Watch the Serpentine Dance, Created by the Pioneering Dancer Loie Fuller, Performed in an 1897 Film by the Lumière Brothers
Whatever their views on copyright, artists and inventors of all kinds can agree on one thing: all dread having their ideas stolen without so much as a footnote of credit. Such thefts have led to tanked careers, lifelong resentments, homicidal rivalries, and lawsuits to fill libraries. They have allowed many a thief to prosper and many an injured party to surrender.
But not legendary modern dance pioneer Loie Fuller.
“Short, plump, and thirty years old,” the dancer from Illinois arrived in Paris in 1892, fresh off the “mid-level vaudeville” circuit, writes Rhonda K. Garelick at Public Domain Review, and bent on proving herself to Édouard Marchand, director of the Folies-Bergère. She scored an interview within days of her arrival.
Alighting from her carriage in front of the theater, she stopped short at the sight of the large placard depicting the Folies’ current dance attraction: a young woman waving enormous veils over her head, billed as the “serpentine dancer.” “Here was the cataclysm, my utter annihilation,” Fuller would later write, for she had come to the Folies that day precisely to audition her own, new “serpentine dance,” an art form she had invented in the United States.
The imposter, an American named Maybelle Stewart, had seen Fuller perform in New York and had lifted her act and taken it to Paris. Rather than succumb to rage or despair, Fuller sat through the matinee performance and was moved from a cold sweat to renewed confidence. “The longer she danced,” she wrote, “the calmer I became.” After Stewart left the stage, Fuller ascended in her serpentine costume and auditioned for Marchand, who agreed to take her on and fire Stewart.
The story gets stranger. The show had been promoted with Stewart’s name, and so, to avoid bad publicity, Fuller agreed to perform the first two nights as Stewart, “dancing her own imitation of Stewart’s imitation of the serpentine dance,” a “triple-layer simulation,” Garelick writes, “worthy of an essay by Jean Baudrillard”—and emblematic of a career in dance marked by “self-replication, mirrored images, and identity play.”
Thus did the woman named Loie Fuller (born Mary-Louise Fuller), begin “what was to become an unbroken thirty-year reign as one of Europe’s most wildly celebrated dancers.” Fuller was “the only female entertainer to have her own pavilion” at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, writes Natalie Lemie at Artsy. “Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec featured her in a number of prints; Auguste Rodin commissioned a series of photographs of the dancer with plans to sculpt her; and the Lumière brothers released a film about her in 1897.”
Fuller’s dance personified Art Nouveau, expressing its elegant, flowing lines in her billowing silk gowns, which she moved by means of bamboo sewn into her sleeves. As she danced “colored lights were projected onto the flowing fabric, and as she twirled, she seemed to metamorphose into elements from the natural world: a flower, a butterfly, a tongue of flame.” Everyone came to see her. The Folies, which “typically attracted working class patrons,” now had aristocratic newcomers lining up outside.
See the serpentine dance that launched her career at the top in the Lumière Brothers’ 1897 film and below it in a colorized excerpt, with the bewitching music of Sigur Ros added for effect. Other films and clips here from other early cinema pioneers show the medium’s embrace of Fuller’s choreography. Ironically, none of this footage, it seems, shows Fuller herself, but only her imitators. “Unfortunately none of the surviving films seem to contain a performance by the original dancer/choreographer,” notes cinema history channel Magical Motion Museum, “despite some of them carrying her name in the title or otherwise crediting her as the dancer.”
Her name carried a lot of weight. Fuller was not only a celebrated dancer, but also a manager, producer, and lighting designer with “over a dozen patents related to her costumes and innovations in stage lighting.” (She was so interested in the “luminous properties” of radium that she sought out and “befriended its discoverers, Pierre and Marie Curie.”) By 1908, however, she had left behind some of these elaborate stage effects to focus on “natural dancing’—dance inspired by nature, which was the forerunner of modern dance.”
And she had taken on a young dancer in her company named Isadora Duncan, often referred to as the “Mother of Modern Dance.” Fuller deserves credit, too, but she didn’t seem to care about this overmuch. She was, notes Oberlin College dance professor Ann Cooper Albright, “way more interested in making things happen than creating a name for herself.” Fame came as a byproduct of her creativity rather than its sought-after reward. She was still renowned after she left the stage, and given a retrospective at The Louvre in 1924.
Fuller continued to work behind the scenes after the Art Nouveau movement gave way to new modernisms and supported and inspired younger artists until her death in 1928. Her work deserves a prominent place in the history of modern dance, but Fuller herself “was—and remains—elusive,” Lemie writes, “something of a phantom.” Others might have stolen, borrowed, or imitated the serpentine dance, but Lois Fuller became it, going beyond competition and into a realm of magic.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Art Class Instead Of Jail: New Program Lets Young Offenders Take Free Art Classes Rather Than Spend Time in the Criminal System
Art saves lives, and art can also save an individual from the stigma of an arrest record, provided that the arrest is for one of 15 non-violent misdemeanors.
Project Reset, a museum-based early diversion program in three of New York City’s five boroughs, aims to reframe the way youthful (and not so youthful) offenders see themselves, by considering an artwork via a collective interpretive process, before using it as the inspiration for a collage or oil pastel-based project of their own.
The stakes are higher and far more personal than they are on the average public school field trip. Upon completion of a class ranging from 2.5 to 4 hours, the participant’s record is wiped clean and their assigned court date is rendered moot.
Rather than being herded through a number of galleries, participants zero in on a single work.
At the Brooklyn Museum, participants in the under-25 age range get a crash course in Shifting the Gaze, Titus Kaphar’s intentional palimpsest, in which all the figures in a replica of Frans Hals’ Family Group in a Landscape are whited out so viewers may focus in on the only character of color, a young boy who appears to be a family servant.
Older participants undertake a similarly deep dive on The Judgement by Bob Thompson, an African American artist who was inspired by the constant interplay between good and evil.
While this may strike some as a cushy punishment, it’s a legitimate attempt to acquaint participants with the very real impact their actions could have on future plans—including college admissions and job applications.
Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., one of Project Reset’s architects, shared a non-partisan fiscal take with City Lab’s Rebecca Bellan that may persuade naysayers who feel the program rewards budding criminals by giving them an easy out:
If you jump subway turnstiles in Manhattan, you never go to jail. You can do it 100 times and no court is ever going to send you to jail. So we spend about $2,200 to process a theft of services arrest for a $2.75 fare. Our justice system falls most heavily on communities of color, and we really need to rethink how we approach these cases, both to get better outcomes, but also to reduce the impact which is very often viewed as targeted and unfair on particular communities.
Above is a list of the non-violent misdemeanors that can channel first timers toward the aptly named Project Reset.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC for her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...A Flowchart of Philosophical Novels: Reading Recommendations from Haruki Murakami to Don DeLillo
Do you want to read a philosophical novel? Sure, we all do. But the question of exactly what kind of philosophical novel you want to read, let alone which individual book, isn’t quite so easily answered. But now a professional has come to the rescue: “Ben Roth, a philosopher who teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program, has put together a kind of flowchart recommending philosophical novels and stories,” reports Daily Nous’ Justin Weinberg. “With categories like ‘about a philosopher,’ ‘by a Ph.D.,’ ‘horror,’ ‘the complications of history,’ and many more, the chart is pretty big.”
The choices you make in navigating it could land you on the work of a writer from one of a variety of countries, one of several eras, and one of a capacious range of definitions of “philosophical.” If you take the word in the sense of a novel’s being about or steeped in the work of a particular philosopher, Roth recommends books like Thomas Bernhard’s Correction (Wittgenstein) and Teju Cole’s Open City (Benjamin and Barthes). Elsewhere on the map he also includes novels written by philosophically credentialed academics like William Gass, Iris Murdoch, and Anuk Arudpragasam.
If you prefer novels where “fiction writers drop into straight essayistic mode,” Roth offers a choice between the easy mode of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the hard mode of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. (If you just wanted to read about a bunch of philosophy students, well, there’s always Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.)
To those who go in for more “novelly novels,” as Geoff Dyer (a known Bernhard enthusiast and author of some pretty philosophical fiction himself) memorably put it, Roth presents more forks in the road: Would you like to read science fiction? Existentialism? Postmodernism? A book free of ‑isms entirely, or anyway as free as possible?
Your answers to those questions and others could have you reading anything from J.G. Ballard’s Crash (“body horror”) to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (“mid-century French classic”) to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (postmodern, encyclopedic, on addiction). Other choices may lead you to selections less obviously involved with philosophy: J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, or Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Of course, you may not want to read a philosophical novel at all: you may want to read philosophical short stories, in which case Roth recommends such form-defining figures as Edgar Allan Poe, writer of “disturbing stories”; Lydia Davis, writer of “short stories” (emphasis his); and Jorge Luis Borges, writer of “awe-inducing stories.”
Borges and quite a few other names on Roth’s philosophical-novel flowchart also appear in critic David Auerbach’s “Inquest on Left-Brained Literature,” a revealing look at the authors read by “engineers with a literary bent.” Both also include Don DeLillo, whose work Auerbach characterizes as making “heavy use of phantasmagoria, complemented by very sophisticated narrative construction,” and “simple, visceral, classical themes approached in [a] flashy, novel way.” Roth, for his part, describes DeLillo’s White Noise as his “favorite book ever.” Elsewhere on the flowchart, to the philosophical literature enthusiast who’s read everything he offers “the most underrated philosophical novel of all time,” Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe. No, I haven’t heard of it either, but I have to admit that it keeps good company.
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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.
Read More...Martin Luther King Jr. Explains the Importance of Jazz: Hear the Speech He Gave at the First Berlin Jazz Festival (1964)
Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of full inclusion for Black Americans still seems painfully unreal fifty years after his death. By most significant measures, the U.S. has regressed. De facto housing and school segregation are entrenched (and worsening since the 60s and 70s in many cities); voting rights erode one court ruling at a time; the racial wealth gap has widened significantly; and open displays of racist hate and violence grow more worrisome by the day.
Yet the movement was not only about winning political victories, though these were surely the concrete basis for its vision of liberation. It was also very much a cultural struggle. Black artists felt forced by circumstances to choose whether they would keep entertaining all-white audiences and pretending all was well. “There were no more sidelines,” writes Ashawnta Jackson at JSTOR Daily. This was certainly the case for that most American of art forms, jazz. “Jazz musicians, like any other American, had the duty to speak to the world around them, and to oppose the brutal conditions for Black Americans.”
Many of those musicians could not stay silent after the murder of Emmett Till, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, and a string of other highly publicized and horrific attacks. Jazz was changing. As Amiri Baraka wrote in a 1962 essay, “the musicians who played it were loudly outspoken about who they thought they were. ‘If you don’t like it, don’t listen’ was the attitude.” That attitude came to define post-Civil Rights Black American culture, a defiant turn away from appeasing white audiences and ignoring racism.
As jazz musicians embraced the movement, so the movement embraced jazz. While King himself is usually associated with the gospel singers he loved, he had a deep respect for jazz as a form that spoke of “some new hope or sense of triumph.” Jazz, wrote King in his opening address for the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival, “is triumphant music…. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument. It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians.”
Jazz not only gave order to chaotic, “complicated urban existence,” it also provided critical emotional support for the Movement.
Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.
King’s take on jazz paralleled his articulations of the movement’s goals—he always understood that the particular struggles of Black Americans had specific historical roots, and required specific political remedies. But ultimately, he believed that everyone should be treated with dignity and respect, and have access to the same opportunities and the same protections under the law.
Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.
Jazz music, said King, “is a stepping stone towards all of these.” Wrought “out of oppression,” it is music, he said, that “speaks for life,” even in the midst of what could seem like death and defeat. Read King’s full address at WCLK 91.9. And at the top of the post, hear the speech read by San Francisco Bay Area artists for a 2012 celebration on King’s birthday.
The 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival (poster above) was the first in the illustrious annual event. See many other stunning posters from the series here.
via JSTOR Daily
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Read More...Treasures in the Trash: A Secret Museum Inside a New York City Department of Sanitation Garage
Like many New Yorkers, retired sanitation worker Nelson Molina has a keen interest in his fellow citizens’ discards.
But whereas others risk bedbugs for the occasional curbside score or dumpster dive as an enviro-political act, Molina’s interest is couched in the curatorial.
The bulk of his collection was amassed between 1981 and 2015, while he was on active duty in Carnegie Hill and East Harlem, collecting garbage in an area bordered by 96th Street, Fifth Avenue, 106th Street, and First Avenue.
At the end of every shift, he stashed the day’s finds at the garage. With the support of his coworkers and higher ups, his hobby crept beyond the confines of his personal area, filling the locker room, and eventually expanding across the massive second floor of Manhattan East Sanitation Garage Number 11, at which point it was declared an unofficial museum with the unconventional name of Treasures in the Trash.
Because the museum is situated inside a working garage, visitors can only access the collection during infrequent, specially arranged tours. Hunter College’s East Harlem gallery and the City Reliquary have hosted traveling exhibits.
The Foundation for New York’s Strongest (a nickname originally conferred on the Department of Sanitation’s football team) is raising funds for an offsite museum to showcase Molina’s 45,000+ treasures, along with exhibits dedicated to “DSNY’s rich history.”
Molina’s former coworkers marvel at his unerring instinct for knowing when an undistinguished-looking bag of refuse contains an object worth saving, from autographed baseballs and books to keepsakes of a deeply personal nature, like photo albums, engraved watches, and wedding samplers.
There’s also a fair amount of seemingly disposable junk—obsolete consumer technology, fast food toys, and “collectibles” that in retrospect were mere fad. Molina displays them en masse, their sheer numbers becoming a source of wonder. That’s a lot of Pez dispensers, Tamagotchis, and plastic Furbees that could be cluttering up a landfill (or Ebay).
Some of the items Molina singles out for show and tell in Nicolas Heller’s documentary short, at the top, seem like they could have considerable resell value. One man’s trash, you know…
But city sanitation workers are prohibited from taking their finds home, which may explain why Department of Sanitation employees (and Molina’s wife) have embraced the museum so enthusiastically.
Even though Molina retired after raising his six kids, he continues to preside over the museum, reviewing treasures that other sanitation workers have salvaged for his approval, and deciding which merit inclusion in the collection.
Preservation is in his blood, having been raised to repair rather than discard, a practice he used to put into play at Christmas, when he would present his siblings with toys he’d rescued and resurrected.
This thrifty ethos accounts for a large part of the pleasure he takes in his collection.
As to why or how his more sentimental or historically significant artifacts wound up bagged for curbside pickup, he leaves the speculation to visitors of a more narrative bent.
Sign up for updates or make a donation to the Foundation for New York’s Strongest’s campaign to rehouse the collection in an open-to-the-public space here.
To inquire about the possibility of upcoming tours, email the NYC Department of Sanitation at to***@******yc.gov.
Photos of Treasures in the Trash by Ayun Halliday, © 2018
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Although she lives and works inside Nelson Molina’s former pick up zone, she has yet to see any of her discards on display. Join her in NYC on Monday, October 7 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain celebrates the art of Aubrey Beardsley. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...The Women of Rock: Discover an Oral History Project That Features Pioneering Women in Rock Music
If you’ve wondered why projects celebrating women in the history of rock are needed, maybe all you need to do is listen to women in rock. Stories of boys’ clubs in the industry, from record labels to journalists to fandoms, are ubiquitous, which is why so many voices are pushed to the margins, say rock historians like Tanya Pearson, director of the Women of Rock oral history project.
Marginalization happens not only on stages and studios but at the level of memory and preservation. “Canons influence how we remember the past,” Pearson writes. “Rock journalism, media, and scholarship perpetuates a one sided, androcentric rock narrative…. Women do not easily fit and so they continue to be underrepresented. If they are represented at all, they are not given the same level of attention or granted the same access to audience as their male counterparts.”
Women of Rock, a “collection of digital interviews and written transcripts housed at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith college,” focuses “primarily on artists who have been left out of the popular rock narratives.”
Pearson and her volunteer collaborators hope that “by creating space for women, trans, and gender nonconforming artists to share their personal and professional histories” the project can “contribute to their personal and professional histories and accurate popular rock narratives.”
Pearson created the project while an undergraduate at Smith, finding herself “frustrated by the scant details available about her favorite musicians,” writes Sharon Hannon at Please Kill Me. “The main reason I started this project,” she tells Hannon, “was that it’s something I wish I had access to when I was 13 or 14,” a time in her life when she was “desperately searching for representation.” The problem wasn’t that women like her did not exist in rock, but that she couldn’t find out much about them.
The site’s current roster of interviewees is an interesting and impressive mix. It includes women who have been integral to punk, indie, and alternative rock—like Lydia Lunch (further up), Nina Gordon and Louise Post of Veruca Salt, Alice Bag, Shirley Manson, Julie Cafritz, Melissa Auf der Mauer, Kristin Hersh, Mary Timony, Kira Rosseler, JD Samson, Amanda Palmer, and Exene Cervanka. (Sadly, Kim Shattuck of the Muffs, who passed away recently, isn’t featured.) And there are lesser-known artists who deserve a much wider audience, like Brie (Howard) Darling, a member of the criminally underrated Fanny, and whose full interview you can see below.
All of these women have stories to tell about surviving in a “male dominated business” as Tracy Bonham says in the trailer at the top of the post. Stories about “the patriarchal system,” as Shirley Manson says in her interview further up, “that allows men to thrive” and pushes women out. All of these musicians also tell us stories about themselves—their childhoods, influences, struggles, and passions, leaving behind a record in which future women rockers and rock historians among the current generation of 13- and 14-year-old kids can see themselves.
See the project’s YouTube channel for more full interviews and interview clips and visit the Women of Rock site for more.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...Watch Robert Hunter (RIP), Grateful Dead Lyricist, Perform His Legendary Songs “Bertha,” “Sugaree,” “Box of Rain,” “Friend of the Devil” & More
Even if you aren’t a fan, a mention of the Grateful Dead will conjure hirsute Jerry Garcia and band, lit by psychedelic lasers from without, hallucinogens from within. You’ll recall the Dead’s logo, the skull with a lightning bolt in its crown; you’ll remember tie-dye shirts with rose-crowned skeletons on them; you’ll see again those grinning, dancing bears your college roommate stuck all over her laptop and on the back of her beat-up 30-year-old Toyota.
You might call to mind these pictures with more or less fondness, but you need never to have heard a single song or have stepped into the parking lot of a Dead show to have imbibed all of the band’s iconic imagery.
Deadheads, however, will see these many signifiers as windows onto a richly textured extended universe, one filled with lore and trivia, and inhabited by-behind-the-scenes creatives who built the band’s look, stage show, and folk-occult mythology.
The Dead were at the center, but their legacy would never have carried such weight without Owsley Stanley, for example, nicknamed “Bear”—who inspired the dancing (actually, marching) bears and came up with the skull and lightning bolt (both drawn by artist Bob Thomas). Stanley also bankrolled the Dead with money from his LSD empire, built their “wall of sound” system, and served as producer, sound engineer, and all-around generative force.
No less critical to the band’s existence was Robert Hunter, the lyricist who penned the words to “Truckin’,” “Dark Star,” “Casey Jones,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Terrapin Station,” “Ripple,” “Jack Straw,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Box of Rain,” “Touch of Grey,” and other songs central to their huge live and studio catalogue, including favorites like “Bertha,” a live-only tune “probably” about “some vaguer connotation of birth, death and reincarnation. Cycle of existences, some kind of such nonsense like that.”
So Hunter told an interviewer about “Bertha”’s origin, adding for clarification, “but then again, it might not be. I don’t remember.” The lyricist, who died yesterday, wrote “dreamlike variations on the American folk tradition,” notes Neil Genzlinger at The New York Times—songs that “meshed seamlessly with the band’s casual musical style, helping to define the Grateful Dead as a counterculture touchstone.”
Hunter earned the admiration not only of the band and its legions of fans, but also of fellow songwriters like Bob Dylan, who thought of Hunter as a peer and often collaborated with him. “He’s got a way with words and I do, too,” Dylan told Rolling Stone. “We both write a different type of song than what passes today for songwriting.” Like Dylan, Hunter worked in a mystical vein, “with a boundless knowledge of subjects running the gamut from classic literature to street life,” notes The Washington Post.
Hunter was a natural storyteller who wrote “authoritatively about everyone from card sharks and hustlers to poor dirt farmers and free-spirited lovers.” His narratives provided the Dead with a cohesive “weird American” folk center to anchor their free-form musical experimentation: a base to return to and exclaim, as Hunter famously wrote in “Truckin’,” “what a long, strange trip it’s been.” Though he was himself a musician, “proficient in a number of instruments including guitar, violin, cello, and trumpet,” he never appeared onstage with the band in all their 30 years.
He preferred to stand in the wings or “sit anonymously in the audience.” Like Stanley, he intended his creative efforts for the Grateful Dead, not the Grateful Dead featuring Robert Hunter. But that doesn’t mean he never took the stage to play those legendary songs—only that he waited until a couple decades after the band’s last gig. Here, you can see Hunter play fan favorite “Bertha” (top), and several other of his beloved Dead songs: “Sugaree,” “Scarlet Begonias,” “Box of Rain,” “Brown Eyed Women,” “Ripple,” and “Friend of the Devil.”
These performances come from appearances at the Stafford Palace Theater and Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in 2013 and the Newport Folk Festival in 2014, before niche audiences who knew very well who Robert Hunter was. But while his name may never be as well-known in popular culture as the many artists he collaborated with and wrote for, Hunter nonetheless left an impression on American culture that will not soon fade away.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Coddling of the American Mind: Malcolm Gladwell Leads a Conversation with Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff & Lenore Skenazy
From the 92nd Street Y in New York City comes a wide-ranging conversation featuring Malcolm Gladwell, Jonathan Haidt (NYU), Greg Lukianoff (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), and Lenore Skenazy (founder of the Free-Range Kids movement). Here’s a quick summary of the ground they cover:
Civil discourse is in decline, with potentially dire results for American democracy.
On college campuses across America, visiting speakers are disinvited, or even shouted down, while professors, students, and administrators are afraid to talk openly, for fear that someone will take offense. Political discussion on social media and television has devolved into a wave of hyper-partisan noise. A generation of overprotective parents are reluctant to let their children play outside without supervision. How did we get here? And how can we change the way that we engage with one another?
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind sounds the depths of this generational crisis. Join us for a lively discussion with the authors, president of the non-profit Let Grow and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement Lenore Skenazy, and #1 New York Times bestseller Malcolm Gladwell on how we as citizens can engage with one another across the political spectrum.
If it’s not already clear, the conversation is based on Lukianoff and Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Skenazy is the author of Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry). If you sign up for a free trial with Audible, you can download copies of both books.
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Read More...The Creepy 13th-Century Melody That Shows Up in Movies Again & Again: An Introduction to “Dies Irae”
The number of iconic scenes in cinema history can and do fill textbooks hundreds of pages long. Doubtless most of us have seen enough of these scenes to know the basic grammar of feature film, and to recognize the hundreds of references in movies and TV to classic cuts and compositions from Hitchcock, Kubrick, or Kurosawa.
Visual and narrative allusions might leap out at us, but music tends to work in subtler ways, prompting emotional responses without engaging the parts of our brain that make comparisons. Case in point, the videos here from Vox and Berklee College of Music professor Alex Ludwig demonstrate the widespread use of a musical motif of four notes from the “Dies Irae,” or “day of wrath,” a 13th century Gregorian requiem, or Catholic mass traditionally sung at funerals.
Of course, we know these notes from the iconic, oft-parodied Amadeus scene of Mozart composing the “Dies Irae” movement of his Requiem in his sickbed, as ultimate frenemy Salieri furiously transcribes. Once you hear the magisterially ominous sequence of notes, you might immediately think of Wendy Carlos’ themes for The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. But did you notice these four notes in Disney’s The Lion King, Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope, or It’s a Wonderful Life?
What about Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Home Alone? Both Vox and Ludwig show how the “dies irae” theme appears over and over, cueing us to peril or tragedy ahead, orienting us to the terror and unease we see onscreen. For almost 800 years, these four notes have signified all of the above for Catholic Europe, as well as, Vox notes, soundtracking the supposed future day when “God will judge the living and the dead and send them to heaven or hell.”
The “dies irae” has permeated narrative cinema for almost as long as film has existed. The oldest example in Ludwig’s compilation comes from a 1927 score written by Gottfried Huppertz for Fritz Lang’s silent Metropolis. Ludwig also brings his musicological expertise to bear in Vox’s exploration of “dies irae” references. He sums up the net effect as creating a “sense of dread,” bestowed upon modernity by hundreds of years of Christian theology as expressed in music.
Film composers were only the latest to pick up the cultural thread of fear and threat in “Dies Irae.” Their work stands on the shoulders of Mozart and later composers like Hector Berlioz, who lifted the melody in his 1830 Symphonie fantastique to tell a story of obsessive love and murder, and a nightmare of a witch’s sabbath. Later came Franz Liszt’s 1849 Totentanz (Dance of the Dead) and Giuseppe Verdi’s 1874 Messa da Requiem, a very recognizable piece of music that has made its appearance in no small number of movies, TV shows, commercials, and temp scores.
Vox and Ludwig show the “dies irae” phenomenon in film to be a slow cultural evolution from the ornate, sacred pomp of medieval Catholic rites to the ornate, secular pomp of Hollywood film production, by way of classical composers who seized on the theme’s “sense of dread” but remained at least ambivalent about happy endings on the day of wrath.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...What Would Michel Foucault Think of Social Media, Fake News & Our Post Truth World?
During the late 70s, Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures at the College de France in which he defined the concept of biopolitics, an idea Rachel Adams calls “political rationality which takes the administration of life and populations as its subject.” These ideas have come to have even more resonance in the spread of biometric identification systems and militarized population control policies.
Foucault begins his lecture series on biopolitics with an account of the birth of Neoliberalism, the engineered privatization of public goods and services and the concentration of capital and power into the hands of a few. “Everything I do,” he once said, “I do in order that it might be of use.” What would he have to say about the current situation? asks the BBC video above, a political landscape permeated by fake news, accusations of fake news, and the general admission that we are now “post truth”?
In some sense, Foucault, argued, we have always lived in such a world—not one in which real news and actual truth did not exist, but in which we are conditioned through language to adopt ideological perspectives that may have little to do with fact. What counts as knowledge, Foucault showed, gets authenticated to serve the interests of power. Later in his career, he saw more space for resistance and self-transformation emerge in power relations—and he would have seen such spaces in social media too, the video claims.
After his infamous acid trip in Death Valley, Foucault reportedly (and self-reportedly) returned a changed man, with a much less gloomy, claustrophobic outlook. The earlier Foucault may have emphasized the totalizing mechanisms of surveillance and control in social media, perhaps to the exclusion of any potential for liberation. The video doesn’t make these distinctions between early and late or give us much in the way of a history of his thought, though it acknowledges how critically important history was to Foucault himself.
We can’t know that he would say any of the things attributed to him here. He was a contrarian thinker, who “didn’t believe in all-embracing theories to explain the world,” the narrator admits. Perhaps he would have seen social media as technical elaboration of biopower: harvesting personal data, tracking everyone’s location, getting us all to watch each other. Or as a version of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, in which we never know when someone’s watching us, so we internalize the control system. These are some of the prisons, Foucault might say, that appear under regimes of “security, territory, population.”
The video features Angie Hobbs, Professor of Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield.
Related Content:
Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky Debate Human Nature & Power on Dutch TV (1971)
An Animated Introduction to Michel Foucault, “Philosopher of Power”
Hear Hours of Lectures by Michel Foucault: Recorded in English & French Between 1961 and 1983
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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