When Marlon Brando Refused the Oscar for His Role in The Godfather to Support the Rights of Native Americans (1973)
At the 45th Academy Awards, Marlon Brando won the Best Actor award for his performance in The Godfather — but sent a Native American civil rights activist named Sacheen Littlefeather to decline it on his behalf. “The twenty-six-year-old activist took the stage in a fringed buckskin dress and moccasins,” writes the New Yorker’s Michael Schulman. “When she explained that Brando’s reasons for refusing the award were Hollywood’s mistreatment of Native Americans and the standoff in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, there were loud boos and scattered cheers.”
More seventies things have happened, but surely not many. With time, Schulman writes, “the whole thing cemented into a pop-culture punch line: preening actor, fake Indian” — the “crying Indian” environmental PSA had aired just a few years before — “kitschy Hollywood freak show. But what if it wasn’t that at all?”
Almost half a century later, this notable chapter in Oscars history has come back into the news in the wake of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ official apology to Littlefeather. It’s now more widely understood who Littlefeather is, and what Brando was going for when he made her his emissary that night in 1973.
Brando wasn’t especially hesitant to explain his actions even at the time: less than three months after the event, he laid out all his reasons on The Dick Cavett Show. “I don’t think that people generally realize what the motion picture industry has done to the American Indian,” he tells Cavett. “As a matter of fact, all ethnic groups.” He then runs down the “silly renditions of human behavior” delivered nightly on television, highlighting the phenomenon of “Indian children seeing Indians represented as savage, as ugly, as nasty, vicious, treacherous, drunken.”
Such clichéd portrayals were what Brando meant to address by speaking through Littlefeather. But the public’s immediate reaction, as Cavett puts it, went along the lines of, “There’s Brando jumping on a social-cause bandwagon now, getting in on the Indians.” They’d forgotten that the actor’s connection with Native American causes went back at least to 1964, when he was arrested at a Pacific Northwest “fish-in” by the Puyallup tribe protesting the denial of their treaty rights. And as Littlefeather’s fêting by the Academy shows, that connection has long survived even Brando himself.
Related content:
Albert Einstein Sports a Native American Headdress and a Peace Pipe at the Grand Canyon, 1931
The Godfather Without Brando?: It Almost Happened
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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...The Art of Translating Hamilton into German: “So Kribbeln Schmetterlinge, Wenn Sie Starten”
The city of Hamburg’s nickname is Tor zur Welt- the gateway to the world.
If the German language production of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s record breaking hiphop musical now in previews in that city’s St. Pauli Theater is as warmly received as the English original has been in London, Melbourne, and, of course, the US, it may earn itself with an additional one — Hamiltonburg.
Excitement has been building since early summer, when a dual language video mashup of the opening number placed the original Broadway cast alongside their German language counterparts.
One need not speak German to appreciate the similarities in attitude — in both performance, and internal assonances, a lyrical aspect of hip hop that Miranda was intent on preserving.
Translator Kevin Schroeder quipped that he and co-translator rapper Sera Finale embraced the motto “as free as necessary, as close as possible” in approaching the score, which at 46 numbers and over 20,000 words, more than doubles the word count of any other musical:
At least we had all these syllables. It gave us room to play around.
Good thing, as the German language abounds with multisyllabic compound nouns, many of which have no direct English equivalent.
Take schadenfreude which the creators of the musical Avenue Q summed up as “happiness at the misfortune of others.”
Or torschlusspanik — the sense of urgency to achieve or do something before it’s too late.
Might that one speak to a translating team who’ve devoted close to four years of their lives to getting everything — words, syllables, meter, sound, flow, position, musicality, meaning, and double meanings — right?
Before Schroeder and Finale were entrusted with this herculean task, they had to pass muster with Miranda’s wife’s Austrian cousin, who listened to their samples and pronounced them in keeping with the spirit of the original.
As translators have always done, Schroeder and Finale had to take their audience into account, swapping out references, metaphors and turns of phrase that could stump German theatergoers for ones with proven regional resonance.
In a round up demonstrating the German team’s dexterity, the New York Times’ Michael Paulson points to “Satisfied,” a song wherein Hamilton’s prospective sister-in-law recalls their first encounter:
ORIGINAL
So this is what it feels like to match wits
With someone at your level! What the hell is the catch?
It’s the feeling of freedom, of seeing the light
It’s Ben Franklin with a key and a kite
You see it right?
GERMAN
So kribbeln Schmetterlinge, wenn sie starten
Wir beide voll auf einem Level, offene Karten!
Das Herz in den Wolken, ich flieg’ aus der Bahn
Die Füße kommen an den Boden nich’ ran
Mein lieber Schwan!
ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF GERMAN
So that’s how butterflies tingle when they take off
We’re on the same level, all cards on the table!
My heart in the clouds, I’m thrown off track
My feet don’t touch the floor
My dear swan!
Miranda, who participated in shaping the German translation using a 3 column system remarkably similar to the compare and contrast content above, gives this change a glowing review:
That section sounds fantastic, and gives the same feeling of falling in love for the first time. The metaphor may be different, but it keeps its propulsiveness.
And while few German theatergoers can be expected to be conversant in Revolutionary War era American history, Germany’s sizeable immigrant population ensures that certain of the musical’s themes will retain their cultural relevance.
The Hamburg production features players from Liberia and Brazil. Other cast members were born in Germany to parents hailing from Ghana, the Philippines, Aruba, Benin, Suriname…and the United States.
For more of Michael Paulson’s insights into the challenges of translating Hamilton, click here.
Hamilton is in previews at Hamburg’s St. Pauli Theater, with opening night scheduled for October 6.
- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Goodbye to the Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo’s Strangest and Most Utopian Apartment Building
On many of my trips to Japan I’ve stayed at the Capsule Inn Osaka, which is exactly where and what it sounds like. To any foreigner the place would be an intriguing novelty, but to those interested in Japanese architecture it also has great historical value. Designed by architect Kurokawa Kisho, the Capsule Inn Osaka opened in 1979 as the world’s first capsule hotel, a form of lodging now widely regarded as no less quintessentially Japanese than the ryokan. At that point Kurokawa had already been advancing capsule as an architectural unit for years, contributing a “capsule house” and capsule-based corporate pavilions to the Osaka World Expo 1970, and even building a curious masterwork of the genre in Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower.
The other architects involved in Expo ’70 included Tange Kenzo, Kawazoe Noboru, Maki Fumihiko, Kikutake Kiyonori, and Isozaki Arata — all associated to one degree or another with Metabolism, an architectural movement inspired by the rapid economic growth, enormous urban expansion, and unprecedented technological change then transforming postwar Japan. The Metabolists “approached the city as a living organism consisting of elements with different metabolic cycles,” writes Lin Zhongjie in Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan. “To accommodate a city’s growth and regeneration, Metabolists advanced transformable technologies based on prefabricated components and the replacement of obsolete parts according to varying life cycles.”
When it opened in 1972, the Nakagin Capsule Tower did so as the first fully realized Metabolist project. Abroad in Japan host Chris Broad introduces it as “not only my favorite building in all of Tokyo, but in all of Japan.” He also contextualizes it within a brief history of Metabolism, as well as of the postwar Japanese society that fired up its practitioners’ aesthetically brazen, techno-Utopian ideals. Geared to the work-dominated, peripatetic lifestyle of what Kurokawa called “homo movens,” the Nakagin Capsule Tower actually consisted of two concrete cores onto which were bolted 140 capsules (architectural theorist Charles Jencks likened their aspect to “superimposed washing machines”), each a self-contained living space replete with cutting-edge amenities up to and including a bathtub ashtray Sony reel-to-reel tape player.
Kurokawa envisioned the capsules being replaced every 25 years over a lifetime of centuries. Alas, the difficulty of such an operation meant that the originals were simply left in, and by the end of the twentieth century many had badly deteriorated. “Ironically,” writes Lin, “Tokyo is growing and transforming itself so rapidly that it even outpaces the ‘metabolism’ that the Metabolists envisioned, and requires renewals on the scale of entire buildings instead of individual capsules.” First announced in 2007, the year of Kurokawa’s death, the building’s demolition began this past April, and it has occasioned such tributes as Studio Ito’s elegiac animation just above. The Nakagin Capsule Tower stood for half a century, long outliving Metabolism itself, but its capsules will now scatter across the world, suggesting that there was something to the biological metaphor all along.
Related content:
Why Do People Hate Modern Architecture?: A Video Essay
New York’s Lost Skyscraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tower
Building Without Nails: The Genius of Japanese Carpentry
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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...Historian Timothy Snyder Presents 20 Lessons for Defending Democracy Against Tyranny in a New Video Series
Yale professor and historian Timothy Snyder has sounded alarm bells about autocracy and fascism for several years now, in both his scholarly and popular books about Russian and German history. Whether you’ve followed his warnings or just started paying attention, it’s not too late to get caught up on the lessons he brings from his rigorous studies of 20th century totalitarianism. To make his relevant points more accessible, Snyder has distilled them over the years, aiming at the widest popular audience.
First, he published On Tyranny in 2017, drawing 20 lessons about unfreedom from the lives of those under the Nazi, Soviet, and other fascist and totalitarian regimes. Without arguing that history repeats, exactly, Snyder noted similarities and differences to past events, and adapted general principles to the geopolitics of the early 21st century. These lessons get reiterated and distilled even further in an edition of the best-selling On Tyranny illustrated by artist Nora Krug.
Published in 2021 and reflecting four years of Trumpism, the illustrated edition continues what we might call Snyder’s Chomskyan commitment to public intellectualism. Trump may be out of power, but the threats to democracy are wired in — in one judicial action after another, and in states like North Carolina, where an illegal, racially-gerrymandered state legislature has held power for years, and now seeks to nullify federal elections at state level, with many other states threatening to follow suit.
This kind of political secessionism imposes the permanent will of a minority on a rapidly changing nation, ensuring that history never catches up with the elites, a category that includes leaders on both sides of the euphemistic “aisle.” For increasing numbers of Americans, political divisions are more aptly characterized by barricades, prison walls, or indivisible codes of silence(ing), repression, and complicity. Snyder meets this time of creeping (loping?) fascism with a YouTube series in which he speaks directly to the camera.
He isn’t giving up on more people paying attention to the bigger picture, and he’s never given up on effective responses to 21st century tyranny. Voting alone has never been enough, and it could be rendered meaningless in the near future. The lessons — “Do not obey in advance”; “Defend institutions”; “Beware the one-party state” — may be familiar to us now, or they may not. But if they bear repeating, it’s worth hearing them from Snyder himself, who closes some of the distance between the intellectual and the public by stepping away from print altogether — a medium perhaps unsuited to the malleable demands of the online present.
How does the media affect, or become, Snyder’s message, especially when it’s effectively one-sidedly televisual, the medium of the 20th century of fascism par excellence? Snyder does not address these theoretical questions, except indirectly by way of a generic book talk aesthetic complete with rumpled shirt, rustling lapel mic, and requisite background shelves of books you’ll find yourself trying to identify as you learn to “be wary of paramilitaries.”
Being wary is one thing, but to what does Snyder’s hyper vigilance add up without the power to make change where we are? Ah, but in asking such a question, maybe we find we are already in the trap, obeying in advance by assuming powerlessness and freely giving up control. It’s our job as individuals to apply the relevant lessons where we can in our own lives, and to read (or watch) Snyder critically, in relation to other trustworthy voices within, and far outside of, Ivy League academic departments.
We do not lack the information we need to understand our moment through a historical lens. But we often lack the knowledge to make sense of things at world-historical scale. Historians like Snyder can bridge the gap, and it’s good to take advantage of the freely-offered professional experience of skilled readers, researchers, and educators. In this instance, Snyder’s approach seems well-tailored to counter innumerable presentations that trivialize WWII history into overfamiliarity and perverse spectacle… or what another anti-fascist public intellectual, Walter Benjamin, identified as the aestheticization of politics — fascism-by-passive-consumerism that leads us down the path to horrors we’d never contemplate outright.…
Watch all 20 lessons above, or find them here.
Related Content:
The Making of Modern Ukraine: A Free Online Course from Yale Professor Timothy Snyder
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...5 Ways to Build an Alzheimer’s-Resistant Brain: Neuroscientist Lisa Genova Explains
Though not easily dealt with in mainstream entertainment, Alzheimer’s disease has inspired popular works of fiction. Take the 2007 novel Still Alice by Lisa Genova, later adapted into a feature film starring Julianne More. As a neuroscientist, Genova brought an understanding of the subject by no means common among novelists in general. Since her debut she has published four more novels, all of them built around characters suffering from neurological impairments of one kind or another. But her latest book, last year’s Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting, is a work of nonfiction, and in the video above she discusses a few of its points about how to build an “Alzheimer’s-resistant brain.”
After briefly explaining the biological processes behind Alzheimer’s (and assuring her older viewers that their day-to-day forgetfulness is probably nothing to worry about), Genova offers five ways to ward off their effects. The first is sleeping, which gives glial cells, “the janitors of your brain,” time to clear away the amyloid plaque that sets the disease in motion if left to accumulate.
Keeping a Mediterranean diet — full of “green leafy vegetables, the brightly colored fruits and berries, fatty fishes, nuts, beans, olive oils” — has similarly salutary effects. So does engaging in regular exercise, which also comes with the benefit of reducing chronic stress, a condition that inhibits the formation of neurons involved in making new memories.
Genova names yoga, meditation, mindfulness, and “being with people” as other elements of an Alzheimer’s-resistant life. But she saves for last the strategy perhaps most relevant to Open Culture readers. “If you’ve lived a life where you’re cognitively active, you’re regularly learning new things. You are building what we call a ‘cognitive reserve.’ Every time you learn something new, you’re building new synapses.” All the neural connections thus established will help you “dance around those roadblocks” put up by the early effects of Alzheimer’s or other deleterious mental conditions. This means that no matter how young you are, you’ll benefit later from forming the habit of learning new things on a daily basis. As for which new things you learn — 1,700 free courses worth of which we’ve gathered here — that’s entirely up to you.
Related content:
How Yoga Changes the Brain and May Guard Against Alzheimer’s and Dementia
How Music Can Awaken Patients with Alzheimer’s and Dementia
Former Ballerina with Dementia Gracefully Comes Alive to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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...The Clock That Changed the World: How John Harrison’s Portable Clock Revolutionized Sea Navigation in the 18th Century
In the early eighteenth century, a pocket watch could keep reasonably accurate time, give or take a minute per day. This may not sound too bad, given how we now regard even the most advanced technology of that era. But it certainly wasn’t good enough for marine navigation: each day, a ship could tolerate its clocks gaining or losing only a couple of seconds. Without proper reliable information about the time, sailors on the open sea had no way of knowing quite where they were. More specifically, the sun told them how far north or south they were, their latitude, but they didn’t know how far east or west they were, their longitude.
Theoretically speaking, the “longitude problem” was easily solvable. You could calculate it, writes Gear Patrol’s Ed Estlow, “by sighting the sun at high noon where you were, and if you had a good enough clock for the time back home, you could compare the two and, with some simple mathematics, determine your position.” But engineering such a good-enough clock in reality took about half a century. “In 1714, the British government offered the huge prize of £20,000 (roughly £2 million today) to anyone who could solve the longitude problem once and for all.” But the money wasn’t fully claimed until 1773, by a Yorkshire clockmaker John Harrison.
Harrison’s name looms large in the annals of chronometry, and not without reason. His work of inventing an accurate ship clock involved the creation of five different models, known by historians as H1 through H5. H1 was a portable version of the kind of sizable wooden clock with which he’d already made his name. It was only in with H4, in 1765, that he realized small is beautiful, or rather accurate, at least if equipped with oversized internal balance wheels to hold up more reliably against the constant movement of a ship at sea. This design worked without a hitch, but even so, the Board of Longitude only saw fit to award him half the money offered.
Neither Harrison’s solving of the longitude problem nor his receipt of a disappointingly halved prize seem to have stopped his obsession with building ever-better timekeeping devices. This comes as no surprise given the qualities of mind that emerge in “The Clock That Changed the World,” the episode of BBC’s A History of the World at the top of the post. While working on H5, Harrison “sought the support of King George III” (he of the famous madness). “The King, a natural philosopher in his own right, tested H5 himself and promised Harrison his support.” That support finally got the elderly Harrison his promised amount and then some, but one senses that — like any pursuit worthy of one’s lifelong dedication — it was never really about the money.
Related content:
How Clocks Changed Humanity Forever, Making Us Masters and Slaves of Time
How Did Cartographers Create World Maps before Airplanes and Satellites? An Introduction
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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...RIP Jean-Luc Godard: Watch the French New Wave Icon Explain His Contrarian Worldview Back in the 1960s
For almost forty years, we’ve been losing the French New Wave. François Truffaut and Jacques Demy died young, back in the twentieth century; Henri Colpi, Éric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol followed in the early years of the twenty-first. The last decade alone saw the passings of Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, and Agnès Varda. But not until yesterday did la Nouvelle Vague’s hardiest survivor, and indeed its defining figure, step off this mortal coil at the age of 91. Jean-Luc Godard didn’t launch the movement — that distinction belongs to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, from 1959 — but in 1960 his first feature Breathless made filmgoers the world over understand at once that the old rules no longer applied.
Yet for all his willingness to violate its conventions, Godard possessed a thoroughgoing respect for cinema. This perhaps came from his pre-auteurhood years he spent as a film critic in Paris, writing for the estimable Cahiers du cinéma (an institution to which Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Rivette also contributed). “It made me love everything,” he says of his experience with criticism in the 1963 interview just above.
“It taught me not to be narrow-minded, not to ignore Renoir in favor of Billy Wilder.” A contrarian from the beginning, the young Godard disdained what he saw as the formalized and intellectualized products of the French film industry in favor of viscerally crowd-pleasing pictures made in the U.S.A.
“We Europeans have movies in our head, and Americans have movies in their blood,” says Godard in the 1965 British television interview above. “We have centuries and centuries of culture behind us. We have to think about things. We can’t just do things.” To “just do things” is perhaps the prime artistic desire driving his oeuvre, which spans seven decades and includes more than 40 feature films as well as many projects of less easily categorizable form. But this went with a lifelong immersion in classical European culture, evidenced by a filmography dense with references to its works. The weight of his formation and ambitions took a certain toll early on: “I’m already tired,” he says in a 1960 interview at Cannes, where Breathless was screening. Did the permanent revolutionary of cinema suspect, even then, how far he still had to go?
Related content:
An Introduction to Jean-Luc Godard’s Innovative Filmmaking Through Five Video Essays
Jean-Luc Godard Takes Cannes’ Rejection of Breathless in Stride in 1960 Interview
Watch Jean-Luc Godard’s Filmmaking Masterclass on Instagram
RIP Jean-Paul Belmondo: The Actor Who Went from the French New Wave to Action Superstardom
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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...Two Women in Their 90s Recall Their Teenage Years in Victorian 1890s London
Mud everywhere…and where there wasn’t mud, there was fog, and in between was us, enjoying ourselves. — Berta Ruck
Berta Ruck and Frances ‘Effy’ Jones were teenagers in the 1890s, and while their recollections of their formative years in muddy old London are hardly a portrait of Jazz Age wildness, neither are they in keeping with modern notions of stuffy Victorian mores.
Interviewed for the BBC documentary series Yesterday’s Witness in 1970, these nonagenarians are formidable personages, sharper than proverbial tacks, and unlikely to elicit the sort of agist pity embodied in the lyrics of a popular ditty Ruck remembers the Cockneys singing in the gutter after the pubs had closed for the night.
“Do you think I might dare to sing [it] now?” Ruck, then 91, asks (rhetorically):
She may have known better days
When she was in her prime
She may have known better days
Once upon a time…
(Raise your hand if you suspect those lyrics are describing a washed up spinster in her late 20s or early 30s.)
The 94-year-old Jones reaches back more than 7 decades to tell about her first job, when she was paid 8 shillings a week to sit in a storefront window, demonstrating a new machine known as a typewriter.
Some of her earnings went toward the purchase a bicycle, which she rode back and forth to work and overnight holidays in Brighton, scandalously clad in bloomers, or as Jones and her friends referred to them, “rational dress”.
Ruck, pegged by her headmistress as an “indolent and feckless girl”, went on to study at the Slade School of Art, before achieving prominence as a bestselling romance novelist, whose 90 some titles include His Official Fiancée, Miss Million’s Maid and In Another Girl’s Shoes.
We do hope at least one of these features a heroine resentfully brushing a skirt muddied up to the knees by passing hansom cabs, an imposition Ruck refuses to sweeten with the nostalgia.
As the British Film Institute’s Patrick Russell writes in 100 British Documentaries, the Yesterday’s Witness series, and Jones and Ruck’s episode, in particular, popularized the oral history approach to documentary, in which the director-interviewer is an invisible presence, creating the impression that the subject is speaking directly to the audience, unprompted:
The series’ makers successfully resisted any temptations to patronize or editorialize, and aimed at sympathetic curiosity rather than nostalgia. The two women tell their stories fluently, humorously, intelligently — offering considered retrospective comment on their generation’s assumptions, neither simply accepting nor rejecting them…Unlike textbooks, and other types of documentary, films like Two Victorian Girls gave the youth access to the modern past as privately experienced.
- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...All of the Different Kinds of Acoustic Guitars, and the Different Woods They’re Made Of: The Ultimate Acoustic Guitar Guide
If you’re just starting out on acoustic guitar, buying your first instrument might seem simple enough…. Head to your local music shop (or ecommerce retailer), thrust out your hand, and say something like, “Give me a beginner guitar now!” Pay your money, take your lessons, Bob’s your uncle, right?
Ah, but say you encounter one of those things known as a guitar salesperson? And say that person has some questions… “Ok, we’ve got traditional-style dreadnoughts with cutaways or no cutaways. We’ve got concert sized guitars, parlor guitars, classical, all sorts!” And you, formerly confident shopper, now find yourself at sea. What’s the difference?
They’re already on to talking about different materials used in making guitars and you check out. You imagine a pursuit where you know what you’re doing: I could learn harmonica…. How many kinds of those are there?
Fear not, beginner, YouTube guitar educator Paul Davids is here to teach us the types of acoustic guitars we’re likely to encounter in the wild, as well as the different kinds of “tone woods” and why they make a difference.
Tone wood simply means the kinds of trees used to make the guitar – maple, mahogany, rosewood, spruce, etc. – and it’s called “tone wood” instead of just “wood” for a reason. Among makers and players of electric guitars, a never-ending argument persists about how much tone wood matters. There should be little debate when it comes to acoustic guitars.
The sound of an acoustic guitar comes from the pick, or the fingers, and from the neck, where the strings’ contact with the fretboard travels down to the resonating chamber of the body and gets sent out into the world. At each of these contact points, the properties of the wood in question naturally condition the shape of the sound waves.
Enlisting the help of Eastwood Guitars Pepijn ‘t Hart above, who donated the guitars in the first video for demonstration purposes, Davids demonstrates beyond question that different woods used to construct the back, sides, and top of an acoustic guitar have a tremendous effect on the tone.
From brighter to darker, treblier to bassier, or whatever you want to call the range of tones, you’ll hear them in these examples of different materials used to make the same sized guitars. Why is this important? As Hart explains, an acoustic guitar is basically its own amplifier. While you can adjust the tone somewhat with technique, the first thing you need to do as an acoustic guitar player is determine the best type of instrument you’ll need for the kind of music you’re playing.
Guitarists may also need to consider (eventually), the kinds of musicians they’re playing with. A heavy rock ensemble with rumbling bass and drums will require a much brighter guitar to cut through the mix, whereas accompanying a banjo player or violinist will call for more low end.
You can still grab the first beginner acoustic guitar you find online and call it a day. But if you’re serious about learning the instrument – and learning to play in a musical tradition, be it folk, blues, country, classical, rock, or whatever – you’ll need this essential information. Davids and Hart make it fun and easy to acquire in the two-part educational series above.
Related Content:
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What Does a $275,000 Classical Guitar Sound Like?
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Elton John Presents 14 of His Iconic Looks: From 1968 to Now
Elton John is packing up his fabulous outfits and hitting stages for the last time, making a graceful exit from the road at age 75 with his “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour. He will, of course, make a stop at Dodger Stadium, where he played one of his most famous concerts in 1975, striding onto the stage in a sequined Dodgers uniform, one of many shimmering costumes he would don during the 3‑hour marathon set.
When John played Dodger stadium, his songs had been “hitting the airwaves with a sense of fantastical futurism,” writes Far Out, “all packaged in flamboyant costumes and dressed in number one albums. Loved by critics and adored by fans, he resembled something entirely different.” Different from what?
John answered that question in a 2020 interview with Vogue: “I wasn’t glam rock. I wasn’t David Bowie. I was me being a blokey guy wearing these clothes. I had to have humor in my costume.” Thus, his turns as Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse, and the Statue of Liberty, all costumes “designed to complement the corresponding performance,” Janelle Okwodu writes at Vogue.
John may not have thought of himself as a glam rock superstar, but his legacy of sparkling, sequined outfits, platform boots, feather boas, and bluesy rock hits says otherwise. In the video above, see the retiring Rocketman break down his most iconic looks. “Let’s begin,” he says, “at the very beginning” — decades before designer Sean Dixon tailored 30 bespoke suits (at 90 hours each to make) for John’s 2018 Million Dollar Piano show.
In 1968, John donned bell bottoms, a three-button jacket, and a fedora for his first publicity shot. “That was probably all I could afford, and it shows,” he remarks. Not a single Swarovski crystal in sight. In the early 70s, it was denim, “and I absolutely loathe denim now.” In 1997, for his 50th birthday party, John appeared in glorious full drag ensemble made by Sandy Powell, but in his later years, he’s mostly dressed down.… which for Elton John means changing into an endless series of bespoke, bedazzled suits.
Now that he’s heading into retirement from performing, we may be entitled to wonder about his bathrobe collection.…
Related Content:
Elton John Takes Us Through the Creative Process of His Early Hit “Tiny Dancer” (1970)
Revisit Six of Elton John’s Most Iconic Concerts, Streaming in Their Entirety for 72 Hours
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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