John Lydon & Public Image Ltd. Sow Chaos on American Bandstand: The Show’s Best and Worst Moment (1980)

in Music, Television | May 12th, 2016

Amer­i­can Band­stand is best remem­bered these days not for doing the job it set out to do–presenting safe pop stars in the com­pa­ny of a stu­dio audi­ence to move units–but for when it ran head­long into the chang­ing cul­ture around it. Or at least that’s what Open Cul­ture thinks. We’ve seen the begin­nings of the Sum­mer of Love with Jef­fer­son Air­plane and chip­per Dick Clark try­ing to fig­ure out why hip­pies wouldn’t cut their hair. We’ve also seen a bemused Clark attempt­ing to inter­act with David Byrne when the Talk­ing Heads played the show. But noth­ing real­ly tops the time Pub­lic Image Ltd. brought true chaos to the Band­stand.

Dick Clark called it the worst moment in Band­stand his­to­ry; Lydon, in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, said the oppo­site, say­ing Clark told him it was one of the best per­for­mances in the show’s his­to­ry. Some­where in between lies the truth–no doubt Clark knew it was great tele­vi­sion.

It all took place on May 17, 1980, one full month before John Lydon and Kei­th Levene’s con­tentious appear­ance on Tom Snyder’s pro­gram, where Lydon insists that Pub­lic Image Ltd. is not a band. “It’s a com­pa­ny,” he shot back in his finest nasal cock­ney.

PIL was on Amer­i­can Band­stand to pro­mote their album Sec­ond Edi­tion, their dark dab­bling into dub and post-punk. The first song may be called “Pop­tones” but there’s noth­ing pop­py about it.

Accord­ing to Cole Coonce in his book Sex & Trav­el & Ves­tiges of Metal­lic Frag­ments, Lydon told Clark that he had a cold. “He said that because he wasn’t feel­ing well he was just going to go up there and take the piss out of me. So I said, ‘Go ahead.’ And he did.’”

Lydon’s account is dif­fer­ent, say­ing the show’s pro­duc­ers cut down “Pop­tones” and “Career­ing” (a total of 13 some min­utes) down to a man­age­able length.

“I don’t know where the vocals are going to drop. What are we sup­posed to do?” Lydon thought.

What PIL did is what was broad­cast. Adrift from their own song, Lydon starts “Pop­tones” sit­ting on the front of the stage, then grabs the micro­phone and wan­ders into the audi­ence. He makes no attempt to lip sync. The audi­ence isn’t sure what to do. Lydon isn’t sure. There’s an ele­ment of dan­ger and excite­ment. Lydon grabs audi­ence mem­bers and takes them onto the stage to dance. By the end of the first song the audi­ence has tak­en over the stage and then Dick Clark has to intro­duce the band. It doesn’t last long, and “Career­ing” begins.

The dan­ger of punk and post-punk that evening wasn’t in the per­for­mance of the band or of a volatile audi­ence. It was in the break­ing down of a tele­vi­sion show’s arti­fice and the sep­a­ra­tion of band and audi­ence. Check it out.

Some great pho­tos of the show can be viewed over at Flash­bak.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Nev­er Mind the Bol­locks, Here’s … John Lydon in a But­ter Com­mer­cial?

John­ny Rotten’s Cor­dial Let­ter to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Next to the Sex Pis­tols, You’re ‘a Piss Stain’

John­ny Rot­ten Goes Before TV’s Judge Judy in 1997 … and Wins!

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based 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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Jon Stewart Resurfaces and Breaks Down the 2016 Election: The “Man Baby” v. the “Inauthentic”

in Current Affairs, Politics | May 11th, 2016

It’s a farce of an elec­tion, and the only thing that could make it bear­able is The Dai­ly Show with Jon Stew­art. (Sor­ry Trevor Noah.) But, alas, Stew­art retired from the show ear­li­er this year, leav­ing us starv­ing for some inci­sive com­ic relief.

But here’s a momen­tary respite.

Two days ago, Stew­art appeared on “The Axe Files,” a pod­cast host­ed by David Axel­rod, once the Chief Strate­gist for Barack Oba­ma’s pres­i­den­tial cam­paigns, and now the Direc­tor of the Insti­tute of Pol­i­tics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go. The pod­cast fea­tures intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tions with key fig­ures in the polit­i­cal world. And they often put a human face on polit­i­cal fig­ures you might oth­er­wise dis­dain. If you want to feel a lit­tle bet­ter about Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, you can lis­ten to archived episodes here.

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!

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Download 144 Beautiful Books of Russian Futurism: Mayakovsky, Malevich, Khlebnikov & More (1910–30)

in Art, Literature, Poetry | May 11th, 2016

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In the years after World War II, the CIA made use of jazz musi­cians, abstract expres­sion­ist painters, and exper­i­men­tal writ­ers to pro­mote avant-garde Amer­i­can cul­ture as a Cold War weapon. At the time, down­ward cul­tur­al com­par­isons with Sovi­et art were high­ly cred­i­ble.

Many years of repres­sive Stal­in­ism and what Isa­iah Berlin called “the new ortho­doxy” had reduced so much Russ­ian art and lit­er­a­ture to didac­tic, homog­e­nized social real­ism. But in the years fol­low­ing the first World War and the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, it would not have been pos­si­ble to accuse the Sovi­ets of cul­tur­al back­ward­ness.

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The first three decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry pro­duced some of the most inno­v­a­tive art, film, dance, dra­ma, and poet­ry in Russ­ian his­to­ry, much of it under the ban­ner of Futur­ism, the move­ment begun in Italy in 1909 by F.T. Marinet­ti. Like the Ital­ian Futur­ists, these avant-garde Russ­ian artists and poets were, writes Poets.org, “pre­oc­cu­pied with urban imagery, eccen­tric words, neol­o­gisms, and exper­i­men­tal rhymes.” One of the movement’s most inven­tive mem­bers, Velimir Khleb­nikov, wrote poet­ry that ranged from “dense and pri­vate neol­o­gisms to exot­ic verse­forms writ­ten in palin­dromes.” Most of his poet­ry “was too impen­e­tra­ble to reach a pop­u­lar audi­ence,” and his work includ­ed not only exper­i­ments with lan­guage on the page, but also avant-garde indus­tri­al sound record­ing.

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Khlebnikov’s exper­i­ments in lin­guis­tic sound and form became known as “Zaum,” a word that can be trans­lat­ed as “tran­srea­son,” or “beyond sense.” He pio­neered his tech­niques with anoth­er major Futur­ist poet, Alek­sei Kruchenykh, who may have been, writes Mono­skop, “the most rad­i­cal poet of Russ­ian Futur­ism.” The most famous name to emerge from the move­ment, Vladimir Mayakovsky, embod­ied Futur­is­m’s con­fi­dent indi­vid­u­al­ism, his poet­ics “a mix­ture of extrav­a­gant exag­ger­a­tions and self-cen­tered and ardu­ous imagery.” Mayakovsky made a name for him­self as an actor, painter, poet, film­mak­er, and play­wright. Even Stal­in, who would soon pre­side over the sup­pres­sion of the Russ­ian avant-garde, called Mayakovsky after his death in 1930 “the best and most tal­ent­ed poet of the Sovi­et epoch.”

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Mono­skop points us toward a siz­able online archive of 144 dig­i­tal­ly scanned Futur­ist pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing major works by Khleb­nikov, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, and oth­er Futur­ist poets, writ­ers, and artists. There’s even a crit­i­cal essay by the impos­ing Russ­ian painter and founder of the aus­tere school of Supre­ma­tism, Kaz­imir Male­vich. All of the texts are in Russ­ian, as is the site that hosts them—the State Pub­lic His­tor­i­cal Library of Rus­sia—though if you load it in Google Chrome, you can trans­late the titles and the accom­pa­ny­ing bib­li­o­graph­ic infor­ma­tion.

You can also down­load full pages in high-res­o­lu­tion. Many of the texts include strong visu­al ele­ments, such as the cov­er at the top from a mul­ti-author col­lec­tion titled Radio, fea­tur­ing Mayakovsky, whose own books include pho­to mon­tages like the two fur­ther up. Just above, see the cov­er of Khleb­nikov and Kruchenykh’s Vin­tage Love, which includes many more such sketch­es. And below, the cov­er of a 1926 book by Kruchenykh called On the Fight Against Hooli­gan­ism in Lit­er­a­ture.

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Although “state con­trol was absolute through­out” Sovi­et his­to­ry, these artists flour­ished before Trotsky’s fall in 1928, wrote Isa­iah Berlin in his 1945 pro­file of Russ­ian art; there was “a vast fer­ment in Sovi­et thought, which dur­ing those ear­ly years was gen­uine­ly ani­mat­ed by the spir­it of revolt against, and chal­lenge to, the arts of the West.” The Par­ty came to view this peri­od as “the last des­per­ate strug­gle of cap­i­tal­ism” and the Futur­ists would soon be over­thrown, “by the strong, young, mate­ri­al­ist, earth­bound, pro­le­tar­i­an culture”—a cul­ture imposed from above in the mid-30s by the Writ­ers’ Union and the Cen­tral Com­mit­tee.

Thus began the regret­table per­se­cu­tions and purges of artists and dis­si­dents of all kinds, and the move­ment toward the Stal­in­ist per­son­al­i­ty cult and “col­lec­tive work on Sovi­et themes by squads of pro­le­tar­i­an writ­ers.” But dur­ing the first quar­ter of the cen­tu­ry, “a time of storm and stress,” Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture and art, Berlin adjudged, “attained its great­est height since its clas­si­cal age of Pushkin, Ler­mon­tov, and Gogol.”

via Mono­skop

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Russ­ian Futur­ist Vladimir Mayakovsky Read His Strange & Vis­cer­al Poet­ry

Hear the Exper­i­men­tal Music of the Dada Move­ment: Avant-Garde Sounds from a Cen­tu­ry Ago

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

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

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

in Film, Random | May 11th, 2016

WARNING: This film con­tains extreme­ly fast edit­ing, flash­es of light, abrupt changes in image and sound.

Back in 2001, Matt Bucy had the inspi­ra­tion to do some­thing tru­ly orig­i­nal — take the entire Wiz­ard of Oz, cut it up, and put it back together–this time in alpha­bet­i­cal order. And that’s pre­cise­ly what he did sev­er­al years lat­er, in 2004. A coder, Bucy cre­at­ed an app that made it easy to decon­struct the beloved 1939 film. He told Vox:

That [app] spit out a big text file with all the words and their loca­tions in the film, which I then import­ed into a spread­sheet, sort­ed in alpha­bet­i­cal and then chrono­log­i­cal order, and fed into anoth­er lit­tle pro­gram that took the sort­ed list and pro­duced the edit. So basi­cal­ly, it was edit­ed in Excel.…

All told, I think it took about sev­en days spread out over a cou­ple of months. Dis­as­sem­bly was mind-bend­ing in itself. It was lit­er­al­ly hard to talk after mov­ing word by word, or syl­la­ble by syl­la­ble, through the film. Eng­lish stopped sound­ing like lan­guage, and at times I had to stop because I could not fig­ure out what a word was — I just could­n’t hear it right.

When final­ly alpha­bet­ized, the film, says Bucy, had a sur­pris­ing ener­gy to it. A cer­tain je ne sais quoi. Yes it’s hard to describe. Maybe you can put your own words to it.

In 2016, Bucy final­ly made the alpha­bet­ized Wiz­ard of Oz avail­able to the rest of world. You can watch it here. And do heed the warn­ing above.

via Vox

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Com­plete Wiz­ard of Oz Series, Avail­able as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

Watch the Ear­li­est Sur­viv­ing Filmed Ver­sion of The Wiz­ard of Oz (1910)

Dark Side of the Rain­bow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wiz­ard of Ozin One of the Ear­li­est Mash-Ups

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170 Renowned Academics Talk About Why They Disbelieve, or Believe, in God

in Philosophy, Physics, Religion, Science | May 11th, 2016

Whether we choose to affil­i­ate with any sort of athe­ist move­ment or not, many peo­ple raised in the­is­tic reli­gions came over time to see God as a lit­er­ary char­ac­ter in ancient mytholo­gies and his­tor­i­cal fic­tions, as a place­hold­er for human igno­rance, or as a per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of humanity’s great­est fears and desires. The notion that such a per­son­al super-being actu­al­ly exists has become for many of us, in William James’ terms, a “dead hypoth­e­sis.” As physi­cist Lawrence Krauss puts it in the video above, “there’s absolute­ly no evi­dence that we need the super­nat­ur­al hand of God” to explain the uni­verse. Reli­gions give us fan­ci­ful sto­ries, illus­trate eth­i­cal (and uneth­i­cal) prin­ci­ples, and enforce trib­al loy­al­ties, but they do not describe real­i­ty as it is.

We all come to hold our beliefs, or lack there­of, about reli­gious claims for an irre­ducibly com­plex vari­ety of rea­sons that are intel­lec­tu­al as well as moral, polit­i­cal, and emo­tion­al. Can we demon­strate, how­ev­er, that “the more sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly lit­er­ate, intel­lec­tu­al­ly hon­est and objec­tive­ly scep­ti­cal a per­son is, the more like­ly they are to dis­be­lieve in any­thing super­nat­ur­al, includ­ing god”? Such is the the­sis of Dr. Jonathan Pararajasignham’s doc­u­men­tary 50 Renowned Aca­d­e­mics Speak­ing About God, which con­sists of edit­ed clips from inter­views with “elite aca­d­e­mics and pro­fes­sors at top insti­tu­tions, many of whom are also Nobel Lau­re­ates.” The claim appears on the screen in each of the three videos above and below, fram­ing the inter­view clips as mount­ing evi­dence for the con­vinc­ing case that dis­be­lief is strong­ly cor­re­lat­ed with, if not nec­es­sar­i­ly caused by, sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­cy, intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty, and skep­ti­cism.

Since his first video, Parara­jas­ing­ham has expand­ed his series to include 100 more “Renowned Aca­d­e­mics Speak­ing About God.” (See Parts Two and Three of the series above.) On the videos’ Youtube pages, he antic­i­pates a ready objec­tion, writ­ing, “I do not claim that this video demon­strates there is no God. It is not an argu­ment against God in itself, so there is no argu­ment from pop­u­lar­i­ty and author­i­ty.” If you’ve already arrived at the con­clu­sion, you’ll find it con­firmed many times over by a cast that includes physi­cists like Krauss, Richard Feyn­man, and Steven Wein­berg, philoso­phers like A.C. Gray­ing, Bertrand Rus­sell, and John Sear­le, and far too many more illus­tri­ous thinkers to name. (See a com­plete list on the Youtube pages of each video.) In addi­tion to well-known athe­ist writ­ers like Daniel Den­nett, the series also fea­tures aca­d­e­mics like anthro­pol­o­gist Pas­cal Boy­er, whose book Reli­gion Explained makes a nov­el and very per­sua­sive nat­u­ral­is­tic argu­ment for why humans have believed in the super­nat­ur­al for thou­sands of years.

Believ­ers may counter with their own list of smart peo­ple who do believe in God, and who also work in the hard sci­ences and aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy, includ­ing renowned fig­ures like Human Genome Project direc­tor Fran­cis Collins and physi­cist Free­man Dyson. Whether or not they’d wish to claim failed pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Ben Car­son or reli­gious apol­o­gists Dinesh D’Souza and Ravi Zacharias as exam­ples of “intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty and sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­cy” I couldn’t say, but all of those peo­ple and more are includ­ed in the video above, 20 Chris­t­ian Aca­d­e­mics Speak­ing About God, which Parara­jas­ing­ham pro­duced as a coun­ter­point to his 50 Aca­d­e­mics series. Find the com­plete list of names for this video, along with links to com­plete inter­views, on Youtube.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Reli­gion Cours­es

Robert Sapol­sky Explains the Bio­log­i­cal Basis of Reli­gios­i­ty, and What It Shares in Com­mon with OCD, Schiz­o­phre­nia & Epilep­sy

Richard Feyn­man on Reli­gion, Sci­ence, the Search for Truth & Our Will­ing­ness to Live with Doubt

Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Why He’s Uncom­fort­able Being Labeled an ‘Athe­ist’

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

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What Are the Most Beautifully & Creatively Shot Films of All Time? Cinematographers Pick Their Favorites

in Film | May 11th, 2016

To deter­mine the all-around great­est films of all time, the well-known Sight and Sound Direc­tors Poll sur­veys film­mak­ers them­selves. By that same log­ic, then, if you want to know which movies most excel in one par­tic­u­lar aspect, you’ll want to poll the peo­ple who work on that aspect of cin­e­ma: the actors will know which have the best act­ing, the edi­tors which have the best edit­ing, the sound design­ers which have the best sound design, the rig­ging grips which have the best-gripped rig­ging. And if you want to know the best-shot films of all time, you have only to ask the cin­e­matog­ra­phers.

In 1998, Amer­i­can Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er polled the Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Cin­e­matog­ra­phers mem­ber­ship for the best-shot films of all time. Kristo­pher Tap­ley at Hit­flix writes that the “cin­e­matog­ra­phers were asked for their top picks in two eras: films from 1894–1949 (or the dawn of cin­e­ma through the clas­sic era), and then 1950–1997, for a top 50 in each case. Then they fol­lowed up 10 years lat­er with anoth­er poll focused on the films between 1998 and 2008.”

Here are the 1894–1949 top-ten results and their cin­e­matog­ra­phers:

  1. Cit­i­zen Kane (Gregg Toland, 1941)
  2. Gone with the Wind (Ernest Haller, Ray Ren­na­han, 1939)
  3. Sun­rise (Charles Rosh­er, Karl Struss, 1927)
  4. Metrop­o­lis (Karl Fre­und, Gün­ther Rit­tau, 1927)
  5. The Wiz­ard of Oz (Harold Rosson, 1939)
  6. The Mag­nif­i­cent Amber­sons (Stan­ley Cortez, 1942)
  7. Casablan­ca (Arthur Edes­on, 1942)
  8. Bat­tle­ship Potemkin (Eduard Tisse, 1926)
  9. The Third Man (Robert Krasker, 1950)
  10. The Birth of a Nation (G.W. Bitzer, 1915)

“The choice of Gregg Toland’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy for Cit­i­zen Kane as the best in the first 45 years of motion pic­tures comes as no sur­prise,” writes Amer­i­can Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er’s George Turn­er. “No oth­er movie has been more praised, stud­ied and writ­ten about — or more panned, damned and black­list­ed.” At the time, “audi­ences in gen­er­al were put off by the ‘arty’ pho­tog­ra­phy, over­lap­ping dia­logue, unusu­al cut­ting and Welles’s pen­chant for inject­ing star­tling and often irri­tat­ing sound effects. It was years before the ‘new­ness’ of the Kane style wore off and gained wide­spread accep­tance,” and even absorbed into the main­stream.

And those from 1950–1997:

  1. Lawrence of Ara­bia (Fred­die Young, 1962)
  2. The God­fa­ther (Gor­don Willis, 1971)
  3. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Geof­frey Unworth, 1969)
  4. Days of Heav­en (Nés­tor Almen­dros, 1978)
  5. Schindler’s List (Janusz Kamin­s­ki, 1993)
  6. Apoc­a­lypse Now (Vit­to­rio Storaro, 1979)
  7. The Con­formist (Vit­to­rio Storaro, 1970)
  8. Rag­ing Bull (Michael Chap­man, 1980)
  9. Blade Run­ner (Jor­dan Cro­nen­weth, 1982)
  10. Touch of Evil (Rus­sell Met­ty, 1958)

Turn­er calls Lawrence of Ara­bia “per­haps the crown­ing achieve­ment in the long and illus­tri­ous career of direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy Fred­er­ick A. Young,” nam­ing as its most famous sin­gle image “the lin­ger­ing scene in which Omar Sharif, rid­ing a camel, is first seen as a tiny spot in a mirage on the hori­zon. In the fore­ground, Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) and an Arab youth are draw­ing water from a well when they notice the wob­bly, dis­tort­ed shape com­ing toward them. Shim­mer­ing in waves of heat and strange­ly liq­uid col­ors, the rid­er steadi­ly approach­es the well. As he gets clos­er, he is still indis­tinct, but the omi­nous thump­ing of the camel’s feet can be heard. Sharif final­ly emerges from the mirage, rais­es his rifle and shoots the Arab. The long scene car­ries a strong ele­ment of dread and sus­pense.”

Final­ly, here are the results from 1998–2008:

  1. Amélie (Bruno Del­bon­nel, 2001)
  2. Chil­dren of Men (Emmanuel Lubez­ki, 2006)
  3. Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan (Janusz Kamin­s­ki, 1998)
  4. There Will Be Blood (Robert Elswit, 2007)
  5. No Coun­try for Old Men (Roger Deakins, 2007)
  6. Fight Club (Jeff Cro­nen­weth, 1999)
  7. The Dark Knight (Wal­ly Pfis­ter, 2008)
  8. Road to Perdi­tion (Con­rad L. Hall, 2002)
  9. City of God (Cidade de Deus) (César Char­lone, 2003)
  10. Amer­i­can Beau­ty (Con­rad L. Hall, 1999)

The Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Cin­e­matog­ra­phers quotes Del­bon­nel on Amélie’s visu­al vic­to­ry: “This is real hon­or for me, espe­cial­ly con­sid­er­ing the oth­er movies in this list. These are some of the finest cin­e­matog­ra­phers, and I’m not sure I deserve to be among them, but I am very hap­py to be. They are all explor­ers.” And in that, he sums up why, when we want to know what movies to watch, we should ask the peo­ple who make movies: their real com­pe­ti­tion lies not in sim­ply gen­er­at­ing beau­ty, but in lead­ing the art form into ter­ri­to­ry unknown.

You can watch sev­er­al films on the lists–Bat­tle­ship Potemkin, Sun­rise and Metrop­o­lis–above. Find more great films in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Hit­flix

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Shots in Cin­e­ma Over the Past 100 Years

A Mes­mer­iz­ing Super­cut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side

Free: F. W. Murnau’s Sun­rise, the 1927 Mas­ter­piece Vot­ed the 5th Best Movie of All Time

Metrop­o­lis: Watch a Restored Ver­sion of Fritz Lang’s Mas­ter­piece (1927)

Watch Bat­tle­ship Potemkin and Oth­er Free Sergei Eisen­stein Films

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 358 Film­mak­ers

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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Monty Python’s Philosopher’s Football Match: The Epic Showdown Between the Greeks & Germans (1972)

in Comedy, Philosophy | May 10th, 2016

Last year, we wit­nessed a very tense, unpleas­ant show­down between Ger­many and Greece as the top­most nation in the Euro­pean Union drove its most indebt­ed coun­try to make painful, per­haps pun­ish­ing com­pro­mis­es. In one analy­sis of this hard-to-watch eco­nom­ic humiliation—for Greece, that is—The Wash­ing­ton Post made use of a much more light­heart­ed con­test between the two coun­tries, one in which Greece emerged the vic­tor after scor­ing the only goal of the match.

The soc­cer match, that is, or, if you must, football—played between Ger­man and Greek philoso­phers in 1972 and staged by Mon­ty Python. On one side, Hegel, Leib­niz, Kant, Marx, Niet­zsche, Wittgen­stein, and more (includ­ing actu­al foot­baller Franz Beck­en­bauer, a “sur­prise inclu­sion”)… on the oth­er, Socrates, Archimedes, Her­a­cli­tus, Pla­to, Dem­ocri­tus, Epicte­tus, etc…. On the side­lines of this show­down between West­ern schools of thought, Con­fu­cius served as the ref­er­ee. Even after that sin­gle goal, scored after two full halves of mean­der­ing, the two teams came into conflict—in heat­ed argu­ments about the nature of exis­tence….

I won’t con­tin­ue to bore you by explain­ing the gags—watch the sketch above. It’s great fun, if by some chance you haven’t seen it, and great fun to watch again if you have.

Filmed at the Grün­walder Sta­dion in Munich (pre­sum­ably giv­ing the Ger­mans home field advan­tage), the sketch, Ter­ry Jones recalled many years lat­er, is about the “clash of oppo­sites.” No, not the two Euro­pean coun­tries, but the oppo­sites of sports and intel­lec­tu­al exer­cise. “You can’t think about foot­ball too much,” said Jones, “you just have to do it.” This proves chal­leng­ing for our deep thinkers.

Why foot­ball? Because it’s “a team activ­i­ty,” Jones answered, “which phi­los­o­phy, as a gen­er­al rule, isn’t.” Well, most­ly. The Pythons weren’t the first to make the “incon­gru­ous” con­nec­tion. Albert Camus played the game, as a goal­keep­er, and played it quite well by all accounts. He once wrote, “all I know most sure­ly about moral­i­ty and oblig­a­tions, I owe to foot­ball.”

The injunc­tion to “just do it” wouldn’t present too much of a chal­lenge for an exis­ten­tial­ist, one would think. Philoso­pher Julian Bag­gi­ni puts the Pythons firm­ly in that school of thought, their take on it a “coher­ent, Anglo-Sax­on” one. Indeed, like Camus, the British come­di­ans rec­og­nized the absur­di­ty of life, and showed us that “the right response is to laugh at it.” They also showed us that phi­los­o­phy could be hilar­i­ous, and made a clas­sic sketch aca­d­e­mics could use to refute charges they’re a dour, humor­less lot.

It should come as no sur­prise that the Python “most inter­est­ed in the sub­ject” of phi­los­o­phy and com­e­dy was John Cleese—whom we’ve fea­tured here many times for his tal­ents in com­bin­ing the two. Cleese, writes Bag­gi­ni, is “on record as say­ing that com­e­dy and deep thought can go hand in hand. ‘You and I could talk about the mean­ing of life, or edu­ca­tion, or mar­riage,’ Cleese once told a jour­nal­ist, ‘and we could be laugh­ing a lot, and it doesn’t mean that what we’re talk­ing about isn’t seri­ous.’”

Inspired by the Pythons’ serio-com­ic love of learn­ing, Bag­gi­ni, and oth­er philoso­phers like A.C. Grayling and Nigel War­bur­ton, along with come­di­ans, his­to­ri­ans, and jour­nal­ists, decid­ed to restage the Ger­many-Greek match in 2010. Where the Pythons indi­rect­ly boost­ed intel­lec­tu­al pur­suits in the course of mock­ing them, the par­tic­i­pants in this “game”—such as it was—explicitly sought to pro­mote “Rea­son­ing,” the “fourth R” in “Read­ing, W®iting, and A®ithmetic.”

See them bum­ble around on the pitch here and gen­er­al­ly have a good time mak­ing philo­soph­i­cal fools of them­selves to the strains of Mon­ty Python’s row­dy anthem “The Philoso­pher’s Song.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mon­ty Python Sings “The Philosopher’s Song,” Reveal­ing the Drink­ing Habits of Great Euro­pean Thinkers

John Cleese Touts the Val­ue of Phi­los­o­phy in 22 Pub­lic Ser­vice Announce­ments for the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion

Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail Re-Imag­ined as an Epic, Main­stream Hol­ly­wood Film

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

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A Clever Supercut of Writers Struggling with Writer’s Block in 53 Films: From Barton Fink to The Royal Tenenbaums

in Film, Writing | May 10th, 2016

Quite patient­ly, Ben Watts cut apart and stitched togeth­er scenes from 53 films (find a com­plete list here) show­ing char­ac­ters suf­fer­ing through writer’s block. Adap­ta­tion, Bar­ton Fink, Shake­speare in Love, The Roy­al Tenen­baums, and, yes, Throw Mom­ma From the Train–they’re among the films fea­tured in the 4‑minute super­cut above. If you give the clip a lit­tle time, you’ll see that the super­cut has an arc to it. It tells a tale, and has an end­ing that Hol­ly­wood would love.

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via AV Club

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a 44-Minute Super­cut of Every Woody Allen Stam­mer, From Every Woody Allen Film

A Mes­mer­iz­ing Super­cut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side

Books in the Films of Wes Ander­son: A Super­cut for Bib­lio­philes

A Great Com­pi­la­tion of “The Lick” Found in Music Every­where: From Coltrane & Stravin­sky, to Christi­na Aguil­era

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