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For most of us, the title The Shining first calls to mind the Stanley Kubrick film, not the Stephen King novel from which it was adapted. Though it would be an exaggeration to say that the former has entirely eclipsed the latter, the enormous difference between the works’ relative cultural impact speaks for itself — as does the resentment King occasionally airs about Kubrick’s extensive reworking of his original story. At the center of both versions of The Shining is a winter caretaker at a mountain resort who goes insane and tries to murder his own family, but in most other respects, the experience of the two works could hardly be more different.
How King’s The Shining became Kubrick’s The Shining is the subject of the video essay above from Tyler Knudsen, better known as CinemaTyler, previously featured here on Open Culture for his videos on such auteurs as Robert Wiene, Jean Renoir, and Andrei Tarkovsky (as well as a seven-part series on Kubrick’s own 2001: A Space Odyssey). It begins with Kubrick’s search for a new idea after completing Barry Lyndon, which involved opening book after book at random and tossing against the wall any and all that proved unable to hold his attention. When it became clear that The Shining, the young King’s third novel, wouldn’t go flying, Kubrick enlisted the more experienced novelist Diane Johnson to collaborate with him on an adaptation for the screen.
Almost all of Kubrick’s films are based on books. As Knudsen explains it, “Kubrick felt that there aren’t many original screenwriters who are a high enough caliber as some of the greatest novelists,” and that starting with an already-written work “allowed him to see the story more objectively.” In determining the qualities that resonated with him, personally, “he could get at the core of what was good about the story, strip away the clutter, and enhance the most brilliant aspects with a profound sense of hindsight.” In no case do the transformative effects of this process come through more clearly than The Shining: Kubrick and Johnson reduced King’s almost 450 dialogue- and flashback-filled pages to a resonantly stark two and a half hours of film that has haunted viewers for four decades now.
“I don’t think the audience is likely to miss the many and self-consciously ‘heavy’ pages King devotes to things like Jack’s father’s drinking problem or Wendy’s mother,” Kubrick once said. Still, anyone can hack a story down: the hard part is knowing what to keep, and even more so what to intensify for maximum effect. Knudsen lists off a host of choices Kubrick and Johnson considered (including showing more Native American imagery, which should please fans of Bill Blakemore’s analysis in “The Family of Man”) but ultimately rejected. The result is a film with an abundance of visual detail, but only enough narrative and character detail to facilitate Kubrick’s aim of “using the audience’s own imagination against them,” letting them fill in the gaps with fears of their own. While his version of The Shining evades nearly all clichés, it does demonstrate the truth of one: less is more.
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Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Reimagined as Wes Anderson and David Lynch Movies
The Shining and Other Complex Stanley Kubrick Films Recut as Simple Hollywood Movies
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The forecasted rain held off, the poor air quality caused by Canadian wildfires had abated, and the world’s largest Pride parade stepped off without incident in New York City on the final Sunday in June.
It’s grown quite a bit since the last Sunday of June 1970, when Christopher Street Liberation Day March participants paraded from Sheridan Square to Central Park’s Sheep Meadow.
Seeking to commemorate the one year anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, when a police raid touched off a riot at the Greenwich Village gay bar, the event’s planners took inspiration from the organized resistance to the Vietnam War and Annual Reminders, a yearly call for equality from the Philadelphia-based Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations.
Parade co-organizer Craig Rodwell imagined a more freewheeling public event involving larger numbers than Annual Reminders, something that could “encompass the ideas and ideals of the larger struggle in which we are engaged—that of our fundamental human rights.”
In the lead up to the parade, Gay Liberation Front News reported that society stacked the deck against openly gay individuals, an observation echoed by a marcher in lesbian activist Lilli M. Vincenz‘s documentary footage, above:
At first I was very guilty, and then I realized that all the things that are taught you, not only by society but by psychiatrists are just to fit you in a mold and I’ve just rejected the mold. And when I rejected the mold, I was happier.
Look carefully for placards from various participating groups, including the Mattachine Societies of Washington and New York, Lavender Menace, the Gay Activists Alliance, a church, and gay student groups at Rutgers and Yale.
Estimates place the crowd at anywhere from 3,000 to 20,000. In addition to marchers, the parade drew plenty of onlookers, some voicing support like a uniformed soldier stationed at Fort Dix who says “Great, man, do your thing!”. Others came prepared to voice their vigorous opposition.
“He’s a closet queen and you can find him in Howard Johnson’s any night,” a marcher cracks when asked his opinion of a counter demonstrator brandishing a sign invoking Sodom and Gomorrah.
Presumably the second part of this marcher’s comment was not intended to signify that the gent in question had a powerful attraction to the venerable Times Square diner’s fried clams, but rather its upstairs neighbor, the all-male Gaiety strip club.
Compared to the flashy festive costumes and booming club music that have become a staple of this millennia’s Pride Marches, 1970’s proceedings were a comparatively modest affair. Marchers chanted in unison, processing uptown in street clothes – hippie-style duds of the period with a couple of square suits and fedoras in the mix.
A clean cut young man in a windbreaker and natty star-spangled tie expressed frank disappointment that Mayor John Lindsay and other political figures had kept their distance.
Younger readers may be taken aback to hear Vincenz asking him how long he had been gay, but gratified when he responds, “I was born homosexual, it’s beautiful.”
By the time the marchers reached the Sheep Meadow, a number of men had shed their shirts. The parade morphed into a pastoral celebration in which revelers can be seen playing Ring Around the Rosie, plucking weeds to decorate each other’s hair, and attempting to break the record for longest kiss.
A man whose bib overalls have been customized with iron-on letters arranged to spell out Stud Farm expresses regret that he spent so many years in the closet.
Co-organizer Foster Gunnison Jr.’s wish was for every queer participant to leave the parade with “a new feeling of pride and self-confidence … to raise the consciences of participating homosexuals-to develop courage, and feelings of dignity and self-worth.”
That first parade’s marshal, Mark Segal, cofounder of Gay Liberation Front, summed it up on the 50th anniversary of the original event:
The march was a reflection of us: out, loud and proud.
Enjoy a glimpse of 2023’s New York City Pride March here.
Via Kottke
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
If you haven’t yet seen Wes Anderson’s new movie Asteroid City, I recommend doing so not just in the theater, but in a seat as close to the screen as you can handle. You’ll feel more enveloped by the desert landscapes (the Spanish desert, standing in for Arizona), but you’ll also be better placed to appreciate the detail of all the miniatures that fill it. Over his past two and a half decades of feature films, Anderson’s signature aesthetic has become ever more Andersonian. This has many aspects, one of them being an intensive use of models: real, physical models, as opposed to digital visuals created entirely by computer. In the new Vox video above, model maker and prop painter Simon Weisse, veteran also of Isle of Dogs and The French Dispatch, explains the how and the why behind it
Asteroid City opens with a train crossing a vast, parched expanse, passing alongside (or through) the occasional rock formation. Any viewer would assume the train is a miniature, though not every viewer would immediately think — as revealed in this video’s behind-the-scenes shots — that the same is true of the rocks.
In both cases, the “miniatures” are only so miniature: the relatively large scale offers a canvas for an abundance of painted detail, which as Weisse explains goes a long way to making them believable onscreen. And even if they don’t quite look “real,” per se, they conjure up a reality of their own, an increasingly central task of Anderson’s cinematic project, in a way that pure CGI — which once seemed to have displaced the art of miniatures entirely — so often fails to do.
The video quotes Anderson as saying that audiences pick up on artificiality in all its forms, whether digital or physical; the filmmaker must commit to his own artificiality, accepting its shortcomings and exploiting its strengths. “The particular brand of artificiality that I like to use is an old-fashioned one,” he adds (but needs not, given his undisputed reputation as the auteur of the retro). Christopher Nolan, a director of the same generation who has an entirely different sensibility from Anderson, also goes in for large, detailed miniatures: mostly buildings that blow up, it seems, but his choices still show an understanding of the kind of physicality that even the most advanced digital effects have never replicated. If he’s seen the alien spaceship that descends on Asteroid City (the mention of which no longer seems to count as a spoiler), he must have felt at least a touch of envy.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
What could be more charmingly idyllic than a glimpse of snowy-bearded Impressionist Claude Monet calmly painting en plein-air in his garden at Giverny?
A wide-brimmed hat and two luxuriously large patio-type umbrellas provide shade, while the artist stays cool in a pristine white suit.
His canvas is off camera for the most part, but given the coordinates, it seems safe to assume the subject’s got something to do with the famous Japanese footbridge spanning Monet’s equally famous lily pond.
The sun’s still high when he puts down his cat’s tongue brush and heads back to the house with his little dog at his heels, no doubt anticipating a delicious, relaxed luncheon.
Even in black-and-white, it’s an irresistible pastoral vision!
And quite a contrast to the recent scene some 300 km away in Ypres, where German troops weaponized chlorine gas for the first time, releasing it in the Allied trenches the same year the above footage of Monet was shot.
Lendon Payne, a British sapper, was an eyewitness to some of the mayhem:
When the gas attack was over and the all clear was sounded I decided to go out for a breath of fresh air and see what was happening. But I could hardly believe my eyes when I looked along the bank. The bank was absolutely covered with bodies of gassed men. Must have been over 1,000 of them. And down in the stream, a little bit further along the canal bank, the stream there was also full of bodies as well. They were gradually gathered up and all put in a huge pile after being identified in a place called Hospital Farm on the left of Ypres. And whilst they were in there the ADMS came along to make his report and whilst he was sizing up the situation a shell burst and killed him.
The early days of the Great War are what spurred director Sacha Guitry, seen chatting with Monet above, to visit the 82-year-old artist as part of his 22-minute silent documentary, Ceux de Chez Nous (Those of Our Land).
The entire project was an act of resistance.
With German intellectuals trumpeting the superiority of Germanic culture, the Russian-born Guitry, a successful actor and playwright, sought out audiences with aging French luminaries, to preserve for future generations.
In addition to Monet, these include appearances by painters Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas, sculptor Auguste Rodin, writer Anatole France, composer Camille Saint-Saens, and actor Sarah Bernhardt.
Although Ceux de Chez Nous was silent, Guitry carefully documented the content of each interview, revisiting them in 1952 for the expanded version with commentary, below.
Beneath his placid exterior, Monet, too, was quite consumed by the horrors unfolding nearby.
James Payne, creator of the web series Great Art Explained, views Monet’s final eight water lily paintings as a “direct response to the most savage and apocalyptic period of modern history…a war memorial to the millions of lives tragically lost in the First World War.”
In 1914, Monet wrote that while painting helped take his mind off “these sad times” he also felt “ashamed to think about my little researches into form and colour while so many people are suffering and dying for us.”
As curator Ann Dumas notes in RA Magazine:
The peace of his garden was sometimes shattered by the sound of gunfire from the battlefields only 50 kilometres away. His stepson was fighting at the front and his own son Michel was called up in 1915. Many of the inhabitants of Giverny fled to safety but Monet stayed behind: “…if those savages must kill me, it will be in the middle of my canvases, in front of all my life’s work.” Painting was what he did and he saw it, in a way, as his patriotic contribution. A group of paintings of the weeping willow, a traditional symbol of mourning, was Monet’s most immediate response to the war, the tree’s long, sweeping branches hanging over the water, an eloquent expression of grief and loss.
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
No American who came of age in the nineteen-eighties — or in most of the seventies or nineties, for that matter — could pretend not to understand the importance of the mall. Edina, Minnesota’s Southdale Center, which defined the modern shopping mall’s enclosed, department store-anchored form, opened in 1956. Over the decades that followed, living patterns suburbanized and developers responded by plunging into a long and profitable orgy of mall-building, with the result that generations of adolescents lived in reasonably easy reach of such a commercial institution. Some came to shop and others came to work, but if Hugh Kinniburgh’s documentary Mall City is to be believed, most came just to “hang out.”
Introduced as “A SAFARI TO STUDY MALL CULTURE,” Mall City consists of interviews conducted by Kinniburgh and his NYU Film School collaborators during one day in 1983 at the Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island. Unsurprisingly, their interviewees tend to be young, strenuously coiffed, and dressed with studied nonchalance in striped T-shirts and Members Only-style windbreakers.
A trip to the mall could offer them a chance to expand their wardrobe, or at the very least to calibrate their fashion sense. You go to the mall, says one stylish young lady, “to see what’s in, what’s out,” and thus to develop your own style. “You look for ideas,” as the interviewer summarizes it, “and then recombine them in your own way, try to be original.”
One part of the value proposition of the mall was its shops; another, larger part was the presence of so many other members of your demographic. In explaining why they come to the mall, some teenagers dissimulate less than others: “It’s like, where the cool people are at,” says one girl, with notable forthrightness. “You’re fakin’ this all. I mean, you’re just tryin’ to meet people.” Kinniburgh and his crew chat with a group of barely adolescent-looking boys — each and every one smoking a cigarette — about what encountering girls has to do with the time they spend hanging out at the mall. One answers without hesitation: “That’s the main reason.” (Yet these labors seem often to have borne bitter fruit: as one former employee and current hanger-out puts it, “Mall relationships don’t last.”)
Opened just two months after Southdale Center, Roosevelt Field is actually one of America’s most venerable shopping malls. (It also possesses unusual architectural credibility, having been designed by none other than I. M. Pei.) By all appearances, it also managed to reconstitute certain functions of a genuine urban social space — or at least it did forty years ago, at the height of “mall culture.” Asked for his thoughts on that phenomenon, one post-hippie type describes it as “probably the wave of the future. Maybe the end of the future, the way things are going.” Here in that future, we speak of shopping malls as decrepit, even vanishing relics of a lost era, one with its own priorities, its own folkways, even its own accents. Could such a variety of pronunciations of the very word “mall” still be heard on Long Island? Clearly, further fieldwork is required.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Jean Eustache’s famous elegy for a left-wing generation is, at its heart, reactionary.
But I’ve gotten really disgruntled with the “prestige TV” landscape and am trying to redirect my content consumption accordingly. One thing that makes movies really great in my view is that before they shoot a movie, they write a screenplay and the screenplay has an end. Both the screenwriter and other people have read that screenplay all the way from beginning to end and they’ve tweaked and changed it and gotten it into a position where they are ready to start production. Then after a movie is filmed, the editor and director work with the footage and come up with a complete movie that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. They then ship the movie out, and it’s screened by critics who watch the entire movie before writing their review.
This does not guarantee that every movie that comes out is good. But it does guarantee that if someone tells you “‘The Menu’ is good,” they are evaluating a completed product…
By contrast, TV shows have this quasi-improvisational quality where the showrunners are constantly needing to come up with new balls to toss into the air. In old-fashioned non-prestigious “adventure of the week”-type shows, this actually works fine because the writers are not building up tension or setting unexplored plots in motion. But as serialized TV storytelling has gotten more and more common, we’re more and more often asked to show patience through early episodes or to try to find things intriguing with no ability to know whether any of it will pay off. Creators often have no idea where they’re going with the story.
Back in HBO’s heyday, the tradeoff was that The Sopranos and The Wire got to paint on a giant canvas and tell stories that are just too capacious for the movie format. But eventually networks got tired of spending that kind of money and cut back the sizes of the casts to something more normal for television.
That is from his Friday mailbag ($). The bottom line is that, like Matt, you should watch more movies and less TV.
The post Matt Yglesias on movies vs. TV appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Your thoughts and suggestions are most welcome, thank you!
The post Seattle bleg appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Somehow, it took me 21 years to see Lilo & Stitch. A huge pizza night blockbuster with our crew.
It is so satisfying to me when you see something and you think, “This is so unlike everything else… how did this even get made?” And the answer turns out to be: “Well, it wasn’t made like everything else.”
In “An Oral History of Lilo & Stitch,” the writer Bilge Ebiri tells the story of how the movie came to be. Basically, it was done for a tiny (for Disney) budget, with a tiny (for Disney) crew, in a “secret hangar” in Florida, far away from the eyes of Disney leadership in Burbank. They’d just worked on Mulan, which was sort of a nightmare, and this time they wanted to do things differently:
We said, “Okay, here’s the deal. We have a lot less money. We have less time. But we want to figure out how we can make this movie so that everybody goes home at night to have dinner with their loved ones. Everybody gets a weekend. We’ll figure out how to make this and be happy doing it.” That became the spirit of making the film.
They did wild stuff like going old school and choosing to use watercolor backgrounds like in the 1930s. The only trouble was, almost nobody was alive who knew how to do it. Luckily they went to see Maurice Noble, who painted backgrounds on Snow White:
Maurice Noble was one of my heroes, and he was in his 80s. He used to work for Disney in the ’40s and ’50s. He could hardly see. One great technique that he told me about: There were these rocks in Peter Pan, in the Mermaid Cove, with beautiful rock texture. I asked, “How’d you get this texture?” He said, “The secret is sea salt — very coarse-grain sea salt.” Now, I had tried to get that texture so many times, and I knew about the salt technique, but I never knew you used sea salt. So all the lava rocks in Lilo & Stitch — it was all sea salt. It came right from Maurice Noble.
They also went on location in Hawaii because they didn’t believe you could really get the light and color right without visiting:
One day we were sitting on the beach at night having dinner by the ocean. The sun was setting and the waves were coming in. The water was turquoise, but the sea foam was pink. “How can the white foam be affected that much by the color of the sky, but not the water?” You’ll see in the surfing scene, we did that. Most people would’ve just done the water with white foam or grayish blue foam. We made it pink because that’s what we saw.
The whole piece is worth reading. (It reminded me a lot of reading about the making of Mad Max: Fury Road. That movie really shouldn’t exist. It is what it is because of the process of making it.)
In fact, now I’m wondering if that’s one way you know something is great? When you say: “How does this even exist?”
Wes Anderson has been making feature films for 27 years now, and in that time his work has grown more temporally and geographically specific. Though shot in his native Texas in the late nineteen-nineties, his breakout picture Rushmore seemed to take place in no one part of the United States — and even more strikingly, no one identifiable era. Few filmgoers had seen anything like Anderson’s clean-edged retro sensibility before, and in subsequent projects like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, it intensified considerably. Then, in 2012, came Moonrise Kingdom, which took the Andersonian aesthetic to a particular time and place: New England in the fall of 1965.
Since then, Anderson and his collaborators have told stories in their distinctive visions of Eastern Europe, Japan, and France — but always, explicitly or implicitly, in one period or another of the mid-twentieth century. Judging by its newly released trailer, the events of Anderson’s next film Asteroid City occur in perhaps the most mid-twentieth-century year imaginable, 1955, and in small-town America at that.
Or rather, very small-town America: Asteroid City itself appears to be located in the middle of the Arizona desert (though shot in Spain, in keeping with Anderson’s increasingly Europe-oriented production habits), and with nothing more exciting going on — apart from the occasional distant nuclear-weapons test — than an annual “junior stargazer competition.”
The film “tells the story of a beleaguered widower (Jason Schwartzman) who’s busy schlepping his four children across the country to see their grandfather (Tom Hanks) when their car suddenly breaks down,” writes The Verge’s Charles Pulliam-More. This strands the family in the titular town, with its “strange earthquakes that no one knows the true cause of, fears about whether aliens might be lurking among the humans living in Asteroid City, and multiple sightings of a celebrity (Scarlett Johansson).” As fans can already guess from this summary, the ensemble cast includes more than a few Anderson regulars, also including Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, and Bob Balaban. A case of COVID-19 kept Bill Murray from participating, but even so, nobody who sees the trailer can doubt that the viewing experience of Asteroid City will be highly Andersonian indeed.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the name of David Byrne’s band was Talking Heads — as the title of their 1982 live album perpetually reminds us. But their overall artistic project arguably had less to do with the head than the body, a proposition memorably underscored in Stop Making Sense, the Jonathan Demme-directed concert film that came out two years later. “Music is very physical and often the body understands it before the head,” Byrne says in a bizarre contemporary self-interview previously featured here on Open Culture. To make that fact visible onstage, “I wanted my head to appear smaller, and the easiest way to do that was to make my body bigger.”
Hence costume designer Gail Blacker’s creation of what Talking Heads fans have long referred to as the “big suit.” Byrne has always been willing discuss its origins, which he traces back to a trip to Japan. There, as he put it to Entertainment Weekly in 2012, he’d “seen a lot of traditional Japanese theater, and I realized that yes, that kind of front-facing outline, a suit, a businessman’s suit, looked like one of those things, a rectangle with just a head on top.”
A friend of his, the fashion designer Jurgen Lehl, said that “everything is bigger on stage.” “He was referring to, I think, gestures and the way you walk and what not,” Byrne told David Letterman in 1984. But he took it literally, thinking, “Well, that solves my costume problem right there.”
Though Byrne only wore the big suit for one number, “Girlfriend Is Better” (from whose lyrics Stop Making Sense takes its title), it became the acclaimed film’s single most iconic element, referenced even in children’s cartoons. New Yorker critic Pauline Kael called it “a perfect psychological fit,” remarking that “when he dances, it isn’t as if he were moving the suit — the suit seems to move him.” The association hasn’t been without its frustrations; he once speculated that his tombstone would be inscribed with the phrase “Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?” But now that Stop Making Sense is returning to theaters in a new 4K restoration, nearly 40 years after its first release, he’s accepted that the time has finally come to pick it up from the cleaner’s. Unsurprisingly, it still fits.
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Talking Heads Live in Rome, 1980: The Concert Film You Haven’t Seen
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Let me quote myself: “From 2010 to 2012, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson released Everything is a Remix, a four-part series that explored art and creativity, and particularly how artists inevitably borrow from one another, draw on past ideas and conventions, and then turn these materials into something beautiful and new. In the initial series, Ferguson focused on musicians, filmmakers, writers and even video game makers. Now, a little more than a decade later, Ferguson has resurfaced and released a fifth and final chapter in his series, with this episode focusing on a different kind of artist: artificial intelligence.” Above, you can watch the complete edition of “Everything is a Remix,” with all parts combined into a single, hour-long video. A transcript of the entire production can be found here. Watch. Ponder. Create.
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Enlarge / Singer-songwriter Joseph Foreman, better known as "Afroman," clowns around poolside at an Orange County hotel. (credit: Don Bartletti / Contributor | Los Angeles Times)
Seven Ohio cops who raided a rapper known as Afroman’s house last summer are now suing the rapper after Afroman made music videos using footage from the raid. The Adams County Sheriff’s Office police officers allege that the rapper is profiting off unauthorized use of their likenesses, not only in the music videos but also on merchandise created after Afroman’s social media posts and music videos went viral on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Cops suing say they’ve been subjected to death threats, ridicule, reputation loss, embarrassment, humiliation, emotional distress, and other alleged harms and will continue to suffer unless the court forces Afroman to destroy all the merchandise and posts bearing their likenesses.
Ars couldn’t immediately reach Afroman, whose real name is Joseph Foreman, for comment, but Vice talked to him in January. Afroman told Vice that after the raid, he suffered, too, losing gigs and feeling powerless. He decided to create music videos for songs called “Lemon Pound Cake,” “Why You Disconnecting My Video Camera,” and “Will You Help Me Repair My Door” to reclaim his good name.
"The book is about the importance of film for enabling audiences to connect to the most remote environment on the planet."
The post Filming the Deep: Margaret Cohen on Underwater Film Technologies appeared first on Public Books.
Here is the transcript, audio, and video. Here is part of the summary:
Historian Tom Holland joined Tyler to discuss in what ways his Christianity is influenced by Lord Byron, how the Book of Revelation precipitated a revolutionary tradition, which book of the Bible is most foundational for Western liberalism, the political differences between Paul and Jesus, why America is more pro-technology than Europe, why Herodotus is his favorite writer, why the Greeks and Persians didn’t industrialize despite having advanced technology, how he feels about devolution in the United Kingdom and the potential of Irish unification, what existential problem the Church of England faces, how the music of Ennio Morricone helps him write for a popular audience, why Jurassic Park is his favorite movie, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Which Gospel do you view as most foundational for Western liberalism and why?
HOLLAND: I think that that is a treacherous question to ask because it implies that there would be a coherent line of descent from any one text that can be traced like that. I think that the line of descent that leads from the Gospels and from the New Testament and from the Bible and, indeed, from the entire corpus of early Christian texts to modern liberalism is too confused, too much of a swirl of influences for us to trace it back to a particular text.
If I had to choose any one book from the Bible, it wouldn’t be a Gospel. It would probably be Paul’s Letter to the Galatians because Paul’s Letter to the Galatians contains the famous verse that there is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no man or woman in Christ. In a way, that text — even if you bracket out and remove the “in Christ” from it — that idea that, properly, there should be no discrimination between people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, based on gender, based on class, remains pretty foundational for liberalism to this day.
I think that liberalism, in so many ways, is a secularized rendering of that extraordinary verse. But I think it’s almost impossible to avoid metaphor when thinking about what the relationship is of these biblical texts, these biblical verses to the present day. I variously compared Paul, in particular in his letters and his writings, rather unoriginally, to an acorn from which a mighty oak grows.
But I think actually, more appropriately, of a depth charge released beneath the vast fabric of classical civilization. And the ripples, the reverberations of it are faint to begin with, and they become louder and louder and more and more disruptive. Those echoes from that depth charge continue to reverberate to this day.
And:
COWEN: In Genesis and Exodus, why does the older son so frequently catch it hard?
HOLLAND: Well, I’m an elder son.
COWEN: I know. Your brother’s younger, and he’s a historian.
HOLLAND: My brother is younger. It’s a question on which I’ve often pondered, because I was going to church.
COWEN: What do you expect from your brother?
HOLLAND: The truth is, I have no idea. I don’t know. I’ve often worried about it.
Quite a good CWT.
The post My excellent Conversation with Tom Holland appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
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Armageddon Time is undercut by the very forces it hopes to expose: white complicity, forged through the exploitation of Black life.
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