Ta-Nehisi Coates’ List of 13 Recommended Books

in Books, History, Literature, Politics | May 19th, 2016

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been rid­ing a wave so high these past few years that most hon­est writ­ers would con­fess to at least some small degree of envy. And yet anyone—writer or reader—who appre­ci­ates Coates’ rig­or­ous schol­ar­ship, styl­is­tic mas­tery, and enthralling per­son­al voice must also admit that the acco­lades are well-earned. Win­ner of the Nation­al Book Award for his sec­ond auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal work, Between the World and Me and recip­i­ent of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” Coates is fre­quent­ly called on to dis­cuss the seem­ing­ly intractable racism in the U.S., both its long, grit­ty his­to­ry and con­tin­u­a­tion into the present. (On top of these cre­den­tials, Coates, an unabashed com­ic book nerd, is now pen­ning the revived Black Pan­ther title for Mar­vel, cur­rent­ly the year’s best-sell­ing com­ic.)

As a senior edi­tor at The Atlantic, Coates became a nation­al voice for black Amer­i­ca with arti­cles on the para­dox­es of Barack Oba­ma’s pres­i­den­cy and the boot­straps con­ser­vatism of Bill Cos­by (pub­lished before the comedian’s pros­e­cu­tion). His arti­cle “The Case for Repa­ra­tions,” a lengthy, his­tor­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of Redlin­ing, brought him fur­ther into nation­al promi­nence. So high was Coates’ pro­file after his sec­ond book that Toni Mor­ri­son declared him the heir to James Baldwin’s lega­cy, a man­tle that has weighed heav­i­ly and sparked some back­lash, though Coates court­ed the com­par­i­son him­self by styling Between the World and Me after Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. In doing so, writes Michael Eric Dyson, “Coates did a dar­ing thing… waged a bet that the Amer­i­can pub­lic could absorb even more of the epis­to­lary device, and wrote a book-length essay to his son.”

Not only did Amer­i­ca “absorb” the device; the nation’s read­ers mar­veled at Coates’ deft mix­ture of exis­ten­tial tough­ness and emo­tion­al vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty; his intense, unsen­ti­men­tal take on U.S. racist ani­mus and his mov­ing, lov­ing por­traits of his close friends and fam­i­ly. As a let­ter from a father to his son, the book also works as a teach­ing tool, and Coates lib­er­al­ly salts his per­son­al nar­ra­tive with the sources of his own edu­ca­tion in African Amer­i­can his­to­ry and pol­i­tics from his father and his years at Howard Uni­ver­si­ty. In the wake of the fame the book has brought him, he has con­tin­ued what he seems to view as a pub­lic mis­sion to edu­cate, and inter­views and dis­cus­sions with the writer fre­quent­ly involve digres­sions on his sources of infor­ma­tion, as well as the books that move and moti­vate him.

So it was when Coates sat down with New York Times Mag­a­zine and ProP­ub­li­ca reporter Nikole Han­nah-Jones at New York’s Schom­burg Cen­ter for Research in Black Cul­ture last year. You can watch the full inter­view at the top of the post. Dur­ing the course of the hour-long talk, Coates men­tioned the books below, in the hopes, he says, that “folks who read” Between the World and Me “will read this book, and then go read a ton of oth­er books.” He both began and end­ed his rec­om­men­da­tions with Bald­win.

1. “The Fire Next Time” in Col­lect­ed Essays by James Bald­win.

2. The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Inves­ti­gates the Dark­est Sto­ry of His Life, His Own by David Carr

3. The Half Has Nev­er Been Told: Slav­ery and the Mak­ing of Amer­i­can Cap­i­tal­ism by Edward E. Bap­tist

4. Bat­tle Cry of Free­dom: The Era of the Civ­il War by James McPher­son

5. Mak­ing the Sec­ond Ghet­to: Race and Hous­ing in Chica­go, 1940–1960 by Arnold R. Hirsch

6. Fam­i­ly Prop­er­ties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploita­tion of Black Urban Amer­i­ca by Beryl Sat­ter

7. Con­fed­er­ate States of Amer­i­ca — Dec­la­ra­tion of the Imme­di­ate Caus­es Which Induce and Jus­ti­fy the Seces­sion of South Car­oli­na from the Fed­er­al Union from Aval­on Project, Lil­lian Gold­man Law Library, Yale Law School

8. Show­down: Thur­good Mar­shall and the Supreme Court nom­i­na­tion That Changed Amer­i­ca by Wil Hay­good

9. Amer­i­can Slav­ery, Amer­i­can Free­dom: The Ordeal of Colo­nial Vir­ginia by Edmund S. Mor­gan

10. Race­craft: The Soul of Inequal­i­ty in Amer­i­can Life by Karen E. Fields and Bar­bara J. Fields

11. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in Amer­i­ca by Paula Gid­dings

12. Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Cam­paign against Lynch­ing by Paula J. Gid­dings

13. Out of the House of Bondage: The Trans­for­ma­tion of the Plan­ta­tion House­hold by Thavo­lia Glymph

Final­ly, Coates ref­er­ences the famous debate between James Bald­win and William F. Buck­ley at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty in 1965, which you can read about and watch in full here.

via The New York Pub­lic Library

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Toni Mor­ri­son Dis­pens­es Writ­ing Wis­dom in 1993 Paris Review Inter­view

James Bald­win Bests William F. Buck­ley in 1965 Debate at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Stephen King Cre­ates a List of 96 Books for Aspir­ing Writ­ers to Read

Ernest Hem­ing­way Cre­ates a Read­ing List for a Young Writer, 1934

Michael Stipe Rec­om­mends 10 Books for Any­one Marooned on a Desert Island

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

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Watch Paul McCartney Perform Live, with 10-Year-Old Leila on Bass, in Buenos Aires Yesterday

in Life, Music | May 18th, 2016

A few weeks ago, I took my kids to see Paul McCart­ney launch his One on One Tour in Fres­no, Cal­i­for­nia. The high­light? See­ing him play “Hard Day’s Night” and “Love Me Do” live for the first time since the 1960s? Not real­ly. Watch­ing Sir Paul wave at my kids when they held up a “Chee­rio Paul” sign? Yeah, that was worth the price of the tick­ets alone.

But none of that com­pares to the scene that played out ear­li­er this week in Buenos Aires. Above, watch lit­tle Leila sweet­ly ask Paul to play a lit­tle bass, get her wish grant­ed, and rock to some “Get Back.” It’s pret­ty adorable.

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

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

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Behold the Sea Organ: The Massive Experimental Musical Instrument That Makes Music with the Sea

in Music | May 18th, 2016

If you ever find your­self in Zadar, Croa­t­ia, pay a vis­it to The Sea Organ, the exper­i­men­tal musi­cal instru­ment cre­at­ed by the archi­tect Niko­la Bašić. Unveiled in 2005, the organ–made of 35 poly­eth­yl­ene pipes tucked under white mar­ble steps–turns the wind and the waves into a nev­er-end­ing stream of avant-garde sounds. In 2006, the Sea Organ won the 2006 Euro­pean Prize for Urban Pub­lic Space. Hear it make its music above.

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

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

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Crowdsourced Database Will Locate the Burial Sites of Forgotten US Slaves

in Archives, History | May 18th, 2016

slave grave database

Image cour­tesy of Nation­al Bur­ial Data­base of Enslaved Amer­i­cans

The sto­ries are infre­quent but deeply com­pelling: one recent news item in the AP’s The Big Sto­ry describes the bones of 14 peo­ple from the 18th or ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry, dis­cov­ered in Albany, NY, “wrapped in shrouds, buried in pine box­es and—over centuries—forgotten.” Sev­en adults, five infants, and two chil­dren, soon to be “pub­li­cal­ly memo­ri­al­ized and [re]buried in per­son­al­ized box­es beside promi­nent fam­i­lies in old Albany.”

Over the 11 years since the bones’ dis­cov­ery by con­struc­tion work­ers, sci­en­tists have been able to piece togeth­er clues about what these lives were like: marked by con­stant toil and phys­i­cal hard­ship. Genet­ic mark­ers, and bro­ken bones, notched and miss­ing teeth, and arthrit­ic joints offer the only means of iden­ti­fy­ing the remains. A gran­ite head­stone donat­ed to the new gravesite will read, “Here lies the remains of 14 souls known only to God. Enslaved in life, they are slaves no more.”

In 1991, many miles south in low­er Man­hat­tan, a find of the remains of 419 peo­ple even­tu­al­ly gave rise to an even more impres­sive memo­r­i­al and muse­um, the African Bur­ial Ground Nation­al Mon­u­ment, a reminder of not only the slave labor that built New York City, but also of the peo­ple bought and sold in the once bustling slave mar­ket at what is now Wall Street.

Elmwood

Cre­ative Com­mons pho­to by Bruce Guthrie

Memo­ri­als like this one and the recent Albany bur­ial site do not change the facts or right the wrongs of his­to­ry, but they do make vis­i­ble lives and his­to­ries long buried and for­got­ten. “Among the scars left by the her­itage of slav­ery,” writes Edward Roth­stein at The New York Times, “one of the great­est is an absence: where are the memo­ri­als, ceme­ter­ies, archi­tec­tur­al struc­tures or stur­dy sanc­tu­ar­ies that typ­i­cal­ly pro­vide the ground for a people’s mem­o­ry?” This is pre­cise­ly the ques­tion San­dra Arnold is now ask­ing, in a very lit­er­al sense, for a project called The Nation­al Bur­ial Data­base of Enslaved Amer­i­cans (NBDEA).

A Grad­u­ate Fel­low at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, Arnold found­ed the Peri­win­kle Ini­tia­tive, “a pub­lic human­i­ties and edu­ca­tion ini­tia­tive ded­i­cat­ed to pre­serv­ing cul­tur­al her­itage asso­ci­at­ed with enslaved Amer­i­cans.” The NBDEA—Periwinkle’s core project in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty, the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties, and the 1772 Foun­da­tion—aims, writes Arnold at The New York Times, to “be the first nation­al repos­i­to­ry of infor­ma­tion on the grave sites of indi­vid­u­als who died while enslaved or after they were eman­ci­pat­ed.”

The grave sites The NBDEA com­piles will depend in some part on the pub­lic: “Any­one who comes to the web­site will even­tu­al­ly be able to sub­mit infor­ma­tion about these places and con­duct search­es.” Cur­rent­ly, the site remains in devel­op­ment, unavail­able for pub­lic search­es, but users can make pre­lim­i­nary sub­mis­sions. Arnold describes the process of sift­ing through the sub­mis­sions she has received as “painful.”

Bur­ial grounds that should be revered spaces… instead are cov­ered by play­grounds and apart­ment com­plex­es. I have learned that many grave sites of for­mer­ly enslaved Amer­i­cans are aban­doned, undoc­u­ment­ed, des­e­crat­ed by the asphalt of “devel­op­ment,” and lack any type of memo­ri­al­iza­tion or recog­ni­tion. The bur­ial grounds are often found inci­den­tal­ly by devel­op­ers under parks and office build­ings, and for many of the sites, oral his­to­ry is their only source of doc­u­men­ta­tion.

Just such an oral his­to­ry pre­served the unmarked gravesite of one of Arnold’s ances­tors in her home­town in West Ten­nessee. Alli­son Meier at Hyper­al­ler­gic points to some specif­i­cal­ly trou­bled sites like those Arnold describes, includ­ing “a slave ceme­tery… bull­dozed in Hous­ton,” anoth­er “cov­ered with asphalt in Atlanta,” and a third “found below a Harlem bus depot.”

Arnold hopes that record­ing and memo­ri­al­iz­ing these “sacred spaces… can con­tribute to heal­ing, under­stand­ing and poten­tial­ly even rec­on­cil­i­a­tion.” Addi­tion­al­ly, she cites a “prag­mat­ic” ratio­nale for the project, since “bur­ial grounds are valu­able resources for schol­ars and his­to­ri­ans, serv­ing as road maps for genealog­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal research.”

The project presents a tremen­dous oppor­tu­ni­ty for the many thou­sands of cit­i­zen his­to­ri­ans scat­tered across the coun­try to come togeth­er and fill in the absences in our his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry; and the cen­tral­ized data­base will also draw more atten­tion to the few memo­ri­als that do exist, many of which, writes Meier, “are often stag­ger­ing­ly small in rela­tion to the num­ber of lives they remem­ber.” She refers to the exam­ple of a “minia­ture mass grave mon­u­ment” in Mem­phis’ Elm­wood Cemetary (above), a “sin­gle stone [that] memo­ri­al­izes over 300 slaves who died between 1852 and 1865.”

Like The Freedman’s Bureau Project, a recent online data­base of 1.5 mil­lion his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments relat­ed to slav­ery, The NBDEA will fur­ther his­tori­cize and human­ize “over­looked lives,” writes Arnold, that “are an inex­tri­ca­ble part of the his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive of our coun­try.”

Can can vis­it The Nation­al Bur­ial Data­base of Enslaved Amer­i­cans here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1.5 Mil­lion Slav­ery Era Doc­u­ments Will Be Dig­i­tized, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans to Learn About Their Lost Ances­tors

Freed Slave Writes Let­ter to For­mer Mas­ter: You Owe Us $11,680 for 52 Years of Unpaid Labor (1865)

The Anti-Slav­ery Alpha­bet: 1846 Book Teach­es Kids the ABCs of Slavery’s Evils

Visu­al­iz­ing Slav­ery: The Map Abra­ham Lin­coln Spent Hours Study­ing Dur­ing the Civ­il War

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

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The Night John Belushi Cartwheeled Onstage During a Grateful Dead Show & Sang “U.S. Blues” with the Band (1980)

in Comedy, Music | May 18th, 2016

Sure, I know ice truck­ers and snow crab fish­er­men have it rough, but I’ve always thought the hard­est job in the world is to be a come­di­an. You walk out on stage, night after night, throw­ing your­self on the mer­cy of the fick­le crowd, with noth­ing but your wits to keep you afloat. It’s nev­er been any won­der to me that so many come­di­ans turn to var­i­ous sub­stances to cope with the heck­ling, chilly silences, and dis­in­ter­est­ed, half-emp­ty rooms. Even suc­cess­ful, beloved comics face tremen­dous per­for­mance pres­sures. Some of them crack. And some, like John Belushi, hop onstage dur­ing a Grate­ful Dead show at the Capi­tol The­atre, cart­wheel over to a micro­phone before the cho­rus of “U.S. Blues,” and join in on back­ing vocals.

Belushi’s impromp­tu 1980 prank per­for­mance with the Dead was not, ini­tial­ly, wel­comed. He had, reports Live for Live Music, “met with some resis­tance from the band” when he asked to join in dur­ing the encore, and drum­mer Bill Kreutz­mann “had to nix Belushi’s wish­es.”

So Belushi, true to form, took mat­ters into his own anar­chic hands, stag­ing what Kreutz­mann called in his 2015 auto­bi­og­ra­phy a “comedic ambush.”

He had on a sport coat with small Amer­i­can flags stuffed into both of his breast pock­ets and he land­ed his last cart­wheel just in time to grab a micro­phone and join in on the cho­rus. The audi­ence and every­one in the band—except for Phil—ate it up. It could­n’t have been rehearsed bet­ter. Belushi had impec­ca­ble comedic tim­ing, musi­cal­i­ty, balls, the works. And appar­ent­ly, he did­n’t take no for an answer.

Belushi’s musi­cal antics, and sur­pris­ing acro­bat­ic agili­ty, are already well-known to fans of The Blues Broth­ers. His pen­chant for real-life musi­cal chaos—such as his stag­ing of an authen­ti­cal­ly riotous punk show on Sat­ur­day Night Live—have also become part of his estimable com­ic leg­end.

Sad­ly, no video of the stunt seems to exist, but you can see Kreutz­mann tell the Belushi sto­ry in the inter­view at the top of the post and, just above, hear that night’s encore per­for­mance of “U.S. Blues.” Lis­ten close­ly at around the 1:50 mark and you’ll hear Belushi join in on the cho­rus. We’ll have to imag­ine the cart­wheels, but it prob­a­bly looked some­thing like this.


Hear the full Dead show from that night here. And if you’re crav­ing more musi­cal Belushi, check out his spas­mod­ic impres­sion of the late, great Joe Cock­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Young John Belushi Imi­tates Tru­man Capote & Per­forms Live on Sec­ond City Stage (1972)

The Night John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on Sat­ur­day Night Live, And They Got Banned from the Show

Stream 36 Record­ings of Leg­endary Grate­ful Dead Con­certs Free Online (aka Dick’s Picks)

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

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Please Touch the Art: Watch a Blind Man Experience His Own Portrait for the First Time

in Art | May 18th, 2016

We all know the rules of art muse­ums: look, but don’t touch. This does­n’t both­er most of us most of the time, but for art-lovers who hap­pen to be blind and thus use feel­ing as a sub­sti­tute for see­ing, it presents a prob­lem indeed — but it also opens up an artis­tic oppor­tu­ni­ty. “Can­tor Fine Art, a just-launched gallery by father and son team Lar­ry and Sam Can­tor, offers a sto­ry of a dif­fer­ent kind of phys­i­cal inter­ac­tion with art in their project, Please Touch the Art,” writes The Cre­ator’s Pro­jec­t’s Gabrielle Bruney. “They part­nered with artist Andrew Myers to cre­ate a tac­tile paint­ing that is appre­cia­ble by both sight­ed and blind art lovers.”

In the five-minute video above, you can see — or if visu­al­ly impaired, hear — Myers dis­cussing the begin­nings of his “screw pieces,” images made by dri­ving count­less screws into a piece of wood, each one ulti­mate­ly act­ing as a kind of phys­i­cal, three-dimen­sion­al pix­el. Though Myers did­n’t begin these works with the blind in mind, one such gallery-goer’s vis­it to his show, and the “huge smile on his face” when he put his hand to the screw pieces, got him think­ing of the pos­si­bil­i­ties in that direc­tion. Thanks to his art, “there was a blind man who could almost see for a sec­ond.”

We also meet the blind wood­work­er George Wurtzel, cur­rent­ly at work on “con­vert­ing an old grape crush­ing barn into a Tac­tile Art Cen­ter” which com­bines a wood­work­ing shop with a “tac­tile gallery space where the visu­al­ly impaired can expe­ri­ence and sell art­work.” Dis­cov­er­ing their shared pas­sion for tac­tile art, Myers decides to make a sur­prise for Wurtzel, “the first por­trait of him­self he can actu­al­ly feel,” the first new piece for his tac­tile art gallery. The video cap­tures the big reveal, which con­verts Wurtzel from his skep­ti­cism about the screw-piece form. Still, even as he runs his fin­gers over his own metal­li­cized fea­tures, he has his objec­tions: “My nose is not that big. I’m sor­ry. I like the beard, though. The beard is good. The beard is real­ly good.”

You can read more about the project at Can­tor Fine Art’s web site. “The one thing I wish,” Myers adds, “is that George could see the piece the way I see it, but at the same time, I would like to look at things the way he sees the world.” You can get more a sense of art as seen, as Bil­ly Joel once sang, by the eyes of the blind in our pre­vi­ous posts on the Prado’s 3D-print­ed exhi­bi­tion for the visu­al­ly impaired and the expe­ri­ence of the col­or­blind see­ing art in col­or for the first time. It seems we’ve found our­selves at the dawn of a new gold­en age for art that does­n’t require sight. If a gallery boom fol­lows, will they serve cof­fee roast­ed by the Unseen Bean?

via The Cre­ator’s Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pra­do Muse­um Cre­ates the First Art Exhi­bi­tion for the Visu­al­ly Impaired, Using 3D Print­ing

What It’s Like to Be Col­or Blind and See Art in Col­or for the First Time

Jorge Luis Borges, After Going Blind, Draws a Self-Por­trait

Wake Up and Smell the Cof­fee with Blind Mas­ter Roast­er Ger­ry Leary

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

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1,000+ Haunting & Beautiful Photos of Native American Peoples, Shot by the Ethnographer Edward S. Curtis (Circa 1905)

in History, Photography | May 17th, 2016

curtis-4

From the fig­ure­heads of ships to cig­ar store stat­ues to the car­i­ca­ture mas­cots of var­i­ous sports teams…. Unfor­tu­nate or den­i­grat­ing images of Native Amer­i­can peo­ples have per­sist­ed in pop­u­lar cul­ture, folk sym­bols of what Elis­a­beth W. Rus­sell refers to in her his­to­ry of the cig­ar store Indi­an as “The Van­ish­ing Amer­i­can.” The phrase comes from the title of a Zane Grey nov­el, which then became a 1925 silent film deal­ing, wrote the New York Times that year, “with the pass­ing of the Amer­i­can Indi­an.” Although both the nov­el and film attempt to protest the treat­ment of Native peo­ple by the U.S. gov­ern­ment, both under­write a com­mon, trou­bling assumption—that Native Amer­i­cans, like the Buf­fa­lo and the wild Mus­tang, were a threat­ened (and threat­en­ing) sep­a­rate species, whose “van­ish­ing” from the picaresque West (as they had “van­ished” from the East) was a lam­en­ta­ble, but per­haps unavoid­able, side effect of the march of Euro-Amer­i­can progress.

Curtis One

Each sym­bol­ic memo­ri­al­iz­ing of Native Amer­i­cans in U.S. iconog­ra­phy, how­ev­er solemn or offen­sive­ly car­toon­ish, ges­tures toward some mea­ger recog­ni­tion of a trag­ic loss, while eras­ing the cir­cum­stances that occa­sioned it. Of course Native Amer­i­cans didn’t van­ish, but were slow­ly killed or hound­ed into pover­ty and dis­pos­ses­sion, and out of sight of white America—their dress, reli­gions, and cul­tures made to dis­ap­pear through forced assim­i­la­tion, only to reap­pear in roman­ti­cized images of trag­i­cal­ly con­quered, but admirably war­like, prim­i­tives.

curtis4x5-8

Those images pro­lif­er­at­ed dur­ing the mid-to-late 19th cen­tu­ry, the peri­od of intense West­ern set­tle­ment and expan­sion and the so-called Indi­an Wars. “It is a giv­en today,” writes his­to­ri­an Bri­an Dip­ple, “that the idea of the Amer­i­can Indi­an has been his­tor­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant. It shaped the atti­tudes of those in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry who shaped Indi­an pol­i­cy. Indi­an policy—be it removal of the East­ern tribes in the 1830s, reser­va­tion iso­la­tion­ism begin­ning in the 1850s, or allot­ment of reser­va­tion lands and assim­i­la­tion in the 1880s—cannot be under­stood with­out an aware­ness of the ideas behind it. Lit­er­a­ture and the visu­al arts pro­vide reveal­ing guides to nine­teenth cen­tu­ry assump­tions about the Indi­an.”

curtis5x7-13

Native his­to­ri­an Vine Delo­ria describes the cul­tur­al sit­u­a­tion with more inci­sive wit in his “Indi­an Man­i­festo,” Custer Died for Your Sins: “The Amer­i­can pub­lic feels most com­fort­able with the myth­i­cal Indi­ans of stereo­type-land who were always THERE. These Indi­ans are fierce, they wear feath­ers and grunt. Most of us don’t fit this ide­al­ized fig­ure since we grunt only when overeat­ing, which is sel­dom.” By the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, “myth­i­cal Indi­ans” had become firm­ly embed­ded in pop­u­lar cul­ture, thanks to art and enter­tain­ment like the pre­sum­ably seri­ous attempts of Zane Grey and Fred­er­ic Rem­ing­ton, and J.M. Barrie’s deeply unse­ri­ous Peter Pan. It is in this cul­tur­al atmos­phere that pho­tog­ra­ph­er Edward Sher­iff Cur­tis’ huge, 20-vol­ume ethno­graph­ic project, The North Amer­i­can Indi­an emerged.

SIL7-058-021, 8/15/08, 3:01 PM, 8C, 5338x5873 (264+1428), 100%, Custom, 1/30 s, R39.5, G27.5, B38.9

Begin­ning in 1904, and with the even­tu­al back­ing of J.P. Mor­gan, writes Mash­able, Cur­tis “spent more than 20 years criss­cross­ing North Amer­i­ca, cre­at­ing over 40,000 images of more than 80 dif­fer­ent tribes. He made thou­sands of wax cylin­der record­ings of native songs and lan­guage, and wrote down oral his­to­ries, leg­ends and biogra­phies.” You can view and down­load more than 1,000 of these pho­tographs at the Library of Con­gress. Cur­tis thought of his work as doc­u­ment­ing “what he saw as a van­ish­ing way of life.” Moti­vat­ed by assump­tions about Native peo­ple as semi-myth­ic rem­nants from the past, the pho­tog­ra­ph­er “some­times med­dled with the doc­u­men­tary authen­tic­i­ty of his images. He posed his sub­jects in roman­ti­cized set­tings stripped of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of an imag­ined pre-Colom­bian exis­tence than the sub­jects’ actu­al lives in the present.”

curtis4x5-7

The pho­tographs are beau­ti­ful, their sub­jects enno­bled by the dra­mat­ic light­ing and styl­ized pos­es, and the breadth and scope of the entire project is noth­ing less than breath­tak­ing. It set the stage for the sig­nif­i­cant work of lat­er pho­tog­ra­phers and ethno­g­ra­phers like Walk­er Evans, Dorothea Lange, and the Lomax­es. Cur­tis has even been cred­it­ed with pro­duc­ing the first doc­u­men­tary film. The images, his­to­ries, tra­di­tions, and biogra­phies Cur­tis pre­served con­sti­tute an invalu­able his­tor­i­cal record. That said, we should bear in mind that The North Amer­i­can Indi­an comes to us framed by Cur­tis’ assump­tions about Native Amer­i­can cul­tures, formed by a cli­mate in which myth vied with, and usu­al­ly sup­plant­ed, fact. What do we see in these staged images, and what do we not see?

One of Cur­tis’ enthu­si­as­tic ear­ly back­ers, Theodore Roosevelt—who authored the intro­duc­tion to Vol­ume One—was, “like many of Cur­tis’ even­tu­al sup­port­ers,” writes Valerie Daniels, “more inter­est­ed in obtain­ing a record of van­ish­ing Native Amer­i­can cul­tures as a tes­ta­ment to the supe­ri­or­i­ty of his own civ­i­liza­tion than out of any con­cern over their sit­u­a­tion or recog­ni­tion of his own role in the process.” Though Cur­tis did not nec­es­sar­i­ly share these views, and lat­er became “rad­i­cal in his admo­ni­tion of gov­ern­ment poli­cies toward Native Amer­i­cans,” he also had to please his financiers and his audi­ence, most of whom would have felt the way Roo­sevelt did. We should bear this cul­tur­al con­text in mind as we take in Cur­tis’ work, and ask how it shaped the cre­ation and recep­tion of this tru­ly impres­sive record of both Amer­i­can his­to­ry and Amer­i­can myth. Enter the archive of images here.

Curtis 9

via Mash­able

Relat­ed Con­tent:

226 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs of Great Amer­i­can Nation­al Parks Are Now Online

200 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs Expose the Rig­ors of Life in Japan­ese Intern­ment Camps Dur­ing WW II

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

New Rosa Parks Archive is Now Online: Fea­tures 7,500 Man­u­scripts & 2,500 Pho­tographs, Cour­tesy of the Library of Con­gress

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

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Martin Scorsese Names His Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection

in Film | May 17th, 2016

“What do you do when you change how the world thinks of cin­e­ma? What’s next? Do you keep mak­ing the same kind of film? If you’re a per­son like Rosselli­ni, you try some­thing exper­i­men­tal. You push fur­ther. Not exper­i­men­tal for exper­i­men­t’s sake, but you push the bound­aries fur­ther.” With these words, Mar­tin Scors­ese describes the sit­u­a­tion of Rober­to Rosselli­ni, one of his pre­de­ces­sors in film­mak­ing he most admires, after com­plet­ing Paisan in 1946. Where to take the move­ment “Ital­ian neo­re­al­ism” from there?

Scors­ese dis­cuss­es Rossellini’s next three major films, Strom­boli, Europe ’51, and Jour­ney to Italy in this Con­ver­sa­tions Inside the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion inter­view clip from Vice. Giv­en his pos­ses­sion of an enthu­si­asm for cin­e­ma as strong as his mas­tery of the craft of cin­e­ma (mak­ing him a pre­de­ces­sor of such younger Amer­i­can indie-root­ed cinephile-auteurs as Quentin Taran­ti­no and Wes Ander­son), it makes sense that Scors­ese would want to engage with the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, whose painstak­ing­ly-pro­duced video releas­es of respect­ed films have for decades con­sti­tut­ed a kind of film school, infor­mal yet rich and rig­or­ous.

When Cri­te­ri­on, whose cat­a­log includes Scors­ese’s own The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ, asked the direc­tor to name his ten favorite films in the Col­lec­tion, he began with a paean to Paisan. (Note: You can watch Paisan for free if you start a free tri­al with Hulu. Also watch Fellini’s 8 1/2–list­ed below–free on Hulu here.) “I saw it for the first time on tele­vi­sion with my grand­par­ents, and their over­whelm­ing reac­tion to what had hap­pened to their home­land since they left at the turn of the cen­tu­ry was just as present and vivid for me as the images and the char­ac­ters,” he said. “I was expe­ri­enc­ing the pow­er of cin­e­ma itself, in this case made far beyond Hol­ly­wood, under extreme­ly tough con­di­tions and with infe­ri­or equip­ment. And I was also see­ing that cin­e­ma wasn’t just about the movie itself but the rela­tion­ship between the movie and its audi­ence.”

Here are Scors­ese’s nine oth­er Cri­te­ri­on selec­tions:

  • The Red Shoes (Michael Pow­ell and Emer­ic Press­burg­er) “There’s no oth­er pic­ture that dra­ma­tizes and visu­al­izes the over­whelm­ing obses­sion of art, the way it can take over your life. But on a deep­er lev­el, in the move­ment and ener­gy of the film­mak­ing itself, is a deep and abid­ing love of art, a belief in art as a gen­uine­ly tran­scen­dent state.”
  • The Riv­er (Jean Renoir) “This was Jean Renoir’s first pic­ture after his Amer­i­can peri­od, his first in col­or, and he used Rumer Godden’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal nov­el to cre­ate a film that is, real­ly, about life, a film with­out a real sto­ry that is all about the rhythm of exis­tence, the cycles of birth and death and regen­er­a­tion, and the tran­si­to­ry beau­ty of the world.”
  • Uget­su (Ken­ji Mizoguchi) “The boat slow­ly mate­ri­al­iz­ing from out of the mist and com­ing toward us… Gen­juro col­laps­ing on the grass in ecsta­sy and being smoth­ered by Lady Wakasa… the final crane up from the son mak­ing an offer­ing at his mother’s grave to the fields beyond. Just to think of these moments now fills me with awe and won­der.”
  • Ash­es and Dia­monds (Andrzej Wada) “I saw Ash­es and Dia­monds for the first time in 1961. And even back then, dur­ing that peri­od when we expect­ed to be aston­ished at the movies, when things were hap­pen­ing all over the world, it shocked me. It had to do with the look, both imme­di­ate and haunt­ed, like a night­mare that won’t stop unfold­ing.”
  • L’avven­tu­ra (Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni) “It’s dif­fi­cult to think of a film that has a more pow­er­ful under­stand­ing of the way that peo­ple are bound to the world around them, by what they see and touch and taste and hear. I real­ize that L’avventura is sup­posed to be about char­ac­ters who are ‘alien­at­ed’ from their sur­round­ings, but that word has been used so often to describe this film and Antonioni’s films in gen­er­al that it more or less shuts down thought.”
  • Sal­va­tore Giu­liano (Francesco Rosi) “On one lev­el, it’s an extreme­ly com­plex film: there’s no cen­tral pro­tag­o­nist (Giu­liano him­self is not a char­ac­ter but a fig­ure around which the action piv­ots), and it shifts between time frames and points of view. But it’s also a pic­ture made from the inside, from a pro­found and last­ing love and under­stand­ing of Sici­ly and its peo­ple and the treach­ery and cor­rup­tion they’ve had to endure.”
  • 8 1/2 (Fed­eri­co Felli­ni) “8½ has always been a touch­stone for me, in so many ways—the free­dom, the sense of inven­tion, the under­ly­ing rig­or and the deep core of long­ing, the bewitch­ing, phys­i­cal pull of the cam­era move­ments and the com­po­si­tions (anoth­er great black-and-white film: every image gleams like a pearl — again, shot by Gian­ni Di Venan­zo). But it also offers an uncan­ny por­trait of being the artist of the moment, try­ing to tune out all the pres­sure and the crit­i­cism and the adu­la­tion and the requests and the advice, and find the space and the calm to sim­ply lis­ten to one­self.”
  • Con­tempt (Jean-Luc Godard) “It’s a shat­ter­ing por­trait of a mar­riage going wrong, and it cuts very deep, espe­cial­ly dur­ing the lengthy and jus­ti­fi­ably famous scene between Pic­coli and Bar­dot in their apart­ment: even if you don’t know that Godard’s own mar­riage to Anna Kari­na was com­ing apart at the time, you can feel it in the action, the move­ment of the scenes, the inter­ac­tions that stretch out so painful­ly but majes­ti­cal­ly, like a piece of trag­ic music.”
  • The Leop­ard (Luchi­no Vis­con­ti) “Time itself is the pro­tag­o­nist of The Leop­ard: the cos­mic scale of time, of cen­turies and epochs, on which the prince mus­es; Sicil­ian time, in which days and nights stretch to infin­i­ty; and aris­to­crat­ic time, in which noth­ing is ever rushed and every­thing hap­pens just as it should hap­pen, as it has always hap­pened.”

For Scors­ese’s full com­men­tary on all ten of these pic­tures, see the arti­cle on Cri­te­ri­on’s site. The direc­tors of his favorite Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion films all changed how the world thinks of cin­e­ma in one way or anoth­er, at dif­fer­ent times, in dif­fer­ent places, and in dif­fer­ent ways. Scors­ese, too, has changed how the world thinks of cin­e­ma, arguably more than once in his career — and giv­en his pen­chant for try­ing new things, avoid­ing that tread­mill where you “keep mak­ing the same film,” he may well make anoth­er movie that changes it again. And if he does, here’s anoth­er impor­tant ques­tion: what spe­cial fea­tures will Cri­te­ri­on include when they put out their deluxe edi­tion?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free on Hulu: Stream Fellini’s 8 1/2, La Stra­da & Oth­er Clas­sic & Con­tem­po­rary Films

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preser­va­tion)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspir­ing Film­mak­er Needs to See

Mar­tin Scors­ese Intro­duces Film­mak­er Hong Sang­soo, “The Woody Allen of Korea”

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of 39 Essen­tial For­eign Films for a Young Film­mak­er

Mar­tin Scors­ese Names the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films: Kubrick, Hitch­cock, Tourneur & More

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

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Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Experimental Band, Xiu Xiu: A Free Stream of Their New Album

in Music, Television | May 17th, 2016

Last year, Col­in Mar­shall high­light­ed for you the music of Xiu Xiu, the exper­i­men­tal post-punk band, which has trav­eled the world, play­ing their own inter­pre­ta­tion of the music Ange­lo Badala­men­ti wrote for David Lynch’s ear­ly 1990s series, Twin Peaks. Our orig­i­nal post fea­tured some of those live per­for­mances, and now comes a stu­dio record­ing of those Twin Peaks inter­pre­ta­tions.

We’d be remiss if we did­n’t tell you that you can stream the new album–called Plays the Music of Twin Peaks– free online. Just click play above. Find a list of indi­vid­ual tracks below. And, if you like what you hear, con­sid­er pur­chas­ing your own copy of the album from the usu­al ven­dors. Enjoy.

1. Lau­ra Palmer’s Theme (0:00)
2. Into The Night (5:03)
3. Audrey’s Dance (10:15)
4. Packard’s Vibra­tion (14:41)
5. Night­sea Wind (18:31)
6. Blue Frank/Pink Room (25:37)
7. Sycamore Tree (31:28)
8. Harold’s Theme (38:16)
9. Dance of the Dream Man (42:12)
10. Falling (47:22)
11. Love Theme Farewell (54:20)
12. Josie’s Past (1:00:44)

via Wel­come to Twin Peaks

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

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exper­i­men­tal Post-Punk Band Xiu Xiu Plays the Music from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Title Sequence, Recre­at­ed in an Adorable Paper Ani­ma­tion

Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

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Hear Robert Frost Read His Most Famous Poems: “The Road Not Taken,” “Mending Wall,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay” & More

in Audio Books, Poetry | May 17th, 2016

Robert Frost has the dubi­ous hon­or of being known the world over as the poet of a seize-the-day cliché. His poem “The Road Not Tak­en” (read by Frost above) appears on cof­fee mugs, autum­nal moti­va­tion­al posters, upbeat email sig­na­tures, and in adver­tise­ments and tele­vi­sion shows, all meant to inspire con­fi­dent deci­sion-mak­ing in uncer­tain times: unin­ten­tion­al­ly iron­ic, pop­ulist appeals to diverge from the herd.

If this is Frost’s lega­cy in the wider cul­ture, it’s a fate most poets wouldn’t wish on their bit­ter­est rival. The typ­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of this poem is an unfor­tu­nate mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Frost’s work in gen­er­al. Indeed, “The Road Not Tak­en” may be “the most mis­read poem in Amer­i­ca,” as David Orr argues at The Paris Review.

Frost’s poet­ry does not often inspire con­fi­dence or moti­va­tion, but rather doubt, uncom­fort­able reflec­tion, fear, and some­times a kind of dread­ful awe. Like Faulkn­er was in his day, Frost was, and still is, mis­tak­en for a quaint, col­or­ful region­al­ist. But rather than a poet of New Eng­land folk sim­plic­i­ty, he is a poet of New Eng­land skep­ti­cism and a kind of hard-head­ed sub­lime. Any­one who reads “The Road Not Tak­en” close­ly, for exam­ple, will note the speaker’s ambigu­ous tone in the final stan­za, and final three lines—oft-quoted as a tri­umphant dénoue­ment.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Some­where ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less trav­eled by,
And that has made all the dif­fer­ence.

The trav­el­er does not tell us what “dif­fer­ence” the choice will have made, nor why he should tell of this cross­roads “ages and ages hence… with a sigh.” Implied in these lines, how­ev­er, is at least the sug­ges­tion of unavoid­able future regret, and a reck­on­ing with irrev­o­ca­ble fate. The ear­li­er line, “Oh, I kept the first for anoth­er day!” sounds more like an excla­ma­tion of rue than the cel­e­bra­tion of a choice well-made.

And as Orr points out, the speak­er’s ini­tial encounter presents him with two paths that “equal­ly lay / in leaves.”; the two roads are equal­ly travelled—or untrav­elled as the case may be—and the trav­eller choos­es one arbi­trar­i­ly. In these final lines, he announces his inten­tion to tell a dif­fer­ent, per­haps self-con­grat­u­la­to­ry sto­ry about his deci­sion. “The poem isn’t a salute to can-do indi­vid­u­al­ism,” Orr writes, “it’s a com­men­tary on the self-decep­tion we prac­tice when con­struct­ing the sto­ry of our own lives.”

One can hear even dark­er notes in anoth­er famous poem, “Mend­ing Wall,” in which a name­less, unfeel­ing “Some­thing” goes about its work of dis­man­tling the speaker’s best efforts, and all human work gen­er­al­ly. It’s a theme in much of Frost’s poet­ry that can, if ful­ly appre­ci­at­ed, inspire a dread as potent as that in the most baroque and florid of H.P. Lovecraft’s weird tales. Frost devel­oped his theme of cos­mic indif­fer­ence ear­ly, in “Stars,” from his first pub­lished col­lec­tion, A Boy’s Will. He intro­duces the poem in the table of con­tents with this suc­cinct descrip­tion: “There is no over­sight in human affairs,” a mat­ter-of-fact state­ment that scarce­ly pre­pares us for the unnerv­ing images to fol­low:

How count­less­ly they con­gre­gate
O’er our tumul­tuous snow,
Which flows in shapes as tall as trees
When win­try winds do blow!—

As if with keen­ness for our fate,
Our fal­ter­ing few steps on
To white rest, and a place of rest
Invis­i­ble at dawn,—

And yet with nei­ther love nor hate,
Those stars like some snow-white
Minerva’s snow-white mar­ble eyes
With­out the gift of sight.

In three short, dev­as­tat­ing stan­zas, Frost under­cuts ancient, com­fort­ing pre­ten­tions about the stars’ (or gods’) sen­tient benev­o­lence, with images and dic­tion that recall Thomas Hardy’s bleak lament “In Tene­bris” and antic­i­pate Wal­lace Stevens’ imper­son­al and chill­ing “The Snow Man.” The snow and ice in Frost’s poems are not part of the pret­ty scenery, but metonymic fig­ures of obliv­ion.

In short, the kind­ly old Robert Frost we think we know from the triv­ial mis­read­ing of “The Road Not Tak­en” is not the poet Robert Frost at all. Frost is a prick­ly, chal­leng­ing, even some­what devi­ous char­ac­ter whose pleas­ing­ly musi­cal lines and quaint, pas­toral images lure read­ers into poems that har­bor much less cheer­ful atti­tudes than they expect to find, and much more com­plex and mature ideas. The young Frost once described him­self as “not unde­sign­ing,” and in his lat­er, 1939 essay “The Fig­ure a Poem Makes,” he famous­ly declared that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wis­dom.”

In the two Spo­ti­fy playlists above (down­load Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware here), you can hear Frost read some of his most famous poems, includ­ing “The Road Not Tak­en,” “Mend­ing Wall,” “Noth­ing Gold Can Stay,” “After Apple Pick­ing,” “Death of a Hired Man,” and sev­er­al more. Not rep­re­sent­ed here, unfor­tu­nate­ly, are poems from the won­der­ful debut A Boy’s Will, but you can read that full col­lec­tion online here, and you should. Get to know the real Frost, if you haven’t already, and you’ll appre­ci­ate all the more why he’s one of the most cel­e­brat­ed poets in the Amer­i­can canon.

The read­ings above will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Robert Frost Read ‘The Gift Out­right,’ the Poem He Recit­ed from Mem­o­ry at JFK’s Inau­gu­ra­tion

Robert Frost Recites ‘Stop­ping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’

Library of Con­gress Launch­es New Online Poet­ry Archive, Fea­tur­ing 75 Years of Clas­sic Poet­ry Read­ings

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

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Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 82 Commandments For Living

in Film, Life, Philosophy | May 16th, 2016

Utopiales_2011_Alejandro_Jodorowsky_16

Cre­ative Com­mons pho­to by Lionel Allorge

If you’re a fan of sci­ence fic­tion or the films of David Lynch, you’ve sure­ly seen the 1984 film adap­ta­tion of Frank Herbert’s cult clas­sic sci-fi nov­el, Dune (though Lynch him­self may pre­fer that you didn’t). And indeed, it’s very like­ly that, by now, you’ve heard the incred­i­ble sto­ry of what Dune might have been, had it been direct­ed ten years ear­li­er by psy­che­del­ic Chilean film­mak­er, writer, com­pos­er, and psy­chother­a­pist Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky. Per­haps you even caught Jonathan Crow’s post on this site fea­tur­ing Jodorowsky’s pro­posed storyboards—drawn by French artist Moebius—for what would most cer­tain­ly would have been “a mind-bog­gling­ly grand epic” of a movie. Alas, Jodorowsky’s Dune nev­er came about, though it did lat­er lead to the doc­u­men­tary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which Matt Zoller Seitz pro­nounced “a call to arms for dream­ers every­where.”

That descrip­tion applies not only to the film about a film that could have been, but also to the entire­ty of Jodorowsky’s work, includ­ing his—thoroughly bizarre and captivating—early fea­tures, El Topo and The Holy Moun­tain, and the cre­ation of a com­ic book uni­verse like no oth­er. Called “The Jodoverse,” the world of his com­ic books is, as writer War­ren Ellis says, “aston­ish­ing­ly beau­ti­ful and total­ly mad”—again, a suc­cinct descrip­tion of Jodorowsky’s every artis­tic endeav­or. Wit­ness below, for exam­ple, the stun­ning trail­er for his most recent fea­ture film, 2014’s The Dance of Real­i­ty. You may find the visu­al excess­es so over­whelm­ing that you only half-hear the nar­ra­tion.

Lis­ten (or read) care­ful­ly, how­ev­er. Jodor­owsky has as much to tell us with his cryp­ti­cal­ly poet­ic pro­nounce­ments as he does with his vision­ary imagery. Do you find his epi­grams plat­i­tudi­nous, sen­ten­tious, Pollyan­naish, or naïve? Jodor­owsky doesn’t mind. He calls, remem­ber, to the dream­ers, not the hard-bit­ten, cyn­i­cal real­ists. And if you’re one of the dream­ers who hears that call, you’ll find much to love in the list below of Jodorowsky’s 82 Com­mand­ments for liv­ing. But so too, I think, will the real­ists. These come from Jodorowsky’s mem­oir The Spir­i­tu­al Jour­ney of Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, and the list comes via Dan­ger­ous Minds, who adapt­ed it from “the bet­ter part of three pages” of text.

As Jodor­owsky frames these max­ims in his book, they orig­i­nat­ed with influ­en­tial Russ­ian mys­tic George Gur­d­ji­eff, and were told to him by Gurdjieff’s daugh­ter, Rey­na d’Assia. Per­haps that’s so. But you’ll note, if you know Jodorowsky’s writing—or sim­ply took a cou­ple min­utes time to watch the trail­er above—that they sound enough like the author’s own words to have been brought forth from his per­son­al store­house of accu­mu­lat­ed wis­dom. In any case, Jodor­owsky has always been quick to acknowl­edge his spir­i­tu­al teach­ers, and whether these are his sec­ond-hand accounts of Gur­d­ji­eff or his own inven­tions has no bear­ing on the sub­stance there­in.

Often sound­ing very much like Bib­li­cal proverbs or Bud­dhist pre­cepts, the com­mand­ments are intend­ed, d’Assia says in Jodorowsky’s account, to help us “change [our] habits, con­quer lazi­ness, and become… moral­ly sound human being[s].” As she remarks in the book, before she deliv­ers the below in a lengthy mono­logue, “to be strong in the great things, we must also be strong in the small ones.” There­fore…

  1. Ground your atten­tion on your­self. Be con­scious at every moment of what you are think­ing, sens­ing, feel­ing, desir­ing, and doing.
  2. Always fin­ish what you have begun.
  3. What­ev­er you are doing, do it as well as pos­si­ble.
  4. Do not become attached to any­thing that can destroy you in the course of time.
  5. Devel­op your gen­eros­i­ty ‒ but secret­ly.
  6. Treat every­one as if he or she was a close rel­a­tive.
  7. Orga­nize what you have dis­or­ga­nized.
  8. Learn to receive and give thanks for every gift.
  9. Stop defin­ing your­self.
  10. Do not lie or steal, for you lie to your­self and steal from your­self.
  11. Help your neigh­bor, but do not make him depen­dent.
  12. Do not encour­age oth­ers to imi­tate you.
  13. Make work plans and accom­plish them.
  14. Do not take up too much space.
  15. Make no use­less move­ments or sounds.
  16. If you lack faith, pre­tend to have it.
  17. Do not allow your­self to be impressed by strong per­son­al­i­ties.
  18. Do not regard any­one or any­thing as your pos­ses­sion.
  19. Share fair­ly.
  20. Do not seduce.
  21. Sleep and eat only as much as nec­es­sary.
  22. Do not speak of your per­son­al prob­lems.
  23. Do not express judg­ment or crit­i­cism when you are igno­rant of most of the fac­tors involved.
  24. Do not estab­lish use­less friend­ships.
  25. Do not fol­low fash­ions.
  26. Do not sell your­self.
  27. Respect con­tracts you have signed.
  28. Be on time.
  29. Nev­er envy the luck or suc­cess of any­one.
  30. Say no more than nec­es­sary.
  31. Do not think of the prof­its your work will engen­der.
  32. Nev­er threat­en any­one.
  33. Keep your promis­es.
  34. In any dis­cus­sion, put your­self in the oth­er person’s place.
  35. Admit that some­one else may be supe­ri­or to you.
  36. Do not elim­i­nate, but trans­mute.
  37. Con­quer your fears, for each of them rep­re­sents a cam­ou­flaged desire.
  38. Help oth­ers to help them­selves.
  39. Con­quer your aver­sions and come clos­er to those who inspire rejec­tion in you.
  40. Do not react to what oth­ers say about you, whether praise or blame.
  41. Trans­form your pride into dig­ni­ty.
  42. Trans­form your anger into cre­ativ­i­ty.
  43. Trans­form your greed into respect for beau­ty.
  44. Trans­form your envy into admi­ra­tion for the val­ues of the oth­er.
  45. Trans­form your hate into char­i­ty.
  46. Nei­ther praise nor insult your­self.
  47. Regard what does not belong to you as if it did belong to you.
  48. Do not com­plain.
  49. Devel­op your imag­i­na­tion.
  50. Nev­er give orders to gain the sat­is­fac­tion of being obeyed.
  51. Pay for ser­vices per­formed for you.
  52. Do not pros­e­ly­tize your work or ideas.
  53. Do not try to make oth­ers feel for you emo­tions such as pity, admi­ra­tion, sym­pa­thy, or com­plic­i­ty.
  54. Do not try to dis­tin­guish your­self by your appear­ance.
  55. Nev­er con­tra­dict; instead, be silent.
  56. Do not con­tract debts; acquire and pay imme­di­ate­ly.
  57. If you offend some­one, ask his or her par­don; if you have offend­ed a per­son pub­licly, apol­o­gize pub­licly.
  58. When you real­ize you have said some­thing that is mis­tak­en, do not per­sist in error through pride; instead, imme­di­ate­ly retract it.
  59. Nev­er defend your old ideas sim­ply because you are the one who expressed them.
  60. Do not keep use­less objects.
  61. Do not adorn your­self with exot­ic ideas.
  62. Do not have your pho­to­graph tak­en with famous peo­ple.
  63. Jus­ti­fy your­self to no one, and keep your own coun­sel.
  64. Nev­er define your­self by what you pos­sess.
  65. Nev­er speak of your­self with­out con­sid­er­ing that you might change.
  66. Accept that noth­ing belongs to you.
  67. When some­one asks your opin­ion about some­thing or some­one, speak only of his or her qual­i­ties.
  68. When you become ill, regard your ill­ness as your teacher, not as some­thing to be hat­ed.
  69. Look direct­ly, and do not hide your­self.
  70. Do not for­get your dead, but accord them a lim­it­ed place and do not allow them to invade your life.
  71. Wher­ev­er you live, always find a space that you devote to the sacred.
  72. When you per­form a ser­vice, make your effort incon­spic­u­ous.
  73. If you decide to work to help oth­ers, do it with plea­sure.
  74. If you are hes­i­tat­ing between doing and not doing, take the risk of doing.
  75. Do not try to be every­thing to your spouse; accept that there are things that you can­not give him or her but which oth­ers can.
  76. When some­one is speak­ing to an inter­est­ed audi­ence, do not con­tra­dict that per­son and steal his or her audi­ence.
  77. Live on mon­ey you have earned.
  78. Nev­er brag about amorous adven­tures.
  79. Nev­er glo­ri­fy your weak­ness­es.
  80. Nev­er vis­it some­one only to pass the time.
  81. Obtain things in order to share them.
  82. If you are med­i­tat­ing and a dev­il appears, make the dev­il med­i­tate too.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Moe­bius Gives 18 Wis­dom-Filled Tips to Aspir­ing Artists (1996)

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

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