Harlan Ellison’s Wonderful Rant on Why Writers Should Always Get Paid

in Business, Writing | November 6th, 2015

In a per­fect world, I could write this post for free. Alas, the rig­ors of the mod­ern econ­o­my demand that I pay reg­u­lar and some­times high prices for food, shel­ter, books, and the oth­er neces­si­ties of life. And so if I spend time work­ing on some­thing — and in my case, that usu­al­ly means writ­ing some­thing — I’d bet­ter ask for mon­ey in exchange, or I’ll find myself out on the street before long. Nobody under­stands this bet­ter than Har­lan Elli­son, the huge­ly pro­lif­ic author of nov­els, sto­ries, essays screen­plays, com­ic books, usu­al­ly in, or deal­ing with, the genre of sci­ence fic­tion.

Elli­son also starred in Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a doc­u­men­tary about his col­or­ful life and all the work he’s writ­ten dur­ing it, a clip of which you can see at the top of the post. In it, he describes receiv­ing a call just the day before from “a lit­tle film com­pa­ny” seek­ing per­mis­sion to include an inter­view clip with him pre­vi­ous­ly shot about the mak­ing of Baby­lon 5, a series on which he worked as cre­ative con­sul­tant. “Absolute­ly,” Elli­son said to the com­pa­ny’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive. “All you’ve got to do is pay me.”

This sim­ple request seemed to take the representative—who went on to insist that “every­one else is just doing it for noth­ing” and that “it would be good publicity”—quite by sur­prise. “Do you get a pay­check?” Elli­son then asked. “Does your boss get a pay­check? Do you pay the telecine guy? Do you pay the cam­era­man? Do you pay the cut­ters? Do you pay the Team­sters when they schlep your stuff on the trucks? Would you go to the gas sta­tion and ask them to give you free gas? Would you go to the doc­tor and have them take out our spleen for noth­ing?”

This line of ques­tion­ing has come up again and again since Elli­son told this sto­ry, as when the jour­nal­ist Nate Thay­er, or more recent­ly Wil Wheaton, spoke out against the expec­ta­tion that writ­ers would hand out the rights to their work “for expo­sure.” The prag­mat­ic Elli­son frames the mat­ter as fol­lows: “Cross my palm with sil­ver, and you can use my inter­view.” But do finan­cial­ly-ori­ent­ed atti­tudes such as his (“I don’t take a piss with­out get­ting paid for it”) taint the art and craft of writ­ing? He does­n’t think so: “I sell my soul,” he admits, “but at the high­est rates.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Faulkn­er Explains Why Writ­ing is Best Left to Scoundrels … Prefer­ably Liv­ing in Broth­els (1956)

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Ray Brad­bury on Zen and the Art of Writ­ing (1973)

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

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Horror Legend Christopher Lee Reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Film, Literature | November 6th, 2015

Did Bram Stoker’s world-famous Drac­u­la character—perhaps the most cul­tur­al­ly unkil­l­able of all hor­ror mon­sters—derive from Irish folk­lore? Search the Gael­ic “Droch-Fhoula” (pro­nounced droc’ola) and, in addi­tion to the req­ui­site met­al bands, you’ll find ref­er­ences to the “Cas­tle of the Blood Vis­age,” to a blood-drink­ing chief­tain named Abhar­tach, and to oth­er pos­si­ble native sources of Irish writer Bram Stok­er’s 1897 nov­el. These Celtic leg­ends, the BBC writes, “may have shaped the sto­ry as much as Euro­pean myths and Goth­ic lit­er­a­ture.”

Despite all this intrigu­ing spec­u­la­tion about Dracula’s Irish ori­gins, the actors play­ing him have come from a vari­ety of places. One recent incar­na­tion, TV series Drac­u­la, did cast an Irish actor, Jonathan Rhys Mey­ers, in the role.

Hun­gar­i­an Bela Lugosi comes clos­est to the fic­tion­al character’s nation­al­i­ty, as well as that of anoth­er, per­haps dubi­ous source, Roman­ian war­lord Vlad the Impaler. Pro­tean Brit Gary Old­man played up the char­ac­ter as Slav­ic aris­to­crat in Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s some­what more faith­ful take. But one too-oft-over­looked por­tray­al by anoth­er Eng­lish actor, Christo­pher Lee, deserves much more atten­tion than it receives.

In ten low-bud­get films made by British exploita­tion stu­dio Ham­mer, Lee por­trayed the mon­strous-yet-seduc­tive blood-suck­ing noble­man as a very prop­er Eng­lish­man with “a cer­tain las­civ­i­ous sex appeal”—begin­ning with 1958’s Hor­ror of Drac­u­la (see a trail­er above) and end­ing with 1973’s The Satan­ic Rites of Drac­u­la. I find Lee’s Drac­u­la so mem­o­rable that I was delight­ed to hear the audio above of him read­ing an adap­ta­tion of the nov­el, in ten parts. The video begins with titles and an estab­lish­ing shot from the Ham­mer films, then segues to images from a 1966 Drac­u­la graph­ic nov­el, the source of the “pret­ty faith­ful” adap­ta­tion by Otto Binder and Craig Ten­nis, for which Lee wrote an intro­duc­tion.

The audio here was also record­ed in 1966 by the book’s edi­tor Russ Jones. Comics blog­ger Steven Thomp­son remarks that “since Drac­u­la is made up of a series of let­ters, jour­nal and diary entries, the writ­ers here log­i­cal­ly take a more straight­for­ward route of telling the tale while main­tain­ing the episod­ic feel quite well.” Rather than the voice of Count Drac­u­la, Lee reads as the nov­el­’s epis­to­lary nar­ra­tor Jonathan Hark­er, and the Drac­u­la in the art­work, drawn by artist Al McWilliams, “bears more than a pass­ing resem­blance here to actor John Car­ra­dine,” a notable Amer­i­can actor who played the char­ac­ter in Uni­ver­sal’s House of Franken­stein and House of Drac­u­la. Nonethe­less, Lee’s voice is enough to con­jure his many excep­tion­al per­for­mances as the pro­to­typ­i­cal vam­pire, a char­ac­ter and con­cept that will like­ly nev­er die.

Schol­ar and writer Bob Cur­ran, a pro­po­nent of the Irish ori­gins of Drac­u­la, argues in his book Vam­pires that leg­ends of undead, blood-drink­ing ghouls are found all over the world, which goes a long way toward explain­ing the endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of Drac­u­la in par­tic­u­lar and vam­pires in gen­er­al. We’ll prob­a­bly see anoth­er actor inher­it the role of Stok­er’s seduc­tive­ly creepy count in the near future. Who­ev­er it is will have to mea­sure him­self against not only the per­for­mances of Lugosi, Car­ra­dine, Old­man, and Mey­ers, but also against the debonair Christo­pher Lee. He would do well, wher­ev­er he comes from, to study Lee’s Drac­u­la films close­ly, and lis­ten to him read the sto­ry in the adap­ta­tion above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Christo­pher Lee (R.I.P.) Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and From “The Fall of the House of Ush­er”

Christo­pher Lee Nar­rates a Beau­ti­ful Ani­ma­tion of Tim Burton’s Poem, Night­mare Before Christ­mas

Watch Nos­fer­atu, the Sem­i­nal Vam­pire Film, Free Online (1922)

Hear Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” Read by the Great Bela Lugosi (1946)

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

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

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Stephen Hawking Wonders Whether Capitalism or Artificial Intelligence Will Doom the Human Race

in Economics, Life, Science, Technology | November 5th, 2015

hawking capitalism future

Cre­ative Com­mons image via NASA

It should­n’t be espe­cial­ly con­tro­ver­sial to point out that we live in a piv­otal time in human history—that the actions we col­lec­tive­ly take (or that plu­to­crats and tech­nocrats take) will deter­mine the future of the human species—or whether we even have a future in the com­ing cen­turies. The threats posed by cli­mate change and war are exac­er­bat­ed and accel­er­at­ed by rapid­ly wors­en­ing eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty. Expo­nen­tial advances in tech­nol­o­gy threat­en to eclipse our abil­i­ty to con­trol machines rather than be con­trolled, or stamped out, by them.

It’s also the case that our most well-regard­ed sci­en­tists and tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tors have not remained silent in the face of these crises. Physi­cist Stephen Hawk­ing has issued some dire warn­ings late­ly when it comes to human­i­ty’s future. Sev­er­al years ago, he pre­dict­ed that “our only chance of long term sur­vival” may be to “spread out into space,” a la Inter­stel­lar. In addi­tion to the wors­en­ing cli­mate cri­sis, the rise of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence con­cerns Hawk­ing. Along with Bill Gates and Elon Musk, he has warned of what futur­ist Ray Kurzweil has called “the sin­gu­lar­i­ty,” the point at which machine intel­li­gence sur­pass­es our own.

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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Where Kurzweil has seen this event through an opti­mistic, New Age lens, Hawk­ing’s view seems more in line with dystopi­an sci-fi visions of robot apoc­a­lypse. “Suc­cess in AI would be the biggest event in human his­to­ry,” he wrote in The Inde­pen­dent last year, “Unfor­tu­nate­ly it might also be the last.” Giv­en the design of autonomous weapons sys­tems and, as he told the BBC, the fact that “Humans, who are lim­it­ed by slow bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion, could­n’t com­pete and would be super­seded,” the prospect looks chill­ing, but it isn’t inevitable.

Our tech isn’t active­ly out to get us. “The real risk with AI isn’t mal­ice but com­pe­tence,” Hawk­ing clar­i­fied, in a fas­ci­nat­ing Red­dit “Ask Me Any­thing” ses­sion last month. Due to the physi­cist’s phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions, read­ers post­ed ques­tions and vot­ed on their favorites. From these, Hawk­ing elect­ed the “ones he feels he can give answers to.” In response to a top-rat­ed ques­tion about the so-called “Ter­mi­na­tor Con­ver­sa­tion,” he wrote, “A super­in­tel­li­gent AI will be extreme­ly good at accom­plish­ing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours, we’re in trou­ble.”

This prob­lem of mis­aligned goals is not of course lim­it­ed to our rela­tion­ship with machines. Our pre­car­i­ous eco­nom­ic rela­tion­ships with each oth­er pose a sep­a­rate threat, espe­cial­ly in the face of mas­sive job loss due to future automa­tion. We’d like to imag­ine a future where tech­nol­o­gy frees us of toil and want, the kind of soci­ety Buck­min­ster Fuller sought to cre­ate. But the truth is that wealth and income inequal­i­ty, at their high­est lev­els in the U.S. since at least the Gild­ed Age, may deter­mine a very dif­fer­ent path—one we might think of in terms of “The Ely­si­um Con­ver­sa­tion.” Asked in the same AMA Red­dit ses­sion, “Do you fore­see a world where peo­ple work less because so much work is auto­mat­ed? Do you think peo­ple will always either find work or man­u­fac­ture more work to be done?,” Hawk­ing elab­o­rat­ed,

If machines pro­duce every­thing we need, the out­come will depend on how things are dis­trib­uted. Every­one can enjoy a life of lux­u­ri­ous leisure if the machine-pro­duced wealth is shared, or most peo­ple can end up mis­er­ably poor if the machine-own­ers suc­cess­ful­ly lob­by against wealth redis­tri­b­u­tion. So far, the trend seems to be toward the sec­ond option, with tech­nol­o­gy dri­ving ever-increas­ing inequal­i­ty.

For decades after the Cold War, cap­i­tal­ism had the sta­tus of an unques­tion­ably sacred doctrine—the end of his­to­ry and the best of all pos­si­ble worlds. Now, not only has Hawk­ing iden­ti­fied its excess­es as dri­vers of human decline, but so have oth­er decid­ed­ly non-Marx­ist fig­ures like Bill Gates, who in a recent Atlantic inter­view described the pri­vate sec­tor as “in gen­er­al inept” and unable to address the cli­mate cri­sis because of its focus on short-term gains and max­i­mal prof­its. “There’s no for­tune to be made,” he said, from deal­ing with some of the biggest threats to our sur­vival. But if we don’t deal with them, the loss­es are incal­cu­la­ble.

via Huff Po

Relat­ed Con­tent:

187 Big Thinkers Answer the Ques­tion: What Do You Think About Machines That Think?

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Sev­en Ques­tions for Stephen Hawk­ing: What Would He Ask Albert Ein­stein & More

Stephen Hawk­ing: Aban­don Earth Or Face Extinc­tion

Noam Chom­sky Explains Where Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Went Wrong

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

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Citizen Maths: A Free Online Course That Teaches Adults the Math They Missed in High School

in Math, Online Courses | November 5th, 2015

Many peo­ple still have a major fear of math­e­mat­ics, hav­ing suf­fered through school and not real­ly hav­ing been in the right frame of mind to grasp con­cepts that we’ve been told will come in handy in our future work­ing lives. When Britons get to the age of 16, many can choose to leave school, escap­ing the ter­ror of math (or, as they say, maths).

But we shouldn’t live in fear, so along comes Cit­i­zen Maths, a UK-based free online course that pur­ports to help adults catch up with Lev­el 2 math (aka what a 16-year-old should know) with­out get­ting hit with a ruler or a spit wad. The course is fund­ed by the UFI Char­i­ta­ble Trust, which focus­es on pro­vid­ing free edu­ca­tion for adults.

The Cit­i­zen Maths course cur­rent­ly con­sists of three units—Proportion, Uncer­tain­ty, and Rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Addi­tion­al sec­tions on Pat­tern and Mea­sure­ments will soon fol­low. All units come with videos and tests that take about an hour of the viewer’s time. As the nar­ra­tor says, you can “learn in safe­ty, with­out fear of being told off or exposed.” The full course takes, on aver­age, about 20 hours.

And the tuto­ri­als bring in the real world, not just the abstract. Ratios and odds are expe­ri­enced through roulette, horse rac­ing, and play­ing dice. Under­stand­ing insur­ance comes into the tuto­r­i­al on mak­ing deci­sions. Mod­el­ing is explained by try­ing to under­stand weath­er pat­terns. And pro­por­tion is explained through bak­ing recipes and mak­ing cock­tails.

You will need a Google Account to get start­ed, though, for those with­out one, there is a sim­ple guide to get you start­ed. The tuto­ri­als fea­ture YouTube instruc­tion along with an embed­ded app called Scratch.

As of this post, three of the five sec­tions are avail­able, with the com­plete course due up by next year. You can find more advanced Math cours­es in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Math Cours­es.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Math Cours­es

Free Math Text­books

The Unex­pect­ed Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Star­ry Night”

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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Poignant and Unsettling Post-Mortem Family Portraits from the 19th Century

in Life, Photography | November 5th, 2015

victoriaanse-post-mortem-fotografie-op-de-foto-met-1

The 19th cen­tu­ry wit­nessed the birth of pho­tog­ra­phy. And, before too long, Vic­to­ri­an soci­ety found impor­tant appli­ca­tions for the new medi­um — like memo­ri­al­iz­ing the dead. A recent post on a Dutch ver­sion of Nation­al Geo­graph­ic notes that “Pho­tograph­ing deceased fam­i­ly mem­bers just before their bur­ial was enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar in cer­tain Vic­to­ri­an cir­cles in Europe and the Unit­ed States. Although adults were also pho­tographed, it was main­ly chil­dren who were com­mem­o­rat­ed in this way. In a peri­od plagued by unprece­dent­ed lev­els of infant mor­tal­i­ty, post-mortem pic­tures often pro­vid­ed the only tan­gi­ble mem­o­ry of the deceased child.”

victoriaanse-post-mortem-fotografie-op-de-foto-met

Though unusu­al by mod­ern stan­dards, the pic­tures played an impor­tant role in a fam­i­ly’s griev­ing process and often became one of its cher­ished pos­ses­sions — cher­ished because it was like­ly the only pho­to of the deceased child that fam­i­lies had. Dur­ing the ear­ly days of pho­tog­ra­phy, por­traits were expen­sive, which meant that most fam­i­lies did­n’t take pic­tures dur­ing the course of every­day life. It was only death that gave them a prompt.

post mortem pic 3

The prac­tice of tak­ing post mortem pic­tures peaked in the 19th cen­tu­ry, right around the time when “snap­shot” pho­tog­ra­phy became more preva­lent, allow­ing fam­i­lies to take por­traits at a low­er cost, when every­one was in the full swing of life. Hence obvi­at­ing the need for post-mortem pho­tos. You can learn more about this bygone prac­tice by vis­it­ing the Burns Archive or get­ting the book, Sleep­ing Beau­ty: Memo­r­i­al Pho­tog­ra­phy in Amer­i­ca.

via Dutch Nat Geo/ Sci­ence Dump

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

 

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Man Ray’s Portraits of Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp & Many Other 1920s Icons

in Art, Literature, Photography | November 5th, 2015

Hemingway Man Ray

When pho­tog­ra­phers spe­cial­ize in por­traits of famous peo­ple, they often speak of find­ing a visu­al way to reveal their oft-pho­tographed sub­jec­t’s rarely exposed nature; to bring their depths, in oth­er words, to the sur­face. Man Ray (1890–1976), the Sur­re­al­ist pho­tog­ra­ph­er and artist, had his own way of doing most every­thing, and he cer­tain­ly had his own approach to celebri­ty por­trai­ture. Take, for exam­ple, his 1923 shot of Ernest Hem­ing­way above, tak­en just a cou­ple years after both the writer and pho­tog­ra­ph­er joined the move­able feast of Paris, which Man Ray would call home for most of his career.

Pound Man Ray

That same year and in that same urban bohemia, Man Ray pho­tographed anoth­er famed man of let­ters, the mod­ernist poet Ezra Pound. You can see the some­what more con­ven­tion­al-look­ing result of that encounter just above. Below, we have a far less con­ven­tion­al-look­ing por­trait from 1922, which takes as its sub­ject the dancer Bro­nisla­va Nijin­s­ka, who per­haps only counts as famous to you if you know the his­to­ry of 20th-cen­tu­ry bal­let — but I say any­one will­ing to appear in a por­trait look­ing that fright­en­ing has earned all the fame they can get.

Nijinska

Mar­cel Duchamp, who appears below, sat for Man Ray in 1921 look­ing less scary than sil­ly, but as one of the wit­ti­est and most artis­ti­cal­ly for­ward-think­ing fig­ures of the era, he sure­ly got the joke. These appear in the book Man Ray: Paris — Hol­ly­wood — Paris, which col­lects 500 of the por­traits Man Ray left in his archives when he died in 1976, all of “mem­bers of Dadaist and Sur­re­al­ist cir­cles, of artists and painters, of writ­ers and US emi­grants of the Lost Gen­er­a­tion, of aris­to­crats, and paragons of the worlds of fash­ion and the­ater.”

Duchamp Man ray

You can sam­ple more such works, which cap­ture as only Man Ray would the natures of such icons as André Bre­ton, Sal­vador Dalí, and Lee Miller, at Mon­do Blo­go. You can also find many more works, in gen­er­al, by Man Ray on the MoMA’s web­site.

via Fla­vor­wire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Three Essen­tial Dadaist Films: Ground­break­ing Works by Hans Richter, Man Ray & Mar­cel Duchamp

Andy Warhol’s 85 Polaroid Por­traits: Mick Jag­ger, Yoko Ono, O.J. Simp­son & Many Oth­ers (1970–1987)

Philoso­pher Por­traits: Famous Philoso­phers Paint­ed in the Style of Influ­en­tial Artists

Por­traits of Vir­ginia Woolf, James Joyce, Wal­ter Ben­jamin & Oth­er Lit­er­ary Leg­ends by Gisèle Fre­und

Cof­fee Por­traits of John Lennon, Albert Ein­stein, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe & Oth­er Icons

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

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Read the Entire Comic Book Adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

in Comics/Cartoons, Poetry | November 4th, 2015

prufrock23

Two years ago, we high­light­ed for you the begin­ning of a promis­ing project — Julian Peters’ com­ic book adap­ta­tion of T.S. Eliot’s 1910 poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” At the time of our post, Peters had only com­plet­ed the first nine pages of his adap­ta­tion. And, about those first pages, our Josh Jones had this to say:

Dante is where “Prufrock” begins, with an epi­graph from the Infer­no. Peters’ first page illus­trates the ago­nized speak­er of Dante’s lines, Gui­do da Mon­te­fel­tro, a soul con­fined to the eighth cir­cle, whom you can see at the top of the title page shown above. Peters’ visu­al choic­es place us firm­ly in the hell­ish emo­tion­al realm of “Prufrock,” a seem­ing cat­a­logue of the mun­dane that har­bors a dark­er import. Peters gives us no hint of when we might expect new pages, but I for one am eager to see more.

Hap­pi­ly for Josh … and the rest of us … we can now find out where Peters took the rest of the project. The adap­ta­tion is now com­plete. 24 pages in total. All now on dis­play on Peters’ web­site here.

If you’re not famil­iar with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” I’d strong­ly encour­age you to revis­it a post in our archive where you can hear “Prufrock” being read by T.S. Eliot him­self and also Sir Antho­ny Hop­kins. There you can learn more about Eliot’s mod­ernist mas­ter­piece.

Note: Julian is look­ing for a pub­lish­er to help put his com­ic book in print. If any pub­lish­ers want to chat with him, you can find his con­tact info on his web site.

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

T.S. Eliot’s Rad­i­cal Poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Read by Antho­ny Hop­kins and Eliot Him­self

Lis­ten to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Mas­ter­piece, the Four Quar­tets

T.S. Eliot Reads Old Possum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats & Oth­er Clas­sic Poems (75 Min­utes, 1955)

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Mod­ernist Poem The Waste Land

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iTunes Terms & Conditions Adapted into a Graphic Novel: Read It Free Online

in Comics/Cartoons, Technology | November 4th, 2015

apple-terms-and-conditions-comic

In the past, we’ve brought you the cre­ative work of R. Siko­ryak. An illus­tra­tor who teach­es at the Par­sons School of Design in NYC, Siko­ryak has a pen­chant for cre­at­ing com­ic book adap­ta­tions of lit­er­ary clas­sics. Take for exam­ple Dos­toyevsky Comics where Bat­man stars in a com­ic book ver­sion of Crime & Pun­ish­ment. Or Wait­ing to Go, which mar­ries Wait­ing for Godot with Beav­is and Butt-Head. 

In his lat­est project, Siko­ryak veers sharply away from lit­er­a­ture toward lan­guage that is much more tech­ni­cal. Now, on his tum­blr, you can find iTunes Terms & Con­di­tions: The Graph­ic Nov­el.

Adding a new page every day, Siko­ryak is cre­at­ing an illus­trat­ed ver­sion of the “com­plete, unabridged legal agree­ment.” You can cur­rent­ly view the first 49 pages. Click here. Go to the bot­tom of the page. Then start scrolling up as you read.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bat­man Stars in an Unusu­al Car­toon Adap­ta­tion of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Pun­ish­ment

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

Comics Inspired by Wait­ing For Godot, Fea­tur­ing Tintin, Roz Chast, and Beav­is & Butthead

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New Video Game Inspired by 20 Haruki Murakami Stories Is Coming Your Way: Help Kickstart It

in Literature, Video Games | November 4th, 2015

Back in grade school, I got into the genre of com­put­er games known as “graph­ic adven­tures,” nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ences — and often quite elab­o­rate ones — through which the play­er guides the pro­tag­o­nist with points and clicks: games like Mani­ac Man­sion, Space Quest, Mean Streets, Zak McCrack­en and the Alien Mind­ben­ders. In col­lege I got into the writ­ing of Haru­ki Muraka­mi, the inter­na­tion­al super­star of Japan­ese lit­er­a­ture spe­cial­iz­ing in the kind of sto­ries that, in his words, have under­gone “a kind of mag­i­cal bap­tism to link the world on this side with the world on the oth­er side.” More recent­ly, I’ve cul­ti­vat­ed an inter­est in projects crowd­fund­ed on plat­forms like Kick­starter. At long last, some­one has come up with a cre­ation that unites all three: Mem­o­randa, a Muraka­mi-inspired graph­ic adven­ture now rais­ing its bud­get on Kick­starter.

memoranda 2

“Three years ago I sat down with a friend to brain­storm for mak­ing a game,” writes one of Mem­o­ran­da’s devel­op­ers. Murakami’s work “had inspired us pro­found­ly and we thought that the vague, sur­re­al­is­tic real­i­ty of his fic­tion­al world would have a great poten­tial for being turned into some­thing visu­al and could lead to the cre­ation of odd char­ac­ters, an essen­tial ele­ment in game design.” This led to a “script inspired by more than 20 sto­ries by Muraka­mi” involv­ing a lit­tle town (which has “Euro­pean-like archi­tec­ture but that does­n’t mean it belongs to some­where in Europe”) “where there are both lap­tops and bam­boo water clocks,” a cast of char­ac­ters from “a WWII sur­viv­ing sol­dier to an ele­phant tak­ing shel­ter in a man’s house hop­ing to become human,” and a pro­tag­o­nist “who lit­tle by lit­tle real­izes she is for­get­ting her own name.”

Kick­starter has proven a viable financ­ing medi­um for a new wave of graph­ic adven­ture games, some of them by the cre­ators of the old wave: Tim Schafer, known for Mani­ac Man­sion’s beloved sequel Day of the Ten­ta­cle, raised $3.3 mil­lion for what would become Bro­ken Age, and Space Quest mas­ter­minds Scott Mur­phy and Mark Crowe more recent­ly reunit­ed to raise over $500,000 for SpaceVen­ture. Mem­o­ran­da, by com­par­i­son, requires no more than a shoe­string, and, with ten days to go in its fund­ing dri­ve, it has already raised more than the $13,695 request­ed by Bit Byterz, its Van­cou­ver-based Iran­ian devel­op­ers (how’s that for a demon­stra­tion of Murakami’s glob­al appeal?). But you can still con­tribute at its Kick­starter page, and as a reward could get a copy of the game, its sound­track, a dig­i­tal art book, or even — enthu­si­asts of Muraka­mi tropes, take note — the inclu­sion of your own cat in the sto­ry. No game com­pa­ny ever offered me that in grade school.

You can watch a trail­er for Mem­o­ran­da above.

via Fla­vor­wire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In Search of Haru­ki Muraka­mi: A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to Japan’s Great Post­mod­ernist Nov­el­ist

Haru­ki Murakami’s Advice Col­umn (“Mr. Murakami’s Place”) Is Now Online: Read Eng­lish Trans­la­tions

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Lists the Three Essen­tial Qual­i­ties For All Seri­ous Nov­el­ists (And Run­ners)

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Dis­cov­er Haru­ki Murakami’s Adver­to­r­i­al Short Sto­ries: Rare Short-Short Fic­tion from the 1980s

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

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

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The Night John Lennon & Yoko Ono Jammed with Frank Zappa at the Fillmore East (1971)

in Music | November 4th, 2015

It’s unfor­tu­nate, I think, that legions of Bea­t­les fans turned on Yoko Ono with such fero­cious ani­mos­i­ty after the breakup of the band. Most fans still absolute­ly despise Yoko. (See the legion of often crude­ly misog­y­nist com­ments under every Youtube video in which she appears.) Sure, her voice and music is cer­tain­ly not to everyone’s taste, but with­out her artis­tic and con­cep­tu­al influ­ence on John Lennon post-Bea­t­les, it’s unlike­ly his amaz­ing solo albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) and Imag­ine (1971) would sound the way they do. Yoko, in fact, more or less gave Lennon the seeds of “Imag­ine,” the song, in her quirky 1964 self-pub­lished book, Grape­fruit: A Book of Instruc­tions and Draw­ings, though she nev­er took the cred­it for it.

Like it or not, if we love solo Lennon, we have no choice but to take the more tra­di­tion­al­ly great song­writ­ing with the messy, exper­i­men­tal, and some­times unlis­ten­able. They can­not be com­plete­ly untan­gled, to the dis­may of a great many peo­ple. As Dami­an Fanel­li at Gui­tar World com­ments on Lennon and the Plas­tic Ono Band’s impromp­tu performance/jam with Eric Clap­ton in Toron­to in 1969, “Yoko screams—very loudly—during the entire oth­er­wise-decent per­for­mance.” This is not an exag­ger­at­ed or espe­cial­ly biased char­ac­ter­i­za­tion. “Some­day,” Fanel­li then goes on, “I’ll vent about how ter­ri­ble and depress­ing this is.” Fine, but whether we think of her singing as chal­leng­ing per­for­mance art or “depress­ing” cat­er­waul­ing, we’re stuck with it. But do the dynam­ics of John and Yoko onstage change when we add anoth­er polar­iz­ing weirdo—Frank Zappa—to the mix? See for your­self in the videos here, from an onstage jam ses­sion the two did with Zap­pa and the Moth­ers of Inven­tion at the Fill­more East in 1971.

See Zap­pa, Lennon, et al. do Wal­ter Ward’s “Well (Baby Please Don’t Go),” which Fanel­li declares “the high­light of the jam, for sure.” Zap­pa announces to the band the key and “not stan­dard blues changes,” then Lennon intro­duces the tune as “a song I used to sing while I was in the Cav­ern in Liv­er­pool. I haven’t done it since.” Zap­pa rips out a fan­tas­tic solo and the band—though seem­ing­ly in the dark at first—lays down a right­eous groove. And Yoko? Well, it’s true, as Fanel­li notes, “all she did was scream her head off.” In this straight-ahead blues num­ber, I have to say, it’s pret­ty obnox­ious. But her vocal tics play much bet­ter in more freeform, odd­ball, Zap­pa-lead jams like “Jam­rag” and “King Kong,” and the shouty, repet­i­tive “Scum­bag,” which sounds almost like a Can out­take.

Zap­pa and band, as always, are in top form. Lennon at times looks out of place and uncer­tain in their impro­visato­ry envi­ron­ment, but he game­ly keeps up. Yoko… Yoko does her usu­al lot of scream­ing, howl­ing, yodel­ing, etc. But before you gin up to tear her to pieces in yet anoth­er nasty online com­ment, bear in mind, for what it’s worth, no Yoko, no “Imag­ine.”

As Fanel­li notes, “the per­for­mance was released as part of Lennon and Ono’s poor­ly received (and not very good at all) 1972 studio/live album, Some­time in New York City.” See Allmusic’s review for a much more thor­ough, fair-mind­ed assess­ment of that record­ing, which “found the Lennons in an explic­it­ly polit­i­cal phase.”

via Gui­tar World

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

The Night Frank Zap­pa Jammed With Pink Floyd … and Cap­tain Beef­heart Too (Bel­gium, 1969)

Down­load the John Lennon/Yoko Ono “War is Over (If You Want It)” Poster in 100+ Lan­guages

Hear John Lennon’s Final Inter­view, Taped on the Last Day of His Life (Decem­ber 8, 1980)

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

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Hand-Colored 1860s Photographs Reveal the Last Days of Samurai Japan

in History, Photography | November 3rd, 2015

Samurai Japan 1

Any fan of samu­rai movies knows the elab­o­rate lengths some pro­duc­tions can go to in order to recre­ate the look and feel of old Japan, but glo­be­trot­ting Ital­ian-British pho­tog­ra­ph­er Felice Beato (1832 — 1909) actu­al­ly man­aged to cap­ture those days on cel­lu­loid first-hand. He arrived in Japan in 1863, at the very twi­light of the era of the samu­rai, a time he doc­u­ment­ed evoca­tive­ly with a series of hand-col­ored pho­tographs of sub­jects like “kimonos, para­sols, baby’s toys, bas­ket sell­ers, cour­te­sans at rest and a samu­rai gang ready for action,” as the Guardian lists them in their gallery of Beat­o’s Japan­ese work.

Samurai Japan 2

“After spend­ing over two hun­dred years in seclu­sion, Japan was being forced by the Amer­i­cans — under a mis­sion led by Com­modore Matthew C. Per­ry — to expand its trade with the west,” writes Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Paul Gal­lagher, describ­ing the unprece­dent­ed moment of Japan­ese his­to­ry in which Beato found him­self, one that pro­vid­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pho­to­graph not just the last of the samu­rais but also the cour­te­sans they loved. But all this had its risks: “Trav­el was dan­ger­ous in Japan,” Gal­lagher adds, “with many of the Shogu­nate samu­rai war­riors killing west­ern­ers,” a fate Beato nar­row­ly avoid­ed at least once.

samurai in color

Hav­ing pho­tographed in Con­stan­tino­ple, India, and Chi­na before Japan, Beato moved on after it to oth­er parts of Asia, includ­ing Korea and Bur­ma, before return­ing to his native Italy at the very end of his life. But his pic­tures of Japan remain among the most strik­ing of his entire career, per­haps because of their artis­tic use of col­or, per­haps because of a his­tor­i­cal time and place that we think we’ve come to know through so many sword-and-sui­cide epics. Their char­ac­ters, from the hon­or-bound samu­rai to the sly cour­te­san to the sim­ple mer­chant, can seem to us a bit the­atri­cal as a result, but Beat­o’s pho­tographs remind us that they all began as very real peo­ple. Who might they inspire to make a film about their real lives?

Samurai Japan 4

Samurai Japan 5

Samurai Japan 6

via The Guardian/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hand-Col­ored Pho­tographs of 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan

Adver­tise­ments from Japan’s Gold­en Age of Art Deco

Glo­ri­ous Ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

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

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

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