Bernie Sanders Sings “This Land is Your Land” on the Endearingly Bad Spoken Word Album, We Shall Overcome

in Music, Politics | September 2nd, 2015

Sooo…. Let’s talk Bernie Sanders. No, I don’t want to talk about Bernie vs. Hillary, or vs. an increasingly worrisome grandstanding demagogue whose name I need not mention. I don’t want to talk Bernie vs. a younger civil rights activist groundswell… No!

Let’s talk about Bernie Sanders the recording artist.

Yeah, that’s right, Bernie made a record in 1987, a spoken-word album of classic hippy folk songs like “This Land is Your Land,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” and—fittingly given his roots as a civil rights campaigner—“We Shall Overcome,” also the title of the album. Sanders, a passionate democratic socialist and stalwart advocate for economic justice, was also so passionate about this music that he wanted to add his voice to the choir. “Apparently,” writes Dan Joseph at MRCTV, “everyone in Sanders’ inner circle thought the recording was a pretty good idea. That was until they realized that Sanders had no musical talent, whatsoever.”

This is no exaggeration. Gawker quotes Todd Lockwood, a Burlington musician who helped produce the record: “As talented of a guy as he is, he has absolutely not one musical bone in his body, and that became painfully obvious from the get-go.” Hell, it never stopped William Shatner, and Shatner is the go-to comparison for the Sanders’ awkward “singing.” (It’s “positively Shatneresque,” writes Dangerous Minds.) Hear for yourself above in the Sander-ization of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.”

Bernie earnestly reads the lyrics in his native Brooklyn accent over a backing track that sounds like an outtake from the frustratingly great/terrible Leonard Cohen/Phil Spector collaboration Death of a Ladies Man. The contrast between the overproduced music and Sanders’ heartfelt and completely unmusical delivery is pretty weird, to say the least. Hear several more samples above, from Todd Lockwood’s Soundcloud. And if for some reason you want to listen to the whole album, and pay for the pleasure, buy Sanders’ We Shall Overcome at Amazon.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Haruki Murakami Publishes His Answers to 3,700 Questions from Fans in a New Japanese eBook

in Life, Literature | September 1st, 2015

A quick follow up: Back in January, Colin Marshall took you inside Haruki Murakami’s unexpected stint as an agony uncle, writing an online advice column called Mr. Murakami’s Place. According to his publisher, readers sent the Japanese novelist 37,465 questions (see a few in translation here), and he penned responses to 3,716 of them — answering questions like: “30 is right around the corner for me, but there isn’t a single thing that I feel like I’ve accomplished.… What should I do with myself?” Or, “My wife quite frequently belches right near the back of my head when she passes behind me… Is there something I can do to stop my wife’s belching?”

Luckily, at least for Japanese readers, Murakami has now published his responses (all of them) as an ebook in Japan. And it’s been climbing Japan’s Kindle bestseller list. Currently, there are no plans to release Mr. Murakami’s Place — The Complete Edition – in English. The task of translating what amounts to an 8‑volume set of books would be formidable. And yet somehow — like most things Murakami has written — I suspect the collection will eventually see the light of day in English-speaking markets.

Thanks to @justinmegahan and @hyloupa for helping us track down this book.

via The Guardian

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The Films of Quentin Tarantino: Watch Video Essays on Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill & More

in Film | September 1st, 2015

In the ten years between Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Kill Bill (2003), Quentin Tarantino was all some film fans could talk about, and who many up-and-coming directors idolized and copied. But it would take another ten years for his films to be intelligently discussed, and it’s a sign of these times that the best essays are not in print but in video format.

Matt Zoller Seitz and his colleagues over at Indiewire’s Press Play blog led the charge with a series of 10 ‑12 minute video essays (collectively called “On the Q.T.”) that explore individual Tarantino films and his approach to filmmaking.

The video above is part two of the series and probes what it means to be cool in Pulp Fiction, how characters create their own mythologies and what happens when reality confronts them.

If that video makes you look at Pulp Fiction in a deeper way, then you’ll enjoy the first in the series, on Reservoir Dogs. Seitz claims the film is both a collage of film quotes and references, from City on Fire to The Killing, but there’s a human heart beating beneath all of it. And that’s a lesson lost on all the imitators that came in Tarantino’s ‘90s wake, he says.

You might also want to check out this two part essay (Part 1 — Part 2) on Jackie Brown – this one crafted by Press Play’s Odie Henderson–which examines what Tarantino took from Elmore Leonard in his only adaptation to date, and what is pure QT. (Hint: It’s the casting of Pam Grier).

The final video in the series looks at the Female Archetype vs. the Goddess in Kill Bill. Created by Nelson Carvajal, who uses captions instead of narration, it’s the weakest in the series, being long on clips and short on ideas.

But with The Hateful Eight on the horizon, the entire series will get you ready for interpreting the latest in his oeuvre.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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The Groundbreaking Silhouette Animations of Lotte Reiniger: Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and More

in Animation | September 1st, 2015

You can’t talk about the origin of the modern animated film without talking about the work of Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981), the German creator of some 40 animated films between the 1910s and the 70s. And you can hardly talk about Reiniger’s work without talking about the enchanting art of shadow puppetry, which we mostly associate with traditional cultures like that of Indonesia, but which also inspired her early 20th-century innovations in animation.

This may sound quite obscure, especially when put up against the Disney and Pixar extravaganzas in theaters today, but all these forms of entertainment draw, in a sense, from a common well: the fairy tale.

The creators of today’s mega-budget animated films know full well the enduring value of fairy tales, and so continue to adapt their basic story material, layering on both the latest visual effects and smirking gags with up-to-the-minute references in order to keep the obvious entertainment value high. But Indonesian shadow puppet theater has been doing the same thing for centuries and centuries, converting ancient folktales into an evening’s (albeit often a long evening’s) musical entertainment for audiences of era after new era. And Reiniger, in her day, revived the oldest European stories with technology once as striking and cinematically cutting-edge as today’s most advanced CGI.

You can watch Reiniger’s 1922 adaptation of Cinderella at the top of the post. “Nobody else has defined a form of animation as authoritatively as she did,” writes Dan North of Spectacular Attractions, “and the opening section, where scissors make the first cuts into the main character, conjuring her out of simple raw materials, displays the means by which the story is fabricated and marks it out as a product of her labour.” Below that, we have a later work, 1955’s Hansel and Gretel, an example of her further developed technique, and just above you’ll find that same year’s Däumelinchen, also known as Thumbelina.

To get a clearer sense of exactly what went into these shorts (or into 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, her only feature-length film, and first fully animated feature in the history of cinema), watch the seventeen-minute documentary “The Art of Lotte Reiniger” just above. “No one else has taken a specific animation technique and made it so utterly her own,” writes the British Film Institute’s Philip Kemp, “to date she has no rivals, and for all practical purposes the history of silhouette animation begins and ends with Reiniger” — but the way she breathed life into her material lives on.

You can find Reiniger’s films added to our list of Free Animated Films, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Watch Animations of Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Stories “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant”

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Oscar Wilde’s Play Salome Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley in a Striking Modern Aesthetic (1894)

in Art, Literature | September 1st, 2015

In William Faulkner’s 1936 Absalom, Absalom!, one of the novel’s most erudite characters paints a picture of a Gothic scene by comparing it to an Aubrey Beardsley drawing. References to Beardsley also appear in other Faulkner novels, and the English artist of the late nineteenth century also influenced the American novelist’s visual art. Like Faulkner, Beardsley was irresistibly drawn to “the grotesque and the erotic,” as The Paris Review writes, and his work was highly favored among French and British poets of his day. The modernist’s appreciation of Beardsley was about more than Faulkner’s own youthful romance with French Symbolist art and morbid romantic verse, however. Beardsley created a modern Gothic aesthetic that came to represent both Art Nouveau and decadent, transgressive literature for decades to come, presenting a seductive visual challenge to the repression of Victorian respectability.

Beardsley was a young aesthete with a literary imagination. In his short career—he died at the age of 25—he illustrated many of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, forefather of the American Gothic.

Beardsley also famously illustrated Oscar Wilde’s scandalous drama, Salome in 1893, to the surprise of its author, who later inscribed an illustrated copy with the words, “For the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the Dance of the Seven Veils is, and can see that invisible dance.” Beardsley’s drawings first appeared in an art magazine called The Studio, then the following year in an English publication of the text.

Beardsley and Wilde’s joint creation embraced the macabre and flaunted Victorian sexual norms. After an abrupt cancellation of Salome’s planned opening in England, the illustrated edition introduced British readers to the play’s unsettling themes. The British Library quotes critic Peter Raby, who argues, “Beardsley gave the text its first true public and modern performance, placing it firmly within the 1890s – a disturbing framework for the dark elements of cruelty and eroticism, and of the deliberate ambiguity and blurring of gender, which he released from Wilde’s play as though he were opening Pandora’s box.”

Wilde’s play was ostensibly banned for its portrayal of Biblical characters, prohibited on stage at the time. Furthermore, it “struck a nerve,” writes Yelena Primorac at Victorian Web, with its “portrayal of woman in extreme opposition to the traditional notion of virtuous, pure, clean and asexual womanhood the Victorians felt comfortable living with.” Wilde was at first concerned that the illustrations, with their suggestively posed figures and frankly sexual and violent images, would “reduce the text to the role of ‘illustrating Aubrey’s illustrations.’” (You can see some of the more suggestive images here.)

Indeed, it is hard to think of Wilde’s text and Beardsley’s images as existing independently of each other, so closely have they been identified for over a hundred years. And yet the drawings don’t always correspond to the narrative. Instead they present a kind of parallel text, itself densely woven with visual and literary allusions, many of them drawn from Symbolist preoccupations—with women’s hair, for example, as an alluring and threatening emblem of unrestrained female sexuality. Published in full in 1894, in an English translation of Wilde’s original French text, the Beardsley-illustrated Salome contained 16 plates, some of them tamed or censored by the publishers. Read the full text, with drawings, here, and see a gallery of Beardsley’s original uncensored illustrations at the British Library.