The Strange Magic of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile”

in Music | September 16th, 2021

Poor Poly­phon­ic. He was just about to deliv­er anoth­er per­fect­ly mixed trea­tise on a clas­sic rock mag­num opus when the YouTube algo­rithm and the Jimi Hen­drix Estate stepped in to stop him before pub­lish­ing. So while you can watch this real-time expli­ca­tion of Hendrix’s more-than-just-a-jam “Voodoo Chile” with just the the graph­ics and the nar­ra­tion, you should cue up the 15 minute track how­ev­er you can (for exam­ple on Spo­ti­fy), and then press play when when the video gives the sig­nal. (This might be the first YouTube explain­er video to ask for copy­right-skirt­ing help.)

And any­way, you should have a copy of Elec­tric Lady­land, right? It’s the one where Hen­drix and the Expe­ri­ence real­ly push all the bound­aries, tak­ing rock, blues, jazz, psy­che­delia, sci-fi, everything…all out as far as pos­si­ble in the stu­dio. It’s the one that intro­duced future mem­bers of the Band of Gyp­sies. And it’s the one that hints of every­thing that might have been, if Hen­drix hadn’t passed away soon after.

Now, clas­sic rock radio usu­al­ly plays the much short­er and less laid back “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” that clos­es the album. But this essay is about the longest track on Elec­tric Lady­land, the one that ends side one. This is the track that Hen­drix want­ed to sound like a light night jam at New York club The Scene—and which he record­ed after one par­tic­u­lar night doing just that. He taped the audi­ence effects soon after. Steve Win­wood is on key­boards. Jack Casady from Jef­fer­son Air­plane plays bass. And Mitch Mitchell turns in one of his great­est per­for­mances and solos.

In the lyrics, Poly­phon­ic notes, Hen­drix con­nects the blues to his Chero­kee her­itage and to voodoo, to sex, and then beyond into sci­ence fic­tion land­scapes. The song is a self-por­trait, show­ing the past, the influ­ence, the train­ing, and then the poten­tial that music, mag­ic, and (let’s face it) LSD could bring. The band is vib­ing. Win­wood drops riffs that are more British folk than Chica­go blues. Hen­drix strays far beyond the orbit of blues, swings past it one more time on his own slight return, and then explodes into star­dust.

Polyphonic’s video also looks beau­ti­ful and per­fect­ly inter­spers­es his cri­tique with the song’s main sec­tions. It may have sound­ed like a jam, but Hen­drix care­ful­ly designed it to flow the way it does. And Poly­phon­ic fol­lows suit. It is a high­ly enjoy­able walk through a track (again find it on Spo­ti­fy here) many already know, reawak­en­ing a sense of won­der about all its inher­ent, strange genius.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Sci­ence Fic­tion Formed Jimi Hen­drix

Jimi Hendrix’s Home Audio Sys­tem & Record Col­lec­tion Gets Recre­at­ed in His Lon­don Flat

Behold Moe­bius’ Many Psy­che­del­ic Illus­tra­tions of Jimi Hen­drix

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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Elvis Presley Gets the Polio Vaccine on The Ed Sullivan Show, Persuading Millions to Get Vaccinated (1956)

in Health, History, Television | September 15th, 2021

No one liv­ing has expe­ri­enced a viral event the size and scope of COVID-19. Maybe the unprece­dent­ed nature of the pan­dem­ic explains some of the vac­cine resis­tance. Dis­eases of such vir­u­lence became rare in places with ready access to vac­cines, and thus, iron­i­cal­ly, over time, have come to seem less dan­ger­ous. But there are still many peo­ple in wealthy nations who remem­ber polio, an epi­dem­ic that dragged on through the first half of the 20th cen­tu­ry before Jonas Salk per­fect­ed his vac­cine in the mid-fifties.

Polio’s dev­as­ta­tion has been summed up visu­al­ly in text­books and doc­u­men­taries by the ter­ri­fy­ing iron lung, an ear­ly ven­ti­la­tor. “At the height of the out­breaks in the late 1940s,” Meilan Sol­ly writes at Smith­son­ian, “polio par­a­lyzed an aver­age of more than 35,000 peo­ple each year,” par­tic­u­lar­ly affect­ing chil­dren, with 3,000 deaths in 1952 alone. “Spread viral­ly, it proved fatal for two out of ten vic­tims afflict­ed with paral­y­sis. Though mil­lions of par­ents rushed to inoc­u­late their chil­dren fol­low­ing the intro­duc­tion of Jonas Salk’s vac­cine in 1955, teenagers and young adults had proven more reluc­tant to get the shot.”

At the time, there were no vio­lent, orga­nized protests against the vac­cine, nor was resis­tance framed as a patri­ot­ic act of polit­i­cal loy­al­ty. But “cost, apa­thy and igno­rance became seri­ous set­backs to the erad­i­ca­tion effort,” says his­to­ri­an Stephen Mawd­s­ley. And, then as now, irre­spon­si­ble media per­son­al­i­ties with large plat­forms and lit­tle knowl­edge could do a lot of harm to the public’s con­fi­dence in life-sav­ing pub­lic health mea­sures, as when influ­en­tial gos­sip colum­nist Wal­ter Winchell wrote that the vac­cine “may be a killer,” dis­cour­ag­ing count­less read­ers from get­ting a shot.

When Elvis Pres­ley made his first appear­ance on Ed Sul­li­van’s show in 1956, “immu­niza­tion lev­els among Amer­i­can teens were at an abysmal 0.6 per­cent,” note Hal Her­sh­field and Ilana Brody at Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can. To counter impres­sions that the polio vac­cine was dan­ger­ous, pub­lic health offi­cials did not sole­ly rely on get­ting more and bet­ter infor­ma­tion to the pub­lic; they also took seri­ous­ly what Her­sh­field and Brody call the “cru­cial ingre­di­ents inher­ent to many of the most effec­tive behav­ioral change cam­paigns: social influ­ence, social norms and vivid exam­ples.” Sat­is­fy­ing all three, Elvis stepped up and agreed to get vac­ci­nat­ed “in front of mil­lions” back­stage before his sec­ond appear­ance on the Sul­li­van show.

Elvis could not have been more famous, and the cam­paign was a suc­cess for its tar­get audi­ence, estab­lish­ing a new social norm through influ­ence and exam­ple: “Vac­ci­na­tion rates among Amer­i­can youth sky­rock­et­ed to 80 per­cent after just six months.” Despite the threat he sup­pos­ed­ly posed to the estab­lish­ment, Elvis him­self was ready to serve the pub­lic. “I cer­tain­ly nev­er wan­na do any­thing,” he said, “that would be a wrong influ­ence.” See in the short video at the top how Amer­i­can pub­lic health offi­cials stopped mil­lions of pre­ventable deaths and dis­abil­i­ties by admit­ting a fact pro­pa­gan­dists and adver­tis­ers nev­er shy from — humans, on the whole, are eas­i­ly per­suad­ed by celebri­ties. Some­times they can even be per­suad­ed for the good.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Yo-Yo Ma Plays an Impromp­tu Per­for­mance in Vac­cine Clin­ic After Receiv­ing 2nd Dose

Dying in the Name of Vac­cine Free­dom

How Do Vac­cines (Includ­ing the COVID-19 Vac­cines) Work?: Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions

How Vac­cines Improved Our World In One Graph­ic

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

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How Victorian Homes Turned Deadly: Exploding Stoves, Poison Wallpaper, Ever-Tighter Corsets & More

in History | September 15th, 2021

The British have a num­ber of say­ings that strike lis­ten­ers of oth­er Eng­lish-speak­ing nation­al­i­ties as odd. “Safe as hous­es” has always had a curi­ous ring to my Amer­i­can ear, but it turns out to be quite iron­ic as well: the expres­sion grew pop­u­lar in the Vic­to­ri­an era, a time when Lon­don­ers were as like­ly to be killed by their own hous­es as any­thing else. That, at least, is the impres­sion giv­en by “The Bizarre Ways Vic­to­ri­ans Sab­o­taged Their Own Health & Lives,” the doc­u­men­tary inves­ti­ga­tion star­ring his­to­ri­an Suzan­nah Lip­scomb above.

Through­out the sec­ond half of the 19th cen­tu­ry, many an Eng­lish­man would have regard­ed him­self as liv­ing at the apex of civ­i­liza­tion. He would­n’t have been wrong, exact­ly, since that place and time wit­nessed an unprece­dent­ed num­ber of large-scale inno­va­tions indus­tri­al, sci­en­tif­ic, and domes­tic.

But a lit­tle knowl­edge can be a dan­ger­ous thing, and the Vic­to­ri­ans’ under­stand­ing of their favorite new tech­nolo­gies’ ben­e­fits ran con­sid­er­ably ahead of their under­stand­ing of the atten­dant threats. The haz­ards of the dark satan­ic mills were com­par­a­tive­ly obvi­ous, but even the heights of domes­tic bliss, as that era con­ceived of it, could turn dead­ly.

Speak­ing with a vari­ety of experts, Lip­scomb inves­ti­gates the dark side of a vari­ety of accou­trements of the Vic­to­ri­an high (or at least com­fort­ably mid­dle-class) life. These harmed not just men but women and chil­dren as well: take the breed­ing-ground of dis­ease that was the infant feed­ing bot­tle, or the organ-com­press­ing corset — one of which, adher­ing to the expe­ri­en­tial sen­si­bil­i­ty of British tele­vi­sion, Lip­scomb tries on and strug­gles with her­self. Mem­bers of the even­tu­al anti-corset revolt includ­ed Con­stance Lloyd, wife of Oscar Wilde, and it is Wilde’s apoc­ryphal final words that come to mind when the video gets into the arsenic con­tent of Vic­to­ri­an wall­pa­per. “Either that wall­pa­per goes, or I do,” Wilde is imag­ined to have said — and as mod­ern sci­ence now proves, it could have been more than a mat­ter of taste.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 108-Year-Old Woman Recalls What It Was Like to Be a Woman in Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land

The Col­or That May Have Killed Napoleon: Scheele’s Green

The 1855 Map That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Dis­ease Pre­ven­tion & Data Visu­al­iza­tion: Dis­cov­er John Snow’s Broad Street Pump Map

Hand-Col­ored Maps of Wealth & Pover­ty in Vic­to­ri­an Lon­don: Explore a New Inter­ac­tive Edi­tion of Charles Booth’s His­toric Work of Social Car­tog­ra­phy (1889)

Poignant and Unset­tling Post-Mortem Fam­i­ly Por­traits from the 19th Cen­tu­ry

Behold the Steam­punk Home Exer­cise Machines from the Vic­to­ri­an Age

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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The Roman Colosseum Has a Twin in Tunisia: Discover the Amphitheater of El Jem, One of the Best-Preserved Roman Ruins in the World

in Architecture, History | September 15th, 2021

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When Rome con­quered Carthage in the Third Punic War (149–146 BC), the Repub­lic renamed the region Africa, for Afri, a word the Berbers used for local peo­ple in present-day Tunisia. (The Ara­bic word for the region was Ifriqiya.) There­after would the Roman Empire have a strong­hold in North Africa: Carthage, the cap­i­tal of the African Province under Julius and Augus­tus Cae­sar and their suc­ces­sors. The province thrived. Sec­ond only to the city of Carthage in the region, the city of Thys­drus was an impor­tant cen­ter of olive oil pro­duc­tion and the home­town of Roman Emper­or Sep­ti­m­ius Severus, who bestowed impe­r­i­al favor upon it, grant­i­ng par­tial Roman cit­i­zen­ship to its inhab­i­tants.

In 238 AD, con­struc­tion began on an amphithe­ater in Thys­drus that would rival its largest cousins in Rome, the famed Amphithe­ater of El Jem. “Designed to seat a whop­ping crowd of 35,000 peo­ple,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra, El Jem was list­ed as a UNESCO World Her­itage site in 1979. Built entire­ly of stone blocks, the mas­sive the­ater was “mod­eled on the Col­i­se­um of Rome,” notes UNESCO, “with­out being an exact copy of the Fla­vian con­struc­tion…. Its facade com­pris­es three lev­els of arcades of Corinthi­an or com­pos­ite style. Inside, the mon­u­ment has con­served most of the sup­port­ing infra­struc­ture for the tiered seat­ing. The wall of the podi­um, the are­na and the under­ground pas­sages are prac­ti­cal­ly intact.”

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

 

Although the small city of El Jem hard­ly fea­tures on tours of the clas­si­cal past, it was, in the time of the Amphitheater’s con­struc­tion, a promi­nent site of strug­gle for con­trol over the Empire. The year 238 “was par­tic­u­lar­ly tumul­tuous,” Atlas Obscu­ra explains, due to a “revolt by the pop­u­la­tion of Thys­drus (El Jem), who opposed the enor­mous tax­a­tion amounts being levied by the Emper­or Maximinus’s local procu­ra­tor.” A riot of 50,000 peo­ple led to the ascen­sion of Gor­dian I, who ruled for 21 days dur­ing the “Year of the Six Emper­ors,” when “in just one year, six dif­fer­ent peo­ple were pro­claimed Emper­ors of Rome.”

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

From such fraught begin­nings, the mas­sive stone struc­ture of the El Jem Amphithe­ater went on to serve as a fortress dur­ing inva­sions of Van­dals and Arabs in the 5th-7th cen­turies. A thou­sand years after the Islam­ic con­quest, El Jem became a fortress dur­ing the Rev­o­lu­tions of Tunis. Lat­er cen­turies saw the amphithe­ater used for salt­pe­tre man­u­fac­ture, grain stor­age, and mar­ket stalls.

Despite hun­dreds of years of human activ­i­ty, in vio­lent upheavals and every­day busi­ness, El Jem remains one of the best pre­served Roman ruins in the world and one of the largest out­door the­aters ever con­struct­ed. More impor­tant­ly, it marks the site of one of North Africa’s first impe­r­i­al occu­pa­tions, one that would des­ig­nate a region — and even­tu­al­ly a con­ti­nent with a dizzy­ing­ly diverse mix of peo­ples — as “African.”

via @WassilDZ

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Explore the Ruins of Tim­gad, the “African Pom­peii” Exca­vat­ed from the Sands of Alge­ria

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pom­peii

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 CE: Explore Stun­ning Recre­ations of The Forum, Colos­se­um and Oth­er Mon­u­ments

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

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King Arthur in Film: Our Most Enduring Popular Entertainment Franchise? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #104

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | September 15th, 2021

With the recent the­atri­cal release of The Green Knight, your Pret­ty Much Pop host Mark Lin­sen­may­er, return­ing host Bri­an Hirt, plus Den of Geek’s David Crow and the very British Al Bak­er con­sid­er the range of cin­e­mat­ic Arthuri­ana, includ­ing Excal­ibur (1981), Camelot (1967), King Arthur (2004), King Arthur: Leg­end of the Sword (2017), First Knight (1995), Sword of the Valiant (1983), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1973), and Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).

Arthuri­ana encom­pass­es numer­ous (some­times con­tra­dict­ing) sto­ries that accrued and evolved for near­ly 1000 years after the prob­a­ble exis­tence of the unknown per­son who was the his­tor­i­cal source for the char­ac­ter before the 14th cen­tu­ry poem (author unknown) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and then in the 15th cen­tu­ry Sir Thomas Mal­o­ry wrote Le Morte d’Arthur, which pro­vid­ed the tem­plate for well-known mod­ern retellings like T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (1958).

The length and com­plex­i­ty of this mythol­o­gy makes a sin­gle film prob­lem­at­ic, with most set­tling on the love tri­an­gle between Arthur, Lancelot, and Guin­e­vere lead­ing to Camelot’s down­fall. Mul­ti­ple TV treat­ments have tried to do it jus­tice, and if Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Leg­end of the Sword had been a box office suc­cess, then we’d cur­rent­ly be see­ing mul­ti­ple films in an Arthuri­an cin­e­mat­ic uni­verse. By pick­ing a small­er sto­ry and not try­ing too hard to tie it to King Arthur (who appears but is not named), The Green Knight is able to be more cre­ative in paint­ing and updat­ing the strange sto­ry of Sir Gawain, who in pre­vi­ous cin­e­mat­ic out­ings (includ­ing Sword of the Valiant where Sean Con­nery played The Green Knight) involved Gawain involved in a series of non­sen­si­cal adven­tures far removed from the events told in the orig­i­nal poem.

We talk through char­ac­ter­i­za­tion in a myth­ic sto­ry, styl­iz­ing the epic (how much vio­lence? how weird?), its sta­tus as pub­lic domain mate­r­i­al (like Robin Hood and Sher­lock Holmes), and the moral les­son of the orig­i­nal Gawain poem and what direc­tor David Low­ery did with that for the new film. Is the new film actu­al­ly enjoy­able, or just care­ful­ly thought through and art­ful­ly shot? Note that we don’t spoil any­thing sig­nif­i­cant about The Green Knight until the last ten min­utes, so it’s fine if you haven’t seen it (Al had­n’t either).

Here are song arti­cles by David Crow on our top­ic:

Oth­er arti­cles we used to prep for this includ­ed:

The YouTube ver­sions of the source mate­r­i­al that Mark lis­tened to are here and here, and the rel­e­vant Great Cours­es offer­ing is here.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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The Very First Webcam Was Invented to Keep an Eye on a Coffee Pot at Cambridge University

in Food & Drink, History, Technology | September 14th, 2021

The inter­net as we know it today began with a cof­fee pot. Despite the ring of exag­ger­a­tion, that claim isn’t actu­al­ly so far-fetched. When most of us go online, we expect some­thing new: often not just some­thing new to read, but some­thing new to watch. This, as those of us past a cer­tain age will recall, was not the case with the ear­ly World Wide Web, con­sist­ing as it most­ly did of sta­t­ic pages of text, updat­ed irreg­u­lar­ly if at all. Younger read­ers will have to imag­ine even that being a cut­ting-edge thrill, but we did­n’t real­ly feel like we were liv­ing in the future until the fall of 1993, when XCof­fee first went live.

This ground­break­ing tech­no­log­i­cal project “start­ed back in the dark days of 1991,” writes co-cre­ator Quentin Stafford-Fras­er, “when the World Wide Web was lit­tle more than a glint in CERN’s eye.” At the time, Stafford-Fras­er was employed as one of fif­teen researchers in the “Tro­jan Room” of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge Com­put­er Lab. “Being poor, impov­er­ished aca­d­e­mics, we only had one cof­fee fil­ter machine between us, which lived in the cor­ri­dor just out­side the Tro­jan Room. How­ev­er, being high­ly ded­i­cat­ed and hard-work­ing aca­d­e­mics, we got through a lot of cof­fee, and when a fresh pot was brewed, it often did­n’t last long.”

It occurred to Stafford-Fras­er to train an unused video cam­era from the Tro­jan Room on the cof­fee pot (and thus the amount of cof­fee avail­able with­in), then con­nect it to a com­put­er, specif­i­cal­ly an Acorn Archimedes. His col­league Paul Jardet­zky “wrote a ‘serv­er’ pro­gram, which ran on that machine and cap­tured images of the pot every few sec­onds at var­i­ous res­o­lu­tions, and I wrote a ‘client’ pro­gram which every­body could run, which con­nect­ed to the serv­er and dis­played an icon-sized image of the pot in the cor­ner of the screen. The image was only updat­ed about three times a minute, but that was fine because the pot filled rather slow­ly, and it was only greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the cof­fee.”

XCof­fee, the result­ing pro­gram, was meant only to pro­vide this much-need­ed infor­ma­tion to Com­put­er Lab mem­bers else­where in the build­ing. But after the release of image-dis­play­ing web browsers in 1993, it found a much wider audi­ence as the world’s first stream­ing web­cam. Stafford-Fraser’s suc­ces­sors “res­ur­rect­ed the sys­tem, treat­ed it to a new frame grab­ber, and made the images avail­able on the World Wide Web. Since then, hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple have looked at the cof­fee pot, mak­ing it undoubt­ed­ly the most famous in the world.” Stafford-Fras­er wrote these words in 1995; in the years there­after XCof­fee went on to receive mil­lions of views before its even­tu­al shut­down in 2001.

In the Cen­tre for Com­put­ing His­to­ry video above, Stafford-Fras­er shows the very Olivet­ti cam­era he orig­i­nal­ly used to mon­i­tor the cof­fee lev­el. (He’d pre­vi­ous­ly worked at the Olivet­ti Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry, whose par­ent com­pa­ny also owned Acorn Com­put­ers.) “We could see things at a dis­tance before,” he says. “We could view tele­vi­sion pro­grams, we could look through tele­scopes.” But only after the Tro­jan Room’s cof­fee pot hit the inter­net could we “see what’s hap­pen­ing now, some­where else in the world,” on demand. Thir­ty years after XCof­fee’s devel­op­ment, we’re mes­mer­ized by live-stream­ing stars and sur­round­ed by “smart” home appli­ances, hop­ing for noth­ing so much as way to con­cen­trate on our imme­di­ate sur­round­ings again — to wake up, if you like, and smell the cof­fee.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Web Cams of Sur­re­al­ly Emp­ty City Streets in Venice, New York, Lon­don & Beyond

Sci-Fi “Por­tal” Con­nects Cit­i­zens of Lublin & Vil­nius, Allow­ing Passers­by Sep­a­rat­ed by 376 Miles to Inter­act in Real Time

George Orwell Pre­dict­ed Cam­eras Would Watch Us in Our Homes; He Nev­er Imag­ined We’d Glad­ly Buy and Install Them Our­selves

The Cof­fee Pot That Fueled Hon­oré de Balzac’s Cof­fee Addic­tion

The Hertel­la Cof­fee Machine Mount­ed on a Volk­swa­gen Dash­board (1959): The Most Euro­pean Car Acces­so­ry Ever Made

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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What Makes Basquiat’s Untitled Great Art: One Painting Says Everything Basquiat Wanted to Say About America, Art & Being Black in Both Worlds

in Art | September 14th, 2021

They wouldn’t have let Jean-Michel into a Tiffany’s if he want­ed to use the bath­room or if he went to buy an engage­ment ring and pulled a wad of cash out of his pock­et. 

– Stephen Tor­ton, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s stu­dio assis­tant

When Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Unti­tled (Skull) sold for $110.5 mil­lion in 2017 to Japan­ese bil­lion­aire Yusaku Mae­sawa, the artist joined the ranks of Da Vin­ci, De Koon­ing, and Picas­so as one of the top sell­ing painters in the world, sur­pass­ing a pre­vi­ous record set in 2013 by his men­tor Andy Warhol’s work. Unti­tled dates from 1982, dur­ing “the young Basquiat’s mer­cu­r­ial ear­ly years,” writes Ben Davis at Art­net, “even before his first gallery show at Anni­na Nosei, when he was still a Caribbean-Amer­i­can kid from Brook­lyn ener­get­i­cal­ly boot­strap­ping him­self into the lime­light of the down­town art scene.” It is this peri­od that most inter­ests col­lec­tors like Mae­sawa.

Basquiat’s tran­si­tion from graf­fi­ti artist to art world dar­ling was dra­mat­ic, cel­e­bra­to­ry, and self-destruc­tive, all char­ac­ter­is­tics of his work. But crit­i­cal prim­i­tivism reduced him to a token — an art world atti­tude saw Basquiats as objects to be stripped of con­text, turned into dec­o­ra­tive badges of authen­tic­i­ty and world­li­ness. “Maezawa’s head paint­ing pos­sess­es a loud, gnash­ing, and con­fi­dent aura,” Shan­non Lee writes at Art­sy. But the artist’s “use of skulls… is deeply root­ed in his iden­ti­ty as a Black artist in Amer­i­ca. They are strong­ly evoca­tive of African masks, which have been so fetishized by the art mar­ket since mod­ernists like Picas­so appro­pri­at­ed them from their native con­texts.”

But head/skull motifs in Basquiat’s work are not only state­ments of dias­poric Black iden­ti­ty — they emerge through his the­mat­ic play of human embod­i­ment, men­tal illness/health, the com­pe­ti­tions of the graf­fi­ti world and the headgames of the art world, which Basquiat both mas­tered and cri­tiqued as a can­ny out­sider. “No sub­ject is more pow­er­ful or more sought after in the oeu­vre of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” notes Christie’s New York, “than the sin­gu­lar skull.” Though maybe not the most repro­duced of Basquiat’s heads, 1982’s Unti­tled — argues the Great Art Explained video above — exem­pli­fies the themes.

At only 22 years old, Basquiat pro­duced “a sin­gle paint­ing” that said “every­thing he want­ed to say about Amer­i­ca, about art and about being black in both worlds.” So sin­gu­lar is Unti­tled that it became its own one-paint­ing show in 2018 when its new own­er sent it on a tour of the world, begin­ning in the artist’s home­town at the Brook­lyn Muse­um. Maesawa’s deci­sion to share the paint­ing presents a con­trast to the way Basquiat has been treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly by oth­er own­ers of his work like Tiffany & Co., who explain their pur­chase and recent, con­tro­ver­sial com­mer­cial use of his Equals Pi by cit­ing his “affin­i­ty for the company’s state­ment blue col­or,” writes Tirhakah Love at Dai­ly Beast — a col­or they trade­marked ten years after Basquiat’s death.

The pro­pri­etary co-opta­tion of Basquiat’s life and work to sell sym­bols of colo­nial­ism like dia­monds, among oth­er lux­u­ry goods — and the turn­ing of his work into the ulti­mate lux­u­ry good — debas­es his pur­pos­es. Why show Equals Pi “as a prop to an ad?” asked his friend and for­mer room­mate Alex­is Adler. “Loan it out to a muse­um. In a time where there were very few Black artists rep­re­sent­ed in West­ern muse­ums, that was his goal: to get to a muse­um.” Find out in the Great Art Explained video how one of his most famous — and most expen­sive — works encap­su­lates that strug­gle through its vivid col­or and sym­bol­ic visu­al lan­guage.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Take a Close Look at Basquiat’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Art in a New 500-Page, 14-Pound, Large For­mat Book by Taschen

The Sto­ry of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Rise in the 1980s Art World Gets Told in a New Graph­ic Nov­el

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Chaot­ic Bril­liance of Jean-Michel Basquiat: From Home­less Graf­fi­ti Artist to Inter­na­tion­al­ly Renowned Painter

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

 

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Zoom Into a Super High Resolution Photo of Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”

in Art, Google, Music | September 14th, 2021

“Just as we take the train to get to Taras­con or Rouen, we take death to reach a star,” Vin­cent Van Gogh wrote to his broth­er from Arles in the sum­mer of 1888:

What’s cer­tain­ly true in this argu­ment is that while alive, we can­not go to a star, any more than once dead we’d be able to take the train.

The fol­low­ing sum­mer, as a patient in the asy­lum of Saint-Paul-de-Mau­sole in Provence, he paint­ed what would become his best known work — The Star­ry Night.

The sum­mer after that, he was dead of a gun­shot wound to the abdomen, com­mon­ly believed to be self-inflict­ed.

Judg­ing from thoughts expressed in that same let­ter, Van Gogh may have con­ceived of such a death as a “celes­tial means of loco­mo­tion, just as steam­boats, omnibus­es and the rail­way are ter­res­tri­al ones”:

To die peace­ful­ly in old age would be to go there on foot.

Although his win­dow at the asy­lum afford­ed him a sun­rise view, and a pri­vate audi­ence with the promi­nent morn­ing star he men­tioned in anoth­er let­ter to Theo, Star­ry Night’s vista is “both an exer­cise in obser­va­tion and a clear depar­ture from it,” accord­ing to 2019’s MoMA High­lights: 375 Works from The Muse­um of Mod­ern Art:

The vision took place at night, yet the paint­ing, among hun­dreds of art­works van Gogh made that year, was cre­at­ed in sev­er­al ses­sions dur­ing the day, under entire­ly dif­fer­ent atmos­pher­ic con­di­tions. The pic­turesque vil­lage nes­tled below the hills was based on oth­er views—it could not be seen from his window—and the cypress at left appears much clos­er than it was. And although cer­tain fea­tures of the sky have been recon­struct­ed as observed, the artist altered celes­tial shapes and added a sense of glow.

Those who can’t vis­it MoMA to see The Star­ry Night in per­son may enjoy get­ting up close and per­son­al with Google Arts and Cul­ture’s zoomable, high res dig­i­tal repro­duc­tion. Keep click­ing into the image to see the paint­ing in greater detail.

Before or after for­mu­lat­ing your own thoughts on The Star­ry Night and the emo­tion­al state that con­tributed to its exe­cu­tion, get the per­spec­tive of singer-song­writer Mag­gie Rogers in the below episode of Art Zoom, in which pop­u­lar musi­cians share their thoughts while nav­i­gat­ing around a famous can­vas.

Bonus! Throw your­self into a free col­or­ing page of The Star­ry Night here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Gallery of 1,800 Gigapix­el Images of Clas­sic Paint­ings: See Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Ear­ring, Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night & Oth­er Mas­ter­pieces in Close Detail

Vin­cent Van Gogh’s “The Star­ry Night”: Why It’s a Great Paint­ing in 15 Min­utes

1,000+ Art­works by Vin­cent Van Gogh Dig­i­tized & Put Online by Dutch Muse­ums: Enter Van Gogh World­wide

Rare Vin­cent van Gogh Paint­ing Goes on Pub­lic Dis­play for the First Time: Explore the 1887 Paint­ing Online

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

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Art History School: Learn About the Art & Lives of Toulouse-Lautrec, Gustav Klimt, Frances Bacon, Edvard Munch & Many More

in Art, History, Life | September 13th, 2021

Artist and video­g­ra­ph­er Paul Priest­ly is an enthu­si­as­tic and gen­er­ous sort of fel­low.

His free online draw­ing tuto­ri­als abound with encour­ag­ing words for begin­ners, and he clear­ly rel­ish­es lift­ing the cur­tain to reveal his home stu­dio set up and self designed cam­era rig.

But we here at Open Cul­ture think his great­est gift to home view­ers are his Art His­to­ry School pro­files of well-known artists like Hen­ri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Vin­cent Van Gogh.

An avid sto­ry­teller, he’s drawn to those with trag­ic his­to­ries — the deci­sion to piv­ot from imper­son­at­ing the artist, as he did with Van Gogh, to serv­ing as a reporter inter­est­ed in how such details as syphilis and alco­holism informed lives and careers is a wise one.

Priest­ly makes a con­vinc­ing case that Lautrec’s aris­to­crat­ic upbring­ing con­tributed to his mis­ery. His short stature was the result, not of dwarfism, but Pykn­odysos­to­sis (PYCD) a rare bone weak­en­ing dis­ease that sure­ly owed some­thing to his par­ents’ sta­tus as first cousins.

His appear­ance made him a sub­ject of life­long mock­ery, and ensured that the free­wheel­ing artist scene in Mont­martre would prove more wel­com­ing than the blue­blood milieu into which he’d been born.

Priest­ly makes a meal of that Demi-monde, intro­duc­ing view­ers to many of the play­ers.

He height­ens our appre­ci­a­tion for Lautrec’s mas­ter­piece, At the Moulin Rouge, by briefly ori­ent­ing us to who’s seat­ed around the table: writer and crit­ic Édouard Dujardin, dancer La Mac­arona, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Paul Secau, and “cham­pagne sales­man and debauchee” Mau­rice Guib­ert, who ear­li­er posed as a lech­er­ous patron in Lautrec’s At the Café La Mie.

Queen of the Can­can La Goulue hangs out in the back­ground with anoth­er dancer, the won­der­ful­ly named La Môme Fro­mage.

Lautrec places him­self square­ly in the mix, look­ing very much at home.

Con­sid­er that these names, like those of fre­quent Lautrec sub­jects acro­bat­ic dancer Jane Avril and chanteuse Yvette Guil­bert were as cel­e­brat­ed in Belle Epoque Mont­martre as many of the painters Lautrec rubbed shoul­ders with — Degas, Pis­sar­ro, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Manet.

In an arti­cle in The Smith­son­ian, Paul Tra­cht­man recounts how Lautrec dis­cov­ered the mod­el for Manet’s famous nude Olympia, Vic­torine Meurent, “liv­ing in abject pover­ty in a top-floor apart­ment down a Mont­martre alley. She was now an old, wrin­kled, bald­ing woman. Lautrec called on her often, and took his friends along, pre­sent­ing her with gifts of choco­late and flow­ers — as if court­ing death itself.”

Mean­while Degas sniffed that Lautrec’s stud­ies of women in a broth­el “stank of syphilis.”

Per­haps Priest­ly will delve into Degas for an upcom­ing Art His­to­ry School episode … there’s no short­age of mate­r­i­al there.

Above are three more of Paul Priestly’s Art His­to­ry School pro­files that we’ve enjoyed on Frances Bacon, Edvard Munch and Gus­tav Klimt. You can sub­scribe to his chan­nel here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Art His­to­ry Web Book

Art His­to­ri­an Pro­vides Hilar­i­ous & Sur­pris­ing­ly Effi­cient Art His­to­ry Lessons on Tik­Tok

Free Art & Art His­to­ry Cours­es 

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

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Sci-Fi Pioneer Hugo Gernsback Predicts Telemedicine in 1925

in Health, Sci Fi, Technology | September 13th, 2021

If you’ve ever won­dered why one of sci­ence fiction’s great­est hon­ors is called the “Hugo,” meet Hugo Gerns­back, one of the genre’s most impor­tant fig­ures, a man whose work has been var­i­ous­ly described as “dread­ful,” “tawdry,” “incom­pe­tent,” “grace­less,” and “a sort of ani­mat­ed cat­a­logue of gad­gets.” But Gerns­back isn’t remem­bered as a writer, but as an edi­tor, pub­lish­er (of Amaz­ing Sto­ries mag­a­zine), and pio­neer of sci­ence fact, for it was Gerns­back who first intro­duced the earth-shak­ing tech­nol­o­gy of radio to the mass­es in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.

“In 1905 (just a year after emi­grat­ing to the U.S. from Ger­many at the age of 20),” writes Matt Novak at Smith­son­ian, “Gerns­back designed the first home radio set and the first mail-order radio busi­ness in the world.” He would lat­er pub­lish the first radio mag­a­zine, then, in 1913, a mag­a­zine that came to be called Sci­ence and Inven­tion, a place where Gerns­back could print cat­a­logues of gad­gets with­out the both­er of hav­ing to please lit­er­ary crit­ics. In these pages he shone, pre­dict­ing futur­is­tic tech­nolo­gies extrap­o­lat­ed from the cut­ting edge. He was under­stand­ably enthu­si­as­tic about the future of radio. Like all self-appoint­ed futur­ists, his pre­dic­tions were a mix of the ridicu­lous and the prophet­ic.

Case in point: Gerns­back the­o­rized in a 1925  Sci­ence and Inven­tion arti­cle that com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nolo­gies like radio would rev­o­lu­tion­ize med­i­cine, in exact­ly the ways that they have in the 21st cen­tu­ry, though not quite through the device Gerns­back invent­ed: the “teledactyl,” which is not a robot­ic dinosaur but a telemed­i­cine plat­form that would allow doc­tors to exam­ine, diag­nose, and treat patients from a dis­tance with robot­ic arms, a hap­tic feed­back sys­tem, and “by means of a tele­vi­sion screen.” Nev­er mind that tele­vi­sion did­n’t exist in 1925. Sound­ing not a lit­tle like his con­tem­po­rary Buck­min­ster Fuller, Gerns­back insist­ed that his device “can be built today with means avail­able right now.”

It would require sig­nif­i­cant upgrades to radio tech­nol­o­gy before it could sup­port the wire­less inter­net that lets us meet with doc­tors on com­put­er screens. Per­haps Gerns­back was­n’t entire­ly wrong — tech­nol­o­gy may have allowed for some ver­sion of this in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, if med­i­cine had been inspired to move in a more sci-fi direc­tion. But the focus of the med­ical com­mu­ni­ty — after the dev­as­ta­tion of the 1918 flu epi­dem­ic — had under­stand­ably turned toward dis­ease cure and pre­ven­tion, not dis­tance diag­no­sis.

Gerns­back looked fifty years ahead, to a time, he wrote, when “the busy doc­tor… will not be able to vis­it his patients as he does now. It takes too much time, and he can only, at best, see a lim­it­ed num­ber today.” Home vis­its did not last anoth­er fifty years, but remote med­i­cine did­n’t take their place until almost 100 years after Gerns­back wrote. Indeed, the web­cams that now give doc­tors access to patients in the pan­dem­ic only came about in 1991 for the pur­pose of mak­ing sure the break room in the com­put­er sci­ence depart­ment at Cam­bridge had cof­fee.

Gerns­back even antic­i­pat­ed advances in space med­i­cine, which has spent the last sev­er­al years build­ing the tech­nol­o­gy he pre­dict­ed in order to per­form surg­eries on sick and injured astro­nauts stuck months or years away from Earth. He would have par­tic­u­lar­ly appre­ci­at­ed this usage, though he isn’t giv­en cred­it for the idea. Gerns­back also deserves cred­it for pok­ing fun at him­self, as he seemed to real­ize how hard it was for most peo­ple to take him seri­ous­ly.

To non-vision­ar­ies, the tech­nolo­gies of the future would all seem equal­ly ridicu­lous today, as in the pages of Gerns­back­’s satir­i­cal 1947 pub­li­ca­tion, Pop­u­lar Neck­an­ics Gagazine. Here, we find such objects as the Lam­pli­fi­er, “the lamp that has EVERYTHING.” Gerns­back­’s love of gad­gets blurred the bound­aries between sci­ence fic­tion and fact, always with the strong sug­ges­tion that — no mat­ter how use­ful or how ludi­crous — if a machine could be imag­ined, it could be built and put to work.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Iso­la­tor: A 1925 Hel­met Designed to Elim­i­nate Dis­trac­tions & Increase Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty (Cre­at­ed by Sci­Fi Pio­neer Hugo Gerns­back)

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Enter a Huge Archive of Amaz­ing Sto­ries, the World’s First Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine, Launched in 1926

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts in 2001 What the World Will Look By Decem­ber 31, 2100

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

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The Evolution of Kandinsky’s Painting: A Journey from Realism to Vibrant Abstraction Over 46 Years

in Art, History | September 13th, 2021

Like most renowned abstract painters, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky could also paint real­is­ti­cal­ly. Unlike most renowned abstract painters, he only took up art in earnest after study­ing eco­nom­ics and law at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Moscow. He then found ear­ly suc­cess teach­ing those sub­jects, which seem to have proven too world­ly for his sen­si­bil­i­ties: at age 30 he enrolled in the Munich Acad­e­my to con­tin­ue the study of art that he’d left off while grow­ing up in Odessa. The sur­viv­ing paint­ings he pro­duced at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry and the begin­ning of the 20th, dis­played on Wikipedi­a’s list of his works, include a vari­ety of land­scapes, most pre­sent­ing Ger­man and Russ­ian (or today Ukrain­ian) land­scapes undis­turbed by a sin­gle human fig­ure.

Kandin­sky made dra­mat­ic change come with 1903’s The Blue Rid­er (above). The pres­ence of the tit­u­lar fig­ure made for an obvi­ous dif­fer­ence from so many of the images he’d cre­at­ed over the pre­vi­ous half-decade; a shift in its very per­cep­tion of real­i­ty made for a less obvi­ous one.

This is not the world as we nor­mal­ly see it, and Kandin­sky’s track record of high­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive paint­ings tells us that he must delib­er­ate­ly have cho­sen to paint it it that way. With fel­low artists like August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch, and Gabriele Mün­ter, he went on to form the Blue Rid­er Group, whose pub­li­ca­tions argued for abstract art’s capa­bil­i­ty to attain great spir­i­tu­al heights, espe­cial­ly through col­or.

“Grad­u­al­ly Kandin­sky makes depar­tures from the exter­nal ‘world as a mod­el’ into the world of ‘paint as a thing in itself,’ ” writes painter Markus Ray. “Still depict­ing ‘world­ly scenes,’ these paint­ings start to take on pur­er col­ors and shapes. He reduces vol­umes into sim­ple shapes, and col­ors into bright and vibrant hues. One can still make out the scene, but the shapes and col­ors begin to take on a life of their own.” This is espe­cial­ly true of the scenes Kandin­sky paint­ed in Bavaria, such as 1909’s Rail­way near Mur­nau above. The out­break of World War I five years lat­er sent him back to Rus­sia, where he con­tin­ued his pio­neer­ing jour­ney toward a visu­al art equal in expres­sive pow­er to music, which he called his “ulti­mate teacher.” But by the ear­ly 1920s it had become clear that his increas­ing­ly indi­vid­u­al­is­tic and non-rep­re­sen­ta­tive ten­den­cies would­n’t sit well with the Sovi­et cul­tur­al pow­ers that be.

A return to Ger­many was in order. “In 1921, at the age of 55, Kandin­sky moved to Weimar to teach mur­al paint­ing and intro­duc­to­ry ana­lyt­i­cal draw­ing at the new­ly found­ed Bauhaus school,” says Christie’s. “There he worked along­side the likes of Paul Klee, Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers,” and also expand­ed on Goethe’s the­o­ries of col­or. A true believ­er in the Bauhaus’ “phi­los­o­phy of social improve­ment through art,” Kandin­sky also wound up among the artists whose work was exhib­it­ed in the Nazi Par­ty’s “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937. By that time the Bauhaus was dis­solved and Kandin­sky had reset­tled in Paris, where until his death in 1944 (as evi­denced by Wikipedi­a’s list of his paint­ings) he kept push­ing fur­ther into abstrac­tion, seek­ing ever-pur­er expres­sions of the human soul until the very end.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Time Trav­el Back to 1926 and Watch Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Make Art in Some Rare Vin­tage Video

Helen Mir­ren Tells Us Why Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Is Her Favorite Artist (And What Act­ing & Mod­ern Art Have in Com­mon)

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

An Inter­ac­tive Social Net­work of Abstract Artists: Kandin­sky, Picas­so, Bran­cusi & Many More

How to Paint Like Kandin­sky, Picas­so, Warhol & More: A Video Series from the Tate

The Guggen­heim Puts Online 1700 Great Works of Mod­ern Art from 625 Artists

Take a Jour­ney Through 933 Paint­ings by Sal­vador Dalí & Watch His Sig­na­ture Sur­re­al­ism Emerge

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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