Bach Played Beautifully on the Baroque Lute, by Preeminent Lutenist Evangelina Mascardi

in History, Music | May 27th, 2022

In the two videos here, see Argen­tine lutenist Evan­geli­na Mas­car­di play pas­sion­ate ren­di­tions of J.S. Bach com­po­si­tions on the rich, res­o­nant Baroque lute. In Bach’s time, lutenists were some of the most wide­ly-admired instru­men­tal play­ers, and it’s easy to see why. The Baroque lute is not an easy instru­ment to play. Much less so were the the­o­r­bo and chi­tar­rone, instru­ments like it but with longer necks for longer bass strings. We see Mas­car­di con­cen­trate with utmost inten­si­ty on every note, a vir­tu­oso on an instru­ment that Bach him­self could not mas­ter.

Indeed, there has been sig­nif­i­cant debate over whether Bach actu­al­ly com­posed his four pieces for solo lute for that instru­ment and not anoth­er. For one thing, he seems to have had a “weak grasp” of the instru­ment, gui­tarist and lutenist Cameron O’Con­nor writes in an exam­i­na­tion of the evi­dence.

“The lute may have been an intim­i­dat­ing sub­ject even for Bach.” There are sev­er­al prob­lems with authen­ti­cat­ing exist­ing copies of the music, and “none of the pieces in staff nota­tion is playable on the stan­dard Baroque lute with­out some trans­po­si­tion of the bass­es and changes in chord posi­tions.”

Clas­si­cal gui­tarist Clive Tit­muss notes, “as stu­dent gui­tarists, we learned that J.S. Bach wrote four suites and a num­ber of mis­cel­la­neous pieces for the lute, now played on the gui­tar.” How­ev­er, recent schol­ar­ship seems to show that Bach, that most revered of Baroque com­posers, “did not write any music specif­i­cal­ly intend­ed for solo lute.” As O’Con­nor spec­u­lates, it was “the Laut­en­wer­ck, or lute harp­si­chord… which Bach most like­ly had in mind while com­pos­ing many of his ‘lute’ works.” You can see it in action here.

What does this debate add to our appre­ci­a­tion of Mas­cardi’s play­ing? Very lit­tle, per­haps. British lutenist and Bach schol­ar Nigel North writes in his Linn Records Bach on the Lute set, “Instead of labour­ing over per­pet­u­at­ing the idea that the so-called lute pieces of Bach are prop­er lute pieces I pre­fer to take the works for unac­com­pa­nied Vio­lin or Cel­lo and make them into new works for lute, keep­ing (as much as pos­si­ble) to the orig­i­nal text, musi­cal inten­tion, phras­ing and artic­u­la­tion, yet trans­form­ing them in a way par­tic­u­lar to the lute so that they are sat­is­fy­ing to play and to hear.”

A lutenist with the skill of North or Mas­car­di can trans­form solo Bach pieces — whether orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten for vio­lin, cel­lo, or laut­en­wer­ck — into the idiom of their cho­sen instru­ment. In Mas­cardi’s trans­for­ma­tions here, these works sound pos­i­tive­ly trans­port­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant.

Hear Bach’s Bran­den­burg Con­cer­tos Played on Orig­i­nal Baroque Instru­ments

Hear J.S. Bach’s Music Per­formed on the Laut­en­wer­ck, Bach’s Favorite Lost Baroque Instru­ment

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

How Korean Things Are Made: Watch Mesmerizing Videos Showing the Making of Traditional Clothes, Teapots, Buddhist Instruments & More

in History, Technology | May 25th, 2022

It would be awful­ly clichéd to call Seoul, where I live, a place of con­trasts between old and new. And yet that tex­ture real­ly does man­i­fest every­where in Kore­an life, most pal­pa­bly on the streets of the cap­i­tal. In my favorite neigh­bor­hoods, one pass­es through a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent eras walk­ing down a sin­gle alley. “Third-wave” cof­fee shops and “newtro” bars coex­ist with fam­i­ly restau­rants unchanged for decades and even small indus­tri­al work­shops. Those work­shops pro­duce cloth­ing, plumb­ing fix­tures, print­ed mat­ter, elec­tron­ics, and much else besides, in many cas­es late into the night. For all its rep­u­ta­tion as a high-tech “Asian Tiger,” this remains, clear­ly and present­ly, a coun­try that makes things.

You can see just how Korea makes things on the Youtube chan­nel All Process of World, which has drawn tens of mil­lions of views with its videos of fac­to­ries: fac­to­ries mak­ing forks, bricks, sliced tuna, sheep­skin jack­ets, bowl­ing balls, humanoid robots. The scale of these Kore­an indus­tri­al oper­a­tions ranges from the mas­sive to the arti­sanal; some prod­ucts are unique to twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry life, and oth­ers have been in use for cen­turies.

On the tra­di­tion­al side, All Process of World has pro­vid­ed close-up views of the mak­ing of ceram­ic teapots, wood­en win­dow frames (as you would see in a clas­si­cal Kore­an hanok), hand­held per­cus­sive mok­tak to aid Bud­dhist monks in their chants, and even jeogori, the dis­tinc­tive jack­ets worn with han­bok dress­es.

Judg­ing by the com­ments, All Process of World’s many view­ers hail from around the globe. This should­n’t come as a sur­prise, giv­en Kore­a’s new­found world­wide pop­u­lar­i­ty. But that so-called “Kore­an wave” owes less to the appeal of Kore­a’s tra­di­tion­al cul­ture than its mod­ern one, less to its rus­tic yet ele­gant pot­tery and bril­liant­ly col­or­ful for­mal­wear than to BTS and “Gang­nam Style,” Par­a­site and Squid Game — whose “robot girl” appears on a rug made in one All Process of World video. Anoth­er shows us the pro­duc­tion of an equal­ly mod­ern item, the face masks seen every­where in Korea dur­ing the past two years. Just a few weeks ago, the gov­ern­ment gave us the okay to take those masks off out­doors. While hop­ing for the arrival of ful­ly post-COVID era, we’d do well to keep in mind how the past always seems to find its way into the present.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch a Kore­an Mas­ter Crafts­man Make a Kim­chi Pot by Hand, All Accord­ing to Ancient Tra­di­tion

The Art of the Japan­ese Teapot: Watch a Mas­ter Crafts­man at Work, from the Begin­ning Until the Star­tling End

How a Kore­an Pot­ter Found a “Beau­ti­ful Life” Through His Art: A Short, Life-Affirm­ing Doc­u­men­tary

How Japan­ese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bam­boo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Three Pink Floyd Songs Played on the Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Gayageum: “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall” & “Great Gig in the Sky”

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.

William Blake: The Remarkable Printing Process of the English Poet, Artist & Visionary

in Art | May 19th, 2022

Few artists have antic­i­pat­ed, or pre­cip­i­tat­ed, the frag­ment­ed, hero­ical­ly indi­vid­u­al­ist, and pur­pose­ful­ly oppo­si­tion­al art of moder­ni­ty like William Blake, a man to whom the cliché ahead of his time can be applied with per­fect accu­ra­cy. Blake stren­u­ous­ly opposed the ratio­nal­ist Deism and Neo­clas­si­cal artis­tic val­ues of his con­tem­po­raries, not only in prin­ci­ple, but in near­ly every part of his artis­tic prac­tice. His pol­i­tics were cor­re­spond­ing­ly rad­i­cal: in oppo­si­tion to empire, racism, pover­ty, patri­archy, Chris­t­ian dog­ma, and the emerg­ing glob­al cap­i­tal­ism of his time.

Nowhere do we see Blake’s visu­al rad­i­cal­ism more in evi­dence, argues Julia M. Wright in a 2000 essay for the jour­nal Mosa­ic, than in his Laocoön, a work that not only seems to presage the mod­ernist col­lag­ing of text and image, from Braque to Rauschen­berg, but also looks toward hyper­text with its non­lin­ear­i­ty, frag­men­ta­tion, and inter­tex­tu­al­i­ty: “By com­bin­ing as many as four dif­fer­ent media in Laocoön — draw­ing, writ­ing, engrav­ing, and sculp­ture [in his depic­tion of the clas­si­cal orig­i­nal] — Blake puts into play their dif­fer­ent prop­er­ties, engag­ing the debate in the­o­ry as well as prac­tice.”

Through an art of visu­al pas­tiche, Blake resists the Neo­clas­si­cal idea that visu­al art and poet­ry were mutu­al­ly exclu­sive for­mal pur­suits that could not coex­ist. (View a larg­er image here to read the poems and slo­gans that sur­round the image.)

We can see the influ­ence of Blake’s rad­i­cal­ism every­where, from zine art to the Blakes repro­duced on the skin of spe­cial edi­tion Doc Martens (the artist was also an enthu­si­as­tic defend­er of the Goth­ic over the Clas­si­cal, Wright points out). An art like Blake’s demand­ed a rad­i­cal process, and he con­ceived one through his pro­fes­sion­al skills as an engraver, an art he began learn­ing at the age of twelve. “Right from his ear­li­est child­hood,” notes the British Library video at the top, “Blake was dri­ven by two extra­or­di­nary and pow­er­ful aspi­ra­tions. On the one hand as a poet, on the oth­er as a painter… so how was he going to bring these two togeth­er in a form that would enable him to pub­lish his own images in illus­tra­tion of his own poems?”

The video demon­strates “Blake’s inno­va­tion” as an engraver and print­er. The print­ing process at that point involved a num­ber of dif­fer­ent spe­cial­ized work­ers, some respon­si­ble for set­ting text, and oth­ers for sep­a­rate­ly print­ing images in blank spaces left on the pages. Blake’s process “enabled him, with the excep­tion of the paper, to be respon­si­ble for every stage in the pro­duc­tion process, from writ­ing the poems, mak­ing the draw­ings, using the stop-out var­nish to write his text, etch­ing and print­ing the impres­sions.”

He began work­ing out his meth­ods as a teenag­er, and they allowed tremen­dous cre­ative free­dom through­out his life to cre­ate per­son­al works of art like the “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books” (from which the oth­er two images here come): con­tain­ers of his com­plex mythol­o­gy and some of his most pas­sion­ate engrav­ings. You can learn even more about Blake’s DIY print­ing process in the video fur­ther up from Ash­molean Muse­um. Blake’s futur­is­tic art drew heav­i­ly from the past — from Renais­sance mas­ters like Michelan­ge­lo, for exam­ple — as a means of cre­at­ing an alter­nate art his­to­ry, one that opposed the val­ues of dom­i­na­tion and oppres­sive sys­tems of order.

His for­mal and polit­i­cal rad­i­cal­ism is per­haps one rea­son Blake became one of the first artists to pop­u­late an online archive, with the launch of the Blake Archive all the way back in 1996, “con­ceived as an inter­na­tion­al [free] pub­lic resource that would pro­vide uni­fied access to major works of visu­al and lit­er­ary art that are high­ly dis­parate, wide­ly dis­persed, and more and more often severe­ly restrict­ed as a result of their val­ue, rar­i­ty, and extreme fragili­ty.” Vis­it the Blake Archive here to see high res­o­lu­tion scans of hun­dreds of Blake’s prophet­ic works, all cre­at­ed from start to fin­ish by his own hand, and learn more about his per­son­al and com­mer­cial illus­tra­tions at the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Blake’s 102 Illus­tra­tions of The Divine Com­e­dy Col­lect­ed in a Beau­ti­ful Book from Taschen

Enter an Archive of William Blake’s Fan­tas­ti­cal “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books”: The Images Are Sub­lime, and in High Res­o­lu­tion

William Blake’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost

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

What’s It Like Drumming For Prince?: Drummer Hannah Welton Describes the Genius of His Musicianship

in Music | May 18th, 2022

Tes­ti­mo­ni­als to Prince’s mind-blow­ing musi­cian­ship flood­ed the media after his death, from cel­e­brat­ed stars and not-so-famous musi­cians who played in the artist’s back­ing bands over the decades. In the for­mer cat­e­go­ry, we have Prince’s own musi­cal hero, Ste­vie Won­der — no slouch as a mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist — whose Songs in the Key of Life stood as a “per­fect album” for the Pur­ple One. Won­der describes their jam ses­sions as “amaz­ing” for the vari­ety of peo­ple and cul­tures Prince could bring togeth­er, and for the incred­i­ble range of his tal­ent.

“He could play clas­si­cal music if he want­ed to,” said Won­der, in tears after Prince’s death. “He could play jazz if he want­ed to, he could play coun­try if he want­ed to. He played rock, you know, he played blues. He played pop. He played every­thing.…” He played all 27 instru­ments on his debut album, from elec­tric gui­tar, bass, and piano to “mini-Moog, poly-Moog, Arp string ensem­ble, Arp Pro Soloist, Ober­heim four-voice, clavinet, drums, syn­drums, water drums, slap­sticks, bon­gos, con­gas, fin­ger cym­bals, wind chimes, orches­tral bells, wood­blocks, brush trap, tree bell, hand claps and fin­ger snaps.”

He did all of this with lit­tle to no for­mal train­ing, teach­ing him­self to com­pose in near­ly any idiom and to switch up gen­res and styles with ease. In short, Prince was a “genius,” says drum­mer Han­nah Wel­ton in the Drumeo video above. Wel­ton joined the New Pow­er Gen­er­a­tion in 2012, then helped form his new back­ing band, 3rdeyegirl. In the video above, the hard-work­ing drum­mer makes it clear that she does not use this word friv­o­lous­ly. “I don’t know that I ever heard an off note,” she says. “Piano, gui­tar, drums, nobody touched any of those instru­ments the way that he did.”

Wel­ton also talks about what she learned from Prince — after their first meet­ing when he asked her to play ping pong. “One thing,” she says, is that “the space between the notes is just a funky as the notes them­selves.” In the hour-long les­son, Wel­ton shows off her own drum skills in songs like “Wom­en’s Intu­ition” (which she wrote with her hus­band Joshua Wel­ton, one of Prince’s pro­duc­ers) and talks more about her time with the untouch­able musi­cian, includ­ing how he recruit­ed her after see­ing her on YouTube and what it’s like to have a “drum-off/bass-off” with him. As for whether she ever beat Prince in ping pong, you’ll have to watch to find out.…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Prince’s First Tele­vi­sion Inter­view (1985)

Watch a New Director’s Cut of Prince’s Blis­ter­ing “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” Gui­tar Solo (2004)

The Lit­tle Prince: Footage Gets Unearthed Of the Pop Star at Age 11

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

The Rolling Stones Play a Gig in Communist Warsaw and a Riot Ensues (1967)

in History, Music, Politics | May 17th, 2022

My Name is called Dis­tur­bance.… – “Street Fight­ing Man”

More than two decades before Ger­man band the Scor­pi­ons blew their alleged­ly CIA-penned “Wind of Change” over the end of the Cold War; before the “hard rock Wood­stock” in Moscow; before Bruce Spring­steen rocked East Berlin and rang the “Chimes of Free­dom,” anoth­er band took the stage behind the Iron Cur­tain: one not par­tic­u­lar­ly well-known at the time for mak­ing geopo­lit­i­cal state­ments.

In 1967, the Rolling Stones record­ed and released Between the But­tons and major hits “Ruby Tues­day” and “Let’s Spend the Night Togeth­er.” They tried to com­pete with the Bea­t­les with stabs at psy­che­delia on Their Satan­ic Majesties Request. They did­n’t record what is some­times con­sid­ered their most polit­i­cal song, “Street Fight­ing Man,” for anoth­er two years, and that song — with its options of street fight­ing or singing for a rock and roll band — has nev­er been mis­tak­en for a peace anthem.

It was­n’t peace the band court­ed in their orig­i­nal plan to play Moscow. “They start­ed toy­ing with the idea of per­form­ing in Moscow and becom­ing the most con­tro­ver­sial rock band to play on the oth­er side of the Iron Cur­tain,” writes Woj­ciech Olek­si­ak at Culture.pl. “Both the Sovi­et Union and the UK denied their requests. How is it, Olek­si­ak asks, “that in 1967 — the mid­dle of the Cold War — Mick, Kei­th, Bri­an, Bill, and Char­lie came to Poland and per­formed in War­saw, at a huge hall known for being tra­di­tion­al­ly used for the Com­mu­nist Par­ty’s ple­nary con­gress­es?” You’ll find the answer in the video at the top from Band­splain­ing.

Just above, see footage of the con­cert itself, culled from news­reel footage and TV broad­casts. The uploader has done us the kind­ness of putting time­stamps in the video for the three songs shown here:

00:00 — Paint It Black

00:43 — 19th Ner­vous Break­down

01:06 — (I Can’t Get No) Sat­is­fac­tion

The Stones were “by no means the first west­ern group to play in com­mu­nist Poland,” writes Pol­ish musi­cian and jour­nal­ist Paweł Brodowsky, who was in the audi­ence. “By that time I had already seen The Ani­mals, The Hol­lies, Lulu, and Cliff Richard and the Shad­ows.” It did­n’t hurt that Władysław Jakubows­ki, the deputy direc­tor of Pagart — “a state-owned con­cert agency,” writes Sam Kemp at Far Out — “had some sym­pa­thy for Poland’s young music fans” (just as Gor­bachev would in the time of glas­nost). None of the oth­er acts caused any­thing like the chaos that would ensue when the Stones came to War­saw.

Bands allowed into the coun­try came from a list of names Jakubows­ki col­lect­ed from young Pol­ish jour­nal­ists. How Jakubows­ki achieved the required per­mis­sions from his high­er-ups is some­thing of a mys­tery, Olek­siek writes. Why the deputy direc­tor let the Stones into the coun­try even more so. Their rep­u­ta­tion for destruc­tion pre­ced­ed them: “He must have heard about The Rolling Stones’ wreck­ing of the Olympia, the most famous con­cert hall in Paris. He was a close friend of Bruno Coqua­trix, its direc­tor.” At any rate, the War­saw con­cert turned into a riot. The band could not be blamed, entire­ly.

Hear­ing about the Stones’ arrival, thou­sands of young fans lined up for tick­ets. “What most of them did­n’t know,” Kemp writes, “was that the bulk of them had already been reserved for com­mu­nist par­ty mem­bers and their fam­i­lies.” The hall was also packed beyond capac­i­ty, “with fans hang­ing off the edge of bal­conies.” Police fought to keep fans away from the stage and the seat­ed crowds of dour bureau­crats. Richards and Jag­ger antag­o­nized the cops with obscen­i­ties, mak­ing tick­et­less fans who’d breached the doors even more rabid.

Out­side, as you can see in the short Pol­ish doc­u­men­tary above, a full-blown riot with tear gas and dogs had bro­ken out. This was a time when riots seemed to break out every­where. (Mick Jag­ger has cit­ed the Paris upris­ings of 1968 as a source for “Street Fight­ing Man.”) But at the end of the six­ties, few oth­er bands could boast not only of play­ing the com­mu­nist East­ern Bloc, but of inspir­ing may­hem from the stage on both sides of the Cold War lines.

And yet, this is not the end of the sto­ry. The Stones returned to War­saw over fifty years lat­er, in 2018, this time with a point­ed polit­i­cal state­ment made at the behest of Lech Wałęsa, in oppo­si­tion to a rule lim­it­ing the age of judges to 65. “I am too old to be a judge but not too old to sing,” Jag­ger shout­ed in Pol­ish from the stage. He then launched into the band’s first song on the setlist. And, yes, it was my favorite and maybe yours too: “Street Fight­ing Man.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of the Rolling Stones: A Selec­tion of Doc­u­men­taries on the Quin­tes­sen­tial Rock-and-Roll Band

A Char­lie Watts-Cen­tric View of the Rolling Stones: Watch Mar­tin Scorsese’s Footage of Char­lie & the Band Per­form­ing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “All Down the Line”

The Rolling Stones Jam with Mud­dy Waters for the First and Only Time at Chicago’s Leg­endary Checker­board Lounge (1981)

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

This Is Spinal Tap Will Get a Sequel 40 Years Later, Reuniting Rob Reiner, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest & Harry Shearer

in Film, Music | May 13th, 2022

Fans of James Cameron’s Avatar are express­ing aston­ish­ment that its long-expect­ed sequel, Avatar: The Way of Water, will have tak­en thir­teen years to get to the­aters. That delay, of course, is noth­ing next to the 35 years that sep­a­rat­ed Blade Run­ner and Blade Run­ner 2049, or the 36 between Top Gun and Top Gun: Mav­er­ick, which comes out next month. But the recent­ly announced sequel to This Is Spinal Tap tops them all: “Spinal Tap II will see Rob Rein­er return as both film-mak­er on and off the screen along with Michael McK­ean, Har­ry Shear­er, and Christo­pher Guest,” writes the Guardian’s Ben­jamin Lee. “The film will be released in 2024 on the 1984 orig­i­nal’s 40th anniver­sary.”

Crit­ics praised This Is Spinal Tap back in 1984, but it took time to become a revered clas­sic of the impro­vised-mock­u­men­tary genre. In fact that genre had­n’t exist at all, which result­ed in some view­ers not quite get­ting the joke. “When the film first came out, we showed it in Dal­las and peo­ple came up to me and said, why would you make a movie about a band nobody’s ever heard of?” says direc­tor Rob Rein­er. “And one that’s so bad?”

Or as Christo­pher Guest remem­bers a cou­ple girls at the con­ces­sion counter observ­ing: “These guys are so stu­pid.” The befud­dle­ment extend­ed even to col­lab­o­ra­tors in the film­mak­ing process: “I don’t under­stand this,” said cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Peter Smok­ler, who’d worked on the Alta­mont doc­u­men­tary Gimme Shel­ter. “This isn’t fun­ny. This is exact­ly what they do.”

Such reac­tions pay indi­rect but great trib­ute to the painstak­ing craft and obser­va­to­ry wit of Spinal Tap’s cre­ators. Those cre­ators — Rein­er, Guest, Michael McK­ean, and Har­ry Shear­er — tell these sto­ries in the Today inter­view above, con­duct­ed in 2019 to mark This Is Spinal Tap’s 35th anniver­sary. In that time they’d occa­sion­al­ly reunit­ed as Spinal Tap for live per­for­mances and real albums, the last of which came out in 2009. Per­haps that’s kept them ready to get back into char­ac­ter, pitch-per­fect Eng­lish accents and all, and put on — as they’ll be forced to in a plot shaped by real­is­tic-sound­ing music-indus­try vagaries — one last con­cert. But like any belat­ed sequel, it brings pro­por­tion­al­ly inflat­ed fan expec­ta­tions: specif­i­cal­ly, about whether they’ll be able to go up to twelve.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Ori­gins of Spinal Tap: Watch the 20 Minute Short Film Cre­at­ed to Pitch the Clas­sic Mock­u­men­tary

The Spinal Tap Stone­henge Deba­cle

Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel Pro­motes World’s Largest Online Gui­tar Les­son

Ian Rub­bish (aka Fred Armisen) Inter­views the Clash in Spinal Tap-Inspired Mock­u­men­tary

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.

Google Unveils a Digital Marketing & E‑Commerce Certificate: 7 Courses Will Help Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months

in Business, Education, Online Courses | May 13th, 2022

Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, Google launched a series of Career Cer­tifi­cates that will “pre­pare learn­ers for an entry-lev­el role in under six months.” Their first cer­tifi­cates focused on Project Man­age­ment, Data Ana­lyt­ics, User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design, IT Sup­port and IT Automa­tion. Now comes their latest–a cer­tifi­cate ded­i­cat­ed to Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce.

Offered on the Cours­era plat­form, the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate con­sists of sev­en cours­es, all col­lec­tive­ly designed to help stu­dents “devel­op dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and e‑commerce strate­gies; attract and engage cus­tomers through dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing chan­nels like search and email; mea­sure mar­ket­ing ana­lyt­ics and share insights; build e‑commerce stores, ana­lyze e‑commerce per­for­mance, and build cus­tomer loy­al­ty.” The cours­es include:

• Foun­da­tions of Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing and E‑commerce
• Attract and Engage Cus­tomers with Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing
• From Likes to Leads: Inter­act with Cus­tomers Online
• Think Out­side the Inbox: Email Mar­ket­ing
• Assess for Suc­cess: Mar­ket­ing Ana­lyt­ics and Mea­sure­ment
• Make the Sale: Build, Launch, and Man­age E‑commerce Stores 
• Sat­is­fac­tion Guar­an­teed: Devel­op Cus­tomer Loy­al­ty Online

In total, this pro­gram “includes over 190 hours of instruc­tion and prac­tice-based assess­ments, which sim­u­late real-world dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and e‑commerce sce­nar­ios that are crit­i­cal for suc­cess in the work­place.” Along the way, stu­dents will learn how to use tools and plat­forms like Can­va, Con­stant Con­tact, Google Ads, Google Ana­lyt­ics, Hoot­suite, Hub­Spot, Mailchimp, Shopi­fy, and Twit­ter. You can start a 7‑day free tri­al and explore the cours­es. If you con­tin­ue beyond that, Google/Coursera will charge $39 USD per month. That trans­lates to about $235 after 6 months.

If you don’t want to pay, you can audit each course for free, with­out ulti­mate­ly receiv­ing the cer­tifi­cate.

Explore the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing & E‑commerce Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Google & Cours­era Launch Career Cer­tifi­cates That Pre­pare Stu­dents for Jobs in 6 Months: Data Ana­lyt­ics, Project Man­age­ment and UX Design

Become a Project Man­ag­er With­out a Col­lege Degree with Google’s Project Man­age­ment Cer­tifi­cate

Google Data Ana­lyt­ics Cer­tifi­cate: 8 Cours­es Will Help Pre­pare Stu­dents for an Entry-Lev­el Job in 6 Months

Quentin Tarantino Names His 20 Favorite Movies, Covering Two Decades

in Film | May 12th, 2022

Quentin Taran­ti­no’s film­mak­ing career began thir­ty years ago — at least if you place its start­ing point at his first fea­ture Reser­voir Dogs in 1992. But even then he had been work­ing toward auteur­hood for quite some time, a peri­od char­ac­ter­ized by projects like My Best Friend’s Birth­day, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Through­out the three decades since he hit it big, there can be no doubt that Taran­ti­no has con­sis­tent­ly made just the films he him­self has most want­ed to see. But he’s also remained a suf­fi­cient­ly hon­est cinephile to admit that oth­er direc­tors have made films he would have want­ed to make: Fukasaku Kin­ji, for instance, whose Bat­tle Royale he prais­es in just such per­son­al terms in the video above.

In six min­utes Taran­ti­no runs down the list of his twen­ty favorite movies between 1992, when he became a direc­tor, and 2009. After giv­ing pride of place to Bat­tle Royale — a Japan­ese comedic thriller of high-school ultra­vi­o­lence that set off a wave of trans­gres­sive thrill through a world­wide “cult” audi­ence — he presents his choic­es in alpha­bet­i­cal rather than pref­er­en­tial order. The com­plete list runs as fol­lows:

• Fukasaku Kin­ji, Bat­tle Royale
• Woody Allen, Any­thing Else (“the Jason Big­gs one”)
• Miike Takashi, Audi­tion
• Tsui Hark, The Blade
• Paul Thomas Ander­son, Boo­gie Nights
• Richard Lin­klater, Dazed and Con­fused (“the great­est hang­out movie ever made”)
• Lars von Tri­er, Dogville
• David Finch­er, Fight Club
• F. Gary Gray, Fri­day
• Bong Joon-ho, The Host
• Michael Mann, The Insid­er
• Park Chan-wook, Joint Secu­ri­ty Area
• Sofia Cop­po­la, Lost in Trans­la­tion
• The Wachowskis, The Matrix (though its sequels “ruined the mythol­o­gy for me”)
• Bong Joon-ho, Mem­o­ries of Mur­der
• Stan­ley Tong, Police Sto­ry 3/Super­cop (con­tains “the great­est stunts ever filmed in any movie”)
• Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead
• Jan de Bont, Speed (there have been “few exhil­a­ra­tion movies quite like it”)
• Trey Park­er and Matt Stone, Team Amer­i­ca: World Police
• M. Night Shya­malan, Unbreak­able

Taran­ti­no may refer to Shya­malan as “M. Night Shamala­mad­ing­dong,” but he clear­ly has a good deal of respect for the man’s films. And he seems to have even more for Bruce Willis’ work in Unbreak­able, which con­tains his “best per­for­mance on film” — bet­ter, evi­dent­ly, than the not-incon­sid­er­able one he gave in a nine­teen-nineties hit called Pulp Fic­tion.

It comes as no sur­prise that Taran­ti­no names movies by his peers in the “Indiewood” gen­er­a­tion like Ander­son, Lin­klater, and Cop­po­la. But watched thir­teen years lat­er, this video also sug­gests a cer­tain cin­e­mat­ic pre­science on his part. Speed, for exam­ple, once seemed like a brain-dead block­buster but now stands as a clas­sic of Los Ange­les cin­e­ma. And we’d do well to remem­ber how far ahead of his peers Taran­ti­no was in his con­scious­ness of Asian cin­e­ma. That we all watch films from Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea today owes some­thing to Taran­ti­no’s advo­ca­cy. More than a decade before Bong Joon-ho’s Par­a­site dom­i­nat­ed the Acad­e­my Awards, Taran­ti­no gave him alone not one but two entries on this top-twen­ty list — which sure­ly makes up for his obvi­ous­ly hav­ing for­got­ten Bong’s name.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Picks the 12 Best Films of All Time; Watch Two of His Favorites Free Online

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghet­ti West­erns

Quentin Tarantino’s Hand­writ­ten List of the 11 “Great­est Movies”

Quentin Tarantino’s Top 20 Grindhouse/Exploitation Flicks: Night of the Liv­ing Dead, Hal­loween & More

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists the 12 Great­est Films of All Time: From Taxi Dri­ver to The Bad News Bears

Quentin Taran­ti­no Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becom­ing a Film­mak­er

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.

Two Decades of Fire Island DJ Sets Get Unearthed, Digitized & Put Online: Stream 232 Mixtapes Online (1979–1999)

in Music | May 10th, 2022

“I was the young, lone­ly gay boy in the Mid­west who had no idea par­adise exist­ed. Every­thing about the Pines was new, the very idea of a place where you could play on the beach and hold hands with a guy and be with like-mind­ed peo­ple and dance all night with a man.” — pho­tog­ra­ph­er Tom Bianchi 

Dis­co did not get demol­ished at Comiskey Park in 1979. It may have dis­ap­peared from pop­u­lar cul­ture after jump­ing the duck, but it nev­er left the New York night­clubs that had nur­tured its exu­ber­ant sound — Stu­dio 54, Par­adise Garage, The Sanc­tu­ary.… Four on the floor beats pound­ed all night in the dawn­ing decade of the 80s, only the beat soon became house music, an elec­tri­fied dis­co deriv­a­tive — with­out the horns and string sec­tions — first played in clubs by DJs like Lar­ry Lev­an, who ruled the Par­adise Garage for a decade and “changed dance music for­ev­er.”

The sounds of Man­hat­tan nightlife at the turn of the 80s have gone main­stream, but sto­ries about the ear­ly, under­ground days of house tend to leave out anoth­er scene just miles away, led by DJs as beloved as Lev­an.

For LGBTQ New York­ers, the par­ty moved every sum­mer to Fire Island, where artists, vaca­tion­ers, celebri­ties, and DJs crowd­ed clubs like The Pavil­ion and the Ice Palace to hear DJs Rob­bie Leslie, Michael Jor­ba, Richie Bernier, Gian­car­lo, Teri Beau­doin, Michael Fier­man, and Roy Thode, “whose per­for­mance at the Ice Palace showed how shim­mery, gui­tar-dri­ven dis­co slow­ly gave way to the dri­ving bass of house music,” The New York Times notes.

Thode became a leg­end not only in the Fire Island sum­mer scene but dur­ing his res­i­den­cy at Stu­dio 54, at the per­son­al invi­ta­tion of club own­er Steve Rubell. Fire Island DJs played records they heard in the off sea­son at the island’s clubs, or debuted new­ly-released tracks. (Don­na Sum­mer’s “MacArthur Park” made its debut on the island, for exam­ple.) “Fire Island’s infa­mous bac­cha­nals have gone on to become the stuff of gay myth and leg­end,” write Matt Moen at Paper. The island has also long been “an icon­ic refuge and safe haven for New York City’s queer com­mu­ni­ty dat­ing back well over half a cen­tu­ry.” One res­i­dent calls it a “gay Shangri La.” Anoth­er com­pares it to Israel, a “spir­i­tu­al home­land.”

Split between two towns, Cher­ry Grove and the Pines, the sum­mer retreat has espe­cial­ly “been a haven for the cre­ative,” says Bob­by Bon­nano, founder and pres­i­dent of the Fire Island Pines His­tor­i­cal Preser­va­tion Soci­ety. It has also been a hide­away for celebri­ties like Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, Calvin Klein, and Per­ry Ellis. Bonnano’s exten­sive online his­to­ry of the island doc­u­ments its 20th cen­tu­ry ori­gins as a place for gay artists who built hous­es in a dis­tinc­tive archi­tec­tur­al style that defines the island to this day, and who par­tied hard at clubs like The Pavil­lion. The mix­es here from Fire Island’s best DJs come from one such beach house, bought by Peter Kriss and Nate Pins­ley, who dis­cov­ered a box of tapes left behind by a pre­vi­ous own­er.

The cou­ple gave the box of tapes to their friend Joe D’E­spinosa. A soft­ware engi­neer and DJ, D’E­spinoza has spent “count­less hours” dig­i­tiz­ing, remas­ter­ing, and upload­ing the col­lec­tion to Mix­cloud. The result­ing archive rep­re­sents a “trea­sure trove of record­ed DJ sets,” span­ning “two decades worth of par­ties,” Moen writes, from 1979 through 1999. The Pine Walk col­lec­tion fea­tures more than 200 tapes (some from gigs in Manhattan),“taken from from Memo­r­i­al Day week­enders, Labor Day par­ties, sea­son open­ings and recur­ring club nights.” These are sol­id sets of vin­tage dis­co and clas­sic house, many of them doc­u­ment­ing the tran­si­tion from one to the oth­er. Browse and stream the full col­lec­tion on Mix­cloud.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Gior­gio Moroder & Don­na Summer’s “I Feel Love” Cre­at­ed the “Blue­print for All Elec­tron­ic Dance Music Today” (1977)

Dis­co Saves Lives: Give CPR to the The Beat of Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive”

Ishkur’s Guide to Elec­tron­ic Music: An Inter­ac­tive, Ency­clo­pe­dic Data Visu­al­iza­tion of 120 Years of Elec­tron­ic Music

Dis­co Demo­li­tion Night: Scenes from the Night Dis­co Died (or Did It?) at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, 1979

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

The Polish Artist Stanisław Witkiewicz Made Portraits While On Different Psychoactive Drugs, and Noted the Drugs on Each Painting

in Art | May 9th, 2022

Much of the infor­ma­tion in this post comes from Juli­ette Bre­ton at the Pub­lic Domain Review. See her post for more.

At least once a day, staff at art muse­ums and gal­leries world­wide must hear some­one say, “the artist must have been on drugs.” It’s the eas­i­est expla­na­tion for art that dis­turbs, unset­tles, con­founds our expec­ta­tions of what art should be. Maybe some­times artists are on drugs. (R. Crumb tells the sto­ry of dis­cov­er­ing his inim­itable style while on acid.) But maybe it’s not the drugs that make their art seem oth­er­world­ly. Maybe mind-alter­ing sub­stances make them more recep­tive to the source of cre­ativ­i­ty.…

In any case, artists have long used psy­choac­tive sub­stances to reach high­er states of con­scious­ness and cope with a world that does­n’t get their vision. In the ear­ly days of LSD exper­i­men­ta­tion, one psy­chi­a­trist even test­ed the phe­nom­e­non. UC Irvine’s Oscar Janiger dosed vol­un­teer sub­jects at a rent­ed L.A. house, then had them draw or oth­er­wise record their expe­ri­ences. He ulti­mate­ly aimed to make a “cre­ativ­i­ty pill,” test­ing hun­dreds of will­ing sub­jects between 1954 and 1962.

Had Pol­ish artist Stanisław Igna­cy Witkiewicz (1885–1939) — who went by “Witka­cy” — lived to see the spread of LSD, he would have signed up for every tri­al. More like­ly, he would have con­duct­ed his own exper­i­ments, with him­self as the sole test sub­ject. The War­saw-born artist, writer, philoso­pher, nov­el­ist, and pho­tog­ra­ph­er died in 1939, the year after Swiss chemist Albert Hoff­man acci­den­tal­ly syn­the­sized acid. Through­out his career, how­ev­er, Witka­cy exper­i­ment­ed with just about every oth­er psy­choac­tive sub­stance, antic­i­pat­ing Janiger by decades with his por­traits — paint­ed while… yes… he was on lots of drugs.

Unlike his con­tem­po­rary Dalí, Witka­cy did not claim to be drugs. But he was hard­ly coy about their use. He made notes on each paint­ing to indi­cate his state of intox­i­ca­tion. “Under the influ­ence of cocaine, mesca­line, alco­hol, and oth­er nar­cot­ic cock­tails,” Juli­ette Bre­tan writes at the Pub­lic Domain Review, “Witka­cy pre­pared numer­ous stud­ies of clients and friends for his por­trait paint­ing com­pa­ny, found­ed in the mid-1920s.” The drugs induced “dif­fer­ent approach­es to colour, tech­nique, and com­po­si­tion. The result­ing images are sur­re­al — and occa­sion­al­ly hor­rif­ic.” Some­times the drugs in ques­tion were lim­it­ed to caf­feine, a dai­ly sta­ple of artists every­where. He also made por­traits while abstain­ing from oth­er addic­tive sub­stances like nico­tine and alco­hol.

At oth­er times, Witka­cy’s notes — writ­ten in a kind of code — spec­i­fied more pro­nounced usage. He made the por­trait above, of Nina Starchurs­ka, in 1929 while on “nar­cotics of a supe­ri­or grade,” includ­ing mesca­line syn­the­sized by Mer­ck and “cocaine + caf­feine + cocaine + caf­feine + cocaine.” Anoth­er por­trait of Starchurs­ka (below) made in that same year involved some heavy dos­es of pey­ote, among oth­er things.

Witka­cy’s inves­ti­ga­tions were lit­er­ary as well, cul­mi­nat­ing in a 1932 book of essays called Nar­cotics: Nico­tine, Alco­hol, Cocaine, Pey­ote, Mor­phone, Ether + Appen­dices. The book “owes much to the exper­i­men­tal works of oth­er Euro­pean psy­cho­nauts through­out the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies.” Invok­ing the deca­dent moral­ism of Thomas De Quincey and Baude­laire, and it antic­i­pates the utopi­an, psy­che­del­ic prose of Aldous Hux­ley and Car­los Cas­tane­da.

Where he might ful­mi­nate, with satir­i­cal edge, against the use of drugs, Witka­cy also joy­ous­ly records their lib­er­at­ing effects on his cre­ative con­scious­ness. His chap­ter on pey­ote “most close­ly approx­i­mates the spir­it” of his paint­ings, notes Bibil­iokept in a review of the recent­ly repub­lished vol­ume:

“Pey­ote” begins with Witkiewicz tak­ing his first of sev­en (!) pey­ote dos­es at six in the evening and cul­mi­nat­ing around eight the fol­low­ing morn­ing with “Strag­gling visions of iri­des­cent wires.” In incre­ments of about 15 min­utes, Witkiewicz notes each of his sur­re­al visions. The wild hal­lu­ci­na­tions are ren­dered in equal­ly sur­re­al lan­guage: “Mun­dane dis­um­bil­i­cal­ment on a cone to the bark­ing of fly­ing canine drag­ons” here, “The birth of a dia­mond goldfinch” there. 

Else­where he writes of “elves on a see­saw (Comedic num­ber)” and “a bat­tle of cen­taurs turned into a bat­tle between fan­tas­ti­cal gen­i­talia,” all of which lead him to con­clude, “Goya must have known about pey­ote.”

Nar­cotics func­tions as a kind of key to Witka­cy’s think­ing as he made the por­traits; part drug diary, part artis­tic state­ment of pur­pose, it includes a “List of Sym­bols” to help decode his short­hand. The artist com­mit­ted sui­cide in 1939 when the Red Army invad­ed Poland. Had he lived to con­nect with the psy­che­del­ic rev­o­lu­tion to come, per­haps he would have been the artist to make psy­chotrop­ic drug use a respectable form of fine art. Then we might imag­ine con­ver­sa­tions in gal­leries going some­thing like this: “Excuse me, was this artist on drugs?” “Why yes, in fact. She took large dos­es of psy­lo­cy­bin when she made this. It’s right here in her man­i­festo.….”

See many more Witka­cy por­traits by vis­it­ing Juli­ette Bre­tan’s post at the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Aldous Hux­ley, Dying of Can­cer, Left This World Trip­ping on LSD, Expe­ri­enc­ing “the Most Serene, the Most Beau­ti­ful Death” (1963)

Artist Draws 9 Por­traits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Exper­i­ments to Turn LSD into a “Cre­ativ­i­ty Pill”

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instant­ly Dis­cov­ered His Artis­tic Style

Take a Trip to the LSD Muse­um, the Largest Col­lec­tion of “Blot­ter Art” in the World

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