Season 3 of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffeekicks off with Jerry Seinfeld and his pal Louis CK piling into a very small 1959 Fiat Jolly and taking a leisurely (death) ride through New York City. Eventually, they escape the city and wind up at an unexpected place — aboard CK’s yacht. There, they share a cappuccino, navigate various nautical dangers, crack their signature jokes, and kibitz the day away. Not a bad way to pass some time. If you’d like to see Jerry and Louis together in another context, see our previous post: Seinfeld, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Ricky Gervais Dissect the Craft of Comedy (NSFW).
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My wife jokes that I’m pretentious for my love of what she calls “tiny awards” on the covers of movies—little laurel leaf-bound seals of freshness from the art film festival circuit. It’s true, I nearly always bite when unknown films come to me preapproved. Were I to encounter the cover of the 2008 Patti Smith documentary Dream of Life I should be forced to watch it even if were I totally ignorant of Patti Smith. It won several tiny awards—including a Sundance Prize for best cinematography, a well-deserved honor that shows director Steven Sebring’s high regard for his subject. Any worthwhile film about Smith—singer, writer, poet, artist—must privilege the visual as well as the musical and literary. Smith’s world has always been one of high contrast and dangerous prescience, like the work of her childhood friend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, with whom she moved to the Chelsea Hotel in 1969 and who took the iconic photo on the cover of her first album, Horses. Her and Mapplethorpe’s storied partnership helped both take New York City by storm. As a young Smith says above, “New York is the thing that seduced me; New York is the thing that formed me; New York is the thing that deformed me.”
Born in Chicago—“mainline of America” she calls it—Smith’s family moved across the Midwest to rural New Jersey. Her work also bespeaks of an experience of Eastern Migration, with nostalgic traces of longing for open spaces. The film opens with a galloping herd of horses, nodding to Smith’s 1975 debut, a blast of punk poetry that still sounds menacing and raw. But the documentary’s title comes from a 1988 record that marked a sort of cesura for Smith, as one period of her life ended and another waited to begin. Produced by her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith (formerly of the MC5), whom she met in 1976, it’s an album of “polished love songs, lullabies, and political statements” and it’s a very grown-up record, the sometimes adult contemporary sound saved from blandness by Smith’s compelling lyricism and beautiful voice.
Fred “Sonic” Smith fell ill not long after the album, and Patti retired, more or less, from music. She returned to performing and recording after her husband’s death in 1994, after the loss also of her brother and Mapplethorpe. Always an intensely emotional writer and performer, her later period is marked by memorials and meditations on loss—not unusual for an older poet and longtime survivor of rock and roll, as well as the literary and art worlds. All of Smith’s many changes occur before us above as she remembers and reflects in her poet’s voice over that Sundance-winning cinematography. It’s hard to imagine another document—save her National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids—doing more justice to Smith’s vision than Dream of Life.
If you believe, as Whitney Houston once did, that children are our future, you’ll be gratified by the work of Jack Andraka, age 15.
Describing him as a kid with a passion for science is an understatement on par with calling Mr. Peabody a cartoon dog.
Not that I’ve got a crystal ball or anything, but let’s just say if you or your loved one come down with pancreatic cancer a decade from now, you’ll be very glad this young man—the 2012 grand prize winner of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, as well as the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award—didn’t squander his freshman year’s extracurricular hours on sports and glee club.
Instead, he became the “cancer paper boy.” His mentor, Johns Hopkins pathologist and researcher, Anirban Maitra floats comparisons to Edison. As Morgan Spurlock points out in his show documentary on Andraka — You Don’t Know Jack (above) — many of Einstein’s discoveries were made beforehe stuck his tongue out beneath that white mane.
Spurred on in part by the death of a family friend, Jack, then 14, developed an inexpensive procedure that can diagnose the presence of the notoriously stealthy cancer of the pancreas while treatment is still an option. Through trial and error, he developed an absorbent filter paper dipstick that helps measure the electrical signal of a nanotube network laced with antibodies specific to the protein mesothelin, after a sixth of a drop of blood has been introduced.
As a theater major, I fear I may not be summarizing the science with sufficient accuracy. The Smithsonian published an article describing Jack’s process in detail. While I don’t know much about pancreatic function, cancerous or otherwise, I do know enough to have deep respect for Jack’s supportive parents, and Johns Hopkins University, the only institution (of 200 contacted) to respond in the affirmative when the then-14-year ‑old got in touch, seeking lab space. (Hosting the Center for Talented Youth may have primed them for such queries.) If this science thing doesn’t work out, Jack could totally make a go of it as a publicist. He’s got the tenacity.
Again, it’ll take another ten years or so before the fruits of Jack’s labors can be part of mainstream medical practice, but it does give one hope for the future. Some paper boy!
This little Spurlock film will be added to the Documentary section of our collection of Free Movies Online.
You may have heard the news that the world will soon see “Alfred Hitchcock’s unseen Holocaust documentary.” That intriguing sounding announcement belies a more complicated reality. This new, restored film draws on footage shot by the British Army Film Unit in Nazi concentration camps in 1945, which was actually released in the mid-80s, in a film called Memory of the Camps. This first version, which you can watch above, took nearly forty years to reach the public, when it was finally released in 1984, first at the Berlin Film Festival, then on PBS. Until that time, the original footage sat unused in storage at the Imperial War Museum, consigned there after the Allied military government decided that such publicity for Nazi atrocities wouldn’t get Germany reconstructed any faster. How, right in the aftermath of the Second World War, might we have reacted to its hauntingly revealing coverage of Bergen-Belsen?
According to the Independent, a screening of Memory of the Camps’ material left even Alfred Hitchcock, certainly no stranger to death and malevolence, “so traumatised that he stayed away from Pinewood Studios for a week.” He’d shown up there in the first place as an advisor, and in that capacity offered director Sidney Bernstein advice on how, visually, to place these shocking revelations in a recognizable geographical and human context. “He took a circle round each concentration camp as it were on a map, different villages, different places and the numbers of people,” Bernstein remembers. “Otherwise you could show a concentration camp, as you see them now, and it could be anywhere, miles away from humanity. He brought that into the film.” For more on Memory of the Camps and its upcoming successor, a remastered version with a “lost” sixth reel restored, see also Richard Brody’s related New Yorker post.
Memory of the Camps and other wartime films appears in our collection of 700 Free Movies Online.
The University of California Press e‑books collection holds books published by UCP (and a select few printed by other academic presses) between 1982–2004. The general public currently has access to 770 books through this initiative. The collection is dynamic, with new titles being added over time.
Readers looking to see what the collection holds can browse by subject. The curators of the site have kindly provided a second browsing page that shows only the publicly accessible books, omitting any frustrating off-limits titles.
Sadly, you can’t download the books to an e‑reader or tablet. Happily, there is a “bookbag” function that you can use to store your titles, if you need to leave the site and come back.
Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter:@rebeccaonion.
When you watch a director’s work for a while, you get to know his/her signature tricks — the themes and camera work that appear again and again. A couple years ago, we featured a video called Wes Anderson // FROM ABOVE, a montage capturing Anderson’s penchant for the aerial shot, a move that contributes to the lightness, playfulness and quirkiness of his films. Now comes a super cut of Anderson’s slo-mo shots, compiled by Alejandro Prullansky, set to The Shins’ song, “New Slang.” If you’re looking for a good overview of Wes Anderson’s filmography, we’d encourage you to watch this series: 7 Video Essays on Wes Anderson’s Films: Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums & More.
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In his 1621 opusThe Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton wrote, “The Turks have a drink called coffa (for they use no wine), so named of a berry as black as soot, and as bitter … which they sip still of, and sup as warm as they can suffer; they spend much time in those coffa-houses, which are somewhat like our alehouses or taverns…”
Prior to 1652, when Pasqua Rosée established a small coffeehouse in St. Michael’s Alley in London, coffee was virtually unknown in England. Rosée, a servant of a coffee-loving trader to the Levant, found tremendous success with his venture and, according to Green, was soon selling over 600 servings a day. Above, readers can view Rosée’s original handbill, where the entrepreneur advertised both the therapeutic and prophylactic effects of his wares on digestion, headaches, rheumatism, consumption, cough, dropsy, gout, scurvy, and miscarriages. It’s a wonder anyone ever drinking the stuff got sick.
Coffeehouses quickly became popular places for men to converse and congregate, and Green notes that women soon grew tired of their absence. This exasperation mounted until the 1674 Women’s Petition Against Coffee, which claimed that “Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE” led to England’s falling birthrate, making men “as unfruitful as the sandy deserts, from where that unhappy berry is said to be brought.” Men, as they are wont to do, expressed their disagreement, and stated in Men’s Answer to the Women’s Petition Against Coffeethat coffee made “the erection more vigorous, the ejaculation more full, add[ing] a spiritual ascendency to the sperm.”
A year later, coffeehouses found more formidable opposition in the form of King Charles II, who issued the “Proclamation for the suppression of Coffee Houses” in 1675. Charles, however, was more interested in their political effects than the spiritual ascendency of his subjects’ sperm. Coffeehouses provided an opportunity for more mindful and serious conversations than did alehouses, and allowed anyone who paid the single penny entrance charge to participate in discussions — to Charles, these were the ideal circumstances for plotting sedition and treason among the populace. Despite the King’s proclamation, the coffeehouses, buoyed by a supportive public, prevailed.
I was lucky enough to be living in Chicago when Marc Smith’sPoetry Slam movement became a thing. What fun it was to hit the Green Mill on Sunday nights to hear such innovators as Lisa Buscani or Patricia Smith tearing into their latest entries in front of packed-to-capacity crowds. Those early slam poets inspired a lot of other wordsmiths to brave the mic, a glorious revolution whose gleam was inevitably tarnished for me once it caught on for real.
I remember thinking something like, “If I never hear another poem about someone’s relationship troubles, it’ll be too soon.”
To further illustrate my waning enthusiasm, here’s the above thought, rendered in Standard Spoken Word Venacular:
If
I never heeeear
Another Po
Em About Someone’s
Re-la-tion-ship…
Troubles, it’ll be
Too
Soon.
Some two-and-a-half decades further along, Leslie Wu, a doctoral student in Computer Science at Stanford University, has been crowned the winner of the inaugural Code Poetry Slam, and I’m mourning the loss of those long-ago relationship troubles.
To create her winning entry, “Say 23,” Wu donned a Google Glass headset, as she recited and typed 16 lines of computer code, which were projected onto a screen. When Wu ran the script, three different computerized voices took over performance duties, sampling the 23rd Psalm along with an uncredited snippet of In the Hall of the Mountain King.
I may be too hot-blooded to appreciate the artistry here.
Melissa Kagen, who organized the competition with fellow graduate student Kurt James Werner, stated on the university’s website that in order “to really get into the intricacies you really need to know that language.”
I guess that goes double for the competitors. According to Werner, Wu’s poem wove together a number of different concepts, tools, and languages, including Japanese, English, and Ruby. Philistine that I am, I had always thought of the latter as an uncapitalized gemstone and nothing more.
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