The King and the Mockingbird: The Surreal French Animated Film That Took 30 Years to Complete, and Profoundly Influenced Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata

in Animation, Film | January 4th, 2019

Ani­ma­tion, as any­one who has ever tried their hand at it knows, takes a great deal of time. The King and the Mock­ing­bird (Le Roi et l’Oiseau), for exam­ple, required more than thir­ty years, a jour­ney length­ened by much more than just the labo­ri­ous­ness of bring­ing hand-drawn images to life. But it does that glo­ri­ous­ly, with a style and sen­si­bil­i­ty quite unlike any ani­mat­ed film made before or since — a sig­na­ture of its cre­ators, ani­ma­tor Paul Gri­mault and poet/screenwriter Jacques Prévert. Hav­ing already worked togeth­er on 1947’s Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen adap­ta­tion The Lit­tle Sol­dier (Le Petit sol­dat, not to be con­fused with the Godard pic­ture), they chose for their next col­lab­o­ra­tion to ani­mate Ander­sen’s sto­ry “The Shep­herdess and the Chim­ney Sweep.”

“The pompous King Charles, who hates his sub­jects and is equal­ly hat­ed in return, rules over the amus­ing­ly named land of Taki­car­dia,” writes crit­ic Christy Lemire. The most prized item in his art col­lec­tion is “his por­trait of a beau­ti­ful and inno­cent shep­herdess with whom he’s des­per­ate­ly in love. What he doesn’t know is that when he’s asleep, the shep­herdess and the chim­ney sweep in the adja­cent can­vas have been car­ry­ing on a sweet and ten­der affair.” Still King Charles keeps try­ing to win her, or steal her, for him­self, “but the cou­ple gets help thwart­ing him at every turn from the one char­ac­ter in the king­dom who does not wor­ship the monar­chy: the brash and trash-talk­ing Mr. Bird, a bright­ly-feath­ered racon­teur.” The film’s mood “shifts seam­less­ly from imp­ish, sil­ly adven­tures to grotesque and night­mar­ish suf­fer­ing. And then the giant robot arrives.”

This may sound ambi­tious, even for the only ani­mat­ed fea­ture in pro­duc­tion in Europe at the time. Alas, the com­pa­ny took Gri­mault and Prévert’s increas­ing­ly expen­sive project out of their hands after just a cou­ple of years, and in 1952 its pro­duc­er André Sar­rut sim­ply released it unfin­ished. (You can watch the now-pub­lic-domain Amer­i­can ver­sion of the film, dubbed by a cast head­ed by Peter Usti­nov and titled The Curi­ous Adven­tures of Mr. Won­der­bird, just above.) But Gri­mault and Prévert held fast to their vision, the lat­ter revis­ing the script until his death in 1977 and the for­mer, hav­ing won back the rights to the film, assem­bling a team of ani­ma­tors to pro­duce new scenes and cut out some of the old ones. This com­plete ver­sion of The King and the Mock­ing­bird had its French pre­miere in 1979, though it would­n’t reach Amer­i­ca until just a few years ago.

“I’m sure this all sounds famil­iar,” says Youtube ani­ma­tion video essay­ist Stevem in his analy­sis of The King and the Mock­ing­bird as a sur­re­al­ist film. “The pro­duc­tion was too ambi­tious, the com­pa­ny steps in and pulls it back, and in spite of its issues it’s remem­bered as a cult clas­sic, and inspired some of the big names along the way.” Those names include Stu­dio Ghi­b­li founders Hayao Miyaza­ki and Isao Taka­ha­ta. “We were formed by the films and film­mak­ers of the 1950s,” Miyaza­ki once said. “It was through watch­ing Le Roi et l’Oiseau by Paul Gri­mault that I under­stood how it was nec­es­sary to use space in a ver­ti­cal man­ner.” Taka­ha­ta saw Gri­mault as hav­ing “achieved bet­ter than any­one else a union between lit­er­a­ture and ani­ma­tion.”

Though Stu­dio Ghi­b­li’s fil­mog­ra­phy may offer plen­ty of mem­o­rably sur­re­al moments, The King and the Mock­ing­bird occu­pies a plane of ani­mat­ed sur­re­al­ism all its own. Draw­ing com­par­isons to Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), Stevem quotes the line from Andre Bre­ton’s Sur­re­al­ist Man­i­festo about “the belief in the supe­ri­or real­i­ty of cer­tain forms of pre­vi­ous­ly neglect­ed asso­ci­a­tions, in the omnipo­tence of dream, in the dis­in­ter­est­ed play of thought.” That’s the sort of expe­ri­ence Gri­mault and Prévert’s film, in its fin­ished state, offers, while also, in the words of Vul­ture’s Bilge Ebiri, draw­ing on “Fritz Lang and per­haps the style of Walt Dis­ney from the great era of Snow White. There are inter­est­ing antic­i­pa­to­ry echoes, not just of ani­me, but Roald Dahl and the Vul­gar­ia of Chit­ty Chit­ty Bang Bang.” Just the sort of mix­ture only pos­si­ble — only even imag­in­able — in ani­ma­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Free Ani­ma­tion Course from a Renowned French Ani­ma­tion School

French Stu­dent Sets Inter­net on Fire with Ani­ma­tion Inspired by Moe­bius, Syd Mead & Hayao Miyaza­ki

Watch Moe­bius and Miyaza­ki, Two of the Most Imag­i­na­tive Artists, in Con­ver­sa­tion (2004)

Métal hurlant: The Huge­ly Influ­en­tial French Com­ic Mag­a­zine That Put Moe­bius on the Map & Changed Sci-Fi For­ev­er

Sal­vador Dalí & Walt Disney’s Short Ani­mat­ed Film, Des­ti­no, Set to the Music of Pink Floyd

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

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

How Nirvana’s Iconic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Came to Be: An Animated Video Narrated by T‑Bone Burnett Tells the True Story

in Music | January 1st, 2019

Cred­it­ed with ignit­ing the 90s grunge craze and putting Pacif­ic North­west punk and indie scenes on the map, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” has eclipsed hun­dreds of rock hits as “the most icon­ic song of all time”—at least accord­ing to the ana­lyt­ics of com­put­er sci­en­tists from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don.

What­ev­er that des­ig­na­tion means, it’s with­out a doubt the most icon­ic Nir­vana song of all time, a tune whose influ­ence may be impos­si­ble to mea­sure. Kurt Cobain might have grown weary of it, but fans nev­er stopped clam­or­ing for the hit (his mom loved it, too). An anthem for a gen­er­a­tion dis­af­fect­ed with cor­po­rate mar­ket­ing and major label pan­der­ing, “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” is also—like the decade it came to define—a nest­ing doll of irony.

Cobain played this up to a degree—the irony of an indie band announc­ing the sec­ond com­ing of charged DIY punk rock with a song that net­ted them a major label deal and put him on the path to super­star­dom. When Nir­vana debuted their soon-to-be icon­ic hit live at Seattle’s OK Hotel on April 17th, 1991, the usu­al­ly tac­i­turn front­man intro­duced him­self by say­ing, “Hel­lo. We’re major label cor­po­rate rock sell­outs.”

Giv­en his sar­don­ic sense of humor, fans have gen­er­al­ly assumed some kind of anti-cap­i­tal­ist in-joke in the title of the song, with its ref­er­ence to a pop­u­lar brand of deodor­ant. But in a more dra­mat­ic irony, Cobain had no idea when he wrote and record­ed it that “Teen Spir­it was a prod­uct, aimed at teenage girls.” The song’s title, as you’ll learn in the short, ani­mat­ed back­sto­ry in the video above, orig­i­nat­ed with Biki­ni Kill singer Kath­leen Han­na, who scrawled it on Cobain’s wall with a Sharpie after the two shared a night of heavy drink­ing and polit­i­cal­ly right­eous van­dal­ism.

Nar­rat­ed by T‑Bone Bur­nett and ani­mat­ed by Drew Christie, the award-win­ning short “Drawn & Record­ed: Teen Spir­it” con­dens­es the song’s sto­ry (which you can read about in more depth here) into two and a half min­utes of pop cul­ture his­to­ry and com­men­tary. Upon wak­ing up and see­ing Hanna’s mes­sage on the wall, Cobain was imme­di­ate­ly flat­tered: “Kurt thought it meant he was a rad­i­cal, a rev­o­lu­tion­ary, a fem­i­nist, a punk, an anti-author­i­tar­i­an, anti-cap­i­tal­ist, anar­chist cru­sad­er.” He got right to work on the song’s cho­rus.

But Han­na main­ly meant to say he lit­er­al­ly smelled like Teen Spir­it, which hap­pened to be the brand of deodor­ant his then-girlfriend—Bikini Kill drum­mer Tobi Vail—used. “I didn’t know that the deodor­ant spray exist­ed until six months after the sin­gle came out,” he told Michael Azer­rad in the biog­ra­phy Come as You Are. He didn’t intend to write an adver­tise­ment, of course. But in yet anoth­er grim twist, “after the song came out,” Bur­nett monot­o­nes, “sales of Teen Spir­it went through the roof.”

The les­son, maybe? “Cap­i­tal­ism is very resilient”? Cobain under­stood this all too well though he may have inad­ver­tent­ly become the last thing he ever want­ed, a prod­uct pitch­man. But his cre­ative mis­read­ing of Han­na’s joke also made music his­to­ry.

Above, you can watch Han­na tell the ori­gin sto­ry her­self. The scene was record­ed at Joes Pub in NYC, back in Decem­ber 2010.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nir­vana Refus­es to Fake It on Top of the Pops, Gives a Big “Mid­dle Fin­ger” to the Tra­di­tion of Bands Mim­ing on TV (1991)

Nir­vana Plays an Angry Set & Refus­es to Play ‘Smells Like Teen Spir­it’ After the Crowd Hurls Sex­ist Insults at the Open­ing Act (Buenos Aires, 1992)

Watch Nir­vana Per­form “Smells Like Teen Spir­it,” Just Days After the Release of Nev­er­mind (1991)

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

What Makes Music Sound Like Christmas Music? Hear the Single Most Christmassy Chord of All Explained

in Music | December 25th, 2018

Dur­ing the past few months of this year, as in those same months of any year, we’ve been hear­ing a great deal of Christ­mas music. Some of the songs in the mix — “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rein­deer,” “Have Your­self a Mer­ry Lit­tle Christ­mas,” “The Christ­mas Song” — few of us have ever known a time with­out, and oth­ers make it in because of their sea­son­al­ly themed lyri­cal con­tent. But cer­tain songs just sound like Christ­mas songs, some­how, and to under­stand what, in musi­cal terms, fills those com­po­si­tions with the spir­it of the hol­i­day sea­son, watch the five-minute Vox explain­er above that reveals “the secret chord that makes Christ­mas music sound so Christ­massy.”

First we should dis­tin­guish pop­u­lar Christ­mas songs from pop­u­lar non-Christ­mas songs, espe­cial­ly ones record­ed in the past half-cen­tu­ry. “Rock ’n’ roll songs (and the sub­se­quent pop songs influ­enced by the genre) may only con­tain three or four chords, each chord usu­al­ly being just a major or a minor — the two chord ‘fla­vors’ anal­o­gous to choco­late and vanil­la,” writes Slate’s Adam Ragusea. In con­trast, a selec­tion from “the Great Amer­i­can Song­book” might “use a Baskin-Rob­bins shop full of chords and chord fla­vors — 7^ths and 9^ths, half and ful­ly dimin­ished, var­i­ous inver­sions, and more” under melodies that “tend to include a lot of chro­mat­ic notes (the black notes on the piano when play­ing in the key of C major).”

In the era when most beloved Christ­mas stan­dards were con­ceived, song­writ­ers still made much use of that wide musi­cal palette, the son­ic col­ors of which had as much to do with jazz as with pop. But since the 1960s, writ­ers of pop songs  have used these now-exot­ic har­monies “to get a ‘clas­sic’ sound. For instance, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘Hap­py Xmas (War Is Over)’ includes some notes in its choral parts that I think are intend­ed to recall the har­mon­ic vocab­u­lary of those 1940s Christ­mas stan­dards.” No coin­ci­dence, sure­ly, that Mari­ah Carey’s “All I Want for Christ­mas Is You,” per­haps the only Christ­mas song writ­ten in recent decades to attain the same pop­u­lar­i­ty as the old stan­dards, uses the same com­po­si­tion­al tech­niques.

“I count at least 13 dis­tinct chords at work in ‘All I Want for Christ­mas Is You,’ result­ing in a sump­tu­ous­ly chro­mat­ic melody,” writes Ragusea. “The song also includes what I con­sid­er the most Christ­massy chord of all — a minor sub­dom­i­nant, or “iv,” chord with an added 6, under the words ‘under­neath the Christ­mas tree,’ among oth­er places.” As in Irv­ing Berlin’s “White Christ­mas,” he notes, “the chord comes imme­di­ate­ly after a major sub­dom­i­nant chord, giv­ing the effect of a ‘bright’ major sub­dom­i­nant that you might say ‘sighs’ or ‘melts’ into a ‘dark’ minor sub­dom­i­nant spiked with a ‘spicy’ extra tone (the added 6), before the songs set­tle back into their ton­ic, or ‘home,’ chords.” And so we come to the unex­pect­ed find­ing — though hard­ly a dis­pleas­ing one — that a prop­er­ly made Christ­mas song has more than a lit­tle in com­mon with a prop­er­ly made Christ­mas cock­tail.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream 22 Hours of Funky, Rock­ing & Swing­ing Christ­mas Albums: From James Brown and John­ny Cash to Christo­pher Lee & The Ven­tures

Stream a Playlist of 68 Punk Rock Christ­mas Songs: The Ramones, The Damned, Bad Reli­gion & More

Hear Paul McCartney’s Exper­i­men­tal Christ­mas Mix­tape: A Rare & For­got­ten Record­ing from 1965

Gui­tarist Randy Bach­man Demys­ti­fies the Open­ing Chord of The Bea­t­les’ “A Hard Day’s Night”

The Moth­er of All Funk Chords

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

Artificial Intelligence Creates Realistic Photos of People, None of Whom Actually Exist

in Photography, Technology | December 24th, 2018

Each day in the 2010s, it seems, brings anoth­er star­tling devel­op­ment in the field of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence — a field wide­ly writ­ten off not all that long ago as a dead end. But now AI looks just as alive as the peo­ple you see in these pho­tographs, despite the fact that none of them have ever lived, and it’s ques­tion­able whether we can even call the images that depict them “pho­tographs” at all. All of them come, in fact, as prod­ucts of a state-of-the-art gen­er­a­tive adver­sar­i­al net­work, a type of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence algo­rithm that pits mul­ti­ple neur­al net­works against each oth­er in a kind of machine-learn­ing match.

These neur­al net­works have, it seems, com­pet­ed their way to gen­er­at­ing images of fab­ri­cat­ed human faces that gen­uine humans have trou­ble dis­tin­guish­ing from images of the real deal. Their archi­tec­ture, described in a paper by the Nvidia researchers who devel­oped it, “leads to an auto­mat­i­cal­ly learned, unsu­per­vised sep­a­ra­tion of high-lev­el attrib­ut­es (e.g., pose and iden­ti­ty when trained on human faces) and sto­chas­tic vari­a­tion in the gen­er­at­ed images (e.g., freck­les, hair), and it enables intu­itive, scale-spe­cif­ic con­trol of the syn­the­sis.” What they’ve come up with, in oth­er words, has made it not just more pos­si­ble than ever to cre­ate fake faces, but made those faces more cus­tomiz­able than ever as well.

“Of course, the abil­i­ty to cre­ate real­is­tic AI faces rais­es trou­bling ques­tions. (Not least of all, how long until stock pho­to mod­els go out of work?)” writes James Vin­cent at The Verge. “Experts have been rais­ing the alarm for the past cou­ple of years about how AI fak­ery might impact soci­ety. These tools could be used for mis­in­for­ma­tion and pro­pa­gan­da and might erode pub­lic trust in pic­to­r­i­al evi­dence, a trend that could dam­age the jus­tice sys­tem as well as pol­i­tics.”

But still, “you can’t doc­tor any image in any way you like with the same fideli­ty. There are also seri­ous con­straints when it comes to exper­tise and time. It took Nvidia’s researchers a week train­ing their mod­el on eight Tes­la GPUs to cre­ate these faces.”

Though “a run­ning bat­tle between AI fak­ery and image authen­ti­ca­tion for decades to come” seems inevitable, the cur­rent abil­i­ty of com­put­ers to cre­ate plau­si­ble faces cer­tain­ly fas­ci­nates, espe­cial­ly when com­pared to their abil­i­ty just four years ago, the hazy black-and-white fruits of which appear just above. Put that against the grid of faces at the top of the post, which shows how Nvidi­a’s sys­tem can com­bine the fea­tures of the faces on one axis with the fea­tures on the oth­er, and you’ll get a sense of the tech­no­log­i­cal accel­er­a­tion involved. Such a process could well be used, for exam­ple, to give you a sense of what your future chil­dren might look like. But how long until it puts con­vinc­ing visions of mov­ing, speak­ing, even think­ing human beings before our eyes?

via Petapix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sci­en­tists Cre­ate a New Rem­brandt Paint­ing, Using a 3D Print­er & Data Analy­sis of Rembrandt’s Body of Work

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Writes a Piece in the Style of Bach: Can You Tell the Dif­fer­ence Between JS Bach and AI Bach?

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Pro­gram Tries to Write a Bea­t­les Song: Lis­ten to “Daddy’s Car”

Google Launch­es a Free Course on Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Sign Up for Its New “Machine Learn­ing Crash Course”

Google Launch­es Three New Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Exper­i­ments That Could Be God­sends for Artists, Muse­ums & Design­ers

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

Watch a Playthrough of the Oldest Board Game in the World, the Sumerian Royal Game of Ur, Circa 2500 BC

in Games, History, Museums | December 20th, 2018

They may not sur­prise the aver­age mar­ket ana­lyst, but the gam­ing industry’s fig­ures tell a pret­ty com­pelling sto­ry. New­zoo esti­mates that “2.3 bil­lion gamers across the globe will spend $137. 9 bil­lion on games in 2018.” Ven­ture­Beat reports that mobile games account for over 50 per­cent of the total. Cur­rent­ly, “about 91 per­cent of the glob­al mar­ket is dig­i­tal, mean­ing that $125.3 bil­lion worth of games flows through dig­i­tal­ly con­nect­ed chan­nels as opposed to phys­i­cal retail.”

That’s a lot of vir­tu­al dough float­ing around in vir­tu­al worlds. But this vast and rapid growth in dig­i­tal gam­ing does not mean phys­i­cal games are going away any­time soon—and that includes cards, board games, and oth­er table­top games, a mar­ket that has “surged as play­ers have grown jad­ed with the dig­i­tal screens they toil over dur­ing the work day,” wrote Joon Ian Wong in 2016.

Ven­ture cap­i­tal is flow­ing into board game devel­op­ment. Table­top bars and cafes are pop­ping up all over the world, encour­ag­ing peo­ple to min­gle over Scrab­ble and Cards Against Human­i­ty. It seems the time is just right to revive the old­est playable board game in the world. If some­one hasn’t already launched a Kick­starter to bankroll a new Roy­al Game of Ur, I sus­pect we’ll see one any day now. At least four-and-a-half-thou­sand years old, accord­ing to British Muse­um Cura­tor Irv­ing Finkel, the Roy­al Game of Ur was prob­a­bly invent­ed by the Sume­ri­ans. And it seems like it might still be a blast, and a con­sid­er­able chal­lenge, to play.

“You might think it’s so old that it’s irre­triev­able to us, that we’ve got no idea what it was like play­ing, what the rules were like,” Finkel says in the video at the top, “but all sorts of evi­dence has come to light so that we know how this game was played.” He promis­es, in no uncer­tain terms, to wipe the floor with YouTu­ber Tom Scott in a Roy­al Game of Ur show­down, and Scott, who has nev­er played the game before, seems at a decid­ed dis­ad­van­tage. But watch their con­test to see how the game is played and whether Finkel makes good on his threat. Along the way, he lib­er­al­ly shares his knowl­edge.

For a short­er course on the Roy­al Game of Ur, see Finkel’s video above. It takes him a cou­ple min­utes to get around to intro­duc­ing his sub­ject, the dis­cov­ery and deci­pher­ing of the “world’s old­est rule book.” A con­sum­mate ancient his­to­ry detec­tive, Finkel describes how he decod­ed an ancient tablet that explained a game, but which game, no one knew. So, the ded­i­cat­ed cura­tor tried the rules on every mys­te­ri­ous ancient game he could find, till he land­ed on the “game of twen­ty squares” from Mesopotamia. “It fit­ted per­fect­ly,” he says with rel­ish. See the orig­i­nal board, pieces, and dice from about 2500 BC, and learn how Finkel had been search­ing for its rules of play since he was 9 years old.

For more of Finkel’s pas­sion­ate pub­lic schol­ar­ship, see him demon­strate how to write in cuneiform and read about how his work on cuneiform tablets led to him dis­cov­er­ing the old­est ref­er­ence to the Noah’s Ark myth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Hear the “Seik­i­los Epi­taph,” the Old­est Com­plete Song in the World: An Inspir­ing Tune from 100 BC

The British Muse­um Is Now Open To Every­one: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour and See 4,737 Arti­facts, Includ­ing the Roset­ta Stone

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

Take a Virtual Tour of Brazil’s National Museum & Its Artifacts: Google Digitized the Museum’s Collection Before the Fateful Fire

in Museums | December 20th, 2018

How to describe the mag­ni­tude of the loss when Brazil’s Museu Nacional caught fire in Sep­tem­ber? The New York­er’s Ale­jan­dro Cha­coff ven­tured an anal­o­gy that would res­onate with read­ers of that mag­a­zine: “It’s as if, in New York, the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry and the New School, or a part of the Colum­bia cam­pus, had been built on the same spot, and then was reduced to ash­es.” The 200-year-old muse­um lost an esti­mat­ed 92.5 per­cent of its 20-mil­lion-item archive, one of the largest col­lec­tions of nat­ur­al his­to­ry and anthro­po­log­i­cal arti­facts in the world — but not before Google Arts & Cul­ture dig­i­tized enough to recre­ate the expe­ri­ence of vis­it­ing the Museu Nacional vir­tu­al­ly.

“Start­ing back in 2016, Google Arts & Cul­ture had begun work­ing with the muse­um to bring their col­lec­tion online — so that any­one, any­where in the world could see and learn about these ancient arti­facts,” writes Google Arts & Cul­ture Pro­gram Man­ag­er Chance Coughenour.

“Now for the first time ever, you can vir­tu­al­ly step inside the muse­um and learn about its lost col­lec­tion through Street View imagery and online exhibits.” In this way you can still expe­ri­ence a por­tion of “the incred­i­ble diver­si­ty of arti­facts in Brazil’s Nation­al Muse­um” that “reflect­ed cen­turies of Brazil’s cul­ture and nat­ur­al his­to­ry, from the Amazon’s endan­gered but­ter­flies to beau­ti­ful­ly-craft­ed indige­nous masks and dec­o­rat­ed pot­tery.”

You can take a vir­tu­al tour of the high­lights of the Museu Nacional as it was here, a tour that of course includes a vis­it with the muse­um’s prized pos­ses­sion: the 12,000-year old Luzia, the old­est skele­ton found in the Amer­i­c­as, whom you can see just as she stood on dis­play in muse­um view. Mirac­u­lous­ly, Luzia counts as one of the arti­facts most­ly recov­ered from the after­math of the con­fla­gra­tion, and the muse­um has announced an ambi­tious restora­tion plan that will cost R$10 mil­lion, an amount pro­vid­ed as emer­gency funds by the Brazil­ian Gov­ern­ment — and an amount much greater than the Museu Nacional, which by its 200th anniver­sary had reached a state of not just seri­ous neglect but near-com­plete aban­don­ment, was ever able to get while still intact. Even in the case of vast repos­i­to­ries of a nation’s cul­tur­al her­itage, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

via Art­sy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wikipedia Leads Effort to Cre­ate a Dig­i­tal Archive of 20 Mil­lion Arti­facts Lost in the Brazil­ian Muse­um Fire

1.8 Mil­lion Free Works of Art from World-Class Muse­ums: A Meta List of Great Art Avail­able Online

25 Mil­lion Images From 14 Art Insti­tu­tions to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online In One Huge Schol­ar­ly Archive

Google Lets You Take a 360-Degree Panoram­ic Tour of Street Art in Cities Across the World

Take a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

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

How the CIA Helped Shape the Creative Writing Scene in America

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

Image by Arielle Fra­gas­si, via Flickr Com­mons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the CIA Fund­ed & Sup­port­ed Lit­er­ary Mag­a­zines World­wide While Wag­ing Cul­tur­al War Against Com­mu­nism

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

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chess Forum: An expe­ri­ence not a trans­ac­tion

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

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

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

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When John Cage & Mar­cel Duchamp Played Chess on a Chess­board That Turned Chess Moves Into Elec­tron­ic Music (1968)

Chess Grand­mas­ter Gar­ry Kas­parov Relives His Four Most Mem­o­rable Games

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

A Human Chess Match Gets Played in Leningrad, 1924

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

Clay­ma­tion Film Recre­ates His­toric Chess Match Immor­tal­ized in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

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

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

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

Introducing the Mellotron: A Groovy 1965 Demonstration of the “Musical Computer” Used by The Beatles, Moody Blues & Other Psychedelic Pop Artists

in Music | December 5th, 2018

With a name like a laid back 60s robot, the Mel­lotron has been most close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with psy­che­del­ic pop like The Bea­t­les’ “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er,” the Moody Blues “Nights in White Satin,” and David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty.” But the ear­ly sam­pling key­board, an elec­tro-acoustic device that used pre-record­ed tape strips mount­ed inside an organ-like key­board, was first mar­ket­ed, Gor­don Reid writes at Sound on Sound, to “old-time/­mod­ern/Latin dance audi­ences.” It was sup­posed to con­vinc­ing­ly repli­cate an orches­tra.

The Mel­lotron, built and sold by Mel­lotron­ics, Ltd., was based on an ear­li­er instru­ment, the Cham­ber­lin Music­Mas­ter, which used record­ed notes from mem­bers of Lawrence Welk’s band—hardly the hippest sounds on the scene when the Mel­lotron MK1 debuted in 1963. By the time of the MK2, how­ev­er, the device devel­oped into a pow­er­ful mul­ti­tim­bral machine, with a dual key­board, “con­tain­ing more than 70 3/8‑inch tape play­ers, a reverb unit, ampli­fiers and speak­ers.”

The rock world “took the Mel­lotron to its heart,” Reid com­ments, “and it was this that ensured its suc­cess.” It could sim­u­late oth­er instru­ments, but it did so with its own dis­tinc­tive fla­vor (pro­vid­ing not only the flute intro to “Straw­ber­ry Fields” but the Span­ish gui­tar at the begin­ning of The White Album’s “The Con­tin­u­ing Sto­ry of Buf­fa­lo Bill”). Brad Allen Williams sums up the slight­ly more portable Mel­lotron M400’s lim­it­ed oper­a­tions suc­cinct­ly at Fly­pa­per:

Due to the rather prim­i­tive tape mech­a­nism (and the inher­ent chal­lenges of keep­ing 35 play­back heads and pinch rollers in good con­di­tion), Mel­lotrons are a lit­tle unpre­dictable and can be quite char­ac­ter­ful. The action of the key­board is stiff and unusu­al-feel­ing, so vir­tu­osic play­ing is not usu­al­ly in the cards. All of these “bugs” some­how become “fea­tures,” how­ev­er — the quirks add up to a son­ic char­ac­ter that’s icon­ic and instant­ly rec­og­niz­able!

Like so many dis­tinc­tive ana­log instru­ments from pop music’s past, the Mel­lotron has returned in Nord’s updat­ed Mel­lotron MK VI, which “uses new mechan­ics and state of the art tech­nol­o­gy, but orig­i­nal unused stock tape heads.” That’s groovy news for musi­cians who dig the Mellotron’s dat­ed idio­syn­crasies. In the short film above, how­ev­er, from 1965, British TV per­son­al­i­ties Eric Robin­son and David Nixon intro­duce the instru­ment to view­ers as a first-rate new “musi­cal com­put­er.”

With built in rhythms and a wide selec­tion of sounds—including trom­bone and French accordion—the Mel­lotron was on the cut­ting edge of its day. Robin­son and Nixon put the device through its paces, show its inter­nal oper­a­tions, and gen­er­al­ly show off what essen­tial­ly looked like a nov­el­ty organ built for liv­ing rooms and cabarets before Lennon/McCartney & Co. got their hands on it in 1967. Just above, see McCart­ney give a mod­ern audi­ence a dif­fer­ent sort of demon­stra­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rick Wake­man Tells the Sto­ry of the Mel­lotron, the Odd­ball Pro­to-Syn­the­siz­er Pio­neered by the Bea­t­les

Every­thing Thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About the Syn­the­siz­er: A Vin­tage Three-Hour Crash Course

Vis­it an Online Col­lec­tion of 61,761 Musi­cal Instru­ments from Across the World

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

Anatomy of a Fake: Forgery Experts Reveal 5 Ways To Spot a Fake Painting by Jackson Pollock (or Any Other Artist)

in Art, Chemistry, History, Science, Technology | December 3rd, 2018

In the old days, deter­min­ing an art forgery was most­ly a mat­ter of nar­ra­tive deduc­tion, a la Sher­lock Holmes.

Thi­a­go Piwowar­czyk and Jef­frey Tay­lor, founders of New York Art Foren­sics, employ such tech­niques to estab­lish prove­nance, trac­ing the chain of own­er­ship of any giv­en work back to its orig­i­nal sale by research­ing cat­a­logues, title trans­fers, and cor­re­spon­dence.

But they also bring a num­ber of high tech tools to the table, to fur­ther prove—or in the case of the alleged Jack­son Pol­lock drip paint­ing above, disprove—a work’s authen­tic­i­ty.

In the WIRED video above, these experts, whose pedi­gree includes degrees in Chem­istry, Foren­sic Sci­ence, and Com­par­a­tive His­to­ry, a Visu­al Arts Man­age­ment text­book, and two Frick Col­lec­tion Fel­low­ships, break the sleuthing process down to five crit­i­cal steps:

1. Estab­lish prove­nance

Obso­lete tech­nol­o­gy has a place in the process too, in the form of a high­ly unre­li­able fax, alleged­ly sent in 1997. It pur­ports to be a pho­to­copy of a type­writ­ten let­ter from 1970, writ­ten by a gallery own­er who talked one of the artist’s for­mer girl­friends into part­ing with a num­ber of works after his death.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly for the painting’s cur­rent own­er, Piwowar­czyk and Tay­lor could find no proof that the gallery or its own­er ever exist­ed. The let­ter also botch­es Pollock’s death date and odd­ly, there’s a blank where the sender’s num­ber would nor­mal­ly be.

Due dili­gence reveals noth­ing resem­bling this paint­ing in the cat­a­logue raison­né of Pollock’s work.

2. Close up visu­al analy­sis

This can be accom­plished with tools as sim­ple as the flash­light and plas­tic caliper Tay­lor uses to exam­ine the sta­ple holes found at reg­u­lar inter­vals along the unsigned can­vas’ edges. In the 1940s, artists start­ed grav­i­tat­ing toward sta­ples over tacks as a method for secur­ing their can­vas­es to stretch­er bars, but would Pol­lock have done so? Like­ly not, to hear him tell it:

I hard­ly ever stretch my can­vas before paint­ing. I pre­fer to tack the unstretched can­vas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resis­tance of a hard sur­face.

Piwowar­czyk and Tay­lor draw on their oth­er sens­es, too, when per­form­ing this in-depth visu­al inspec­tion. A deep sniff reveals that teabags were used to dis­col­or the can­vas, in hope of mak­ing it appear old­er than it is.

3. Pho­tog­ra­phy with a mul­ti­spec­tral imag­ing cam­era 

This camera’s abil­i­ty to see the Ultra-Vio­let spec­trum allows our foren­sic experts to spot restora­tions, under­draw­ing, and pen­ti­men­ti. Here, the cam­era revealed an under­ly­ing paint­ing whose geo­met­ric lay­out is unchar­ac­ter­is­tic of Pol­lock, as well as a sus­pi­cious­ly ama­teur­ish patch job on the back of the can­vas, anoth­er attempt to make the paint­ing appear old­er than it is.

4. Exam­i­na­tion with an X‑ray flu­o­res­cence spec­trom­e­ter

It looks like a cool Star Wars prop, and allows the exam­in­ers to iden­ti­fy ele­ments in the pig­ment. Here, our “Pol­lock” gets a pass. There’s tita­ni­um (as in Tita­ni­um White) in evi­dence, but that’s per­mis­si­ble for any­thing paint­ed from the 30s onward.

5. Mol­e­c­u­lar Imag­ing and Analy­sis by Raman Spec­troscopy

The forg­er might have got­ten away with it if it weren’t for those med­dling kids and their Raman Spec­tro­scope! The minus­cule sam­ples of paint Piwowar­czyk har­vests from the can­vas reveal all sorts of organ­ic debris that have no place in a Pol­lock, such as dry­wall dust and an acrylic that didn’t come into use ‘til the 1960s.

In con­clu­sion, exer­cise cau­tion and con­sult the experts before pur­chas­ing a high val­ue drip paint­ing this hol­i­day sea­son! Accord­ing to Piwowar­czyk, the fakes—over 100 and pre­sum­ably still counting—outstrip the num­ber of drip paint­ings Pol­lock cre­at­ed through­out his life­time.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How an Art Con­ser­va­tor Com­plete­ly Restores a Dam­aged Paint­ing: A Short, Med­i­ta­tive Doc­u­men­tary

The Art of Restor­ing a 400-Year-Old Paint­ing: A Five-Minute Primer

How a Book Thief Forged a Rare Edi­tion of Galileo’s Sci­en­tif­ic Work, and Almost Pulled it Off

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC from Decem­ber 6 — 20 for the 10th anniver­sary pro­duc­tion of Greg Kotis’ apoc­a­lyp­tic hol­i­day tale, The Truth About San­ta, and the next month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.