“The joys of motoring are more or less fictional,” wrote Zelda Fitzgerald to Ludlow Fowler, a friend of her husband F. Scott, in 1920. But what an inspiring breadth of fiction they’ve inspired on the page and screen, mostly set along the seemingly endless road-miles of America. But look over to Germany, a land of drivers renowned for their love of and respect for the automobile, and you find a whole other sort of, as it were, driving-driven creativity. Most famously, 34 years after Fitzgerald wrote to Fowler, a young Düsseldorf band by the name of Kraftwerk looked to the joys of motoring and laid down their signature song: “Autobahn.”
Taking up 22 full minutes of the eponymous 1974 album (though less than three and a half as a single), “Autobahn,” which rock critic Robert Christgau described as emanating from “a machine determined to rule all music with a steel hand and some mylar,” uses the kind of electronic composition techniques Kraftwerk would go on to popularize to evoke the feeling of movement on the titular German highway system.
“We used to drive a lot,” percussionist Wolfgang Flür once recalled. “We used to listen to the sound of driving, the wind, passing cars and lorries, the rain, every moment the sounds around you are changing, and the idea was to rebuild those sounds on the synth.”
But as veteran road-trippers know, you aren’t really driving unless the driving hypnotizes you: not only should you spend prolonged stretches of time on the road, you should ideally do it to a rhythmically and temporally suitable sonic backdrop. And so we offer you this live 40-minute version of “Autobahn” which, in the words of Electronic Beats, “demonstrates what a musical force the group was back in the day,” taken from “a show in the German city of Leverkusen that fuses the group’s latter-era techno-futurism with its earlier free-jazz psychedelic freakiness.” To keep the road-robot mood rolling, why not fire up the animated “Autobahn” music video from 1979 we featured last year? But please, don’t watch while you drive — especially if there’s no speed limit.
There have been many times in American history when celebrations of the country’s multi-ethnic, ever-changing demography served as powerful counterweights to narrow, exclusionary, nationalisms. In 1855, for example, the publication of Brooklyn native Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself offered a “passionate embrace of equality,” writes Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, “the soul of democracy.” We can contrast the vibrancy and dynamism of Whitman’s vision with the violent nativism of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, who reached their peak in 1850. The movement was founded by two other New Yorkers, gang leader William “Bill the Butcher” Poole and writer Thomas R. Whitney, who asked in one of his political tracts, “What is equality but stagnation?”
Almost 100 years later, we see another nationalist movement taking hold, not only in Europe, but in the States. Before the U.S. entered World War II, its views on National Socialist Germany were decidedly ambivalent, with glowing portraits of its leader published throughout the 30s, and a sizable Nazi presence in the U.S. From 1934 to 1939, for example, German groups in the U.S. organized massive rallies in Madison Square Garden (see the first mass meeting of the “Friends of New Germany” above). Additionally, the German-American Bund promoted the Nazi Party throughout the U.S. with 70 different local chapters. These organizations held Nazi family and summer camps in New Jersey, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania…. “There were forced marches in the middle of the night to bonfires,” says historian Arnie Bernstein, “where the kids would sing the Nazi national anthem and shout ‘Sieg Heil.’”
Needless to say, these scenes made a number of minority groups and immigrants particularly nervous, especially Jews who had just escaped from Europe. One such immigrant, physicist Albert Einstein, had made the U.S. his permanent home in 1933 when he accepted a position at Princeton after living as a refugee in England. He would go on to become a forceful advocate for equality in the U.S., speaking out against the racial caste system of segregation. In 1940, Einstein gave a little-known speech at the New York World’s Fair to inaugurate an exhibit that paid “homage to the diversity of the U.S. population.” On the display, called the “Wall of Fame,” were inscribed “the names and professions of hundreds of the nation’s most notable ‘immigrants, Negroes and American Indians.’” (See the first page of the typed list above, and the full list here.)
Einstein’s speech comes to us via Speeches of Note, a new sibling of two favorite sites of ours, Letters of Note and Lists of Note. Below, you can read the full transcript of the speech, in which Einstein—having adopted the country as it had adopted him—-declaims, “these, too, belong to us, and we are glad and grateful to acknowledge the debt that the community owes them.”
It is a fine and high-minded idea, also in the best sense a proud one, to erect at the World’s Fair a wall of fame to immigrants and Negroes of distinction.
The significance of the gesture is this: it says: These, too, belong to us, and we are glad and grateful to acknowledge the debt that the community owes them. And focusing on these particular contributors, Negroes and immigrants, shows that the community feels a special need to show regard and affection for those who are often regarded as step-children of the nation—for why else this combination?
If, then, I am to speak on the occasion, it can only be to say something on behalf of these step-children. As for the immigrants, they are the only ones to whom it can be accounted a merit to be Americans. For they have had to take trouble for their citizenship, whereas it has cost the majority nothing at all to be born in the land of civic freedom.
As for the Negroes, the country has still a heavy debt to discharge for all the troubles and disabilities it has laid on the Negro’s shoulders, for all that his fellow-citizens have done and to some extent still are doing to him. To the Negro and his wonderful songs and choirs, we are indebted for the finest contribution in the realm of art which America has so far given to the world. And this great gift we owe, not to those whose names are engraved on this “Wall of Fame,” but to the children of the people, blossoming namelessly as the lilies of the field.
In a way, the same is true of the immigrants. They have contributed in their way to the flowering of the community, and their individual striving and suffering have remained unknown.
One more thing I would say with regard to immigration generally: There exists on the subject a fatal miscomprehension. Unemployment is not decreased by restricting immigration. For unemployment depends on faulty distribution of work among those capable of work. Immigration increases consumption as much as it does demand on labor. Immigration strengthens not only the internal economy of a sparsely populated country, but also its defensive power.
The Wall of Fame arose out of a high-minded ideal; it is calculated to stimulate just and magnanimous thoughts and feelings. May it work to that effect.
The speech is remarkable for its egalitarianism. The exhibit works more or less as a “who’s who” of notable personalities—all of them men. Of course, Einstein himself was one of the most notable immigrants of the age. And yet, his ethos is Whitmanian, celebrating the multitudes of laborers and artists “blossoming namelessly” and those who have “remained unknown.” The country, Einstein suggests, could not possibly be itself without its diversity of people and cultures. That same year, Einstein would pass his citizenship test, and explain in a radio broadcast, “Why I am an American.”
Many techniques shown in Bray Studios’ 1919 short How Animated Cartoons are Made, above, were rendered obsolete by digital advancements, but its 21-year-old star, animator Wallace Carlson, seems as if he would fit right in at Cal Arts or Pratt, Class of 2017.
Like many of today’s working animators, the industry pioneer got started early, getting attention (and a distribution deal!) for work made as a young teen.
His comic sensibilities also suggest that young Carlson would’ve found a place among the 21st-century’s animation greats (and soon-to-be-greats).
It doesn’t hurt that he’s cute, in an indie Williamsburg Dandy sort of way.
The vintage feel of his little instructional film is pretty hip these days. It could be the work of a very particular kind of millennial, familiar to fans of Girls, Search Party, or other shows whose characters spend a lot of time in cafes, making art that will find its greatest audience on the internet.
You know, download some silent clips from the Prelinger Archives, browse the Free Music Archive for a suitably jangly old time tune, and put it all together in iMovie, messing around with title fonts until you achieve the desired effect. That’s what Carlson might have been doing, had he been born a hundred years later.
Some of his (silent) observations about his craft still ring true.
Unless you’re working on your own thing, it’s a good idea to get the boss’ blessing on your script before embarking on the painstaking animation process.
And character eyebrow movements remain an excellent storytelling device.
Animators whose talents are more visual than verbal could take a lesson from Carlson’s kicky period dialogue—“Gee I just busted a window! Hope I don’t get pinched.”—though I’d advise against turning a character’s disability into a punchline.
While today’s young animators have little to no experience with film processing, Carlson’s exhaustion after pumping out drawing after drawing may strike a chord. The devil is still in the details for anyone seeking to produce work of a higher quality than that which can be achieved with purchase of an app.
It’s also pretty cool to see Carlson prefiguring white board animation 56 years before the invention of dry erase markers, as he demonstrates how to set a scene using his Little Rascals-esque characters Mamie and Dreamy Dud.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She used one of the alluded-to archives to create the trailer for her play, Zamboni Godot, opening in New York City next month. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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.
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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-Mansoundtrack. 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.
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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 andthe 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.
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.
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 Spiegelcalls 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.”
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