MOOCs on the beach? Why not. New MOOCs are getting started, even during the dog days of summer. You can find 45 courses getting going this month. They’re all captured on our complete and frequently-updated list of Massive Open Online Courses. As for me, I think I will be finally checking out this University of Rochester course on The Music of the Beatles. It starts on July 6 and runs 6 weeks.
Mike Hamad, a music writer for The Hartford Courant, has a deep and abiding love for Phish. He also has a talent for drawing “schematics” or maps that turn the experience of listening to music into something visual. Over at his tumblr SetlistSchematics, you can find nearly 200 schematics of songs (usually performed live) by The Grateful Dead, The Dave Matthews Band, Pink Floyd, and mostly Phish. According to a short profile in The New York Times, Hamad “has a master’s degree in music theory and a Ph.D. in musicology” — his dissertation focused on the tonal relationships in Franz Liszt’s songs — and, somewhere along the way, he developed a tendency to translate music into schematics, a flurry of “arrows, descriptive notes, roman numerals and wavy lines.”
The Sonny and Cher Show aired in the years right before I was born. Not only do I have no memory of it, of course, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen an entire episode, either in re-runs or on the internet. Nevertheless, I immediately recognized the style of the show’s animator, English artist John David Wilson, when I encountered these music videos Wilson made for the singing comedy duo’s variety hour. Though a much less famous name, Wilson’s work seems to have animated the 70s in the way that R. Crumb’s illustrated the 60s. The opening sequences to iconic productions Grease and The Carol Burnett Show are Wilson’s, as are animations for Laugh In and cheesy Saturday morning kids’ show The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show (best known now, perhaps, because of Hudson brother progeny Kate Hudson). Though Wilson’s career stretches back to the 50s—with work on Mr. Magoo, Peter Pan, and Lady and the Tramp—and into the 90s, with FernGully: The Last Rainforest, he seems to belong to the decade of “I Got You Babe” more so than any other.
Drawn “in a simplistic, funky-looking style” and with goofy sound effects added (probably by the Sonny and Cher producers), Wilson’s animated films for Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” (top), Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” (above), and The Kinks “Demon Alcohol” (below, sung by Wayne Carpenter) enhance songs already rich with narrative. This, the blog Media Funhouse points out, was by design: “Wilson was wise to concentrate on the ‘story songs’ of the time, in order to create repeating characters and have the viewer ‘connect’ with the piece in a very short span of time.”
In most cases, Sonny and Cher’s vocals were dubbed over the original tracks, but in many of the animations that surfaced on VHS in the eighties and now appear on Youtube, the original songs have been restored, as in the two above. If you grew up with the show, you’ve surely seen at least a couple of these early music videos, a form Wilson is widely credited with pioneering. Beginning in the second season, Wilson’s company, Fine Arts Films, produced a total of fourteen animated shorts for the show.
The story-songs above of environmental degradation, tough street characters, and the depths of addiction seem so very characteristic of the period, though Wilson certainly animated more lighthearted pop fare, such as Melanie’s “Brand New Key” (sung here by Cher). For more of Wilson’s animated music videos, see Dangerous Minds or Media Funhouse, and for the full range of Wilson’s long career in animation, check out the website of the production company he founded, Fine Arts Films.
Does Wim Wenders, one of my favorite directors, make perfect films? Hardly — and therein, at least for me, lies the appeal. Perfection strikes me as a singularly uninteresting goal for art, and Wenders has made some of the most interesting pieces of motion picture art going for the past thirty years: Wings of Desire; Paris, Texas;Notebook on Cities and Clothes;Tokyo-Ga. Perhaps, it occurs to me, he has achieved his own kind of very specific, inimitable perfection. But if you seek to imitate it nevertheless, have a look at “Wim Wenders’ Rules of Cinema Perfection” above. In this video (actually a kind of spot for Stella Artois, a brand with which the auteur has worked before), we see humorously revealed several of Wenders’ best filmmaking practices: “You need a good title from the beginning,” “Continuity is clearly overrated,” “Try to welcome and incorporate” the unexpected, and “If you like football, don’t shoot during the world championship.”
If you’ve done your reading on Wenders, you can probably tell that the clip draws from a published list of the director’s “50 Golden Rules of Filmmaking.” Other helpful recommendations include “Before you say ‘cut,’ wait five more seconds,” “A ‘beautiful image’ can very well be the worst thing that can happen to a scene,” and “There are no rules.” Will following these if-n0t-rules-then-guidelines turn you into the next Wim Wenders? Unlikely. Will drinking Stella Artois do it? Certainly not. But it could hurt none of us, whatever our creative endeavor of choice, to emulate his willingness on display here to learn from his mistakes (based on his list, I’d say he’s taken his share of hard knocks hiring couples, adapting novels, and working with animals); to share his wisdom; and (maybe most importantly of all) to learn not to take ourselves too seriously. Sure, his detractors tend to accuse him of pretentiousness, but we true fans (who pay close attention even to his commercial acting gigs) know the truth.
Last year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art wrapped up a brilliant, exhaustive exhibition about Stanley Kubrick. It was a veritable cornucopia of Kubrick memorabilia, ranging from grainy black and white photographs he took for Look magazine as a youth, to a creepy plastic Star Child from 2001: A Space Odyssey,to the blood soaked dresses of those hollow-eyed twins in The Shining. The exhibit was a massive success. It’s hard to imagine any other director, with the possible exception of Alfred Hitchcock, who would not only get an exhibit in a major art museum but also be able to pack the hall week after week.
Part of his allure, no doubt, is Kubrick’s carefully-honed public persona – a reclusive genius who controlled every element of his movies, from the font on the opening titles to the design of the poster. His movies, especially his later ones, are dense, deeply-layered works of such complexity that they continue to unpack themselves after multiple viewings. Heck, there’s an entire documentary, Room 237, that presents nine starkly different interpretations of The Shining.
Kubrick’s movies seem designed to appeal to a certain breed of obsessive film geek. So if you count yourself a member of this tribe (as I do) and you didn’t happen to catch LACMA’s exhibit, you’re in luck. The Chicago design firm Coudal Partners has created a whole online treasure trove of Kubrick ephemera. We’ve culled a few cool things from their site.
Above is a cheesy, behind-the-scenes movie for 2001. The 20-minute promo sets up the movie as if it were an episode of The Outer Limits. “It is the year 2001, you’re on your way to a space station for business,” intones the narrator. “This is but one example of what life would be like in 2001.” What follows is a series of interviews with the scientists, experts, and craftsmen involved in creating Kubrick’s vision of the future with only fleeting footage of the filmmaker himself at around the 18-minute marker. Though it does give you a lot more information on the nuts and bolts of the astronauts’ spacesuits, the short movie, one can’t help but think, is setting up the audience for disappointment. It does little to help viewers understand that the first half of 2001 is about the struggles of ape men on the plains of Africa and does even less to address the psychedelic freakout of the movie’s last reel.
Also found in Coudal’s collection is a site that has compiled all the fonts that Kubrick, a noted typography enthusiast, used in his movies. We’ve posted a couple. He liked Futura and Gothic a lot, apparently. The title card for The Shining was designed by Saul Bass.
And on this site, some genius has created sweaters, ski masks, and doormats from that odd, geometric carpet pattern from The Shining. Pre-orders have sadly closed, but hopefully they’ll start selling them again. I want the cardigan.
“From the first, she was interesting to watch—even in the way she walked in for her interview, casually sat down, walked out. She was cool and non-giggly. She was enigmatic without being dull. She could keep people guessing about how much Lolita knew about life.”
And speaking of photos, here’s a few pictures Kubrick took of the New York subway system back in 1946 for Look magazine. Compare these photos to his earliest movies like Fear and Desire and Killer’s Kiss. Both his early flicks and these pictures have the same gritty immediacy.
There is much, much more there at the Coudal Partners to keep any film nerd and Kubrick maven occupied. Check it out.
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.
At the height of the Harry Potter novels’ popularity, I asked a number of people why those books in particular enjoyed such a devoted readership. Everyone gave almost the same answer: that author J.K. Rowling “tells a good story.” The response at once clarified everything and nothing; of course a “good story” can draw a large, enthusiastic (and, at that time, impatient) readership, but what does it take to actually tell a good story? People have probably made more money attempting, questionably, to pin down, define, and teach the best practices of storytelling, but at the top of this post, we have a revealing scrap of Rowling’s own process. And I do, almost literally, mean a scrap: this piece of lined paper contains part of the handwritten plot spreadsheet she used to write the fifth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
This particular page (click to view it in a larger format) covers chapters 13 through 24, during which even more happens than you may now remember. It may have amounted to more than Rowling, too, could remember, hence the spreadsheet itself. Endpaper explains some of her story notes as follows:
“Prophecy”: A subplot about the prophecy Harry finds himself concerned about all through the book
“Cho/Ginny”: The book’s romantic subplot
“D.A.”: What’s happening with the resistance army, or “Dumbledore’s Army”
“O of P”: What’s happening with the “Order of the Phoenix” group
“Snape/Harry”: What’s happening with Snape and Harry
“Hagrid and Grawp”: What’s happening with Hagrid and Grawp
“If you think about Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, that’s it,” writes /Film’s Germain Lussier. “Those columns pretty much encompass the whole story.” Rowling, of course, hardly counts as the only novelist to write with such techniques, and based on this example, hers don’t get nearly as elaborate as some. (I recall once reading that Vikram Chandra had to bust out Microsoft Project to keep track of the complications of Sacred Games, his 900-page novel about the Mumbai underworld.) But Rowling must certainly rank as the most famous novelist to, quite literally, draw up spreadsheets like this. I suppose it does leave her books even more exposed to accusations of overplotting than before, but something tells me it won’t bother her.
Yesterday,E.O. Wilson’sLife on Earth was released asa free iBook on iTunes. It features “state-of-the-art digital media animations, video, and interactive modules in a comprehensive 41-chapter text covering standards-based biology curriculum.” Created under the direction of Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Harvard naturalist Edward O.Wilson, Life on Earth can be downloaded in 7 units on iTunes. The free book also comes with a free iTunesU course. In addition to reading assignments, the course “incorporates activities such as field observations, writing assignments, project-based learning exercises,” using apps and other materials. Combining information from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, National Geographic, and the Encyclopedia of Life, the course covers a variety of important themes — citizen science, evolution, climate change, and protecting biodiversity. The first nine chapters of the iTunesU course are available now, and the remaining materials for the 41-chapter course will be released throughout 2014.
Bill Watterson, creator of arguably the last great comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, wrote the following about perhaps the greatest comic strip ever. “Peanuts pretty much defines the modern comic strip, so even now it’s hard to see it with fresh eyes. The clean, minimalist drawings, the sarcastic humor, the unflinching emotional honesty….” Charles Schulz, the artistic force behind Peanuts, funneled a lifetime of loneliness and emotional pain into these spare little drawings, creating a strip that was bleakly funny, philosophical and real. Characters like the socially inept Charlie Brown or the bossy though oddly tragic Lucy connected with audiences in a way that few ever did.
The one way that Watterson and Schulz differed, and differed greatly, was in the area of merchandising. While Watterson famously refused to license any of his characters (those praying/peeing Calvin car decals, it might surprise you to learn, are not officially sanctioned), Schulz licensed his creations far and wide. For those who grew up in the ‘70s, a Snoopy plush toy was simply de rigueur. The Peanuts characters hawked Dolly Madison snack cakes, MetLife insurance, and Wendy’s kids meals. And those sponsorship deals paid spectacularly well. By the time that Schulz died in February 2000 — the night before the final Peanuts strip was to go to print — he had reportedly earned over the course of his life $1.1 billion dollars.
The first instance of Charlie, Snoopy and the gang being corporate spokescharacters happened to be also the first time they were animated. The Ford Motor Company licensed them in 1959 to do TV commercials along with intros to the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show. You can watch them above. Probably the most striking thing about the commercials is that the adults are intelligible, not the incomprehensible muted trumpet bleats of the Peanuts movies.
The spots proved to be such a success that Schulz and animator Bill Meléndez were soon producing half-hour long TV specials, including the Emmy-winning A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. In a 1984 interview, Meléndez talked about working with Schulz, who went by the nickname of “Sparky,” for those first Ford spots.
Well, I was doing Ford commercials at J. Walter Thompson when it was decided that Charlie Brown would be the spokesman for the Ford Falcon. I was told Charles Schulz was very shy and reticent about commercializing his strip. So I went to San Francisco and met Sparky and we hit it off. I told him what we did, and he nodded and said, “All right, we’ll try it.” He was very leery of getting involved with “Hollywood types” as he used to call us.
Of course he understands that his drawings are flat, two-dimensional designs, and that, for example, the front view is very different from the side view. They are not three-dimensional characters. You can’t turn them around the way we used to turn the Walt Disney characters, who were designed to be round and three-dimensional. To animate Peanuts characters we have to be more inventive, because we tend not to be realistic. We don’t try to ape real live action as we did in animating Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.
I imagine Sparky must have been curious about how we were going to do it, but he never gave us any kind of a hint or anything at all about what he wanted. So we showed him how we thought it should move, how we thought they should turn, how we thought they should walk and he accepted everything. From then on we hit it off pretty well.
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.
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