I hope Orson Welles got used to seeing his name on top-ten-films-of-all-time lists. He became a mainstay as soon as critical consensus declared his debut Citizen Kane probably the most important motion picture ever made, and some cinephiles give special notice to his subsequent works, such as The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil, F for Fake, and — for true contrarians only — The Trial. So what does a man whose projects appear on so many top-ten lists from critics and other filmmakers alike put on his own?
“I don’t like cinema,” goes one perhaps-apocryphal Welles quote. “I like making cinema.” (Sometimes-heard variation: “I don’t like cinema unless I shoot it.”) But even if he actually said and believed that, he still managed to put together the following list of favorites in the early 1950s, about a decade after having entered the filmmaking game but with most of the cinema he would make still to come:
If Citizen Kane opened up the possibilities of cinema — and to get an idea of just how much influence it has had from its release to this day, simply watch any film made before it — the pictures Welles puts onto his list, in large part a classicist’s even in the 50s, gave cinema its form in the first place. If you plan on doing a self-administered course in film history, you could do much worse than beginning with the favorite films of Orson Welles — then moving on, of course, to the films of Orson Welles.
I can well remember the first time I read Mad Magazine. I was probably around Bart Simpson’s age, but nowhere near his degree of wiseass-ness. I found the humor of the adult world mostly mystifying and also pretty tame, given my rather sheltered existence. It was my discovery of Mad—stacks and stacks of old Mads, to be precise, in the rec room of a family acquaintance—that cracked the shell, one of those formative loss-of-innocence moments that are ultimately edifying. At the time, I couldn’t tell sophisticated satire from puerile parody, and the average issue of Mad was no Gulliver’s Travels. Nonetheless, its gleeful skewering of the American civil religion of politics, celebrity, professional sports, commerce, and middle class comfort hooked me instantly, and taught me about the value of freethought before I’d ever heard the name Jonathan Swift.
Founded as a comic book by editor Harvey Kurtzman and publisher William Gaines in 1952, Mad and its gap-toothed mascot Alfred E. Newman (still active today!) pioneered populist satire and inspired many lesser imitators. One distinctive feature of the magazine for almost its entire existence was its ability to run without advertising, allowing it to tear apart materialist culture without fear of biting the hands that fed it. Instead, for decades, the magazine ran fake spoof ads like those you see here. At the top, for example, see a 1963 ad for the “1963 ¾ Edsel,” an update of the “1963 ½ models—which made all ’63 models obsolete.” The text goes on to state frankly, “we’re taking the first steps toward “Planned Monthly Obsolescence—when every car owner will be shamed into trading in his old June ’64 car for a brand new shiny July ’64 model.” Apple, take note.
In the 1960 spoof ad above, military culture gets a send-up with “Aspire Boot-Lick Polish,” made for “The Man in Command: Pompous… Pig-headed… Pathological.” The flavored boot polish—“licorice, caviar, chocolate, caramel, molasses, borscht, halavah, and Moxie in a base of chicken fat”—is said to make “boot-licking a little more tasty when you gotta do it.” A clever inset links the U.S. chain of command with previous empires, showing a cartoon European naval officer of centuries past getting his boots licked by a subordinate sailor.
Just above, the disturbing 1969 fake ad for “Cemetery Filler Cigarettes” predates the tobacco trials of the 1990s by decades. Long promoted for their health benefits, calming effects, sophistication, and taste—as in that memorable first episode of Mad Men—cigarettes are exposed for the mass killers they are by none other than “Adolph Hitler”. (Another 1970 fake ad for “Winsom Cigarettes” uses an actual cemetery to similar effect.)
While cigarette companies were a frequent target of Mad’s fake ads, just as often they took on the inanity of the entire ad industry itself, as in the above 1965 meta-ad for “Let’s Kill Off Ridiculous Ad Campaigns.” The text reads, “If you advertisers have to blow your own horns, why tie your products to unrelated activities? Mainly, what’s eating a Breakfast Cereal got to do with playing a musical instrument? Boy… we just can’t swallow that!” Another regular feature was “Mad’s Great Moments in Advertising,” a kind of highlight blooper reel of ads gone wrong. The example below, also from 1965, spoofs the promises of cleaning product ads to make the lives of housewives easier with a product that works just a little too well.
Image by Luigi Novi. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Making the rounds today on the Internet is a poignant letter from Oliver Sacks, announcing that he has terminal cancer. An NYU professor of neurology who has published several bestselling books (including one that became the basis for the 1990 film, Awakenings, starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro) Sacks first developed ocular melanoma nine years ago, and it apparently, sadly, metastasized to the liver.
Perhaps mortality is something you think about fairly often; or maybe you haven’t reached that point in life yet. Either way, I’d recommend giving his letter a read, and then maybe tucking it away. Because when — as is inevitable — you find yourself facing mortality head on, Sacks’ thoughts and outlook may help guide you through. His letter concludes:
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
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Toward the end of 2013, we featured a series of video essays by Matt Zoller Seitz on the films of Wes Anderson. They first came out to accompany The Wes Anderson Collection, the critic’s coffee-table retrospective of that auteur of whimsical handcrafted films’ career to date — to the date of late 2013, anyway. Even then, fans had already geared themselves up in anticipation of the then-imminent release of The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson’s eighth and latest picture, which at the moment has resurfaced in awards-season buzz.
The diminishing number of you who have proven still impervious to Anderson’s peculiar brand of movie magic might, actually, feel you’ve heard a bit too much about The Grand Budapest Hotel over the past year or so. What, pray tell, is the big deal? Here to answer that question, we have Zoller Seitz’s brand new video essay on Anderson’s tale of that titular once-grand mountain hotel and the 20th-century Europe of the imagination (eventually giving way to the 20th-century Europe of history) that swirls around and through it.
“All of Wes Anderson’s films are comedies,” says Zoller Seitz, “and none are.” Throughout the following fifteen minutes, he analyzes exactly how, with The Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson climbs to the top of both of his personal twin peaks of frivolity and seriousness — or seriousness expressed through frivolity, or vice versa. In the director’s “most structurally ambitious film,” we see not just layers of comedy and melancholy but of history, literature, artistry, and anxiety, all tied in with the Andersonian characters’ endless quest to master their own sense of loss by mastering the world around them — which Anderson shows us, to a fuller extent in The Grand Budapest Hotel, than in any of his live-action movies before, with his own mastery of the world he and his collaborators create.
For another look into what this requires in filmmaking terms, see also “Here’s How Wes Anderson Uses Matte Paintings in His Incredible Set Designs” by The Creators Project’s Beckett Mufson. That interview with Grand Budapest Hotel matte painter Simone de Salvatore reveals, by looking at just one aspect of the whole, how much goes into the design of a Wes Anderson production. Viewers who love Anderson’s pictures, of course, love them in large part for exactly that, and even viewers who hate them have to concede their impeccability on that count. Both groups now have only to wait for this Sunday to see how the Academy feels about it.
The art of the album cover is ground we cover here often enough, from the jazz deco creations of album art inventor Alex Steinweiss to the bawdy burlesques of underground comix legend R. Crumb. We could add to these American references the iconic covers of European graphic artists like Peter Saville of Joy Divisions’ Unknown Pleasures and Storm Thorgerson of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.These names represent just a small sampling of the many renowned designers who have given popular music its distinctive look over the decades, and without whom the experience of record shopping—perhaps itself a bygone art—would be a dreary one. Though these creative personalities work in a primarily commercial vein, there’s no reason not to call their products fine art.
But in a great many cases, the images that grace the covers of records we know well come directly from the fine art world—whether appropriated from pieces that hang on museum walls or commissioned from famous artists by the bands. Such, of course, was the case with the much-ballyhooed cover of Lady Gaga’s Artpop, a candy-colored collaboration with pop art darling Jeff Koons, who gets a namecheck in the Gaga single “Applause.” Gaga has put a unique spin on the mélange of pop and pop art, but she hardly pioneered such collaborations.
Long before Artpop, there was Warhol, whose promotion of the Velvet Underground included his own design of their 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. The cover originally featured a yellow banana record buyers could peel away, as Flavorwire writes, “to reveal a suggestively pink flesh-toned banana.” The “saucy covers” required “special machinery, extra costs, and the delay of the album release,” but Warhol’s name persuaded MGM the added overhead was worth it. It’s a gamble that hardly paid off for the label, but pop music is infinitely better off for Warhol’s promotion of Lou Reed and company’s dark, droning art rock.
Of the many millions of bands inspired by that first Velvets’ release, The Smiths also looked to Warhol for inspiration when it came to the even more suggestive album cover (above) for their first, self-titled record in 1984. This time, the image comes not from the pop artist himself, but from his protégée Paul Morrissey—a still from his salacious, Warhol-produced film Flesh. Just one of many savvy uses of monochromatic film stills and photographs by the image-conscious Steven Patrick Morrissey and band.
Ten years earlier, another Smith, Patti, posed for the photograph above, a Polaroid taken by her close friend, Robert Mapplethorpe. At the time, the two were roommates and “just kids” struggling jointly in their starving artisthood. In her National Book Award-winning memoir of their time together, Smith describes the “exquisitely androgynous image” as deliberately posed in a “Frank Sinatra style,” writing, “I was full of references.” Mapplethorpe, of course, would go on to infamy as the focus of a conservative congressional campaign against “obscene” art in 1989, which tended to make his name synonymous with sensationalism and scandal and obscured the breadth of his work.
Like the Velvets and Patti Smith, the members of Sonic Youth have had a long and fruitful relationship with the art world, pursuing several art projects of their own and collaborating frequently with famous fine artists. The relationship between their noisy art rock and the visual arts crystalizes in their many iconic album covers. My personal favorite, and perhaps the most recognizable of the bunch, is Raymond Pettibon’s cover for 1990’s Goo, inspired from a photograph of two witnesses to a serial killer case. Pettibon, brother to Black Flag founder and guitarist Greg Ginn, is much better known in the punk rock world than the fine art world, but Sonic Youth has also collaborated with established high art figures like Gerhard Richter, whose painting Kerze (“Candle”) graces the cover of their acclaimed 1988 album Daydream Nation (above).
Another example of a band using already existing artwork—this time from a painter long dead—the cover of New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies comes from the still life A Basket of Roses by 19th century French realist Henri Fantin-Latour. Designer Peter Saville, who, as noted above, created the look of New Order’s previous incarnation, chose the image on a whim. Writes Artnet, “the art director for the post-punk band… had originally planned to use a Renaissance portrait of a dark prince to tie in with the Machiavellian theme of the title, but failed to find anything he liked. While visiting [the National Gallery in London], Saville picked up a postcard of the Fantin-Latour work, and his girlfriend joked that he should use it as the cover.” Saville thought it was “a wonderful idea.” As Saville explains his choice, “Flowers suggested the means by which power, corruption and lies infiltrate our lives. They’re seductive.”
Another art-rock band, the Talking Heads—formed at the Rhode Island School of Design and originally called “The Artistics”—went in a very high art direction for 1983’s new wave masterpiece Speaking in Tongues, their fifth album. Though we’re probably more familiar with frontman David Byrne’s cover art for the album, the band also produced a limited edition LP featuring the work of artist Robert Rauschenberg, which you can see above. Byrne, writes Artnet, approached Rauschenberg “after seeing his work at the Leo Castelli Gallery” and Rauschenberg agreed on the condition that he could “do something different.” He certainly did that. The cover is a “transparent plastic case with artwork and credits printed on three 12 inch circular transparent collages, one per primary color. Only by rotating the LP and the separate plastic discs could one see—and then only intermittently—the three-color images included in the collage.” The artist won a Grammy for the design.
You can see many more fine art album covers by painters like Banksy, Richard Prince, and Fred Tomaselli and photographers like Duane Michaels and Nobuyoshi Araki at Artnet and Flavorwire. The selection of enticing album covers above will hopefully also propel you to revisit, or hear for the first time, some of the finest art-pop of the last four decades. Finally, we leave you with a bizarre and seemingly unlikely collaboration, above, between pop-surrealist Salvador Dalí and Honeymooners comedian Jackie Gleason for Gleason’s 1955 album Lonesome Echo. No weirder, perhaps, than Dalí’s work with Walt Disney, it’s still a rather unexpected look for the comedian, in his role here as a kitschy easy listening composer. Gleason’s many album covers tended toward the Mad Men-esque cheap and tawdry. Here, he gets conceptual. Dalí himself explained the work thus:
The first effect is that of anguish, of space, and of solitude. Secondly, the fragility of the wings of a butterfly, projecting long shadows of late afternoon, reverberates in the landscape like an echo. The feminine element, distant and isolated, forms a perfect triangle with the musical instrument and its other echo, the shell.
Make of that what you will. I’d say it’s the one album on this list with a cover much more interesting by far than the music inside.
In 1983, the Harvard economic historian David Landes wrote an influential book called Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. There, he argued that timepieces (more than steamships and power looms) drove the economic development of the West, leading it into the Industrial Revolution and eventually into an advanced form of capitalism. Timepieces allowed us to measure time in accurate, uniform ways. And, once we had that ability, we began to look at the way we live and work quite differently. Landes wrote:
“The mechanical clock was self-contained, and once horologists learned to drive it by means of a coiled spring rather than a falling weight, it could be miniaturized so as to be portable, whether in the household or on the person. It was this possibility of widespread private use that laid the basis for ‘time discipline,’ as against ‘time obedience.’ One can … use public clocks to simon people for one purpose or another; but that is not punctuality. Punctuality comes from within, not from without. It is the mechanical clock that made possible, for better or worse, a civilization attentive to the passage of time, hence to productivity and performance.”
It’s all part of the logic that eventually gets us to Benjamin Franklin offering this famous piece of advice to a young tradesman, in 1748, “Remember that Time is Money.”
You can find similar arguments at the core of this newly-released video called “A Briefer History of Time: How technology changes us in unexpected ways.” The video brings us back to the 1650s — to a turning point when Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock, which remained the world’s most precise and widespread timekeeping device for the next three centuries. He wasn’t alone. But certainly Huygens did much to make us masters of time. And certainly also slaves to it.
Dubai, located in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has become a bustling, metropolis, and a major business hub in the Persian Gulf region. “My first impression of Dubai was that of super-tall buildings jutting out of the desert sand,” writes Rob Whitworth, the creator of the film above. “Dubai may be home to the world’s most outrageous skyline,” but there’s more to it than that. After “3 months of exploration, research and filming,” Whitworth continues, “my lasting impression is of the eternal wonder of the desert and the importance it holds for the Emirati people.” Skyscrapers and desert dunes, they both get captured in the photographer’s fast moving short film called “Dubai Flow Motion” — a film which, as Petapixel rightly notes, takes “hyperlapses to the next level.” Watch and you’ll see what they mean.
One particularly distressing hallmark of late modernity can be characterized as a cultural loss of the future. Where we once delighted in imagining the turns civilization would take hundreds and even thousands of years ahead—projecting radical designs, innovative solutions, great explorations, and peculiar evolutionary developments—we now find the mode of forecasting has grown apocalyptic, as climate change and other catastrophic, man-made global phenomena make it difficult to avoid some very dire conclusions about humanity’s impending fate. We can add to this assessment the loss of what we may call the “long view” in our day-to-day lives.
As the Long Now Foundation co-founder Stewart Brand describes it, “civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span,” driven by “the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking.”
Such is the texture of modern existence, and though we may run our hands over it daily, remarking on how tightly woven the fabric is, we seem to have few-to-no mechanisms for unweaving—or even loosening—the threads. Enter the Long Now Foundation and its proposal of “both a mechanism and a myth” as a means encouraging “the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility.”
Inspired by computer scientist Daniel Hill’s idea for a Stonehenge-sized clock that “ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium,” the foundation proposes a number of projects and guidelines for restoring long-term thinking, including “minding mythic depth,” “rewarding patience,” and “allying with competition.” The clock, initially a thought experiment, is becoming a reality, as you can see in the short video above, with a massive, “monument scale” version under construction in West Texas and scale prototypes in London and the Long Now Foundation’s San Francisco headquarters. Largely a symbolic gesture, the “10,000 year clock,” as it’s called, has been joined with another, eminently practical undertaking reminiscent of Isaac Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica—a “library of the deep future.”
One wing of this library, the Manual for Civilization, aims to compile a collection of 3,500 books in the Foundation’s physical space—books deemed most likely to “sustain or rebuild civilization.” To begin the project, various future-minded contributors have been asked to make their own lists of books to add. The first list comes from musician/composer/producer/musical futurist and founding board member Brian Eno, who named the foundation. Other notable contributors include Long Now Foundation president Stewart Brand and board member and co-founder of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly. Below, see the first ten titles from each of these futurist’s lists, and further down, links to the full list of contributors’ selections so far. As you scan the titles below, and browse through each contributor’s list, consider why and how each of these books would help humanity rebuild civilization, and suggest books of your own in the comments.
10 Titles from Brian Eno’s Manual for Civilization list
Once again, these are only excerpts from longer lists by these three futuristic thinkers. For their complete selections, click on their lists below, as well as those from such cultural figures as sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson and Brain Pickings’ editor Maria Popova. And please let us know: Which books would you include in the “Manual for Civilization” library project, and why? You can also add your own suggestions for the growing library at the Long Now Foundation’s website.
I often wonder just how I would have done my job(s) before the advent of an internet that puts more or less whatever information I might need right at my fingertips. The answer, of course, applies to any question about how we did things in an earlier technological era: we would’ve had to talk to someone. Some of us would’ve had to talk to a librarian, just like the ones The New York Public Library has employed (and continues to employ) to research and respond to any questions people need answered.
The internet, as it happens, has loved #letmelibrarianthatforyou, the hashtag the New York Public Library started using on Instagram to identify the unusual such questions it fielded in the 20th century. Their recent discovery of a box of notecards filled with preserved questions from the 1940s through the 80s, photographs of which they now post on a regular basis, has provided a clear window onto the human curiosity of days past — or rather, the instances of human curiosity that librarians found curious enough to preserve in their box labeled “interesting research questions” and kept behind the desk.
Search technology, of course, hasn’t yet made human consultants of every kind obsolete; there are more Googleable and less Googleable questions, after all. Examples of the former include 1962’s “What is the gestation of human beings in days?” (“I was born on 1/29/62,” replies one commenter. “Maybe my mother was getting impatient!”), 1966’s query about whether Jules Verne wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the undated “Are Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates the same person?”
Some patrons, on the other end of the spectrum, preferred to ask the unanswerable: one needed the solution to “the riddle of existence,” and another called in pursuit of The Oxford Ornithology of American Literature. Even if the librarians couldn’t help out these inquisitive people of the mid-20th century, I do hope they found a way to satiate your curiosity. It almost makes me want to see what modern humanity is Googling right now. Wait, no — I said “almost.”
Blank on Blank returns this week with another one of their groovy animations. This time, we find Lou Reed recalling the goals and ambitions of his avant-garde rock band, The Velvet Underground. We wanted, he says, “to elevate the rock n’ roll song, to take it where it hadn’t been taken before.” And, in his humble opinion, they did just that, far exceeding the musical output of contemporary bands like The Doors and The Beatles, which he respectively calls “stupid” and “garbage.” If you listen to the complete interview recorded in 1987 (web — iTunes), you’ll hear Lou diss a lot of bands. But which one did he give props to? U2. Go figure.
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It’s time, again, for Edge.org’s annual question. The 2015 edition asks 187 accomplished (and in some cases celebrated) thinkers to answer the question: What Do You Think About Machines That Think?
John Brockman, the literary über agent and founder of Edge.org, fleshes the question out a bit, writing:
In recent years, the 1980s-era philosophical discussions about artificial intelligence (AI)—whether computers can “really” think, refer, be conscious, and so on—have led to new conversations about how we should deal with the forms that many argue actually are implemented. These “AIs”, if they achieve “Superintelligence” (Nick Bostrom), could pose “existential risks” that lead to “Our Final Hour” (Martin Rees). And Stephen Hawking recently made international headlines when he noted “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
But wait! Should we also ask what machines that think, or, “AIs”, might be thinking about? Do they want, do they expect civil rights? Do they have feelings? What kind of government (for us) would an AI choose? What kind of society would they want to structure for themselves? Or is “their” society “our” society? Will we, and the AIs, include each other within our respective circles of empathy?
Numerous Edgies have been at the forefront of the science behind the various flavors of AI, either in their research or writings. AI was front and center in conversations between charter members Pamela McCorduck (Machines Who Think) and Isaac Asimov (Machines That Think) at our initial meetings in 1980. And the conversation has continued unabated, as is evident in the recent Edge feature “The Myth of AI”, a conversation with Jaron Lanier, that evoked rich and provocative commentaries.
Is AI becoming increasingly real? Are we now in a new era of the “AIs”? To consider this issue, it’s time to grow up. Enough already with the science fiction and the movies, Star Maker, Blade Runner, 2001, Her, The Matrix, “The Borg”. Also, 80 years after Turing’s invention of his Universal Machine, it’s time to honor Turing, and other AI pioneers, by giving them a well-deserved rest. We know the history. (See George Dyson’s 2004 Edge feature “Turing’s Cathedral”.) So, once again, this time with rigor, the Edge Question—2015: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?
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