Quentin Tarantino Names His 20 Favorite Movies, Covering Two Decades

Quentin Taran­ti­no’s film­mak­ing career began thir­ty years ago — at least if you place its start­ing point at his first fea­ture Reser­voir Dogs in 1992. But even then he had been work­ing toward auteur­hood for quite some time, a peri­od char­ac­ter­ized by projects like My Best Friend’s Birth­day, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Through­out the three decades since he hit it big, there can be no doubt that Taran­ti­no has con­sis­tent­ly made just the films he him­self has most want­ed to see. But he’s also remained a suf­fi­cient­ly hon­est cinephile to admit that oth­er direc­tors have made films he would have want­ed to make: Fukasaku Kin­ji, for instance, whose Bat­tle Royale he prais­es in just such per­son­al terms in the video above.

In six min­utes Taran­ti­no runs down the list of his twen­ty favorite movies between 1992, when he became a direc­tor, and 2009. After giv­ing pride of place to Bat­tle Royale — a Japan­ese comedic thriller of high-school ultra­vi­o­lence that set off a wave of trans­gres­sive thrill through a world­wide “cult” audi­ence — he presents his choic­es in alpha­bet­i­cal rather than pref­er­en­tial order. The com­plete list runs as fol­lows:

  • Fukasaku Kin­ji, Bat­tle Royale
  • Woody Allen, Any­thing Else (“the Jason Big­gs one”)
  • Miike Takashi, Audi­tion
  • Tsui Hark, The Blade
  • Paul Thomas Ander­son, Boo­gie Nights
  • Richard Lin­klater, Dazed and Con­fused (“the great­est hang­out movie ever made”)
  • Lars von Tri­er, Dogville
  • David Finch­er, Fight Club
  • F. Gary Gray, Fri­day
  • Bong Joon-ho, The Host
  • Michael Mann, The Insid­er
  • Park Chan-wook, Joint Secu­ri­ty Area
  • Sofia Cop­po­la, Lost in Trans­la­tion
  • The Wachowskis, The Matrix (though its sequels “ruined the mythol­o­gy for me”)
  • Bong Joon-ho, Mem­o­ries of Mur­der
  • Stan­ley Tong, Police Sto­ry 3/Super­cop (con­tains “the great­est stunts ever filmed in any movie”)
  • Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead
  • Jan de Bont, Speed (there have been “few exhil­a­ra­tion movies quite like it”)
  • Trey Park­er and Matt Stone, Team Amer­i­ca: World Police
  • M. Night Shya­malan, Unbreak­able

Taran­ti­no may refer to Shya­malan as “M. Night Shamala­mad­ing­dong,” but he clear­ly has a good deal of respect for the man’s films. And he seems to have even more for Bruce Willis’ work in Unbreak­able, which con­tains his “best per­for­mance on film” — bet­ter, evi­dent­ly, than the not-incon­sid­er­able one he gave in a nine­teen-nineties hit called Pulp Fic­tion.

It comes as no sur­prise that Taran­ti­no names movies by his peers in the “Indiewood” gen­er­a­tion like Ander­son, Lin­klater, and Cop­po­la. But watched thir­teen years lat­er, this video also sug­gests a cer­tain cin­e­mat­ic pre­science on his part. Speed, for exam­ple, once seemed like a brain-dead block­buster but now stands as a clas­sic of Los Ange­les cin­e­ma. And we’d do well to remem­ber how far ahead of his peers Taran­ti­no was in his con­scious­ness of Asian cin­e­ma. That we all watch films from Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea today owes some­thing to Taran­ti­no’s advo­ca­cy. More than a decade before Bong Joon-ho’s Par­a­site dom­i­nat­ed the Acad­e­my Awards, Taran­ti­no gave him alone not one but two entries on this top-twen­ty list — which sure­ly makes up for his obvi­ous­ly hav­ing for­got­ten Bong’s name.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Picks the 12 Best Films of All Time; Watch Two of His Favorites Free Online

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghet­ti West­erns

Quentin Tarantino’s Hand­writ­ten List of the 11 “Great­est Movies”

Quentin Tarantino’s Top 20 Grindhouse/Exploitation Flicks: Night of the Liv­ing Dead, Hal­loween & More

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists the 12 Great­est Films of All Time: From Taxi Dri­ver to The Bad News Bears

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becom­ing a Film­mak­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Forgotten Women of Surrealism: A Magical, Short Animated Film

“The prob­lem of woman is the most mar­velous and dis­turb­ing prob­lem in all the world,” — Andre Bre­ton, 1929 Sur­re­al­ist Man­i­festo.

“I warn you, I refuse to be an object.” — Leono­ra Car­ring­ton

Fash­ion mod­el, writer, and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Lee Miller had many lives. Dis­cov­ered by Condé Nast in New York (when he pulled her out of the path of traf­fic), she became a famous face of Vogue in the 1920s, then launched her own pho­to­graph­ic career, for which she has been just­ly cel­e­brat­ed: both for her work in the fash­ion world and on the bat­tle­fields (and Hitler’s tub!) in World War II. One of Miller’s achieve­ments often gets left out in men­tions of her life, the Sur­re­al­ist work she cre­at­ed as an artist in the 1930s.

Hailed as a “leg­endary beau­ty,” writes the Nation­al Gal­leries of Scot­land, Miller stud­ied act­ing, dance, and exper­i­men­tal the­ater. “She learned pho­tog­ra­phy first through being a sub­ject for the most impor­tant fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phers of her day, includ­ing Nick­o­las Muray, Arnold Gen­the and Edward Ste­ichen.” Her appren­tice­ship and affair with Man Ray is, of course, well-known. But rather than call­ing Miller an active par­tic­i­pant in his art and her own (she co-cre­at­ed the “solar­iza­tion” process he used, for exam­ple) she’s most­ly referred to only as his muse, lover, and favorite sub­ject.

“Sur­re­al­ism had a very high pro­por­tion of women mem­bers who were at the heart of the move­ment, but who often get cast as ‘muse of’ or ‘wife of,’ ” says Susan­na Greeves, cura­tor of an all-women Sur­re­al­ist exhib­it in South Lon­don. The mar­gin­al­iza­tion of women Sur­re­al­ists is not a his­tor­i­cal over­sight, many crit­ics and schol­ars con­tend, but a cen­tral fea­ture of the move­ment itself. When British Sur­re­al­ist Eileen Agar said in a 1990 inter­view, “In those days, men thought of women sim­ply as mus­es,” she was too polite by half.

Despite their rad­i­cal pol­i­tics, male Sur­re­al­ists per­fect­ed turn­ing women into dis­fig­ured objects. “While Dalí used the female fig­ure in opti­cal puz­zles, Magritte paint­ed porni­fied faces with breasts for eyes, and Ernst sim­ply decap­i­tat­ed them,” Izabel­la Scott writes at Art­sy. Sur­re­al­ist artist René Crev­el wrote in 1934, “the Noble Man­nequin is so per­fect. She does not always both­er to take her head, arms and legs with her.” Edgar Allan Poe’s love for “beau­ti­ful dead girls” esca­lat­ed into dis­mem­ber­ment.

Dalí employed no lyri­cal obfus­ca­tion in his thoughts on the place of women in the move­ment. He called his con­tem­po­rary, Argentine/Italian artist Leonor Fini (who nev­er con­sid­ered her­self a Sur­re­al­ist), “bet­ter than most, per­haps.” Then he felt com­pelled to add, “but tal­ent is in the balls.”

When writ­ing her dis­ser­ta­tion on Sur­re­al­ism in the 1970s at New York Uni­ver­si­ty, Glo­ria Feman Oren­stein found that all of the women had been total­ly left out of the record. So she found them — track­ing down and becom­ing “a close friend to many influ­en­tial female sur­re­al­ists,” notes Aeon, “includ­ing Leono­ra Car­ring­ton and Meret Elis­a­beth Oppeneim” (anoth­er Man Ray mod­el and the only Sur­re­al­ist of any gen­der to have actu­al train­ing and expe­ri­ence in psy­cho­analy­sis).

Through her research, Oren­stein “became the aca­d­e­m­ic voice of fem­i­nist sur­re­al­ism,” recov­er­ing the work of artists who had always been part of the move­ment, but who had been shoul­dered aside by male con­tem­po­raries, lovers, and hus­bands who did not see them on equal terms. In the short film above, Glo­ri­a’s Call, L.A.-based artist Cheri Gaulke “man­i­fests Oren­stein’s jour­ney into the sur­re­al with col­lage-like ani­ma­tions.” It was a quest that took her around the world, from Paris to Sami­land, and it began in Mex­i­co City, where she met the great Leono­ra Car­ring­ton.

See how Oren­stein not only redis­cov­ered the women of Sur­re­al­ism, but helped recov­er the essen­tial roots of Sur­re­al­ism in Latin Amer­i­ca, also erased by the art his­tor­i­cal schol­ar­ship of her time. And learn more about the artists she befriend­ed and brought to light at Art­space and in Pene­lope Rose­mon­t’s 1998 book, Sur­re­al­ist Women: An Inter­na­tion­al Anthol­o­gy.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Intro­duc­tion to Sur­re­al­ism: The Big Aes­thet­ic Ideas Pre­sent­ed in Three Videos

Sal­vador Dalí Gets Sur­re­al with 1950s Amer­i­ca: Watch His Appear­ances on What’s My Line? (1952) and The Mike Wal­lace Inter­view (1958)

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

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

Real Interviews with People Who Lived in the 1800s

The nine­teenth cen­tu­ry is well and tru­ly gone. That may sound like a triv­ial claim, giv­en that we’re now liv­ing in the 2020s, but only in recent years did we lose the last per­son born in that time. With Taji­ma Nabi, a Japan­ese woman who died in 2018 at the age of 117 years, went our last liv­ing con­nec­tion to the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry (1900, the year of Taji­ma’s birth, tech­ni­cal­ly being that cen­tu­ry’s last year.) Luck­i­ly that same cen­tu­ry saw the inven­tion of pho­tog­ra­phy, sound record­ing, and even motion pic­tures, which offered cer­tain of its inhab­i­tants a means of pre­serv­ing not just their mem­o­ries but their man­ner. You can view a col­lec­tion of just such footage, restored and col­orized, at the Youtube chan­nel Life in the 1800s.

In the chan­nel’s playlist of inter­view clips you’ll find first-hand mem­o­ries of, if not the par­tic­u­lar decade of the eigh­teen-hun­dreds, then at least of the eigh­teen-fifties through the eigh­teen-nineties. Take the inven­tor Eli­hu Thom­son, inter­view sub­ject in the video at the top of the post. Born in Eng­land in 1853, Thom­son emi­grat­ed with his fam­i­ly to the Unit­ed States in 1857.

They set­tled in Philadel­phia, where Thom­son found him­self “forced out of school at eleven” because he was­n’t yet old enough to enter high school. Some advi­sors said, “Keep him away from books and let him devel­op phys­i­cal­ly.” To which the young Thomp­son respond­ed, “If you do that, you might as well kill me now, because I’ve got to have my books.”

One of those books was full of “chem­istry exper­i­ments and elec­tri­cal exper­i­ments,” and car­ry­ing them out him­self gave Thom­son his “first knowl­edge of elec­tric­i­ty” — a phe­nom­e­non of great impor­tance to the devel­op­ment that would hap­pen through­out the rest of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and into the twen­ti­eth. Albert L. Salt also got in on the ground floor, hav­ing start­ed work­ing for West­ern Elec­tric at age four­teen in 1881 and even­tu­al­ly become the pres­i­dent of West­ern Elec­tric’s appli­ance sub­sidiary Gray­bar. But of course, not every­one had such a pro­fes­sion­al lad­der avail­able: take the elder­ly inter­vie­wees in the footage just above, who were born into slav­ery the eigh­teen-for­ties and eigh­teen-fifties.

The more dis­tant a time grows, the more it tends to flat­ten in our per­cep­tion. In the absence of delib­er­ate his­tor­i­cal research, we lack a sense of the var­i­ous tex­ture of eras out of liv­ing mem­o­ry. In the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca alone, the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry encom­passed both great tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion and the days of the Wild West. The lat­ter was the realm known to Civ­il War vet­er­an and pho­tog­ra­ph­er William Hen­ry Jack­son, who in the inter­view above remem­bers the Amer­i­can west “before the cow­boys came in” — not the time of the cow­boys, but before. Could Flo­rence Pan­nell, whose mem­o­ries of Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, have imag­ined his world? Could he have imag­ined hers? See more inter­views here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A 108-Year-Old Woman Recalls What It Was Like to Be a Woman in Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land

The Ear­li­est Known Motion Pic­ture, 1888’s Round­hay Gar­den Scene, Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

What the First Movies Real­ly Looked Like: Dis­cov­er the IMAX Films of the 1890s

A Rare Smile Cap­tured in a 19th Cen­tu­ry Pho­to­graph

Hand-Col­ored Pho­tographs of 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan

Hear the Voic­es of Amer­i­cans Born in Slav­ery: The Library of Con­gress Fea­tures 23 Audio Inter­views with For­mer­ly Enslaved Peo­ple (1932–75)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

When Orson Welles Became a Speech & Joke Writer for Franklin Delano Roosevelt

As some­one who had mas­tered radio, film, and stage at such a young age, it shouldn’t be a sur­prise that Orson Welles once flirt­ed with the idea of run­ning for office. It nev­er hap­pened, but Welles got pret­ty close in 1944 by ghost-writ­ing speech­es for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s re-elec­tion cam­paign. This in-depth arti­cle at Smith­son­ian by Erick Trick­ey goes into greater detail about this mix of enter­tain­ment and pol­i­tics, and shows how both have always influ­enced each oth­er.

In the final four months of 1944, Amer­i­ca was still at war with Japan and Ger­many, and Roo­sevelt was seek­ing an unprece­dent­ed fourth term to bring the war to a close. Roosevelt’s Repub­li­can chal­lenger Thomas Dewey ques­tioned the ail­ing president’s sta­mi­na and well­ness for the job, along with accu­sa­tions of cor­rup­tion and incom­pe­tence.

Welles was still Hollywood’s gold­en boy, with a career that had tak­en off dur­ing Roosevelt’s sec­ond term with his infa­mous War of the Worlds radio play, pick­ing up on America’s pre-war para­noia. It had con­tin­ued through 1941’s Cit­i­zen Kane and its thin­ly veiled attack on William Ran­dolph Hearst and oth­er oli­garchs. Welles’ voice car­ried author­i­ty and grav­i­tas. He was also mar­ried to Rita Hay­worth at the time, and enjoy­ing the upside of Hol­ly­wood suc­cess.

Roo­sevelt engaged the left-wing Welles in the last month of the cam­paign and soon the actor was trav­el­ing the coun­try and deliv­er­ing speech­es at ral­lies for FDR. In one stop he called Repub­li­cans “the par­ti­sans of priv­i­lege, the cham­pi­ons of monop­oly, the old oppo­nents of lib­er­ty, the deter­mined adver­saries of the small busi­ness and the small farm.”

Welles also sup­plied ideas and jokes for FDR’s speech­es. When Dewey and oth­er Repub­li­cans attacked FDR’s dog Fala, Welles’ penned this: “Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my fam­i­ly doesn’t resent attacks — but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scot­tie, as soon as he learned that the Repub­li­can fic­tion writ­ers, in Con­gress and out, had con­coct­ed a sto­ry that I had left him behind on the Aleut­ian Islands and had sent a destroy­er back to find him — at a cost to the tax­pay­ers of 2 or 3 or 8 or $20 mil­lion — his Scotch soul was furi­ous. He has not been the same dog since.”

The Amer­i­can pub­lic seemed to agree that going after a pet was a bit too much. The nation­al­ly broad­cast speech turned FDR’s for­tunes around. And at FDR’s final ral­ly at Fen­way Park in Boston, the pres­i­dent intro­duced both Welles (“The Dra­mat­ic Voice”) and Frank Sina­tra (“The Voice”). Welles spoke out against GOP elit­ism: “By free enter­prise they want exclu­sive right to free­dom. They are stu­pid enough to think that a few can enjoy pros­per­i­ty at the expense of the rest.”

Days lat­er, FDR won 53 per­cent of the pop­u­lar vote and took the elec­toral col­lege, 432–99. In one sense though, Dewey’s attacks on FDR’s health were found­ed: Roo­sevelt died five months lat­er on April 12, 1945.

FDR had writ­ten to Welles to thank him for the ral­ly, but also wrote about that April’s meet­ing of the Unit­ed Nations. The man had the weight of the free world upon his shoul­ders, and Welles felt it. The artist wrote a eulo­gy for FDR for the New York Post:

Des­per­ate­ly we need his courage and his skill and wis­dom and his great heart. He moved ahead of us show­ing a way into the future. If we lose that way, or fall beside it, we have lost him indeed. Our tears would mock him who nev­er wept except when he could do no more than weep. If we despair. because he’s gone — he who stood against despair — he had as well nev­er have lived, he who lived so great­ly.

You can read it online here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Orson Welles’ Icon­ic War of the Worlds Broad­cast (1938)

Rare Video Shows FDR Walk­ing: Filmed at the 1937 All-Star Game

When Amer­i­can Financiers and Busi­ness Lead­ers Plot­ted to Over­throw Franklin D. Roo­sevelt and Install a Fas­cist Gov­ern­ment in the U.S. (1933)

Lis­ten to Eight Inter­views of Orson Welles by Film­mak­er Peter Bog­danovich (RIP)

The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles’ Sur­re­al­ist First Film (1934)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell Talks About the Time When His Grandfather Met Napoleon

Maybe our gen­er­a­tional enmi­ty has grown too great these days, but once upon a time, pri­ma­ry school teach­ers would ask stu­dents to inter­view an elder as an eye­wit­ness to his­to­ry. Most of our elders didn’t par­tic­i­pate in His­to­ry, big H. Few of them were (or stood adja­cent to) world lead­ers. But in some way or anoth­er, they expe­ri­enced events most of us only see in pho­tographs and film: the Viet­nam War, seg­re­ga­tion and the Civ­il Rights Move­ment, the Cold War and its end…. It’s not hard to see how this rel­a­tive­ly recent his­to­ry has shaped the world we live in.

Hear­ing from peo­ple who lived through such world-his­tor­i­cal events can give us need­ed per­spec­tive, if they’re still liv­ing and will­ing to talk. It offers a sense that the apoc­a­lyp­tic dread we often feel in the face of our own crises – cli­mate, virus, war, the seem­ing end of demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions – was also acute­ly felt, and often with as much good rea­son, by those who lived a gen­er­a­tion or two before us. And yet, they sur­vived — or did so long enough to make chil­dren and grand­chil­dren. They saw glob­al cat­a­stro­phes pass and change and some­times wit­nessed turns of for­tune that brought empires to their knees.

Indeed, when we step back just a gen­er­a­tion or two before the oft-maligned boomers, we find peo­ple whose elders lived through the event that has come to stand for the hubris­tic fall of empires — Napoleon’s defeat and cap­ture at Water­loo on March, 20, 1815. The philoso­pher, writer, social crit­ic, and pub­lic fig­ure Bertrand Rus­sell was such a per­son. Both of Rus­sel­l’s par­ents died when he was very young, and his grand­par­ents raised him. In the restored, col­orized and “speech adjust­ed” 1952 inter­view just above, you can hear Rus­sell rem­i­nisce about his grand­fa­ther, the 1st Earl Rus­sell, who was born in 1792.

Rus­sel­l’s grand­fa­ther was a world leader. He served as prime min­is­ter between 1846 and 1856 and again from 1865 to 1866. Or as Rus­sell puts it to his Amer­i­can inter­view­er, “He was prime min­is­ter dur­ing your Mex­i­can War, dur­ing the Rev­o­lu­tions of 1848. I remem­ber him quite well. But as you can see, he belonged to an age that now seems rather removed.” A time when one man could and did, in just a few years time, place near­ly all of Europe under his direct con­trol or the con­trol of his sub­or­di­nates; before mod­ern war­fare, guer­ril­la war­fare, cyber and drone war.…

Earl Rus­sell not only met Napoleon, but became a late ally. After a 90-minute meet­ing with Bona­parte dur­ing the self-pro­claimed Emper­or’s exile, “Rus­sell denounced the Bour­bon Restora­tion and Britain’s dec­la­ra­tion of war against the recent­ly-returned Napoleon,” notes the video’s poster, “by argu­ing in the House of Com­mons that for­eign pow­ers had no right to dic­tate France’s form of gov­ern­ment.” The younger Rus­sell, him­self born in 1872, also saw his­to­ry swept away. He lived in “a world where all kinds of things that have now dis­ap­peared were thought to be going to last for­ev­er,” he says.

One may be remind­ed of the Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo’s “all that is sol­id melts into air.” Rus­sell gives no indi­ca­tion that his grand­fa­ther, a con­tem­po­rary of that world-his­tor­i­cal doc­u­men­t’s author, ever inter­act­ed with Karl Marx. But Rus­sell him­self met an impos­ing his­tor­i­cal fig­ure who looms just as large in world his­to­ry. Hear him above, in 1961, describe how he met Vladimir Lenin in 1920.

via @TamasGorbe

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Orson Welles Crossed Paths With Hitler (and Churchill): “He Had No Per­son­al­i­ty…. I Think There Was Noth­ing There.”

Bertrand Russell’s Advice For How (Not) to Grow Old: “Make Your Inter­ests Grad­u­al­ly Wider and More Imper­son­al”

Bertrand Russell’s Advice to Peo­ple Liv­ing 1,000 Years in the Future: “Love is Wise, Hatred is Fool­ish”

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

Two Decades of Fire Island DJ Sets Get Unearthed, Digitized & Put Online: Stream 232 Mixtapes Online (1979–1999)

“I was the young, lone­ly gay boy in the Mid­west who had no idea par­adise exist­ed. Every­thing about the Pines was new, the very idea of a place where you could play on the beach and hold hands with a guy and be with like-mind­ed peo­ple and dance all night with a man.” — pho­tog­ra­ph­er Tom Bianchi 

Dis­co did not get demol­ished at Comiskey Park in 1979. It may have dis­ap­peared from pop­u­lar cul­ture after jump­ing the duck, but it nev­er left the New York night­clubs that had nur­tured its exu­ber­ant sound — Stu­dio 54, Par­adise Garage, The Sanc­tu­ary.… Four on the floor beats pound­ed all night in the dawn­ing decade of the 80s, only the beat soon became house music, an elec­tri­fied dis­co deriv­a­tive — with­out the horns and string sec­tions — first played in clubs by DJs like Lar­ry Lev­an, who ruled the Par­adise Garage for a decade and “changed dance music for­ev­er.”

The sounds of Man­hat­tan nightlife at the turn of the 80s have gone main­stream, but sto­ries about the ear­ly, under­ground days of house tend to leave out anoth­er scene just miles away, led by DJs as beloved as Lev­an.

For LGBTQ New York­ers, the par­ty moved every sum­mer to Fire Island, where artists, vaca­tion­ers, celebri­ties, and DJs crowd­ed clubs like The Pavil­ion and the Ice Palace to hear DJs Rob­bie Leslie, Michael Jor­ba, Richie Bernier, Gian­car­lo, Teri Beau­doin, Michael Fier­man, and Roy Thode, “whose per­for­mance at the Ice Palace showed how shim­mery, gui­tar-dri­ven dis­co slow­ly gave way to the dri­ving bass of house music,” The New York Times notes.

Thode became a leg­end not only in the Fire Island sum­mer scene but dur­ing his res­i­den­cy at Stu­dio 54, at the per­son­al invi­ta­tion of club own­er Steve Rubell. Fire Island DJs played records they heard in the off sea­son at the island’s clubs, or debuted new­ly-released tracks. (Don­na Sum­mer’s “MacArthur Park” made its debut on the island, for exam­ple.) “Fire Island’s infa­mous bac­cha­nals have gone on to become the stuff of gay myth and leg­end,” write Matt Moen at Paper. The island has also long been “an icon­ic refuge and safe haven for New York City’s queer com­mu­ni­ty dat­ing back well over half a cen­tu­ry.” One res­i­dent calls it a “gay Shangri La.” Anoth­er com­pares it to Israel, a “spir­i­tu­al home­land.”

Split between two towns, Cher­ry Grove and the Pines, the sum­mer retreat has espe­cial­ly “been a haven for the cre­ative,” says Bob­by Bon­nano, founder and pres­i­dent of the Fire Island Pines His­tor­i­cal Preser­va­tion Soci­ety. It has also been a hide­away for celebri­ties like Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, Calvin Klein, and Per­ry Ellis. Bonnano’s exten­sive online his­to­ry of the island doc­u­ments its 20th cen­tu­ry ori­gins as a place for gay artists who built hous­es in a dis­tinc­tive archi­tec­tur­al style that defines the island to this day, and who par­tied hard at clubs like The Pavil­lion. The mix­es here from Fire Island’s best DJs come from one such beach house, bought by Peter Kriss and Nate Pins­ley, who dis­cov­ered a box of tapes left behind by a pre­vi­ous own­er.

The cou­ple gave the box of tapes to their friend Joe D’E­spinosa. A soft­ware engi­neer and DJ, D’E­spinoza has spent “count­less hours” dig­i­tiz­ing, remas­ter­ing, and upload­ing the col­lec­tion to Mix­cloud. The result­ing archive rep­re­sents a “trea­sure trove of record­ed DJ sets,” span­ning “two decades worth of par­ties,” Moen writes, from 1979 through 1999. The Pine Walk col­lec­tion fea­tures more than 200 tapes (some from gigs in Manhattan),“taken from from Memo­r­i­al Day week­enders, Labor Day par­ties, sea­son open­ings and recur­ring club nights.” These are sol­id sets of vin­tage dis­co and clas­sic house, many of them doc­u­ment­ing the tran­si­tion from one to the oth­er. Browse and stream the full col­lec­tion on Mix­cloud.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Gior­gio Moroder & Don­na Summer’s “I Feel Love” Cre­at­ed the “Blue­print for All Elec­tron­ic Dance Music Today” (1977)

Dis­co Saves Lives: Give CPR to the The Beat of Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive”

Ishkur’s Guide to Elec­tron­ic Music: An Inter­ac­tive, Ency­clo­pe­dic Data Visu­al­iza­tion of 120 Years of Elec­tron­ic Music

Dis­co Demo­li­tion Night: Scenes from the Night Dis­co Died (or Did It?) at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, 1979

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

Stanley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke Spent Years Debating How to Depict the Aliens in 2001: A Space Odyssey; Carl Sagan Provided the Answer: Don’t Depict Them at All

The statute of lim­i­ta­tions has sure­ly expired for Con­tact, the 1997 Robert Zemeck­is adap­ta­tion of Carl Sagan’s epony­mous nov­el. The film sug­gests ear­ly on that Earth has been receiv­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions from out­er space, but for most of its two and a half hours keeps its audi­ence in sus­pense as to the nature of the extrater­res­tri­als send­ing them. When Jodie Fos­ter’s astronomer pro­tag­o­nist final­ly gets some one-on-one time with an alien, it takes the form of her own long-dead father, who inspired her choice of career. This end­ing quick­ly became fod­der for South Park jokes, but time seems to have vin­di­cat­ed it; any look back at the CGI aliens in oth­er movies of the mid-nine­teen-nineties con­firms that the right choice was made.

Con­tact was not a straight­for­ward book-to-film adap­ta­tion. Rather, Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan intend­ed the project as a film first, and even wrote a detailed script treat­ment before pub­lish­ing the sto­ry as a nov­el. About three decades ear­li­er, 2001: A Space Odyssey had emerged out of a sim­i­lar­ly uncon­ven­tion­al process. Rather than adapt­ing an exist­ing book, as he’d done before with Loli­ta and Dr. Strangelove, Stan­ley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke decid­ed to work togeth­er on the ideas that would shape both a film direct­ed by the for­mer and a nov­el writ­ten by the lat­ter. The col­lab­o­ra­tion had its dif­fi­cul­ties, not least when it came time to bring their vision of mankind’s future to a sat­is­fy­ing close.

Enter Sagan, already on his way to becom­ing a well-known thinker about the uni­verse and man’s place with­in it. “My friend Arthur C. Clarke had a prob­lem,” he remem­bers in his book The Cos­mic Con­nec­tion. “He was writ­ing a major motion pic­ture with Stan­ley Kubrick” (then called Jour­ney Beyond the Stars) on which “a small cri­sis in the sto­ry devel­op­ment had arisen.” In the film a space­craft’s crew “was to make con­tact with extrater­res­tri­als. Yes, but how to por­tray the extrater­res­tri­als?” Kubrick had ideas about going the tra­di­tion­al route, cre­at­ing aliens “not pro­found­ly dif­fer­ent from human beings” and thus por­trayable by humans in suits, much like the apes at the mono­lith

Sagan opposed this, as “the num­ber of indi­vid­u­al­ly unlike­ly events in the evo­lu­tion­ary his­to­ry of Man was so great that noth­ing like us is ever like­ly to evolve again any­where else in the uni­verse. I sug­gest­ed that any explic­it rep­re­sen­ta­tion of an advanced extrater­res­tri­al being was bound to have at least an ele­ment of false­ness about it, and that the best solu­tion would be to sug­gest, rather than explic­it­ly to dis­play, the extrater­res­tri­als.” Kubrick ulti­mate­ly did choose that artis­tic path, result­ing in such haunt­ing, alien-free scenes as the end­ing where­in David Bow­man encoun­ters his aged self in an eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry bed­room. Whether or not that was quite what he had in mind, Sagan did cred­it Kubrick­’s 2001 with “expand­ing the aver­age per­son­’s aware­ness of the cos­mic per­spec­tive” — which was more than he could say a decade lat­er about Star Wars.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Let­ter Between Stan­ley Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke That Sparked the Great­est Sci-Fi Film Ever Made (1964)

What’s the Dif­fer­ence Between Stan­ley Kubrick’s & Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (A Side-by-Side Com­par­i­son)

Stan­ley Kubrick Explains the Mys­te­ri­ous End­ing of 2001: A Space Odyssey in a New­ly Unearthed Inter­view

Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawk­ing & Arthur C. Clarke Dis­cuss God, the Uni­verse, and Every­thing Else

An Ani­mat­ed Carl Sagan Talks with Studs Terkel About Find­ing Extrater­res­tri­al Life (1985)

Carl Sagan Tells John­ny Car­son What’s Wrong with Star Wars: “They’re All White” & There’s a “Large Amount of Human Chau­vin­ism in It” (1978)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Polish Artist Stanisław Witkiewicz Made Portraits While On Different Psychoactive Drugs, and Noted the Drugs on Each Painting

Much of the infor­ma­tion in this post comes from Juli­ette Bre­ton at the Pub­lic Domain Review. See her post for more.

At least once a day, staff at art muse­ums and gal­leries world­wide must hear some­one say, “the artist must have been on drugs.” It’s the eas­i­est expla­na­tion for art that dis­turbs, unset­tles, con­founds our expec­ta­tions of what art should be. Maybe some­times artists are on drugs. (R. Crumb tells the sto­ry of dis­cov­er­ing his inim­itable style while on acid.) But maybe it’s not the drugs that make their art seem oth­er­world­ly. Maybe mind-alter­ing sub­stances make them more recep­tive to the source of cre­ativ­i­ty.…

In any case, artists have long used psy­choac­tive sub­stances to reach high­er states of con­scious­ness and cope with a world that does­n’t get their vision. In the ear­ly days of LSD exper­i­men­ta­tion, one psy­chi­a­trist even test­ed the phe­nom­e­non. UC Irvine’s Oscar Janiger dosed vol­un­teer sub­jects at a rent­ed L.A. house, then had them draw or oth­er­wise record their expe­ri­ences. He ulti­mate­ly aimed to make a “cre­ativ­i­ty pill,” test­ing hun­dreds of will­ing sub­jects between 1954 and 1962.

Had Pol­ish artist Stanisław Igna­cy Witkiewicz (1885–1939) — who went by “Witka­cy” — lived to see the spread of LSD, he would have signed up for every tri­al. More like­ly, he would have con­duct­ed his own exper­i­ments, with him­self as the sole test sub­ject. The War­saw-born artist, writer, philoso­pher, nov­el­ist, and pho­tog­ra­ph­er died in 1939, the year after Swiss chemist Albert Hoff­man acci­den­tal­ly syn­the­sized acid. Through­out his career, how­ev­er, Witka­cy exper­i­ment­ed with just about every oth­er psy­choac­tive sub­stance, antic­i­pat­ing Janiger by decades with his por­traits — paint­ed while… yes… he was on lots of drugs.

Unlike his con­tem­po­rary Dalí, Witka­cy did not claim to be drugs. But he was hard­ly coy about their use. He made notes on each paint­ing to indi­cate his state of intox­i­ca­tion. “Under the influ­ence of cocaine, mesca­line, alco­hol, and oth­er nar­cot­ic cock­tails,” Juli­ette Bre­tan writes at the Pub­lic Domain Review, “Witka­cy pre­pared numer­ous stud­ies of clients and friends for his por­trait paint­ing com­pa­ny, found­ed in the mid-1920s.” The drugs induced “dif­fer­ent approach­es to colour, tech­nique, and com­po­si­tion. The result­ing images are sur­re­al — and occa­sion­al­ly hor­rif­ic.” Some­times the drugs in ques­tion were lim­it­ed to caf­feine, a dai­ly sta­ple of artists every­where. He also made por­traits while abstain­ing from oth­er addic­tive sub­stances like nico­tine and alco­hol.

At oth­er times, Witka­cy’s notes — writ­ten in a kind of code — spec­i­fied more pro­nounced usage. He made the por­trait above, of Nina Starchurs­ka, in 1929 while on “nar­cotics of a supe­ri­or grade,” includ­ing mesca­line syn­the­sized by Mer­ck and “cocaine + caf­feine + cocaine + caf­feine + cocaine.” Anoth­er por­trait of Starchurs­ka (below) made in that same year involved some heavy dos­es of pey­ote, among oth­er things.

Witka­cy’s inves­ti­ga­tions were lit­er­ary as well, cul­mi­nat­ing in a 1932 book of essays called Nar­cotics: Nico­tine, Alco­hol, Cocaine, Pey­ote, Mor­phone, Ether + Appen­dicesThe book “owes much to the exper­i­men­tal works of oth­er Euro­pean psy­cho­nauts through­out the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies.” Invok­ing the deca­dent moral­ism of Thomas De Quincey and Baude­laire, and it antic­i­pates the utopi­an, psy­che­del­ic prose of Aldous Hux­ley and Car­los Cas­tane­da.

Where he might ful­mi­nate, with satir­i­cal edge, against the use of drugs, Witka­cy also joy­ous­ly records their lib­er­at­ing effects on his cre­ative con­scious­ness. His chap­ter on pey­ote “most close­ly approx­i­mates the spir­it” of his paint­ings, notes Bibil­iokept in a review of the recent­ly repub­lished vol­ume:

“Pey­ote” begins with Witkiewicz tak­ing his first of sev­en (!) pey­ote dos­es at six in the evening and cul­mi­nat­ing around eight the fol­low­ing morn­ing with “Strag­gling visions of iri­des­cent wires.” In incre­ments of about 15 min­utes, Witkiewicz notes each of his sur­re­al visions. The wild hal­lu­ci­na­tions are ren­dered in equal­ly sur­re­al lan­guage: “Mun­dane dis­um­bil­i­cal­ment on a cone to the bark­ing of fly­ing canine drag­ons” here, “The birth of a dia­mond goldfinch” there. 

Else­where he writes of “elves on a see­saw (Comedic num­ber)” and “a bat­tle of cen­taurs turned into a bat­tle between fan­tas­ti­cal gen­i­talia,” all of which lead him to con­clude, “Goya must have known about pey­ote.”

Nar­cotics func­tions as a kind of key to Witka­cy’s think­ing as he made the por­traits; part drug diary, part artis­tic state­ment of pur­pose, it includes a “List of Sym­bols” to help decode his short­hand. The artist com­mit­ted sui­cide in 1939 when the Red Army invad­ed Poland. Had he lived to con­nect with the psy­che­del­ic rev­o­lu­tion to come, per­haps he would have been the artist to make psy­chotrop­ic drug use a respectable form of fine art. Then we might imag­ine con­ver­sa­tions in gal­leries going some­thing like this: “Excuse me, was this artist on drugs?” “Why yes, in fact. She took large dos­es of psy­lo­cy­bin when she made this. It’s right here in her man­i­festo.….”

See many more Witka­cy por­traits by vis­it­ing Juli­ette Bre­tan’s post at the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Aldous Hux­ley, Dying of Can­cer, Left This World Trip­ping on LSD, Expe­ri­enc­ing “the Most Serene, the Most Beau­ti­ful Death” (1963)

Artist Draws 9 Por­traits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Exper­i­ments to Turn LSD into a “Cre­ativ­i­ty Pill”

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instant­ly Dis­cov­ered His Artis­tic Style

Take a Trip to the LSD Muse­um, the Largest Col­lec­tion of “Blot­ter Art” in the World

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

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