“If you have means please show [the bands] love by naming your price. If you do not have any means, in exchange for each download we kindly request that you post, share, tag and tweet to tell your friends about each album as our bands depend on your word of mouth.”
The indie record label has released LPs by bands such as Lights & Motion, The Appleseed Cast, Brandtson, The White Octave, and Planes Mistaken for Stars, plus a number of compilation albums, including The Emo Diaries. If you’re looking for a place to get started, one reader on Metafilter offers up this list.
Every now and again, we like to bring you a reimagining of an old classic. Some time ago, for example, we posted about a reinvention of Star Wars: A New Hope, shot by scores of ardent fans, and spliced together from 15-second fragments. Today, we’re writing about another project that grew out of a twist on Star Wars, called Classic Movies in Miniature Style. Murat Palta, a Turkish illustrator, decided to combine a western film with the intricate two-dimensional motifs found in Ottoman miniature paintings, and got the surreal result that you see above. Pay particular attention to Han Solo’s smug grin, and Darth Vader dallying to smell the roses.
With Ottoman Star Wars having garnered high marks from his professors, and having enjoyed the project, Palta decided to keep with his theme and illustrate other iconic movies in the same style. Here are a couple of other movie posters he’s produced since:
As you probably guessed, the first depicts the final moments of Scarface (1983), where a coked-out Tony Montana rains bullets on a team of assassins who have infiltrated his lavish compound. In the second, a compendium of Godfather scenes, a regal Don Corleone listens to supplicants, as Jack Woltz, in the bottom left-hand corner, finds his prized stallion’s severed head in his bed. While the concept is clever, what really stands out in Palta’s illustrations is the level of detail, from Brando’s sour facial expression, to Tony Montana’s fez. The remainder of the posters on his website, which include The Shining, Alien, and a terrific version of A Clockwork Orange, are no less impressive.
Film noir received its name in 1946 when French critic Nino Frank expressed his fascination with dark Hollywood melodramas of the time. But noir as a genre only took shape retrospectively, and the bitter arguments over what it is continue to the present. I’ve always thought of film noir as the offspring of German Expressionism, pulp fiction, and the hard-boiled crime novels of Raymond Chandler. Its characters—dangerous seductresses and “fallen” women, cynical detectives, sadistic villains and amoral deviants of all kinds—are exaggerated outlaw mirrors of the era’s virtuous everyman protagonists. Most noirs seem expressly created to defy the Hays Code’s strong suggestion that “the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.”
Alain Silver, editor of the Film Noir Reader, dates “the classic era of film noir” to “a fifteen year span from You Only Live Once (1937) to Where Danger Lives (1952).” But films as early as Fritz Lang’s 1931 M are discussed in noir terms, and the aesthetic persists, if only in homage or parody, as in the obvious noir take-off Sin City. Roger Ebert concisely defined the genre in a short list of ten essential features. Despite its French name and stylistically German origins, Ebert called it “the most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.”
Whatever the genre’s boundaries, I think it’s safe to say that film noir’s history rests in good hands. The Film Noir Foundation has dedicated itself to “rescuing and restoring America’s Film Noir Heritage”; Film Noir Studies aims to be a critical resource for students, scholars, and fans alike. And perhaps best of all, we have Eddie Muller—self-described “wordslinger, impresario, noirchaelogist”—on the case. A very noir-ish character himself, Muller, a seasoned San Francisco reporter, barfly, boxing enthusiast, and adult film historian, defines film noir as “the flip side of the all-American success story.”
It’s about people who realize that following the program will never get them what they crave. So they cross the line, commit a crime and reap the consequences. Or, they’re tales about seemingly innocent people tortured by paranoia and ass-kicked by Fate. Either way, they depict a world that’s merciless and unforgiving.
On his site, Muller has compiled a list of “25 noir films that will stand the test of time.” His picks range from acknowledged classics like Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard to lesser-known pictures like Raw Deal. Below, I’ve listed his favorites in the reverse order he prefers. Calling his list “Endless Night,” Muller asks us to “take this with a grain of salt” and to “consider the listing a sort of carnival barometer, ranging from INFATUATED to PASSIONATE.”
Why have cinephiles, from the era of Laserdiscs through that of DVDs and now Blu-rays, so consistently respected The Criterion Collection? Speaking as one such cinephile, I could point to a number of factors: their curatorial bent toward important films, their production of rich supplementary features, their always impressive pieces of cover art. But Criterion has become increasingly known for the considerable work they put in not at the end of the process, when they package a classic or potentially classic motion picture for maximum aesthetic and intellectual appeal (and your purchase), but at the beginning, when they track down the actual celluloid film in the first place, often aged or damaged, and engage in the often painstaking task of returning it to the prime of visual and sonic life.
In the short Gizmodo video at the top, Criterion director Lee Kline and his team talk about the work they did to restore Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 Foreign Correspondent, which included acquiring the negative from the Library of Congress, scanning the whole thing at high resolution over two days to a week, doing the research necessary to figure out how the film “should have looked,” clean up scratches and film damage, and filter out the clicks and pops on the soundtrack. (And yes, we get some insight into its “snazzy” cover design as well.) The Kline-narrated video just above offers a demonstration of Criterion’s restoration process on another piece of classic Hitchcock, the first, 1934-made version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, a picture with no known negative still in existence. A formidable challenge, but if we film geeks entrust that job to anyone, we entrust it to Criterion.
Thanks to the efforts of Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox and singer Miche Braden, the world now knows how heavy metal rockers, Guns N’ Roses sound with their knees rouged up and their stockings down.
Their New Orleans jazz take on 1987’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine” replaces the preening rock god sensitivity of the original with a sort of mature, female swagger harkening all the way back Bessie Smith. (Braden’s stage credits include turns as Billie Holiday, Valaida Snow, and Ma Rainey.)
The backup musicians get in on the fun, too, retooling Slash’s guitar solo as a horn-driven cakewalk. I know which party I’d rather hit!
Over the years, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” has proved a remarkably study workhorse, withstanding attempts to make it over as electronica, a Gregorian Chant and Brazilian prog rock. Or how about this version played on the Guzheng, an ancient Chinese instrument. Postmodern Jukebox’s entry into this stakes is not without gimmick, but it’s a winning one.
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“What has been my prettiest contribution to the culture?” asked Kurt Vonnegut in his autobiographyPalm Sunday. His answer? His master’s thesis in anthropology for the University of Chicago, “which was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun.” The elegant simplicity and playfulness of Vonnegut’s idea is exactly its enduring appeal. The idea is so simple, in fact, that Vonnegut sums the whole thing up in one elegant sentence: “The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.” In 2011, we featured the video below of Vonnegut explaining his theory, “The Shapes of Stories.” We can add to the dry wit of his lesson the picto-infographic by graphic designer Maya Eilam above, which strikingly illustrates, with examples, the various story shapes Vonnegut described in his thesis. (Read a condensed version here.)
The presenter who introduces Vonnegut’s short lecture tells us that “his singular view of the world applies not just to his stories and characters but to some of his theories as well.” This I would affirm. When it comes to puzzling out the import of a story I’ve just read, the last person I usually turn to is the author. But when it comes to what fiction is and does in general, I want to hear it from writers of fiction. Some of the most enduring literary figures are expert writers on writing. Vonnegut, a master communicator, ranks very highly among them. Does it do him a disservice to condense his ideas into what look like high-res, low-readability workplace safety graphics? On the contrary, I think.
Though the design may be a little slick for Vonnegut’s unapologetically industrial approach, he’d have appreciated the slightly corny, slightly macabre boilerplate iconography. His work turns a suspicious eye on overcomplicated posturing and champions unsentimental, Midwestern directness. Vonnegut’s short, trade publication essay, “How to Write With Style,” is as succinct and practical a statement on the subject in existence. One will encounter no more a ruthlessly efficient list than his “Eight Rules for Writing Fiction.” But it’s in his “Shapes of Stories” theory that I find the most insight into what fiction does, in brilliantly simple and funny ways that anyone can appreciate.
Tezuka Osamu (1928–1989) is known as “the God of manga” in Japan. He created classics for both children and adults in every genre – from horror to romance to action. The sheer amount of work produced in Osamu’s relatively short life is staggering; some estimates have it that he drew over 150,000 pages of comics.
While focusing just on manga would have been enough for most mortals, Osamu was also a trailblazer in animation. He created Astro-Boy, the hugely popular character that spawned comic books, TV shows, video games and a couple of movies. The visual style of Osamu’s animated work — Astro-Boy and others — proved to be very influential. Those trademark giant eyes on anime characters come straight from Osamu (who in turn was influenced by Walt Disney and Max Fleischer).
Osamu relentlessly challenged the limits of what manga and anime could do. He’s credited with making the first ever X‑Rated animated feature film, Cleopatra, Queen of Sex(1970) — imagine Disney doing that. He also made a series of experimental animated shorts, which showcase not only Osamu’s creativity and range but also his philosophy, which was heavily influenced by Buddhism.
His 1962 work Tale of Street Corner is a surprisingly moving short about the day-to-day life of a city street corner as seen through the eyes of some anthropomorphized mice and sentient street posters.
And if you want get a sense of Osamu’s versatility, check out his 1966 movie Pictures at an Exhibition. The work is an omnibus film featuring ten smaller shorts, all set to Mussorgsky’s famous suite. Osamu recreated each short in a completely different style from the others.
His 1984 short, Jumping is a technical tour-de-force told with admirable simplicity. Seen from a first person point of view, the movie is about a young child who is jumping down a country road. As each jump gets higher and longer, the camera passes through cities, fields and oceans and eventually into a warzone. The sharp-eyed viewer will see R2D2 and C‑3PO make a surprise cameo at around the 2:57 marker.
And finally, here is an interview with the master himself as he talks about making these movies. And you can see all 13 of the animated shorts 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.
Austen was, by and large, a homeschooled and autodidactic child. Although she had taken part in some formal schooling between the ages of 7 and 10, illness and the family’s lack of means dictated that she had to rely on her father’s extensive library for an education. By the time she was fifteen, Austen had evidently gathered sufficient material to fuel her writing, and had completed a history of England, beginning with Henry IV (1367–1413), and ending with Charles I (1600–1649). Above, you can see one of the book’s many illustrations drawn by Jane’s elder sister, Cassandra, depicting Edward IV, of whom Austen writes, “This Monarch was famous only for his Beauty & his Courage, of which the Picture we have here given of him, & his undaunted Behaviour in marrying one Woman while he was engaged to another, are sufficient proofs.” In spite of its brevity — the book numbers only 36 handwritten pages — Austen’s juvenilia shows unmistakable signs of her distinct satirical voice. The volume is, in fact, a parody of the stuffy claims of objectivity found in 18th century grade school history textbooks, like Oliver Goldsmith’sThe History of England from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II. Rather than follow suit, Austen skips trivialities such as key dates and events, noting to her readers in the introduction to a section on Henry VIII,
“It would be an affront to my Readers were I to suppose that they were not as well acquainted with the particulars of the King’s reign as I am myself. It will therefore be saving them the task of reading again what they have read before, & myself the trouble of writing what I do not perfectly recollect, by giving only a slight sketch of the principal Events which marked his reign”
I had the sense that Austin relished writing such humorous prose as much as I enjoyed reading it. Unconstrained by the formalities of her medium, she takes to referencing Shakespeare and giving voice to her numerous opinions. Take, for example, her entries on Henry V and Henry VI:
Henry the 5th
This Prince after he succeeded to the throne grew quite reformed and amiable, forsaking all his dissipated Companions, & never thrashing Sir William again. During his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for. His Majesty then turned his thoughts to France, where he went & fought the famous Battle of Agincourt. He afterwards married the King’s daughter Catherine, a very agreeable Woman by Shakespear’s account. Inspite of all this however, he died, and was succeeded by his son Henry.
Henry the 6th
I cannot say much for this Monarch’s sense. Nor would I if I could, for he was a Lancastrian. I suppose you know all about the Wars between him & the Duke of York who was of the right side; if you do not, you had better read some other History, for I shall not be very diffuse in this, meaning by it only to vent my Spleen against, & shew my Hatred to all those people whose parties or principles do not suit with mine, & not to give information. This King married Margaret of Anjou, a Woman whose distresses & misfortunes were so great as almost to make me who hate her, pity her. It was in this reign that Joan of Arc lived & made such a row among the English. They should not have burnt her — but they did.
The whole book, including the above pages on Queens Mary and Elizabeth, may be viewed at the British library’s website.
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A quick heads up, courtesy of Metafilter: Deep Elm Records turns 20 years old next year and announced yesterday that all 200+ of its albums are available on a “name your price, no minimum” basis:
