Charles Bukowski, the Poet Laureate of American Lowlife, would have celebrated his 94th birthday tomorrow, almost certainly with some beer and cigarettes. (The very stuff that makes it difficult to reach 94 — but I digress.) To mark this occasion, the folks behind the Blank on Blank animations previously featured on Open Culture have created a video called “Charles Bukowski Uncensored.” The video animates outtakes from candid conversations that took place between Bukowski, his wife, and the producer of the recording session for the 1993 audio CD, Run With the Hunted. It’s a little something to hold you over until the Blank on Blank team returns with new animations this fall. If you’re wondering, Bukowski died in 1994, at age 73.
T.S. Eliot may have been the most unavoidable force in American letters in the early 20th century, but he was probably not a very likable person. At least Ernest Hemingway didn’t think so. The burly novelist, often in the habit of telling fellow writers to “kiss my ass,” wrote in a July 1950 letter to writer and editor Harvey Breit that Eliot could do just that “as a man,” since he “never hit a ball out of the infield in his life and he would not have existed for dear old Ezra [Pound], the lovely poet and stupid traitor.” Of Pound’s “stupid” treason, Hemingway had previously written some choice words; Of Eliot’s sins—in addition to his failing to measure up to Yogi Berra, despite both of them hailing from St. Louis—Hemingway included the following: “Royalist, Anglo-Catholic and conservative”
Despite all this, however, Hemingway, like most of his modernist contemporaries, owed a debt to Eliot, whom Papa almost-grudgingly admitted was “a damned good poet and a fair critic,” though “there isn’t any law a man has to go and see [Eliot’s play] the Cocktail party” [sic]. Writes Wendolyn E. Tetlow, author of Hemingway’s In Our Time: Lyrical Dimensions, “despite Hemingway’s acid comments, however, he could not escape Eliot’s influence.” Of particular significance for Hemingway’s terse, elliptical style was the Eliot doctrine of the “objective correlative,” something of a refinement of Pound’s imagism. In Hemingway’s ruminations on his own process, it seems he could not have done without this poetic technique—one of encapsulating abstract concepts and fleeting, insubstantial emotions in the amber of concrete, discrete objects, symbols, and acts.
“Find what gave you the emotion,” Hemingway wrote in “The End of Something,” remarking on a schooner moving through a ruined mill town, “then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it and have the same feeling.” Eliot would never have been so vulgar as to plainly spell out his method in the text itself, like a set of instructions, but Hemingway does so again in Death in the Afternoon:
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.
Compare these passages with Eliot’s definition in his 1919 essay on Hamlet: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.” The influence—if not outright borrowing—is unmistakable. Yet Hemingway remained leery of Eliot “as a man.” In 1954, Robert Manning of The Atlanticvisited Hemingway in Cuba and found him surly on the subject and “not warm toward T.S. Eliot,” preferring instead to “praise Ezra Pound.” Hemingway would go so far, in fact, as to claim that Pound deserved Eliot’s Nobel.
We shouldn’t take any of this salty talk too seriously. After all, Hemingway, the great boaster, liked to trash people he envied. Even Joe Louis, whom you would think aspiring boxer Hemingway would hold in highest esteem, “never learned to box,” though he was, Papa admitted, “a good getter-upper.”
Bruce Lee died in 1973 just before the premiere of Enter the Dragon — the highest grossing movie of that year. Lee’s sudden and mysterious death left a huge void that studios scrambled to fill. Some shady Hong Kong producers started cranking out kung fu flicks starring deceptively named actors like Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Lai or, combining two ‘70s tough guys in one name, Bronson Lee. American studios started making movies like Black Belt Jones starring Enter the Dragon co-star Jim Kelly. It was in this context that American producers acquired the Japanese karate thriller Gekitotsu! Satsujin Ken starring Shinichi Chiba and renamed it The Street Fighter. The movie became notorious for earning an X‑rating solely for violence, and it turned its lead, rechristened Sonny Chiba, into a cult idol. You can watch The Street Fighterabove, poorly dubbed and in the wrong aspect ratio. Just as it was probably screened at your local grindhouse theater back during the Ford administration. (The film, by the way, is in the public domain.)
The movie’s story is a typical tale of manly honor, revenge and betrayal, where men settle their differences with their fists and women — the “good” women, anyway – simper on the sidelines. Chiba plays Terry Tsurugi, a badass street thug. Sure, he might be a world-class jerk, especially after he sells one deadbeat client into prostitution, but he’s a jerk with a code of honor. Of course, you don’t watch martial arts movies – or almost any Japanese movie from the 1970s, really – for its progressive stance on gender relations. You watch them for the ass kicking. And on that front, The Street Fighter delivers. So when Tsuguri gets hired to protect the beautiful daughter of a dead oil tycoon from a nefarious band of gangsters, you know he will do just that, even if it involves throwing punches, delivering gory eye gouges and, in one memorable scene, ripping the testicles clean off of a rapist. The movie’s relentless violence and general nihilism made The Street Fighter a hit, spawning a handful of sequels – Return of the Street Fighter, Sister Street Fighter and Street Fighter’s Last Revenge. The movie also made at least one major fan: Quentin Tarantino.
Tarantino loved the movie in a way that only the reigning uber-nerd of ’70s exploitation movies could: he made references to it in his works. Clarence and Alabama watched The Street Fighter and its sequels in True Romance. Tarantino even cast Chiba as Hanzo, the ace katana maker in Kill Bill. In the run up to his 2007 double bill with Robert Rodriguez,Grindhouse, Tarantino placedThe Street Fighter 13th on his list of favorite exploitation flicks, above Dario Argento’s giallo classic Suspiria but below the absolutely bonkers Master of the Flying Guillotine.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.
In 1998, legendary Beatles’ producer George Martin—all set to “hang up his earphones” and retire— brought together the most unusual assortment of people for In My Life, a tribute album composed entirely of Martin-produced Beatles’ songs performed primarily by actors and comedians. Goldie Hawn gives a “giggly nightclub chanteuse” reading of “A Hard Day’s Night,” Billy Connolly does a slightly cracked version of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” Jim Carrey covers “I Am the Walrus” (in a musical performance surprisingly subdued next to, for example, his rendition of ”Somebody to Love”), and Sean Connery closes things out with a somber reading of “In My Life.”
But the album’s opening track is its best: Robin Williams and Bobby McFerrin’s duet of “Come Together” redeems many of the record’s weakest moments. Just above, hear the track over a fan-made slideshow of Williams highlights. Williams and McFerrin had teamed up before in the wonderfully silly video for “Don’t Worry Be Happy.” Here, with ample help from Martin’s lush production, they manage to evoke the slinky, seductive weirdness of the original song while simultaneously having a goofy old time of it. Popmatters editor Sarah Zupko, a self-confessed Beatlemaniac who otherwise found the album a supreme disappointment, calls Williams’ “leering” through the song “a hoot,” and I’m sure you’ll agree.
Just above, watch a one-hour BBC documentary on the making of In My Life. At 9:30, see Williams, Martin, and McFerrin in the hysterical recording sessions for their “Come Together” cover. Martin admits that he asked Williams to join the project “with some trepidation,” then realized that “it was with some trepidation” that Williams accepted. It was Williams who suggested “bringing along a mate,” McFerrin, whom he calls “a one-man accompaniment.” Among many other charms, the short doc features Martin throughout explaining not only the process of recording In My Life, but also his memories of the original recording sessions for these songs, clearly so dear to him and his proudest legacy. But of course, given our national period of mourning for the warm, brilliantly funny, deeply humane, and tragically sad Robin Williams, the real joy is seeing him here in much happier times, encouraging and praising the talents of others even as he shines so brightly alongside them.
Before the word processor, before Whiteout, before Post It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that’s what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare manuscripts. In 2011, the Bodleian Library acquired the manuscript of Austen’s abandoned novel, The Watsons. In announcing the acquisition, the Bodleian wrote:
The Watsons is Jane Austen’s first extant draft of a novel in process of development and one of the earliest examples of an English novel to survive in its formative state. Only seven manuscripts of fiction by Austen are known to survive.The Watsons manuscript is extensively revised and corrected throughout, with crossings out and interlinear additions.
Janeausten.ac.uk (the web site where Austen’s manuscripts have been digitized) takes a deeper dive into the curious quality of The Watsons manuscript, noting:
The manuscript is written and corrected throughout in brown iron-gall ink. The pages are filled in a neat, even hand with signs of concurrent writing, erasure, and revision, interrupted by occasional passages of heavy interlinear correction.… The manuscript is without chapter divisions, though not without informal division by wider spacing and ruled lines. The full pages suggest that Jane Austen did not anticipate a protracted process of redrafting. With no calculated blank spaces and no obvious way of incorporating large revision or expansion she had to find other strategies – the three patches, small pieces of paper, each of which was filled closely and neatly with the new material, attached with straight pins to the precise spot where erased material was to be covered or where an insertion was required to expand the text.
According to Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library, this prickly method of editing wasn’t exactly new. Archivists at the library can trace pins being used as editing tools back to 1617.
I know, it’s a dated reference now, but since I still watch the remade Battlestar Galactica series on Netflix, the mystical refrain—“All of this has happened before and will happen again”–still seems fresh to me. At any rate, it’s fresher than the clichéd “history repeats itself.” However you phrase it, the truism looks more and more like a genuine truth the more one studies ancient history, literature, and philosophy. The conflicts and concerns that feel so of the moment also occupied the minds and lives of people living hundreds, and thousands, of years ago, and whatever you make of that, it certainly helps put the present into perspective. Can we benefit from studying the wisdom, and the folly, of the ancients? To this question, I like to turn to an introductory essay C.S. Lewis penned to the work of a certain church father:
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. […] If we read only modern books […] where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
I may disagree with Lewis about many things, including that “clean sea breeze” of history, but I take to heart his point about reading the ancients to mitigate our modern biases and shine light on our blind spots. To that end, we present links to several excellent online courses on the ancients from institutions like Yale, NYU, and Stanford, free to peruse or take in full. See our master list—Free Courses in Ancient History, Literature & Philosophy—for 36 quality offerings. As always, certain courses provide more resources than others, and a few only offer their lectures through iTunes. These are decisions course administrators have made, not us! Even so, these free resources are invaluable to those wishing to acquaint, or reacquaint, themselves with the study of ancient humanities.
Osamu Tezuka is one of the great creative forces of the 20th century. Known in his native Japan as the “god of manga,” Tezuka was mind-bogglingly productive, cranking out around 170,000 pages of comics in his 60 years of life. He almost single-handedly made manga respectable to read for adults, creating tales that were both universal and emotionally complex. And he worked in pretty much every genre you can imagine from horror, to girly fantasy, to an epic series about the life of the Buddha. Yet of all of Tezuka’s many volumes of comics, his best beloved work was Tetsuwan Atomu, otherwise known as Astro Boy.
In 1962, Tezuka fulfilled a childhood dream by opening an animation studio. One of his first projects was to adapt was Astro Boy. The television series premiered in 1963 and proved to be hugely popular in Japan. It wasn’t long before American TV started airing dubbed versions of the show. You can see the very first episode, “Birth of Astro Boy,” above.
After his son dies in a freak car accident, scientist Dr. Astor Boynton is driven mad by grief. He develops an insane laugh and, with it, an equally insane plan to build a robot who looks just like his dead son. After a Frankenstein-esque montage, Astro Boy is born. All seems well for the adorable, sweet-natured robot, until Boynton freaks out over Astro Boy’s lack of growth. “I’ve been a good father to you, haven’t I?” he whines. “Well then, why can’t you be a good son to me and grow up to be a normal human adult?” How’s that for a parental guilt trip?
So Dr. Boynton casts Astro Boy out, selling him into slavery to The Great Cacciatore, an evil circus ringleader who forces him to be the world’s cutest robot gladiator. Fortunately, Dr. Elefun, a colleague of Dr. Boynton, takes pity on Astro Boy and works to free him from his bondage.
The whole story plays out as if Mary Shelley and Fritz Lang collaborated to make Dumbo. Tezuka throws in a lot of wacky slapstick comedy, which just barely takes the edge off the story’s Dickensian melodrama, which relentlessly mines all those primal fears you thought you got over. In short, it’s brilliant.
The series ran for two years in the States and then continued on re-runs thoughout the decade. One of the shows fans was apparently Stanley Kubrick. During the mid-60s, Kubrick sent Tezuka a letter asking if he would be interested in helping with the art direction and design of his new movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. The offer would have required that Tezuka spend a year or more in London. Though greatly flattered, Tezuka turned the offer down. The workaholic artist simply couldn’t spend that much time away from his studio. One has to wonder what Kubrick’s masterpiece would have looked like seen through the prism of Tezuka.
In 2001, Steven Spielberg premiered a movie that was a long gestating project of Kubrick’s – the wildly underrated A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The parallels between that movie, about a robot child cast out by his parents into a cruel world, and Astro Boy are striking. Kubrick, as it turns out, might have been even a bigger fan of the God of Manga than previously thought.
Here’s the trailer for A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.
If you call yourself a Tolkien fanboy or fangirl, you’ve almost certainly kept up with the various film and television adaptations of not just the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but of its predecessor, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. Tolkien’s first children’s novel (or so the literary world first received it). The story it tells of the reluctant hero Bilbo Baggins and the band of raffish compatriots who drag him out to claim some treasure from Smaug the dragon offers understandably irresistible material for adaptation: the richly detailed, often funny high-fantasy adventure has, over the decades, made for numerous productions on the stage, radio, and screen.
Known in English as The Fairytale Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit and in Russian, in full, as Сказочное путешествие мистера Бильбо Бэггинса, Хоббита, через дикий край, чёрный лес, за туманные горы. Туда и обратно. По сказочной повести Джона Толкина “Хоббит,”the hourlong TV movie debuted on the Leningrad TV Channel’s children’s showTale After Tale in 1985. This unlicensed adaptation frames itself with the words of a Tolkien stand-in called “the Professor,” using live actors to play the main characters like Bilbo, Thorin, Gandalf, and Gollum, portraying the more exotic ones with either puppets or, according to Tolkien Gateway, dancers from the Leningrad State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre. The fact that this version of The Hobbitonly recently became available with real English subtitles (as opposed to goofy parody ones) goes to show just how seriously the Tolkien fandom has taken it, but it does retain a kind of handcrafted charm. Plus, it gives the internet the chance to indulge in the obligatory Yakov Smirnoff gag: in Soviet Russia, ring finds you.
In her New York Times review of Haruki Murakami’s latest, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Patti Smith writes that the novelist has two modes, “the surreal, intra-dimensional side” and the “more minimalist, realist side.” These two Murakamis often coexist within the same work of fiction, as the fantastic or the supernatural invades the real, or the other way around. Like one of his literary heroes, Franz Kafka, Murakami’s work doesn’t so much create alternate realities as it alters reality, with all its mundane details and humdrum daily routines. As Ted Gioia put it in a review of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, “this ability to capture the phantasmagorical in the thick of commuter traffic, broadband Internet connections and high-rise architecture is the distinctive calling card of Murakami”—he “mesmerizes us by working his legerdemain in places where reality would seem to be rock solid.”
In Colorless Tsukuru TazakiMurakami works this same magic, as you can see in this excerpt published in Slate last month. Textured with granular realist details and straightforward narration, the scene slowly builds into a captivating supernatural tale that slides just as easily back into the weft and warp of waking life. In one piece of dialogue, Murakami sums up one way we might read all of his “surreal, intra-dimensional” flights: “It wasn’t an issue of whether or not he believed it. I think he totally accepted it as the weird tale it was. Like the way a snake will swallow its prey and not chew it, but instead let it slowly digest.” Given the jittery, distracted state of most modern readers in a technological landscape that pushes us to make hasty judgments and snappy, ill-considered replies, it is surprising how many of Murakami’s fans are willing to take the time. And it is no subset of cloistered devotees either, but, in Patti Smith’s words, “the alienated, the athletic, the disenchanted and the buoyant.”
Murakami finds readers across this broad spectrum for many reasons; his prose is accessible even when his narratives are baffling. (Gioia notes that “when the Japanese publisher of Kafka on the Shore set up a website allowing readers to ask questions of the author, some 8,000 were submitted.”) His perennial preoccupation with, and immersion in, the worlds of jazz, rock, and classical music, baseball, and running, draw in those who might normally avoid the Kafka-esque. But when we come to Murakami, Kafka-esque is very often what we find, as well as Salinger-esque, Vonnegut-esque, Pynchon-esque, even Philip K. Dick-esque, as well as the –esque of realist masters like Raymond Carver. Whether you’re new to Murakami or a longtime fan of his work, you’ll find all of these tendencies, and much more to love, in the four short stories we present below, all free to read at The New Yorker for a limited time (the magazine will go behind a paywall in the fall).
Take advantage of this brief reprieve and enjoy the many riches of Haruki Murakami’s fictive worlds, which so deceptively impersonate the one most of us live in that we feel right at home in his work until it jolts us out of the familiar and into a “weird tale.” Whether you believe them or not, they’re sure to stay with you awhile.
And last but surely not least, we bring you “The Folklore of Our Times” from The Guardian (published August 1, 2003), one of Murakami’s involved realist coming-of-age narratives notable for the mature, almost world-weary insights he draws from the seemingly unexceptional fabric of ordinary experience.
We know that depression affects people from all walks of life. Rich. Poor. Celebs. Ordinary Joes. Young. Old. But, somehow after the death of Robin Williams, there’s a renewed focus on depression, and my mind turned immediately to a lecture we featured on the site way back in 2009. The lecture is by Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist, who has a talent for making scientific subjects publicly accessible. A recipient of the MacArthur genius grant, Sapolsky notes that depression — currently the 4th greatest cause of disability worldwide, and soon the 2nd — is deeply biological. Depression is rooted in biology, much as is, say, diabetes. As the lecture unfolds, you will see how depression changes the body. When depressed, our brains function differently while sleeping, our stress response goes way up 24/7, our biochemistry levels change, etc. You will see that biology is at work.
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Jim Jarmusch is the anti-MTV filmmaker. Most music videos, from the dawn of MTV in 1981 on, are slick and facile, long on visual spectacle and short on things like depth or, you know, coherence. Jarmusch, who started making movies in the East Village in the 1970s when the DIY-spirit of the No Wave movement was at its zenith, made movies that were deliberately slow and spare, recalling Bertolt Brecht and Yasujiro Ozu.
“I don’t generally like music videos because they provide you images to go with the songs rather than you providing your own,” he said in an interview with Film Comment back in 1992. “You lose the beauty of music by not bringing your own mental images or recollections or associations. Music videos obliterate that.”
Yet he did direct a handful of videos. As much as he dislikes the medium, Jarmusch gets music in a way that few other directors do. It is an integral element of all Jarmusch’s work. Check out the opening to his third feature Down By Law:
He uses Tom Waits’s “Jockey Full of Bourbon” to animate those gorgeous tracking shots of New Orleans to set up the characters and evoke a mood of retro-cool. Jarmusch’s brilliant editing and camera work create new associations with the music. I can’t listen to Tom Waits’ song now without thinking of Down By Law.
The problem that Jarmusch really had with music videos, it seems, is the end purpose. The music in Down By Law serves the story. A music video serves commerce. Jarmusch admitted as much when he butted heads with Waits over making a video for “It’s All Right By Me,” which you can see above.
“I had a big fight years ago with Tom Waits,” he recalled in an interview with The Guardian. “He said: ‘Look, it’s not your film. It’s a promo for my song.’ It was after Down By Law, and it was about the editing. But he was right….I remember I locked him outside in the parking lot, and he’s hammering at the door, and he’s shouting through ‘Jim! I’m gonna glue your head to the wall!’ He didn’t glue my head to the wall. But they’re not really films of mine, they’re films for a song. I learned that a long time ago.”
Jarmusch’s first music video was “The Lady Don’t Mind” by the Talking Heads off, of their album Little Creatures. It features some lonely shots of New York City and an empty apartment that looks very reminiscent of Jarmusch’s early ‘80s works.
Here’s a music video for Neil Young’s “Dead Man” which is essentially a montage of shots from Jarmusch’s same-named 1996 masterpiece. One suspects he had less trouble with this video than the others.
Finally, over at Dangerous Minds, you can see a video that Jarmusch shot for Big Audio Dynamite’s song “Sightsee M.C.!.” BAD was, of course, the band formed by the guitarist and singer of the Clash, Mick Jones.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.
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