With more than 480 fan-made segments culled from over 1,500 submissions, The Empire Strikes Back Uncut (also known as ESB Uncut) features a stunning mash-up of styles and filmmaking techniques, including live action, animation, and stop-motion. The project launched in 2013, with fans claiming 15-second scenes to reimagine as they saw fit – resulting in sequences created with everything from action figures to cardboard props to stunning visual effects. Helmed by Casey Pugh, who oversaw 2010’s Emmy-winning Star Wars Uncut, the new film has a wonderful homemade charm, stands as an affectionate tribute to The Empire Strikes Back, and is a testament to the talent, imagination, and dedication of Star Wars fans.
ESB Uncut was just released yestery, right in time for the weekend. Below we have some more creative takes on the Star Wars films to keep you entertained.
In Stephen King’s first televised interview from way back in 1982, the horror writer revealed that he sleeps with the lights on. He may have grown out of the habit by now, but it’s no wonder if he hasn’t. A macabre imagination like his probably sees all sorts of creepy things lurking in the dark. In any case, King has certainly learned a thing or two since then about making his fears more marketable. In the past several years he’s been promoting his work on the Internet to reach new audiences.
In 2000, his novella Riding the Bulletdebuted exclusively online, and in 2008 he partnered with Marvel Comics to promote his first collection of short stories in six years, releasing one short graphic video episode at a time adapted from the 56-page novella “N.” See all 25 episodes above. It’s a story, writes Time, “about a psychologist whose obsessive-compulsive patient is entranced by a mysterious plot of land.” King calls the adaptation “kind of a video comic book,” and while the “point of the exercise,” says his editor Susan Moldow,” is to stimulate book sales,” I think you’ll agree it’s a pretty nifty bit of storytelling on its own.
On King’s website, you’ll find links to all sorts of multimedia products, including a Lifetime original movie, Big Driver, a film titled A Good Marriage, now out on video-on-demand, and the latest from graphic novel series Dark Tower. You’ll also find a comic adaptation of the short story “Little Green God of Agony.” See the first panel above, and read the full story here.
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Long before Youtube and online comics, there was the audiobook. King has narrated his own work for years, and it’s also been read by such big names as Kathy Bates, Sissy Spacek, Willem Defoe, Anne Heche, Eli Wallach, and many more. Just above, hear character actor John Glover—a name you may not know, but a face you’d recognize—read “One for the Road,” a story from King’s first, 1978, collection Night Shift. It’s a vampire story, but a particularly deft one, writes Noah Charney at New Haven Review, one that “deals in archetypes that are the heart of good horror fiction.” King’s stories, Charney asserts, are “beautifully-written, highly intelligent. They happen to feature monsters of all sorts, from natural to preternatural, but that is secondary to their core as great stories, well-told.”
King has long defended popular fiction to the literati—in his acceptance speech for the National Book Award, for example—and lashed out at “the keepers of the idea of serious literature,” whom he says “have a short list of authors who are going to be allowed inside.” It may have taken a few years, but King got in, eventually publishing in such august outlets as The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Read four stories from those publications at the links below. And if you’re still in need of a good scare in the days leading up to Halloween, make sure to check out “The Man in the Black Suit,” a short film adaptation of another story published in The New Yorker in 1994.
When we featured his illumination of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” we called Gustave Doré “one of the busiest, most in-demand artists of the 19th century,” who “made his name illustrating works by such authors as Rabelais, Balzac, Milton, and Dante.” His hand may have given a visual dimension to a number of revered texts, but what of the man himself? For the deepest insight into an artist, we should look to the works of art he inspires. In the case of the cutout animated film above, Doré not only provides the inspiration but plays, in a sense, the starring role. L’imaginaire au pouvoir offers us a portrait of the artist as a two-dimensional man, stumbling into haunting drawn-and-cut-out realms straight from his own imagination.
“The film was created by Vincent Pianina and Lorenzo Papace of Le Petit Écho Malade and features music by Ödland,” writes EDW Lynch at Laughing Squid (a site that previously featured Le Petit Écho Malade’s music video for Ödland’s “Østersøen”) “It is a promo, Lynch adds, for ‘Gustave Doré (1832–1883): Master of Imagination,’ an ongoing exhibition of Doré’s work at Musée d’Orsay in Paris through May 11, 2014.” Though Doré, by all accounts, lived a fairly eventful life, he had to have spent a great deal of it slaving painstakingly away with his wood engraving tools. The same goes for any producer of such vivid artistic visions—but I suspect that all of them have to go on this kind of harrowing journey to the center of their soul now and again. Here, Pianina and Papace have, with Doré’s very materials, created a journey into the inner realm that still gives them life today. And they’ve added a healthy dose of 21st-century humor for good measure.
A decade before tens of thousands turned on, tuned in, and dropped out at the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, psychiatrist Sidney Cohen was investigating the effects of LSD on human consciousness. If his voluntary subjects at LA’s Veteran’s Administration Hospital found themselves suddenly able to “see the music” a la Lizard Queen Lisa Simpson, they did so in a very respectable-seeming, mid-1950s setting.
Witness this session with the polite young wife of a hospital employee, above. She’s a bit nervous, but not because of any media-fueled preconceptions regarding the trip she’s about to take. It was 1956, and another of Dr. Cohen’s guinea pigs, publisher Henry Luce, had yet to regale the public with some of acid’s more colorful properties via multiple articlesin both Time and Life magazines.
As such, our unidentified participant is as pure as the glass of water she’s served at the one minute mark. Purer, actually, given that the drink has been dosed with 1/10th of a milligram Lysergic acid diethylamide.
Three hours further along, she’s tripping her brains out, still seated demurely in the same chair in which her intake interview was conducted. Had it been filmed 20 years later, her revelations would seem trite, but the context renders them endearing. If she’s bummed out about anything, it’s that the nice doctor questioning her about her mind blowing journey isn’t able to see the molecules too.
I’d love to know what became of her.
Cohen continued observing LSD, with subjects as celebrated as writer Aldous Huxley, philosopher Gerald Heard and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. He published his findings inThe Beyond Within: the LSD Story. His ultimate takeaway was that ”beatnik microculture” destroyed LSD’s chances for achieving its potential as a psychotherapy tool.
This may be why we never hear him urging his subject to check out the drapes, which is surely what several young men of my acquaintance would have resorted to, back in the day.
David Lynch-style austerity of the setting aside, perhaps such coaching was unnecessary. Whatever this woman’s brain had her seeing, it made her want to “talk in technicolor.”
May I suggest that we’re just as delusional if we assume that someone who could be described as a 1950s “housewife” must have inhabited a world we can only perceive in black-and-white?
Criterion specializes in selling “important classic and contemporary films” to film aficionados. If you like masterpieces by David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, John Cassavetes, Truffaut, Fellini and the rest, you won’t want to miss this rare sale.
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Ask enough people to name their favorite artist of any kind, and sooner rather than later, someone will name Miles Davis. The trumpeter and jazz auteur behind — or, strictly speaking, up in front of — such unchallenged masterpieces as Birth of the Cool, Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, and Bitches Brewhas long since ascended to the pantheon of American music, but that doesn’t mean we should overlook his other artistic achievements. Achievements as a painter, for instance: true fans know that Davis’ visual art appears on a few of his album covers, such as that of 1989’s Amandlaright below. “Painting, long a Davis avocation, is becoming a profitable sideline,” says a contemporary Los Angeles Times article. “In collaboration with his girlfriend, Jo Gelbard, he did the artwork for his new album; the cover is an impressive self-portrait using the reds and greens he seems to favor.”
You can see more of Davis’ visual art over at Dangerous Minds and The Daily Beast. The so-called Prince of Darkness “didn’t begin to draw and paint in earnest until he was in his mid-fifties, during the early 1980s and a period of musical inactivity,” writes Tara McGinley. ”
Miles being Miles, he didn’t merely dabble, but made creating art as much a part of his life as making music in his final decade,” resulting in “a sharp, bold and masculine mixture of Kandinsky, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Picasso and African tribal art.” Just last year, Insight Editions published Miles Davis: The Collected Artwork, finally bringing together the fruits of the creativity the trumpeter could command even without his horn. Countless young jazz players claim Davis as an influence to this day, and they’ll continue to do so as long as jazz itself persists, but I do wonder how soon young painters will as well.
Rock ‘n’ roll has a sad tradition of geniuses who’ve succumbed to mental illness and addiction. Some of them have, paradoxically, produced some of the best music of their careers during periods of decline. We’d have to mention Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, Moby Grape’s Skip Spence, Big Star’s Chris Bell… all of whom recorded strange, intimate, and heartfelt solo albums after leaving their respective bands. Then, of course, there’s Brian Wilson, whose 1966 Pet Sounds re-invented pop, and laid the groundwork for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Wilson is said to have been inspired by Rubber Soul). We may know Pet Sounds as a Beach Boys release, but it was really Wilson’s record. In the video series here, “Behind the Sounds,” we get a unique listen in to the creation of the album by way of early takes, lots of studio chatter, and pop-up video style factoids in the Pet Sounds cover’s Cooper Black font over behind-the-scenes photos.
At the top, hear behind the sounds of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.” Just above, hear the making of “I Know There’s An Answer,” and below, hear Parts 1 and 2 of the creation of “God Only Knows,” the lush, self-effacing ballad whose harpsichord and French horn intro clearly inspired the orchestration in songs like “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” See videos for the rest of Pet Sounds’ songs at the “Behind the Sounds” Youtube channel.
Pet Sounds has been named the greatest album of all time by NME and Mojo magazines and ranks at number two in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, right behind Sgt. Pepper’s. Wilson wrote the songs with lyricist Tony Asher during a time when he was pulling away from his sunny surf-pop group and expanding his repertoire of studio techniques in unprecedented ways. The songs can sound superficially like breezy Beach Boys pop, but reveal themselves as complex, baroque orchestrations that hold enough instrumental surprises and lyrical subtleties for a lifetime of listening. It’s a record both thoroughly of its time and thoroughly timeless.
Unlike many a tragic rock composer, Wilson has survived and recovered (many times over) into old age, recording and touring on and off with the Beach Boys and opening up about his darker times. And unless you’re spending this week under a rock somewhere, you’ll catch the BBC’s star-studded video re-make of “God Only Knows,” just below, circulating all over the ‘net. Both a promo for the more than two dozen musicians involved and a benefit single for charitable organization BBC Children in Need, the glamorous production features Wilson behind his piano, looking stately and healthy. For more on the making of Pet Sounds, see this 2002 BBC documentary, Art That Shook The World: The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. And please, amidst this flurry of Pet Sounds goodies, don’t forget to listen to the album itself, best appreciated, says Wilson, with “earphones, in the dark.”
Are you feeling doomed and insignificant, like a shrimp destined for the frying pan? Well, then, we have just the thing for you. Last week we featured three introductory philosophy videos from Alain de Botton’s School of Life, on Martin Heidegger, the Stoics, and Epicurus. Each of these shorts is designed to show how philosophy, ancient and modern, can enhance our daily life by addressing questions of freedom, suffering, and happiness. Above—in what Maria Popova at Brain Pickings calls an “imaginative video essay”—de Botton again engages with Heidegger’s thought, this time distilling the difficult German philosopher’s concept of “Being” (das sein) to its essence.
Heidegger’s desire, de Botton tells us, was to “wake us up to the idea that we are surrounded by death.” (Heidegger used the “grander term,” das nichts,” the nothing, or “inexistence, the opposite of life.”) Instead of simply awakening existential terror by reminding us of how fragile and precarious our lives are, Heidegger sought to encourage moments of insight into the mysterious unity and beauty of life. In these moments, he thought, we might learn “to recognize our kinship with all living things and with the Earth itself.”
What keeps us from having these insights all of the time? For Heidegger, our social denial of Being takes the form of “endless chatter,” what he called das gerede. We are all familiar with its many manifestations; from the perpetual trivia of celebrity gossip to the numbing scaremongering of the 24-hour news cycle, thousands of voices surround us hourly, clamoring for our attention and seeking to drown out our individual awareness of death and of Being. In the visual kitchen metaphor above, das gerede is represented by a “pancake-like dough layer” that “smothers our connection with Being.” “The task of philosophy,” Heidegger believed, “is to remove us from the doughy comfort of chatter and introduce us, systematically, to the bracing concept of Nothingness.”
It’s certainly not for nothing that Heidegger has been identified as an existentialist, though he repudiated the term. For Heidegger, the question of human existence was primary and above all other kinds of inquiry. Heidegger did not believe that the methods and technologies of the natural sciences could ever offer satisfactory answers to our fundamental questions about our existence. So what was Heidegger’s cheerful advice to those of us seeking a more authentic connection to Being? Like Morrissey and various Romantic poets, Heidegger recommended that we “spend more time in graveyards.” To get in touch with life, he suggests, we must first learn to get in touch with death.
Some directors like John Cassavetes and Wong Kar-wai like to discover the movie as they are making it. Others filmmakers have a very clear conception of the movie right from the beginning. Alfred Hitchcock was very much in that latter category. “Once the screenplay is finished, I’d just as soon not make the film at all,” he once told Roger Ebert. “I have a strongly visual mind. I visualise a picture right down to the final cuts.” And that is very much evident in the final product. From the famous Psycho shower scene to a wild-eyed Jimmy Stewart dangling from a ledge in Vertigo to Cary Grant being menaced by a crop duster in North By Northwest, Hitchcock has produced some of the most memorable, arresting images of the 20th Century.
British artist Dave Pattern set out to highlight Hitch’s visual genius with his 1000 Frames of Hitchcockseries, which compresses each of Hitchcock’s 52 major movies down to a mere 1000 frames. That’s about six seconds of running time.
“It all started when in 2003 I made a website that tries to gather information about Hitchcock DVD releases over the world,” Pattern told Danish movie magazine Echo. “The quality of the publications are very different from country to country. It sort of snowballed from there.”
What’s amazing about this project is just how much of the movie comes through in this greatly abbreviated, soundless version. You completely understand that Tippi Hedren is getting terrorized by an implacable enemy in The Birds. You don’t even need to see that malevolent murder of crows. You can see it just in her face. At the beginning of the movie, she’s elegant, aloof and perfectly composed. At the end of the film, she’s unkempt, bloody and broken. Hitchcock’s creepy sexual politics and his famously unwholesome obsession with blondes shines through here.
What is utterly apparent in this project – and something you might miss while watching the movie — is Hitchcock’s complete control of color. The palette of The Birds (middle image) is dominated by the color green, from Hedren’s outfit to the color of a pickup truck to the hue of the hills. North By Northwest(bottom), by contrast, is composed mostly of beige and slate blue. Click on the images to view them in a larger format.
Below, you can check out all the movies, each distilled down to 1,000 frames. And, if you’re inspired to dive deep into the works of the Master of Suspense, you can watch 23 of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies for free here.
(If you have any problems playing this clip, please refresh the page.)
On November 10, Pink Floyd will unveil The Endless River. And, above, you can hear ‘Louder Than Words,’ the first track released from the album. It’s the only vocal track on an otherwise instrumental LP.
The Endless River is the band’s first album since 1994’s The Division Bell. And it’s apparently going to be their last. In the second clip recorded by the BBC, David Gilmour talks about the concept behind The Endless River, how they wrote “Louder Than Words,” and how, especially with the death of keyboardist Richard Wright, it’s going to be their last creative effort. “I think we have successfully commandeered the best of what there is. I suspect this is it.”
The Endless River can be pre-ordered on Amazon or iTunes.
In my day job, I have the privilege of overseeing Stanford’s Continuing Studies program where we bring Stanford courses to the San Francisco Bay Area community, and increasingly the larger world. This fall, we’re presenting a pretty special course called The State of the Union 2014. Taught by Rob Reich (Political Science, Stanford), David Kennedy (History, Stanford), and James Steyer (CEO, Common Sense Media), the course examines “the abundant challenges and opportunities of major themes contributing to the health, or disease, of the United States body politic: inequality, energy and the environment, media and technology, the economy, and the 2014 midterm elections.” And to help sort through these complex questions, the professors will be joined by 18 distinguished guests, including Steven Chu (former Secretary of Energy), Reed Hastings (CEO of Netflix), Janet Napolitano (former Secretary of Homeland Security), Ruth Marcus (columnist for the Washington Post), Karl Eikenberry (former US Ambassador to Afghanistan) and Joel Benenson (chief pollster for President Barack Obama).
We’re filming the class sessions of this seven-week course and making them available on YouTube and iTunes. The first two sessions (each lasting about 90 minutes) can be viewed in the playlist above. The first session focuses on the Midterm elections; the second on the state of California. New sessions will be added each week, generally on Thursday or Friday.
Education
Technology and Social Change
If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, make sure you check out the Continuing Studies program. It’s a tremendous resource for lifelong learners.
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