Watch Willem Dafoe Become Vincent Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s New Film, At Eternity’s Gate

in Art, Film | September 6th, 2018

We know Julian Schn­abel for work­ing in two forms: paint­ing and film. His work in both has more con­nec­tion than it might at first seem, since most of his films are about art, or at least about artists. After mak­ing it big in the art world him­self in the late 1970s and 1980s with his sig­na­ture large-scale can­vass­es incor­po­rat­ing a wide vari­ety of mate­ri­als, he got behind the cam­era in 1996 to direct Basquiat, a biopic on the epony­mous graf­fi­ti-artist-turned-painter. In the 2000s he fol­lowed it up with Before Night Falls, about Cuban poet Reinal­do Are­nas, and The Div­ing Bell and the But­ter­fly, about a French mag­a­zine edi­tor turned writer after a stroke left him “locked” inside his own head. (At that same time he also shot a Lou Reed con­cert film, a song from which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.)

Now Schn­abel has brought his film­mak­ing career back to where he start­ed it with anoth­er film about anoth­er painter, a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure in his day, whose influ­ence grew after his ear­ly death. At Eter­ni­ty’s Gate depicts the final days in the life of Dutch Post-Impres­sion­ist Vin­cent van Gogh, cast­ing in the role no less a thes­pi­an than Willem Dafoe, known for play­ing every­one from T.S. Eliot to Pier Pao­lo Pasoli­ni to Jesus of Nazareth.

Though he has already lived a much longer life than Van Gogh ever did, Dafoe no doubt has the skills to use that in the per­for­mance’s favor, trans­mit­ting the way that the painter saw more deeply into the world around him than any­one else did and got labeled a mad­man for it. And yes, there was also the mat­ter of his ear, from which the trail­er above assures us that Schn­abel’s film does­n’t shy away.

But At Eter­ni­ty’s Gate clear­ly focus­es on Van Gogh’s strug­gle to pur­sue his art, accord­ing to his per­son­al vision, in an unre­cep­tive time and place. “Rather than sim­ply sug­gest that mad­ness and genius are inex­tri­ca­bly linked, as count­less movies of this sort have already done, the film­mak­er por­trays the act of cre­at­ing art as less an action and more a state of being, an ever-flow­ing stream that the man hold­ing the paint­brush is pow­er­less to stop or even con­trol,” writes Indiewire’s Michael Nor­dine. “Watch­ing the artist at work and hear­ing noth­ing but his rapid brush­strokes as the wind howls in the back­ground is med­i­ta­tive, even mes­mer­ic.” Schn­abel’s film fol­lows last year’s Lov­ing Vin­cent, which told Van Gogh’s sto­ry with ani­ma­tion made entire­ly of oil paint­ings. Its suc­cess, and the acclaim that has so far come in for At Eter­ni­ty’s Gate in advance of its wide release in Novem­ber, sup­ports one obser­va­tion in par­tic­u­lar made by Dafoe-as-Van Gogh: “Maybe God made me a painter for peo­ple who aren’t born yet.”

via IndieWire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Near­ly 1,000 Paint­ings & Draw­ings by Vin­cent van Gogh Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online: View/Download the Col­lec­tion

New Ani­mat­ed Film About Vin­cent Van Gogh Will Be Made Out of 65,000 Van Gogh-Style Paint­ings: Watch the Trail­er and Mak­ing-Of Video

Watch as Van Gogh’s Famous Self-Por­trait Morphs Into a Pho­to­graph

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

The Vin­cent Van Gogh Action Fig­ure, Com­plete with Detach­able Ear

Lou Reed Sings “Sweet Jane” Live, Julian Schn­abel Films It (2006)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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To Make Great Films, You Must Read, Read, Read and Write, Write, Write, Say Akira Kurosawa and Werner Herzog

in Film | September 6th, 2018

I wouldn’t pre­sume to draw many com­par­isons between the work of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Wern­er Her­zog. There is, in both direc­tors, a rough, mas­culin­ist dar­ing that ful­ly explores the trag­ic lim­i­ta­tions and bloody con­se­quences of rough, mas­culin­ist dar­ing. This broad the­mat­ic com­mit­ment express­es itself in both artists’ films in wild­ly dif­fer­ent ways. Maybe what most con­nects them, and con­nects them to their ardent fans, is a shared writer­ly sen­si­bil­i­ty. Film may be fore­most a visu­al medi­um, yet—given the weight of thou­sands of years of oral and writ­ten sto­ry­telling that came before it—filmmakers can­not pro­duce great work with­out steep­ing them­selves in lit­er­a­ture.

Or, at least, that’s what both Kuro­sawa and Her­zog have argued—and who would con­tra­dict them? Film­mak­ing is a risky endeav­or in the best of cir­cum­stances. “It costs a great deal of mon­ey to make a film these days,” and becom­ing a direc­tor is “not so eas­i­ly accom­plished,” says Kuro­sawa in his inter­view offer­ing advice to aspir­ing film­mak­ers above. “If you gen­uine­ly want to make films,” he says, “then write screen­plays.” Where did the ideas for his screen­plays come from? From lit­er­a­ture. It’s impor­tant, he says, that film­mak­ers “do a cer­tain amount of read­ing. Unless you have a rich reserve with­in, you can’t cre­ate any­thing.”

Kuro­sawa adapt­ed the 1951 Rashomon, per­haps his most wide­ly acclaimed film, from two short sto­ries by Japan­ese writer Ryūno­suke Aku­ta­gawa, “Rashomon” (1915) and “In a Grove” (1921). 1985’s Ran is famous­ly “an East­ern retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear,” an author from whom Kuro­sawa learned much. He adapt­ed Dos­to­evsky, his favorite writer, in a Japan­ese con­text, and his 1957 film The Low­er Depths adapts a play by Max­im Gorky. Even his films that do not direct­ly trans­late anoth­er writer’s work still draw inspi­ra­tion from lit­er­ary sources. Read­ing leads to writ­ing, and to become an accom­plished film­mak­er, Kuro­sawa says in no uncer­tain terms, you must write.

This advice does not always go over well, he admits. Writ­ing is painful and dif­fi­cult, often a thank­less, unfor­giv­ing task with no imme­di­ate reward. “Still,” he says, para­phras­ing Balzac, “for writ­ers, includ­ing nov­el­ists, the most essen­tial and nec­es­sary thing is the for­bear­ance to face the dull task of writ­ing one word at a time.” One only learns how to do this by doing it—and by immers­ing one­self in the work of oth­ers who have done it. To suc­ceed as a sto­ry­teller, the basis of the director’s art, you must “write, write, write, and read.”

Her­zog, imply­ing the impor­tance of writ­ing more than stat­ing it out­right, begins and ends his advice to young aspi­rants above with the repeat­ed injunc­tion, “read, read, read, read,” and so on. “If you don’t read, you’ll nev­er be a film­mak­er.” Tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tions are sec­ondary. Herzog’s Rogue Film School encour­ages stu­dents to “go absolute­ly and com­plete­ly wild”… by read­ing Hem­ing­way, Vir­gil, The Poet­ic Edda, and J.A. Baker’s The Pere­grine. (He also sug­gests The War­ren Com­mis­sion Report and Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s True His­to­ry of the Con­quest of New Spain.) Kuro­sawa does not offer spe­cif­ic sug­ges­tions. He grants that “cur­rent nov­els are fine, but one should read the clas­sics too.” The kinds of sto­ries these film­mak­ers rec­om­mend has much to do with their own tem­pera­ments and inter­ests; what­ev­er you might pre­fer to read in the course of your direc­to­r­i­al train­ing, Her­zog says you must read as much as pos­si­ble, and, Kuro­sawa adds, you must write, write, write, and write some more.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Cre­ates Required Read­ing & Movie View­ing Lists for Enrolling in His Film School

Wern­er Herzog’s Rogue Film School: Apply & Learn the Art of Gueril­la Film­mak­ing & Lock-Pick­ing

How Did Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Make Such Pow­er­ful & Endur­ing Films? A Wealth of Video Essays Break Down His Cin­e­mat­ic Genius

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies

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

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How Breaking Bad Crafted the Perfect TV Pilot: A Video Essay

in Television | September 6th, 2018

“A high school teacher finds out that he has ter­mi­nal can­cer and decides to cook meth in order to make mon­ey for his fam­i­ly.” Twen­ty years ago that would have sound­ed like an insane premise for a tele­vi­sion show. Ten years ago that show actu­al­ly pre­miered. Almost five years ago it end­ed its both wide­ly watched and crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed five-sea­son run. Break­ing Bad could only have emerged at a cer­tain point in tele­vi­sion his­to­ry, when the high-qual­i­ty, cin­e­mat­ic dra­ma became a viable prospect even for a basic-cable net­work like AMC. But it nev­er would have got any­where with­out an impres­sive pilot, the first episode of a series that pro­vides a sense of what the whole thing will be like.

A pilot, for its part, can nev­er get any­where with­out an impres­sive screen­play. Here, YouTube video essay chan­nel Lessons from the Screen­play breaks down the rea­sons the screen­play for Break­ing Bad’s pilot works so well, not least because it per­fect­ly exe­cutes the con­ven­tions of the form. First, it grabs the view­er’s atten­tion with the image of a man bar­rel­ing through the desert in a Win­neba­go, wear­ing only a under­pants and a gas mask. This open­ing sequence, the “teas­er,” quick­ly inten­si­fies and ends with a feel­ing of life-and-death stakes. Then, when the episode prop­er­ly begins, it intro­duces the man in the Win­neba­go, a chem­istry teacher named Walt, by tak­ing us through an ear­li­er day in his high­ly unsat­is­fac­to­ry life: dis­re­spect­ful stu­dents, finan­cial woes, a pas­sion­less mar­riage.

Soon the screen­play address­es the implic­it ques­tion, “What is miss­ing in Walt’s life?”  The scenes the pilot shows us illus­trate that “he is some­one who longs for con­trol and pur­pose, but lacks both.” Then it deliv­ers the “incit­ing inci­dent for the show”: his col­lapse on the job and sub­se­quent can­cer diag­no­sis. Such an inci­dent con­ven­tion­al­ly turns the pro­tag­o­nist’s life upside down, as this one turns Walt’s life upside down, and moti­vate that pro­tag­o­nist to take some kind of action, as it moti­vates Walt to team up with a for­mer stu­dent to start a meth-cook­ing oper­a­tion. Short­ly after that, the now fear­less Walt gets his first taste of pow­er in a fight at a cloth­ing store, begin­ning his trans­for­ma­tion from the meek, put-upon Walt into the steely drug king­pin Wal­ter White — a trans­for­ma­tion that trans­fixed Break­ing Bad’s audi­ence.

“Tele­vi­sion is his­tor­i­cal­ly good at keep­ing its char­ac­ters in a self-imposed sta­sis so that shows go on for years or even decades,” says cre­ator Vince Gilli­gan. “When I real­ized this, the log­i­cal next step was to think, how can I do a show in which the fun­da­men­tal dri­ve is toward change?” In this way, Break­ing Bad fur­thered the rev­o­lu­tion in cin­e­mat­ic tele­vi­sion not just with its look and feel or even its con­tent, but with its com­mit­ment to the idea that a char­ac­ter must come out of the sto­ry as a dif­fer­ent per­son than he was when he entered it. The pilot man­ages to do in its own self-con­tained sto­ry while also estab­lish­ing expec­ta­tions for the rest of the series. Break­ing Bad, most crit­ics will agree, met those expec­ta­tions and then some, but with­out a pilot as well-writ­ten as this, it almost cer­tain­ly would­n’t have had the chance to try.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Orig­i­nal Audi­tion Tapes for Break­ing Bad Before the Final Sea­son Debuts

The Break­ing Bad Theme Played with Meth Lab Equip­ment

The Sci­ence of Break­ing Bad: Pro­fes­sor Don­na Nel­son Explains How the Show Gets it Right

Bryan Cranston Reads Shelley’s Son­net “Ozy­man­dias” in Omi­nous Teas­er for Break­ing Bad’s Last Sea­son

Break­ing Bad Illus­trat­ed by Gonzo Artist Ralph Stead­man

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Michael Jackson Wrote a Song: A Close Look at How the King of Pop Crafted “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”

in Music | September 6th, 2018

First of all, hap­py belat­ed birth­day to Evan Puschak, the man behind Nerd­writer and some of the best video essays on the web that we often fea­ture here on Open Cul­ture. He recent­ly turned 30, and if you’re in your 20s that’s some elder states­man busi­ness. If you’re old­er, well, remem­ber how you felt when you turned 30? Wouldn’t you want that youth­ful anx­i­ety back?

Any­way, Evan’s gift to us is this appre­ci­a­tion of Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” the break­away hit from his 1979 album Off the Wall, the one that began Jackson’s rise into the stratos­phere, a jour­ney that would end with an iso­lat­ed man chas­ing the dragon’s tail of suc­cess. But that was far off in the future, and though Thriller was the block­buster album, Off the Wall has so much more joy, sex­u­al­i­ty, and heart than what was to come. “Rock with You” and the title track are smooth, soul­ful num­bers, but as Puschak says, “Don’t Stop” is *the* sin­gle off that album, a song that still sounds fresh today, a cross-over pop hit par excel­lence, despite being over­played at every wed­ding recep­tion since the ‘80s. (Even when watch­ing the video for this piece, I found myself clap­ping along, some­thing I rarely do. But it’s just so. damn. catchy.)

So why is that? How does this song work?

Puschak makes a few salient points.

One is that the song comes heav­i­ly indebt­ed to dis­co, yet it is not a dis­co song. The rhythm struc­ture is clos­er to funk than disco–it’s real­ly just a vamp on two chords–and the verse-cho­rus struc­ture is from rock music. It’s “pure dance music,” as Puschak says, quot­ing writer Ann Daniel­son.

Anoth­er point is that the rhythm mix is all about syn­co­pa­tion, with bass, shak­ers, strings, horns, and even a Coke bot­tle (played by Jack­son him­self) fill­ing in the spaces between the beat. (Those that find, say, house music bor­ing can put a lot of it down to the lack of syn­co­pa­tion).

And final­ly, there’s Jackson’s vocals, the top of each verse being two notes in a tri­tone inter­val. The tri­tone has been called the “devil’s inter­val”–there’s a nice video essay here on its his­to­ry–but there’s noth­ing dev­il­ish about Jackson’s falset­to. As Puschak says, quot­ing Ethan Hein, “the rela­tion­ship between these notes is some­what off kil­ter, and your mind notices that. And that infus­es the song with an urgency that it wouldn’t oth­er­wise have.”

Inter­est­ing­ly, the lyrics are not dis­cussed. And prob­a­bly for good reason–apart from the song’s title in the cho­rus, Jackson’s lyrics are sung so high they are inscrutable. Be hon­est, until you read the lyric sheet, did you know what he was singing? My point would be–it doesn’t mat­ter. The point is in the title; the mean­ing is in the mood.

Jack­son would try to catch light­ing in a bot­tle again on Thriller with “You Wan­na Be Startin’ Some­thing,” a pret­ty bla­tant rewrite. It’s still a great sin­gle, but that song, along with “Beat It” start­ed Jack­son along the path of lry­ics about aggres­sion and pos­tur­ing. (A few years lat­er, we’d have “Bad,” “Smooth Crim­i­nal,” and more.)

Hence my point about the mag­ic of Off the Wall–before the fame, before the insan­i­ty, before the “King of Pop” busi­ness, Jack­son was a sen­su­al, androg­y­nous angel sent down to bring love to the dance floor, or your bed­room, and all spaces in between. It didn’t last long, but it’s a beau­ti­ful sin­gle, a beau­ti­ful album, and a beau­ti­ful moment in pop.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear “Starlight,” Michael Jackson’s Ear­ly Demo of “Thriller”: A Ver­sion Before the Lyrics Were Rad­i­cal­ly Changed

The Ori­gins of Michael Jackson’s Moon­walk: Vin­tage Footage of Cab Cal­loway, Sam­my Davis Jr., Fred Astaire & More

Miles Davis Cov­ers Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” (1983)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Why You Should Read One Hundred Years of Solitude: An Animated Video Makes the Case

in Animation, Books, Literature | September 5th, 2018

Maybe we read some cel­e­brat­ed lit­er­ary works the way we eat kale or quinoa—you don’t exact­ly love it but they say it’s, like, a super­food. Not so Gabriel Gar­cia Marquez’s One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude. When I first start­ed read­ing the nov­el, I couldn’t stop. Twelve hours and a cou­ple pots of cof­fee lat­er, I want­ed to read it again right away. It’s a page-turner—not some­thing one often says of lit­er­ary fic­tion beloved by high­brow crit­ics and academics—but I mean it as the high­est pos­si­ble com­pli­ment.

The book has every fea­ture of a binge-wor­thy soap opera: char­ac­ters we love and love to hate, doomed affairs, sex, vio­lence, end­less fam­i­ly squab­bling, tragedy, intrigue, melo­dra­ma…. Again, this is no crit­i­cism; Mar­quez loved telen­ov­e­las and even wrote a script for one. He want­ed his work to reach as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble, to thrill and enter­tain. But he did­n’t with­hold any lit­er­ary nutri­ents either.


The novel’s poet­ic lan­guage, his­tor­i­cal scope, and the­mat­ic and sym­bol­ic com­plex­i­ty has led crit­ics like William Kennedy to com­pare it to the book of Gen­e­sis, and led no small num­ber of read­ers to wild­ly pre­fer it to the Bible or any oth­er ancient book of mythol­o­gy.

If you’re one of the two or three peo­ple who hasn’t read the nov­el, and you don’t find all this praise ful­ly con­vinc­ing, con­sid­er the case made by Fran­cis­co Díez-Buzo in the TED-Ed ani­mat­ed video above.

The sto­ry, we learn, arrived as an epiphany Mar­quez had while he and his fam­i­ly were on the road to a vaca­tion des­ti­na­tion. He turned the car around, aban­doned the trip, and start­ed writ­ing immediately—an exam­ple of the total com­mit­ment many writ­ers promise them­selves they’ll one day get around to maybe work­ing on. Eigh­teen months and many pots of cof­fee lat­er, One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude appeared, intro­duc­ing a world­wide read­er­ship to Mar­quez, mag­i­cal real­ism, and Latin Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, pol­i­tics, and his­to­ry.

Most every read­er now has a vol­ume of Octavio Paz or Pablo Neru­da on the shelf, and nov­els by Mar­quez, Mario Var­gas Llosa, or Isabelle Allende. Before Cien años de soledad arrived, how­ev­er, this was rarely so out­side of Span­ish-speak­ing coun­tries. The nov­el cre­at­ed a glob­al appetite for rich Latin Amer­i­can tra­di­tions of sto­ry­telling and lyri­cal poet­ry. New trans­la­tions from the region began appear­ing every­where.

Like Faulkner’s entire cor­pus com­pressed into one vol­ume, the epic tale of sev­en gen­er­a­tions of Buendías in the fic­tion­al Colom­bian town of Macon­do is vast and sprawl­ing. It “is not an easy book to read,” says Díez-Buzo. Here, as you might expect, I dis­agree. It is hard­er not to read it once you’ve picked it up. But you will need to read it again, and again, and again.

So packed is the book with detail, allu­sion, his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ence, and nar­ra­tive that you could read it for the rest of your life and nev­er exhaust its lay­ers of mean­ing. As Harold Bloom put it, “every page is rammed full of life beyond the capac­i­ty of any sin­gle read­er to absorb… There are no wast­ed sen­tences, no mere tran­si­tions, in this nov­el, and you must notice every­thing at the moment you read it.” Pablo Neru­da called it “the great­est rev­e­la­tion in the Span­ish lan­guage since Don Quixote of Cervantes”—the found­ing text of Span­ish-lan­guage lit­er­a­ture and, indeed, of the nov­el form itself.

The super­nat­ur­al and the sur­re­al suf­fuse each page, rais­ing even mun­dane encoun­ters to a myth­ic dimen­sion, stag­ing his­to­ry as time­less dra­ma, played out over and over again through each gen­er­a­tion. In each rep­e­ti­tion, fan­tas­tic and fatal changes also “pro­duce a sense of his­to­ry,” says Díez-Buzo, “as a down­ward spi­ral the char­ac­ters seem pow­er­less to escape.”

It is this his­to­ry that Mar­quez described, when he accept­ed the Nobel Prize in 1982, as “a bound­less realm of haunt­ed men and his­toric women, whose unend­ing obsti­na­cy blurs into leg­end.” Marquez’s own fam­i­ly his­to­ry, full of “haunt­ed men and his­toric women,” served as a mod­el for his suc­ces­sion of fic­tion­al ances­tors. Latin Amer­i­cans, he said, “have not had a moment’s rest,” yet in the face of colo­nial­ist bru­tal­i­ty, civ­il war, dic­ta­tor­ships, “oppres­sion, plun­der­ing and aban­don­ment,” he declared, “we respond with life.” By some strange act of mag­ic, Mar­quez con­tained all of that life in one extra­or­di­nary nov­el.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s Extra­or­di­nary Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech, “The Soli­tude Of Latin Amer­i­ca,” in Eng­lish & Span­ish (1982)

New Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Dig­i­tal Archive Fea­tures More Than 27,000 Dig­i­tized Let­ters, Man­u­script Pages, Pho­tos & More

Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Describes the Cul­tur­al Mer­its of Soap Operas, and Even Wrote a Script for One

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

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Discover “Journey of the Universe,” a Multimedia Project That Explores Humanity’s Place in the Epic History of the Cosmos

in Astronomy, Books, History | September 5th, 2018

Today we know what no pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion knew: the his­to­ry of the uni­verse and of the unfold­ing of life on Earth. Through the aston­ish­ing achieve­ments of nat­ur­al sci­en­tists world­wide, we now have a detailed account of how galax­ies and stars, plan­ets and liv­ing organ­isms, human beings and human con­scious­ness came to be.

With this knowl­edge, the ques­tion of what role we play in the 14-bil­lion-year his­to­ry of the uni­verse impos­es itself with greater poignan­cy than ever before. In ask­ing our­selves how we will tell the sto­ry of Earth to our chil­dren, we must inevitably con­sid­er the role of human­i­ty in its his­to­ry, and how we con­nect with the intri­cate web of life on Earth.

In Jour­ney of the Uni­verse–a mul­ti­me­dia edu­ca­tion­al project that fea­tures a book, film and free online courses–evolutionary philoso­pher Bri­an Thomas Swimme and his­to­ri­an of reli­gions Mary Eve­lyn Tuck­er pro­vide an ele­gant, sci­ence-based nar­ra­tive to tell this epic sto­ry, lead­ing up to the chal­lenges of our present moment. The authors describe the ori­gins of humans on Earth, how we devel­oped a sym­bol­ic con­scious­ness, and how our abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate using sym­bols make humans a “plan­e­tary pres­ence.”

We are now faced with a new dynamic—one where the sur­vival of the species and entire ecosys­tems depend pri­mar­i­ly on human activ­i­ty, and the choic­es humans make.

Weav­ing togeth­er the find­ings of mod­ern sci­ence togeth­er with endur­ing wis­dom found in the human­is­tic tra­di­tions of the West, Asia, and indige­nous peo­ples, the authors explore cos­mic evo­lu­tion as a pro­found­ly won­drous process based on cre­ativ­i­ty, con­nec­tion, and inter­de­pen­dence, and they envi­sion an unprece­dent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty for the world’s peo­ple to address the daunt­ing eco­log­i­cal and social chal­lenges of our times.

Devel­oped over sev­er­al decades, and inspired by the authors’ long col­lab­o­ra­tion with Thomas Berry, Jour­ney of the Uni­verse boasts an impres­sive ros­ter of sci­ence advi­sors includ­ing Ursu­la Good­e­nough, Craig Kochel, and Ter­ry Dea­con.

Jour­ney of the Uni­verse is a mul­ti­me­dia edu­ca­tion­al project that includes:

1.) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: A Sto­ry for Our Time Spe­cial­iza­tion avail­able on Cours­era, cre­at­ed by Yale.  This is a col­lec­tion of three Mas­sive Online Open Cours­es that take stu­dents through the sci­en­tif­ic and cul­tur­al cos­mol­o­gy found through­out Jour­ney of the Uni­verse, as well as deep into its lin­eage with cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an and cos­mol­o­gist Thomas Berry:

Course 1: Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: The Unfold­ing of Life

Course 2: Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: Weav­ing Knowl­edge and Action

Course 3: The World­view of Thomas Berry: The Flour­ish­ing of the Earth Com­mu­ni­ty

2) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Film, win­ner of the 2012 San Francisco/Northern Cal­i­for­nia Emmy® Award for best doc­u­men­tary. You can watch the trail­er for the film above

3) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Book, pub­lished by Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press. Trans­lat­ed into French, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Ger­man, Turk­ish, Chi­nese, Kore­an, Indone­sian.

4) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Con­ver­sa­tion Series, a twen­ty-part edu­ca­tion­al series inte­grates the per­spec­tives of the sci­ences and the human­i­ties into a retelling of our 13.7 bil­lion year sto­ry. In a series of one-on-one inter­views, sci­en­tists, his­to­ri­ans, and envi­ron­men­tal­ists explore the unfold­ing sto­ry of the uni­verse and Earth and the role of the human in respond­ing to our present chal­lenges.

Devin O’Dea lives in San Fran­cis­co where he serves as the man­ag­er of the Jour­ney of the Uni­verse project: a col­lab­o­ra­tive, mul­ti­me­dia con­ver­sa­tion that draws togeth­er sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies with human­is­tic insights con­cern­ing the nature of the uni­verse.  Devin wel­comes all inter­ests and feed­back to Jour­ney mate­ri­als at devin@journeyoftheuniverse.org.

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Hear Langston Hughes Read His Poetry Over Original Compositions by Charles Mingus & Leonard Feather: A Classic Collaboration from 1958

in Jazz, Music, Poetry | September 5th, 2018

Have you looked up Charles Min­gus late­ly? You should. Min­gus, who died in 1979, has a “lost” album com­ing out—live record­ings made in ‘73, aired on the radio once, then dis­ap­peared into obscu­ri­ty until now. Seems there’s always some­thing new to learn about our favorite jazz musicians—and our favorite jazz poets. New­ly-dis­cov­ered poems from Langston Hugh­es, for exam­ple, appeared a few years back, writ­ten in “depths of the cri­sis” of the Great Depres­sion.

These poems are dark and bit­ter, “some of the harsh­est polit­i­cal verse ever penned by an Amer­i­can,” writes Hugh­es schol­ar Arnold Ram­per­sad. They are not the cel­e­bra­to­ry Hugh­es we read in school. While angry con­ser­v­a­tives and McCarthy­ism may have forced this side of him into hid­ing, in Hugh­es’ view, poet­ry, like jazz, had room for every­thing, whether it be love or rage.

“Jazz is a great big sea,” he wrote in his 1956 essay “Jazz as Com­mu­ni­ca­tion.” The music “wash­es up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old beat, or off-beat.” His task, in poems like “The Weary Blues” had been to put “jazz into words,” with all of its wild mood swings, lovers’ quar­rels, rapid-fire con­ver­sa­tions, and heat­ed argu­ments.

Through­out his career, Min­gus had been mov­ing in the oth­er direc­tion, tak­ing storms of ideas—angry, melan­choly, joy­ful, etc.—and turn­ing them into sounds. But his music, always “supreme­ly vocal,” notes The Nation’s Adam Shatz, spoke in one way or anoth­er. Min­gus “col­lab­o­rat­ed with poets in East Vil­lage Cof­fee­hous­es” and won his only Gram­my for a piece of writ­ing, the lin­er notes for his 1971 album Let My Chil­dren Hear Music.

For Min­gus, crit­ic Whit­ney Bal­li­ett remarked, jazz “was anoth­er way of talk­ing.” For anoth­er com­pos­er, pianist and jour­nal­ist Leonard Feath­er, lan­guage and music played equal roles. Feath­er, notes Jason Anke­ny, was known both as “the acknowl­edged dean of Amer­i­can jazz crit­ics” and author of “peren­ni­al” stan­dards “Evil Gal Blues,” “Blow­top Blues,” and “How Blue Can You Get?”

Two years after Hugh­es read “Jazz as Com­mu­ni­ca­tion” at the New­port Jazz Fes­ti­val, he col­lab­o­rat­ed with Feather’s All-Star Sex­tet and Min­gus and the Horace Par­lan Quin­tet on an album first released as The Weary Blues. It has recent­ly been re-released by Fin­ger­tips as Harlem in Vogue—22 tracks of Hugh­es read­ing poems like “The Weary Blues,” “Blues at Dawn,” and “Same in Blues/Comment on Curb” (top) over orig­i­nal com­po­si­tions by Feath­er and Min­gus, with six addi­tion­al tracks of Hugh­es read­ing solo and two orig­i­nal songs by Bob Dor­ough with the Bob Dor­ough Quin­tet. (Min­gus plays bass on tracks 11–18.)

You can stream the album in full above (and buy it here). Here, lis­ten to the Poet­ry Foundation’s Cur­tis Fox, jazz musi­cian Charley Ger­ard, and poet Hol­ly Bass dis­cuss the record and Hugh­es’ rela­tion­ship to jazz and blues. Hugh­es’ poems, notes Ger­ard, are “struc­tured just like blues,” their meters, rhymes, and rhythms always invok­ing the sounds of Harlem’s musi­cal scene. In these record­ings, Feath­er and Min­gus trans­pose Hugh­es’ lan­guage into music, just as he had turned jazz into words.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Langston Hugh­es Read Poet­ry from His First Col­lec­tion, The Weary Blues (1958)

Charles Min­gus Explains in His Gram­my-Win­ning Essay “What is a Jazz Com­pos­er?”

Poems as Short Films: Langston Hugh­es, Pablo Neru­da and More

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

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A First Look at The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks, a Feature-Length Journey Into the Mind of the Famed Neurologist

in Animation, Film, Neuroscience | September 5th, 2018

“Every day a word sur­pris­es me,” famed neu­rol­o­gist Oliv­er Sacks once told Bill Hayes, with whom he spent the final six years of his life. The com­ment came “apro­pos of noth­ing oth­er than that a word had sud­den­ly popped into his head,” writes Hayes in a recent New York Times piece on Sacks’ love of lan­guage. “Often this hap­pened while swim­ming — ‘ideas and para­graphs’ would devel­op as he back­stroked, after which he’d rush to the dock or pool’s edge to get the words down on paper — as Dempsey Rice has cap­tured in an enchant­i­ng forth­com­ing film, The Ani­mat­ed Mind of Oliv­er Sacks.” You can get a glimpse of that film, and its por­tray­al of Sacks’ habit of get­ting ideas while swim­ming, in the trail­er above.

“In 1982 I wrote a sec­tion of A Leg to Stand On” — his mem­oir of his expe­ri­ence recov­er­ing from a moun­taineer­ing acci­dent that left him with­out aware­ness of his left leg — “by a lake.” We watch his ani­mat­ed form mak­ing its way across the water in cap and speedo, a wake of words trail­ing behind them.

After the swim, “drip­ping, I would write.” We then see James Sil­ber­man, then pres­i­dent and edi­tor at Sum­mit Books, read­ing Sacks’ hand­writ­ten, still-sog­gy man­u­script. The sog­gi­ness might be artis­tic license, but the hand­writ­ten-ness was­n’t: Sil­ber­man “wrote me back say­ing, did I think this was the 19th cen­tu­ry? No one has sent him a man­u­script for thir­ty years. And besides, this one looked like it had been dropped in the bath.”

So maybe the ani­ma­tors did­n’t get quite as cre­ative draw­ing those pages as it might seem, but they still must have had to get cre­ative indeed to keep up with Sacks him­self, a decade of whose con­ver­sa­tions with Rice pro­vide the film’s nar­ra­tion. “Oliv­er saw his patients as whole peo­ple, rather than iso­lat­ed dis­or­ders,” she says by way of explain­ing what made Sacks’ books, like Awak­en­ings, The Man Who Mis­took His Wife for a Hat, and many more besides, so res­o­nant with read­ers the world over. “He was­n’t afraid to open­ly inquire of the patient with autism or amne­sia, ‘What is it like to be you?’ ” The Ani­mat­ed Mind of Oliv­er Sacks fin­ished a suc­cess­ful Kick­starter cam­paign in July, but you can still donate and keep up with release details at its offi­cial site. As a view­ing expe­ri­ence, it should con­firm what read­ers have long sus­pect­ed: though they come for a look into the unusu­al minds of Oliv­er Sacks’ patients, they stay to inhab­it the even more unusu­al mind of Oliv­er Sacks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Fas­ci­nat­ing Case Study by Oliv­er Sacks Inspires a Short Ani­mat­ed Film, The Lost Mariner

Oliv­er Sacks Explains the Biol­o­gy of Hal­lu­ci­na­tions: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well”

This is What Oliv­er Sacks Learned on LSD and Amphet­a­mines

Oliv­er Sacks Con­tem­plates Mor­tal­i­ty (and His Ter­mi­nal Can­cer Diag­no­sis) in a Thought­ful, Poignant Let­ter

Oliv­er Sacks’ Final Inter­view: A First Look

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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