The Sex Pistols Make a Scandalous Appearance on the Bill Grundy Show & Introduce Punk Rock to the Startled Masses (1976)

in Music, Television | September 19th, 2017

The brain­less­ness and hypocrisy of tele­vi­sion has long been a source of fun and social com­men­tary in punk rock—from Black Flag’s “TV Par­ty” (“I don’t even both­er to use my brain any­more”) to the Dead Kennedys’ “M.T.V. –Get Off the Air” (“… feed­ing you end­less dos­es / of sug­ar-coat­ed mind­less garbage”). It’s fit­ting then that one of the sem­i­nal moments in punk his­to­ry hap­pened on tele­vi­sion, orches­trat­ed by Sex Pis­tols man­ag­er and arch provo­ca­teur Mal­colm McLaren, who knew as well as any­one how to manip­u­late the media. The noto­ri­ous Bill Grundy inter­view, which you can watch—likely not for the first or even sec­ond time—above, rock­et­ed the Sex Pis­tols to nation­al infamy overnight, sim­ply because of a few swear words and some slight­ly rude behav­ior.

Though the U.S. does its damn­d­est to keep up these days, no one in 1976 could match the out­rage machin­ery of the UK press. As rock pho­tog­ra­ph­er and man­ag­er Leee Black Childers put it in the oral his­to­ry of punk, Please Kill Me, the tabloids “can work the pop­u­lace into a fren­zy.” McLaren goes on record to say, “I knew the Bill Grundy show was going to cre­ate a huge scan­dal. I gen­uine­ly believed it would be his­to­ry in the mak­ing.” We might expect him to take cred­it after the fact, but in any case, it worked: the day after the band’s appear­ance on the Grundy-host­ed Today show on Thames Tele­vi­sion, every tabloid paper fea­tured them on the front page. The Dai­ly Mir­ror pro­vid­ed the title of Julien Temple’s 2000 doc­u­men­tary with their clever head­line, “The Filth and the Fury.”

Even in 2008, a sur­vey showed the Grundy inter­view as the most request­ed clip in UK tele­vi­sion his­to­ry. With all this hype, you might be dis­ap­point­ed if you’re one of the few who hasn’t seen it. Though f‑bombs on TV can still cause a minor stir, a few mum­bled curse words will hard­ly gar­ner the kind of pub­lic­i­ty they did forty years ago. McLaren claims punk rock began that day on the Today show, and that’s true, at least, for the view­ing pub­lic who would have been treat­ed to an appear­ance from Queen if Fred­die Mer­cury hadn’t devel­oped a crip­pling toothache. Instead, they were intro­duced to Paul Cook in a Vivi­enne West­wood naked breasts t‑shirt, and Glen Mat­lock, Steve Jones, and John­ny Rot­ten toss­ing insults at Grundy, who egged them on, hit on the teenage Siouxsie Sioux, part of the band’s entourage, and may have been drunk, though he denied it.

It may be one of the least wit­ty exchanges in tele­vi­sion his­to­ry, and that’s say­ing a lot. But for all the pearl-clutch­ing over the band’s cru­di­ty, it’s maybe Grundy who comes off look­ing the worse. More inter­est­ing than the inter­view itself is the hyper­bol­ic fall­out, as well as what hap­pened imme­di­ate­ly after­ward. The sta­tion was flood­ed with com­plaints, and for some rea­son, its tele­phone sys­tem rerout­ed unan­swered calls to the green room, where the band and their fol­low­ers had decamped. “A pro­duc­er on the pro­gramme ignored instruc­tions to remain in the room,” notes Jon Ben­nett at Team Rock. “The result? The group start­ed answer­ing the phones and dish­ing out even more abuse. How this evad­ed the press at the time remains a mys­tery.” Indeed. It’s doubt­ful McLaren could have planned it, but the image evokes the sneer of every punk who has ever spit on the pious insis­tence that TV spoon­feed its view­ers mid­dle-class deco­rum with their adver­tis­ing, sports, wish-ful­fill­ing fan­tasies, and info­tain­ment.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Sex Pis­tols’ Very Last Con­cert (San Fran­cis­co, 1978)

The Sex Pis­tols’ 1976 Man­ches­ter “Gig That Changed the World,” and the Day the Punk Era Began

The Sex Pis­tols Play in Dal­las’ Long­horn Ball­room; Next Show Is Mer­le Hag­gard (1978)

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

Neil deGrasse Tyson is Creating a New Space Exploration Video Game with the Help of George R.R. Martin & Neil Gaiman

in Astronomy, Games, Science | August 25th, 2017

Although Neil deGrasse Tyson is some­what hes­i­tant to go in on plans to ter­raform and col­o­nize Mars, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t like a good ol’–yet science-based–video game. Sev­er­al out­lets announced recent­ly that the videogame Space Odyssey, spear­head­ed by deGrasse Tyson–one of America’s main defend­ers of log­ic and Enlightenment–has sur­passed its Kick­starter fund­ing goal. The game promis­es to send play­ers on “real sci­ence-based mis­sions to explore space, col­o­nize plan­ets, cre­ate and mod in real time.”

In the game, accord­ing to deGrasse Tyson, “you con­trol the for­ma­tion of plan­ets, of comets, of life, civ­i­liza­tion. You could maybe tweak the force of grav­i­ty and see what effect that might have.” It will be, he says, “an explo­ration into the laws of physics and how they shape the world in which we live.”

The game has been form­ing for sev­er­al years now, and most impor­tant­ly to our read­ers, has called in sev­er­al sci-fi and fan­ta­sy writ­ers to help cre­ate the var­i­ous worlds in the game, as they have apt­ly demon­strat­ed their skills in doing so on the print­ed page. That includes George R.R. Mar­tin, cur­rent­ly ignor­ing what­ev­er HBO is doing to his cre­ation Game of Thrones; Neil Gaiman, who cre­ates a new uni­verse every time he drops a new nov­el; and Len Wein, who has had a hand in cre­at­ing both DC’s Swamp Thing and Marvel’s Wolver­ine. Also on board: deGrasse Tyson’s bud­dy Bill Nye, for­mer NASA astro­naut Mike Mas­simi­no, and astro­physi­cist Charles Liu.

The idea of world/­galaxy-build­ing is not new in video games, espe­cial­ly recent­ly. No Man’s Sky (2015) fea­tures “eigh­teen quin­til­lion full-fea­tured plan­ets” and Minecraft seems lim­it­less. But Space Odyssey (still a tem­po­rary title!) is the first to have deGrasse Tyson and friends work­ing the con­trols in the back­ground. And a game is as good as the vision­ar­ies behind it.

Accord­ing to the Kick­starter page, the raised funds will go into “the abil­i­ty to have this com­mu­ni­ty play the game and engage with it while the final build is under­way. As the Kick­starter gam­ing com­mu­ni­ty begins to beta test game-play and pro­vide feed­back, we can begin to use the funds raised via Kick­starter to incor­po­rate your mod­ding, map­ping and build­ing sug­ges­tions, togeth­er build­ing the awe­some gam­ing expe­ri­ence you helped to cre­ate.”

DeGrasse Tyson will be in the game him­self, urg­ing play­ers onward. There’s no indi­ca­tion whether Mr. Mar­tin will be pop­ping up, though.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Because of Pink Floyd, I’ve Spent Decades Undo­ing the Idea That There’s a Dark Side of the Moon”

David Byrne & Neil deGrasse Tyson Explain the Impor­tance of an Arts Edu­ca­tion (and How It Strength­ens Sci­ence & Civ­i­liza­tion)

Are We Liv­ing in a Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tion?: A 2‑Hour Debate with Neil Degrasse Tyson, David Chalmers, Lisa Ran­dall, Max Tegmark & More

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Figures from Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” Come to Life as Fine Art Piñatas

in Art, Creativity | August 25th, 2017

Piñatas are a night­mare.

Oh sure, they look fes­tive, but seri­ous­ly, think twice before arm­ing a blind­fold­ed child (or a beer guz­zling adult guest) with a stur­dy stick and encour­ag­ing him to swing wild­ly.

There’s no need to wor­ry, how­ev­er, about any­one tak­ing a bat to the intri­cate Hierony­mus Bosch-inspired piñatas of Rober­to Benavidez, a self-described half-breed, South Tex­an, queer fig­u­ra­tive sculp­tor.

Even if you filled them with can­dy, the exte­ri­ors would be far more valu­able than any trea­sures con­tained with­in.

Bosch, of course, excelled at sce­nar­ios far more night­mar­ish than any­thing one might encounter in a back­yard par­ty. Benavidez seems less drawn to that aspect than the beau­ty of the fan­tas­ti­cal crea­tures pop­u­lat­ing The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights.

In fact, the major­i­ty of his papi­er-mâché homages are drawn from the par­a­disi­a­cal left pan­el of the famous trip­tych.

Not so the first in the series, 2013’s superbly titled Piña­ta of Earth­ly Delights #1, above

In the orig­i­nal, a mis­shapen water­bird uses its long beak to spear a cher­ry with which it tempts a pas­sel of weak-willed mor­tals, crowd­ed togeth­er inside a spiky pink blos­som.

In Benavidez’s ver­sion the lack of naked humans allows us to focus on the crea­ture, whose beak now pierces a sim­ple star-shaped piña­ta of its own.

Those with a fas­ci­na­tion for the antics of Bosch’s par­ty peo­ple are invit­ed to play a vari­a­tion of Where’s Wal­do, scour­ing the paint­ing for the inspi­ra­tion behind Can­dy Ass Bot­tom, above.

(Hint: if you’re grav­i­tat­ing toward those pos­te­ri­ors serv­ing as ves­sels for flutes, flocks of black­birds, or red hot pok­ers, you’re get­ting cold­er…)

While lit­tle is known about Bosch’s artis­tic train­ing, Benavidez majored in act­ing, before return­ing to his child­hood fas­ci­na­tion for sculpt­ing, tak­ing class­es in draw­ing, paint­ing, and bronze cast­ing at Pasade­na City Col­lege. Thrift and porta­bil­i­ty led him to begin explor­ing paper as his pri­ma­ry medi­um.

As he remarked on the blog of the crepe paper man­u­fac­tur­er Car­totec­ni­ca Rossi:

I was intrigued by the idea of tak­ing the piña­ta form, some­thing seen as cheap and dis­pos­able, and mov­ing it into the are­na of fine art.  I feel that my sculp­tur­al forms and fring­ing tech­niques set my work apart from what most peo­ple think of as a typ­i­cal piña­ta and the themes are more com­plex than is typ­i­cal.

Def­i­nite­ly.

View more of Rober­to Benavidez’ fine art piñatas, includ­ing those inspired by Hierony­mus Bosch on his web­site or Insta­gram feed.

via This Is Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

Hierony­mus Bosch Fig­urines: Col­lect Sur­re­al Char­ac­ters from Bosch’s Paint­ings & Put Them on Your Book­shelf

Take a Mul­ti­me­dia Tour of the But­tock Song in Hierony­mus Bosch’s Paint­ing The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Web Site “Centuries of Sound” is Making a Mixtape for Every Year of Recorded Sound from 1860 to Present

in History, Music | August 24th, 2017

The vibra­tions of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Ele­vat­ed Rail­road in Man­hat­tan, a recita­tion of “Mary Had a Lit­tle Lamb,” the announce­ments issu­ing forth from an inven­tor’s attempt at a talk­ing clock — hard­ly a mix with which to get the par­ty start­ed, but one that pro­vides the clos­est expe­ri­ence we can get to trav­el­ing in a son­ic time machine. With Cen­turies of Sound, James Erring­ton has assem­bled those record­ings and a few oth­ers into its 1878–1885 mix, an ear­ly chap­ter in his project of cre­at­ing one lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence for each year in the his­to­ry of record­ed sound.

“Things get a lit­tle more lis­ten­able in 1887 with a record­ing of ‘Twin­kle Twin­kle Lit­tle Star,’ ” writes The A.V. Club’s Matt Ger­ar­di. “It’s also with this third mix that we start to get a sense for Cen­turies Of Sound’s edit­ing style, as speech­es start to be lay­ered over musi­cal per­for­mances, cre­at­ing a lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence that’s as plea­sur­able as it is edu­ca­tion­al.”

In so doing, “Erring­ton calls atten­tion to the issue of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, as one of his pri­ma­ry goals is to paint a glob­al, mul­ti-cul­tur­al pic­ture of record­ing his­to­ry,” dig­ging past all the “march­ing bands, sen­ti­men­tal bal­lads, nov­el­ty instru­men­tals and noth­ing much else” in the his­tor­i­cal archives while putting out the call for expert help sourc­ing and eval­u­at­ing “Rem­beti­ka, ear­ly micro­ton­al record­ings, French polit­i­cal speech­es, Tagore songs or any­thing else.”

Putting up anoth­er year’s mix each month, Cen­turies of Sound has so far made it up to 1893, the year of the World’s Columbian Expo­si­tion in Chica­go which “set the tone for the next twen­ty-five years of archi­tec­ture, arts, cul­ture and the elec­tri­fi­ca­tion of the world,” and also the first age of “ ‘hits’ – music pro­duced with an eye to sell­ing, even if only as a sou­venir or a fun nov­el­ty.” With a decade remain­ing until Cen­turies of Sound catch­es up with the present moment, Erring­ton has put togeth­er a taste of what its son­ic dose of the almost-present will sound like with a 2016 pre­view mix fea­tur­ing the likes of the final album by A Tribe Called Quest and Lazarus, the musi­cal by David Bowie, both of whom took their final bows last year. We’re def­i­nite­ly a long way from the time of “Mary Had a Lit­tle Lamb.” But how will it all sound to the ears of 2027?

via The A.V. Club

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

Great New Archive Lets You Hear the Sounds of New York City Dur­ing the Roar­ing 20s

Map­ping the Sounds of Greek Byzan­tine Church­es: How Researchers Are Cre­at­ing “Muse­ums of Lost Sound”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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.

Hear the Beach Boys’ Angelic Vocal Harmonies in Four Isolated Tracks from Pet Sounds: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B” & “Good Vibrations”

in Music | August 18th, 2017

I didn’t get the Beach Boys for a while. They had pro­vid­ed the sound­track to an alien world, one I knew most­ly from chew­ing gum com­mer­cials. They were “uncool—cornball,” writes Ben Ratliff, “unen­light­ened” pur­vey­ors of “beach priv­i­lege.” The “nar­ra­tors of Beach Boys songs used their time as they liked: amuse­ment parks, surf­ing, drag rac­ing, dat­ing, sit­ting in their rooms.” They had no cares, no real bur­dens, just shal­low sum­mer loves and heartaches. They came off as some of the bland­est, safest-sound­ing peo­ple on earth.

Then, in a puz­zling turn in the nineties, indie artists like Neu­tral Milk Hotel, Jim O’Rourke, and The Sea and Cake began exper­i­ment­ing with the com­plex arrange­ments, odd instru­men­ta­tion, and sun­ny melodies of 60s pop artists like The Beach Boys and Burt Bacharach.

This is music that can seduce us into think­ing it is sim­plis­tic, child­ish, unin­spired vanil­la. Its use as back­ground muzak in super­mar­kets and shop­ping malls con­firms the impres­sion. But crit­i­cal lis­ten­ing explodes it. (Dig the phras­ing in the oth­er­wise sil­ly, Bacharach/Hal David-com­posed “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.”)

Yes, it took a retro-hip return to ’60s lounge music, bossa nova, and surf pop for many peo­ple to recon­sid­er the Beach Boys as seri­ous artists. And while the trend became a lit­tle cloy­ing, once I put on the head­phones and gave the rad­i­cal Pet Sounds a few dozen spins, as so many song­writ­ers I admired had gushed about doing, I got it. Of course. Yes. The arrange­ments, and those har­monies…. It isn’t only the tech­ni­cal wiz­ardry, though there’s that. It’s how thor­ough­ly weird those clas­si­cal­ly-inspired arrange­ments are. Per­haps a bet­ter way to put it would be, total­ly coun­ter­in­tu­itive.

What near­ly any oth­er pop arranger would nat­u­ral­ly do with a har­mo­ny or rhythm part—just to get the house in order and show­case more impor­tant “lead” parts—Brian Wil­son almost nev­er does. As the min­i­mal­ist com­pos­er John Adams put it, “more than any oth­er song­writer of that era, Bri­an Wil­son under­stood the val­ue of har­mon­ic sur­prise.” At least in Pet Sounds and the long-unfin­ished “labyrinth of melody” SMiLE, each part of the song sus­tains its own indi­vid­ual inter­est with­out break­ing away from the minia­ture sym­phon­ic whole.

Even with­in the har­monies, there is a strange ten­sion, an off-kil­ter wob­bling as in a machine whose gears are all just a bit off-cen­ter. Instru­ments and voic­es go in and out of key, tem­pos slow and quick­en. The vocal har­monies are angel­ic, but trou­bled, uncer­tain, maudlin, and under­lined with unex­pect­ed inten­si­ty giv­en the innocu­ous­ness of their lyrics. In the iso­lat­ed vocal tracks here for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B,” and “Good Vibra­tions,” you may catch it, or not. It isn’t fore­bod­ing, exact­ly, but a kind of uneasy recog­ni­tion that the plea­sures these songs cel­e­brate will soon pass away. An Arca­di­an theme in the Cal­i­for­nia pas­toral.

The ten­sion is there in Wilson’s idol Phil Spector’s com­posi­tons as well, but the con­trast is remark­ably greater in Pet Sounds, of long­ing, nos­tal­gia, and youth at its peak. The utopia they imag­ine may only appeal to a spe­cif­ic sub­set of boomer Amer­i­cans, but their intri­cate, melod­i­cal­ly com­plex, yet har­mo­nious­ly appeal­ing sound­world belongs to every­one. As Zack Schon­feld observed in a sad­ly prophet­ic review of Wilson’s Pet Sounds per­for­mance in Brook­lyn last sum­mer, “it is hard to imag­ine mod­ern indie or indie-pop—or pop in general—without Pet Sounds.” (That includes, of course The Bea­t­les, who answered with Sgt. Pep­pers.) “A world with­out Pet Sounds is a fright­en­ing dystopia,” he writes, “like imag­in­ing a world with­out beach­es or one in which Don­ald Trump is pres­i­dent.” Maybe as you sit back and lis­ten to the oth­er­world­ly beau­ty of these naked har­monies, think of all those love­ly beach­es we still have left.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter Bri­an Wilson’s Cre­ative Process While Mak­ing The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds 50 Years Ago: A Fly-on-the Wall View

The Mak­ing (and Remak­ing) of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Arguably the Great­est Rock Album of All Time

89 Essen­tial Songs from The Sum­mer of Love: A 50th Anniver­sary Playlist

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

The Color Palettes of Your Favorite Films: The Royal Tenenbaums, Reservoir Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner & More

in Film | August 17th, 2017

We tend to think of film as rough­ly divid­ed into the “black and white” and “col­or” eras, the lat­ter ush­ered in by such lav­ish Tech­ni­col­or pro­duc­tions as Gone with the Wind and The Wiz­ard of Oz. But we also know it’s not as sim­ple as that: those pic­tures came out in Hol­ly­wood’s “gold­en year” of 1939, but some film­mak­ers had already been exper­i­ment­ing with col­or, and the gold­en age of black-and-white film would con­tin­ue through the 1960s. Movies today still occa­sion­al­ly dare to ven­ture into the nev­er-entire­ly-shut­tered realm of the mono­chrome, but on the whole, col­or reigns supreme.

Even though most movies now use col­or, few use it to its fullest advan­tage. Col­or gives view­ers some­thing more to look at, of course, but it can also give a movie its visu­al iden­ti­ty. Think of the films you’ve seen that you can call back most vivid­ly to mind, almost as if you had a pro­jec­tor inside your head, and most of them will prob­a­bly have a dis­tinc­tive col­or palette.

The most mem­o­rable cin­e­mat­ic images, in oth­er words, will have been com­posed not just with any col­or they hap­pened to need, but with a very spe­cif­ic set of col­ors, delib­er­ate­ly assem­bled by the film­mak­ers for its par­tic­u­lar expres­sive­ness.

For a few years now, the Twit­ter account Cin­e­ma Palettes has drawn out and iso­lat­ed those col­ors, ten per film, for all to see. “Though based on a momen­tary still, each spec­trum of shades seems to encap­su­late its movie’s over­all mood,” writes My Mod­ern Met’s Leah Pel­le­gri­ni, point­ing to “the somber, oth­er­world­ly blues of Har­ry Pot­ter and the Death­ly Hal­lows: Part 2, the dream­like pinks and pur­ples of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the cloy­ing­ly pret­ty pas­tels of Edward Scis­sorhands, and the earth­ly, organ­ic greens and browns of Atone­ment.”

It will sur­prise nobody to see the work of Wes Ander­son, famed for the care he gives not just to col­or but every visu­al ele­ment of his film, appear more than once on the feed. Here we see Cin­e­ma Palettes’ selec­tions from The Roy­al Tenen­baums, as well as from Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Reser­voir Dogs, Stan­ley Kubrick­’s A Clock­work Orange, and Rid­ley Scot­t’s Blade Run­ner. The project reveals an aspect of film­mak­ing that few of us may think con­scious­ly about, but nev­er­the­less reflects the nature of cin­e­ma itself: the best films select not just the right col­ors but the right aspects of real­i­ty itself to present, to inten­si­fy, to dimin­ish, and to leave out entire­ly.

Explore more films and col­ors at Cin­e­ma Palettes.

via My Mod­ern Met and h/t Natal­ie W‑S

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Ear­ly Exper­i­ments in Col­or Film (1895–1935)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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.

36 Abstract Covers of Vintage Psychology, Philosophy & Science Books Come to Life in a Mesmerizing Animation

in Animation, Books, Design, Psychology, Science | August 11th, 2017

Ani­mat­ed ebook cov­ers are the wave of the future.

Graph­ic and motion design­er Hen­ning M. Led­er­er surfs that wave on the most unex­pect­ed of boards—a col­lec­tion of abstract mid-cen­tu­ry cov­ers drawn from the Insta­gram feed of artist Julian Mon­tague, who shares his enthu­si­asm for vin­tage min­i­mal­ism.

Led­er­er first came to our atten­tion in 2015, when we cov­ered the first install­ment of what seems des­tined to become an ongo­ing project.

His lat­est effort, above, con­tin­ues his explo­rations in the sub­jects which most fre­quent­ly trad­ed in these sorts of geo­met­ric covers—science, psy­chother­a­py, phi­los­o­phy and soci­ol­o­gy.

No word on what inspired him to toss in the first cov­er, which fea­tures a cheer­ful, Play­mo­bil-esque mush­room gath­er­er. It’s endear­ing, but—to quote Sesame Street—is not like the oth­ers. Those of us who can’t deci­pher Cyril­lic script get the fun of imag­in­ing what sort of text this is—a mycol­o­gy man­u­al? A children’s tale? A psy­cho­log­i­cal examination—and ulti­mate­ly rejection—of mid­cen­tu­ry pub­lish­ers’ fas­ci­na­tion for spi­rals, diag­o­nal bars, and oth­er non-nar­ra­tive graph­ics?

Whether or not you’d be inclined to pick up any of these titles, you may find your­self want­i­ng to dance to them, com­pli­ments of musi­cian Jörg Stier­le’s trip­py elec­tron­ics.

Or take your cue from yet anoth­er cov­er  con­tained there­in: I. P. Pavlov’s Essays in Psy­chol­o­gy and Psy­chi­a­try with a Spe­cial Sec­tion on Sleep and Hyp­no­sis.

Here’s the one that start­ed it all:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

55 Cov­ers of Vin­tage Phi­los­o­phy, Psy­chol­o­gy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Short Ani­ma­tion

Artist Ani­mates Famous Book Cov­ers in an Ele­gant, Under­stat­ed Way

500+William S. Bur­roughs Book Cov­ers from Across the Globe: 1950s Through the 2010s

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

What Happens When the Books in William S. Burroughs’ Personal Library Get Artistically Arranged — with His Own “Cut-Up” Method

in Art, Books | August 7th, 2017

If your Face­book news feed looks any­thing like mine, you wake up each morn­ing to a stream of not just food snap­shots and self­ies but pic­tures of books, whether stacked up, dumped into a pile, or arranged neat­ly on shelves. Why do we post dig­i­tal pho­tos of our print­ed mat­ter? Almost cer­tain­ly for the same rea­son we do any­thing on social media: to send a mes­sage about our­selves. We want to tell our friends who we are, or who we think we are, but not in so many words, or rather not in so few; a few of the books we’ve read (or intend to read), care­ful­ly select­ed and arranged, does the job. But what if, instead of assem­bling a self-por­trait through books, some­one else entered your per­son­al library and did it for you?

Artist Nina Katchadouri­an (she of, among many oth­er endeav­ors, the air­plane-bath­room 17th-cen­tu­ry Flem­ish por­trai­ture) recent­ly took on that task in the Lawrence, Kansas home of famous­ly hard-liv­ing and furi­ous­ly cre­ative beat writer William S. Bur­roughs. She did it as part of her long-run­ning Sort­ed Books project, in which, in her words, “I sort through a col­lec­tion of books, pull par­tic­u­lar titles, and even­tu­al­ly group the books into clus­ters so that the titles can be read in sequence.

The final results are shown either as pho­tographs of the book clus­ters or as the actu­al stacks them­selves, often shown on the shelves of the library they came from. Tak­en as a whole, the clus­ters are a cross-sec­tion of that library’s hold­ings that reflect that par­tic­u­lar library’s focus, idio­syn­crasies, and incon­sis­ten­cies.”

Kansas Cut-Up, the Bur­roughs chap­ter of Sort­ed Books, fea­tures such arrange­ments as How Did Sex Begin? / Unin­vit­ed Guests / Human Error, Mem­oirs of a Bas­tard Angel / A Night of Seri­ous Drink­ing / A Lit­tle Orig­i­nal Sin, and Amer­i­can Diplo­ma­cy / Phys­i­cal Inter­ro­ga­tion Tech­niques / In the Secret State. Thom Robin­son of the Euro­pean Beat Stud­ies Net­work describes Bur­roughs’ book col­lec­tion as “a selec­tion of large­ly Euro­pean works whose con­tents include para­noia, the­o­ries of lan­guage, pseu­do­science, mor­dant humour and drugs: in ret­ro­spect, it’s easy to imag­ine the own­er of such an idio­syn­crat­ic library pro­duc­ing the melange of Naked Lunch. Per­haps for this rea­son, it seems hard to resist reorder­ing the books which Bur­roughs owned in 1944 in order to empha­sise the most recog­nis­able ele­ments of the lat­er Bur­roughs per­sona.”

Some­times Katchadouri­an seems to do just that and some­times she does­n’t, but her method of book-sort­ing, which she explains in the episode of John and Sarah Green’s series The Art Assign­ment at the top of the post, bears more than a lit­tle resem­blance to Bur­roughs’ own “cut-up” method of lit­er­ary com­po­si­tion. “Take a page,” as Bur­roughs him­self explained it. “Now cut down the mid­dle and cross the mid­dle. You have four sec­tions: 1 2 3 4 … one two three four. Now rearrange the sec­tions plac­ing sec­tion four with sec­tion one and sec­tion two with sec­tion three. And you have a new page. Some­times it says much the same thing. Some­times some­thing quite dif­fer­ent.” And just as a rearranged book can speak in a new and strange voice, so can a rearranged library.

via Austin Kleon’s newslet­ter (which you should sub­scribe to here)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art Assign­ment: Learn About Art & the Cre­ative Process in a New Web Series by John & Sarah Green

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

The 321 Books in David Fos­ter Wallace’s Per­son­al Library: From Blood Merid­i­an to Con­fes­sions of an Unlike­ly Body­builder

115 Books on Lena Dun­ham & Miran­da July’s Book­shelves at Home (Plus a Bonus Short Play)

Dis­cov­er the 1126 Books in John Cage’s Per­son­al Library: Fou­cault, Joyce, Wittgen­stein, Vir­ginia Woolf, Buck­min­ster Fuller & More

The 430 Books in Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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.

Cindy Sherman’s Instagram Account Goes Public, Revealing 600 New Photos & Many Strange Self-Portraits

in Art, Photography | August 4th, 2017

The career of Jen­ny Holz­er, the artist who became famous in the 1970s and 80s through her pub­lic instal­la­tions of phras­es like “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE” and “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT,” has made her into an ide­al Tweet­er. By the same token, the career of Cindy Sher­man, the artist who became famous in the 1970s and 80s through her inven­tive not-exact­ly-self-por­traits — pic­tures of her­self elab­o­rate­ly remade as a vari­ety of oth­er peo­ple, includ­ing oth­er famous peo­ple, in a vari­ety of time peri­ods — has made her into an ide­al Insta­gram­mer.

But though Sher­man had been using Insta­gram for quite some time, most of the pub­lic had no idea she had any pres­ence there at all until just this week. “The account, which mys­te­ri­ous­ly switched from pri­vate to pub­lic in recent months, is a mix of per­son­al pho­tos along­side Sherman’s ever-famous manip­u­lat­ed images of her­self,” reports Art­net’s Car­o­line Elbaor.

“What we see here is some­what of a depar­ture from the artist’s tra­di­tion­al mod­el: the frame is tighter and clos­er to her face, in what is clear use of a phone’s front-fac­ing cam­era. Plus, the sub­ject mat­ter is decid­ed­ly inti­mate in com­par­i­son to her usu­al work — the lat­est posts doc­u­ment a stay in the hos­pi­tal. She may even be hav­ing fun with fil­ters.”

She appar­ent­ly start­ed hav­ing fun with them a few months ago, from one May post whose pho­to she describes as “Self­ie! No fil­ter, haha­ha” — but in which she does seem to have made use of cer­tain effects to give the image a few of the suite of uncan­ny qual­i­ties in which she spe­cial­izes. Though not a mem­ber of the gen­er­a­tions the world most close­ly asso­ciates with avid self­ie-tak­ing, Sher­man brings a unique­ly rich expe­ri­ence with the form, or forms like it. Her “method of turn­ing the lens onto her­self is uncan­ni­ly appro­pri­ate to our times,” writes Elbaor,” in which the stage-man­aged self­ie has become so ubiq­ui­tous that it’s now fod­der for exhi­bi­tions and often cit­ed as an art form in itself.”

Sher­man’s Insta­gram self-por­trai­ture, in con­trast to the often (but not always) glam­orous pro­duc­tions that hung on the walls of her shows before, has entered fas­ci­nat­ing new realms of strange­ness and even grotes­querie. Using the image-mod­i­fi­ca­tion tools so many of us might pre­vi­ous­ly assumed were used only by teenage girls des­per­ate to erase their imag­ined flaws, Sher­man twists and bends her own fea­tures into what look like liv­ing car­toon char­ac­ters. “A bit scary,” one com­menter wrote of Sher­man’s recent hos­pi­tal-bed self­ie (tak­en while recov­er­ing from a fall from a horse), “but I can’t look away.” Many of the artist’s thou­sands and thou­sands of new and cap­ti­vat­ed Insta­gram fol­low­ers are sure­ly react­ing the same way. Check out Sher­man’s Insta­gram feed here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Say What You Real­ly Mean with Down­load­able Cindy Sher­man Emoti­cons

Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (MoMA) Launch­es Free Course on Look­ing at Pho­tographs as Art

See The First “Self­ie” In His­to­ry Tak­en by Robert Cor­nelius, a Philadel­phia Chemist, in 1839

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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.

Marshall McLuhan Predicts That Electronic Media Will Displace the Book & Create Sweeping Changes in Our Everyday Lives (1960)

in Media, Television | July 24th, 2017

“The elec­tron­ic media haven’t wiped out the book: it’s read, used, and want­ed, per­haps more than ever. But the role of the book has changed. It’s no longer alone. It no longer has sole charge of our out­look, nor of our sen­si­bil­i­ties.” As famil­iar as those words may sound, they don’t come from one of the think pieces on the chang­ing media land­scape now pub­lished each and every day. They come from the mouth of mid­cen­tu­ry CBC tele­vi­sion host John O’Leary, intro­duc­ing an inter­view with Mar­shall McLuhan more than half a cen­tu­ry ago.

McLuhan, one of the most idio­syn­crat­ic and wide-rang­ing thinkers of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, would go on to become world famous (to the point of mak­ing a cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall) as a prophet­ic media the­o­rist. He saw clear­er than many how the intro­duc­tion of mass media like radio and tele­vi­sion had changed us, and spoke with more con­fi­dence than most about how the media to come would change us. He under­stood what he under­stood about these process­es in no small part because he’d learned their his­to­ry, going all the way back to the devel­op­ment of writ­ing itself.

Writ­ing, in McLuhan’s telling, changed the way we thought, which changed the way we orga­nized our soci­eties, which changed the way we per­ceived things, which changed the way we inter­act. All of that holds truer for the print­ing press, and even truer still for tele­vi­sion. He told the sto­ry in his book The Guten­berg Galaxy, which he was work­ing on at the time of this inter­view in May of 1960, and which would intro­duce the term “glob­al vil­lage” to its read­ers, and which would crys­tal­lize much of what he talked about in this broad­cast. Elec­tron­ic media, in his view, “have made our world into a sin­gle unit.”

With this “con­tin­u­al­ly sound­ing trib­al drum” in place, “every­body gets the mes­sage all the time: a princess gets mar­ried in Eng­land, and ‘boom, boom, boom’ go the drums. We all hear about it. An earth­quake in North Africa, a Hol­ly­wood star gets drunk, away go the drums again.” The con­se­quence? “We’re re-trib­al­iz­ing. Invol­un­tar­i­ly, we’re get­ting rid of indi­vid­u­al­ism.” Where “just as books and their pri­vate point of view are being replaced by the new media, so the con­cepts which under­lie our actions, our social lives, are chang­ing.” No longer con­cerned with “find­ing our own indi­vid­ual way,” we instead obsess over “what the group knows, feel­ing as it does, act­ing ‘with it,’ not apart from it.”

Though McLuhan died in 1980, long before the appear­ance of the mod­ern inter­net, many of his read­ers have seen recent tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments val­i­date his notion of the glob­al vil­lage — and his view of its per­ils as well as its ben­e­fits — more and more with time. At this point in his­to­ry, mankind can seem less unit­ed than ever than ever, pos­si­bly because tech­nol­o­gy now allows us to join any num­ber of glob­al “tribes.” But don’t we feel more pres­sure than ever to know just what those tribes know and feel just what they feel?

No won­der so many of those pieces that cross our news feeds today still ref­er­ence McLuhan and his pre­dic­tions. Just this past week­end, Quartz’s Lila MacLel­lan did so in argu­ing that our media, “while glob­al in reach, has come to be essen­tial­ly con­trolled by busi­ness­es that use data and cog­ni­tive sci­ence to keep us spell­bound and loy­al based on our own tastes, fuel­ing the relent­less rise of hyper-per­son­al­iza­tion” as “deep-learn­ing pow­ered ser­vices promise to become even bet­ter cus­tom-con­tent tai­lors, lim­it­ing what indi­vid­u­als and groups are exposed to even as the uni­verse of prod­ucts and sources of infor­ma­tion expands.” Long live the indi­vid­ual, the indi­vid­ual is dead: step back, and it all looks like one of those con­tra­dic­tions McLuhan could have deliv­ered as a res­o­nant sound bite indeed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­shall McLuhan in Two Min­utes: A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the 1960s Media The­o­rist Who Pre­dict­ed Our Present

Has Tech­nol­o­gy Changed Us?: BBC Ani­ma­tions Answer the Ques­tion with the Help of Mar­shall McLuhan

McLuhan Said “The Medi­um Is The Mes­sage”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

The Vision­ary Thought of Mar­shall McLuhan, Intro­duced and Demys­ti­fied by Tom Wolfe

Mar­shall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buck­min­ster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy & Media (1971)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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.