How Norman Rockwell Used Photographs to Create His Famous Paintings: See Side-by-Side Comparisons

in Art, History, Photography | February 9th, 2021


More than 40 years after Nor­man Rock­well’s death, the ques­tion of whether his paint­ings are real­is­tic or unre­al­is­tic remains open for debate. On one hand, crit­i­cal opin­ion has long dis­missed his Sat­ur­day Evening Post-adorn­ing visions of Amer­i­can life as sheer­est fan­ta­sy. “A lit­tle girl with a black eye, an elder­ly woman say­ing grace with her grand­son, a boy going to war: Rock­wellian scenes rep­re­sent a cer­tain sen­ti­men­tal Amer­i­ca — an ide­al Amer­i­ca, or at least Rock­well’s ide­al,” says a 2009 NPR sto­ry on his work.

On the oth­er hand, if Rock­well’s admir­ers give him a pass on this sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty, his detrac­tors often turn a blind eye to his obvi­ous tech­ni­cal mas­tery. Say what you will about his themes, the man might as well have been a cam­era.  Indeed, his process began with an actu­al cam­era. Accord­ing to that NPR piece, he “used pho­tos, tak­en by a rotat­ing cast of pho­tog­ra­phers, to make his illus­tra­tions — and all of his mod­els were neigh­bors and friends,” res­i­dents of his small town of Stock­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts.

The cam­era­men includ­ed a Ger­man immi­grant named Clemens Kalis­ch­er: “An artist-pho­tog­ra­ph­er him­self, Kalis­ch­er was at odds with the trac­ing tech­niques and sac­cha­rine sub­ject mat­ter in Rock­well’s work. After all, Rock­well nev­er paint­ed free­hand, and almost all of his paint­ings were com­mis­sioned by mag­a­zines and adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies.”

But “although he may not have clicked the shut­ter, Rock­well direct­ed every facet of every com­po­si­tion,” as you can see by exam­in­ing his paint­ings and ref­er­ence pho­tos togeth­er, fea­tured as they’ve been on sites like Petapix­el.

At Google Arts & Cul­ture, you can scroll through a short exhi­bi­tion of Rock­well’s late work on race rela­tions in Amer­i­ca that reveals how he had not just one but many pho­tographs tak­en as source mate­r­i­al for each paint­ing, which he would then com­bine into a sin­gle image. This qua­si-cin­e­mat­ic “edit­ing” process brings to mind the “sto­ry­board­ing” of Edward Hop­per, who stands along­side Rock­well as one of the most Amer­i­can painters of the 20th cen­tu­ry.

But while Hop­per gave artis­tic form to the coun­try’s alien­ation, Rock­well — whom his­to­ry has­n’t remem­bered as a par­tic­u­lar­ly hap­py man — cre­at­ed an “Amer­i­can sanc­tu­ary oth­ers wished to share.” And though nei­ther Hop­per nor Rock­well’s Amer­i­ca may ever have exist­ed, they were craft­ed from the pieces of Amer­i­can life the artists found every­where around them.

via Petapix­el/Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nor­man Rock­well Illus­trates Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer & Huck­le­ber­ry Finn (1936–1940)

NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Lei­bovitz, Nor­man Rock­well & 350 Oth­er Artists to Visu­al­ly Doc­u­ment America’s Space Pro­gram

Nor­man Rockwell’s Type­writ­ten Recipe for His Favorite Oat­meal Cook­ies

Edward Hopper’s Cre­ative Process: The Draw­ing & Care­ful Prepa­ra­tion Behind Nighthawks & Oth­er Icon­ic Paint­ings

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

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.

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The Magic of the Beach Boys’ Harmonies: Hear Isolated Vocals from “Sloop John B.,” “God Only Knows,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” & Other Pet Sounds Classics

in Music | February 8th, 2021

Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to the Smith­son­ian.
                        —Bob Dylan on Bri­an Wil­son

The Beach Boys tar­nished their rep­u­ta­tion when they reformed in lat­er years and tried to “reclaim their whole­some­ness,” Dan Caf­frey writes at Con­se­quence of Sound, “only to find that it had all but dis­ap­peared.” But in the days when they sound­ed like the most whole­some thing on earth, they also had the dis­tinct advan­tage of sound­ing seri­ous­ly weird: “Weird­er than Waits, weird­er than Zap­pa, and def­i­nite­ly weird­er than the Bea­t­les. The immac­u­late vocal har­mo­ny that made them famous was their weird­est weapon of all; a sun­ny fortress of eupho­ny that shone through the dark­est of times and strangest of lyrics in their lat­ter days.”

The phe­nom­e­non could emerge “only out of the fer­ment that char­ac­ter­izes today’s pop music scene,” said Leonard Bern­stein when he heard “Surf’s Up.” Despite the sur­face-lev­el corni­ness, there were “real­ly deep, pro­found emo­tions” in the band’s music, emo­tions “that came out of a lot of pain,” Lin­da Ron­stadt remarked.

The full depths of Pet Sounds may nev­er be plumbed, yet one can also put it on and imme­di­ate­ly feel the SoCal sun­shine hit them square­ly in the face. Only a genius like Bri­an Wil­son could turn surf pop into clas­si­cal com­po­si­tion, with­out com­pro­mis­ing the sim­ple emo­tions of pop or the pro­fun­di­ty of a clas­si­cal arrange­ment. (“I fig­ure no one is edu­cat­ed musi­cal­ly ’til they’ve heard ‘Pet Sounds,’ ” says Paul McCart­ney.)

And only the Beach Boys as a group could pull off those har­monies. The rest of the band may not have quite grasped what their quixot­ic leader was up to. (Mike Love once famous­ly com­plained, “Who’s gonna hear this shit? The ears of a dog?”) But they knew how to sing togeth­er like no one else before or since. (When David Cros­by heard “In My Room,” he says, “I thought, ‘I give up–I can’t do that–I’ll nev­er be able to do that.’”) They were so good, they could pull off gor­geous a‑capella pas­sages like those in “Sloop John B,” Pet Sounds’ lead sin­gle. Hear it at the top in a full iso­lat­ed vocal ver­sion.

A tra­di­tion­al folk song that orig­i­nat­ed in the Bahamas and was record­ed in the six­ties by every­one from John­ny Cash to Lon­nie Done­gan to the Kingston Trio, the arrang­ing of the song took only 24 hours, Al Jar­dine remem­bers, from the time he brought it to Wil­son as a pos­si­ble cov­er to the time Wil­son com­plet­ed his ver­sion of the track. The vocals were anoth­er mat­ter. Jar­dine assumed he would sing lead, but Wil­son had a process:

It was like inter­view­ing for a job. Pret­ty fun­ny. He didn’t like any of us. My vocal had a much more mel­low approach because I was bring­ing it from the folk idiom. For the radio, we need­ed a more rock approach. Bri­an and Mike end­ed up singing it.

Those demand­ing vocal record­ing ses­sions, Jar­dine wrote in the Pet Sounds lin­er notes, could last 12–15 hours a day. The end results are an espe­cial­ly impres­sive feat con­sid­er­ing that the back­ing vocals were all record­ed at once, with no over­dub­bing or any of the dig­i­tal stu­dio wiz­ardry used today to nudge stray voic­es into the right pitch and rhythm:

At the vocal ses­sions, there was so much good ten­sion. At any one time, you would have four out of five of us get our parts just fine, and there would be one who would screw up. But it would­n’t be the same per­son each time. Then the next take, he would get it right, but some­body else would get it wrong. Kind of like the chaos the­o­ry at work. The more peo­ple you have in a giv­en sit­u­a­tion, the more chance there is for error. Then, there would be the mag­ic moment when it all came togeth­er, and then you had your take.

Just below, hear Pet Sounds’ sad­dest song, “Car­o­line, No,” in a vocal take fea­tur­ing only Wil­son. He thought of it as “prob­a­bly the best [song] I’ve ever writ­ten… a pret­ty love song about how this guy and this girl lost it and there’s no way to get it back. I just felt sad, so I wrote a sad song.” It’s also a song, for all its melan­choly, born from the sense of inno­cent long­ing the band brought to all their music in their prime, con­veyed in har­monies that would nev­er shine as bright­ly for any oth­er band at any oth­er time. Hear more of the Beach Boys, a‑cappella, in the YouTube playlist here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How the Beach Boys Cre­at­ed Their Pop Mas­ter­pieces: “Good Vibra­tions,” Pet Sounds, and More

The Beach Boys’ Bri­an Wil­son & Bea­t­les Pro­duc­er George Mar­tin Break Down “God Only Knows,” the “Great­est Song Ever Writ­ten”

The Mak­ing (and Remak­ing) of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Arguably the Great­est Rock Album of All Time

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A New Yorker Cartoonist Explains How to Draw Literary Cartoons

in Comedy, Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Magazines | February 8th, 2021

“I enjoy pok­ing fun at any­thing edu­cat­ed peo­ple do and civ­i­lized soci­ety per­pet­u­ates that is odd, frus­trat­ing, wacky, or hyp­o­crit­i­cal,” car­toon­ist Amy Kurzweil, above, recent­ly told the New York Pub­lic Library’s Mar­go Moore.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, she’s been get­ting pub­lished in The New York­er a lot of late.

The process for get­ting car­toons accept­ed there is the stuff of leg­end, though report­ed­ly less gru­el­ing since Emma Allen, the magazine’s youngest and first-ever female car­toon edi­tor, took over. Allen has made a point of seek­ing out fresh voic­es, and work­ing with them to help mold their sub­mis­sions into some­thing in The New York­er vein, rather than “this end­less game of pre­sent­ing work and then hear­ing ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

Kurzweil has a fond­ness for lit­er­ary themes (and the same brand of pen­cils that John Stein­beck, Tru­man Capote, and Vladimir Nabokov pre­ferred—Black­wings—whether in her hand or, con­vers­ing with Allen on Zoom, above, in her ears.)

Get­ting the joke of a New York­er car­toon often depends on get­ting the ref­er­ence, and while both women seem tick­led at the first exam­ple, Kurzweil’s mash-up of Proust’s Remem­brance of Things Past and the pic­ture book If You Give a Mouse a Cook­ie, it may go over many read­ers’ heads.

The thing that holds it all togeth­er?

Madeleines, of course, though out­side France, not every Proust lover is able to iden­ti­fy an inked rep­re­sen­ta­tion of this evoca­tive cook­ie by shape.

Kurzweil states that she has nev­er actu­al­ly read the children’s book that sup­plies half the con­text.

(It’s okay. Like the idea that mem­o­ries can be trig­gered by cer­tain nos­tal­gic scents, its con­cept is pret­ty easy to grasp.)

Nor has she read philoso­pher Derek Parfit’s whop­ping 1,928-page On What Mat­ters. Her inspi­ra­tion for using it in a car­toon is her per­son­al con­nec­tion to the mas­sive, unread three-vol­ume set in her family’s library. Because both the size and the title are part of the joke, she directs the viewer’s eye to the unwieldy tome with a light water­col­or wash.

She also has a good tip for any­one draw­ing a library scene—go fig­u­ra­tive, rather than lit­er­al, vary­ing sizes and shapes until the eye is tricked into see­ing what is mere­ly sug­gest­ed.

A all-too-true lit­er­ary expe­ri­ence informs her sec­ond exam­ple at the 4:30 mark—that of a lit­tle known author giv­ing a read­ing in a book­store. Despite a pref­er­ence for draw­ing “fleshy things like peo­ple and ani­mals” she for­goes depict­ing the author or those in atten­dance, giv­ing the punch­line instead to the event posters in the store’s win­dow.

As she told the NYPL’s Moore:

A car­toon is always an oppor­tu­ni­ty to show­case a con­tem­po­rary phe­nom­e­non by exag­ger­at­ing it or plac­ing it in a dif­fer­ent con­text.

Over the last year, a huge num­ber of New York­er car­toons have con­cerned them­selves with the domes­tic dull­ness of the pan­dem­ic, but when Allen asked if she has a favorite New York­er car­toon cliché, Kurzweil went with “the Moby Dick trope, because whales are easy to draw, and I like a good metaphor for the unat­tain­able.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New York­er Car­toon Edi­tor Bob Mankoff Reveals the Secret of a Suc­cess­ful New York­er Car­toon

The Not York­er: A Col­lec­tion of Reject­ed & Late Cov­er Sub­mis­sions to The New York­er

Down­load a Com­plete, Cov­er-to-Cov­er Par­o­dy of The New York­er: 80 Pages of Fine Satire

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Breathtaking Courage of Harriet Tubman: An Animated History Lesson Speaks to Her Place on the $20 Bill

in Current Affairs, Economics, History | February 8th, 2021

I was a con­duc­tor on the Under­ground Rail­road, and I can say what many oth­ers can­not. I nev­er ran my train off the track, and I nev­er lost a pas­sen­ger.  —Har­ri­et Tub­man

Remem­ber how one of the Oba­ma administration’s final ini­tia­tives was to redesign the $20 bill, ban­ish­ing Andrew Jack­son, a slave­hold­er, to a minor role on the back of the bill, in favor of abo­li­tion­ist Har­ri­et Tub­man, who was born into slav­ery?

The announce­ment arrived on the heels of a con­tro­ver­sy, after then-Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Jacob J. Lew enraged Amer­i­can women by going back on a promise to install a woman on the face of a new­ly designed $10 bill.

The deci­sion to keep Alexan­der Hamil­ton, archi­tect of our finan­cial sys­tem and the country’s first Trea­sury Sec­re­tary, in place is rumored to owe rather a lot to his sta­tus as the sub­ject of a cer­tain hit musi­cal that had opened ear­li­er in the year.

The offi­cial design of the Tub­man bill was to have been unveiled in 2020, to coin­cide with the hun­dredth anniver­sary of the 19th Amend­ment, which guar­an­teed a wom­an’s right to vote. Had all gone accord­ing to plan, it would have been in wide cir­cu­la­tion lat­er this decade.

At the time Lew was untrou­bled by the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the incom­ing admin­is­tra­tion might kill off the pro­posed makeover:

I don’t think somebody’s going to prob­a­bly want to do that — to take the image of Har­ri­et Tub­man off of our mon­ey? To take the image of the suf­frag­ists off?

It seems, how­ev­er, that some­one did want to do that.

In 2016, pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Don­ald Trump told NBC that replac­ing Jack­son with Tub­man was “pure polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness,” sug­gest­ing instead that a place might be found for Tub­man on the $2 bill… which is no longer print­ed.

He also report­ed­ly remarked to for­mer White House advis­er Omarosa Mani­gault New­man, “You want me to put that face on the twen­ty-dol­lar bill?”

The Trea­sury Depart­ment website’s revi­sion in the wake of the 2016 elec­tion scrubbed all ref­er­ences to planned changes to the cur­ren­cy.

Lew’s replace­ment, Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Steven Mnuchin, final­ly announced that the new $20 bill wouldn’t be ready until 2028, and that the fin­ished design might not include Tub­man at all. He attrib­uted this to tech­ni­cal rea­sons relat­ing to secu­ri­ty fea­tures, though a Trea­sury Depart­ment employ­ee told The New York Times that the engrav­ing plate for it was com­plet­ed “as recent­ly as May 2018” and that the design “appeared to be far along in the process.”

Cer­tain­ly, there were big­ger sto­ries in 2020 than the absence of the promised Har­ri­et Tub­man $20 bill, but the obfus­ca­tion and delay were mad­den­ing giv­en every­thing Tub­man, a woman of action, was able to accom­plish well over a hun­dred years ago.

Most of us are famil­iar with her promi­nence on the Under­ground Rail­road, which led to the sobri­quet “Moses of her peo­ple,” but there are sev­er­al things in the above ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son by Janell Hob­son, Depart­ment Chair of Wom­en’s, Gen­der and Sex­u­al­i­ty Stud­ies at SUNY Albany, that may come as news to you.

Of par­tic­u­lar note, Tub­man was the first woman in US his­to­ry to plan and lead a mil­i­tary raid, result­ing in the lib­er­a­tion of near­ly 700 enslaved per­sons in South Car­oli­na.

Her sec­ond hus­band, Nel­son Davis, also born into slav­ery, had been a Union sol­dier, which enti­tled her to a pen­sion of $8 as a mil­i­tary wid­ow.

She fought hard for an increase on the basis of her own ser­vice to the Union Army, enlist­ing var­i­ous friends and sup­port­ers to lob­by on her behalf, includ­ing Lincoln’s Sec­re­tary of State, William Seward, who said, “I have known her long as a noble high spir­it, as true as sel­dom dwells in the human form.”

Final­ly, in 1899, her pen­sion was increased to $20 a month.

Pro­fes­sor Hob­son, whose les­son pre­dates Mnuchin’s announce­ment of the stall, called the denom­i­na­tion “a fit­ting twist of fate.”

As is the rub­ber stamp that artist Dano Wal cre­at­ed to help dis­gust­ed Amer­i­cans con­vert Jack­sons into Tub­mans with­out the help of the Trea­sury Depart­ment:

Who we choose to hon­or as a soci­ety affects the moral atti­tudes that are baked into us as we grow up. The impact that see­ing the face of Har­ri­et Tub­man star­ing back at you from a $20 bill should not be under­es­ti­mat­ed. This sort of rep­re­sen­ta­tion can sub­tly but deeply affect some­one’s con­cep­tion of them­selves and their place in soci­ety. The slight­ly sub­ver­sive nature of it being cur­ren­cy that’s been hand-stamped by anoth­er human makes a dis­cov­ery of one of these bills all the more joy­ous.

Good news looms on the hori­zon. Less than a week into the Biden admin­is­tra­tion, the Trea­sury Depart­ment con­firmed that the agency is “explor­ing ways to resume” putting Har­ri­et Tub­man on the bill, as well as ways to has­ten their release. She will be the first female and first Black Amer­i­can to be fea­tured on our fold­ing mon­ey.

TED-Ed has a list of addi­tion­al resources for those who’d like to delve deep­er into Tubman’s life and lega­cy, as well as a dis­cus­sion as to whether putting Tubman’s face on the $20 bill is a fit­ting hon­or.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Design­er Cre­ates a 3D-Print­ed Stamp That Replaces Andrew Jack­son with Har­ri­et Tub­man on the $20 Bill

What the Text­books Don’t Tell Us About The Atlantic Slave Trade: An Ani­mat­ed Video Fills In His­tor­i­cal Gaps

The Names of 1.8 Mil­lion Eman­ci­pat­ed Slaves Are Now Search­able in the World’s Largest Genealog­i­cal Data­base, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans Find Lost Ances­tors

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch a Korean Master Craftsman Make a Kimchi Pot by Hand, All According to Ancient Tradition

in Art, Food & Drink, History | February 8th, 2021

The South Kore­an cap­i­tal of Seoul, where I live, has in the 21st cen­tu­ry aston­ished vis­it­ing West­ern­ers with its tech­nol­o­gy, its infra­struc­ture, and its sheer urban vital­i­ty. It strikes many of those West­ern­ers (and I include myself among them) as con­sid­er­ably more devel­oped than any­where in the coun­tries they came from. But how­ev­er much Seoul may feel like the future, nowhere in Korea has the past whol­ly van­ished. Take the bul­bous earth­en­ware jars still vis­i­ble on more than a few of the coun­try’s ter­races and rooftops, meant to hold condi­ments like soy­bean and red pep­per paste as well as that world-famous sym­bol of not just Kore­an cui­sine but Kore­an cul­ture itself, the fer­ment­ed cab­bage known as kim­chi.

Com­mon­ly called hangari, or more tra­di­tion­al­ly ong­gi, these jars essen­tial to the fer­men­ta­tion of kim­chi and oth­er Kore­an foods are today pro­duced in large num­bers with indus­tri­al meth­ods. But there are also Kore­an pot­ters who’ve stuck to the old ways — and in a select few cas­es, the very old ways indeed. Take Jin-Gyu, the sub­ject of the video above, a short doc­u­men­tary from Eater’s “Hand­made” series.

“I’m the youngest of the intan­gi­ble cul­tur­al assets in Korea,” he says, refer­ring to the offi­cial list of Impor­tant Intan­gi­ble Cul­tur­al Prop­er­ties intro­duced to pro­tect long-stand­ing tra­di­tions in music, dance, and craft just as the coun­try began its unprece­dent­ed surge into moder­ni­ty. The mak­ing of ong­gi itself, a process Jin-Gyu demon­strates from start to fin­ish in the video, is Impor­tant Intan­gi­ble Cul­tur­al Prop­er­ty No. 96.

After pound­ing his clay into shape while describ­ing how its soil first flows down from the moun­tains, Jin-gyu places it onto his wheel and gives it the dis­tinc­tive shape rec­og­niz­able from all those ter­races and rooftops. This requires con­stant use of his hands, occa­sion­al use of his feet, and even the appli­ca­tion of tra­di­tion­al tools that he also made him­self. The con­trast with tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese pot­tery, its empha­sis on small-scale ele­gance and near-exis­ten­tial­ist atti­tude toward the final prod­uct, is instruc­tive: the Kore­an vari­ety, as Jin-gyu prac­tices it, has a dif­fer­ent ener­gy, more of an emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal rus­tic­i­ty. “This makes me so hap­py,” he says after remov­ing fin­ished jar from the kiln orig­i­nal­ly built by his ong­gi-pot­ter father. “After 300 years, it’ll return to the soil.” But there are plen­ty of hearty meals to be had in the mean­time, none of them with­out kim­chi.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Kore­an Pot­ter Found a “Beau­ti­ful Life” Through His Art: A Short, Life-Affirm­ing Doc­u­men­tary

The Art of the Japan­ese Teapot: Watch a Mas­ter Crafts­man at Work, from the Begin­ning Until the Star­tling End

How Soy Sauce Has Been Made in Japan for Over 220 Years: An Inside View

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

“Prim­i­tive Pot­ter” Trav­els into the Back­coun­try for 10 Days with Only a Knife & Buck­skin and Makes Anasazi Pot­tery

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.

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Little Kid Merrily Grooves to ZZ Top While Waiting for the Bus

in Music | February 7th, 2021

A musi­cian in Van­cou­ver, British Colum­bia took to the streets and busked some ZZ Top, much to the delight of a young child wait­ing for the bus. From the moment he starts play­ing “La Grange,” the child bops up and down, then twirls in a cir­cle, los­ing her­self in the song. On YouTube he writes, “I don’t often see this, but when it hap­pens it’s always 99% kids that are doing it. Before they become jad­ed (age 8), they still have that spon­ta­neous spark, that reac­tion to music that we all used to have. Emo­tion is no.1 pri­or­i­ty and they express it with­out shame.”

If this bright­ens your day, even a lit­tle, con­sid­er giv­ing the busker a tip on Pay­pal or Patre­on. As he explains on YouTube, he’s had–like many of us–a rough year. He writes:

1) I’m glad every­one is enjoy­ing this video but I want to men­tion a few things.

Street play­ing is not all fun and games and danc­ing kids. Doing this for 7 years. I reg­u­lar­ly face not only ver­bal abuse, but phys­i­cal assault as I work a few blocks from down­town east­side Van­cou­ver. I’m sur­round­ed by addicts, drunks, and peo­ple who should be in men­tal homes.

2) I’m unem­ployed. All live music includ­ing busk­ing, is banned. I lost all work last year and received ZERO com­pen­sa­tion. I had a very bad year in 2020 and only recent­ly came out of a depres­sion.

3) I make ZERO from youtube no mat­ter how many views I get. I don’t run ads. And more impor­tant­ly, even if I did, most of my videos are instant­ly copy­right­ed and auto mon­e­tized by record labels because they are COVERS. If you see an ad, it’s the record label col­lect­ing. If you liked the per­for­mance, please think about sup­port­ing me on patreon/paypal tip/bandcamp.

4) I’m a musi­cian that writes his own music and has been doing it for 20 years. Check out my band­camp page to see what I can real­ly do with a gui­tar.

5) It’s a lot of unpaid work to post these videos all the time so please try to help me keep the chan­nel going. Many thanks to those that have sup­port­ed me! It means a lot!

6) I get asked this 100 times a day so here’s the answer: I play on the street and not in a band because all the clubs closed years ago. I used to lead many bands from 2006 to 2018. That’s all gone. Live music is dead, as well as banned. It’s also a lot more has­sle, and less mon­ey, to run a band than play by myself.

Any­one who has music work to offer can con­tact me at shatnershairpiece@yahoo.com

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ital­ian Street Musi­cian Plays Amaz­ing Cov­ers of Pink Floyd Songs, Right in Front of the Pan­theon in Rome

Crowd Breaks into Singing Bon Jovi in the Park: The Pow­er of Music in 46 Sec­onds

80s Pop Singer Jim­my Somerville Sur­pris­es Ger­man Street Musi­cian as the Busker Sings Somerville’s Hit

Lenny Kravitz Over­hears High School Kids Play­ing His Music and Sur­pris­es Them by Join­ing In

Street Artist Plays Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah” With Crys­tal Glass­es

Neil Young Busk­ing in Glas­gow, 1976: The Sto­ry Behind the Footage

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David Gilmour, David Crosby & Graham Nash Perform the Pink Floyd Classic, “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” (2006)

in Music | February 5th, 2021

Come on you raver, you seer of visions
Come on you painter, you piper, you pris­on­er, and shine

“It’s a gift I sup­pose,” David Gilmour respond­ed humbly when a 2015 inter­view­er asked the ques­tion he’s always asked about his leg­endary gui­tar tone. “It’s some­thing that just arrives nat­u­ral­ly at this point.” Gilmour seemed gen­uine­ly mys­ti­fied. “I think there’s some kind of strange pecu­liar­i­ty or my lack of coor­di­na­tion between hands that gives it some­thing rather off and thus dis­tinct.” Maybe there’s more than he real­izes to his answer: the qual­i­ties that make an artist unique can be those that seem like deficits or defects in oth­er lights.

There are hints of this wis­dom in “Shine on You Crazy Dia­mond,” Gilmour and Roger Waters’ trib­ute to Syd Bar­rett, the child­hood friend whom Gilmour replaced as the band’s gui­tarist. What­ev­er it was that drove Barrett’s bril­liant mind also seems to have dri­ven him to excess and mad­ness under the spotlights—”You were caught on the cross­fire of child­hood and star­dom… Threat­ened by shad­ows at night, and exposed in the light.” Yet with­out Barrett’s “crazi­ness,” or Gilmour’s lack of coor­di­na­tion, there would be no Pink Floyd.

“Shine on You Crazy Dia­mond” is a trag­ic song—made more so when we learn that an unrec­og­niz­able Bar­rett arrived at the stu­dio the moment they began record­ing it, sev­en years after he left the band with men­tal health strug­gles. With typ­i­cal bit­ter­ness, Waters described him in an inter­view that year as “a sym­bol for all the extremes of absence some peo­ple have to indulge in because it’s the only way they can cope with how f—ing sad it is—modern life.”

The band lost not only a found­ing mem­ber but also a friend when they lost Bar­rett. These sad per­son­al asso­ci­a­tions notwith­stand­ing, the song can also be an uniron­ic call to those who may be hold­ing back or hid­ing because they think there’s some­thing wrong with them. And it’s a song fea­tur­ing some of the most impres­sive gui­tar work of Gilmour’s record­ing career. On “the epic 13-minute open­ing track to Wish You Were Here, he lays down more awe­some tones than most gui­tarists achieve in a life­time,” writes Chris Gill at Gui­tar World.

Play­ing onstage above with Richard Wright at Roy­al Albert Hall in 2006, just months before Bar­ret­t’s death, Gilmour casu­al­ly blows the audi­ence away with awe­some tones. Then he is joined by David Cros­by and Gra­ham Nash in a live ren­di­tion that sounds like both an ele­gy and an anthem, a fit­ting trib­ute to an artist who “reached for the secret too soon”—or what­ev­er com­bi­na­tion of drugs and men­tal health crises caused Bar­rett to retreat into him­self in the last decades of his life—but who also, by shin­ing for a brief moment, left a cre­ative lega­cy in Pink Floyd that few artists can hope to equal.

via Laugh­ing Squid 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch David Gilmour Play the Songs of Syd Bar­rett, with the Help of David Bowie & Richard Wright

Under­stand­ing Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Their Trib­ute to Depart­ed Band­mate Syd Bar­rett

How Pink Floyd’s “Com­fort­ably Numb” Was Born From an Argu­ment Between Roger Waters & David Gilmour

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The History of American Newspapers Has Been Digitized: Explore 114 Years of Editor & Publisher, “the Bible of the Newspaper Industry”

in Archives, History, Internet Archive, Magazines | February 5th, 2021

If you look into the his­to­ry of the Amer­i­can news­pa­per, you can’t get too deep before your inevitable encounter with Edi­tor & Pub­lish­er. Brand­ed as “the bible of the news­pa­per indus­try,” the trade mag­a­zine has for 120 years cov­ered its sub­ject from every pos­si­ble angle. Though news­pa­pers had already been pub­lished in the Unit­ed States for near­ly 200 years before the mag­a­zine’s found­ing, its run has been coeval with an espe­cial­ly fas­ci­nat­ing, even dra­mat­ic peri­od in their his­to­ry. It was in the 20th cen­tu­ry that Amer­i­can news­pa­pers con­sol­i­dat­ed into the pil­lars of what looked, for a time, like a mighty “fourth estate”; in this cen­tu­ry, they’ve plunged into what Edi­tor & Pub­lish­er’s own­er Mike Blind­er terms “such a cri­sis.”

Still, since pur­chas­ing the mag­a­zine last year, writes Inter­net Archive Col­lec­tions Man­ag­er Mari­na Lewis, “Blind­er and his wife, Robin, have been able to turn the oper­a­tion around, dou­bling its rev­enues and tripling its audi­ence.” He also gave the Inter­net Archive per­mis­sion to upload and make avail­able 114 years of Edi­tor & Pub­lish­er issues online for free.

“Going beyond the Inter­net Archive’s tra­di­tion­al lend­ing sys­tem ensures it can be indexed by search engines and made max­i­mal­ly use­ful to read­ers and researchers,” writes Lewis. “The abil­i­ty to research these archived issues has been tru­ly excit­ing, espe­cial­ly for those look­ing up his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments, many with a per­son­al or fam­i­ly con­nec­tion.”

As the Nie­man Jour­nal­ism Lab’s Joshua Ben­don remem­bers it, Edi­tor & Pub­lish­er was once “the best (and often only) place to find out about job open­ings at news­pa­pers.”  With more than a cen­tu­ry of its back issues freely avail­able at the Inter­net Archive, “if you’re at all inter­est­ed in the 20th-cen­tu­ry his­to­ry of the Amer­i­can news­pa­per busi­ness, you now have access to a robust new resource.” In the archive he finds doc­u­men­ta­tion of “some of the century’s most inter­est­ing moments,” at least as far as that busi­ness is con­cerned: The New York­er’s 1946 pub­li­ca­tion of John Hersey’s “Hiroshi­ma,” which it sub­se­quent­ly offered to con­ven­tion­al news­pa­pers (“The piece runs about 30,000 words and no cut­ting or con­dens­ing is to be per­mit­ted”); the 1965 hir­ing of Ben Bradlee by The Wash­ing­ton Post; the 1971 debut of Doones­bury in nation­al news­pa­pers.

Not all of these reflect well on the U.S. news­pa­per indus­try. Ben­ton high­lights the 1981 expo­sure of “Jim­my’s World,” a Pulitzer-win­ning Post sto­ry about an eight-year-old hero­in addict, as a fab­ri­ca­tion — or a piece of “fake news,” as we might say today. That arti­cle also quotes a Boston Globe edi­tor as say­ing “the pub­lic faith in the press is min­i­mal at the moment,” a sen­ti­ment not unheard these 40 years lat­er. The mag­a­zine was also quick to observe the emer­gence of oth­er forms of media (such as a 1925 test of French inven­tor Édouard Belin’s exper­i­men­tal “tele­vi­sion”) that would lat­er force change upon the news­pa­per indus­try’s very nature. And if the cur­rent cri­sis is, as some argue, not destroy­ing the fourth estate but return­ing it to its roots, there could be few bet­ter paths back to an under­stand­ing of those roots than through the Edi­tor & Pub­lish­er archive.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Techie Work­ing at Home Cre­ates Big­ger Archive of His­tor­i­cal News­pa­pers (37 Mil­lion Pages) Than the Library of Con­gress

Enter “The Mag­a­zine Rack,” the Inter­net Archive’s Col­lec­tion of 34,000 Dig­i­tized Mag­a­zines

The End of an Era: A Short Film About The Last Day of Hot Met­al Type­set­ting at The New York Times (1978)

A Big Dig­i­tal Archive of Inde­pen­dent & Alter­na­tive Pub­li­ca­tions: Browse/Download Rad­i­cal Peri­od­i­cals Print­ed from 1951 to 2016

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

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.

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The Films of Hayao Miyazaki Celebrated in a Glorious Concert Arranged by Film Composer Joe Hisaishi

in Music | February 5th, 2021

Direc­tor Hayao Miyazaki’s work­ing rela­tion­ship with com­pos­er Joe Hisaishi is up there with the oth­er great film pair­ings: Ser­gio Leone with Ennio Mor­ri­cone, Alfred Hitch­cock with Bernard Her­rmann, David Lynch with Ange­lo Badala­men­ti. Work­ing togeth­er they attain a sym­bio­sis of sound and vision, one of the rea­sons their work has become part of film his­to­ry. But it’s also rare that a film com­pos­er gets to cel­e­brate that rela­tion­ship with a stun­ner of a ret­ro­spec­tive con­cert like the one above.

In 2008, Hisaishi con­duct­ed and per­formed at a two-hour ret­ro­spec­tive of 25 years work­ing with Miyaza­ki at Stu­dio Ghi­b­li. This mam­moth per­for­mance at the 14,000-seat Tokyo Budokan was big in every way: six fea­tured vocal­ists, the 200-mem­ber New Japan Phil­har­mon­ic World Dream Orches­tra, the 800 com­bined voic­es of the Ippan Koubo, Rit­suyuukai and Lit­tle Singers of Tokyo choirs, along with a 160-piece march­ing band made up of mem­bers from four high schools.

The con­cert fea­tures selec­tions from Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of Wind, Princess Mononoke, My Neigh­bor Totoro, Kiki’s Deliv­ery Ser­vice, Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle, Spir­it­ed Away, Por­co Rosso, and what would have been his most recent score at the time, Ponyo. For those won­der­ing when the march­ing band and col­or guard turn up, it’s 50 min­utes in, play­ing selec­tions from Lapu­ta, Cas­tle in the Sky.

Hayao Miyaza­ki met Joe Hisaishi in 1983, when his record com­pa­ny rec­om­mend­ed him to score Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind. They became true friends and col­lab­o­ra­tors, and the direc­tor him­self appears just after an hour in to speak to the audi­ence.

“After [our first] meet­ing,” Miyaza­ki says (accord­ing to a trans­la­tion in the com­ments) “he sent me some piano sketch­es, which are used in many scenes in Nau­si­caä any­way, and those were so amaz­ing that I played tapes of them on my desk over and over again while I was working…I have been work­ing thanks to so many pieces of luck, and meet­ing him is def­i­nite­ly one of them. I guess I couldn’t wish for bet­ter luck than that.”

For some­one whose music is often roman­tic, beau­ti­ful, and relaxed, the com­pos­er says the work doesn’t come easy.

“The most painful ele­ment of my life is com­pos­ing because some­times noth­ing comes to mind,” he told the South Chi­na Morn­ing Post. “It is very hard and very dif­fi­cult. Some­times the result is zero, but I go to bed and I feel some­thing and some idea is born. So in the end there might be a com­po­si­tion, but the expe­ri­ence is often most painful.” For those who have recent­ly seen sim­i­lar memes of Miyaza­ki being super hard on him­self, it’s no won­der the two are friends.

A few in the YouTube com­ment sec­tion actu­al­ly attend­ed the con­cert, and this quote from “Love W” sums up what was an emo­tion­al con­cert for Ghi­b­li and Hisaishi fans:

“It was also qui­et after­wards. No one was talk­ing very loud­ly, even with hun­dreds of peo­ple stream­ing out of the build­ing. I think every­one were just too touched and want­ed to reflect over what they had seen.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Makes 1,178 Images Free to Down­load from My Neigh­bor Totoro, Spir­it­ed Away & Oth­er Beloved Ani­mat­ed Films

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Pro­duc­er Toshio Suzu­ki Teach­es You How to Draw Totoro in Two Min­utes

A Vir­tu­al Tour Inside the Hayao Miyazaki’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Muse­um

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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All 80 Issues of the Influential Zine Punk Planet Are Now Online & Ready for Download at the Internet Archive

in Magazines, Music | February 4th, 2021

Punk did­n’t die, it evolved, since its incep­tion in the 70s to the ethos of major­ly influ­en­tial fig­ures like Kath­leen Han­na and Ian MacK­aye in the 90s, two of the most promi­nent faces of pro­gres­sive DIY punk in the U.S. Then, as before, scenes came togeth­er around zines, sites of cul­tur­al recog­ni­tion, dis­sem­i­na­tion, and record­ing for pos­ter­i­ty in the archives of phys­i­cal print. One zine crit­i­cal to the social­ly con­scious punk that emerged at the time, Punk Plan­et, has recent­ly been dig­i­tized in all 80 issues by the Inter­net Archive.

Based in Chica­go and found­ed by edi­tor Dan Sinker (whom you may know from his pres­ence on Twit­ter), Punk Plan­et ran from 1994 to 2007, focus­ing “most of its ener­gy on look­ing at punk sub­cul­ture,” the Inter­net Archive writes, “rather than punk as sim­ply anoth­er genre of music to which teenagers lis­ten. In addi­tion to cov­er­ing music, Punk Plan­et also cov­ered visu­al arts and a wide vari­ety of pro­gres­sive issues—including media crit­i­cism, fem­i­nism, and labor issues.”

Punk Plan­et “tran­scend­ed stereo­types to chron­i­cle the pro­gres­sive under­ground com­mu­ni­ty, from thought­ful band inter­views to excep­tion­al­ly thor­ough inves­tiga­tive fea­tures,” wrote the A.V. Club’s Kyle Ryan in an inter­view with Sinker the year of the magazine’s demise.

“Over the course of 13 years, Punk Plan­et became heav­i­ly influ­en­tial beyond the increas­ing­ly small world of inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ing.” Arguably, that influ­ence can be felt in online mag­a­zines like Rook­ie as well as music-focused stal­warts like Pitch­fork, who note that Punk Plan­et’s “issues includ­ed inter­views with Sleater-Kin­ney, Nick Cave, Ralph Nad­er, and count­less oth­er cul­tur­al icons.”

The mag­a­zine fold­ed for the usu­al rea­sons, as Utne not­ed in a farewell, leav­ing a “gap­ing hole in the land­scape of inde­pen­dent mag­a­zines…. The deck was stacked against Punk Plan­et, though, and the hard knocks of inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ing final­ly became too much to bear.” Sinker says he saw the end as part of a big­ger pic­ture and “start­ed look­ing at the larg­er issues that were also affect­ing us. Things like, ‘Hey, wow, record labels are going under because no one is pay­ing for music!’ And, ‘Hey, look at this, peo­ple are going to these Inter­net sites because peo­ple can pick up a record review the same day the record came out!’”

It’s a moot point now—2020 has not made it any eas­i­er for small pub­li­ca­tions and inde­pen­dent musi­cians to sur­vive. But the con­tin­ued exis­tence of Punk Plan­et online for new gen­er­a­tions to dis­cov­er promis­es to fos­ter the con­ti­nu­ity that car­ried the spir­it of punk rock through decades of evo­lu­tion­ary change. Enter the Punk Plan­et archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Down­load 834 Rad­i­cal Zines From a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Online Archive: Glob­al­iza­tion, Punk Music, the Indus­tri­al Prison Com­plex & More

Down­load 50+ Issues of Leg­endary West Coast Punk Music Zines from the 1970–80s: Dam­age, Slash & No Mag

Judy!: 1993 Judith But­ler Fanzine Gives Us An Irrev­er­ent Punk-Rock Take on the Post-Struc­tural­ist Gen­der The­o­rist

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Giorgio Moroder & Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” Created the “Blueprint for All Electronic Dance Music Today” (1977)

in Music | February 4th, 2021

House, trance, techno—any DJ play­ing a four-on-the-floor groove can drop Don­na Sum­mer and Gior­gio Moroder’s “I Feel Love” into a set and instant­ly mes­mer­ize the crowd. It has been hap­pen­ing since 1977. The dis­co hit doesn’t just hold up as a clas­sic moment of nos­tal­gia: it’s still one of the great­est dance tracks ever pro­duced. “‘I Feel Love’ was and remains an aston­ish­ing achieve­ment,” Jon Sav­age writes at The Guardian. “A futur­is­tic record that still sounds fan­tas­tic 35 years on. With­in its mod­u­la­tions and puls­es, it achieves the per­fect state of grace that is the ambi­tion of every dance record: it oblit­er­ates the tyran­ny of the clock.”

DJ Jim Stan­ton puts it this way: “It is safe to say [‘I Feel Love’] was the blue­print for all elec­tron­ic dance music today. It still has a mas­sive impact every time I play it.”

The song was not only a “rad­i­cal break­through” at the time but it was explic­it­ly meant to be one, an exper­i­men­tal stu­dio col­lab­o­ra­tion between Moroder, Pete Bel­lotte, drum­mer Kei­th Forsey, and engi­neer Rob­by Wedel, who was clas­si­cal com­pos­er Eber­hard Schoener’s assis­tant and was hired because he was the only one who knew how to work Schoener’s bor­rowed Moog Mod­u­lar 3P. Wedel cooked up the bassline and Moroder and Bel­lotte pieced the track togeth­er from twen­ty to thir­ty-sec­ond snip­pets, since the Moog “would go out of tune every few min­utes,” Moroder remem­bered. “It was quite a job.”

Bel­lotte and Sum­mer wrote the lyrics and Sum­mer, fresh off an impor­tant call with her astrologer about her love life, “turned up to the stu­dio,” Bill Brew­ster writes at Mix­mag, “and deliv­ered the song in one take.” Upon hear­ing “I Feel Love” on its release, dur­ing the Berlin ses­sions for David Bowie’s Low, no less a shaper of the future than Bri­an Eno imme­di­ate­ly real­ized its poten­tial, run­ning into the stu­dio to pro­claim, “I have heard the sound of the future. This is it, look no fur­ther. This sin­gle is going to change the sound of club music for the next fif­teen years.” He was not wrong.

“Until ‘I Feel Love,’” Brew­ster writes, “syn­the­siz­ers had either been the province of seri­ous musi­cians like Kei­th Emer­son, Jean-Michel Jarre or Tan­ger­ine Dream or used as a nov­el­ty prop in throw­away songs.” They had gained respect in the clas­si­cal world, thanks to Wendy Car­los’ Switched on Bach, and by the late sev­en­ties they popped up in the mix of rock and funk often. Moroder’s cre­ation, how­ev­er, put the instru­ment at the cen­ter of a dance track for the first time. “‘I Feel Love’ was a rejec­tion of the intel­lec­tu­al­iza­tion of the syn­the­siz­er in favour of pure plea­sure.”

The song killed on Soul Train and “went to No 1 in the UK dur­ing the high sum­mer of 1977, and stayed there for four weeks—filling dance floors every­where,” writes Sav­age. “Like David Bowie’s Low and Heroes, and Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express, it was also the secret vice of those punks who were already tir­ing of sped-up pub rock, and it sowed the seeds for the next gen­er­a­tion of UK elec­tron­i­ca.” It didn’t chart in the U.S. but became “an all-time gay clas­sic,” and hence a sta­ple of the pre‑A.I.D.S. house music era. Remix­es appeared imme­di­ate­ly, includ­ing Patrick Cowley’s psy­che­del­ic 15-minute ver­sion, “which real­ly does go on for ever and ever with­out trashing—even enhancing—the con­cept of the orig­i­nal.”

Indeed, “I Feel Love” is as near a pure arche­type of the dance track as we’re ever going to find, so time­less it oblit­er­ates time, stretch­ing out to 30 min­utes in the “Dis­co Purr­fec­tion” ver­sion below, the first song to “ful­ly uti­lize the poten­tial of elec­tron­ics, replac­ing lush dis­co orches­tra­tion with the hyp­not­ic pre­ci­sion of machines,” and ush­er­ing in the age of New Order, Depeche Mode, and count­less clas­sic house and tech­no records from Chica­go, New York, and Detroit, none of which hold up as well Moroder and Summer’s slick, sul­try “I Feel Love.”

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ishkur’s Guide to Elec­tron­ic Music: An Inter­ac­tive, Ency­clo­pe­dic Data Visu­al­iza­tion of 120 Years of Elec­tron­ic Music

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music Visu­al­ized on a Cir­cuit Dia­gram of a 1950s Theremin: 200 Inven­tors, Com­posers & Musi­cians

A Soul Train-Style Detroit Dance Show Gets Down to Kraftwerk’s “Num­bers” in the Late 80s

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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