When Halloween comes around this year, consider playing a round of hyakumonogatari. You’ll need to assemble a hundred candles beforehand, but that’s the easy part; you and your friends will also need to know just as many ghost stories. In early nineteenth-century Japan, “participants would sit in a candlelit room and take turns telling frightening tales. After each one was shared, a candle would be extinguished until there was no light left, in the room. It was then that the yōkai [“strange apparitions”) would appear.” So says Youtuber Hochelaga (who’s previously covered the Biblical apocalypse and long-ago predictions of the future) in the video above, “The Ghosts of Hokusai.”

We all know the name of Katsushika Hokusai, the most widely renowned master of the traditional Japanese woodblock-print art called ukiyo-e. In a lifetime spanning the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, Hochelaga notes, Hokusai created around 30,000 unique pieces of art, including The Great Wave off Kanagawa, part of Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

But before executing that triumphant late series, […]

“What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians?” goes the hoary old musicians’ joke. Answer: “a bass player.” Hahaha. Very funny. And just plain untrue. Maybe the bass has fewer strings to master than the guitar, but it requires better timing, and — most importantly — more listening than any other instrument in a band setting. Or so says Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band I sometimes think of as a bunch of guys who hang out with a bass player.

All musicians need to listen carefully to other players on stage, but the bass player’s role is special, Flea says in the video above, excerpted from the hour-long bass lesson you can watch in full below. Bassists need to listen to melody players and soloists, supporting their parts with subtlety and nuance, without (says Flea of all people) doing the kind of showboating that pulls focus from the leads. Bass players also need to lock in with the drummer, listening so intently they can fit their notes right in the center of each drum hit.

This […]

Those who love the work of Federico Fellini must envy anyone who sees La Dolce Vita for the first time. But today such a viewer, however overwhelmed by the lavish cinematic feast laid before his eyes, will wonder if giving the intrusive tabloid photographer friend of Marcello Mastroianni’s protagonist the name “Paparazzo” isn’t a bit on the nose. Unlike La Dolce Vita‘s first audiences in 1960, we’ve been hearing about real-life paparazzi throughout most all of our lives, and thus may not realize that the word itself originally derives from Fellini’s masterpiece. Each time we refer to the paparazzi, we pay tribute to Paparazzo.

In the video essay above, Evan Puschak (better known as the Nerdwriter) traces the origins of paparazzi: not just the word, but the often bothersome professionals denoted by the word. The story begins with the dictator Benito Mussolini, an “avid movie fan and fanboy of film stars” who wrote “more than 100 fawning letters to American actress Anita Page, including several marriage proposals.” Knowing full well “the emotional power of cinema as a tool for propaganda […]

The flapper is the Roaring 20s’ enduring emblem – a liberated, young woman with bobbed hair, rolled down stockings, and a public thirst for cocktails.

(My grandmother longed to be one, and succeeded, as best one could in Cairo, Illinois, only to marry an older man at the age of 17, and give birth to my father a few months before the stock market crashed, bringing the frivolity of the decade to an abrupt halt.)

Our abiding affection for the flapper is stoked on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novella, The Great Gatsby, and its many stage and screen adaptations, with their depictions of wild parties featuring guests like Miss Baedecker (“When she’s had five or six cocktails she always starts screaming like that”) and Lucille (“I never care what I do, so I always have a good time.”)

The vintage fashion blog Glamour Daze’s newly colorized footage of a 1929  fashion show in Buffalo, New York, at […]

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