Famous Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci Celebrated in a New Series of Stamps

in Art, History | February 18th, 2019

No spe­cial occa­sion is required to cel­e­brate Leonar­do da Vin­ci, but the fact that he died in 1519 makes this year a par­tic­u­lar­ly suit­able time to look back at his vast, inno­v­a­tive, and influ­en­tial body of work. Just last month, “Leonar­do da Vin­ci: A Life in Draw­ing” opened in twelve muse­ums across the Unit­ed King­dom. “144 of Leonar­do da Vinci’s great­est draw­ings in the Roy­al Col­lec­tion are dis­played in 12 simul­ta­ne­ous exhi­bi­tions across the UK,” says the exhi­bi­tion’s site, with each venue’s draw­ings “select­ed to reflect the full range of Leonar­do’s inter­ests – paint­ing, sculp­ture, archi­tec­ture, music, anato­my, engi­neer­ing, car­tog­ra­phy, geol­o­gy and botany.”

The Roy­al Col­lec­tion Trust, writes Art­net’s Sarah Cas­cone, has even “sent a dozen draw­ings from Wind­sor Cas­tle to each of the 12 par­tic­i­pat­ing insti­tu­tions.” They’d pre­vi­ous­ly been in Wind­sor Castle’s Print Room, the home of a col­lec­tion of old mas­ter prints and draw­ings rou­tine­ly described as one of the finest in the world.

Now dis­played at insti­tu­tions like Liv­er­pool’s Walk­er Art Gallery, Sheffield­’s Mil­len­ni­um Gallery, Belfast’s Ulster Muse­um, and Cardif­f’s Nation­al Muse­um Wales, this selec­tion of Leonar­do’s draw­ings will be much more acces­si­ble to the pub­lic dur­ing the exhi­bi­tion than before.

But the Roy­al Mail has made sure that the draw­ings will be even more wide­ly seen, doing its part for the 500th anniver­sary of Leonar­do’s death by issu­ing them in stamp form.

“The stamps depict sev­er­al well-known works,” writes Art­net’s Kate Brown, “such as The skull sec­tioned (1489) and The head of Leda (1505–08), a study for his even­tu­al paint­ing of the myth of Leda, the queen of Spar­ta, which was the most valu­able work in Leonardo’s estate when he died and was appar­ent­ly destroyed around 1700. Oth­er stamps show the artist’s stud­ies of skele­tons, joints, and cats.”

While none of these images enjoy quite the cul­tur­al pro­file of a Vit­ru­vian Man, let alone a Mona Lisa, they all show that what­ev­er Leonar­do drew, he drew it in a way reveal­ing that he saw it like no one else did (pos­si­bly due in part, as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly post­ed about here on Open Cul­ture, to an eye dis­or­der).

Though that may come across more clear­ly at the scale of the orig­i­nals than at the scale of postage stamps, even a glimpse at the intel­lec­tu­al­ly bound­less Renais­sance poly­math­’s draw­ings com­pressed into 21-by-24-mil­lime­ter squares will sure­ly be enough to draw many into his still-inspi­ra­tional artis­tic and sci­en­tif­ic world. To the intrigued, may we sug­gest plung­ing into his 570 pages of note­books?

Note: If you live in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area, con­sid­er attend­ing the new course–The Genius of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: A 500th Anniver­sary Cel­e­bra­tion–being offered through Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies. Reg­is­tra­tion opens on Feb­ru­ary 25. The class runs from April 16 through June 4.

via Colos­sal/Art­net

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load the Sub­lime Anato­my Draw­ings of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Avail­able Online, or in a Great iPad App

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Bizarre Car­i­ca­tures & Mon­ster Draw­ings

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ear­li­est Note­books Now Dig­i­tized and Made Free Online: Explore His Inge­nious Draw­ings, Dia­grams, Mir­ror Writ­ing & More

The Doo­dles in Leonar­do da Vinci’s Man­u­scripts Con­tain His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries on the Laws of Fric­tion, Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er

New Stamp Col­lec­tion Cel­e­brates Six Nov­els by Jane Austen

Postage Stamps from Bhutan That Dou­ble as Playable Vinyl Records

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.

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A Telecaster Made Out of 1200 Colored Pencils

in Music, Random | February 18th, 2019

A cou­ple weeks back, Burls Art dared to make a Stra­to­cast­er out of 1200 Cray­ola col­ored pen­cils. Now comes a Tele­cast­er-style gui­tar, which Fend­er first put into pro­duc­tion back in 1950. You can watch it get made, from start to fin­ish, in the 11-minute video above.

On a more seri­ous note, any­one inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the elec­tric guitar–particularly the Strat, Tele and Les Paul–should spend time with the new book by Ian S. Port, The Birth of Loud: Leo Fend­er, Les Paul, and the Gui­tar-Pio­neer­ing Rival­ry That Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll. It offers a pret­ty rich and live­ly account of the inven­tors and instru­ments who cre­at­ed a new mod­ern sound. If inter­est­ed, you can get The Birth of Loud as a free audio­book if you sign up for Audible.com’s free tri­al pro­gram. Find details on that here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Fend­er Stra­to­cast­er Made Out of 1200 Col­ored Pen­cils

Behold the First Elec­tric Gui­tar: The 1931 “Fry­ing Pan”

Bri­an May’s Home­made Gui­tar, Made From Old Tables, Bike and Motor­cy­cle Parts & More

Oxford Sci­en­tist Explains the Physics of Play­ing Elec­tric Gui­tar Solos

Repair­ing Willie Nelson’s Trig­ger: A Good Look at How a Luthi­er Gets America’s Most Icon­ic Gui­tar on the Road Again

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800 Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts Are Now Online: Browse & Download Them Courtesy of the British Library and Bibliothèque Nationale de France

in Books, History, Libraries | February 15th, 2019

Kazuo Ishiguro’s nov­el The Buried Giant begins with an immer­sive depic­tion of what it might have been like to live in a Euro­pean vil­lage dur­ing the mid­dle ages. Or what it might feel like for us mod­erns, at least. The cou­ple at the cen­ter of the sto­ry spends sev­er­al pages fret­ting over the loss of a can­dle, their only one. With­out it, their nights are pitch black. In the day, they wan­der in a fog, unable to remem­ber any­thing. Though the cause of this turns out to be dark mag­ic, one can’t help think­ing that a smart­phone would imme­di­ate­ly solve all their prob­lems.

This was a time not only before mobile video, but when images of any kind were scarce, when every book was painstak­ing­ly copied by hand in care­ful, ele­gant script. Many of those rare, scrib­al copies were not illus­trat­ed, they were “illu­mi­nat­ed.” Their pages shone out into the dark­ness and fog. Most of the pop­u­la­tion could not read them, but they could, in rare instances when they might catch a glimpse, be deeply moved by the col­or­ful, styl­ized images and let­ter­ing.

For the intel­lec­tu­al class­es, illu­mi­na­tion con­sti­tut­ed a lan­guage of its own, fram­ing and inter­pret­ing med­ical, clas­si­cal, and legal texts, gospels and works by the church fathers. Not all books received this treat­ment but the “most lux­u­ri­ous,” notes the British Library, were “lit­er­al­ly ‘lit up’ by dec­o­ra­tions and pic­tures in bright­ly coloured pig­ments and bur­nished gold leaf.” For cen­turies, despite the explo­sion of image-mak­ing tech­nolo­gies of every kind, most of us, unless we were schol­ars or aris­to­crats, were in the same posi­tion vis-à-vis these stun­ning arti­facts as the aver­age medieval peas­ant. Medieval man­u­scripts were locked away in rare book rooms and seen by very few.

The sit­u­a­tion has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly as libraries dig­i­tize their hold­ings. Last Novem­ber, hun­dreds more rare, valu­able medieval man­u­scripts became avail­able to every­one when the British Library and the Bib­lio­thèque nationale de France launched a joint project, mak­ing “800 man­u­scripts dec­o­rat­ed before the year 1200 avail­able freely” online, as the BL blog announced in 2016. Both insti­tu­tions pro­vid­ed 400 man­u­scripts each for dig­i­ti­za­tion. Some of these are cur­rent­ly on dis­play at the wild­ly pop­u­lar, sold-out British Library exhi­bi­tion Anglo-Sax­on King­doms: Art, Word, War. Now they are also vir­tu­al pub­lic prop­er­ty, as it were, thanks to a grant from the Polon­sky Foun­da­tion.

That these frag­ile arti­facts have been so inac­ces­si­ble, kept under glass and well away from insects, thieves, and van­dals, now means they are in a con­di­tion to be dig­i­tal­ly copied and uploaded in high res­o­lu­tion for close view­ing, com­par­i­son, and care­ful study. Medievalists.net describes the com­ple­men­tary web­sites the two libraries have launched:

The first, France-Eng­land: medieval man­u­scripts between 700 and 1200, has been cre­at­ed by the Bib­lio­thèque nationale de France based on the Gal­li­ca mar­que blanche infra­struc­ture, using the IIIF stan­dard and Mirador view­er to make the images held by the dif­fer­ent insti­tu­tions inter­op­er­a­ble and enable them to be com­pared side-by-side with­in the same dig­i­tal library or anno­tat­ed. The sec­ond web­site, Medieval Eng­land and France, 700‑1200, is aimed at a wider pub­lic audi­ence, and has been devel­oped by the British Library to show­case a selec­tion of man­u­scripts as well as arti­cles, essays and video clips.

The French site has ports of entry accord­ing to theme, author, place, and cen­tu­ry, and many links to resources for schol­ars. The British Library site fea­tures curat­ed selec­tions, intro­duced by acces­si­ble arti­cles. Laypeo­ple with lit­tle expe­ri­ence study­ing medieval man­u­scripts can learn about legal, med­ical, and musi­cal texts, see how the writ­ings of the church fathers received spe­cial atten­tion in monas­tic cul­ture, and learn how man­u­scripts cir­cu­lat­ed before 1200. Those who know what they are look­ing for can con­duct advanced search­es at the Medieval Man­u­scripts site, and down­load a full list of all 800 man­u­scripts here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

Behold 3,000 Dig­i­tized Man­u­scripts from the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na: The Moth­er of All Medieval Libraries Is Get­ting Recon­struct­ed Online

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

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When Fred Rogers and Francois Clemmons Broke Down Race Barriers on a Historic Episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1969)

in History, Life, Television | February 15th, 2019

Last year’s Fred Rogers doc­u­men­tary, Won’t You Be My Neigh­bor, pro­pelled François Clem­mons—bet­ter known to gen­er­a­tions of Mis­ter Rogers Neigh­bor­hood view­ers as Offi­cer Clemmons—back into the inter­na­tion­al spot­light.

One of the most strik­ing anec­dotes in the doc con­cerns a 1969 episode in which Mis­ter Rogers, who was white, invit­ed Offi­cer Clem­mons, who is black, to join him in soak­ing his bare feet in a back­yard baby pool on a hot summer’s day.

It was one of those giant leaps for mankind moments that pass­es itself off as a homey, fair­ly unre­mark­able step, though as Clem­mons told his friend Karl Lind­holm in a Sto­ryCorps inter­view, Rogers under­stood the pow­er­ful mes­sage this ges­ture would send.

Like­wise, his choice of Clem­mons to embody a friend­ly cop for his tele­vi­sion neigh­bor­hood, a part Clem­mons, who played the role for 30 years, was ini­tial­ly hes­i­tant to accept:

Fred came to me and said, “I have this idea, you could be a police offi­cer.” That kind of stopped me in my tracks. I grew up in the ghet­to. I did not have a pos­i­tive opin­ion of police offi­cers. Police­men were sick­ing police dogs and water hoses on peo­ple. And I real­ly had a hard time putting myself in that role. So I was not excit­ed about being Offi­cer Clem­mons at all.

Rogers, who had met Clem­mons in a Pitts­burgh area church where the trained opera singer was per­form­ing, pre­vailed, stress­ing the impact such a pos­i­tive por­tray­al of a black author­i­ty fig­ure could have on the com­mu­ni­ty.

Offi­cer Clem­mons, the first recur­ring black char­ac­ter on a children’s series, paved the way for the mul­tira­cial casts of Sesame Street and The Elec­tric Com­pa­ny, also on PBS.

If a pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words, a song can also pack quite a wal­lop. It’s hard not to get choked up hear­ing Clem­mons sing “There Are Many Ways to Say I Love You,” above, a tune he reprised in 1993, for his final appear­ance on the show.

Such sen­ti­ments are a nat­ur­al fit in pro­grams aimed at the preschool crowd, whose love of their fam­i­lies is rein­forced at every turn, but it’s still unusu­al to see these feel­ings artic­u­lat­ed so pure­ly when the only peo­ple in sight are grown men.

Clem­mons learned not to doubt Roger’s sin­cer­i­ty when he said, “I like you just the way you are.”

And Rogers grew to accept his friend’s sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, though this embrace came a bit less nat­u­ral­ly. In an inter­view with Van­i­ty Fair’s Chris Azzopar­di, Clem­mons was philo­soph­i­cal, recall­ing his “sur­ro­gate father’s” request to steer clear of gay clubs so as not to endan­ger the show’s whole­some image:

Sac­ri­fice was a part of my des­tiny. In oth­er words, I did not want to be a shame to my race. I didn’t want to be a scan­dal to the show. I didn’t want to hurt the man who was giv­ing me so much, and I also knew the val­ue as a black per­former of hav­ing this show, this plat­form. Black actors and actresses—SAG and Equity—90 per­cent of them are not work­ing. If you know that and here you are, on a nation­al plat­form you’re gonna sab­o­tage your­self?

I weighed this thing, the pros and the cons. And I thought, I not only have a nation­al plat­form, I’m get­ting paid. I was also get­ting a pro­mo­tion that I sim­ply could not have afford­ed to pay for. Every time I did the show, and every time Fred took us across the coun­try to do three, four, five per­son­al appear­ances, my name was being writ­ten into somebody’s heart—some lit­tle kid who would grow up and say, “Oh, I remem­ber him, I remem­ber that he could sing, I remem­ber that he was on Mis­ter Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood.” I didn’t have the mon­ey to pay for that, but I was get­ting it free. There were so many things that I got back for that sac­ri­fice that I kept my big mouth shut, kept my head down, kept my shoul­der to the plough.

Stu­dents at Mid­dle­bury Col­lege, where Clem­mons was a long time fac­ul­ty pres­ence, were well acquaint­ed with the self-pro­claimed “Divaman’s”’ flam­boy­ant side:

Clem­mons has added col­or and soul to the Mid­dle­bury Col­lege scene for near­ly 25 years. As Alexan­der Twi­light Artist in Res­i­dence and direc­tor of the Mar­tin Luther King Spir­i­tu­al Choir, he is known by many names: the divo, the mae­stro, the rev­erend, doc­tor-madam-hon­ey-man, sportin’ life, and even black mag­ic. He has played the role of pro­fes­sor, choir­mas­ter, res­i­dent vocal soloist, advi­sor, con­fi­dant, and com­mu­ni­ty cheer­leader. Yet his pur­pose is sin­gu­lar: to share hope through song.

Lis­ten to Sto­ryCorps pod­cast episode #462 about Mis­ter Rogers’ and Fran­cois Clem­mons’ famous foot bath, as well as an inci­dent that took place five years pri­or where pro­test­ers staged a “wade in” at the “Whites Only” pool at St. Augus­tine, Florida’s Mon­son Motor Lodge.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Col­ors of Mis­ter Rogers’ Hand-Knit Sweaters from 1979 to 2001: A Visu­al Graph Cre­at­ed with Data Sci­ence

Mis­ter Rogers Turns Kids On to Jazz with Help of a Young Wyn­ton Marsalis and Oth­er Jazz Leg­ends (1986)

Mr. Rogers Takes Break­danc­ing Lessons from a 12-Year-Old (1985)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City on March 11 as host of  The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Lucille Ball Demos a Precursor to Peter Frampton’s “Talk Box” (1939)

in Music, Technology | February 15th, 2019

Decades before Peter Framp­ton made the Talk Box come alive on songs like “Do You Feel Like We Do” and “Show Me the Way,” anoth­er leg­end, Lucille Ball, exper­i­ment­ed with its fore­run­ner, the Sonovox. Invent­ed by Gilbert Wright in 1939, the Sonovox “used speak­ers pressed into [a per­former’s] throat to pro­duce mechan­i­cal talk­ing sounds.” And the sounds could then be mod­u­lat­ed by the tongue and lips.  Above, in a 1939 news­reel clip called “Machine Made Voic­es!,” Ball puts the Sonovox on dis­play. This marked one of her ear­li­est appear­ances on film.

The Sonovox would lat­er fea­ture promi­nent­ly in radio sta­tion IDs and jin­gles. Bela Lugosi would use it to “por­tray the voice of a dead per­son dur­ing a seance.” And it would even make an appear­ance on The Who’s 1967 album, The Who Sell Out–all before the mod­ern Talk Box arrived on the scene.

via Boing­Bo­ing

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Only Sur­viv­ing Behind-the-Scenes Footage of I Love Lucy, and It’s in Col­or! (1951)

How to Use the Rotary Dial Phone: A Primer from 1927

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

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Watch the Trailers for Tolkien and Catch-22, Two New Literary Films

in Film, Literature, Television | February 15th, 2019

For decades, fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings won­dered if the books could ever become a film. The Bea­t­les and John Boor­man both tried to get adap­ta­tions off the ground in the 1960s and 70s, and ani­ma­tor Ralph Bak­shi came up with his own cin­e­mat­ic inter­pre­ta­tion, if only a par­tial one, in 1978. But now we live in a world rich with Lord of the Rings and Lord of the Rings-relat­ed mate­r­i­al on film, thanks to the efforts of direc­tor Peter Jack­son and his col­lab­o­ra­tors on not just the adap­ta­tions of The Fel­low­ship of the Ring, The Two Tow­ers, and The Return of the King, but three whole fea­ture films bring­ing the rel­a­tive­ly brief tale The Hob­bit to the screen.

What remains for the Tolkien-inspired film­mak­er today? None, so far, have proven brave enough to take on the likes of The Sil­mar­il­lion, the for­bid­ding­ly mythopoe­ic work pub­lished a few years after the writer’s death. But the Finnish direc­tor Dome Karukos­ki, whose last pic­ture told the sto­ry of male-erot­i­ca illus­tra­tor Tom of Fin­land, has found mate­r­i­al in the writer’s life.

Going by the trail­er above, Tolkien deals not just with the writ­ing of The Lord of the Rings, described by star Nicholas Hoult as “a sto­ry about jour­neys, the jour­neys we take to prove our­selves,” about “adven­tures” and “potent mag­ic, mag­ic beyond any­thing any­one has ever felt before.”

It’s also, says Hoult-as-Tolkien, a sto­ry about “what it means to love, and to be loved.” That fits with anoth­er appar­ent sto­ry­line of Tolkien itself, that of the man who dreamed up Mid­dle-Earth­’s rela­tion­ship with Edith Bratt, the girl he met as a teenag­er who would become his wife — not long after which he received the let­ter sum­mon­ing him to France to fight in the First World War, where he man­aged to sur­vive the Bat­tle of the Somme. An equal­ly skilled writer of anoth­er tem­pera­ment might have pro­duced an endur­ing nov­el of the war, but Tolkien, as his gen­er­a­tions of read­ers know, went in anoth­er direc­tion entire­ly. A gen­er­a­tion lat­er, Joseph Heller proved to be that skilled writer of a dif­fer­ent tem­pera­ment, and six­teen years after com­ing back from the Sec­ond World War, he pro­duced Catch-22.

Heller’s nov­el has also made it to the screen a few times: Mike Nichols direct­ed a fea­ture-film adap­ta­tion in 1970, the pilot for a tele­vi­sion series aired three years lat­er, and now we await a Catch-22 minis­eries that will air on Hulu this May. Christo­pher Abbott stars as Cap­tain John Yos­sar­i­an, the hap­less bom­bardier with no aim in the war but to stay out of har­m’s way, and George Clooney (also one of the series’ direc­tors) as Lieu­tenant Scheis­skopf, one of the book’s cast of high­ly mem­o­rable minor char­ac­ters. The series’ six episodes should accom­mo­date more of that cast — and more of the forms Heller’s elab­o­rate satire takes in the nov­el — than a movie can. If, as a result, you need to con­sult Heller’s large-for­mat hand­writ­ten out­line for the book, by all means do — and have a look at Tolkien’s anno­tat­ed map of Mid­dle-Earth while you’re at it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Beyond

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Per­son­al Book Cov­er Designs for The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

Map of Mid­dle-Earth Anno­tat­ed by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read From The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit

J.R.R. Tolkien Expressed a “Heart­felt Loathing” for Walt Dis­ney and Refused to Let Dis­ney Stu­dios Adapt His Work

Joseph Heller’s Hand­writ­ten Out­line for Catch-22, One of the Great Nov­els of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

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.

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A Six-Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports: Meditate, Relax, Study

in Music | February 14th, 2019

Writ­ing in his 1995 diary about his sem­i­nal ambi­ent album Music for Air­ports, Eno remem­bered his ini­tial thoughts going into it: “I want to make a kind of music that pre­pares you for dying–that doesn’t get all bright and cheer­ful and pre­tend you’re not a lit­tle appre­hen­sive, but which makes you say to your­self, ‘Actu­al­ly, it’s not that big a deal if I die.’”

Cre­at­ed in 1978 from sec­onds-long tape loops from a much longer improv ses­sion with musi­cians includ­ing Robert Wyatt, Music for Air­ports start­ed the idea of slow, media­tive music that aban­doned typ­i­cal major and minor scales, brought in melod­ic ambi­gu­i­ty, and began the explo­ration of sounds that were designed to exist some­where in the back­ground, beyond the scope of full atten­tion.

For those who think 50 min­utes is too short and those piano notes too rec­og­niz­able, may we sug­gest this 6‑hour, time-stretched ver­sion of the album, cre­at­ed by YouTube user “Slow Motion TV.” The tonal field is the same, but now the notes are no attack, all decay. It’s gran­u­lar as hell, but you could imag­ine the whole piece unspool­ing unno­ticed in a ter­mi­nal while a flight is delayed for the third time. (Maybe that’s when the accep­tance of death hap­pens, when you’ve giv­en up on ever get­ting home?)

Unlike Music for Films, which fea­tured sev­er­al tracks Eno had giv­en to film­mak­ers like Derek Jar­man, it took some time for Music for Air­ports to be real­ized in its intend­ed loca­tion: being piped in at a ter­mi­nal at La Guardia, New York, some­time in the 1980s. And that was just a one-time thing.

The album seemed des­tined for per­son­al use only, but then in 1997 the mod­ern ensem­ble Bang on a Can played it live, trans­lat­ing the ran­dom­ness of out of sync tape loops into music nota­tion. Over the years they’ve per­formed it at air­ports in Brus­sels, Hol­land and Liv­er­pool, and in 2015 the group brought it to Ter­mi­nal 2 of San Diego Inter­na­tion­al. Writ­ing for KCET, Alex Zaragoza report­ed that “cry­ing babies, echoes of rolling suit­cas­es and board­ing pass­es serv­ing as tick­ets to the con­cert failed to remind any­one that they were, indeed, at one of the busiest air­ports in the coun­try. Even the tell­tale announce­ments were there: Air­port secu­ri­ty is every­one’s respon­si­bil­i­ty. Do not leave bags unat­tend­ed.”

And then in 2018, Lon­don City Air­port played the orig­i­nal album in a day-long long loop for the album’s 40th anniver­sary.

As site-spe­cif­ic mul­ti-media art builds pop­u­lar­i­ty in the 21st cen­tu­ry with increas­ing­ly cheap­er and small­er tech­nol­o­gy, we might hope to hear ambi­ent drones, and not clas­sic rock or pop, in more and more land­scapes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bri­an Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Cre­ative Work: Don’t Get a Job

Behold the Orig­i­nal Deck of Oblique Strate­gies Cards, Hand­writ­ten by Bri­an Eno Him­self

Bri­an Eno Explains the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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10 Tips on How to Write a Great Screenplay from Billy Wilder: Pearls of Wisdom from the Director of Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity & More

in Film | February 14th, 2019

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

There’s an old sto­ry — Orson Welles called it “the great­est Hol­ly­wood one-lin­er ever made” — that when some­one attend­ing the 1958 funer­al of Har­ry Cohn, the fear­some pres­i­dent of Colum­bia Pic­tures, asked how it was pos­si­ble that such a huge crowd would show up for Cohn’s funer­al, Bil­ly Wilder quipped: “Well, give the peo­ple what they want.”

The sto­ry is almost cer­tain­ly apoc­ryphal. The line may have been spo­ken by some­one else, at a dif­fer­ent Hol­ly­wood mogul’s funer­al. But the fact that it is so often attrib­uted to Wilder says some­thing about his rep­u­ta­tion as a man with a razor-sharp wit and a firm grasp of the imper­a­tives of pop­u­lar movie-mak­ing. In films like Sun­set Boule­vard, Some Like it Hot, Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty and Sab­ri­na, Wilder used his for­mi­da­ble craft as a direc­tor to tell sto­ries in a clear and effi­cient way. It was an eth­ic he picked up as a screen­writer.

Wilder was born in Aus­tria-Hun­gary and moved as a young man to Ger­many, where he worked as a news­pa­per reporter. In the late 1920s he began writ­ing screen­plays for the Ger­man film indus­try, but he fled the coun­try soon after Adolf Hitler became chan­cel­lor in 1933. Wilder made his way to Hol­ly­wood, where he con­tin­ued to write screen­plays. He co-wrote a num­ber of suc­cess­ful films in the 30s, includ­ing Ninotch­ka, Hold Back the Dawn and Ball of Fire. In the ear­ly 40s he got his first chance to direct a Hol­ly­wood movie, and a long string of hits fol­lowed. In 1960 he won three Acad­e­my Awards for pro­duc­ing, writ­ing and direct­ing The Apart­ment.

Wilder was 90 years old when the young direc­tor Cameron Crowe approached him in 1996 about play­ing a small role in Jer­ry Maguire. Wilder said no, but the two men formed a friend­ship. Over the next sev­er­al years they talked exten­sive­ly about film­mak­ing, and in 1999 Crowe pub­lished Con­ver­sa­tions with Wilder. One of the book’s high­lights is a list of ten screen­writ­ing tips by Wilder. “I know a lot of peo­ple that have already Xerox­ed that list and put it by their type­writer,” Crowe said in a 1999 NPR inter­view. “And, you know, there’s no bet­ter film school real­ly than lis­ten­ing to what Bil­ly Wilder says.”

Here are Wilder’s ten rules of good film­mak­ing:

1: The audi­ence is fick­le.
2: Grab ’em by the throat and nev­er let ’em go.
3: Devel­op a clean line of action for your lead­ing char­ac­ter.
4: Know where you’re going.
5: The more sub­tle and ele­gant you are in hid­ing your plot points, the bet­ter you are as a writer.
6: If you have a prob­lem with the third act, the real prob­lem is in the first act.
7: A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audi­ence add up two plus two. They’ll love you for­ev­er.
8: In doing voice-overs, be care­ful not to describe what the audi­ence already sees. Add to what they’re see­ing.
9: The event that occurs at the sec­ond act cur­tain trig­gers the end of the movie.
10: The third act must build, build, build in tem­po and action until the last event, and then — that’s it. Don’t hang around.

Note: Read­ers might also be inter­est­ed in Wilder’s 1996 Paris Review inter­view. It’s called The Art of of Screen­writ­ing.

An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in August 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ing­mar Bergman Names the 11 Films He Liked Above All Oth­ers (1994)

Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

Watch Ray­mond Chandler’s Long-Unno­ticed Cameo in Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty

Fritz Lang Tells the Riv­et­ing Sto­ry of the Day He Met Joseph Goebbels and Then High-Tailed It Out of Ger­many

 

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Hear Neil Gaiman Read Aloud 15 of His Own Works, and Works by 6 Other Great Writers: From The Graveyard Book & Coraline, to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven & Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

in Literature | February 14th, 2019

Neil Gaiman is a sto­ry­teller. That title encom­pass­es quite a few pur­suits, most of which seem­ing­ly involve writ­ing — writ­ing nov­els, writ­ing radio dra­mas, writ­ing com­ic books — but he also occa­sion­al­ly tells sto­ries the old-fash­ioned way: speak­ing aloud, and to an audi­ence of rapt lis­ten­ers. Tra­di­tion­al­ly, such sto­ry­telling hap­pened in a cir­cle around the camp­fire, but as a sto­ry­teller of the 21st cen­tu­ry — albeit a mas­ter of time­less tech­niques who uses those tech­niques to deal with time­less themes — Gaiman can tell sto­ries to the entire world. Today we’ve gath­ered all of Gaiman’s stream­able read­ings, both video and audio, in one place.

Near­ly every type of text at which he has tried his hand appears in this col­lec­tion, from nov­els (The Grave­yard Book) to novel­las (Cora­line) to poet­ry (“Instruc­tions,” above) to man­i­festos (“Mak­ing Good Art”). Suit­able as his voice and deliv­ery are to his own work, Gaiman’s live sto­ry­telling tal­ent also extends to the works of oth­ers, as you’ll find out if you lis­ten to the selec­tions on the sec­ond list below.

The mate­r­i­al varies wide­ly, from non­sense or near-non­sense poet­ry like Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham and Lewis Car­rol­l’s “Jab­ber­wocky” to the work of his friend Ursu­la K. Le Guin to a clas­sic like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” whose Goth­ic atmos­phere will no doubt appeal to Gaiman’s fans.

And Gaiman cer­tain­ly has his fair share of fans. If you already count your­self in that group, you’ll need lit­tle con­vinc­ing to do a binge-lis­ten of his read­ings here. But if you aren’t yet famil­iar with Gaiman’s work in all its var­i­ous forms, you might con­sid­er using these pieces of video and audio as an entry­way into his nar­ra­tive world, with its emo­tion­al chiaroscuro, it mod­ern-day mythol­o­gy, and its unflag­ging sense of humor. There’s plen­ty of Neil Gaiman out there to read, of course, but with his style of sto­ry­telling, some­times he must sim­ply be heard — if not around an actu­al camp­fire, then on that largest camp­fire ever cre­at­ed, the inter­net. These texts will be added to our list, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

His own work
Works by oth­ers
  • A Christ­mas Car­ol by Charles Dick­ens — Free Audio
  • Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss — Free Video
  • “Democ­ra­cy” by Leonard Cohen — Free Video
  • “How It Seems to Me,” a Poem by Ursu­la K Le Guin — Free Video
  • “Jab­ber­wocky” by Lewis Car­roll — Free Video
  • “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe — Free Video 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

18 Sto­ries & Nov­els by Neil Gaiman Online: Free Texts & Read­ings by Neil Him­self

Neil Gaiman Reads His Man­i­festo on Mak­ing Art: Fea­tures the 10 Things He Wish He Knew As a Young Artist

Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains

Neil Gaiman Teach­es the Art of Sto­ry­telling in His New Online Course

Aman­da Palmer Ani­mates & Nar­rates Hus­band Neil Gaiman’s Uncon­scious Mus­ings

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.

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Women’s Hidden Contributions to Modern Genetics Get Revealed by New Study: No Longer Will They Be Buried in the Footnotes

in Gender, Science | February 14th, 2019

It’s too easy, when our his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge is lim­it­ed, to mis­take effects for caus­es, to fall for just-so sto­ries that nat­u­ral­ize and per­pet­u­ate inequal­i­ty. Many of us may have only recent­ly learned, for exam­ple, that the moon land­ing would not have been pos­si­ble with­out math­e­mati­cian Kather­ine John­son and her Hid­den Fig­ures col­leagues, or that the Hub­ble tele­scope would not have been pos­si­ble with­out astronomer Nan­cy G. Roman (now immor­tal­ized in LEGO). Pri­or to this knowl­edge, we might have been led to believe that women had lit­tle to do with humankind’s first leaps into out­er space, to the sur­face of the moon, and beyond.

Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty his­to­ri­an of sci­ence Mar­garet Rossiter has called this phe­nom­e­non “the Matil­da effect,” after an 1893 essay by suf­frag­ist Matil­da Joslyn Gage. Rossiter spent years try­ing to counter the dom­i­nant nar­ra­tives that leave out women in sci­ence with a mul­ti-vol­ume schol­ar­ly his­to­ry. Counter-nar­ra­tives like hers now appear reg­u­lar­ly online. And pop­u­lar media like the book, then film, Hid­den Fig­ures have inspired oth­er aca­d­e­mics to drill into the his­to­ry of their fields, find the women who have been ignored, and try to under­stand the how and why.

When Brown University’s Emil­ia Huer­ta-Sánchez and San Fran­cis­co State University’s Rori Rohlfs saw Hid­den Fig­ures, they decid­ed to research their spe­cial­iza­tion, the­o­ret­i­cal pop­u­la­tion genet­ics. It may not be as glam­orous as space trav­el, and their research may not become a Hol­ly­wood film or LEGO set, but the results they unearthed are rev­e­la­to­ry and impor­tant. Dur­ing the 1970s, for exam­ple, “a piv­otal time for the field of pop­u­la­tion genet­ics,” notes Ed Yong at The Atlantic, the two researchers and their team of under­grad­u­ates found that “women account­ed for 59 per­cent of acknowl­edged pro­gram­mers, but just 7 per­cent of actu­al authors.”

Those women were sci­en­tists doing “cru­cial work,” writes Yong. One pro­gram­mer, Mar­garet Wu, cre­at­ed a sta­tis­ti­cal tool still reg­u­lar­ly used to cal­cu­late opti­mal genet­ic diver­si­ty. Her mod­el appeared in a 1975 paper and is now known as the Wat­ter­son esti­ma­tor, after the “one and only” named author, G.A. Wat­ter­son. “The paper has been cit­ed 3,400 times.” Today, “if a sci­en­tist did all the pro­gram­ming for a study, she would expect to be list­ed as an author.” But the prac­tice only began to change in the 1980s, when “pro­gram­ming began chang­ing from a ‘pink col­lar’ job, done large­ly by low-paid women, to the male-dom­i­nat­ed pro­fes­sion it remains today.”

The mar­gin­al­iza­tion of female pro­gram­mers dur­ing some of the field’s most pro­duc­tive years—their rel­e­ga­tion to lit­er­al foot­notes in history—has cre­at­ed the impres­sion, as Huer­ta- Sánchez, Rohlfs, and their co-authors write, that “this research was con­duct­ed by a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of inde­pen­dent indi­vid­ual sci­en­tists near­ly all of whom were men.” See a sum­ma­ry of the authors’ find­ings in the video above. To obtain their results, they combed through every issue of the jour­nal The­o­ret­i­cal Pop­u­la­tion Biol­o­gy—near­ly 900 papers—then pulled out “every name in the acknowl­edg­ments, worked out whether they did any pro­gram­ming, and deduced their gen­ders where pos­si­ble.”

The study, pub­lished in the lat­est issue of Genet­ics does not com­pre­hen­sive­ly sur­vey the entire field, nor does it defin­i­tive­ly show that every pro­gram­mer who con­tributed to a paper did so sub­stan­tive­ly enough to war­rant author­ship. But it does not need to do these things. The dis­par­i­ties between named authors and mar­gin­al­ly acknowl­edged sci­en­tif­ic labor­ers in a major jour­nal in the field calls for an expla­na­tion beyond selec­tion bias or chance. The expla­na­tion of sys­temic bias not only has the ben­e­fit of being well-sup­port­ed by a huge aggre­gate of data across the sci­ences, but it also presents us with a sit­u­a­tion that can be changed when the prob­lems are wide­ly seen and acknowl­edged.

The study’s results “dis­pel the mis­con­cep­tion that women weren’t par­tic­i­pat­ing in sci­ence,” the researchers point out in their video, and they sug­gest that a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of women in genet­ics weren’t giv­en the cred­it they deserved. Huer­ta- Sánchez and Rohlfs walk their talk. The under­grad­u­ate researchers who worked on “Illu­mi­nat­ing Wom­en’s Hid­den Con­tri­bu­tion to His­tor­i­cal The­o­ret­i­cal Pop­u­la­tion Genet­ics” are all named as authors in the paper, so that their con­tri­bu­tions to writ­ing a new his­to­ry of their field can be rec­og­nized.

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Women Philoso­phers: A New Web Site Presents the Con­tri­bu­tions of Women Philoso­phers, from Ancient to Mod­ern

Hen­ri­et­ta Lacks Gets Immor­tal­ized in a Por­trait: It’s Now on Dis­play at the Nation­al Por­trait Gallery

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

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Hear Siouxsie Sioux’s Powerful Isolated Vocals on “The Killing Jar,” “Hong Kong Garden,” “Cities In Dust” & “Kiss Them for Me”

in Music | February 13th, 2019

Like hun­dreds of oth­er teenagers in late sev­en­ties Eng­land, Susan Bal­lion, bet­ter known as Siouxsie Sioux, embraced the any­one-can-do-it-ness of punk after see­ing the Sex Pis­tols. In 1976, already a tastemak­er in the scene, she threw a band togeth­er with Sid Vicious on drums, and with no prac­tice, or even any songs, they got onstage, and impro­vised a 20-minute ren­di­tion of “The Lord’s Prayer.” There launched the career of a post-punk, dark pop leg­end, span­ning that first anar­chic gig, the infa­mous Bill Grundy TV appear­ance, some of the most influ­en­tial British rock of the late-70s and 80s, and major tours and hits through­out the last three decades.

Despite the awards, star col­lab­o­ra­tions, and mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional influ­ence, Siouxsie’s strik­ing musi­cal tal­ent has often been giv­en short shrift in the U.S. press. For exam­ple, a 1992 Los Ange­les Times con­cert write-up after the release of her biggest U.S. hit, “Kiss Them for Me,” cast her as “the leader of a cult of weird chicks,” writes Liz Ohnane­sian at Noisey, “in a review that spent five para­graphs on her looks and a whop­ping two on the music.” Maybe, “at that point, the band was used to that.” But it’s a seri­ous over­sight.

“Much has been writ­ten about the vocal range of artists like Fred­die Mer­cury,” Dan­ger­ous Minds points out, “but not so much on the equal­ly bril­liant Siouxsie Sioux.” If the com­par­i­son seems stretched, con­sid­er anoth­er one: Kate Bush.

Though very dif­fer­ent artists, both released debut albums in 1978 and became style icons who are as influ­en­tial for their look as for their vocal prowess. Siouxsie, whose voice “devel­oped from spiky, punky vocals to rich, pow­er­ful, and glo­ri­ous tex­tured tones… can hit the high notes and bring an unnerv­ing warmth and men­ace to her low­er range.”

With Siouxsie and the Ban­shees, The Crea­tures, and in her solo work, she has giv­en cool, icy voice to goth­ic sen­ti­ments and images, con­vey­ing ache and fear and bru­tal beau­ty. In the videos here, lis­ten to Siouxsie’s iso­lat­ed vocals from 1988’s “The Killing Jar” (hear the orig­i­nal right above), an excel­lent exam­ple of “just how good she is.” Above, also hear her vocal track from “Hong Kong Gar­den,” her 1978 debut sin­gle, and “arguably the most impor­tant of the ear­ly post-punk hits,” writes Robert Webb at The Inde­pen­dent.

Lis­ten to her sing 1985’s “Cities in Dust,” about the destruc­tion of Pom­peii, and below, hear “Kiss Them for Me,” a cryp­tic trib­ute to actress Jayne Mans­field and a song that made a new gen­er­a­tion of Siouxsie and the Ban­shees fans when it came out in 1991. Siouxsie has attract­ed a new­ly devot­ed fan­base every decade since the 70s for her style, song­writ­ing, and her voice, an instru­ment that deserves greater atten­tion.

“These days,” she said in a 2007 inter­view, the lega­cy of punk has “almost been reduced to a fash­ion state­ment. I think there’s been a false sense of empow­er­ment for women” in music. “Almost as if there’s that ever-present pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with body form and image… not about express­ing any style or intent.” Young artists look­ing for gen­uine inspi­ra­tion will always find the real thing in Siouxsie’s impres­sive body of work.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Siouxsie and the Banshee’s Raw & Com­plete­ly Impro­vised First Show, with Sid Vicious on Drums (1976)

The Sex Pis­tols Make a Scan­dalous Appear­ance on the Bill Grundy Show & Intro­duce Punk Rock to the Star­tled Mass­es (1976)

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

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

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