Watch “A Family Tree,” Jonathan Demme’s 1980s Sitcom Episode with David Byrne & Rosanna Arquette

It comes as some­thing of a sur­prise to real­ize that the film­mak­er Jonathan Demme, who died last week, nev­er made a tele­vi­sion series of his own. He did, in addi­tion to fea­tures like Some­thing Wild and The Silence of the Lambs and doc­u­men­taries like Stop Mak­ing Sense, direct a few episodes of TV shows as var­ied as Sat­ur­day Night Live and Enlight­ened. But we nev­er got to see a full-on cre­at­ed-by-Demme series that, in this long Gold­en Age of Tele­vi­sion in which we live, could sure­ly have show­cased in an even deep­er way his much-praised inter­est in and empa­thy for human­i­ty. But we can get a sense of how one might have played from “A Fam­i­ly Tree,” the Rosan­na Arquette-star­ring sit­com episode he made in 1987 for the PBS prime-time com­e­dy series Try­ing Times.

Demme, in the words of The New York­er’s Dan Piepen­bring, “direct­ed an ensem­ble com­e­dy about CB-radio enthu­si­asts, a doc­u­men­tary on an Epis­co­palian min­is­ter, and the only episode of Colum­bo to traf­fic in the dra­ma of haute cui­sine. But nev­er did he roam far­ther afield than he does in ‘A Fam­i­ly Tree,’ a pitch-black anti-sit­com about an anx­ious young woman whose desire to belong leads her — per­haps in a nod to Stop Mak­ing Sense — to lit­er­al­ly burn down the house. Fit­ting­ly, David Byrne him­self is there to watch the flames go up, enjoy­ing an impe­ri­ous turn as a cig­ar-puff­ing, pie-hid­ing, rep­tile-obsessed broth­er-in-law.” And who could resist, hav­ing read a descrip­tion like that, giv­ing the episode a watch on Youtube, avail­able there in three parts (watch them above and below)?

The pro­duc­tion cer­tain­ly stood out from the Amer­i­can tele­vi­su­al land­scape of the time. The Chica­go Tri­bune’s TV crit­ic Clif­ford Per­ry, after trash­ing the then-new Full House, described Dem­me’s episode of Try­ing Times, the series’ pre­miere, as “built upon sick humor and a per­va­sive nas­ti­ness,” high­light­ing “an appeal­ing­ly vul­ner­a­ble per­for­mance by Arquette as the harassed out­sider who suf­fers through cig­ar smoke, belch­ing, home­made apple­jack, intra­mur­al bick­er­ing and a bar­rage of insults — as well as her own inep­ti­tude, which results in a series of house­hold dis­as­ters. Fine sup­port is giv­en by Hope Lange as the shrewish moth­er, Robert Ridge­ly as the just-fired father,” and par­tic­u­lar­ly Byrne “as the acer­bic yet bor­ing broth­er-in-law-to-be.”

Ulti­mate­ly, Per­ry judged “A Fam­i­ly Tree” as a “schiz­o­phrenic half-hour” that “veers between the far­ci­cal and the sur­re­al,” which pre­sum­ably was­n’t intend­ed as a straight­for­ward com­pli­ment. Today, how­ev­er, its laugh track-free tone of inti­mate unease and real­ism unapolo­get­i­cal­ly tinged with the bizarre would no doubt win it a con­sid­er­able fol­low­ing. The trib­utes paid to Demme have described him as a mak­er of films well root­ed in their eras and set­tings, but now we know he could make tele­vi­sion thir­ty years ahead of its time as well.

via The New York­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Jonathan Demme Put Human­i­ty Into His Films: From The Silence of the Lambs to Stop Mak­ing Sense

Jonathan Demme Nar­rates I Thought I Told You To Shut Up!!, a Short Film About the Coun­ter­cul­ture Car­toon Reid Flem­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hear a Reading of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Set to Music: Features 100+ Musicians and Readers from Across the World

In a post last year on an ambi­tious musi­cal adap­ta­tion of Finnegans Wake, I not­ed that—when most in baf­fle­ment over the Irish writer’s final, seem­ing­ly unin­ter­pretable, work—I turn to Antho­ny Burgess, who not only pre­sumed to abridge the book, but wrote more lucid com­men­tary than any oth­er schol­ar­ly crit­ic or writer­ly admir­er of Joyce. In his study ReJoyce, Burgess described the novel—or whatever-you-call-it—as a “man-made moun­tain… as close to a work of nature as any artist ever got—massive, baf­fling, serv­ing noth­ing but itself, sug­gest­ing a mean­ing but nev­er quite yield­ing any­thing but a frac­tion of it, and yet (like a tree) des­per­ate­ly sim­ple.”

Joyce did seem to aspire to omni­science and the pow­er of god­like cre­ation, to sup­plant the “old father, old arti­fi­cer” he beseech­es at the end of A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man. And if Finnegans Wake is a work of nature, it seems to me that we might approach it like nat­u­ral­ists, look­ing for its inner laws and mech­a­nisms, per­form­ing dis­sec­tions and mount­ing it, flayed open, on dis­play boards.

Or we might approach it like poets, painters, field recordists—like artists, in oth­er words. We might leave its innards intact, and instead rep­re­sent what it does to our minds when we con­front its nigh-inscrutable ontol­ogy.

This lat­ter approach is the one adopt­ed by Way­words and Mean­signs’ lat­est release, which brings togeth­er record­ings from over 100 artists from 15 dif­fer­ent coun­tries—some semi-famous, most thrilling­ly obscure. Joyce’s book, explains project direc­tor Derek Pyle, is “the kind of thing that demands cre­ative approaches—from jazz and punk musi­cians to sound artists and mod­ern com­posers, each per­son hears and per­forms the text in a way that’s total­ly unique and end­less­ly excit­ing.” We first com­ment­ed on the endeav­or two years ago, when it released 31 hours of unabridged Joyce inter­pre­ta­tion. Last year’s sec­ond edi­tion great­ly expand­ed on the singing, read­ing, and exper­i­men­tal noodling of and around Finnegans Wake.

The third edi­tion con­tin­ues what has becom­ing a very fine tra­di­tion, and per­haps one of the most appro­pri­ate respons­es to the nov­el in the 78 years since its pub­li­ca­tion. This release (stream­able above, or on Archive.org) adds to the sec­ond edi­tion a belat­ed con­tri­bu­tion from icon­ic bassist and song­writer Mike Watt (of The Min­ute­men, fIRE­HOSE, and solo fame) and “actor and ‘JoyceGeek” Adam Har­vey. (And a Gum­by-star­ring illus­tra­tion, above, by punk rock cov­er artist Ray­mond Pet­ti­bon). The third unabridged col­lec­tion of inter­pre­ta­tive musi­cal read­ings, fur­ther up, offers con­tri­bu­tions from:

Mer­cury Rev vet­er­ans Jason Sebas­t­ian Rus­so and Paul Dil­lon, Joe Cas­sidy of But­ter­fly Child, Rail­road Earth’s Tim Car­bone and Lewis & Clarke’s Lou Rogai, psych-rock­ers Kin­s­ki, vocal­ist Phil Minton, poet S.A. Grif­fin, trans­la­tor Krzysztof Bart­nic­ki, “krautrock” pio­neer Jean-Hervé Péron of faUSt, British fringe musi­cian Neil Camp­bell, Mar­tyn Bates of Eye­less in Gaza, Lit­tle Spar­ta with Sal­ly Timms (Mekons) and Mar­tin Bill­heimer, com­pos­er Seán Mac Erlaine, indi­etron­i­ca pio­neer Schnei­der TM, and many more.

If some­thing on that list doesn’t grab you, you may have stum­bled into the wrong par­ty. In any case, you’ll find hun­dreds oth­er read­ings, songs, etc. to choose from in the expand­ing three-vol­ume com­pi­la­tion. Or you can lis­ten to it straight through, from the first edi­tion, to the sec­ond, to the third. Like the book, this project cel­e­brates, imi­tates, reflects, and refracts, Way­words and Mean­signs admits entry at any point, and near­ly always charms even as it per­plex­es. The fact that no one can real­ly grasp the slip­pery nature of Finnegans Wake per­haps makes the book, and its best cre­ative inter­pre­ta­tions, all the more gen­uine­ly for every­one.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load as a Free Audio Book & Free eBook

Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Read­ing

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Gets Turned into an Inter­ac­tive Web Film, the Medi­um It Was Des­tined For

H.G. Wells Reads Finnegans Wake & Tells James Joyce: It’s “A Dead End,” “You Have Turned Your Back on Com­mon Men” (1928)

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

Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl Explains Why If We Have True Meaning in Our Lives, We Can Make It Through the Darkest of Times

In one school of pop­u­lar rea­son­ing, peo­ple judge his­tor­i­cal out­comes that they think are favor­able as wor­thy trade­offs for his­tor­i­cal atroc­i­ties. The argu­ment appears in some of the most inap­pro­pri­ate con­texts, such as dis­cus­sions of slav­ery or the Holo­caust. Or in indi­vid­ual thought exper­i­ments, such as that of a famous inven­tor whose birth was the result of a bru­tal assault. There are a great many peo­ple who con­sid­er this think­ing repul­sive, moral­ly cor­ro­sive, and astound­ing­ly pre­sump­tu­ous. Not only does it assume that every ter­ri­ble thing that hap­pens is part of a benev­o­lent design, but it pre­tends to know which cir­cum­stances count as unqual­i­fied goods, and which can be blithe­ly ignored. It deter­mines future actions from a tidy and con­ve­nient sto­ry of the past.

We might con­trast this atti­tude with a more Zen stance, for exam­ple, a rad­i­cal­ly agnos­tic “wait and see” approach to every­thing that hap­pens. Not-know­ing seems to give med­i­tat­ing monks a great deal of seren­i­ty in prac­tice. But the the­o­ry ter­ri­fies most of us. Effects must have caus­es, we think, caus­es must have effects, and in order to pre­dict what’s going to hap­pen next (and there­by save our skins), we must know why we’re doing what we’re doing. The deep impulse is what psy­chol­o­gist and psy­chother­a­pist Vik­tor Fran­kl iden­ti­fies, in his pre-gen­der-neu­tral­ly titled book, as Man’s Search for Mean­ing. Despite the mis­use of this fac­ul­ty to cre­ate neu­rot­ic or dehu­man­iz­ing myths, “man’s search for mean­ing,” writes Fran­kl, “is the pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion in his life and not a ‘sec­ondary ratio­nal­iza­tion’ of instinc­tu­al dri­ves.”

Fran­kl under­stood per­fect­ly well how the con­struc­tion of meaning—through nar­ra­tive, art, rela­tion­ships, social fic­tions, etc.—might be per­vert­ed for mur­der­ous ends. He was a sur­vivor of four con­cen­tra­tion camps, which took the lives of his par­ents, broth­er, and wife. The first part of his book, “Expe­ri­ences in a Con­cen­tra­tion Camp,” recounts the hor­ror in detail, spar­ing no one account­abil­i­ty for their actions. From these expe­ri­ences, Fran­kl draws a con­clu­sion, one he explains in the inter­view above in two parts from 1977. “The les­son one could learn from Auschwitz,” he says, “and in oth­er con­cen­tra­tion camps, in the final analy­sis was, those who were ori­ent­ed toward a meaning—toward a mean­ing to be ful­filled by them in the future—were most like­ly to sur­vive” beyond the expe­ri­ence. “The ques­tion,” Fran­kl says, “was sur­vival for what?” (See a short ani­mat­ed sum­ma­ry of Fran­kl’s book below.)

Fran­kl does not excuse the deaths of his fam­i­ly, friends, and mil­lions of oth­ers in his psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ry, which he calls logother­a­py. He cer­tain­ly does not triv­i­al­ize the most unimag­in­able of in-human expe­ri­ences. “We all said to each oth­er in camp,” he writes, “that there could be no earth­ly hap­pi­ness which could com­pen­sate for all we had suf­fered.” But it was not the hope of hap­pi­ness that “gave us courage,” he writes. It was the “will to mean­ing” that looked to the future, not to the past. In Frankl’s exis­ten­tial­ist view, we our­selves cre­ate that mean­ing, for our­selves, and not for oth­ers. Logother­a­py, Fran­kl writes, “defo­cus­es all the vicious-cir­cle for­ma­tions and feed­back mech­a­nisms which play such a great role in the devel­op­ment of neu­roses.” We must acknowl­edge the need to make sense of our lives and fill what Fran­kl called the “exis­ten­tial vac­u­um.” And we alone are respon­si­ble for writ­ing bet­ter sto­ries for our­selves.

To dig deep­er in Fran­kl’s phi­los­o­phy, you can read not only Man’s Search for Mean­ing but also The Will to Mean­ing: Foun­da­tions and Appli­ca­tions of Logother­a­py.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exis­ten­tial­ist Psy­chol­o­gist Vik­tor Fran­kl Explains How to Find Mean­ing in Life, No Mat­ter What Chal­lenges You Face

A Crash Course in Exis­ten­tial­ism: A Short Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Paul Sartre & Find­ing Mean­ing in a Mean­ing­less World

Albert Camus’ His­toric Lec­ture, “The Human Cri­sis,” Per­formed by Actor Vig­go Mortensen

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

A Three-Minute Introduction to Buckminster Fuller, One of the 20th Century’s Most Productive Design Visionaries

Archi­tect, inven­tor, the­o­rist, and all-around fount of ideas Buck­min­ster Fuller came up with many new things, though most of us asso­ciate him with one above all: geo­des­ic domes. Those dis­tinc­tive hemi­spher­ic struc­tures built out of strong tri­an­gu­lar parts, hav­ing gone in and out of vogue over the decades, most recent­ly reap­peared in the zeit­geist as the type of lodg­ing promised to the atten­dees of the ill-con­ceived Fyre Fes­ti­val — an ultra-lux­u­ry mar­ket-tar­get­ed dis­as­ter not rep­re­sen­ta­tive, safe to say, of the world Fuller spent his entire career try­ing to real­ize. His vision of a future for “Space­ship Earth,” as he called it, drove him to cre­ate all he cre­at­ed, from new maps to new hous­es to new cars to new sleep­ing meth­ods. But what did he base that vision on?

“Fuller’s phi­los­o­phy could be best sum­ma­rized as being a social thinker, believ­ing that human­i­ty’s sur­vival is con­tin­gent upon how it man­ages Space­ship Earth and the resources it con­tains,” says the nar­ra­tor of the three-minute Proso­cial Progress Foun­da­tion primer above, “and that cre­at­ing abun­dance whilst doing lit­tle to no harm to the envi­ron­ment would help to alle­vi­ate a lot of the prob­lems in the world today.”

With every project he empha­sized “sys­tems think­ing,” or think­ing premised on “the idea that the world is an inter­con­nect­ed sys­tem with inter­con­nect­ed prob­lems, and that a way to solve these prob­lems would be to call upon col­lec­tive action.” We’d all have to work togeth­er, in his view, to solve the prob­lems we suf­fer togeth­er.

That notion may strike us as utopi­an even today, and indeed, most of Fuller’s inven­tions only saw lim­it­ed appli­ca­tion dur­ing his life­time. But the label of utopi­an, which sug­gests a dis­re­gard for the rig­ors of real­i­ty, does­n’t quite fit the man him­self, so much con­cern did he have for prac­ti­cal­i­ties like the effi­cient allo­ca­tion of resources, quick con­struc­tion and deploy­ment, and ease of use. But giv­en the dystopi­an terms we’ve increas­ing­ly come to use to describe events here on Space­ship Earth, maybe we need a Fuller-style prac­ti­cal utopi­anism now more than ever. If these three min­utes have giv­en you a taste for more of the details, have a look at Fuller’s video lec­ture series Every­thing I Know — but make sure to clear 42 hours of your cal­en­dar first. The future of human­i­ty may depend on it!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Buck­min­ster Fuller Tell Studs Terkel All About “the Geo­des­ic Life”

Bet­ter Liv­ing Through Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Utopi­an Designs: Revis­it the Dymax­ion Car, House, and Map

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vig­or­ous” and “Alert”

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Mar­shall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buck­min­ster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy & Media (1971)

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch a Reading of Steve Bannon’s Screenplay Which Attempted to Turn Shakespeare’s Coriolanus Into a Rap Musical

Some­where between work­ing at Gold­man Sachs, and call­ing the shots for Bre­it­bart and Don­ald Trump, the Volde­mor­t­ian Steve Ban­non went to Hol­ly­wood and made 18 films, many of them polit­i­cal. Described “as the Leni Riefen­stahl of the Tea Par­ty move­ment” (by Andrew Bre­it­bart him­self), Ban­non helped pro­duce the Ronald Rea­gan doc­u­men­tary In the Face of Evil and Fire from the Heart­land: The Awak­en­ing of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Woman. But he’s per­haps best known for writ­ing a treat­ment for the nev­er-made doc­u­men­tary, Destroy­ing the Great Satan: The Rise of Islam­ic Fas­cism in Amer­i­ca. The eight page draft, writes The Wash­ing­ton Post, pro­posed “a three-part movie that would trace ‘the cul­ture of intol­er­ance’ behind sharia law, exam­ine the ‘Fifth Col­umn’ made up of ‘Islam­ic front groups’ and iden­ti­fy the Amer­i­can enablers paving ‘the road to this unique hell on earth.’ ” Look­ing back, it’s no won­der that Ban­non tried to engi­neer a ban of Mus­lims immi­grants upon enter­ing the White House.

For any­one inter­est­ed in revis­it­ing anoth­er unre­al­ized Ban­non pro­duc­tion, you can now watch (above) a table read of his screen­play for The Thing I Am. Co-writ­ten with Julia Jones dur­ing the late 1990s, it’s a “rap musi­cal adap­ta­tion of Shakespeare’s Cori­olanus set in South Cen­tral Los Ange­les dur­ing the 1992 riots after the LAPD beat­ing of Rod­ney King.” Put togeth­er by an orga­ni­za­tion called Now This, the read fea­tures Rob Corddry, Lucas Neff, Parvesh Cheena, Daniele Gaither, Gary Antho­ny Williams, Char­lie Carv­er, Cedric Yarbor­ough, and hip hop artist A.J. Crew. And, as the web­site Refinery29 warns, it’s “full of cussing, the n‑word, and men­tions of crotch grabs.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sin­clair Lewis’ Chill­ing Play, It Can’t Hap­pen Here: A Read-Through by the Berke­ley Reper­to­ry The­atre

A Free Course from Yale on the U.S. Civ­il War: Because Trump Just Gave Us Anoth­er Teach­able Moment

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A Hypnotic Look at How Japanese Samurai Swords Are Made

Paper, books, wood­en joints, tea whisks — Japan­ese cul­ture has, for seem­ing­ly all of its long record­ed his­to­ry, great­ly esteemed the mak­ing of objects. But no one object rep­re­sents the Japan­ese ded­i­ca­tion to crafts­man­ship, and with­in that the eter­nal pur­suit of approach­able but nev­er quite attain­able per­fec­tion, than the sword. You can see what it takes to make a katana, the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese sword of the kind car­ried by the armed mil­i­tary class of the samu­rai between rough­ly the 8th and 19th cen­turies, in the 26-minute video above, which offers a close look at each stage of the sword­mak­ing process: the Shin­to bless­ing of the forge, the ham­mer­ing of the red-hot met­al, the tem­per­ing of the fresh­ly shaped blade, the con­struc­tion of the scab­bard and hilt, the final assem­bly, and every painstak­ing step in between.

Orig­i­nal­ly pro­duced for the Unit­ed King­dom’s Nation­al Muse­um of Arms and Armour and Port­land Art Muse­um’s col­lab­o­ra­tive 2013 spe­cial exhi­bi­tion “Samu­rai! Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Bar­bi­er-Mueller Col­lec­tion,” the video’s word­less but cer­tain­ly not silent por­tray­al of this ancient and con­tin­u­ing prac­tice has a kind of hyp­not­ic qual­i­ty.

But if you’d like a more ver­bal expla­na­tion to accom­pa­ny your views of the mak­ing of a tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese sword, you’ll get it in the 50-minute doc­u­men­tary above, The Secret World of the Japan­ese Sword­smith, a por­trait of the high­ly respect­ed Yoshin­do Yoshi­hara, one of only thir­ty full-time sword­smiths cur­rent­ly prac­tic­ing in Japan. If you then feel up to a Japan­ese sword­smithing triple-bill, give Samu­rai Sword: Mak­ing of a Leg­end a watch as well.


This 50-minute pro­gram tells the sto­ry of the katana itself, begin­ning with this breath­less nar­ra­tion: “For over one thou­sand years, one weapon has dom­i­nat­ed the bat­tle­fields of Japan, a weapon so fear­some that it can split a man from throat to groin — yet it spawned an an entire­ly new art form and spir­i­tu­al way of life. A sword so tech­no­log­i­cal­ly per­fect in struc­ture, so beau­ti­ful in cre­ation, that it gave rise to an aris­to­crat­ic war­rior creed.” It also gave rise to no small num­ber of samu­rai movies, a tra­di­tion that many a cinephile among us can cer­tain­ly appre­ci­ate. Though inex­tri­ca­bly tied to a spe­cif­ic time and place in his­to­ry, and an even more spe­cif­ic class that arose from the pecu­liar polit­i­cal cir­cum­stances of that time and place, the katana con­tin­ues to fas­ci­nate — and in this dig­i­tal, hands-free age, its mak­ers draw a more intense kind of respect than ever.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Japan­ese Crafts­man Spends His Life Try­ing to Recre­ate a Thou­sand-Year-Old Sword

Female Samu­rai War­riors Immor­tal­ized in 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Pho­tos

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

How Japan­ese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bam­boo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How the Soviets Imagined in 1960 What the World Would Look in 2017: A Gallery of Retro-Futuristic Drawings

In one of the most impas­sioned and beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten defens­es of Burkean con­ser­vatism I have ever read, the poet Wen­dell Berry took gov­ern­ment projects of both the left and right to task, pro­claim­ing in 1968 that the emer­gence of a mas­sive bureau­cra­cy was a trag­ic sign of the “loss of the future.” His argu­ment is sim­i­lar to one made over twen­ty years ear­li­er by the Trot­sky­ist-turned-con­ser­v­a­tive writer James Burn­ham, whose 1941 book The Man­age­r­i­al Rev­o­lu­tion pre­dict­ed “at each point,” wrote George Orwell in a thor­ough review, “a con­tin­u­a­tion of the thing that is hap­pen­ing.” A “man­age­r­i­al” cen­tral state, Burn­ham also argued, inevitably brought about a “loss of the future.”

Nei­ther the con­tem­pla­tive Berry nor the inci­sive Burn­ham have been able to account for one his­tor­i­cal­ly inescapable fact: the peri­ods in which 20th cen­tu­ry soci­eties imag­ined the future most vivid­ly were those most dom­i­nat­ed by bureau­crat­ic, tech­no­crat­ic, cen­tral­ized polit­i­cal economies. This is true under con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ments like that of the U.S. under Eisen­how­er, in which huge infra­struc­ture projects—from the high­way sys­tem to hydro­elec­tric dams— rearranged the lives of mil­lions.

And it was true under Khrushchev’s Sovi­et state, whose Vir­gin Lands cam­paign did the same. Indeed, mid-cen­tu­ry Sovi­et “expec­ta­tions were pret­ty sim­i­lar to the futur­is­tic pre­dic­tions of Amer­i­cans,” writes Matt Novak, “with a touch more Com­mu­nism, of course.” Unsur­pris­ing, per­haps, giv­en that the two nations were locked in com­pe­ti­tion over the dom­i­na­tion of both earth and space.

Novak’s under­state­ment is ful­ly war­rant­ed. Although the peo­ple in images like those you see here tend to appear in more col­lec­tive arrange­ments, their sci-fi sur­round­ings almost mir­ror those in the images from the U.S. that were par­o­died by The Jet­sons two years after this 1960 col­lec­tion. These detailed sce­nar­ios come from a “retro-futur­is­tic film­strip, which would have been played through a Diafilm,” a kind of slide pro­jec­tor. It’s a vision, it just so hap­pens, of our time, 2017, but it looks back­ward to get there, both in its tech­nol­o­gy and its design. The illus­tra­tion above, for exam­ple, “was almost cer­tain­ly inspired by the Futu­ra­ma exhib­it from the 1939 New York World’s Fair.” (Itself built, we may note, on the shoul­ders of Roosevelt’s New Deal.)

You can see many more of these illus­tra­tions at Pale­o­fu­ture, and at the top of the post watch a video ver­sion with “jazzy music and star wipes.” You may find these visions quaint, charm­ing in their naiveté and inaccuracy—yet often quaint­ly pre­scient as well. Retro-futurism’s appeal to us seems to rest prin­ci­pal­ly in how sil­ly it can seem in hind­sight, even when it gets things right. Per­haps it is the case that the most ful­ly-real­ized, total­iz­ing visions of tomor­row are as far-fetched as the con­trol­ling soci­eties that pro­duce them are unsus­tain­able. As Bob Dug­gan writes at Big Think, for exam­ple, we are bound to asso­ciate the “undead art move­ment” of Ital­ian Futur­ism with the very short-lived regime of Ital­ian Fas­cism. Maybe the degree to which a gov­ern­ment lacks a future is in inverse pro­por­tion to the inten­si­ty of its retro-futur­ism.

So what exact­ly is the rela­tion­ship between state pow­er and utopi­an futur­ism? The ques­tion invites a dis­ser­ta­tion, and sure­ly many have been writ­ten, as they have on the symp­to­mol­o­gy of the tech­no-dystopi­an and urban apoc­a­lyp­tic forms of futur­ism. We might begin by won­der­ing what our actu­al 2017 will look like 57 years from now. What will peo­ple in 2074 make of our end­less cul­ture of revival­ism, from zom­bie steam­punk to retreads and remakes of every­thing from Ghost in the Shell, to The Matrix, to Star Wars? Who can say. Per­haps, for what­ev­er soci­o­log­i­cal rea­son, we are suf­fer­ing, as Berry put it, from a loss of the future.

 

via Pale­o­fu­ture

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sovi­et Artists Envi­sion a Com­mu­nist Utopia in Out­er Space

“Glo­ry to the Con­querors of the Uni­verse!”: Pro­pa­gan­da Posters from the Sovi­et Space Race (1958–1963)

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

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

John F. Kennedy Explains Why Artists & Poets Are Indispensable to American Democracy (October 26th, 1963)

The Greek word poe­sis did not con­fine itself to the lit­er­ary arts. Most broad­ly speak­ing, the word meant “to make”—as in, to cre­ate any­thing, god­like, out of the stuff of ideas. But the Eng­lish word “poet­ry” has always retained this grander sense, one very present for poets steeped in the clas­sics, like Per­cy Shel­ley, who famous­ly called poets the “unac­knowl­edged leg­is­la­tors of the world” in his essay “A Defence of Poet­ry.” Shel­ley argued, “If no new poets should arise to cre­ate afresh the asso­ci­a­tions which have been thus dis­or­ga­nized, lan­guage will be dead to all the nobler pur­pos­es of human inter­course.”

It can feel at times, watch­ing cer­tain of our lead­ers speak, that lan­guage may be dying for “nobler pur­pos­es.” But cer­tain poets would seek to con­vince us oth­er­wise. As Walt Whit­man wrote of his coun­try­men in an intro­duc­tion to Leaves of Grass, “pres­i­dents shall not be their com­mon ref­er­ee so much as their poets shall.”

Whit­man lived in a time that val­ued rhetor­i­cal skill in its lead­ers. So too did anoth­er of the country’s revered nation­al poets, Robert Frost, who accept­ed the request of John F. Kennedy to serve as the first inau­gur­al poet in 1961 with “his sig­na­ture ele­gance of wit,” com­ments Maria Popo­va. Frost, 86 years old at the time, read his poem “The Gift Out­right” from mem­o­ry and offered Kennedy some full-throat­ed advice on join­ing “poet­ry and pow­er.”

Kennedy, an “arts patron in chief,” as the L.A. Times’ Mark Swed describes him, was so moved that two years lat­er, after the poet’s death, he deliv­ered an elo­quent eulo­gy for Frost at Amherst Col­lege that picked up the poet’s theme, and acknowl­edged the pow­er of poet­ry as equal to, and per­haps sur­pass­ing, that of pol­i­tics. “Our nation­al strength mat­ters,” he began, “but the spir­it which informs and con­trols our strength mat­ters just as much.” That ani­mat­ing spir­it for Kennedy was not reli­gion, civ­il or super­nat­ur­al, but art. Frost’s poet­ry, he said, “brought an unspar­ing instinct for real­i­ty to bear on the plat­i­tudes and pieties of soci­ety.”

His sense of the human tragedy for­ti­fied him against self-decep­tion and easy con­so­la­tion… it is hard­ly an acci­dent that Robert Frost cou­pled poet­ry and pow­er, for he saw poet­ry as the means of sav­ing pow­er from itself. When pow­er leads men towards arro­gance, poet­ry reminds him of his lim­i­ta­tions. When pow­er nar­rows the areas of man’s con­cern, poet­ry reminds him of the rich­ness and diver­si­ty of his exis­tence. When pow­er cor­rupts, poet­ry cleans­es. For art estab­lish­es the basic human truth which must serve as the touch­stone of our judg­ment.

The tragedy of hubris and cel­e­bra­tion of diver­si­ty, how­ev­er, we can see not only in Frost, but in Shel­ley, Whit­man, and per­haps every oth­er great poet whose “per­son­al vision… becomes the last cham­pi­on of the indi­vid­ual mind and sen­si­bil­i­ty against an intru­sive soci­ety and an offi­cious state.” Kennedy’s short speech, with great clar­i­ty and con­ci­sion, makes the case for using the country’s resources to “reward achieve­ment in the arts as we reward achieve­ment in busi­ness or state­craft.” But just as impor­tant­ly, he argues against any kind of state impo­si­tion on an artist’s vision: “If art is to nour­ish the roots of our cul­ture, soci­ety must set the artist free to fol­low his vision wher­ev­er it takes him. We must nev­er for­get that art is not a form of pro­pa­gan­da; it is a form of truth.”

You can hear Kennedy deliv­er the speech in the audio above, read a full tran­script in Eng­lish here and in 12 oth­er lan­guages here. In the audi­ence at Amherst sat poet and crit­ic Archibald MacLeish, who, in his “Ars Poet­i­ca,” had sug­gest­ed that poet­ry should not be stripped of its sounds and images and turned into a didac­tic tool. Kennedy agrees. “In free soci­ety art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ide­ol­o­gy.” Yet poet­ry is not a lux­u­ry, but a neces­si­ty if a body politic is to flour­ish. “The nation which dis­dains the mis­sion of art,” Kennedy warned, “invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of hav­ing ‘noth­ing to look back­ward to with pride, and noth­ing to look for­ward to with hope.’”

Kennedy’s is a point of view, per­haps, that might get under a lot of peo­ple’s skin. It’s worth con­sid­er­ing, as a less opti­mistic crit­ic argued at the time, whether an over­abun­dance of didac­tic polit­i­cal state­ments in art may be as cul­tur­al­ly dam­ag­ing as the absence of art in pol­i­tics. Or whether art like Frost’s is ever “dis­in­ter­est­ed,” in Kennedy’s phras­ing, or apo­lit­i­cal, or can oper­ate inde­pen­dent­ly as a check to pow­er. Frost him­self may express ambiva­lence in his embrace of “human tragedy.” But in his doubt he ful­fills the poet­’s role, enter­ing into the kind of crit­i­cal dialec­tic Kennedy claims for poet­ry and democ­ra­cy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Robert Frost Read ‘The Gift Out­right,’ the Poem He Recit­ed from Mem­o­ry at JFK’s Inau­gu­ra­tion

New Film Project Fea­tures Cit­i­zens of Alaba­ma Read­ing Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a Poet­ic Embod­i­ment of Demo­c­ra­t­ic Ideals

Theodor Adorno’s Rad­i­cal Cri­tique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Viet­nam War Protest Move­ment

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

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