Every Spider-Man Movie and TV Show Explained By Kevin Smith

in Comics/Cartoons | December 20th, 2018

Look, I’ve nev­er been a fan of Kevin Smith’s ooooooov-rah, per se, but I will nev­er crit­i­cize his abil­i­ty to spin a bloody good yarn. He’s fun­ny, engag­ing, charm­ing, and knows his pop cul­ture. WIRED also knows this, so when on the eve of the (appar­ent­ly very good) Spi­der-verse movie, they called on Smith to sit down and run through every Spi­der-man Movie and TV Show and opin­ion­ate all over that mess. (And because Sony’s con­tract with the Mar­vel super­hero is up, this might be a nice demar­ca­tion line.)

I stepped on board the Spidey-train when he appeared as a char­ac­ter on PBS’ The Elec­tric Com­pa­ny, the edu­ca­tion­al kids show that would screen after Sesame Street. As Smith points out, this Spidey was mute, a red and blue mime who only spoke in thought bal­loons, some of which oth­ers could lit­er­al­ly read as they hung above his head.

Around the same time the ‘60s car­toon was also screen­ing, copy­ing the rogue’s gallery of vil­lains well known from the Steve Ditko-Stan Lee com­ic book. Both this and the Elec­tric Com­pa­ny Spideys had the best theme songs, and they still haven’t been topped. (If you’re a Gen‑X’er, you can drop the lyrics on request, any­time).

Now, before this, there had been a few live action attempts to bring the wall-crawler to the big screen but, well, they’re as cheesy and not-good as you might expect, so for the peri­od dur­ing the ‘90s, Spi­der-man stayed an ani­mat­ed con­cern. The high­light of the ’94-’98 ani­mat­ed series, accord­ing to Smith, is the final meta episode, where Spi­der-man cross­es over into “our” real­i­ty and meets Stan Lee, while Lee’s wife Joan played Madame Web.

Inter­est­ing­ly, Smith gloss­es over the three oth­er ani­mat­ed series that have run since then because of the begin­ning of live-action Spi­der-man films made with the pow­er and mon­ey of the mod­ern block­buster. (Inter­est­ing, I say, because crit­ics are now declar­ing the new ani­mat­ed film the best of the bunch).

Smith isn’t wild about the first Sam Rai­mi film in 2002. He ques­tions the deci­sion to cov­er up emo­tive actor Willem Dafoe with a Green Gob­lin mask for the final bat­tle. How­ev­er, he not only likes the sequel, but calls it “one of the great­est super­hero films ever made” because it nev­er los­es sight of the man behind the Spidey mask.

He chas­tis­es Sony for the need­less 2012 reboot, just five years from the final film in the Rai­mi tril­o­gy. His prob­lem: Garfield’s Spi­der-man is great, his Peter Park­er is not. The oppo­site is true with McGuire.

Final­ly, they got it right with Tom Holland’s ver­sion in Avengers: Civ­il War, that mix of geeky stu­dent by day, cocky quip­ster by night. Plus, as Smith points out, they gave him his Queens accent back. (Mar­vel comics, at least the first cou­ple of years, was always entrenched in a real New York City as back­ground.)

“The real charm of that character…is that he’s cov­ered from head-to-toe,” Kevin says, para­phras­ing Stan Lee. “You don’t know who he is or what he is. You don’t know if he’s a boy, a girl, you don’t know what he is, what race, creed, col­or, any­thing. So any kid read­ing that book can see them­selves as the char­ac­ter.”

And that leads us to the cur­rent film, which Smith can tell you about him­self. It fol­lows that uni­ver­sal­i­ty of the char­ac­ter and explodes it out to a bunch of alter­na­tive uni­verse ver­sions of all races, gen­ders, and genus.

“We live in such a gold­en era (for com­ic book movies),” Smith declares and even in a world of Mar­vel burnout, you want to believe him. Maybe the new film is the way for­ward: more diver­si­ty, more fun, more talk­ing ani­mals.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear an Hour of the Jazzy Back­ground Music from the Orig­i­nal 1967 Spi­der-Man Car­toon

The Math­e­mat­ics of Spi­der­man and the Physics of Super­heroes

The Reli­gious Affil­i­a­tion of Com­ic Book Heroes

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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The Beastie Boys Release a New Freewheeling Memoir, and a Star-Studded 13-Hour Audiobook Featuring Snoop Dogg, Elvis Costello, Bette Midler, John Stewart & Dozens More

in Audio Books, Books, Music | December 19th, 2018

Quick way to date your­self: name the first Beast­ie Boys album you bought (or heard). If you some­how got your hands on an orig­i­nal press­ing of their first sin­gle “Cooky Puss”—released in 1981 when the then-four­some was a New York hard­core band—congratulations, you’re a leg­end. If you first bought 1986’s Licensed to Ill—their major label debut and com­ing-out as a crude rap-rock par­o­dy three­some (minus fired drum­mer Kate Schel­len­bach), pre­ci­sion-engi­neered to freak your par­ents out—congrats, you’re old.

In what­ev­er era you dis­cov­ered them—Paul’s Bou­tique, Check Your Head, Ill Com­mu­ni­ca­tion… maybe even their last album, 2011’s Hot Sauce Com­mit­tee Part Two—you dis­cov­ered a dif­fer­ent Beast­ies than the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion did. Over the course of their 30-year career, the trio evolved and matured, grew up and got down with new grooves to suit new audi­ences. That’s always been a very good thing.

As Mike D, Ad-Rock, and MCA—three per­son­al­i­ties as dis­tinc­tive as the three Stooges—got bet­ter at what they did, they tran­scend­ed the misog­y­nist, meat­head­ed mid-eight­ies incar­na­tion they came to look back on with embar­rass­ment and apol­o­gy. “We got so caught up with mak­ing fun of that rock-star per­sona,” writes Adam Horowitz (Ad-Rock) in the huge new Beast­ies mem­oir, “that we became that per­sona. Became what we hat­ed.”

Rob Harvil­la calls these very gen­uine moments of self-reflec­tion the best parts of the book. But with so many sto­ries over so many years, so much bril­liant writ­ing, and so many guest appear­ances from celebri­ty Beast­ie Boy fans, that’s a tough call. “Part mem­oir, part pho­to-heavy zine, part fan-appre­ci­a­tion tes­ti­mo­ni­al… and part sin­cere apol­o­gy,” the book seems both fresh and made to order and a ver­i­ta­ble buf­fet table of nos­tal­gia. Or, as Amy Poehler puts it in her intro to a sec­tion on their videos: “These days, their music makes me feel young and old at the same time.”

Behind the silli­ness and sin­cer­i­ty there is mourn­ing for third Beast­ie Adam Yauch (MCA), who died of can­cer in 2012 and whose voice is con­spic­u­ous­ly absent from the book. Yet the two remain­ing mem­bers choose not to dwell. “You brace for the heart­break­ing account of Yauch’s diag­no­sis and death,” Harvil­la writes, “but those details go undis­cussed. ‘Too fuck­ing sad to writ­ing about’ is all Horovitz has to say.’” The pre­vail­ing atmos­phere is cel­e­bra­to­ry, like any good Beast­ie Boys album—this one a par­ty full of adult peers look­ing back, laugh­ing, and winc­ing at their younger selves.

The voic­es on the page are so vivid you can squint and almost hear them (at one point Horovitz describes unwind­ing a cas­sette tape as “pulling 60 min­utes of wet fet­tuc­cine out of a dog’s mouth”). But we don’t have to imag­ine what they sound like. Along with the 571-page hard­bound cin­derblock of a book, the band has released what Rolling Stone hails as the “audio­book of the year,” a “bril­liant 13-hour radio play” in which Mike D and Ad-Rock are joined by a major­ly star-stud­ded cast of guest read­ers includ­ing Snoop Dogg, Kim Gor­don, Steve Busce­mi, Chloë Sevi­gny, Wan­da Sykes, Jon Stew­art, Ben Stiller, and Bette Midler (that’s just the very short list).

New York hip hop leg­ends LL Cool J, Chuck D, and Rev Run (of Run DMC) show up, as does Brook­lyn act­ing leg­end Rosie Perez and non-New York­ers Exene Cer­ven­ka and Elvis Costel­lo. (See the full cast list at Audi­ble.) It’s not a mem­oir, it’s a mix­tape. Hear excerpts from the audio book in the Sound­Cloud clips above and buy it online, or down­load it for free through Audible.com’s 30-day free tri­al pro­gram.  Guar­an­teed, no mat­ter what age you are, to make you feel young and old at the same time.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bruce Spring­steen Nar­rates Audio­book Ver­sion of His New Mem­oir (and How to Down­load It for Free)

Hear Kim Gor­don, Son­ic Youth Rock­er, Read From Her New Mem­oir, Girl in a Band

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

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Meet the Hurdy Gurdy, the Hand-Cranked Medieval Instrument with 80 Moving Parts

in History, Music | December 19th, 2018

Donovan’s “Hur­dy Gur­dy Man” may be the creepi­est song ever writ­ten about an obscure medieval instru­ment (made all the more so by its use in David Fincher’s Zodi­ac), but the Hur­dy Gur­dy did not give his record­ing its omi­nous sound. Those dron­ing notes come from an Indi­an tan­pu­ra. Yet they evoke the title instru­ment, an inge­nious musi­cal inven­tion “set up pri­mar­i­ly for the pur­pose of mak­ing drones,” Case West­ern Reserve’s Col­lege of Art and Sci­ences explains. “In the Mid­dle Ages, it was known in Latin as the organ­istrum and the sym­pho­nia, and in French as the vielle à roue (the vielle with the wheel).”

With a sound pro­duced by a “rosined wood­en wheel, turned by a crank” that set “a num­ber of strings in con­tin­u­ous dron­ing vibra­tion,” the hur­dy gur­dy can, it’s true, give off a bit of a folk hor­ror vibe. From its very ear­ly, maybe 10th or 11th cen­tu­ry ori­gins in litur­gi­cal music, hur­dy gur­dy expert Jim Kendros tells us in the video above, the instru­ment became asso­ci­at­ed with Euro­pean folk music, shrink­ing from a beast played by two peo­ple to more portable dimen­sions, about the size of a large gui­tar and resem­bling a hand-cranked vio­lin with keys for play­ing melodies on cer­tain strings.

Though it grew small­er and more maneu­ver­able, how­ev­er, the instru­ment grew no less com­pli­cat­ed. Kendros calls it “the equiv­a­lent of a medieval space­ship,” with its more than 80 mov­ing parts.

The hur­dy gur­dy, or “wheel fid­dle,” played in the TED Talk above by Car­o­line Phillips looks less like a fid­dle, or a space­ship, and more like a medieval keytar—just one of the many shapes the instru­ment could take. All of them, how­ev­er, had one impor­tant fea­ture in com­mon: the hur­dy gur­dy is “the only musi­cal instru­ment that uses a crank to turn a wheel to rub strings like the bow of a vio­lin to pro­duce music.” His­tor­i­cal­ly, it was used in medieval dance music “because of the unique­ness of the melody com­bined with the acoustic boom box” of its large body. Try not to shake your body, or to shiv­er, when Phillips plays a haunt­ing, dron­ing Basque folk song.

The Hur­dy Gur­dy spread all over Europe, from Britain to France, Spain, Italy, Ger­many, Hun­gary, and Swe­den, where stringed-instru­ment enthu­si­asts The String­dom caught up with vir­tu­oso Hur­dy Gur­dy play­er Johannes Geworkian Hell­man. He tells us how the hur­dy gur­dy and its dron­ing son­ic cousin, the bag­pipes, set off “an ear­ly folk revival” as com­posers took inspi­ra­tion from peas­ant music. The inter­est from medieval upper class­es meant bet­ter luthiers and high­er-qual­i­ty hur­dy gur­dies. Now mod­ern inter­est in the Hur­dy Gur­dy is grow­ing. While it may take two to three years to hand­craft one, “a lot of new instru­ments are get­ting made,” says Hell­man.

Should you doubt that the 1000-year old hur­dy gur­dy can still sound hip, lis­ten to Hell­man play an elec­tri­fied ver­sion in his hur­dy gurdy/accordion duo, Sym­bio, or hur­dy gurdy/dulcimer two-piece, Mai­ja & Johannes. He coax­es from the instru­ment such a range of rhythms and tim­bres that it’s easy to see why it was so immense­ly pop­u­lar for so long. Yet for all its musi­cal appeal, it is a com­plex machine, dif­fi­cult to tune and sub­ject to any num­ber of mechan­i­cal prob­lems. Not for the casu­al ama­teur, the instru­ment still requires a ded­i­cat­ed Hur­dy Gur­dy man or woman to make it sing—a much more com­mon sight than in Dono­van’s day but an exceed­ing­ly rare one com­pared to the many cen­turies of the hur­dy gur­dy’s hey­day. See more hur­dy gur­dies at the Vin­tage News.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How an 18th-Cen­tu­ry Monk Invent­ed the First Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment

Vis­it an Online Col­lec­tion of 61,761 Musi­cal Instru­ments from Across the World

Watch a Musi­cian Impro­vise on a 500-Year-Old Music Instru­ment, The Car­il­lon

New Order’s “Blue Mon­day” Played with Obso­lete 1930s Instru­ments

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

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Watch the First-Ever Kiss on Film Between Two Black Actors, Just Honored by the Library of Congress (1898)

in Film, History | December 19th, 2018

In 1896, Thomas Edi­son pro­duced The Kiss. One of the first films ever com­mer­cial­ly screened, it adapts the then-pop­u­lar musi­cal The Wid­ow Jones — or at least it adapts about twen­ty sec­onds of it, a kiss that hap­pens in the very last scene. Two years lat­er came the equal­ly short but dif­fer­ent­ly ground­break­ing Some­thing Good – Negro Kiss, a ver­sion of The Kiss star­ring black actors instead of white ones. Only now, thanks in part to the efforts of Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia archivist Dino Everett and Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Cin­e­ma and Media Stud­ies pro­fes­sor Allyson Nadia Field, has it received prop­er recog­ni­tion as the first such kiss on film.

“To uncov­er the ori­gins of Everett’s footage, Field relied on inven­to­ry and dis­tri­b­u­tion cat­a­logs, trac­ing the film to Chica­go,” writes UChica­go News’ Jack Wang. “This was where William Selig —a  vaude­ville per­former turned film pro­duc­er — had shot it on his knock­off of a Lumière Ciné­matographe. That cam­era pro­duced the tell­tale per­fo­ra­tion marks which had tipped Everett off to the print’s age.”

With sup­port from the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Jas­mine Weber, “Field not only iden­ti­fied the film­mak­er, but the per­form­ers: Saint Sut­tle and Ger­tie Brown. Sut­tle is dressed in a dap­per suit and bowtie, while Brown dons an ornate dress — cos­tumes that Field says were typ­i­cal of min­strel per­form­ers.”

“What makes this film so remark­able is that if you look at films from this peri­od that fea­ture African-Amer­i­cans, first of all, most of them are white actors in black­face,” says Field in the NPR seg­ment above. “They are car­i­ca­tures. They’re cer­tain­ly racist. They fea­ture racist tropes like water­mel­on-eat­ing con­tests and things like that. The Amer­i­can screen was incred­i­bly hos­tile to African-Amer­i­cans for much of its his­to­ry,” but Some­thing Good — Negro Kiss “refutes those kind of car­i­ca­tures and asserts an image of human­i­ty and of love.”

That image has received quite a response on the inter­net as the clip has cir­cu­lat­ed in the week since its induc­tion into the Library of Con­gress’ Nation­al Film Reg­istry along­side the likes of The Shin­ing, Mon­terey Pop, Broke­back Moun­tain, The Lady from Shang­hai, and Juras­sic Park. One lawyer-slash-crit­ic even brought this piece of ear­ly cin­e­ma togeth­er with a piece of cur­rent cin­e­ma, mash­ing it up with the score of Bar­ry Jenk­ins’ just-released James Bald­win adap­ta­tion If Beale Street Could Talk. Selig, Sut­tle, and Brown must have known full well that they were mak­ing some­thing new. But did they know they were also mak­ing his­to­ry?

via Quartz

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Pio­neer­ing Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-Amer­i­can Film­mak­er

African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle (A Free Course from Stan­ford)

Mas­sive New Data­base Will Final­ly Allow Us to Iden­ti­fy Enslaved Peo­ples and Their Descen­dants in the Amer­i­c­as

Down­load Dig­i­tized Copies of The Negro Trav­el­ers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civ­il Rights Guide to Trav­el­ing Safe­ly in the U.S. (1936–66)

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 Beautifully-Designed Edition of Euclid’s Elements from 1847 Gets Digitized: Explore the New Online, Interactive Reproduction

in Art, Books, Math | December 19th, 2018

For two mil­len­nia, Euclid­’s Ele­ments, the foun­da­tion­al ancient work on geom­e­try by the famed Greek math­e­mati­cian, was required read­ing for edu­cat­ed peo­ple. (The “clas­si­cal­ly edu­cat­ed” read them in the orig­i­nal Greek.) The influ­ence of the Ele­ments in phi­los­o­phy and math­e­mat­ics can­not be over­stat­ed; so inspir­ing are Euclid’s proofs and axioms that Edna St. Vin­cent Mil­lay wrote a son­net in his hon­or. But over time, Euclid’s prin­ci­ples were stream­lined into text­books, and the Ele­ments was read less and less.

In 1847, maybe sens­ing that the pop­u­lar­i­ty of Euclid’s text was fad­ing, Irish pro­fes­sor of math­e­mat­ics Oliv­er Byrne worked with Lon­don pub­lish­er William Pick­er­ing to pro­duce his own edi­tion of the Ele­ments, or half of it, with orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions that care­ful­ly explain the text.

“Byrne’s edi­tion was one of the first mul­ti­col­or print­ed books,” writes design­er Nicholas Rougeux. “The pre­cise use of col­ors and dia­grams meant that the book was very chal­leng­ing and expen­sive to repro­duce.” It met with lit­tle notice at the time.

Byrne’s edi­tion—The First Six Books of The Ele­ments of Euclid in which Coloured Dia­grams and Sym­bols are Used Instead of Let­ters for the Greater Ease of Learn­ers—might have passed into obscu­ri­ty had a ref­er­ence to it in Edward Tufte’s Envi­sion­ing Infor­ma­tion not sparked renewed inter­est. From there fol­lowed a beau­ti­ful new edi­tion by TASCHEN and an arti­cle on Byrne’s dia­grams in math­e­mat­ics jour­nal Con­ver­gence. Rougeux picked up the thread and decid­ed to cre­ate an online ver­sion. “Like oth­ers,” he writes, “I was drawn to its beau­ti­ful dia­grams and typog­ra­phy.” He has done both of those fea­tures ample jus­tice.

As in anoth­er of Rougeux’s online reproductions—his Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours—the design­er has tak­en a great deal of care to pre­serve the orig­i­nal inten­tions while adapt­ing the book to the web. In this case, that means the spelling (includ­ing the use of the long s), type­face (Caslon), styl­ized ini­tial cap­i­tals, and Byrne’s alter­nate designs for math­e­mat­i­cal sym­bols have all been retained. But Rougeux has also made the dia­grams inter­ac­tive, “with click­able shapes to aid in under­stand­ing the shapes being ref­er­enced.”

He has also turned all of those love­ly dia­grams into an attrac­tive poster you can hang on the wall for quick ref­er­ence or as a con­ver­sa­tion piece, though this sem­a­phore-like arrange­ment of illustrations—like the sim­pli­fied Euclid in mod­ern textbooks—cannot replace or sup­plant the orig­i­nal text. You can read Euclid in ancient Greek (see a primer here), in Latin and Ara­bic, in Eng­lish trans­la­tions here, here, here, and many oth­er places and lan­guages as well.

For an expe­ri­ence that com­bines, how­ev­er, the best of ancient wis­dom and mod­ern infor­ma­tion technology—from both the 19th and the 21st cen­turies—Rougeux’s free, online edi­tion of Byrne’s Euclid can’t be beat. Learn more about the metic­u­lous process of recre­at­ing Byrne’s text and dia­grams (illus­trat­ed above) here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore an Inter­ac­tive, Online Ver­sion of Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours, a 200-Year-Old Guide to the Col­ors of the Nat­ur­al World

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

Where to Find Free Text­books

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

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Meet Henry Darger, the Most Famous of Outsider Artists, Who Died in Obscurity, Leaving Behind Hundreds of Unseen Fantasy Illustrations and a 15,000-Page Novel

in Art | December 18th, 2018

In his cheeky inven­tion of a char­ac­ter called Mar­vin Pon­ti­ac, an obscure West African-born blues­man, the avant-garde com­pos­er and sax­o­phon­ist John Lurie cre­at­ed “a wry and pur­pose­ful sendup of the ways in which crit­ics can­on­ize and wor­ship the dis­en­fran­chised and bedev­iled,” Aman­da Petru­sich writes at The New York­er. Lurie’s satire shows how the crit­i­cal fetish for out­sider artists has a per­sis­tent empha­sis: a hyper­fo­cus on “mis­shapen yet per­va­sive ideas” about class, race, edu­ca­tion, and abil­i­ty as mark­ers of prim­i­tive authen­tic­i­ty.

The term “out­sider art” can sound patron­iz­ing and even preda­to­ry, laden with assump­tions about who does and who does not deserve inclu­sion and agency in the art world. Out­sider art gets col­lect­ed, exhib­it­ed, cat­a­logued, and sold, usu­al­ly accom­pa­nied by a semi-mythol­o­gy about the artist’s fringe cir­cum­stances. Yet the artists them­selves rarely seem to be the pri­ma­ry ben­e­fi­cia­ries of any largesse. In the case of the fic­tion­al Mar­vin Pon­ti­ac, his sta­tus as “dead and hereto­fore undis­cov­ered” makes the ques­tion moot. The same goes for the very real and per­haps most famous of out­sider artists, whose life sto­ry can some­times make Lurie’s Pon­ti­ac seem under­writ­ten by com­par­i­son.

Reclu­sive hos­pi­tal cus­to­di­an Hen­ry Darg­er spent his ear­ly years, after both par­ents died, in an orphan­age and the Illi­nois Asy­lum for Fee­ble-Mind­ed Chil­dren. He spent his almost com­plete­ly soli­tary adult life in a sec­ond-floor room on the North Side of Chica­go, attend­ing Mass dai­ly (often sev­er­al times a day), before pass­ing away in 1973 in the same old age home in which his father died. He had one friend, left only four pho­tographs of him­self, and his few acquain­tances were nev­er even sure how to pro­nounce his last name (it’s a hard “g”). In his last diary entry, New Year’s Day, 1971, Darg­er wrote, “I had a very poor noth­ing like Christ­mas. Nev­er had a good Christ­mas all my life, nor a good new year, and now… I am very bit­ter but for­tu­nate­ly not revenge­ful, though I feel should be how I am.”

So much for “out­sider.” As for the label “Artist”—inscribed on his pauper’s grave (along with “Pro­tec­tor of Children”)—Darger shocked the art world, who had no idea he even exist­ed, when his land­lord dis­cov­ered the type­script of an unpub­lished 15,000-page fan­ta­sy nov­el, The Sto­ry of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unre­al, of the Glan­de­co-Angelin­ian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebel­lion. Also in his apart­ment were a 8,500 fol­low-up, Fur­ther Adven­tures of the Vivian Girls in Chica­go, and sev­er­al hun­dred “panoram­ic ‘illus­tra­tions,’” notes the “offi­cial” Hen­ry Darg­er web­site: “many of them dou­ble-sided and more than 9 feet in length.”

These works, we learn in the PBS video at the top, “The Secret Life of Hen­ry Darg­er,” now reg­u­lar­ly sell for hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars. Darg­er, it seems, nev­er meant for any­one to see them at all. Per­haps for good rea­son. His work leaves “a set of con­tra­dic­to­ry impres­sions,” Edward Gómez writes at Hyper­al­ler­gic, “a cel­e­bra­tion of child­hood ful­some­ness and a whiff of pedophil­i­ac per­ver­sion.” The lat­ter impres­sion seems to have less to do with crim­i­nal sex­u­al incli­na­tions than with con­tem­po­rary cul­tur­al per­cep­tions about child­hood. Com­pare Darg­er’s work, for exam­ple, with Lewis Car­rol­l’s obses­sion with chil­dren, alarm­ing to us now but not at all unusu­al at the time.

Still, Darg­er’s hun­dreds of “draw­ings of naked, pre­pu­bes­cent girls whose bod­ies promi­nent­ly include male gen­i­tals” have raised all sorts of ques­tions. Crit­ics have point­ed to the obvi­ous influ­ence of Vic­to­ri­an chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture, but per­haps even more per­va­sive was Darg­er’s own painful child­hood, his con­sid­er­able dis­com­fort with the adult world, and his expressed desire to pro­tect chil­dren who might suf­fer sim­i­lar­ly (a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion shared by Charles Dick­ens). Learn about Darger’s trou­bled, trag­ic child­hood in the Down the Rab­bit Hole video biog­ra­phy above, and in these two por­traits, see why his work deserves—despite but not because of his mar­gin­al­i­ty and odd­ness, his being self-taught, and his desire for his art to disappear—the posthu­mous acclaim it has received. Like that quin­tes­sen­tial out­sider artist, William Blake, Darg­er left behind a dar­ing­ly orig­i­nal body of work that is as com­pelling and beau­ti­ful as it is dis­turb­ing and oth­er­world­ly.

To delve deep­er into Darg­er’s world, check out the 2004 doc­u­men­tary, The Realms of the Unre­al, which can be viewed on Youtube, or pur­chased on Ama­zon. The film’s trail­er appears below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Space of Their Own, a New Online Data­base, Will Fea­ture Works by 600+ Over­looked Female Artists from the 15th-19th Cen­turies

Near­ly 1,000 Paint­ings & Draw­ings by Vin­cent van Gogh Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online: View/Download the Col­lec­tion

Lewis Carroll’s Pho­tographs of Alice Lid­dell, the Inspi­ra­tion for Alice in Won­der­land

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

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Apple Lets You Download Six Free Audio Books Read by Celebrity Narrators: Start with Kate Beckinsale Reading Pride & Prejudice

in Audio Books | December 18th, 2018

A quick heads up: Apple has just released six clas­sic books read by celebri­ty nar­ra­tors. And they’re all free. The list includes:

From start to fin­ish, that’s 36 hours of free audio. For much more of that, vis­it our col­lec­tion: 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­­sion­al­­ly-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oscar-Win­ning Actress Vio­la Davis Reads the Children’s Sto­ry, Rent Par­ty Jazz, for Jazz Appre­ci­a­tion Month

Christo­pher Lee Reads Four Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries by Edgar Allan Poe (1979)

Bill Mur­ray Reads the Poet­ry of Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti, Wal­lace Stevens, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Bil­ly Collins, Lorine Niedeck­er, Lucille Clifton & More

Pat­ti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde’s 1897 Love Let­ter De Pro­fundis: See the Full Three-Hour Per­for­mance

Hear Arthur C. Clarke Read 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Vin­tage 1976 Vinyl Record­ing

The Great Leonard Nimoy Reads H.G. Wells’ Sem­i­nal Sci-Fi Nov­el The War of the Worlds

Leonard Nimoy Reads Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries From The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles & The Illus­trat­ed Man (1975–76)

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See Classic Japanese Woodblocks Brought Surreally to Life as Animated GIFs

in Animation, Art | December 18th, 2018

Much of the image we have of life in Japan in the 17th through the 19th cen­tu­ry, we have because of wood­block prints, or specif­i­cal­ly ukiyo‑e, or “pic­tures of the float­ing world,” which vivid­ly cap­ture a great vari­ety of scenes and the peo­ple who inhab­it­ed them. The once-closed-off Japan has changed a great deal since that era, on most lev­els even more so than oth­er coun­tries, and the artis­tic por­tray­als of Japan­ese life have also mul­ti­plied enor­mous­ly. Yet even in the 21st cen­tu­ry, ukiyo‑e con­tin­ue to pro­vide a com­pelling image of Japan in its essence.

But that does­n’t mean that ukiyo‑e prints can’t be updat­ed to reflect the present day. Film­mak­er and ani­ma­tor Atsu­ki Segawa, writes Spoon & Tam­ago’s John­ny Wald­man, “takes tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Ukiyo‑e wood­block prints and sets them into motion through dig­i­tal ani­ma­tion. He began his col­lec­tion of ‘mov­ing ukiyo‑e’ in 2015 and has been slow­ly adding to his col­lec­tion.” At those two linked Spoon & Tam­a­go posts you can see a selec­tion of ten of Segawa’s cre­ations, which hybridize not just art forms but eras.

Here you can see Segawa’s take on, from top to bot­tom, Kiy­ochi­ka Kobayashi’s Fire­work Show at Ryo­goku, Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai’s Yoshi­da at Tōkaidō, Toshu­sai Sharaku’s Naka­mu­ra Kono­zo and Naka­ji­ma Wadayemon (“If any­one has ever eat­en oden you’ll know how this man feels,” adds Wald­man), Hokusai’s Ejiri in Suru­ga Province, Hokusai’s Great Wave, and Uta­gawa Hiroshige’s Fujikawa. Keep your eye on that last and you’ll notice Doc Brown and Mar­ty McFly cruis­ing through the scene, only the most obvi­ous of the anachro­nis­tic touch­es (though as time trav­el­ers, what real­ly counts as anachro­nism?) Segawa has added to these clas­sic ukiyo‑e and set into motion.

Segawa’s oth­er “mov­ing ukiyo” intro­duce fly­ing drones into an Osa­ka mar­ket­place, the mul­ti­col­ored lights of speed­ing cars down a qui­et sea­side road, a Shinkansen bul­let train pass­ing a rest­ing place full of weary foot trav­el­ers, and vio­lent motion to the waves and boats in Hoku­sai’s Great Wave off Kanaza­wa, quite pos­si­bly the most famous ukiyo‑e print of them all.

Sheer incon­gruity — incon­gruity between the times of the ele­ments depict­ed and ref­er­enced, between the aes­thet­ics of the past and the aes­thet­ics of the present, and between the tech­nolo­gies used to cre­ate and dis­play the orig­i­nals and these light-heart­ed revi­sions — has much to do with the appeal of these images, but some­how it all makes them feel much more, not less, like Japan itself.

via Spoon and Tam­a­go

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

The Evo­lu­tion of The Great Wave off Kanaza­wa: See Four Ver­sions That Hoku­sai Paint­ed Over Near­ly 40 Years

Down­load Hun­dreds of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters of the Tra­di­tion

What Hap­pens When a Japan­ese Wood­block Artist Depicts Life in Lon­don in 1866, Despite Nev­er Hav­ing Set Foot There

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

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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Pristine Footage Lets You Revisit Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Brothers

in Film, History | December 17th, 2018

Pio­neer­ing film­mak­ers Auguste and Louis Lumière, the inven­tors of the pro­ject­ed motion pic­ture, held their first pri­vate screen­ing in Paris in March of 1895. The streets of the French cap­i­tal would go on to pro­vide the broth­ers with plen­ty of life in motion for their new tech­nol­o­gy to cap­ture in the years there­after, and you can watch eight such real scenes com­piled in the video above. With its star­tling clar­i­ty — and its more recent­ly cor­rect­ed motion and added sound — this selec­tion of pieces of Lumière footage offers a rich six-minute cin­e­mat­ic time-trav­el expe­ri­ence to the City of Light between the years of 1896 and 1900.

Guy Jones, the uploader of the video on Youtube, pro­vides the fol­low­ing guide to the loca­tions:

Notre-Dame Cathe­dral (1896)

Alma Bridge (1900)

Avenue des Champs-Élysées (1899)

Place de la Con­corde (1897)

Pass­ing of a fire brigade (1897)

Tui­leries Gar­den (1896)

Mov­ing walk­way at the Paris Expo­si­tion (1900)

The Eif­fel Tow­er from the Rives de la Seine à Paris (1897)

These places have con­tin­ued to pro­vide gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of film­mak­ers with loca­tions for their urban cin­e­mat­ic visions. (The Eif­fel Tow­er now pro­vides an imme­di­ate visu­al short­hand for the city, though it cer­tain­ly would­n’t have in this Lumière footage, when it was less than ten years old.) That goes for French film­mak­ers as well as those of many oth­er nation­al­i­ties: even the Coen Broth­ers used Tui­leries Gar­den for their short film Tui­leries, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.

Or at least they used the sub­way sta­tion under­neath Tui­leries Gar­den, which would­n’t open until 1900, the same year as the Paris Métro itself — and the year of the Paris Expo­si­tion, also known as the Expo­si­tion Uni­verselle, which gave Parisians the chance to ride the mov­ing side­walk seen in the sec­ond-to-last Lumière seg­ment.

Any­one famil­iar with the Paris of the 21st cen­tu­ry will be quick to observe the dif­fer­ences between the city now and the city 120 years ago. But a Parisian of the 1890s might well have said they were the ones who lived in a city made unrec­og­niz­able to ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions, giv­en Georges-Eugène Hauss­man­n’s com­plete revi­sion of the cen­tral city com­mis­sioned by Napoléon III and car­ried out between 1853 and 1870. For good or for ill, it’s just as much Hauss­man­n’s Paris today as it was Hauss­man­n’s Paris in the 1890s, and crit­i­cisms that the city has remained frozen in time aren’t with­out mer­it. But to see what has most dra­mat­i­cal­ly changed about mod­ern Paris — that is, what has changed about how peo­ple see and inter­act with mod­ern Paris — we must turn to cin­e­ma. Might I sug­gest the work of Éric Rohmer?

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beau­ti­ful, Col­or Pho­tographs of Paris Tak­en 100 Years Ago—at the Begin­ning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Dra­mat­ic Footage of San Fran­cis­co Right Before & After the Mas­sive­ly Dev­as­tat­ing Earth­quake of 1906

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 Short Video Introduction to Hilma af Klint, the Mystical Female Painter Who Helped Invent Abstract Art

in Art, Religion | December 17th, 2018

It can be both a bless­ing and curse for an artist to toil at the behest of an influ­en­tial patron. Finan­cial sup­port and pow­er­ful con­nec­tions are among the obvi­ous perks. Being ham­strung by some­one else’s ego and time­frame are some of the less wel­come real­i­ties on the flip side.

Hilma af Klint, the sub­ject of a high pro­file exhi­bi­tion at the Guggen­heim, does not fit the usu­al artist-patron mold. She made her paint­ings to suit a spir­it named Amaliel, with whom she con­nect­ed in a seance. Amaliel tapped her to con­vey a very impor­tant, as yet inde­ci­pher­able mes­sage to humankind.

Although af Klint was an accom­plished botan­i­cal and land­scape painter who trained at the Roy­al Acad­e­my in Stock­holm, “Paint­ings for the Tem­ple,” 193 works pro­duced between 1906 and 1915 upon order of her spir­it guide, are bright­ly col­ored abstrac­tions.

As the Guggenheim’s Senior Cura­tor and Direc­tor of Col­lec­tions, Tracey Bashkoff, points out above, af Klint’s work was trad­ing in sym­bol­ic, non-nat­u­ral­is­tic forms ten years before abstrac­tions began show­ing up in the work of the men we con­sid­er pio­neers—Vasi­ly Kandin­sky, Piet Mon­dri­an, and Paul Klee. Yet, she was nowhere to be found in MoMA’s 2012 block­buster show, Invent­ing Abstrac­tion: 1910–1925. Cura­tor Leah Dick­er­man implied that the snub was af Klint’s own fault for con­sid­er­ing her work to be part of a spir­i­tu­al prac­tice, rather than a pure­ly artis­tic one.

In his 1920 essay, Cre­ative Con­fes­sion, Klee wrote, “art does not repro­duce the vis­i­ble; rather, it makes vis­i­ble.”

It was a sen­ti­ment Klint shared, but the spir­i­tu­al mes­sage encod­ed in her work was intend­ed for a future audi­ence. She instruct­ed her nephew that her work was to be kept under wraps until twen­ty years after her death. (She died in 1944, the same year as Kandin­sky and Mon­dri­an, but her work was not pub­licly shown until 1986, when the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art orga­nized an exhi­bi­tion titled The Spir­i­tu­al in Art.)

Per­haps af Klint did not fore­see how dra­mat­i­cal­ly the respectabil­i­ty of spir­i­tu­al­ism and seances—a pop­u­lar pur­suit of her time, and one shared by Mon­dri­an and Kandinsky—would decline.

Her ded­i­ca­tion to car­ry­ing out her spir­it guide’s mis­sion may remind some mod­ern view­ers of Hen­ry Darg­er, the Chica­go jan­i­tor who cre­at­ed hun­dreds of art­works and thou­sands of pages of text doc­u­ment­ing the Glan­de­co-Angelin­ian War Storm, a strange and gory series of events tak­ing place in an alter­nate real­i­ty that was very real to him.

Thus far no one has ful­ly divined the spir­it’s mes­sage af Klint devot­ed so much of her life to pre­serv­ing.

As crit­ic Rober­ta Smith notes in her New York Times review of the Guggen­heim show, af Klint, a mem­ber of the Swedish Lodge of the Theo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety, was well versed in occult spir­i­tu­al­ism, Rosi­cru­cian­ism, Bud­dhism, Dar­win­ism, and the sci­ence of sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles.

Hints of these inter­ests are thread­ed through­out her work.

Col­or also helps to unlock the nar­ra­tive. She used blue and lilac to rep­re­sent female ener­gy, rose and yel­low for male, and green for the uni­ty of the two. The Guardian’s Kate Kell­away reports that the artist may have been influ­enced by Goethe’s 1810 The­o­ry of Colours.

Mov­ing on to geom­e­try, over­lap­ping discs also stand for uni­ty. U‑shapes ref­er­ence the spir­i­tu­al world and spi­rals denote evo­lu­tion.

Af Klint’s spi­ral obses­sion was not con­fined to the can­vas. Rober­ta Smith reveals that af Klint envi­sioned a spi­ral-shaped build­ing for the exhi­bi­tion of The Paint­ings for the Tem­ple. Vis­i­tors would ascend a spi­ral stair­case toward the heav­ens, the exact con­fig­u­ra­tion described by archi­tect Frank Lloyd Wright’s inte­ri­or ramps at the Guggen­heim.

Per­haps we are get­ting clos­er to under­stand­ing.

For fur­ther study, check out the Guggenheim’s Teacher’s Guide to Hilma af Klint: Paint­ings for the Future. See the exhi­bi­tion in per­son through mid-April.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Hilma af Klint: Pio­neer­ing Mys­ti­cal Painter and Per­haps the First Abstract Artist

Who Paint­ed the First Abstract Paint­ing?: Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky? Hilma af Klint? Or Anoth­er Con­tender?

Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Syncs His Abstract Art to Mussorgsky’s Music in a His­toric Bauhaus The­atre Pro­duc­tion (1928)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City through Decem­ber 20th in the 10th anniver­sary pro­duc­tion of Greg Kotis’ apoc­a­lyp­tic hol­i­day tale, The Truth About San­ta, and the book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How Emily Dickinson Writes A Poem: A Short Video Introduction

in Literature, Poetry | December 17th, 2018

It became fash­ion­able dur­ing the Euro­pean Renais­sance for poets to write what is called an ars poet­i­ca, a “med­i­ta­tion on poet­ry using the form and tech­niques of a poem.” The form fol­lows Horace’s 19th cen­tu­ry, B.C.E. Ars Poet­i­ca, in which the Roman writer rec­om­mends that poet­ry should both “instruct and delight.”

The­o­ries of poet­ry var­ied from one gen­er­a­tion to the next, but the ars poet­i­ca per­sist­ed through­out mod­ern lit­er­ary his­to­ry and into the mod­ernism of Archibald Macleish, Ezra Pound, and Mar­i­anne Moore, all of whom issued mag­is­te­r­i­al dic­ta about poet­ry that has stuck to it ever since.

“A poem should be motion­less in time / As the moon climbs,” writes Macleish in his “Ars Poet­i­ca,” famous­ly con­clud­ing, “A poem should not mean / But be.” In Moore’s “Poet­ry,” which she revised through­out her life, final­ly whit­tling it down to just three lines, she writes of “imag­i­nary gar­dens with real toads in them.”

Such cryp­tic images and ellip­ti­cal apho­risms enact ambi­gu­i­ty as they pre­scribe it, but they make per­fect­ly clear they are mak­ing crit­i­cal judg­ments about the art of poet­ry. Then we have Emi­ly Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” (1263), a poem that serves as her ars poet­i­ca, argues Evan Puschak, the Nerd­writer, in his video essay above, but pur­ports on its sur­face to be about truth, cap­i­tal “T.”

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Suc­cess in Cir­cuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb sur­prise
As Light­ning to the Chil­dren eased
With expla­na­tion kind
The Truth must daz­zle grad­u­al­ly
Or every man be blind —

Rarely is Dick­in­son so “direct,” says Puschak. “Known for ambi­gu­i­ty, odd manip­u­la­tions in meter and rhyme” and “images that seem mys­te­ri­ous and some­times out of place,” she wrote “poet­ry brim­ming with slant truth, poet­ry that’s seem­ing­ly laid out here, in per­fect meter and match­ing rhymes.” The poem’s mes­sage is restat­ed four times, from the the­sis in the first line to the sim­i­le of the final four. “The mean­ing could not be more clear,” says Puschak.

But no, of course it’s not. A poem is not a man­u­al or man­i­festo. Like those poems more explic­it­ly about poet­ry, this one enacts the ambi­gu­i­ty it pre­scribes. Are we, for exam­ple, to “tell all the truth” as in “the whole truth?” or as in “tell every­one the truth”? Does “suc­cess” lie “in cir­cuit” like a patient lies on a table? Or does it tell lies, like, well… like poet­ry? Does the word “cir­cuit” refer to an uncer­tain, cir­cuitous path? Or, as one crit­ic has sug­gest­ed, to “cir­cum­fer­ence” (a term Dick­in­son used to refer to one’s lifes­pan or prop­er sphere)?

The next cou­plet, whose ref­er­ence to “infirm Delight” may or may not take Horace to task, push­es us fur­ther out to sea when we begin to read it care­ful­ly. What is this truth that can be told, slant­ed, but also comes as a “sur­prise,” like lightning—terrible, sud­den, and blind­ing? Is this a poem about “Truth” or about poet­ry?

In the final, heav­i­ly trun­cat­ed, ver­sion of “Poet­ry,” Mar­i­anne Moore con­cedes, grumpi­ly, that “one dis­cov­ers in / it, after all, a place for the gen­uine.” As Dickinson’s poem demon­strates, try­ing to find a “place” in poet­ry for any sta­ble mean­ing may be impos­si­ble. Still she insists that truth should “daz­zle grad­u­al­ly,” an oxy­moron­ic phrase, says Puschak, but it’s as evoca­tive, if more abstract, as real toads in made-up gardens—both are para­dox­i­cal means of describ­ing what poet­ry does.

Dick­in­son real­ized that her poem “had to be the phi­los­o­phy… that feel­ing of the text being desta­bi­lized from with­in, oscil­lat­ing from mean­ing to the nega­tion of that mean­ing.” Truth is inex­press­ible, per­haps inac­ces­si­ble, and maybe even fatal. Yet it may strike us, nonethe­less, in the daz­zling ambi­gu­i­ties of poet­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Online Emi­ly Dick­in­son Archive Makes Thou­sands of the Poet’s Man­u­scripts Freely Avail­able

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Film of Emi­ly Dickinson’s Poem ‘I Start­ed Early–Took My Dog’

An 8‑Hour Marathon Read­ing of 500 Emi­ly Dick­in­son Poems

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

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