R. Crumb Illustrates Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea: Existentialism Meets Underground Comics

in Art, Literature, Philosophy | September 18th, 2018

Sartre’s nov­el Nau­sea intro­duced his philo­soph­i­cal view as a form of ill­ness to a WWII read­er­ship. “Nau­sea is exis­tence reveal­ing itself—and expe­ri­ence is not pleas­ant to see,” he wrote in his own sum­ma­ry of his first book, pub­lished in 1938. The novel’s drama­ti­za­tion of His­to­ri­an Roquentin’ s cri­sis presents a case of exis­ten­tial sick­ness as most­ly invol­un­tary.

Though pub­lished before his many Marx­ist books and essays, Nau­sea con­nects the malaise to a cer­tain class expe­ri­ence. “I have no trou­bles,” thinks Roquentin in Robert Crumb’s short adap­ta­tion of the book above, “I have mon­ey like a cap­i­tal­ist, no boss, no wife, no chil­dren; I exist, that’s all…. And that trou­ble is so vague, so meta­phys­i­cal that I am ashamed of it.” Nau­sea, in one sense, is bour­geoise alien­ation, while Roquentin’s con­ver­sa­tion part­ner, the Self-Taught Man, con­fess­es a naïve human­ist ide­al­ism.

The char­ac­ters alone, some crit­ics sug­gest, imbue the book with a sub­tle par­o­dy. As he lis­tens to the Self-Taught Man’s trou­bles and rumi­nates on his own, Crumb’s Roquentin grows more Sartre-like. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the Self-Taught Man takes on a Crumb-like demeanor and aspect. Their dia­logue moves briskly, the scene resem­bling My Din­ner with Andre with less ban­ter and more neu­ro­sis. Sartre’s tone lends itself well to Crumb’s obses­sive, tight­ly-com­posed pan­els.

Crumb’s lit­er­ary inter­pre­ta­tions have grav­i­tat­ed toward oth­er anx­ious writ­ers like Charles Bukows­ki and Franz Kaf­ka, as well as the mur­der and incest of the book of Gen­e­sis. The under­ground comics leg­end is right at home with Sartre­an dread and despair. Crumb became famous for Fritz the Cat, an ani­mat­ed film ver­sion of his raunchy hip­ster, what many called his gross­ly sex­ist and racist sex fan­tasies, and the draw­ing and slo­gan “Keep on Truckin’.” He was a fig­ure of 60s and 70s coun­ter­cul­ture, but that’s nev­er where he belonged.

Crumb was a Sartre­an pro­tag­o­nist , even when he “often por­trayed him­self in his work as naked… and pri­apic.” In an an inter­view with Crumb The Guardian describes him:

his words are depres­sive and lugubri­ous, and yet he appears mel­low, laugh­ing eas­i­ly through his exis­ten­tial nau­sea. The most ter­ri­ble sto­ries amuse him as much as they pain him. He tells me how a best friend killed him­self by swal­low­ing four bot­tles of paper cor­rec­tion flu­id, and he chor­tles. He talks of his own despair, and gig­gles. He admits that he could nev­er have imag­ined a life quite so fulfilled—with Aline, and his beloved daugh­ter Sophie, also a car­toon­ist, and suc­cess and money—and says he’s still mis­er­able as hell, and laughs.

He is a lit­tle Roquentin, a lit­tle bit Sartre, a lit­tle bit Self-Taught man, apply­ing to his read­ing of lit­er­a­ture and phi­los­o­phy an LSD-assist­ed, sex-pos­i­tive, and unavoid­ably con­tro­ver­sial and depres­sive sen­si­bil­i­ty. See the full Crumb-illus­trat­ed Nau­sea here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instant­ly Dis­cov­ered His Artis­tic Style

R. Crumb Shows Us How He Illus­trat­ed Gen­e­sis: A Faith­ful, Idio­syn­crat­ic Illus­tra­tion of All 50 Chap­ters

Three Charles Bukows­ki Books Illus­trat­ed by Robert Crumb: Under­ground Com­ic Art Meets Out­sider Lit­er­a­ture

Under­ground Car­toon­ist Robert Crumb Cre­ates an Illus­trat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Franz Kafka’s Life and Work

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Behold Mystical Photographs Taken Inside a Cello, Double Bass & Other Instruments

in Art, Music, Photography | September 13th, 2018

“If God had designed the orches­tra,” remarks a char­ac­ter in Rick Moody’s Hotels of North Amer­i­ca, “then the cel­lo was His great­est accom­plish­ment.” I couldn’t agree more. The cel­lo sounds sub­lime, looks state­ly… even the word cel­lo evokes regal poise and grace. If orches­tral instru­ments were chess pieces, the cel­lo would be queen: shape­ly and dig­ni­fied, prime mover on the board, majes­tic in sym­phonies, quar­tets, cham­ber pop ensem­bles, post rock bands….

With all its many son­ic and aes­thet­ic charms, I didn’t imag­ine it was pos­si­ble to love the cel­lo more. Then I saw Roman­ian artist Adri­an Bor­da’s mag­nif­i­cent pho­tos tak­en from inside one. The pho­to above, Bor­da tells us at his Deviant Art page, was tak­en from inside “a very old French cel­lo made in Napoleon’s times.” It looks like the bel­ly of the HMS Vic­to­ry mat­ed with the nave of Chartres Cathe­dral. The light descend­ing through the f‑holes seems of some divine ori­gin.

Bor­da has also tak­en pho­tos from inside an old dou­ble bass (above), as well as a gui­tar, sax, and piano. The stringed orches­tral instru­ments, he says, yield­ed the best results. He was first inspired by a 2009 ad cam­paign for the Berlin­er Phil­har­moniker that “cap­tured the insides of instru­ments,” writes Twist­ed Sifter, “reveal­ing the hid­den land­scapes with­in.” With­out any sense of how the art direc­tor cre­at­ed the images, Bor­da set about exper­i­ment­ing with meth­ods of his own.

He was lucky enough to have a luthi­er friend who had a con­tra­bass open for repairs. Lat­er he trav­eled to Amiens, where he found the French cel­lo, also open. “To achieve these shots,” Twist­ed Sifter notes, “Bor­da fit a Sony NEX‑6 cam­era equipped with a Samyang 8mm fish­eye lens inside the instru­ment and then used a smart remote so he could pre­view the work­flow on his phone.” Depend­ing on the angle and the play of light with­in the instru­ment, the pho­tos can look eerie, somber, omi­nous, or angelic—mirroring the cello’s expres­sive range.

Bor­da gives the cel­lo inte­ri­or shot above the per­fect title “A Long, Lone­ly Time….” Its play of smoke and light is ghost­ly noir. His pho­to below, of the inside of a sax­o­phone, pulls us into a haunt­ed, alien tun­nel. If you want to know what’s on the oth­er side, con­sid­er the strange sur­re­al­ist worlds of Borda’s main gig as a sur­re­al­ist painter of warped fan­tasies and night­mares. Unlike these pho­tos, his paint­ings are full of lurid, vio­lent col­or, but they are also filled with mys­te­ri­ous musi­cal motifs. See more of Bor­da’s inte­ri­or instru­ment pho­tos at Deviant Art and Twister Sifter.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a Luthi­er Birth a Cel­lo in This Hyp­not­ic Doc­u­men­tary

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Nine Tips from Bill Mur­ray & Cel­list Jan Vogler on How to Study Intense­ly and Opti­mize Your Learn­ing

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

When Steve Jobs Taught Andy Warhol to Make Art on the Very First Macintosh (1984)

in Art, History, Technology | September 7th, 2018

When Andy Warhol first became famous, few knew what to make of his art. When Apple first released the Mac­in­tosh — dra­mat­i­cal­ly pro­mot­ed with that Rid­ley Scott Super Bowl com­mer­cial — few knew what to make of it either. The year was 1984, when almost nobody had seen a graph­i­cal user inter­face or even a mouse, let alone used them, and the Mac­in­tosh looked as strange and com­pelling when it entered the com­put­ing scene as Warhol did when he entered the art scene. Both seemed so casu­al­ly to repu­di­ate so many long-held assump­tions, an act that tends to star­tle and con­fuse old­er peo­ple but makes imme­di­ate sense to younger ones. What hap­pened, then, when Warhol and the Mac­in­tosh first crossed paths?

Jour­nal­ist David Sheff, who wrote an ear­ly pro­file of Steve Jobs and con­duct­ed the last in-depth inter­view with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, remem­bers it well. In Octo­ber 1984, he and Jobs attend­ed the ninth-birth­day par­ty thrown by Ono for Sean, her son with Lennon. As a present, Jobs brought along one of his com­pa­ny’s new Mac­in­tosh­es and set it up him­self in young Sean’s bed­room. “Sean took con­trol of the mouse, and rolled the small box along the floor,” Sheff writes. “Steve said, ‘Now hold the but­ton down while you move it and see what hap­pens.’ Sean did, and a thin, jagged, black line, appeared on the screen. Sean, entranced, said, ‘Cool!’ He clicked the mouse but­ton, pushed it around, and on the screen appeared shapes and lines, which he erased, and then he drew a sort of lion-camel and then a fig­ure that he said was Boy George.”

Though Boy George may not have been in atten­dance, the par­ty’s unsur­pris­ing­ly fab­u­lous guest list also includ­ed Andy Warhol (an “eccen­tric uncle” to Sean) and Kei­th Har­ing, both of whom Sheff remem­bers com­ing into the room as part of a crowd want­i­ng to catch a glimpse of Sean’s new toy. It was­n’t long before Warhol, pre­sum­ably com­pelled by the artis­tic impulse as well as by his fas­ci­na­tion for all things new, asked if he could give it a try:

Andy took Sean’s spot in front of the com­put­er and Steve showed him how to maneu­ver and click the mouse. Warhol didn’t get it; he lift­ed and waved the mouse, as if it were a conductor’s baton. Jobs gen­tly explained that the mouse worked when it was pushed along a sur­face. Warhol kept lift­ing it until Steve placed his hand on Warhol’s and guid­ed it along the floor. Final­ly Warhol began draw­ing, star­ing at the “pen­cil” as it drew on the screen.

Warhol was spell­bound – peo­ple who knew him know the way he tuned out every­thing extra­ne­ous when he was entranced by what­ev­er it was – glid­ing the mouse, eyes affixed to the mon­i­tor. Har­ing was bent over watch­ing. Andy, his eyes wide, looked up, stared at Har­ing, and said, “Look! Kei­th! I drew a cir­cle!”

In his diary, Warhol writes of enter­ing Sean’s room to find “a kid there set­ting up the Apple com­put­er that Sean had got­ten as a present, the Mac­in­tosh mod­el. I said that once some man had been call­ing me a lot want­i­ng to give me one, but that I’d nev­er called him back or some­thing, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ ” But Jobs, pos­sessed of as keen a pro­mo­tion­al instinct as Warhol’s own, assured him that the offer was still good, and that he would also give him a les­son in draw­ing on the Mac right then and there. “I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it,” writes Warhol, not­ing that “it only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in col­or.”

The Mac­in­tosh made an appear­ance in Warhol’s “Ads” series of paint­ings in 1984, the same year he also agreed, accord­ing to Art­sy’s Abi­gail Cain, “to be a spokesper­son for Apple’s rival in the per­son­al com­put­ing sphere — Com­modore. The artist was to pro­mote the company’s new com­put­er, the Ami­ga 1000, and its cut­ting-edge mul­ti­me­dia capa­bil­i­ties” that includ­ed a 4,096-color dis­play. At the machine’s launch, Warhol “used ProPaint to sketch Blondie lead singer Deb­bie Har­ry in front of a crowd of eager tech enthu­si­asts,” which you can see in the video above. Just a few years ago, the efforts of dig­i­tal artist Cory Arcan­gel and spe­cial­ists at Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty recov­ered 28 long-lost dig­i­tal paint­ings Warhol made on his Ami­ga. Whether the artist ever made any­thing with or even took deliv­ery of his promised Mac, we don’t know – or at least we don’t know yet.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Short Film Takes You Inside the Recov­ery of Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art

Andy Warhol Dig­i­tal­ly Paints Deb­bie Har­ry with the Ami­ga 1000 Com­put­er (1985)

Apple’s Guid­ed Tour to Using the First Mac­in­tosh (1984)

Dis­cov­er the Lost Ear­ly Com­put­er Art of Telidon, Canada’s TV Pro­to-Inter­net from the 1970s

Japan­ese Com­put­er Artist Makes “Dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans” in 1964: When Giant Main­frame Com­put­ers Were First Used to Cre­ate Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Enter an Archive of William Blake’s Fantastical “Illuminated Books”: The Images Are Sublime, and in High Resolution

in Art, Literature | September 7th, 2018

William Blake earned his place as the patron saint of all free­think­ing out­sider artists. One might say he per­fect­ed the role as he per­fect­ed his art—or his arts rather, since his poet­ry inspires as much awe and acclaim as his vision­ary engrav­ings and illus­tra­tions. Stand­ing astride the Neo­clas­si­cal eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry and the Roman­tic era, Blake reject­ed the ratio­nal­ism and clas­si­cism that sur­round­ed him from birth and devel­oped a prophet­ic style drawn from an ear­li­er age.

He “sought to emu­late the exam­ple of artists such as Raphael, Michelan­ge­lo and Dür­er in pro­duc­ing time­less, ‘Goth­ic’ art, infused with Chris­t­ian spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and cre­at­ed with poet­ic genius,” writes the Met’s Eliz­a­beth Bark­er. (“Blake described his paint­ing tech­nique as ‘fres­co.’) But no one would ever mis­take the works of Blake for any­one oth­er than Blake, with their mus­cu­lar, hero­ic fig­ures, vio­lent­ly expres­sive faces, and tor­tured pos­es.

The William Blake Archive gives us access to a huge sam­pling of Blake’s work, from his book illus­tra­tions to his draw­ings and paint­ings, to his man­u­scripts, etc. The images are high res­o­lu­tion scans that users can add to a light­box, rotate, zoom into, view “true size,” or enlarge.

Per­haps most inter­est­ing are the images, like those here, from Blake’s “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books,” a series of philo­soph­i­cal, reli­gious, and mytho­log­i­cal works com­posed from about 1788 to 1822. The archive con­tains dozens of vari­ant print­ings of these end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ing hand-let­tered books.

Becom­ing a furi­ous­ly pro­lif­ic, mys­ti­cal­ly inspired artist while liv­ing in pover­ty and near-obscurity—“considered insane and large­ly dis­re­gard­ed by his peers,” as BBC His­to­ry puts it—required for­ti­tude and almost super­hu­man belief in him­self, espe­cial­ly since his belief sys­tem was large­ly self-cre­at­ed. While Blake con­sid­ered the Bible “the great­est work of poet­ry ever writ­ten,” and its themes and nar­ra­tives spoke to him through­out his career, his own reli­gious ten­den­cies took the form of the mythol­o­gy he elab­o­rat­ed through the fan­tas­ti­cal illu­mi­nat­ed books.

“I must Cre­ate a Sys­tem,” he wrote in Jerusalem, com­posed between 1804 and 1820, “or be enslav’d by anoth­er Mans,” and so he did, invent­ing fig­ures like Los, Urizen (the oppres­sive, sup­pres­sive God of the Old Tes­ta­ment), Albion, the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of Eng­land, and his daugh­ters, Bromion, Oothoon, and Theotor­mon. While work­ing on these unortho­dox projects, he bare­ly “eked out a liv­ing as an engraver and illus­tra­tor” of com­mer­cial books. He also drew and paint­ed sev­er­al Bib­li­cal sub­jects and scenes from lit­er­ary texts by his favorite authors, Mil­ton and Dante.

The illu­mi­nat­ed books, Bark­er writes “rank among Blake’s most cel­e­brat­ed achieve­ments.” Writ­ten “in a range of forms—prophecies, emblems, pas­toral vers­es, bib­li­cal satire, and children’s books,” these eclec­tic works “addressed var­i­ous time­ly subjects—poverty, child exploita­tion, racial inequal­i­ty, tyran­ny, reli­gious hypocrisy.” With lit­er­ary vig­or, moral clar­i­ty, and emo­tion­al insight, Blake harsh­ly cri­tiqued what he saw as the evils of his age, and more­over, offered an alternative—an anti-Enlight­en­ment, rad­i­cal­ly egal­i­tar­i­an, free love vision, com­posed of patch­work ele­ments of the Bible, Mil­ton, Emanuel Swe­den­borg, and pagan and druidic sources.

Two of the most famous of Blake’s illu­mi­nat­ed books show the influ­ence of Milton’s Il Penseroso and L’Allegro, stud­ies in the con­trast of melan­choly and mirth, which Blake once illus­trat­ed. In Blake’s hands, these become Songs of Inno­cence, “the gen­tlest of his lyrics,” writes BBC, and Songs of Expe­ri­ence, “con­tain­ing a pro­found expres­sion of adult cor­rup­tion and repres­sion.” Blake also found in Dante “a seem­ing­ly inex­haustible source of inspi­ra­tion in his own fer­tile mind,” Bark­er explains. But just as he trans­formed his artis­tic influ­ences, he took his lit­er­ary inspi­ra­tions in direc­tions no one else but Blake would think to do. And for that, he remains a sin­gu­lar­ly orig­i­nal artist, peer­less in inven­tive­ness and ded­i­ca­tion to his work.

See the William Blake Archive here. The link to his “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books” from which the images here come is at the top left-hand cor­ner of the archive’s nav bar.

You can pur­chase a copy of William Blake: The Com­plete Illu­mi­nat­ed Books in book for­mat here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Blake’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost

William Blake’s Mas­ter­piece Illus­tra­tions of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

Artists Illus­trate Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Through the Ages: Doré, Blake, Bot­ti­cel­li, Mœbius & More

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Watch Willem Dafoe Become Vincent Van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s New Film, At Eternity’s Gate

in Art, Film | September 6th, 2018

We know Julian Schn­abel for work­ing in two forms: paint­ing and film. His work in both has more con­nec­tion than it might at first seem, since most of his films are about art, or at least about artists. After mak­ing it big in the art world him­self in the late 1970s and 1980s with his sig­na­ture large-scale can­vass­es incor­po­rat­ing a wide vari­ety of mate­ri­als, he got behind the cam­era in 1996 to direct Basquiat, a biopic on the epony­mous graf­fi­ti-artist-turned-painter. In the 2000s he fol­lowed it up with Before Night Falls, about Cuban poet Reinal­do Are­nas, and The Div­ing Bell and the But­ter­fly, about a French mag­a­zine edi­tor turned writer after a stroke left him “locked” inside his own head. (At that same time he also shot a Lou Reed con­cert film, a song from which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.)

Now Schn­abel has brought his film­mak­ing career back to where he start­ed it with anoth­er film about anoth­er painter, a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure in his day, whose influ­ence grew after his ear­ly death. At Eter­ni­ty’s Gate depicts the final days in the life of Dutch Post-Impres­sion­ist Vin­cent van Gogh, cast­ing in the role no less a thes­pi­an than Willem Dafoe, known for play­ing every­one from T.S. Eliot to Pier Pao­lo Pasoli­ni to Jesus of Nazareth.

Though he has already lived a much longer life than Van Gogh ever did, Dafoe no doubt has the skills to use that in the per­for­mance’s favor, trans­mit­ting the way that the painter saw more deeply into the world around him than any­one else did and got labeled a mad­man for it. And yes, there was also the mat­ter of his ear, from which the trail­er above assures us that Schn­abel’s film does­n’t shy away.

But At Eter­ni­ty’s Gate clear­ly focus­es on Van Gogh’s strug­gle to pur­sue his art, accord­ing to his per­son­al vision, in an unre­cep­tive time and place. “Rather than sim­ply sug­gest that mad­ness and genius are inex­tri­ca­bly linked, as count­less movies of this sort have already done, the film­mak­er por­trays the act of cre­at­ing art as less an action and more a state of being, an ever-flow­ing stream that the man hold­ing the paint­brush is pow­er­less to stop or even con­trol,” writes Indiewire’s Michael Nor­dine. “Watch­ing the artist at work and hear­ing noth­ing but his rapid brush­strokes as the wind howls in the back­ground is med­i­ta­tive, even mes­mer­ic.” Schn­abel’s film fol­lows last year’s Lov­ing Vin­cent, which told Van Gogh’s sto­ry with ani­ma­tion made entire­ly of oil paint­ings. Its suc­cess, and the acclaim that has so far come in for At Eter­ni­ty’s Gate in advance of its wide release in Novem­ber, sup­ports one obser­va­tion in par­tic­u­lar made by Dafoe-as-Van Gogh: “Maybe God made me a painter for peo­ple who aren’t born yet.”

via IndieWire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

New Ani­mat­ed Film About Vin­cent Van Gogh Will Be Made Out of 65,000 Van Gogh-Style Paint­ings: Watch the Trail­er and Mak­ing-Of Video

Watch as Van Gogh’s Famous Self-Por­trait Morphs Into a Pho­to­graph

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

The Vin­cent Van Gogh Action Fig­ure, Com­plete with Detach­able Ear

Lou Reed Sings “Sweet Jane” Live, Julian Schn­abel Films It (2006)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

“The Long Tomorrow”: Discover Mœbius’ Hard-Boiled Detective Comic That Inspired Blade Runner (1975)

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Sci Fi | September 4th, 2018

Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky may nev­er have made his film adap­ta­tion of Frank Her­bert’s Dune, but plen­ty came out of the attempt — includ­ing, one might well argue, Blade Run­ner. Mak­ing that still huge­ly influ­en­tial adap­ta­tion of Philip K. Dick­’s Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?, Rid­ley Scott and his col­lab­o­ra­tors looked to a few key visu­al sources, one of them a two-part short sto­ry in com­ic form called “The Long Tomor­row.”

Illus­trat­ed by none oth­er than French artist Mœbius, one of the rich­est visu­al imag­i­na­tions of our time, it tells the futur­is­tic hard-boiled sto­ry of a pri­vate detec­tive in a dense, ver­ti­cal under­ground city filled with androids, row­dy bars, assas­sins, and fly­ing cars. “I’m a con­fi­den­tial nose,” says the pro­tag­o­nist by way of intro­duc­tion. “My office is on the 97th lev­el. Club’s the name, Pete Club.”

Then comes the fate­ful piece of nar­ra­tion that begins any detec­tive sto­ry worth its salt: “It start­ed out a day like any oth­er day.” But by the end of that day, Club has tak­en a job from a clas­sic dame in need, fend­ed off both a four-armed thug and a hired assas­sin, slain an alien mon­ster with whom he finds him­self in bed, and recov­ered the pres­i­den­t’s miss­ing brain.

The sto­ry was writ­ten writ­ten by Dan O’Ban­non, then known main­ly for the film Dark Star, a sci­ence-fic­tion com­e­dy he’d made with his Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia class­mate John Car­pen­ter. On the strength of that, Jodor­owsky had brought him onto Dune to work on its spe­cial effects, just as he’d brought Mœbius on to cre­ate its sto­ry­boards and con­cept art. With noth­ing to do before shoot­ing began — which it nev­er did — O’Ban­non first drew “The Long Tomor­row” him­self as a way of keep­ing busy. Mœbius took one look at it and imme­di­ate­ly saw its promise.

The French may have coined the term film noir, but this ear­ly work of future noir ben­e­fit­ed from hav­ing an Amer­i­can writer. “When Euro­peans try this kind of par­o­dy, it is nev­er entire­ly sat­is­fac­to­ry,” Mœbius writes in the intro­duc­tion to the book ver­sion of “The Long Tomor­row.” “The French are too French, the Ital­ians are too Ital­ian … so, under my nose was a pas­tiche that was more orig­i­nal than the orig­i­nals.” It also, with Mœbius’ art, laid the visu­al ground­work for gen­er­a­tions of sci-fi sto­ries to come.

“The way Neu­ro­mancer-the-nov­el ‘looks’ was influ­enced in large part by some of the art­work I saw in  Heavy Met­al,” said William Gib­son, refer­ring to the Eng­lish ver­sion of Métal hurlant, the mag­a­zine that pop­u­lar­ized Mœbius’ work. (O’Ban­non also worked on the ani­mat­ed Heavy Met­al anthol­o­gy film, released in 1981.) But per­haps Rid­ley Scott, who start­ed work­ing with the artist on 1979’s O’Ban­non-script­ed Alien, described the influ­ence of Mœbius’ art on our visions of the future best: “You see it every­where, it runs through so much you can’t get away from it.” In a cul­tur­al sense, all of us live in Pete Club’s city now.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Métal hurlant: The Huge­ly Influ­en­tial French Com­ic Mag­a­zine That Put Moe­bius on the Map & Changed Sci-Fi For­ev­er

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

In Search of Mœbius: A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to the Inscrutable Imag­i­na­tion of the Late Com­ic Artist Mœbius

The Blade Run­ner Sketch­book Fea­tures The Orig­i­nal Art of Syd Mead & Rid­ley Scott (1982)

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles & Mick Jag­ger Nev­er Made

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Frida Kahlo’s Passionate Love Letters to Diego Rivera

in Art, Letters | September 4th, 2018

The truth young ide­al­is­tic lovers learn: rela­tion­ships are messy and complicated—filled with dis­ap­point­ments, mis­un­der­stand­ings, betray­als great and small. They fall apart and some­times can­not be put back togeth­er. It’s easy to grow cyn­i­cal and bit­ter. Yet, as James Bald­win famous­ly wrote, “you think your pain and your heart­break are unprece­dent­ed in the his­to­ry of the world, but then you read.” You read, that is, the life sto­ries and let­ters of writ­ers and artists who have expe­ri­enced out­sized roman­tic bliss and tor­ment, and who some­how became more pas­sion­ate­ly alive the more they suf­fered.

When it comes to per­son­al suf­fer­ing, Fri­da Kahlo’s biog­ra­phy offers more than one per­son could seem to bear. Already dis­abled by polio at a young age, she found her life for­ev­er changed at 18 when a bus acci­dent sent an iron rod through her body, frac­tur­ing mul­ti­ple bones, includ­ing three ver­te­brae, pierc­ing her stom­ach and uterus. Recall­ing the old Gre­go­ri­an hymn, Kahlo’s friend Mex­i­can writer Andrés Hen­e­strosa remarked that she “lived dying”—in near con­stant pain, endur­ing surgery after surgery and fre­quent hos­pi­tal­iza­tions.

In the midst of this pain, she found love with her men­tor and hus­band Diego Rivera—and, it must be said, with many oth­ers. Kahlo, writes Alexxa Got­thardt at Art­sy, “was a pro­lif­ic lover: Her list of romances stretched across decades, con­ti­nents, and sex­es. She was said to have been inti­mate­ly involved with, among oth­ers, Marx­ist the­o­rist Leon Trot­sky, dancer Josephine Bak­er, and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Nick­o­las Muray. How­ev­er, it was her obses­sive, abid­ing rela­tion­ship with fel­low painter Diego Rivera—for whom she’d har­bored a pas­sion­ate crush since she laid eyes on him at age 15—that affect­ed Kahlo most pow­er­ful­ly.”

Her let­ters to Rivera—himself a pro­lif­ic extra-mar­i­tal lover—stretch “across the twen­ty-sev­en-year span of their rela­tion­ship,” writes Maria Popo­va; they “bespeak the pro­found and abid­ing con­nec­tion the two shared, brim­ming with the seething caul­dron of emo­tion with which all ful­ly inhab­it­ed love is filled: ela­tion, anguish, devo­tion, desire, long­ing, joy.”

Diego.
Truth is, so great, that I wouldn’t like to speak, or sleep, or lis­ten, or love. To feel myself trapped, with no fear of blood, out­side time and mag­ic, with­in your own fear, and your great anguish, and with­in the very beat­ing of your heart. All this mad­ness, if I asked it of you, I know, in your silence, there would be only con­fu­sion. I ask you for vio­lence, in the non­sense, and you, you give me grace, your light and your warmth. I’d like to paint you, but there are no col­ors, because there are so many, in my con­fu­sion, the tan­gi­ble form of my great love.

So begins the let­ter pic­tured at the top. In anoth­er, equal­ly pas­sion­ate and poet­ic let­ter, pic­tured fur­ther up, she writes:

Noth­ing com­pares to your hands, noth­ing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. you are the mir­ror of the night. the vio­lent flash of light­ning. the damp­ness of the earth. The hol­low of your armpits is my shel­ter. my fin­gers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-foun­tain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.

Kahlo and Rivera fell in love in 1928, when she asked him to look at her paint­ings. Over her mother’s objec­tions, they mar­ried the fol­low­ing year. After ten tumul­tuous years, they divorced in 1939, then remar­ried in 1940 and stayed part­nered until her death in 1954. Over these years, she poured out her emo­tions in let­ters, many, like those above, first writ­ten in her illus­trat­ed diary. Let­ters to and from her many lovers have also just emerged in a trove of per­son­al arti­facts, recent­ly lib­er­at­ed from a bath­room at Casa Azul where they had been kept under lock and key at River­a’s behest.

Both artists’ many affairs caused tremen­dous pain and “cre­at­ed rifts between them per­son­al­ly,” notes Katy Fal­lon at Broad­ly, although “their rela­tion­ship has been mythol­o­gized past recog­ni­tion,” in the way of so many oth­er famous cou­ples. In the most egre­gious betray­al, Rivera even slept with Kahlo’s younger sis­ter Cristi­na, his favorite mod­el, an act that inspired Frida’s 1937 paint­ing Mem­o­ry, the Heart, a self-por­trait in which she stands with a met­al rod pierc­ing her chest, her hands seem­ing­ly ampu­tat­ed, face expres­sion­less. We learn the wrong lessons from roman­ti­ciz­ing “every­thing” about Fri­da and Diego’s life, Pat­ti Smith sug­gests in her trib­ute to Kahlo’s love let­ters. But there is also dan­ger in pass­ing judg­ment.

“I don’t look at these two as mod­els of behav­ior,” Smith says, but “the most impor­tant les­son… isn’t their indis­cre­tions and love affairs but their devo­tion. Their iden­ti­ties were mag­ni­fied by the oth­er. They went through their ups and downs, part­ed, came back togeth­er, to the end of their lives.” In a 1935 let­ter to Rivera, read by pianist Mona Golabek above, Kahlo for­gives his affairs, call­ing them “only flir­ta­tions…. At bot­tom, you and I love each oth­er dear­ly, and thus go through adven­tures with­out num­bers, beat­ings on doors, impre­ca­tions, insults, inter­na­tion­al claims. Yet, we will always love each oth­er…. All the ranges I have gone through have served only to make me under­stand in the end that I love you more than my own skin.”

Read many more excerpts from Frida’s let­ters to Diego at Brain Pick­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:   

Vis­it the Largest Col­lec­tion of Fri­da Kahlo’s Work Ever Assem­bled: 800 Arti­facts from 33 Muse­ums, All Free Online

Artists Fri­da Kahlo & Diego Rivera Vis­it Leon Trot­sky in Mex­i­co: Vin­tage Footage from 1938

Rare Pho­tos of Fri­da Kahlo, Age 13–23

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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

in Art, History, Science | August 31st, 2018

Do a search on the word “poly­math” and you will see an image or ref­er­ence to Leonar­do da Vin­ci in near­ly every result. Many his­tor­i­cal figures—not all of them world famous, not all Euro­peans, men, or from the Ital­ian Renaissance—fit the descrip­tion. But few such record­ed indi­vid­u­als were as fever­ish­ly active, rest­less­ly inven­tive, and aston­ish­ing­ly pro­lif­ic as Leonar­do, who left rid­dles enough for schol­ars to solve for many life­times.

Leonar­do him­self, though world-renowned for his tal­ents in the fine arts, spent more of his time con­ceiv­ing sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies and engi­neer­ing projects. “When he wrote in the ear­ly 1480s to Ludovi­co Sforza, then ruler of Milan, to offer him his ser­vices,” remarks Cather­ine Yvard, Spe­cial Col­lec­tions cura­tor at the Vic­to­ria and Albert Nation­al Art Library, “he adver­tised him­self as a mil­i­tary engi­neer, only briefly men­tion­ing his artis­tic skills at the end of the list.”

But since so few of his projects were, or could be, real­ized in his life­time, we can only expe­ri­ence them through his most­ly inac­ces­si­ble, and gen­er­al­ly inde­ci­pher­able, note­books, which he began keep­ing after the Duke accept­ed his appli­ca­tion. “None of Leonardo’s pre­de­ces­sors, con­tem­po­raries or suc­ces­sors used paper quite like he did,” notes the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um site, “a sin­gle sheet con­tains an unpre­dictable pat­tern of ideas and inventions—the work­ings of both a design­er and a sci­en­tist.”

Part of the dif­fi­cul­ty of piec­ing his lega­cy togeth­er stems from the fact that his hun­dreds of pages of notes have been dis­trib­uted across sev­er­al insti­tu­tions and pri­vate col­lec­tions, not all of them acces­si­ble to researchers. But ambi­tious dig­i­ti­za­tion projects are eras­ing those bar­ri­ers. We recent­ly fea­tured one, a joint effort of the British Library and Microsoft that brought 570 pages from the Codex Arun­del col­lec­tion to the web. As The Art News­pa­per reports, the Vic­to­ria and Albert has now launched a sim­i­lar endeav­or, dig­i­tiz­ing the Codex Forster note­books, so named because they came from the pri­vate col­lec­tion of John Forster in 1876.

This col­lec­tion includes some of Leonardo’s ear­li­est note­books. Codex Forster I, now online, con­tains the ear­li­est note­book the V&A holds, dat­ing from about 1487, and the lat­est, from 1505. “Writ­ten in Leonardo’s famous ‘mir­ror-writ­ing,’” the V&A notes, “the sub­jects explored with­in range from hydraulic engi­neer­ing to a trea­tise on mea­sur­ing solids.” Forster II and III should come online soon. “We are plan­ning to make these two oth­er vol­umes also ful­ly acces­si­ble online in 2019 to cel­e­brate the 500th anniver­sary of Leonardo’s death,” says Yvard.

The most inno­v­a­tive aspect of this par­tic­u­lar project is the use of IIIF (Inter­na­tion­al Image Inter­op­er­abil­i­ty Frame­work), a tech­nol­o­gy that “has enabled us to present the codex in a new way,” remarks Kati Price, V&A’s head of dig­i­tal media. “We’ve used deep-zoom func­tion­al­i­ty… to present some of the most spec­tac­u­lar and detailed items in our col­lec­tion.” Schol­ars and laypeo­ple alike can take a very close-up look at the many schemat­ics and tech­ni­cal dia­grams in the note­books and see Leonardo’s mind and hand at work.

But while all of us can mar­vel at the sight of his engi­neer­ing genius, when it comes to read­ing his hand­writ­ing, we’ll have to rely on experts. Let’s hope the muse­um will some­day sup­ply trans­la­tions for non­spe­cial­ists. In the mean­time, explore the dig­i­tized man­u­scripts here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

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

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To Do List (Cir­ca 1490) Is Much Cool­er Than Yours

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast