Gil Scott-Heron, sometimes called the “Godfather of Rap,” passed away in New York today. He was 62 years old.
Scott-Heron started setting poetry to rhythmic jazz during the late 60s and and gained fame when he recorded The Revolution Will Not Be Televised in 1971. Almost 40 years later, he released his final album, I’m New Here, which included a track called Where Did the Night Go that’s featured above. That same year, the New Yorker published a profile – New York Is Killing Me:The unlikely survival of Gil Scott-Heron – that takes you through a life that knew hardship from beginning to end, but which brimmed with creativity in between.
The Franz Kafka Society announced yesterday that it was awarding the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize for 2011 to the Irish writer John Banville, who has built a reputation for being one of the finest prose stylists working in English–and for being a bit difficult.
First, there are the books themselves. “In their architecture and their style,” wrote Belinda McKeon in the introduction to Banville’s 2009 Paris Review interview, “his books are like baroque cathedrals, filled with elaborate passages and sometimes overwhelming to the casual tourist.” And then there is the personality. When Banville won the 2005 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sea, he proclaimed, “it is nice to see a work of art win the Booker Prize.” As he explained later to The Village Voice, “the Booker Prize and literary prizes in general are for middle-ground, middlebrow work, which is as it should be. The Booker Prize is a prize to keep people interested in fiction, in buying fiction. If they gave it to my kind of book every year, it would rapidly die.”
Art may not be for everyone, but for those who have read his books–16 novels published under his own name, four crime novels under the pen name Benjamin Black, and one collection of short stories–there is no doubt that Banville is an artist. “It all starts with rhythm for me,” Banville told the Paris Review. “I love Nabokov’s work, and I love his style. But I always thought there was something odd about it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then I read an interview in which he admitted he was tone deaf. And I thought, that’s it–there’s no music in Nabokov, it’s all pictorial, it’s all image-based. It’s not any worse for that, but the prose doesn’t sing. For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above any expectation I might have had for it. That’s what keeps me going on those dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing.”
For an example of Banville’s singing prose, we leave off where The Sea begins:
They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds. The waves were depositing a fringe of soiled yellow foam along the waterline. No sail marred the high horizon. I would not swim, no, not ever again.
Watch to the end. As you might expect, the master upstages his co-star, flapping wings and all.
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The great actor Sir Anthony Hopkins is well versed in the work of fellow Welshman Dylan Thomas — so much so he even directed the critically lauded film Dylan Thomas: The Return Journey in 2006. Here, he is reading one of Thomas’ best-known poems, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” (If anyone knows when this video was made, please drop us a line.)
There is, of course, no reader of Thomas’ poetry equal to Thomas himself. Just listen to this BBC recording from 1951, the year the beloved villanelle was first published. But if dulcet tones and minimalist recordings aren’t your thing, then you might want to check out this John Cale version.
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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!
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
For Class Day 2011, Harvard had comedian Amy Poehler, and Yale had Tom Hanks — two figures who have a whole lot more entertainment value than the speaker at my graduation — the Assistant County Coroner. Dead serious! Pun only halfway intended. Anyway, I digress. Today, we’re featuring Tom Hanks, the two-time winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor, who starts funny, but then turns a little serious, reminding graduates, à la F.D.R., that essentially “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Not a bad talk overall, but we’re still most partial to Steve Job’s Stanford talk from 2005. Our hands-down favorite…
E. chromi, a short film about a unique collaboration between designers and biologists has won the best documentary award at Bio:Fiction, the world’s first synthetic biology film festival, held earlier this month in Vienna.
E. chromi tells the story of a project uniting designers Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and James King with a team of undergraduate biology students at Cambridge University. Using genes from existing organisms, the team designed custom DNA sequences, called BioBricks, and inserted them into E. coli bacteria.The new E. coli—dubbed “E. chromi”—were programmed to express a rainbow of colors when exposed to various chemicals.
Ginsberg and King helped the young biologists dream up a variety of possible applications for the invention.For example, E. chromi could be used to test the safety of drinking water–turning red if a toxin is present, green if it’s okay. Or it might be used as an early warning system for disease: a person would ingest some yogurt containing E. chromi, then watch out for tell-tale colors at the other end of the digestive process.
The E. chromi team was awarded the grand prize at the 2009 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For more films on synthetic biology, see the Bio:Fiction website.
The road to success runs right through failure. It’s an idea that’s getting a lot of attention lately. Earlier this month, the Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm organized an exhibition around the whole premise that “success never happens without taking risks. And risks are what you’re capable of taking when you overcome the fear of failing.” But how to do that? How to take that leap? The exhibition put that question to artists and thinkers who know success in a very intimate way. (See full list on BrainPickings here.) That includes Paulo Coelho, the author of The Alchemist, a book that has sold 65 million copies across 150 countries, and he had this to say:
I’m never paralyzed by my fear of failure… I say “Ok, I’m doing my best… ” And, from the moment that I can say that I’m doing my best … I sit down, I breathe, and I say “I put all of my love into it, I did it with all my heart.” … And whether they like [the book] or not is irrelevant, because I like it. I’m committed to the thing that I did. And so far nobody has criticized or refused it. When you put love and enthusiasm into your work, even if people don’t see it, they know it’s there, that you did this with all of your body and soul, so that is what I encourage you to do.
It’s a good thought, which gets pursued on a parallel track by Tim Harford. In 2005, Harford wrote the bestselling book, The Undercover Economist, and now he returns with Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. Speaking yesterday on KQED in San Francisco, the writer, sometimes likened to Malcolm Gladwell, talked about the importance of experimentation, taking calculated risks, and creating room for failure, something that matters as much to individuals as it does to corporations or nations trying to solve difficult problems. You can listen to the full interview here.
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!
We’ve already written about the excellent film blog MUBIdaily, which is published by the online screening room Mubi.com. We’ve never really pushed Mubi itself, even though the site features a wide selection of independent and foreign films.It’s a subscription site, and we prefer to focus on cultural offerings that you can access free of charge.
Still, for the next month, you can watch certain films on Mubi free of charge — specifically, selections from multiple years of Cannes’ La Semaine de la Critique (Critics’ Week), one of the festival’s most consistently interesting sidebars. Each year a panel of international critics selects a current crop of shorts and features from first and second time directors, and now MUBI has made a number of past selections freely available online. The selection is a little uneven, but still often inspiring. Of the choices offered at Mubi’s mini-retrospective, we recommend the Japanese film Chicken Heart, the clever Swedish short Seeds of the Fall, and especially Round Da Way (Lascars), a lively French animated feature about life in the projects. You can watch Round Da Way above.
The full selection is available for free on Mubi until June 30th, with a caveat or two: Each film is only free for its first 1,000 viewings, you do need to register to watch, and there may be some georestriction at work (though we can’t say for sure since we’re based in the US).
And finally, of course, don’t miss our big curated collection of 380 Free Movies, which includes a few major films from Cannes too.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
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