Sit back and let Willie Nelson, accompanied by his sister Bobbie, show you a great card trick. It’s a variation on a trick called “Sam the Bellhop,” which sleight of hand expert Bill Malone popularized, it not invented. If you want to figure out how the wizardy is done, you’ll need to look elsewhere. We’re not going to spoil this bit of fun.
Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl raised an internet meme to an art form when he took the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge while parodying the epic prom scene from Carrie. John Travolta appeared in the 1976 horror film, and Stephen King wrote the book behind it. So Grohl name checks them both. Where Jack Black fits into the picture, I’m not exactly sure.
Donations to help find a cure for the horrific disease can be made over at the ALS Association. For a truly sobering account of what it’s like to live with ALS, read Tony Judt’s essay, “Night,” in The New York Review of Books. It was published in February 2010, shortly before the disease took his life.
If asked to explain the art movement known as Dada, I’d feel tempted to quote Louis Armstrong on the music movement known as jazz: “Man, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.” But maybe I’d do better to sit them down in front of the half-hour documentary The ABCs of Dada. They may still come away confused, but not quite so deeply as before — or maybe they’ll feel more confused, but in an enriched way.
Even the video, which gets pretty thorough about the origins of and contributors to Dada, quotes heavily from the relevant Wikipedia article in its description, framing the movement as “a protest against the barbarism of World War I, the bourgeois interests that Dada adherents believed inspired the war, and what they believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society.” They came to the conclusion that “reason and logic had led people into the horrors of war, so the only route to salvation was to reject logic and embrace anarchy and irrationality.” So there you have it; don’t try to understand.
Perhaps you remember that vintage Onion article, “Republicans, Dadaists Declare War on Art,” satirizing, among other things, the way proponents of Dada called its fruit not art, but “anti-art.” They made it deliberately meaningless where “real” art strove to deliver messages, deliberately offensive where it strained to appeal to common sensibilities. The ABCs of Dada examines Dada through a great many of these Dadaists themselves, such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a teacher and dancer forced to wear a mask for her Dada activities due to the group’s scandalous reputation in the academy; architect Marcel Janco, who remembers of the group that “among us were neither blasé people nor cynics, actors nor anarchists who took the Dada scandal seriously”; and “Dada-marshal” George Grosz, who declared that “if one calls my work art depends on whether one believes that the future belongs to the working class.” You can find further clarification among UBUweb’s collection of Dada, Surrealism, & De Stijl Magazines, such as Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire and Berlin’s Der Dada. Or perhaps you’ll find further obfuscation, but that aligns with the Dada spirit — in a world that has ceased to make sense, so the Dadaists believed, the duty falls to you to make even less.
Don Pardo voiced the introductions of Saturday Night Live for 38 seasons. He began calling out the names of the S.N.L. cast members during the first episode in October, 1975, and (except for the 1981–82 season) he kept calling out those names straight through last May. Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey — he called them all. Thanks to an impersonator, you can hear a compilation of Pardo’s call for every cast member.
Don Pardo died yesterday at 96 years of age. Earlier in his career, he was the announcer for a number of American TV shows, including The Price Is Right, Jackpot, and Jeopardy!. But his voice became part of the fabric of America’s greatest comedy show, Saturday Night Live. And he continued voicing the intro long after his formal retirement from NBC in 2004. Not lacking energy (watch him blow out his candles on his 90th birthday), Pardo flew from Tucson to New York weekly to get S.N.L. started. Above, we have a short video that features Pardo, then 88, showing off, his sheer linguistic awesomeness.
Somehow, I’m now hoping that whenever my day comes, Don Pardo’s voice will introduce me on the other side.
In July, the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast discussed Sandel’s first (and most academically influential) book, 1982’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, in which he argued that society can’t be neutral with regard to claims about what the good life amounts to. Modern liberalism (by which he means the tradition coming from John Locke focusing on rights; this includes both America’s current liberals and conservatives) acknowledges that people want different things and tries to keep government in a merely mediating role, giving people as much freedom as possible.
So what’s the alternative? Sandel thinks that public discourse shouldn’t just be about people pushing for what they want, but a dialogue about what is really good for us. He gives the famous example of the Nazis marching in Skokie. A liberal would defend free speech, even if the speech is repellent. Sandel thinks that we can acknowledge that some speech is actually pernicious, that the interests of that community’s Holocaust survivors are simply more important than the interests of those who want to spread a message of hate.
A week later, a follow-up episode brought Sandel himself onto the podcast, primarily to speak about his most recent book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. A more popular work, this book considers numerous examples of the market society gone amok, where everything from sex to body parts to advertising space on the side of one’s house is potentially for sale.
Sandel helped us understand the connection between this and his earlier work: In remaining neutral among competing conceptions of what’s really good for us, liberalism has made an all-too-quick peace with unfettered exchange. If two people want to make a deal, who are the rest of us to step in and stop it? Liberal thinking does justify preventing supposedly free exchanges on the grounds that they might not actually be free, e.g. one side is under undue economic pressure, not mature or fully informed, in some way coerced or incompetent. But Sandel wants to argue that some practices can be merely degrading, even if performed willingly, and that a morally neutral society doesn’t have the conceptual apparatus to formulate such a claim. Instead, as exemplified by his course on justice, Sandel thinks that moral issues need to be a part of public debate. By extension, we can’t pretend that economics is a morally neutral science that merely measures human behavior. Our emphasis on economics in public policy crowds out other positive goods like citizenship and integrity.
Next to Star Wars, David Lynch’s Dune was one of my very first introductions to great science fiction filmmaking, and my first introduction to David Lynch. My sci-fi-loving father and I watched it over and over, along with Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, Kubrick’s 2001, and popcornier fare like the Planet of the Apes films. Now, when I call Dune “great,” I’m fully aware that many well-respected critics, especially the late Roger Ebert, hated, and continue to hate, Dune. Some fans and critics—and for the life of me I cannot understand why—have even stated a preference for the Syfy Channel’s mediocre 2000 miniseries adaptation, mostly because of issues of “faithfulness” to the source, despite it looking, as one blogger aptly put it, “like a cross between a telenovela and a youth group staging of Godspell.” This won’t stand for me. Some poor editing decisions notwithstanding, Lynch’s Dune is brilliant. Hell, even Frank Herbert himself, godlike creator of the Dune universe, loved it.
In 1984, however, the movie seemed destined for permanent obscurity, not cult fandom. Lynch disowned it—releasing it under the name “Alan Smithee,” longstanding pseudonym of embarrassed directors. For its tanking in the theaters, Dune appears on this list of “Greatest Box Office Bombs” for the years 1983–84, along with turds like Krull and the sequel to Saturday Night Fever. “If a film-viewer had no knowledge of the massively dense book,” the reviewer notes, “the bloated film made little sense.”
While I found Dune’s nigh-impenetrably alien nature alluring, film-going audiences had little patience for it. A large part of the problem, of course, is Herbert’s invented language. “Within the first 10 minutes,” writes Daniel Snyder at The Atlantic, “the film bombarded audiences with words like Kwisatz Haderach, landsraad, gom jabber, and sardaukar with little or no context.” Contrast this with Star Wars’ “blaster,” “droid,” and “force”—“words for made up things but they’re words that we know.” Although Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange—with its heavy, untranslated nadsatslang—was a hit over a decade earlier, it seems Universal Studios felt Dune’s audiences needed preparatory materials, and so, reports io9, they circulated a glossary to filmgoers (first page at the top, obverse above—click to enlarge and then click again).
There’s little information on when, exactly, the studio decided this was necessary, or how they expected audiences to read it in the dark. But it’s perfect for home viewing. In the dark about the precise nature of a “fremkit”? Flip on the lights, pause your Amazon stream or blu-ray, scroll down, and there you have it: “desert survival kit of Fremen manufacture.” (See the previous entry for a “Fremen” explanation.) For all its uselessness in an actual theater, you have to hand it to whomever was tasked with compiling this list of terms; it’s a fairly comprehensive crash course on Herbert’s expansive space epic. It’s doubtful David Lynch had anything to do with these materials, but it’s also true that he found the world of Dune almost as baffling as those first audiences. Just above, see him in a pained interview on the “nightmare” that was the making of the film. No matter what he feels about it, I’m one fan who’s grateful he endured the torment.
Image by Alvin Georges Biard, via Wikimedia Commons
Back in ’92, when I was taking a French New Wave class at Boston University, my professor, Gerald Perry, brought in an intense, bearish looking guy in a leather trench coat and announced him as the new Martin Scorsese. I hadn’t a clue who he was nor had I heard of his movie, Reservoir Dogs, which was playing at the Boston Film Festival. The guy, of course, was Quentin Tarantino. As he talked passionately about movies, in particular Jean-Pierre Melville, who’s movie Le Samouraiwas the inspiration for Reservoir Dogs’s distinct sartorial style, I was struck by just how many f‑bombs he was able to squeeze into a 20-minute spiel.
The comparison to Scorsese is apt. Both directors took the innovations of French New Wave and adapted them for a mainstream American audience in the form of ferocious, stylish crime thrillers. Both filmmakers also make regular homages to the films of their childhood. For Scorsese, it was largely films from the ’40s and ‘50s by filmmakers like Vincent Minnelli, Michael Powell, and Alfred Hitchcock. Tarantino’s inspirations, on the other hand, were largely 1970s grindhouse flicks.
In the 1960s, a combination of the increasing popularity of television and white-flight from urban centers greatly reduced the number of people coming to single-screen theaters. A number of movies houses, especially in Times Square in New York and on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, started screening double and triple bills of cheaply made, independently produced exploitation movies filled with sex, nudity, graphic violence and straight up sadism.
As Tarantino’s career progressed, his movies became more and more transparent pastiches of the grindhouse movies he loved. Kill Bill is, after all, a supremely entertaining patchwork of homages to Game of Death, Lady Snowblood, Five Fingers of Death and dozens of other Asian exploitation flicks. Heck, he even tried to recreate the experience of grindhouse cinema by making a double-bill movie with Robert Rodriguez called Grindhouse.
So when Tarantino was asked to come up with a list of his favorite exploitation flicks for the Grindhouse Cinema Database, it was not terribly surprising that he was very particular about his choices. “Some of [the movies] don’t quite work,” said the filmmaker. “For instance, Female Prisoner 701 Scorpion, that was never released anywhere outside Japan… My point being, it has to have been played in a grindhouse… The same way like Halloween could be on [the list], but Friday The 13th…couldn’t, because that was a Paramount movie.”
The movies that did make the list include horror classics, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Night of the Living Dead; the martial arts masterpiece Five Fingers of Death; and blaxploitation flicks including Coffy and The Mack. There’s even one movie, The Lady in Red, which was written by indie film icon John Sayles. Check out the full list below.
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. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.
Living in Los Angeles, I suppose I could go up and have a look (albeit a distant one) at Charles and Ray Eames’ Eames House any time I like. But I’ve never got around to visiting that most notable of all works of midcentury modern California architecture, since I have another example of their era- (and coast-) defining design much closer at hand. Whenever I look to my left, I see an Eames’ Lounge Chair — not my Eames Lounge Chair, per se, but the one my girlfriend brought with her when we moved in together. Much more than the sum of its molded plywood and leather parts, the Eames Chair made even more of a mark on the design sensibility of the 20th century than did the Eames House. Could the Eamses themselves have known, when they first rolled it out in 1956, that the chair would remain unsurpassed in its furniture niche more than 55 years later? Watch them debuting the Eames Chair on TV, to Home Show host Arlene Francis,and see if you can read it between the lines.
We first see the Eames Chair only in silhouette — but already we recognize it. “Well, that is quite a departure, Charles, and it looks wonderfully comfortable,” says host to designer. He takes the question quite literally: “It’s rosewood, plywood, and it’s black leather, and its insides are all feathers and down. I think it’d be a better idea if we would just build it for you right here.” We then see a short film, produced in a combination of live action and stop motion, showing the complete assembly and subsequent disassembly of an Eames Chair. It also includes the packing of its parts into a box with the logo of Herman Miller, the company for whom the Eames originally designed it, and one that, so Charles says, allowed them seemingly complete aesthetic independence, dependent on no specific market or season. Hence the range of timeless Eames-designed chairs displayed on the segment that reveal the design evolution leading up to the Eames Chair itself, the most timeless of them all. “You really create your own market, don’t you?” Francis asks. Charles remains modest (and Ray has already exited stage left), but on some level must have understood that every important designer does just that.
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