee bar prompt­ed the youth cul­ture explo­sion that soon changed social life in Britain for­ev­er.

“By 1972,” Watts writes, “cof­fee bars were every­where and the teenage rev­o­lu­tion was firm­ly estab­lished.” Places like the Moka Bar might seem like the ide­al place for coun­ter­cul­tur­al maven William S. Bur­roughs—a Lon­don res­i­dent from the late six­ties to ear­ly seventies—to hob­nob with young dis­si­dents and out­siders. Bur­roughs, who so approv­ing­ly refers the pos­si­bly apoc­ryphal anar­chist pirate colony of Lib­er­ta­tia in his Cities of the Red Night, would, one might think, appre­ci­ate the bud­ding anar­chism of British youth cul­ture, which would flower into punk soon enough.

Moka-Bar-Frith-Street

But rather than join­ing the cof­fee bar scene, the can­tan­ker­ous Bur­roughs had tak­en to fre­quent­ing “plush gentlemen’s shops of the area, not to men­tion the ‘Dil­ly Boys,’ young male pros­ti­tutes who hus­tled for clients out­side the Regent Palace Hotel.”

And he had grown increas­ing­ly dis­il­lu­sioned with Lon­don, fum­ing, writes Ted Mor­gan in Bur­roughs biog­ra­phy Lit­er­ary Out­law, “at what he was pay­ing for his hole-in-the-wall apart­ment with a clos­et for a kitchen” and at the ris­ing price of util­i­ties. “Bur­roughs,” Mor­gan tells us, “began to feel that he was in ene­my ter­ri­to­ry.” And he thought the Moka cof­fee bar should pay the price for his indig­ni­ties.

There, “on sev­er­al occa­sions a snarling coun­ter­man had treat­ed him with out­ra­geous and unpro­voked dis­cour­tesy, and served him poi­so­nous cheese­cake that made him sick.” Bur­roughs “decid­ed to retal­i­ate by putting a curse on the place.” He chose a means of attack that he’d ear­li­er employed against the Church of Sci­en­tol­ogy, “turn­ing up… every day,” writes Watts, “tak­ing pho­tographs and mak­ing sound record­ings.” Then he would play them back a day or so lat­er on the street out­side the Moka. “The idea,” writes Mor­gan, “was to place the Moka Bar out of time. You played back a tape that had tak­en place two days ago and you super­im­posed it on what was hap­pen­ing now, which pulled them out of their time posi­tion.”

Bur­roughs also con­nect­ed the method to the Water­gate record­ings, the Gar­den of Eden, and the the­o­ries of Alfred Korzyb­s­ki. The trig­ger for the mag­i­cal oper­a­tion was, in his words, “play­back.” In a very strange essay called “Feed­back from Water­gate to the Gar­den of Eden,” from his col­lec­tion Elec­tron­ic Rev­o­lu­tion, Bur­roughs described his oper­a­tion in detail, a dis­rup­tion, he wrote, of a “con­trol sys­tem.”

Now to apply the 3 tape recorder anal­o­gy to this sim­ple oper­a­tion. Tape recorder 1 is the Moka Bar itself it is pris­tine con­di­tion. Tape recorder 2 is my record­ings of the Moka Bar vicin­i­ty. These record­ings are access. Tape recorder 2 in the Gar­den of Eden was Eve made from Adam. So a record­ing made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The record­ing once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their con­trol. Tape recorder 3 is play­back. Adam expe­ri­ences shame when his dis­crace­ful behav­ior is played back to him by tape recorder 3 which is God. By play­ing back my record­ings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the record­ings, I become God for this local. I effect them. They can­not effect me.

The the­o­ry made per­fect sense to Bur­roughs, who believed in a Mag­i­cal Uni­verse ruled by occult forces and who exper­i­ment­ed heav­i­ly with Sci­en­tol­ogy, Crow­ley-an Mag­ick, and the orgone ener­gy of Wil­helm Reich. The attack on the Moka worked, or at least Bur­roughs believed it did. “They are seething in there,” he wrote, “I have them and they know it.” On Octo­ber 30th, 1972  the estab­lish­ment closed its doors—perhaps a con­se­quence of those ris­ing rents that so irked the Beat writer—and the loca­tion became the Queens Snack Bar.

The audio-visu­al cut-up tech­nique Bur­roughs used in his attack against the Moka Bar was a method derived by Bur­roughs and Brion Gysin from their exper­i­ments with writ­ten “cut-ups,” and Bur­roughs applied it to film as well. At the top of the post, see an inter­pre­tive “med­i­ta­tion” based on Bur­roughs’ use of audio/visual “mag­i­cal weapons” and incor­po­rat­ing his record­ings. On YouTube, you can watch “The Cut Ups,” a short film Bur­roughs him­self made in 1966 with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Antony Balch, a dis­ori­ent­ing illus­tra­tion of the cut up tech­nique.

Not lim­it­ed to attack­ing annoy­ing Lon­don cof­fee­house own­ers, Bur­roughs’ sup­pos­ed­ly mag­i­cal inter­ven­tions in real­i­ty were in fact the fullest expres­sion of his cre­ativ­i­ty. As Ted Mor­gan writes, “the sin­gle most impor­tant thing about Bur­roughs was his belief in the mag­i­cal uni­verse. The same impulse that lead him to put out curs­es was, as he saw it, the source of his writ­ing.” Read much more about Bur­roughs’ the­o­ry and prac­tice in Matthew Levi Stevens’ essay “The Mag­i­cal Uni­verse of William S. Bur­roughs,” and hear the author him­self dis­course on the para­nor­mal, tape cut-ups, and much more in the lec­ture below from a writ­ing class he gave in June, 1986.

via The Great Wen

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When William S. Bur­roughs Joined Sci­en­tol­ogy (and His 1971 Book Denounc­ing It)

William S. Bur­roughs on the Art of Cut-up Writ­ing

William S. Bur­roughs Explains What Artists & Cre­ative Thinkers Do for Human­i­ty: From Galileo to Cézanne and James Joyce

William S. Bur­roughs’ Short Class on Cre­ative Read­ing

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

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Ideasthesia: An Animated Look at How Ideas Feel

in Philosophy, Science | December 19th, 2014

Danko Nikolic, a researcher at the Max-Planck Insti­tute for Brain Research, has come up with a the­o­ry called “ideas­t­he­sia,” which ques­tions the real­i­ty of two philo­soph­i­cal dual­i­ties: 1.) the mind and body, and 2.) sense per­cep­tion and ideas. Nikolic’s research sug­gests that these dual­i­ties may not exist at all, and par­tic­u­lar­ly that sense per­cep­tion and ideas are inex­tri­ca­bly bound up in one anoth­er. If you want to bet­ter under­stand “ideas­t­he­sia,” I can’t rec­om­mend read­ing the ter­m’s Wikipedia page. It’s tough sled­ding. But you can make it through Nikolic’s TED-Ed video released last month. It still requires you to wear a think­ing cap. But if you’re read­ing this site, you’re prob­a­bly will­ing to put one on for five min­utes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Play­ing an Instru­ment Is a Great Work­out For Your Brain: New Ani­ma­tion Explains Why

This is Your Brain on Jazz Impro­vi­sa­tion: The Neu­ro­science of Cre­ativ­i­ty

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy and Neu­ro­science Cours­es

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Discover the Church of St. John Coltrane, Founded on the Divine Music of A Love Supreme

in Jazz, Music, Religion | December 18th, 2014

For some time now, peo­ple like poet Robert Graves and coun­ter­cul­tur­al guru Tim­o­thy Leary have assumed that ancient reli­gion and mys­ti­cism were the prod­ucts of mind-alter­ing drugs. But in the case of one mod­ern reli­gious experience—the inspi­ra­tion behind John Coltrane’s holy four-part suite, A Love Supreme—it was the dis­tinct absence of drugs that lit the flame. Like many recov­er­ing addicts, Coltrane found God in 1957, after hav­ing what he called in the album’s lin­er notes “a spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing.” Sev­en years lat­er, he ded­i­cat­ed his mas­ter­piece, “a hum­ble, offer­ing,” to the deity he cred­it­ed with “a rich­er, fuller, more pro­duc­tive life.” No rote hym­nal, chant, or psalter, A Love Supreme offers itself up to the lis­ten­er as the prod­uct of intense­ly per­son­al devo­tion. And like the ecsta­t­ic rev­e­la­tions of many a saint, Coltrane’s work has inspired its own devo­tion­al cult—The Church of St. Coltrane.

Presided over by Bish­op Fran­zo King and his wife Rev­erend Moth­er Mari­na King, the Saint John Coltrane African Ortho­dox Church in San Fran­cis­co reminds peo­ple, says Bish­op King in the short doc­u­men­tary at the top of the post, “that God is nev­er with­out a wit­ness. St. John Coltrane is that wit­ness for this time and this age.” Dig. The vibe of the Coltrane con­gre­ga­tion is “a rap­tur­ous out-of-your-head-ness” writes Aeon mag­a­zine in their intro­duc­tion to anoth­er short film about the church. And just above, you can meet more of the worshippers—of the music, its cre­ator, and his god—in “The Sax­o­phone Saint,” yet anoth­er pro­file of St. Coltrane’s prodi­gious reli­gious influ­ence. The con­gre­ga­tion, NPR tells us, “mix­es African Ortho­dox litur­gy with Coltrane’s quotes” and of course music, and A Love Supreme is “the cor­ner­stone of the [Bish­op King’s] 200-mem­ber church.”

King cites the titles of the suite’s four movements—“Acknowledgement,” “Res­o­lu­tion,” “Pur­suance,” and “Psalm”—as the basis for his form of wor­ship: “It’s like say­ing, ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost.’ It’s like say­ing Melody, har­mo­ny and rhythm.’ In oth­er words, you have to acknowl­edge and then you resolve and then you pur­sue, and the man­i­fes­ta­tion of it is a love supreme.” The Kings found­ed the church in 1969, but their intro­duc­tion to the pow­er of Coltrane came four years ear­li­er when they saw him per­form at the San Fran­cis­co Jazz Work­shop, an expe­ri­ence they describe on their web­site as a “sound bap­tism.” Since its incep­tion, they tell us, the church “has grown beyond the con­fines of San Fran­cis­co to include the whole globe. Every Sun­day, the con­gre­ga­tion includes mem­bers and vis­i­tors from through­out the world.”

That diverse assem­bly recent­ly filled the sanc­tu­ary of San Francisco’s Grace Cathe­dral for a ser­vice in cel­e­bra­tion of the 50th anniver­sary of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme on Mon­day, Decem­ber 8th. Just above you can see Bish­op King open the ser­vice. His inspired deliv­ery should con­vince you, as it did New York Times reporter Samuel Freed­man, that “the Coltrane church is not a gim­mick or a forced alloy of night­club music and ethe­re­al faith. Its mes­sage of deliv­er­ance through divine sound is actu­al­ly quite con­sis­tent with Coltrane’s own expe­ri­ence and mes­sage.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Coltrane Per­forms A Love Supreme and Oth­er Clas­sics in Antibes (July 1965)

John Coltrane’s Hand­writ­ten Out­line for His Mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme

Watch John Coltrane Turn His Hand­writ­ten Poem Into a Sub­lime Musi­cal Pas­sage on A Love Supreme

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

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Noam Chomsky Almost Appeared on Saturday Night Live During the 90s

in Comedy, Politics | December 18th, 2014

Noam_Chomsky_2

Image by jean­bap­tis­teparis

There are those guest hosts on Sat­ur­day Night Live who imme­di­ate­ly become exem­plary cast mem­bers they fit in so well. I’m think­ing most­ly of Alec Bald­win. Then there are those—certain pop stars and athletes—who are too awk­ward even to make for unin­ten­tion­al humor. Some­times the show will choose a host for obvi­ous cul­tur­al or polit­i­cal rea­sons, whether or not that per­son has any sense of humor what­so­ev­er. Lorne Michaels even once con­sid­ered ask­ing noto­ri­ous­ly stiff then-pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Mitt Rom­ney to host in 2012, a prospect that excit­ed no one except maybe Rom­ney.

Giv­en the show’s many ques­tion­able choic­es, it’s maybe not too sur­pris­ing that it would con­sid­er ask­ing an aca­d­e­m­ic to host. Some extro­vert­ed pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als, like Cor­nell West and Slavoj Zizeck, are nat­ur­al enter­tain­ers. But that they would think of Noam Chom­sky—known for his rum­pled sweaters and inci­sive, unspar­ing geopo­lit­i­cal analy­sis, deliv­ered in the dri­est monot­o­ne this side of Ben Stein’s Fer­ris Bueller’s Day Off char­ac­ter—is, well, pret­ty odd.

It does make a lit­tle bit more sense con­sid­er­ing that they only asked Pro­fes­sor Chom­sky to play him­self on the show, not deliv­er a mono­logue or do imper­son­ations. Accord­ing to his assis­tant Bev Stohl, the show called some­time in the late 90s and told her that the “writ­ers had writ­ten a loose script for Noam. The only thing he need­ed to do was show up on the set and play it straight, answer­ing the ques­tions that were put to him. Sort of like, ‘I’m Noam Chom­sky, and I play myself on TV.’” Most­ly, writes Stohl on her blog, “I liked the idea of Noam appear­ing in main­stream media, some­thing that was just begin­ning to hap­pen in small ways in the 1990’s.”

And how did Chom­sky him­self feel about the request? It seems he was vague­ly famil­iar with the show and open to the idea. His wife, on the oth­er hand, was not. “After a brief exchange” with her, writes Crit­i­cal The­o­ry, “he informed Stohl that ‘Car­ol says no.’” We’ll nev­er know if we were “robbed of either the great­est SNL skit ever” or spared “anoth­er ter­ri­bly unfun­ny seg­ment,” but the ques­tion of whether Chom­sky can be fun­ny is still an open one. Matthew Alford at The Guardian writes that dur­ing the Q&A after a lec­ture he attend­ed, “Chom­sky was suc­cess­ful not only at con­vey­ing his rad­i­cal polit­i­cal mes­sage but also at rais­ing bel­ly laughs from the audi­ence with dark-laced, insight­ful humour about his pol­i­tics.” Alford says he mea­sured “a laugh every cou­ple of minutes—very high for a pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al but of course not close to the pro­fes­sion­al comic’s bench­mark of one gag every 20 sec­onds.” He offers some typ­i­cal Chom­sky-an one-lin­ers, such as:

“[The Bush administration’s] moral val­ues are very explic­it: shine the boots of the rich and pow­er­ful, kick every­one else in the face, and let your grand­chil­dren pay for it.”

“If you’ve resist­ed the temp­ta­tion to tell the teacher ‘you’re an ass­hole’ which maybe he or she is, and if you don’t say ‘that’s idi­ot­ic’ when you get a stu­pid assign­ment… you will end up at a good col­lege and even­tu­al­ly with a good job.”

And “It’s to the point where Ronald Rea­gan could put on his cow­boy boots and cow­boy hat and declare a nation­al emer­gency because the nation­al secu­ri­ty of the Unit­ed States was in dan­ger from the gov­ern­ment of Nicaragua… whose troops were two days from Texas.”

Above, you can catch a glimpse of the lighter side of Chom­sky.

via Crit­i­cal The­o­ry

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Went Gang­nam Style … Ever So Briefly?

Film­mak­er Michel Gondry Presents an Ani­mat­ed Con­ver­sa­tion with Noam Chom­sky

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

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

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John Cage Performs Water Walk on US Game Show I’ve Got a Secret (1960)

in Art, Music, Television | December 18th, 2014


Back in 2011, we fea­tured John Cage’s 1960 tele­vi­sion per­for­mance of his piece Water Walk. Its video qual­i­ty may have left some­thing to be desired, but now, thanks to the YouTube chan­nel of Bard Col­lege’s Richard B. Fish­er Cen­ter for the Per­form­ing Arts, you can watch the entire ten-minute seg­ment in much crisper qual­i­ty than most sur­viv­ing pro­grams from that era. This unlike­ly hap­pen­ing occurred on I’ve Got a Secret, the long-run­ning occu­pa­tion-guess­ing game show whose guest ros­ter also includ­ed chess prodi­gy Bob­by Fis­ch­er, “fifth Bea­t­le” Pete Best, and fried-chick­en icon Colonel Har­land Sanders. For this par­tic­u­lar episode, we wrote in our ear­li­er post, “the TV show offered Cage some­thing of a teach­able moment, a chance to intro­duce the broad­er pub­lic to his brand of avant-garde music.”

For Water Walk, Cage round­ed up a vari­ety of “instru­ments” all to do with that liq­uid — a bath­tub, a pitch­er, ice cubes in a mix­er — and the uncon­ven­tion­al sym­pho­ny they pro­duce cul­mi­nates in the Rube Gold­ber­gian mix­ing of a drink, the sip­ping of which the com­po­si­tion dic­tates about two and a half min­utes in. Nat­u­ral­ly, Cage being Cage, the piece incor­po­rates audi­ence reac­tion nois­es; when host Gary Moore warns him that cer­tain mem­bers of the stu­dio audi­ence will laugh, Cage responds, “I con­sid­er laugh­ter bet­ter than tears.”

You can learn more about this inter­sec­tion of far for­ward-think­ing artistry and the mid­cen­tu­ry tele­vi­su­al main­stream in Lau­ra Paolin­i’s piece “John Cage’s Secret,” avail­able at johncage.org. “At that moment in 1960, a rup­ture was being deep­ened,” Paoli­ni writes. “High art and low were becom­ing more and more com­fort­able with one anoth­er over the air­waves. At this moment, as the screens glow their blue auras into the homes of North Amer­i­ca, every­one sees some­thing they haven’t seen before. And every­one has an opin­ion about it.” And those opin­ions, I like to think Cage would have said, only extend the art fur­ther.

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.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cage Per­forms Water Walk on “I’ve Got a Secret” (1960)

10 Rules for Stu­dents and Teach­ers Pop­u­lar­ized by John Cage

Lis­ten to John Cage’s 5 Hour Art Piece: Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Mat­ters Worse)

Hear Joey Ramone Sing a Piece by John Cage Adapt­ed from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Watch a Sur­pris­ing­ly Mov­ing Per­for­mance of John Cage’s 1948 “Suite for Toy Piano”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How to Defeat the US with Math: An Animated North Korean Propaganda Film for Kids

in Animation, Current Affairs, History | December 18th, 2014

Yes, North Korea won yes­ter­day. Threat­en­ing 9/11-like vio­lence, the DPRK scared Sony and Amer­i­ca’s four largest the­ater chains into pulling the plug on the release of The Inter­view. And, just like that, Amer­i­cans lost their right to watch their own pro­pa­gan­da films — even dumb fun­ny ones — in their own the­aters. But, don’t despair, we can still watch pro­pa­gan­da films from North Korea on YouTube — like the vin­tage ani­ma­tion for chil­dren above. You don’t need to under­stand what’s being said to get the gist. Take your school­work seri­ous­ly, bone up on your geom­e­try, and you can launch enough mis­siles to force Amer­i­ca into sub­mis­sion. True, geom­e­try does­n’t put you in a good posi­tion to hack cor­po­rate com­put­ers. But seem­ing­ly you can get that help from Chi­na.

via The Week

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Don­ald Duck’s Bad Nazi Dream and Four Oth­er Dis­ney Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons from World War II

Neu­ro­science and Pro­pa­gan­da Come Togeth­er in Disney’s World War II Film, Rea­son and Emo­tion

How the CIA Turned Doc­tor Zhiva­go into a Pro­pa­gan­da Weapon Against the Sovi­et Union

 

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Watch Adam Savage Build Barbarella’s Space Rifle in One Day

in Design, Film | December 18th, 2014

In a new video by Test­ed, Adam Sav­age (mod­el mak­er, indus­tri­al design­er and tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ty) shows you how to build a repli­ca of the space rifle from the 1968 sci-fi film Bar­barel­la. To design the repli­ca, Sav­age had only one doc­u­ment to work with — a pho­to­graph show­ing Jane Fon­da hold­ing the gun, which orig­i­nal­ly appeared on the cov­er of a 1968 issue of LIFE Mag­a­zine. The 77-minute video above takes you inside Sav­age’s build process, mov­ing from start to fin­ish. If DIY is your thing, you won’t want to miss it.

via Digg

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Lennon or McCartney? 550 Artists Answer the Essential, Timeless Question

in Music | December 17th, 2014

Lennon & McCart­ney — the two musi­cians came togeth­er and com­posed the most impor­tant song­book of the last 50 years. Ear­ly on, John and Paul wrote many of their songs togeth­er — songs like “She Loves You” and “Eight Days a Week.” Lat­er, as they describe it here, the dynam­ic changed: one would write the bulk of a song; the oth­er would give it a lis­ten and work out the kinks, adding the right melody, or remov­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly corny verse. Although the two shared writ­ing cred­its for all Bea­t­les songs, Lennon prin­ci­pal­ly wrote “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er,” “Nor­we­gian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” and “Come Togeth­er.” McCart­ney gave us “Eleanor Rig­by,” “Hey Jude,” “Let It Be,” and “Pen­ny Lane.” Depend­ing on which you like, you might put your­self in the Lennon or the McCart­ney camp.

Along the way, we’ve all been asked to take a side, and that applies to musi­cians too. Above, you can find a 34 minute com­pi­la­tion where musi­cians and artists — from Lady GaGa to David Byrne — make their pick. And below, in the com­ments, you’re invit­ed to tell us where you fall — with John or Paul, and why?

Or who is going to offer up George, who, for my mon­ey, released the best of the Bea­t­les’ solo albums?

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Bea­t­les: Unplugged Col­lects Acoustic Demos of White Album Songs (1968)

The Last Time Lennon & McCart­ney Played Togeth­er Cap­tured in the Boot­leg A Toot And a Snore in ’74

The 10-Minute, Nev­er-Released, Exper­i­men­tal Demo of The Bea­t­les’ “Rev­o­lu­tion” (1968)

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Patti Smith’s Musical Tributes to the Russian Greats: Tarkovsky, Gogol & Bulgakov

in Literature, Music, Poetry | December 17th, 2014

In 2010, Pat­ti Smith won a Nation­al Book Award for her mem­oir Just Kids, mak­ing her, by my count, the only Rock and Roll Hall of Fame mem­ber to land that prize. Of course, she’s also the only per­son I can think of who has appeared in both a movie by Jean-Luc Godard (Film Social­isme) and an episode of Law and Order. And she’s def­i­nite­ly the only rock­er out there who has a per­son­al invite from the Pope to play at the Vat­i­can.

Back in the mid-‘70s, Smith fused the noise and urgency of punk rock with spo­ken word poet­ry and cre­at­ed some­thing unlike any­thing before or since. She per­formed with such inten­si­ty on stage that she looked like a mod­ern day shaman in the midst of an ecsta­t­ic rev­el­ry. Yet she had a lit­er­ary sen­si­bil­i­ty that made her stand apart from most of her fel­low pro­to-punks at CBG­Bs. (The Ramones are awe­some but no one is going to parse the lyrics of “Beat on the Brat with a Base­ball Bat.”) The B‑side track of Smith’s first sin­gle, “Piss Fac­to­ry,” describes the unre­lent­ing tedi­um she expe­ri­enced work­ing at a fac­to­ry before she swiped a copy of Illu­mi­na­tions by French poet Arthur Rim­baud.

While mak­ing Film Social­isme with Godard, she con­ceived of her lat­est album, Ban­ga, released in 2012. When she start­ed writ­ing songs, she was, as she said in an inter­view, very inter­est­ed in Russ­ian cul­ture.

I like my trav­els to be akin with my stud­ies, and so when I start­ed being smit­ten with Bul­gakov and start­ed read­ing a lot of Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture and then watch­ing a lot of Tarkovsky, being very immersed in Russ­ian cul­ture, I got some jobs in Rus­sia. … But I’ve always done that. We have very idio­syn­crat­ic tours – I always make sure that the band does well finan­cial­ly, but a lot of our tours are based on things that I’m study­ing, and I’ll make choic­es as to where we go so that I can see some­thing spe­cial.

The title track of the work, Ban­ga, is tak­en from a minor char­ac­ter in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta – Pon­tus Pilate’s extreme­ly loy­al dog who wait­ed cen­turies for his mas­ter to come to heav­en. Fun fact: John­ny Depp played drums on this track.

Accord­ing to the lin­er notes, the album’s first sin­gle, “April Fool” was inspired by nov­el­ist Niko­lai Gogol. As John Free­man notes in the Moscow Times, a num­ber of lines from the song evoke the writer.

We’ll race through alley­ways in tat­tered coats” is a fair­ly clear ref­er­ence to Gogol’s short sto­ry “The Over­coat,” while “we’ll burn all of our poems” begs to be con­sid­ered a nod to the fact that Gogol famous­ly burned the sec­ond vol­ume of his great nov­el “Dead Souls.” That work, one of Rus­si­a’s fun­ni­est and dark­est, is con­jured in the lines, “We’ll tramp through the mire when our souls feel dead. With laugh­ter we’ll inspire them back to life again.

And the track “Tarkovsky (The Sec­ond Stop Is Jupiter)”, not sur­pris­ing­ly, evokes images from the films of cin­e­mat­ic auteur Andrei Tarkovsky – specif­i­cal­ly, his meta­phys­i­cal sci-fi epic Solaris along with Ivan’s Child­hood. Hear the track at the top of this post, and watch Tarkovsky’s films online here.

In case you thought that the album was just about Rus­sians, her song “This is the Girl” is about the life and death of Amy Wine­house, “Fuji-San” is a trib­ute to the mas­sive 2011 Tohoku earth­quake, and “Nine” is a birth­day present to John­ny Depp.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

See Pat­ti Smith Give Two Dra­mat­ic Read­ings of Allen Ginsberg’s “Foot­note to Howl”

Pat­ti Smith Plays Songs by The Ramones, Rolling Stones, Lou Reed & More on CBGB’s Clos­ing Night (2006)

Pat­ti Smith Doc­u­men­tary Dream of Life Beau­ti­ful­ly Cap­tures the Author’s Life and Long Career (2008)

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 lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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Johnny Cash’s Christmas Specials, Featuring June Carter, Steve Martin, Andy Kaufman & More (1976–79)

in Music, Television | December 17th, 2014

John­ny Cash, out­law coun­try singer and defi­ant man in black, comes care­ful­ly pack­aged for many peo­ple through the mer­chan­dis­ing of his life and image. From t‑shirts to posters, doc­u­men­taries to award-win­ning biopics, we know about his ornery prison con­certs, drug use and arrests, noble cham­pi­oning of the dis­en­fran­chised, and dra­mat­ic sto­ry of pain and redemp­tion. We mar­veled at the mys­tique around the aged Cash in his late-life revival. But many of us know lit­tle about anoth­er side of the man—Johnny Cash, genial TV per­son­al­i­ty.

If you hap­pened to have been glued to the tube dur­ing the sev­en­ties and eight­ies, how­ev­er, you would know this John­ny Cash well from his cameo appear­ances on Colum­bo and Lit­tle House on the Prairie. You’d have seen him shilling for Amo­co dur­ing the gas cri­sis of the ear­ly 70s—a gig he took on dur­ing a seri­ous career slump. You’d have maybe caught his recur­ring role on Dr. Quinn Med­i­cine Woman, his turn on 1985 mini-series North and South (as John Brown, nat­u­ral­ly), as well as a num­ber of film appear­ances. And that’s not to men­tion Cash’s own, short-lived vari­ety show, which ran from 1969–71.

If this rather com­mer­cial, main­stream Cash seems at odds with the leg­end, wait till you see The John­ny Cash & Fam­i­ly Christ­mas Show, which ran each year from 1976–79. Here, writes Dan­ger­ous Minds, “Cash game­ly refash­ioned him­self as a fam­i­ly-friend­ly coun­try music TV host” in the vein of Porter Wag­oner. It is decid­ed­ly “far from the mid­dle-fin­ger John­ny Cash or Fol­som Prison Blues”—closer instead to Hee Haw’s Buck Owens and Roy Clark (who appears in the first spe­cial at the top). After his mar­riage to June Carter in 1968, many of his ven­tures fea­tured the two as a singing duo. Here, they aren’t just man and wife, but “fam­i­ly,” mean­ing “many of June and Johnny’s wide-rang­ing clan of rel­a­tives are fea­tured.

We’re also treat­ed to appear­ances from Tony Orlan­do and Cash’s spir­i­tu­al men­tor Bil­ly Gra­ham (’76), Jer­ry Lee Lewis (’77), Kris Kristofer­son and Steve Mar­tin (’78), and even Andy Kauf­man, in char­ac­ter as Taxi’s Lat­ka Gravas (’79). Yes, these may be coun­try corny as all get-out, but they’re also real­ly fun. We get charm­ing, infor­mal goof-offs with June and John­ny, lots of Vegas style com­e­dy bits and lounge rou­tines, and, of course, some stel­lar musi­cal per­for­mances. After his dra­mat­ic late-six­ties con­ver­sion, Cash remained staunch­ly evan­gel­i­cal to the end of his days. (Hear him read The New Tes­ta­ment here.) But rather than rail at sec­u­lar­ists in his Christ­mas spe­cials, he treats the hol­i­day as a laid-back occa­sion for food (“snake ‘n’ pota­toes”), laughs, friends and fam­i­ly, and all-star sing alongs by the fire. Hop on over to Dan­ger­ous Minds to see all four spe­cials.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Episode of The John­ny Cash Show, Fea­tur­ing Bob Dylan & Joni Mitchell (1969)

John­ny Cash: Singer, Out­law, and, Briefly, Tele­vi­sion Host

The First Episode of The John­ny Cash Show, Fea­tur­ing Bob Dylan & Joni Mitchell (1969)

John­ny Cash Reads the Entire New Tes­ta­ment

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

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