Documentaries on the Groundbreaking Work & Life of Ursula K. Le Guin & Four Other Trailblazing Artists, Streaming Free this Week
What sort of art will emerge from this unprecedented moment in history, when the global coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement grew exponentially, and synchronously.
And not to presume, but to hope, what will humans think of that literature in 50 or 100 years’ time?
Over the course of a not quite hour-long American Masters episode devoted to author Ursula LeGuin, flux emerges as a major theme of the science fiction pioneer’s life and work.
The youngest child of A.L. Kroeber, the founder of academic anthropology, LeGuin, who died in 2018, criticized herself for having been slow to open her eyes to the injustice around her.
It became a preoccupation in stories like The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, a thought experiment in which the reader must consider the ethics of a prosperous happy society, whose good fortune depends on the suffering of a captive child.
The Dispossessed arose from her curiosity as to what “a genuine, working anarchist society (would) be like.”
(Answer: flawed, like every other human society.)
One of her best known books, The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969, prefigured the coming battle for gender equality, and so much more, by creating a truly gender fluid world in which the androgynous inhabitants’ monthly periods of sexual activity conferred temporarily male or female biological status at random.
It was hailed as a feminist groundbreaker, but as time went on, LeGuin found herself in hot water for having gone with the masculine pronoun as a default way of referring to her androgynous characters:
At first, I felt a little bit defensive, but, as I thought about it, I began to see my critics were right. I was coming up against how I write about gender equality.
My job is not to arrive at a final answer and just deliver it.
I see my job as holding doors open or opening windows, but who comes in and out the doors? What do you see out the window? How do I know?
The book is still in print, should new generation of readers feel compelled to plumb the text for problematic passages. Why should the many reflections, essays, and think pieces that marked the 50th anniversary of its publication be the last word?
Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is available to stream for free on PBS through Monday August 31, along with four other American Masters episodes featuring artists who, like Le Guin, broke the existing molds:
Terrence McNally: Every Act of Life
Over a six-decade career, four-time Tony-winner and outspoken LGBTQ activist Terrence McNally wrote dozens of trailblazing plays, musicals, operas and screenplays about sexuality, homophobia, faith, and the power of art.
Raúl Juliá: The World’s a Stage
The charismatic actor from Puerto Rico was celebrated for the range and versatility he brought to roles on stage and screen, from Shakespearean plays to the “The Addams Family.” Though his career was cut short by his death at age 54, he paved the way for generations of Latinx actors.
Rothko: Pictures Must be Miraculous
One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Mark Rothko’s signature style helped define Abstract Expressionism. The celebrated painter’s luminous paintings now set records at auction, and are seen by millions in London, Washington, D.C. and at the famous Rothko Chapel in Houston.
Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear
A formative voice of the Native American Renaissance in art and literature, author and poet N. Scott Momaday was the first Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Here’s to ever-evolving worlds, and acknowledging the contributions of those who helped make this change possible.
Stream the five PBS American Masters episodes mentioned above for free through the end of August here.
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Ursula K. Le Guin Names the Books She Likes and Wants You to Read
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Hear 10 of Bach’s Pieces Played on Original Baroque Instruments
We could say that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach transcends instrumentation. Wendy Carlos did a great deal to prove that with her 1968 album Switched-On Bach, composed entirely (and laboriously) on an early Moog synthesizer. Despite its controversial union of long-revered compositions with practically untested musical technology, that project won high praise, not least from as famed an interpreter of Bach as Glenn Gould. Here at Open Culture we’ve featured many of Gould’s own performances of Bach: of the Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D minor in his 1960 U.S. television debut, of the cantata BWV 54 on a 1962 CBC special, of The Art of Fugue and the Goldberg Variations as played toward the end of his life in the early 1980s.
Going back to 1959, we find a 27-year-old Gould playing Bach in a National Film Board of Canada documentary, and on “the piano he favors above all others for practicing: a 70-year-old Chickering with a resonant, harpsichord quality recalling the instruments of the time of Bach.” But to truly hear Bach’s music as Bach himself would have heard it, you need to bring out those very same instruments.
That’s the mandate of San Francisco’s Voices of Music, an ensemble dedicated to “renaissance and baroque music, drawing upon the many and varied sources for historical performance practice.” We’ve previously featured their performances of Pachelbel’s Canon and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons on original instruments; more recently they’ve put together a Youtube playlist of their original-instrument performances of Bach.
The ten selections on Voices of Music’s Bach playlist include the Cello Suite No. 2 in D Minor BWV 1008, Allemande and Courante played on the baroque cello by Eva Lymenstull; the Arioso from Cantata 156 (Sinfonia) with Marc Schachman on the baroque oboe; the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in B Flat Major BWV 1051 played by Kati Kyme and Elizabeth Blumenstock on baroque viola (viole da braccio), Elisabeth Reed and William Skeen on the viola da gamba, Tanya Tomkins on the baroque cello, Farley Pearce on the violone, and Hanneke van Proosdij on the harpsichord; and the Sonata No. 3 in C Major for baroque violin BWV 1005 interpreted by August and Georgina McKay Lodge, the former playing the baroque violin and the latter reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s poem “Hymn to Time.”
This isn’t the first time the work of Le Guin, now remembered as an influential author of science fiction and fantasy literature, has been set to music. Just after her death in 2018 we featured Rigel 9, the space rock opera she created in collaboration with avant-garde composer David Bedford in 1985. If Le Guin’s words suited a tale of the future told with high-tech New Wave sounds, they suit an acoustic return to the eighteenth century just as well.
This is a versatility much like Bach’s own, which has guaranteed that, more than 250 years after his death, his music retains its power and depth whether expressed through a piano, a synthesizer, or indeed the instruments of his day — not that the players of percussion tubes or wine glasses have done him great injustice either.
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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Hear Musicians Play the Only Playable Stradivarius Guitar in the World: The “Sabionari”
What makes one artisan stand out in a field of highly skilled competitors? When we think of classical instruments, we think of the Stradivari family, famed makers of violins, violas, cellos, and other instruments. But the Stradivarius’ success may owe as much to chance as to superior craftsmanship. A Texas A&M professor emeritus of biochemistry, Joseph Nagyvary (also a violinist and violin maker), discovered that Stradivarius instruments were soaked in chemicals “to protect them from a worm infestation that was sweeping through Italy in the 1700s.”
“By pure accident,” this method of pest control, Texas A&M Today writes, had “the unintended result of producing the unique sounds that have been almost impossible to duplicate in the past 400 years.”
So, there you have it, the secret of the Stradivarius sound: borax and brine. There’s more to it than that, of course, but the chemical bath advantage makes for a fascinating bit of trivia. To the ear, it matters little whether a sound is the result of accident, intention, or some measure of the two.
If it sounds sweet, it is, and Stradivarius instruments (in playable condition, anyway) sound like the voices of angels. Happily, the Stradivarius experiment was repeatable hundreds of times, and not only for the famed orchestral instruments with which we’re familiar, if only by reputation. The family made around 1000 instruments, 960 of which are violins. They also made a couple handfuls of guitars, five of which exist in complete form. These are:
- The ‘Sabionari’ (1679)
- The ‘Giustiniani’ (1681)
- The ‘Hill’ (1688)
- The ‘Rawlings’ (1700)
- The ‘Vuillaume’ (1711?)
The first, and earliest of these instruments, the so-called Sabionari, was made by Antonio Stradivari himself and happens to be the only playable guitar of the five, due to a restoration by three master luthiers. All of the Stradivari guitars are ten-string (five-course) instruments, with doubled notes like a modern 12-string guitar. But, “as with all Stradivari instruments,” The Strad points out, “the ‘Sabionari’ was modernized,” converted to six-string in a process that sounds especially violent in relation to what we now view as a precious museum piece (especially as Andrés Segovia signed the guitar in 1948).
In the early 19th century, Italian luthier Giuseppe Marconcini “changed the neck, peghead and bridge, and added new linings and braces.” The original parts he removed were long gone, so restorers had to fit new ones to the body. Curiously, Marconcini’s 150-year-old parts were “infested by woodworm,” but “the insects spared the original soundboard and bracing wood by Stradivari.” Effective pest control not only preserved the wood; it also contributed to the sound we hear above in these many videos featuring the Sabionari, with players Krishnasol Jimenéz, Ugo Nasrucci, and Rolf Lislevand, who plays a lively Tarantella below and gives us a taste of how the instrument was likely used to accompany dances.
Where it was once “extremely rare” to hear the sound of a Baroque guitar, we can now all, thanks to the internet, enjoy Stradivarius guitar performances. You can see many more here, and learn much more about the 1679 guitar itself, here.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Nina Simone Writes an Admiring Letter to Langston Hughes: “Brother, You’ve Got a Fan Now!” (1966)
Nina Simone’s creative and political community meant everything to her, and the many losses she suffered in the 60s sent her deeper into the depression of the last decades of her life. “Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry [were] prominent,” writes Malik Gaines at LitHub, “among… socially engaged writers and dramatists” whom she considered not only her “political tutors” but also her heroes and closest friends. She never stopped grieving the loss of Hansberry and Hughes and frequently memorialized them in tributes like “Backlash Blues.”
Written by Hughes, and one of Simone’s fiercest and most timely civil rights songs, “Backlash Blues” represents the significant influence the poet had on her and her art. In a live 1967 recording, she sings, “When Langston Hughes died—He told me many months before—Nina keep working until they open up that door.” The two first met when Simone was still Eunice Waymon from Tryon, North Carolina: an aspiring classical pianist, “president of the 11th-grade class and an officer with the school’s NAACP chapter,” explains Andrew J. Fletcher, a board member of the Nina Simone Project in Asheville.
This was 1949, and Hughes had come to Asheville to address Allen High School, the private school for African American girls Simone attended through a scholarship that her music teacher and early champion collected from her hometown. The poet “could not have known,” Maria Popova writes at Brain Pickings, “that [Simone] would soon revolutionize the music canon under her stage name.” But nearly ten years later, he recognized her talent immediately.
On the release of Simone’s first album, Little Girl Blue, Hughes was “so stunned that he lauded it with lyrical ardor” in his column for the Chicago Defender.
She is different. So was Billie Holiday, St. Francis, and John Donne. So in Mort Sahl. She is a club member, a coloured girl, an Afro-American, a homey from Down Home. She has hit the Big Town, the big towns, the LP discs and the TV shows — and she is still from down home. She did it mostly all by herself. Her name is Nina Simone.
They would become close friends and mutual admirers. Hughes sent her “books he thought would inspire her,” including several of his own, and wrote “words for her to set to song.” She wrote to him with earnest expressions of appreciation, especially in the letter here, penned in 1966 just before Hughes’ death.
Simone had just read Hughes’ autobiography The Big Sea. The book, she says, “gives me such pleasure—you have no idea! It is so funny.” She also writes, with candor:
Then too, if I’m in a negative mood and want to get more negative (about the racial problem, I mean) if I want to get downright mean and violent I go straight to this book and there is also material for that. Amazing—
I use the book—what I mean is I underline all meaningful sentences to me…. And as I said there is a wealth of knowledge concerning the negro problem, especially if one wants to trace the many many areas that we’ve had it rough in all these years—sometimes when I’m with white “liberals” who want to know why we’re so bitter—I forget (I don’t forget—I just get tongue-tied) how complete has been the white races’ rejection of us all these years and then when this happens I go get your book.
Hughes’ is rarely “mean and violent,” but Simone brought to her reading her own despair and rage and raw sense of rejection, emotions she was never afraid to explore in her work or talk about with humor and fierce ire in her life. “Brother, you’ve got a fan,” she gushes. The Big Sea “grips my imagination immediately plus everything in it I identify with, even your going to sea and I’ve never been to sea.” She had not been to sea, but she had been adrift, “depressed, alienated and low,” as she sang at Morehouse College in 1969 in a performance of her civil rights anthem and tribute to Lorraine Hansberry, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.”
The adlib framed Simone’s feelings with the same “emotional and political dimensions,” writes Gaines, she found in Hughes’ work. Though she does not mention it in her letter, her annotated copy of The Big Sea surely marks up the passage below, in which Hughes’ describes his early unhappiness and his transformative encounter with art:
When I was in the second grade, my grandmother took me to Lawrence to raise me. And I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books–where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.
For Simone, music gave her suffering purpose, but not the music she played for audiences and on record. One of the saddest ironies of her career is that the woman dubbed “The High Priestess of Soul” had little interest in playing soul. She embarked on her popular music career to fund her classical education. However, the opportunities to play the way she wanted to did not arise. “Nina closed her letter on a strangely down note,” writes Nadine Cohodas in Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone. “Her melancholy overwhelmed any excitement about playing for the first time in France and Belgium. ‘No pleasure,’ she told Langston, ‘just work.’”
So much of Simone’s frustration and burnout in the music industry came out of a deep sense of alienation from her work. The shy Eunice Waymon had never craved the spotlight, something Hughes must have come to know about her in the years of their acquaintance. In his first note of praise, however, he gets one thing wrong. As she was always the first to point out, Simone did not do it “mostly all by herself.”
The support of her mother, her teacher, and her small “down home” community took her as far as it could. Her relationships with Hansberry, Hughes, and other artists/activists carried her the rest of the way. Until they were gone. But when Hughes died, Popova writes, “a devastated Simone turned her coveted set at the Newport Jazz Festival into a tribute and closed it with an exhortation to the audience: ‘Keep him with you always. He was a beautiful, a beautiful man, and he’s still with us, of course.’” See much more of their correspondence at the Beinecke.
via the Beinecke
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Face of Bill Murray Adds Some Joy to Classic Paintings
Bill Murray isn’t one of those actors who disappears into a role.
Nor is he much of a chameleon on canvas, however iconic, as artist Eddy Torigoe demonstrates with a series that grafts Murray’s famous mug onto a number of equally well-known paintings.
Torigoe told Digg that he was inspired by accident, when he was struck by the uncanny resemblance between Gilbert Stuart’s Lansdowne portrait of George Washington, and a photo of Murray posted by a Reddit user.
He downloaded both images and busied himself with Photoshop.
The rest is history.
The Presidential update is an improvement in ways. Murray-faced Washington appears kindly, and not averse to a bit of fun. No teeth of enslaved peoples compromising that mouth.
While Murray is capable of maintaining a straight face—witness his work in Lost in Translation, The Razor’s Edge, Hamlet 2000, and Torigoe’s homage to Whistler’s Mother, above—more often than not a certain puckishness shines through.
One wonders what would have befallen painter Jacques-Louis David had he bestowed The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries with Murray’s goofy expression.
And it’s well established that a key element of Grant Wood’s oft-parodied American Gothic is the poker faced reserve of its male subject.
Had they been alive today, it’s conceivable that Lucas Cranach the Elder’s portrait of Martin Luther might have depicted a lighter side of his friend, something more Murray-esque. Though given the Reformation and his 95 Theses against Indulgences, maybe not….
Explore more of Eddy Torigoe’s Bill Murray-enriched masterpieces of art, including self-portraits by Rembrandt, Frida Kahlo, and Picasso, on his website.
via My Modern Met
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...The Story of “Wipe Out,” the Classic Surf Rock Instrumental
“Not all genres in music are self-explanatory,” writes Mark Stock at The Manual. “Just ask baroque pop or post metal. With surf rock, however, it’s pretty much as advertised.” This observation gets at what makes surf rock so refreshing. Its “wavy guitar sounds” and rollicking beats are a musical onomatopoeia for the thrills of a sun-drenched sport. From its niche origins, surf rock invaded garages around the world. It found its way into the Pixies and the B‑52s. Waves of indie surf bands continue to wash ashore.
Surf rock melded with hardcore punk, another genre that does what it says and has scored many a board sport. Where hardcore is aggro, surf is mellow and joyous, even when it’s sinister and dangerous; hardcore thrives on bashing three-minute attacks, surf shows off its technical chops, even when it sticks to three chords, as in the Surfaris’ classic “Wipe Out.”
The song, a 12-bar blues driven by Ron Wilson’s drum solo, produced “the yardstick for every aspiring young drummer in the early 60s” and beyond. At the time of its recording, Wilson wasn’t even old enough to drive.
According to guitarist Bob Berryhill, the Surfaris formed in 1962 while the members of the band were still in high school. (Their sax player, Jim Pash, was 12 when he joined.) They played teen dances and talent shows, and by January the following year, they had an original, “Surfer Joe.” They had their parents drive them to a studio owned by a man named Dale Smallen.
We met at a place in the California desert called Cucamonga, and recorded Surfer Joe. In those days 45’s required a B side so Dale asked us to play another song. We had not written a song before Surfer Joe so I suggested a drum solo type of song with simple guitar breaks. Ronnie started playing the famous Wipe Out solo and in about 10 minutes we had the song together. We needed a gimmick introduction so my Dad broke a plaster soaked board close to the mic and Dale Smallen let out a laugh and screamed wipe out. We gave Dale the master tape and he took it to Hollywood, and by July 1963 it was #2 on the Billboard top 100.
Before they knew it, the teenaged Surfaris were touring Japan, Australia, and the U.S. with Roy Orbison, The Beach Boys, the Righteous Brothers, and The Ventures, a brilliant instrumental rock band who were one of the biggest things going in the early 1960s.
The Ventures took “Wipe Out” further into the reaches of drumming legend in their cover (see drummer Mel Taylor attacking the skins like Gene Krupa in a live performance in Japan from 1965, above). Then, in 1966, the Surfaris broke up. The Beatles had wiped them off the charts, or as Berryhill puts it, somewhat bitterly, “The British Invasion changed music to focus more on the introspective needs of the ‘Me Generation.’” Surf lost its hip appeal, but it was not forgotten.
“In 1980,” Berryhill says, “the punk/new wave movement revived ‘Wipe Out,’ which gave it a new audience.” It popped up in commercials, The Fat Boys teamed up with The Beach Boys for a rap cover, even the Muppets had a version. Surf rock “became a sponge,” surf guitarist Jason Loughlin says. “In the 80s through the 90s [it] soaked up influences from punk music and alternative rock.” Bands like Man or Astro-Man? brought in period sci-fi reverences; surf teamed up with rockabilly, another genre that “had a short window of popularity and growth and then went underground” until the 80s.
But “Wipe Out” acquired a special status as a pure specimen of surf. It remains one of the most popular instrumental songs of all time. And all because of an inventive 15-year-old drummer, his high school buddies, and their supportive parents. It may not be the most rock ’n’ roll of musical histories, but it is the most surf rock of stories. A tale of talent, teenage enthusiasm, and the guileless desire to make other kids dance.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Every Possible Kind of Science Fiction Story: An Exhaustive List Created by Pioneering 1920s SciFi Writer Clare Winger Harris (1931)
When Jeanette Ng gave her acceptance speech at the 2019 Joseph W. Campbell awards (now called the Astounding Award for Best New Writer), she described “Golden Age” editor Campbell as “a fascist” who “set a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White.” The list of Hugo winners this year show how much the situation is changing. Ng herself won a Hugo for her Campbell speech. (The unpleasant performance of the awards’ online presenter sadly got more headlines than the winners.)
Yet popular canons of sci-fi, even “seemingly progressive books for their time,” Liz Lutgendorff writes, still contain a “pervasive sexism.” Campbell was hardly the only offender, but the charge certainly sticks to him. “The first science fiction anthologies were published during a backlash against first-wave feminism,” Wired explains. In response to growing women’s activism, “male editors such as John W. Campbell and Groff Conklin specifically excluded women from” the pages of Astounding Science Fiction’s popular anthology series and Conklin’s many best-ofs.
Prior to these powerful editors, “women writers were relatively common throughout the pulp era, and the proportion of women readers was even higher.” Lisa Yaszek, Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, found that “at least 15 percent of the science fiction community were women—producers—and reading polls suggest that 40 to 50 percent of the readers were women.” These figures surprised even her. Many of the writers whom Campbell excluded were hugely popular during 1920s, influencing their contemporaries and inspiring readers.
One such writer, Clare Winger Harris, published her first short story “The Runaway World,” in the July 1926 issue of Weird Tales (after writing an earlier historical novel in 1923). That same year, she won third place in a story contest run by legendary Amazing Stories editor Hugo Gernsback, from whom the Hugo Awards take their name. She would go on to publish ten more stories in popular science fiction pulps, most of them for Gernsback. Then she disappeared from writing in 1930, ostensibly to raise her three sons.
But she had more to say. In the August 1931 edition of Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, a letter from Harris appears in which she rallies the community to insist that Hollywood make sci-fi films. “Come on, science fiction fans, let’s go!” she writes, “Our united efforts might bring this country a few films in 1932 that are not wild west, sex drama or gangster stuff. I think we’re all strong for good comedies, but let’s have of our serious dramas a little less of the emotional and more of the intellectual.”
Harris goes on, in response to another reader letter, to correct the notion that “there are only five or six original plots.” (This number has varied over the ages from seven to thirty-seven). “That may be true as regards the technique of plot development,” writes Harris, “but I have made a table of sixteen general classifications into which it seems to me all science fiction stories written to date can be placed.” See it above.
Sci-fi author Doris V. Sutherland points to the redundancies and dated quaintness of much of the list. Giant insects have fallen out of fashion. “A number of the categories speak of the technological level of the day. The inclusion of ‘ray and vibration stores’ harks back to an era when the unseen effects of various electro-magnetic waves had only recently been grasped by researchers.” Moreover, the atomic age was yet to dawn. After it, “the idea of a man-made apocalypse would become rather more topical.”
The status of Harris’s letter as a “time capsule” that summarizes the “dominant themes in SF” at the time documents her keen appreciation for, as well as innovation on, those themes. She was valued for this talent by many in the field, Gernsback included. Upon learning she had won third prize in the 1926 Amazing Stories contest, he “gave praise,” Brad Ricca writes at LitHub, “couched in the cultural moment”—as well as indicative of his own biases.
That the third prize winner should prove to be a woman was one of the surprises of the contest, for, as a rule, women do not make good scientification writers, because their education and general tendencies on scientific matters are usually limited. But the exception, as usual, proves the rule, the exception in this case being extraordinarily impressive.
These insulting beliefs did not prevent Gernsback from continuing to publish Harris’s work, nor any of women whose writing he approved. (He also helped make Campbell’s career.) Some have found it remarkable that Harris published under her own name rather than a male pseudonym, but Yaszek argues this was fairly common at the time. In fact, several male authors published under female pseudonyms. (Gernsback himself once adopted the moniker “Grace G. Hucksnob.”)
As women writers were edged out of science fiction during Campbell’s reign in the 1930’s, Harris retreated. Her only published literary productions were the 1931 letter and a short story that again proves her status as a pioneer. Her last story original story “appeared in 1933 in the fifth and last issue of a stapled, mimeographed pamphlet called Science Fiction that had a print run of maybe—maybe—50 issues,” Ricca writes. The story had been solicited by the tiny magazine’s editors, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, major Harris fans who would, of course, “go on to create Superman, the most recognized science fiction character on the planet.”
Learn more about Harris’s fascinating life—including her father’s brief stint as a Gernsback-influenced sci-fi novelist and her status as an early American convert to Buddhism before her death in 1968—at Ricca’s excellent LitHub investigation. See her full letter above.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Gilda Radner Does a Comic Impersonation of Patti Smith: Watch the Classic SNL Skit, “Rock Against Yeast” (1979)
Gimme Mick, gimme Mick
Baby’s hair, bulgin’ eyes, lips so thick
Are you woman, are you man
I’m your biggest funked-up fan
So rock me and roll meeee…
‘Til I’m sick—(the fictional) Candy Slice, Saturday Night Live
Sir Michael Philip—aka Mick Jagger—celebrated his 77th birthday earlier this summer, a milestone his fellow Rolling Stones Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood observed remotely, as befits seniors at particular risk from COVID-19 infection.
You, Mick Jagger, are English and go out with a model and get an incredible amount of publicity
You, Mick Jagger, don’t keep regular hours
You, Mick Jagger, have the greatest rock ‘n roll band in the history of rock ‘n roll, and you don’t even play an instrument yourself
It’s a bit sobering, watching the late Gilda Radner, expertly preening and prancing as the then-36-year-old, yet-to-be-knighted Mick in “Rock Against Yeast,” the star studded Saturday Night Live Sketch from 1979, above.
Readers over the age of 36 who want to get seriously bummed out, poll your under-35 friends to see who’s heard of the versatile Gilda, an original Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Player and one of America’s most complicated sweethearts.
Fortunately, she’s not entirely forgotten:
I can personally attest, and I feel comfortable speaking for Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph and Rachel Dratch when I say that seeing Gilda as a kid…[she was] so authentically herself and so regular in so many ways. She was not a piece of casting, she was who she was on TV. We all saw that and said, ‘I want to do that, and it’s possible because I see her doing that. It was an early example for me of how important representation is, for everyone from every walk of life. Gilda was our equivalent of Michelle Obama. —Tina Fey
Gilda’s not alone in having left us at a young age. Some of her “Rock Against Yeast” castmates and the celebrities they spoofed made similarly shocking early exits:
Guest host Ricky Nelson, appearing as himself
Music producer Don Kirshner—embodied here by musician Paul Shaffer—made it to a ripe old age, ie: just a year younger than Sir Mick is now.
Actually, Gilda’s Mick routine was filtered through the fictional Candy Slice, a satirical take on Godmother of Punk Patti Smith—now a venerable 73-year-old National Book award-winning memoirist, gearing up for next month’s “high-end multi-camera visual and sonic experience,” i.e. virtual book reading for last year’s Year Of The Monkey.
Smith, who over the years has proved herself to be a very good egg, admitted to NPR that while her band found Gilda’s characterization “hilarious,” she took a while to warm up to it:
When I was younger, I—it sort of bothered me because, you know, she makes a big thing about, you know, I think it’s like the white powder and the vast amounts of cocaine in the recording studio. I had never even had cocaine. It wasn’t how—it’s not how I work. But I thought it was actually hilarious besides that. She was a great artist.
It was—actually, it was a privilege to be played—it was a privilege to have Gilda Radner project what she thought I might be like. And the funniest part was since there was a big controversy over the armpit hair on the cover of “Easter,” she brushed the hair under her arms, and I think she had like a foot of hair coming from her armpit, and we were all laughing so hard.
She was a great artist, and cocaine or not, I salute her. And I feel very lucky to have been, you know, portrayed by Gilda.
Read a full transcript of “Rock Against Yeast” here, while heaving a sigh of relief that that singer Dolly Parton (Jane Curtin) continues to walk so vigorously amongst us.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...When Salvador Dalí Met Alice Cooper & Turned Him into a Hologram: The Meeting of Two Kings of Camp (1973)
Kings of camp Alice Cooper and Salvador Dalí made a natural pair when they met in New York City in April of 1973. “A mind-melding of sorts took place,” writes Super Rad Now. “Over the course of about two weeks” Cooper and Dalí “ate together, drank together, and basked in the glow of each other’s exceptional uniqueness.” Then Dalí decided to turn Cooper into a hologram, the First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram Portrait of Alice Cooper’s Brain.
How did this come about? It was only a matter of time before Dalí sought out the “godfather of shock rock.” The Surrealist prankster “knew how to promote himself and others,” notes historian and writer Sophia Deboick in a fantastic understatement. Dalí had been shocking audiences decades before Vincent Furnier, lead singer of the band Alice Cooper—who took the name for himself in 1975—was born, making transgressive films like Un Chien Andalou and getting tossed out of the Surrealists for possible fascist sympathies and unabashedly commercial aspirations.
Dalí used his connections to the world of pop music to meet “figures such as Brian Jones, Bryan Ferry and David Bowie” in the late 60s and early 70s. He came calling at Cooper’s door after the 1972 “rapier-waving performance of ‘School’s Out’ on Top of the Pops [drew] the opprobrium of Mary Whitehouse… and a truck carrying a billboard image of Alice wearing only a snake… mysteriously ‘broke down’ on Oxford Circus the same summer, causing chaos.”
Cooper’s schtick was catnip to Dalí, but as usual, the artist had something more sophisticated in mind when he staged what looked like a typically bizarre publicity stunt. Cooper was invited to Dalí’s studio to pose with “an ant-covered plaster brain topped with a chocolate éclair.” This Dalí placed behind Cooper’s head on a red velvet cushion as Alice “sat on a rotating turntable wearing over a million dollars-worth of diamonds from the famous Harry Winston jewelers on Fifth Avenue (Cooper remembers it in the short video clip at the top as 4 million dollars worth), holding a fragmented Venus de Milo as a microphone.”
For Cooper and the band, the collaboration helped bring their own particular artistic vision to fruition, lending them the imprimatur of the most popular shock artist of the century. “Five of the original band members were art majors,” he later recalled, “and we worshipped Dalí: we thought of ourselves as surrealists.” (He also named one of his boa constrictors Dalí.)
For Dalí, the resulting holographic image fulfilled a longstanding exploration of new ideas and a new medium—as well as a deliberate movement away from his devotion to Freudian psychoanalysis.
Throughout the 1970s Dalí worked with optical illusions and stereoscopic images… but his interest in working in the third and fourth dimensions dated back further. His 1958 Anti-Matter Manifesto proclaimed his intent to abandon his exploration of the interior world for a focus on “the exterior world and that of physics [which] has transcended the one of psychology,” saying he had swapped Freud for Heisenberg. The tesseract cross of his Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954) was inspired by the diverse influences of mathematical theory, cubism, and works of Philip II’s architect Juan de Herrera and Catalan mystic Ramon Llull. The Alice hologram may have taken an emerging popular icon as its subject, but the medium was one which fulfilled Dalí’s artistic ambitions at the end of his career to embrace science and break out of the two dimensional.
The attention may have gone to Cooper’s head. He attended the unveiling of the hologram without his band members, then went on to record 1975’s Welcome to My Nightmare without them and promoted “an ABC television special starring Vincent Price” that same year, again with a new band. His star fell over the decade, but his essential place in rock and roll history had already been fully secured.
Alice Cooper’s (the band) gender-bending had influenced David Bowie and the New York Dolls. The Sex Pistol’s John Lydon breathlessly proclaimed them his favorite and sang (“or at least mimed to”) their “I’m Eighteen” at his audition. “The direct line between Alice Cooper and every possible genre of metal is obvious,” Deboick writes.
Like the Surrealist master, Cooper became something of a parody of his earlier incarnation in later years, and in sobriety, the preacher’s son from Detroit reappeared as a “golf-playing born-again Christian.” But however else he is remembered, the man born Vincent Furnier will also always be the only rock star to have his ant-covered brain turned into a hologram by Salvador Dalí, who knew a kindred spirit when he saw one. See a video of the hologram, which resides in Spain, just above.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...How John Woo Makes His Intense Action Scenes: A Video Essay
The world does not lack action movies, but well-made ones have for most of cinema history been few and far between. Despite long understanding that action sells, Hollywood seldom manages to get the most out of the genre’s master craftsmen. Hence the excitement in the early 1990s when fans of Hong Kong gangster pictures learned that John Woo, that country’s preeminent action auteur, was coming stateside. His streak of Hong Kong hits at that point included A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Bullet in the Head, and Hard Boiled, most of which starred no less an action icon than Chow Yun-fat. For Woo’s American debut Hard Target, starring a Belgian muscleman called Jean-Claude Van Damme, it would prove a hard act to follow.
Hard Target, Evan Puschak (better known as the Nerdwriter) drily puts it in the video essay above, is “not quite a masterpiece.” Woo “battled a mediocre script, studio pressure, and a star who couldn’t really act,” and then “the studio re-edited a lot of the movie to get an R rating, and to make it more palatable for American moviegoers, diluting Woo’s signature style in the process.”
But despite being a weak spot in Woo’s filmography, it makes for an illuminating case study in his cinematic style. Puschak calls its action scenes “absurdly creative” in a way that has “grown more impressive over time”: in them Woo employs slow motion — a signature technique “he weaves it into his highly kinetic sequences like an expert composer” — and other forms of time dilation to “heighten the experience of impact.”
Like most action movies, Hard Target offers a great many impacts: punches, kicks, improbable leaps, gunshots, and explosions aplenty. Under Woo’s direction they feel even more plentiful than they are, given that he “often repeats things two or three times so that the impact has an echoing effect.” Yet unlike in run-of-the mill examples of the genre, we feel each and every one of those impacts, owing to such relatively subtle editing strategies as presenting the firing of a gun and the bullet hitting its target as “two distinct moments.” (Several such gunshots, as Puschak shows us using deleted footage, were among the studio-mangled sequences.) “This is unlike any traditional films in the States,” Woo later said of Hard Target’s disappointing performance, “so the audience didn’t understand what’s going on with these techniques.” More than a quarter-century later, Western audiences have more of a grasp of Woo’s cinematic language, but few other filmmakers have come close to mastering it.
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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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