Monty Python’s Eric Idle Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters

in Film, Television | September 9th, 2019

When I first saw Mon­ty Python’s Fly­ing Cir­cus, late at night on PBS and in degrad­ed VHS videos bor­rowed from friends, I assumed the show’s con­cepts must have come out of bonkers improv ses­sions. But the troupe’s many state­ments since the show’s end, in the form of books, doc­u­men­taries, inter­views, etc., have told us in no uncer­tain terms that Mon­ty Python’s cre­ators always put writ­ing first. “I’m not an actor at all,” says Eric Idle in the GQ video above. “I’m real­ly a writer who just acts occa­sion­al­ly.”

Like­wise, in the PBS series Mon­ty Python’s Per­son­al Best, Idle dis­cuss­es the joy of writ­ing for the show—and com­pares cre­at­ing Mon­ty Python to fish­ing, of all things: “You go to the river­bank every day, you don’t know what you’re going to catch.” This idyl­lic scene may be the last thing you’d asso­ciate with the Pythons, though you may recall their take on fish­ing in the sec­ond sea­son sketch “Fish License,” in which John Cleese’s char­ac­ter, Eric, tries to buy a license for his pet hal­ibut, Eric.

Idle’s protes­ta­tions notwith­stand­ing, none of the show’s writ­ing would have worked as well as it did onscreen with­out the con­sid­er­able act­ing tal­ents of all five per­form­ers. (Idle mod­est­ly ascribes his own abil­i­ty to being “lift­ed up” by the oth­ers.) Above, he talks about the most icon­ic char­ac­ters he embod­ied on the show, begin­ning with the “wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean?” guy: a char­ac­ter, we learn, based on Vivian Stan­shall of the Bon­zo Dog Doo-Dah Band crossed with a reg­u­lar from Idle’s local pub named Mon­ty, from whom the troupe took their first name.

We also learn that the char­ac­ter was so pop­u­lar in the States that “Elvis called every­body ‘squire’ because of that f*cking sketch!” Pres­ley’s’ pen­chant for doing Mon­ty Python mate­r­i­al while in bed with his girl­friend (“if only there was footage”) is but one of the many fas­ci­nat­ing anec­dotes Idle casu­al­ly toss­es off in his com­men­tary on char­ac­ters like the Aus­tralian Bruces, who went on to sing “The Philosopher’s Song”; Mr. Smoke­toomuch, who deliv­ers a ten-minute mono­logue writ­ten by John Cleese and Gra­ham Chap­man; and Idle’s char­ac­ters in the non-Python moc­u­men­tary All You Need Is Cash, which he cre­at­ed and co-wrote, about a par­o­dy Bea­t­les band called The Rut­les.

Idle is stead­fast in his descrip­tion of him­self as a com­pe­tent “car­i­ca­tur­ist,” and not a “com­ic actor.” But his song and dance rou­tines, sly sub­tle wit and broad ges­tures, and for­ev­er fun­ny turn as cow­ard­ly Sir Robin in Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail should leave his fans with lit­tle doubt about his skill in front of the cam­era.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mon­ty Python’s Best Phi­los­o­phy Sketch­es: “The Philoso­phers’ Foot­ball Match,” “Philosopher’s Drink­ing Song” & More

Ter­ry Gilliam Reveals the Secrets of Mon­ty Python Ani­ma­tions: A 1974 How-To Guide

The Mon­ty Python Phi­los­o­phy Foot­ball Match: The Ancient Greeks Ver­sus the Ger­mans

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

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Watch a Short 1967 Film That Imagines How We’d Live in 1999: Online Learning, Electronic Shopping, Flat Screen TVs & Much More

in Film, History, Technology | September 9th, 2019

Nobody uses the word com­put­er­ized any­more. Its dis­ap­pear­ance owes not to the end of com­put­er­i­za­tion itself, but to the process’ near-com­plete­ness. Now that we all walk around with com­put­ers in our pock­ets (see also the fate of the word portable), we expect every aspect of life to involve com­put­ers in one way or anoth­er. But in 1967, the very idea of com­put­ers got peo­ple dream­ing of the far-flung future, not least because most of them had nev­er been near one, let alone brought one into their home. But for the Shore fam­i­ly, each and every phase of the day involves a com­put­er: their “cen­tral home com­put­er, which is sec­re­tary, librar­i­an, banker, teacher, med­ical tech­ni­cian, bridge part­ner, and all-around ser­vant in this house of tomor­row.”

Tomor­row, in this case, means the year 1999. Today is 1967, when Philco-Ford (the car com­pa­ny hav­ing pur­chased the bank­rupt radio and tele­vi­sion man­u­fac­tur­er six years before) did­n’t just design and build this spec­u­la­tive “house of tomor­row,” which made its debut on a tele­vi­sion broad­cast with Wal­ter Cronkite, but pro­duced a short film to show how the fam­i­ly of tomor­row would live in it. Year 1999 AD traces a day in the life of the Shores: astro­physi­cist Michael, who com­mutes to a dis­tant lab­o­ra­to­ry to work on Mars col­o­niza­tion; “part-time home­mak­er” Karen, who spends the rest of the time at the pot­tery wheel; and eight-year-old James, who attends school only two morn­ings a week but gets the rest of his edu­ca­tion in the home “learn­ing cen­ter.”

There James watch­es footage of the moon land­ing, plau­si­ble enough mate­r­i­al for a his­to­ry les­son in 1999 until you remem­ber that the actu­al land­ing did­n’t hap­pen until 1969, two years after this film was made. The flat screens on which he and his par­ents per­form their dai­ly tasks (a tech­nol­o­gy that would also sur­face in Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey the fol­low­ing year) might also look strik­ing­ly famil­iar to we denizens of the 21st cen­tu­ry. (Cer­tain­ly the way James watch­es car­toons on one screen while his record­ed lec­tures play on anoth­er will look famil­iar to today’s par­ents and edu­ca­tors.) But many oth­er aspects of the Philco-Ford future won’t: even though the year 2000 is also retro now, the Shores’ clothes and decor look more late-60s than late-90s.

In this and oth­er ways, Year 1999 AD resem­bles a par­o­dy of the tech­no-opti­mistic shorts made by post­war cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca, so much so that Snopes put up a page con­firm­ing its verac­i­ty. “Many vision­ar­ies who tried to fore­cast what dai­ly life would be like for future gen­er­a­tions made the mis­take of sim­ply pro­ject­ing exist­ing tech­nolo­gies as being big­ger, faster, and more pow­er­ful,” writes Snopes’ David Mikkel­son. Still, Year 1999 AD does a decent job of pre­dict­ing the uses of tech­nol­o­gy to come in dai­ly life: “Con­cepts such as ‘fin­ger­tip shop­ping,’ an ‘elec­tron­ic cor­re­spon­dence machine,’ and oth­ers envi­sioned in this video antic­i­pate sev­er­al inno­va­tions that became com­mon­place with­in a few years of 1999: e‑commerce, web­cams, online bill pay­ment and tax fil­ing, elec­tron­ic funds trans­fers (EFT), home-based laser print­ers, and e‑mail.”

Even twen­ty years after 1999, many of these visions have yet to mate­ri­al­ize: “Split-sec­ond lunch­es, col­or-keyed dis­pos­able dish­es,” pro­nounces the nar­ra­tor as the Shores sit down to a meal, “all part of the instant soci­ety of tomor­row, a soci­ety of leisure and tak­en-for-grant­ed com­forts.” But as easy as it is to laugh at the notion that “life will be rich­er, eas­i­er, health­i­er as Space-Age dreams come true,” the fact remains that, like the Shores, we now real­ly do have com­put­er pro­grams that let us com­mu­ni­cate and do our shop­ping, but that also tell us what to eat and when to exer­cise. What would the minds behind Year 1999 AD make of my watch­ing their film on my per­son­al screen on a sub­way train, amid hun­dreds of rid­ers all sim­i­lar­ly equipped? “If the com­put­er­ized life occa­sion­al­ly extracts its pound of flesh,” says the nar­ra­tor, “it holds out some inter­est­ing rewards.” Few state­ments about 21st-cen­tu­ry have turned out to be as pre­scient.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry… Back in 1967

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964… And Kind of Nails It

In 1968, Stan­ley Kubrick Makes Pre­dic­tions for 2001: Human­i­ty Will Con­quer Old Age, Watch 3D TV & Learn Ger­man in 20 Min­utes

Did Stan­ley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

9 Sci­ence-Fic­tion Authors Pre­dict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asi­mov, William Gib­son, Philip K. Dick & More Imag­ined the World Ahead

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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The Secret Student Group Who Took on the Nazis: An Introduction to “The White Rose”

in History | September 9th, 2019

Late­ly, young peo­ple stand­ing up against oppres­sive regimes have faced unre­lent­ing streams of ridicule, abuse, and worse: some have even lost their lives in mys­te­ri­ous cir­cum­stances that recall the trag­ic fates of those who bat­tled racism in the U.S. south decades ago. Though it’s cold con­so­la­tion to the bereaved and harassed, it at least remains the case today that activists who speak out can count on vary­ing, but vocal lev­els of sup­port, and they will find celebri­ties and politi­cians, whether cyn­i­cal or well-mean­ing, to ampli­fy (or co-opt) their mes­sage.

We can and should draw par­al­lels between 20th-cen­tu­ry Euro­pean fas­cism and the 21st-century’s fas­cist turn. But the above sit­u­a­tion could nev­er have obtained in Nazi Ger­many of the 1930s and 40s. Anti-Nazi points of view were banned even for enter­tain­ment pur­pos­es. Cir­cu­lat­ing them would almost cer­tain­ly result in exe­cu­tion. Ordi­nary Ger­mans may have also vent­ed their spleens at dis­senters, but they did so with full assur­ance that those peo­ple would be crushed by the gov­ern­ment, and that no one would stand up for them, not even to pos­ture.

It was in this par­a­lyz­ing cli­mate of ter­ror that the stu­dent mem­bers of The White Rose, a secre­tive, anony­mous group of activists, began dis­trib­ut­ing leaflets denounc­ing Hitler and Nazism. “At a time when a sar­cas­tic remark could con­sti­tute trea­son,” notes the TED-Ed les­son above, the stri­dent lan­guage “was unprece­dent­ed.” Most of the leaflets were writ­ten by Hans Scholl, as the short, ani­mat­ed video—scripted by schol­ar Iseult Gillespie—informs us. Just a few years ear­li­er, Scholl had been an enthu­si­as­tic mem­ber of the Hitler Youth, and his sis­ter Sophie, who joined him in The White Rose, had been a mem­ber of the League of Ger­man Girls.

In 1936, when Hans wit­nessed a mass Nazi ral­ly for the first time, he began to seri­ous­ly ques­tion his life choic­es. Sophie had been enter­tain­ing her own doubts. Their par­ents, both increas­ing­ly con­cerned about the Nazi threat, were very sup­port­ive. The Scholl fam­i­ly had secret­ly lis­tened to for­eign broad­casts and learned “shock­ing truths” about what was hap­pen­ing in their coun­try. While at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich, Hans “start­ed read­ing anti-Nazi ser­mons,” writes Erin Blake­more at Smith­son­ian, “and attend­ing class­es with Kurt Huber, a psy­chol­o­gy and phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor whose lec­tures includ­ed veiled crit­i­cisms of the regime.”

Hans was draft­ed into the army as a medic, where he wit­nessed abus­es against Jew­ish pris­on­ers and heard about the con­cen­tra­tion camps. When he returned to med­ical school at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich, he met sev­er­al friends who shared his out­rage. In 1939, The White Rose print­ed its first leaflets, spread­ing them all over Munich. “Adopt pas­sive resis­tance,” they urged, inspir­ing Ger­mans to sab­o­tage the war effort. “Block the func­tion­ing of this athe­is­tic war machine before it is too late. Before the last city is a heap of rub­ble. Before the last youth in our nation bleeds to death.”

Many more leaflets fol­lowed. (Sophie would not dis­cov­er them and join the group until after their activ­i­ties began.) “The White Rose mailed the pam­phlets to ran­dom peo­ple they found in the phone book,” writes Blake­more. They “took them in suit­cas­es to oth­er cities, and left them in phone booths. They also paint­ed graf­fi­ti on the walls of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich with slo­gans like ‘Free­dom!’ and ‘Hitler the Mass Mur­der­er!’” It was the first time pub­lic dis­sent against the Nazis had tak­en hold. “The soci­ety’s work quick­ly spread to oth­er cities, with some of its lit­er­a­ture even show­ing up in Aus­tria.”

In 1943, Allied planes dropped tens of thou­sands of The White Rose’s leaflets over Nazi Ger­many. News of them “even reached con­cen­tra­tions camps and pris­ons,” the video notes. Soon after­ward, the Scholls and their friend Christoph Prob­st were arrest­ed by the Gestapo. (Read a mov­ing account of their arrest and tri­al at the Jew­ish Vir­tu­al Library.) The three were put on show tri­al and exe­cut­ed by guil­lo­tine. Lat­er, their pro­fes­sor, Kurt Huber and oth­er mem­bers of The White Rose were also behead­ed.

The iden­ti­ties of The White Rose would not be known until after the war. They have since become heroes to anti-fas­cists and activists around the world, and their call for pas­sive resis­tance echoes in one of their final leaflets: “We will not be silent. We are your bad con­science. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!” In spite of the risks, which they all knew, the Scholls and their allies chose to act, cau­tious­ly, but deci­sive­ly, against a regime they final­ly saw to be a ter­ri­ble evil.

To learn more about The White Rose, explore these books: The White Rose (1970), A Noble Trea­son (1979), and An Hon­ourable Defeat (1994).

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Edu­ca­tion for Death: The Mak­ing of Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Pro­pa­gan­da Film Shows How Fas­cists Are Made

Rare 1940 Audio: Thomas Mann Explains the Nazis’ Ulte­ri­or Motive for Spread­ing Anti-Semi­tism

20,000 Amer­i­cans Hold a Pro-Nazi Ral­ly in Madi­son Square Gar­den in 1939: Chill­ing Video Re-Cap­tures a Lost Chap­ter in US His­to­ry

How Warn­er Broth­ers Resist­ed a Hol­ly­wood Ban on Anti-Nazi Films in the 1930s and Warned Amer­i­cans of the Dan­gers of Fas­cism

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

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30 Fans Joyously Sing the Entirety of Bob Marley’s Legend Album in Unison

in Art, Life, Music | September 9th, 2019

The thir­ty Bob Mar­ley super­fans who heed­ed artist Can­dice Bre­itz’s 2005 call to vis­it a Port Anto­nio, Jamaica record­ing stu­dio, to be filmed indi­vid­u­al­ly per­form­ing the entire­ty of Marley’s Leg­end album a capel­la, were not pro­pelled by show­biz dreams.

Rather, their par­tic­i­pa­tion was a way for them to con­nect with the beloved icon, in a man­ner as inti­mate as singing along in one’s teenaged bed­room.

They were giv­en no direc­tion as far as per­for­mance style or cos­tume, only that they stick with it for the dura­tion of the hour-long album, piped into their ears via dis­creet grey buds.

Some dart their eyes appre­hen­sive­ly, bare­ly mov­ing.

Oth­ers bob and weave with unbri­dled aban­don.

One man shucks his cap when dread­locks are men­tioned in “Buf­fa­lo Sol­dier.”

A young woman gri­maces and shrugs apolo­get­i­cal­ly as the final track’s many “jammin’s” get away from her.

Some nod and widen their eyes at per­son­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant lines, point­ing for empha­sis, as if to tell view­ers less famil­iar with Marley’s work to lis­ten up, because here­in the mes­sage lies.

In between songs, they sip from plas­tic bot­tles of water and soda, occa­sion­al­ly offer­ing impromp­tu com­men­tary (“I feel this one!”). The grey-beard­ed gent mops his brow.

Once these solos were in the can, Bre­itz arranged them into a choir, stacked Brady Bunch-style, six across, five down.

Every­one starts at the same moment, but with no instruc­tion as to how to approach back­ing vocals and the word­less aspects of Marley’s per­for­mance, inad­ver­tent soloists emerge, some­times as the result of a jumped gun.

(You try singing “I Shot the Sher­iff” with no karaoke prompts guid­ing you…)

Bre­itz, who has since cre­at­ed sim­i­lar work with Michael Jack­son, John Lennon, Madon­na, and Leonard Cohen fans, took pains to make sure the par­tic­i­pants left the stu­dio feel­ing good about the expe­ri­ence. It’s not a TV tal­ent con­test.

While cer­tain squares con­tain star qual­i­ty charis­ma, all thir­ty were nec­es­sary to achieve the goal of a com­pos­ite por­trait that eschews the “overt­ly icon­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion” of the sub­ject as “some kind of fixed, unchang­ing enti­ty.”

As art crit­ic Christy Lange observed in con­junc­tion with an inter­view with Bre­itz for Mod­ern Painters:

While Mar­ley, Madon­na and Jack­son may play a lop­sid­ed­ly cen­tral role in shap­ing their fans’ lives and iden­ti­ties, these fans play a rec­i­p­ro­cal part in res­ur­rect­ing the stars’ orig­i­nal appeal, which has been sub­sumed by the celebri­ty cul­ture that cre­at­ed them. The cul­ture of star­dom may thrive on a series of cheap imi­ta­tions, mim­ic­k­ing an elu­sive idea of ‘celebri­ty’, but even in this con­cate­na­tion of sim­u­lat­ed iden­ti­ties, a few authen­tic por­traits can still be dis­cov­ered.

Listen—and sing along—to Bob Marley’s Leg­end in its entire­ty on Spo­ti­fy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bob Marley’s “Redemp­tion Song” Played by Musi­cians Around the World

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

Watch a Young Bob Mar­ley and The Wail­ers Per­form Live in Eng­land (1973): For His 70th Birth­day Today

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Join her in NYC tonight, Sep­tem­ber 9, for the sea­son kick-off of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How They Worked to Overcome Them

in Life, Neuroscience, Psychology, Religion | September 6th, 2019

St. Bene­dict by Fra Angeli­co, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We might imag­ine that life in a monastery is one of the safest, most pre­dictable ways of life on offer, and there­fore one of the least dis­tract­ed. But “medieval monks had a ter­ri­ble time con­cen­trat­ing,” writes Sam Hasel­by at Aeon, “and con­cen­tra­tion was their life­long work!” They com­plained of infor­ma­tion over­load, for­get­ful­ness, lack of focus, and over­stim­u­la­tion. Their jumpy brains, fun­da­men­tal­ly no dif­fer­ent from those we use to nav­i­gate our smart phones, were the cul­prit, though, like us, the monks found oth­er sources to blame.

“Some­times they accused demons of mak­ing their minds wan­der. Some­times they blamed the body’s base instincts.” Giv­en the nature of their restric­tive vows, it’s no won­der they found them­selves think­ing “about food or sex when they were sup­posed to be think­ing about God.” But the fact remains, as Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia pro­fes­sor Jamie Krein­er says in an inter­view with PRI’s The World, monks liv­ing 1600 years ago found them­selves con­stant­ly, painful­ly dis­tract­ed.

It wasn’t even nec­es­sar­i­ly about tech at all. It was about some­thing inher­ent in the mind. The dif­fer­ence between us and them is not that we are dis­tract­ed and they aren’t, it’s that they actu­al­ly had savvi­er ways of deal­ing with dis­trac­tion. Ways of train­ing their minds the way we might train our bod­ies.

So, what did the wis­est monks advise, and what can we learn, hun­dreds of years lat­er, from their wis­dom? Quite a lot, and much of it applic­a­ble even to our online lives. Some of what medieval monks like the 5th cen­tu­ry John Cass­ian advised may be too aus­tere for mod­ern tastes, even if we hap­pen to live in a monastery. But many of their prac­tices are the very same we now see pre­scribed as ther­a­peu­tic exer­cis­es and good per­son­al habits.

Cass­ian and his col­leagues devised solu­tions that “depend­ed on imag­i­nary pic­tures” and “bizarre ani­ma­tions” in the mind,” Hasel­by explains. Peo­ple were told to let their imag­i­na­tions run riot with images of sex, vio­lence, and mon­strous beings. “Nuns, monks, preach­ers and the peo­ple they edu­cat­ed were always encour­aged to visu­al­ize the mate­r­i­al they were pro­cess­ing,” often in some very graph­ic ways. The gore may not be fash­ion­able in con­tem­pla­tive set­tings these days, but ancient meth­ods of guid­ed imagery and cre­ative visu­al­iza­tion cer­tain­ly are.

So too are tech­niques like active lis­ten­ing and non­vi­o­lent com­mu­ni­ca­tion, which share many sim­i­lar­i­ties with St. Benedict’s first rule for his order: “Lis­ten and incline the ear of your heart.” Bene­dict spoke to the mind’s ten­den­cy to leap from thought to thought, to pre­judge and for­mu­late rebut­tals while anoth­er per­son speaks, to tune out. “Basi­cal­ly,” writes Fr. Michael Ren­nier, Bene­dic­t’s form of lis­ten­ing “is tak­ing time to hear in a cer­tain way, with an atti­tude of open­ness, and com­mit­ment to devote your whole self to the process,” with­out doing any­thing else.

Benedict’s advice, Ren­nier writes, is “great… because obsta­cles are all around, so we need to be inten­tion­al about over­com­ing them.” We do not need to share the same inten­tions as St. Bene­dict, how­ev­er, to take his advice to heart and stop treat­ing lis­ten­ing as wait­ing to speak, rather than as a prac­tice of mak­ing space for oth­ers and mak­ing space for silence. “Bene­dict knew the ben­e­fits of silence,” writes Alain de Botton’s School of Life, “He knew all about dis­trac­tion,” too, “how easy it is to want to keep check­ing up on the lat­est devel­op­ments, how addic­tive the gos­sip of the city can be.”

Silence allows us to not only hear oth­ers bet­ter, but to hear our deep­er or high­er selves, or the voice of God, or the uni­verse, or what­ev­er source of cre­ative ener­gy we tune into. Like their coun­ter­parts in the East, medieval Catholic monks also prac­ticed dai­ly med­i­ta­tion, includ­ing med­i­ta­tions on death, just one of sev­er­al meth­ods “Cis­ter­cian monks used to reshape their own men­tal states,” as Julia Bourke writes at Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly.

“A medieval Cis­ter­cian and a mod­ern neu­ro­sci­en­tist” would agree on at least one thing, Bourke argues: “the prin­ci­ple that cer­tain feel­ings and emo­tions can be changed through med­i­ta­tive exer­cis­es.” No one devis­es numer­ous for­mal solu­tions to prob­lems they do not have; although their phys­i­cal cir­cum­stances could not have been more dif­fer­ent from ours, medieval Euro­pean monks seemed to suf­fer just as much as most of us do from dis­trac­tion. In some part, their lives were exper­i­ments in learn­ing to over­come it.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Med­i­ta­tion for Begin­ners: Bud­dhist Monks & Teach­ers Explain the Basics

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Con­cen­tra­tion

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

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Orson Welles Trashes Famous Directors: Alfred Hitchcock (“Egotism and Laziness”), Woody Allen (“His Arrogance Is Unlimited”) & More

in Film | September 6th, 2019

A bold artist acts first and thinks lat­er. In the case of Orson Welles, one of the bold­est artists pro­duced by 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca, that habit also found its way into his speech. This became espe­cial­ly true in the inter­views he gave lat­er in life, when he freely offered his opin­ions, solicit­ed or oth­er­wise, on the work of his fel­low film­mak­ers. The man who made Cit­i­zen Kane did­n’t hes­i­tate to roast, for instance, the Euro­pean auteurs who ascend­ed after his own career in cin­e­ma seemed to stall, and whose work he elab­o­rate­ly sat­i­rized in the posthu­mous­ly released The Oth­er Side of the Wind. His con­sid­ered remarks include the fol­low­ing: “There’s a lot of Bergman and Anto­nioni that I’d rather be dead than sit through.” No, Orson, tell us what you real­ly think.

“Accord­ing to a young Amer­i­can film crit­ic, one of the great dis­cov­er­ies of our age is the val­ue of bore­dom as an artis­tic sub­ject,” Welles says in anoth­er inter­view. If so, Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni “deserves to be count­ed as a pio­neer and found­ing father,” a mak­er of movies that amount to “per­fect back­grounds for fash­ion mod­els.” As for Bergman, “I share nei­ther his inter­ests nor his obses­sions. He’s far more for­eign to me than the Japan­ese.” Welles has kinder words for Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, whom he calls “as gift­ed as any­one mak­ing movies today,” but also “fun­da­men­tal­ly very provin­cial.” His pic­tures are “a small-town boy’s dream of the big city,” which is also the source of their charm, but the man him­self “shows dan­ger­ous signs of being a superla­tive artist with lit­tle to say.”

Welles esti­mat­ed the younger Jean-Luc Godard­’s gifts as a direc­tor as “enor­mous. I just can’t take him very seri­ous­ly as a thinker — and that’s where we seem to dif­fer, because he does. And though Godard may admire Woody Allen (him­self an admir­er of Bergman), Welles cer­tain­ly did­n’t: “I hate Woody Allen phys­i­cal­ly, I dis­like that kind of man,” he tells film­mak­er Hen­ry Jaglom. “That par­tic­u­lar com­bi­na­tion of arro­gance and timid­i­ty sets my teeth on edge.” When Jaglom objects that Allen isn’t arro­gant but shy, Welles dri­ves on: “Like all peo­ple with timid per­son­al­i­ties, his arro­gance is unlim­it­ed.” Allen “hates him­self, and he loves him­self, a very tense sit­u­a­tion. It’s peo­ple like me who have to car­ry on and pre­tend to be mod­est,” while, in Allen’s case, “every­thing he does on screen is ther­a­peu­tic.”

Allen has what Welles calls “the Chap­lin dis­ease,” and Welles’ inter­views also fea­ture severe crit­i­cisms of Chap­lin him­self. After ref­er­enc­ing the fact that, unlike his fel­low silent come­di­an Harold Lloyd, Chap­lin did­n’t write all his own jokes but used “six gag­men,” he declares that Mod­ern Times — regard­ed by many as Chap­lin’ mas­ter­piece — “does­n’t have a good moment in it.” Clear­ly Welles felt no more need to pull his punch­es on his elders than he did with the whip­per­snap­pers: John Ford “made very many bad pic­tures,” includ­ing The Searchers (“ter­ri­ble”); Cecil B. DeMille Welles cred­its with giv­ing Mus­soli­ni and Hitler the idea for the fas­cist salute; Elia Kazan will nev­er be for­giv­en for nam­ing names to the House Com­mit­tee on Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties (“it’s just inex­cus­able”); and even Sergei Eisen­stein, father of the mon­tage, is also “the most over­rat­ed great direc­tor of them all.”

You can read more of Welles’ choice words on his col­leagues in cin­e­ma in this thread of inter­view clips post­ed by a Twit­ter user who goes by John Franken­stein­er. It also includes Welles’ assess­ment of Alfred Hitch­cock, who declined into “ego­tism and lazi­ness,” mak­ing films “all lit like tele­vi­sion shows.” Welles sus­pects age-relat­ed cog­ni­tive issues — “I think he was senile a long time before he died,” in part because “he kept falling asleep while you were talk­ing to him” — but he also trash­es the work Hitch­cock did in his prime, such as Ver­ti­go. Sight & Sound’s last crit­ics poll named that film the great­est of all time, but Welles calls it even worse than Rear Win­dow, about which “every­thing was stu­pid.” But at least all these film­mak­ers, liv­ing and dead, can rest easy know­ing they did­n’t rank as low in Welles’ esti­ma­tion as John Lan­dis, “the ass­hole from Ani­mal House.” Jaglom, believ­ing he can influ­ence Lan­dis and mend their rela­tion­ship, asks what he can do to help. Welles’ sug­ges­tion: “Kill him.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ing­mar Bergman Eval­u­ates His Fel­low Film­mak­ers — The “Affect­ed” Godard, “Infan­tile” Hitch­cock & Sub­lime Tarkovsky

Jorge Luis Borges Reviews Cit­i­zen Kane — and Gets a Response from Orson Welles

Jean-Paul Sartre Reviews Orson Welles’ Mas­ter­work (1945): “Cit­i­zen Kane Is Not Cin­e­ma”

Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a “Pho­ny” Film “With Only Pre­ten­sions to Truth”

Ter­ry Gilliam on the Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick & Spiel­berg: Kubrick Makes You Think, Spiel­berg Wraps Every­thing Up with Neat Lit­tle Bows

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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Bob Odenkirk & Errol Morris Create Comedic Shorts to Help You Take Action Against Global Warming: Watch Them Online

in Comedy, Environment, Film, Life, Nature, Science | September 6th, 2019

My beach house must be some­where around here. I used to be able to see the ocean from it. I should be able to see it from the ocean. Ooo, that looks famil­iar. Lady Lib­er­ty. Ha ha! Hel­looo! All the best to you.     —Admi­ral Hor­a­tio Horn­tow­er

Are there any Bet­ter Call Saul fans among the glob­al warm­ing deniers?

A sce­nario in which one can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly pooh pooh the melt­ing of the polar ice caps and embrace The Thin Blue Line?

Direc­tor Errol Mor­ris and his star, Bob Odenkirk, may not change any minds with their Glob­al Melt­down spots they pro­duced in part­ner­ship with the Insti­tute for the Future, but hope­ful­ly the emphat­ic end cards will stir some fans to action.

The absur­dist 30-sec­ond shorts fea­ture Odenkirk, encrust­ed in epaulets and naval insignia, as the fic­tion­al Horn­tow­er, “an admi­ral of a fleet of one and per­haps the last man on Earth.” Marooned on a small block of ice, he rails against the inex­pert­ly ani­mat­ed wildlife encroach­ing on his domain.

(“You don’t even have the facil­i­ty of lan­guage!” he tells a pen­guin, and lat­er threat­ens a wal­rus that it will “get paint­ed out” of the final cut for “com­plain­ing all the time…”)

Cer­tain­ly a doc­u­men­tar­i­an of Mor­ris’ stature could have tak­en a length­i­er, more seri­ous approach to the sub­ject, but as he notes:

Log­ic rarely con­vinces any­body of any­thing. Cli­mate change has become yet anoth­er vehi­cle for polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion. If Al Gore said the Earth was round there would be polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion insist­ing that the Earth was flat. It’s all so pre­pos­ter­ous, so con­temptible.

Odenkirk also has some out-of-uni­form con­cerns about cli­mate change, as expressed in “Where I Got These Abs,” a 2011 Shouts & Mur­murs piece for The New York­er:

The mid­dle ab on the left (not my left, your left, if you are look­ing at me) is called Ter­rence. It’s a dig­ni­fied ab. It tens­es each time I read an op-ed arti­cle about glob­al warm­ing. The article’s point of view is imma­te­r­i­al; sim­ply being remind­ed that I can do noth­ing to stop the hor­rif­ic future of floods and cat­a­stro­phe gives this ab a taut yank that lingers, burn­ing calo­ries in my well-creased fore­head at the same time. 

Watch all of Mor­ris and Odenkirk’s Admi­ral Horn­tow­er spots, cur­rent­ly total­ing nine, with ten more to come, on Glob­al Melt­down’s YouTube chan­nel.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cli­mate Change Gets Strik­ing­ly Visu­al­ized by a Scot­tish Art Instal­la­tion

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

NASA Cap­tures the World on Fire

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC this Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for the new season’s kick­off of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Why Learn Latin?: 5 Videos Make a Compelling Case That the “Dead Language” Is an “Eternal Language”

in Education, Language Lessons, TED Talks | September 5th, 2019

“I tried to get Latin can­celed for five years,” says an exas­per­at­ed Max Fis­ch­er, pro­tag­o­nist of Wes Ander­son­’s Rush­more, when he hears of his school’s deci­sion to scrap Latin class­es. “ ‘It’s a dead lan­guage,’ I’d always say.” Many have made a sim­i­lar­ly blunt case against the study of Latin. But as we all remem­ber, Max’s edu­ca­tion­al phi­los­o­phy over­turns just as soon as he meets Miss Cross and brings up the can­cel­la­tion to make con­ver­sa­tion. “That’s a shame because all the Romance lan­guages were based on Latin,” she says, artic­u­lat­ing a stan­dard defense. “Nihi­lo sanc­tum estne?” Max’s reply, after Miss Cross clar­i­fies that what she said is Latin for “Is noth­ing sacred?”: “Sic tran­sit glo­ria.”

From ad hoc and bona fide to sta­tus quo and vice ver­sa, all of us know a lit­tle bit of Latin, even the “dead lan­guage’s” most out­spo­ken oppo­nents. But do any of us have a rea­son to build delib­er­ate­ly on that inher­it­ed knowl­edge? The video at the top of the post offers not just one but “Three Rea­sons to Study Latin (for Nor­mal Peo­ple, Not Lan­guage Geeks).”

As its host admits, “I could tell you that study­ing Latin will set you up to learn the Romance lan­guages or give you a base of knowl­edge for fine arts and lit­er­a­ture. I can tell you that you’ll be able to read Latin on old build­ings, hymns, state mot­toes, or that read­ing Cicero and Vir­gil in the orig­i­nal is divine­ly beau­ti­ful.” But the num­ber one rea­son to study Latin, he says, is that it will improve your lan­guage acqui­si­tion skills.

And lan­guage acqui­si­tion isn’t just the skill of learn­ing lan­guages, but “the skill of learn­ing oth­er skills.” It teach­es us that “thoughts them­selves are formed dif­fer­ent­ly in dif­fer­ent lan­guages,” and learn­ing even a sin­gle for­eign word “is the act of learn­ing to think in a new way.” Study a for­eign lan­guage and you enter a com­mu­ni­ty, just as you do “every time you learn a new pro­fes­sion, learn a new hob­by,” or when you “inter­act with his­to­ri­ans or philoso­phers, inter­act with the writ­ers of cook­books, or gar­den­ing books, or even writ­ers of soft­ware.” Latin in par­tic­u­lar will also make you bet­ter at speak­ing Eng­lish, espe­cial­ly if you already speak it native­ly. Not only are you “unavoid­ably blind to the weak­ness­es and strengths of your native mean­ing car­ry­ing sys­tem — your lan­guage — until you test dri­ve a new one,” the more com­plex, abstract half of the Eng­lish vocab­u­lary comes from Latin in the first place.

Above all, Latin promis­es wis­dom. Not only can it “train you to con­cep­tu­al­ize one thing in the con­text of many things and to see the con­nec­tions between all of them,” it can, by the time you’re under­stand­ing mean­ing as well as form, “grow you in big-pic­ture and small-pic­ture think­ing and give you the dex­ter­i­ty to move back and forth between both.” Just as you are what you eat, “your mind becomes like what you spend your time think­ing about,” and the rig­or­ous­ly struc­tured Latin lan­guage can imbue it with “log­ic, order, dis­ci­pline, struc­ture, pre­ci­sion.” In the TED Talk above, Latin teacher Ryan Sell­ers builds on this idea, call­ing the study of Latin “one of the most effec­tive ways of build­ing strong fun­da­men­tals in stu­dents and prepar­ing them for the future.” Among the time­less ben­e­fits of the “eter­nal lan­guage” Sell­ers includes its abil­i­ty to increase Eng­lish “word pow­er,” its “math­e­mat­i­cal” nature, and the con­nec­tions it makes between the ancient world and the mod­ern one.

Latin used to be more a part of the aver­age school cur­ricu­lum than it is now, but the debates about its use­ful­ness have been going on for gen­er­a­tions. Why Study Latin?, the 1951 class­room film above, cov­ers a wide swath of them in ten min­utes, from read­ing clas­sics in the orig­i­nal to under­stand­ing sci­en­tif­ic and med­ical ter­mi­nol­o­gy to becom­ing a sharp­er writer in Eng­lish to trac­ing mod­ern West­ern gov­ern­men­tal and soci­etal prin­ci­ples back to their Roman roots. And as the School of Life video below tells us, some things are still best expressed in Latin, an eco­nom­i­cal lan­guage that can pack a great deal of mean­ing into rel­a­tive­ly few words: Veni, vidi, vici. Carpe diem. Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. And of course, Latin makes every expres­sion sound weight­i­er — it gives a cer­tain grav­i­tas, we might say.

If all these argu­ments have sold you on the ben­e­fits of Latin, or at least got you intrigued enough to learn more, watch “How Latin Works” for a brief overview of the his­to­ry and mechan­ics of the lan­guage, as well as an expla­na­tion of what it has giv­en to and how it dif­fers from Eng­lish and the oth­er Euro­pean lan­guages we use today. You might then pro­ceed to the free Latin lessons avail­able at the the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas’ Lin­guis­tics Research Cen­ter, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. The more Latin you acquire, the more you’ll see and hear it every­where. You might even ask the same ques­tion Max Fis­ch­er pos­es to the assem­bled admin­is­tra­tors of Rush­more Acad­e­my: “Is Latin dead?” His moti­va­tions have more to do with romance than Romance, but there are no bad rea­sons to learn a lan­guage, liv­ing or oth­er­wise.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

Hip 1960s Latin Teacher Trans­lat­ed Bea­t­les Songs into Latin for His Stu­dents: Read Lyrics for “O Teneum Manum,” “Diei Duri Nox” & More

Why Should We Read Virgil’s Aeneid? An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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