Please Touch the Art: Watch a Blind Man Experience His Own Portrait for the First Time

in Art | May 18th, 2016

We all know the rules of art muse­ums: look, but don’t touch. This does­n’t both­er most of us most of the time, but for art-lovers who hap­pen to be blind and thus use feel­ing as a sub­sti­tute for see­ing, it presents a prob­lem indeed — but it also opens up an artis­tic oppor­tu­ni­ty. “Can­tor Fine Art, a just-launched gallery by father and son team Lar­ry and Sam Can­tor, offers a sto­ry of a dif­fer­ent kind of phys­i­cal inter­ac­tion with art in their project, Please Touch the Art,” writes The Cre­ator’s Pro­jec­t’s Gabrielle Bruney. “They part­nered with artist Andrew Myers to cre­ate a tac­tile paint­ing that is appre­cia­ble by both sight­ed and blind art lovers.”

In the five-minute video above, you can see — or if visu­al­ly impaired, hear — Myers dis­cussing the begin­nings of his “screw pieces,” images made by dri­ving count­less screws into a piece of wood, each one ulti­mate­ly act­ing as a kind of phys­i­cal, three-dimen­sion­al pix­el. Though Myers did­n’t begin these works with the blind in mind, one such gallery-goer’s vis­it to his show, and the “huge smile on his face” when he put his hand to the screw pieces, got him think­ing of the pos­si­bil­i­ties in that direc­tion. Thanks to his art, “there was a blind man who could almost see for a sec­ond.”

We also meet the blind wood­work­er George Wurtzel, cur­rent­ly at work on “con­vert­ing an old grape crush­ing barn into a Tac­tile Art Cen­ter” which com­bines a wood­work­ing shop with a “tac­tile gallery space where the visu­al­ly impaired can expe­ri­ence and sell art­work.” Dis­cov­er­ing their shared pas­sion for tac­tile art, Myers decides to make a sur­prise for Wurtzel, “the first por­trait of him­self he can actu­al­ly feel,” the first new piece for his tac­tile art gallery. The video cap­tures the big reveal, which con­verts Wurtzel from his skep­ti­cism about the screw-piece form. Still, even as he runs his fin­gers over his own metal­li­cized fea­tures, he has his objec­tions: “My nose is not that big. I’m sor­ry. I like the beard, though. The beard is good. The beard is real­ly good.”

You can read more about the project at Can­tor Fine Art’s web site. “The one thing I wish,” Myers adds, “is that George could see the piece the way I see it, but at the same time, I would like to look at things the way he sees the world.” You can get more a sense of art as seen, as Bil­ly Joel once sang, by the eyes of the blind in our pre­vi­ous posts on the Prado’s 3D-print­ed exhi­bi­tion for the visu­al­ly impaired and the expe­ri­ence of the col­or­blind see­ing art in col­or for the first time. It seems we’ve found our­selves at the dawn of a new gold­en age for art that does­n’t require sight. If a gallery boom fol­lows, will they serve cof­fee roast­ed by the Unseen Bean?

via The Cre­ator’s Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pra­do Muse­um Cre­ates the First Art Exhi­bi­tion for the Visu­al­ly Impaired, Using 3D Print­ing

What It’s Like to Be Col­or Blind and See Art in Col­or for the First Time

Jorge Luis Borges, After Going Blind, Draws a Self-Por­trait

Wake Up and Smell the Cof­fee with Blind Mas­ter Roast­er Ger­ry Leary

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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1,000+ Haunting & Beautiful Photos of Native American Peoples, Shot by the Ethnographer Edward S. Curtis (Circa 1905)

in History, Photography | May 17th, 2016

curtis-4

From the fig­ure­heads of ships to cig­ar store stat­ues to the car­i­ca­ture mas­cots of var­i­ous sports teams…. Unfor­tu­nate or den­i­grat­ing images of Native Amer­i­can peo­ples have per­sist­ed in pop­u­lar cul­ture, folk sym­bols of what Elis­a­beth W. Rus­sell refers to in her his­to­ry of the cig­ar store Indi­an as “The Van­ish­ing Amer­i­can.” The phrase comes from the title of a Zane Grey nov­el, which then became a 1925 silent film deal­ing, wrote the New York Times that year, “with the pass­ing of the Amer­i­can Indi­an.” Although both the nov­el and film attempt to protest the treat­ment of Native peo­ple by the U.S. gov­ern­ment, both under­write a com­mon, trou­bling assumption—that Native Amer­i­cans, like the Buf­fa­lo and the wild Mus­tang, were a threat­ened (and threat­en­ing) sep­a­rate species, whose “van­ish­ing” from the picaresque West (as they had “van­ished” from the East) was a lam­en­ta­ble, but per­haps unavoid­able, side effect of the march of Euro-Amer­i­can progress.

Curtis One

Each sym­bol­ic memo­ri­al­iz­ing of Native Amer­i­cans in U.S. iconog­ra­phy, how­ev­er solemn or offen­sive­ly car­toon­ish, ges­tures toward some mea­ger recog­ni­tion of a trag­ic loss, while eras­ing the cir­cum­stances that occa­sioned it. Of course Native Amer­i­cans didn’t van­ish, but were slow­ly killed or hound­ed into pover­ty and dis­pos­ses­sion, and out of sight of white America—their dress, reli­gions, and cul­tures made to dis­ap­pear through forced assim­i­la­tion, only to reap­pear in roman­ti­cized images of trag­i­cal­ly con­quered, but admirably war­like, prim­i­tives.

curtis4x5-8

Those images pro­lif­er­at­ed dur­ing the mid-to-late 19th cen­tu­ry, the peri­od of intense West­ern set­tle­ment and expan­sion and the so-called Indi­an Wars. “It is a giv­en today,” writes his­to­ri­an Bri­an Dip­ple, “that the idea of the Amer­i­can Indi­an has been his­tor­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant. It shaped the atti­tudes of those in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry who shaped Indi­an pol­i­cy. Indi­an policy—be it removal of the East­ern tribes in the 1830s, reser­va­tion iso­la­tion­ism begin­ning in the 1850s, or allot­ment of reser­va­tion lands and assim­i­la­tion in the 1880s—cannot be under­stood with­out an aware­ness of the ideas behind it. Lit­er­a­ture and the visu­al arts pro­vide reveal­ing guides to nine­teenth cen­tu­ry assump­tions about the Indi­an.”

curtis5x7-13

Native his­to­ri­an Vine Delo­ria describes the cul­tur­al sit­u­a­tion with more inci­sive wit in his “Indi­an Man­i­festo,” Custer Died for Your Sins: “The Amer­i­can pub­lic feels most com­fort­able with the myth­i­cal Indi­ans of stereo­type-land who were always THERE. These Indi­ans are fierce, they wear feath­ers and grunt. Most of us don’t fit this ide­al­ized fig­ure since we grunt only when overeat­ing, which is sel­dom.” By the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, “myth­i­cal Indi­ans” had become firm­ly embed­ded in pop­u­lar cul­ture, thanks to art and enter­tain­ment like the pre­sum­ably seri­ous attempts of Zane Grey and Fred­er­ic Rem­ing­ton, and J.M. Barrie’s deeply unse­ri­ous Peter Pan. It is in this cul­tur­al atmos­phere that pho­tog­ra­ph­er Edward Sher­iff Cur­tis’ huge, 20-vol­ume ethno­graph­ic project, The North Amer­i­can Indi­an emerged.

SIL7-058-021, 8/15/08, 3:01 PM, 8C, 5338x5873 (264+1428), 100%, Custom, 1/30 s, R39.5, G27.5, B38.9

Begin­ning in 1904, and with the even­tu­al back­ing of J.P. Mor­gan, writes Mash­able, Cur­tis “spent more than 20 years criss­cross­ing North Amer­i­ca, cre­at­ing over 40,000 images of more than 80 dif­fer­ent tribes. He made thou­sands of wax cylin­der record­ings of native songs and lan­guage, and wrote down oral his­to­ries, leg­ends and biogra­phies.” You can view and down­load more than 1,000 of these pho­tographs at the Library of Con­gress. Cur­tis thought of his work as doc­u­ment­ing “what he saw as a van­ish­ing way of life.” Moti­vat­ed by assump­tions about Native peo­ple as semi-myth­ic rem­nants from the past, the pho­tog­ra­ph­er “some­times med­dled with the doc­u­men­tary authen­tic­i­ty of his images. He posed his sub­jects in roman­ti­cized set­tings stripped of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of an imag­ined pre-Colom­bian exis­tence than the sub­jects’ actu­al lives in the present.”

curtis4x5-7

The pho­tographs are beau­ti­ful, their sub­jects enno­bled by the dra­mat­ic light­ing and styl­ized pos­es, and the breadth and scope of the entire project is noth­ing less than breath­tak­ing. It set the stage for the sig­nif­i­cant work of lat­er pho­tog­ra­phers and ethno­g­ra­phers like Walk­er Evans, Dorothea Lange, and the Lomax­es. Cur­tis has even been cred­it­ed with pro­duc­ing the first doc­u­men­tary film. The images, his­to­ries, tra­di­tions, and biogra­phies Cur­tis pre­served con­sti­tute an invalu­able his­tor­i­cal record. That said, we should bear in mind that The North Amer­i­can Indi­an comes to us framed by Cur­tis’ assump­tions about Native Amer­i­can cul­tures, formed by a cli­mate in which myth vied with, and usu­al­ly sup­plant­ed, fact. What do we see in these staged images, and what do we not see?

One of Cur­tis’ enthu­si­as­tic ear­ly back­ers, Theodore Roosevelt—who authored the intro­duc­tion to Vol­ume One—was, “like many of Cur­tis’ even­tu­al sup­port­ers,” writes Valerie Daniels, “more inter­est­ed in obtain­ing a record of van­ish­ing Native Amer­i­can cul­tures as a tes­ta­ment to the supe­ri­or­i­ty of his own civ­i­liza­tion than out of any con­cern over their sit­u­a­tion or recog­ni­tion of his own role in the process.” Though Cur­tis did not nec­es­sar­i­ly share these views, and lat­er became “rad­i­cal in his admo­ni­tion of gov­ern­ment poli­cies toward Native Amer­i­cans,” he also had to please his financiers and his audi­ence, most of whom would have felt the way Roo­sevelt did. We should bear this cul­tur­al con­text in mind as we take in Cur­tis’ work, and ask how it shaped the cre­ation and recep­tion of this tru­ly impres­sive record of both Amer­i­can his­to­ry and Amer­i­can myth. Enter the archive of images here.

Curtis 9

via Mash­able

Relat­ed Con­tent:

226 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs of Great Amer­i­can Nation­al Parks Are Now Online

200 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs Expose the Rig­ors of Life in Japan­ese Intern­ment Camps Dur­ing WW II

Hand-Col­ored 1860s Pho­tographs Reveal the Last Days of Samu­rai Japan

New Rosa Parks Archive is Now Online: Fea­tures 7,500 Man­u­scripts & 2,500 Pho­tographs, Cour­tesy of the Library of Con­gress

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

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Martin Scorsese Names His Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection

in Film | May 17th, 2016

“What do you do when you change how the world thinks of cin­e­ma? What’s next? Do you keep mak­ing the same kind of film? If you’re a per­son like Rosselli­ni, you try some­thing exper­i­men­tal. You push fur­ther. Not exper­i­men­tal for exper­i­men­t’s sake, but you push the bound­aries fur­ther.” With these words, Mar­tin Scors­ese describes the sit­u­a­tion of Rober­to Rosselli­ni, one of his pre­de­ces­sors in film­mak­ing he most admires, after com­plet­ing Paisan in 1946. Where to take the move­ment “Ital­ian neo­re­al­ism” from there?

Scors­ese dis­cuss­es Rossellini’s next three major films, Strom­boli, Europe ’51, and Jour­ney to Italy in this Con­ver­sa­tions Inside the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion inter­view clip from Vice. Giv­en his pos­ses­sion of an enthu­si­asm for cin­e­ma as strong as his mas­tery of the craft of cin­e­ma (mak­ing him a pre­de­ces­sor of such younger Amer­i­can indie-root­ed cinephile-auteurs as Quentin Taran­ti­no and Wes Ander­son), it makes sense that Scors­ese would want to engage with the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, whose painstak­ing­ly-pro­duced video releas­es of respect­ed films have for decades con­sti­tut­ed a kind of film school, infor­mal yet rich and rig­or­ous.

When Cri­te­ri­on, whose cat­a­log includes Scors­ese’s own The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ, asked the direc­tor to name his ten favorite films in the Col­lec­tion, he began with a paean to Paisan. (Note: You can watch Paisan for free if you start a free tri­al with Hulu. Also watch Fellini’s 8 1/2–list­ed below–free on Hulu here.) “I saw it for the first time on tele­vi­sion with my grand­par­ents, and their over­whelm­ing reac­tion to what had hap­pened to their home­land since they left at the turn of the cen­tu­ry was just as present and vivid for me as the images and the char­ac­ters,” he said. “I was expe­ri­enc­ing the pow­er of cin­e­ma itself, in this case made far beyond Hol­ly­wood, under extreme­ly tough con­di­tions and with infe­ri­or equip­ment. And I was also see­ing that cin­e­ma wasn’t just about the movie itself but the rela­tion­ship between the movie and its audi­ence.”

Here are Scors­ese’s nine oth­er Cri­te­ri­on selec­tions:

  • The Red Shoes (Michael Pow­ell and Emer­ic Press­burg­er) “There’s no oth­er pic­ture that dra­ma­tizes and visu­al­izes the over­whelm­ing obses­sion of art, the way it can take over your life. But on a deep­er lev­el, in the move­ment and ener­gy of the film­mak­ing itself, is a deep and abid­ing love of art, a belief in art as a gen­uine­ly tran­scen­dent state.”
  • The Riv­er (Jean Renoir) “This was Jean Renoir’s first pic­ture after his Amer­i­can peri­od, his first in col­or, and he used Rumer Godden’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal nov­el to cre­ate a film that is, real­ly, about life, a film with­out a real sto­ry that is all about the rhythm of exis­tence, the cycles of birth and death and regen­er­a­tion, and the tran­si­to­ry beau­ty of the world.”
  • Uget­su (Ken­ji Mizoguchi) “The boat slow­ly mate­ri­al­iz­ing from out of the mist and com­ing toward us… Gen­juro col­laps­ing on the grass in ecsta­sy and being smoth­ered by Lady Wakasa… the final crane up from the son mak­ing an offer­ing at his mother’s grave to the fields beyond. Just to think of these moments now fills me with awe and won­der.”
  • Ash­es and Dia­monds (Andrzej Wada) “I saw Ash­es and Dia­monds for the first time in 1961. And even back then, dur­ing that peri­od when we expect­ed to be aston­ished at the movies, when things were hap­pen­ing all over the world, it shocked me. It had to do with the look, both imme­di­ate and haunt­ed, like a night­mare that won’t stop unfold­ing.”
  • L’avven­tu­ra (Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni) “It’s dif­fi­cult to think of a film that has a more pow­er­ful under­stand­ing of the way that peo­ple are bound to the world around them, by what they see and touch and taste and hear. I real­ize that L’avventura is sup­posed to be about char­ac­ters who are ‘alien­at­ed’ from their sur­round­ings, but that word has been used so often to describe this film and Antonioni’s films in gen­er­al that it more or less shuts down thought.”
  • Sal­va­tore Giu­liano (Francesco Rosi) “On one lev­el, it’s an extreme­ly com­plex film: there’s no cen­tral pro­tag­o­nist (Giu­liano him­self is not a char­ac­ter but a fig­ure around which the action piv­ots), and it shifts between time frames and points of view. But it’s also a pic­ture made from the inside, from a pro­found and last­ing love and under­stand­ing of Sici­ly and its peo­ple and the treach­ery and cor­rup­tion they’ve had to endure.”
  • 8 1/2 (Fed­eri­co Felli­ni) “8½ has always been a touch­stone for me, in so many ways—the free­dom, the sense of inven­tion, the under­ly­ing rig­or and the deep core of long­ing, the bewitch­ing, phys­i­cal pull of the cam­era move­ments and the com­po­si­tions (anoth­er great black-and-white film: every image gleams like a pearl — again, shot by Gian­ni Di Venan­zo). But it also offers an uncan­ny por­trait of being the artist of the moment, try­ing to tune out all the pres­sure and the crit­i­cism and the adu­la­tion and the requests and the advice, and find the space and the calm to sim­ply lis­ten to one­self.”
  • Con­tempt (Jean-Luc Godard) “It’s a shat­ter­ing por­trait of a mar­riage going wrong, and it cuts very deep, espe­cial­ly dur­ing the lengthy and jus­ti­fi­ably famous scene between Pic­coli and Bar­dot in their apart­ment: even if you don’t know that Godard’s own mar­riage to Anna Kari­na was com­ing apart at the time, you can feel it in the action, the move­ment of the scenes, the inter­ac­tions that stretch out so painful­ly but majes­ti­cal­ly, like a piece of trag­ic music.”
  • The Leop­ard (Luchi­no Vis­con­ti) “Time itself is the pro­tag­o­nist of The Leop­ard: the cos­mic scale of time, of cen­turies and epochs, on which the prince mus­es; Sicil­ian time, in which days and nights stretch to infin­i­ty; and aris­to­crat­ic time, in which noth­ing is ever rushed and every­thing hap­pens just as it should hap­pen, as it has always hap­pened.”

For Scors­ese’s full com­men­tary on all ten of these pic­tures, see the arti­cle on Cri­te­ri­on’s site. The direc­tors of his favorite Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion films all changed how the world thinks of cin­e­ma in one way or anoth­er, at dif­fer­ent times, in dif­fer­ent places, and in dif­fer­ent ways. Scors­ese, too, has changed how the world thinks of cin­e­ma, arguably more than once in his career — and giv­en his pen­chant for try­ing new things, avoid­ing that tread­mill where you “keep mak­ing the same film,” he may well make anoth­er movie that changes it again. And if he does, here’s anoth­er impor­tant ques­tion: what spe­cial fea­tures will Cri­te­ri­on include when they put out their deluxe edi­tion?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free on Hulu: Stream Fellini’s 8 1/2, La Stra­da & Oth­er Clas­sic & Con­tem­po­rary Films

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preser­va­tion)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspir­ing Film­mak­er Needs to See

Mar­tin Scors­ese Intro­duces Film­mak­er Hong Sang­soo, “The Woody Allen of Korea”

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of 39 Essen­tial For­eign Films for a Young Film­mak­er

Mar­tin Scors­ese Names the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films: Kubrick, Hitch­cock, Tourneur & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Experimental Band, Xiu Xiu: A Free Stream of Their New Album

in Music, Television | May 17th, 2016

Last year, Col­in Mar­shall high­light­ed for you the music of Xiu Xiu, the exper­i­men­tal post-punk band, which has trav­eled the world, play­ing their own inter­pre­ta­tion of the music Ange­lo Badala­men­ti wrote for David Lynch’s ear­ly 1990s series, Twin Peaks. Our orig­i­nal post fea­tured some of those live per­for­mances, and now comes a stu­dio record­ing of those Twin Peaks inter­pre­ta­tions.

We’d be remiss if we did­n’t tell you that you can stream the new album–called Plays the Music of Twin Peaks– free online. Just click play above. Find a list of indi­vid­ual tracks below. And, if you like what you hear, con­sid­er pur­chas­ing your own copy of the album from the usu­al ven­dors. Enjoy.

1. Lau­ra Palmer’s Theme (0:00)
2. Into The Night (5:03)
3. Audrey’s Dance (10:15)
4. Packard’s Vibra­tion (14:41)
5. Night­sea Wind (18:31)
6. Blue Frank/Pink Room (25:37)
7. Sycamore Tree (31:28)
8. Harold’s Theme (38:16)
9. Dance of the Dream Man (42:12)
10. Falling (47:22)
11. Love Theme Farewell (54:20)
12. Josie’s Past (1:00:44)

via Wel­come to Twin Peaks

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exper­i­men­tal Post-Punk Band Xiu Xiu Plays the Music from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Title Sequence, Recre­at­ed in an Adorable Paper Ani­ma­tion

Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

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Hear Robert Frost Read His Most Famous Poems: “The Road Not Taken,” “Mending Wall,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay” & More

in Audio Books, Poetry | May 17th, 2016

Robert Frost has the dubi­ous hon­or of being known the world over as the poet of a seize-the-day cliché. His poem “The Road Not Tak­en” (read by Frost above) appears on cof­fee mugs, autum­nal moti­va­tion­al posters, upbeat email sig­na­tures, and in adver­tise­ments and tele­vi­sion shows, all meant to inspire con­fi­dent deci­sion-mak­ing in uncer­tain times: unin­ten­tion­al­ly iron­ic, pop­ulist appeals to diverge from the herd.

If this is Frost’s lega­cy in the wider cul­ture, it’s a fate most poets wouldn’t wish on their bit­ter­est rival. The typ­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of this poem is an unfor­tu­nate mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Frost’s work in gen­er­al. Indeed, “The Road Not Tak­en” may be “the most mis­read poem in Amer­i­ca,” as David Orr argues at The Paris Review.

Frost’s poet­ry does not often inspire con­fi­dence or moti­va­tion, but rather doubt, uncom­fort­able reflec­tion, fear, and some­times a kind of dread­ful awe. Like Faulkn­er was in his day, Frost was, and still is, mis­tak­en for a quaint, col­or­ful region­al­ist. But rather than a poet of New Eng­land folk sim­plic­i­ty, he is a poet of New Eng­land skep­ti­cism and a kind of hard-head­ed sub­lime. Any­one who reads “The Road Not Tak­en” close­ly, for exam­ple, will note the speaker’s ambigu­ous tone in the final stan­za, and final three lines—oft-quoted as a tri­umphant dénoue­ment.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Some­where ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less trav­eled by,
And that has made all the dif­fer­ence.

The trav­el­er does not tell us what “dif­fer­ence” the choice will have made, nor why he should tell of this cross­roads “ages and ages hence… with a sigh.” Implied in these lines, how­ev­er, is at least the sug­ges­tion of unavoid­able future regret, and a reck­on­ing with irrev­o­ca­ble fate. The ear­li­er line, “Oh, I kept the first for anoth­er day!” sounds more like an excla­ma­tion of rue than the cel­e­bra­tion of a choice well-made.

And as Orr points out, the speak­er’s ini­tial encounter presents him with two paths that “equal­ly lay / in leaves.”; the two roads are equal­ly travelled—or untrav­elled as the case may be—and the trav­eller choos­es one arbi­trar­i­ly. In these final lines, he announces his inten­tion to tell a dif­fer­ent, per­haps self-con­grat­u­la­to­ry sto­ry about his deci­sion. “The poem isn’t a salute to can-do indi­vid­u­al­ism,” Orr writes, “it’s a com­men­tary on the self-decep­tion we prac­tice when con­struct­ing the sto­ry of our own lives.”

One can hear even dark­er notes in anoth­er famous poem, “Mend­ing Wall,” in which a name­less, unfeel­ing “Some­thing” goes about its work of dis­man­tling the speaker’s best efforts, and all human work gen­er­al­ly. It’s a theme in much of Frost’s poet­ry that can, if ful­ly appre­ci­at­ed, inspire a dread as potent as that in the most baroque and florid of H.P. Lovecraft’s weird tales. Frost devel­oped his theme of cos­mic indif­fer­ence ear­ly, in “Stars,” from his first pub­lished col­lec­tion, A Boy’s Will. He intro­duces the poem in the table of con­tents with this suc­cinct descrip­tion: “There is no over­sight in human affairs,” a mat­ter-of-fact state­ment that scarce­ly pre­pares us for the unnerv­ing images to fol­low:

How count­less­ly they con­gre­gate
O’er our tumul­tuous snow,
Which flows in shapes as tall as trees
When win­try winds do blow!—

As if with keen­ness for our fate,
Our fal­ter­ing few steps on
To white rest, and a place of rest
Invis­i­ble at dawn,—

And yet with nei­ther love nor hate,
Those stars like some snow-white
Minerva’s snow-white mar­ble eyes
With­out the gift of sight.

In three short, dev­as­tat­ing stan­zas, Frost under­cuts ancient, com­fort­ing pre­ten­tions about the stars’ (or gods’) sen­tient benev­o­lence, with images and dic­tion that recall Thomas Hardy’s bleak lament “In Tene­bris” and antic­i­pate Wal­lace Stevens’ imper­son­al and chill­ing “The Snow Man.” The snow and ice in Frost’s poems are not part of the pret­ty scenery, but metonymic fig­ures of obliv­ion.

In short, the kind­ly old Robert Frost we think we know from the triv­ial mis­read­ing of “The Road Not Tak­en” is not the poet Robert Frost at all. Frost is a prick­ly, chal­leng­ing, even some­what devi­ous char­ac­ter whose pleas­ing­ly musi­cal lines and quaint, pas­toral images lure read­ers into poems that har­bor much less cheer­ful atti­tudes than they expect to find, and much more com­plex and mature ideas. The young Frost once described him­self as “not unde­sign­ing,” and in his lat­er, 1939 essay “The Fig­ure a Poem Makes,” he famous­ly declared that a poem “begins in delight and ends in wis­dom.”

In the two Spo­ti­fy playlists above (down­load Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware here), you can hear Frost read some of his most famous poems, includ­ing “The Road Not Tak­en,” “Mend­ing Wall,” “Noth­ing Gold Can Stay,” “After Apple Pick­ing,” “Death of a Hired Man,” and sev­er­al more. Not rep­re­sent­ed here, unfor­tu­nate­ly, are poems from the won­der­ful debut A Boy’s Will, but you can read that full col­lec­tion online here, and you should. Get to know the real Frost, if you haven’t already, and you’ll appre­ci­ate all the more why he’s one of the most cel­e­brat­ed poets in the Amer­i­can canon.

The read­ings above will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Robert Frost Read ‘The Gift Out­right,’ the Poem He Recit­ed from Mem­o­ry at JFK’s Inau­gu­ra­tion

Robert Frost Recites ‘Stop­ping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’

Library of Con­gress Launch­es New Online Poet­ry Archive, Fea­tur­ing 75 Years of Clas­sic Poet­ry Read­ings

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

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Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 82 Commandments For Living

in Film, Life, Philosophy | May 16th, 2016

Utopiales_2011_Alejandro_Jodorowsky_16

Cre­ative Com­mons pho­to by Lionel Allorge

If you’re a fan of sci­ence fic­tion or the films of David Lynch, you’ve sure­ly seen the 1984 film adap­ta­tion of Frank Herbert’s cult clas­sic sci-fi nov­el, Dune (though Lynch him­self may pre­fer that you didn’t). And indeed, it’s very like­ly that, by now, you’ve heard the incred­i­ble sto­ry of what Dune might have been, had it been direct­ed ten years ear­li­er by psy­che­del­ic Chilean film­mak­er, writer, com­pos­er, and psy­chother­a­pist Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky. Per­haps you even caught Jonathan Crow’s post on this site fea­tur­ing Jodorowsky’s pro­posed storyboards—drawn by French artist Moebius—for what would most cer­tain­ly would have been “a mind-bog­gling­ly grand epic” of a movie. Alas, Jodorowsky’s Dune nev­er came about, though it did lat­er lead to the doc­u­men­tary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which Matt Zoller Seitz pro­nounced “a call to arms for dream­ers every­where.”

That descrip­tion applies not only to the film about a film that could have been, but also to the entire­ty of Jodorowsky’s work, includ­ing his—thoroughly bizarre and captivating—early fea­tures, El Topo and The Holy Moun­tain, and the cre­ation of a com­ic book uni­verse like no oth­er. Called “The Jodoverse,” the world of his com­ic books is, as writer War­ren Ellis says, “aston­ish­ing­ly beau­ti­ful and total­ly mad”—again, a suc­cinct descrip­tion of Jodorowsky’s every artis­tic endeav­or. Wit­ness below, for exam­ple, the stun­ning trail­er for his most recent fea­ture film, 2014’s The Dance of Real­i­ty. You may find the visu­al excess­es so over­whelm­ing that you only half-hear the nar­ra­tion.

Lis­ten (or read) care­ful­ly, how­ev­er. Jodor­owsky has as much to tell us with his cryp­ti­cal­ly poet­ic pro­nounce­ments as he does with his vision­ary imagery. Do you find his epi­grams plat­i­tudi­nous, sen­ten­tious, Pollyan­naish, or naïve? Jodor­owsky doesn’t mind. He calls, remem­ber, to the dream­ers, not the hard-bit­ten, cyn­i­cal real­ists. And if you’re one of the dream­ers who hears that call, you’ll find much to love in the list below of Jodorowsky’s 82 Com­mand­ments for liv­ing. But so too, I think, will the real­ists. These come from Jodorowsky’s mem­oir The Spir­i­tu­al Jour­ney of Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, and the list comes via Dan­ger­ous Minds, who adapt­ed it from “the bet­ter part of three pages” of text.

As Jodor­owsky frames these max­ims in his book, they orig­i­nat­ed with influ­en­tial Russ­ian mys­tic George Gur­d­ji­eff, and were told to him by Gurdjieff’s daugh­ter, Rey­na d’Assia. Per­haps that’s so. But you’ll note, if you know Jodorowsky’s writing—or sim­ply took a cou­ple min­utes time to watch the trail­er above—that they sound enough like the author’s own words to have been brought forth from his per­son­al store­house of accu­mu­lat­ed wis­dom. In any case, Jodor­owsky has always been quick to acknowl­edge his spir­i­tu­al teach­ers, and whether these are his sec­ond-hand accounts of Gur­d­ji­eff or his own inven­tions has no bear­ing on the sub­stance there­in.

Often sound­ing very much like Bib­li­cal proverbs or Bud­dhist pre­cepts, the com­mand­ments are intend­ed, d’Assia says in Jodorowsky’s account, to help us “change [our] habits, con­quer lazi­ness, and become… moral­ly sound human being[s].” As she remarks in the book, before she deliv­ers the below in a lengthy mono­logue, “to be strong in the great things, we must also be strong in the small ones.” There­fore…

  1. Ground your atten­tion on your­self. Be con­scious at every moment of what you are think­ing, sens­ing, feel­ing, desir­ing, and doing.
  2. Always fin­ish what you have begun.
  3. What­ev­er you are doing, do it as well as pos­si­ble.
  4. Do not become attached to any­thing that can destroy you in the course of time.
  5. Devel­op your gen­eros­i­ty ‒ but secret­ly.
  6. Treat every­one as if he or she was a close rel­a­tive.
  7. Orga­nize what you have dis­or­ga­nized.
  8. Learn to receive and give thanks for every gift.
  9. Stop defin­ing your­self.
  10. Do not lie or steal, for you lie to your­self and steal from your­self.
  11. Help your neigh­bor, but do not make him depen­dent.
  12. Do not encour­age oth­ers to imi­tate you.
  13. Make work plans and accom­plish them.
  14. Do not take up too much space.
  15. Make no use­less move­ments or sounds.
  16. If you lack faith, pre­tend to have it.
  17. Do not allow your­self to be impressed by strong per­son­al­i­ties.
  18. Do not regard any­one or any­thing as your pos­ses­sion.
  19. Share fair­ly.
  20. Do not seduce.
  21. Sleep and eat only as much as nec­es­sary.
  22. Do not speak of your per­son­al prob­lems.
  23. Do not express judg­ment or crit­i­cism when you are igno­rant of most of the fac­tors involved.
  24. Do not estab­lish use­less friend­ships.
  25. Do not fol­low fash­ions.
  26. Do not sell your­self.
  27. Respect con­tracts you have signed.
  28. Be on time.
  29. Nev­er envy the luck or suc­cess of any­one.
  30. Say no more than nec­es­sary.
  31. Do not think of the prof­its your work will engen­der.
  32. Nev­er threat­en any­one.
  33. Keep your promis­es.
  34. In any dis­cus­sion, put your­self in the oth­er person’s place.
  35. Admit that some­one else may be supe­ri­or to you.
  36. Do not elim­i­nate, but trans­mute.
  37. Con­quer your fears, for each of them rep­re­sents a cam­ou­flaged desire.
  38. Help oth­ers to help them­selves.
  39. Con­quer your aver­sions and come clos­er to those who inspire rejec­tion in you.
  40. Do not react to what oth­ers say about you, whether praise or blame.
  41. Trans­form your pride into dig­ni­ty.
  42. Trans­form your anger into cre­ativ­i­ty.
  43. Trans­form your greed into respect for beau­ty.
  44. Trans­form your envy into admi­ra­tion for the val­ues of the oth­er.
  45. Trans­form your hate into char­i­ty.
  46. Nei­ther praise nor insult your­self.
  47. Regard what does not belong to you as if it did belong to you.
  48. Do not com­plain.
  49. Devel­op your imag­i­na­tion.
  50. Nev­er give orders to gain the sat­is­fac­tion of being obeyed.
  51. Pay for ser­vices per­formed for you.
  52. Do not pros­e­ly­tize your work or ideas.
  53. Do not try to make oth­ers feel for you emo­tions such as pity, admi­ra­tion, sym­pa­thy, or com­plic­i­ty.
  54. Do not try to dis­tin­guish your­self by your appear­ance.
  55. Nev­er con­tra­dict; instead, be silent.
  56. Do not con­tract debts; acquire and pay imme­di­ate­ly.
  57. If you offend some­one, ask his or her par­don; if you have offend­ed a per­son pub­licly, apol­o­gize pub­licly.
  58. When you real­ize you have said some­thing that is mis­tak­en, do not per­sist in error through pride; instead, imme­di­ate­ly retract it.
  59. Nev­er defend your old ideas sim­ply because you are the one who expressed them.
  60. Do not keep use­less objects.
  61. Do not adorn your­self with exot­ic ideas.
  62. Do not have your pho­to­graph tak­en with famous peo­ple.
  63. Jus­ti­fy your­self to no one, and keep your own coun­sel.
  64. Nev­er define your­self by what you pos­sess.
  65. Nev­er speak of your­self with­out con­sid­er­ing that you might change.
  66. Accept that noth­ing belongs to you.
  67. When some­one asks your opin­ion about some­thing or some­one, speak only of his or her qual­i­ties.
  68. When you become ill, regard your ill­ness as your teacher, not as some­thing to be hat­ed.
  69. Look direct­ly, and do not hide your­self.
  70. Do not for­get your dead, but accord them a lim­it­ed place and do not allow them to invade your life.
  71. Wher­ev­er you live, always find a space that you devote to the sacred.
  72. When you per­form a ser­vice, make your effort incon­spic­u­ous.
  73. If you decide to work to help oth­ers, do it with plea­sure.
  74. If you are hes­i­tat­ing between doing and not doing, take the risk of doing.
  75. Do not try to be every­thing to your spouse; accept that there are things that you can­not give him or her but which oth­ers can.
  76. When some­one is speak­ing to an inter­est­ed audi­ence, do not con­tra­dict that per­son and steal his or her audi­ence.
  77. Live on mon­ey you have earned.
  78. Nev­er brag about amorous adven­tures.
  79. Nev­er glo­ri­fy your weak­ness­es.
  80. Nev­er vis­it some­one only to pass the time.
  81. Obtain things in order to share them.
  82. If you are med­i­tat­ing and a dev­il appears, make the dev­il med­i­tate too.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Moe­bius Gives 18 Wis­dom-Filled Tips to Aspir­ing Artists (1996)

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

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The Alchemy of Film Editing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Hannah and Her Sisters, The Empire Strikes Back & Other Films

in Film | May 16th, 2016

Writ­ing, cast­ing, shoot­ing — all impor­tant parts of the film­mak­ing process, but the real mak­ing of a movie hap­pens, so they say, in the edit­ing room. Though often film edi­tors them­selves, “they” have a point: even movie­go­ers unfa­mil­iar with the mechan­ics of edit­ing can sense that, when some­thing feels right onscreen, and even more so when some­thing feels wrong, it has to do less with the pieces them­selves than how those pieces have been put togeth­er.

“There’s an inbuilt rela­tion­ship between the sto­ry itself, how to tell the sto­ry, and the rhythm with which you tell it,” says famed edi­tor Wal­ter Murch, known for his work with Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la on the God­fa­ther tril­o­gy and Apoc­a­lypse Now, “and edit­ing is sev­en­ty per­cent about rhythm.” Twen­ty years ago, in his book In the Blink of an Eye, Murch shed light on how an edi­tor works. Now, cin­e­ma video essay­ist Tony Zhou has con­tin­ued that mis­sion with a new episode of his series Every Frame a Paint­ing, “How Does an Edi­tor Think and Feel?”

Zhou’s cho­sen medi­um places him well to address the ques­tion, since each video essay must require at least as much time spent edit­ing as think­ing about film in the first place. Still, asked by a friend how he knows where to cut, he can come up with only this unsat­is­fy­ing answer: “Like a lot of edi­tors, I cut based on instinct.” As to what exact­ly con­sti­tutes that edi­tor’s instinct, Zhou spends the bulk of this ten-minute essay search­ing for answers him­self, exam­in­ing the cuts in pic­tures like Han­nah and Her Sis­ters, In the Mood for Love, The Empire Strikes Back, Tam­popo, Only Angels Have Wings, Pier­rot le Fou, and All That Jazz.

He also turns to the words of edi­tors with decades of expe­ri­ence in the game, includ­ing fre­quent Steven Spiel­berg col­lab­o­ra­tor Michael Kahn, fre­quent Mar­tin Scors­ese col­lab­o­ra­tor Thel­ma Schoon­mak­er, and even Murch him­self. But ulti­mate­ly, no mat­ter how much wis­dom about tim­ing, emo­tions, ten­sion, and rhythm you col­lect, you’ve got to sit down in the edit­ing suite and go it alone. “If you watch any­thing over and over again,” Zhou says, “you even­tu­al­ly feel the moment when the shot wants you to cut.” If this seems like an over­whelm­ing task, espe­cial­ly giv­en hun­dreds of thou­sands of hours of footage an edi­tor will work through in a career, do keep Kah­n’s sim­ple words in mind: “I see all that film up there — it does­n’t mat­ter. I’m doing one piece at a time. One scene at a time. One cut at a time.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Film­mak­ing Tech­niques of Mar­tin Scors­ese, Jack­ie Chan, and Even Michael Bay

Alfred Hitchcock’s 7‑Minute Mas­ter Class on Film Edit­ing

The Dark Knight: Anato­my of a Flawed Action Scene

The Wiz­ard of Oz Bro­ken Apart and Put Back Togeth­er in Alpha­bet­i­cal Order

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Thomas Edison’s Silent Film of the “Fartiste” Who Delighted Crowds at Le Moulin Rouge (1900)

in Comedy, Film, History, Theatre | May 16th, 2016

In 1900, Thomas Edi­son trav­eled to Paris to doc­u­ment the many won­ders of the Expo­si­tion Uni­verselle, and the city itself. Among the sights cap­tured with his kine­to­scope cam­eras were the Expo’s mov­ing side­walks, the Champs-Élysées, and the pre­vi­ous Expo­si­tion Uni­verselle’s crown jew­el, the Eif­fel Tow­er, now eleven years old.

It wasn’t all so high-mind­ed. Edi­son and his kine­to­scope also caught a per­for­mance by for­mer Moulin Rouge star, Joseph Pujol, aka Le Pétomane, above. This ele­gant­ly attired gen­tle­men achieved fame and for­tune with a series of impres­sions, car­ried out by a rather eccen­tric ori­fice. He was not so much artiste as fartiste, a title he wore with pride.

Pujol claimed to have dis­cov­ered his unusu­al tal­ent as a child, and soon set about achiev­ing dif­fer­ent effects by using his abdom­i­nal mus­cles to expel not gas, but odor­less air. By vary­ing the pres­sure, he was able to play sim­ple tunes. By the time he turned 30, his act had expand­ed to include imper­son­ations of celebri­ties, musi­cal instru­ments, birds, a thun­der­storm and such stock char­ac­ters as a ner­vous bride. His grand finale includ­ed such feats as blow­ing out can­dles, smok­ing cig­a­rettes and play­ing an oca­ri­na (below), all with the aid of a rub­ber hose insert­ed into his anus via a mod­est trouser slit.

oc-fluted-top

What a tragedy that Edison’s short film is silent! No live piano accom­pa­ni­ment could do jus­tice to this mag­i­cal artis­tic fruit, and if there were oth­er record­ings of Pujol, they’ve been lost to his­to­ry.

He lives on in the imag­i­na­tions of artists who fol­lowed him.

Actor Ugo Tog­nazzi, below, assumed the title role in a 1983 Ital­ian lan­guage fea­ture.

Direc­tor Mel Brooks inject­ed a bit of sub­tle­ty into Blaz­ing Sad­dles’  beans-around-the-camp­fire humor when he appeared as a char­ac­ter named Gov­er­nor William J. LeP­etomane.

Sad­ly, Pujol was left on the cut­ting room floor of direc­tor Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, but all is not lost. Report­ed­ly, John­ny Depp has indi­cat­ed inter­est in bring­ing this his­toric fig­ure back to life. (Gen­tle­men, start your screen­plays…)

Fartiste

Then there is the half hour biopic, below, direct­ed by Mon­ty Python alum Ian McNaughton and star­ring Leonard Rossiter as Pujol. Pre­pare to hear the open­ing ses­sion of the Con­gress of Vien­na, a toad, and a four-part har­mo­ny.

via Messy Nessy Chic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Thomas Edison’s Creepy Talk­ing Dolls: An Inven­tion That Scared Kids & Flopped on the Mar­ket

Thomas Edison’s Box­ing Cats (1894), or Where the LOL­Cats All Began

Thomas Edi­son Recites “Mary Had a Lit­tle Lamb” in Ear­ly Voice Record­ing

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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