She was a little bit country. He was a little bit rock and roll.
Turns out Marie was also more than a little bit Dada.
From 1985 to 1986, Marie served as actor Jack Palance’s cohost on Ripley’s Believe It or Not, a TV series exploring strange occurrences, bizarre historical facts, and other such crowd-pleasing oddities… one of which was apparently the aforementioned European avant-garde art movement, founded a hundred years ago this week.
If you don’t know as much about Dada as you’d like, Ms. Osmond’s brief primer is a surprisingly sturdy introduction.
No cutesy bootsy, easy references to melting clocks here.
The highlight is her performance of Dada poet and manifesto author Hugo Ball’s nonsensical 1916 sound poem “Karawane.”
Lose the yellow bathrobe and she could be a captive warrior princess onGame of Thrones, fiercely petitioning the Mother of Dragons on behalf of her people. (Invent some subtitles for extra Dada-inflected fun!)
A sharp eyed young art student named Ethan Bates did catch one error in Marie’s lesson. The ’13’ costume she pulls from a handy dressing room niche was not worn by Hugo Ball, but rather Dutch painter Theo Van Doesburg, one of the founders of the De Stijl movement.
Still you’ve got to hand it to Marie, who was slated to perform just a single line of the poem. When it came time to tape, she abandoned the cue cards, blowing producers’ and crew’s minds by delivering the poem in its unhinged entirety from memory.
Now that’s rock and roll.
Below you’ll find footage of Ball himself performing the work in 1916.
People have spoken for decades, and with great certainty, of the impending death of print. But even here into the 21st century, presses continue to run around the world, putting out books and periodicals of all different shapes, sizes, and print runs. The technology has endured so well in part because it has had so long to evolve. Everyone knows that printing began with something called the Gutenberg Press, and many know that Gutenberg himself (Johannes, a German blacksmith) unveiled his invention in 1440, introducing movable type to the world. Ten years later came the Gutenberg Bible, the first major book printed using it, still considered among the most beautiful books ever mass-produced.
But how did the Gutenberg press actually work? In the video above, you can watch a demonstration of “the most complete and functioning Gutenberg Press in the world” at the Crandall Historical Printing Museum in Provo, Utah. While it certainly marked a vast improvement in efficiency over the hand-copying used to make books before, it still required no small amount of labor on the part of an entire staff specially trained to apply the ink, square up the paper, and turn a not-that-easy-to-turn lever. The guide, who’s clearly put in the years mastering his routine, has both clear explanations and plenty of corny jokes at hand throughout the process.
One can hardly overstate the importance of the machine we see in action here, which facilitated the spread of ideas all around Europe and the world and turned the book into what no less a technophile than Stephen Fry calls “the building block of our civilization.” He says that in an episode of the BBC series The Medieval Mind in which he explores the world of Gutenberg printing in even greater depth. We’ve grown so accustomed to the near-instantaneous transfer of information over the internet that dealing with print can feel like a hassle. I myself just recently resented having to buy a printer for work reasons, even though its sheer speed and clarity would have seemed like a miracle to Gutenberg, whose invention — and the labor of the countless skilled workers who operated it — set in motion the developments that let us spread ideas so impossibly fast on sites like this today.
Everyone’s favorite alcoholic poet and dirty old man Charles Bukowski was hardly what you’d call a romantic, though he had a softer side: a vulnerability and compassion for the lonely, poor, and suffering. But we don’t love Bukowski because he prettied up the nasty business of being human. We love him—those of us who do (I won’t presume to speak for his detractors)—because he was honest: about his own desires and disappointments, about the beauty and the sordid ugliness of things. Mostly the ugliness.
Often the ugliness in Bukowski’s work comes from Bukowski himself—or the voice he adopts of the leering old man on the corner who makes women cross the street: voyeuristic, sardonic, imaginative, self-aware, miserable, embittered, contemptuous…. We see this Bukowski encountering strange women—sometimes ogling, sometimes sneering—in poems like “The Girl Outside the Supermarket,” “Girl in a Miniskirt Reading the Bible Outside My Window,” and “Girl on the Escalator,” all in their way offering candidly narcissistic insights into the male gaze and male ego.
In “Girl on the Escalator,” Bukowski’s speaker both ogles and sneers, and drifts into an imaginative fugue as he constructs a fantasy life for the “girl” of the title, then deconstructs her in the grossest, most visceral way. Feminist he ain’t, and the new short film above, created by Kayhan Lannes Ozmen, gives us a very literal interpretation of every one of the poem’s images, as a deadpan narrator reads Bukowski’s poem. One fan recommends that you read the poem yourself (find it here) before watching the film, and see what you make of it first. I’d agree, but that is, of course, up to you.
Daily Nous, a website about philosophy and the philosophy profession, recently featured a detailed mapping of the entire discipline of philosophy, created by an enterprising French grad student, Valentin Lageard. Drawing on a taxonomy provided by PhilPapers, Lageard used NetworkX (a Python software package that lets you study the structure and dynamics of complex networks) to map out the major fields of philosophy, and show how they relate to various sub-fields and even sub-sub-fields. The image above shows the complete map, revealing the astonishing size of philosophy as an overall field. The images below let you see what happens when you zoom in and move down to different levels.
To explore the map, head over to Daily Nous–or open this image, click on it, wait for it to expand (it takes a second), and then start maneuvering through the networks.
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Fifty years on, you can read all you want about the Beach Boys’ 1966 masterpiece Pet Sounds (and here’s twobooks that are great), but to really appreciate the intricate nature of the arrangements, you have to turn to the multi-tracks themselves.
Working with session players that could pick up the ideas tumbling from his head (and hurriedly transcribe them), Brian Wilson created a sonic tapestry at L.A.‘s Gold Star Studios that still sounds fresh and, as the years go by, otherworldly. Influenced by Phil Spector’s work, along with the textures of the songs of Burt Bacharach and Martin Denny, Wilson created something as unique as his own DNA. Pet Sounds continues to reveal secrets and treasures the more you listen to it–as this series of YouTube mini-docs from user Behind the Sounds reveals.
These videos use the raw session recordings that were released in 1997, and annotates them, pointing out moments of Wilson’s artistry as we hear these classic tracks assembled. (Wilson, it’s said, kept his swearing to a minimum in order to be taken seriously by the musicians.)
An experienced arranger would probably never have come up with the recipe for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” for example: two pianos, three guitars, three basses, four horns, two accordions, drums, and percussion. And certainly not for a pop song. But there it is.
Yet, as amazing as Pet Sounds is, the album was also a cry for help as mental illness began to really take hold of Wilson. The album would be the high point before a slow decline. It’s as if one man couldn’t hold all this art in his head. It was too much. Aware of the endless possibilities of the studio as instrument, and owning a perfectionist nature, Wilson came undone. These docs are an excellent insight into a beautiful, troubled mind, but one that recovered after a long spell. Wilson continues to record and tour, including full performances of Pet Sounds. Click here to find tour dates for Brian Wilson’s “Pet Sounds 50th Anniversary World Tour.”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
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Sports Night, The West Wing, The American President, The Social Network — hardly shameful items to appear on anyone’s résumé. Sure, people disagree about the likes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and The Newsroom, but we’ve all got to admit that when Aaron Sorkin writes, he hits more than he misses, and even the supposed misses have more of interest about them than many others’ hits. How does this master of the modern American scene — its concerns, its personalities, its conversations, its politics — do it? You can find out in his Screenwriting course on MasterClass, the new platform for online instruction as given by big-name doers of high-profile work.
Back in May, we featured MasterClass’s offering of Werner Herzog on filmmaking, and though most everyone can enjoy hearing the man behind Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and Grizzly Man talk for five hours, not everyone can summon the will to make movies like those. Sorkin, by contrast, uses his also considerable creative vitality to a different end entirely, writing snappy scripts that bring his own compelling idiosyncrasies to mainstream film and television.
But he started, according to MasterClass, by writing his first screenplay on the humble medium of cocktail napkins — cocktail napkins that became A Few Good Men. Since then, he’s come up with “rules of storytelling, dialogue, character development, and what makes a script actually sell,” now ready to share with his online students.
In fact, he gives one away for free in the trailer above: “No one in real life starts a sentence with, ‘Damn it.’ ” That alone may get you writing your own Oscar-winning screenplay, thus saving you the $90 fee for the whole five-hour course, but Sorkin goes on to tease his methods for breaking through his “constant state of writer’s block” to craft dialogue as he conceives of that process: “Taking something someone has just said, holding them in your hand, and then punching them in the face with it.” He also makes reference to Aristotle’s Poetics, making his own lecturing sound like the very same high-and-low, intellectual and visceral cocktail that his fans so enjoy in the dialogue he writes. “The worst crime you can commit,” he warns, “is telling the audience something they already know,” and it sounds as if, in teacher mode to his audience of aspiring screenwriters, he plans on following his own advice.
Some of the best, most succinct writing advice I ever received came from the great John McPhee, via one of his former students: “Writing is paying attention.” What do you see, hear, taste, etc.? Questions of style, syntax, and punctuation come later. Obsess over them before you’ve learned to pay attention, and you’ll have nothing of interest to write about. And in order to notice what you’re noticing, you’ve got to record it; so keep a notebook with you at all times to jot down overheard expressions, thrilling sights and insights, dramatic chance encounters… hoarding material, all the time.
Amongst the tidal wave of advice you’ll encounter when you first begin to write—much of it contradictory and some of little practical benefit—you’d have a hard time finding anyone who disagrees with McPhee. Not even Walt Whitman, who embraced contrariness and contradiction like no other American writer, thus becoming all the more an honest reflection of the nation. Few writers spent more time noticing than Whitman, who seemingly recorded everything he saw and heard on his travels. “I heard what the talkers were talking,” he proclaimed, “I perceive after all so many uttering tongues.” Whitman—as a project called HarvardX Neuroscience dubs him—was a “poet of perception.”
But he was also a hard-headed realist with a bent toward the utilitarian and a scrappy resourcefulness that made him an artistic survivor. Whitman contained multitudes, not only in his poetry but in his writing advice. When editors of The Signal, newspaper of The College of New Jersey, asked the poet in 1888 to advise young scholars on the “literary life,” he obliged, giving the paper a brief interview in which the “gray-haired, handsome, aged poet of Camden” proffered the following (condensed in list form below):
1. Whack away at everything pertaining to literary life—mechanical part as well as the rest. Learn to set type, learn to work at the ‘case’, learn to be a practical printer, and whatever you do learn condensation.
2. To young literateurs I want to give three bits of advice: First, don’t write poetry; second ditto; third ditto. You may be surprised to hear me say so, but there is no particular need of poetic expression. We are utilitarian, and the current cannot be stopped.
3. It is a good plan for every young man or woman having literary aspirations to carry a pencil and a piece of paper and constantly jot down striking events in daily life. They thus acquire a vast fund of information. One of the best things you know is habit. Again, the best of reading is not so much in the information it conveys as the thoughts it suggests. Remember this above all. There is no royal road to learning.
Whitman’s advice contains sound, practical tips on what we might today call “professionalization.” Should we take his admonishment against writing poetry seriously? Why not? For a good portion of his life, Whitman earned a living “whacking away,” as he liked to say often, at more utilitarian forms of writing, from reportage to an advice column. Whitman took seriously his role as a voice of working people and perhaps saw this interview as an occasion to address them.
Whitman’s “seething rejection of poetry,” writes Nicole Kukawski in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, should not surprise us; it is “simply part of his attack on conventionality in all respects… poetry can never be ‘utilitarian’—in no way can it reach the masses for their benefit.” Unlike our day, poetry was ubiquitous in late nineteenth century America, part of an entrenched, highly conventional polite discourse. Who knows, maybe a Whitman of the early 21st century would feel very differently on this point. Surely we could use a great deal more “poetic expression” these days.
Whitman’s final piece of advice accords fully with John McPhee’s—and several hundred other writers and teachers. But in Whitman’s estimation, noticing, and acquiring “a vast fund of information,” was not only essential to the literary life but also key to pursuing an “individualistic,” real-world self-education. “One subject about which Whitman did not contradict himself,” writes Kukawski, “was his consistent belief that the scholar should learn by encountering life instead of reading books alone.” There may be no better exemplar of that philosophy in American letters than Walt Whitman himself.
If your understanding of early punk derives mainly from documentaries, you’re sorely missing out. As I wrote in a post yesterday on international treasure John Peel—the BBC DJ who exposed more than a couple generations to carefully-curated punk rock—finding such music before the internet could be a daunting, and exciting, adventure. Without a doubt the best way die-hard fans and curious onlookers could get a feel for the music, manners, and personalities of any number of local scenes was through magazine culture, which disseminated trends pre-Tumblr with a special kind of intensity and aesthetic personalization. Punk publications documented firsthand the doings of not only musicians, but visual artists, activists, promoters, managers, and, of course, the fans, offering points of view unavailable anywhere else.
The breadth and range of local punk rock fanzines, from the UK, the States, and elsewhere, can seem staggering, and the quality curve is a steep one—from barely legible, mimeographed broadsheets to large-format newsprint affairs with professional layout and typesetting, like legendary titles Touch & Go and Search & Destroy. The latter publication emerged from the rich, but often overlooked San Francisco scene and featured frequent contributions from Dead Kennedys’ singer Jello Biafra, who appears on the cover of another San Francisco ‘zine, Damage (top), “as fine an example of the [punk ‘zine] form as any you care to name,” writes Dangerous Minds. Thanks to Austin-based archivist Ryan Richardson, you can download 13 complete issues of Damage, from 1979 to 1981, in one large PDF.
Through his project Circulation Zero, Richardson has made other punk magazine collections available as well, in “an attempt to answer some questions…. Are collections better off inside institutional libraries or in the hands of collectors? Should ancient in-fighting prevent bringing the punk print hey-day to a new generation?” Obviously on that account, he’s come to terms with “eggshell walking over copyright issues” and decided to deliver not only Damage but two more seminal titles from the West Coast punk scene’s golden age: Slash and No Mag. Each download is fairly large, including as they do “single searchable PDFs” of print runs over several years. In the case of Slash, we get a whopping 29 issues, from 1977 to 1980, and Richardson gives us 14 issues of No Mag, from 1978 to 1985. Because “some publications stuck around for a long time,” he writes, “I’ve picked a reasonable stopping point based mostly on when my fascination precipitously declines heading into the mid-80s.”
Even so, these collections are magnificent representations of the most fertile years of the movement, and they capture some of the most necessary publications for fans and scholars seeking to understand punk culture. “The importance of Slash,” Dangerous Minds writes, “to the L.A. punk scene, and really to the worldwide punk scene in general, cannot be overstated.” The edgier, “filthier” No Mag’s “transgressive art and photography, along with the interviews of now-legendary bands, make this run a crucial historical resource.”
Founded in 1978 by Bruce Kalberg and Michael Gira—before he moved to New York and started punishing noise-rock band Swans—No Mag’s catalog included the usual roundup of L.A. punk heroes: X, Fear, the Germs, Suicidal Tendencies, along with several forgotten local stalwarts as well. This particular rag—as an L.A. Weekly piece detailed—“frequently bordered on the pornographic… forcing [Kalberg] to manufacture it in San Francisco, where printers are apparently more tolerant.” It may go without saying, but we say it all the same: many of these pages make for unsafe work viewing.
Circulation Zero generously makes these invaluable collections available to all, ostensibly free of charge, but with the understanding that readers will “decide what your experience was worth and then donate” to charities of Richardson’s choice, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Doctors Without Borders. You’ll find download links for all three titles on this page, and donation links here. However much, or little, you’re able to give (on your honor!), it’s worth the time and cost. Whether you’re an old-school punk, a new fan learning the history, or an academic cultural historian or theorist, you’ll glean an inestimable amount of knowledge and pleasure from these archives.
Drawing of William S. Burroughs by Nathan Gelgud/The Paris Review
America’s political circus will soon roll through Cleveland and then Philadelphia–the sites of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. And, not without some merit, there’s concern that the carnivals could turn violent, as happened in 1968, when Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley, backed by 23,000 police and National Guardsmen, assaulted protesters in the streets. A federal report later called it a display of “unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence.”
This week, that tumultuous ’68 convention is being commemorated in a comic over at The Paris Review. Issued in daily installments by illustrator Nathan Gelgud, the comic–simply titled “Unconventional”–looks at the writers, artists, and demonstrators who attended the convention.Part 1 features poet, singer, activist Ed Sanders. Part 2 puts Jean Genet center stage (who knew he was there?). Part 3 focuses on Norman Mailer, who was always ready for a fight. Part 4 gives us the inimitable William S. Burroughs, and Part 5, Terry Southern. You can follow the series here.
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If you went to high school in America, you almost certainly saw a production of Our Town. If you participated in your high school’s drama program, you almost certainly acted in a production of Our Town. I myself built sets for a production of Our Town, doing what I could to properly realize the fictional, small early 20th-century American town of Grover’s Corners on my high school’s stage while remaining within its long-respected tradition of minimalist scenery. Sometimes I wonder if it would have taken the wind out of my sails had I known that no less an auteur than the 24-year-old Orson Welles had produced his own Our Town more than sixty years before using no sets or props at all — using, in fact, nothing but sound.
Since its first performance in 1938, Thornton Wilder’s quaint yet dark, sentimental yet metafictional signature dramatic work has become the most popular high-school play of them all (though George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s comedy You Can’t Take It with You gives it a run for its money). Welles adapted it for radio in 1939, the year after its premiere on stage as well as the year after the broadcast of his much more infamous radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds(and, notably, the year before Citizen Kane). Welles and Wilder had first met at a party in 1933, not long after Welles had put in a performing stint at Dublin’s Gate Theatre. “To Welles’ amazement,” writes Charles Higham in Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius, “Wilder knew all about his career at the Gate,” recalling praise the young actor received from the New York Times.
“Wilder whisked Welles away from the party on a round of late night speakeasies,” Higham continues, “and as dawn broke, Wilder scribbled out notes of introduction to friends in New York, all of whom were influential in the theater.” Given Wilder’s non-trivial role in facilitating the development of Welles’ early career, it makes sense that Welles would want to do right by Wilder’s work, and it still holds up well against the versions of Our Town in any form that have followed. For a taste of how the play translates to the cinema, you could do worse than Sam Wood’s 1940 adaptation starring William Holden, free to watch at the Internet Archive, although it uses relatively elaborate production design and turns the original tragic ending into a happy one. For a purer Our Town, you’ll want to stick with Welles’ interpretation — or that of an American high school near you.
Surrealism, Discordianism, Frank Zappa, Situationism, punk rock, the Residents, Devo… the anarchists of counterculture in all their various guises may never have come into being—or into the being they did—were it not for an anti-art movement that called itself Dada. And like many of those anarchist countercultural movements and artists, Dada came about not as a playful experiment in “disrupting” the art world for fun and profit—to use the current jargon—but as a politically-charged response to rationalized violence and complacent banality. In this case, as a response to European culture’s descent into the mass-murder of World War One, and to the domestication of the avant-garde’s many proliferating isms.
The explicit tenets of Dada, in their intentionally scrambled way, were ecumenical, international, anti-elitist, and concerned with questions of craft. “The hospitality of the Swiss is something to be profoundly appreciated,” wrote poet Hugo Ball in his 1916 Dada manifesto, “And in questions of aesthetics the key is quality.” Ball conceived Dada as a means of reaching back toward primal origins, “to show how articulated language comes into being…. I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it.” Risking a lapse into solipsism, Ball sneered at “The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness.” And yet, he concluded, “The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.”
Two years later, artist Tristan Tzara issued a more bilious Dada manifesto with similar intent: “a need for independence… a distrust toward unity.” At once intensely political and anti-theoretical, he wrote, “Those who are with us preserve their freedom…. Here we are dropping our anchor in fertile ground.” How right he was, we can say 100 years later. “However short-lived,” writes Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim in a New York Times celebration of Dada’s 100th anniversary, “Dada constitutes something like the Big Bang of Modernism.” Both Ball and Tzara positioned Dada as a collective, international movement. As such, it needed a publication to both centralize and spread its anti-establishment messages: thusDada, the arts journal, first published in 1917 and printing 8 issues in Zurich and Paris until 1921.
Edited by Tzara and including his manifesto in issue 3, the magazine “served to distinguish and define Dada in the many cities it infiltrated,” writes the Art Institute of Chicago, “and allowed its major figures to assert their power and position.” Dada succeeded a previous attempt by Ball at a journal called Cabaret Voltaire—named for his Zurich theater—which survived for one issue in 1917 before folding, along with the first version of the cabaret. That year, Tzara, “an ambitious and skilled promoter… began a relentless campaign to spread the ideas of Dada…. As Dada gained momentum, Tzara took on the role of a prophet by bombarding French and Italian artists and writers with letters about Dada’s activities.” Whatever Dada was, it wasn’t shy about promoting itself.
The first issue (cover at the top), contained commentary and poetry in French and Italian, and artwork like that above by important Romanian Dada artist, architect, and theorist Marcel Janco. Issues 4 and 5 were published together as an anthology, then World War I ended, and with travel again possible, Tzara, several Dada compatriots, and the journal moved to Paris. The final issue, Number 8, appeared in a truncated form. You can download each issue as a PDF from Monoskop or from Princeton University’s Blue Mountain Project, which also has an online viewer that allows you to preview each page before downloading.
Ball and Tzara were not the only assertive disseminators of Dada’s art and aims. The Art Institute of Chicago notes that in Berlin a “highly aggressive and politically involved Dada group” published its own short-lived journal, Der Dada, from 1919–1920. Download all three issues of that publication from the University of Iowa here.
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