The Last Cigarette Commercial Ever Aired on American TV (1971)

The slo­gan “You’ve come a long way, baby” still has some pop-cul­tur­al cur­ren­cy. But how many Amer­i­cans under the age of six­ty remem­ber what it adver­tised? The line was first rolled out in 1968 to pro­mote Vir­ginia Slims, the then-new brand of cig­a­rettes mar­ket­ed explic­it­ly to women. “Every ad in the cam­paign put a woman front and cen­ter, equat­ing smok­ing Vir­ginia Slims with being inde­pen­dent, styl­ish, con­fi­dent and lib­er­at­ed,” says the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of Adver­tis­ing Agen­cies. “The slo­gan itself spoke direct­ly about the progress women all over Amer­i­ca were fight­ing for.”

Such was the zeit­geist pow­er of Vir­ginia Slims that they became the very last cig­a­rette brand ever adver­tised on Amer­i­can TV, at 11:59 p.m on Jan­u­ary 2, 1971, dur­ing The Tonight Show Star­ring John­ny Car­son. Richard Nixon had signed the Pub­lic Health Cig­a­rette Smok­ing Act, which banned cig­a­rette adver­tise­ments on broad­cast media, on April 1, 1970. But it did­n’t take effect imme­di­ate­ly, the tobac­co indus­try hav­ing man­aged to nego­ti­ate for itself one last chance to air com­mer­cials dur­ing the col­lege foot­ball games of New Year’s Day 1971.

“The Philip Mor­ris com­pa­ny has bought all com­mer­cial time on the first half hour of all the net­work talk shows tonight,” says ABC’s Har­ry Rea­son­er on a news­cast from that same day. “That is, the last half hour on which it is legal to sell cig­a­rettes on radio or tele­vi­sion in the Unit­ed States. This marks, as we like to say, the end of an era.” In trib­ute, ABC put togeth­er an assem­blage of past cig­a­rette com­mer­cials. That some will feel odd­ly famil­iar even to those of us who would­n’t be born for a decade or two speaks to the pow­er of mass media in post­war Amer­i­ca. More than half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, now that cig­a­rettes are sel­dom glimpsed even on dra­mat­ic tele­vi­sion, all this feels almost sur­re­al­is­ti­cal­ly dis­tant in his­to­ry.

Equal­ly strik­ing, cer­tain­ly by con­trast to the man­ner of news anchors in the twen­ty-twen­ties, is the poet­ry of Rea­son­er’s reflec­tion on the just-closed chap­ter of tele­vi­sion his­to­ry. “It isn’t like say­ing good­bye to an old friend, I guess, because the doc­tors have con­vinced us they aren’t old friends,” he admits. “But we may be par­doned, I think, on dim win­ter nights in the future, sit­ting by the fire and nod­ding and say­ing, ‘Remem­ber L.S./M.F.T.? Remem­ber Glen Gray play­ing smoke rings for the Camel car­a­van? Remem­ber ‘Nature in the raw is sel­dom mild’? Remem­ber all those girls who who had it all togeth­er?’ ”

Relat­ed con­tent:

When the Flint­stones Ped­dled Cig­a­rettes

Cig­a­rette Com­mer­cials from David Lynch, the Coen Broth­ers and Jean Luc Godard

Two Short Films on Cof­fee and Cig­a­rettes from Jim Jar­musch & Paul Thomas Ander­son

Glo­ri­ous Ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

How Edward Munch Sig­naled His Bohemi­an Rebel­lion with Cig­a­rettes (1895): A Video Essay

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.

As Star Trek’s Lieutenant Uhura, Nichelle Nichols (RIP) Starred in “TV’s First Interracial Kiss” in 1968

The orig­i­nal Star Trek ran for only three sea­sons, but in that short time it had, to put it mild­ly, an out­sized cul­tur­al impact. That part­ly had to do with the series hav­ing aired in the late nine­teen-six­ties, an era when a host of long-stand­ing norms in Amer­i­can soci­ety (as well as in oth­er soci­eties across the world) seemed to have come up for re-nego­ti­a­tion. Through its sci­ence-fic­tion­al premis­es and twen­ty-third-cen­tu­ry set­ting, Star Trek could deal with the present in ways that would have been dif­fi­cult for oth­er, osten­si­bly more real­is­tic pro­grams.

In “Pla­to’s Stepchil­dren,” an episode from 1968, sev­er­al mem­bers of the Enter­prise’s crew find them­selves cap­tive on a plan­et of tele­ki­net­ic, ancient-Greece-wor­ship­ping sadists. It was there that Star Trek staged one of its most mem­o­rable moments, a kiss between William Shat­ner’s Cap­tain Kirk and the late Nichelle Nichols’ Lieu­tenant Uhu­ra. It aris­es not out of a rela­tion­ship that has devel­oped organ­i­cal­ly between the char­ac­ters, but out of com­pul­sion by the pow­ers of their “Pla­ton­ian” cap­tors, who force the humans to per­form for their enter­tain­ment.

Despite that nar­ra­tive loop­hole, the scene nev­er­the­less wor­ried the man­age­ment at NBC. They imag­ined that, giv­en that Shat­ner was white and Nichols black, to show them kiss­ing would pro­voke a neg­a­tive reac­tion among view­ers in parts of the coun­try his­tor­i­cal­ly hos­tile to the idea of roman­tic rela­tions between those races. Ensur­ing that the scene made it to the air as writ­ten (Nichols lat­er remem­bered in her auto­bi­og­ra­phy) neces­si­tat­ed such tac­tics as sab­o­tag­ing the alter­nate takes shot with­out the kiss: “Bill shook me and hissed men­ac­ing­ly in his best ham-fist­ed Kirkian stac­ca­to deliv­ery, ‘I! WON’T! KISS! YOU! I! WON’T! KISS! YOU!’ ”

The Kirk-Uhu­ra kiss did occa­sion a great many respons­es, prac­ti­cal­ly all of them pos­i­tive. That Nichols and Shat­ner — not to men­tion Star Trek cre­ator Gene Rod­den­ber­ry, and all their oth­er col­lab­o­ra­tors – pulled it off in the right way at the right moment is evi­denced by its being remem­bered more than 50 years lat­er as “TV’s First Inter­ra­cial Kiss.” In fact there had been inter­ra­cial kiss­es on tele­vi­sion for at least a decade (one, on a 1958 Ed Sul­li­van Show, involved Shat­ner him­self), but none had made quite such a con­vinc­ing state­ment, even to skep­tics. “I am total­ly opposed to the mix­ing of the races,” as Nichols remem­bered one view­er writ­ing in. “How­ev­er, any time a red-blood­ed Amer­i­can boy like Cap­tain Kirk gets a beau­ti­ful dame in his arms that looks like Uhu­ra, he ain’t gonna fight it.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Nichelle Nichols Explains How Mar­tin Luther King Con­vinced Her to Stay on Star Trek

Star Trek‘s Nichelle Nichols Cre­ates a Short Film for NASA to Recruit New Astro­nauts (1977)

Watch the First-Ever Kiss on Film Between Two Black Actors, Just Hon­ored by the Library of Con­gress (1898)

Watch Edith+Eddie, an Intense, Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Short Film About America’s Old­est Inter­ra­cial New­ly­weds

William Shat­ner in Tears After Becom­ing the Old­est Per­son in Space: ‘I’m So Filled with Emo­tion … I Hope I Nev­er Recov­er from This”

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.

Watch a Complete Mini-Series Adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

Not long after pub­lish­ing his most beloved nov­el Anna Karen­i­na, Leo Tol­stoy gave away his wealth, renounced his aris­to­crat­ic priv­i­leges, and embraced the life of a peas­ant. His extreme exper­i­ment in Chris­t­ian anar­chism notwith­stand­ing, how­ev­er, Tol­stoy was fas­ci­nat­ed by new tech­nol­o­gy and allowed him­self to be pho­tographed and filmed near the end of his life. On one occa­sion, he sup­pos­ed­ly con­fessed a love of the cin­e­ma to his vis­i­tors and told them he was think­ing of writ­ing “a play for the screen” on a “bloody theme.”

“All the same,” argues Rosamund Bartlett at the OUP blog, Tol­stoy “would prob­a­bly have tak­en a dim view of the twen­ty odd screen adap­ta­tions of Anna Karen­i­na.” The author died the year before the first filmed adap­ta­tion of his work, a silent French/Russian adap­ta­tion of Anna Karen­i­na made in 1911. Five more would fol­low before Gre­ta Gar­bo stepped into the role for a loose 1927 adap­ta­tion titled Love, then again a 1935 film ver­sion direct­ed by Clarence Brown, with Fredric March as Vron­sky and Gar­bo as the “most famous and crit­i­cal­ly-acclaimed of all the Annas Karen­i­na,” Dan Shee­han writes at LitHub.

Gar­bo’s ver­sion is often con­sid­ered the pin­na­cle of Tol­stoy film adap­ta­tions — large­ly because of Gar­bo. Or as Gra­ham Greene wrote then, “it is Gre­ta Gar­bo’s per­son­al­i­ty which ‘makes’ this film, which fills the mold of the neat respect­ful adap­ta­tion with some kind of sense of the great­ness of the nov­el.” The prob­lem of adap­ta­tions — of great nov­els in gen­er­al, and of Tol­stoy’s in par­tic­u­lar — is that they must reduce too much com­plex­i­ty, cut out too many char­ac­ters and vital sub­plots, and boil down the wider themes of the book to focus almost sole­ly on the trag­ic romance at its cen­ter.

Maybe this is what Tol­stoy meant when he alleged­ly called the cam­era (“the lit­tle click­ing con­trap­tion with the revolv­ing han­dle”) a “direct attack on the old meth­ods of lit­er­ary art.” Nov­els were not meant to be films. They’re too loose and expan­sive. “We shall have to adapt our­selves to the shad­owy screen and to the cold machine,” Tol­stoy pre­scient­ly not­ed, aware that film required an entire­ly dif­fer­ent con­cep­tion of nar­ra­tive art. Adap­ta­tions of Anna con­tin­ue to pro­lif­er­ate nonethe­less in the 21st cen­tu­ry, from Joe Wright’s 2012 adap­ta­tion with Kiera Knight­ley to, most recent­ly, Net­flix’s first Russ­ian orig­i­nal dra­ma series with Svet­lana Khod­chenko­va as the title char­ac­ter.

Tol­stoy schol­ars large­ly echo what I sus­pect Tol­stoy him­self might have thought of filmed ver­sions of his nov­el. As Car­ol Apol­lo­nio put it in a recent online dis­cus­sion, “If you want Anna Karen­i­na, read it again (and again). If you want some­thing else, then read or watch that, but don’t assume it has a lot to do with Tol­stoy.” That said, we bring you yet anoth­er adap­ta­tion of Anna Karen­i­na, just above, a mini-series from 2013 star­ring Vit­to­ria Puc­ci­ni, San­ti­a­go Cabr­era, Ben­jamin Sadler, and Max von Thun. Its set­ting and cos­tum­ing are peri­od-cor­rect, but does it meet the exact­ing lit­er­ary stan­dard of the orig­i­nal? Of course not.

Film ver­sions of nov­els can’t approx­i­mate lit­er­a­ture. But a good adap­ta­tion of Anna Karen­i­na, whether set in 19th-cen­tu­ry Rus­sia, 21st-cen­tu­ry Aus­tralia, or entire­ly — as in Joe Wright’s 2012 film — on a stage, can con­vey “the emo­tion­al tragedy of Anna’s sto­ry,” Apol­lo­nio writes. Adap­ta­tions should­n’t just illus­trate their sources faith­ful­ly, nor should they take so much license that the source becomes irrel­e­vant. They are always tied in some way to the orig­i­nal, and thus in every cin­e­mat­ic Anna is a lit­tle bit of Tol­stoy. But you’ll have to read, or reread, the nov­el to see how much of it the series above cap­tures, and how much it frus­trat­ing­ly leaves out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an 8‑Part Film Adap­ta­tion of Tolstoy’s Anna Karen­i­na Free Online

Watch the Huge­ly-Ambi­tious Sovi­et Film Adap­ta­tion of War and Peace Free Online (1966–67)

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Leo Tol­stoy, and How His Great Nov­els Can Increase Your Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence

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

The Inventive Artwork of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett

We’ve had fun at the expense of the mul­ti-hyphen­ate: i.e. “I’m an actor-slash-drum­mer-slash-make­up-artist-slash-brand-ambas­sador,” etc…. And, fair enough. Few peo­ple are good enough at their one job to rea­son­ably excel at two or three, right? But then again, we live in the kind of hyper­spe­cial­ized world Hen­ry Ford could only dream of, and con­sid­er our­selves high­ly favored if we’re allowed to be just the one thing long enough to retire and do noth­ing.

What if we could have mul­ti­ple iden­ti­ties with­out being thought of as unse­ri­ous, eccen­tric, or men­tal­ly ill?

Dis­cus­sions of Syd Bar­rett, Pink Floyd’s found­ing singer and gui­tarist, nev­er pass with­out ref­er­ence to his men­tal ill­ness and abrupt dis­ap­pear­ance from the stage. But they also rarely engage with Bar­rett as an artist post-Pink Floyd: name­ly, his two under­rat­ed solo albums; and his out­put as a painter, the medi­um in which he began his career and to which he returned for the last thir­ty years of his life.

If Bar­rett were allowed a role oth­er than crazy dia­mond (a role, we must allow, assigned to him by his for­mer band­mates), we might see more of his work in gallery col­lec­tions and exhi­bi­tions. One can­not say this about every famous musi­cian who paints. For Bar­rett, art was not a hob­by, and it called to him before music. It was in his stu­dent days at Cam­bridgeshire Col­lege of Arts and Tech­nol­o­gy that he met David Gilmour. From Cam­bridge he moved to Cam­ber­well Col­lege of Arts in Lon­don and began to pro­duce and exhib­it mature stu­dent work (see here).

Bar­ret­t’s work “shows some of the advan­tages of an art school train­ing,” wrote a review­er of a 1964 exhi­bi­tion. “He is already show­ing him­self a sen­si­tive han­dler of oil paint who wise­ly lim­its his palette to gain rich­ness and den­si­ty.” (Bar­rett had dis­played a prodi­gious ear­ly tal­ent for achiev­ing these qual­i­ties in water­col­or — see, for exam­ple, an impres­sive, impres­sion­is­tic still-life of orange dahlias, auc­tioned off in 2021, made when the artist was only 15.)

His train­ing gave him the con­fi­dence to break away from for­mal exer­cis­es dur­ing this peri­od and exper­i­ment with dif­fer­ent styles and sub­jects, from the dis­turb­ing, prim­i­tivist Lions to the hol­low-eyed, Munch-like Por­trait of a Girl. Bar­ret­t’s first stu­dent peri­od end­ed in the mid-six­ties, as Pink Floyd began to take off and Bar­rett “turned into a song­writer” (then-man­ag­er Andrew King lat­er wrote) “it seemed like overnight.”

After his spell with Pink Floyd and brief solo record­ing career came to an end, Bar­rett moved back to Cam­bridge with his moth­er in 1978, dropped the nick­name “Syd” and began paint­ing again as Roger Bar­rett, avoid­ing any men­tion of life in music. From that year until he died, he worked in sev­er­al styles and dif­fer­ent media, paint­ing strik­ing abstrac­tions and land­scapes and even mak­ing his own fur­ni­ture designs.

While he burned many can­vas­es, many from this time sur­vive. See a select­ed chronol­o­gy of his work in the video above and in the pho­tos here. Try to put aside the sto­ry of Syd Bar­rett the trag­ic Pink Floyd front­man, and let the work of Roger Bar­rett the artist inspire you.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Syd Barrett’s “Effer­vesc­ing Ele­phant” Comes to Life in a New Retro-Style Ani­ma­tion

Under­stand­ing Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Their Trib­ute to Depart­ed Band­mate Syd Bar­rett

Watch David Gilmour Play the Songs of Syd Bar­rett, with the Help of David Bowie & Richard Wright

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

Quentin Tarantino & Roger Avary Rewatch Cult-Classic Movies on Their New Video Archives Podcast

Quentin Taran­ti­no has count­less fans all around the world, increas­ing­ly many of whom are too young to ever have rent­ed a tape from a video store. But when those twen­ty-some­thing cinephiles learn his ori­gin sto­ry as a film­mak­er, they must sus­pect they missed out on a valu­able expe­ri­ence in the VHS era, what­ev­er its incon­ve­niences. When Taran­ti­no broke out in the nine­teen-nineties with Reser­voir Dogs and Pulp Fic­tion, he was pub­licly cel­e­brat­ed not just for those films, but for his hav­ing made them as a video-store-clerk-turned-auteur.

Indeed, it real­ly does seem true that Taran­ti­no’s cin­e­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty owes some­thing to the years he’d spent exer­cis­ing his movie exper­tise behind the counter at Video Archives in Man­hat­tan Beach. When the store closed in 1995, the fresh­ly ascen­dant Taran­ti­no seized the oppor­tu­ni­ty to buy up its thou­sands of VHS tapes. Roger Avary, his fel­low Archives alum­nus and col­lab­o­ra­tor on the screen­play for Pulp Fic­tion, bought the Laserdiscs. Though much of Avary’s col­lec­tion has suc­cumbed to the “disc rot” that noto­ri­ous­ly afflicts that for­mat, Taran­ti­no’s col­lec­tion has held up for more than a quar­ter-cen­tu­ry.

Now Taran­ti­no’s pri­vate tape stash pro­vides the mate­r­i­al for his and Avary’s lat­est col­lab­o­ra­tion: The Video Archives Pod­cast, to which you can lis­ten on plat­forms like Apple Pod­casts and Stitch­er. On it, the two of them aim to re-cre­ate the vehe­ment­ly cinephile envi­ron­ment of Video Archives by dis­cussing the movies from its stock — after watch­ing them on the actu­al VHS tapes the store once rent­ed out. As Taran­ti­no explains it, each episode of The Video Archives Pod­cast will fea­ture three titles. But the con­ver­sa­tions will go well beyond the films them­selves, involv­ing details of the par­tic­u­lar home-video releas­es popped into the VCR as well as the his­to­ry of the dis­trib­u­tors that put them out.

Nat­u­ral­ly, the hosts also get into their per­son­al his­to­ries with these movies — which in some cas­es go back near­ly 50 years — as film-lovers and film­mak­ers. Owing to the need to intro­duce the show itself, in the first episode they dis­cuss only two pic­tures, both from the nine­teen-sev­en­ties: John Car­pen­ter and Dan O’Ban­non’s anti-estab­lish­ment sci-fi com­e­dy Dark Star, fol­lowed by Ulli Lom­mel’s rock-Mafia dra­ma Cocaine Cow­boys, which fea­tures a cameo from Andy Warhol. Rep­re­sent­ing a younger gen­er­a­tion is Avary’s daugh­ter Gala, pro­duc­er of the pod­cast, who in a mid-show seg­ment (and her own after-show) offers anoth­er per­spec­tive on the movies of the week. She clear­ly knows how to appre­ci­ate a cult clas­sic, even if she’s nev­er paid a late fee in her life.

via IndieWire

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

Quentin Taran­ti­no Reviews Movies: From Dunkirk and King of New York, to Soul Broth­ers of Kung Fu & More

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

An Analy­sis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Nar­rat­ed (Most­ly) by Quentin Taran­ti­no

The Last Video Store: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on How the World’s Old­est Video Store Still Sur­vives Today

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.

Scenes from The Wizard of Oz Remastered in Brilliant 4K Detail: Behold the Work of a Creative YouTuber

The Wiz­ard of Oz came out more than 80 years ago, but there must still be a few among us who remem­ber see­ing it in the the­ater. Only they would have felt com­plete­ly the pow­er of its famous scene when Dorothy leaves black-and-white Kansas and enters the col­or­ful land of Oz. Much of the pow­er of art comes from con­trast, and this par­tic­u­lar con­trast could hard­ly have been a more per­sua­sive adver­tise­ment for the pow­er of Tech­ni­col­or. After a devel­op­ment his­to­ry of more than twen­ty years, that col­or motion-pic­ture process had by 1939 reached the stage of its tech­no­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion called “Process 4,” which enabled stu­dios to make use of not just some but all of the spec­trum.

This final form of Tech­ni­col­or enrap­tures view­ers even today, repro­duc­ing col­ors as it did at intense, some­times bor­der­line-psy­che­del­ic depths of sat­u­ra­tion. The process found its ide­al mate­r­i­al in the fan­ta­sy of The Wiz­ard of Oz, with its yel­low brick road (choos­ing whose exact shade inspired about a week of delib­er­a­tion at MGM), its ruby slip­pers (cal­cu­lat­ed­ly changed from the sil­ver shoes in L. Frank Baum’s orig­i­nal nov­el), and its host of set­tings and char­ac­ters with great chro­mat­ic poten­tial.

You can appre­ci­ate this un-repeat­ably for­tu­itous inter­sec­tion of con­tent and tech­nol­o­gy again in these scenes from an unof­fi­cial 4K restora­tion of the film post­ed by Youtu­ber Oriel Malik.

This is sure­ly the sharpest and most-detail rich ver­sion of The Wiz­ard of Oz most of us have seen, and, in those respects, it actu­al­ly out­does the orig­i­nal prints of the film. For some the image may actu­al­ly be too clear, mak­ing obvi­ous as it does cer­tain arti­fi­cial-look­ing aspects of the back­grounds and cos­tumes. But in a sense this may not run counter to the inten­tions of the film­mak­ers, who knew full well what genre they were work­ing in: even on film, a musi­cal must retain at least some of the look and feel of the stage. Yet it’s also true that the soft­er visu­al edges of the con­tem­po­rary ana­log print­ing and pro­jec­tion tech­nolo­gies would have enhanced the dream­like atmos­phere cre­at­ed in part by all those sur­re­al­ly vivid hues — which, accord­ing to die-hard Tech­ni­col­or enthu­si­asts, only real­ly come through on film any­way.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Tech­ni­col­or Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Cin­e­ma with Sur­re­al, Elec­tric Col­ors & Changed How We See Our World

The Com­plete Wiz­ard of Oz Series, Avail­able as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

The Wiz­ard of Oz Bro­ken Apart and Put Back Togeth­er in Alpha­bet­i­cal Order

Dark Side of the Rain­bow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wiz­ard of Oz in One of the Ear­li­est Mash-Ups

Watch the Ear­li­est Sur­viv­ing Filmed Ver­sion of The Wiz­ard of Oz (1910)

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.

Cover Songs: Philosophy and Taxonomy on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #129

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Is re-play­ing or re-record­ing a song writ­ten and per­formed by some­one else an act of love or pre­da­tion? Your host Mark Lin­sen­may­er is joined by Too Much Joy’s Tim Quirk, the Gig Gab Podcast’s Dave Hamil­ton, and the author of A Phi­los­o­phy of Cov­er Songs Prof. P.D. Mag­nus to talk about dif­fer­ent types of and pur­pos­es for cov­ers, look a lit­tle at the his­to­ry, share favorites, and more.

A few of the many cov­er songs we men­tion include:

This playlist includes most of the songs men­tioned in P.D.’s book.

To prep for this, in addi­tion to read­ing P.D.’s book (which is free), we looked at var­i­ous lists of best and worst cov­er songs of all time: from timeout.combestlifeonline.comRolling StoneRadio X. Also check out this episode of the Ghost Notes Pod­cast.

Fol­low us @news4wombats (for P.D.), @tbquirk@DaveHamilton, and @MarkLinsenmayer.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop. Sup­port the show at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

How Joni Mitchell Learned to Play Guitar Again After a 2015 Brain Aneurysm–and Made It Back to the Newport Folk Festival

Joni Mitchell almost quit the music indus­try in 1996, two years after releas­ing what crit­ics called her best album since the 70s, 1994’s Tur­bu­lent Indi­go. “I was in a los­ing fight with a busi­ness that basi­cal­ly, you know, was treat­ing me like an also-ran or a has-been, even though I was still doing good work,” she told an inter­view­er at the time. “Every­thing about the busi­ness dis­gust­ed me.”

But show busi­ness has nev­er real­ly been about the show or the busi­ness for Mitchell. From her deeply per­son­al song­writ­ing to her vocal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, she imbues her music with the deep­est parts of her­self. Then there’s her bril­liant­ly idio­syn­crat­ic gui­tar play­ing. “Her gui­tar does­n’t real­ly sound like a gui­tar,” Jef­frey Pep­per Rodgers writes at Acoustic Gui­tar. “The tre­ble strings become a cool-jazz horn sec­tion; the bass snaps out of syn­co­pa­tions like a snare drum; the notes ring out in clus­ters that sim­ply don’t come out of a nor­mal six-string.”

Mitchell “mas­tered the idea that she could tune the gui­tar any way she want­ed,” says David Cros­by. She tuned to “the num­bers in a date… a piece of music that I liked on the radio,” she says. “I’d tune to bird­songs and the land­scape I was sit­ting in.” Try­ing to dupli­cate Mitchel­l’s tun­ings is typ­i­cal­ly a fool’s errand; even she for­gets them. But “Joni’s weird chords,” as she says, are indis­pens­able to her sound. (She also says she’s only writ­ten two songs — one of them her first — in stan­dard tun­ing.)

In 1996, a dig­i­tal gui­tar ped­al that emu­lat­ed her tun­ings and allowed a greater range of sym­phon­ic tones brought her back to the stage. Or, to put it anoth­er way — what brought her back to music was the gui­tar, which is exact­ly what brought her back to the stage at this year’s New­port Folk Fes­ti­val — play­ing her first live set in 20 years after suf­fer­ing a brain aneurysm in 2015. (She last played New­port 53 years ago in 1969.) Noth­ing keeps Joni down for long.

In this case, how­ev­er, Mitchell did­n’t just for­get her tun­ings after her ill­ness. She for­got how to play the gui­tar alto­geth­er. She had to teach her­self again by watch­ing videos of her play­ing online. “I’m learn­ing,” she says in the CBS inter­view at the top. “I’m look­ing at videos that are on the net, to see where to put my fin­gers. It’s amaz­ing… when you have an aneurysm, you don’t know how to get into a chair. You don’t know how to get out of bed. You have to learn all these things again. You’re going back to infan­cy, almost.”

She’s come a long way since 2015, when she could nei­ther speak nor walk, “much less play the gui­tar,” notes NPR. “To be able to recov­er to the point of being able to per­form as a musi­cian is real­ly incred­i­ble,” says Dr. Antho­ny Wang, a neu­ro­sur­geon at Ronald Regan UCLA Hos­pi­tal. “Play­ing an instru­ment and vocal cord coor­di­na­tion, those sort of things are real­ly, super com­plex fine move­ments that would take a long time to relearn.” Mitchel­l’s com­mit­ment to mas­ter­ing her instru­ment again was unflag­ging.

See her above pluck out “Joni’s weird chords” on one of her Park­er Fly gui­tars in a solo sec­tion from the song “Just Like This Train” from Court & Spark. As we not­ed in an ear­li­er post, she was joined at New­port by a host of celebri­ty friends, includ­ing Bran­di Carlile, who sits with her in the CBS inter­view and con­firms the amount of “will and grit” she applied to her recov­ery. She’s sur­vived polio, per­son­al tragedy, the 60s, chain smok­ing, and a debil­i­tat­ing aneurysm: the 78-year-old liv­ing leg­end won’t be with us for­ev­er, but we might expect she’ll have a gui­tar in her hand when she final­ly makes her exit from the music busi­ness for the last time.

via NPR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Joni Mitchell Sings “Both Sides Now” at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val: Watch Clips from Her First Full Con­cert Since 2002

Hear Demos & Out­takes of Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the 50th Anniver­sary of the Clas­sic Album

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

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

Visit Great Cities in the 1920s in Restored Color Film: New York City, London, Berlin, Paris, Venice & More

Woody Allen’s Mid­night in Paris stars Owen Wil­son as a Hol­ly­wood screen­writer on vaca­tion in the French cap­i­tal. Alas, the City of Lights as it is in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry does­n’t sat­is­fy him. When he walks his streets he thinks only of the nine­teen-twen­ties, when a trav­el­er in Paris could eas­i­ly cross paths with the likes of Paul Gau­guin, Hen­ri Matisse, and Edgar Degas — as well as expa­tri­ates from Pablo Picas­so and Dju­na Barnes to F. Scott Fitzger­ald and Ernest Hem­ing­way. Or so he imag­ines, at any rate, and so he goes on to expe­ri­ence when he finds him­self trans­port­ed back in time to the city of the “Lost Gen­er­a­tion” at each stroke of mid­night.

With the video above, you, too, can take a trip to nine­teen-twen­ties Paris — as well as nine­teen-twen­ties New York, Chica­go, San Fran­cis­co, Lon­don, Berlin, Stock­holm, Copen­hagen, Ams­ter­dam, Nice, Gene­va, Milan, and Venice. A com­pi­la­tion of peri­od footage sourced from the Prelinger Archives, it light­ly col­orizes, adds ambi­ent sound, and in oth­er ways enhances its dis­parate mate­ri­als to make them feel all of a piece.

And indeed, the clip plays almost as if shot by a sin­gle, and sin­gu­lar­ly ambi­tious, world trav­el­er of one hun­dred years ago. That hypo­thet­i­cal trav­el­er’s world is both ours — filled as it is with such rec­og­niz­able and ever-pho­tograph­able sites as the Eif­fel Tow­er, the gon­do­las of Venice, and the non-latex-clad cyclists of Copen­hagen — and not.

Whether tra­di­tion­al or mod­ern, the dress of every­one on the street looks neater and more for­mal than that worn by urban­ites in the main today. In some cities, horse-drawn car­riages still make their way through the traf­fic of bus­es, trams, and waves of seem­ing­ly iden­ti­cal per­son­al cars. (Ford man­u­fac­tured more than two mil­lion Mod­el Ts in 1923 alone.) The nine­teen-twen­ties brought rapid urban devel­op­ment in both the New World and the Old, as well as rapid devel­op­ment in motion pho­tog­ra­phy. Not for noth­ing was it the decade of the “city sym­pho­ny” film; for equal­ly good rea­son, it remains the decade of which many of us dream, even a cen­tu­ry lat­er, when we want to feel the exhil­a­ra­tion of moder­ni­ty.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch 1920s “City Sym­phonies” Star­ring the Great Cities of the World: From New York to Berlin to São Paulo

Expe­ri­ence Footage of Roar­ing 1920s Berlin, Restored & Col­orized with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Nerves of Steel!: Watch Peo­ple Climb Tall Build­ings Dur­ing the 1920s.

Great New Archive Lets You Hear the Sounds of New York City Dur­ing the Roar­ing Twen­ties

Footage of Cities Around the World in the 1890s: Lon­don, Tokyo, New York, Venice, Moscow & More

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

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.

Watch 70+ Soviet Films Free Online, Courtesy of Mosfilm, the Hollywood of the Soviet Union

Recent­ly we’ve fea­tured films by Sergei Eisen­stein, a pio­neer of cin­e­ma as we know it, and Andrei Tarkovsky, one of the most respect­ed auteurs in the his­to­ry of the art form. They’re all free to watch on Youtube, as is Sergei Bon­darchuk’s epic adap­ta­tion of War and Peace from the late nine­teen-six­ties and Karen Shakhnazarov’s eight-part Anna Karen­i­na, which came out just a few years ago. For all this we have Mos­film to thank. Once the nation­al film stu­dio of the Sovi­et Union — equipped with the kind of resources that made it more or less the Hol­ly­wood of the U.S.S.R. — Mos­film remains in oper­a­tion as a pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, as well as a Youtube chan­nel.

Mos­film’s playlist of Sovi­et movies now offers more than 70 Eng­lish-sub­ti­tled fea­tures, each one labeled by genre. The dozen come­dies cur­rent­ly free to watch include Leonid Gaidai’s mas­sive­ly suc­cess­ful crime-and-soci­ety com­e­dy The Dia­mond Arm (1969) and Eldar Ryazanov’s satir­i­cal Car­ni­val Night (1956).

The ver­sa­tile Ryazanov also direct­ed pic­tures of oth­er types for Mos­film, includ­ing the musi­cal Hus­sar Bal­lad (1962) and the melo­dra­ma Rail­way Sta­tion for Two (1982). A vari­ety of gen­res and sub­gen­res: Abram Room’s “love movie” Bed and Sofa (1927), Karen Shakhnazarov’s “mys­tic dra­ma” Assas­si­na­tion of the Tsar (1991), Vladimir Motyl’s “East­ern” (as opposed to West­ern) White Sun of the Desert (1970), and Georgiy Daneliya’s “distopia movie” Kin-dza-dza! (1986).

Of course, one need not search far and wide to see the Sovi­et Union itself described as a dystopia. Few today could deny the fatal flaws of Sovi­et polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic sys­tems, but then, those flaws were hard­ly unknown to Sovi­et cit­i­zens them­selves, even those in posi­tions of cul­tur­al promi­nence. View­ers today may be sur­prised at just how keen­ly some of these movies (Georgiy Daneliya’s “trag­ic com­e­dy” Autumn Marathon from 1979 being one clas­sic exam­ple) observe the nature of life behind the Iron Cur­tain. In this and oth­er ways, Sovi­et film has a greater vari­ety of sen­si­bil­i­ties and tex­tures than one might expect. And giv­en that Mos­film pro­duced more than 3,000 pic­tures dur­ing the exis­tence of the U.S.S.R. — includ­ing Aki­ra Kuro­sawa’s Der­su Uza­la, from 1975 — there remain many more to dis­cov­er, at least if the upload­ing con­tin­ues apace. View the entire playlist of Sovi­et films with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free: Watch Bat­tle­ship Potemkin and Oth­er Films by Sergei Eisen­stein, the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Sovi­et Film­mak­er

Watch the Huge­ly-Ambi­tious Sovi­et Film Adap­ta­tion of War and Peace Free Online (1966–67)

Watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s Films Free Online: Stalk­er, The Mir­ror & Andrei Rublev

Watch an 8‑Part Film Adap­ta­tion of Tolstoy’s Anna Karen­i­na Free Online

The Top 20 Russ­ian Films, Accord­ing to Rus­sians

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.

Behold! A Medieval Graphic Novel Carved on an 14th Century Ivory Box

The Châte­laine de Ver­gy, a court­ly romance that was wild­ly pop­u­lar in the mid-13th cen­tu­ry, would’ve made a crowd pleas­ing graph­ic nov­el adap­ta­tion. It’s got sex, treach­ery, a trio of vio­lent deaths, and a cute pup in a sup­port­ing role.

See­ing as how the form had yet to be invent­ed, medieval audi­ences got the next best thing — a Goth­ic ivory cas­ket on which the sto­ry is ren­dered as a series of carved pic­tures that start on the lid and wrap around the sides.

In an ear­li­er video for the British Museum’s Curator’s Cor­ner series, Late Medieval Col­lec­tions Cura­tor Nao­mi Speak­man admit­ted that the pur­pose of such deluxe cas­kets is dif­fi­cult to pin down. Were they tokens from one lover to anoth­er? Wed­ding gifts? Jew­el­ry box­es? Doc­u­ment cas­es?

Unclear, but the intri­cate carv­ings’ nar­ra­tive has def­i­nite­ly been iden­ti­fied as that of The Châte­laine de Ver­gy, a steamy sec­u­lar alter­na­tive to the reli­gious scenes whose depic­tion con­sumed a fair num­ber of medieval ele­phant tusks.

In addi­tion to the ear­ly-14th cen­tu­ry exam­ple in the British Museum’s col­lec­tion, the Cour­tauld Insti­tute of Art’s Goth­ic Ivories data­base cat­a­logues a num­ber of oth­er medieval cas­kets and cas­ket frag­ments depict­ing The Châte­laine de Ver­gi, cur­rent­ly housed in muse­ums in Milan, Flo­rence, Paris, Vien­na, New York City and Kansas.

A very graph­ic nov­e­l­esque con­ceit Speak­man points to in the British Museum’s cas­ket finds the Duke of Bur­gundy break­ing the frame (to use comics ter­mi­nol­o­gy), reach­ing behind the gut­ter to help him­self to the sword the Châtelaine’s knight­ly lover has just plunged into his own breast.

Peer around to the far side of the cas­ket to find out what the Duke intends to do with that sword. It’s a shock­er that silences the trum­pets, qui­ets the danc­ing ladies, and might even have laid ground for a sequel: Chate­laine: The Duke’s Wrath.

Read Eugene Mason’s ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry trans­la­tion of The Chate­laine of Ver­gi here.

Watch more episodes of the British Museum’s Curator’s Cor­ner here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Book of St Albans, One of the Finest Medieval Man­u­scripts, Gets Dig­i­tized and Put Online

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Dif­fer­ent Ways, Reveal­ing Six Dif­fer­ent Books in One

Behold Medieval Snow­ball Fights: A Time­less Way of Hav­ing Fun

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.


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