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It’s an ungainly word for English speakers, which is maybe why we do not hear it often: Gleichschaltung. Yet the concept remains central for a clear view of what happened to Germany in the 1930s. In 1933, the nation completely transformed, seemingly overnight, through “a concerted policy of ‘coordination’ (Gleischaltung),” the U.S. Holocaust Museum writes. “Culture, the economy, education, and law all came under Nazi control.” Those artists and organizations that were not purged had their essential character changed to reflect an entirely different set of artistic and political values. One publication, especially, serves as an example of the Nazification of culture.
The arts journal Jugend (Youth), writes Messy ’N Chic, “had been turned largely into propaganda” between 1933 and 1940, its final year. But prior to the regime’s takeover, Jugend showcased the most avant-garde, “degenerate” artists of the era, and might have been “the ‘brainiest’ periodical of the day,” as one critic wrote in a 1904 issue of The Yale Literary Magazine. “There is no magazine published in England or in this country which is at all like it.”
As in England, France, Austria, and the U.S., the Art Nouveau movement in Germany emerged from a whirlwind of post-Impressionist painting, Orientalist motifs, folk art, modernist art and advertising, book illustration, and graphic and industrial design. Appropriately, given its perch on the threshold of a new millennium, Art Nouveau looked both backward—to the medieval, gothic, and Romantic—and forward toward a more modernist, urbane, and urbanized sensibility.
So influential was Jugend that Art Nouveau in Germany became known as Jugendstil. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines writes, “Among Jugend’s most important qualities—indeed, an essential aspect of Art Nouveau and its German equivalent Jugendstil—was its brilliant escapism.” Founded in 1896 by writer George Hirth, the magazine was “from the start a venue to promote the new cultural Renaissance without recourse to the established ‘vintage’ art.” (See its very first cover right above.)
Jugenstil was primarily based in Munich, where most of its artists, designers, and writers lived and worked, until the turn of the century, when, notes the Art Encyclopedia, “the Munich group dispersed, heading for Berlin, Weimar and Darmstadt.” Art Nouveau in Germany developed in two phases, “a pre-1900 phase dominated by floral motifs, themselves rooted in English Art Nouveau and Japanese art,” and a “post-1900 phase, marked by a tendency towards abstract art.”
While we know the names of many Art Nouveau artists from elsewhere in Europe—Henri Toulouse-Lautrec in France, Aubrey Beardsley in England, Gustave Klimt in Austria, for example— Jugendstil in Germany produced few international stars. Many of the artists published in its pages were relatively unknown at first. But its shockingly brilliant covers and radical editorial tone put it at the forefront of German arts for decades. “Jugend’s political and social platform,” wrote the The Yale Literary Magazine critic, “is one of opposition—opposition to everything.”
In 1933, however, the magazine was forced to comply with the kind of dour conservatism it had arisen explicitly to protest. Its wild covers and proudly original contents turned sombre and neoclassical, as in the bust of Nietzsche on the cover above from 1934. Many of its artists disappeared or went into exile. But as we observe this transformation happening abruptly in the University of Heidelberg archive, we still see a magazine whose editorial staff held fast to notions of artistic quality, as they were forced to turn away from everything that had made Jugend exciting, cutting-edge, and worthy of its title.
Our illustrious Senator from Minnesota Al Franken has long been a Deadhead, or at least an ardent fan. He and comedy partner Tom Davis were the first writers hired by Saturday Night Live in 1975 and occasionally also performed routines on the show. They were also Grateful Dead fans responsible for getting the band booked on SNL.
So by the time 1980 and the eight-night residency of the Grateful Dead at Radio City Music Hall rolled around, Franken and Davis were asked to host the final night, Halloween, for a show that was simulcast on radio and closed circuit television to 14 movie theaters around the country. Their job? To help entertain viewers and fill the two 40-minute breaks in the Dead’s show.
For Radio City Music Hall, the event saved its financial skin. According to Rolling Stone, by the late ‘70s, “with New York City in fiscal freefall, Radio City’s future was suddenly shaky; movie attendance dropped, and plans to convert it into an office building or parking lot loomed.”
The solution was to book pop and rock acts. The first was Linda Ronstadt. The second was the Dead, and soon Deadheads descended on Rockefeller center, buying up 36,000 tickets.
Franken and Davis pre-taped many of the segments, and the Dead loved mocking themselves. There’s a Jerry Lewis Telethon parody for “Jerry’s Kids,” where Franken urges donations for acid casualties; Bob Weir’s luxurious hair is admired; drugs and penis jokes abound; and at one point Davis “mistakenly” drinks acid-dosed urine and trips out. (In reality, Davis actually had dropped acid for the live portion.)
Radio City’s lawyers sued after the concerts for damaging its reputation, but later settled. A compilation video of the Halloween show and the previous night’s concert was released in 1981 as Dead Ahead, the source of these clips.
Tom Davis died in 2012 from throat and neck cancer; and Al Franken represents the citizens of Minnesota, but did briefly take over SiriusXM’s Grateful Dead channel in May of 2017 to host a full day of music and interviews with Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, the surviving members of the Dead (always an ironic turn of phrase).
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.
When humorist and New Yorker contributor David Sedaris quit smoking about a decade ago, he chose Tokyo in which to do it: “Its foreignness would take me out of myself, I hoped, and give me something to concentrate on besides my own suffering.” That first extended trip not only allowed him to kick the habit and gave him plenty of culture clashes to write about, but began his relationship with Tokyo that continues to this day. “Windows flanked the moving sidewalks, and on their ledges sat potted flowers,” he writes in appreciation in his first diaries there. “No one had pulled the petals off. No one had thrown trash into the pots or dashed them to the floor. How different life looks when people behave themselves.”
Most strikingly of all, there stood all “those vending machines, right out in the open, lined up on the sidewalk like people waiting for a bus.” The then-Paris-based Sedaris commiserates with a French Japanese language school classmate: “ ‘Can you believe it?’ he asked. ‘In the subway station, on the street, they just stand there, completely unmolested.’ ”
Our Indonesian classmate came up, and after listening to us go on, he asked what the big deal was.
“In New York or Paris, these machines would be trashed,” I told him.
The Indonesian raised his eyebrows.
“He means destroyed,” Christophe said. “Persons would break the glass and cover everything with graffiti.”
The Indonesian student asked why, and we were hard put to explain.
“It’s something to do?” I offered.
“But you can read a newspaper,” the Indonesian said.
“Yes,” I explained, “but that wouldn’t satisfy your basic need to tear something apart.”
Those vending machines, a basic expectation to Tokyoites but a barely imaginable luxury to many a foreigner, appear on one cover of theTokyoiter, a collaborative art project producing a series of covers for an imaginary New Yorker-style magazine based in the Japanese capital. This tribute to a distinctively Japanese form of automated sidewalk commerce comes from Hennie Haworth, an illustrator based in England (where Sedaris also now lives, incidentally) who spent six months in Japan doing nothing but drawing its vending machines.
“I have a family member living in Japan which gives me excuse to visit every now and again,” writes illustrator Yuliya. “One of the main inspirations I find in folklore and all the magical beings of Japan. I’m originally from Ukraine and grew up surrounded by folk tales and superstitions, and even though I never truly believed in any of it, it always fascinated me. I miss that in modern Western world. So the creatures on my cover are made up but they are inspired by Japanese Yokai and just like the rest of Tokyo, they’re taking a spontaneous nap on the train.” Other Tokyoiter covers, contributed by artists from all around the world, take as their subjects Tokyo’s architecture, its food, its street life, its bath houses, and much more besides.
Taken as a collection, the project presents a combination of images of Tokyo familiar even to those who’ve never set foot in the city and references whose nuances only a Tokyoite — or at least someone with a Sedaris-level familiarity with the place — can immediately grasp. What could be more Tokyo, for instance, than the Rockabilly dancers of YoyogiPark, portrayed here by Australian artist Grace Lee, who for more than 40 years have spent their Sunday afternoons taking 1950s Americana to its absolute limit for the enjoyment of all who pass by? And if you’ve gone to see them yourself, you’ll know that, if you get thirsty while watching, you can simply buy a drink from one of the many vending machines nearby, all lined up right out in the open.
If you don’t move, nothing happens. — Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons, the subject of Oscar Boyson’s recent pop video essay, above, is surely one of the most widely known living artists. As with fellow artists Damien Hirst and Cindy Sherman the spotlight has produced an army of detractors who know very little about him, or his large, far-ranging body of work.
The choice of Scarlett Johansson to provide snarky second-person narration might not jolly Koons’ naysayers into suspending judgment long enough for a proper reintroduction. (His show-and-tell display of his Venus of Willendorf coffee mug causes her to quip, “You sexy motherfucker.” Ugh.)
On the other hand, there’s rapper Pharrell Williams’ onscreen observation that, “We need haters out there. They’re our walking affirmations that we’re doing something right.”
The potential for clamorous negative reaction has never propelled Koons to shy away from doing things on the grand scale in the public arena, as the giant open air display of such sculptures as “Seated Ballerina,” “Balloon Flower,” and “Puppy” will attest.
Surely, the genial affect he brings to the film is not what those who abhor “Made in Heaven,” a series of erotic 3‑D self-portraits co-starring his then-wife, porn-star Ilona “Cicciolina” Staller, would have expected.
Nor does he come off as a pandering, high priest of kitsch, something certain to disappoint those who abhor “Michael Jackson and Bubbles,” his gaudy, larger-than-life glazed porcelain sculpture of the King of Pop and his pet chimp.
“Kitsch is a word I really don’t believe in,” he smiles (possibly all the way to the bank).
Instead, he veers toward reflection, a fitting preoccupation for an artist given to mirror-polished stainless steel and more recently, gazing balls of the sort commonly found on 20th-century American lawns. He wants viewers to take a good look at themselves, along with his work.
Those whose hearts are set against him are unlikely to be swayed, but the undecided and open-minded might soften to a list of influences including Duchamp, Dali, DaVinci, Fragonard, Bernini, and Manet.
Ditto the opinions of a diverse array of talking heads like Frank Gehry, Larry Gagosian, and fellow post-modernist David Salle, who praises Koons’ artistic dedication to “everyday American-style happiness.”
Blade Runner, as anyone who’s seen so much as its first shot knows, takes place in the Los Angeles of November 2019. Though the film flopped when it came out in 1982, the acclaim and fans it has drawn with each of the 35 years that have passed since didn’t take long to reach the kind of critical mass that demands a sequel. After numerous rumors and false starts, the October release of Blade Runner 2049, produced by Blade Runner director Ridley Scott and directed by Arrival director Denis Villeneuve, now fast approaches. The new movie’s promotional push, which has so far included trailers and making-of featurettes, has now begun to tell us what happened between 2019 and 2049.
“I decided to ask a couple of artists that I respect to create three short stories that dramatize some key events that occurred after 2019, when the first Blade Runner takes place, but before 2049, when my new Blade Runner story begins,” says Villeneuve in his introduction to the brand new short above.
Taking place in the Los Angeles of 2036, the Luke Scott-directed piece “revolves around Jared Leto’s character, Niander Wallace,” writes Collider’s Adam Chitwood, who “introduces a new line of ‘perfected’ replicants called the Nexus 9, seeking to get the prohibition on replicants repealed,” the government having shut replicant production down thirteen years before due to a devastating electromagnetic pulse attack for which replicants took the blame.
A timeline appeared at Comic-Con this past summer covering the events of the thirty years between Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, though in very broad strokes: in 2020 “the Tyrell Corporation introduces a new replicant model, the Nexus 8S, which has extended lifespans,” in 2025 “a new company, Wallace Corp., solves the global food shortage and becomes a massive super power,” in 2049 “life on Earth has reached its limit and society divides between Replicant and human.” The two other short films to come should just about tide over fans until the release of Blade Runner 2049 — not that those who’ve been waiting for a new Blade Runner movie since the 1980s can’t handle another month.
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In the recorded history of philosophy, there may be no sharper a mind than Ludwig Wittgenstein. A bête noire, enfant terrible, and all other such phrases used to describe affronts to order and decorum, Wittgenstein also represented an anarchic force that disturbed the staid discipline. His teacher Bertrand Russell recognized the existential threat Wittgenstein posed to his profession (though not right away). When Wittgenstein handed Russell the compact, cryptic Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he admitted his student had gone beyond his own analytic insights in the pursuit of absolute clarity. Wittgenstein’s longtime mentor and friend, famed logician and mathematician Gottlob Frege, expressed criticism. Some have suggested he did so in part because he saw that Wittgenstein had rendered much of his work irrelevant.
Alain de Botton gives a brief but fascinating sketch of Wittgenstein’s ideas and incredibly odd biography in the School of Life video above. The eccentric Austrian savant, he asserts, “can help us with our communication problems” through his penetrating, though often impenetrable, claims about language. That may be so. But we may need to redefine what we mean by “communication.” According to Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, an overwhelming percentage of what we obsess about on a daily basis—political and religious abstractions, for example—is so totally incoherent and muddled that it means nothing at all. He revised this opinion dramatically in his later thought.
Though he published nothing after the Tractatus and soon became a near-recluse after his startling entry into analytic philosophy, notes from his students were collected and published as well as a posthumous book called Philosophical Investigations. This version of Wittgenstein’s approach to the problems of communication involves a development of the “ostensive”—or demonstrative—role of language. Wittgenstein made an argument that language can only serve a social, rather than a personal, subjective, function. To make the point, he introduced his “Beetle in a Box” analogy, which you can see explained above in an animated BBC video written by Nigel Warburton and narrated by Aidan Turner.
The analogy uses the idea of each of us claiming to have a beetle in a box as a stand in for our individual, private experiences. We all claim to have them (we can even observe brain states), but no one can ever see inside the theater of our minds to verify. We simply have to take each other’s word for it. We play “language games,” which only have meaning in respect to their context. That such games can be mutually intelligible among individuals who are otherwise opaque to each other has to do with our shared environment, abilities, and limitations. Should we, however, meet a lion who could speak—in perfectly intelligible English—we would not, Wittgenstein asserted, be able to understand a single word. The vastly different experiences of human versus lion would not translate through any medium.
Just above, we have an explanation of this thought experiment from an unlikely source, Ricky Gervais, in an attempted explanation to his comic foil Karl Pilkington, who takes things in his own peculiar direction. Though Wittgenstein used the idea for a different purpose, his observation about the unbridgeable chasm between humans and lions anticipates Thomas Nagel’s provocative claims in the 1974 essay “What is it like to be a bat?” We cannot inhabit the subjective states of beings so different from us, and therefore cannot say much of anything about their consciousness. Maybe it isn’t like anything to be a bat. Luckily for humans, we do have the ability to imagine each other’s experiences, in indirect, imperfect, roundabout, ways, and we all have enough shared context that we can, at least theoretically, use language to produce more clarity of thought and greater social harmony.
When I first read news of the now-infamous Google memo writer who claimed with a straight face that women are biologically unsuited to work in science and tech, I nearly choked on my cereal. A dozen examples instantly crowded to mind of women who have pioneered the very basis of our current technology while operating at an extreme disadvantage in a culture that explicitly believed they shouldn’t be there, this shouldn’t be happening, women shouldn’t be able to do a “man’s job!”
The memo, as Megan Molteni and Adam Rogers write at Wired, “is a species of discourse peculiar to politically polarized times: cherry-picking scientific evidence to support a pre-existing point of view.” Its specious evolutionary psychology pretends to objectivity even as it ignores reality. As Mulder would say, the truth is out there, if you care to look, and you don’t need to dig through classified FBI files. Just, well, Google it. No, not the pseudoscience, but the careers of women in STEM without whom we might not have such a thing as Google.
Women like Margaret Hamilton, who, beginning in 1961, helped NASA “develop the Apollo program’s guidance system” that took U.S. astronauts to the moon, as Maia Weinstock reports at MIT News. “For her work during this period, Hamilton has been credited with popularizing the concept of software engineering.” Robert McMillan put it best in a 2015 profile of Hamilton:
It might surprise today’s software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys’ club was, in fact, a mother—and that should give them pause as they consider why the gender inequality of the Mad Men era persists to this day.
Hamilton was indeed a mother in her twenties with a degree in mathematics, working as a programmer at MIT and supporting her husband through Harvard Law, after which she planned to go to graduate school. “But the Apollo space program came along” and contracted with NASA to fulfill John F. Kennedy’s famous promise made that same year to land on the moon before the decade’s end—and before the Soviets did. NASA accomplished that goal thanks to Hamilton and her team.
Photo courtesy of MIT Museum
Like many women crucial to the U.S. space program (many doubly marginalized by race and gender), Hamilton might have been lost to public consciousness were it not for a popular rediscovery. “In recent years,” notes Weinstock, “a striking photo of Hamilton and her team’s Apollo code has made the rounds on social media.” You can see that photo at the top of the post, taken in 1969 by a photographer for the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. Used to promote the lab’s work on Apollo, the original caption read, in part, “Here, Margaret is shown standing beside listings of the software developed by her and the team she was in charge of, the LM [lunar module] and CM [command module] on-board flight software team.”
As Hank Green tells it in his condensed history above, Hamilton “rose through the ranks to become head of the Apollo Software development team.” Her focus on errors—how to prevent them and course correct when they arise—“saved Apollo 11 from having to abort the mission” of landing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon’s surface. McMillan explains that “as Hamilton and her colleagues were programming the Apollo spacecraft, they were also hatching what would become a $400 billion industry.” At Futurism, you can read a fascinating interview with Hamilton, in which she describes how she first learned to code, what her work for NASA was like, and what exactly was in those books stacked as high as she was tall. As a woman, she may have been an outlier in her field, but that fact is much better explained by the Occam’s razor of prejudice than by anything having to do with evolutionary determinism.
Taught by Yale professor Craig Wright, this course, Listening to Music, operates on the assumption that listening to music is “not simply a passive activity one can use to relax, but rather, an active and rewarding process.” When we understand the basic elements of Western music (e.g., rhythm, melody, and form), we can appreciate music in entirely new ways. That includes everything from classical music, rock and techno, to Gregorian chant and the blues.
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