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

in Art, Religion | December 17th, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hints of these interests are threaded throughout her work.

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

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

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

Perhaps we are getting closer to understanding.

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

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

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

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

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How Emily Dickinson Writes A Poem: A Short Video Introduction

in Literature, Poetry | December 17th, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An 8‑Hour Marathon Reading of 500 Emily Dickinson Poems

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

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The Revolutionary Title Sequences and Trailers Created by Pablo Ferro: Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Stop Making Sense, Bullitt & Other Films

in Animation, Film | December 17th, 2018

Pablo Ferro, who died last month after more than 60 years in graphic design, had such an impact on cinema that we’ve all felt it at one time or another, despite the fact that he never directed a single feature himself. Rather, he made his mark with title sequences and trailers, each of them exuding no small amount of then-revolutionary and still difficult-to-imitate style. Having emigrated from Cuba to New York at the age of twelve, Ferro taught himself to animate before finding his first freelance work in illustration and then his first real job in advertising. For his commercials he developed a signature style of rapid cutting, a new aesthetic made to sell new products, and that impressed many who saw them, including a certain Stanley Kubrick, then at work on Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

“He said we could sell the movie as a product,” Ferro remembers Kubrick telling him in an in-depth three-part interview at Art of the Title. “I said that would be great.” The resulting trailer’s interplay of image, sound, voiceover, and especially text looked like nothing that had ever come before, and even it turned out not to be Ferro’s most memorable contribution to the film.

That honor belongs to the opening credits above, which layer Ferro’s signature hand lettering — an element requested by clients again and again throughout the rest of his career. (“He asked me what I thought about human beings,” Ferro remembers of Kubrick in the interview. “I said one thing about human beings is that everything that is mechanical, that is invented, is very sexual. We looked at each other and realized — the B‑52, refueling in midair, of course, how much more sexual can you get?!”)

Four years later, in 1968, Ferro would use cutting-edge split-screen image techniques to craft an even more visually stunning opening title sequence for Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair, a masterpiece of style made to open a film itself celebrated as a masterpiece of style. Ferro describes it as an experience “where it was a challenge to make it both simple to watch and understand, and fitting for the film. I was lucky that the costumes and the cinematography had the look of, like, a bizarre magazine. The whole film felt like a theatrical show.”

Later that same year, another set of Ferro-designed titles would open another Steve McQueen-starring thriller, Bullitt, which needed each and every one of its visual elements to reflect the daredevil sensibility, albeit a controlled one, at its core. Ferro got a bit wilder when he worked for Kubrick again, cutting together the trailer below for 1971’s A Clockwork Orange. Though reminiscent of his Dr. Strangelove trailer in its use of onscreen text — “SATIRIC,” “BIZARRE,” “FRIGHTENING,” “METAPHORICAL,” and “BEETHOVEN,” among other suitable descriptors — it dispenses entirely with voices, those of the film’s characters or otherwise, relying entirely on the intricate layering of music and image for its considerable effect.

“Every frame is perfect with the music and it tells you the whole story at the same time without saying a word or reading words aloud,” as Ferro himself puts it. “I could see why nobody imitated it — it takes a lot of work.”

With all this on his résumé, it makes sense that more work continued to come his way until the end, including trailers and titles for Stop Making Sense, Beetlejuice, Men in Black, and L.A. Confidential, all of which, and much else besides, you can see in the Art of the Title retrospective video below. Though Pablo Ferro himself has gone, his influence on film will no doubt last for decades and decades to come.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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How the CIA Helped Shape the Creative Writing Scene in America

in Literature, Politics, Writing | December 14th, 2018

Image by Arielle Fragassi, via Flickr Commons

In May of 1967,” writes Patrick Iber at The Awl, “a former CIA officer named Tom Braden published a confession in the Saturday Evening Post under the headline, ‘I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral.’” With the hard-boiled tone one might expect from a spy, but the candor one may not, Braden revealed the Agency’s funding and support of all kinds of individuals and activities, including, perhaps most controversially, in the arts. Against objections that so many artists and writers were socialists, Braden writes, “in much of Europe in the 1950’s [socialists] were about the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.”

Whatever truth there is to the statement, its seeming wisdom has popped up again in a recent Washington Post op-ed by Sonny Bunch, editor and film critic of the conservative Washington Free Beacon. The CIA should once again fund “a culture war against communism,” Bunch argues. The export (to China) he offers as an example? Boots Riley’s hip, anti-neoliberal, satirical film Sorry to Bother You, a movie made by a self-described Communist.

Proud declarations in support of CIA funding for “socialists” may seem to take the sting out of moral outrage over covert cultural tactics. But they fail to answer the question: what is their effect on artists themselves, and on intellectual culture more generally? The answer has been ventured by writers like Joel Whitney, whose book Finks looks deeply into the relationship between dozens of famed mid-century writers and literary magazines—especially The Paris Review—and the agency best known for toppling elected governments abroad.

In an interview with The Nation, Whitney calls the CIA’s containment strategies “the inversion of influence. It’s the instrumentalization of writing.… It’s the feeling of fear dictating the rules of culture, and, of course, therefore, of journalism.” According to Eric Bennett, writing at The Chronicle of Higher Education and in his book Workshops of Empire, the Agency instrumentalized not only the literary publishing world, but also the institution that became its primary training ground, the writing program at the University of Iowa.

The Iowa Writer’s Workshop “emerged in the 1930s and powerfully influenced the creative-writing programs that followed,” Bennett explains. “More than half of the second-wave programs, about 50 of which appeared by 1970, were founded by Iowa graduates.” The program “attained national eminence by capitalizing on the fears and hopes of the Cold War”—at first through its director, self-appointed cold warrior Paul Engle, with funding from CIA front groups, the Rockefeller Foundation, and major corporations. (Kurt Vonnegut, an Iowa alum, described Engle as “a hayseed clown, a foxy grandpa, a terrific promoter, who, if you listened closely, talks like a man with a paper asshole.”)

Under Engle writers like Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman went through the program. In the literary world, its dominance is at times lamented for the imposition of a narrow range of styles on American writing. And many a writer has felt shut out of the publishing world and its coteries of MFA program alums. When it comes to certain kinds of writing at least, some of them may be right—the system has been informally rigged in ways that date back to a time when the CIA and conservative funders approved and sponsored the high modernist fiction beloved by the New Critics, witty realism akin to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (and later John Cheever), and magical realism (part of the agency’s attempt to control Latin American literary culture.)

These categories, it so happens, roughly correspond to those Bennett identifies as acceptable in his experience at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and to the writing one finds filling the pages of The Best American Short Stories annual anthologies and the fiction section of The New Yorker and The Paris Review. (Exceptions often follow the path of James Baldwin, who refused to work with the agency, and whom Paris Review co-founder and CIA agent Peter Matthiessen subsequently derided as “polemical.”)

Bennett’s personal experiences are merely anecdotal, but his history of the relationships between the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the explosion of MFA programs in the last 40 years under its influence, and the CIA and other groups’ active sponsorship are well-researched and substantiated. What he finds, as Timothy Aubry summarizes at The New York Times, is that “writing programs during the postwar period” imposed a discipline instituted by Engle, “teaching aspiring authors certain rules of propriety.”

“Good literature, students learned, contains ‘sensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.’” These rules have become so embedded in the aesthetic canons that govern literary fiction that they almost go without question, even if we encounter thousands of examples in history that break them and still manage to meet the bar of “good literature.” What is meant by the phrase is a kind of currency—literature that will be supported, published, marketed, and celebrated. Much of it is very good, and much happens to have sufficiently satisfied the gatekeepers’ requirements.

In a reductive, but interesting analogy, Motherboard’s Brian Merchant describes “the American MFA system, spearheaded by the infamous Iowa Writers’ Workshop” as a “content farm” first designed to optimize for “the spread of anti-Communist propaganda through highbrow literature.” Its algorithm: “More Hemingway, less Dos Passos.” As Aubry notes, quoting from Bennett’s book:

Frank Conroy, Engle’s longest-serving successor, who taught Bennett, “wanted literary craft to be a pyramid.” At the base was syntax and grammar, or “Meaning, Sense, Clarity,” and the higher levels tapered off into abstraction. “Then came character, then metaphor … everything above metaphor Conroy referred to as ‘the fancy stuff.’ At the top was symbolism, the fanciest of all. You worked from the broad and basic to the rarefied and abstract.”

The direct influence of the CIA on the country’s preeminent literary institutions may have waned, or faded entirely, who can say—and in any case, the institutions Whitney and Bennett write about have less cultural valence than they once did. But even so, we can see the effect on American creative writing, which continues to occupy a fairly narrow range and show some hostility to work deemed too abstract, argumentative, experimental, or “postmodern.” One result may be that writers who want to get funded and published have to conform to rules designed to co-opt and corral literary writing.

Read the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual: A Timeless, Kafkaesque Guide to Subverting Any Organization with “Purposeful Stupidity” (1944)

How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

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

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A Beautiful Short Documentary Takes You Inside New York City’s Last Great Chess Store

in Games, Life, Philosophy, Travel | December 14th, 2018

Chess Forum in Greenwich Village is, like Gramercy Typewriter and the Upper East Side’s Tender Buttons, the sort of shop New Yorkers feel protective of, even if they’ve never actually crossed the threshold.

“How can it still exist?” is a question left unanswered by “King of the Night,” Lonely Leap’s lovely short profile of Chess Forum’s owner, Imad Khachan, above, but no matter. We’re just glad it does.

The store, located a block and a half south of Washington Square, looks older than it is. Khachan, hung out his shingle in 1995, after five years as an employee of the now-defunct Village Chess Shop, a rift that riled the New York chess community.

Now, things are much more placid, though the film incorrectly suggests that Chess Forum is the only refuge where chess loving New Yorkers can avail themselves of an impromptu game, take lessons, and buy sets. (There are also shops in Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Upper East Side.) That said, Chess Forum might not be wrong to call itself “New York’s last great chess store.” It may well be the best of the last.

The narrow shop’s interior triggers nostalgia without seeming calculation, an organic reminder of the Village’s Bohemian past, when beret-clad folkies, artists, and students wiled away hours at battered wooden tables in its many cheap cafes and bars. (Two blocks away, sole survivor Caffé Reggio’s ambience is intact, but the prices have kept pace with the neighborhood, and the majority of its clientele are clutching guidebooks or the digital equivalent thereof.)

Khachan, born in Lebanon to Palestinian refugees, gives a warm welcome to tourists and locals alike, especially those who might make for an uneasy fit at tonier neighborhood establishments.

In an interview with the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, he recalled a “well-dressed and highly educated doctor who would come in wearing his Harvard logo sweater, and lose repeatedly to a homeless man who was a regular at Chess Forum and a chess master.”

The game also provides common ground for strangers who share no common tongue. In Jonathan Lord’s rougher New York City chess-themed doc, Passport Play, Khachan points out how diagrams in chess books speak volumes to experienced players, regardless of the language in which the book is written.

The store’s mottos also bear witness to the value its owner places on face-to-face human interaction:

Cool in the summer, warm in the winter and fuzzy all year long.

Chess Forum: An experience not a transaction

Smart people not smart phones. (You can play a game of chess on your phone, Khachan admits, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that it’s giving you a full chess experience.)

An hour of play costs about the same as a small latte in a coffeehouse chain (whose prevalence Khachan refers to as the Bostonization of NYC.) Senior citizens and children, both revered groups at Chess Forum, get an even better deal—from $1/hour to free.

Although the store’s official closing time is midnight, Khachan, single and childless, is always willing to oblige players who would stay later. His solitary musings on the neighborhood’s wee hours transformation supply the film’s title and meditative vibe, while reminding us that this gentle New York character was originally drawn to the city by the specter of a PhD in literature at nearby NYU.

Readers who would like to contribute to the health of this independently owned New York City establishment from afar can do so by purchasing a chess or backgammon set online.

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Man Ray Designs a Supremely Elegant, Geometric Chess Set in 1920–and It Now Gets Re-Issued

A Human Chess Match Gets Played in Leningrad, 1924

A Free 700-Page Chess Manual Explains 1,000 Chess Tactics in Plain English

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Play Chess Against the Ghost of Marcel Duchamp: A Free Online Chess Game

Chess Grandmaster Maurice Ashley Plays Unsuspecting Trash Talker in Washington Square Park

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How the Astonishing Sushi Scene in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs Was Animated: A Time-Lapse of the Month-Long Shoot

in Animation, Film, Food & Drink | December 14th, 2018

Since the moviegoing public first started hearing it twenty years ago, Wes Anderson’s name has been a byword for cinematic meticulousness. The association has only grown stronger with each film he’s made, as the live-action ones have featured increasingly complex ships, trains, and grand hotels — to say nothing of the costumes worn and accoutrements possessed by the characters who inhabit them — and the stop-motion animated ones have demanded a superhuman attention to detail by their very nature. It made perfect sense when it was revealed that Isle of Dogs, Anderson’s second animated picture, would take place in Japan: not only because of Japanese film, which opens up a vast field of new cinematic references to make, but also because of traditional Japanese culture, whose meticulousness matches, indeed exceeds, Anderson’s own.

Most of us first experience that traditional Japanese meticulousness through food. And so most of us will recognize the form of the bento, or meal in a box, prepared step-by-step before our eyes in Isle of Dogs, though we may never before have witnessed the actual process of carving up the wriggling, scurrying sea creatures that fill it.

One viewing of this 45-second shot is enough to suggest how much work must have gone into it, but this time-lapse of its 32-day-long shoot (within a longer seven-month process to make the entire sequence) reveals the extent of the labor involved. In it you can see animators Andy Biddle (who’d previously worked on Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, and before that his animated The Fantastic Mr. Fox) and Tony Farquhar-Smith painstakingly positioning and repositioning each and every one of the bento’s ingredients — all of which had to be specially made to look right even when chopped up and sliced open — as well as the disembodied hands of the sushi master preparing them.

Shooting stop-motion animation takes a huge amount of time, and so does making sushi, as anyone who has tried to do either at home knows. Performing the former to Andersonian standards and the latter to Japanese standards hardly makes the tasks any easier. But just as a well crafted bento provides an enjoyable and unified aesthetic experience, one that wouldn’t dare to remind the consumer of how much time and effort went into it, a movie like Isle of Dogs provides thrills and laughs to its viewers who only later consider what it must have taken to bring such an elaborate vision to life on screen. If you want to hear more about the demands it made on its animators, have a look at the Variety video above, in which Andy Gent, head of Isle of Dogs’ puppet department, explains the process and its consequences. “It took three animators, because it broke quite a few people to get it through the shot,” he says. “Seven months later, we end up with one minute of animation.” But that minute would do even the most exacting sushi master proud.

The Geometric Beauty of Akira Kurosawa and Wes Anderson’s Films

Wes Anderson & Yasujiro Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unexpected Parallels Between Two Great Filmmakers

The History of Stop-Motion Films: 39 Films, Spanning 116 Years, Revisited in a 3‑Minute Video

How to Make Sushi: Free Video Lessons from a Master Sushi Chef

The Right and Wrong Way to Eat Sushi: A Primer

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Carlos Santana & Tom Morello Launch Online Courses on How to Play the Guitar

in Music, Online Courses | December 14th, 2018

Thanks to two new courses from Master Class, you can now learn to play guitar from Carlos Santana and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello. Launched yesterday, Santana’s Master Class on the Art and Soul of Guitar “breaks down his creative process and teaches you his spiritual take on making music,” covering:

How to pull from multiple musical styles and influences.
How to break down music you hear and use it to improve how you play.
Ideas for exercises in the styles of great blues musicians.
How he marries harmonies with rhythmic accents.
His approach to writing a melody for guitar.
How he creates dialogue between guitar parts when he writes songs.
Guidance for leading a band and building trust with band members.

For his part, Tom Morello’s course on the electric guitar will teach you, in 26 video lessons, the riffs, rhythms, and solos that launched his career. The course covers everything from beginner music theory, to learning how to improvise, solo and play with speed, to developing an appreciation for lyrics and melody. Each course costs $90. For $180, you can get an annual pass to the 45 courses in Masterclass’ course catalogue.

FYI: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.

David Gilmour Talks About the Mysteries of His Famous Guitar Tone

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The Encyclopedia Of Alternate Guitar Tunings

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

in Art, History | December 13th, 2018

Has any Japanese woodblock print — or for that matter, any piece of Japanese art — endured as well across place and time as The Great Wave off Kanagawa? Even those of us who have never known its name, let alone those of us unsure of who made it and when, can bring it to mind it with some clarity, as sure a sign as any (along with the numerous parodies) that it taps into something deep within all of us. But though the artist behind it, 18th- and 19th-century ukiyo‑e painter Katsushika Hokusai, was undoubtedly a master of his tradition, even he didn’t conjure up The Great Wave off Kanagawa in the form we know it on the first try.

In fact, he’d been producing different versions of it for nearly forty years. On Twitter Tarin tkasasagi recently posted four versions of the Great Wave that Hokusai painted over that period. Here you see them arranged from top to bottom: the first from 1792, when he was 33; the second from 1803, when he was 44; the third from 1805, when he was 46; and the famous fourth from 1831, when he was 72.

Each time, Hokusai de-emphasizes the human presence and emphasizes the natural elements, bringing out drama from the water itself rather than from the people who regard or navigate it. In each version, too, the colors grow bolder and the lines stronger.

The skill level of a working artist — especially an artist working as hard as Hokusai — almost inevitably increases over time, and that must have something to do with these changes, though it also looks like the process of an artistic personality settling into its subject matter. “From the time I was six, I was in the habit of sketching things I saw around me,” says Hokusai himself in a widely circulated quotation. “Around the age of 50, I began to work in earnest, producing numerous designs. It was not until my 70th year, however, that I produced anything of significance.”

In the artist’s telling, only at the age of 73, after the final Great Wave, did he begin to grasp “the underlying structure of birds and animals, insects and fish, and the way trees and plants grow. Thus if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive.” The fact that he didn’t make it to 100 will forever keep enthusiasts wondering what magnificence an even older Hokusai might have achieved, but even so, the body of work he managed to produce in his 88 years contains works that, like the ultimate form of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, outlived him and will outlive all of us.

via Ted Gioia

Enter a Digital Archive of 213,000+ Beautiful Japanese Woodblock Prints

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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David Byrne Curates a Playlist of Great Protest Songs Written Over the Past 60 Years: Stream Them Online

in Music | December 13th, 2018

When you hear the words “protest song,” what do you see? Is it a folkie like Bob Dylan or Joan Baez delivering songs about injustice? Is it an earnest young thing with a guitar? Is it trapped in 1960s amber, while time has moved on to more ambiguity, more nihilism, more solipsism?

British writers–and may we add amateur folksingers–Jonathan Luxmoore and Christine Ellis made this lament over two years ago in the pages of The Guardian, in an opinion piece entitled, “Not talkin’ bout a revolution: where are all the protest songs?” Here they blame the immediacy of social media, the rise of aspirational hip hop, and the decline of radical politics. They end, presciently, with a Jeremy Corbyn-shaped hope for change. Well, look where we are now. Things developed rather quickly, did they not?

(And as a side note, I would suggest the 1980s as a way more protest-filled music decade than the 1960s. Because of the self-aggrandizement of 1960s curators, they claim more than they did. But nearly every pop, rock, r’n’b, and hip hop act of the ‘80s has at least one political song in its discography.)

Enter David Byrne, whose mission apart from his day job as a musician is to bring hope to the masses with a determined optimism. He’s here to say that the protest song never went away, only our definition of it. And he’s brought the receipts, or rather the playlist above, to prove his point:

…in fact, they now come from all directions in every possible genre—country songs, giant pop hits, hip hop, classic rock, indie and folk. Yes, maybe there weren’t many songs questioning the wisdom of invading Iraq, but almost every other issue has been addressed.

Stretching over six decades, the playlist demonstrates the various forms protest can take, from describing racial violence (Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” to Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout”) to bemoaning economic injustice (The Specials’ “Ghost Town”) and railing against war and conflict (U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, Edwin Starr’s “War”). Sometimes declaring the positive and gaining a voice is enough of a protest: you could argue that James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” did more for equality than any song about racism. Bikini Kills’ “Rebel Girl” does similar things for third-wave feminism.

But Byrne wisely gives voice to those who feel they’re swimming against any resistance tide:

I’ve even included a few songs that “protest the protests.” Buck Owens, the classic country artist from Bakersfield, for example, has two songs here. “Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer,” is a celebration of Americans who feel they are unnoticed, left behind. One might call it a populist anthem, but I think the reference to white socks is intentionally meant to be funny—in effect, it says: “we know who we are, we know how uncool white socks are.”

Look, it’s easy to believe that songs “changed the world” when they are easily accessible to hear decades later but the boots-on-the-ground marches and revolutionary acts from which they sprang are now just photographs, film reels, and foggy memories. But who can deny the gut punch of this year’s “This Is America” from Childish Gambino, the continued excellence of Killer Mike and/or Run the Jewels, and any number of songs that document our outrage? The songs of protest continue as long as there is injustice.

And in the case of David Byrne, covering a modern protest song and adding to its list of names, is what can keep an idea, a memory, and a feeling alive for a new audience. Here he is at the encore of his current tour, covering Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout,” a memorial to all the black lives killed by law enforcement.

“Here was a protest song that doesn’t hector or preach at us,” he said in an article for the Associated Press. “It simply asks us to remember and acknowledge these lives that have been lost, lives that were taken from us through injustice, though the song leaves that for the listener to put together. I love a drum line, so that aspect of the song sucked me in immediately as well. The song musically is a celebration and lyrically a eulogy. Beautiful.”

He also wisely asked permission to cover such a recent song, especially when it’s an older white man lending his voice to it. But Monae gave her blessing:

“I thought that was so kind of him and of course I said yes. The song’s message and names mentioned need to be heard by every audience.”

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 21 ) |

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

in Art, Books | December 13th, 2018

At many a bookstore and art gallery gift shop, you will find copies of writer and artist Javaka Steptoe’s Radiant Child, a young person’s introduction to Jean-Michel Basquiat. The book has deservedly won a Caldecott Medal and the praise of adult readers who find as much or more to admire in it as their kids do. A surprisingly moving short biography, it hits many of the major notes in Basquiat’s formative years: His Brooklyn childhood and Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage; his love for his encouraging mother and heartbreak at her institutionalization in a mental hospital; his childhood spent in New York art galleries planning to be a famous artist, and his keen interest in anatomy textbooks, jazz, and black history….

But for a seriously deep immersion in the artist’s history and development, you will want to consult a new 500-page book from TASCHEN, Jean-Michel Basquiat XXL. Written by curator Eleanor Nairne and edited by Hans Werner Holzwarth, the “oversized hardcover,” notes This is Colossal,” is filled with large-scale reproductions of the artist’s drawings, paintings, and notebook pages. Several essays guide the reader year-by-year through Basquiat’s artistic career, from 1978 to his untimely death in 1988.”

The ten years the book covers provide enough material for two or three volumes, and also happen to tell the story of a cultural revolution in which Basquiat was at the center, as TASCHEN writes:

The legend of Jean-Michel Basquiat is as strong as ever. Synonymous with New York in the 1980s, the artist first appeared in the late 1970s under the tag SAMO, spraying caustic comments and fragmented poems on the walls of the city. He appeared as part of a thriving underground scene of visual arts and graffiti, hip hop, post-punk, and DIY filmmaking, which met in a booming art world. As a painter with a strong personal voice, Basquiat soon broke into the established milieu, exhibiting in galleries around the world.

Basquiat is now recognized—art scholar and curator Dieter Buchhart argues—as an artist who “eternalized… the exhilarating possibilities for art, music, and social critique in New York.” But for all the high praise he has garnered after his tragic overdose at 27, in life his work was often “’explained away’ by his Afro-Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage,” writes Kristen Foland at Swamp. “Some art historians and critics, including Sharon F. Patton, categorized his work as ‘primitive’ and called him a ‘black graffiti artist,’ a term he found inherently racist.”

Basquiat recoiled at the idea of being segregated and singled out as a “black artist”; but he proudly celebrated black life and cultural forms in narrative works rich with symbolism and poetry, mourning and triumph. Asked about his subject matter, he once replied, “royalty, heroism and the streets.” Grand themes and settings were what he had in mind, and Nairne fittingly titles her essay in the TASCHEN book, “The Art of Storytelling.”

Perhaps the reason Basquiat’s life makes such a good story, for kids and grownups alike, is that he himself was such a powerful storyteller. He weaved his personal history seamlessly into the social and political fabric that enmeshed him in the legendary late-seventies/early-eighties downtown New York scene. The new large format TASCHEN book lets you get a close-up look at the fine details of his revolutionary canvases, drawings, collages, wood panel paintings, and street poetry and painting.

You can purchase the book through Amazon.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Bertrand Russell’s Advice For How (Not) to Grow Old: “Make Your Interests Gradually Wider and More Impersonal”

in Life, Philosophy | December 12th, 2018

Advice on how to grow old frequently comes from such banal or bloodless sources that we can be forgiven for ignoring it. Public health officials who dispense wisdom may have good intentions; pharmaceutical companies who do the same may not. In either case, the messages arrive in a form that can bring on the despair they seek to avert. Elderly people in well-lit photographs stroll down garden paths, ballroom dance, do yoga. Bulleted lists punctuated by dry citations issue gently-worded guidelines for sensible living. Inoffensive blandness as a prescription for living well.

At the other extreme are profiles of exceptional cases—relatively spry individuals who have passed the century mark. Rarely do their stories conform to the model of abstemiousness enjoined upon us by professionals. But we know that growing old with dignity entails so much more than diet and exercise or making it to a hundred-and-two. It entails facing death as squarely as we face life. We need writers with depth, sensitivity, and eloquence to deliver this message. Bertrand Russell does just that in his essay “How to Grow Old,” written when the philosopher was 81 (sixteen years before he eventually passed away, at age 97).

Russell does not flatter his readers’ rationalist conceits by citing the latest science. “As regards health,” he writes, “I have nothing useful to say…. I eat and drink whatever I like, and sleep when I cannot keep awake.” (We are inclined, perhaps, to trust him on these grounds alone.) He opens with a drily humorous paragraph in which he recommends, “choose your ancestors well,” then he issues advice on the order of not dwelling on the past or becoming a burden to your children.

But the true kernel of his short essay, “the proper recipe for remaining young,” he says, came to him from the example of a maternal grandmother, who was so absorbed in her life, “I do not believe she ever had time to notice she was growing old.” “If you have wide and keen interests and activities in which you can still be effective,” Russell writes. “you will have no reason to think about the merely statistical fact of the number of years you have already lived, still less of the probable shortness of your future.”

Such interests, he argues, should be “impersonal,” and it is this quality that loosens our grip. As Maria Popova puts it, “Russell places at the heart of a fulfilling life the dissolution of the personal ego into something larger.” The idea is familiar; in Russell’s hands it becomes a meditation on mortality as ever-timely as the so-often-quoted passages from Donne’s “Meditation XVII.” Philosopher and writer John G. Messerly calls Russell’s concluding passage “one of the most beautiful reflections on death I have found in all of world literature.”

The best way to overcome it [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

Read Russell’s “How to Grow Old” in full here. And see many more eloquent meditations on aging and death—from Henry Miller, André Gide, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Grace Paley—at Brain Pickings.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 17 ) |

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Bertrand Russell’s Advice For How (Not) to Grow Old: “Make Your Interests Gradually Wider and More Impersonal”

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