Do We Need Yet More Films About Time Loops? A Pretty Much Pop Discussion (#80) of Groundhog Day and its Descendents

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi, Television | February 2nd, 2021

Tine loop­ing, where a char­ac­ter is doomed to repeat the same day (or hour, or longer peri­od) is a sci-fi trope dat­ing back more than a cen­tu­ry, but real­ly entered Amer­i­can con­scious­ness with the 1993 Bill Mur­ray film Ground­hog Day. Since then, and espe­cial­ly in the last five years, there have been numer­ous iter­a­tions of this idea in var­i­ous gen­res from racial police-shoot­ing dra­ma to teen sex com­e­dy. But do we need more of this? What are the philo­soph­i­cal ideas involved, and how do these change with tweaks to the sce­nario?

Mark, Eri­ca, Bri­an, and return­ing guest Ken Ger­ber dis­cuss not only the very recent and pop­u­lar for­ays into this genre with Hulu’s Palm Springs and Net­flix’s Russ­ian Doll, but also touch on Edge of Tomor­row, Repeaters, 12:01 PM, Before I Fall, The Fare, and episodes of The Twi­light Zone, Star Trek: Dis­cov­ery, The X‑Files, and Rick & Morty.

There are of course oth­er film and TV uses of this trope. For a rel­a­tive­ly full list, you can see this wiki page list­ing time loop films and this oth­er wiki page dis­cussing lit­er­ary antecedents. Also see the “Ground­hog Day” Loop page on tvtropes.org, and here’s a rel­e­vant red­dit thread.

Here are more arti­cles:

Watch the 12:01 PM 1990 short film. This bonus episode of the 11.22.63 pod­cast had a great dis­cus­sion of time loop media includ­ing the Ken Grim­wood nov­el Replay and the short sto­ry “12:01 P.M.” and its sequels. You can read the 1941 Mal­colm Jame­son sto­ry “Dou­bled and Redou­bled” online. As a fore­run­ner to the time loop idea, check out the very short 1892 chil­dren’s sto­ry “Christ­mas Every Day” by William Dean How­ells, where time does move for­ward with its con­se­quences, but it’s always Christ­mas!

We talked a lit­tle about Hap­py Death Day with its cos­tume design­er in our ep. 38 and got into time trav­el more gen­er­al­ly with Ken in ep. 22 and into “weird sit­u­a­tions” in our Twi­light Zone ep. 52. You may also enjoy Wes Alwan’s (sub)Text pod­cast dis­cussing the psy­cho­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions of Ground­hog Day.

Check out the time loop movie bin­go card that Bri­an put togeth­er (with ground­hog pic­ture by Ken):

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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Tony Bennett Duets with Lady Gaga, Amy Winehouse & Other Musicians, Passing on the Great American Songbook

in Music | February 2nd, 2021

I was pos­sessed with a won­der­ful exam­ple of my Ital­ian Amer­i­can fam­i­ly. They would come over and join us every Sun­day, all my aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces, and I would sing for them. I was 10 years old, and I was just say­ing, “Who am I? What am I sup­posed to do?” And they told me that they love the way I sang. It cre­at­ed a pas­sion in my life that exists to this moment as I speak to you, that is stronger now at 89 than in my whole life. I still feel that I can get bet­ter some­how. And I search for it all of the time. —Tony Ben­nett, Week­end Edi­tion inter­view, Octo­ber 10, 2015

Tony Ben­nett “is not just an artist for the ages, but an artist for all ages,” the Library of Con­gress wrote in its announce­ment of the icon­ic singer as the 2017 Gersh­win Prize Win­ner. Bennett’s life and career have tru­ly been extra­or­di­nary. The gold­en-voiced croon­er from Queens “has been on the front lines of his­to­ry” as a World War II vet­er­an who “fought in the Bat­tle of the Bulge and par­tic­i­pat­ed in the lib­er­a­tion of a con­cen­tra­tion camp.” He “marched with Mar­tin Luther King in Sel­ma to sup­port civ­il rights,” then went on to win 19 Gram­mys, sell 10 mil­lion records, per­form “for 11 U.S. pres­i­dents,” and become a pro­lif­ic visu­al artist who “con­tin­ues to paint every day, even as he tours inter­na­tion­al­ly.”

When he received the Gersh­win hon­or, Ben­nett had already been diag­nosed with Alzhiemers dis­ease, a diag­no­sis just revealed to the pub­lic by Bennett’s wife, Susan Benedet­to. He had been show­ing signs all the way back in 2014 when he released Cheek to Cheek, an album of jazz stan­dards record­ed with Lady Gaga. When AARP’s John Colap­in­to vis­it­ed him at his New York City apart­ment recent­ly, “there was lit­tle doubt that the dis­ease had pro­gressed.”

But Bennett’s gold­en voice and insa­tiable desire to get bet­ter remain. He still paints every day and rehears­es twice a week, and even as his symp­toms wors­ened over the past few years, he per­formed and record­ed with younger artists, deter­mined to pass on the tra­di­tion of the “Great Amer­i­can Song­book” in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Bennett’s advo­ca­cy for jazz singing through his duets with singers like Lady Gaga and Amy Wine­house may turn out to be his most endur­ing lega­cy. 2011’s Duets II began the col­lab­o­ra­tions with Lady Gaga. Dur­ing the record­ing of Cheek to Cheek, Ben­net enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly told NPR that “It’s the first time that young peo­ple that love [her] so much will fall in love with George Gersh­win, with Cole Porter, with Irv­ing Berlin.” She added, “Tony’s real­ly open­ing up a whole new gen­er­a­tion.” The two then got togeth­er again four years lat­er, going into the stu­dio between 2018 and 2020. “Tony was a con­sid­er­ably more mut­ed pres­ence dur­ing the record­ing of the new album,” writes Colap­in­to. “In raw doc­u­men­tary footage of the ses­sions, he speaks rarely, and when he does his words are halt­ing; at times he seems lost and bewil­dered.” It may “very well be the last Tony Ben­nett record.”

This sense of final­i­ty is why Benedet­to and their son Dan­ny “have joint­ly decid­ed to break the silence around his con­di­tion, a deci­sion they have, nec­es­sar­i­ly, had to make with­out Tony’s input, since he is, Susan said, inca­pable of under­stand­ing the dis­ease.” Nonethe­less, the new album of duets, due out this spring, promis­es to show Ben­nett in the fine form he has main­tained through­out the pro­gres­sion of his dis­ease, exer­cis­ing his voice to keep the worst symp­toms at bay. “He is doing so many things, at 94, that many peo­ple with­out demen­tia can­not do,” says Bennett’s neu­rol­o­gist Gay­a­tri Devi. “He real­ly is the sym­bol of hope for some­one with a cog­ni­tive dis­or­der.” Benedet­to is open about what’s been lost. “There’s a lot about him that I miss,” she says. “Because he’s not the old Tony any­more. … But when he sings, he’s the old Tony.”

See Ben­nett in clas­sic duets with Amy Wine­house and Lady Gaga above, includ­ing the stun­ning live ver­sion of “Any­thing Goes” with Gaga, just above, from 2014. “I feel very val­i­dat­ed by this,” she said that year. “You know, he’s giv­en my fans a gift by say­ing to them that he likes the way I sing jazz.” See those fans look on with rapt atten­tion, absorb­ing the songs Ben­nett loved so much through a new gen­er­a­tion of singers inspired by his incred­i­ble lega­cy. Just below, see sev­er­al more career-cap­ping duets from Duets II, and even more at the YouTube playlist here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Music Can Awak­en Patients with Alzheimer’s and Demen­tia

Demen­tia Patients Find Some Eter­nal Youth in the Sounds of AC/DC

Christo­pher Walken Reads Lady Gaga

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

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Watch 36 Short Animations That Tell the Origin Stories of Mexico’s Indigenous Peoples in Their Own Languages

in Animation, Language, Travel | February 2nd, 2021

In our efforts to pre­serve endan­gered species we seem to over­look some­thing equal­ly impor­tant. To me it is a sign of a deeply dis­turbed civ­i­liza­tion where tree hug­gers and whale hug­gers in their weird­ness are accept­able while no one embraces the last speak­ers of a lan­guage.

 — Wern­er Her­zog, Encoun­ters at the End of the World

Trees and whales aside, we sus­pect the ever quotable Her­zog would warm to fel­low direc­tor Gabriela Badil­lo’s 68 Voic­es, 68 Hearts, a series of one-minute ani­ma­tions that pre­serve indige­nous Mex­i­can sto­ries with nar­ra­tion pro­vid­ed by native speak­ers.

“It was cre­at­ed in order to help fos­ter pride, respect, and the use of indige­nous Mex­i­can lan­guages between speak­ers and non-speak­ers, as well as to help reduce dis­crim­i­na­tion and fos­ter a sense of pride towards all com­mu­ni­ties and cul­tures that are part of the cul­tur­al rich­ness that makes up Mex­i­co,” Badil­lo says in an inter­view with Awasqa.

The project stemmed from a real­iza­tion in the wake of the death of her grand­fa­ther, a Max­canu from Yucatan:

Aside from los­ing a loved one, I real­ized that an enor­mous wis­dom had also been lost: a lan­guage, sto­ries, tra­di­tions and cus­toms, a whole world had dis­solved with him.

Each ani­ma­tion involves col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Nation­al Insti­tute of Indige­nous Lan­guage and the com­mu­ni­ty whose sto­ry is being shared. Com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers choose the sub­ject, then sup­ply nar­ra­tion and trans­la­tion. Their chil­dren draw scenes from the select­ed sto­ry, which steers the style of ani­ma­tion.

Pri­or to being released to the gen­er­al pub­lic, each film is pre­sent­ed to its com­mu­ni­ty of ori­gin, along with a book­let of sug­gest­ed edu­ca­tion­al activ­i­ties for par­ents and teach­ers to use in con­junc­tion with screen­ings. Box­es of post­cards fea­tur­ing art­work from the series are donat­ed to the com­mu­ni­ty school.

Some of the entries, like the above About Earth­quakes and the Ori­gin of Life on Earth, nar­rat­ed in Ch’ol by Euge­nia Cruz Mon­te­jo, pack a mas­sive amount of sto­ry into the allot­ted minute:

They say many years ago Ch’u­j­ti­at, the Heav­en’s lord, cre­at­ed the Earth with 12 immor­tal men to car­ry it. And it is when they get tired that the Earth moves, pro­vok­ing earth­quakes.

At the same time he cre­at­ed the first men, who were ungrate­ful, so Ch’u­j­ti­at sent the flood and turned the sur­vivors into mon­keys, and the inno­cent chil­dren into stars. He then cre­at­ed our first par­ents, na’al, Ixic y Xun’Ok, who mul­ti­plied and pop­u­lat­ed the Earth. 

That’s how life on Earth began.That’s how the Ch’oles tell it.

Vari­ants of “that’s how we tell it” are a com­mon refrain, as in the Cora (also known as Náay­eri) sto­ry of how the Moth­er God­dess cre­at­ed earth (and oth­er gods), nar­rat­ed by Pedro Muñiz López.

Here is the writ­ten ver­sion, in Cora:

E’itɨ tiuséi­jre cháana­ka

Yaapú ti’nyúukari tɨkɨn a’najpú ɨtyáj nái­mi ajnáana Náa­sisaa, Téijkame jemín ɨ cháana­ka ajtá ɨ máxkɨrai, góutaaguaka’a ɨ tabóu­jsimua yaati’xáata tɨkɨn mata’a já guatéchaɨn majtá tyuipuán iyakúi cháana­ka japuá.

Muxáj kɨmen­pú góutaaguaka’a tɨ’kí nájkɨ’ta gojoutyáj­tua. Áuna me’séira aɨjme tabou­jsimua matákua’naxɨ.

Tɨ’kí aɨj­na tanáana Náa­sisaa, ukɨpuapú guatákɨɨnitya’a, yán guajaikagua’xɨjre uyóu­j­mua matɨ’jmí jet­sán guatyáakɨ yán miye’ntiné tajapuá. Kapú aɨn jé’i, matákua’naxɨ máj akábibɨɨ yán juté’e, makaupɨxɨɨ ujet­sé matɨ’jmí chuéj kɨj ten­tyóu metya’úrara, ajtá ɨ Taja’as xu’rabe’táana tiuɨrɨj tyau­tyáj­tua ajpúi tanáana Náa­sisaa tsíikɨri guatyákɨs­ta­ka ukɨpuá kɨmen. Japuan­pú aɨj­na chuéj utía­j­ka tɨ’kí goutaíjte aɨjme tabóu­jsimua guatái­jte máj atapa’tsaren metya’tanya’tɨkɨ’káa ayaapú tiutéjbe máj tiunéi­tan.

Ayaapú tiuséi­jre cháana­ka. Ayáj tigua’nyúukari Náay­eri.

Badillo’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion is well served by one of our favorites, The Ori­gin of the Moun­tains. In addi­tion to moun­tains, this Cucapá sto­ry, nar­rat­ed by Inocen­cia González Sainz, delves into the ori­gin of oceans and the Col­orado Riv­er, though fair warning—it may be dif­fi­cult to restore class­room order once the stu­dents hear that tes­ti­cles and ear­wax fig­ure promi­nent­ly.

To watch a playlist of the 36 ani­ma­tions com­plet­ed so far with Eng­lish sub­ti­tles, click here.

68 Voic­es, 68 Heart’s Kick­starter page has more infor­ma­tion about this ongo­ing project. Con­tri­bu­tions will go toward ani­mat­ing sto­ries in the three lan­guages that are at the high­est risk of dis­ap­pear­ing—Akateko, Popolo­ca, and Ku’ahl.

As Badil­lo writes:

When a lan­guage dis­ap­pears, not only a sound, a way of writ­ing, a let­ter or a word goes away. Some­thing much deep­er than just a form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion dis­ap­pears — a way of see­ing and con­ceiv­ing the world, sto­ries, tales, a way of nam­ing and relat­ing to things, an enor­mous knowl­edge that we should relearn because of its deep respect with nature.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

200+ Films by Indige­nous Direc­tors Now Free to View Online: A New Archive Launched by the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Peru­vian Schol­ar Writes & Defends the First The­sis Writ­ten in Quechua, the Main Lan­guage of the Incan Empire

Opti­cal Scan­ning Tech­nol­o­gy Lets Researchers Recov­er Lost Indige­nous Lan­guages from Old Wax Cylin­der Record­ings

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Japanese Violinist Covers Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption”: Metal Meets Classical Again

in Music | February 2nd, 2021

In a 1992 jour­nal arti­cle “Erup­tions: heavy met­al appro­pri­a­tions of clas­si­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty,” musi­col­o­gist Robert Walser explored the link between heavy met­al and clas­si­cal music–the way in which met­al gui­tarists stud­ied clas­si­cal music and cre­at­ed “a new kind of gui­tar vir­tu­os­i­ty.” Pub­lished by Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Press, Walser’s essay comes to focus on Eddie Van Halen’s “Erup­tion,” the “solo that trans­formed rock gui­tar.” He writes: “Released in 1978 on Van Halen’s first album, ‘Erup­tion’ [see an extend­ed live ver­sion below] is one minute and twen­ty-sev­en sec­onds of exu­ber­ant and play­ful vir­tu­os­i­ty, a vio­lin­ist’s pre­cise and showy tech­nique inflect­ed by the vocal rhetoric of the blues and rock ’n’ roll irrev­er­ence.” The solo fea­tures rhyth­mic pat­terns rem­i­nis­cent of J. S. Bach’s famous ‘Pre­lude in C major’, while “the har­mon­ic pro­gres­sions of ‘Erup­tion’ lead the lis­ten­er along an aur­al adven­ture,” much like you’d find in the music of Vival­di. None of this was an acci­dent. As a young­ster, Eddie Van Halen was raised on a diet of Mozart and Beethoven.

Above, you can watch “Jill,” a mem­ber of the Japan­ese met­al band Unlucky Mor­pheus, per­form a vio­lin-dri­ven ver­sion of “Erup­tion.” It’s clas­si­cal meets met­al once again, except this time a clas­si­cal instru­ment takes the lead. Enjoy.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

14-Year-Old Girl’s Blis­ter­ing Heavy Met­al Per­for­mance of Vival­di

Watch Some of Eddie Van Halen’s (RIP) Great­est Per­for­mances: “Shred­ding Was Eddie’s Very Essence”

The Great Illus­tra­tion That Accom­pa­nied Eddie Van Halen’s Appli­ca­tion to the U.S. Patent and Trade­mark Office (1987)

15-Year-Old French Gui­tar Prodi­gy Flaw­less­ly Rips Through Solos by Eddie Van Halen, David Gilmour, Yng­wie Malm­steen & Steve Vai

Musi­cal Come­di­an Reg­gie Watts Rein­vents Van Halen’s Clas­sic, “Pana­ma”

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Listen to the Never-Heard Song Written for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

in Film, Music | February 2nd, 2021

Hol­ly­wood film scores have become bland­ly for­mu­la­ic, thanks to film­mak­ers’ over-reliance on the same kinds of “temp music” dur­ing the edit­ing process, a prac­tice that can lead to a boil­er­plate approach at the scor­ing stage. But the use of tem­po­rary music is noth­ing new. Stan­ley Kubrick left the temp score for 2001: A Space Odyssey as the film’s offi­cial sound­track, opt­ing for Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathus­tra for the icon­ic open­ing sequence over the score com­posed by Alex North.

While com­posers may now stick too close­ly to temp music, North strayed too far, Kubrick com­plained, writ­ing a score “which could not have been more alien to the music we had lis­tened to.” Anoth­er com­pos­er, Wendy Car­los, scored two of Kubrick’s films—The Shin­ing and A Clock­work Orange. In both cas­es, her orig­i­nal music was most­ly cut in favor of clas­si­cal record­ings. Kubrick described his atti­tude in an inter­view with Michael Ciment: “Why use music which is less good when there is such a mul­ti­tude of great orches­tral music avail­able from the past and from our own time?”

Few have argued with the results of Kubrick’s ruth­less approach, though Car­los refused to work with him again. Maybe Kubrick’s films would have been equal­ly well-received with dif­fer­ent music, who can say? But if the direc­tor found North’s score “alien,” con­sid­er what he must have thought when he heard Mike Kaplan’s lyri­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of his sci-fi epic, “2001: A Gar­den of Per­son­al Mir­rors.” Weird doesn’t real­ly begin to describe it, and it’s odd­er still giv­en that Kubrick him­self com­mis­sioned the song. After reject­ing anoth­er song­writer’s demo at MGM’s offices, he sup­pos­ed­ly turned to Kaplan, then a young pub­li­cist, and said, “I hear you write music. Why don’t you write some­thing?”

There’s no indi­ca­tion that Kubrick had “MacArthur Park” in mind as inspi­ra­tion, but Kaplan chose to “emu­late the suc­cess of the quirky hit,” writes Vanes­sa Thor­pe at The Guardian. After 52 years, Kaplan’s song has final­ly been released, “thanks to a small British record label.” Thor­pe quotes Observ­er film crit­ic Mark Ker­mode, who played the song on his radio show: “Audi­ence reac­tion was utter­ly polar­ized, but I have the sus­pi­cion it will become a cult favorite. It is very ear-wormy.” It was sup­posed to be, any­way, as a sin­gle to pro­mote the film to con­fused audi­ences.

When Kaplan played the ver­sion above with folk singer Nao­mi Gard­ner for Kubrick, Thor­pe writes, he got a very dif­fer­ent response: “Although the great direc­tor liked the title, he said he could not imag­ine it becom­ing a hit. The two friends nev­er dis­cussed the song again, although they con­tin­ued to work togeth­er close­ly on A Clock­work Orange.” Kaplan didn’t take the rejec­tion per­son­al­ly, but he’s pleased it has final­ly emerged for the pub­lic to hear. “I know it doesn’t sound like any­thing else,” he says. It cer­tain­ly does­n’t sound remote­ly like any of the music in 2001.

Kubrick may not have cared for “2001: A Gar­den of Per­son­al Mir­rors,” but it does, in its way, cap­ture the spir­it of a film Kaplan calls “a meta­phys­i­cal dra­ma encom­pass­ing evo­lu­tion, rein­car­na­tion, the beau­ty of space, the ter­ror of sci­ence and the mys­tery of mankind,” a film that “required crit­ics and audi­ences to sur­ren­der to its unique rhythms.”

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Open­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Orig­i­nal, Unused Score

The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Pro­vides a Sound­track for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

The Scores That Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Com­posed for Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

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

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Werner Herzog Discovers the Ecstasy of Skateboarding: “That’s Kind of My People”

in Film, Sports | February 1st, 2021

If Wern­er Her­zog has ever stood atop a skate­board, cin­e­ma seems not to have record­ed it. But when asked by online skate­board­ing mag­a­zine Jenkem to dis­cuss the sport and/or lifestyle, he did so with char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly lit­tle reser­va­tion. “I’m not famil­iar with the scene of skate­board­ing,” he admits in the video inter­view above. “At the same time, I had the feel­ing, yes, that’s kind of my peo­ple.” Fans will make the con­nec­tion between skate­board­ing videos and the Bavar­i­an film­mak­er’s ear­ly doc­u­men­tary The Great Ecsta­sy of Wood­carv­er Stein­er, on cham­pi­on ski jumper Wal­ter Stein­er, even before a clip of it appears.

In fact Her­zog him­self, as revealed in the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal short Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog, only turned film­mak­er after shelv­ing his own dreams of ski-jump­ing. The expe­ri­ence must have taught him vis­cer­al­ly, through those parts of the body that don’t for­get, what it means to make count­less attempts result­ing in count­less fail­ures — with a bet­ter fail­ure here and there, and at some dis­tant, ecsta­t­ic moment, per­haps a suc­cess.

Viewed at great enough length, the kind of skate­board­er who attempts a trick on video dozens, even hun­dreds of times, before land­ing it could well be a char­ac­ter from one of Her­zog’s own films, espe­cial­ly his doc­u­men­taries about men unable to stop putting them­selves in har­m’s way in the name of their fix­a­tions.

“So many fail­ures,” mar­vels Her­zog as he watch­es one such video. “That’s aston­ish­ing.” It cer­tain­ly “does­n’t do good to his pelvis, nor to his elbows,” Her­zog adds, but such is the price of ecsta­sy. For him, the obscu­ri­ty of the vast major­i­ty of skate­board­ers only com­pounds the sacred­ness of their prac­tice. This as opposed to the David Blaines of the world, whose phys­i­cal feats “are meant only for his own pub­lic­i­ty, and for shin­ing out in the media. Skate­board kids are not out for the media. They do it for the joy of it, and for the fun of it.” If Her­zog were to pay cin­e­mat­ic trib­ute to these kids, sure­ly he would make sim­i­lar obser­va­tions though voiceover nar­ra­tion. As for his instinct of how to fill out the rest of the sound­track, “What comes to mind first and fore­most would be Russ­ian Ortho­dox church choirs.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing and Life Advice

Tony Hawk & Archi­tec­tur­al His­to­ri­an Iain Bor­den Tell the Sto­ry of How Skate­board­ing Found a New Use for Cities & Archi­tec­ture

“Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Bet­ter”: How Samuel Beck­ett Cre­at­ed the Unlike­ly Mantra That Inspires Entre­pre­neurs Today

Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog: The Director’s Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Short Film from 1986

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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The Internet Archive Now Digitizing 1,000,000+ Objects from a Massive Cinema History Library

in Archives, Film, History, Internet Archive | February 1st, 2021


Major motion pic­tures need the work of writ­ers, direc­tors, actors, cin­e­matog­ra­phers, and a slew of oth­er pro­fes­sion­als besides. That group also includes researchers, whose role has until recent­ly gone prac­ti­cal­ly uncel­e­brat­ed out­side the indus­try. In 2015, film­mak­er Daniel Raim brought the work of the film researcher to light with Harold and Lil­lian: A Hol­ly­wood Love Sto­ry, about pro­duc­tion design­er Harold Michel­son and his researcher wife Lil­lian. “In Raim’s doc­u­men­tary, she talks about work­ing on Fid­dler on the Roof and the film­mak­ers need­ed to know what a Jew­ish wom­an’s under­gar­ments looked like in the 1890s,” writes The Hol­ly­wood Reporter’s Emi­ly Hilton. How could she find such obscure infor­ma­tion?

“Michel­son sat on a bench at Fair­fax and Bev­er­ly near a Jew­ish deli and spoke to women who were about the right age to have been alive in that era.” One of these women “ran home and grabbed a sewing pat­tern for her to ref­er­ence. This research inspired the out­fits that Τevye’s daugh­ters wear in the num­ber: knee length bloomers with scal­loped edges.”

As yet, this pat­tern has­n’t appeared in the Michel­son Cin­e­ma Research Library, now host­ed online at the Inter­net Archive. But it may yet, as the project of dig­i­ti­za­tion and upload­ing has hard­ly begun: it was just last year that the nona­ge­nar­i­an Lil­lian Michel­son donat­ed to the Archive her for­mi­da­ble col­lec­tion of research mate­ri­als, amassed over her long career.

“After near­ly six decades serv­ing film­mak­ers first at Samuel Gold­wyn, then the Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute, Zoetrope Stu­dio, Para­mount and Dream­Works,” writes the Los Ange­les Times’ Mary McNa­ma­ra, “the library filled 1,594 box­es: tens of thou­sands of books, pho­tographs, mag­a­zines and a panoply of oth­er visu­al resources. All of this had been sit­ting for five years in a stor­age facil­i­ty, paid for by friends who could not bear to see it all destroyed.” Now that the dig­i­tal archival process is under­way, you can browse the first 1,300 or so entries at the Inter­net Archive, which allows users to vir­tu­al­ly check out the Michel­son Cin­e­ma Research Library’s books on sub­jects rang­ing from the­atri­cal cos­tumes and vin­tage cin­e­ma lob­by cards to places like Japan and Paris to less expect­ed top­ics like the Amaz­ing Kre­skin and the exter­nals of the Catholic Church.

But then, a Hol­ly­wood researcher must be pre­pared to learn about any­thing, and by all accounts Lil­lian Michel­son was per­haps the great­est of them all. In addi­tion to its com­pre­hen­sive­ness, her library became a hang­out of choice for a vari­ety of stu­dio pro­fes­sion­als and celebri­ties includ­ing Tom Waits. (“I wouldn’t be sur­prised if that’s how he found some time to unwind,” says Raim, “just drink­ing tea there.”) The Inter­net Archive describes her col­lec­tion as con­sist­ing of “5,000 books, 30,000 pho­tographs, and more than 1,000,000 clip­pings, scrap­books and ephemera,” more of which will come online as time goes by. Even­tu­al­ly the site will con­tain all the mate­ri­als from which Michel­son drew vital knowl­edge for film­mak­ers like Roman Polan­s­ki, Alfred Hitch­cock, and Stan­ley Kubrick. And if her research mate­ri­als sat­is­fied those three, they’re more than good enough for us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10,000 Clas­sic Movie Posters Get­ting Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter at UT-Austin: Free to Browse & Down­load

40,000 Film Posters in a Won­der­ful­ly Eclec­tic Archive: Ital­ian Tarkovsky Posters, Japan­ese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

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

Good Movies as Old Books: 100 Films Reimag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

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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When the Frequency for Tuning Instruments Became a Grand Conspiracy Theory

in Music | February 1st, 2021

Con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries are like block­buster Hol­ly­wood movies. Instead of the painful, con­fus­ing tedi­um of his­tor­i­cal detail that meets us when we try to under­stand the world, they offer spec­ta­cle, clear dichotomies of good and evil, the promise of redemp­tive res­o­lu­tion. If only, say, we could rid our­selves of scur­rilous fig­ures behind the scenes, we could get back to the gar­den and make every­thing great. Or, if only we could change the fre­quen­cy of stan­dard musi­cal pitch from 440 Hz to 432 Hz, we could throw off the yoke of Nazi mind con­trol, expe­ri­ence pure med­i­ta­tive bliss, open our root chakras, and.… Wait… what? 

If this one’s new to you, you’ll find rab­bit holes aplen­ty to fall into online. Retired den­tist Leonard Horowitz, for exam­ple, has elab­o­rat­ed a the­o­ry that has “the Rock­e­feller Foundation’s mil­i­tary com­mer­cial­iza­tion of music,” then Nazi pro­pa­gan­da min­is­ter Joseph Goebbels, trick­ing the world into 440 Hz, “effec­tive­ly per­suad­ing Hitler’s sup­posed ene­mies in Britain to adopt this alleged­ly supe­ri­or stan­dard tun­ing for the ‘Mas­ter Race.’” Mean­while, on YouTube (and even in sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals), notes Thom Dunn at Boing Boing, pseu­do­science about the “‘med­i­ta­tive qual­i­ties of 432 Hertz” pro­lif­er­ates, “which, of course, relates back to Horow­itz’s the­o­ry that 440 Hertz is a weapon of Nazi aggres­sion.”

Like most con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, “there is a ker­nel of truth here—that there has been an his­tor­i­cal debate between these fre­quen­cies for mid­dle ‘A,’ and that 440 Hertz won out large­ly because of West­ern indus­tri­al­iza­tion, which coin­cid­ed with some World Wars.” The his­to­ry, how­ev­er, pre­dates the Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion and the Nazis, extend­ing back at least to 1885, as Alan Cross writes at Glob­al News, when “the Music Com­mis­sion of the Ital­ian Gov­ern­ment declared that all instru­ments and orches­tras should use a tun­ing fork that vibrat­ed at 440 Hz, which was dif­fer­ent from the orig­i­nal stan­dard of 435 Hz and the com­pet­ing 432 Hz used in France.”

The push for world­wide com­mer­cial stan­dard­iza­tion final­ly decid­ed the ques­tion in the 20th cen­tu­ry, not mind con­trol. It was just busi­ness, but why do the pro­po­nents of 432 Hz believe this is the supe­ri­or fre­quen­cy? In the video above, gui­tar teacher Paul Davids sat­i­rizes the rea­son­ing (over the X‑Files theme): some­thing to do with “the nat­ur­al har­mon­ics found in sacred num­bers” and the “psy­chic poi­son­ing of the mass of human­i­ty.” Davids quick­ly moves on to dis­cuss the actu­al his­to­ry of tun­ing, from the 15th cen­tu­ry onward, when stan­dards ranged from coun­try to coun­try, even city to city, any­where between 400 and 500 Hz. (Learn more about the his­to­ry of pitch in the video above.)

Some clas­si­cal musi­cians who play Bach, for exam­ple, tune to 415 Hz, not because it has mag­i­cal qual­i­ties but because it’s the fre­quen­cy Bach used, one semi­tone below today’s stan­dard 440 Hz. But all of this is aca­d­e­m­ic. Should not our ears and chakras be the judge? I stick close­ly to the cri­te­ri­on, “if it sounds good, it is good,” so I’m open to con­sid­er­ing the supe­ri­or­i­ty of 432 Hz. So is Davids, and he demon­strates the dif­fer­ence between the two pitch­es in some fin­ger­picked exam­ples of clas­si­cal and con­tem­po­rary hits. What do we hear?

Each of us will have a dif­fer­ent response to these fre­quen­cies, depend­ing on sev­er­al fac­tors, not least of which is our degree of con­di­tion­ing to 440 Hz. Musi­cians and com­posers, for exam­ple, are far more sen­si­tive to changes in pitch and more like­ly to feel the dif­fer­ence, espe­cial­ly if they try to sing or play along. What does Davids hear? He per­son­al­ly dis­miss­es any notion that 432 Hz tun­ing will “let a dif­fer­ent part of the uni­verse vibrate,” or what­ev­er. For one thing, play­ing in a dif­fer­ent key makes the fre­quen­cy change large­ly irrel­e­vant. For anoth­er, every musi­cal note res­onates at mul­ti­ple fre­quen­cies, nev­er only one.

Log­i­cal­ly, the dif­fer­ence between 432 and 440 Hz is arbi­trary, even in the most med­i­ta­tive of relax­ing 432 Hz videos on YouTube. “It all comes down,” says Davids, “to what you’re play­ing and how it sounds.” Or as Thelo­nious Monk put it in his indis­pens­able advice to musi­cians, “You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?” and “A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imag­i­na­tion.”

For more, read Ted Gioia’s 2017 piece in The Dai­ly Beast, Are We All Mis­tun­ing Our Instru­ments, and Can We Blame the Nazis?.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The His­to­ry of Music Told in Sev­en Rapid­ly Illus­trat­ed Min­utes

Music Is Tru­ly a Uni­ver­sal Lan­guage: New Research Shows That Music World­wide Has Impor­tant Com­mon­al­i­ties

Vis­it an Online Col­lec­tion of 61,761 Musi­cal Instru­ments from Across the World

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

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YInMn Blue, the First Shade of Blue Discovered in 200 Years, Is Now Available for Artists

in Art, Chemistry, Science | January 29th, 2021

Pho­to via Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty

“Col­or is part of a spec­trum, so you can’t dis­cov­er a col­or,” says Pro­fes­sor Mas Sub­ra­man­ian, a sol­id-state chemist at Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty. “You can only dis­cov­er a mate­r­i­al that is a par­tic­u­lar color”—or, more pre­cise­ly, a mate­r­i­al that reflects light in such a way that we per­ceive it as a col­or. Sci­en­tif­ic mod­esty aside, Sub­ra­man­ian actu­al­ly has been cred­it­ed with dis­cov­er­ing a color—the first inor­gan­ic shade of blue in 200 years.

Named “YIn­Mn blue” —and affec­tion­ate­ly called “Mas­Blue” at Ore­gon State—the pig­men­t’s unwieldy name derives from its chem­i­cal make­up of yttri­um, indi­um, and man­ganese oxides, which togeth­er “absorbed red and green wave­lengths and reflect­ed blue wave­lengths in such a way that it came off look­ing a very bright blue,” Gabriel Rosen­berg notes at NPR. It is a blue, in fact, nev­er before seen, since it is not a nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring pig­ment, but one lit­er­al­ly cooked in a lab­o­ra­to­ry, and by acci­dent at that.

The dis­cov­ery, if we can use the word, should just­ly be cred­it­ed to Subramanian’s grad stu­dent Andrew E. Smith who, dur­ing a 2009 attempt to “man­u­fac­ture new mate­ri­als that could be used in elec­tron­ics,” heat­ed the par­tic­u­lar mix of chem­i­cals to over 2000 degrees Fahren­heit. Smith noticed “it had turned a sur­pris­ing, bright blue col­or [and] Sub­ra­man­ian knew imme­di­ate­ly it was a big deal.” Why? Because the col­or blue is a big deal.

In an impor­tant sense, col­or is some­thing humans dis­cov­ered over long peri­ods of time in which we learned to see the world in shades and hues our ances­tors could not per­ceive. “Some sci­en­tists believe that the ear­li­est humans were actu­al­ly col­or­blind,” Emma Tag­gart writes at My Mod­ern Met, “and could only rec­og­nize black, white, red, and only lat­er yel­low and green.” Blue, that is to say, didn’t exist for ear­ly humans. “With no con­cept of the col­or blue,” Tag­gart writes, “they sim­ply had no words to describe it. This is even reflect­ed in ancient lit­er­a­ture, such as Homer’s Odyssey,” with its “wine-dark sea.”

Pho­to via Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty

Sea and sky only begin to assume their cur­rent col­ors some 6,000 years ago when ancient Egyp­tians began to pro­duce blue pig­ment. The first known col­or to be syn­thet­i­cal­ly pro­duced is thus called Egypt­ian blue, cre­at­ed using “ground lime­stone mixed with sand and a cop­per-con­tain­ing min­er­al, such as azu­rite or mala­chite.” Blue holds a spe­cial place in our col­or lex­i­cog­ra­phy. It is the last col­or word that devel­ops across cul­tures and one of the most dif­fi­cult col­ors to man­u­fac­ture. “Peo­ple have been look­ing for a good, durable blue col­or for a cou­ple of cen­turies,” Sub­ra­man­ian told NPR.

And so, YIn­Mn blue has become a sen­sa­tion among indus­tri­al man­u­fac­tur­ers and artists. Patent­ed in 2012 by OSU, it received approval for indus­tri­al use in 2017. That same year, Aus­tralian paint sup­pli­er Derivan released it as an acrylic paint called “Ore­gon Blue.” It has tak­en a few more years for the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency to come around, but they’ve final­ly approved Yln­Mn blue for com­mer­cial use, “mak­ing it avail­able to all,” Isis Davis-Marks writes at Smith­son­ian. “Now the authen­ti­cat­ed pig­ment is avail­able for sale in paint retail­ers like Gold­en in the US.”

Pho­to via Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty

The new blue solves a num­ber of prob­lems with oth­er blue pig­ments. It is non­tox­ic and not prone to fad­ing, since it “reflects heat and absorbs UV radi­a­tion.” YIn­Mn blue is “extreme­ly sta­ble, a prop­er­ty long sought in a blue pig­ment,” says Sub­ra­man­ian. It also fills “a gap in the range of col­ors,” says art sup­ply man­u­fac­tur­er Georg Kre­mer, adding, “The pure­ness of YIn­Blue is real­ly per­fect.”

Since their first, acci­den­tal col­or dis­cov­ery, “Sub­ra­man­ian and his team have expand­ed their research and have made a range of new pig­ments to include almost every col­or, from bright oranges to shades of pur­ple, turquoise and green,” notes the Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty Depart­ment of Chem­istry. None have yet had the impact of the new blue. Learn much more about the unique chem­i­cal prop­er­ties of YIn­Mn blue here and see Pro­fes­sor Sub­ra­man­ian dis­cuss its dis­cov­ery in his TED talk fur­ther up.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Behold One of the Ear­li­est Known Col­or Charts: The Table of Phys­i­o­log­i­cal Col­ors (1686)

A 900-Page Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­or from 1692: A Com­plete Dig­i­tal Scan

Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colour, the 19th-Cen­tu­ry “Col­or Dic­tio­nary” Used by Charles Dar­win (1814)

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

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The First American Cookbook: Sample Recipes from American Cookery (1796)

in Food & Drink, History | January 29th, 2021

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

On the off chance Lin-Manuel Miran­da is cast­ing around for source mate­r­i­al for his next Amer­i­can his­to­ry-based block­buster musi­cal, may we sug­gest Amer­i­can Cook­ery by “poor soli­tary orphan” Amelia Sim­mons?

First pub­lished in 1796, at 47 pages (near­ly three of them are ded­i­cat­ed to dress­ing a tur­tle), it’s a far quick­er read than the fate­ful Ron Cher­now Hamil­ton biog­ra­phy Miran­da impul­sive­ly select­ed for a vaca­tion beach read.

Slen­der as it is, there’s no short­age of meaty mate­r­i­al:

Calves Head dressed Tur­tle Fash­ion

Soup of Lamb’s Head and Pluck

Fowl Smoth­ered in Oys­ters

Tongue Pie

Foot Pie

Mod­ern chefs may find some of the first Amer­i­can cook­book’s meth­ods and mea­sure­ments take some get­ting used to.

We like to cook, but we’re not sure we pos­sess the where­with­al to tack­le a Crook­neck or Win­ter Squash Pud­ding.

We’ve nev­er been called upon to “per­fume” our “whipt cream” with “musk or amber gum tied in a rag.”

And we wouldn’t know a whortle­ber­ry if it bit us in the whit­pot.

The book’s full title is an indi­ca­tion of its mys­te­ri­ous author’s ambi­tions for the new country’s culi­nary future:

Amer­i­can Cook­ery, or the art of dress­ing viands, fish, poul­try, and veg­eta­bles, and the best modes of mak­ing pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, pud­dings, cus­tards, and pre­serves, and all kinds of cakes, from the impe­r­i­al plum to plain cake: Adapt­ed to this coun­try, and all grades of life.

As Kei­th Stave­ly and Kath­leen Fitzger­ald write in an essay for What It Means to Be an Amer­i­can, a “nation­al con­ver­sa­tion host­ed by the Smith­son­ian and Ari­zona State Uni­ver­si­ty,” Amer­i­can Cook­ery man­aged to strad­dle the refined tastes of Fed­er­al­ist elites and the Jef­fer­so­ni­ans who believed “rus­tic sim­plic­i­ty would inoc­u­late their fledg­ling coun­try against the cor­rupt­ing influ­ence of the lux­u­ry to which Britain had suc­cumbed”:

The recipe for “Queen’s Cake” was pure social aspi­ra­tion, in the British mode, with its but­ter whipped to a cream, pound of sug­ar, pound and a quar­ter of flour, 10 eggs, glass of wine, half-teacup of del­i­cate-fla­vored rose­wa­ter, and spices. And “Plumb Cake” offered the striv­ing house­wife a huge 21-egg show­stop­per, full of expen­sive dried and can­died fruit, nuts, spices, wine, and cream.

Then—mere pages away—sat john­ny­cake, fed­er­al pan cake, buck­wheat cake, and Indi­an slap­jack, made of famil­iar ingre­di­ents like corn­meal, flour, milk, water, and a bit of fat, and pre­pared “before the fire” or on a hot grid­dle. They sym­bol­ized the plain, but well-run and boun­ti­ful, Amer­i­can home. A dia­logue on how to bal­ance the sump­tu­ous with the sim­ple in Amer­i­can life had begun.

(Hamil­ton fans will please note that the cake for the 1780 Schuyler-Hamil­ton wed­ding leaned more toward the for­mer than any­thing in the john­ny­cake / slap­jack vein…)

Amer­i­can Cook­ery is one of nine 18th-cen­tu­ry titles to make the Library of Con­gress’ list of 100 Books That Shaped Amer­i­ca:

This cor­ner­stone in Amer­i­can cook­ery is the first cook­book of Amer­i­can author­ship to be print­ed in the Unit­ed States. Numer­ous recipes adapt­ing tra­di­tion­al dish­es by sub­sti­tut­ing native Amer­i­can ingre­di­ents, such as corn, squash and pump­kin, are print­ed here for the first time. Sim­mons’ “Pomp­kin Pud­ding,” baked in a crust, is the basis for the clas­sic Amer­i­can pump­kin pie. Recipes for cake-like gin­ger­bread are the first known to rec­om­mend the use of pearl ash, the fore­run­ner of bak­ing pow­der.

Stu­dents of Women’s His­to­ry will find much to chew on in the sec­ond edi­tion of Amer­i­can Cook­ery as well, though they may find a few spoon­fuls of pearl ash dis­solved in water nec­es­sary to set­tle upset stom­achs after read­ing Sim­mons’ intro­duc­tion.

Stave­ly and Fitzger­ald observe how “she thanks the fash­ion­able ladies,” or “respectable char­ac­ters,” as she calls them, who have patron­ized her work, before return­ing to her main theme: the “egre­gious blun­ders” of the first edi­tion, “which were occa­sioned either by the igno­rance, or evil inten­tion of the tran­scriber for the press.”

Ulti­mate­ly, all of her prob­lems stem from her unfor­tu­nate con­di­tion; she is with­out “an edu­ca­tion suf­fi­cient to pre­pare the work for the press.” In an attempt to side­step any crit­i­cism that the sec­ond edi­tion might come in for, she writes: “remem­ber, that it is the per­for­mance of, and effect­ed under all those dis­ad­van­tages, which usu­al­ly attend, an Orphan.”

Read the sec­ond edi­tion of Amer­i­can Cook­ery here. (If the archa­ic font trou­bles your eyes, a plain­er ver­sion is here.) A fac­sim­i­le edi­tion of Amer­i­can Cook­ery can be pur­chased online.

Lis­ten to a Lib­riVox audio record­ing of Amer­i­can Cook­ery here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

His­toric Mex­i­can Recipes Are Now Avail­able as Free Dig­i­tal Cook­books: Get Start­ed With Dessert

Recipes from the Kitchen of Geor­gia O’Keeffe

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Great Gatsby Is Now in the Public Domain and There’s a New Graphic Novel

in Books | January 29th, 2021

If you’ve ever dreamed about mount­ing that “Great Gats­by” musi­cal, or writ­ing that sci-fi adap­ta­tion based on Gats­by but they’re all androids, there’s some good news: as of Jan­u­ary 1, 2021, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s clas­sic nov­el final­ly entered the pub­lic domain. (Read a pub­lic domain copy here.) Cre­atives can now do what they want with the work: reprint or adapt it any way they like, with­out hav­ing to nego­ti­ate the rights.

Or you could, just like Min­neapo­lis-based artist K. Wood­man-May­nard adapt the work into a beau­ti­ful graph­ic nov­el, pages of which you can glimpse here. Her ver­sion is all light and pas­tel water­col­ors, with a lib­er­al use of the orig­i­nal text along­side more fan­tas­tic sur­re­al imagery, mak­ing visu­al some of Fitzgerald’s word play. At 240 pages, there’s a lot of work here and, as if it needs repeat­ing, no graph­ic nov­el is a sub­sti­tute for the orig­i­nal, just…a jazz riff, if you were.

But Wood­man-May­nard was one of many wait­ing for Gats­by to enter the pub­lic domain, which apart from Dis­ney prop­er­ty, will hap­pen to most record­ed and writ­ten works over time. Many authors have been wait­ing for the chance to riff on the nov­el and its char­ac­ters with­out wor­ry­ing about a cease and desist let­ter. Already you can find The Gay Gats­by, B.A. Baker’s slash fic­tion rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of all the sup­pressed long­ing in the orig­i­nal nov­el; The Great Gats­by Undead, a zom­bie ver­sion; and Michael Far­ris Smith’s Nick, a pre­quel that fol­lows Nick Car­raway through World War I and out the oth­er side. And there are plen­ty more to come.

Copy­right law stip­u­lates that any work after 95 years will enter the pub­lic domain. (Up until 1998, this used to be 75 years, but some lawyers talked to some con­gress­crit­ters).

As of 2021, along with The Great Gats­by, the pub­lic domain gained:

Mrs. Dal­loway — Vir­ginia Woolf

In Our Time — Ernest Hem­ing­way

The New Negro — Alain Locke (the first major com­pendi­um of Harlem Renais­sance writ­ers)

An Amer­i­can Tragedy — Theodore Dreis­er (adapt­ed into the 1951 film A Place in the Sun)

The Secret of Chim­neys — Agatha Christie

Arrow­smith — Sin­clair Lewis

Those Bar­ren Leaves — Aldous Hux­ley

The Paint­ed Veil — W. Som­er­set Maugh­am

Now, the thing about The Great Gats­by is that it is both loved by read­ers and hard to adapt into oth­er medi­ums by its fans. It has been adapt­ed five times for the screen (the Baz Luhrmann-Leonar­do DiCaprio ver­sion is the most recent from 2013) and they have all dealt with the cen­tral para­dox: Fitzger­ald gives us so lit­tle about Gats­by. The author is inten­tion­al­ly hop­ing the read­er to cre­ate this “great man” in our heads, and there he must stay. The nov­el is very much about the “idea” of a man, much like the idea of the “Amer­i­can Dream.” But film must cast some­body and Hol­ly­wood absolute­ly has to cast a star like Leonar­do DiCaprio or Robert Red­ford. A graph­ic nov­el, how­ev­er, does not have those con­ces­sions to the mar­ket. Woodman-Maynard’s ver­sion is not even the first graph­ic nov­el based on Fitzgerald’s book—-Scribner pub­lished a ver­sion adapt­ed by Fred Ford­ham and illus­trat­ed by Aya Mor­ton last year—-and it cer­tain­ly will not be the last. Get ready for a bumper decade celebrating/critiquing the Roar­ing ‘20s, while we still fig­ure out what to call our own era.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2021: The Great Gats­by & Mrs. Dal­loway, Music by Irv­ing Berlin & Duke Elling­ton, Come­dies by Buster Keaton, and More

The Great Gats­by and Wait­ing for Godot: The Video Game Edi­tions

The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gats­by, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Clas­sic Crit­i­cism of Amer­i­ca (NSFW)

The Only Known Footage of the 1926 Film Adap­ta­tion of The Great Gats­by (Which F. Scott Fitzger­ald Hat­ed)

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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