The Graphic Novel Adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, Literature | February 6th, 2020

Since its publication just over half a century ago, Slaughterhouse-Five has seen bans and burnings, gone through various adaptations, and all the while held its place in the American literary canon. Something about Kurt Vonnegut’s story of the involuntarily time-traveling optometrist Billy Pilgrim, who like his creator survived the firebombing of Dresden in the Second World War, continues to resonate with readers even as that war (and so very many novels about it) pass out of living memory. Vonnegut himself loved George Roy Hill’s 1972 film of the novel, but alas, having died in 2007, he didn’t stick around long enough to see Slaughterhouse-Five — or, to use its full title, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death — turned into a graphic novel.

“Indie graphic novel house BOOM! Studios announced plans to publish a graphic version of Kurt Vonnegut’s classic sci-fi/antiwar novel,” reports Publishers Weekly’s Calvin Reid, naming the adaptors as writer Ryan North, artist Albert Monteys, and colorist Ricard Zaplana. Nerdist’s Matthew Hart writes that it’s “unclear at this point what’s been included and what’s been dropped for BOOM!’s Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel adaptation, it seems like the story is in good hands.” [Update: You can now purchase a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel online here.]

The images released so far “showcase a world painted with appropriately muted colors, and populated by some of the most iconic moments from the novel. The graphic novel’s interpretation of Billy Pilgrim will possibly ignite some disagreement amongst readers, however, as his face can be juxtaposed with Vonnegut’s.”

For a novel considered a “classic” longer than readers who discover it today have been alive, Slaughterhouse-Five has its own unconventional way with reality. Not only does Vonnegut make its protagonist “unstuck in time,” he also works into its cast real characters from his own life. Take Bernard O’Hare, shown here in panels from the graphic novel. As Vonnegut’s officially designated “buddy” in the the 106th Infantry Division, O’Hare was taken prisoner along with him in Dresden and held captive in a meatpacking plant known as Schlachthof Fuenf. When Vonnegut completed the manuscript he let O’Hare and his wife Mary read it, and the latter urged the author to write about how “all the men who fought in the Second World War were just babies.” Hence the novel’s subtitle, which befits the plainspoken sensibility of Kurt Vonnegut, a man who believed in calling things what they were — and thus would surely have rejected the label “graphic novel” in favor of “comic book.”

Purchase a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel online.

via Publishers Weekly

Why Should We Read Kurt Vonnegut? An Animated Video Makes the Case

Kurt Vonnegut Maps Out the Universal Shapes of Our Favorite Stories

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Incensed Letter to the High School That Burned Slaughterhouse-Five

Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Novel Adaptation

Read Ulysses Seen, A Graphic Novel Adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Terry Jones, the Late Monty Python Actor, Helped Turn Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Into a Free App: Explore It Online

in Education, Literature, Technology | February 5th, 2020

People’s eyes tend to glaze over when they hear the phrase “digital humanities.” Granted, it’s not the most thrilling combination of words. But when you show them what’s possible at the intersection of technology and the arts, the glaze turns to a gleam: a Shazam-like app for scanning, identifying, and learning about fine art? Yes, please…. An iPad app introducing the works of Shakespeare, with contextual notes, summaries, essays, and videos featuring Sir Ian McKellen? Fascinating….

The possibilities for casual learners and serious students alike are vast. You just have to know where to look. And if you’re looking for a tech-savvy way into Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the classic medieval story cycle written in Middle English verse and prose, you’ve found it. Thanks in part to medieval scholar Terry Jones, formerly a member of Monty Python—and the writer and director of Monty Python and the Holy Grail—we now have a Chaucer app.

“The project… features a 45-minute audio performance of the General Prologue of the Tales,” writes Henry Bodkin at the Independent. “While listening to the reading, users have access to a modern translation, explanatory notes and a vocabulary explaining Middle English words used by Chaucer, as well as a digitized version of the original 14th century manuscript.” The project was Jones’ final scholarly work—he passed away last month—but his contribution is significant.

Jones’ two books on Chaucer and his translation of the “General Prologue” are both featured in the app’s introduction and notes, as Ellen Gutoskey notes at Mental Floss. One of the project’s leaders, Peter Robinson of the University of Saskatchewan, also points to his behind-the-scenes influence. “His work and his passion for Chaucer was an inspiration for us. We talked a lot about Chaucer and it was his idea that the Tales would be turned into a performance.”

We can enjoy many a modern English translation of Chaucer, and there’s nothing wrong with doing so, but to truly understand what made the text so revolutionary, we should hear it in its original language. Middle English is beautifully musical, but it was not in Chaucer’s time a literary tongue. Like Dante, he broke new ground by writing in the vernacular when most everyone else wrote in Latin or French.

The strangeness of Middle English to our eyes and ears can make approaching the Canterbury Tales for the first time a daunting experience. The Chaucer app is an excellent research tool for scholars, yet the researchers want “the public, not just academics to see the manuscript as Chaucer would have likely thought of it,” says Robinson, “as a performance that mixed drama and humor.” In other words, reading Chaucer should be fun.

Why else would Terry Jones—a man who knew his comedy as well as his medieval history—spend decades reading and writing about him? Find out for yourself at the Canterbury Tales app, where, with a click of a few buttons at the top of the page, you can see part of the original manuscript, a transcription of the Middle English text, explanatory notes, and Jones’ translation of the “General Prologue.”

Enter the app here.

via Mental Floss

The Canterbury Tales Remixed: Baba Brinkman’s New Album Uses Hip Hop to Bring Chaucer Into the 21st Century, Yo

Sir Ian McKellen Releases New Apps to Make Shakespeare’s Plays More Enjoyable & Accessible

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What is a Blade Runner? How Ridley Scott’s Movie Has Origins in William S. Burroughs’ Novella, Blade Runner: A Movie

in Film, Literature | February 4th, 2020

Why, in the course of two extraordinary films by Ridley Scott and Denis Villeneuve, do we never learn what the term Blade Runner actually means? Perhaps the mystery only deepens the sense of “super-realism” with which the film leaves audiences, including—and especially—Philip K. Dick, who only lived long enough to see excerpts. “The impact of Blade Runner is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the public and on creative people,” he wrote. As usual, Dick saw beyond his contemporaries, who mostly panned or ignored the film.

Dick seemed to have “had no beef with the fact Blade Runner was not a faithful adaptation of his novel,” writes David Barnett at the Independent. Not only did he not write a book called Blade Runner—the film was loosely adapted from his 1968 book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—but he also never used those words, “Blade Runner,” to describe his characters. “It’s not a phrase used in the book and it doesn’t really make much sense in the context of the movie…. It’s simply a throwaway slang for cops who hunt replicants.”

The phrase, as Keele University professor Oliver Harris tells The Quietus, is so much more than that. It brings along with it “a weird backstory that tells us something about how the Burroughs virus spreads around,” infecting nearly everything science fictional and countercultural over the past half-century or so. That’s William S. Burroughs, of course, author of—among a few other things—a 1979 novelistic film treatment called Blade Runner: A Movie.

If Scott and screenwriter Hampton Fancher had adapted Burroughs’ nightmarish 21st century to the cinema, we would have seen a much different film—though one as wholly resonant with our current dystopia. The story imagines “a medical-care apocalypse,” in which medical supplies like scalpels become smuggled contraband—hence “blade runners.” Burroughs’ book is itself an adaptation—or a re-writing and re-editing—of sci-fi writer Alan Nourse’s 1974 pulp sci-fi novel The Bladerunner.

It is Nourse who introduced the scenario of a “medical apocalypse” and who coined the term “blade runner,” though we owe its separation into two words to Burroughs. “Reading one text against the other is fascinating,” says Harris. “Nourse writes pedestrian, realist prose with two-dimensional characters who all talk in the same colourless style.” Burroughs, on the other hand, writes with “extraordinary economy, mastery of idiom, and wildly unbound imagination.”

In the crumbling New York (not L.A.) of Burroughs’ future world, the government controls its citizens “through the ability to withhold essential services including work, credit, housing, retirement benefits and medical care through computerization.” Granted, this might not seem to lend itself to a very cinematic treatment, but Burroughs was attracted to the central concept of Nourse’s book, one inherently rich in human tragedy: “medical pandemics appealed to his vision of a species in peril, a planet heading for terminal disaster.”

Dick imagined a species in peril from a different kind of infection, as Burroughs would have it—artificial intelligence. Was the most cinematically-adapted sci-fi novelist aware that he had indirectly helped reintroduce a strain of the Burroughs virus—a paranoid, if justified, suspicion of authority—back into popular culture through Blade Runner? We might expect, given his status in the science fiction community at the time of his death, three months before the film debuted, that he might be aware of the connection. But he gave no hint of it, leaving us to ponder what Burroughs’ Blade Runner: The Movie, the movie, would be like, made with the skill and sensibility of a Scott or Villeneuve.

via The Verge

Philip K. Dick Previews Blade Runner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Overwhelming” (1981)

How Jim Jarmusch Gets Creative Ideas from William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Method and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Word “Robot” Originated in a Czech Play in 1921: Discover Karel Čapek’s Sci-Fi Play R.U.R. (a.k.a. Rossum’s Universal Robots)

in History, Literature, Science, Technology | February 4th, 2020

When I hear the word robot, I like to imagine Isaac Asimov’s delightfully Yiddish-inflected Brooklynese pronunciation of the word: “ro-butt,” with heavy stress on the first syllable. (A quirk shared by Futurama’s crustacean Doctor Zoidberg.) Asimov warned us that robots could be dangerous and impossible to control. But he also showed young readers—in his Norby series of kids’ books written with his wife Janet—that robots could be heroic companions, saving the solar system from cosmic supervillains.

The word robot conjures all of these associations in science fiction: from Blade Runner’s replicants to Star Trek’s Data. We might refer to these particular examples as androids rather than robots, but this confusion is precisely to the point. Our language has forgotten that robots started in sci-fi as more human than human, before they became Asimov-like machines. Like the sci-fi writer’s pronunciation of robot, the word originated in Eastern Europe in 1921, the year after Asimov’s birth, in a play by Czech intellectual Karel Čapek called R.U.R., or “Rossum’s Universal Robots.”

The title refers to the creations of Mr. Rossum, a Frankenstein-like inventor and possible inspiration for Metropolis’s Rotwang (who was himself an inspiration for Dr. Strangelove). Čapek told the London Saturday Review after the play premiered that Rossum was a “typical representative of the scientific materialism of the last [nineteenth] century,” with a “desire to create an artificial man—in the chemical and biological, not mechanical sense.”

Rossum did not wish to play God so much as “to prove God to be unnecessary and absurd.” This was but one stop on “the road to industrial production.” As technology analyst and Penn State professor John M. Jordan writes at the MIT Press Reader, Čapek’s robots were not appliances become sentient, nor trusty, superpowered sidekicks. They were, in fact, invented to be slaves.

The robot… was a critique of mechanization and the ways it can dehumanize people. The word itself derives from the Czech word “robota,” or forced labor, as done by serfs. Its Slavic linguistic root, “rab,” means “slave.” The original word for robots more accurately defines androids, then, in that they were neither metallic nor mechanical.

Jordan describes this history in an excerpt from his book Robots, part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, and a timelier than ever intervention in the cultural and technological history of robots, who walk (and moonwalk) among us in all sorts of machine forms, if not quite yet in the sense Čapek imagined. But a Blade Runner-like scenario seemed inevitable to him in a society ruled by “utopian notions of science and technology.”

In the time he imagines, he says, “the product of the human brain has escaped the control of human hands.” Čapek has one character, the robot Radius, make the point plainly:

The power of man has fallen. By gaining possession of the factory we have become masters of everything. The period of mankind has passed away. A new world has arisen. … Mankind is no more. Mankind gave us too little life. We wanted more life.

Sound familiar? While R.U.R. owes a “substantial” debt to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it’s also clear that Čapek contributed something original to the critique, a vision of a world in which “humans become more like their machines,” writes Jordan. “Humans and robots… are essentially one and the same.” Beyond the surface fears of science and technology, the play that introduced the word robot to the cultural lexicon also introduced the darker social critique in most stories about them: We have reason to fear robots because in creating them, we’ve recreated ourselves; then we’ve treated them the way we treat each other.

You can find the text of Čapek’s play in book format on Amazon.

via Boing Boing

Twerking, Moonwalking AI Robots–They’re Now Here

The Robots of Your Dystopian Future Are Already Here: Two Chilling Videos Drive It All Home

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Evelyn Waugh’s “Victorian Blood Book”: A Most Strange & Macabre Illustrated Book

in Books, Libraries, Literature, Religion | January 30th, 2020

Most U.S. readers come to know Evelyn Waugh as the “serious” writer of the saga Brideshead Revisited (and inspirer of the 1981 miniseries adaptation). This was also the case in 1954, when Charles Rolo wrote in the pages of The Atlantic that the novel “sold many more copies in the United States than all of Waugh’s other books put together.” Yet “among the literary,” Waugh’s name evokes “a singular brand of comic genius… a riotously anarchic cosmos, in which only the outrageous can happen—and when it does happen is outrageously diverting.”

The comic Waugh’s imagination “runs to… appalling and macabre inventions,” incorporating a “lunatic logic.” The sources of that imagination now reside at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, who hold Waugh’s manuscripts and 3,500-volume library.

The novelist, the Ransom Center notes, “was an inveterate collector of things Victorian (and well ahead of most of his contemporaries in this regard). Undoubtedly the single most curious object in the entire library is a large oblong folio decoupage book, often referred to as the ‘Victorian Blood Book.’”

Waugh deeply admired Victorian art, and especially “those nineteenth-century enemies of technology, the Pre-Raphaelites,” writes Rolo. Still, like us, he may have looked upon scrapbooks like these as bizarre and morbidly humorous, if also possessed by an unsettling beauty. (One 2008 catalogue described them as “weird” and “rather elegant but very scary.”) More than anything, they resemble the kind of thing a goth teenager raised on Monty Python and Emily Dickinson might put together in her bedroom late at night. Such an artist would be carrying on a long “cherished tradition.”

“Victorian scrapbooking,” the Ransom Center writes, “was almost exclusively the province of women,” a way of organizing information, although “the esthetic aspect” could sometimes be “secondary.” The “Victorian Blood Book,” however, is the work of a paterfamilias named John Bingley Garland, “a prosperous Victorian businessman who moved to Newfoundland, went on to become speaker of its first Parliament, and returned to Stone Cottage in Dorset to end his days.”

Inscribed to Bingley’s daughter Amy on September 1, 1854, the book seems to have been a wedding present, made with serious devotional intent:

How does one “read” such an enigmatic object? We understandably find elements of the grotesque and surreal. But our eyes view it differently from Victorian ones. As Garland’s descendants have written, “our family doesn’t refer to…‘the Blood Book;’ we refer to it as ‘Amy’s Gift’ and in no way see it as anything other than a precious reminder of the love of family and Our Lord.”

The “Blood Book“ ‘s actual title appears to have been Durenstein!, which is the Austrian castle where Richard the Lionhearted was imprisoned. Assembled from hundreds of engravings, many by William Blake, it apparently depicts “the spiritual battles encountered by Christians along the path of life and the ‘blood’ to Christian sacrifice.” The “blood” is red India ink. The quotations surrounding each collage, according to the Garland family “are encouraging one to turn to God as our Saviour.”

One can imagine the “serious” Waugh looking on this strange object with almost reverential affection. He lapsed into a highly affected, reactionary nostalgia in his later period, announcing himself “two hundred years” behind the times. One contemporary declared, “He grows more old-fashioned every day.” But the savagely comic Waugh would not have been able to approach such a bizarre piece of folk collage art without an eye toward its use as material for his own “appalling and macabre inventions.”

See a full scanned copy of the “Victorian Blood Book,” and download high-resolution images, online at the University of Texas, Austin’s Harry Ransom Center.

Browse The Magical Worlds of Harry Houdini’s Scrapbooks

A Witty Dictionary of Victorian Slang (1909)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Concise Breakdown of How Time Travel Works in Popular Movies, Books & TV Shows

in Film, Literature, Sci Fi | January 24th, 2020

As least since H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel The Time Machine, time travel has been a promising storytelling concept. Alas, it has seldom delivered on that promise: whether their characters jump forward into the future, backward into the past, or both, the past 125 years of time-travel stories have too often suffered from inelegance, inconsistency, and implausibility. Well, of course they’re implausible, everyone but Ronald Mallett might say — they’re stories about time travel. But fiction only has to work on its own terms, not reality’s. The trouble is that the fiction of time travel can all too easily stumble over the potentially infinite convolutions and paradoxes inherent in the subject matter.

In the MinutePhysics video above, Henry Reich sorts out how time-travel stories work (and fail to work) using nothing but markers and paper. For the time-travel enthusiast, the core interest of such fictions isn’t so much the spectacle of characters hurtling into the future or past but “the different ways time travel can influence causality, and thus the plot, within the universe of each story.” As an example of “100 percent realistic travel” Reich points to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, in which space travelers at light speed experience only days or months while years pass back on Earth. The same thing happens in Planet of the Apes, whose astronauts return from space thinking they’ve landed on the wrong planet when they’ve actually landed in the distant future.

But when we think of time travel per se, we more often think of stories about how actively traveling to the past, say, can change its future — and thus the story’s “present.” Reich poses two major questions to ask about such stories. The first is “whether or not the time traveler is there when history happens the first time around. Was “the time-traveling version of you always there to begin with?” Or “does the very act of time traveling to the past change what happened and force the universe onto a different trajectory of history from the one you experienced prior to traveling?” The second question is “who has free will when somebody is time traveling” — that is, “whose actions are allowed to move history onto a different trajectory, and whose aren’t?”

We can all look into our own pasts for examples of how our favorite time-travel stories have dealt with those questions. Reich cites such well-known time-travelers’ tales as A Christmas Carol, Groundhog Day, and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, as well, of course, as Back to the Future, the most popular dramatization of the theoretical changing of historical timelines caused by travel into the past. Rian Johnson’s Looper treats that phenomenon more complexly, allowing for more free will and taking into account more of the effects a character in one time period would have on that same character in another. Consulting on that film was Shane Carruth, whose Primer — my own personal favorite time-travel fiction — had already taken time travel “to the extreme, with time travel within time travel within time travel.”

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Reich’s personal favorite time-travel fiction, exhibits a clarity and consistency uncommon in the genre. J.K. Rowling accomplishes this by following the rule that “while you’re experiencing your initial pre-time travel passage through a particular point in history, your time-traveling clone is also already there, doing everything you’ll eventually do when you time-travel yourself.” This single-time-line version of time travel, in which “you can’t change the past because the past already happened,” gets around problems that have long bedeviled other time-travel fictions. But it also demonstrates the importance of self-consistency in fiction of all kinds: “In order to care about the characters in a story,” Reich says, “we have to believe that actions have consequences.” Stories, in other words, must obey their own rules — even, and perhaps especially, stories involving time-traveling child wizards.

Professor Ronald Mallett Wants to Build a Time Machine in this Century … and He’s Not Kidding

Mark Twain Predicts the Internet in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Story, “From The ‘London Times’ in 1904”

What Happened When Stephen Hawking Threw a Cocktail Party for Time Travelers (2009)

Pretty Much Pop #22 Untangles Time-Travel Scenarios in the Terminator Franchise and Other Media

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Hear Christopher Tolkien (RIP) Read the Work of His Father J.R.R. Tolkien, Which He Tirelessly Worked to Preserve

in Books, Literature | January 17th, 2020

J.R.R. Tolkien is responsible for the existence of Middle-earth, the richly realized fictional setting of the Lord of the Rings novels. But he also did his bit for the existence of the much less fictional Christopher Tolkien, his third son as well as, in J.R.R.‘s own words, his “chief critic and collaborator.” Christopher spent much of his life returning the favor, dedicating himself to the organization, preservation, and publication of his father’s notes on Middle-earth’s elaborate geography, history, and mythology until his own death this past Wednesday at the age of 95.

Most fans of Tolkien père came to know the work of Tolkien fils through The Silmarillion, the collection of the former’s previously unpublished mythopoeic writings on Middle-Earth and the universe that contains it. That book came out in 1977, four years after J.R.R. Tolkien’s death, and for a time thereafter, write The New York Times’ Katharine Q. Seelye and Alan Yuhas, “Tolkien fans and scholars wondered how much of The Silmarillion was the work of the father and how much was the work of the son.”

In response, “Christopher produced the 12-volume The History of Middle-Earth (1996), a compilation of drafts, fragments, rewrites, marginal notes and other writings culled from 70 boxes of unpublished material.”

Christopher Tolkien didn’t just take over J.R.R. Tolkien’s duties as the steward of Middle-earth; he more or less grew up in the place, and even provided comments, at his father’s request, on the work that would become The Lord of the Rings. The power of J.R.R. Tolkien’s storytelling, one often hears, owes in part to the writer’s thorough grounding in literary and linguistic subjects like English and Germanic philology, heroic verse, Old Norse, Old Icelandic, and medieval Welsh. Christopher Tolkien, in turn, made himself into what Seelye and Yhuas call “an authority, above all, on the reams of writing that his father produced.” You can hear Christopher Tolkien read authoritatively from the work of J.R.R. Tolkien in the videos presented here.

The first three clips from the top come two vinyl LPs released in 1977 and 1988 by Caedmon Records (the proto-audiobook label that also put out Edgar Allan Poe read by Vincent Price and Basil Rathbone as well as Hemingway and Faulkner read by Hemingway and Faulkner). All of their selections come from The Silmarillion, the Tolkien text that would never have seen the light of day if not for Christopher’s efforts (and those of Guy Gavriel Kay, who would later become a fantasy novelist himself). But as a tribute to the man’s life so rigorously devoted to a body of work that has fascinated so many, what could be more suitable than the video above, his reading of the very end of the final book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King. Christopher Tolkien kept his father’s flame alive, and thanks to his work that flame will survive him — and generations of Tolkien readers to come.

110 Drawings and Paintings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Middle-Earth and Beyond

Map of Middle-Earth Annotated by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Artist Ed Ruscha Reads From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in a Short Film Celebrating His 1966 Photos of the Sunset Strip

in Art, Books, Film, Literature, Philosophy | January 13th, 2020

In 1956, the Pop artist Ed Ruscha left Oklahoma City for Los Angeles. “I could see I was just born for the job” of an artist, he would later say, “born to watch paint dry.” The comment encapsulates Ruscha’s ironic use of cliché as a centerpiece of his work. He called himself an “abstract artist… who deals with subject matter.” Much of his subject matter has been commonplace words and phrases—decontextualized and foregrounded in paintings and prints made with careful deliberation, against the trend toward Abstract Expressionism and its gestural freedom.

Another of Ruscha’s subjects comes with somewhat less conceptual baggage. His photographic books capture mid-century America gas stations and the city he has called home for over 50 years. In his 1966 book, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Ruscha “photographed both sides of Sunset Boulevard from the back of a pickup truck,” writes filmmaker Matthew Miller. “He stitched the photos together to make one long book that folded out to 27 feet. That project turned into his larger Streets of Los Angeles series, which spanned decades.”

Miller, inspired by work he did on a 2017 short film called Ed Ruscha: Buildings and Words, decided to bring together two of Ruscha’s longstanding inspirations: the city of L.A. and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which Kerouac supposedly wrote as a continuous 120-foot long scroll—a format, Miller noticed, much like Every Building on the Sunset Strip. (Ruscha made his own artist’s book version of On the Road in 2009). Miller and editor Sean Leonard cut Ruscha’s photographs together in the montage you see above, commissioned by the Getty Museum, while Ruscha himself read selections from the Kerouac classic.

The connection between their style and their use of language feels really strong, but at the end of the day, I simply thought it’d be great to hear Ed Ruscha read On the Road. Something about Ed’s voice just feels right. Something about his work just feels right. It’s like the images, the words, and the forms he makes were always meant to be together.”

Miller describes the painstaking process of selecting the photos and “constructing a mini narrative that evoked Ed’s sensibilities” at Vimeo. The artist’s “perspective seemed to speak to the signage and architecture of the city, while Kerouac’s voice felt like it was pulling in all the lively characters of the street.” It’s easy to see why Ruscha would be so drawn to Kerouac. Both share a fascination with vernacular American speech and iconic American subjects of advertising, the automobile, and the freedoms of the road.

But where Ruscha turns to words for their visual impact, Kerouac relished them for their music. “For a while,” Miller writes of his project, “it felt like the footage wanted one thing and the voiceover wanted another.” But he and Leonard, who also did the sound design, were able to bring image and voice together in a short film that frames both artists as mid-century visionaries who turned the ordinary and seemingly unremarkable into an experience of the ecstatic.

173 works by Ruscha can be viewed on MoMA’s website.

via Aeon

Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol Demystify Their Pop Art in Vintage 1966 Film

A Brief History of John Baldessari, Narrated by Tom Waits

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Graphic Novel Adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

Terry Jones, the Late Monty Python Actor, Helped Turn Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Into a Free App: Explore It Online

What is a Blade Runner? How Ridley Scott’s Movie Has Origins in William S. Burroughs’ Novella, Blade Runner: A Movie

The Word “Robot” Originated in a Czech Play in 1921: Discover Karel Čapek’s Sci-Fi Play R.U.R. (a.k.a. Rossum’s Universal Robots)

Evelyn Waugh’s “Victorian Blood Book”: A Most Strange & Macabre Illustrated Book

A Concise Breakdown of How Time Travel Works in Popular Movies, Books & TV Shows

Hear Christopher Tolkien (RIP) Read the Work of His Father J.R.R. Tolkien, Which He Tirelessly Worked to Preserve

Artist Ed Ruscha Reads From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in a Short Film Celebrating His 1966 Photos of the Sunset Strip

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search