Prior to this, the records—which include books and serials, music and manuscripts, and maps and visual materials spanning from 1968 to 2014—have only been accessible through a paid subscription. These files will be available for free download on [the Library of Congress site] and are also available on data.gov.
This move helps free up the library’s digital assets, allowing social scientists, data analysts, developers, statisticians and everyone else to work with the data “to enhance learning and the formation of new knowledge.” The huge data sets will be available here.
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It may seem like a dubious honor to belong to a select group that includes some of my favorite creative people: art school dropouts. But while a failed endeavor can be painful, many a dropout learns that the experience is valuable not only because failures can fuel future success, but also because the skills, techniques, and ways of thinking one picks up in the first, “boot camp,” year of art school are widely applicable to every creative endeavor.
My favorite art school class was simply called “Foundations.” As the name implies, it dealt exclusively with basic materials and techniques—for joining, painting, sculpting, building, etc. One learns to think of large, complicated, potentially overwhelming projects of as reducible in some sense to materials and techniques. What am I working with? What is the nature of this material and what are the best ways to shape it? What does it want to become?
These are practical, fundamental questions artists ask themselves, no matter how big or high concept their ideas. These days, the materials are likely to be more virtual than physical, or some creative mixture of the two. Still, similar considerations apply, as well as the basic skills of using color, perspective, shadow, and line effectively. In the free video tutorials here, you can learn many of those skills without attending, or dropping out, of art school. They may not provide a complete arts education, but they offer high quality lessons for artists needing to supplement or refresh their skill sets.
At the top, Ahmed Aldoori explains the color wheel and color palettes in Photoshop. In other videos on his YouTube channel, he gives tips on drawing hands (a particular challenge for every artist), artist anatomy, digital painting, and more. Another channel, Draw with Chris, offers free and premium content for both digital and traditional artists, such as the long video on shading technique above. He also has a popular two part series on life drawing (part 1 — part 2).
All of these tutorials come from a list compiled by Deviantart user DamaiMikaz, who has helpfully divided several dozen YouTube instructional series into categories like “Art Fundamentals,” “Tutorial & How to,” “Digital art software,” “Traditional Art,” and others. Whether you’re an aspiring artist, dabbling amateur, working professional, or an art school dropout picking the craft back up, you’ll find what you need here. Know of any other free video resources not listed in this archive? Let us and our readers know in the comments and we’ll add the primo picks to the list.
Still not enough? How about a digital library of 2.2 million images from the history of photography? Europeana Collections just launched its “latest thematic collection,” Europeana Photography, which, notes Douglas McCarthy at the site’s blog, “includes images and documents from 50 European institutions in 34 different countries.”
The collection promises, “future exhibitions on specific themes… telling compelling stories with stunning images.” Currently, you’ll find there themed “expositions” like “Industrial Photography in the Machine Age” and “Vintage Postcards of Southeastern Europe,” among others. A gallery on “The Magic Lantern” offers a tour of a pre-cinema entertainment technology. One on photographer Johan Wilhelm Weimar introduces viewers to incredibly striking work from his 1901 Herbarium.
The collection is searchable, downloadable, shareable, and you can choose from 23 different languages, including English. Its mission is international, but also very much built on the idea—some might say political fiction—of a culturally unified Europe, allowing people to “connect with their past, with fellow European citizens, explore remote eras and locations, and better appreciate the value of their continental, national and local cultural heritage.”
Lofty goals, but one need no such larger purpose to simply enjoy casually browsing, and making the kind of odd discoveries one might on a continental walking tour, with no particular destination in mind.
It’s no accident that one of the best-known series of cinema-analyzing video essays bears the title Every Frame a Painting. When describing the height of film’s visual potential, we often draw metaphors from art history, but the relationship also goes in another direction: more often than we might think, the filmmakers and their collaborators looked to the canvases of the masters for inspiration in the first place. In this trilogy of short video essays, “Film Meets Art,”“Film Meets Art II,” and “Film Meets Art III,”Vugar Efendi highlights some of the most striking paintings-turned-shots in the work of, among other auteurs, Alfred Hitchcock, Terry Gilliam, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson.
Efendi, writes Slate’s Madeline Raynor in a post on the second installment, “places shots from films side by side with the paintings that inspired them. And once you see the pairings, you won’t be able to unsee them. Some of these are unmistakable references — like Jean-Luc Godard’s ode to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres — while others are more subtle.
Filmmakers have been recreating paintings since the days of silent film: the video’s earliest example is 1927’s Metropolis.” More recent instances include Alex Colville’s To Prince Edward Island in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, and Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. While perhaps too obvious for inclusion into these essays, Wim Wenders once satirized this process with a movie-within-a-movie recreation of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks in The End of Violence.
Which painters do filmmakers most often turn to for material? Efendi’s visual essays show us a fair few memorable and varied uses of Hopper, whose paintings possess a cinematic atmosphere of their own, and also Magritte, possibly because his dreamlike sensibility aligns well with that of cinema itself: L’empire des lumièresin William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, La Robe du soir in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (winner of last year’s Best Picture Oscar), and Architecture au clair de Lunein Peter Weir’s The Truman Show. Weir’s work makes another appearance in the essays in the form of Picnic at Hanging Rock, a haunting film based on a haunting novel written in part out of fascination with a haunting painting, William Ford’s At the Hanging Rock — whose imagery then made it back into the screen adaptation. It seems that art, be it on canvas, film, or some medium yet unimagined, tells the story of civilization in more ways than one.
If you want to write, most every writer will tell you, you’ve got to read, read, read, and read. “Read more than you write,” advises Teju Cole. Even great filmmakers like Werner Herzog and Akira Kurasawa cite copious reading as a prerequisite for their primarily visual medium. But what about music? What advice might we hope to receive about the art of writing memorable, culturally significant songs? Listen, listen, listen, and listen, perhaps.
One of the greatest of rock and roll greats, Lou Reed, had overt literary ambitions, formed during his years as an English major at Syracuse University, where he studied under poet Delmore Schwartz. “Hubert Selby, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Delmore Schwartz,” he once told Spin, “To be able to achieve what they did, in such little space, using such simple words. I thought if you could do what those writers did and put it to drums and guitar, you’d have the greatest thing on earth.”
Thematically, Reed accomplished this, bringing the same violence, tenderness, and streetwise decadence to his work as his literary heroes did to theirs. But formally, he drew on another battery of influences: classic soul, doo wop, rhythm and blues, folk, jazz, and early rock and roll. Cribbing from all these genres during his long career, Reed displayed a seemingly effortless mastery of archetypal American pop music.
Unlike Leonard Cohen—another literary songwriter drawn to life’s darker themes—Reed did not leave college and start publishing poetry. In 1964, he moved to New York to begin work as an in-house songwriter for Pickwick Records, soaking up the music around him through his pores, transmuting it into his own warped take on early hits like his dance craze, “The Ostrich,” which included the line “put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it.”
As weird as Reed was even then, he wrote immensely catchy tunes and eventually inspired several thousand punk, post-punk, alternative, and indie songwriters with the novel idea that one could make dangerous, shocking music with simple, catchy—even bubblegum—melodies. Perhaps no one had as great an effect on post-60s rock, but Reed’s own influences drew solidly from the fifties and before, as partially evidenced in his own hand, in a scrawled list of “best albums of all time,” which he submitted for a 1999 magazine interview.
The list, transcribed above, includes the three-volume Specialty Sessions at number 4, a comprehensive omnibus of Little Richard hits. Below it is Hank Williams’ 3‑disc singles collection, and further down, at twice the size, Harry Smith’s enormous Anthology of American Folk Music. By far, the bulk of Reed’s suggestions saw release before he ever put pen to paper and came up with “The Ostrich.” We’re just peeking into the sixties with Ornette Colemans’ Change of the Century, at number one.
But you’ll also note that, tied at number two with Al Green’s Belle and “Anything by Jimmy Scott” (making his list of ten come out to 13), we have Scott Walker’s bizarre, experimental 1995 masterpiece Tilt (hear “Farmer in the City” further up), a return from oblivion for the reclusive sixties crooner and an album, writes Allmusic, “on a plateau somewhere between Nico’s Marble Index and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.” Ever modest (he once claimed, “my bullshit is worth more than other people’s diamonds”), Reed was acutely aware of his own pivotal place in 20th century music, though he does refrain from listing one of his own records. He ends instead with the pulsing, trance-like single “Oh Superman,” by his romantic and musical partner, Laurie Anderson.
Who knows how seriously Reed took this assignment, given how much he could be “circumspect about the materials and methods of his art” in his often confrontational public statements. That same year, VH1 polled several journalists and “esteemed musicians,” writes the music channel, on their choice of the 100 greatest songs of rock and roll. “Naturally we approached Reed, who sent his choices back via fax. In true iconoclast form, instead of listing out his 100 favorite songs, he picked just eight.” Only two of the artists from his top ten appear here: Lorraine Ellison and Al Green. See his hand-written ballot above, and the eight songs listed below.
“His name was Yasuke. His height was 6 shaku 2 sun” — roughly six feet, two inches — “he was black, and his skin was like charcoal.” Those words come from the 16th-century samurai Matsudaira Ietada, and they describe one of his colleagues. Though we don’t know much detail about his life itself, we do know that there once lived a black samurai called Yasuke, a version of the name he had in Africa, probably the then Portuguese Mozambique. Brought to Japan in 1579 by an Italian Jesuit named Alessandro Valignano on a mission-inspection tour, Yasuke’s appearance in the capital drew so much attention that thrilled onlookers clambered over one another to get so much as a glimpse at this strange visitor with his unfathomable stature and skin tone.
“His celebrity status soon piqued the curiosity of Oda Nobunaga, a medieval Japanese warlord who was striving to unify Japan and bring peace to a country racked by civil war,” writes Ozy’s Leslie Nguyen-Okwu. “Nobunaga praised Yasuke’s strength and stature, describing ‘his might as that of 10 men,’ and brought him on as his feudal bodyguard.”
As many foreigners in Japan still discover today, the foreigner’s outsider status there also has its benefits: “Nobunaga grew fond of Yasuke and treated him like family as he earned his worth on the battlefield and on patrol at Azuchi Castle. In less than a year, Yasuke went from being a lowly page to joining the upper echelons of Japan’s warrior class, the samurai. Before long, Yasuke was speaking Japanese fluently and riding alongside Nobunaga in battle.”
The legend of Yasuke ends soon after, in 1582, with Nobunaga’s fall at the hands of one of his own generals. That resulted in the first and only black samurai’s exile, probably to a Jesuit mission in Kyoto, but Yasuke has lived on in the imaginations of the last few generations of Japanese readers, all of whom grew up with the award-winning children’s book Kuro-suke (kuro meaning “black” in Japanese) by Kurusu Yoshio. This illustrated version of Yasuke’s life story, though told with humor, ends, according to a site about the book, on a bittersweet note: the defeated “Nobunaga kills himself, and Kuro-suke is saved and sent to Namban temple. When he sleeps that night, he dreams of his parents in Africa. Kuro-suke cries silently.”
What the story of Yasuke lacks in thorough historical documentation (though you can see a fair few pieces briefly cited on the site of this documentary project) it more than makes up in fascination, and somehow Hollywood, nearly fifteen years after Tom Cruise’s high-profile turn as a white samurai, has only just awoken to its potential. In March, Hollywood Reporter announced that the film studio Lionsgate “has tapped Highlander creator Gregory Widen to script Black Samurai,” a “period action drama” based on the Yasuke legend. Widen’s considerable experience in the outsider-with-sword genre makes him an understandable choice, but one has to wonder — shouldn’t Quentin Tarantino’s phone be ringing off the hook right about now?
The artistic morphing is already underway before the very first frame of filmmaker Joan Gratz’ 1992 Oscar-winning animation, Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase.
Most viewers will recognize the title as a mashup of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous work and Marcel Duchamp’s modernist classic Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.
What follows is a constantly morphing, chronological trip through the history of modern art, beginning with Impressionism and passing through Cubism and Surrealism en route to Pop art and hyper-realism.
The seamless transitions were created by painstakingly manipulating small pieces of oil-based modeling clay on a solid easel-mounted surface, a technique Gratz developed as an architecture student at the University of Oregon.
The transitions were the most interesting aspect of the work. A great deal of what they show consists of providing information about the style of the paintings…. The relationship between the images depends on the era, the artistic movement and the interconnection between the artists.
The paintings were chosen over nearly eight years of research and planning, but not the minutiae of the transitions, as Gratz preferred to improvise in front of the camera. Just as in more narrative claymations, each painstaking adjustment required her to stop and shoot a frame, a process that ended up taking two-and-a-half years, fit in around Gratz’s schedule for such paying gigs as Return to Ozand the feature-length claymation, The Adventures of Mark Twain.
Given the spontaneous nature of the transformations from one painting to the next, the exact length of the finished film was impossible to predict. When it was at last complete, composer Jamie Haggerty and sound designer Chel White were brought in to provide further historical and cultural context, via music, environmental sounds, and conspicuous use of a digeridoo.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She’ll be appearing onstage in New York City this June as one of the clowns in Paul Young’s Faust 3. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
We’re just days away from the 50th anniversary of the release of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And, as we mentioned last week, the BBC has kicked off the celebrations with a series of videos that introduce you to the 60+ figures who appeared in the cardboard collage that graced the album’s iconic cover. Bob Dylan, Edgar Allan Poe, William S. Burroughs, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, HG Wells, Shirley Temple–they all get a video introduction, among others.
Historic as it is, the Pepper cover recently became a good vehicle for remembering the bewildering number of musicians, artists and celebrities who left this mortal coil in 2016. Above you can see an illustration created by Twitter user @christhebarker in the waning days of last year. If you look closely, you can see some thought went into the design. Muhammad Ali, for example, now stands where boxer Sonny Liston did in the original. Find them all in a larger format here.
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Have you prepared yourself to return, this Sunday, to Twin Peaks, that small Washington town, so well known for its coffee and cherry pie, once rocked by the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer? Fans of the eponymous television series, which first made surreal prime-time television history on ABC in 1990, have binge-watched and re-binge-watched its original two seasons in advance of the new Twin Peaks’ May 21st debut on Showtime. Even fans who disliked the second season, in which series creators David Lynch and Mark Frost gave in to network pressure to resolve the story of Palmer’s murder, have re-watched it, and with great excitement.
But can simply watching those first thirty episodes (and maybe the follow-up feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk withMe, once booed at Cannes, the very same festival which will screen the first two parts of the new Twin Peaks on the 25th) suffice?
To get yourself as deep into the show’s reality as possible, we recommend dipping into the Twin Peaks material we’ve posted over the years here at Open Culture, beginning with the four-hour video essay on the series’ making and mythology we featured just this past January. You can orient yourself by keeping an eye on Lynch’s hand-drawn map of the the town of Twin Peaks, which he used to pitch the show to ABC in the first place, and which appears just above.
But Twin Peaks has its foundation as much in music as in geography. Just above, you can hear composer Angelo Badalamenti, a frequent collaborator with Lynch, tell the story of how he and the director composed the show’s famous “Love Theme,” which not only made an impact on the televisual zeitgeist but set the tone for the everything to follow. “It’s the mood of the whole piece,” Lynch once said of the composition, “It is Twin Peaks.” Badalamenti has scored the new series as well, joining the long list of returnees to the project that includes not just Lynch and Frost, but Kyle MacLachlan as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and many others from the original cast as well, including the late Miguel Ferrer and Warren Frost.
“There’s so much more to Twin Peaks than a riveting murder mystery,” says Alan Thicke, another performer no longer with us, hosting the 1990 behind-the-scenes preview of the show’s second season just above. “There’s a whole look and a feel and a texture,” an experience “180 degrees away from anything else on television.” As dramatically as televisual possibilities have expanded over the past 27 years, it seems safe to say that the continuation of Twin Peaks, which comes after such expansions of its fictional universe as Frost’s Secret History of Twin Peaks, will maintain a similar creative distance from the rest of what’s on the air. “The one thing I feel I can say with total confidence,” to paraphrase David Foster Wallace writing about Lost Highway twenty years ago, is that the new Twin Peaks will be… Lynchian.
Above, you can watch a mini-season of Twin Peaks, which also doubles as a series of Japanese coffee commercials. They, too, come courtesy of David Lynch. And below, watch “Previously, on Twin Peaks…”, an abbreviated, 55-minute refresher on what happened during the first two seasons of the show. (It comes to us via WelcometoTwinPeaks.) Also you can read a recap of every episode over at The New York Times.
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I entered high school to the huge sounds of Soundgarden’s second album, Louder than Love, playing at home, in friends’ cars, on MTV’s 120 Minutes late at night.… The band’s debut, and two previous EPs released on Seattle’s Sub Pop records, had not attracted much notice outside of a fairly small scene. But Louder than Love—especially “Hands All Over”—was as hooky and alarming as breakthrough singles by other emerging bands on the other side of the country, while losing none of the propulsive grit, groove, and raw, metal/hardcore power of their earlier work. Thousands of new listeners started paying attention.
But there’s another reason the songs on Louder than Love resonated so strongly (and scored them a major label deal). The album announced singer Chris Cornell as a vocalist to be reckoned with—a singer with incredible power, melodic instinct, and a four-octave range.
On songs like “Hands All Over” and “Loud Love,” he broke away from a fairly narrow Ozzy Osbourne/Robert Plant style he’d cultivated and introduced a sound that took both influences in a direction neither had gone before, one full of anguish, urgency, and even menace.
Millions more got to know Cornell’s voice after Superunknown’s “Black Hole Sun,” but even then no one would have predicted the direction he would go in after leaving Soundgarden. He injected soul and sensitivity into songs like Audioslave’s “Original Fire” and “Be Yourself”—love ‘em or don’t—qualities we can hear in abundance in his covers of sensitive and soulful songs like Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” In his unplugged version of Jackson’s pop masterpiece the song acquires the heaviness and grievous beauty of a murder ballad. And I mean that entirely as a compliment. He brings “Nothing Compares 2 U” into “soulful new life,” as Slate writes, which is saying quite a lot, given that Sinead O’Connor’s version is more or less perfect.
Cornell took his own life at age 52 on Wednesday night after playing with a reunited Soundgarden in Detroit, and after struggling with depression for many years. It’s true he was never lauded as a songwriter of a Prince/Michael Jackson caliber. His lyrics were often tossed-off free associations rather than carefully crafted narratives. One’s appreciation for them is a matter of taste. But like the artists he covers here, both of whom also died tragically in their 50s, his music reflected a deep concern for the state of the world. This comes through clearly in songs like “Hands All Over,” “Hunger Strike,” and in some pointed comments he made during his final performance.
Rolling Stonehas a few more acoustic Cornell covers of Metallica, the Beatles, Elvis Costello, and more, and they’re all great. He did a profoundly affecting, gospel-like take on Whitney Houston’s belter, “I Will Always Love You.” But for a true, and truly heartbreaking, example of how he could imbue a song with his “unforgettable vulnerability,” watch him play Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” at New York’s Beacon Theater in 2015 above, in an absolutely riveting duet with his daughter, Toni. Cornell will be dearly missed by everyone who knew him, and by the millions of people who were deeply moved by his voice.
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