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Wednesday, September 11th, 2019
- “The Differences Between The Handmaid’s Tale Show and Book, Explained” by Eliana Dockterman
- “In Its First Season, The Handmaid’s Tale’s Greatest Failing Is How It Handles Race” by Angelica Jade Bastién
- “The Handmaid’s Tale Could Be So Much Better. But First It Has to Leave Its Star Behind” by Judy Berman
| Time | Event |
| 7:20a | Pretty Much Pop #10 Examines Margaret Atwood’s Nightmare Vision: The Handmaid’s Tale
Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt take on both Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel plus the Bruce Miller/Hulu TV series through season 3. There’s also a graphic novel and the 1990 film. We get into what’s needed to move a novel to the screen like that: The character can’t just remain passive as in the novel in order to keep us suffering with her past the first season as storytelling beyond the book begins. We talk about Atwood’s funny neologisms (like “prayvaganza”) that didn’t make it into the show. How does race play into the story, and how should it? Is the story primarily a political statement or a self-contained work of art? Given the bleakness of the situation depicted, can there be comic relief? How can we have a nominally funny podcast about this work? Some of the articles we drew on or bring up include: Plus Erica brings up this video of Bill Moyers interviewing Atwood about religion. We also touch on Shindler’s List, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, David Brin dissing Star Wars as anti-democratic storytelling, and the many conservative dismissals of the show as hysterical propaganda. Buy the book, the graphic novel, or its new sequel The Testaments. You may be interested in these related Partially Examined Life episodes (Mark's long-running philosophy podcast): #181 on Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil, #139 on bell hooks and her historical account of conditions for black women not terribly dissimilar to the ones described by Atwood, #90 interviewing David Brin about the connections between speculative fiction, philosophy, and political speech. PEL has also recorded several episodes on Sartreand Mark ran a supporter-only session that you could listen to on Nausea in particular. Also check out Brian’s Contellary Tales podcast #2 talking about another breeding-related sci-fi story by Octavia Butler. This episode includes bonus discussion that you can only hear by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network. Pretty Much Pop is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode. Pretty Much Pop #10 Examines Margaret Atwood’s Nightmare Vision: The Handmaid’s Tale 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.  |
| 8:00a | Animated Series Drawn & Recorded Tells “Untold Stories” from Music History: Nirvana, Leonard Cohen, Blind Willie Johnson & More
Who hasn’t tasted the pleasures, guilty or otherwise, of VH1’s Behind the Music? The long-running show, a juicy mix of tabloid gossip, documentary insight, and unabashed nostalgia, debuted in 1997, a totally different media age. Its original viewers were the first generation to use email, shop online, or download (usually pirated) music. People were willing to sit through episodes of an hour or more, without a pause button, whether they liked the music or not. (Some of the best shows profile the most ridiculous one-hit wonders). Behind the Music is still on, and you can stream old episodes all day long, pausing every few minutes to check email or social media, stream another video, or download an album in seconds. But with so many distractions, it’s easy to lose the thread of Huey Lewis and the News’ rise to stardom or the thrilling life and times of Ice-T. We need stories like these, but we may need them in a smaller, more self-contained form. Enter Drawn & Recorded: Modern Myths of Music, an online series that delivers the frisson of Behind the Music in a fraction of the time, with the added bonus of whimsical, high-quality animation and narration by T. Bone Burnett. Now in its fourth season, the award-winning series, directed and hand-drawn by animator Drew Christie for studio Gunpowder & Sky, brings us anecdotes “sometimes hilarious, occasionally tragic, always compelling,” writes Animation Magazine.
Those stories include “Leonard Cohen’s escape from Cuban authorities after being detained under suspicion of espionage” (see the trailer here) and the origins of Kurt Cobain’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (above), a story we covered in a previous post. Drawn & Recorded has differentiated itself from the aforementioned pop music documentary show not only in its length and aesthetic sensibilities but also in its willingness to venture deeper into music history. The episode below, for example, features tragic bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, who made modern history when his music traveled into outer space on the Voyager Golden Record. Given their lengths of under five minutes, each Drawn & Recorded must prune its story carefully—there’s no room for meandering or gratuitous repetition. Each of the vignettes promises an “untold story” from music history, and while that may not always be the case, they are each well-told and surprising and often as strange as Christie’s animations and Burnett’s haunted, raspy baritone suggest.
In the episode below, country legend Jimmie Rogers, whose influence “would range from Hank Williams to Louis Armstrong to Bob Dylan,” arrived in Kenya a decade after his death, by way of British missionaries toting a phonograph. The native people became fascinated with the sound of Rogers’ music. They pronounced his name “Chemirocha,” a word that came to mean “anything new and different.” This became a song called “Chemirocha,” about a half-man/half-antelope god.
It’s a fascinatingly odd little tale about cross-cultural contact, one that has little to do with the biography of Jimmie Rogers, and hence might never make it into your standard-issue documentary. But Drawn & Recorded is something else—a handmade artifact that streams digitally, telling stories about musicians famous, infamous, and rarely remembered. Other episodes feature a canny mix of the contemporary, classic, and golden age, including Grimes, David Bowie, the Beatles, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, MF Doom, and more. Find them, notes Animation Magazine, “on the Network, available on DirecTV, DirecTV Now and AT&T U-verse” or find scattered episodes on Vimeo.
Related Content: Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Animated Series Drawn & Recorded Tells “Untold Stories” from Music History: Nirvana, Leonard Cohen, Blind Willie Johnson & More 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. |
| 11:00a | American Cities Then & Now: See How New York, Los Angeles & Detroit Look Today, Compared to the 1930s and 1940s
Palimpsest has become clichéd as a descriptor of cities, but only due to its truth. Repeatedly erasing and rewriting parts of cities over years, decades, and centuries has left us with built environments that reflect every period of urban history at once. Or at least in an ideal world they do: we've all felt the dullness of new cities built whole, or of old cities that have barely changed in living memory, dullness that underscores the value of places in which a variety of forms, styles, and eras all coexist. Take New York, which even in the 1930s presented the genteelly historical alongside the thoroughly modern. The New Yorker video above places driving footage from that era alongside the same places — the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, Harlem, the West Side Highway— shot in 2017, highlighting what has changed, and even more so what hasn't.
Los Angeles has undergone a more dramatic transformation, as Kevin McAlester's side-by-side video of Bunker Hill in the 1940s and 2016 reveals. "An area of roughly five square blocks in downtown Los Angeles," says The New Yorker, Bunker Hill was from 1959 "the subject of a massive urban-renewal project, in which 'improvement' was generally defined by the people who stood to profit from it, as well as their backers at City Hall, at the expense of anyone standing in their way." The 53-year process turned a neighborhood of "some of the city’s most elegant mansions and hotels," later subdivided and "populated by a mix of pensioners, immigrants, workers, and people looking to get lost," into an attempted acropolis of works by architectural superstars, including Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, recent Pritzker-winner Arata Isozaki's Museum of Contemporary Art, and John Portman's (movie-beloved) Bonaventure Hotel.
Above the classic American buildings of Detroit stands another of Portman's signature glass-and-steel cylinders: the Renaissance Center, commissioned in the 1970s by Henry Ford II as the centerpiece of the city's hoped-for revival. Three decades earlier, says The New Yorker, "Detroit was the fourth-largest city in America, drawing in workers with opportunities for stable employment on the assembly lines at the Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler plants." But soon "factories closed, and jobs vanished from the city that had been the center of the industry." The Motor City's downward slide continued until its 2013 bankruptcy, but some auto manufacturing remains, as shown in this split-screen video of Detroit over the past century alongside Detroit in 2018. It even includes footage of the QLine, the streetcar that opened in the previous year amid the latest wave of interest in restoring Detroit to its former glory. As in any city, the most solid future for Detroit must be built, in part, with the materials of its past.
Related Content: London Mashed Up: Footage of the City from 1924 Layered Onto Footage from 2013 Paris, New York & Havana Come to Life in Colorized Films Shot Between 1890 and 1931 Immaculately Restored Film Lets You Revisit Life in New York City in 1911 The Oldest Known Footage of London (1890-1920) Shows the City’s Great Landmarks Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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. American Cities Then & Now: See How New York, Los Angeles & Detroit Look Today, Compared to the 1930s and 1940s 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. |
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