I believe some movies are so classic, they should be considered untouchable, an opinion I wish more Broadway producers shared.
Brace yourself. Rocky, Sylvester Stallone’s heartwarming tale about a small-potatoes boxer in 1970s Philadelphia, has been turned into a musical.
It’s likely not as bad as I fear. Stallone himself is co-producing, young director Alex Timbers is deservedly hot, and lyricist Lynn Ahrens is responsible, in large degree, for Schoolhouse Rock.
All the same, prank collective Improv Everywhere’s take on one of Rocky’s most iconic scenes falls more squarely within my comfort zone. The first installment in the group’s weekly Movies in Real Life series, this Rocky features lookalike comedian Dan Black running through the streets of Philly, a crowd of kids tailing him on the final leg. (“So, uh, you have parents?” he gasps, atop the art museum steps.)
As with the annual No-Pants Subway Ride and many other Improv Everywhere stunts, a great deal of fun comes from the reactions of unsuspecting passersby. Some of my favorites are viewable in the prank’s Mission Report, a follow up with less need to stick to the script. Still in character, Black demands royalty checks from street vendors selling Rocky t‑shirts and screws with tourists posing in front of the famed Rocky statue. Small wonder Improv Everywhere’s motto is “we cause scenes.”
For those in need of refreshment, here is the original:
Silent films had a respectable showing, as it were, on Sight & Sound magazine’s last big critics poll. The votes, cast to determine the greatest motion pictures of all time, placed three silents among the top ten overall: F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. These, of course, also rank at the top of Sight & Sound’s separate list of the ten greatest silent films of all time, which came out as follows:
Though all of these pictures came out within the seemingly short 15-year span between 1916 and 1921, they represent a wide cinematic diversity: in form, in theme, in genre, in place of origin (of both the films and the filmmakers), in sensibility, in aesthetics. You probably recognize all of their names, especially if you’ve taken a film studies course, and you may think of them all as familiar, but how many have you watched? Even we avowed cinephiles have a way of tricking ourselves into believing we’ve seen all the most important movies in their entirety, when in reality we know only about, albeit sometimes a lot about, their place in the history of cinema and their currents of influence that flow into films made today.
But thanks to the internet, we can catch up with ease. Given the age of works from the silent era, most of them have passed into the public domain. You can therefore watch almost all of the top ten greatest silent films of all time, as selected by the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll, for free, online, right now. Some you can even watch right here, without leaving Open Culture: at the top of the post, you’ll find Sunrise. Just above, we’ve featured Man with a Movie Camera. Below, The Passion of Joan of Arc. To watch the others, simply click their linked titles on the list. After you’ve enjoyed everything from Murnau’s German-Expressionist-by-way-of-Hollywood romance to Keaton’s epic comedy to Buñuel’s surrealist procession of still-troubling visions, you’ll not just know where many modern cinematic techniques came from, you’ll feel how they’ve evolved over the decades. All of the films listed above appear on our list of Great Silent Films, part of our larger collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
Saturday Night Live, now in its 39th season, has become more notable lately for its takes on such unintentionally (and too often painfully) funny political figures as Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, rather than for its actual sketches. The show’s had some rough years, and though I can’t count myself among its current fans, for perhaps an eight-year period, from the late 80s to the mid 90s, I tried to catch every episode. Occasionally, I would have to endure what every fan of the long-running show must bear: a long nostalgic rant from my parents’ generation about how terrible the show had become and how it would never be as funny as it was in their day. But they may have just been right, since they watched it live in its infancy in the mid-seventies, when the show featured such comedic giants as Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin, John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Gilda Radner. Although the topical humor of those early episodes is badly dated, the raw energy radiating from people who would go on to create such enduring classics as Animal House, The Blues Brothers, The Jerk, and Caddyshack sets the bar very high for everyone who followed.
Debuting on October 11, 1975, the brainchild of Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol was originally just called the show Saturday Night to differentiate it from an ABC show called Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. But from its inception, the hallmark elements were in place: the opening sketch ending in “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” (originally uttered each time by Chevy Chase); the live studio audience; the celebrity guest host (pioneered by George Carlin in the first episode); and the live musical guests (the first were Billy Preston and Janis Ian). The original cast consisted of Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, and Laraine Newman. In the video at the top you can see a very young Lorne Michaels introduce the eight original cast members before the first show aired in an interview on The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. Asked by Snyder about the format of the show, Michaels jokingly replies, “we’ve got eight, and we’re hoping for two to really work. Not all of these people will become stars.” The cast laughs nervously. There’s no way any of them could have known how much the show would function as a star-making machine, but that is exactly what it became, even in its first season.
We are lucky to have screen tests from two of the first cast’s biggest stars-to-be, John Belushi (above) and Dan Aykroyd (below). In his audition, Belushi waggles his famous eyebrows, does a couple of brilliant Brando impressions, and generally hams it up. Aykroyd plays it straight, engaging in the smart satire of current events and pop culture that he did so well and pulling off a very credible Louisiana accent.
While some of the most famous comedians of season one, including Belushi and Aykroyd, are well known even to the raw youth of today, Lorne Michael’s first hire, the fabulous Gilda Radner, has sadly faded from pop culture memory, and there are precious few clips of her SNL work online. But Radner was a singular artist whose stand-up routines and Broadway shows are absolutely phenomenal, and still hold up today. You can see her below from her 1979 show “Gilda Live” doing a character called Candy Slice, her take on Patti Smith (who was never so wasted, I think). Notice a young Paul Schaeffer on the drums and SNL’s G.E. Smith, Radner’s first husband, on guitar. Radner’s tragic death from ovarian cancer in 1989 cast her late life in somber tones, but seeing her below, before her illness, offers but a glimpse of the tremendous physical energy and commitment she brought to her every memorable character on the show.
Americans do not live in a culture that values philosophy. I could go on about the deep veins of anti-intellectualism that run under the country like fault lines or natural gas deposits, but I won’t. Let’s just say that we favor more obvious displays of prowess: feats of strength, agility, and physical violence, for example, of the superhero variety. With this fact in mind, first-year graduate student Ian Vandewalker decided he “wanted to do something that would bring a discipline that is often seen as difficult, esoteric, and even irrelevant, into new light—especially in the eyes of young people.” Remembering a poster he once saw of “an action figure of Adam Smith with Invisible Hand action,” Vandewalker decided he would combine his own love of toys and philosophy into a philosopher action figure series he called “Philosophical Powers!” Here are just a few of Vandewalker’s creations, designed somewhat like professional wrestlers, with their various leagues and range of epithets.
He begins at the traditional beginning, with figures of “Plunderous Plato” and “Arrogant Aristotle” (above), “The Angry Ancients.” Aristotle, known as the “peripatetic” philosopher, has only one power: “walking.” His quality is attested by a rather circular syllogism: “All Philosophical Powers figures are totally awesome. This toy is a Philosophical Powers figure. Therefore, this toy is totally awesome.” Like much of Aristotle’s deductive reasoning, the argument is airtight, provided one accept the truth of its premises.
In the category of “Contumelious Continental Rationalists,” who began the revolt against those Aristotelian “Merciless Medievals,” we have “Dangerous Descartes.” René Decartes may have claimed to doubt everything—every principle that Aristotle took for granted—but he fell prey to his own errors, hence his action figure’s weakness, the “Cartesian circle.” Decartes’ method of doubt produced its own brand of dualistic certainty about his own existence as a “thinking thing,” and the existence of God, hence “certainty” is one of his action figure’s strengths.
Skipping ahead over a century, we have the lone figure in “The Abominable Absolute Idealist” series, “Hateful Hegel.” Hegel is the ultimate systematizer whose embrace of contradiction can seem maddeningly incoherent, unless we believe his metaphysic of “Absolute Spirit.” Given his dialectic of everything, Hegel’s power is that “he is infinite.” His weakness? “He is finite,” of course. Given Hegel’s teleological theory of history, people who purchase his action figure “can expect them to become more and more valuable as time passes.”
The most amusing of “The Antagonistic Analytic Philosophers” is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was himself an amusingly eccentric individual. Known for his terrible temper, which would often drive him to verbally abuse and strike those poor students who couldn’t grasp his abstruse concepts, “Vindictive Wittgenstein” has the power of “poker wielding ability.” His weakness, naturally, is his “teaching ability.” I particularly like the “notes” section of the figure’s description:
Wittgenstein figures come in two variations: the early model’s recorded messages include nonsense about language being a “picture” of the world, while the later model’s messages include nonsense about games and their “family resemblances” to one another. It’s fun to communicate! (Doll does not actually communicate. Children who claim that Wittgenstein figures talk to them with their own “private language” are mistaken or lying and should be severely beaten by their teachers.)
You can see the whole set at the Philosophical Powers site. It is problematic that we only get dead white men represented, but this is not solely the fault of Vandewalker but also a problem of history and the traditional academic history of ideas. One would hope that the concept is clever enough that it might make philosophy appealing to people who find it dull or unapproachable. That may be too lofty a goal, but these figures are sure to amuse the already philosophically-inclined, and perhaps spur them on to learn more.
The guzheng was born in China over 2500 years ago. Originally made out of bamboo and silk strings, the instrument became very popular in the imperial court during the Qin period (221 to 206 BCE), and by the Tang Dynasty (618 CE to 907 CE), it was perhaps the most popular instrument in China. According to the San Francisco Guzheng Music Society, it remained popular through the late Qing dynasty (1644 A.D. — 1911 A.D.) and into the 20th century, when, in 1948, “the renowned musician Cao Zheng established the first university level guzheng program” in the country, and the “old silk strings were replaced with nylon strings, which are still being used today.”
Ricky Gervais, the creator of The Office, rarely gets out of his comic persona. It’s usually laughs, schtick, and more laughs. But when Fast Company pinned him down and asked him about “the single biggest influence on his creative process,” he turned serious (after a few more laughs) and talked about a formative moment with a childhood English teacher. The teacher taught him this: you’re better off writing … Never mind, I’ll let Ricky tell the tale. It’s his story after all.
As maître of the mid-century French philosophical scene, Jean-Paul Sartre wielded some considerable influence in his home country and abroad. His celebrity did not prevent him from working under the editorship of his friend and fellow novelist, Albert Camus, however. Camus, the younger of the two and the more restless and unsettled, edited the French resistance newspaper Combat; Sartre wrote for the paper, and even served as its postwar correspondent in New York (where he met Herbert Hoover) in 1945. According to Simone de Beauvoir, the two became acquainted two years earlier at a production of Sartre’s The Flies. They were already mutual admirers from afar, Camus having reviewed Sartre’s work and Sartre having written glowingly of Camus’ The Stranger. Ronald Aronson, a scholar and biographer of the philosophers’ relationship, describes their first meeting below, quoting from de Beauvoir’s memoir The Prime of Life:
“[A] dark-skinned young man came up and introduced himself: it was Albert Camus.” His novel The Stranger, published a year earlier, was a literary sensation, and his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus had appeared six months previously. [Camus] wanted to meet the increasingly well-known novelist and philosopher—and now playwright—whose fiction he had reviewed years earlier and who had just published a long article on Camus’s own books. It was a brief encounter. “I’m Camus,” he said. Sartre immediately “found him a most likeable personality.”
As the recently discovered letter above shows—from Camus to Sartre—the two were intimate friends as well as collaborators. Thought to have been written sometime between 1943 and 1948, the letter is familiar and candid. Camus opens with “My dear Sartre, I hope you and Castor [“the beaver,” Sartre’s nickname for de Beauvoir] are working a lot… let me know when you return and we will have a relaxed evening.” Aronson comments that the letter “shows that despite what some writers have said, Sartre and Camus had a close friendship.”
Aronson’s comment is understated. The querulous falling out of Sartre and Camus has acquired almost legendary status, with the two sometimes standing in for two divergent paths of French post-war philosophy. Where Sartre gravitated toward orthodox Marxism, and aligned his views with Stalin’s even in the face of the Soviet camps, Camus repudiated revolutionary violence and valorized the tragic struggle of the individual in 1951’s The Rebel, the work that allegedly incited their philosophical split. Andy Martin at the New York Times’ “The Stone” blog writes a concise summary of their intellectual and temperamental differences:
While Sartre after the war was more than ever a self-professed “writing machine,” Camus was increasingly graphophobic, haunted by a “disgust for all forms of public expression.” Sartre’s philosophy becomes sociological and structuralist in its binary emphasis. Camus, all alone, in the night, between continents, far away from everything, is already less the solemn “moralist” of legend (“the Saint,” Sartre called him), more a (pre-)post-structuralist in his greater concern and anxiety about language, his emphasis on difference and refusal to articulate a clear-cut theory: “I am too young to have a system,” he told one audience [in New York].
While Camus’ political disengagement and critique of Communist praxis in The Rebel may have precipitated the increasingly fractious relationship between the two men, there may have also been a personal disagreement over a mutual love interest named Wanda Kosakiewicz, whom both men pursued long before their split over ideas. Martin also tells that story—one perhaps more interesting in a dramatic sense than the abstract summary above—at The Telegraph. The short documentary clip below also dramatizes their disagreement with interviews, rare photos, newsreel footage, and readings from The Rebel. There is no mention, however, of Wanda.
As a preteen, I steered clear of “young adult” fiction, a form I resentfully suspected would try too hard to teach me lessons. Then again, if I’d had a young adult novelist like John Green — not far out of adolescence himself when I entered the YA demographic — perhaps I’d have actively hoped for a lesson or two. While Green has earned a large part of his fame writing novels like Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and The Fault in Our Stars, a sizable chunk of his renown comes from his prolific way with internet videos, especially of the educational variety, which also demonstrate his possession of serious teaching acumen. Last year we featured his 40-week Crash Course in World History, and today we offer you his collection of crash courses in English literature. At the top, you’ll find its first lesson, the seven-minute “How and Why We Read.” Green, in the same jokey, enthusiastic onscreen persona as before, follows up his world history course by reminding us of the importance of writing as a marker of civilization, and then reveals his personal perspective as a writer: “I don’t want to get all liberal artsy on you, but I do want to make this clear: for me, stories are about communication. We didn’t invent grammar so that your life would be miserable in grade school as you attempted to learn what the Márquez a preposition is. By the way, on this program I will be inserting names of my favorite writers when I would otherwise insert curse words.”
Those lines give you a sense of Green’s tone, as well as his objective. If you felt miserable not just studying grammar in grade school but studying actual literature in high school, these lessons may well revitalize a few of the classics with which you couldn’t engage in the classroom. Just above, we have Green’s crash course on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (part one, part two) which, early on, gets interrupted by a familiar-looking young objector: “Mr. Green, I hate everything about this stupid collection of first-world problems passing for a novel, but my hatred of that Willa Cather-ing loser Daisy Buchanan burns with the fire of a thousand suns.” This draws a groan from our host: “Ugh, me from the past. Here’s the thing: you’re not supposed to like Daisy Buchanan, at least not in the uncomplicated way you like, say, cupcakes. I don’t know where you got the idea the quality of a novel should be judged by the likability of its characters, but let me submit to you that Daisy Buchanan doesn’t have to be likable to be interesting. Furthermore, most of what makes her unlikable — her sense of entitlement, her limited empathy, her inability to make difficult choices — are the very things that make you unlikable.” Green knows that many of us, no matter how literate, still fall back into the disadvantageous reading strategies for which we settled in high school. He does his entertaining utmost to correct them while exploring the deeper themes of not just Gatsby, but other such oft-assigned (and oft-ruined-for-kids) works as Romeo and Juliet (part one, part two), the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and, below, The Catcher in the Rye (part one, part two):
We’re in a spoiler-free zone here. When you’re done watching once, twice or thrice, click here to get the backstory … but not before giving us a follow onFacebook and Twitter and making us part of your daily social media diet. Mmm.
Flavorwire titles their post on album covers designed by artist Andy Warhol—auteur of that special brand of late-midcentury, impassive yet rocking-and-rolling, New York-rooted American cool—“Beyond the Banana.” They refer, of course, to the fruit emblazoned uponThe Velvet Underground & Nico, the 1967 debut album from the avant-rock band formed right there in Warhol’s own “Factory.” It would, of course, insult your cultural awareness to post an image of that particular cover and ask if you knew Andy Warhol designed it. But how about that of Count Basie’s self-titled 1955 album above? Warhol, not a figure most of us associate immediately with jazz and its traditions, designed it, too.
We now regard Blue Note highly for its taste in not only the aesthetics of the music itself but also the packaging that surrounds it, and thus we might assume the label had a natural inclination to work with a visionary like Warhol. But in the late fifties, Blue Lights stretched Blue Note’s graphical sensibilities as well as Warhol’s own; with it, he “finally broke away from simply drawing close-ups of musicians and their instruments and delivered a piece of art as evocative as the music inside,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle’s Aidin Vaziri.
Given Warhol’s interest in the United States and its icons, it stands to reason that he would take on design jobs for Basie, Monk, and Burrell just as readily as he would for the Velvet Underground, or for those Englishmen who could out-American the Americans, the Rolling Stones. He even did an album cover for a representative of a whole other slice of American culture: playwright Tennesee Williams, author of plays like The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
In 1952, Caedmon put out a record called Tennessee Williams Reading from The Glass Menagerie, The Yellow Bird and Five Poems, and its 1960 printing bears the Warhol artwork you see just above. Warhol in all these shows an impressive willingness to adapt to the persona of the musician and the feel of their music; a casual Warhol enthusiast may own one of these albums for years without ever realizing who did the cover art. He didn’t even cleave exclusively toward American forms, or to styles that mainstream America might once have considered artistically edgy. You could hardly get further from the position of the Velvet Underground than easy-listening vocals, let alone the easy-listening vocals of the Canadian-born Paul Anka, but when the singer’s 1976 The Painter needed a cover, Warhol delivered — and with a recognizably Warholian look, no less.
“You know,” says Ray Charles in this new animated interview from Blank on Blank, “what I got to live up to is being myself. If I do that the rest will take care of itself.”
Charles always sounded like no one else. When he played or sang just a few notes, you would immediately recognize his distinctive sound, that unique blending of gospel and blues. As he explains in the interview, his style was a direct reflection of who he was. “I can’t help what I sound like,” he says. “What I sound like is what I am, you know? I cannot be anything other than what I am.”
Blank on Blank is a project that brings lost interviews with famous cultural figures back to life. The Charles video is the 12th episode in Blank on Blank’s ongoing series with PBS Digital Studios. The audio of Charles is from the Joe Smith Collection at the Library of Congress. Smith is a former record company executive who recorded over 200 interviews with music industry icons for his book Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music. He talked with Charles on June 3, 1987, when the musician was 56 years old. You can hear the complete, unedited interview at the Library of Congress Web site.
In the interview, Charles says that being true to himself was a night-by-night thing. “I don’t sing ‘Georgia’ like the record. I sing it true,” he says. “I sing what I sing true. Each night I sing it the way I feel that night.” For an example of Charles being true to himself, here he is performing “Georgia On My Mind” on the Dick Cavett Show on September 18, 1972:
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