48 Hours of Joseph Campbell Lectures Free Online: The Power of Myth & Storytelling

in History, Photography | August 31st, 2015

Photo by “Folkstory” features Joseph Campbell (left) with Jonathan Young, via Wikimedia Commons.

You may not be interested in politics, they say, but politics is interested in you. The same, if you believe famed mythologist Joseph Campbell, goes for myth: far from explaining only the origin of the world as believed by extinct societies, it can explain the power of stories we enjoy today — up to and including Star Wars.

The man behind PBS’ well-known series The Power of Myth left behind many words in many formats telling us precisely why, and now you can hear a fair few of them — 48 hours worth — for free on this Spotify playlist. (If you don’t have Spotify’s software already, you can download it free here.)

“From the Star Wars trilogy to the Grateful Dead,” says the Joseph Campbell Foundation, “Joseph Campbell has had a profound impact on our culture, our beliefs, and the way we view ourselves and the world.” This collection, The Lectures of Joseph Campbell, which comes from early in his career, offers “a glimpse into one of the great minds of our time, drawing together his most wide-ranging and insightful talks” in the role of both “a scholar and a master storyteller.” So not only can Campbell enrich our understanding of all the stories we love, he can spin his lifetime of mythological research into teachings that, in the telling, weave into a pretty gripping yarn in and of themselves.

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The Zen Teachings of Alan Watts: A Free Audio Archive of His Enlightening Lectures

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Everything I Know: 42 Hours of Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975)

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Jean-Paul Sartre Reviews Orson Welles’ Masterwork (1945): “Citizen Kane Is Not Cinema”

in Film, Photography | July 23rd, 2015

You may recall our posting last year of Jorge Luis Borges’ review of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane — surely one of the most Open Culture-worthy intersections of 20th century luminaries ever to occur. Borges described Welles’ masterwork as possessed of one side that, “pointlessly banal, attempts to milk applause from dimwits,” and another, a “kind of metaphysical detective story” whose “subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man’s inner self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has spoken, the many lives he has ruined.” On the whole, the author of Labyrinths called the picture “not intelligent, though it is the work of genius.”

Not long after our post, the Paris Review’s Dan Piepenbring wrote one that also quoted another, later review of Citizen Kane by none other than Jean-Paul Sartre:

Kane might have been interesting for the Americans, [but] it is completely passé for us, because the whole film is based on a misconception of what cinema is all about. The film is in the past tense, whereas we all know that cinema has got to be in the present tense. ‘I am the man who is kissing, I am the girl who is being kissed, I am the Indian who is being pursued, I am the man pursuing the Indian.’ And film in the past tense is the antithesis of cinema. Therefore Citizen Kane is not cinema.

The 1945 review originally ran in high-minded film journal L’Écran français under the headline “Quand Hollywood veut faire penser … Citizen Kane d’Orson Welles,” or, “When Hollywood Wants to Make Us Think … Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.” According to The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre: A Bibliographical Life, “in re-reading this [review], which he did not remember at all, Sartre hardly recognized his style and expressed some doubt about the authenticity of his signature. On the other hand, he did find in it the ideas Citizen Kane suggested to him when he first saw it in the United States. After he saw the film again in France, Sartre had a slightly more favorable opinion of it, but he still thinks it is undoubtedly no masterpiece.”

But at the time, writes Simon Leys, “the impact of this condemnation was devastating. The Magnificent Ambersons was shown soon afterwards in Paris but failed miserably. The cultivated public always follows the directives of a few propaganda commissars: there is much more conformity among intellectuals than among plumbers or car mechanics.” Or at least the cultivated public did so in 1940s Paris; the mechanics of culture have changed somewhat since then, but as far as Citizen Kane goes, high-profile opinions about it have grown only more positive over time. Sure, Vertigo recently knocked it down a peg in the Sight and Sound poll, but that just makes me wonder what Sartre thought of Hitchcock’s masterwork — a film that might have had a resonance or two in the mind of an existentialist.

Orson Welles Explains Why Ignorance Was His Major “Gift” to Citizen Kane

Jean-Paul Sartre Rejects the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964: “It Was Monstrous!”

Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intellectuals

Human, All Too Human: 3‑Part Documentary Profiles Nietzsche, Heidegger & Sartre

Nietzsche, Wittgenstein & Sartre Explained with Monty Python-Style Animations by The School of Life

Download Walter Kaufmann’s Lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Modern Thought (1960)

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How to Take Photographs Like Ansel Adams: The Master Explains The Art of “Visualization”

in Photography | July 21st, 2015

How to take photographs like Ansel Adams did? The question dogs many who’ve recently picked up the camera, especially those directly inspired to do so by he whose black-and-white landscapes practically defined the American West for the 20th century. Conveniently, though, Adams left behind much to study, and not just his considerable body of work; he also spoke without hesitation about the techniques he developed and employed, and even further explained them in books like Making a Photograph; Camera and Lens: The Creative Approach; and Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, the closest thing we have to a master class with the man.

Adams got particular results out of a procedure he called “visualization,” in which the photographer “sees” the final image as fully as possible in their imagination before attempting to capture that image on film in the real world. In the two clips featured here, you can hear Adams himself discuss visualization. “When you visualize a photograph, it is not only a matter of seeing it in the mind’s eye,” he says in the video from the Getty Museum, “but it’s also, and primarily, a matter of feeling it.” In the interview just above, he adds that “the picture has to be there clearly and decisively, and if you have enough craft in your own work and in your practice, you can then make the photograph you desire.”

Here, Adams outlines “the steps in making a photograph” in a bit more detail as follows:

Need, or desire, to photograph. This attitude is obviously essential. Sometimes just going out with a camera can excite perceptive interest and the desire to work. An assignment—a purpose—can be the greatest stimulus for functional or creative work.
Discovery of the subject, or recognition of its essential aspects, will evoke the concept of the image. This leads to the exploration of the subject and the optimum point of view.
Visualization of the final picture is essential in whatever medium is used. The term “seeing” can be used for visualization, but the latter term is more precise in that it relates to the final picture—its scale, composition, tonal and textural values, etc. Just as a musician “hears” notes and chords in his mind’s eye, so can the trained photographer “see” certain values, textures, and arrangements in his mind’s eye.

For more information still on Adams’ artistic process, see also Ansel Adams, Photographer, the 1958 documentary we featured here in 2013. None of this material, of course, guarantees you the ability to take photographs exactly like Ansel Adams, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to: we do our best work, after all, not when we do exactly what our greatest predecessors did, but when we think how our greatest predecessors thought. Hence the importance of visualization, which you can do right now without buying the exact model of Zeiss Milliflex Adams used or going to the exact spots in Yosemite from which he shot — you only need to think.

Discover Ansel Adams’ 226 Photos of U.S. National Parks (and Another Side of the Legendary Photographer)

Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye, a Revealing Look at “The Father of Modern Photography”

1972 Diane Arbus Documentary Interviews Those Who Knew the American Photographer Best

Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Decisive Moment

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Venice in Beautiful Color Images 125 Years Ago: The Rialto Bridge, St. Mark’s Basilica, Doge’s Palace & More

in History, Photography | July 1st, 2015

A few months ago, Mental Floss put up a post of “Fantastic 120-Year-Old Color Pictures of Ireland.” Fantastic pictures indeed, although the nature of the technology that produced them seems as interesting to me as the 19th-century Irish life captured in the images themselves. They came from the Library of Congress’ geographically organized archive of photocrom prints, a method perhaps known only to die-hard historical photography enthusiasts. For the rest of us, the Library of Congress’ page on the photocrom process explains it: “Photochrom prints are ink-based images produced through ‘the direct photographic transfer of an original negative onto litho and chromographic printing plates.’ ”

Its inventor Hans Jakob Schmid came up with the technique in the 1880s, a decade that began with color photography consigned to the realm of theory. While Photocrom prints may look an awful lot like color photographs, look at them through a magnifying glass and “the small dots that comprise the ink-based photomechanical image are visible.” “The photomechanical process permitted mass production of the vivid color prints,” each color requiring “a separate asphalt-coated lithographic stone, usually a minimum of six stones and often more than ten stones.”

But that unwieldy-sounding technology and laborious-sounding process has given us, among other striking pieces of visual history, these lush images of fin de siècle Venice, which the writer of place Jan Morris once described as “less a city than an experience.”

At the top of the post, we have a view of the Rialto Bridge, which spans one of the city’s famous canals; below that a scene of pigeon-feeding in St. Mark’s Piazza; the image just above leaves the pigeons behind to view the interior of St. Mark’s Basilica.

The photos below, all also taken between 1890 and 1900, depict the exterior and interior of the Doge’s Palace, as well as its view of San Giorgio Island by moonlight.

We may not consider these “real” color photographs, but the colors they present, vividly applied in the printing process, somehow more accurately represent the spirit of late 19th-century Europe — one of history’s truly vivid periods, in one of its enduringly vivid human environments. More color images of fin-de-siecle Venice can be viewed here.

via Mental Floss

How Venice Works: A Short Film

Venice in a Day: From Daybreak to Sunset in Timelapse

Venice is Way Under Water…

Hand-Colored Photographs of 19th Century Japan

The First Color Photos From World War I: The German Front

The Oldest Color Movies Bring Sunflowers, Exotic Birds and Goldfish Back to Life (1902)

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Discovered: The Only Known Picture of Vincent Van Gogh as an Adult Artist? (Maybe, Maybe Not)

in Art, History, Museums, Photography | June 22nd, 2015

Close your eyes for a moment and picture the artist Vincent Van Gogh. What do you see?

Probably one of the prolific post-Impressionist’s self-portraits. That’s all well and good, but who else did you see?

Kirk Douglas?

Indie darling (and Incredible Hulk adversary) Tim Roth?

Director Martin Scorsese?

Thanks to the recently discovered photograph at the top of this article, we may soon have the option of picturing the actual Vincent Van Gogh as an adult artist. As Petapixel tells us, he sat for portraits at age 13, and again as a 19-year-old gallery apprentice (below), but beyond that no photographic evidence of the camera-shy artist was known to exist.

Exciting!

That’s Paul Gauguin on the far right. Others at the table include Emile Bernard and Arnold Koning, politician Felix Duval and actor-director André Antoine. But who is the bearded man smoking the pipe?

Van Gogh?

So thought the two collectors who purchased the small 1887 photo at a house sale a couple of years ago. Serge Plantureux, an antiquarian bookseller and photography expert who examined their find was optimistic enough to help them with further research, as he noted in the French magazine, L’Oeil de la Photographie:

I didn’t want to start doing what Americans call “wishful thinking,” that trap into which collectors and researchers fall, where their reasoning is governed only by what they want to see.

Don’t ditch Douglas, Roth, and Scorsese just yet, however. Experts at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum say the bearded fellow cannot be the artist. According to them, there’s not even much of a resemblance. He wasn’t so much camera shy, as deadly opposed to the photographic medium. His refusal to be photographed was an act of resistance.

That kind of puts a damper on things…

So.. no go Van Gogh? Oh well…vive la photo nouvellement découverte de Paul Gauguin (and friends)!

Simon Schama Presents Van Gogh and the Beginning of Modern Art

Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ Re-Created by Astronomer with 100 Hubble Space Telescope Images

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

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Frida Kahlo’s Colorful Clothes Revealed for the First Time & Photographed by Ishiuchi Miyako

in Art, Museums, Photography | May 29th, 2015

Imagine the dress up fun we could have in Grandma’s attic, if Grandma were Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954) and the attic was a sealed off Mexico City bathroom where Grandpa — artist Diego Rivera, natch — had stashed all her stuff.

Yellow-laced scarlet booties trimmed with beads!

A glamorous, rotting swimsuit and an extremely familiar-looking traditional Tehuana headdress!

A saucy prosthetic leg! A skirted body cast embellished with hand-painted hammer and sickle.

Now let us take a minute to live vicariously through photographer Ishiuchi Miyako, whose previous subjects have included the clothing of her late mother and victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In 2004, the Museo Frida Kahlo’s staff started organizing Frida’s personal effects. Rivera (1886–1957) had stored them in the aforementioned Mexico city bathroom, along with instructions that the room should remain sealed for a period of 15 years following his death. In 2011, the museum invited Miyako in to document the far-from-mint condition relics, almost 300 in total.

“If I met her, I wouldn’t ask any questions,” the photographer avowed in an interview with AnOther Magazine. “I would only want to stare at her and touch her body.”

There is an intimacy to her gaze that suggests this statement might be true. Rarely have a couple of bottles of dried up nail polish exuded such sensuality.

Miyako’s Frida photographs have been collected in a book, and can be seen in the flesh in London’s Michael Hoppen Gallery through mid-July.

via Patron of the Arts

Frida Kahlo Writes a Personal Letter to Georgia O’Keeffe After O’Keeffe’s Nervous Breakdown (1933)

Photos of a Very Young Frida Kahlo, Taken by Her Dad

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Visit Leon Trotsky in Mexico, 1938

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Patti Smith’s Polaroids of Artifacts from Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Roberto Bolaño & More

in Art, Literature, Photography | May 28th, 2015

Polaroid photography has seen a new wave of interest over the past decade, in large part from young photographers looking to do something different from what they can with the digital technology on which they grew up.

The other modern practitioners include no less a creator than Patti Smith, who have personally witnessed the format’s appearance, fade, and return. A few years ago, her Polaroid photography reached the galleries, becoming shows and installations in Connecticut and Paris.

These “black-and-white silver gelatin prints made from Polaroid negatives, small and square and in soft focus,” writes the New York Times’ A.O. Scott, “are culled from a collection that documents hundreds of encounters with worldly effects transformed into sacred relics. A fork and a spoon that belonged to Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet who has been one of Smith’s touchstones forever. [Robert] Mapplethorpe’s bedroom slippers and the tambourine he made for Smith. A chair that belonged to the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. William S. Burroughs’s bandanna. A replica of a life mask cast from the features of William Blake.”

Smith’s “gorgeous, misty photographs are inspired by artifacts from some of Smith’s favorite artists, from museums she has visited around the world, and many are from her personal life,” writes Flavorwire’s Emily Temple on “Camera Solo,” the Hartford exhibition which introduced these Polaroids to America in 2011. If you didn’t make it to the Wadsworth Atheneum for that show, you can still experience it through Patti Smith: Camera Solo, its companion book. Or have a look at her work on display at the BBC’s site, the gallery that offers the photos of Virginia Woolf’s bed, writing desk, and gravestone just above.

You can see even more at this post from Lens Culture on “Land 250,” the exhibition of Smith’s Polaroid photography at Paris’ Fondation Cartier.“I first took Polaroids in the early 1970s as components for collages,” it quotes Smith as saying. “In 1995, after the death of my husband, I was unable to center on the complex process of drawing, recording or writing a poem. The need for immediacy drew me again to the Polaroid. I chose a vintage Land 100.” In 2002, she settled on the Land 250, the venerable instant camera that gave the Paris show and its associated monograph their titles. It surely counts as one of the most important artifacts of Smith’s artistic life — and one with which she has captured the artifacts of so many other artistic lives important to her.

Patti Smith Reads Her Final Words to Robert Mapplethorpe

Patti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rimbaud to Susan Sontag

Andy Warhol’s 85 Polaroid Portraits: Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, O.J. Simpson & Many Others (1970–1987)

The Masterful Polaroid Pictures Taken by Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Björk’s 6 Favorite TED Talks, From the Mushroom Death Suit to the Virtual Choir

in Architecture, Art, Biology, Design, Food & Drink, Music, Photography, TED Talks | April 17th, 2015

Image by Zach Klein

Singer-songwriter Björk, currently enjoying a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, celebrated TED’s billionth video view with a playlist of six treasured TED Talks. What do her choices say about her?

In this talk, artist Jae Rhim Lee models her Mushroom Death Suit, a kicky little snuggy designed to decompose and remediate toxins from corpses before they leech back into the soil or sky. Despite Björk’s fondness for outré fashion, I’m pretty sure this choice goes beyond the merely sartorial.

For more information, or to get in line for a mushroom suit of your own, see the Infinity Burial Project.

Continuing with the mushroom / fashion theme, Björk next turns to designer Suzanne Lee, who demonstrates how she grows sustainable textiles from kombucha mushrooms. The resulting material may variously resemble paper or flexible vegetable leather. It is extremely receptive to natural dyes, but not water repellent, so bring a non-kombucha-based change of clothes in case you get caught in the rain.

For more information on Lee’s homegrown, super green fabric, visit BioCouture.

Björk’s clearly got a soft spot for things that grow: mushrooms, mushroom-based fabric, and now…building materials? Professor of Experimental Architecture Rachel Armstrong’s plan for self-regenerating buildings involves protocols, or “little fatty bags” that behave like living things despite an absence of DNA. I’m still not sure how it works, but as long as the little fatty bags are not added to my own ever-growing edifice, I’m down.

For more information on what Dr. Armstrong refers to as bottom up construction (including a scheme to keep Venice from sinking) see Black Sky Thinking.

Björk’s next choice takes a turn for the serious… with games. Game Designer Brenda Romero began exploring the heavy duty emotional possibilities of the medium when her 9‑year-old daughter returned from school with a less than nuanced understanding of the Middle Passage. The success of that experiment inspired her to create games that spur players to engage on a deeper level with thorny historical subjects. (The Trail of Tears required 50,000 individual reddish-brown pieces).

Learn more about Romero’s analog games at The Mechanic is the Message.

Remember those 50,000 individual pieces? As photographer Aaron Huey documented life on Pine Ridge Reservation, he was humbled by hearing himself referred to as “wasichu,” a Lakota word that can be translated as “non-Indian.” Huey decided not to shy away from its more pointed translation: “the one who takes the best meat for himself.” His TED Talk is an impassioned history lesson that begins in 1824 with the creation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and ends in an activist challenge.

Proof that Björk is not entirely about the quirk.

See Huey’s photos from the National Geographic cover story, “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.”

Björk opts to close things on a musical note with excerpts from composer Eric Whitacre’s “Lux Aurumque” and “Sleep” performed by a crowdsourced virtual choir. Its members—they swell to 1999 for “Sleep”—record their parts alone at home, then upload them to be mixed into something sonically and spiritually greater than the sum of its parts.

Listen to “Sleep” in its entirety here.

A Young Björk Deconstructs (Physically & Theoretically) a Television in a Delightful Retro Video

Björk and Sir David Attenborough Team Up in a New Documentary About Music and Technology

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

48 Hours of Joseph Campbell Lectures Free Online: The Power of Myth & Storytelling

Jean-Paul Sartre Reviews Orson Welles’ Masterwork (1945): “Citizen Kane Is Not Cinema”

How to Take Photographs Like Ansel Adams: The Master Explains The Art of “Visualization”

Venice in Beautiful Color Images 125 Years Ago: The Rialto Bridge, St. Mark’s Basilica, Doge’s Palace & More

Discovered: The Only Known Picture of Vincent Van Gogh as an Adult Artist? (Maybe, Maybe Not)

Frida Kahlo’s Colorful Clothes Revealed for the First Time & Photographed by Ishiuchi Miyako

Patti Smith’s Polaroids of Artifacts from Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Roberto Bolaño & More

Watch Björk’s 6 Favorite TED Talks, From the Mushroom Death Suit to the Virtual Choir

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