San Quentin State Prison, California’s only male-inmate death row, has a reputation for having contained some of the most fearsome murderers to make headlines, up to and including Charles Manson. But some non-serial-killing cultural figures have also passed through it gates: country singer-songwriter Merle Haggard, for car theft and armed robbery in his youth; actor Danny Trejo, who did a few years in the sixties; jazz saxophonist Art Pepper, who served two sentences there in that decade; and Neal Cassady, the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, locked up for marijuana possession in 1958. The following year would see the construction, up north at the University of Oregon, of the very first full-sphere “continuous tension-discontinuous compression” geodesic dome. What on Earth could link these these two structures, one brutally utilitarian with a name that spooks even hardened outlaws, and the other a technologically forward-thinking, utopian attempt at architecturally bringing about a better world?
The connection comes in the form of Buckminster Fuller himself, the architect, inventor, writer, and much else besides responsible for the design of the geodesic dome. (He also invented the Dymaxion Car, Dymaxion House, Dymaxion Map… and the list goes on.) He came to San Quentin that same year, not as an inmate — one imagines him as far too busy spinning off new theories or keeping the Dymaxion Chronofile to so much as consider committing a crime — but as a lecturer. Described as “a talk given to inmates on general semantics,” Fuller’s address, which you can hear above, starting around the 20:30 minute mark, takes on an even more general breadth of subjects than that, including his own biography and the experiences that originated the ideas that drove him to live his life as “an experiment to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.” Through that concern with humanity, he could relate to prisoners just as well as he could to anyone else. “There are no throw-away resources,” he says at one point, “and no throw-away people.” At over three hours long, the lecture gets into some detail, but if you want a still more thorough look into Fuller’s mind, consider following it up with the 42-hour Everything I Know.
Now we can share an interactive tool that is using some of those Landsat images to stop illegal deforestation.
With help from Google Earth Engine, the World Resources Institute launched Global Forest Watch, an online forest monitoring and alert system that allows individual computer users to watch forests around the world change in an almost real-time stream of imagery.
Whistle blowers are making powerful use of the Global Forest Watch tool. Using spatial data streams available on the site to observe forest changes in southeastern Peru, a number of users submitted alerts about rapidly escalating deforestation near a gold mine and river valley. In another case, observers submitted an alert about illegal logging in the Republic of the Congo.
Five years ago, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey lifted protocols that kept Landsat images proprietary. Now, agencies like the World Resources Institute—and even tiny citizen watchdog groups around the world—have access to incredibly rich tools and data. Some of the imagery is hard to interpret. Global Forest Watch developed a number of different data layers for users to apply, making it possible to monitor forest areas for trends or illegal logging. The video at the top of this page gives a good overview of how the site works. This one gives more detail about how to use the maps on the Global Forest Watch site.
Select an area of the world and then select a data set that interests you. Choose to look at terrain, satellite, road, tree height, or composite images of a particular region. Data layers can be layered on top of one another to show trends in forest management. In Indonesia, for example, you can use the FORMA alerts button to see what has already been reported in that area of the humid tropics.
How can you tell if forest change is due to illegal logging? Turn on the Forest Use filters to see which areas are authorized for logging and mining and which are protected. In Indonesia, many areas are designated for oil palm production, but expansion of those crops are often associated with loss of natural forest.
Do your own sleuthing. The site is designed to harness data from government and academic scientists, along with observation from individuals (us). There is even information about companies that are growing oil palm trees, so it’s possible that a diligent user could catch an over-aggressive grower stepping over the forest boundary.
It may seem that we live in an era so technologically advanced that our daily concerns differ vastly from those of our ancestors. Nothing could be farther from the truth: we still wonder about the best ways to talk to the opposite sex, still devise outlandish hangover cures, and still obsess over how to lose weight. Considering that our forebears have, by now, repeatedly faced these niggling problems, would it not be wise to consult their wisdom? If you’re more inclined to take the advice of an ancient monk than write Dear Abby, you’re in luck. Ask The Past is here to help.
Run by Johns Hopkins’ Elizabeth Archibald, Ask The Past is a compendium of wisdom from the history books. Below, we’ve selected several pieces of ancient wisdom that may (or may not) help our readers overcome some common problems:
“They call stigmata things inscribed on the face or some other part of the body, for example on the hands of soldiers… In cases where we wish to remove such stigmata, we must use the following preparation… When applying, first clean thestigmata with niter, smear them with resin of terebinth, and bandage for five days… The stigmata are removed in twenty days, without great ulceration and without a scar.”
“That one shall not be drunke. Drink the iuyce of Yerrow fasting, and ye shall not be drunke, for no drinke; and if you were drunke it will make you sober: or else take the marrow of porke fasting, and ye shall not be drunke; and if you be drunke annoint your privie members in vineger, and ye shall waxe sober.”
“An excellent and approved thing to make them slender, that are grosse. Let them eate three or foure cloves of Garlick, with as much of Bread and butter every morning and evening, first and last, neither eating nor drinking of three or foure howres after their taking of it in the morning for the space of fourteene days at the least: and drinke every day three draughts of the decoction of Fennell: that is, of the water wherein Fennell is sod, and well strained, fourteene dayes after the least, at morning, noone and night. I knewe a man that was marveilous grosse, & could not go a quarter of a mile, but was enforst to rest him a dosen times at the least: that with this medicine tooke away his grossenesse, and after could iourney verye well on foote.”
“To make hair and beard grow. Take honeybees in quantity and dry them in a basket by the fire, then make a powder of them, which you thin out with olive oil, and with this ointment, dab several times the place where you would like to have hair, and you will see miracles.”
Traicté nouveau, intitulé, bastiment de receptes (1539)
Wes Anderson’s latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, opens this week and next in selected theaters, and reviews of the film seem to follow what at this point in the director’s career almost feels like a template: discuss the oddities and perfections of Anderson’s stalwart band of actors (always Bill Murray, natch, and often a standout young newcomer); dissect the use of music as a kind of mood ring for the deadpan dialogue; marvel at the intricate scenery and costuming; frost with a thesaurus’s worth of variations on the word “quirky.”
The Guardian gives us descriptors like “nostalgia-tinted” and “gently charming.” NPR writes “weird and wonderful,” “a tumble down a rabbit hole,” and “like a trio of Russian nesting dolls.” And Dave Itzkoff in The New York Times refers to the film’s “pastel color schemes, baroque costumes and delicate pastries.” Itzkoff goes further and wonders what we might find if we opened up Anderson’s head. Among other options, he imagines “a junk drawer crammed with kite string, Swiss Army knives, and remote-controlled toys” and “a well-organized tackle box.”
The Times review comes closest to evoking the tactile and hyper-specific Andersonian mise-en-scène, but few of his reviewers, it seems, dare attempt the difficult task of fitting the filmmaker into cinema history. Were we to chart the aesthetic interconnections of a few-hundred well-known auteurs, just where, exactly, would we put Wes Anderson? It’s a little hard to say—the worlds he creates feel sui generis, sprung fully formed from his “junk drawer, tackle box” of a mind. While his work has certain affinities with contemporary stylists like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, it also seems to emerge, like an isolated only child, from (writes Itzkoff) “a memory palace assembled ad hoc from brownstone apartments, underground caves and submarine compartments.”
But of course, like every artist, Anderson has many connections to history and tradition, and works through his influences to make them his own. And he hasn’t been shy about naming his favorite films and directors. In fact, the Texas-born filmmaker has compiled several lists of favorites in the past couple years. Below, find excerpts culled from three such lists.
Asked about his five favorite movies, Anderson quipped, “you may have to call it ‘The five movies that I just say, for whatever reason’… the five I manage to think up right now.” Here are the “top three” of that arbitrary list:
Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968): “This has always been a big influence on me, or a source of ideas; and it’s always been one of my favorites.”
A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971): “It’s a movie that’s very particularly designed and, you know, conjures up this world that you’ve never seen quite this way in a movie before.”
Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932): “I don’t know if anybody can make a movie like that anymore—that perfect tone, like a “soufflé”-type of move. A confection, I guess.”
Anderson, says the Daily News, “always fancied himself a New Yorker” even before he’d set foot in Manhattan. Below are a few of his top films set in his adopted city (Rosemary’s Baby is number 7).
4. Moonstruck (Norman Jewison, 1987): “I’ve always loved this script. It’s a very well-done Hollywood take on New York.”
6.Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957): “Here’s a classic staple of New York movies. The look of it is this distilled black-and-white New York and Clifford Odets writes great dialogue.”
8. Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Paul Mazursky, 1976): “I saw the movie many years ago and I don’t really remember much other than loving it. I love Paul Mazursky’s films. He’s a New Yorker who is a great writer-director.”
Anderson prefaces this list with: “I thought my take on a top-ten list might be to simply quote myself from the brief fan letters I periodically write to the Criterion Collection team.” Here are a few of his picks:
4. The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Roberto Rossellini, 1966): “The man who plays Louis cannot give a convincing line reading, even to the ears of someone who can’t speak French—and yet he is fascinating…. What does good acting actually mean? Who is this Tag Gallagher?”
7. Classe tous risques (Claude Sautet, 1960): “I am a great fan of Claude Sautet, especially Un coeur en hiver.”
10. The Exterminating Angel(Luis Buñuel, 1962): “He is my hero. Mike Nichols said in the newspaper he thinks of Buñuel every day, which I believe I do, too, or at least every other.”
So there you have… at least some of it (I am surprised to find no Georges Méliès). Depending on your familiarity with Anderson’s choices, a perusal of his favorites’ lists may give you some special appreciation of The Grand Budapest Hotel. Then again, it may just be the case that the only real context for any Wes Anderson film is other Wes Anderson films.
Last year, I had a chance to interviewSteven Soderbergh for Side Effect, his final theatrical feature before his supposed retirement. During our discussion, he mused on the future of cinema.
There’s a new grammar of cinema out there. I’m convinced that there’s another sort of iteration to be had, and I don’t know what it is … I feel like we’re not taking advantage of how sophisticated we’ve gotten at reading the images. It’s not about the number of images or how fast those images come. It’s about loading each one with so many preexisting associations that the audience is doing a lot of work. No one has really challenged them before to mine all of these associations they have from seeing the images their whole lives.
When he was saying this, I confess that I had a hard time imagining what he was describing. But last week, Soderbergh uploaded a video to his website that might be what he had in mind – a mashup of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Psycho (1960) and Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot remake (1998). (You can watch a fragment above and the long, complete mashup here.)
For much of the piece, Soderbergh alternates between a scene from the original and one from the remake – Anne Heche, who plays Marion Crane in Van Sant’s version leaves her apartment for work and in the next scene, Janet Leigh shows up at the office. At other moments, he cuts back and forth within the scene; at one point the Marion from the remake is at a traffic light and sees her boss from the original movie. And during a few key points in the film — like the famed shower scene, which you can see above — Soderbergh does something different. That sequence opens with Heche disrobing and lathering up. But when the killer starts stabbing, Soderbergh jarringly overlays the original movie over top the remake, creating a disconcerting kaleidoscopic effect.
If there were any movie laden with “many preexisting associations,” it would be Psycho. All of Hitchcock’s simmering voyeurism, fetishism and general psychosexual weirdness come to a boil in this movie. Ever since it came out, filmmakers from Douglas Gordon to Brian De Palma have been trying to unpack its power.
When Van Sant unveiled his movie in 1998, audiences and critics alike were baffled. “Why bother,” seemed the general consensus. Indeed, Van Sant seems to have pulled off the enviable feat of snookering a Hollywood studio into funding a big-budget conceptual art film.
By intercutting the original with the copy, Soderbergh forces the audience to reappraise both by casting the greatness of Hitchcock’s movie and the oddness of Van Sant’s effort in a new light. You can watch the entire mashup here.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
danah boyd (she doesn’t capitalize her name) is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, where she looks at how young people use social media as part of their everyday lives. She has a new book out called It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, and she’s made it available as a free PDF. On her website she writes, “I didn’t write this book to make money. I wrote this book to reach as wide of an audience as I possibly could. This desire to get as many people as engaged as possible drove every decision I made throughout this process. One of the things that drew me to Yale [the publisher] was their willingness to let me put a freely downloadable CC-licensed copy of the book online on the day the book came out.” But she also asks that you purchase a copy of the book if you find it useful. “Your purchasing decisions help me signal to the powers that be that this book is important, that the message in the book is valuable.” Find the PDF here, or in our collection of Free eBooks. Buy the book online here.
Oxford University professor Marianne Talbot has a number of excellent philosophy podcasts online, some of which we’ve previously featured on the site. Today, we bring you Talbot’s A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners (Web — iTunesU — YouTube), which addresses one of philosophy’s central questions: what is the right way to conduct yourself in life?
The problem may, at first, seem somewhat trivial. “Live whichever way you want, as long as you’re going to be a good person,” you might say, shrugging off the question. But it’s really a great deal more complicated than that. What does being a “good” person entail? Should we emulate the actions of someone widely considered virtuous?
Does being good mean living by absolute rules? Say, never murder another human being? Or should we tailor our actions according to each situation, with the aim of achieving the greatest quantity of good as our only hard-and-fast rule? If the possibilities are making your head spin, you’re not alone: philosophers have done their best to figure out precisely what constitutes moral rights and wrongs since the days of Socrates.
Luckily, Talbot is ready to guide us through the complexities. True to its title, A Romp Through Ethics for Complete Beginners walks students through seven comprehensive lectures (watch them all above) on moral thought, providing a neatly-packaged survey of the field. Talbot begins by discussing some preconditions to moral reasoning, and then sets out Aristotle’s conception of righteous living, which consists of acting in a virtuous manner (if you smell something fishy about that statement, you’re on the right track). Talbot then proceeds to guide the class through some of philosophy’s most significant ethical paradigms, explaining Immanuel Kant’s idea of the inviolable categorical imperative and the moral calculus behind John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian thought.
A cottage industry quickly sprang up in the early 80s when the first videocassettes made their way to the West African nation of Ghana. Armed with a TV, a VCR and a portable generator, mobile cinema operators set up shop in city neighborhoods and in rural berg and began to screen Hong Kong action flicks, Bollywood musicals, Nigerian movies and Hollywood blockbusters.
In order to pack their mobile theaters, promoters hired artists to design movies posters — usually the sole means of advertisement for a screening. As with a lot of advertisements in Sub-Saharan Africa, the posters were hand painted on large pieces of canvas or used flour bags. The artists – many of whom seem to have only a tenuous grasp on perspective and human anatomy — were oftentimes commissioned to design a poster without having seen the movie or even really knowing what a given movie star looks like.
The resulting work is garish, lurid and wonderfully strange. In an age when the posters coming out of Hollywood are bland and forgettable, the rough-hewn style of these posters is a real joy — movie art with a pulse. The version of Catwoman as advertised in the Ghanaian poster above looks way more interesting than the actual movie.
The golden age of the mobile movie theaters started to decline in the 90s when more and more people were able to buy their own equipment. About that same time, Western collectors started to buy and collect the posters.
Jeaurs Oka Afutu, a veteran poster designer who got his start when he was a teenager, reflects on his work. “Action and war works a lot … and women too: both actually,” he said in an interview with CNN. “It all depends on what the audience prefers.”
On this page, you’ll also find posters for The Matrix, The Terminator, The Spy Who Love Me [sic] and Alien. Find more of these remarkable posters at Twisted Sifter.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
