When David Bowie Played Andy Warhol in Julian Schnabel’s Film, Basquiat

in Film | July 22nd, 2021

Many actors have played Andy Warhol over the years, but not as many as you might think. Crispin Glover played him in The Doors, Jared Harris played him in I Shot Andy Warhol, Guy Pearce played him in Factory Girl, and Bill Hader played him in Men in Black III, but with a twist: he is actually an agent who is so bad as his cover role as an artist, he’s “painting soup cans and bananas, for Christ sakes!” On television John Cameron Mitchell has acted the Warhol role in Vinyl, and Evan Peters briefly portrayed him in American Horror Story: Cult.

But you might suspect our favorite Warhol would be the one acted by David Bowie in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 Basquiat, the biopic of the Black street artist who was taken into the art world fold by Warhol, and wound up collaborating with him in last works by both artists. Jeffrey Wright plays Basquiat in one of his earliest roles.

Now, you might watch this scene from Basquiat above (and another below) and say, well, that’s just mostly Bowie. But I would say, yes, that’s kind of the point. Andy Warhol is an enigmatic figure, a legend to many, a man who hid behind a constructed persona; David Bowie is too. When one plays the other, a weird sort of magic happens. Fame leaks into fame. Many actors might do better with the mannerisms or the voice, but the charisma…that is all Bowie. After singing about the painter back in 1972, Bowie finally collapsed their visions together in the art of film, where reality and fantasy meet and meld.

Around this time in the mid 1990s, Bowie was very much a part of the New York/London art scene. He was on the editorial board of Modern Painters magazine and interviewed Basquiat director (and artist) Julian Schnabel, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, and Balthus. A conceptual artist-slash-serial killer became one of the main characters of his overlooked 1995 Eno collaboration Outside. He was both a collector and an artist, which we’ve focused on before. And he was thinking about the new world opening up because of the internet. Bowie’s artist brain saw the possibilities and the dangers, and also the raw capitalist potential. He offered shares in himself as an IPO in 1997 and released a single as Tao Jones Index, three puns in one. Bowie never predicted the idiocy of the NFT, but he certainly would have laughed wryly at it.

In this Charlie Rose interview to promote Basquiat, Bowie and Schnabel discuss the role of Warhol, the role of art, and the reality of the art world.

“It was more of an impersonation, really,” says Bowie about his Warhol. “That’s how I approach anything.” Of note, however, is how quickly Bowie moves away from discussing himself or the film to talk about larger issues of art and commerce. Bowie does admit that he and Schnabel disagree on a lot of things, and you can see it in their body language. But there’s also a huge respect. It’s a fascinating interview, go watch the whole thing.

Bonus: Below watch Bowie meeting Warhol back during the day…

The Odd Couple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986

When David Bowie Launched His Own Internet Service Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

Take a Close Look at Basquiat’s Revolutionary Art in a New 500-Page, 14-Pound, Large Format Book by Taschen

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.

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What’s the Role of a Director in Constructing Comedy? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #100

in Comedy, Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | July 22nd, 2021

What makes for a good comedy film or show? Funny people reading (or improvising) funny lines is not enough; an good director needs to capture (or recreate in the editing room) comic timing, construct shots so that the humor comes through and coach the actors to make sure that the tone of the work is consistent.

Your Pretty Much Pop hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt are joined by Heather Fink to discuss the role of the director in making a comedy (or anything else) actually good. Heather has directed for TV, film, and commercials and spent a lot of time doing sound (a boom operator or sound utility) for productions like Saturday Night Live, Get Out, The Morning Show, and Marvel’s Daredevil.

We talk about maintaining comedy through the tedious process of filming, putting actors through sex scenes and other hardships, not telling them how to say their lines, comedians in dramas, directing improv/prank shows, and more. We touch on include Bad Trip, Barry, and Ted Lasso, and more.

Watch some of Heather’s work:

Alleged, a short about dramatizing accusations against Steven Segal
Inside You, a film she wrote, directed, and (reluctantly) starred in
The Focus Group, a short Heather directed written by and starring Sara Benincasa

We used some articles to bring various directors and techniques to mind:

“Directing Comedy 101″ by Ray Richmond
“Judd Apatow Talks to Jason Bateman About Being the ‘Anti-David Fincher’ | Directors on Directors”
“10 Best Contemporary Comedy Directors” by Rafael Sarmiento
“The Best Comedy Directors in Film History” from Ranker
“10 Hollywood notables who directed an episode of ‘The Office’” by Mike Rose

Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion that you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. 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.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Aesthetic of Evil: A Video Essay Explores Evil in the Films of Bergman, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Scorsese & Beyond

in Film | July 21st, 2021

Movies have heroes and villains. Or at least children’s movies do; the more sophisticated the audience, the hazier the line between good and evil becomes, until it finally seems to vanish altogether. Not that cinema directed toward genuinely mature audiences dispenses with those concepts entirely: rather, it makes art out of the ambiguity and interpenetration between them. This is true, to an extent, even in some of the recent wave of big-budget superhero movies, in the main exercises in rolling an “adult” texture onto stories essentially geared toward adolescents. Hence the appearance of the Joker, Batman’s grinning arch-nemesis, in “The Aesthetic of Evil,” the Cinema Cartography video essay above.

In the Joker of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, “we see an evil that’s relentless, primarily because the core function is complete and total anarchy. Whatever order is established, whoever it’s under ‚must be destroyed. As a result, an epoch is created where any rules or codes of conduct are broken. Anything that you anticipate will happen, will result in the opposite.”

This Joker made an outsized cultural impact with not just the explicitness of his disorder-oriented morality, but also a material-transcending performance by Heath Ledger. In that same era, Jamie Hector took a comparatively minimalist but equally memorable turn in David Simon’s series The Wire as Marlo Stanfield, a drug kingpin “too villainous for the villains.” Like the Joker, Marlo is a law unto himself, “willing to destroy the equilibrium of any facet of the world there is, on a whim.”

These two represent just one of the forms evil has taken in recent decades. The essay’s other examples range from Psycho’s Norman Bates and 2001’s HAL 9000 to The King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin and Fanny and Alexander’s stepfather Edvard — or rather, the unwelcome transformation of the family Edvard represents. The most diabolical evil does not confine itself within the person of the antagonist, especially not in the work of Michael Haneke, which twice appears in “The Aesthetic of Evil.” Benny’s Video is on one level about a murderous adolescent; on another, it’s about the “evasion of the real” that seduces us all. The White Ribbon is on one level about random acts of violence in a small village; on another, it’s about how evil reflects “the collective consciousness of a society.” Haneke’s films have often been described as difficult to watch, and that may well have less to do with what they show than what they know: even if we aren’t all villains, we’re certainly not heroes.

Rare Video: Georges Bataille Talks About Literature & Evil in His Only TV Interview (1958)

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” a Quote Falsely Attributed to Edmund Burke

Why Do Tech Billionaires Make for Good TV Villains? Pretty Much Pop #93 Considers “Made for Love,” et al.

The Aesthetic of Anime: A New Video Essay Explores a Rich Tradition of Japanese Animation

The Dark Knight: Anatomy of a Flawed Action Scene

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.

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Explore Divine Comedy Digital, a New Digital Database That Collects Seven Centuries of Art Inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy

in Art, Literature | July 21st, 2021

The number of artworks inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy in the seven hundred years since the poet completed his epic, vernacular masterwork is so vast that referring to the poem inevitably means referring to its illustrations. These began appearing decades after the poet’s death, and they have not stopped appearing since. Indeed, it might be fair to say that the title Divine Comedy (simply called Comedy before 1555) names not only an epic poem but also its many constellations of artworks and interpretations, which would have filled a modest-sized set of Dante encyclopedias before the internet.

Luckily for art historians and Dante scholars working today, there is now Divine Comedy Digital, a beautifully designed database which brings these artworks — spread out all over the world — together in one virtual place.

The interface requires no special Dante knowledge to navigate, though it helps to be familiar with the poem and/or have a reference copy nearby when looking through the menus. Dividing neatly into the poem’s three books (or cantiche), the menu at the left further breaks down into circles (Inferno), terraces (Purgatorio), and Cantos (all three books).

Toggling between options in a menu on the right allows visitors to see the number of illustrated verses in each Canto or the number of artworks. Within a matter of minutes, you’ll be discovering Dante illustrations you never knew existed, from Salvador Dali’s The Delightful Mount (1950, above) to Alessandro Vellutello’s Dante and St. Bernard, Mary and the Trinity (1544) and hundreds of others in the years in-between.

Calling itself a “slow surfing site,” Divine Comedy Digital contains a handy tutorial if you do get lost and allows users “not only to navigate through the collection, but also to suggest missing artworks.” So far, the 17th and 18th centuries are hugely underrepresented, though not for a lack of Dante-inspired artwork made in that two-hundred year period. The gaps mean there is much more Dante art to come.

Released in June of this year, the project is the work of The Visual Agency, “an information design agency specialized in data-visualization based in Milan and Dubai” and was created to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. As he continues to inspire artists for the next few hundred years, perhaps the work based on his epic poem will trend more digital than medieval, creating interpretations the poet never could have dreamt. Enter the Divine Comedy Digital project here.

You can also see some of the earliest illustrated editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1487–1568), courtesy of Columbia University, here.

Rarely-Seen Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy Are Now Free Online, Courtesy of the Uffizi Gallery

Mœbius Illustrates Dante’s Paradiso

Artists Illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy Through the Ages: Doré, Blake, Botticelli, Mœbius & More

Visualizing Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Drawings of Dante’s Inferno from the Renaissance Through Today

Hear Dante’s Inferno Read Aloud by Influential Poet & Translator John Ciardi (1954)

A Digital Archive of the Earliest Illustrated Editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1487–1568)

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

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

Frida Kahlo: The Life of an Artist

in Art | July 21st, 2021

Frida Kahlo has been a martyr to art history. Her twinned self-portrait The Two Fridas sits at number 87 on a list of the 100 most popular paintings (behind Diego Rivera’s The Flower Carrier and Cassius Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker series). She is “one of the most iconic and contradictory cultural figures around,” Judy Cox writes: “a card-carrying Communist whose image adorned a bracelet worn by Theresa May, a feminist who has her own barbie doll.”

Her cultural credentials sell. Her work is acclaimed as a leading example of indigenismo, as Denver art museum senior curatorial assistant Jesse Laird Ortega writes, “a political, intellectual, and artistic movement that celebrated indigenous peoples in Mexico.” Kahlo herself is lauded as “a passionate nationalist who advocated for the revolution… and supported farmers and workers.”

This praise sounds suspicious to other critics. “Missing from the public discourse about the artist are discussions about how the ‘nationalism’ that Kahlo promoted,” Joanna Garcia Cheran argues, “both in her art and personal style perpetuated the construction of a mythologized Indianness at the expense of Indigenous people.” Kahlo only began wearing the rebozos and other indigenous fashions she made famous when she married Diego Rivera (for the first time) in 1929.

Does Paul Priestly, the host of the Art History School video lesson above, help smooth out the contradictions of Kahlo’s life and art? No, but to be fair, he makes no pretense to higher criticism. The lesson is a basic introduction (with a content warning for younger viewers) to the well-known facts of Frida’s life, those amply covered in documentaries like Ken Madel’s Frida Kahlo: A Ribbon Around a Bomb and (with plenty of dramatic license, of course) the Salma Hayek-starring biopic Frida.

Priestley’s video is a sound introduction to Kahlo’s life, however, precisely because it shies away from hagiography or theory. He walks us through the facts of the artist’s life in brief, with clips of a woman reading Frida’s own words and images of her work alongside photographic portraits of herself at every stage of life, allowing viewers to see the side-by-side development of Kahlo’s art and her public persona.

In the midst of Kahlo worship and iconoclasm, what seems too often neglected is Kahlo’s complex humanity. She was not one thing or another — neither wholly Marxist saint, nor a bourgeois appropriator; neither wholly feminist hero, nor tragic victim of patriarchal male hero worship: she was both and neither, at many times, a figure twinned in her imagination and split in half by cultural logics that want to claim and possess art and artists for their own.

Discover Frida Kahlo’s Wildly-Illustrated Diary: It Chronicled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades

Take a Virtual Tour of Frida Kahlo’s Blue House Free Online

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

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They Might Be Giants’ John Linnell Releases an EP of Songs in Latin

in Language, Music | July 20th, 2021

Those who know Latin know Wheelock’s Latin as the time-honored resource for learning the language of the Caesars. They also know how many years of intensive study and practice goes into translating the textbook’s hefty classical passages. Reading Latin is one thing — writing in the language is quite another: something very few people do for any reason, other than a perverse kind of enjoyment that is most definitely a niche affair.

What about songwriting in Latin? Professor Wheelock doesn’t offer any specific instructions for composing pop music in the dead language, though classics teacher and former British Labour Party MP Eddie O’Hara once translated Beatles songs (see “O Teneum Manum” and “Dei Duri Nox” here). For a more casual approach, one could turn to a resource more in line with contemporary teaching methods — Duolingo, where you can “learn a language for free. Forever.”

For some reason, John Linnell, one of the two Johns in 90s alt-rock band They Might Be Giants, decided on the Duolingo approach while hunkered down at home during the pandemic, and — because he’s a songwriter, and a right good one, at that — he decided to compose some catchy pop songs in Latin. Catchy, he could do (I’m still singing the chorus of “Birdhouse in Your Soul” thirty-two years later.) But the Latin, not so much.

After taking a short course, Linnell writes, “I figured I could write a few songs… I was soon disabused of the notion. I can barely string two words together in Latin, and to borrow from Mark Twain, I would rather decline two drinks than one Latin noun.” A career Latinist and childhood friend Linnell calls “Schoolmaster Smith” came to his aid, translating his English lyrics into Latin for him. “All credit for any success in this project is due to him,” he avers, “and any mistakes and failures are entirely mine.”

Trapped at home with his son Henry, who played guitar on the 4‑track EP, Linnell recorded and released Roman Songs (along with a t‑shirt!). Why? “All I can tell you,” he shrugs, “is that I’m deeply jealous of people who are fluent in a second language and can apply that skill to their creative work in a way that doesn’t seem like cultural appropriation of the most offensive and embarrassing kind.”

No ancient Romans around to accuse Linnell of stealing their culture, but they’d be hard pressed to recognize if they were. “HAEC QVOQVE EST RES” (“This is Also the Case”) and “TECVM CIRCVMAMBVLARE NOLO” (“I Don’t Want to Walk Around with You”) sound like classic They Might Be Giants tunes. (The other John, Mr. Flansburgh, “strongly encouraged this project and art directed the package,” Linnell writes.)

In fact, they sound so much like They Might Be Giants songs, I almost wish they were in English, but as a lover of Latin I have to admit, it’s fun to learn these phrases and melodies and walk around singing them like a Roman pop star. Linnell may be a little in the dark about his motivations, but I say, good on him: if there’s any way to make Latin live again, this may be it. Now we just need someone talented and really bored to step up and deliver classical raps to keep momentum going…. Pick up Linnell’s Roman Songs EP here.

via Boing Boing

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

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

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

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The Meaning of Hieronymus Bosch’s Spellbinding Triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights

in Art, History, Television | July 20th, 2021

Hieronymus Bosch was born Jheronimus van Aken. We know precious little else about him, not even the year of his birth, which scholar Nicholas Baum guesses must have been right in the middle of the fifteenth century. But we do know that the artist was born in the Dutch town of ‘s‑Hertogenbosch, better known as Den Bosch, to which his assumed name pays tribute. It is thus to Den Bosch that Baum travels in the The Mysteries of Hieronymus Bosch, the 1983 BBC TV movie above, in search of clues to an interpretation of Bosch’s mysterious, grotesque, and sometimes hilarious paintings. What manner of place could produce an artistic mind capable of The Garden of Earthly Delights?

“My first reaction was disappointment,” Baum says of Den Bosch. “I wasn’t expecting such a very ordinary, very commercial, very provincial little town. I couldn’t for the life of me fit anybody as extraordinary as Bosch into a sleepy little place like this.” A hardworking everyday Dutchman might laugh at Baum’s English imagination having got away with him; perhaps he’d even quote his country’s well-worn proverb about normal human behavior being crazy enough.

Nevertheless, fueled by a near-lifelong fascination with Bosch’s fantastical and forbidding art, Baum goes deeper: quite literally deeper, in one case, descending to the dank cellar beneath the house where the artist grew up in order to take in “the authentic smell and feel of Bosch’s own day.”

Further insights come when Baum investigates Bosch’s membership in the Catholic fraternity of the Common Life. A few decades later, that same order would also educate northern Renaissance philosopher Erasmus, whose religiosity is well known. Bosch must have been no less pious, but for centuries that didn’t figure as thoroughly into the interpretation of his paintings as it might have. Focused on the vivid images of bacchanalia Bosch incorporated into his work, some speculated on his involvement in orgy-oriented secret societies. But Baum’s journey convinces him that Bosch was “a fierce and pious Christian” who painted with the goal of turning a gluttonous, wealth- and pleasure-obsessed humanity back toward the teachings of the Bible. And half a millennium later, it is his wildly imaginative renderings of sin that continue to compel us — as well as hold out the promise of further secrets yet unexplained.

For anyone interested, Taschen now publishes an Bosch: The Complete Works, a beautiful and exhaustive exploration of the painter’s work. It includes a special chapter on The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Take a Virtual Tour of Hieronymus Bosch’s Bewildering Masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights

Hieronymus Bosch’s Medieval Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights Comes to Life in a Gigantic, Modern Animation

Take a Multimedia Tour of the Buttock Song in Hieronymus Bosch’s Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights

The Musical Instruments in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Horrible”

New App Lets You Explore Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” in Virtual Reality

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.

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

When Rage Against the Machine Interviewed Noam Chomsky (1999)

in Music, Politics | July 20th, 2021

“The first great [economic] experiment was a ‘bad idea’ for the subjects, but not for the designers and local elites associated with them. This pattern continues until the present: placing profit over people.” — Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People

“A global decomposition is taking place. We call it the Fourth World War: neoliberalism’s globalization attempt to eliminate that multitude of people who are not useful to the powerful — the groups called ‘minorities’ in the mathematics of power, but who happen to be the majority population in the world.” — Subcomandante Marcos

Whether we think of global neoliberalism — to the extent that we think about it — as the inertia of centuries-old economic theory or as deliberate genocide, the effects are the same. The majority of the world’s population suffers under massive inequality, including, now, vaccine inequality, leading to raging COVID epidemics in some parts of the world as other places emerge from lockdowns and resume “normal” operations. The “Capitalist Hydra,” as Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos once called it, always seems to grow more heads.

Indeed, most plans to alleviate global poverty and disease seem to further enrich the architects and immiserate the targets of their purported care. Noam Chomsky has pointed out repeatedly that neoliberal economic rules are only applied to subject populations, since the wealthy ignore the strict conditions they impose by force and coercion on others, calling the outcomes a natural sorting of “winners and losers.” Ongoing global economic practices have accelerated a climate crisis that impacts the majority of the world’s (poor) population, sending millions on a collision course with brutality at the borders as they flee to other parts of the world for bare survival.

The multiple crises we now face were clearly evident at the turn of the millennium, when Rage Against the Machine played Mexico City for the first time in 1999. They released the concert footage in a video titled The Battle of Mexico City in 2001, the same year the indigenous guerrilla force EZLN — popularly known as the Zapatistas — marched on Mexico City. (Concert audio was released on vinyl this past June.) The video release included interviews with Chomsky and then-EZLN military leader Marcos, and you can see them both here.

At the top, Chomsky responds to a question about NAFTA, a “free-trade” agreement that proved his point about how such policies do the opposite of what they propose, benefitting the very few instead of the many. Chomsky, who analyzed the ways that the government and corporate media manufactured consent for their policies during the Vietnam War, wasn’t taken in by the hype. The agreement never had anything to do with free trade, he says, but with locking Mexico into programs of “structural adjustment” that kept people in poverty and the country dependent on economic terms dictated from outside its borders.

From the perspective of the indigenous people in Mexico fighting for an autonomous region in Chiapas, the struggle is not only against the Mexican government, but also an international economic order that imposes its will on the country and its citizens, who then turn on the poorest and most dispossessed among them in conditions of manufactured scarcity. Indigenous Mexicans, like other internally subjected people around the world, are deemed expendable, figured as a “problem” to be solved or eliminated. What is so striking about these perspectives, twenty years after the release of The Battle of Mexico City, is just how prescient, even prophetic, they sound today.

Requiem for the American Dream: Noam Chomsky on the 10 Principles That Have Led to Unprecedented Inequality in the US

Noam Chomsky Explains the Best Way for Ordinary People to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunting

An Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Groundbreaking Linguistic Theories

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Neil Young Plays “Hey, Hey, My, My” with Devo: Watch a Classic Scene from the Improvised Movie Human Highway (1980)

in Film, Music | July 19th, 2021

For Neil Young fans, the words “Human Highway” can mean one of three different things, two of which are so unlike the third, it’s as if they came from different artists. First, there’s “Human Highway,” the song, one of Young’s gentle acoustic rags, with Nicolette Larson’s soft vocal harmonies and lots of banjo and fiddle. It landed on 1978’s Comes a Time but debuted five years earlier, nearly becoming the title track for a CSNY album that never materialized, a legendary follow-up to Déjà Vu.

None of this has anything to do with Human Highway, the 1980 film directed by Neil Young (as “Bernard Shakey”) and Dean Stockwell, which tells the “story,” if it can be called, of a crooked diner owner in a small town next to a nuclear power plant staffed by the members of Devo as “nuclear garbagepersons.” The cast is cult film royalty: “Dennis Hopper is a psychotic cook named Crackers,” notes critic Steven Puchalski, “Sally Kirkland is a beleaguered waitress; [Stockwell] is the new owner, Young Otto (son of the late Old Otto); plus Neil Young and Russ Tamblyn are frighteningly convincing as two noodle-headed gas pump operators, Lionel and Fred.”

The film is set on the last day before a nuclear apocalypse, a slapstick take on the time’s nuclear anxiety and Young’s stance against nuclear power. His nerdy Lionel idolizes rock star Frankie Fontaine (also Young), then becomes him in a dream sequence full of “wooden Indians” — his backing band. He then jams out with Devo for ten minutes (top) one of the highlights of the film, a performance of “Hey, Hey, My, My” with Mark Mothersbaugh taking lead vocals as Devo character “Booji Boy” (pronounced “boogie boy”).

“By normal standards,” Puchalski writes, “the movie sucks, but it’s a Mutant Must-See for Rock-‘N’-Schlock Completists.” It could also be one of the most influential indie films of the eighties, argues Den of Geek’s Jim Knipfel, leaving its mark on everything from Alex Cox’s Repo Man to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (in which Hopper and Stockwell play somewhat similar characters) and Twin Peaks (in which Russ Tamblyn appears), to Tim Burton’s Pee Wee Herman’s Big Adventure.

Or maybe Young “was simply cursed to be ten minutes ahead of his time,” given that hardly anyone saw Human Highway in 1982. Shot over four years, and mostly financed by Young himself, Human Highway saw a limited release in L.A. then disappeared until a 1996 VHS edit of the film brought it some renown and critical reappraisal. (Its cover quoted an agent at William Morris saying, “It’s so bad, it’s going to be huge.”) The film has since become a cult classic, warranting special screenings like a reunion in 2016 at L.A.‘s Regal Theater featuring Young, Tamblyn, Devo’s Gerald Casale, actress Charlotte Stewart, and Cameron Crowe. (See a trailer for the DVD director’s cut release just above.)

At one point during the Q&A, Young turned to Crowe and asked, “Do you think we could get this movie made today?”. The film was made under unique conditions: “no script, improvised dialogue and a daily routine that began with someone asking him ‘What’s the plan today, Neil?’ to which he always replied ‘The plan today is no plan!’ ” It could get made, if Neil wanted to finance it (and a younger cast could handle the amount of drugs that clearly went into making the film). Given the number of digital distribution channels and Young’s fame, it could also very likely find a wide audience.

But in 1982, releasing a self-financed film, even if you were Neil Young, proved much more challenging. And in the late seventies and early eighties, one of the few ways for innovative New Wave bands like Devo to get wider notice was to catch the ear of stars like Young, who discovered them on stage in 1977 and knew he had to get them on film — before “Whip It” and their first defining hits came out — and show the rest of us what we were missing.

The Mastermind of Devo, Mark Mothersbaugh, Presents His Personal Synthesizer Collection

Who Is Neil Young?: A Video Essay Explores the Two Sides of the Versatile Musician–Folk Icon and Father of Grunge

When Neil Young & Rick “Super Freak” James Formed the 60’s Motown Band, The Mynah Birds

The Philosophy & Music of Devo, the Avant-Garde Art Project Dedicated to Revealing the Truth About De-Evolution

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

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Watch 15 Hours of The Pink Panther for Free

in Animation, Film, K-12 | July 19th, 2021

Remember Saturday mornings?

If you’re an American of a certain age, you probably spent a good chunk of them sprawled in front of the TV, absorbing a steady stream of network cartoons peppered with ads for toys and sugared cereal.

One of Saturday morning’s animated stars stood out from the crowd, a lanky, bipedal feline of a distinctly rosy hue.

He shared Bugs Bunny’s anarchic streak, without the hopped-up, motormouthed intensity.

In fact, he barely spoke, and soon went entirely mute, relying instead on Henry Mancini’s famous theme, which followed him everywhere he went.

Above all, he was sophisticated, with a minimalist aesthetic and a long cigarette holder.

Director Blake Edwards attributes his lasting appeal to his “promiscuous, fun-loving, devilish” nature.

John Cork’s short documentary Behind the Feline: The Cartoon Phenomenon, below, details how Edwards charged commercial animators David DePatie and Friz Freleng with creating a cartoon persona for the Pink Panther Diamond in his upcoming jewel heist caper.

DePatie, Freleng and their team drafted over a hundred renderings in response to the character notes Edwards bombarded them with via telegram.

Edward’s favorite, designed by director Hawley Pratt, featured the iconic cigarette holder and appeared in the feature film’s trailer and title sequence, ultimately upstaging a star studded cast including David Niven, Claudia Cardinale, Robert Wagner, and Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau.

The cartoon panther’s sensational debut prompted United Artists to order up another 156 shorts, to be released over a four to five year period. The first of these, The Pink Phink, not only established the tone, it also nabbed the Academy Award for 1964’s best animated short.

Although he was created with an adult audience in mind — the narrator of the original theatrical trailer asks him about bedroom scenes — his wordless torment of the simplified cartoon Inspector proved to be money in the bank on Saturday mornings.

The Pink Panther Show ran from 1969 to 1980, weathering various title tweaks and a jump from NBC to ABC.

Syndication and cable TV ensured a vibrant afterlife, here and in other countries, where the character’s sophistication and reliance on body language continues to be a plus.

The plots unfolded along predictable lines — the groovy panther spends 6 minutes thwarting and bedeviling a less cool, less pink-oriented character, usually the Inspector.

Every episode’s title includes a reference to the star’s signature color, often to groaning degree — Pink of the Litter, Pink-A-Boo, The Hand Is Pinker Than the Eye, Pinkcome Tax, The Scarlet Pinkernel.…

We won’t ask you to guess the color of Pink Panther Flakes, manufactured under the auspices of Post, a Pink Panther Show co-sponsor.

“I thought it was just fine for the film,” Edwards says of the animated Pink Panther in Cork’s 2003 documentary, “But I had no idea that it would take off like that, that it would have that kind of a life of its own… that kind of a merchandising life of its own. Thank god it did!”

Stay cool this summer with an 11-hour Pink Panther marathon, comprised of the following free compilations of Seasons 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Season 1

Season 2

Season 3

Season 4

The Animations That Changed Cinema: The Groundbreaking Legacies of Prince Achmed, Akira, The Iron Giant & More

Peter Sellers Performs The Beatles “A Hard Day’s Night” in Shakespearean Voice

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Introduction to Japanese Kabuki Theatre, Featuring 20th-Century Masters of the Form (1964)

in Dance, Film, Theatre | July 19th, 2021

The English language has adopted kabuki as an adjective, applied to situations where exaggerated appearances and performances are everything. Business, politics, media: name any realm of modernity, and the myriad ways in which its affairs can turn kabuki will spring to mind. A highly stylized form of dance-drama originating in the seventeenth century, it continues to stand today as a pillar of classical Japanese culture — and indeed, according to UNESCO, one piece of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The worldwide regard for kabuki owes in part to self-promotional efforts on the part of Japan, whose Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned the half-hour introductory film above.

Produced in 1964, Kabuki: The Classic Theatre of Japan holds up as a representation of the art, as well as a view of some of the mid-20th century’s master practitioners. These actors include Jitsukawa Enjaku III, Nakamura Utaemon VI, and Ichikawa Danjūrō XI, whose stage names reflect their place in an unbroken professional lineage.

In fact, Ichikawa Danjūrō XI is a predecessor of Ichikawa Ebizō XI, previously featured here on Open Culture for his work in kabuki Star Wars adaptations. The generations shown here didn’t go in for such pop-cultural hybridization, but rather plays from the traditional kabuki repertoire like Shibaraku, Musume Dōjōji, and Sukeroku, scenes from all three of which appear in the film.

“Through elaborate costumes and vivid makeup, through beautifully stylized acting and exaggerated vocalization, and highlighted with picturesque settings and colorful music, the kabuki actors create dramatic effects of extraordinary intensity within a framework of pure entertainment,” explains the narrator. And as in the early performances of Shakespeare, all the roles are played by males, specialists known as onnagata. “Because the emphasis in kabuki is on artistic performance, not realism, the onnagata is considered more capable of expressing true femininity than is possible for an actress.” This may have struck Western viewers in the 1960s as an odd notion, but the sheer foreignness of kabuki — cultural, geographical, and temporal — must have been as captivating back then as it remains today, no matter how long we’ve been throwing its name around.

Kabuki Star Wars: Watch The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi Reinterpreted by Japan’s Most Famous Kabuki Actor

World Shakespeare Festival Presents 37 Plays by the Bard in 37 Languages: Watch Them Online

A Page of Madness: The Lost, Avant Garde Masterpiece from the Early Days of Japanese Cinema (1926)

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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An Introduction to Japanese Kabuki Theatre, Featuring 20th-Century Masters of the Form (1964)

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