Stream Marc Maron’s Excellent, Long Interview with The Band’s Robbie Robertson

in Music | February 2nd, 2017

Image of Robertson (left) and Bob Dylan (right) by Jim Summaria, via Wikimedia Commons

A quick heads up: Marc Maron released this week a long, probing and quite excellent interview with The Band’s Robbie Robertson. The conversation gives you:

the full lowdown on the history of The Band, from its origins as a backing group to its final bow with The Last Waltz. Robbie talks about being with Bob Dylan when he went electric and dealing with the blowback of that, and he explains how he came to have such a great working relationship with Martin Scorsese on many of the director’s films.

You can stream the interview below. It’s worth listening to Maron’s impassioned monologue. But if you want to skip straight to the interview itself, then jump to the 15 minute mark.

Robertson recently published a new memoir called Testimony, and I should point out that you can download it as a free audiobook if you take part in Audible.com’s 30 day free trial program. Get details on Audible’s free trial here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

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Martin Scorsese Captures Levon Helm and The Band Performing “The Weight” in The Last Waltz

Jeff Bridges Narrates a Brief History of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes

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Hear an Hour of the Jazzy Background Music from the Original 1967 Spider-Man Cartoon

in Comics/Cartoons, Music | February 2nd, 2017

Ray Ellis had a six-decade career as a producer, arranger, and jazz composer. And while he’s best known for arranging music for Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin (1958), he also enjoyed a long career orchestrating music for television. Working under a pseudonym “Yvette Blais” (his wife’s name), Ellis composed background music for the cartoon studio Filmation between 1968 and 1982. And, during the late 60s, he notably created the background and incidental music for the original Spider-Man cartoons.

Above, hear Ray Ellis’ Spider-Man soundtrack. The show’s talking parts and sound effects have been removed as much as possible, then “pieced back together into complete form,” by a YouTuber who uses the moniker “11db11.” All of the music from Season 1 is included, plus many recordings from Seasons 2 and 3. It’s worth noting that the 52 episodes from the original 1967 Spider-Man TV series have been completely restored. You can purchase them on DVD online.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

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!

via Retroist

Download Over 22,000 Golden & Silver Age Comic Books from the Comic Book Plus Archive

Crime Jazz: How Miles Davis, Count Basie & Duke Ellington Created Soundtracks for Noir Films & TV

Watch Miles Davis Improvise Music for Elevator to the Gallows, Louis Malle’s New Wave Thriller (1958)

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20,000 Letters, Manuscripts & Artifacts From Sigmund Freud Get Digitized and Made Available Online

in Archives, Psychology | February 2nd, 2017

In his introduction to the 2010 essay collection Freud and Fundamentalism, Stathis Gourgouris defines fundamentalism as “thought that disavows multiplicities of meaning, abhors allegorical elements, and strives toward an exclusionary orthodoxy.” While there may be both religious and secular versions of such ideologies worldwide, we can trace the word itself to an Evangelical movement in the U.S., and to a set of beliefs that endures today among around a third of all Americans and has “animated America’s culture wars for over eighty years,” writes David Adams. The fundamentalist movement first took shape in 1920, just as Sigmund Freud wrote and published his Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

It was in that book that Freud introduced the concept of the “death drive.” Adams argues that “the ‘fundamentalist’ and the ‘death drive,’ are twins: they came into being simultaneously,” and “their simultaneity is not merely an accident. Both of these concepts are responding to the profound cultural and psychological crisis resulting from the First World War.” Every calamity since World War I has seemed to reanimate that early 20th century struggle between modernism—with its pluralist values and emphasis on creativity and experiment—and fundamentalism, with its compulsion for rigid hierarchy and destruction. And we might see, as Adams does, such cultural conflicts as analogous to those Freud wrote of between Eros—the pleasure principle—and the drive toward death.

The Great War turned Freud’s thoughts in this direction, as did the racism and anti-Semitism taking hold in both Europe and the U.S. His theory of an instinctual drive toward the destruction of self and others seemed to anticipate the horror of the World War yet to come. Freud integrated the concept into his social theory ten years later in Civilization and its Discontents, in which he wrote that “the inclination to aggression” was “the greatest impediment to civilization.” While meditating on the death instinct as a psychoanalytic and social concept, Freud also pondered his own mortality. Just above, you can see the draft of a death notice that he wrote for himself during the 1920s. This comes to us from the Library of Congress’s new collection of Sigmund Freud papers, which contains artifacts and manuscripts dating from the 6th century B.C.E. (a Greek statue) to correspondence discovered in the late 90s.

The “bulk of the material,” writes the LoC, dates “from 1891 to 1939,” and the “digitized collection documents Freud’s founding of psychoanalysis, the maturation of psychoanalytic theory, the refinement of its clinical technique, and the proliferation of its adherents and critics.” Much of this archive may be of interest only to the specialist scholar of Freud’s life and work, with “legal documents, estate records… school records” of the Freud children, and other mundane bureaucratic paperwork. But there are also letters representing “nearly six hundred correspondents,” such as Freud’s onetime protégé Carl Jung and Albert Einstein, with whom Freud corresponded in 1932 on the subject of “Why war?” (See Freud’s letter to Einstein above.)

The documents are nearly all in German and the handwritten letters, notes, and drafts will be difficult to read even for speakers of the language. Yet, there are also artifacts like the 1936 portrait of Freud at the top, by Victor Krausz, the pocket notebook Freud carried between 1907 and 1908, just above, and—below—a picture of a pocket watch given to Freud by physician Max Schur, whose family left Austria with Freud’s in 1938. You can browse the online collection of over 20,000 items by date, name, location, and other indices, and all images are downloadable in high resolution scans.

The Famous Letter Where Freud Breaks His Relationship with Jung (1913)

Albert Einstein & Sigmund Freud Exchange Letters and Debate How to Make the World Free from War (1932)

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

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The Filmmaking of Martin Scorsese Demystified in 6 Video Essays

in Film | February 2nd, 2017

Some filmmakers of the 1970s “New Hollywood” era have passed away, retired, or faded into relative obscurity, but each movie Martin Scorsese makes still meets with great interest from critics and moviegoers alike. His latest picture Silence, despite its outwardly dry subject matter of 17th-century Jesuit priests in Japan, has remained a subject of conversation and indeed debate since its release at the end of last year. Coincidentally, its title evokes one of the signature techniques that have kept his work engaging over the decades, no matter its story, setting, or theme: his unconventional and powerful use of moments without sound or music, explored in the Every Frame a Painting video essay “The Art of Silence” above.

One especially effective example of Scorsese’s silence comes from Goodfellas, quite possibly the most acclaimed of his gangster movies — and indeed, one of the most acclaimed works in his robust filmography.

The “film breakdown” from Film-Drunk Love above gets into what, exactly, has already solidified this quarter-century-old film into a classic, highlighting its use of freeze-frames to emphasize particularly significant moments in the life of its young mobster protagonist as well as the importance of that protagonist’s wife and other female characters in motivating or observing the events of this highly male-oriented story, one that fits well among those of Scorsese’s favorite subjects, a list that includes the police, boxers, investment bankers, Jesus Christ, and the Rolling Stones.

Scorsese’s movies may depict a man’s world, but as James Brown once sang, it wouldn’t be nothing without a woman — and this filmmaker certainly knows it. The Press Play video essay above examines the indispensable presence of women in his work, who offer ferocity, temptation, manipulation, judgment, and motivation, and often a combination of all of the above and more, but never friendship. “Men can’t be friends with women, Howard,” says Cate Blanchett’s Katharine Hepburn to Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled mogul in The Aviator. “They must possess them or leave them be. It’s a primitive urge from caveman days. It’s all in Darwin: hunt the flesh, kill the flesh, eat the flesh. That’s the male sex all over.”

But Scorsese works in cinema, after all, and none of these elements would have a fraction of their impact if not delivered with the keen visual sense on display since his elementary-school days. We’ve previously featured the video essays of Antonios Papantoniou, which provide technical shot-by-shot breakdowns of how master filmmakers assemble their most memorable sequences. Scorsese’s filmography can sometimes seem made up of nothing other than memorable sequences, but Papantoniou picks one from Cape Fear where Scorsese’s wide-angle lenses, “constant motion,” “ultra quick shots,” and “unsettling angles and zooms,” the essay argues, put the viewer in the protagonist’s place “and project to us his private horror.”

Cape Fear came, of course, as a remake—starring Robert de Niro and Nick Nolte—of the eponymous 1962 psychological thriller with Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck. Scorsese, perhaps America’s first openly cinephilic big-name director, has made no secret of his knowledge of and enthusiasm for this history of his chosen medium. In the Goodfellas breakdown, for example, he describes that picture as an homage to the decades of gangster movies that preceded it. “Equipped with encyclopedic knowledge of the medium, he draws from its past to inform his work,” argues Steven Benedict in his video essay “The Journeys of Martin Scorsese,” a look at how that mastery of what has come before allows his own films to not just “explore the human experience” but to “expand cinema’s ability to express that experience.”

In 2015 we featured Scorsese’s list of 85 films every aspiring filmmaker needs to see (this in addition to his 39 essential foreign films for the young filmmaker), all of which he mentioned during a four-hour interview granted to Fast Company. The Flavorwire video essay above illustrates Scorsese’s words with clips from the movies he recommends, making a crash-course “Martin Scorsese film school” that encompasses everything from Jennifer Jones shooting Gregory Peck in The Duel in the Sun to the “self-consciousness” of Citizen Kane’s style to the testament to “the power of movies to effect change in the world, to interact with life and fortify the soul” that is neorealism. From which cinematic tradition — or set of traditions — will Scorsese draw, and in the process expand and transform, next? No doubt this tireless auteur is just as excited to reveal it as we are to find out.

Martin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imaginative Short Works

Revisit Martin Scorsese’s Hand-Drawn Storyboards for Taxi Driver

11-Year-Old Martin Scorsese Draws Storyboards for His Imagined Roman Epic Film, The Eternal City

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

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

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Animated Video Tells the Story of Jean-Paul Sartre & Albert Camus’ Famous Falling Out (1952)

in Life, Philosophy | February 1st, 2017

Yesterday we wrote about Albert Camus’ role as the editor of Combat, a newspaper that emerged from a French Resistance cell and played a central role in the ideological conflicts of post-war France. Camus wrote essay after essay about the problems of violent extremism and the complications inherent in forming a new democratic civil order. Although he briefly fought alongside Communists in the resistance, and stood in solidarity with their cause, Camus would split with his Marxist allies after the war and come to define his own anarchist political philosophy, one he described as “modest… free of all messianic elements and devoid of any nostalgia for an earthly paradise.”

Camus gave the fullest exposition of his position in The Rebel, a critique of revolutionary violence on both the left and right. Published in 1951, this compelling, impressionistic work is an ethics as much as a politics–indeed, the two were inseparable for Camus. To proceed otherwise was a form of nihilism that would only end in profound unfreedom. “Nihilist thought,” he wrote in the chapter on “Moderation and Excess,” ignores the limits of human nature; “nothing any longer checks it in its course and it reaches the point of justifying total destruction or unlimited conquest.”

Fascism and Nazism were not far from Camus’ mind when he wrote these words. But he also referred to the increasingly doctrinaire Stalinism of his close friend and fellow existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who, writes Sam Dresser at Aeon, read The Rebel with “disgust.” Sartre published a scathing review in his journal, Les Temps Modernes. Camus sent a long reply, and Sartre countered with what Volker Hage in Der Spiegel calls a “merciless” response. “The split between the two friends,” writes Dresser, “was a media sensation,” the kind of popular feud between public intellectuals that may only happen in France.

Animated by Andrew Khosravani, the Aeon video above gives us a brief narrative of the famous falling-out. There may be “no better bust-up in the annals of philosophy than the row between” these “two titans of Existentialism.” The two fought not only over ideas, but over women, including Sartre’s famous partner Simone de Beauvoir. (Camus offended Sartre by turning down her advances.) Both Sartre and Camus “worried about how to make meaning in an essentially absurd, godless world.” But Sartre, Camus thought, abrogated the radical freedom he had written of in works like Being and Nothingness with his acceptance of dialectical materialism and his admiration for an authoritarian regime that imprisoned and murdered its own people.

Camus found the contradictions in Sartre’s thought intolerable, and he begins The Rebel with a philosophical inquiry into the ethics of killing. Can murder be justified in the name of a utopian ideal? Camus was not a pacifist—he had no problem fighting the Nazi occupation. But he categorically rejected revolutionary violence and all forms of extremism in the name of some “earthly paradise.” Sartre and Camus could not agree to disagree and went their separate ways, and Camus died in a car accident in 1960. In a heartfelt appreciation that Sartre penned shortly before his own death 20 years later, he called Camus, “probably my only good friend.”

NOTE: The creator of this video is now looking to raise funds to produce new animations about philosophical feuds. Please consider contributing to their Kickstarter campaign.

Sartre Writes a Tribute to Camus After His Friend-Turned-Rival Dies in a Tragic Car Crash: “There Is an Unbearable Absurdity in His Death”

Albert Camus Writes a Friendly Letter to Jean-Paul Sartre Before Their Personal and Philosophical Rift

The Existentialism Files: How the FBI Targeted Camus, and Then Sartre After the JFK Assassination

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

T.S. Eliot’s Classic Poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Gets Adapted into a Hip Modern Film

in Film, Poetry | February 1st, 2017

T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” gives us a psychological portrait of a neurotic character who eloquently perseverates on the nature of his existence and the weakness of his will. The poem is a dream, but not an erotic one. Prufrock’s libido is too tied up in knots of self-doubt and self-consciousness for that. Though he moves through a high class brothel, he hardly ever seems to touch another person, asking himself repeatedly, “Do I dare?”

“I am no prophet,” muses Prufrock, his name conjuring a kind of gaunt Puritanical figure who fears that “the eternal Footman” and the women who come and go are laughing at him. Prufrock is pathetic and ridiculous, and he knows it. He escapes from the hell that is his life (the poem opens with an epigraph from Dante’s Inferno) with elaborate symbolist daydreams. He is a dandyish version of James Thurber’s Walter Mitty.

You may be forgiven for seeing few of these qualities in the central character of “A Lovesong,” a short film by director Laura Scrivano and starring Daniel Henshall (from the AMC series TURN: Washington’s Spies). They are not there. The project supposedly arose from Henshall’s own fascination with the poem. But in this adaptation of it, Prufrock—if we can call Henshall’s character by that name—seems to have no trouble with his libido.

Henshall’s solitary figure is pensive, brooding, and hip—a whiskey-sipping Brooklyn flâneur—moving between a seductive nighttime New York and a sleeping lover in bed, recalling perhaps Prufrock’s reference to “one-night cheap hotels.” The film is a unique interpretation of Eliot’s commentary on modern alienation, one perhaps suited to our moment. Yet, we would half-expect that any contemporary Prufrock would wander the streets lost in his smartphone, fretting over his lack of sufficient “likes.”

For contrast to this stylish reimaging of “Prufrock,” we can hear Eliot himself read from the poem just above.

Young T.S. Eliot Writes “The Triumph of Bullsh*t” and Gives the English Language a New Expletive (1910)

T.S. Eliot’s Radical Poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Read by Anthony Hopkins and Eliot Himself

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

John Cage Had a Surprising Mushroom Obsession (Which Began with His Poverty in the Depression)

in Food & Drink, Music | February 1st, 2017

“You know that my hobby is hunting wild mushrooms,” says John Cage in the 1990 reading at Harvard University you can hear above. “I was sure there was a haiku poem — Japanese — that would have to do with mushrooms, because haikus are related to the seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter, and fall is the period for mushrooms.” Having found a suitably autumnal piece of verse by seventeenth-century poet-saint Matsuo Bashō featuring a mushroom and a leaf, Cage first reads the Japanese-language original, then offers translations, his favorite being this loose interpretation: “What leaf? What mushroom?” Perhaps we’d expect that from a more-zen-than-zen avant-garde composer best known for four minutes and thirty-three seconds without music.

But Cage’s mushroom hobby may come as more of a surprise, let alone the fact that it turns out to have gone much deeper than a hobby. “He won a mushroom quiz contest in 1958 on Italian television,” writes the New York Times’ Edward Rothstein in a review of For the Birds, Cage’s book of conversations with philosopher Daniel Charles. “In the 1960s he supplied a New York restaurant with edible fungi. He led mushroom outings at the New School. He knows a Lactarius Piperatus burns the tongue when raw but is delicious when cooked. He has even had his stomach pumped. As Marcel Duchamp wrote, inscribing a chess book for his cagey friend, ‘Dear John look out: yet another poisonous mushroom.’ ”

Cage happened upon mushrooms, quite literally, while living in Carmel during the Depression. “I didn’t have anything to eat,” he tells composer and filmmaker Henning Lohner in a conversation collected in Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art. But he knew from “tradition” that “mushrooms were edible and that some of them are deadly. So I picked one of the mushrooms and went in the public library and satisfied myself that it was not deadly, that it was edible, and I ate nothing else for a week.” So began his journey to the status he called “amateur mushroom hunter,” albeit one with a professional breadth of working mycological knowledge.

“Fascinated by their haphazard growth, the artist went on mushroom hunts, studied fungi identification, and even collected them,” writes Artsy’s Sarah Gottesman. He “crystallized his mushroom obsession by co-founding the New York Mycological Society, along with some of his students from the New School,” and even “made a living by regularly supplying New York restaurants like the Four Seasons with the pickings from his mushroom hunts.” His Mushroom Book, a collaboration with mycologist Alexander H. Smith and artist Lois Long, came out in 1972, the year after he gifted his fungi collection to the University of California, Santa Cruz.

And yet in his beloved mushrooms, Cage found the same escape from the pre-cast strictures of logic and reason that he did in sound (or indeed in the brief burst of sense impression distilled in haiku): “It’s useless to pretend to know mushrooms,” he says to Charles in For the Birds. ”They escape your erudition.” Hyperallergic’s Allison Meier, in a piece on the Horticultural Society of New York exhibition of his work as a naturalist, also sees the possibility of “parallels between his free-thinking music and the unstructured way mushrooms sprout up haphazardly,” but points out that, in images of “Cage frolicking with his mushroom basket” or “the playful wind of words in the Mushroom Book,” we see that “this really was a passion in its own right” — and one, like his passion for music, that could produce unpredictably delicious results.

via Artsy

The Music of Avant-Garde Composer John Cage Now Available in a Free Online Archive

The Curious Score for John Cage’s “Silent” Zen Composition 4’33”

How to Get Started: John Cage’s Approach to Starting the Difficult Creative Process

Listen to John Cage’s 5 Hour Art Piece: Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)

John Cage Unbound: A New Digital Archive Presented by The New York Public Library

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch “Geometry of Circles,” the Abstract Sesame Street Animation Scored by Philip Glass (1979)

in Animation, Music, Television | January 31st, 2017

Look into the childhood of any highly innovative American artist of the past couple generations, and you’ll probably find at least a trace of Sesame Street. The long-running children’s public television series, though widely regarded as a sound source of entertainment and education for the country’s youngsters, has also done more than its part to expose its quite literally growing audience to the vast possibilities of creation. This has proven especially so in the realm of music, where the show’s performing guests have included Herbie Hancock, Nina Simone, and Grace Slick — to name just three of the ones we’ve previously featured here.

But Sesame Street, known in its heyday for a steadfast refusal to talk down to its viewers, no matter how small, has also demonstrated a reach far outside rock, pop, and soul. In 1979 it aired “Geometry of Circles,” a series of four animations with music by minimalist, “repetitive structure”-oriented composer Philip Glass, who turns 80 years old today. Producer Cathryn Aison, according to the Muppet Wiki, commissioned Glass to score her visual work, whose storyboards had already gotten the go-ahead from Children’s Television Workshop.

The music she received from Glass to accompany this show of shape, line, and color “underscores the animation in a style that closely resembles the ‘Dance’ numbers and the North Star vignettes written during the same time period as his Einstein on the Beach opera.”

“Glass has written scores to The Truman Show and Notes on a Scandal and his style is much imitated,” writes Telegraph “opera novice” Sameer Rahim by way of background on the composer’s wide range of other work in a review of his five-hour formalist collaboration with experimental theater director Robert Wilson. “Anyone, like me, born in 1981 has absorbed his musical grammar without realising.” Though a few years too young to have caught “Geometry of Circles” in its first run (and having grown up in the wrong country in any case), the willingness of creators like Glass to work in all kinds of settings, and the willingness of venues like Sesame Street to have them, planted the seeds for countless careers, both today’s and tomorrow’s, in art, in mathematics, and no doubt even in experimental opera.

Below you can listen to an 47-track collection of Glass’ work. The Spotify playlist is simply called, “This is: Philip Glass.” If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here.

Related Content:

A Minimal Glimpse of Philip Glass

Watch Philip Glass Remix His Own Music—Then Try it Yourself With a New App

‘The Ballad of the Skeletons’: Allen Ginsberg’s 1996 Collaboration with Philip Glass and Paul McCartney

Watch Jazzy Spies: 1969 Psychedelic Sesame Street Animation, Featuring Grace Slick, Teaches Kids to Count

Watch Nina Simone Sing the Black Pride Anthem, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” on Sesame Street (1972)

Watch Herbie Hancock Rock Out on an Early Synthesizer on Sesame Street (1983)

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Stream Marc Maron’s Excellent, Long Interview with The Band’s Robbie Robertson

Hear an Hour of the Jazzy Background Music from the Original 1967 Spider-Man Cartoon

20,000 Letters, Manuscripts & Artifacts From Sigmund Freud Get Digitized and Made Available Online

The Filmmaking of Martin Scorsese Demystified in 6 Video Essays

Animated Video Tells the Story of Jean-Paul Sartre & Albert Camus’ Famous Falling Out (1952)

T.S. Eliot’s Classic Poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Gets Adapted into a Hip Modern Film

John Cage Had a Surprising Mushroom Obsession (Which Began with His Poverty in the Depression)

Watch “Geometry of Circles,” the Abstract Sesame Street Animation Scored by Philip Glass (1979)

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