Tony Conrad’s 200-Hour Avant-Garde Piano Composition, “Music & the Mind of the World”: Now Free Online for the First Time

in Music | March 13th, 2017

Last year, Tony Con­rad–an avant-garde video artist, exper­i­men­tal film­mak­er, musi­cian, com­pos­er, and sound artist–died at the age of 76. In its obit­u­ary, The New York Times wrote:

Mr. Con­rad was relent­less and rig­or­ous in expand­ing the para­me­ters of the fields in which he worked. His ear­ly musi­cal com­po­si­tions, like “Four Vio­lins” (1964), were high-vol­ume sus­tained drones. His first film, “The Flick­er” (1966), cre­at­ed a pul­sat­ing stro­bo­scop­ic effect with alter­nat­ing black and white frames. It was pre­ced­ed by a stern warn­ing that the film could induce epilep­tic seizures in cer­tain spec­ta­tors and that audi­ence mem­bers remained in the the­ater at their own risk.

Anoth­er work that else­where gets spe­cial men­tion is “Music and the Mind of the World,” a piano com­po­si­tion com­pris­ing over 200 hours of record­ed music. Influ­en­tial but lit­tle heard, “Music and the Mind of the World” fea­tures “the sounds of prac­tic­ing, bang­ing on the keys, for­mal exer­cis­es, exper­i­ments with the har­mon­ic sonor­i­ty of the piano itself, and even ‘On Top of Old Smokey’.” Begun in 1976 and com­plet­ed in 1982,“Music and the Mind of the World” is a “total encounter between an impro­vis­ing per­former and the cen­tral instru­ment of West­ern musi­cal cul­ture.”

For the first time, that influ­en­tial piece has now been pub­lished and made avail­able online for free on Youtube (above), or at this ded­i­cat­ed web­site. Set aside a big chunk of time and start stream­ing.

To learn more about the con­cep­tu­al under­pin­nings of this avant-garde cre­ation, read this inter­view with Con­rad. (I’d sug­gest click­ing here and doing a key­word search for “Could you tell me some­thing about your late 70s music, such as Music and the Mind of the World?”).

via @WFMU

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Acclaimed Japan­ese Jazz Pianist Yōsuke Yamashita Plays a Burn­ing Piano on the Beach

Ital­ian Pianist Ludovi­co Ein­au­di Plays a Grand Piano While Float­ing in the Mid­dle of the Arc­tic Ocean

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Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation?: An Introduction to the Mind-Boggling “Simulation Argument”

in Computer Science, Games, Philosophy, Technology | March 10th, 2017

The idea that we are liv­ing in a vast com­put­er sim­u­la­tion as hyper-sophis­ti­cat­ed sim­u­lat­ed char­ac­ters with lim­it­ed self-aware­ness sounds like the kind of thing that issues forth from stoned phi­los­o­phy majors in late night dorm room ses­sions. And no doubt it has, thou­sands of times over, espe­cial­ly after 1999, when The Matrix debuted and turned an amal­gam of Pla­to, Descartes, Berke­ley, and oth­er meta­physi­cians into a then-cut­ting-edge sci-fi kung fu flick.

But is it a ridicu­lous idea? The obvi­ous objec­tion that first aris­es is: how could we pos­si­bly ever know? Com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed char­ac­ters, after all, have no abil­i­ty to step beyond the con­fines of the worlds designed for them by pro­gram­mers, a lim­i­ta­tion illus­trat­ed when one reach­es a dead-end in a game and finds that, while there may be the image of a for­est or a field, the game design­ers have seen no need to actu­al­ly cre­ate the envi­ron­ment. Our char­ac­ter bumps up against the game’s edge stu­pid­ly, until we tog­gle the con­trols and move it back into the pre­scribed field of play.

But (fire up your bongs), does the char­ac­ter know it’s reached a dead end? And if the uni­verse is a sim­u­la­tion, who’s run­ning the damned thing? And why? Wel­come to “the sim­u­la­tion argu­ment,” a the­o­ry endorsed by philoso­pher and futur­ol­o­gist Nick Bostrom, Tes­la and Space X founder Elon Musk, and quite a few oth­er non-dorm-dwelling thinkers. “Many peo­ple have imag­ined this sce­nario over the years,” writes Joshua Roth­man at The New York­er, “usu­al­ly while high. But recent­ly, a num­ber of philoso­phers, futur­ists, sci­ence-fic­tion writ­ers, and technologists—people who share a near-reli­gious faith in tech­no­log­i­cal progress—have come to believe that the sim­u­la­tion argu­ment is not just plau­si­ble, but inescapable.”

Giv­en their qua­si-reli­gious bent, are these tech­nol­o­gists and futur­ists sim­ply replac­ing a cre­ator-god with a cre­ator-coder to flat­ter them­selves? Judge for your­self, first­ly per­haps by lis­ten­ing to Musk explain the con­cept in brief at a Recode Con­fer­ence above. (If you find your­self com­fort­ed by his answer, you may just be a game design­er.) Then, for a more sprawl­ing, pop-cul­tur­al dive into the sim­u­la­tion argu­ment, spend an hour with The Sim­u­la­tion Hypoth­e­sis at the top of the post, a doc­u­men­tary that—depending on the laws of your cur­rent place of residence—may or may not be enhanced by an edi­ble.

We might also ref­er­ence Bostrom’s 2003 arti­cle—or watch him describe his posi­tion in the video below. Bostrom spec­u­lates that we might be liv­ing in an “ances­tor sim­u­la­tion” run by an incred­i­bly advanced civ­i­liza­tion thou­sands of years in our future. Like Musk, writes Roth­man, he con­cludes that “we are far more like­ly to be liv­ing inside a sim­u­la­tion right now than to be liv­ing out­side of one.” The pos­si­bil­i­ty rais­es all sorts of dis­turb­ing ques­tions about the real­i­ty of choice, the moral mean­ing of our actions, and the nature of human iden­ti­ty. These are ques­tions philoso­phers (and Philip K. Dick) have always asked, but until recent­ly, they had lit­tle recourse to inde­pen­dent con­fir­ma­tion of their hypothe­ses. Now, as you’ll dis­cov­er in The Sim­u­la­tion Hypoth­e­sis, physi­cists have begun to dis­cov­er that “our uni­verse isn’t an objec­tive real­i­ty.”

It is indeed per­fect­ly plau­si­ble, giv­en the expo­nen­tial speed with which tech­nol­o­gy advances, that we will be able to run sim­u­la­tions with the same lev­el of sophis­ti­ca­tion as our real­i­ty in a mat­ter of a few gen­er­a­tions or less… pro­vid­ed we don’t destroy our­selves first or com­plete­ly lose inter­est. Which answers the ques­tion of who might be run­ning the pro­gram. As with the high­er beings in Inter­stel­lar who reach back to give the dying human species a hand, “there is,” writes Roth­man, “no sanc­ti­ty or holi­ness in the sim­u­la­tion argu­ment. The peo­ple out­side the sim­u­la­tion aren’t gods,” or even aliens, “they’re us.” Or some suf­fi­cient­ly evolved ver­sion, that is, whose tech­no­log­i­cal achieve­ments would like­ly seem to us like mag­ic.

The Sim­u­la­tion Hypoth­e­sis will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Philip K. Dick The­o­rizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in “A Com­put­er-Pro­grammed Real­i­ty”

What Do Most Philoso­phers Believe? A Wide-Rang­ing Sur­vey Project Gives Us Some Idea

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix

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

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Memoranda: Haruki Murakami’s World Recreated as a Classic Adventure Video Game

in Literature, Video Games | March 10th, 2017

Haru­ki Muraka­mi has a spe­cial way of inspir­ing his fans. I write these very words, in fact, from a cof­fee shop in Seoul not just stocked with his books and the music ref­er­enced in them but named after the jazz bar he ran in Tokyo in the 1970s before becom­ing a writer. But each fan builds their own kind of mon­u­ment to the author of Nor­we­gian Wood, Hard-Boiled Won­der­land and the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chron­i­cle, and oth­er nov­els with a sen­si­bil­i­ty all their own. The Muraka­mi-heads (or per­haps Haruk­ists) at Van­cou­ver-based stu­dio Bit Byterz have cho­sen to pay elab­o­rate trib­ute to Muraka­mi by recre­at­ing his uncan­ny world with an adven­ture game called Mem­o­ran­da.

You may remem­ber this project from when we fea­tured its Kick­starter dri­ve back in 2015. Bit Byterz end­ed up rais­ing about $20,000, enabling them to release Mem­o­ran­da this year. You can buy it on Steam, or first view the launch trail­er above and get a sense of what The Verge’s Andrew Web­ster describes as a game “inspired in large part by Murakami’s sto­ries” which “cen­ters on a young woman in a vague­ly Euro­pean town who has lost her mem­o­ry — she doesn’t even remem­ber her name. (The title, Mem­o­ran­da, refers to the sticky notes she uses to remind her­self of impor­tant things.)” While not a direct adap­ta­tion of any one work of Murakami’s in par­tic­u­lar, its loca­tions, its char­ac­ters, and above all its atmos­phere come drawn from the same — to use a high­ly appro­pri­ate metaphor — well.

“I start­ed with one of his short sto­ries, and grad­u­al­ly added char­ac­ters from oth­er short sto­ries,” lead devel­op­er Sahand Sae­di told Way­point’s John Robert­son. “I tried to bring over the sur­re­al atmos­phere, as well as the lone­ly and strange char­ac­ters from the sto­ries, and hope that the gamer will feel like they are liv­ing in one of these sto­ries while play­ing.” Robert­son describes Mem­o­ran­da as “an adven­ture game in the most tra­di­tion­al sense, in terms of inter­ac­tion and pac­ing. While it might be tak­ing an enlight­ened path to adapt­ing one medi­um into anoth­er, it fol­lows well-trod­den game design routes, and sticks to estab­lished rules. You click on items or pick them up, observe them or inter­act with them, sav­ing key exam­ples to your inven­to­ry for lat­er use in puz­zles that are often abstract in their con­struc­tion.”

And so Mem­o­ran­da at once pays homage to the dis­tinc­tive real­i­ty — or rather unre­al­i­ty — of Murakami’s fic­tion and to the dis­tinc­tive gam­ing expe­ri­ence of point-and-click adven­ture games, the genre that first took shape on home com­put­ers in the 1980s and pro­duced the likes of Mani­ac Man­sion, the King’s Quest series (not to men­tion all of Sier­ra On-Line’s oth­er Quests), the Mon­key Island series, and Myst. More recent­ly it has under­gone some­thing of a renais­sance thanks to crowd­fund­ing ser­vices like Kick­starter, ever since respect­ed point-and-click adven­ture game design­er Tim Schafer raised $3.45 mil­lion to fund 2015’s Bro­ken Age. Bit Byterz may have had only a small frac­tion of that bud­get to work with, but they know, as every avid Muraka­mi read­er knows, that mere mon­ey can’t buy uncan­ni­ness.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In Search of Haru­ki Muraka­mi: A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to Japan’s Great Post­mod­ernist Nov­el­ist

An Intro­duc­tion to the World of Haru­ki Muraka­mi Through Doc­u­men­taries, Sto­ries, Ani­ma­tion, Music Playlists & More

New Video Game Inspired by 20 Haru­ki Muraka­mi Sto­ries Is Com­ing Your Way: Help Kick­start It

Read 5 Sto­ries By Haru­ki Muraka­mi Free Online (For a Lim­it­ed Time)

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. 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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Alfred Hitchcock Reveals The Secret Sauce for Creating Suspense

in Film | March 10th, 2017

Speak­ing at an Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute sem­i­nar in 1970, Alfred Hitch­cock revealed the essen­tial ingre­di­ents that went into mak­ing his films. When he stripped every­thing away, what Hitch­cock real­ly cared about was cre­at­ing sus­pense films (not mys­tery films) and get­ting the sus­pense ele­ment right. In the clip above, the direc­tor explains why sus­pense­ful scenes have to sim­mer for a time and then cool down prop­er­ly. Things can’t be brought to a rapid boil and then be quick­ly tak­en off the stove. Hitch­cock once made that mis­take in his 1936 film, Sab­o­tage. (Watch the offend­ing scene right below or find the full film here.)

Of course, Hitch­cock learned from his mis­take, and there­after shot count­less scenes where the sus­pense builds in the right way. But we par­tic­u­lar­ly want­ed to find one scene that pulls off the bomb sce­nario, and so here it goes. From 1957 to 1959, Hitch­cock pro­duced Sus­pi­cion, a tele­vi­sion series for NBC, and he per­son­al­ly direct­ed one episode called “Four O’Clock”. It fea­tures a watch­mak­er who sus­pects his wife of hav­ing an affair, and so, filled with jeal­ousy, he decides to mur­der her with a bomb made by his own hands. Things take an unex­pect­ed turn, how­ev­er, when two bur­glars tie him up in the base­ment with the tick­ing bomb. We leave you with the final, cli­mac­tic scene. You can watch the full episode on YouTube 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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

16 Free Hitch­cock Movies Online

Alfred Hitch­cock Explains the Plot Device He Called the ‘MacGuf­fin’

The Eyes of Hitch­cock: A Mes­mer­iz­ing Video Essay on the Expres­sive Pow­er of Eyes in Hitchcock’s Films

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

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Watch FLAMENCO AT 5:15, a Life-Affirming, Oscar-Winning Documentary About a Flamenco Dance Class

in Dance, Film, Life | March 10th, 2017

FLAMENCO AT 5:15, the Acad­e­my Award-win­ning short doc­u­men­tary, above, is a wel­come anti­dote to the depress­ing specter of youth­ful bod­ies in a chron­ic state of com­put­er-relat­ed pos­tur­al col­lapse.

Direc­tor Cyn­thia Scott’s thir­ty-minute vignette can­not help but show off the beau­ti­ful, high­ly trained physiques of the young dancers delv­ing into the art of fla­men­co at Canada’s Nation­al Bal­let School.

She also cap­tures the last­ing beau­ty of their instruc­tor, Susana Audeoud, then in her late 60s. Her pos­ture erect, her eyes shin­ing bright­ly in a face weath­ered by expe­ri­ence and time, Audeleoud shares one of flamenco’s great secrets—that its prac­tion­ers, unlike their coun­ter­parts in the bal­let, can con­tin­ue danc­ing until they die. (Audleoud her­self passed away on the first day of 2010, at the age of 93.)

Fla­men­co is an incred­i­bly exact­ing art, but Aude­loud and her hus­band, com­pos­er Anto­nio Rob­le­do, showed them­selves to be warm and good humored teach­ers.

All of us could ben­e­fit from fol­low­ing Aude­loud’s instruc­tions to her bare­foot pupils at the 1:10 mark. For­go your med­i­ta­tion app for a day and give it a try.

Or join the stu­dents in Robledo’s joy­ful group clap­ping exer­cise at the 8:00 mark.

Accord­ing to Aude­loud, fla­men­co dancers only dance when it’s nec­es­sary…

I know that most of us are utter­ly with­out train­ing, but it appears that we have entered a peri­od of extreme neces­si­ty.

So put on your shoes, stomp your feet, and clap as if no one is watch­ing.

You can find FLAMENCO AT 5:15 list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Grace­ful Move­ments of Kung Fu & Mod­ern Dance Revealed in Stun­ning Motion Visu­al­iza­tions

1944 Instruc­tion­al Video Teach­es You the Lindy Hop, the Dance That Orig­i­nat­ed in 1920’s Harlem Ball­rooms

Sta­tis­tics Explained Through Mod­ern Dance: A New Way of Teach­ing a Tough Sub­ject

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er whose new play. Zam­boni Godot, is now play­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Music in Quentin Tarantino’s Films: Hear a 5‑Hour, 100-Song Playlist

in Music | March 9th, 2017

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Ear­li­er this week we told you about this 326-track, 20-hour playlist of music from the films of Mar­tin Scors­ese. One of the mas­ters of jux­ta­pos­ing song with image, Scors­ese paved the way for anoth­er direc­tor with a fine record col­lec­tion, Quentin Taran­ti­no. And what do you know? There’s a sim­i­lar Spo­ti­fy playlist that you can enjoy fea­tur­ing 100 tracks and run­ning five hours. (If you need Spo­ti­fy’s soft­ware, down­load it here.)

Taran­ti­no might be more of a music geek, but he just hasn’t made as many films as Scors­ese. How­ev­er, if you came of cineaste age dur­ing the 1990s, dol­lars to donuts you had a CD of the Pulp Fic­tion sound­track in your col­lec­tion. Just like Taran­ti­no resus­ci­tat­ed John Travolta’s career, he took an obscure single–a cov­er of a Turk­ish-Ara­bic-Egypt­ian melody called “Misir­lou” by a once-pop­u­lar surf guitarist–and made it not just the open­ing track, but the sound of 1980s film­mak­ing being shot and stuffed in a trunk. (And gui­tarist Dick Dale got to have a sec­ond career from it.) The sound­track made surf instru­men­tals pop­u­lar again, Urge Overkill rel­e­vant, Neil Dia­mond cool, and insert­ed a Statler Broth­ers’ song into the col­lec­tions of thou­sands of peo­ple who wouldn’t touch coun­try with a ten foot pole.

Pri­or to this, Reser­voir Dogs used both “Lit­tle Green Bag” by George Bak­er and “Stuck in the Mid­dle with You” by Steal­ers Wheel to great effect, and the sound­track includ­ed the nar­colep­tic DJ pat­ter by come­di­an Steven Wright, but it was just an appe­tiz­er for the full Pulp Fic­tion meal.

After that, there’s still flash­es of bril­liance–Jack­ie Brown is a safe but excel­lent col­lec­tion of most­ly ‘70s soul–but the sound­tracks by them­selves don’t stand up as cul­tur­al objects in the post-CD era. Instead, there’s moments like the 5.6.7.8’s “Woo Hoo” and Tomoy­a­su Hotei’s “Bat­tle with­out Hon­or or Human­i­ty” from Kill Bill, and the goose­bump-induc­ing use of David Bowie’s “Cat Peo­ple” in an oth­er­wise peri­od cen­tric, WWII-set Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds.

In lat­er films, he’s become more of a cura­tor of Ennio Mor­ri­cone works and oth­er com­posers of the films he loves, and less of a pop mag­pie. But then, his films have dark­ened and deep­ened, and his sound­track vinyl collection–which he has col­lect­ed since a kid–just con­tin­ues to grow.
In an inter­view with Bill­board mag­a­zine, he men­tioned how inte­gral his record col­lec­tion is to his film­mak­ing process.

I am always look­ing for some cool song that I could use as a big set piece. I’ll fin­ish work and I’ll go into my record room and I’ll put on some song, and lit­er­al­ly, I can see it on the screen. I can project myself into a movie the­ater and I’m watch­ing the scene onscreen and I’m hear­ing the music and I’m imag­in­ing an audi­ence: either an audi­ence of peo­ple I know who are dig­ging it or an audi­ence of peo­ple I don’t know who are dig­ging it — they’re always dig­ging it. (laughs) And it keeps remind­ing me that I’m mak­ing a movie.

And Taran­ti­no usu­al­ly gets the rights to use what­ev­er he pleas­es because of his fame and the Quentin-bump he gives the artists: “It’s actu­al­ly quite easy to get the rights now, because I’ll use music that some peo­ple haven’t heard that much before,” he says in the same inter­view. “Then after my movie comes out, it seems like every com­mer­cial in the world buys it. They can dou­ble or triple and quadru­ple their income just by the expo­sure the movie gets it.”

Dive into this playlist and let us know any spe­cif­ic gems you find.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jim Jar­musch: The Art of the Music in His Films

Hear a Playlist of the 336 Songs Men­tioned in Bruce Springsteen’s New Mem­oir, Born to Run

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains The Art of the Music in His Films

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. 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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Akira Kurosawa’s Adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death Finally in Production, Coming in 2020

in Film, Literature | March 9th, 2017

The film­mak­ers we most respect tend not to stop work­ing until the very end, and so almost always leave pieces of incom­plete projects behind. Stan­ley Kubrick did, giv­ing Steven Spiel­berg the chance to pick up where his elder col­league left off on the sci-fi dra­ma A.I.: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence. That film began in the late 1970s as an adap­ta­tion of Bri­an Ald­iss’ short sto­ry “Super­toys Last All Sum­mer Long,” but over the decades became some­thing more tech­ni­cal­ly com­plex, and — giv­en Spiel­berg’s involve­ment — more emo­tion­al. What, now, will emerge from the res­ur­rec­tion of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa’s The Mask of the Black Death, a sim­i­lar­ly unmade adap­ta­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”?

“Chi­nese stu­dios Huayi Broth­ers and CKF Pic­tures will pro­duce the film based on the late Japan­ese filmmaker’s screen­play,” report­ed Indiewire’s Yoselin Aceve­do last week. “He start­ed pen­ning the film right after his 1975’s Der­su Uza­la.

Orig­i­nal­ly, the project was sup­posed to be filmed in 1998, but was shelved after Kuro­sawa suf­fered a stroke, and lat­er died that same year.” Kuro­sawa intend­ed to set his ver­sion of “The Masque of the Red Death” in Rus­sia, where he’d made Der­su Uza­la, and in an ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry when, accord­ing to a Cinephil­ia & Beyond post fea­tur­ing an Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the screen­play, “human­i­ty is faced with a dead­ly con­ta­gion, and people’s char­ac­ters, resilience and sur­vival are being test­ed as the soci­ety is pushed well into the brinks of despair and pos­si­ble anni­hi­la­tion.”

“The ‘Red Death,’ ” wrote Poe, “had long dev­as­tat­ed the coun­try. No pesti­lence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous.” A prince of this unnamed land sum­moned “a thou­sand hale and light-heart­ed friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclu­sion of one of his castel­lat­ed abbeys,” lav­ish­ly sup­plied behind its tight­ly barred doors. “With such pre­cau­tions the courtiers might bid defi­ance to con­ta­gion. The exter­nal world could take care of itself. In the mean­time it was fol­ly to grieve, or to think.” But months lat­er, at the stroke of mid­night dur­ing one of the prince’s mas­quer­ade balls, a “masked fig­ure which had arrest­ed the atten­tion of no sin­gle indi­vid­ual before” makes itself seen, pro­vok­ing “a buzz, or mur­mur, expres­sive of dis­ap­pro­ba­tion and sur­prise — then, final­ly, of ter­ror, of hor­ror, and of dis­gust.”

One imag­ines that such a milieu, as any­one who’s seen the omi­nous rev­el­ry on dis­play in Eyes Wide Shut, might have appealed to Kubrick as well. It cer­tain­ly appealed to pro­lif­ic “B‑movie” pro­duc­er Roger Cor­man, the man respon­si­ble for a 1964 adap­ta­tion star­ring Vin­cent Price and anoth­er 25 years lat­er star­ring Adri­an Paul from High­lander. But Kuro­sawa, a film­mak­er who showed a strong the­mat­ic inter­est in the upper class­es’ dis­re­gard for the rest of soci­ety in every­thing from katana-and-top­knots peri­od pieces like Sev­en Samu­rai to mod­ern-day crime sto­ries like High and Low, could have done Poe’s chill­ing Goth­ic tale spe­cial jus­tice. As for whether Huayi Broth­ers and CKF Pic­tures can do jus­tice to Kuro­sawa’s vision, his fans will find out in 2020 — per­haps walled tight­ly up in their home the­aters with his clas­sic pic­tures until then.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Advice to Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers: Write, Write, Write and Read

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Talk About Film­mak­ing (and Nuclear Bombs) in Six Hour Inter­view

When Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Watched Solaris with Andrei Tarkovsky: I Was “Very Hap­py to Find Myself Liv­ing on Earth”

William S. Bur­roughs Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. 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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Free Audio: Hear Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Atwood & Authors

in Audio Books, Literature | March 9th, 2017

Fyi: Pen­guin Ran­dom House and Crown Pub­lish­ing Group recent­ly pro­duced “Sea­son of Sto­ries,” an eleven-week “seri­al­ized read­ing expe­ri­ence.” It fea­tures seri­al­ized sto­ries by Jhumpa Lahiri, Mar­garet Atwood, and oth­er authors. You can stream the episodes, right here. Or you can lis­ten to them through this 60db iPhone app. We will be sure to add these to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

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:

The New Yorker’s Fic­tion Pod­cast: Where Great Writ­ers Read Sto­ries by Great Writ­ers

Three Ray­mond Carv­er Sto­ries, Read by Richard Ford, Anne Enright, and David Means

Lis­ten to 90 Famous Authors & Celebri­ties Read Great Sto­ries & Poems

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