In 1968, Charles Manson listened to The Beatles’ White Album and came away thinking that America was on the verge of an apocalyptic race war between whites and blacks. As Manson imagined it, the race war would be triggered by a shocking, chaotic event called “Helter Skelter” — a named borrowed from a song on the White Album. And, like most megalomaniacs, Manson put himself at the center of the drama. In the summer of 1969, Manson had members of his cult commit a series of infamous murders in Southern California, hoping that African-Americans would be blamed and the race war would begin. Instead, a lengthy police investigation led to Manson’s arrest on December 2, 1969 and his conviction soon thereafter, making him then, and now, one of America’s notorious inmates.
Through the 1980s, Manson, even though behind bars, remained a very public figure, giving high profile interviews to Tom Snyder, Charlie Rose, and Geraldo Rivera. But then, he began to fade from view, for whatever reasons. For the past 20 years, we haven’t heard much from him. Until this came along. Above, you can watch Leah Shore’s animation of never-before-heard phone conversations between Charles Manson and Marlin Marynick (who later published a best-selling biography called Charles Manson Now). Fittingly strange, the animation reminds us of the very odd things going on inside Manson’s mind. Off kilter as ever, he goes in all kinds of unexpected directions.
We also believe that you shouldn’t have to endure a Priceless Halloween — that is to say, a Halloween without Vincent Price. Though he proved his versatility in a wide variety of genres throughout his long acting career, history has remembered Price first and foremost for his work in horror, no doubt thanks in large part to his possession of a voice perfectly suited to the elegantly sinister. It also made him an ideal teller of Poe’s ingeniously macabre tales, which you can experience for yourself in the recordings we’ve posted of Price reading Poe, a playlist which also includes readings by Price’s equally versatile Basil Rathbone.
Rathbone may also have got to read Poe, the work, but despite his huge number of roles on stage and screen, he never actually played Poe, the man. But Price did, in the special An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe, the closest any of us will get to an audience with the troubled, brilliant, and terrifyingly inventive writer himself. In it, Price-as-Poe takes the stage and, over the course of an hour, weaves into his performance four of his most enduring stories: “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Sphinx,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Go on, join Edgar Allan Poe in his drawing room this Halloween by having Price bring him to life on your screen — it will guarantee you a memorable holiday evening.
Darwin had no real use for the original manuscript once galley proofs came back from the publisher. So one can imagine father Charles giving his kids the only worthwhile paper in the house to draw on. It seems flippant now, but at the time, it was perfectly normal.
Researchers surmise that the majority of the art comes from three of the 10 children, Francis, George, and Horace, all of whom went into the sciences as adults. The illustrations are colorful and witty, drawn in pencil and sometimes colored in watercolor. Birds and butterflies are drawn and colored with attention to detail. Some creatures are imaginary, like the green fish with legs carrying an umbrella, and there are short stories about fairies and battles too.
Overall, the drawings show a Darwin who was a family man and not a reclusive scientist. We’re just glad that the kids let dad do his work in relative silence.
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.
If you visited The Tate Modern in recent years, perhaps you saw the large, 130-foot art installation covering a concourse wall. Created by illustrator Sara Fanelli, the “Tate Artist Timeline” provided museumgoers with a sprawling roadmap showing the major artistic movements and important artists of the 20th century, moving from Art Nouveau to more contemporary Graffiti Art.
Nowadays, you can revisit Fanelli’s educational timeline by purchasing a copy in a handsome book format. You can also watch the timeline play out in the video above.
Or, happily we’ve been informed by the Tate, there’s now an updated, interactive version installed in the museum. The video below gives you a preview:
We’ve all been to a museum with that friend or family member who just doesn’t “get” modern art and suggests it’s all a con. Conceptual art? Abstract expressionism? What is that?! Impressionism? Who wants blurry, poorly drawn paintings?! Arrgh!
Hey, maybe some of us are that friend or family member. Maybe our complaints are even more specific—maybe some of us are members of a “cultural justice” movement called “Renoir Sucks at Painting.” Maybe we show up at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with signs parodying the cartoonishly terrible Westboro Baptist Church (“God Hates Renoir”) and demanding, with as much force as one can with a parody sign, that the Renoirs be removed from the company of worthier objets d’art.
One critical difference between the typical art hater and the Renoir Sucks crew: the latter do not object to Pierre-Auguste Renoir because his work is too hard to “get,” but because it’s too easy. Renoir, they say, painted “treacle” and “deformed pink fuzzy women.” As art critic Peter Schjeldahl writes in The New Yorker, “Renoir’s winsome subjects and effulgent hues jump in your lap like a friendly puppy.” Renoir is so far from avant-garde that Schjeldahl can peg his “exaggerated blush and sweetness” as an example of the “popular appeal” that “advanced the bourgeois cultural revolution that was Impressionism.” Ouch.
This kind of assessment gets no help from the painter’s great-great granddaughter, Genevieve, who responds to critics by quoting sales figures: “It is safe to say,” she writes, “that the free market has spoken and Renoir did NOT suck at painting.” By this measure, Thomas Kinkade and Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel were also artistic geniuses. The charges of “aesthetic terrorism” against Renoir come right out of the iconoclasm that functions in the art world as both meaningful dissent and successful gimmick (cf. Marcel Duchamp, or Ai Weiwei’s controversial, gallery-filling attacks on revered cultural artifacts.) But perhaps the honest question remains: does Renoir Suck at Painting?
Let us reserve judgment and take a look at another side of Renoir, a rarely seen excursion into book illustration—specifically the four illustrations he made for an 1878 edition of Emile Zola’s novel L’Assommoir (“The Dram Shop”). Described by the Art Institute of Chicago as “grittily realistic,” Zola’s naturalist depiction of what he called “the inevitable downfall of a working-class family in the polluted atmosphere of our urban areas” provoked many of its readers, who regarded the book as “an unforgivable lapse of taste on the part of its author.” It showed Parisians “an aspect of current life that most found frightening and repulsive.” Nonetheless, the novel became a popular success.
The four black-and-white engravings here—made from Renoir’s original drawings—are the impressionist’s contribution to Zola’s illlustrated novel. The choice of Renoir as one of several artists for this edition seems an odd one. (Zola, a friend of the painter’s, approached him personally.) Then, as now, Renoir had a reputation for sunny optimism: “he always looks on the bright side,” remarked one contemporary. Renoir’s “preference for creating images of beauty,” writes The Art Institute of Chicago, “made the illustration of the particularly seedy passages of the novel problematic, and some of the resulting drawings lack conviction.”
Instead of succumbing to the novel’s grim tone, Renoir’s original renderings, like the “loose wash drawing” in “warm, brown ink” at the top of the post, “gently subverted the dark undertones of Zola’s text.” Below the original drawing, see the engraving that appeared in the book. Book blog Adventures in the Print Trade concedes the plates “are of varying quality” and singles out the illustration just above as the most successful one, since “the subject-matter is perfect for Renoir, and the whole scene is brimming with life.”
As you can see from the two images at the top of the post, the translation from Renoir’s drawings to the final book engravings left many of his figures blurred and obscured, and introduce a dark heaviness to work undertaken with a much softer, lighter touch. Do these illustrations add anything to our understanding of whether Renoir Sucks at Painting? Who can say. It’s true that here, as in many of his well-known paintings, “the compositions tend to be slack,” as Schjeldahl writes. Nonetheless, the Art Institute of Chicago audaciously judges the brown ink wash drawing at the top of the post “one of the most important drawings the artist produced during the years of high Impressionism.”
They only add to my appreciation of Renoir, who does not, I think, suck. Even if his work can be, as Schjeldahl says, “high glucose,” I would argue that his sweetness and light provide just the right approach to Zola, whose novels, like those of other naturalists such as Theodore Dreiser or Thomas Hardy, contain much more than a hint of sentimentality.
Those who watch and dislike Chantal Akerman’s best-known film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, often complain that “nothing happens” in it. But in my experience of introducing it — nay, evangelizing for it — to friends, it usually only takes a solid viewing or two of that 1975 three-hour-and-twenty-minute tale of a Belgian single mother’s days and nights spent cooking (a short clip of which you can see above), cleaning, and possibly engaging in prostitution to feel — or at least in the immediate aftermath of viewing, feel — that in no movie but Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles does anything truly happen. Every other movie plays, by comparison, as if on fast-forward, or like a set of filmed Cliff’s Notes.
Clearly, Akerman saw, and realized, a wider storytelling potential in cinema than do most filmmakers. So much worse the loss, then, when she died earlier this month, leaving behind a filmography consisting of not just her early masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, which she directed at just 25 years of age, but a variety of feature films and shorts made between 1968 and this year. As a tribute, the cinephile-beloved home video company The Criterion Collection has, for a very limited time, made all of their Akerman films free to view on Hulu (unfortunately, for viewers in certain territories only), including 1978’s Les rendezvous d’Anna, embedded just above, 1972’s Hotel Monterey and La chambre, 1975’s Je tu il elle,1976’s News from Home…
… and of course, Jeanne Dielman. If you plan to enjoy a free Akerman marathon on Hulu thanks to Criteron, you’d better do it soon, since they’ll only remain free to view through the next day. And do invite all your most cinematically adventurous friends to join your side, as with most auteur films, the interest that doesn’t lie in watching them lies in arguing about their merits afterward. You can hear one such fun conversation on a 2011 episode of The Criterioncast, a podcast dedicated to films released by the Criterion Collection, just above. It actually features yours truly as the special guest, discussing Jeanne Dielman with the regular panelists. Do you side with the likes of an Akerman partisan like me, or does your opinion most closely resemble one of the others who doesn’t take quite such a rich experience from their every viewing? Today, you can find out where you stand on this and other of Akerman’s fascinating works for free. And you can always find many more free films in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
You may remember that we featured Wireless Philosophy, an open access philosophy project created by Yale and MIT, back in 2013 when it first got started. Wi-Phi, for short, has kept on keeping in with its mission of producing free, informative and entertaining animated videos meant to introduce a host of philosophical issues. Our own Josh Jones called it “a necessary service to those just beginning to wade out into the sea of The Big Questions” in 2013, and now, in 2015, you can wade in from a wider expanse of the Big Question coastline than ever before. There are currently 105 Wiphi videos in total.
Both of those playlists do come with a certain practicality, at least by philosophical standards: who, after all doesn’t want to think more correctly (or at least less incorrectly), and who doesn’t want to live the good life (or at least a better life than they live now)? But the harder core of casual philosophy enthusiasts — always a demanding group — should rest assured that Wiphi also offers video series on more abstract or historical philosophical topics, such as the seven-part playlist on classical theism above. Dig deeper into their Youtube channel and you’ll find more simple but not simplistic lessons on the philosophy of mathematics, language, ancient China, and much more.
Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki detests being referred to as the Japanese Walt Disney. The great animator and storyteller admires the gorgeous animation of classic Disney films, but finds them lacking in emotional complexity, the element he prizes above all else.
Miyazaki’s films are celebrated for their mystical, supernatural elements, but they take shape around the human characters inhabiting them. Plot comes later, after he has figured out the desires driving his people. “Keep it simple,” he counsels in Lewis Bond’s short documentary The Essence of Humanity above. An interesting piece of advice, given that a hallmark of his 40-year career is his insistence on creating realistic three-dimensional characters, warts and all.
American animators are also taught to simplify. They should all be able to sum up the essence of their proposed features by filling in the blank of the phrase “I want _____,” presumably because such concision is a necessary element of a successful elevator pitch.
As Bond points out, Western animated features often end with a convenient deus ex machina, freeing the characters up for a crowd pleasing dance party as the credits roll.
Miyazaki doesn’t cotton to the idea of tidy, unearned endings, nor does he feel bound to grant his characters their wants, preferring instead to give them what they need. Spiritual growth is superior to wish fulfillment here.
Such growth rarely happens without time for reflection, and Miyazaki films are notable for the number of non-verbal scenes wherein characters perform small, everyday actions, a number of which can be sampled in Bond’s documentary. The beautifully-rendered weather and settings have provided clues as to the characters’ development, ever since the lovely scene of cloud shadows skimming across a field in his first feature, 1979’s The Castle of Cagliostro.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City next month. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Lynch has been practicing Transcendental Meditation for as long as he’s been a filmmaker, and in interviews and in books like Catching the Big Fish, he espouses the wonders of meditation for creativity. (See him talk more about that here.) Students enrolled in the David Lynch Film program will follow Lynch’s example by combining meditation with filmmaking. You might not create the next Eraserhead (Lynch’s AFI project that turned into his career-defining debut), but, according to Lynch, students are promised to discover
the ability to dive within—to transcend and experience that unbounded ocean of pure consciousness which is unbounded intelligence, creativity, happiness, love, energy, power, and peace.
Before one gets too excited and thinks that the director himself will be teaching every class and that you’ll get to hang out with him during office hours, that’s not the way the program works.
Classes are taught by director/cinematographer Michael W. Barnard (and once the head of the Maharishi’s film department), screenwriter Dorothy Rompalske, and David Lynch Foundation Television founder Amine Kouider. Guest speakers have included Jim Carrey, Peter Farrelly, script doctor Dara Marks, Twin Peaks alum Duwayne Dunham, and many other Hollywood insiders.
However, students do get a field trip to Los Angeles to meet Lynch and spend time with the filmmaker. The aspiring filmmakers should consider themselves lucky, seeing that the director is busy working on Twin Peaks’ new season and apparently writing an autobiography.
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.
Everyone in the spotlight has at least one damning incident to live down, and sometimes a whole damning period. There’s David Bowie’s brief fascism controversy, for example, or Eric Clapton’s more substantive, and much more disturbing, far-right political views, which he broadcast from the stage in 1976, then repeated to the magazines shortly after. Clapton’s racist invective and support for Enoch Powell and the National Front was particularly appalling given that he rode in on the shoulders of blues artists and scored a huge hit just two years earlier with his version of Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff.” As photographer Red Saunders would write in a published letter to Clapton after the guitar god’s bizarre onstage rant: “Half your music is black. You’re rock music’s biggest colonist.” At least for a time, Clapton fell decidedly on the wrong side of a dichotomy Eric Lott called “Love and Theft.”
One might make similar accusations against punk troubadour Elvis Costello, who took his look from Buddy Holly, his name from The King, and has also drawn heavily from black music for the better part of thirty years. And Costello once had his own brief racist outburst in 1979 during a tour stop in Columbus, Ohio, dropping a couple n‑bombs in reference to James Brown and Ray Charles, and getting a beating from one of Stephen Stills’ backing singers. Costello maintained the outrage was a deliberately nasty way to troll the hated old guard Stills represented, but he thereafter received death threats and continued his tour under armed guard. Ironically, the previous year he had appeared with The Clash and reggae bands Misty in Roots and Aswad at a festival concert in London sponsored by Rock Against Racism, who formed in response to Enoch Powell, the National Front, and Clapton—and whose American chapter picketed Costello after the Ohio brawl.
Costello addresses the incident in his new memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, writing “whatever I did, I did it to provoke a bar fight. Surely this was all understood. Didn’t they know the love I had for James Brown and Ray Charles, whose record of ‘The Danger Zone’ I preferred to watching men walk on the moon?” (He’s made several other comments over the years, and even Ray Charles weighed in afterwards with something of a forgiving statement.) Stephen Deusner at Vulture writes, “you somehow never doubt the sincerity of that love, just as you don’t doubt that Costello could be a raving bastard when he’s drunk.” Unlike so many other examples of the genre, Unfaithful Music doesn’t peddle contrition or controversy for their own sake. On the contrary, The Quietus calls the book “without doubt, one of the greatest self-penned appraisals of a popular entertainer’s life and work.”
That greatness, Deusner argues, comes in large part from Costello’s “nerdishly prodigious” knowledge of, and love for—mostly American—music: “There are nearly 400 songs Costello name-checks as influences within the pages of Unfaithful Music, and hundreds more he refers to in passing.” These include songs from James Brown and Ray Charles, and also Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, David Bowie, Doc Watson, The Drifters, his namesake Elvis Presley, Fleetwood Mac, huge helpings of The Beatles, Burt Bacharach… even CSNY’s “Ohio.” Based on Costello’s encyclopedic devotion to country, pop, R&B, punk, reggae, and nearly every other genre under the sun, Vulture compiled the 300-song Spotify playlist above, “by no means complete,” writes Deusner, “due in large part to Spotify’s scarcity of Beatles, Bacharach, and Neil Young albums.” (If you need Spotify’s software, download it for free here.)
The playlist serves as an audio accompaniment to Costello’s almost 700-page reminiscence; taken together, both explain how “the angry young man of the late 70s,” with a “reputation as one of the smartest and bristliest figures in the London punk scene” became “a revered troubadour craftsman playing the White House, jamming with various Beatles, and composing ballet scores.” Just above, you can hear Costello himself read a brief excerpt from the book, a story about hanging out with David Bowie. The Quietus has another exclusive extract from Unfaithful Music. (Note that you can download the entire book, narrated by Costello himself, for free if you join Audible.com’s Free Trial program.) And if you need to hear more about what he now calls that “f***** stupid” fracas in ’79, see him talk about his angry young man persona and tell other “war stories” of his life in music in an interview with ?uestlove. Of his fierce devotion to so much of the music above, Costello tells The Roots’ drummer, “English musicians have such this weird outside love for American music, particularly rhythm and blues as we grew up to know it, that we sort of felt we had possession of it in some weird way.”
Do you consider yourself well-educated? Cultured, even? By whose standards?
We may superficially assume these terms name immutable qualities, but they are in any analysis dependent on where and when we happen to be situated in history. The most sophisticated of Medieval doctors—a title then closer to the European “docent” than our general use of Dr.—would appear profoundly ignorant to us; and we, with our painfully inadequate grasp of church Latin, Aristotelianism, and arcane theological arguments, would appear profoundly ignorant to him.
What does it mean to be cultured? Is it the acquisition of mostly useless cultural capital for its own sake, or of a set of codes that helps us navigate the world successfully? In an attempt to address these fraught questions, Ashley Montagu, a student of hugely influential German-born anthropologist Franz Boas, wrote The Cultured Man in 1958. Rebecca Onion at Slate describes the book as containing “quizzes for 50 categories of knowledge in the arts and sciences, with 30 questions each.” In the page above, we have the first 22 questions of Montagu’s “Art” quiz (with the answers here).
You’ll probably notice right away that while most of the questions have definite, unambiguous answers, others like “Define art,” seem patently unanswerable in all but the most general and unsatisfactory ways. Montagu defines art in one succinct sentence: “Art is the making or doing of things that have form and beauty”—which strikes me as anemic, though functional enough.
Montagu intended his book to test not only knowledge of cultural facts, but also of “attitudes”: a person “considered ‘cultured,’” writes Onion, “would not just be able to readily summon facts, but also to access humane feelings, which would necessarily come about after contact with culture.” Many administrators of “culture”—curators, art historians, literature professors, etc—would agree with the premise: ideally, the more cultural knowledge we acquire, the more empathy and understanding of other peoples and cultures we should manifest. Whether this routinely occurs in practice is another matter. For Montagu, Onion remarks, a “cultured man” is “curious, unprejudiced, rational, and ethical.”
Given Montagu’s enlightened philosophical bent, we can charitably ascribe language in his book that itself seems prejudiced to our viewing this artifact from a distance of almost seventy years in the future. We might also find that many of his questions push us to examine our 21st century biases more carefully. His approach may remind us of frivolous internet diversions or the standardized tests we’ve grown to think of as the precise opposite of lively, critically-engaged educational tools. Yet Montagu intended his quizzes to be “both dynamic and constructive,” to alert readers to areas of ignorance and encourage them to fill gaps in their cultural knowledge. Many of his answers offer references for further study. “No one grows who stands still,” he wrote.
To see more of Montagu’s quiz questions—such as those above from the “Culture History” category (get the answers here)—and find out how you stack up against the cultured elite of the 50s, head over to Rebecca Onion’s post at Slate.
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