The World of Wong Kar-Wai: How the Films of Hong Kong’s Most Acclaimed Auteur Have Stayed Thrilling

in Film | April 5th, 2021

I’ve just seen the future of cin­e­ma.” So declared the Amer­i­can film crit­ic Peter Brunette after stum­bling, “still dazed,” from a screen­ing at the 1995 Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film fes­ti­val. “Oh,” replied TIFF Ciné­math­èque pro­gram­mer (and respect­ed author­i­ty on Asian cin­e­ma) James Quandt. “You’re just com­ing from the Wong Kar-wai film?” Brunette includes this sto­ry in his mono­graph on Wong’s work, which was pub­lished in 2005. At that point, his pic­tures like Days of Being Wild, Chungk­ing Express, and In the Mood for Love had already torn through glob­al film cul­ture, inspir­ing cinephiles and film­mak­ers alike to believe that an intox­i­cat­ing range of cin­e­mat­ic pos­si­bil­i­ties still lay unex­plored.

What’s more, they seemed to do it all of a sud­den, hav­ing come out of nowhere. Of course, they came out of some­where: Hong Kong, to be pre­cise, a small but dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed and eco­nom­i­cal­ly mighty soon-to-be-for­mer-colony whose dis­tinc­tive cul­tur­al and indus­tri­al mix­ture pro­duced a kind of moder­ni­ty at once famil­iar and alien to behold­ers around the world.

Or at least it felt that way to those behold­ing it through Wong Kar-wai movies, which cre­at­ed their very own aes­thet­ic world with­in the con­text of Hong Kong. That “neon-drenched” world in which “lone­ly souls drift around, des­per­ate­ly try­ing to make a mean­ing­ful con­nec­tion, no mat­ter how fleet­ing,” is the sub­ject of the new BFI video essay at the top of the post.

As a part of Hong Kong’s “sec­ond new wave,” Wong found his cin­e­mat­ic voice by telling “high­ly atmos­pher­ic sto­ries of restrained pas­sion, using daz­zling visu­als, mem­o­rable songs, and uncon­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tives,” all the while “push­ing the bound­aries of Hong Kong genre cin­e­ma to cre­ate some­thing fresh and inven­tive.” The West got its first big dose of it in 1994 through Chungk­ing Express, whose world­wide release owed in part to the enthu­si­asm of Quentin Taran­ti­no. In the clip above Taran­ti­no does some enthus­ing about it and the rest of Wong’s oeu­vre up to that point, which “has all that same ener­gy that Hong Kong tends to bring to its cin­e­ma, but he’s also tak­ing a cue from the French New Wave” — and espe­cial­ly Jean-Luc Godard, who showed how to “take genre pieces and break the rules.”

None of Wong’s films has made as much of an impact as 2000’s In the Mood for Love, the tale of a man and woman brought togeth­er — though not all the way togeth­er — by the fact that their spous­es are cheat­ing on them with each oth­er. Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, ana­lyzes the movie’s pow­er in the video essay “Frames with­in Frames.” Watch­ing it, he says, “you can’t help but feel that you’re in the hands of some­body in com­plete con­trol.” By restrict­ing his cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage, Wong “echoes the restric­tion of action that plagues Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan in 1960s Hong Kong.” The recent 20th-anniver­sary restora­tion of In the Mood for Love and those of Wong’s oth­er work are even now being screened around the globe. Hav­ing caught one such screen­ing just last night, I feel like I’ve seen the future of cin­e­ma again.

Note: The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion now offers a Wong Kar-wai box set that fea­tures sev­en blu-rays, includ­ing 4k dig­i­tal restora­tions of Chungk­ing Express, In the Mood for Love, Hap­py Togeth­er and more. Find it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Cen­tu­ry (So Far) Named by 177 Film Crit­ics

Jean-Luc Godard’s Breath­less: How World War II Changed Cin­e­ma & Helped Cre­ate the French New Wave

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

The Secret of the “Per­fect Mon­tage” at the Heart of Par­a­site, the Kore­an Film Now Sweep­ing World Cin­e­ma

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

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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Tina Turner Delivers a Blistering Live Performance of “Proud Mary” on Italian TV (1971)

in Music | April 5th, 2021

John Foger­ty once said that he con­ceived the open­ing bars of “Proud Mary” in imi­ta­tion of Beethoven’s Fifth sym­pho­ny. It’s an unusu­al asso­ci­a­tion for a song about a steam­boat, but it works as a clas­sic blues rock hook. Most peo­ple would say, how­ev­er, that the song didn’t tru­ly come into its own until Tina Turn­er began cov­er­ing it in 1969.

“Proud Mary” helped Turn­er come back after a sui­cide attempt the pre­vi­ous year. Her ver­sion, released as a sin­gle in Jan­u­ary 1971, “plant­ed the seeds of her lib­er­a­tion as both an artist and a woman,” Jason Heller writes at The Atlantic, bring­ing Ike and Tina major crossover suc­cess. Their ver­sion of the CCR song “rose to No.4 on Bill­board’s pop chart, sold more than 1 mil­lion copies, and earned Turn­er the first of her 12 Gram­my Awards.” See her, Ike, and the Ikettes per­form it live on Ital­ian TV, above.

It’s a sad­ly iron­ic part of her sto­ry that the suc­cess of “Proud Mary” also helped keep Turn­er in an abu­sive rela­tion­ship with her musi­cal part­ner and hus­band Ike for anoth­er five years until she final­ly left him in 1976. She spent the next sev­er­al decades telling her sto­ry as she rose to inter­na­tion­al fame as a solo artist, in mem­oirs, inter­views, and in the biopic What’s Love Got to Do With It.

The new HBO doc­u­men­tary, Tina, tells the sto­ry again but also includes Turner’s weary response to it. Asked in 1993 why she did not go see What’s Love Got to Do With It, Turn­er replied, “the sto­ry was actu­al­ly writ­ten so that I would no longer have to dis­cuss the issue. I don’t love that it’s always talked about… this con­stant reminder, it’s not so good. I’m not so hap­py about it.”

Like all musi­cians, Turn­er liked to talk about the music. “Proud Mary,” the sec­ond sin­gle from Ike and Tina’s Workin’ Togeth­er, came about when they heard an audi­tion tape of the song, which they’d been cov­er­ing on stage. “Ike said, ‘You know, I for­got all about that tune.’ And I said let’s do it, but let’s change it. So in the car Ike plays the gui­tar, we just sort of jam. And we just sort of broke into the black ver­sion of it.”

She may have giv­en Ike cred­it for the idea, but the exe­cu­tion was all Tina (and the extra­or­di­nary Ikettes), and the song became a sta­ple of her solo act for decades. Now, with Tina, it seems she may be leav­ing pub­lic life for good. “When do you stop being proud? How do you bow out slow­ly — just go away?” she says.

It’s a ques­tion she’s been ask­ing with “Proud Mary” for half a cen­tu­ry — onstage work­ing day and night — a song, she said last year, that could be summed up in a sin­gle word, “Free­dom.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Aretha Franklin Turned Otis Redding’s “Respect” Into a Civ­il Rights and Fem­i­nist Anthem

Watch the Ear­li­est Known Footage of the Jimi Hen­drix Expe­ri­ence (Feb­ru­ary, 1967)

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

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

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The Rules of 100 Sports Clearly Explained in Short Videos: Baseball, Football, Jai Alai, Sumo Wrestling, Cricket, Pétanque & Much More

in Sports | April 5th, 2021

When you get down to it, every sport is its rules. This leaves aside great his­tor­i­cal weight and cul­tur­al asso­ci­a­tions, grant­ed, but if you don’t know a sport’s rules, not only can you not play it, you can’t appre­ci­ate it (the many child­hood after­noons I thrilled to tele­vised 49ers games with­out hav­ing any idea what was hap­pen­ing on the field notwith­stand­ing). What’s worse, you can’t dis­cuss it. “There is a shared knowl­edge of sports in Amer­i­ca that is unlike our shared knowl­edge of any­thing else,” as Chuck Kloster­man once put it. “When­ev­er I have to hang out with some­one I’ve nev­er met before, I always find myself secret­ly think­ing, ‘I hope this dude knows about sports. I hope this dude knows about sports. I hope this dude knows about sports.’ ”

Kloster­man is a cul­tur­al crit­ic, a posi­tion not at odds with his sports fanati­cism, and he sure­ly knows that his obser­va­tion holds well beyond the U.S.: just con­sid­er how deeply so much of the world is invest­ed in foot­ball. Despite its rel­a­tive sim­plic­i­ty, many Amer­i­cans nev­er quite grasped the work­ings of what we call soc­cer. But thanks to a Youtu­ber called Ninh Ly, we can learn in just over four min­utes.

Ly’s expla­na­tion of asso­ci­a­tion football/soccer is just one of near­ly 100 such videos on his chan­nel, each of which clear­ly and con­cise­ly lays out the rules of a dif­fer­ent sport. An Amer­i­can who watch­es it imme­di­ate­ly becomes not just able to under­stand a game, but pre­pared to engage with the cul­tures of foot­ball-enthu­si­ast coun­tries from Mex­i­co to Malaysia, Turkey to Thai­land.

Though British, Ly just as cogent­ly explains sports from the Unit­ed States, even the rel­a­tive­ly com­pli­cat­ed ones: bas­ket­ball, for instance, or what most of the world calls Amer­i­can foot­ball (as well as its are­na, Cana­di­an, and twice-failed XFL vari­ants), a game whose devot­ed fans include no less acclaimed-in-Europe an Amer­i­can nov­el­ist than than Paul Auster. Pre­vi­ous­ly on Open Cul­ture, we fea­tured Auster’s cor­re­spon­dence with J.M. Coet­zee on the sub­ject of sports, where­in the for­mer probes his own enthu­si­asm for foot­ball, and the lat­ter his own enthu­si­asm for crick­et. “If I look into my own heart and ask why, in the twi­light of my days, I am still — some­times — pre­pared to spend hours watch­ing crick­et on tele­vi­sion,” writes Coet­zee, “I must report that, how­ev­er absurd­ly, how­ev­er wist­ful­ly, I con­tin­ue to look out for moments of hero­ism, moments of nobil­i­ty.”

Any­one can enjoy such moments when and where they come, but only if they know the rules of crick­et in the first place. Ly has, of course, made a crick­et explain­er, which in four min­utes ful­ly elu­ci­dates a sport as obscure to some as it is beloved of oth­ers. He’s also cov­ered much more spe­cial­ized sports, includ­ing fenc­ing, curl­ing, pick­le­ball, jai alai, axe throw­ing, and sumo wrestling. (Unable to “ignore the over­whelm­ing demand,” he’s even explained the rules of quid­ditch, a game adapt­ed from the Har­ry Pot­ter books.) After a cou­ple of hours with his playlist (embed­ded below), you’ll come away ready to ascend to a new plane of appre­ci­a­tion for sports­man­ship in all its var­i­ous man­i­fes­ta­tions. If you’re any­thing like me, you’ll then revis­it your ear­li­est edu­ca­tion in these sub­jects: Sports Car­toons.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Ker­ouac Was a Secret, Obses­sive Fan of Fan­ta­sy Base­ball

Albert Camus’ Lessons Learned from Play­ing Goalie: “What I Know Most Sure­ly about Moral­i­ty and Oblig­a­tions, I Owe to Foot­ball”

Mon­ty Python’s Philosopher’s Foot­ball Match: The Epic Show­down Between the Greeks & Ger­mans (1972)

Read and Hear Famous Writ­ers (and Arm­chair Sports­men) J.M. Coet­zee and Paul Auster’s Cor­re­spon­dence

Jorge Luis Borges: “Soc­cer is Pop­u­lar Because Stu­pid­i­ty is Pop­u­lar”

The Weird World of Vin­tage Sports

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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5 Free Online Courses on Marx’s Capital from Prof. David Harvey

in Economics, Online Courses, Politics | April 2nd, 2021

Geo­g­ra­ph­er and Marx­ist schol­ar David Har­vey did not set out to become a Marx­ist. He didn’t even know what a Marx­ist was. He sim­ply start­ed to read Marx one day, at the age of 35, because all of the oth­er social sci­ence meth­ods he had applied in his study of the hous­ing mar­ket and social unrest in US cities “didn’t seem to be work­ing well,” he says in a Jacobin inter­view. “So, I start­ed to read Marx, and I found it more and more rel­e­vant…. After I cit­ed Marx a few times favor­ably, peo­ple pret­ty soon said I was a Marx­ist. I didn’t know what it meant… and I still don’t know what it means. It clear­ly does have a polit­i­cal mes­sage, though, as a cri­tique of cap­i­tal.”

The word “Marx­ist” has been as much a defam­a­to­ry term of moral and polit­i­cal abuse as it has a coher­ent descrip­tion of a posi­tion. But ask Har­vey to explain what Marx means in the Ger­man philosopher’s mas­sive analy­sis of polit­i­cal econ­o­my, Cap­i­tal, and he will glad­ly tell you at length. Har­vey has not only read all three vol­umes of the work many times over, a feat very few can claim, but he has expli­cat­ed them in detail in his cours­es at Johns Hop­kins and the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York since the 1970s. In the age of YouTube, Har­vey post­ed his lec­tures online, and they became so pop­u­lar they inspired a series of equal­ly pop­u­lar writ­ten com­pan­ion books.

Why study a dead 19th-cen­tu­ry social­ist? What could he pos­si­bly have to say about the world of AI, COVID, and cli­mate change? “I think Marx is more rel­e­vant today than ever before,” says Har­vey. “When Marx was writ­ing, cap­i­tal was not dom­i­nant in the world. It was dom­i­nant in Britain and West­ern Europe and the east­ern Unit­ed States, but it wasn’t dom­i­nant in Chi­na or India. Now it’s dom­i­nant every­where. So, I think Marx’s analy­sis of what cap­i­tal is and its con­tra­dic­tions is more rel­e­vant now than ever.”

To illus­trate, and exhaus­tive­ly explain, the point, Har­vey announced by tweet recent­ly that he’s made 5 cours­es freely avail­able online as videos and pod­casts. Find links to all 5 cours­es below. Or find them in our col­lec­tion: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Read­ing Marx’s Cap­i­tal Vol­ume 1 with David Har­vey – 2019 Edi­tion

Read­ing Marx’s Cap­i­tal Vol­ume I with David Har­vey – 2007 Edi­tion

Read­ing Marx’s Cap­i­tal Vol­ume 2 with David Har­vey

Read­ing Marx’s Grun­drisse with David Har­vey

Marx, Cap­i­tal, and the Mad­ness of Eco­nom­ic Rea­son

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Marx­ism by Ray­mond Geuss: A Free Course 

A Short Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Karl Marx

David Harvey’s Course on Marx’s Cap­i­tal: Vol­umes 1 & 2 Now Avail­able Free Online

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

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Discover the First Modern Kitchen–the Frankfurt Kitchen–Pioneered by the Architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1926)

in Architecture, Design, Gender, Life | April 2nd, 2021

Near­ly 100 years after it was intro­duced, archi­tect Mar­garete (Grete) Schütte-Lihotzky’s famous Frank­furt Kitchen con­tin­ues to exert enor­mous influ­ence on kitchen design.

Schütte-Lihotzky ana­lyzed designs for kitchens in train din­ing cars and made detailed time-motion stud­ies of house­wives’ din­ner prepa­ra­tions in her quest to come up with some­thing that would be space sav­ing, effi­cient, inex­pen­sive­ly pre-fab­ri­cat­ed, and eas­i­ly installed in the new hous­ing spring­ing up in post-WWI Ger­many.

Schütte-Lihotzky hoped that her design would have a lib­er­at­ing effect, by reduc­ing the time women spent in the kitchen. Noth­ing is left to chance in these 1.9 by 3.44 meters, with the main empha­sis placed on the well-trav­eled “gold­en tri­an­gle” between work­top, stove, and sink.

The design’s sci­en­tif­ic man­age­ment hon­ored ergonom­ics and effi­cien­cy, ini­ti­at­ing a sort of house­hold dance, but as film­mak­er Mari­beth Rom­s­lo, who direct­ed eight dancers on a painstak­ing fac­sim­i­le of a Frank­furt Kitchen, below, observes:

…as with any progress, there is fric­tion and pres­sure. As women gain more rights (then and now), are they real­ly just adding more to their to-do list of respon­si­bil­i­ties? Adding to the num­ber of plates they need to spin? They haven’t been excused from domes­tic duties in order to pur­sue careers or employ­ment, the new respon­si­bil­i­ties are addi­tive.

 

(Note: enter your infor­ma­tion to view the film.)

Chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Zoé Hen­rot, who also appears in the film, empha­sizes the Frank­furt Kitchen’s design effi­cien­cies and many of its famous fea­tures — the draw­ers for flour and oth­er bulk goods, the adjustable stool, the cut­ting board with a recep­ta­cle for par­ings and peels.

At the same time, she man­ages to tele­graph some pos­si­ble Catch-22s.

Its diminu­tive size dic­tates that this work­place will be a soli­tary one — no helpers, guests, or small chil­dren.

The built-in expec­ta­tions regard­ing uni­for­mi­ty of use leaves lit­tle room for culi­nary exper­i­men­ta­tion or a loosey goosey approach.

When crush­ing­ly repet­i­tive tasks begin to chafe, options for escape are lim­it­ed (if very well-suit­ed to the expres­sive pos­si­bil­i­ties of mod­ern dance).

Inter­est­ing­ly, many assume that a female archi­tect work­ing in 1926 would have brought some per­son­al insights to the task that her male col­leagues might have been lack­ing. Not so, as Schütte-Lihotzky read­i­ly admit­ted:

The truth of the mat­ter was, I’d nev­er run a house­hold before design­ing the Frank­furt Kitchen, I’d nev­er cooked, and had no idea about cook­ing.

Singer-song­writer Robert Rotifer is anoth­er artist who was moved to pay homage to Schütte-Lihotzky and the Frank­furt Kitchen, a “cal­cu­lat­ed move” that he describes as some­thing clos­er to design­ing a kitchen than “divine inspi­ra­tion”:

I sat on the train trav­el­ing from Can­ter­bury up to Lon­don… I was about to record a new album, and I need­ed one more uptem­po song, some­thing dri­ving and rhyth­mi­cal. While the noisy com­bi­na­tion of rick­ety train and worn-out tracks sug­gest­ed a beat, I began to think about syn­co­pa­tions and sub­jects.

I thought about the mun­dane things nobody usu­al­ly writes songs about, func­tion­al things that defy metaphor—tools, devices, house­hold goods. As I list­ed some items in my head, I soon real­ized that kitchen uten­sils were the way to go. I thought about the mechan­ics of a kitchen, and that’s when the name of the cre­ator of the famous Frank­furt Kitchen flashed up in my head.

There, in the nat­ur­al rhythm of her name, was the syn­co­pa­tion I had been look­ing for: “I sing this out to Grete Schütte-Lihotzky.” Writ­ing the rest of the lyrics was easy. The repet­i­tive ele­ment would illus­trate the way you keep return­ing to the same tasks and posi­tions when you are work­ing in a kitchen. In the mid­dle-eight I would also find space for some of the crit­i­cisms that have been lev­eled at Schütte-Lihotzky’s kitchen over the decades, such as the way her design iso­lat­ed the kitchen work­er, i.e. tra­di­tion­al­ly the woman, from the rest of the fam­i­ly.

Rotifer, who also cre­at­ed the paint­ings used in the ani­mat­ed music video, gives the archi­tect her due by includ­ing accom­plish­ments beyond the Frank­furt Kitchen: her micro-apart­ment with “a dis­guised roll-out bed,” her ter­raced hous­es at the Werk­bund­sied­lung, a hous­ing project’s kinder­garten, a print­ing shop, and the Vien­nese Com­mu­nist par­ty head­quar­ters.

It’s a love­ly trib­ute to a design pio­neer who, reflect­ing on her long career around the time of her 100th birth­day, remarked:

If I had known that every­one would keep talk­ing about noth­ing else, I would nev­er have built that damned kitchen!

Muse­ums that have acquired a Frank­furt Kitchen include Frankfurt’s Muse­um Ange­wandte Kun­st, New York City’s Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, London’s Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, and Oslo’s Nation­al Muse­um.

Learn more about the Kitchen Dance Project in this con­ver­sa­tion between film­mak­er Mari­beth Rom­s­lo, chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Zoé Emi­lie Hen­rot, and Min­neapo­lis Insti­tute of Art cura­tor Jen­nifer Komar Oli­varez.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Recipes from the Kitchen of Geor­gia O’Keeffe

The Pol­i­tics & Phi­los­o­phy of the Bauhaus Design Move­ment: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Vis­it the Homes That Great Archi­tects Designed for Them­selves: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Cor­busier, Wal­ter Gropius & Frank Gehry

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

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Why Do Wes Anderson Movies Look Like That?

in Film | April 2nd, 2021

The dom­i­nant form of Hol­ly­wood and/or main­stream film­mak­ing has been real­ism, the sense that even in our wildest fan­ta­sy, sci-fi, and super­hero films there’s still an attempt to hide the cam­era, the crew, and the light­ing, and that what we’re see­ing just *is*, that noth­ing has been con­struct­ed for us. Despite the tricks that edit­ing and non-diegetic sound (music, etc.) play on us, we are still will­ing to believe that we are see­ing a thing that hap­pened.

There’s very few film­mak­ers that explic­it­ly resist this and still make pop­u­lar and suc­cess­ful Hol­ly­wood films, and Wes Ander­son is one of them. Hence the above video essay from Thomas Flight, who recent­ly vis­it­ed Anderson’s films to pull out the more eso­teric of his ref­er­ences.

Flight’s the­sis runs thus­ly. Ander­son chose to use real fur on the stop-motion pup­pets in the Fan­tas­tic Mr. Fox not despite the hair mov­ing from the ani­ma­tors’ hands’ manip­u­la­tion, but *because* of it. Show­ing the fin­ger­prints as it were of the cre­ators with­in the film itself is a con­stant styl­is­tic choice in his cin­e­ma, and one that is also reflect­ed in his use of flat, dio­ra­ma-like frames. This is what crit­ic Matt Zoller Seitz, who has writ­ten sev­er­al beau­ti­ful cof­fee table books on Wes Ander­son, calls Plani­met­ric Com­po­si­tion. But it’s also there in the titles, use of the­ater cur­tains, of the numer­ous sto­ry­book and com­ic book ref­er­ences that shape Anderson’s work.

This is not new of course, if you fol­low any writ­ing on Ander­son. It’s a key to under­stand­ing his aes­thet­ic. But Flight goes fur­ther to ask why. Why con­struct some­thing so arti­fi­cial and risk alien­at­ing audi­ences?

Flight comes to the point: it’s a risk worth tak­ing. It’s a moment in childhood—he com­pares it to a par­ent read­ing a bed­time sto­ry. A par­ent is present, often the focus of the child’s atten­tion (there might not even be a book) but at the same time so is the sto­ry. Words unfold in speech and also unfold in a child’s mind. Both exist in the same space, the arti­fi­cial and the real.

So many Ander­son films unfold like storybooks—we often see a hard­back book with the same title in the film itself, or in the case of The Grand Budapest Hotel, a series of sto­ries and books, all nes­tled inside each oth­er. Flight doesn’t make the com­par­i­son, but it is worth doing so: Anderson’s films are like epis­to­lary nov­els of the 19th cen­tu­ry, such as Franken­stein or Wuther­ing Heights, sto­ries with­in let­ters with­in sto­ries.

But here’s the inter­est­ing part: when Ander­son has a moment of height­ened emo­tion in his films, where char­ac­ters let down their guard and speak from the heart, the direc­tor will give us the clas­sic real­ist shot/reverse shot. It’s fleet­ing but it’s there.

And that works exact­ly because Ander­son holds off on reveal­ing it to us until that one moment. The sto­ry­teller knows it’s spe­cial and knows we’re going to find it spe­cial. At a time when the auteur the­o­ry is under attack from crit­ics on one side and the cap­i­tal­ist machine, it’s good to know there’s a direc­tor like Ander­son who doesn’t give us what we want, but gives us what we so sore­ly need.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wes Anderson’s Shorts Films & Com­mer­cials: A Playlist of 8 Short Ander­son­ian Works

A Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Wes Ander­son Video Essays

Wes Ander­son Releas­es the Offi­cial Trail­er for His New Film, The French Dis­patch: Watch It Online

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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On “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” and the Female Buddy Comedy–Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #87

in Comedy, Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | April 2nd, 2021

The bud­dy com­e­dy is a sta­ple of Amer­i­can film, but using this to explore female friend­ship is still fresh ground. Eri­ca, Mark, Bri­an, and Eri­ca’s long-time friend Mic­ah Greene (actor and nurse) dis­cuss tropes and dynam­ics with­in this kind of film, focus­ing pri­mar­i­ly on Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, the 2021 release writ­ten and star­ring Kristin Wiig and Annie Mumo­lo as a cou­ple of mid­dle aged near-twin odd­balls expand­ing their hori­zons in a sur­re­al­is­tic, gag-filled trop­i­cal venue.

While male pair­ings of this sort (Cheech and Chong, Bob and Doug McKen­zie, Beav­is and Butthead et al) stick to sil­ly jokes, Barb and Star base their antics around their evolv­ing rela­tion­ship toward each oth­er. As with the 2019 film Books­mart and many TV shows includ­ing Dead to Me, PEN15, and Grace and Frankie, the trend is toward dram­e­dy as the dynam­ics of friend­ship are tak­en seri­ous­ly. We also touch on Brides­maids, Sis­ters, The Heat, BAPS, I Love You Man, and more.

A few rel­e­vant arti­cles:

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.

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When the Indiana Bell Building Was Rotated 90° While Everyone Worked Inside in 1930 (by Kurt Vonnegut’s Architect Dad)

in Architecture, History | April 1st, 2021

These days, when a com­pa­ny finds itself in need of more space than its cur­rent build­ing affords, it moves to a big­ger one, expands the one it has, or does a full tear­down-and-rebuild. But con­sid­er­ing only these options shows a cer­tain fail­ure of imag­i­na­tion, as under­scored by the video above: a brief sum­ma­ry of how the Indi­ana Bell Tele­phone Com­pa­ny added a sec­ond build­ing along­side its Indi­anapo­lis head­quar­ters — but only after hoist­ing up the lat­ter and piv­ot­ing it 90 degrees on its side. “This was no small task,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor, “as the eight-sto­ry, steel-frame-and-brick build­ing mea­sured about 100 by 135 feet, and weighed 11,000 tons.”

But between Octo­ber 20th and Novem­ber 14th, 1930, the com­pa­ny did indeed man­age to turn and shift the entire struc­ture as planned, “and the move caused no ser­vice out­ages, and all 600 work­ers with­in the build­ing still report­ed to work every day.”

This neces­si­tat­ed length­en­ing and mak­ing flex­i­ble all its util­i­ty cables and pipes, then lift­ing it a quar­ter-inch with jacks and plac­ing it on rollers. “Every six strokes of the jacks would shift the build­ing three-eighths of an inch, mov­ing it fif­teen inch­es per hour.” As for Indi­ana Bel­l’s employ­ees, they entered and left their slow­ly piv­ot­ing work­place “using a mov­able pas­sen­ger walk­way that moved with the build­ing.” To Kurt Von­negut Jr., then eight years old, all this must have been an impres­sive sight indeed.

http://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ew1X9HsxS3o

The young nov­el­ist-to-be must have seen it not just because he was born and raised in Indi­anapo­lis, a fact he ref­er­enced through­out his life, but because his father was the pro­jec­t’s lead archi­tect. Kurt Von­negut, Sr. fol­lowed in the foot­steps of his own father Bernard Von­negut, design­er of Das Deutsche Haus, today known as the Athenaeum, which the Nation­al Reg­is­ter of His­toric Places des­ig­nates as “the best pre­served and most elab­o­rate build­ing asso­ci­at­ed with the Ger­man Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty of Indi­anapo­lis.” This Ger­man lega­cy would prove rather more com­pli­cat­ed for the most famous Von­negut of them all, impris­oned in Dres­den as he was dur­ing World War II. The dark­ness of his expe­ri­ence man­i­fests in his work, not least his mas­ter­piece Slaugh­ter­house-Five; but so, one imag­ines, does the near-fan­tas­ti­cal prac­ti­cal­i­ty of 1930s Indi­anapo­lis.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A New Kurt Von­negut Muse­um Opens in Indi­anapo­lis … Right in Time for Banned Books Week

Watch the Com­plete­ly Unsafe, Ver­ti­go-Induc­ing Footage of Work­ers Build­ing New York’s Icon­ic Sky­scrap­ers

See New York City in the 1930s and Now: A Side-by-Side Com­par­i­son of the Same Streets & Land­marks

Free Online Engi­neer­ing Cours­es

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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Meet Les Rallizes Dénudés, the Mysterious Japanese Psych-Rock Band Whose Influence Is Everywhere

in Music | April 1st, 2021

For those young peo­ple – includ­ing you – who live this mod­ern ago­nis­ing ado­les­cence and who are want­i­ng the true rad­i­cal music, I sin­cere­ly wish the dia­logue accom­pa­nied by pierc­ing pain will be born and fill this recital hall.

– text from late 60s’ Les Ral­lizes Dénudés con­cert fly­ers

In Span­ish writer Car­los Ruiz Zafón’s best­selling nov­el The Shad­ow of the Wind, nar­ra­tor Daniel Sem­pere spends his ado­les­cence try­ing to solve the mys­tery of an obscure dead nov­el­ist. Fans of the book might see Daniel’s detec­tive sto­ry in Grayson Haver Currin’s quest to learn more about Japan­ese psych rock band Les Ral­lizes Dénudés and its elu­sive founder Takashi Mizu­tani. The band has inspired devo­tion and end­less fas­ci­na­tion among their small cult fol­low­ing. But Currin’s inves­ti­ga­tions met with one after anoth­er dead end. Les Ral­lizes Dénudés is, he writes, “a band that’s exist­ed behind a veil of secre­cy for so long that it’s almost impos­si­ble to tell where facts end and where fan­ta­sy begins.”

It does not help that many people’s first and last encounter with Les Ral­lizes Dénudés was Julian Cope’s 2007 Japrock­sam­pler, a gen­er­ous, even ency­clo­pe­dic intro­duc­tion to post-war Japan­ese rock and roll. The book played “a piv­otal role in expos­ing Amer­i­can and Eng­lish audi­ences to Les Ral­lizes Dénudés’ tantric gui­tar shrieks,” yet its mea­ger chap­ter on the band is appar­ent­ly rid­dled with inac­cu­ra­cies, includ­ing the claim that the band nev­er record­ed in the stu­dio in their entire 29-year exis­tence. They did, in 1991, 24 years after they began play­ing stages in Tokyo.

So how did any­one hear about them if they did­n’t make or pro­mote albums? “Through bootlegs, bootlegs and more bootlegs,” Cope wrote. Here he does not exag­ger­ate, but even where he does, “it’s in the ser­vice of truth,” Dan­ger­ous Minds argues, going on to sum­ma­rize the “skele­tal” biog­ra­phy Cope sketch­es out for the band:

Takashi Mizu­tani formed the group as a col­lege stu­dent in the ‘60s, when, Cope writes, French cul­ture still found devo­tees among post­war Japan­ese youth look­ing for a rev­o­lu­tion­ary alter­na­tive to Uncle Sam. That means: Cool for these guys was ice cold. Dead­pan as the Vel­vets or Space­men 3, Mizu­tani and his band­mates iden­ti­fied with the loud­est, dark­est and most destruc­tive aspects of psych-rock.

Les Ral­lizes Dénudés is leg­endary for good rea­son, as you can learn in the Band­splain­ing video at the top. One thing we do know about them is that a for­mer bassist appar­ent­ly hijacked an air­plane for the Japan­ese Red Army Fac­tion (then found asy­lum in North Korea), but “it’s actu­al­ly not the most inter­est­ing thing about them.” Those who already know a cer­tain kind of psy­che­del­ic rock may hear the dark, echoey drone of White Light/White Heat-era Vel­vet Under­ground and lat­er bands like Bri­an Jon­estown Mas­sacre or Moon Duo, as well as the No Wave noise rock of Son­ic Youth and hazy shoegaze of My Bloody Valen­tine.

The band’s echo­ing vocals and swirling, wail­ing peals of fuzzed-out gui­tar “fore­shad­owed the next five decades of under­ground rock,” the Band­splain­ing video notes. This seems to be the case whether the musi­cians inspired by Les Ral­lizes Dénudés had ever heard their music direct­ly. Japan­ese under­ground music “only began reach­ing West­ern ears in the ear­ly 90s,” writes Alan Cum­mings, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don pro­fes­sor of Japan­ese trans­la­tion, dra­ma, cul­ture, and his­to­ry, and a fore­most West­ern author­i­ty on Japan­ese psych rock. When the music first reached lis­ten­ers out­side Japan, how­ev­er, it wasn’t Les Ral­lizes Dénudés they first heard.

Cum­mings, who saw Les Ral­lizes Dénudés live in Japan, wrote “what might be the first Eng­lish piece to ever men­tion the band” ten years lat­er in 1999 in a Wire arti­cle on under­ground Japan­ese rock. “What is or was a ral­lize, and why it should be naked,” he remarked of their non­sen­si­cal French name, “remains unknown,” like most every­thing else about them. This was by design. As one musi­cian liv­ing in Tokyo put it, their ubiq­ui­tous obscu­ri­ty was “part of the Les Ral­lizes Dénudés strat­e­gy.”

You start hear­ing about this band, and once you know what their music sounds like, you hear their influ­ence every­where. Yet they’re not any­where. They’re ether. They’re smoke.

Les Ral­lizes Dénudés are so obscure in Japan, they don’t receive a men­tion in the fol­low-up arti­cle Cum­mings wrote for the Wire in 2013, in which he sur­veys the under­ground Japan­ese rock scene once again. He also admits to being part of a mys­ti­fi­ca­tion of Japan­ese sub­cul­tures and adopt­ing an atti­tude of “fan­ta­sy and pro­jec­tion” that he traces back to the 19th cen­tu­ry. In the case of Les Ral­lizes Dénudés, how­ev­er, fan­ta­sy and pro­jec­tion are often all we have to work with in the sto­ry of a band whose sound is every­where but whose for­mer asso­ciates and mem­bers, includ­ing Mizu­tani him­self, don’t wish to be found. As Cur­rin writes, “Peo­ple not only talk about Mizu­tani as a folk leg­end; they talk about peo­ple who sim­ply know him as such.”

Thanks to YouTube and the preva­lence of cam­corders at Les Ral­lizes Dénudés shows, hours of footage of the band per­form­ing live can be viewed online, avail­able to peo­ple out­side the small com­mu­ni­ty of cas­sette and VHS tapers and traders who kept their leg­end alive. See some of that footage above, includ­ing an hour and a half long “doc­u­men­tary” that con­sists of noth­ing but the band’s hyp­not­ic jams.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Ambi­ent Music of Hiroshi Yoshimu­ra, the Pio­neer­ing Japan­ese Com­pos­er

Zam­rock: An Intro­duc­tion to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psy­che­del­ic Rock Scene

Hear Enchant­i­ng Mix­es of Japan­ese Pop, Jazz, Funk, Dis­co, Soul, and R&B from the 70s and 80s

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

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The Archive of Healing Is Now Online: UCLA’s Digital Database Provides Access to Thousands of Traditional & Alternative Healing Methods

in Archives, Health | April 1st, 2021

Pho­to by Kather­ine Han­lon on Unsplash

Folk med­i­cine is, or should be, anti­thet­i­cal to cap­i­tal­ism, mean­ing it should not be pos­si­ble to trade­mark, copy­right, or oth­er­wise own and sell plants and nat­ur­al reme­dies to which every­one has access. The entire rea­son such prac­tices devel­oped over the course of mil­len­nia was to help com­mu­ni­ties of close affil­i­a­tion sur­vive and thrive, not to fos­ter mar­ket com­pe­ti­tion between com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als. The impulse to prof­it from suf­fer­ing has dis­tort­ed what we think of as heal­ing, such that a strict­ly allo­path­ic, or “West­ern,” approach to med­i­cine relies on ethics of exclu­sion, exploita­tion, and out­right harm.

What we tend to think of as mod­ern med­i­cine, the Archive of Heal­ing writes, “is object-ori­ent­ed (phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly dri­ven) and struc­tured by his­tor­i­cal injus­tice against women and peo­ple of col­or.” The Archive, a new dig­i­tal project from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, offers “one of the most com­pre­hen­sive data­bas­es of med­i­c­i­nal folk­lore in the world,” Valenti­na Di Lis­cia writes at Hyper­al­ler­gic. “The inter­ac­tive, search­able web­site boasts hun­dreds of thou­sands of entries describ­ing cures, rit­u­als, and heal­ing meth­ods span­ning more than 200 years and sev­en con­ti­nents.”

In coun­tries like the Unit­ed States, where health­care is treat­ed as a scarce com­mod­i­ty mil­lions of peo­ple can­not afford, access to knowl­edge about effec­tive, age-old nat­ur­al wis­dom has become crit­i­cal. There may be no treat­ments for COVID-19 in the data­base, but there are like­ly tra­di­tion­al reme­dies, rit­u­als, prac­tices, treat­ments, oint­ments, etc. for just about every oth­er ill­ness one might encounter. The archive was curat­ed over a peri­od of more than thir­ty years by “a team of researchers at UCLA, work­ing under the direc­tion of Dr. Way­land Hand and then Dr. Michael Owen Jones,” the site notes in its brief his­to­ry.

The mate­r­i­al from the col­lec­tion, which was orig­i­nal­ly called the “archive of tra­di­tion­al med­i­cine,” came from “data on heal­ing from over 3,200 pub­li­ca­tions, six uni­ver­si­ty archives, as well as first-hand and sec­ond-hand infor­ma­tion from anthro­po­log­i­cal and folk­loric field­notes.” In 2016, when Dr. Del­ga­do Short­er took over as direc­tor of the pro­gram, he “reor­ga­nized it with an eye to social shar­ing and allow­ing for users to sub­mit new data and com­ment on exist­ing data,” notes UCLA’s School of the Arts and Archi­tec­ture in an inter­view with Short­er, who describes the project’s aims thus:

The whole goal here is to democ­ra­tize what we think of as heal­ing and knowl­edge about heal­ing and take it across cul­tures in a way that’s respect­ful and gives atten­tion to intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty rights.

This may seem like a del­i­cate bal­anc­ing act, between the schol­ar­ly, the folk­loric, and the realms of rights, remu­ner­a­tion, and social pow­er. The Archive strikes it with an ambi­tious set of tenets you can read here, includ­ing an empha­sis on offer­ing tra­di­tion­al and Indige­nous heal­ing prac­tices “out­side of often expen­sive allo­path­ic and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal approach­es, and not as alter­na­tives but as com­ple­men­tary modal­i­ties.”

The archive states as one of its the­o­ret­i­cal bases that health should be treat­ed “as a social goal with social meth­ods that affirm rela­tion­al­i­ty and kin­ship.” Those wish­ing to get involved with the Archive as part­ners or advi­so­ry board mem­bers can learn how at their About page, which also fea­tures the fol­low­ing dis­claimer: “State­ments made on this web­site have not been eval­u­at­ed by the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion. The infor­ma­tion con­tained here­in is not intend­ed to diag­nose, treat, cure or pre­vent any dis­ease.” Use the infor­ma­tion wise­ly, at your own risk, in oth­er words.

To use the Archive of Heal­ing, you will need to reg­is­ter with the site first.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

The Illus­trat­ed Med­i­c­i­nal Plant Map of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca (1932): Down­load It in High Res­o­lu­tion

Down­load 100,000+ Images From The His­to­ry of Med­i­cine, All Free Cour­tesy of The Well­come Library

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

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What Andrei Tarkovsky’s Most Notorious Scene Tells Us About Time During the Pandemic: A Video Essay

in Current Affairs, Film | March 31st, 2021

In his films, Andrei Tarkovsky shows us things no oth­er auteur does: an unbro­ken eight-minute shot, for exam­ple, of a man slow­ly walk­ing a lit can­dle across an emp­ty pool, start­ing over again when­ev­er the flame goes out. One of the best-known (or at least most often men­tioned) sequences in the Russ­ian mas­ter’s oeu­vre, it comes from Nos­tal­ghia, a late pic­ture made dur­ing his final, exiled years in Italy. Some cite it as an exam­ple of all that’s wrong with Tarkovsky’s cin­e­ma; oth­ers as an exam­ple of all that’s right with it. But both the crit­i­cism and the praise are root­ed in the direc­tor’s height­ened sen­si­tiv­i­ty to and delib­er­ate use of time — a resource about which we’ve all come to feel dif­fer­ent­ly after a year of glob­al pan­dem­ic.

“Our sense of time dur­ing the pan­dem­ic was just as warped as our sense of space,” says Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, in his new video essay above, a fol­low-up to his pre­vi­ous explo­ration of how lock­downs turned cities around the world into de Chiri­co paint­ings.

At first, “time felt simul­ta­ne­ous­ly slow and fast: hours dragged on at a snail’s pace, but weeks flew by. 2020 seemed end­less while it was hap­pen­ing, but in ret­ro­spect it feels brief, short­er than a nor­mal year.” But even under “nor­mal” con­di­tions, it holds true that “the more atten­tion we give to time, the slow­er it feels.” And when we think back to our past expe­ri­ences, “the more we can remem­ber in a giv­en peri­od expands our sense of its length.”

Watch­ing Nos­tal­ghia’s can­dle-in-the-pool scene, “you become aware of the odd encounter you’re hav­ing with time itself. You can feel the tex­ture of it, its pres­ence, as if time were not only a con­cept, but a sub­stance, stretch­ing out in front of you, expand­ing and con­tract­ing with every breath. It’s beyond inter­est, beyond bore­dom.” Unlike most film­mak­ers, Tarkovsky does­n’t manip­u­late time to keep us on a pre-laid emo­tion­al track, but to make us aware of our own move­ment through it. “It’ll be the same for the pan­dem­ic,” says Puschak. “There are some rhythms we’ll be eager to get back to, and oth­ers, now that we’ve expe­ri­enced their absence, we’ll be eager to leave behind.” Right now, we’d do well to ques­tion the new forms of nos­tal­gia that have beset us. Or we could use the time still on our hands to hold Tarkovsky ret­ro­spec­tives of our own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online: Watch the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Arguably the Most Respect­ed Film­mak­er of All Time

The Poet­ic Har­mo­ny of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film­mak­ing: A Video Essay

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Tran­scends Sci­ence Fic­tion

Andrei Tarkovsky Answers the Essen­tial Ques­tions: What is Art & the Mean­ing of Life?

When Our World Became a de Chiri­co Paint­ing: How the Avant-Garde Painter Fore­saw the Emp­ty City Streets of 2020

Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Old­er: What the Research Says

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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