A couple of years ago, Maria Popova highlighted for us a 2009 talk by John Cleese that offered a handbook for creating the right conditions for creativity. Of course, John Cleese knows something about creativity, being one of the leading forces behind Monty Python, the beloved British comedy group.
Now, we have another talk, recorded circa 1991, where Cleese uses scientific research to describe what creativity is … and what creativity isn’t. He starts by telling us, creativity is not a talent. It has nothing to do with IQ. It is a way of doing things, a way of being — which means that creativity can be learned. The rest he explains in 37 thought-filled minutes.
It’s April, which means it’s time for a new batch of Open Courses from Yale University. The latest release adds another six courses to the mix, bringing Yale’s total to 42. We have listed the new additions below, and also added them to our ever-growing list of Free Online Courses. As always, Yale gives you access to their courses in multiple formats. You can generally download their lectures via YouTube, iTunes or Yale’s Open Course web site.
African American History: From Emancipation to the Present — Web Site — Jonathan Holloway
Financial Markets 2011 — YouTube — Robert Shiller
Note: Earlier this week, my local NPR station featured a big conversation about Disruptive Innovation in Higher Education. Guests included Salman Khan (Khan Academy), Sebastian Thrun (Udacity), Anant Agarwal (MITx) and Ben Nelson (The Minerva Project). You can listen to their wide-ranging conversation here.
Here’s an amazing time capsule from the golden age of jazz: Miles Davis and his group–including John Coltrane–performing with the Gil Evans Orchestra on the CBS program, The Robert Herridge Theater.
The show was recorded on April 2, 1959 at Studio 61 in New York. It was a bold departure for The Robert Herridge Theater, a program normally devoted to the dramatic story-telling arts. Davis was slated to appear with his full sextet, but alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley had a migraine headache that day, according to the Miles Ahead Web site, so the group was pared down to a quintet, with Davis on trumpet and flugelhorn, Coltrane on tenor and alto saxophone, Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums.
The broadcast took place halfway through the recording of Davis’s landmark album, Kind of Blue. The 26-minute show (see above) opens with the classic “So What,” recorded only a month earlier. Davis solos twice on the song to fill in for Adderley. The group is then joined by Gil Evans and his orchestra. Together they play three numbers from Davis’s 1957 album, Miles Ahead. Here’s the set list:
So What
The Duke
Blues for Pablo
New Rhumba
So What (reprise)
“There are many ways of telling a story,” says host and producer Robert Herridge. “What you’re listening to now, the music of Miles Davis, is one of those ways.”
“David Foster Wallace’s writing sort of lends itself to being read aloud,” says actor Brian Elerding. He understates the case; at times, Wallace seems to have crafted his prose specifically to reflect and embody spoken language. He listened to the English actually used today, including all its tics, hitches, solecisms, and deliberate inarticulacies, with an observatory precision and rigor approaching the scientific. Actor-writer-director John Krasinski first put this quality of Wallace’s writing to a high-profile test with his 2009 film adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. In the above clip, we see the making of a similar project in a very different form: last April in Beverly Hills, the PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) Center USA put on a live reading where “eleven talented actors” performed David Foster Wallace monologues “to an enthusiastic crowd of 300.”
These monologues came adapted from The Pale King, Wallace’s famously posthumous novel about what, if anything, lays beyond the crushing veil of tedium at a Peoria IRS branch office. As we enter the throes of United States tax time, the book gears up for a paperback release featuring additional material, some of which appeared last month at The Millions. PEN’s reading, introduced by Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin, showcased interpretations of The Pale King’s characters through the voices of actors like Nick Offerman and Josh Radnor, comedians like Rob Delaney and June Diane Raphael, and even former Black Flag frontman Henry Rollins. Now best known as a spoken-word artist, Rollins understands well the power and depth of human speech. “It’s trying to reach you on every page,” he says of Wallace’s writing. “He’s trying to make a connection.” Struggling to pin down the exact nature of Wallace’s resonance, so strong with so many readers, literary scholars have used hundreds of thousands of their own words to draw the very same conclusion.
One day in early 1962, Mel Brooks was sitting in a New York City theater watching an avant-garde film by the Scottish-born Canadian animator Norman McLaren when he heard someone in the audience expressing bewilderment. “Three rows behind me,” Brooks told Kenneth Tynan for a 1979 New Yorker profile, “there was an old immigrant man mumbling to himself. He was very unhappy because he was waiting for a story line and he wasn’t getting one.”
Brooks had made a study of old curmudgeons ever since he was a boy growing up in a Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn. In a 1975 Playboy interview he described his eccentric Uncle Joe, who would say to him when he was five years old, “Don’t invest. Put da money inna bank. Even the land could sink.”
Later, as a young comedian learning his craft on the borscht belt circuit, Brooks paid close attention to the elocution and timing of the old Yiddish comedians. After working as a writer for Sid Caesar’s early television program, Your Show of Shows, Brooks and fellow writer Carl Reiner hit it big as performers in 1961, with their “2000-Year-Old Man” routine. Reiner was the straight man interviewing an old man played by Brooks. In one famous scene Reiner asked, “You knew Jesus?” Brooks replied, “Yeah. He was a thin man, always wore sandals. Came into the store but never bought anything.”
So when he overheard the old kvetch in the movie theater giving a running commentary on his own bewilderment, Brooks recognized the comedic possibilities. He approached director Ernest Pintoff, whose Oscar-nominated 1959 short The Violinist had been narrated by Reiner, about making a movie. Pintoff hired artist Bob Heath to create the animation, and chose Bach to set the highbrow tone. Brooks was 36 years old when he created the voice of the 71-year-old man. As he told Tynan, the commentary was ad-libbed:
I asked my pal Ernie Pintoff to do the visuals for a McLaren-type cartoon. I told him, ‘Don’t let me see the images in advance. Just give me a mike and let them assault me.’ And that’s what he did…I sat in a viewing theatre looking at what Ernie showed me, and I mumbled whatever I felt that old guy would have mumbled, trying to find a plot in this maze of abstractions. We cut it down to three and a half minutes and called it The Critic.
The film was a critical as well as a popular success, winning the Academy Award for best animated short film of 1963. Putting The Critic into perspective, Samuel Raphael Franco of J, the Jewish news weekly, wrote in 2009:
The film is a relic of quintessential borscht belt humor.…It is also a valuable sociologic portrait of the predominant cultural attitudes of Brooklyn’s first generation of Russian-Jewish immigrants. The influence of Brooks’ development as a comic as a tummler for the crowds in the Catskills surfaces right away in the first line, “Vat the hell is dis?”
Fewer than 40 minutes survive of My Best Friend’s Birthday, the first film directed by Quentin Tarantino. But its brief screen time runs dense with references to Elvis Presley, the Partridge Family, A Countess from Hong Kong, Rod Stewart, Deputy Dawg, and That Darn Cat. In between the rapid-fire gab sessions, we also witness a slapstick kung-fu battle and even hear a bit of repurposed early-seventies pop music. Though a fire claimed the second half of what was presumably the picture’s only print, the first half, which you can
“>watch free on YouTube, leaves no doubt as to the identity of its auteur. In some sense, it bears an even deeper imprint of Tarantino’s personality than his subsequent films, since he stars in it as well. To behold the early-twentysomething Tarantino portraying the good-hearted and aggressively enthusiastic but jittery and distractible rockabilly DJ Clarence Poole is to behold the Quentin Tarantino public persona in an embryonic form, a distilled form — or both.
The plot of My Best Friend’s Birthday, such as it remains, finds Clarence looking to give a birthday present to his pal Mickey, who’s been freshly, and harshly, re-rejected by an ex-girlfriend. None of Clarence’s ideas — not the cake, not the call girl — work out quite as intended, though now I suppose we’ll never know how wrong things really went, or if they managed to right themselves in the end. Yet the truncated version of the film feels somehow more fascinating — more satisfying, even — than any completion I can imagine. Both the movie’s hopelessly unresolved story and its dreamy visual quality, courtesy of a beaten-up 16-millimeter print transferred onto what looks like a VHS tape, turn it into the most experimental art Tarantino has ever created. It casts adrift even the director’s hardiest fans in a stark southern California reality: long-running arguments about meaningless culture, ceaseless elevation of the disposable, and a vague, looming, but nevertheless constant sense of threat. And amid all this, it can still serve up a line like, “What made you interested in tackling prostitution as a career goal?”
My Best Friend’s Birthday appears in our collection of Free Movies Online.
A couple weeks back, we mentioned that you can download a finely-read audio version of James Joyce’s Ulysses for free. What that version doesn’t include — and couldn’t include — are etchings by Henri Matisse. Back in the mid-1930s, George Macey, an American publisher, approached the celebrated painter and asked him how many etchings he could provide for $5,000. Although it’s widely believed that Matisse never read Joyce’s sprawling classic (despite being given a French translation of the text), he did come back with 26 full-page illustrations, all of them based on six themes from Homer’s Odyssey, the epic poem that Ulysses consciously plays upon. In 1935, an illustrated edition of Ulysses was printed. Matisse signed 1500 copies; Joyce only 250. And today a copy signed by both artists will run you a cool $37k. Buy, hey, the shipping is only $6.
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