Writing in The New York Times this weekend, author Lisa Scottoline remembers her days at the University of Pennsylvania, back during the 1970s, when she took seminars with then-visiting professor, Philip Roth. One course the famous novelist taught was called ““The Literature of Desire,” which prompted students to think, “Who wouldn’t want to read dirty books with Philip Roth?” It turns out the class didn’t get very sexy. But students did learn quite a bit. Scottoline writes:
Looking back, I’ve come to understand that he was the best professor I ever had, not only because of his genius, but also because of his distance. We were a group of girls eager to please, to guess at what he wanted us to say, and to say that for him. We all wanted to hear about him, or have him tell us how to write, but that was something he steadfastly denied us. By withholding his own personality, thoughts and opinions, he forced us back on our own personalities, thoughts and opinions. He made us discover what we wanted to write about, and to write about it the way we wanted to.
James Franco, like Ethan Hawke before him, is one of those movie stars who gets bashed left and right for daring to behave like any other arty young man. How dare he think he can write a novel, or paint, or make short films? What a pretentious idiot, right?!
I would counter that these activities out him as a passionate reader who cares deeply about art and movies.
I rarely feel sorry for celebs who tweet their wounded feelings, but I was rather moved by Franco’s poetic take on what it’s like to be on the receiving end of all this vitriol. It’s the first of six poems he reads in the video above, when he shared the stage with his 74-year-old mentor Frank Bidart, who no doubt enjoyed performing to a sold out crowd of 800. Franco’s debut poetry collection’s title, Directing Herbert White owes something to Bidart. His poem, “Herbert White,” is the inspiration for a short film directed by Franco.
Those who would consider all that just more evidence of Franco’s insupportable pretentiousness should consider the opposing viewpoint, courtesy of non-movie star poet Bidart, who told the Chicago Tribune:
“I’m almost 75. At some point you know the parameters of your life. The terrifying thing about getting older is the feeling that everything that happens from now on will be a species of something that has already happened. Becoming friends with James changed that: I no longer feel I can anticipate the future. Which is liberating.”
Perhaps all that frantic, cross-media creative expression can result in something more than a snarky one-man show.
Because
Because I played a knight,
And I was on a screen,
Because I made a million dollars,
Because I was handsome,
Because I had a nice car,
A bunch of girls seemed to like me.
But I never met those girls,
I only heard about them.
The only people I saw were the ones who hated me,
And there were so many of those people.
It was easy to forget about the people who I heard
Like me, and shit, they were all fucking fourteen-year-olds.
And I holed up in my place and read my life away,
I watched a million movies, twice,
And I didn’t understand them any better.
But because I played a knight,
Because I was handsome,
This was the life I made for myself.
Years later, I decided to look at what I had made,
And I watched myself in all the old movies, and I hated that guy I saw.
Ayun Halliday is a Freaks and Geek diehard who gets all her Lohan-related intel from the poetry of James Franco and d‑listed. Follow her@AyunHalliday
“My life came to a standstill,” wrote Leo Tolstoy in his 1882 conversion memoir A Confession, “I could not breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things.” So Tolstoy’s described his “arrest of life,” a period of severe depression that led to a very deep, personal brand of faith in his late middle age. The towering Russian novelist renounced worldly desires and came to identify with the poor, the former serfs of his aristocratic class. Tolstoy’s radical religious anarchism in his final years spread his fame far among the peasantry just as his literary achievements had brought him worldwide renown among the reading public. So famous was Tolstoy, William Nickell tells us, that Russian critic Vasily Rozanov wrote that “to be a Russian and not have [seen] Tolstoy was like being Swiss and not having seen the Alps.”
Nickell describes the occasions that Tolstoy appeared on film, the new medium that allowed the author’s millions of adoring fans to get a glimpse of him. Just as his life was punctuated by a radical departure from his earlier attitudes, his medium was in for a shock as film forever changed the way stories were told.
In those early days, however, it was very often simply a means of recording history, and we should be glad of that. It means we too can see Tolstoy, at the top on his 80th birthday. We see him vigorously sawing logs and piously giving alms to the poor. Also included in the initial footage are Tolstoy’s wife Sofya, his daughter Aleksandra, and aide and editor Vladimir Chertkov. Then, at 1:04, the scene shifts to Tolstoy’s deathbed and scenes of his funeral. The remaining 11 minutes give us some unidentified footage of the author. (If you’re able to read the title cards in Russian, please let us know!).
Just above, see a more complete film of Tolstoy’s death and funeral procession. The author died at age 82 after he abruptly decided to leave his wife, taking only a few possessions and his doctor. Read the dramatic story of Tolstoy’s last ten days in this translated excerpt from Pavel Basinsky’s award winning Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise.
Bach wrote 1080 compositions during his lifetime. And now thanks to the new and certainly ambitious All of Bach web site, you can eventually watch the Netherlands Bach Society (founded in 1921) perform each and every one of those compositions. The site features 13 performances so far (see below), which means there’s only another 1067 to go. A new Bach recording will go live every Friday. So you mark your calendars and check in weekly for the next 20 years. Thanks to Erik for sending this our way!
A couple weeks ago, we showed you the Pre-History of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk, highlighting a medley of the fancy foot moves of Cab Calloway, Sammy Davis Jr., Fred Astaire and some lesser-known figures like Rubberneck Holmes and Earl “Snakehips” Tucker. Someone could just as easily make another montage, a Post-History of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk, and it would surely have to include the clip above. It features our favorite astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson strutting his stuff atStarTalk Live last year. In the background, you can see another great moonwalker, Buzz Aldrin, on the stage.
Episode #9 of Tyson’s Cosmos reboot airs on Fox tonight. US viewers can watch episodes 1–8 on Hulu here. The original Cosmos with Carl Sagan appears here.
If one can characterize Stanley Kubrick by his complete control over the medium and his dogged insistence on staying within 30 miles of his house when shooting a movie, even if it means dressing up a London factory to look like Hue, Vietnam as he did for Full Metal Jacket, then Werner Herzog can be characterized as his opposite.
Herzog’s movies are strange, messy and ecstatic, a far cry from the chilly aloofness of Kubrick. In both his feature films and his documentaries, Herzog uses his camera to uncover new layers of nature, experience and the human psyche. And there have been few filmmakers more willing to shoot films in rugged, exotic places as Herzog — from Antarctica to the Amazonian rainforest. In fact, a number of his most notorious shoots seem more designed to test the endurance of the cast and crew than to produce a movie.
His film Fitzcarraldo, for example, is about a guy who has the visionary idea to haul a riverboat over a mountain in the Amazon rainforest. Herzog decided, for the purposes of realism, that he would actually drag a riverboat over a mountain. The production, which is in the running for the most miserable film shoot ever, is the subject of the absolutely riveting documentary The Burden of Dreams. At point one in the doc, Herzog quips, “I shouldn’t make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.” And by the end of the movie, you think that he’s probably right.
Of course, that crazed bravura has always been at the center of Herzog’s mystique. After all, this is the guy who actually ate a shoe after losing a bet with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (find 30 of his films online).
In 2009, when Herzog released Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, he was asked by the folks over at Rotten Tomatoes to list his top 5 movies. This is a director who once said, “I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.” So it’s a pretty safe bet that The Lion King didn’t make the cut.
The list starts with Nosferatu from 1922 (up top). Herzog liked this movie so much that he shot his own version in 1979.
In my opinion, the greatest of great films is Nosferatu by [F.W.] Murnau, which I should include in the greatest five films of all time.
D.W. Griffith’s epic was his response to the public outcry following his epically racist Birth of a Nation. The movie also happened to revolutionize filmmaking.
Everything that [D.W.] Griffith made: Broken Blossoms, Intolerance, Birth of a Nation, you just name it. Everything. He’s the Shakespeare of cinema. Period. Watch his films and you’ll know instantly.
Next is Freaks, Tod Browning’s 1932 cult masterpiece that featured actual circus performers and dwarves. No doubt the movie was an influence on Herzog’s 1970 film Even Dwarves Started Out Small. “It’s just formidable, it’s phenomenal,” says Herzog. “You’ve gotta see it. It would take me an hour to explain.”
The last two films on Herzog’s list? Where Is The Friend’s Home?(1987),Abbas Kiarostami’s quiet tale of a kid who is just looking to return a notebook to his friend. And Rashomon (1950), Akira Kurosawa’s first true masterpiece, the film that introduced Japanese film to the western world after it won a Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. The movie also clearly impressed Herzog:
It is probably the only film that I’ve ever seen which has something like a perfect balance, which does not occur in filmmaking very often. You sense it sometimes in great music, but I haven’t experienced it in cinema, and it’s mind boggling. I don’t know how [Akira] Kurosawa did it. It’s still a mystery to me. That’s greatness.
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’ve brought you Talking Heads shows from New York’s CBGB in 1975, Dortmund, Germany in 1980, and Rome that same year. Now we’ve got one more valuable live find from that formative, busy era for the David Byrne-led, Rhode Island School of Design-forged new-wave band: their November 1978 performance in Syracuse. The exact venue? Perhaps somewhere at Syracuse University, perhaps not, though a college performance space would make sense, given how many institutions of higher education they played in 1978. The Talking Heads Concert History blog has a complete list, and the total number of shows in that year alone comes in, astonishingly, at over 130, a fair few of them at schools like NYU, Brown, Berklee, Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Arizona. “It was really an education for us,” the page quotes drummer Chris Frantz as saying of the 1978 tour. “I’m afraid we bit off more than we could chew. We thought that we could play every night, and we found that after four months we were feeling pretty uninspired.”
Yet this Syracuse gig, which came ten months in, sounds pretty inspired to me. It looks it, too, at least from what I can discern from the lo-fi footage. What the image lacks in crispness, though, it makes up for in technological interest; it has the signature look of the Sony Portapak, one of the very early portable consumer video recording systems beloved of the 1970s’ video amateurs and video artists alike. Whoever manned the Portapak for these 92 minutes in Syracuse captured a valuable chapter in the Talking Heads story, one the band spent working as hard as possible — which, of course, meant playing as hard, and as often, as possible — and refining their inimitable sound and sensibility in concert spaces that, while often low-profile, nevertheless provided them with excited and appreciative audiences. College students and otherwise, came eager to hear something new — and given that the 70s, that decade of slick disco and smooth rock, had almost come to a close, something a bit askew. The Talking Heads, as we see them here, could gladly deliver.
Experimental electronic musician and inventor Bruce Haack’s compositions expanded many a young consciousness, and taught kids to dance, move, meditate, and to be endlessly curious about the technology of sound. All of this makes him the perfect guest for Fred Rogers, who despite his totally square demeanor loved bringing his audience unusual artists of all kinds. In the clips above and below from the first, 1968 season of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Haack introduces Rogers and a group of youngsters to the “musical computer,” a homemade analog synthesizer of his own invention—one of many he created from household items, most of which integrated human touch and movement into their controls, as you’ll see above. In both clips, Haack and longtime collaborator Esther Nelson sing and play charming songs as Nelson leads them in various movement exercises. (The remainder of the second video mostly features Mr. Roger’s cat.)
Although he’s seen a revival among electronic musicians and DJs, Haack became best known in his career as a composer of children’s music, and for good reason. His 1962 debut kid’s record Dance, Sing & Listen is an absolute classic of the genre, combining a dizzying range of musical styles—country, classical, pop, medieval, and experimental electronic—with far-out spoken word from Haack and Nelson. They followed this up with two more iterations of Dance, Sing & Listen, then The Way Out Record for Children, The Electronic Record for Children, the amazing Dance to the Music, and several more, all them weirder and more wonderful than maybe anything you’ve ever heard. (Don’t believe me? Take a listen to “Soul Transportation,” “EIO (New MacDonald),” or the absolutely enchanting “Saint Basil,” with its Doors‑y organ outro.) A psychedelic genius, Haack also made grown-up acid rock in the form of 1970’s The Electric Lucifer, which is a bit like if Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice had written Jesus Christ Superstar on heavy doses of LSD and banks of analog synthesizers.
While Haack’s Mr. Rogers appearance may not have seemed like much at the time, in hindsight this is a fascinating document of an artist who’s been called “The King of Techno” for his forward-looking sounds meeting the cutting edge in children’s programming. It’s a testament to how much the counterculture influenced early childhood education. Many of the progressive educational experiments of the sixties have since become historical curiosities, replaced by insipid corporate merchandising. What Haack and Nelson’s musical approach tells me is that we’d do well to revisit the educational climate of that day and take a few lessons from its freeform experimentation and openness. I’ll certainly be playing these records for my daughter.
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