Watch Johnny Cash’s Poignant Final Interview & His Last Performance: “Death, Where Is Thy Sting?” (2003)

in Music | June 29th, 2017

“Ask some­one to name a song that always has the pow­er to reduce them to tears,” writes Inde­pen­dent cul­ture edi­tor Christo­pher Hooton, “and the chances are they’ll swift­ly reply ‘John­ny Cash. Hurt,’” the coun­try leg­end’s heart­break­ing cov­er of Trent Reznor’s masochis­tic anthem. Asked to name a music video with the same emo­tion­al res­o­nance, and you’re just as like­ly to get the same answer. I find myself tear­ing up just read­ing Hooton’s descrip­tion of it. Shot at The House of Cash, the singer’s decrepit home (and shut­tered muse­um), direc­tor Mark Romanek’s wrench­ing video speaks to us of “the tran­sience of life, the grace­less­ness of death, the Ozy­man­di­an crum­bling of an oeu­vre and the decline of a genre, an era and an atti­tude.”

It does all that, but does much more besides: the video, and Cash’s last record­ings in gen­er­al, show us a man in the depths of lovelorn grief, yet unafraid to face mor­tal­i­ty and decline and unwill­ing to deny their rav­ages. We mourn with Cash and for him, but his final per­for­mances are so riv­et­ing because, while most of us may fear death, he did not.

“Corinthi­ans 15:55,” his last orig­i­nal song—on his final, posthu­mous col­lec­tion, Ain’t No Grave—is named after the verse that asks “Death, where is thy sting?” Through­out the album, Cash sounds, writes Adam Richter, “unim­pressed by the threat of death…. Singers are almost nev­er as pre­pared as Cash was to bid adieu to all that.”

The “Hurt” video net­ted Cash, Romanek, and his team six MTV Video Music Award nom­i­na­tions. Before it won for Best Cin­e­matog­ra­phy, Cash sat down with Kurt Loder on August 20th, 2003, for what would turn out to be his final inter­view. Although he con­fess­es to a dis­taste for the work of mak­ing videos, of “Hurt,” he says, “I felt we were doing some­thing worth­while.” He talks about meet­ing Rick Rubin and mak­ing the Amer­i­can Record­ings series of albums, some of the most wide­ly praised records of his career, and the music he had always want­ed to make. And he express­es the fierce inde­pen­dence, com­pas­sion, and authen­tic­i­ty that made him such a phe­nom­e­nal writer and admirable human being.

“You can’t let peo­ple del­e­gate to you what you should do,” Cash says, point­ing at his heart, “when it’s com­ing from way in here, you know?… I wouldn’t let any­body influ­ence me into think­ing I was doing the wrong thing by singing about death, hell, and drugs.” We’re all lucky that he didn’t. Cash’s expres­sions of grief after the death of June Carter cut deep, but it was his abil­i­ty not only to play the out­law but also to empathize with peo­ple who are abused, per­se­cut­ed, and exclud­ed by the law that set him apart from oth­er coun­try and gospel singers, and made him a hero to mil­lions of peo­ple who don’t share his roots or his faith.

The month before Cash gave his final inter­view, he gave his last per­for­mance at the Carter Ranch. (Watch it above.) Less than a month after the inter­view, he was dead. In 2007, the House of Cash, the house Cash had lived in since 1968, burned to the ground. Cash sure­ly would have mourned the loss, but it would­n’t have kept him down for long, I sus­pect. Not only did he stare down death with grace, humor, and dig­ni­ty, but he faced the pains of life with those same qual­i­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John­ny Cash Sings “Man in Black” for the First Time, 1971

John­ny Cash & Joe Strum­mer Sing Bob Marley’s “Redemp­tion Song” (2002)

John­ny Cash’s Christ­mas Spe­cials, Fea­tur­ing June Carter, Steve Mar­tin, Andy Kauf­man & More (1976–79)

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

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The Female Pioneers of the Bauhaus Art Movement: Discover Gertrud Arndt, Marianne Brandt, Anni Albers & Other Forgotten Innovators

in Art, Design, History | June 29th, 2017

You’d be for­giv­en for assum­ing that the Bauhaus, the mod­ern art and design move­ment that emerged from the epony­mous Ger­man art school in the 1920s and 30s, did­n’t involve many women. Per­haps the famous near-indus­tri­al aus­ter­i­ty of its aes­thet­ic, espe­cial­ly at large scales, has stereo­typ­i­cal asso­ci­a­tions with male­ness, but also, Bauhaus’ most oft-ref­er­enced lead­ing lights — Paul Klee, Wal­ter Gropius, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlem­mer — all hap­pened to be men. But if we seek out the women of the Bauhaus, what can we learn?

“When it opened, the Bauhaus school declared itself pro­gres­sive and mod­ern and advo­cat­ed equal­i­ty for the sex­es, which was rare at the time,” says Eve­lyn Adams in her short video on the Women of the Bauhaus above. “Val­ue was placed on skill rather than gen­der. Class­es weren’t seg­re­gat­ed, and women were free to select whichev­er sub­jects they want­ed.”

This had an under­stand­able appeal, and in the school’s first year more women applied than men. But alas, “in real­i­ty, despite hav­ing rad­i­cal aspi­ra­tions, the men in charge of the school rep­re­sent­ed the soci­etal atti­tudes of the time. If every­one was wel­comed as equals, then why did none of the women reach the same lev­el of recog­ni­tion as Paul Klee or Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky?”

The sto­ry of Gertrud Arndt, one of whose self-por­traits appears above and one of whose tex­tiles appears below that, sheds some light on the answer. “She must have felt so opti­mistic,” writes the New York Times’ Alice Raw­sthorn, when she arrived at the Bauhaus school of art and design in 1923 as “a gift­ed, spir­it­ed 20-year-old who had won a schol­ar­ship to pay for her stud­ies. Hav­ing spent sev­er­al years work­ing as an appren­tice to a firm of archi­tects, she had set her heart on study­ing archi­tec­ture.” But because of a “long-run­ning bat­tle between its found­ing direc­tor, the archi­tect Wal­ter Gropius, and one of its most charis­mat­ic teach­ers, Johannes Itten, who want­ed to use the school as a vehi­cle for his qua­si-spir­i­tu­al approach to art and design,” the Bauhaus’ house, as it were, had fall­en out of order.

Alas, “Arndt was told that there was no archi­tec­ture course for her to join and was dis­patched to the weav­ing work­shop.” In recent years, the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin has put on shows to hon­or female Bauhausers like Ard­nt, tex­tile design­er Beni­ta Koch-Otte, and the­ater design­er, illus­tra­tor, and col­or the­o­rist Lou Schep­er-Berkenkamp. “The sit­u­a­tion improved after Gropius suc­ceed­ed in oust­ing Itten in 1923,” writes Raw­sthorn, hir­ing Moholy-Nagy in Itten’s place. “Hav­ing ensured that female stu­dents were giv­en greater free­dom, Moholy encour­aged one of them, Mar­i­anne Brandt, to join the met­al work­shop. She was to become one of Germany’s fore­most indus­tri­al design­ers dur­ing the 1930s,” and her 1924 tea infuser and strain­er appears just above.

Art­sy’s Alexxa Got­thardt has the sto­ries of more women of the Bauhaus, includ­ing Anni Albers, whose 1947 Knot 2 appears just above. Her oth­er work includes “a cot­ton and cel­lo­phane cur­tain that simul­ta­ne­ous­ly absorbed sound and reflect­ed light” and tapes­tries that “would go on to have a con­sid­er­able impact on the devel­op­ment of geo­met­ric abstrac­tion in the visu­al arts.” Alma Sied­hoff-Busch­er, writes Got­thardt, dared “to switch from the weav­ing work­shop to the male-dom­i­nat­ed wood-sculp­ture depart­ment,” where she invent­ed a “small ship-build­ing game,” pic­tured below and still in pro­duc­tion today, that “man­i­fest­ed Bauhaus’s cen­tral tenets: its 22 blocks, forged in pri­ma­ry col­ors, could be con­struct­ed into the shape of a boat, but could also be rearranged to allow for cre­ative exper­i­men­ta­tion.”

Bauhaus art and design took crit­i­cism in its hey­day, as it still takes crit­i­cism now, for a cer­tain cold­ness and steril­i­ty — or at least the work of the men of the Bauhaus does. But the more we dis­cov­er about the less­er-known women of the Bauhaus, the more we see how they man­aged to bring no small degree of human­i­ty to its artis­tic fruits, even to those of its most rig­or­ous branch­es. “There is no dif­fer­ence between the beau­ti­ful sex and the strong sex,” Gropius once insist­ed in a some­what self-defeat­ing pro­nounce­ment, but the dif­fer­ences between the male and female Bauhausers — in their per­son­al­i­ties as well as in their work — make the move­ment look all the rich­er in ret­ro­spect.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books & Jour­nals for Free: Gropius, Klee, Kandin­sky, Moholy-Nagy & More

3,900 Pages of Paul Klee’s Per­son­al Note­books Are Now Online, Pre­sent­ing His Bauhaus Teach­ings (1921–1931)

Kandin­sky, Klee & Oth­er Bauhaus Artists Designed Inge­nious Cos­tumes Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Before

Watch an Avant-Garde Bauhaus Bal­let in Bril­liant Col­or, the Tri­adic Bal­let First Staged by Oskar Schlem­mer in 1922

32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Avail­able Online by Har­vard Muse­um Web­site

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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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The Animated Score for Penderecki’s “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima,” the Horrifying Composition Featured in Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Cuarón’s Children of Men & Other Films

in Music | June 29th, 2017

If you were watch­ing episode 8 of Twin Peaks on Sun­day night, you might still be recov­er­ing from an over­dose of uncut, pure David Lynch. We’re not here to sum­ma­rize the episode but instead to point to the musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment to one of the most star­tling sequences in all of the director’s fil­mog­ra­phy: The slow track­ing aer­i­al shot into the heart of the first nuclear test mush­room cloud, right into the mid­dle of hell itself (see below).

Although Ange­lo Badala­men­ti is back on board as the show’s com­pos­er, Lynch chose to use for this scene the mod­ern clas­si­cal work by Krzysztof Pen­derec­ki, Thren­ody to the Vic­tims of Hiroshi­ma, one of the most har­row­ing works of the 20th cen­tu­ry.

The eight-and-a-half minute composition—-which you can lis­ten to while fol­low­ing the composer’s abstract score in the video above—-was writ­ten by the Pol­ish com­pos­er for 52 strings, noth­ing else. This accounts for the shrill, all tre­ble nature of the piece. The title and ded­i­ca­tion came lat­er, only after Pen­derec­ki had lis­tened to it being per­formed.

“I was struck by the emo­tion­al charge of the work,” Pen­derec­ki said, “I searched for asso­ci­a­tions and, in the end, I decid­ed to ded­i­cate it to the Hiroshi­ma vic­tims.”

The work went on to take third place at the Grze­gorz Fitel­berg Com­posers’ Com­pe­ti­tion in Katow­ice in 1960 and won the Tri­bune Inter­na­tionale des Com­pos­i­teurs UNESCO prize in 1961, two major awards that began Penderecki’s jour­ney to become one of Poland’s most respect­ed com­posers, sec­ond only to Hen­ryk Górec­ki.

This isn’t Lynch’s first use of Pen­derec­ki, hav­ing put an excerpt of 1970’s Kos­mogo­nia in Wild at Heart’s “lip­stick freak­out” scene, and six pieces in Inland Empire.

And it isn’t the first time Thren­ody to the Vic­tims of Hiroshi­ma, has been used in film. It was cho­sen by Alfon­so Cuarón for Chil­dren of Men, and by Wes Craven for The Peo­ple Under the Stairs, which coin­ci­den­tal­ly starred two actors from Twin Peaks.

Inter­est­ing­ly, Pen­derec­ki had scored films in the ‘60s, but they were work for hire jobs: a pleas­ant folk filled score for Woj­ciech Has’s The Saragos­sa Man­u­script and choral pas­tiche in a Renais­sance style for Alain Resnais’ Je t’aime, Je t’aime, along with some tele­vi­sion work. But he kept that music sep­a­rate from his seri­ous work as a con­cert com­pos­er, see­ing sound­track work as undignified—-this was long before Philip Glass was scor­ing films, when careers were more reg­i­ment­ed.

Because he refused to score William Friedkin’s The Exor­cist for that rea­son, the direc­tor chose instead to use five of Penderecki’s already exist­ing works for some of the film’s scari­est moments: the appear­ance of words on Regan’s body, Father Merrin’s vision of evil near the start of the film, and dur­ing the exor­cism itself. Peo­ple remem­ber Mike Oldfield’s “Tubu­lar Bells” for its futur­is­tic sound of occult appre­hen­sion, but it’s Pen­dereck­i’s work that accom­pa­nied all the scream­ing from the audi­ences.

Six years lat­er in 1979, Stan­ley Kubrick would use sev­en Pen­derec­ki works for The Shin­ing, under­lin­ing the state of mad­ness in that par­tic­u­lar­ly jar­ring film.

By the mid-1970s, the com­pos­er was turn­ing away from the dis­cor­dant tonal clus­ters of these ear­ly works and towards a more tra­di­tion­al and often beau­ti­ful style. But for a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion of film­mak­ers, Pen­derec­ki will be syn­ony­mous with hor­ror. Last Sun­day showed the piece still holds a grim, dev­as­tat­ing pow­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

The Scores That Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Com­posed for Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing
Ange­lo Badala­men­ti Reveals How He and David Lynch Com­posed the Twin Peaks‘ “Love Theme”

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the 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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Edvard Munch’s Famous Painting “The Scream” Animated to the Sound of Pink Floyd’s Primal Music

in Art, Music | June 28th, 2017

In this short video, Roman­ian ani­ma­tor Sebas­t­ian Cosor brings togeth­er two haunt­ing works from dif­fer­ent times and dif­fer­ent media: The Scream, by Nor­we­gian Expres­sion­ist painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944), and “The Great Gig in the Sky,” by the British rock band Pink Floyd.

Munch paint­ed the first of four ver­sions of The Scream in 1893. He lat­er wrote a poem describ­ing the apoc­a­lyp­tic vision behind it:

I was walk­ing along the road with two Friends
the Sun was set­ting — the Sky turned a bloody red
And I felt a whiff of Melan­choly — I stood
Still, death­ly tired — over the blue-black
Fjord and City hung Blood and Tongues of Fire
My Friends walked on — I remained behind
– shiv­er­ing with anx­i­ety — I felt the Great Scream in Nature

Munch’s hor­rif­ic Great Scream in Nature is com­bined in the video with Floy­d’s oth­er­world­ly “The Great Gig in the Sky,” one of the sig­na­ture pieces from the band’s 1973 mas­ter­piece, Dark Side of the Moon. The vocals on “The Great Gig” were per­formed by an unknown young song­writer and ses­sion singer named Clare Tor­ry.

Tor­ry had been invit­ed by pro­duc­er Alan Par­sons to come to Abbey Road Stu­dios and impro­vise over a haunt­ing piano chord pro­gres­sion by Richard Wright, on a track that was ten­ta­tive­ly called “The Mor­tal­i­ty Sequence.”  The 25-year-old singer was giv­en very lit­tle direc­tion from the band. “Clare came into the stu­dio one day,” said bassist Roger Waters in a 2003 Rolling Stone inter­view, “and we said, ‘There’s no lyrics. It’s about dying — have a bit of a sing on that, girl.’ ”

Forty-two years lat­er, that “bit of a sing” can still send a shiv­er down any­one’s spine. For more on the mak­ing of “The Great Gig in the Sky,” and Tor­ry’s amaz­ing con­tri­bu­tion, see the clip below to hear Tor­ry’s sto­ry in her own words.

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 and BlueSky.

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:

30,000 Works of Art by Edvard Munch & Oth­er Artists Put Online by Norway’s Nation­al Muse­um of Art

Hear How Clare Torry’s Vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Made the Song Go from Pret­ty Good to Stun­ning

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

The Night Frank Zap­pa Jammed With Pink Floyd … and Cap­tain Beef­heart Too (Bel­gium, 1969) 

Three Pink Floyd Songs Played on the Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Gayageum: “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall” & “Great Gig in the Sky”

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George Orwell Reviews We, the Russian Dystopian Novel That Noam Chomsky Considers “More Perceptive” Than Brave New World & 1984

in Literature, Politics | June 28th, 2017

We know George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, at least by rep­u­ta­tion, and we’ve heard both ref­er­ences tossed around with alarm­ing fre­quen­cy this past year. Before these water­shed dystopi­an nov­els, pub­lished over a decade apart (1949 and 1932, respec­tive­ly), came an ear­li­er book, one tru­ly “most rel­e­vant to our time,” writes Michael Bren­dan Dougher­ty: Yevge­ny Zamyatin’s We, writ­ten in 1923 and set “1,000 years after a rev­o­lu­tion that brought the One State into pow­er.” The nov­el had a sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on Orwell’s more famous polit­i­cal dystopia. And we have a good sense of Orwell’s indebt­ed­ness to the Russ­ian writer.

Three years before the pub­li­ca­tion of 1984, Orwell pub­lished a review of Zamyatin’s book, hav­ing “at last got my hands on a copy… sev­er­al years after hear­ing of its exis­tence.” Orwell describes the nov­el as “one of the lit­er­ary curiosi­ties of this book-burn­ing age” and spends a good part of his brief com­men­tary com­par­ing We to Huxley’s nov­el. “[T]he resem­blance with Brave New World is strik­ing,” he writes. “But though Zamyatin’s book is less well put together—it has a rather weak and episod­ic plot which is too com­plex to summarise—it has a polit­i­cal point which the oth­er lacks.” The ear­li­er Russ­ian nov­el, writes Orwell, in 1946, “is on the whole more rel­e­vant to our own sit­u­a­tion.”

Part of what Orwell found con­vinc­ing in Zamyatin’s “less well put togeth­er” book was the fact that under­neath the tech­no­crat­ic total­i­tar­i­an state he depicts, “many of the ancient human instincts are still there” rather than hav­ing been erad­i­cat­ed by eugen­ics and med­ica­tion. (Although cit­i­zens in We are lobot­o­mized, more or less, if they rebel.) “It may well be,” Orwell goes on to say, “that Zamy­atin did not intend the Sovi­et regime to be the spe­cial tar­get of his satire.” He did write the book many years before the Stal­in­ist dic­ta­tor­ship that inspired Orwell’s dystopias. “What Zamy­atin seems to be aim­ing at is not any par­tic­u­lar coun­try but the implied aims of indus­tri­al civ­i­liza­tion.”

In the inter­view at the top of the post (with clum­sy sub­ti­tles), Noam Chom­sky makes some sim­i­lar obser­va­tions, and declares We the supe­ri­or book to both Brave New World and 1984 (which he pro­nounces “obvi­ous and wood­en”). Zamy­atin was “more per­cep­tive” than Orwell or Hux­ley, says Chom­sky. He “was talk­ing about the real world…. I think he sensed what a total­i­tar­i­an sys­tem is like,” pro­ject­ing an over­whelm­ing­ly con­trol­ling sur­veil­lance state in We before such a thing exist­ed in the form it would in Orwell’s time. The nov­el will remind us of the many dystopi­an sce­nar­ios that have pop­u­lat­ed fic­tion and film in the almost 100 years since its pub­li­ca­tion. As Dougher­ty con­cise­ly sum­ma­rizes it, in We:

Cit­i­zens are known only by their num­ber, and the sto­ry’s pro­tag­o­nist is D‑503, an engi­neer work­ing on a space­ship that aims to bring the glo­ri­ous prin­ci­ples of the Rev­o­lu­tion to space. This world is ruled by the Bene­fac­tor, and presided over by the Guardians. They spy on cit­i­zens, who all live in apart­ments made of glass so that they can be per­fect­ly observed. Trust in the sys­tem is absolute.

Equal­i­ty is enforced, to the point of dis­fig­ur­ing the phys­i­cal­ly beau­ti­ful. Beau­ty — as well as its com­pan­ion, art — are a kind of heresy in the One State, because “to be orig­i­nal means to dis­tin­guish your­self from oth­ers. It fol­lows that to be orig­i­nal is to vio­late the prin­ci­ple of equal­i­ty.”

Zamy­atin sure­ly drew from ear­li­er dystopias, as well as the clas­si­cal utopia of Plato’s Repub­lic. But an even more imme­di­ate influ­ence, curi­ous­ly, was his time spent in Eng­land just before the Rev­o­lu­tion. Like his main char­ac­ter, Zamy­atin began his career as an engineer—a ship­builder, in fact, the craft he stud­ied at St. Peters­burg Poly­tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty. He was sent to New­cas­tle in 1916, writes Yolan­da Del­ga­do, “to super­vise the con­struc­tion of ice­break­ers for the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment. How­ev­er, by the time the ships actu­al­ly reached Rus­sia, they belonged to the new authorities—the Bol­she­viks…. [I]n an iron­ic twist, Zamy­atin, one of the most out­spo­ken ear­ly crit­ics of the Sovi­et regime, actu­al­ly designed the first Sovi­et ice­break­ers.”

While Zamy­atin wrote We in response to the Sovi­et takeover, his style and sci-fi set­ting was great­ly inspired by his immer­sion in Eng­lish cul­ture. His two years abroad “great­ly influ­enced him,” from his dress to his speech, earn­ing him the nick­name “the Eng­lish­man.” He became so flu­ent in Eng­lish that he found work as an “edi­tor and trans­la­tor of for­eign authors such as H.G. Wells, Jack Lon­don, and Sheri­dan.” (Dur­ing his sojourn in Eng­land, writes Orwell, Zamy­atin “had writ­ten some blis­ter­ing satires on Eng­lish life.”) Upon return­ing to Rus­sia, Zamy­atin quick­ly became one of the “very first dis­si­dents.” We was banned by the Sovi­et cen­sors in 1921, and that year the author pub­lished an essay called “I Fear,” in which he described the strug­gles of Russ­ian artists under the new regime, writ­ing, “the con­di­tions under which we live are tear­ing us to pieces.”

Even­tu­al­ly smug­gling the man­u­script of We to New York, Zamy­atin was able to get the nov­el pub­lished in 1923, incur­ring the wrath of the Sovi­et author­i­ties. He was “ostra­cized… demo­nized in the press, black­list­ed from pub­lish­ing and kicked out of the Union of Sovi­et Writ­ers.” Zamy­atin was unapolo­getic, writ­ing Stal­in to ask that he be allowed to leave the coun­try. Stal­in not only grant­ed the request, allow­ing Zamy­atin to set­tle in Paris, but allowed him back into the Union of Sovi­et Writ­ers in 1934, an unusu­al turn of events indeed. Just above, you can see a Ger­man film adap­ta­tion of We (turn on closed cap­tions to watch it with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles). And you can read Orwell’s full review of We here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Hear the Very First Adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Star­ring David Niv­en (1949)

Hear Aldous Hux­ley Read Brave New World. Plus 84 Clas­sic Radio Dra­mas from CBS Radio Work­shop (1956–57)

George Orwell’s 1984 Is Now the #1 Best­selling Book on Ama­zon

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

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art Makes 140,000+ Artistic Images from Its Collections Available on Archive.org

in Art, Internet Archive, Museums | June 28th, 2017

As an Open Cul­ture read­er, you might already know the Inter­net Archive, often sim­ply called “Archive.org,” as an ever expand­ing trove of won­ders, freely offer­ing every­thing from polit­i­cal TV ads to vin­tage cook­books to Grate­ful Dead con­cert record­ings to the his­to­ry of the inter­net itself. You might also know the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art as not just a build­ing on Fifth Avenue, but a lead­ing dig­i­tal cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion, one will­ing and able to make hun­dreds of art books avail­able to down­load and hun­dreds of thou­sands of fine-art images usable and remix­able under a Cre­ative Com­mons license.

Now, the Inter­net Archive and the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art have teamed up to bring you a col­lec­tion of over 140,000 art images gath­ered by the lat­ter and orga­nized and host­ed by the for­mer.

Most every dig­i­tal vault in the Inter­net Archive offers a cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal jour­ney with­in, but the col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art offers an espe­cial­ly deep one, rang­ing his­tor­i­cal­ly from ear­ly 19th-cen­tu­ry India (The Plea­sures of the Hunt at the top of the post) to mid­cen­tu­ry New York (the pho­to of the mighty loco­mo­tive before the entrance to the 1939 World’s Fair above) and, in either direc­tion, well beyond.

Cul­tur­al­ly speak­ing, you can also find in the Met’s col­lec­tion in the Inter­net Archive every­thing from from Japan­ese inter­pre­ta­tions of French pho­tog­ra­phy (the wood­block print French Pho­tog­ra­ph­er above) to the Bel­gian inter­pre­ta­tion of Anglo-Amer­i­can cin­e­ma (the poster design for Char­lie Chap­lin’s Play Day below). You can dial in on your zone of inter­est by using the “Top­ics & Sub­jects,” whose hun­dreds of fil­ter­able options include, to name just a few, such cat­e­gories as Asia, wood, frag­ments, Lon­don, folios, and under­wear.

The col­lec­tion also con­tains works of the mas­ters, such as Vin­cent van Gogh’s 1887 Self-Por­trait with Straw Hat (as well as its obverse, 1885’s The Pota­to Peel­er), and some of the world’s great vis­tas, includ­ing Francesco Guardi’s 1765 ren­der­ing of Venice from the Baci­no di San Mar­co. If you’d like to see what in the col­lec­tion has drawn the atten­tion of most of its browsers so far, sort it by view count: those at work should beware that nudes and oth­er erot­i­cal­ly charged art­works pre­dictably dom­i­nate the rank­ings, but they do it along­side Naru­to Whirlpool, the Philoso­pher’s Stone, and Albert Ein­stein. Human inter­est, like human cre­ativ­i­ty, always has a sur­prise or two in store.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Makes 375,000 Images of Fine Art Avail­able Under a Cre­ative Com­mons License: Down­load, Use & Remix

Down­load 464 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

1.8 Mil­lion Free Works of Art from World-Class Muse­ums: A Meta List of Great Art Avail­able Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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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An Animated Introduction to Stoicism, the Ancient Greek Philosophy That Lets You Lead a Happy, Fulfilling Life

in Philosophy | June 28th, 2017

For­ev­er known, it seems, as keep­ing a “stiff upper lip,” Sto­icism—like its pre­de­ces­sor, Cyn­i­cism—is an ancient school of Greek phi­los­o­phy that has been reduced into an atti­tude, a pose rather than a way of life. “We do this to our philoso­phies,” writes Lary Wal­lace at Aeon, “We redraft their con­tours based on pro­ject­ed shad­ows, or give them a car­toon­ish shape like a car­i­ca­tur­ist empha­siz­ing all the wrong fea­tures.” We do this espe­cial­ly to schools as obscure to most peo­ple as Sto­icism and Cyn­i­cism.

“In real­i­ty,” how­ev­er, writes Mas­si­mo Pigli­uc­ci at The Stone, “prac­tic­ing Sto­icism is not real­ly that dif­fer­ent from, say, prac­tic­ing Bud­dhism (or even cer­tain forms of mod­ern Chris­tian­i­ty): it is a mix of reflect­ing on the­o­ret­i­cal pre­cepts, read­ing inspi­ra­tional texts, and engag­ing in med­i­ta­tion, mind­ful­ness, and the like.” Would the ancient Sto­ics have agreed with this assess­ment? In the short TED-Ed les­son above, writ­ten by Pigli­uc­ci and ani­mat­ed by Com­pote Col­lec­tive, we learn about Zeno of Cyprus, “strand­ed miles from home, with no mon­ey or pos­ses­sions.”

Des­ti­tute and “ship­wrecked in Athens around 300 BCE,” the once-wealthy mer­chant dis­cov­ered Socrates, and decid­ed to “seek out and study with the city’s not­ed philoso­phers.” Zeno then taught his own stu­dents the prin­ci­ples of “virtue, tol­er­ance, and self-con­trol” that under­lie Sto­ic phi­los­o­phy (called so for “the porch (stoa poik­ilê) in the Ago­ra at Athens” where the group con­gre­gat­ed). Although the abil­i­ty to remain calm and com­posed in a crisis—the qual­i­ty most asso­ci­at­ed with Stoicism—occupies a promi­nent place in Sto­ic thought, it is cen­tral­ly con­cerned with two ques­tions.

As the site 99u puts it, Sto­ics ask: “1. How can we lead a ful­fill­ing, hap­py life?” and “2. How can we become bet­ter human beings?” In brief, we do so not by obey­ing or sub­mit­ting to some kind of capri­cious divine will, but by attend­ing to the ratio­nal struc­ture of the uni­verse, the Logos, an intri­cate web of cause and effect that deter­mines the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. The Sto­ic cul­ti­vates four virtues—Wisdom, Tem­per­ance, Jus­tice, and Courage—and the char­ac­ter rec­om­mend­ed by Sto­ic phi­los­o­phy makes it plain why Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, as Pigli­uc­ci notes, was “actu­al­ly mod­eled after [Gene Roddenberry’s]—mistaken—understanding of Sto­icism.”

Giv­en Stoicism’s con­cern with hap­pi­ness and virtue, we might expect Alain de Botton’s School of Life to be an advo­cate, and we would be right. In the ani­mat­ed intro­duc­tion to Sto­icism above, de Bot­ton assures view­ers “you need more of it in your life.” Why? Because “life is dif­fi­cult,” and Sto­icism is “help­ful,” for com­mon­ers and aris­to­crats alike. Indeed the most famous of Sto­ic philoso­phers, Mar­cus Aure­lius, was Emper­or of Rome from 161 to 180 CE. Con­sid­ered one of the great­est works of ancient thought, Aure­lius’ Med­i­ta­tions is also per­haps one of the most acces­si­ble of philo­soph­i­cal texts.

In plain, straight­for­ward lan­guage, the emper­or-philoso­pher rec­om­mends a series of Gre­co-Roman virtues, and gives cred­it to his many teach­ers. In book two, he writes, “Why should any of these things that hap­pen exter­nal­ly, so much dis­tract thee? Give thy­self leisure to learn some good thing, and cease rov­ing and wan­der­ing to and fro. Thou must also take heed of anoth­er kind of wan­der­ing, for they are idle in their actions, who toil and labour in this life, and have no cer­tain scope to which to direct all their motions, and desires.” In oth­er words, rather than suf­fer­ing in coura­geous silence—the car­i­ca­ture of Stoicism—Aurelius dis­tills much of its essence to this: “Don’t wor­ry about what you can’t con­trol, find good work to do, and do it well and wise­ly.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Alain de Botton’s School of Life Presents Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to Hei­deg­ger, The Sto­ics & Epi­cu­rus

A Guide to Hap­pi­ness: Alain de Bot­ton Shows How Six Great Philoso­phers Can Change Your Life

Free Cours­es in Ancient His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture & Phi­los­o­phy 

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

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David Sedaris Breaks Down His Writing Process: Keep a Diary, Carry a Notebook, Read Out Loud, Abandon Hope

in Writing | June 27th, 2017

When did you first hear David Sedaris? Nor­mal­ly in the case of a writer, let alone one of the most famous and suc­cess­ful writ­ers alive, the ques­tion would be when you first read him, but Sedaris’ writ­ing voice has nev­er real­ly exist­ed apart from his actu­al voice. He first became famous in 1992 when Nation­al Pub­lic Radio aired his read­ing of the “San­ta­land Diaries,” a piece lit­er­al­ly con­struct­ed from diaries kept while he worked in San­ta­land, the Christ­mas vil­lage at Macy’s, as an elf. Though that break illus­trates the impor­tance of what we might call two pil­lars of Sedaris’ writ­ing process, nobody in his enor­mous fan­base-to-be gave it much thought at the time — they just want­ed to hear more of his hilar­i­ous sto­ry­telling.

A quar­ter-cen­tu­ry lat­er, Sedaris has released more diaries — many more diaries — to his ador­ing pub­lic in the form of Theft by Find­ing, a hefty vol­ume of select­ed entries writ­ten between 1977 and 2002. They give addi­tion­al insight into not just the events and char­ac­ters involved in the per­son­al essays com­piled in best­selling books like Naked, Me Talk Pret­ty One Day, and Dress Your Fam­i­ly in Cor­duroy and Den­im, but also into his writ­ing process itself. “A woman on All Things Con­sid­ered wrote a book of advice called If You Want to Write and men­tioned the impor­tance of keep­ing a diary,” a 26-year-old Sedaris writes in an entry from 1983. “After a while you’d stop being forced and pre­ten­tious and become hon­est and unafraid of your thoughts.”

Obvi­ous­ly he did­n’t need that advice at the time, since even then keep­ing a diary had already become the first pil­lar of the David Sedaris writ­ing process. “I start­ed writ­ing one after­noon when I was twen­ty, and ever since then I have writ­ten every day,” he once told the New York­er, also a pub­lish­er of his sto­ries. “At first I had to force myself. Then it became part of my iden­ti­ty, and I did it with­out think­ing.” Most of what he writes in his diary each and every morn­ing he describes as “just whin­ing,” but “every so often there’ll be some­thing I can use lat­er: a joke, a descrip­tion, a quote.”

The entries lat­er cohere, along with oth­er ideas and expe­ri­ences, into his wide­ly read sto­ries. One such piece began, Sedaris told Fast Com­pa­ny’s Kristin Hohenadel, as “a diary entry from a trip to Ams­ter­dam. He met a col­lege kid who told him he’d learned that the first per­son to reach the age of 200 had already been born.” Then, Sedaris said, “I spec­u­lat­ed that the first per­son to reach the age of 200 would be my father. And then I attached it to some­thing else that had been in my diary, that all my dad talks about is me get­ting a colonoscopy. So I con­nect­ed the 200-year-old man to my father want­i­ng me to get a colonoscopy, and that became the sto­ry.”

Only con­nect, as E.M. Forster said, but you do need mate­r­i­al to con­nect in the first place. Hence the sec­ond pil­lar of the process: car­ry­ing a note­book. To the Mis­souri Review Sedaris described him­self as less fun­ny than obser­vant, adding that “everybody’s got an eye for some­thing. The only dif­fer­ence is that I car­ry around a note­book in my front pock­et. I write every­thing down, and it helps me recall things,” espe­cial­ly for lat­er inclu­sion in his diary. When he pub­licly opened his note­book at the request of a red­di­tor while doing an AMA a few years ago, he found the words, “Ille­gal met­al sharks… white skin classy… dri­ver’s name is free Time… rats eat coconuts… beau­ti­ful place city, not beau­ti­ful…”

These cryp­tic lines, he explained, were “notes I wrote in the Mekong delta a few weeks ago. A Viet­namese woman was giv­ing me a lit­tle tour, and this is what I jot­ted down in my note­book.” For instance, “I was ask­ing about all the women whom I saw on motor scoot­ers wear­ing opera gloves, and masks that cov­ered every­thing but their eyes. And the dri­ver told me they were try­ing to keep their skin white, because it’s just classier. Tan skin means you’re a farmer. So that’s some­thing I remem­bered from our con­ver­sa­tion, so when I tran­scribe my note­book into my diary, I added all of that.” And one day his read­ers may well see this frag­ment of life that caught his atten­tion appear again, but as part of a coher­ent, pol­ished nar­ra­tive whole.

The bet­ter part of that pol­ish­ing hap­pens through the prac­tice of read­ing, and revis­ing, in front of an audi­ence. “Dur­ing his bian­nu­al mul­ti­c­i­ty lec­ture tours, Sedaris says he rou­tine­ly notices imper­fec­tions in the text sim­ply through the act of read­ing aloud to oth­er peo­ple,” writes Hohenadel. “He cir­cles acci­den­tal rhymes or close­ly repeat­ed words, or words that sound alike — like night and nightlife — in the same sen­tence, rewrit­ing after each read­ing and try­ing out revi­sions dur­ing the next stop on his tour.” When a pas­sage gets laughs from the audi­ence, he pen­cils in a check mark beside it; when one gets coughs (which he likens to “a ham­mer dri­ving a nail into your cof­fin”), he draws a skull. “On the page it seems like I’m try­ing too hard, and that’s one of the things I can usu­al­ly catch when I’m read­ing out loud,” he says, whether his writ­ing “sounds a lit­tle too obvi­ous” or “like some­body who’s just strain­ing for a laugh.”

And the pres­ence of live human beings can’t but improve your sto­ry­telling skills. It helps to be able to fill Carnegie Hall like Sedaris can, but all of us can find, and learn from, some kind of audi­ence some­where, no mat­ter how mod­est. He told Jun­kee that he began read­ing out loud back in his art-school days: “I was in a paint­ing class and we had a cri­tique, and you put your work up and talk about it, and most peo­ple would talk as if they were alone with a psy­chi­a­trist.” He real­ized that “they don’t have any sense of an audi­ence. For some rea­son, maybe it’s because I have so many broth­ers and sis­ters, I was always very acute­ly aware of an audi­ence,” and so for his cri­tiques he pre­pared in-char­ac­ter mono­logues from the point of view of invent­ed artists. “Peo­ple laughed, and it felt amaz­ing to me,” which brought about an even big­ger real­iza­tion: “This is what I’m sup­posed to do. Write my own stuff and read it out loud.”

What­ev­er fears so many of us have about speak­ing in pub­lic, the fourth pil­lar of the Sedaris process may prove the most dif­fi­cult to incor­po­rate into your own work meth­ods: aban­don­ing hope. “If I sit at my com­put­er, deter­mined to write a New York­er sto­ry I won’t get beyond the first sen­tence,” he told the New York­er. “It’s bet­ter to put no pres­sure on it. What would hap­pen if I fol­lowed the pre­vi­ous sen­tence with this one, I’ll think. If the eighth draft is tor­ture, the first should be fun.” And any­body who gets stuck can use the writer’s-block-break­ing strat­e­gy he revealed on Red­dit: “There are a lot of col­lege writ­ing text­books that will include essays and short sto­ries, and after read­ing the sto­ry or essay, there will be ques­tions such as ‘Have YOU Had any expe­ri­ence with a pedophile in YOUR fam­i­ly?’ or ‘When was the last time you saw YOUR moth­er drunk?’ and they’re just real­ly good at prompt­ing sto­ries.”

And though it might seem obvi­ous, the activ­i­ty that con­sti­tutes Sedaris’ fifth pil­lar gets all too much neglect from aspir­ing writ­ers: con­stant read­ing, the active pur­suit of which he con­sid­ers “one of those things that changes your life.” At the same time he began writ­ing his diary, he told the Mis­souri Review, “I start­ed read­ing vora­cious­ly. They go hand in hand, espe­cial­ly for a young per­son who’s try­ing to write.” Today, when peo­ple ask him to have a look at what they’ve writ­ten, “I often want to say to them, ‘This doesn’t look like how things in books look.’ Read­ing is impor­tant when you’re try­ing to write because then you can look at what’s in a book and remind your­self, ‘Hey, I’m young; I just start­ed, and it’s gonna take me a long time, but boy, look at the dif­fer­ence between this and that.’ ”

He should know, giv­en the vicious­ness with which he crit­i­cizes his own work. Even now his sto­ries require more than twen­ty drafts to get right, as he men­tions in the PBS New­sHour clip at the top of the post, but when he re-read his first diaries, “it was real­ly painful. Real­ly painful.” These ear­ly entries revealed that “no one was a worse writer than me. No one was more false. No one was more pre­ten­tious. It was just absolute garbage.” But some of them hint at things to come. “I stayed up all night and worked on my new sto­ry,” a 28-year-old Sedaris writes in 1985. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I write like I paint: one cor­ner at a time. I can nev­er step back and see the full pic­ture. Instead, I con­cen­trate on a lit­tle square and real­ize lat­er that it looks noth­ing like the real live object. Maybe it’s my strength, and I’m the only one who can’t see it.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Sedaris: A Sam­pling of His Inim­itable Humor

Be His Guest: David Sedaris at Home in Rur­al West Sus­sex, Eng­land

Ray Brad­bury on Zen and the Art of Writ­ing (1973)

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

John Updike’s Advice to Young Writ­ers: ‘Reserve an Hour a Day’

The Dai­ly Habits of Famous Writ­ers: Franz Kaf­ka, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Stephen King & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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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