When Lucy Lawless Impersonated Stevie Nicks & Imagined Her as the Owner of a Bad Tex-Mex Restaurant: A Cult Classic SNL Skit

in Comedy, Music, Television | June 5th, 2020

What we wouldn’t give to trav­el back in time to Sedona, Ari­zona for a non-social­ly-dis­tanced $2.99 Tues­day night bur­ri­to spe­cial at Ste­vie Nicks’ Faji­ta Roundup, the hun­dredth best restau­rant in this 161-restau­rant town accord­ing to one rat­ings site.

Alas, the clos­est this Fleet­wood Mac‑flavored Tex-Mex estab­lish­ment has ever come to phys­i­cal exis­tence was in Octo­ber 1998 when actor Lucy Law­less, famous then as now for play­ing Xena the War­rior Princess, was host­ing Sat­ur­day Night Live.

The day before the Wednes­day table read to deter­mine which sketch­es will make it on air, writer Hugh Fink got wind of Law­less’ Ste­vie Nicks imper­son­ation (she also does a mean Chrissie Hyn­de…)

Fink thought this was some­thing to build on, inspired by his dad’s Fleet­wood Mac fan­dom, and the fact that Nicks’ star had dimmed a bit since the band’s 70’s hey­day, when its mem­bers’ inter­per­son­al rela­tions were a hot top­ic and Rumours, still the 8th best sell­ing album of all time, dom­i­nat­ed.

He joined forces with fel­low staff writer, Nicks fan Scott Wainio, tar­ry­ing ’til the wee hours of Wednes­day morn­ing to begin cast­ing about for com­ic ideas of how the sexy, shawl-draped fairy god­moth­er of rock ‘n’ roll might spend her off duty hours, now that “Lind­say Buck­ing­ham and cocaine” were in the rear view.

They decid­ed that hav­ing her own a bar­gain-priced local eatery sim­i­lar to the ones Fink remem­bered din­ing in as a tour­ing stand up was their best bet…and what more fit­ting locale than New Age mec­ca Sedona?

Plot-dri­ven SNL skits often peter out en route from a strong open­ing premise to the end­ing.

As a com­mer­cial par­o­dy, Ste­vie Nicks’ Faji­ta Roundup has no such trou­ble.

As Fink recent­ly recalled in an inter­view with The Ringer’s Dan Devine:

I want­ed this com­mer­cial to come off as not a classy, nation­al­ly pro­duced ad, but clear­ly a cheap, local­ly pro­duced com­mer­cial for a shit­ty restau­rant and that’s why, even in the script, at the time, I put in those cut­aways of, like, real­ly unap­peal­ing, bad-look­ing food with the price, and adver­tis­ing spe­cials. Comed­ical­ly, I thought it’d be even fun­nier if the restau­rant was cheap. The research depart­ment had to get me pho­tos of the Mex­i­can food, which I would approve. I would tell them, ‘No, I want it to look shit­ti­er than that. That looks too good.

The research depart­ment def­i­nite­ly deliv­ered. As did New Zealan­der Law­less, though she lacked the cul­tur­al ref­er­ence points to get the joke, and game as she was, dis­creet­ly tried to get pro­duc­er Lorne Michaels to pull the skit, wor­ried that it was a lead bal­loon.

It came by its laughs hon­est­ly in per­for­mance, the audi­ence eat­ing up retooled Fleet­wood Mac hits pro­mot­ing bur­ri­tos and nachos, but with Youtube some 8 years away, Ste­vie Nicks’ Faji­ta Round Up fad­ed into obscu­ri­ty….

It took a man with vision and a long mem­o­ry to bring it back.

In 2012, Matthew Amador truf­fled up the fond­ly remem­bered clip and start­ed a Face­book page for the hypo­thet­i­cal restau­rant, large­ly so he could claim it had catered the end-of-year intern-appre­ci­a­tion buf­fet at the cast­ing agency where he was work­ing.

The first likes came from the duti­ful interns, but even­tu­al­ly the page attract­ed oth­er like­mind­ed fans, who’d caught the orig­i­nal per­for­mance over a decade before.

It has since migrat­ed to Twit­ter, where “Stevie”—the first female dou­ble inductee to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame —is eager­ly await­ing reopen­ing while remind­ing her fol­low­ers that the Roundup’s tables “have always been a MINIMUM of 6’ apart, giv­ing you a safer din­ing expe­ri­ence you’ll nev­er for­get and giv­ing me plen­ty of room to twirl depend­ing on the length of my fringe.”

View the full tran­script here. And yes, you are cor­rect, that’s Jim­my Fal­lon at the piano, in his 3rd SNL appear­ance.

via The Ringer and Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ste­vie Nicks “Shows Us How to Kick Ass in High-Heeled Boots” in a 1983 Women’s Self Defense Man­u­al

How Fleet­wood Mac Makes A Song: A Video Essay Explor­ing the “Son­ic Paint­ings” on the Clas­sic Album, Rumours

Actress Lucy Law­less Per­forms the Pro­to-Fem­i­nist Com­e­dy “Lysis­tra­ta” for The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Pod­cast

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

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How Jazz Helped Fuel the 1960s Civil Rights Movement

in History, Jazz, Music | June 4th, 2020

Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em shoot us!
Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em stab us!
Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em tar and feath­er us!
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

—Charles Min­gus, “Fables of Faubus”

In 1957, Arkansas Gov­er­nor Orval Faubus decid­ed that integration—mandated three years ear­li­er by Brown v. Board of Ed.—constituted such a state of emer­gency that he mobi­lized the Nation­al Guard to pre­vent nine black stu­dents from going to school. An out­raged Charles Min­gus respond­ed with the lyrics to “Fables of Faubus,” a com­po­si­tion that first appeared on his cel­e­brat­ed Min­gus Ah Um in 1959.

Those who know the album may be puzzled—there are no lyrics on that record­ing. Colum­bia Records, notes Michael Ver­i­ty, found them “so incen­di­ary that they refused to allow them to be record­ed.” Min­gus re-record­ed the song the fol­low­ing year for Can­did Records, “lyrics and all, on Charles Min­gus Presents Charles Min­gus.” The iras­ci­ble bassist and bandleader’s words “offer some of the most bla­tant and harsh­est cri­tiques of Jim Crow atti­tudes in all of jazz activism.”

Min­gus’ expe­ri­ence with Colum­bia shows the line most jazz artists had to walk in the ear­ly years of the Civ­il Rights move­ment. Sev­er­al of Min­gus’ elders, like Louis Arm­strong and Duke Elling­ton, refrained from mak­ing pub­lic state­ments about racial injus­tice, for which they were lat­er harsh­ly crit­i­cized.

But between Min­gus’ two ver­sions of “Fables of Faubus,” jazz rad­i­cal­ly broke with old­er tra­di­tions that catered to and depend­ed on white audi­ences. “’If you don’t like it, don’t lis­ten,’ was the atti­tude,” as Amiri Bara­ka wrote in 1962.

Musi­cians turned inward: they played for each oth­er and for their com­mu­ni­ties, invent­ed new lan­guages to con­found jazz appro­pri­a­tors and car­ry the music for­ward on its own terms. Can­did Records own­er Nat Hentoff, long­time Vil­lage Voice jazz crit­ic and colum­nist, not only issued Min­gus’ vocal Faubus protest, but also that same year Max Roach’s We Insist! Free­dom Now Suite, which fea­tured a cov­er pho­to of a lunch counter protest and per­for­mances from his then-wife, singer and activist Abbey Lin­coln.

Roach record­ed two oth­er albums with promi­nent Civ­il Rights themes, Speak Broth­er Speak in 1962 and Lift Every Voice and Sing in 1971. Jazz’s turn toward the move­ment was in full swing as the 60s dawned. “Nina Simone sang the incen­di­ary ‘Mis­sis­sip­pi God­dam,’” writes KCRW’s Tom Schn­abel, “Coltrane per­formed a sad dirge, ‘Alaba­ma’ to mourn the Birm­ing­ham, Alaba­ma church bomb­ing in 1963. Son­ny Rollins record­ed The Free­dom Suite for River­side Records as a dec­la­ra­tion of musi­cal and racial free­dom.”

Every Civ­il Rights gen­er­a­tion up to the present has had its songs of sor­row, anger, and cel­e­bra­tion. Where gospel guid­ed the ear­ly marchers, jazz musi­cians of the 1960s took it upon them­selves to score the move­ment. Though he didn’t much like to talk about it in inter­views, “Coltrane was deeply involved in the civ­il rights move­ment,” writes Blank on Blank, “and shared many of Mal­colm X’s views on black con­scious­ness and Pan-African­ism, which he incor­po­rat­ed into his music.”

Jazz clubs even became spaces for orga­niz­ing:

In 1963, CORE—Congress of Racial Equality—organized two ben­e­fit shows at the Five Spot Café, [fea­tur­ing] a host of promi­nent musi­cians and music jour­nal­ists.

In the wake of Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech at the March on Wash­ing­ton and with the church bomb­ing in Birm­ing­ham that killed 4 lit­tle girls only the month before, the ben­e­fit attract­ed a host of musi­cians like Ben Web­ster, Al Cohn, and Zoot Sims in sup­port of the orga­ni­za­tion, which, along with the NAACP and SNCC, was one of the lead­ing civ­il rights groups at the time.

The new jazz, hot or cool, became more deeply expres­sive of musi­cians’ indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ties, and thus of their whole polit­i­cal, social, and spir­i­tu­al selves. This was no small thing; jazz may have been an Amer­i­can inven­tion, but it was an inter­na­tion­al phe­nom­e­non. Artists in the 60s car­ried the strug­gle abroad with music and activism. After a wave of bru­tal bomb­ings, mur­ders, and beat­ings, “there were no more side­lines,” writes Ashawn­ta Jack­son at JSTOR Dai­ly. “Jazz musi­cians, like any oth­er Amer­i­can, had the duty to speak to the world around them.” And the world lis­tened.

The first Berlin Jazz Fes­ti­val, held in 1964, was intro­duced with an address by Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. (who did not attend in per­son). “Jazz is export­ed to the world,” King wrote, and “much of the pow­er of our Free­dom Move­ment in the Unit­ed States has come from this music. It has strength­ened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich har­monies when spir­its were down.” Music still plays the same role in today’s strug­gles. It’s a dif­fer­ent sound now, but you’ll still hear Min­gus’ vers­es in the streets, against more waves of hatred and brute force:

Boo! Nazi Fas­cist suprema­cists
Boo! Ku Klux Klan (with your Jim Crow plan)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Coltrane Talks About the Sacred Mean­ing of Music in the Human Expe­ri­ence: Lis­ten to One of His Final Inter­views (1966)

Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Explains the Impor­tance of Jazz: Hear the Speech He Gave at the First Berlin Jazz Fes­ti­val (1964)

Nina Simone’s Live Per­for­mances of Her Poignant Civ­il Rights Protest Songs

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

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How David Chase Breathed Life into the The Sopranos

in Television | June 4th, 2020

Warn­ing: watch­ing the above video essay with David Chase, Matthew Wein­er, Ter­ence Win­ter, and the oth­er writ­ers of The Sopra­nos (along with select longer-form videos below) may send you into a binge watch (or re-watch) of the HBO series. Just say­ing, because you might want to set aside some time.

It is hard to believe that the series pre­miere was over 20 years ago, since its insights into Amer­i­ca, our love affair with vio­lence, and the mob hasn’t changed. (I mean, look at the gang­sters cur­rent­ly run­ning the coun­try).

David Chase orig­i­nal­ly balked at the idea of a God­fa­ther-type show after it was pitched to him, but the gang­ster idea stuck and mutat­ed into an idea for a fea­ture film about a mob boss seek­ing ther­a­py. Across town in one of those Hol­ly­wood coin­ci­dences, Harold Ramis was hav­ing the same idea for a film called Ana­lyze This.

Ramis’ film would be a per­fect­ly fine com­e­dy and Chase wound up tak­ing his fea­ture idea and turn­ing it into a tele­vi­sion series. It would go on to rev­o­lu­tion­ize tele­vi­sion and change the gang­ster genre for good. For now here was a show about gang­sters who were all very aware of the film and tele­vi­sion his­to­ry of the genre, and they act­ed accord­ing to the roles that they idol­ized from The God­fa­ther and from Good Fel­las. Yet, as Chase points out, the char­ac­ters nev­er real­ly know how to feel about all this:

To me it wasn’t just the end­ing that was ambigu­ous. There was ambi­gu­i­ty going on all the time. And you know what that comes down to now that I think about it—the char­ac­ters in the piece were ambigu­ous them­selves. They didn’t know how they felt. When you write a scene some­times you think, does this guy real­ly believe what he’s say­ing? Does he real­ly feel this? Or is this just a place­hold­er in his mind? ‘I’ll say this line just so I can eat my sandwich’…That’s why [the show] is so fun to write, because usu­al­ly you are writ­ing what peo­ple are think­ing of feel­ing, but in The Sopra­nos you’re always writ­ing what they’re *not* think­ing or feel­ing.

These were brutish, dumb guys who believed they were the clever, fun­ny guys they grew up watch­ing, and you can extrap­o­late that to quite a lot of our his­to­ry from the Cold War and beyond—electing peo­ple based on who we want them to be, or for the role they play, not for who they actu­al­ly are. The end point of Tony Soprano’s ther­a­py ses­sions is not that he was “cured,” but that he learned the lan­guage of ther­a­py in order to jus­ti­fy his actions to him­self. As Wein­er says, Dr. Melfi’s real­iza­tion was, “This was all a waste of time. He can’t be helped. I’ve just made him be a bet­ter crim­i­nal.” Once a sociopath, always a sociopath.

Chase also reveals how the show was struc­tured for each of its sev­en, 13-episode sea­sons, with char­ac­ter arcs orig­i­nal­ly being plot­ted as sep­a­rate sto­ries. But inevitably in the writ­ers’ room, the the­mat­ic con­nec­tions between the sto­ries would reveal them­selves and the scripts would be tweaked accord­ing­ly. Con­ver­sa­tions in the room would often be about every­thing *except* the sto­ry and the char­ac­ters. In the end this was all mate­r­i­al that would wind up in the show, the mulch that would cre­ate the gar­den.

This is a good time indeed for a rewatch. Not only did crit­ics Matthew Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepin­wall drop the lov­ing­ly detailed The Sopra­no Ses­sions last year, but actors Michael Impe­ri­oli (Christo­pher Molti­san­ti) and Steve Schirri­pa (Bob­by Bac­calieri) have a pod­cast where they are cur­rent­ly rewatch­ing and com­ment­ing on the show, one episode at a time. You can find all their episodes so far on this youtube playlist. The show is also list­ed in our new col­lec­tion, The 150 Best Pod­casts to Enrich Your Mind.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

HBO Is Stream­ing 500 Hours of Shows for Free: The Sopra­nos, The Wire, and More

How Mar­tin Scors­ese Directs a Movie: The Tech­niques Behind Taxi Dri­ver, Rag­ing Bull, and More

60 Free Film Noir Movies

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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The History of the 1918 Flu Pandemic, “The Deadliest Epidemic of All Time”: Three Free Lectures from The Great Courses

in Education, Health, History, How to Learn for Free, Science | June 4th, 2020

In one cas­cade of events after anoth­er, peo­ple are find­ing out the nor­mal they once knew doesn’t exist any­more. Instead it feels as if we’re liv­ing through sev­er­al past crises at once, try­ing to cram as much his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge as we can to make sense of the moment. 2020 espe­cial­ly feels like an echo of 1918–1919, when the “dead­liest epi­dem­ic of all time,” as The Great Cours­es calls the “Span­ish flu,” killed mil­lions (then the U.S. devolved into a wave of racist vio­lence.) By offer­ing exam­ples of both neg­a­tive and pos­i­tive respons­es, the his­to­ry, soci­ol­o­gy, and epi­demi­ol­o­gy of the 1918 flu can guide deci­sion-mak­ing as we pre­pare for a sec­ond wave of COVID-19 infec­tions.

The Great Cours­es start­ed offer­ing free resources on the coro­n­avirus out­break back in March, with a brief “What You Need to Know” explain­er and a free lec­ture course on infec­tious dis­eases. After catch­ing up on the his­to­ry of epi­demics, we’ll find our­selves nat­u­ral­ly won­der­ing why we learned lit­tle to noth­ing about the Span­ish flu.

The three-part lec­ture series here, excerpt­ed from the larg­er course Mys­ter­ies of the Micro­scop­ic World (avail­able with a Free Tri­al to the Great Cours­es Plus), begins by bold­ly call­ing this his­tor­i­cal lacu­na “A Con­spir­a­cy of Silence.” Tulane pro­fes­sor Bruce E. Fleury quotes Alfred Cros­by, who writes in America’s For­got­ten Pan­dem­ic, “the impor­tant and almost incom­pre­hen­si­ble fact about the Span­ish influen­za, is that it killed mil­lions upon mil­lions of peo­ple in a year or less… and yet, it has nev­er inspired awe, not in 1918 and not since.”

Epi­dem­ic dis­eases that have had tremen­dous impact in the past have become the sub­ject of lit­er­ary epics. Few epi­demics have accom­plished mass death “through sheer brute force” like the 1918 flu. The num­bers are tru­ly stag­ger­ing, in the tens to hun­dreds of mil­lions world­wide, with U.S. deaths dwarf­ing the com­bined casu­al­ties of all the coun­try’s major wars. Yet there are only a few men­tions of the flu in Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture from the time. Fleury men­tions some rea­sons for the amne­sia: WWI “took cen­ter stage,” sur­vivors were too trau­ma­tized to want to remem­ber. We may still won­der why we should look back over 100 years ago and learn about the past when cur­rent events are so all-con­sum­ing.

“His­to­ry com­pels us not to look away,” pro­fes­sor Fleury says, “lest we fail to learn the lessons paid for by our par­ents and our grand­par­ents.” Faulkn­er, it seems, was right that the past is nev­er past. But we need not respond in the same failed ways each time. The abil­i­ty to study and learn from his­to­ry gives us crit­i­cal per­spec­tive in per­ilous, uncer­tain times.

Sign up here for a free tri­al to the Great Cours­es Plus now rebrand­ed as Won­dri­um.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Span­ish Flu: A Warn­ing from His­to­ry

Louis Arm­strong Remem­bers How He Sur­vived the 1918 Flu Epi­dem­ic in New Orleans

Watch “Coro­n­avirus Out­break: What You Need to Know,” and the 24-Lec­ture Course “An Intro­duc­tion to Infec­tious Dis­eases,” Both Free from The Great Cours­es

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

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An Introduction to the Sublime, Entrepreneurial Art of Christo & Jeanne-Claude (Courtesy of Alain de Botton’s School of Life)

in Art | June 4th, 2020

Of all the work that made Chris­to and Jeanne-Claude the most famous instal­la­tion artists of the past fifty years, none still exists. If you want­ed to see the Reich­stag wrapped in sil­ver fab­ric, you’d have to have been in Berlin in the sum­mer of 1995. If you want­ed to see Cen­tral Park thread­ed with Shin­to shrine-style gates, you’d have to have been in New York in the win­ter of 2005. If you want­ed to see an enor­mous Mesopotami­an masta­ba made out of 7,506 oil bar­rels, you’d have to have been in Lon­don in the sum­mer of 2018. Though often cel­e­brat­ed for its “ephemer­al” nature, Chris­to and Jeanne-Claude’s art neces­si­tat­ed a for­mi­da­ble amount of polit­i­cal, orga­ni­za­tion­al, logis­ti­cal, and man­u­al work to pull it off — and in that con­trast lies its sub­lim­i­ty.

“To oper­ate real­is­ti­cal­ly on a large scale, they need­ed to deploy many of the skills tra­di­tion­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with busi­ness and which we think of as the domain of the entre­pre­neur,” says the arti­cle on Chris­to and Jeanne-Claude at The Book of Life, a prod­uct of Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life. The two “had to nego­ti­ate with city coun­cils and gov­ern­ments; they had to draw up busi­ness plans, arrange large scale finance, employ the tal­ents and time of hun­dreds even thou­sands of peo­ple, coor­di­nate vast efforts and deal with mil­lions of users or vis­i­tors. And all the while, they held on to the high ambi­tions asso­ci­at­ed with being an artist.” What’s more, since the cou­ple nev­er took grants or pub­lic mon­ey of any kind, they had to turn enough of a prof­it from each project to finance the next, even more majes­tic (and to some, fool­hardy) one.

You can see more of Chris­to and Jeanne-Claude’s projects, and footage of those projects under con­struc­tion, in the School of Life video at the top of the post. It also shows Chris­to cre­at­ing the prepara­to­ry mate­ri­als that made their work pos­si­ble, not only in that they pre­sent­ed the visions of the wrapped-up pieces of infra­struc­ture or val­leys full of umbrel­las to come, but that the sale of the plans and draw­ings financed the process of mak­ing those visions real. All this in the ser­vice of what Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, called “works of art of joy beau­ty,” and through Chris­to depart­ed the realm of exis­tence him­self last Sun­day, the rest of us have anoth­er such work to look for­ward to: L’Arc de Tri­om­phe, Wrapped. Based on an idea that came to Chris­to when he and Jeanne-Claude lived in Paris in the late 1950s and ear­ly 60s (and recent­ly delayed one more year due to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic), it will pro­vide more than rea­son enough to be in Paris in the fall of 2021.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Vision­ary Artist Chris­to (RIP) Changed the Way We See the World

Cli­mate Change Gets Strik­ing­ly Visu­al­ized by a Scot­tish Art Instal­la­tion

Pi in the Sky: The World’s Largest Ephemer­al Art Instal­la­tion over Beau­ti­ful San Fran­cis­co

This Huge Crash­ing Wave in a Seoul Aquar­i­um Is Actu­al­ly a Gigan­tic Opti­cal Illu­sion

Alain de Bot­ton Shows How Art Can Answer Life’s Big Ques­tions in Art as Ther­a­py

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Watch Martin Scorsese’s Brand New Short Film, Made Entirely in His Office Under Quarantine

in Current Affairs, Film | June 3rd, 2020

Most who saw the last fea­ture by Mar­tin Scors­ese, 2019’s The Irish­man, saw it at home. That had to do with the fact that the bud­get came from Net­flix, which sure­ly aimed to get its not incon­sid­er­able mon­ey’s worth by offer­ing the film on its own stream­ing ser­vice as soon as pos­si­ble. If The Irish­man’s financ­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion was a sign of the times, Scors­ese’s new short is even more so: shot on a smart­phone by the famed direc­tor him­self, it recent­ly pre­miered on Mary Beard’s BBC spe­cial about “lock­down cul­ture.” See­ing as the coro­n­avirus isn’t known to spare famous auteurs — and indeed does seem dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly to harm indi­vid­u­als over age 70 — Scors­ese has spent a great deal of time at home over the past few months. But like all true cre­ators, he has­n’t stopped doing what he does.

“Been quite a while, now, that I’ve been quar­an­tined,” says Scors­ese, turn­ing his cam­era away from a screen­ing of Alfred Hitch­cock­’s The Wrong Man on his office wall. “We had been work­ing so hard on so many dif­fer­ent projects, and things were spin­ning and spin­ning and spin­ning, and sud­den­ly there was a crash. And a stop.” At first, “there was a day or so of a kind of relief. I did­n’t have to go any­where or do any­thing. I mean, I had to do every­thing, but I did­n’t have to do it then.” Then, “the anx­i­ety set in.” But as time passed, and as he tru­ly felt that time pass­ing, “a sense of relief set­tled in. And a real sense of free­dom, because you can’t do any­thing else. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be in this room. I don’t know when we’re going to be able to actu­al­ly start pro­duc­tion in this film.”

By “this film” Scors­ese means Killers of the Flower Moon, a $200 mil­lion true-crime West­ern set in 1920s Okla­homa that will bring Leonar­do DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, the direc­tor’s lead­ing men of choice, togeth­er in a Scors­ese fea­ture for the first time. As a joint pro­duc­tion between Apple and Para­mount, notes the Observ­er’s Bran­don Katz, the pic­ture “will receive all the nec­es­sary fund­ing it needs while still receiv­ing a world­wide the­atri­cal roll­out,” but the ques­tion of when its shoot can start — and indeed, when movie­go­ers will return to the­aters — remains open. “I do know that, giv­en the grace of time and life, we will be in pro­duc­tion some­how,” says Scors­ese in his lock­down short, after a few shots of the mem­o­ra­bil­ia on his shelves.

Toward the end of this per­son­al dis­patch, Scors­ese remem­bers his final con­ver­sa­tion with the Iran­ian film­mak­er Abbas Kiarosta­mi. “We were at a din­ner in Lyon a few years ago and he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t do any­thing you don’t want to do.’ He knew. He under­stood. One can’t depend on time. One does­n’t know. Ulti­mate­ly that time has to be worth it, even if it’s just exist­ing. Even if it’s just being alive, breath­ing — if you can, under these cir­cum­stances.” But as we’ve all learned, cir­cum­stances can change, and sud­den­ly; it falls to us only to make best use of the sit­u­a­tion in which we find our­selves. To under­score that last truth, Scors­ese char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cites a clas­sic Amer­i­can movie. Though our lives may be restrict­ed, as we see in Robert Siod­mak’s Hem­ing­way adap­ta­tion The Killers, noth­ing’s stop­ping us from keep­ing our eyes on the stars.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Film­mak­ing of Mar­tin Scors­ese Demys­ti­fied in 6 Video Essays

How Mar­tin Scors­ese Directs a Movie: The Tech­niques Behind Taxi Dri­ver, Rag­ing Bull, and More

What Makes Taxi Dri­ver So Pow­er­ful? An In-Depth Study of Mar­tin Scorsese’s Exis­ten­tial Film on the Human Con­di­tion

Mar­tin Scors­ese Explains the Dif­fer­ence Between Cin­e­ma and Movies

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

11-Year-Old Mar­tin Scors­ese Draws Sto­ry­boards for His Imag­ined Roman Epic Film, The Eter­nal City

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Spike Lee Debuts the Short Film “3 Brothers”: A Remake of Do the Right Thing for Our Dark Times

in Current Affairs, Film | June 3rd, 2020

When beloved actor Bill Nunn died in Sep­tem­ber of 2016, two months before the elec­tion, his pass­ing felt prophet­ic of more bad things to come. Best known as the boom­box-tot­ing, ulti­mate Pub­lic Ene­my fan Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, Nunn’s char­ac­ter is mur­dered by a gang of cops, who put him in a choke­hold and suf­fo­cate him. At the time, Raheem’s death was a fic­tion­al restate­ment of what had come before, as Lee explains above in the 30th anniver­sary com­men­tary on the film.

“I’m renam­ing this ‘Anato­my of a Mur­der,’” he says, explain­ing how he based the scene of Raheem’s death on the 1983 killing of graf­fi­ti artist Michael Stew­art, who was stran­gled by 11 NYC tran­sit offi­cers. “The things that are hap­pen­ing in this film,” he says, “are still rel­e­vant today.” Lee then ref­er­ences the death of Eric Gar­ner, killed in exact­ly the same way as Raheem. Now we have seen the mur­der of George Floyd, asphyx­i­at­ed with a knee to the neck. These on-cam­era killings are trau­mat­ic, but Lee has not shied away from the pow­er of doc­u­men­tary images.

He reclaimed his place as a big-bud­get inter­preter of Amer­i­can racism with Black­kKlans­man, a fic­tion­al­ized film that ends with extreme­ly hard-to-watch (espe­cial­ly for those who were there) real footage of the mur­der of anti-racist activist Heather Hey­er in Char­lottesville. Lee faced a good deal of crit­i­cism over the use of this video, but he has again tak­en real-life footage of racial­ly-moti­vat­ed killings, this time by the police, and cut them togeth­er with fic­tion, edit­ing togeth­er the death of Raheem with the deaths of Gar­ner and Floyd.

Call­ing the short “3 Broth­ers,” he opens with the ques­tion, “Will His­to­ry Stop Repeat­ing Itself?” Lee Debuted the film on the CNN spe­cial “I Can’t Breathe: Black Men Liv­ing & Dying in Amer­i­ca.” The cumu­la­tive effects of his­to­ry are crit­i­cal to under­stand­ing the moment we are in, he says. The rage and protest on streets around the world are not a reac­tion to a sin­gle event—they are a con­fronta­tion with hun­dreds of years of vio­lent con­trol over black bod­ies, a state of affairs always includ­ing mur­der with impuni­ty. “The attack on black bod­ies has been here from the get-go,” Lee says.

Lee’s short is hard to watch, and I don’t blame any­one who nev­er wants to see this footage again (I don’t). The mur­ders of indi­vid­ual, unarmed black men by groups of offi­cers take on an eerie monot­o­ny in their same­ness over time. “The killings caught on cam­era,” writes his­to­ri­an Robert Greene II, “offer a dis­turb­ing reminder of the numer­ous pho­tographs of lynch­ings dis­persed through­out the nation in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Some were cat­a­logued by the NAACP and dis­played as exam­ples of Amer­i­can bru­tal­i­ty and bar­barism. Oth­ers, how­ev­er, were fea­tured on post­cards and sent to white Amer­i­cans through­out the coun­try, small trin­kets of white ter­ror.”

This chill­ing his­to­ry gives rise to an under­stand­able ambiva­lence about shar­ing videos of police killings. Are these evi­dence of bar­barous injus­tice or racist snuff films run­ning on an end­less loop? As in the lynch­ing pho­tographs, it depends on the audi­ence and the con­text in which the videos are shown. But when Spike Lee made Do the Right Thing—pre-Rod­ney King and cell phone cameras—hardly any­one out­side of heav­i­ly policed black neigh­bor­hoods wit­nessed first­hand the kind of bru­tal­i­ty that is now so depress­ing­ly famil­iar in our news­feeds.

The death of Radio Raheem was shock­ing to audi­ences, as it was dev­as­tat­ing to the char­ac­ters and remains, for those who grew up with the film, a mov­ing cin­e­mat­ic touch­stone of the time. It is tru­ly heart­break­ing and enrag­ing that such scenes have become com­mon cur­ren­cy on social media, instead of his­toric exam­ples of the bru­tal­i­ty of the past—a sto­ry, as one per­son wrote of the 1968 police killing of poet Hen­ry Dumas, of “gen­er­a­tions of lost poten­tial.”

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Spike Lee Shares His NYU Teach­ing List of 87 Essen­tial Films Every Aspir­ing Direc­tor Should See

How Spike Lee Got His First Big Break: From She’s Got­ta Have It to That Icon­ic Air Jor­dan Ad

Spike Lee Directs, “Wake Up,” a Five-Minute Cam­paign Film for Bernie Sanders

Gil Scott-Heron Spells Out Why “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised”

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

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Why Should We Read Melville’s Moby-Dick? A TED-Ed Animation Makes the Case

in Literature | June 3rd, 2020

Her­man Melville’s Moby-Dick is a major 19th epic and a “Great Amer­i­can Nov­el” that rou­tine­ly appears on best-of-all-time lists next to Homer and Dante. This grand lit­er­ary judg­ment descends from ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry crit­ics who res­cued the nov­el from obscu­ri­ty after decades of scorn and neglect. When the book first appeared in 1851, no one knew what to make of Melville’s cos­mic whal­ing revenge tale. Reviews were high­ly mixed, sales dis­mal, the book flopped.

This Moby-Dick revival hap­pened to coin­cide with a peri­od of mod­ernist exper­i­men­ta­tion with nar­ra­tive struc­ture in the work of writ­ers like James Joyce and Vir­ginia Woolf. Sud­den­ly, Moby-Dick didn’t seem so strange any­more. More like a bril­liant, pro­to-mod­ernist tragedy. But if you expect straight­for­ward sea­far­ing adven­ture, as the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above by Sascha Mor­rell points out, it’s a hard slog. The exhaus­tive lessons on whales and whal­ing, chap­ter-length solil­o­quies, lan­guage so dense, col­or­ful, and allu­sive.… Leonard Woolf became so frus­trat­ed in a 1929 review, he called the book’s prose “the most exe­crable Eng­lish.”

Melville wrote bad sen­tences, Woolf pro­nounced. “His sec­ond great­est vice is rant or rhetoric…. I can­not see the slight­est point in this kind of bom­bast, and, when it raves on for page after page, I almost pitch the book into the waste-paper bas­ket and swear that I will not read anoth­er line, how­ev­er many peo­ple vouch for the author’s genius.” This con­trar­i­an­ism sounds an awful like Vir­ginia Woolf’s take on Joyce’s Ulysses. Like that book, Moby-Dick inspires wide­spread guilt among those who have been told they should read it, but who can’t bring them­selves to fin­ish or even begin.

Who was right: Melville’s ear­ly crit­ics and read­ers (and Leonard Woolf)? Or the mil­lions who have since seen in the nov­el some­thing pro­found and prophet­ic, though no one can say exact­ly what that is? Why should we read Moby-Dick? For many, many rea­sons, but most of all the lan­guage. The word “rich” doesn’t begin to describe the lay­er­ing of images: “A moun­tain sep­a­rat­ing two lakes,” Mor­rell says in a strik­ing exam­ple, “a room papered floor to ceil­ing with bridal satins, the lid of an immense snuff box. These seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed images take us on a tour of a sperm whale’s head.”

The sym­bols them­selves invite us into oth­er cryp­tic alle­gories. Chap­ter 99, “The Dou­bloon,” com­petes with Achilles’ shield in The Ili­ad for metaphor­ic den­si­ty, yet like a mod­ernist nov­el, it frag­ments into mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives, each one exam­in­ing ideas of cur­ren­cy, con­quest, myth, rit­u­al, etc., as Ahab bul­lies and pro­vokes the crew into inter­pret­ing a coin nailed to the Pequod’s mast.

If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the sun stands in some one of these signs. I’ve stud­ied signs, and know their marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch in Copen­hagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right oppo­site the gold. And what’s the horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign- the roar­ing and devour­ing lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee.

What Woolf saw as exces­sive bom­bast seems to me more like form mir­ror­ing func­tion. Melville writes sen­tences that must echo over the squalls and talk through mad­den­ing lulls that bring on strange hal­lu­ci­na­tions. Like Joyce’s, his lan­guage mir­rors the dis­cur­sive tics of Ahab and Ish­mael’s modes of thought—nautical, the­o­log­i­cal, polit­i­cal, soci­o­log­i­cal, myth­ic, his­toric, nat­u­ral­ist, sym­bol­ist: explo­rations into a bloody, cru­el, eco­log­i­cal­ly dev­as­tat­ing enter­prise that dri­ves its dement­ed captain—violently obsessed with a great white beast that has crip­pled and enraged him—to wreck the ship and kill every­one aboard except our nar­ra­tor.

Learn about Melville and Moby-Dick in the addi­tion­al resources at the TED-Ed les­son page.

Relat­ed Con­tent:   

Hear Moby Dick Read in Its Entire­ty by Til­da Swin­ton, Stephen Fry, John Waters & Oth­ers

How to Mem­o­rize an Entire Chap­ter from “Moby Dick”: The Art and Sci­ence of Remem­ber­ing Every­thing

An Illus­tra­tion of Every Page of Her­man Melville’s Moby Dick

A View From the Room Where Melville Wrote Moby Dick (Plus a Free Celebri­ty Read­ing of the Nov­el)

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

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What Is a “Casual Game?” Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #46 Talks to Nick Fortugno, Creator of “Diner Dash”

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Video Games | June 3rd, 2020

Famed game design­er Nick joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to con­sid­er fun­da­men­tal ques­tions about the activ­i­ty of gam­ing (Nick calls games “arbi­trary lim­its on mean­ing­less goals”) and what con­sti­tutes a casu­al game: Is it one that’s easy (maybe not easy to win, but at least you don’t die), one meant to be played in short bursts, or maybe one with a cer­tain kind of art style, or just about any game that runs on a phone? Nick­’s most famous cre­ation is the casu­al Din­er Dash, which can be very stress­ful. Vast­ly dif­fer­ent games from very hard but very short action games and very involved but sooth­ing strat­e­gy games get lumped under this one label.

Our con­ver­sa­tion touch­es on every­thing from cross­words to Super Meat Boy, plus the rela­tion between psy­chol­o­gy and game design, whether casu­al games real­ly play less than hard­core gamers, the stig­ma of an activ­i­ty that was for mar­ket­ing rea­sons at one point brand­ed as being just for ado­les­cent boys, and even heuris­tics for beat­ing slot machines.

Some sources we looked at include:

Just so you don’t have to write them down, our rec­om­men­da­tions at the end were:

You can fol­low Nick @nickfortugno.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear 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 or start with the first episode.

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When Al Capone Opened a Soup Kitchen During the Great Depression: Another Side of the Legendary Mobster’s Operation

in History | June 2nd, 2020

In response to the words “Amer­i­can gang­ster,” one name comes to mind before all oth­ers: Al Capone. (Apolo­gies to Rid­ley Scott.) Though few Amer­i­cans could now describe the full scope of his empire’s crim­i­nal activ­i­ties, many know that he grew that empire boot­leg­ging dur­ing Pro­hi­bi­tion and that he was even­tu­al­ly brought down on the rel­a­tive­ly mild charge of tax eva­sion. A media spec­ta­cle by the stan­dards of the day, the tri­al that con­vict­ed Capone in 1931 was in some sense the nat­ur­al last act of his pub­lic­i­ty-com­mand­ing career. Most Capo­ne­ol­o­gists place the begin­ning of the mob boss’ fall at the 1929 “Saint Valen­tine’s Day Mas­sacre” of sev­en of Capone’s rivals. Lat­er that year came the stock mar­ket crash that set off the Great Depres­sion, which offered Chicago’s “Pub­lic Ene­my No. 1” one last chance to win back that pub­lic’s favor.

Hav­ing long trad­ed on a Robin Hood-esque image, Capone opened a soup kitchen in his home base of Chica­go to serve the unfor­tu­nates sud­den­ly dis­pos­sessed by the dev­as­tat­ed Amer­i­can econ­o­my. “Capone’s soup kitchen served break­fast, lunch and din­ner to an aver­age of 2,200 Chicagoans every day,” writes History.com’s Christo­pher Klein. “Inside the soup kitchen, smil­ing women in white aprons served up cof­fee and sweet rolls for break­fast, soup and bread for lunch and soup, cof­fee and bread for din­ner. No sec­ond help­ings were denied. No ques­tions were asked, and no one was asked to prove their need.”

Capone’s will­ing­ness to sat­is­fy human needs and desires out­side the law kept him rich, and thus more than able to run such an oper­a­tion, even as the Depres­sion set in; still, he “may not have paid a dime for the soup kitchen, rely­ing instead on his crim­i­nal ten­den­cies to stock­pile his char­i­ta­ble endeav­or by extort­ing and brib­ing busi­ness­es to donate goods.”

Capone’s soup kitchen may have helped keep Chica­go fed, but it could only do so much to clean up his dete­ri­o­rat­ing pub­lic image, asso­ci­at­ed as it had become with smug­gling, extor­tion, and vio­lence. “Capone’s soup kitchen closed abrupt­ly in April 1932,” writes Men­tal Floss’ Shoshi Parks. “The pro­pri­etors claimed that the kitchen was no longer need­ed because the econ­o­my was pick­ing up, even though the num­ber of unem­ployed across the coun­try had increased by 4 mil­lion between 1931 and 1932.” Two months lat­er, “Capone was indict­ed on 22 counts of income tax eva­sion; the charges that even­tu­al­ly land­ed him in San Francisco’s Alca­traz Fed­er­al Pen­i­ten­tiary. Though Capone vowed to reopen his soup kitchen dur­ing his tri­al, its doors stayed shut.” You can learn more about Capone’s soup kitchen at My Al Capone Muse­um and The Vin­tage News, and even vis­it its loca­tion at 935 South State Street today — though you won’t find any oper­a­tion more ambi­tious than a park­ing lot.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map of Chicago’s Gang­land: A Cheeky, Car­to­graph­ic Look at Al Capone’s World (1931)

Yale Presents an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

1,600 Rare Col­or Pho­tographs Depict Life in the U.S Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion & World War II

Con­fi­dence: The Car­toon That Helped Amer­i­ca Get Through the Great Depres­sion (1933)

What Pris­on­ers Ate at Alca­traz in 1946: A Vin­tage Prison Menu

New Archive Presents The Chicagoan, Chicago’s Jazz-Age Answer to The New York­er (1926 to 1935)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Gil Scott-Heron Spells Out Why “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”

in Current Affairs, Music, Politics | June 2nd, 2020

Con­sid­er the influ­ence of tele­vi­sion, even in the dig­i­tal age. Con­sid­er the pow­er that net­works like Fox and CNN con­tin­ue to wield over that neb­u­lous thing called pub­lic opin­ion; the con­tin­ued dom­i­nance of NBC and CBS. These giants don’t real­ly inform so much as sell pack­aged ide­o­log­i­cal con­tent paid for and approved by cor­po­rate spon­sors. There’s real­ly no need to update poet and musi­cian Gil Scott-Heron’s rad­i­cal, 1971 clas­sic “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised,” unless we want­ed to change the names. His voice still speaks direct­ly to the moment we live in.

We exist on a con­tin­u­um of con­di­tions that have wors­ened since the late 1960s—despite promis­es and appear­ances to the contrary—until they have become intol­er­a­ble. Scott-Heron wrote and sang about those con­di­tions since his fiery 1970 debut.

“Dubbed the ‘God­fa­ther of Rap,’” notes Brook­lyn Rail in a 2007 inter­view, “Scott-Heron has become a ubiq­ui­tous and prac­ti­cal­ly de rigueur influ­ence for every­one from hip hop­pers and indie rock­ers to aging literati and dyed-in-the-wool aca­d­e­mics.”

One might think Scott-Heron’s clas­sic spo­ken-word tes­ta­ment “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised” speaks for itself by now, but it still cre­ates con­fu­sion in part because peo­ple still mis­con­strue the nature of the medi­um. Why can’t you sit at home and watch jour­nal­ists cov­er protests and revolts on TV? If you think you’re see­ing “the Rev­o­lu­tion” instead of curat­ed, maybe spu­ri­ous, con­tent designed to tell a sto­ry and gin up views, you’re fool­ing your­self.

But Scott-Heron also had some­thing else in mind—you can’t see the rev­o­lu­tion on TV because you can’t see it at all. As he says above in a 1990s inter­view:

The first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move. The thing that’s going to change peo­ple is some­thing that nobody will ever be able to cap­ture on film. It’s just some­thing that you see and you’ll think, “Oh I’m on the wrong page,” or “I’m on I’m on the right page but the wrong note. And I’ve got to get in sync with every­one else to find out what’s hap­pen­ing in this coun­try.”

If we real­ize we’re out of sync with what’s real­ly hap­pen­ing, we can­not find out more on tele­vi­sion. The infor­ma­tion is where the bat­tles are being fought, at street lev­el, and in the mech­a­nisms of the legal process. “I think that the Black Amer­i­cans are the only real die-hard Amer­i­cans here,” Scott-Heron goes on, “because we’re the only ones who’ve car­ried the process through the process…. We’re the ones who marched… we’re the ones who tried to go through the courts. Being born Amer­i­can didn’t seem to mat­ter.” It still doesn’t, as we see in the killings of George Floyd and Bre­on­na Tay­lor and so many before them, and in the griev­ous injuries and deaths from uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, mil­i­tary-grade police esca­la­tions nation­wide since.

Scott-Heron asked us to ques­tion the nar­ra­tives. “How do they know?” he sang in “There’s a War Going On” at Wood­stock 94, above. How do the self-appoint­ed guardians of infor­ma­tion know what’s real­ly going on? Tele­vi­sion spreads igno­rance and mis­in­for­ma­tion, as does radio and, of course, social media. This much we should know. But we’ve mis­in­ter­pret­ed “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised” if we think it’s real­ly about mass media, Scott-Heron always main­tained. Before we can engage mean­ing­ful­ly with cur­rent events, a rev­o­lu­tion­ary change must hap­pen from the inside out. No one’s broad­cast­ing the truths we first, most need to hear.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gil Scott-Heron, God­fa­ther of Rap, Rest in Peace

Nina Simone’s Live Per­for­mances of Her Poignant Civ­il Rights Protest Songs

How Nina Simone Became Hip Hop’s “Secret Weapon”: From Lau­ryn Hill to Jay Z and Kanye West

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

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