Friday, April 28th, 2017

Time	Event
7:58a	The First 100 Days of Fascist Germany: A New Online Project from Emory University From Emory University comes The First 100 Days of Fascist Germany, an attempt to document online what happened on each day–from January 30, 1933 through May 9, 1933–when Hitler was named Reichskanzler of Germany. As you can perhaps imagine, the motivation for the project isn’t entirely divorced from current events. The grad students behind The First 100 Days explain: During the highly contentious political climate in this country, the terms “fascism” and “Nazi Germany” have been tossed around quite freely by both sides of the political spectrum. As a response to this and in an effort to provide some clarity of what fascism in Nazi Germany actually looked like, we at the Emory University German Department initiated a research project that aims to document the first 100 days of National Socialism- from the day that Adolf Hitler was named Reichskanzler on January 30, 1933 until May 9, 1933. They continue: The general plan for our project is that our research team will work its way through the 100 days, investigating and documenting the events of each day and then posting the findings on a daily basis for public consumption. As the daily calendar shows, Hitler didn’t waste a lot of time. By Day 51, Dachau–one of the first concentration camps–opened and received its first prisoners, notes Emory News. By Day 60, all new stories critical of the government were censored. And, by Day 88, the press expelled from its ranks all Marxists and Jews. That was just the beginning. Meanwhile, on Day 88 over here, Trump’s initiatives (some relatively innocuous, some alarming) have met civil, judicial and political resistance, or collapsed under their own weight. The concern of January has given way to comedy in April: But don’t get complacent, terror might be the operative word in May. You can learn more about Emory’s historical project here. via John McMurtrie Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox.  If you’d like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: Harvard Students Launch a Free Course on How to Resist Trump Hitler Was ‘Blitzed’ On Cocaine & Opiates During World War II: Hear a Wide-Ranging Interview with Best-Selling Author Norman Ohler Fritz Lang Tells the Riveting Story of the Day He Met Joseph Goebbels and Then High-Tailed It Out of Germany How Did Hitler Rise to Power? : New TED-ED Animation Provides a Case Study in How Fascists Get Democratically Elected The New York Times’ First Profile of Hitler: His Anti-Semitism Is Not as “Genuine or Violent” as It Sounds (1922) Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will Wasn’t a Cinematic Masterpiece; It Was a Staggeringly Effective Piece of Propaganda The First 100 Days of Fascist Germany: A New Online Project from Emory University is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
2:15p	Metamorfosis: Franz Kafka’s Best-Known Short Story Gets Adapted Into a Tim Burtonesque Spanish Short Film In one sense, given their spare settings and allegorical feel, the stories of Franz Kafka could play out anywhere. But in another, one can only with difficulty separate those stories from the late 19th- and early 2oth-century central Europe in which Kafka himself spent his short life. This simultaneous connection to place and placelessness (and also, per David Foster Wallace’s interpretation, playfulness, or at least humor of some kind) has made Kafka’s work appealing material indeed for animators, some of whose work we’ve featured here on Open Culture before. When filmmakers try their hands at live-action Kafka adaptations, though, they tend to find themselves performing acts of not just artistic but cultural transplantation. Just last year we posted Dominic Allen’s Two Men, an award-winning short film that relocates Kafka’s parable “Passers-by” to a remote section of Western Australia. Working with a much longer and better-known piece of the Kafka canon, director Fran Estévez’s Metamorfosis brings the tale of Gregor Samsa’s sudden transformation into a large insect to Spain — or into the Spanish language, anyway. The recipient of quite a few awards itself in South America and Europe (including a festival in Kafka’s own birthplace, the current Czech Republic), Metamorfosis combines Kafka’s still-startling man-turned-bug first-person narration with both stark black-and-white footage and illustrations to create just the right claustrophobic, askew atmosphere. The set design, which at certain moments feels right out of early Tim Burton, underscores the fairy-tale aspect of this grim work of imagination. But then, at the very end, the aesthetic ceiling lifts, widening the viewer’s perspective on not just the movie’s foregoing sixteen minutes but on the nature of The Metamorphosis, Kafka’s original story, itself — though, alas, things still don’t end particularly well for poor old Gregor Samsa. Metamorfosis will be added to our list, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Hear Benedict Cumberbatch Read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis Four Franz Kafka Animations: Enjoy Creative Animated Shorts from Poland, Japan, Russia & Canada Franz Kafka Story Gets Adapted into an Award-Winning Australian Short Film: Watch Two Men Franz Kafka Says the Insect in The Metamorphosis Should Never Be Drawn; Vladimir Nabokov Draws It Anyway Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Metamorfosis: Franz Kafka’s Best-Known Short Story Gets Adapted Into a Tim Burtonesque Spanish Short Film is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
4:15p	Rick Wakeman’s Prog-Rock Opera Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 We’ve seen sales of George Orwell’s dystopian nightmare scenario 1984 peak in recent months. Millions of readers seek to understand the brave new world we live in through Orwell’s vision. Parallels abound. We might reasonably ascribe to the ruling party in the U.S. and its media apparatus the slogan “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.” But our experience of reality never fails to validate that old saw about truth and fiction. As Case Western Reserve professor of history John Broich writes, “2017 is stranger than Orwell imagined.” The state doesn’t need a Ministry of Truth to censure the information that reaches us. We are simply overwhelmed with “alternative authorities and realities” who delegitimize the facts and accelerate “the decline in standards of evidence and reasoning in the US electorate.” A sad state of affairs. But in every decade since the publication of Orwell’s novel, critics, journalists, and pundits have seen evidence of his dire forecast. In the titular year itself, Manhattan College professor Edmond van den Bossche summed up the general tenor in The New York Times: “In our 1984… the warnings of George Orwell are more than ever relevant.” Van den Bossche wrote of NATO and the UN. But he might have written about MTV and CNN— both in their infancy—who birthed 24-hour cable news and reality TV.  What Orwell understood about state power, later thinkers like Guy DeBord, Roland Barthes, and Jean Baudrillard built careers writing about: the importance not only of surveillance, but also of spectacle that blurs the lines of truth and fiction as it overwhelms our senses. It’s largely this key theme, I’d argue, that has rendered 1984 so attractive to some of the most spectacular of musicians, including David Bowie—whose attempts to make an Orwell concept album formed part of his Diamond Dogs—and Rick Wakeman, the virtuoso prog-rock keyboardist of Yes fame. After releasing as a solo artist such rock-literary adaptations as 1974’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and the following year’s The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Wakeman turned Orwell’s classic into a rock opera. The 1981 production is an extravaganza of musical excess, with lyrics and vocals by Tim Rice, riveting performances by Chaka Khan (above) and Wakeman’s former Yes bandmate Jon Anderson, and eclectic orchestral instrumentation woven in with Wakeman’s battery of keyboards and synthesizers. The record has become a fan favorite and Allmusic describes it as one of Wakeman’s “most well-rounded albums.” The perfectionistic Wakeman himself looks back on his 1984 with embarrassment. “In retrospect, a mistake,” he has said. “The wrong album at the wrong time, with all the wrong people around at the time…. I formed the wrong band, (the worst I have ever had), the deal for the stage show fell through and all in all I listen back to the music with my head in my hands.” Luckily, we are not bound to respect an artist’s assessment of his work. Wakeman’s music and Rice’s lyrics take the leaden, gray world of Winston Smith and Julia and turn it into a carnival, moving from soaring ballads to rockers with the sneering vaudevillian satire of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (See especially “The Proles,” above, the penultimate number before the final title track.) Orwell’s novel is not what one would call an entertaining book; it is gloomy—though not without its own kind of dark humor—and its monochromatic tone was perfectly captured by Michael Radford’s 1984 film adaptation. But it heavily suggested the world to come, one constantly illuminated and obscured by mass media, with screens in every home and pocket, forever broadcasting some colorful distraction. In the videos above, you’ll see excerpts from the movie mixed with dazzling live performance footage of Wakeman and band playing their 1984 live, synced to the studio recordings, courtesy of Youtuber ROLT (Ronaldo Lopes Teixeira.) Watch his full project at the top of the post. The mash-up suitably shows how these very different interpretations—the more straightforwardly dour and the prog-rock operatic—somehow both do justice to Orwell’s prescient novel. Just above, you can hear Wakeman’s full album on Spotify (whose software you can download for free here). Related Content: David Bowie Dreamed of Turning George Orwell’s 1984 Into a Musical: Hear the Songs That Survived the Abandoned Project Hear the Very First Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Starring David Niven (1949) George Orwell’s 1984 Staged as an Opera: Watch Scenes from the 2005 Production in London Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Rick Wakeman’s Prog-Rock Opera Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
5:00p	Inspiration from Charles Bukowski: You Might Be Old, Your Life May Be “Crappy,” But You Can Still Make Good Art Now more than ever, there’s tremendous pressure to make it big while you’re young. Pity the 31-year-old who fails to make it onto a 30-under-30 list… The soon-to-graduate high schooler passed over for YouTube stardom… The great hordes who creep into middle age without so much as a TED Talk to their names… Social media definitely magnifies the sensation that an unacceptable number of our peers have been granted first-class cabins aboard a ship that’s sailed without us. If we weren’t so demoralized, we’d sue Instagram for creating the impression that everyone else’s #VanLife is leading to book deals and profiles in The New Yorker. Don’t despair, dear reader. Charles Bukowski is about to make your day from beyond the grave. In 1993, at the age of 73, the late writer and self-described “spoiled old toad,” took a break from recording the audiobook of Run With the Hunted to reflect upon his “crappy” life. Some of these thoughts made it into Drew Christie’s animation, above, a reminder that the smoothest road isn’t always necessarily the richest one. In service of his ill-paying muse, Bukowski logged decades in unglamorous jobs —dishwasher, truckdriver and loader, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouseman, shipping clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, elevator operator, and most notoriously, postal carrier and clerk. These gigs gave him plenty of material, the sort of real world experience that eludes those upon whom literary fame and fortune smiles early. (His alcoholic misadventures provided yet more material, earning him such honorifics as the ”poet laureate of L.A. lowlife” and “enfant terrible of the Meat School poets.”) One might also take comfort in hearing a writer as prodigious as Bukowski revealing that he didn’t hold himself to the sort of daily writing regimen that can be difficult to achieve when one is juggling day jobs, student loans, and/or a family. Also appreciated is the far-from-cursory nod he accords the therapeutic benefits that are available to all those who write, regardless of any public or financial recognition: Three or four nights out of seven. If I don’t get those in, I don’t act right. I feel sick. I get very depressed. It’s a release. It’s my psychiatrist, letting this shit out. I’m lucky I get paid for it. I’d do it for nothing. In fact, I’d pay to do it. Here, I’ll give you ten thousand a year if you’ll let me write.  Related Content: 4 Hours of Charles Bukowski’s Riotous Readings and Rants Hear 130 Minutes of Charles Bukowski’s First-Ever Recorded Readings (1968) Rare Recordings of Burroughs, Bukowski, Ginsberg & More Now Available in a Digital Archive Created by the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Follow her @AyunHalliday. Inspiration from Charles Bukowski: You Might Be Old, Your Life May Be “Crappy,” But You Can Still Make Good Art is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)

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