Brooklyn photographer Dan Eckstein captured India’s truck driving culture during two trips through Rajasthan, Punjab, and Haryana. He describes the garish decorations that fill the rigs as a unique form of folk art, sporting glittering, tassel-filled markers that express everything from caste, religion, and Bollywood film favorites. His series, Horn Please, takes its name from the signs plastered across the back of most trucks in India — “a place where lanes are a mere suggestion, side-view mirrors are seldom used and modes of transport range from horse-drawn carts to eighteen-wheel trucks.” Grant Truck Road stretches from Afghanistan to Bangladesh and has become a fascinating hub of roadside culture. Enter the decorated domain of India’s truck drivers in our gallery. … Read More
The Original Endings of 10 Famous Films
A slow dolly shot and the haunting, ethereal sounds of “Midnight, The Stars and You” by Al Bowlly takes us into the closing scene of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The moment leaves us speculating about the film’s supernatural subtext as we catch our breath. It’s one of the most famous endings in cinema, but it almost never happened. Website The Overlook Hotel — a great source for fans of Kubrick’s iconic horror film — recently posted a copy of the director’s original screenplay that includes a deleted scene cut from the film at the last minute. We talk about it more after the jump. Audience feedback, filmmaker OCD, and other factors have helped shape the movies we know and love, changing the course of cinema history. We took a look at other popular movies and their original endings (as always, there may be spoilers). Did the final cuts triumph? … Read More
Badass Photos of 19th-Century Tattooed Japanese Mail Runners
Who runs around wearing a loincloth, covered in tattoos, and delivers mail on a stick while managing not to look like an absolute fool? Japanese mail runners during the 19th century, that’s who — and they put modern bike messengers to shame. During the Edo period, tattoos became a popular form of art, and these guys are sporting some fantastic ink. Some historians debate that skin art was mainly a phenomenon amongst the lower class, but Okinawa Soba — the culture purveyor who published these wonderful hand colored photos that we found on Retronaut — points out, “the tattoo showed up everywhere in Japan — from the Ainu in the North, to the Okinawans in the South.” Check out more mail runners in our gallery, and feel sad that you’ll never look this badass in your life. … Read More
The Love Stories of 10 Intellectual Power Couples
Unmarried, radical, and leaders of a postwar philosophical movement, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir defined the power couple for a new generation. The early feminist author of The Second Sex and the French existentialist philosopher were partners in work and wisdom, even though they often kept very separate lives. Our friends at Open Culture introduced us to a video that shows footage of the prominent twentieth-century thinkers in a 1968 documentary filmed at Sartre’s Montparnasse apartment. It’s a rare and intimate glimpse into their private lives. The website also quotes Louis Menand in The New Yorker, in an excerpt that defines the essence of Sartre and Beauvoir’s relationship: “They were a powerful couple, with independent lives, who met in cafés, where they wrote their books and saw their friends at separate tables… but who maintained a kind of soul marriage.” With romantic intrigue on the brain, we surveyed history for other famous power couples that embodied the same shared sophistication, cultured appeal, and keen intellect. … Read More
The Fascinating Last Photographs of Famous People
This week marks the 32nd anniversary of Rolling Stone’s famous cover featuring a portrait of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, photographed by Annie Leibovitz. It was the last professional photo captured of the iconic musician, who was killed hours later outside his apartment in New York City. We’re discounting the chilling image fan Paul Goresh took of Lennon and Chapman that fateful morning.
“What is interesting is she said she’d take her top off and I said, ‘Leave everything on’ — not really preconceiving the picture at all,” Leibovitz told the magazine. “Then he curled up next to her and it was very, very strong. You couldn’t help but feel that he was cold and he looked like he was clinging on to her. I think it was amazing to look at the first Polaroid and they were both very excited. John said, ‘You’ve captured our relationship exactly. Promise me it’ll be on the cover.’ I looked him in the eye and we shook on it.”
Leibovitz had only planned to photograph Lennon, but the image of the couple turned out to be one of her most famous portraits and would define one of the most talked about relationships in pop culture history. We scouted for other fascinating photographs that perhaps offer some insight into the final days of famous people. See more photos after the jump. … Read More
12 Filmmakers’ Musings on New York and Cinema
Indie filmmaking icon Jim Jarmusch turns 60 today. He’s always seemed ageless, sporting a shock of gray hair since he was a teenager, immersed in the underground arts scene with a finger on the pulse of “unassuming cool.” Jarmusch, a longtime resident of the Lower East Side, has explored the hidden exoticism of the everyday in other cities, but he remains a quintessential New York filmmaker. “When I left Ohio when I was 17 and ended up in New York and realized that not all films had the giant crab monsters in them, it really opened up a lot of things for me.” As a musician, Jarmusch was a memorable figure in the city’s No Wave scene during the 1980s with his band The Del-Byzanteens. Last year, he even narrated a walking poetry tour of the East Village called Passing Stranger. We wanted to celebrate Jarmusch’s birthday by looking at other filmmakers who have shared their appreciation for New York City and the way it helped shape their oeuvre. See what they had to say about their favorite New York films, and read their musings on life in the city and its enduring influence on cinema. … Read More
A Dizzying, Kaleidoscopic View of the World Looking Up
“I was photographing in Paris, exploring my interest in architecture when I became fascinated by the outlines of the tops of the buildings against the sky,” Toronto artist Brent Townshend writes on his website. “By looking upward and taking in a wider view, the scene changes radically from what we normally experience.” Townshend creates kaleidoscopic scenes that dizzy and thrill. Website Faith is Torment introduced us to his all-encompassing view, which twists and swirls the horizon, leaving a gorgeous nucleus of images in the center of the picture. … Read More
10 Feature Films You Didn’t Realize Started As Shorts
This week, we’ll finally learn the secret behind the disappearance of two young girls that were rescued from a cabin in the woods and became haunted by an eerie presence. Mama opens in theaters tomorrow. Super producer Guillermo del Toro is never one to turn his back on a film about kids and things that creep in the dark. He’s been promoting the movie since it started as a Spanish short film. You can watch the spooky video after the jump, where we’ve shared other short films that became feature-length movies. Several directors used their shorts as a jumping point to expand their vision, while others were discovered thanks to their introductory projects. Watch the movies that started life small and grew into big screen hits, below. … Read More
How to Fake Like You Know About Art
New episodes of USA Network’s White Collar — our favorite series that follows the exploits of a con man’s (Matt Bomer) adjunct assignment with an FBI Special Agent (Tim DeKay) — are right around the corner. To get in the mood for more forgeries and billion-dollar heists, we devised our own cheat sheet to help you fake it with the best of them. If you can’t tell your Post-Impressionist painters from classical Greek sculpture, you can master the art of deception with our guide to the classics. Fake your way through the world’s greatest museums, meet the first Renaissance men, and find out the difference between Monet and Manet after the jump. … Read More
Incredible, Abstract Photos Taken From the Seat of an Airplane
Julieanne Kost’s Window Seat series, spotted on Faith is Torment, finds the artist snapping photos from the seat of an airplane, resulting in some incredible, abstract images of the world around her. Kost shot over 3,000 aerial artworks from commercial airplane windows over a five-year period, and the experience inspired her to create a book described as a “unique creative seminar.” Head to our gallery to see how Kost observed cloud formations, bodies of water, and the friendly skies in striking ways. … Read More
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