Discover the 1950s & 1960s Computer & Cut-Up Animation of Pioneering Filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek

in Animation | December 3rd, 2014

Hey, lovers of ani­ma­tion and exper­i­men­tal film: do you know the name Stan Van­Der­Beek? If not, you’ll enjoy learn­ing it, for more rea­sons than that it allows you to type four cap­i­tal let­ters. End­less­ly adven­tur­ous in his quest to find new ways to craft (not to men­tion dis­play) mov­ing images, Van­Der­Beek, who in col­lege encoun­tered the likes of John Cage, Mer­ce Cun­ning­ham, and Robert Rauschen­berg, mobi­lized for his ani­ma­tion a vari­ety of tech­nolo­gies that, in his day, peo­ple did­n’t have much of a sense of what to do with, artis­ti­cal­ly or oth­er­wise. “Every­thing that artists made art from, or with, in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry, he pret­ty much touched,” this NPR piece quotes MIT LIST Visu­al Arts Cen­ter cura­tor Joao Ribas as say­ing about him. “The medi­um, what­ev­er he was work­ing with, was not ade­quate enough. Paint­ing was too sta­t­ic, and then one film was too lin­ear, and then four films were too cum­ber­some.”

You can see here some of the fruits of this dri­ve that kept Van­Der­Beek “con­stant­ly try­ing some­thing else that could get clos­er and clos­er to what he saw.” At the top, we have a 1966 exam­ple of the ani­mat­ed poet­ry he cre­at­ed with Bell Labs com­put­er graph­ics pio­neer Ken Knowl­ton, using a pro­gram­ming lan­guage of Knowl­ton’s own design and a score by jazz drum­mer Paul Mot­ian. But Van­Der­Beek built more of his rep­u­ta­tion with his mas­tery of cut-and-paste ani­ma­tion, the kind you see in action in 1959’s Sci­ence Fric­tion just above. Five years lat­er, he would put out Breathdeath below, which Tate calls “a sur­re­al fan­ta­sy based on 15th cen­tu­ry wood­cuts of The Dance of the Dead” made of “cut-up pho­tos and news­reels, reassem­bled into a black com­e­dy ded­i­cat­ed to Char­lie Chap­lin and Buster Keaton.” Does this all remind you a bit of Ter­ry Gilliam? It should. The Mon­ty Python ani­ma­tor, a notable Van­Der­Beek fan, named Breathdeath one of the best ani­mat­ed films of all time.

Find more exper­i­men­tal films in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Best Ani­mat­ed Films of All Time, Accord­ing to Ter­ry Gilliam

Watch 13 Exper­i­men­tal Short Films by Tezu­ka Osamu, the Walt Dis­ney of Japan

Opti­cal Poems by Oskar Fischinger, the Avant-Garde Ani­ma­tor Hat­ed by Hitler, Dissed by Dis­ney

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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Chrissie Hynde’s 10 Pieces of Advice for “Chick Rockers” (1994)

in Music | December 3rd, 2014

advicetoChrissie Hyn­de knows a few things about being a female rock­er. When at the ten­der age of 14 she saw Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels play at a fair­ground in her home­town of Akron, Ohio, the band got into a fist­fight with each oth­er dur­ing the per­for­mance. She was hooked. “I thought,” she said to The Guardian ‘That’s got to be the life!’ ”

Not long after col­lege at Kent State, where she was in a band with Devo’s Mark Moth­ers­baugh, she end­ed up in Lon­don. There she worked at Mal­colm McLaren’s noto­ri­ous store SEX along­side the future mem­bers of The Sex Pis­tols. She even asked Sid Vicious and John­ny Rot­ten to mar­ry her for the work visa. She tried to start a band with Mick Jones of The Clash, but that didn’t take. She was kicked out of the band Mas­ters of the Back­side before they changed their name to The Damned and became famous. Then in 1978, she formed the band The Pre­tenders and quick­ly became a rock icon with hit tunes like “Don’t Get Me Wrong” and “Mes­sage of Love.”

In short, Hyn­de has been rock­ing for over 40 years now and she has some advice for aspir­ing lady rock­ers, which was orig­i­nal­ly print­ed as a pro­mo for her 1994 release “Night in my Veins.”

1. Don’t moan about being a chick, refer to fem­i­nism or com­plain about sex­ist dis­crim­i­na­tion. We’ve all been thrown down the stairs, and f—ed about, but no one wants to hear a whin­ing female. Write a loose­ly dis­guised song about it instead and clean up. ($)

2. Nev­er pre­tend to know more than you do. If you don’t know chord names, refer to the dots. Don’t go near the desk unless you plan on becom­ing an engi­neer.

3. Make the oth­er band mem­bers look and sound good. Bring out the best in them; that’s your job. Oh, and you bet­ter sound good too.

4. Do not insist in [sic] work­ing with “females.” That’s just more b.s. Get the best man for the job. If it hap­pens to a woman, great – you’ll have some­one to go to depart­ment stores with on tour instead of mak­ing one of the road crew go with you.

5. Try not to have a sex­u­al rela­tion­ship with the band. It always ends in tears.

6. Don’t think that stick­ing your boobs out and try­ing to look f—able will help. Remem­ber you’re in a rock and roll band. It’s not “f—me,” it’s “f—you”!

7. Don’t try to com­pete with the guys; it won’t impress any­body. Remem­ber, one of the rea­sons they like you is because you don’t offer yet more com­pe­ti­tion to the already exist­ing male egos.

8. If you sing, don’t “belt” or “screech.” No one wants to hear that sh–; it sounds “hys­ter­i­cal.”

9. Shave your legs, for chris­sakes!

10. Don’t take advice from peo­ple like me. Do your own thing always.

A lot of this is just sound advice for get­ting along at the work­place – don’t act like you know more than you do, don’t com­plain, make your work­mates look good but don’t doink them. But prob­a­bly the key points for Hyn­de is num­ber one and num­ber sev­en.

In that inter­view with the Guardian, she indeed proved to be reluc­tant to “moan” about sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion in the rock­dom. “There’s always been women doing this, just not that many,” she said. “I don’t know what the fem­i­nists have to say about it. Over the years, you’d hear, ‘We weren’t encour­aged.’ Well, I don’t think Jeff Beck­’s moth­er was say­ing, ‘Jef­frey! What are you doing up in your room? Are you rehears­ing up there?’ No one was ever encour­aged to play gui­tar in a band. But I nev­er found it hard­er because I’m a woman. If any­thing I’ve been treat­ed bet­ter. Guys will car­ry my gui­tars and stuff – who’s going to say no? Guys always tune my gui­tars, too.”

Check out the video for “Night in my Veins” below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

CBGB’s: The Roots of Punk Lets You Watch Vin­tage Footage from the Hey­day of NYC’s Great Music Scene

The Art of Punk Presents a New Doc­u­men­tary on The Dead Kennedys and Their Grit­ty Aes­thet­ics

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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Theodor Adorno’s Radical Critique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Vietnam War Protest Movement

in Music, Philosophy, Politics | December 3rd, 2014

The Marx­ist Frank­furt School’s prac­tice of neg­a­tive dialec­tics put the “crit­i­cal” in crit­i­cal the­o­ry, and none of its loose band of philoso­pher-crit­ics was as inci­sive as the dour, depres­sive Theodor Adorno. Against both mys­ti­cal and mate­ri­al­ist notions of his­to­ry as progress, Adorno argued in his trea­tise Neg­a­tive Dialec­tics that, writes Peter Thomp­son, “his­to­ry is not the sim­ple unfold­ing of some pre­or­dained noume­nal realm,” but rather an open sys­tem. In oth­er words, we can nev­er know in advance where we are going, or should go, only that we live enmeshed in con­tra­dic­tions. And in the thick of late-moder­ni­ty, these are engen­dered by the log­ic of con­sumer cap­i­tal­ism. For Adorno, the ulti­mate prod­uct of this sys­tem is what he termed the “Cul­ture Indus­try”—the mono­lith­ic com­plex of Hol­ly­wood film, TV, radio, adver­tis­ing, mag­a­zines, etc.—engineered to lull the mass­es into docil­i­ty so that they pas­sive­ly accept the dic­tates of an author­i­tar­i­an state.

The anti­dote to this cul­tur­al drug­ging, Adorno argued, was to be found in the avant-garde, in dif­fi­cult and chal­leng­ing works of art that appeal pri­mar­i­ly to the intel­lect. In demon­stra­tion of the kind of art he meant, he even com­posed his own music, inspired by the work of Arnold Schoen­berg. It’s very tempt­ing to read Adorno’s attacks on jazz and rock ‘n’ roll as the belly­ach­ing of a can­tan­ker­ous snob, but there is sub­stance to these cri­tiques, and they deserve to be tak­en seri­ous­ly, even if in the end to be refut­ed.

Take, for exam­ple, Adorno’s take on the protest music of the six­ties. We tend to assume the impor­tance of artists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez (at the top, singing the spir­i­tu­al “Oh Free­dom”) to the anti-war movement—their songs, after all, pro­vide the sound­track for our doc­u­men­taries and fic­tion­al­ized films of the peri­od. But Adorno felt that pop­u­lar “protest music” was a con­tra­dic­tion in terms, giv­en its rela­tion­ship to the same Cul­ture Indus­try that man­u­fac­tured and dis­sem­i­nat­ed adver­tis­ing and pro­pa­gan­da. It’s obvi­ous­ly a prob­lem many artists, includ­ing Dylan, have grap­pled with. In the short clip above, Adorno deliv­ers his ver­dict on Baez:

I believe, in fact, that attempts to bring polit­i­cal protest togeth­er with “pop­u­lar music”—that is, with enter­tain­ment music—are for the fol­low­ing rea­son doomed from the start.  The entire sphere of pop­u­lar music, even there where it dress­es itself up in mod­ernist guise, is to such a degree insep­a­ra­ble from past tem­pera­ment, from con­sump­tion, from the cross-eyed trans­fix­ion with amuse­ment, that attempts to out­fit it with a new func­tion remain entire­ly super­fi­cial…

Put anoth­er way—whatever else protest music is, it is also inevitably a com­mod­i­ty, mar­ket­ed, like the most vac­u­ous bub­blegum pop, as enter­tain­ment for the mass­es. But it isn’t only the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of music that gets under Adorno’s skin, but also the standardization—the very thing that makes pop music pop­u­lar. Its forms are instant­ly rec­og­niz­able and easy to hum along to while per­form­ing mind­less repet­i­tive tasks. As he wrote in his essay “On Pop­u­lar Music”: “The whole struc­ture of pop­u­lar music is stan­dard­ized, even where the attempt is made to cir­cum­vent stan­dard­iza­tion, [guar­an­tee­ing] the same famil­iar expe­ri­ence.” Such for­mal stag­na­tion pre­cludes for Adorno the emer­gence of any­thing “nov­el,” and, there­fore, any­thing tru­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary. He goes on to say specif­i­cal­ly of anti-Viet­nam protest music:

And I have to say that when some­body sets him­self up, and for what­ev­er rea­son sings maudlin music about Viet­nam being unbear­able, I find that real­ly it is this song that is in fact unbear­able, in that by tak­ing the hor­ren­dous and mak­ing it some­how con­sum­able, it ends up wring­ing some­thing like con­sump­tion-qual­i­ties out of it.

The flat­ten­ing effect of mass cul­ture, Adorno sug­gests, ren­ders every ges­ture per­formed with­in it—whether of protest or acquiescence—as fun­da­men­tal­ly triv­ial… and mar­ketable. His posi­tion is irritating–it tips one of our cul­tur­al sacred cows–and it’s cer­tain­ly debat­able; Lisa Whitak­er, author of the blog Con­tex­tu­al Stud­ies takes issue with it. Oth­er writ­ers have explained his cri­tique in more nuanced terms. But what­ev­er you think of them, his argu­ments do give us a use­ful frame­work for dis­cussing the ways in which cul­tur­al move­ments seem to get instant­ly co-opt­ed and turned into prod­ucts: Every rad­i­cal ends up on a t‑shirt; every rev­o­lu­tion­ary gets reduced to pithy quota­bles on cof­fee mugs; every move­ment seems reducible to hand­fuls of quirky memes.

For an inter­est­ing engage­ment with Adorno’s pop cul­ture cri­tique vis-à-vis the work of Dylan, see this entry in the Madame Pick­wick Art Blog. And for much more of Adorno’s cranky but enlight­en­ing state­ments on pop­u­lar cul­ture, see this list of read­ings of work he pro­duced in the for­ties with Max Horkheimer, as well as a lat­er recon­sid­er­a­tion of the “Cul­ture Indus­try.” We live in an age dom­i­nat­ed by mass pop­u­lar cul­ture, and sat­u­rat­ed with protest. Adorno asks us to think crit­i­cal­ly about the rela­tion­ships between the two, and about the effi­ca­cy of using the media and mes­sag­ing of cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism as a means of resist­ing the oppres­sive struc­tures cre­at­ed by cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism. But rather than Adorno’s wet blan­ket the­o­riz­ing, I’ll leave you with Joan Baez. What­ev­er the use­ful­ness of her so-called protest music, any­one who denies the beau­ty of her voice has sure­ly got tin ears.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Theodor Adorno’s Avant-Garde Musi­cal Com­po­si­tions

Theodor Adorno’s Phi­los­o­phy of Punc­tu­a­tion

Wal­ter Benjamin’s Mys­ti­cal Thought Pre­sent­ed by Two Exper­i­men­tal Films

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

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Science Journal Nature Will Make Its Archives Free to View Online (Kind of), Dating Back to 1869

in Archives, Magazines | December 3rd, 2014

A quick note: Nature announced yes­ter­day that it will make all of its arti­cles free to view, read, and anno­tate online. That applies to the his­toric sci­ence jour­nal (launched in 1869) and to 48 oth­er sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals in Macmillan’s Nature Pub­lish­ing Group (NPG). Oth­er titles include Nature Genet­ics, Nature Med­i­cine and Nature Physics.

But there are a whole lot of caveats. The press release reads:

All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a pro­pri­etary screen-view for­mat that can be anno­tat­ed but not copied, print­ed or down­loaded… The con­tent-shar­ing pol­i­cy … marks an attempt to let sci­en­tists freely read and share arti­cles while pre­serv­ing NPG’s pri­ma­ry source of income — the sub­scrip­tion fees libraries and indi­vid­u­als pay to gain access to arti­cles.

But wait, there are a few more caveats. The archives will be made avail­able to sub­scribers (e.g., researchers at uni­ver­si­ties) as well as 100 media out­lets and blogs, and they can then share the arti­cles (as read-only PDFs) with the rest of the world.  This is all part of a one-year exper­i­ment.

To learn more about this ini­tia­tive, read the press release here.

Not the purest form of Open Cul­ture, I know, but it’s hope­ful­ly worth the quick men­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­ing Ergo, the New Open Phi­los­o­phy Jour­nal

Read 700 Free eBooks Made Avail­able by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

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Pink Floyd’s The Wall: The Original Live Show & Behind-the-Scenes Footage of the 1980 Tour and 1982 Film

in Music | December 2nd, 2014

Open­ing with max­i­mum fan­fare and pomp, and clos­ing with the sound of dive bombers, “In the Flesh?,” the first track on Pink Floyd’s mag­num opus The Wall announces that the two-disc con­cept album will be big, bom­bas­tic, and impor­tant. All that it is, but it’s also somber, groovy, even some­times del­i­cate, har­ness­ing the band’s full range of strengths—David Gilmour’s min­i­mal­ist funk rhythms and soar­ing, com­plex blues leads, Nick Mason’s tim­pani-like drum fills and thump­ing dis­co beats, and Richard Wright’s moody key­board sound­scapes. Under it all, the propul­sive throb of Roger Waters’ bass—and pre­sid­ing over it his jad­ed, nos­tal­gic vision of per­son­al and social alien­ation.

Expert­ly blend­ing per­son­al nar­ra­tive with tren­chant, if at times not par­tic­u­lar­ly sub­tle, social cri­tique, Waters’ rock opera—and it is, pri­mar­i­ly, his—debuted just over 35 years ago on Novem­ber 30, 1979. The project grew out of a col­lec­tion of demos Waters wrote and record­ed on his own. He pre­sent­ed the almost-ful­ly formed album (minus the few col­lab­o­ra­tions with Gilmour like “Com­fort­ably Numb”) to the band and pro­duc­er Bob Ezrin, who described it as “Roger’s own project and not a group effort.” That may be so in its com­po­si­tion, but the final record­ing is a glo­ri­ous group effort indeed, show­cas­ing each member’s par­tic­u­lar musi­cal per­son­al­i­ty, as well as those of a host of guest musi­cians. The leg­endary stage show drew togeth­er an even larg­er pool of tal­ent, such as polit­i­cal car­toon­ist Ger­ald Scarfe, whose ani­ma­tions were pro­ject­ed on a giant card­board wall that slow­ly came down over the course of the con­cert.

At the top of the page, see the band play the entire­ty of the album at Earl’s Court in Lon­don, and just above, watch a “lost” doc­u­men­tary com­piled from behind-the-scenes footage of that show, the last of thir­ty the band per­formed on The Wall tour, which began in Los Ange­les. We get inter­views with the band and crew, Waters at sound check, and “the fre­net­ic oper­a­tion of the entire load-in process.” Archi­tect Mark Fish­er describes the plan­ning and cre­ation of the stage show—a year in the making—from the wall itself to the huge inflat­able char­ac­ters made from Scarfe’s ani­ma­tions. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing look at the very first show of its kind, a huge mul­ti­me­dia extrav­a­gan­za that blew audi­ences away and raised the bar for every are­na rock tour that fol­lowed.


The film ver­sion of The Wall, which debuted almost three years lat­er in 1982, was also decid­ed­ly a col­lab­o­ra­tive affair. Just above, a doc­u­men­tary called “The Oth­er Side of The Wall” intro­duces us to “four very dif­fer­ent tal­ents”: Waters, Scarfe, direc­tor Alan Park­er, and star Bob Geld­of. (Album pro­duc­er Ezrin doesn’t get a men­tion, though he claims to have writ­ten the film’s script.) Giv­ing us a look at “how the final brick in The Wall fell into place,” the short film begins with Waters’ inspi­ra­tion for the con­cept album; he tells us in his own words how it grew from his frus­tra­tions with the sta­di­um tour­ing for Ani­mals. Park­er dis­cuss­es his artis­tic inten­tion to not make “a con­cept movie” (though the movie seems to be exact­ly that), and Scarfe talks about his designs for the album and film, which Park­er describes as “weird” and “psy­cho­path­ic.”

The final piece of behind-the-scenes mak­ing of The Wall we bring you is the BBC Radio inter­view, above, that Waters’ gave in 1979. He talks about the album’s gen­e­sis, and breaks down the mean­ing of each song at length. Waters’ rela­tion­ship with The Wall defined the rest of his career after he left Pink Floyd in 1986. In fact, since 2010, he’s been tour­ing his ver­sion of the stage show, and has pro­duced a doc­u­men­tary of its revival. But long before the cur­rent incar­na­tion of the endur­ing­ly clas­sic album and live spec­ta­cle, he brought a revival of The Wall to Berlin in 1990 to com­mem­o­rate the fall of that city’s lit­er­al wall eight months ear­li­er. See the full con­cert video of that show below. Fea­tur­ing an array of guest musi­cians, the show approx­i­mates the musi­cal inten­si­ty of the orig­i­nal 1980 tour—but noth­ing, of course, can sub­sti­tute for the incred­i­ble ener­gy of the orig­i­nal four mem­bers of the band play­ing togeth­er. The vision may have been all Waters, but the exe­cu­tion of The Wall need­ed Pink Floyd for its suc­cess.


Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Roger Waters’ Ear­ly, Work-in-Progress Record­ings of Pink Floyd’s The Wall

Watch Doc­u­men­taries on the Mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here

Watch the Rare Reunions of Pink Floyd: Con­certs from 2005, 2010 & 2011

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

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Thug Notes Demystifies 60 Literary Classics (from Shakespeare to Gatsby) with a Fresh Urban Twist

in Books, Comedy, Literature | December 2nd, 2014

Gen­tle read­er, if you feel your knee jerk­ing at Thug Notes, may I sug­gest tak­ing a moment to gaze beyond the gold bling and du-rag favored by its fic­ti­tious host, lit­er­a­ture lover Sparky Sweets, PhD.

Or do we think YA author John Green should hold the monop­oly on wit­ty, break­neck decon­struc­tions of clas­sic lit­er­a­ture? No shade towards Green. The Crash Course empire he’s cre­at­ed with his sci­en­tist broth­er, Hank, pro­vides a great and enter­tain­ing ser­vice to stu­dents of all ages. His cute-nerd vibe makes him an appeal­ing host.

But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

A poor choice of metaphor, giv­en the fic­ti­tious Dr. Sweets’ soft spot for baby felines. It’s not some­thing he talks about on the show, but he fre­quent­ly tweets pho­tos of him­self in their oh-so-cud­dly com­pa­ny, tag­ging them #kit­ten­ther­a­py.

He (or per­haps head writer / pro­duc­er Jared Bauer) also turns to Twit­ter to dis­sem­i­nate quotes by the likes of Cer­vantes (“Dili­gence is the moth­er of good for­tune”) and Orwell (“Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does”).

Thug Notes’ tagline “clas­sic lit­er­a­ture, orig­i­nal gangs­ta” may be its punch­line, but the humor of incon­gruity is not its sole aim.

Come­di­an Greg Edwards, who plays Sparky Sweets, told The New York Times that the project is “triv­i­al­iz­ing academia’s attempt at mak­ing lit­er­a­ture exclu­sion­ary by show­ing that even high­brow aca­d­e­m­ic con­cepts can be com­mu­ni­cat­ed in a clear and open fash­ion.”

Amen. As Sparky Sweets observes fol­low­ing Simon’s mur­der in the Lord of the Flies above, “Whoo, this $hit (is) get­tin’ real!”

Is there a dan­ger that white teenage boys who love com­e­dy and hip hop, who are indif­fer­ent to lit­er­a­ture, and who know few black peo­ple and/or urban dwellers, might run around imi­tat­ing their favorite parts of these videos, not real­iz­ing that their attempt to embody the char­ac­ter is per­pet­u­at­ing a stereo­type in a bad way?

Yes.

Is there an equal or greater dan­ger that a reluc­tant stu­dent might be prod­ded in a pos­i­tive direc­tion by Sparky’s zesty, insight­ful take on their assigned read­ing?

Resound­ing­ly, yes.

Thug Notes’ dis­cus­sion of racism as por­trayed in To Kill a Mock­ing­bird is not the longest I’ve ever heard, but it is the most straight­for­ward and brac­ing. It got my blood going! I’m inspired to drag my dog eared paper­back copy out and give it anoth­er read! (Maybe I’ll have a Scotch and play some clas­si­cal music. Sparky does that too.)

I’m hop­ing the kids at the high school a cou­ple of blocks away — who, for the record, look and sound far more like Sparky than they do me — will be encour­aged to sup­ple­ment their read­ing of this book, and oth­ers, with Thug Notes.

As an out-of-char­ac­ter Greg Edwards, bear­ing as much resem­blance to Sparky Sweets as Stephen Col­bert does to his most famous cre­ation, told inter­view­er Tavis Smi­ley:

We don’t want to stop kids from read­ing the book. We just want to open up doors. Maybe teach­ers can use it. It’s hard being a teacher nowa­days. You’re under­paid, you’re over­worked, the class­rooms are full, the kids are crazy, so throw this on and maybe it’ll spark one kid’s atten­tion.

As of this writ­ing, Thug Notes has tack­led dozens of titles (you can watch them all here, or right below), a heap­ing help­ing of banned books, and four of Shakespeare’s plays (above).

New titles will be added every oth­er Tues­day. I can’t wait.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alexan­der Hamil­ton: Hip-Hop Hero at the White House Poet­ry Evening

The Can­ter­bury Tales Remixed: Baba Brinkman’s New Album Uses Hip Hop to Bring Chaucer Into the 21st Cen­tu­ry, Yo

Do Rap­pers Have a Big­ger Vocab­u­lary Than Shake­speare?: A Data Sci­en­tist Maps Out the Answer

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, home­school­er, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Leonardo Da Vinci’s To Do List (Circa 1490) Is Much Cooler Than Yours

in Art, History | December 2nd, 2014

da vinci todo list

Most people’s to-do lists are, almost by def­i­n­i­tion, pret­ty dull, filled with those quo­tid­i­an lit­tle tasks that tend to slip out of our minds. Pick up the laun­dry. Get that thing for the kid. Buy milk, canned yams and kumquats at the local mar­ket.

Leonar­do Da Vin­ci was, how­ev­er, no ordi­nary per­son. And his to-do lists were any­thing but dull.

Da Vin­ci would car­ry around a note­book, where he would write and draw any­thing that moved him. “It is use­ful,” Leonar­do once wrote, to “con­stant­ly observe, note, and con­sid­er.” Buried in one of these books, dat­ing back to around the 1490s, is a to-do list. And what a to-do list.

NPR’s Robert Krul­wich had it direct­ly trans­lat­ed. And while all of the list might not be imme­di­ate­ly clear, remem­ber that Da Vin­ci nev­er intend­ed for it to be read by web surfers 500  years in the future.

[Cal­cu­late] the mea­sure­ment of Milan and Sub­urbs

[Find] a book that treats of Milan and its church­es, which is to be had at the stationer’s on the way to Cor­du­sio

[Dis­cov­er] the mea­sure­ment of Corte Vec­chio (the court­yard in the duke’s palace).

[Dis­cov­er] the mea­sure­ment of the castel­lo (the duke’s palace itself)

Get the mas­ter of arith­metic to show you how to square a tri­an­gle.

Get Mess­er Fazio (a pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine and law in Pavia) to show you about pro­por­tion.

Get the Brera Fri­ar (at the Bene­dic­tine Monastery to Milan) to show you De Pon­deribus (a medieval text on mechan­ics)

[Talk to] Gian­ni­no, the Bom­bardier, re. the means by which the tow­er of Fer­rara is walled with­out loop­holes (no one real­ly knows what Da Vin­ci meant by this)

Ask Benedet­to Poti­nari (A Flo­ren­tine Mer­chant) by what means they go on ice in Flan­ders

Draw Milan

Ask Mae­stro Anto­nio how mor­tars are posi­tioned on bas­tions by day or night.

[Exam­ine] the Cross­bow of Mas­tro Gian­net­to

Find a mas­ter of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lom­bard man­ner

[Ask about] the mea­sure­ment of the sun promised me by Mae­stro Gio­van­ni Francese

Try to get Vitolone (the medieval author of a text on optics), which is in the Library at Pavia, which deals with the math­e­mat­ic.

You can just feel Da Vinci’s vora­cious curios­i­ty and intel­lec­tu­al rest­less­ness. Note how many of the entries are about get­ting an expert to teach him some­thing, be it math­e­mat­ics, physics or astron­o­my. Also who casu­al­ly lists “draw Milan” as an ambi­tion?

Leonardo da Vinci exhibition

Lat­er to-do lists, dat­ing around 1510, seemed to focus on Da Vinci’s grow­ing fas­ci­na­tion with anato­my. In a note­book filled with beau­ti­ful­ly ren­dered draw­ings of bones and vis­cera, he rat­tles off more tasks that need to get done. Things like get a skull, describe the jaw of a croc­o­dile and tongue of a wood­peck­er, assess a corpse using his fin­ger as a unit of mea­sure­ment.

On that same page, he lists what he con­sid­ers to be impor­tant qual­i­ties of an anatom­i­cal draughts­man. A firm com­mand of per­spec­tive and a knowl­edge of the inner work­ings of the body are key. So is hav­ing a strong stom­ach.

You can see a page of Da Vinci’s note­book above but be warned. Even if you are con­ver­sant in 16th cen­tu­ry Ital­ian, Da Vin­ci wrote every­thing in mir­ror script.

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:

Thomas Edison’s Huge­ly Ambi­tious “To-Do” List from 1888

Watch Leonar­do da Vinci’s Musi­cal Inven­tion, the Vio­la Organ­ista, Being Played for the Very First Time

The Anatom­i­cal Draw­ings of Renais­sance Man, Leonar­do da Vin­ci

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry Of Avi­a­tion: From da Vinci’s Sketch­es to Apol­lo 11

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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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The Art of Making Blade Runner: See the Original Sketchbook, Storyboards, On-Set Polaroids & More

in Film, Sci Fi | December 2nd, 2014

There’s nev­er been a bad time to revis­it Blade Run­ner, but now, with all the news about the in-devel­op­ment Blade Run­ner 2 break­ing even as you read this, it seems like an espe­cial­ly appro­pri­ate time to go deep­er into Rid­ley Scot­t’s piece of ground­break­ing, Philip K. Dick-adapt­ing cyber­punk cin­e­ma. What­ev­er you think of the prospect of a sequel, if you call your­self a Blade Run­ner fan, you’ll nev­er turn down a chance for anoth­er look behind the scenes of the orig­i­nal.

Hence our offer­ing today of BBC crit­ic Mark Ker­mod­e’s doc­u­men­tary above, On the Edge of Blade Run­ner, and, via Fla­vor­wire, a selec­tion of orig­i­nal sto­ry­boards from the film. Few sci­ence-fic­tion movies hold up so well aes­thet­i­cal­ly after 32 years, but only because few sci­ence-fction movies had so much sheer work put into their design — we are still, I imag­ine, assured a steady stream of pro­duc­tion mate­ri­als to gaze upon for a long time to come.

blade runner storyboard

In recent years, for instance, Sean Young, who played the repli­cant Rachel, released her Polaroid pho­tos from the film’s set. And if you missed it the first time around, you’ll want to cir­cle back to our post fea­tur­ing a freely read­able online ver­sion of Blade Run­ner Sketch­book, a col­lec­tion of over 100 pro­duc­tion draw­ings and pieces of art­work that orig­i­nal­ly came out along­side the film. (See it above.)

blade runner polaroid

And what­ev­er direc­tion Blade Run­ner 2 takes, promis­ing or less so, we’ll all hear a lot about it in the com­ing months. So to bal­ance out the com­ing wave of pro­mo­tion for the sec­ond one, why not watch a lit­tle of the pro­mo­tion of the first one in the form of the con­ven­tion reel below (pro­duced not least to counter all the bad press the pro­duc­tion had drawn at the time), which con­tains inter­views with some of those respon­si­ble for Blade Run­ner’s most endur­ing qual­i­ties: Rid­ley Scott, “visu­al futur­ist” Syd Mead, and visu­al effects design­er Dou­glas Trum­bull. If all three of those guys work on the sequel, well, maybe I’ll start get­ting excit­ed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Blade Run­ner Pro­mo­tion­al Film

Blade Run­ner: The Pil­lar of Sci-Fi Cin­e­ma that Siskel, Ebert, and Stu­dio Execs Orig­i­nal­ly Hat­ed

The Blade Run­ner Sketch­book: The Orig­i­nal Art of Syd Mead and Rid­ley Scott Online

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

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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‘Tired of Giving In’: The Arrest Report, Mug Shot and Fingerprints of Rosa Parks (December 1, 1955)

in History | December 1st, 2014

Rosa_Parks_Booking_Photo_

On this day in 1955, Rosa Parks took her fate­ful bus ride in Mont­gomery, Alaba­ma.

As the sto­ry is often told, Parks was a diminu­tive African-Amer­i­can seam­stress who was weary from a long day of work at a down­town depart­ment store. Her feet ached, so when the dri­ver ordered her to give up her seat to a white man who had just got­ten on the bus, Parks refused, acci­dent­ly set­ting into motion a series of events that led to the mod­ern Civ­il Rights Move­ment.

The prob­lem with the sto­ry, told in that way, is that it is gross­ly mis­lead­ing.

Besides being a seam­stress, Parks was a polit­i­cal orga­niz­er and activist, a mem­ber of the Mont­gomery Vot­ers League and sec­re­tary of the local chap­ter of the NAACP. And while it’s true that Parks did­n’t know when she board­ed the bus that day that she would com­mit an act of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence, when the moment arose she knew what she was doing, and why. As Parks lat­er wrote in her auto­bi­og­ra­phy:

Peo­ple always say that I did­n’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired phys­i­cal­ly, or no more tired than I usu­al­ly was at the end of a work­ing day. I was not old, although some peo­ple have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giv­ing in.

Rosa_Parks_Fingerprints_

Parks was not the first black per­son to be arrest­ed in 1955 for refus­ing to give up a seat on Mont­gomery’s racial­ly seg­re­gat­ed bus­es. There was a grow­ing sense in the African-Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty that the time was ripe for change. The pre­vi­ous year, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its land­mark deci­sion in Brown v. Board of Edu­ca­tion, declar­ing that seg­re­ga­tion in pub­lic schools was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.

The Wom­en’s Polit­i­cal Coun­cil in Mont­gomery was already lay­ing the ground­work for a boy­cott of the city bus sys­tem when it learned of Parks’ arrest. Giv­en the respect and sup­port Parks had with­in the com­mu­ni­ty, the group decid­ed it was an oppor­tune moment to take action. A one-day boy­cott was held on the day of Park­s’s tri­al (she was con­vict­ed of vio­lat­ing Chap­ter 6, Sec­tion 11 of the Mont­gomery City Code and ordered to pay a $10 fine plus $4 in court costs) and a longer one was launched short­ly after­ward, crip­pling the finances of the com­pa­ny that ran the bus sys­tem, which typ­i­cal­ly derived over 75 per­cent of its fare rev­enue from African-Amer­i­can pas­sen­gers. That boy­cott last­ed more than a year, until late Decem­ber of 1956, when the Supreme Court upheld a low­er court rul­ing in Brow­der, et al v. Gayle that the seg­re­ga­tion of Mont­gomery’s bus sys­tem was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.

Rosa_Parks_Arrest_Report_

The doc­u­ments shown here were sub­mit­ted as evi­dence in Brow­der v. Gayle. The arrest report (above) states that Parks was sit­ting in the white sec­tion of the bus. Actu­al­ly, she had com­plied with the law when she first entered, sit­ting down behind the first 10 seats which were per­ma­nent­ly reserved for whites. (See the chart below; the front of the bus is at the top of the chart, with the dri­ver’s seat des­ig­nat­ed by an “X.”) Under Mont­gomery law, the bus dri­ver had the dis­cre­tion to move blacks far­ther back when the white sec­tion filled up. Black peo­ple paid the same fare as whites, but were often ordered to exit the bus after pay­ing the fare and re-enter through the back door. In stand­ing-room-only con­di­tions, they were not allowed even to stand next to white peo­ple.

Rosa_Parks_Bus_Chart_

At rush hour on Dec. 1, 1955, the bus was fill­ing up as Parks and three oth­er African-Amer­i­cans sat in the first row behind the white sec­tion. When a white man entered the bus, the dri­ver James F. Blake ordered Parks and the oth­er three to leave their seats and move back, where they would all have to stand. After hes­i­tat­ing, the oth­ers got up but Parks stayed seat­ed. In The Rebel­lious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Jeanne Theo­haris recon­structs the scene:

Blake want­ed the seats. “I had police pow­ers — any dri­ver did.”  The bus was crowd­ed and the ten­sion height­ened as Blake walked back to her. Refus­ing to assume a def­er­en­tial posi­tion, Parks looked him straight in the eye.

Blake asked, “Are you going to stand up?”

Parks replied, “No.” She then told him she was not going to move  “because I got on first and paid the same fare, and I did­n’t think it was right for me to stand so some­one else who got on lat­er could sit down.”

“Well, I’m going to have you arrest­ed.”

“You may do that,” Parks replied.

via: Nation­al Archives

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Watch Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Haunting Vision of the Future

in Film | December 1st, 2014

A friend recent­ly told me about a screen­ing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris he attend­ed in a state of, er, expand­ed per­cep­tion. The vivid sci-fi trip he’d expect­ed turned into the most har­row­ing emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence of his life. 2001: A Space Odyssey has proven a reli­able favorite of the con­scious­ness-alter­ing crowd since it came out in 1968, almost to the point where you’d think Kubrick made the film just for them. But Tarkovsky’s 1972 sto­ry of a sen­tient plan­et and the hal­lu­ci­na­tions with which it tempts and tor­ments a near­by space sta­tion has an entire­ly dif­fer­ent exis­ten­tial con­cep­tion of mankind’s ven­ture into the unknown realms of space and time. What­ev­er your own state of mind, you can watch Solaris free online. (Watch below and make sure click “cc” at the bot­tom of the videos to launch the sub­ti­tles.) If you don’t feel sure about tak­ing the plunge, have a look first at the updat­ed trail­er above.


Rework­ing Stanis­law Lem’s orig­i­nal nov­el toward his own artis­tic ends, Tarkovsky real­ized his vision of the future with a num­ber of unusu­al tech­niques. View­ers often take spe­cial, bemused notice of the scene above, a five-minute dri­ve down an urban high­way which comes just before the pro­tag­o­nist, psy­chol­o­gist Kris Kelvin, departs for his space mis­sion. (Tarkovsky liked to say he put it there to dis­cour­age impa­tient film­go­ers.) The clip includes com­men­tary from film schol­ars Vida John­son and Gra­ham Petrie. As John­son explains, “Tarkovsky knew that in order to sit­u­ate the sto­ry in a for­eign place and a dis­tant time, both to ful­fill genre require­ments and deflect poten­tial cen­sors, he need­ed to con­trast his nos­tal­gia for nature and the past with a city of the future.” And so, unable to build such a thing on his lim­it­ed bud­get, Tarkovsky went to Tokyo: “The Japan­ese road signs, the for­eign cars, long tun­nels, and mul­ti-lane high­ways with wind­ing bridges and over­pass­es might have rep­re­sent­ed a city of the future for ear­ly-1970s Sovi­et audi­ences used to sim­ple two-lane roads and domes­tic tin-box cars, if they were lucky enough to have a car at all.”

akasaka_08Petrie ref­er­ences an entry from Tarkovsky’s diaries “where he wor­ries that if the Japan­ese visa does­n’t come through in time, they will miss the end of the exhi­bi­tion” — prob­a­bly Osaka’s thor­ough­ly future-ori­ent­ed Expo ’70 World’s Fair. (Inci­den­tal­ly, next time you swing by Osa­ka, I do rec­om­mend tak­ing a walk around the still-fas­ci­nat­ing Expo ’70 grounds.) Tarkovsky did end up miss­ing the Osa­ka exhi­bi­tion, and so he shot in Tokyo instead. At Tarkovsky fan site nostalghia.com, Yuji Kiku­take has gone through mod­ern-day Tokyo and found the sur­viv­ing land­marks of the Akasa­ka and Iiku­ra neigh­bor­hoods over which the sequence pass­es — reveal­ing the future, in oth­er words, of the city of the future. What­ev­er you think of the result­ing five min­utes, the fact that Tarkovsky man­aged to go shoot them and that the offi­cials in charge fund­ed it demon­strates, as Petrie puts it, not just “the inge­nu­ity of film­mak­ers try­ing to pen­e­trate the Iron Cur­tain,” but “the high esteem in which [Tarkovsky] was held by the same film-indus­try bureau­crats who made his life mis­er­able by cut­ting his bud­gets and try­ing to cen­sor his films.”

In addi­tion to Solaris (watch here or above) you can find oth­er major films by the Russ­ian auteur in our col­lec­tion of Free Tarkovsky Films, or our larg­er col­lec­tion: 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online

Tarkovsky’s Solaris Revis­it­ed

The Mas­ter­ful Polaroid Pic­tures Tak­en by Film­mak­er Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

A Poet in Cin­e­ma: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Film­mak­ing and Life

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

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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George Harrison’s Mystical, Fisheye Self-Portraits Taken in India (1966)

in Music, Photography, Religion | December 1st, 2014

Harrison Fisheye1

The Bea­t­les’ sojourn in India can seem like a bit of a stunt, as much a rock n’ roll cliché as Led Zeppelin’s trashed hotel rooms or Fleet­wood Mac’s coke binges. Eas­i­ly par­o­died in, for exam­ple, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Sto­ry, the band’s turn East­ward looks in hind­sight like fad­dish spir­i­tu­al tourism. That impres­sion may not be so far off. As one writer puts it:

By the late 1960s, The Bea­t­les had engi­neered anoth­er pop cul­ture rev­o­lu­tion (at least in Europe and North Amer­i­ca) by wear­ing Indi­an-style cloth­ing, spout­ing reli­gious and philo­soph­i­cal apho­risms that seemed to bor­row from ‘East­ern’ thought, and lat­er even vis­it­ing India for a high­ly-pub­li­cized train­ing ses­sion to learn Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion with the fraud­u­lent ‘mys­tic’ Mahar­ishi Mahesh Yogi.

But while for John, Paul, and Ringo, “inter­est in Indian/Hindu cul­ture was rather fleet­ing and tem­po­ral […] for George, India com­plete­ly over­hauled and changed his life per­ma­nent­ly.” As Har­ri­son him­self would lat­er recount of his first jour­ney in 1966, “it was the first feel­ing I’d ever had of being lib­er­at­ed from being a Bea­t­le or a num­ber.” The rest of the band wouldn’t make the trip until two years lat­er.

Harrison Fisheye 2

Har­ri­son had prin­ci­pal­ly embarked to study sitar under Ravi Shankar and learn yoga, but this was also a peri­od of self-dis­cov­ery and escape from, as he says, the “mania.” Trav­el­ing, as he always did, with a cam­era, he doc­u­ment­ed his jour­ney. His pic­tures are far from ordi­nary tourist images.

While he describes in writ­ing the “mix­ture of unbe­liev­able things” he saw, he just as often turned the cam­era on him­self, his pho­to­graph­ic intro­spec­tion made even more pro­nounced by his use of a fish­eye lens.

Harrison Fisheye 3

Inter­est­ing­ly, in his rec­ol­lec­tion of the trip, Har­ri­son ref­er­ences the sur­re­al cult, sci-fi show The Pris­on­er as a prime illus­tra­tion of life as “a num­ber.” One of the show’s most mem­o­rable devices involves a huge, mys­te­ri­ous white bub­ble that cap­tures or kills any­one try­ing to escape the sin­is­ter orga­ni­za­tion that holds the main char­ac­ter cap­tive. In Harrison’s pho­tos, the bub­ble becomes a para­dox­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of his way out of fame’s fish­bowl, of the prison of Beat­le­ma­nia and an iden­ti­ty that felt con­trived and alien­at­ing.

Harrison Fisheye 4

Behind his steady, seri­ous gaze open up vis­tas that presage the breadth and depth of his immer­sion in Indi­an spir­i­tu­al prac­tices. What­ev­er one thinks of his con­ver­sion, there’s no doubt it was sin­cere, and life­long. Not long after this first trip, at the age of 24, he wrote to his moth­er, “I want to be self-real­ized. I want to find God. I’m not inter­est­ed in mate­r­i­al things, this world, fame.” Har­ri­son expressed the very same mys­ti­cal aspi­ra­tions in his final, 1997 inter­view, still play­ing and singing with his men­tor Ravi Shankar.

Harrison Fisheye 5

via Shoot­ing Film/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ravi Shankar Gives George Har­ri­son a Sitar Les­son … and Oth­er Vin­tage Footage

Watch George Harrison’s Final Inter­view and Per­for­mance (1997)

Phil Spector’s Gen­tle Pro­duc­tion Notes to George Har­ri­son Dur­ing the Record­ing of All Things Must Pass

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

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