Take a Trip Through the History of Modern Art with the Oscar-Winning Animation Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase

in Animation, Art | May 22nd, 2017

The artis­tic mor­ph­ing is already under­way before the very first frame of film­mak­er Joan Gratz’ 1992 Oscar-win­ning ani­ma­tion, Mona Lisa Descend­ing a Stair­case.

Most view­ers will rec­og­nize the title as a mashup of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s famous work and Mar­cel Duchamp’s mod­ernist clas­sic Nude Descend­ing a Stair­case, No. 2.

What fol­lows is a con­stant­ly mor­ph­ing, chrono­log­i­cal trip through the his­to­ry of mod­ern art, begin­ning with Impres­sion­ism and pass­ing through Cubism and Sur­re­al­ism en route to Pop art and hyper-real­ism.

The seam­less tran­si­tions were cre­at­ed by painstak­ing­ly manip­u­lat­ing small pieces of oil-based mod­el­ing clay on a sol­id easel-mount­ed sur­face, a tech­nique Gratz devel­oped as an archi­tec­ture stu­dent at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ore­gon.

Van Gogh’s self-por­trait recon­fig­ures itself into Gaugin’s. Andy Warhol’s Gold Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe becomes Roy Lichtenstein’s Woman with Flow­ered Hat—a far trick­i­er tran­si­tion than had Gratz start­ed with Picasso’s 1941 Dora Maar au Chat, the orig­i­nal inspi­ra­tion for Lichtenstein’s 1963 work.

As Gratz told Olivi­er Cotte, author of Secrets of Oscar-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion:

The tran­si­tions were the most inter­est­ing aspect of the work. A great deal of what they show con­sists of pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion about the style of the paint­ings…. The rela­tion­ship between the images depends on the era, the artis­tic move­ment and the inter­con­nec­tion between the artists.

Thus the work is not just about cap­tur­ing the 55 select­ed images, but also their tex­ture, from the Expres­sion­ists’ thick impas­to to the post-painter­ly slick­ness of 60s pop artists.

The paint­ings were cho­sen over near­ly eight years of research and plan­ning, but not the minu­ti­ae of the tran­si­tions, as Gratz pre­ferred to impro­vise in front of the cam­era. Just as in more nar­ra­tive clay­ma­tions, each painstak­ing adjust­ment required her to stop and shoot a frame, a process that end­ed up tak­ing two-and-a-half years, fit in around Gratz’s sched­ule for such pay­ing gigs as Return to Oz and the fea­ture-length clay­ma­tion, The Adven­tures of Mark Twain.

Giv­en the spon­ta­neous nature of the trans­for­ma­tions from one paint­ing to the next, the exact length of the fin­ished film was impos­si­ble to pre­dict. When it was at last com­plete, com­pos­er Jamie Hag­ger­ty  and sound design­er Chel White were brought in to pro­vide fur­ther his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al con­text, via music, envi­ron­men­tal sounds, and con­spic­u­ous use of a digeri­doo.

See more of Gratz’s clay paint­ing tech­nique in the music video for Peter Gabriel’s “Dig­ging in the Dirt,” and ads for Coca-Cola and Microsoft.

Read Olivi­er Cotta’s analy­sis of Mona Lisa Descend­ing a Stair­case, includ­ing a longer inter­view with Joan Gratz here.

Mona Lisa Descend­ing a Stair­case will be added to our list of Ani­ma­tions, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Ani­mat­ed Film About Vin­cent Van Gogh Will Be Made Out of 65,000 Van Gogh-Style Paint­ings: Watch the Trail­er and Mak­ing-Of Video

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

Hear Mar­cel Duchamp Read “The Cre­ative Act,” A Short Lec­ture on What Makes Great Art, Great

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She’ll be appear­ing onstage in New York City this June as one of the clowns in Paul Young’s Faust 3.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Huge Hands Rise Out of Venice’s Waters to Support the City Threatened by Climate Change: A Poignant New Sculpture

in Art, Science | May 17th, 2017

Upon arriv­ing in Venice in the late 1930s, colum­nist and Algo­nquin Round Table reg­u­lar Robert Bench­ley imme­di­ate­ly sent a telegram back home to Amer­i­ca: “Streets full of water. Please advise.” The line has tak­en its place in the canon of Amer­i­can humor, but in more recent times the image of water-filled streets — unin­ten­tion­al­ly water-filled streets, that is — has arisen most often in the con­ver­sa­tion about cli­mate change. Some of the poten­tial dis­as­ter sce­nar­ios envi­sion every major coastal city on Earth even­tu­al­ly turn­ing into a kind of Venice, albeit a much less pleas­ant ver­sion there­of.

And so what bet­ter place than the one that hosts per­haps the world’s best known art exhi­bi­tion, the Venice Bien­nale, to express cli­mate-change anx­i­ety in the form of pub­lic sculp­ture? “Venice is known for its gon­do­las, canals, and his­toric bridges,” writes Condé Nast Trav­el­er’s Sebas­t­ian Modak, “but vis­i­tors will now also be greet­ed by anoth­er, albeit tem­po­rary, reminder of the city’s inti­mate rela­tion­ship with water: a giant pair of hands reach­ing out of the Grand Canal and appear­ing to sup­port the walls of the his­toric Ca’ Sagre­do Hotel.” The piece is called Sup­port, and it’s cre­at­ed by Barcelona-based Ital­ian sculp­tor Loren­zo Quinn.

“I have three chil­dren, and I’m think­ing about their gen­er­a­tion and what world we’re going to pass on to them,” Quinn told Mash­able’s Maria Gal­luc­ci. “I’m wor­ried, I’m very wor­ried.” The hands of his 11-year-old son actu­al­ly pro­vid­ed the mod­el for the polyurethane-and-resin hands of Sup­port, weigh­ing 5,000 pounds each, that stand on 30-foot pil­lars at the bot­tom of the Grand Canal. Modak quotes one of Quin­n’s Insta­gram posts which describes the work as speak­ing to the peo­ple “in a clear, sim­ple and direct way through the inno­cent hands of a child and it evokes a pow­er­ful mes­sage, which is that unit­ed we can make a stand to curb the cli­mate change that affects us all.”

Those argu­ing in favor of more aggres­sive polit­i­cal mea­sures to coun­ter­act the effects of cli­mate change have gone to great lengths to point out what forms those effects have so far tak­en. But the fact that, apart from a stretch of hot sum­mers, few of those effects have yet man­i­fest­ed unde­ni­ably in most peo­ple’s lives has cer­tain­ly made their job hard­er. But nobody who vis­its Venice dur­ing the Bien­nale could fail to pause before Sup­port, a work whose visu­al dra­ma demands a reac­tion that tem­per­a­ture charts or data-filled stud­ies can’t hope to pro­voke by them­selves. And even apart from the issue at hand, as it were, Quin­n’s sculp­ture reminds us that art, even in as deeply his­tor­i­cal a set­ting as Venice, can also keep us think­ing about the future.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

132 Years of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in 26 Dra­mat­i­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed Sec­onds

Music for a String Quar­tet Made from Glob­al Warm­ing Data: Hear “Plan­e­tary Bands, Warm­ing World”

A Song of Our Warm­ing Plan­et: Cel­list Turns 130 Years of Cli­mate Change Data into Music

How Cli­mate Change Is Threat­en­ing Your Dai­ly Cup of Cof­fee

Frank Capra’s Sci­ence Film The Unchained God­dess Warns of Cli­mate Change in 1958

Watch Episode 1 of Years of Liv­ing Dan­ger­ous­ly, The New Show­time Series on Cli­mate Change

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The MC5 Performs at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention, Right Before All Hell Breaks Loose

in Music, Politics | May 16th, 2017

With some rare excep­tions (Sid and Nan­cy, I’m Not There, maybe Walk the Line and Cadil­lac Records), biopics usu­al­ly stum­ble bad­ly when they try to recre­ate the per­son­al­i­ties and atmos­pheres of famous musi­cians. For this rea­son I am grate­ful that no stu­dio has yet attempt­ed a nar­ra­tive of one of my favorite bands, the not-quite-famous MC5. On the oth­er hand, it’s hard to believe there’s no script in devel­op­ment some­where. If there’s one band whose story—and music—deserves a wider audi­ence, it’s this one. Sad­ly, gui­tarist Wayne Kramer has sup­pressed a very well-reviewed doc­u­men­tary that might do them as much jus­tice as any film can.

Formed in Lin­coln Park Michi­gan in 1964, the “Motor City 5” became syn­ony­mous with Detroit’s left­ist polit­i­cal scene. They were also some of the most uncom­pro­mis­ing garage rock­ers to emerge from the era, along with pro­to-punks The Stooges, with whom they often per­formed.

By the time of the infa­mous 1968 Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­ven­tion in Chica­go—well-known for the bru­tal attacks of police against thou­sands of aggriev­ed protesters—the MC5 had become heav­i­ly influ­enced by Fred Hamp­ton and Huey New­ton. Under their man­ag­er John Sin­clair, they became promi­nent rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the “White Pan­thers,” an anti-racist ana­logue of the Black Pan­thers formed on a sug­ges­tion of Newton’s.

In Sep­tem­ber of 1968, Sin­clair would be indict­ed for tak­ing part in the bomb­ing a CIA office in Ann Arbor. But exact­ly one month pri­or, he presided over the MC5’s appear­ance at the riotous Chica­go Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion. The band was booked as part of Abbie Hoffman’s attempt to stage a “Fes­ti­val of Life,” bring­ing 100,000 young peo­ple to the city “for five days of peace, love, and music,” writes the site Chica­go ’68, to “redi­rect youth cul­ture and music toward polit­i­cal ends.” Fit­ting­ly, per­haps, the MC5 was the only band that showed up after Hoff­man and his Yip­pies failed to secure the per­mits. They played for less than an hour to a crowd of a few thou­sand. Kramer remem­bered the day in a 2008 inter­view:

There was no stage, there was no flatbed truck, there was no sound sys­tem, there were no por­ta-toi­lets, there was no elec­tric­i­ty. We had to run an elec­tri­cal cord from the hot dog stand to pow­er our gear. We played on the ground in the mid­dle of Lin­coln Park in Chica­go with the crowd all around us sit­ting on the ground, in the back stand­ing. I’m going to guess there were maybe 3,000 young peo­ple there. And it was very tense. The Chica­go police had been very aggres­sive and very intim­i­dat­ing all day, and even though it was a rock con­cert and we were the only band to play, it didn’t feel like a rock con­cert. There was a dark cloud over the day because we knew the like­li­hood of peo­ple being hurt was great.

The only film we seem to have of the event is silent sur­veil­lance footage at the top of the post. Fur­ther down, see clips of the riot­ing that ensued, with the band’s hit “Kick Out the Jams” played over it. And just below, see a video of them play­ing the song over a back­drop of riot footage. They released their debut album, Kick Out the Jams , the fol­low­ing year. It was an uneven col­lec­tion of per­for­mances, but “when they got it right,” says Michael Hann, “they sim­ply got it com­plete­ly right.” It was cer­tain­ly their phi­los­o­phy to go all in. As Kramer described it, “You have to come ear­ly, and you have to stay late. The song doesn’t say, ‘Slide out the jams.” It doesn’t say, ‘Stroll out the jams.” It says, ‘Kick out the jams!’”

What I find fas­ci­nat­ing about the emer­gence of the MC5 at this time in his­to­ry is how great of a con­trast they pre­sent­ed to the weary blues of the Rolling Stones, who became grim­ly linked in ’69 at Alta­mont with the cyn­i­cal end of flower pow­er. Despite their asso­ci­a­tion with the vio­lent spec­ta­cle of the DNC riots—another sign of the hip­pie apocalypse—the MC5 became the sound­track for peo­ple pow­er, and in a way bridged the R&B, garage rock, psy­che­delia, punk, and met­al of the grit­ty 1970s to come. But addic­tion, polit­i­cal repres­sion, and cen­sor­ship killed the band a few years lat­er. Lead singer Rob Tyn­er died in 1991, and gui­tarist Fred “Son­ic” Smith, who mar­ried Pat­ti Smith, passed away in 1994.

Kramer has car­ried on, and still tours (and gives lec­tures). When he revis­it­ed the DNC in 2008 for an unof­fi­cial per­for­mance and anti-war protest, he reflect­ed on the pol­i­tics of the day. “It will be help­ful not to have to bat­tle as hard as we have with the Bush admin­is­tra­tion,” he told The Huff­in­g­ton Post, “but Barack Oba­ma can­not save us. It’s real­ly a mat­ter of peo­ple them­selves tak­ing action in their own neigh­bor­hoods, at their own jobs, in their own homes, with their own friends, their own co-work­ers, to move us into the future, a more just world.” The peo­ple pow­er the MC5 rep­re­sent­ed lives on even into this grim era, and the band itself will always live in leg­end, if not—for good or ill—in cin­e­ma.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Web Com­ic Revis­its the Artists & Writ­ers at the Bloody ’68 Con­ven­tion: Jean Genet, William S. Bur­roughs & More

Hear the First Live Per­for­mance of the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sug­ar:” Record­ed at the Fate­ful Alta­mont Free Con­cert in 1969

A Gallery of Visu­al­ly Arrest­ing Posters from the May 1968 Paris Upris­ing

New Jim Jar­musch Doc­u­men­tary on Iggy Pop & The Stooges Now Stream­ing Free on Ama­zon Prime

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

“Calling Bullshit”: Watch Lectures for the College Course Designed to Combat the BS in our Information Age

in Current Affairs, Online Courses | May 15th, 2017

This past Jan­u­ary, we high­light­ed a syl­labus for a ten­ta­tive course called “Call­ing Bull­shit,” designed by two pro­fes­sors at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West.

The course–also some­times called “Call­ing Bull­shit in the Age of Big Data”–ended up being offered this spring. And now you can see how it unfold­ed in the class­room. The 10 video lec­tures from the class are avail­able online. Watch them above, or at this YouTube playlist. Also find them housed in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Accord­ing to The Seat­tle Times, the course “achieved the aca­d­e­m­ic ver­sion of a chart-top­ping pop sin­gle: At the UW [Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton], it reached its 160-stu­dent capac­i­ty short­ly after reg­is­tra­tion opened this spring.” And now col­leges “in Cana­da, France, Por­tu­gal, Eng­land and Aus­tralia have con­tact­ed the pro­fes­sors about teach­ing a ver­sion of the course this fall.”

The course itself was premised on this basic idea: “Bull­shit is every­where, and we’ve had enough. We want to teach peo­ple to detect and defuse bull­shit wher­ev­er it may arise.”

A longer overview of the course appears below. It was cit­ed in our orig­i­nal post. And it’s worth high­light­ing again:

The world is awash in bull­shit. Politi­cians are uncon­strained by facts. Sci­ence is con­duct­ed by press release. High­er edu­ca­tion rewards bull­shit over ana­lyt­ic thought. Start­up cul­ture ele­vates bull­shit to high art. Adver­tis­ers wink con­spir­a­to­ri­al­ly and invite us to join them in see­ing through all the bull­shit — and take advan­tage of our low­ered guard to bom­bard us with bull­shit of the sec­ond order. The major­i­ty of admin­is­tra­tive activ­i­ty, whether in pri­vate busi­ness or the pub­lic sphere, seems to be lit­tle more than a sophis­ti­cat­ed exer­cise in the com­bi­na­to­r­i­al reassem­bly of bull­shit.

We’re sick of it. It’s time to do some­thing, and as edu­ca­tors, one con­struc­tive thing we know how to do is to teach peo­ple. So, the aim of this course is to help stu­dents nav­i­gate the bull­shit-rich mod­ern envi­ron­ment by iden­ti­fy­ing bull­shit, see­ing through it, and com­bat­ing it with effec­tive analy­sis and argu­ment.

What do we mean, exact­ly, by the term bull­shit? As a first approx­i­ma­tion, bull­shit is lan­guage, sta­tis­ti­cal fig­ures, data graph­ics, and oth­er forms of pre­sen­ta­tion intend­ed to per­suade by impress­ing and over­whelm­ing a read­er or lis­ten­er, with a bla­tant dis­re­gard for truth and log­i­cal coher­ence.

While bull­shit may reach its apogee in the polit­i­cal domain, this is not a course on polit­i­cal bull­shit. Instead, we will focus on bull­shit that comes clad in the trap­pings of schol­ar­ly dis­course. Tra­di­tion­al­ly, such high­brow non­sense has come couched in big words and fan­cy rhetoric, but more and more we see it pre­sent­ed instead in the guise of big data and fan­cy algo­rithms — and these quan­ti­ta­tive, sta­tis­ti­cal, and com­pu­ta­tion­al forms of bull­shit are those that we will be address­ing in the present course….

Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think crit­i­cal­ly about the data and mod­els that con­sti­tute evi­dence in the social and nat­ur­al sci­ences.

If you’re inter­est­ed in watch­ing the course, get start­ed with Lec­ture 1: Intro­duc­tion to Bull­shit.

To learn more about the course, please vis­it this web­site.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Call­ing Bull­shit”: See the Syl­labus for a Col­lege Course Designed to Iden­ti­fy & Com­bat Bull­shit

How to Spot Bull­shit: A Primer by Prince­ton Philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt

How Filmmakers Tell Their Stories: Three Insightful Video Essays Demystify the Craft of Editing, Composition & Color

in Film | May 11th, 2017

Every­one knows that if you want to make a movie, you first have to write down its sto­ry. Many of us have tried our hands at writ­ing movie sto­ries our­selves — as treat­ments, screen­plays, or whichev­er oth­er forms the indus­try has come up with — and some have made careers out of it. But even if a film begins on the page, it does­n’t, of course, remain there; up on screen, the final prod­uct has to tell its sto­ry visu­al­ly as much as it does with words, and usu­al­ly even more so. Lewis Bond, the video essay­ist behind the cin­e­ma-ana­lyz­ing Youtube chan­nel Chan­nel Criswell, under­stands that bet­ter than most, hence his three essays ded­i­cat­ed to the three most impor­tant ele­ments of visu­al sto­ry­telling, the first chap­ter of which, “Colour in Sto­ry­telling,” we fea­tured a cou­ple months ago here on Open Cul­ture.

The sec­ond, “Com­po­si­tion in Sto­ry­telling,” explores the pos­si­bil­i­ties inher­ent in arrang­ing peo­ple, places, and things with­in a shot. “Decid­ing the place­ment of sub­jects through the viewfind­er of a cam­era isn’t mere­ly a tech­ni­cal deci­sion,” says Bond, “it’s an expres­sive one.”

Beyond show­ing the audi­ence what they need to see to under­stand the sto­ry, film­mak­ers have relied on “tried and test­ed for­mu­las to make an image pleas­ing to the eye” such as the rule of thirds, the gold­en ratio, and tri­an­gu­lar com­po­si­tion. But beyond those basics opens up the vast cre­ative space of com­pos­ing images in order to care­ful­ly guide the audi­ence’s atten­tion, craft sym­bols and sub­texts, and make the pow­er of a scene felt — all as depen­dent upon what gets left out of the pic­ture as what gets put in.

Final­ly, “Edit­ing in Sto­ry­telling” cov­ers the step of the film­mak­ing process wide­ly con­sid­ered one of the most impor­tant, even more so than writ­ing the sto­ry in the first place. “Beyond the basic func­tion of putting a film togeth­er,” says Bond, “the crafts­man­ship of edit­ing can be dealt with such sub­tle­ty that it can be the foun­da­tion of a film’s pace, its atmos­phere — it can even be the enrich­ing ingre­di­ent to strength­en all the film’s themes, and you may not even notice.” Though the edi­tor holds “total manip­u­la­tion over our emo­tions,” decid­ing what we see, when we see it, and how we see it, they also labor under the respon­si­bil­i­ty of know­ing the film will stand or fall on their skill. Watch Chan­nel Criswell’s entire visu­al sto­ry­telling essay tril­o­gy and you’ll notice all their tech­niques much more eas­i­ly while watch­ing movies — espe­cial­ly if you start watch­ing them, as you might well find your­self inspired to do, with the sound off.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Alche­my of Film Edit­ing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Han­nah and Her Sis­ters, The Empire Strikes Back & Oth­er Films

Alfred Hitchcock’s 7‑Minute Mas­ter Class on Film Edit­ing

How Film­mak­ers Like Kubrick, Jodor­owsky, Taran­ti­no, Cop­po­la & Miyaza­ki Use Col­or to Tell Their Sto­ries

“Bleu, Blanc, Rouge”: a Strik­ing Super­cut of the Vivid Col­ors in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960s Films

Wes Ander­son Likes the Col­or Red (and Yel­low)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Obses­sion with the Col­or Red: A Super­cut

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Love Letters of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

in History, Philosophy | May 10th, 2017

The noto­ri­ous four-year affair between Han­nah Arendt and Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger has occa­sioned many a bit­ter aca­d­e­m­ic debate, for rea­sons with which you may already be famil­iar. If not, Alan Ryan sums it up suc­cinct­ly in a 1996 New York Review of Books essay:

She was a Jew who fled Ger­many in August 1933, a few months after Hitler’s assump­tion of pow­er. He was elect­ed Rec­tor of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Freiburg in the spring of 1933, and in a noto­ri­ous inau­gur­al address hailed the pres­ence of the brown-shirt­ed storm-troop­ers in his audi­ence, claimed that Hitler would restore the Ger­man peo­ple to spir­i­tu­al health, and end­ed by giv­ing the famil­iar stiff-armed Nazi salute to cries of “Sieg Heil.” The thought that these two were ever soul­mates is hard to swal­low.

Arendt went on to write The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism and Eich­mann in Jerusalem, in which she used the phrase “banal­i­ty of evil” for the Nazi func­tionary on tri­al at Nurem­berg. Hei­deg­ger refused to dis­cuss his col­lab­o­ra­tion pub­licly and “remained silent about the exter­mi­na­tion of the Jews, about the ter­ror­ism of Hitler’s regime.” But as we’ve learned from his recent­ly pub­lished jour­nals, the so-called Black Note­books, he was pri­vate­ly a “con­vinced Nazi,” as Peter Gor­don observes, who “did not awak­en from his philo­soph­i­cal-polit­i­cal fan­tasies. They only grew more extreme.”

But indeed, Arendt and Hei­deg­ger were in love, dur­ing an affair that began when she was an 18-year-old stu­dent and he her mar­ried 36-year-old pro­fes­sor. Their let­ters show an illic­it rela­tion­ship devel­op­ing from cau­tion to infat­u­a­tion. Hei­deg­ger waxed roman­ti­cal­ly philo­soph­i­cal:

.…we become what we love and yet remain our­selves. Then we want to thank the beloved, but find noth­ing that suf­fices.

We can only thank with our selves. Love trans­forms grat­i­tude into loy­al­ty to our selves and uncon­di­tion­al faith in the oth­er. That is how love steadi­ly inten­si­fies its inner­most secret.

But both of them knew the rela­tion­ship could not last, and Hei­deg­ger sug­gest­ed that mov­ing on from him would be in her best inter­est as a young schol­ar. In 1929, Arendt met and became engaged to a Ger­man jour­nal­ist and class­mate in Heidegger’s sem­i­nar. She sent her pro­fes­sor a note on her wed­ding day which begins, “Do not for­get me, and do not for­get how much and how deeply I know that our love has become the bless­ing of my life.”

Before his Nazi appoint­ment, Arendt wrote to her for­mer lover and men­tor in 1932 or 33 upon hear­ing rumors “about Heidegger’s sym­pa­thy with Nation­al Social­ism.” (Her let­ter has been lost.) He replied with a num­ber of excus­es for spe­cif­ic acts—such as refus­ing to super­vise Jew­ish students—and assured her of his feel­ings, but “nowhere in the let­ter is there any denial of Nazi sym­pa­thies,” writes Adam Kirsch at The New York­er. The two met after the war in Freiburg, and Hei­deg­ger lat­er sent Arendt a pas­sion­ate, poet­ic let­ter in 1950, extolling the “excit­ing, still almost unspo­ken under­stand­ing” between them, “emerg­ing from an affin­i­ty that was cre­at­ed so quick­ly, that comes from so far away, that has not been shak­en by evil and con­fu­sion.”

Lat­er, in a 1969 birth­day trib­ute essay “Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger at Eighty,” Arendt penned what has gen­er­al­ly been tak­en as an exon­er­a­tion of Hei­deg­ger. In it, she “com­pared Hei­deg­ger to Thales,” writes Gor­don, “the ancient philoso­pher who grew so absorbed in con­tem­plat­ing the heav­ens that he stum­bled into the well at his feet.” The truth is quite a bit more com­pli­cat­ed than that, and quite a bit less lofty. But as Maria Popo­va elo­quent­ly writes, their rela­tion­ship “expos­es the com­plex­i­ty and con­tra­dic­tion of which the human spir­it is woven, its threads nowhere more ragged than in love.” Read many more excerpts from their let­ters at Brain Pick­ings. And find com­plete let­ters col­lect­ed in the vol­ume, Let­ters: 1925–1975 — Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger and Han­nah Arendt.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Look Inside Han­nah Arendt’s Per­son­al Library: Down­load Mar­gin­a­lia from 90 Books (Hei­deg­ger, Kant, Marx & More)

Heidegger’s “Black Note­books” Sug­gest He Was a Seri­ous Anti-Semi­te, Not Just a Naive Nazi

Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger Talks Phi­los­o­phy with a Bud­dhist Monk on Ger­man Tele­vi­sion (1963)

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

The History of Electronic Music Visualized on a Circuit Diagram of a 1950s Theremin: 200 Inventors, Composers & Musicians

in Music, Technology | May 9th, 2017

No his­tor­i­cal leap for­ward has changed human cul­ture more than the har­ness­ing and com­mer­cial­iza­tion of elec­tric­i­ty. It may seem banal to point out such a truism—of course, noth­ing in the mod­ern world would be what it is with­out the furi­ous activ­i­ty of Thomas Edi­son, Niko­la Tes­la, and so many oth­er inven­tors and ear­ly elec­tri­cal engi­neers. But the scope of electricity’s role in the music of the past hun­dred plus years becomes tru­ly awe-inspir­ing when we see it mapped out in the blue­print-like graph­ic above, “Elec­tric Love,” inspired by cir­cuit dia­grams from the 1950s for a Theremin. (You can view the graph­ic in a larg­er, zoomable fash­ion here.)

As we not­ed in an ear­li­er post, design­er of “Elec­tric Love” James Quail has cre­at­ed a sim­i­lar dia­gram for Alter­na­tive and Indie rock, based on the cir­cuit lay­out for a 1954 tran­sis­tor radio. In the elec­tron­ic music ver­sion here, not only does Quail draw on old­er tech­nol­o­gy, but he reach­es back to ear­li­er ances­tors as well: to Edi­son, Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell rival Elisha Gray, and Édouard-Léon Scott de Mar­t­inville, inven­tor of the obscure ear­ly record­ing device the pho­nau­to­graph.

It’s a choice that fore­grounds just how much tech­ni­cians and engi­neers con­tributed direct­ly to the sound of the mod­ern world. Among them, of course, is the late Robert Moog, inven­tor of the portable ana­log syn­the­siz­er that become ubiq­ui­tous in near­ly every genre of mod­ern music, and whose work “was actu­al­ly based,” notes Wired, “on tech­nol­o­gy from the 1800s.”

When it comes to the musi­cians who took this tech­nol­o­gy and trans­formed it into avant-gardism and dance records, the rela­tion­ships are com­plex and per­haps impos­si­ble to ful­ly rep­re­sent in sim­ple terms giv­en the num­ber of indi­rect influ­ences through sam­pling tech­nol­o­gy. But “Elec­tric Love” does an admirable job of show­ing how dif­fuse and diverse the music made by ana­log and dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy has been. From the musique con­crete of Pierre Schaf­fer, the exper­i­men­tal­ism of Karl­heinz Stock­hausen and Arnold Schoen­berg, com­mer­cial avant-garde of Delia Der­byshire and Wendy Car­los, min­i­mal­ism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, new wave of Kraftwerk, house and hip hop of Der­rick May, Afri­ka Bam­baataa and Kool DJ Herc, ambi­ent sound­scapes of Bri­an Eno, jit­tery elec­tron­i­ca of Aphex Twin, syn­th­pop of Depeche Mode and New Order…

It’s seem­ing­ly all there, and every­thing in-between, con­nect­ed, Quail says, accord­ing to “com­mon link[s]—whether that’s a style, or an instru­ment, or an influ­ence on one anoth­er.” Even The Bea­t­les and Pink Floyd show up, pre­sum­ably for their cre­ative stu­dio exper­i­ments. On the whole, how­ev­er, most of the small­er names here are much less famil­iar by com­par­i­son to Quail’s Alter­na­tive chart, but for true fans of elec­tron­ic music, this only means there’s more to dis­cov­er in this visu­al com­pendi­um of “over 200 inven­tors, inno­va­tors, artists, com­posers and musi­cians.” You can pur­chase “Elec­tric Love” as a print from design house Dorothy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A His­to­ry of Alter­na­tive Music Bril­liant­ly Mapped Out on a Tran­sis­tor Radio Cir­cuit Dia­gram: 300 Punk, Alt & Indie Artists

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

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

Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl Explains Why If We Have True Meaning in Our Lives, We Can Make It Through the Darkest of Times

in Philosophy, Psychology | May 3rd, 2017

In one school of pop­u­lar rea­son­ing, peo­ple judge his­tor­i­cal out­comes that they think are favor­able as wor­thy trade­offs for his­tor­i­cal atroc­i­ties. The argu­ment appears in some of the most inap­pro­pri­ate con­texts, such as dis­cus­sions of slav­ery or the Holo­caust. Or in indi­vid­ual thought exper­i­ments, such as that of a famous inven­tor whose birth was the result of a bru­tal assault. There are a great many peo­ple who con­sid­er this think­ing repul­sive, moral­ly cor­ro­sive, and astound­ing­ly pre­sump­tu­ous. Not only does it assume that every ter­ri­ble thing that hap­pens is part of a benev­o­lent design, but it pre­tends to know which cir­cum­stances count as unqual­i­fied goods, and which can be blithe­ly ignored. It deter­mines future actions from a tidy and con­ve­nient sto­ry of the past.

We might con­trast this atti­tude with a more Zen stance, for exam­ple, a rad­i­cal­ly agnos­tic “wait and see” approach to every­thing that hap­pens. Not-know­ing seems to give med­i­tat­ing monks a great deal of seren­i­ty in prac­tice. But the the­o­ry ter­ri­fies most of us. Effects must have caus­es, we think, caus­es must have effects, and in order to pre­dict what’s going to hap­pen next (and there­by save our skins), we must know why we’re doing what we’re doing. The deep impulse is what psy­chol­o­gist and psy­chother­a­pist Vik­tor Fran­kl iden­ti­fies, in his pre-gen­der-neu­tral­ly titled book, as Man’s Search for Mean­ing. Despite the mis­use of this fac­ul­ty to cre­ate neu­rot­ic or dehu­man­iz­ing myths, “man’s search for mean­ing,” writes Fran­kl, “is the pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion in his life and not a ‘sec­ondary ratio­nal­iza­tion’ of instinc­tu­al dri­ves.”

Fran­kl under­stood per­fect­ly well how the con­struc­tion of meaning—through nar­ra­tive, art, rela­tion­ships, social fic­tions, etc.—might be per­vert­ed for mur­der­ous ends. He was a sur­vivor of four con­cen­tra­tion camps, which took the lives of his par­ents, broth­er, and wife. The first part of his book, “Expe­ri­ences in a Con­cen­tra­tion Camp,” recounts the hor­ror in detail, spar­ing no one account­abil­i­ty for their actions. From these expe­ri­ences, Fran­kl draws a con­clu­sion, one he explains in the inter­view above in two parts from 1977. “The les­son one could learn from Auschwitz,” he says, “and in oth­er con­cen­tra­tion camps, in the final analy­sis was, those who were ori­ent­ed toward a meaning—toward a mean­ing to be ful­filled by them in the future—were most like­ly to sur­vive” beyond the expe­ri­ence. “The ques­tion,” Fran­kl says, “was sur­vival for what?” (See a short ani­mat­ed sum­ma­ry of Fran­kl’s book below.)

Fran­kl does not excuse the deaths of his fam­i­ly, friends, and mil­lions of oth­ers in his psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ry, which he calls logother­a­py. He cer­tain­ly does not triv­i­al­ize the most unimag­in­able of in-human expe­ri­ences. “We all said to each oth­er in camp,” he writes, “that there could be no earth­ly hap­pi­ness which could com­pen­sate for all we had suf­fered.” But it was not the hope of hap­pi­ness that “gave us courage,” he writes. It was the “will to mean­ing” that looked to the future, not to the past. In Frankl’s exis­ten­tial­ist view, we our­selves cre­ate that mean­ing, for our­selves, and not for oth­ers. Logother­a­py, Fran­kl writes, “defo­cus­es all the vicious-cir­cle for­ma­tions and feed­back mech­a­nisms which play such a great role in the devel­op­ment of neu­roses.” We must acknowl­edge the need to make sense of our lives and fill what Fran­kl called the “exis­ten­tial vac­u­um.” And we alone are respon­si­ble for writ­ing bet­ter sto­ries for our­selves.

To dig deep­er in Fran­kl’s phi­los­o­phy, you can read not only Man’s Search for Mean­ing but also The Will to Mean­ing: Foun­da­tions and Appli­ca­tions of Logother­a­py.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exis­ten­tial­ist Psy­chol­o­gist Vik­tor Fran­kl Explains How to Find Mean­ing in Life, No Mat­ter What Chal­lenges You Face

A Crash Course in Exis­ten­tial­ism: A Short Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Paul Sartre & Find­ing Mean­ing in a Mean­ing­less World

Albert Camus’ His­toric Lec­ture, “The Human Cri­sis,” Per­formed by Actor Vig­go Mortensen

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

Montblanc Unveils a New Line of Miles Davis Pens … and (Kind of) Blue Ink

in Business, Music | May 1st, 2017

Got spare cash burn­ing a hole in your pock­et? An urge to com­mod­i­fy your favorite jazz artist? The need for an admit­ted­ly beau­ti­ful writ­ing instru­ment? All of the above, you say? Good, because Mont­blanc recent­ly unveiled a new line of Miles Davis pens. They’ve got the Miles Davis ball­point pen, foun­tain pen, and roller pen. But sure­ly the pièce de résis­tance is the Miles Davis Lim­it­ed Edi­tion 1926 Foun­tain Pen, which “tells the sto­ry of one of the great­est jazz per­son­al­i­ties.” “The sur­face of the cap and bar­rel is engraved with sym­bol­ic motifs that refer to the five major jazz peri­ods he helped to cre­ate.” What’s more, “a star, set with a dia­mond, is engraved on the bar­rel, and Miles Davis’s famous album Kind of Blue is reflect­ed in the blue col­or on the cone.” Swank.

And what’s a pen with­out ink? It’s blue, of course. Get a close up view of that here.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead in 1970: Hear the Com­plete Record­ings

Watch Miles Davis Impro­vise Music for Ele­va­tor to the Gal­lows, Louis Malle’s New Wave Thriller (1958)

The Paint­ings of Miles Davis

The Career of Paul Thomas Anderson: A 5‑Part Video Essay on the Auteur of Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love, The Master, and More

in Film | May 1st, 2017

For at least the past decade and a half, each of Paul Thomas Ander­son­’s movies has arrived in the­aters as a major cin­e­mat­ic event. By pure chance, I got an espe­cial­ly pow­er­ful taste of this a few years ago in Los Ange­les when, after a revival screen­ing of The Shin­ing, we in the audi­ence were told to stay right there in our seats for the rest of the night’s sur­prise dou­ble-fea­ture, the sec­ond half being Ander­son­’s as yet unre­leased and almost com­plete­ly unseen The Mas­ter — pro­ject­ed in 70-mil­lime­ter. Need­less to say, nobody left, so pal­pa­ble was the desire to expe­ri­ence the next phase of the cin­e­mat­ic vision of the auteur who has, to that point, giv­en us Hard Eight, Boo­gie Nights, Mag­no­lia, Punch-Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood.

So what makes Ander­son­’s cin­e­mat­ic vision so com­pelling? Video essay­ist Cameron Beyl, cre­ator of The Direc­tors Series (whose explo­rations of Stan­ley Kubrick, David Finch­er, and the Coen broth­ers we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), attempts an answer in this analy­sis of Ander­son­’s films, each of whose chap­ters reflect a chap­ter of the auteur’s jour­ney to his cur­rent promi­nence. The first of them finds him, at sev­en­teen after a child­hood in the San Fer­nan­do Val­ley, shoot­ing a porn-star mock­u­men­tary called The Dirk Dig­gler Sto­ry, ele­ments of which would lat­er shape his 1997 porn-indus­try epic Boo­gie Nights. Hav­ing ditched film school after just two days, the slight­ly old­er Ander­son set out to make Cig­a­rettes & Cof­fee, a short tale of low life told in high style that would expand into his first fea­ture, the mis­treat­ed but redis­cov­ered Hard Eight.

Beyl’s minis­eries of video essays, which runs near­ly three hours in total, con­tin­ues from Ander­son­’s ear­ly Sun­dance suc­cess (a suc­cess that did much to raise the pro­file of the fes­ti­val itself) to his much larg­er-bud­get “Cal­i­for­nia chron­i­cles” Boo­gie Nights and Mag­no­lia, his “con­cept come­dies” Punch-Drunk Love and var­i­ous oth­er shorts made at the time, his “por­traits of pow­er” There Will Be Blood and The Mas­ter, and his ascent to “high­er states” in the Thomas Pyn­chon adap­ta­tion Inher­ent Vice and the doc­u­men­tary Jun­jun.

Beyl describes Ander­son as unde­ni­ably “born to be a film­mak­er,” and so it stands to rea­son that, though his favorite themes includ­ing fam­i­ly, pow­er, and sex­u­al dys­func­tion remain con­stant, each new phase of the direc­tor’s life results in a new phase in his film­mak­ing — or indeed, the oth­er way around. And so every­one who takes film seri­ous­ly eager­ly awaits his next chap­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Hid­den Secrets in “Day­dream­ing,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s New Radio­head Music Video

Two Short Films on Cof­fee and Cig­a­rettes from Jim Jar­musch & Paul Thomas Ander­son

What Makes a Coen Broth­ers Movie a Coen Broth­ers Movie? Find Out in a 4‑Hour Video Essay on Bar­ton Fink, The Big Lebows­ki, Far­go, No Coun­try for Old Men & More

Dis­cov­er the Life & Work of Stan­ley Kubrick in a Sweep­ing Three-Hour Video Essay

How Did David Finch­er Become the Kubrick of Our Time? A New, 3.5 Hour Series of Video Essays Explains

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.