Joni Mitchell Tells Elton John the Stories Behind Her Iconic Songs: “Both Sides Now,” “Carey” & More

in Apple, Life, Music | November 14th, 2022

When Joni Mitchell heard the great cabaret artist Mabel Mer­cer in con­cert, she was so struck by the old­er woman’s ren­di­tion of “Both Sides Now,” the endur­ing bal­lad Mitchell wrote at the ten­der age of 23, that she went back­stage to show her appre­ci­a­tion:

… but I didn’t tell her that I was the author. So, I said, y’know, I’ve heard var­i­ous record­ings of that song, but you bring some­thing to it, y’know, that oth­er peo­ple haven’t been able to do. You know, it’s not a song for an ingenue. You have to bring some age to it. 

Well, she took offense. I insult­ed her. I called her an old lady, as far as she was con­cerned. So I got out of there in a hell of a hur­ry! 

But I think I final­ly became an old lady myself and could sing the song right.

This is just one of many can­did treats to be found in Mitchell’s inter­view with Elton John, for his Apple Music 1 show Rock­et Hour.

For the most part, Mitchell’s rem­i­nis­cences coa­lesce around var­i­ous icon­ic tracks from her near­ly six­ty years in the music indus­try.

“Carey,” off Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue, sparks mem­o­ries of an explod­ing stove dur­ing a hip­pie-era sojourn in Mata­la on Crete’s south coast, with an Odyssey ref­er­ence thrown in for good mea­sure.

“Amelia” was hatched, as were most of the tunes on 1976’s Heji­ra, while Mitchell was on a solo road trip in a sec­ond­hand Mer­cedes, an expe­ri­ence that caused her to dwell on the first female avi­a­tor to cross the Atlantic solo. (She scrib­bled down lyrics that had come to her at the wheel when­ev­er she pulled over for lunch.)

Regard­ing “Sex Kills” from 1994’s Tur­bu­lent Indi­go, John quotes a Rolling Stone arti­cle in which Mitchell dis­cussed the “ugli­ness” she was detect­ing in pop­u­lar music:

I think it’s on the increase. Espe­cial­ly towards women. I’ve nev­er been a fem­i­nist, but we haven’t had pop songs up until recent­ly that were so aggres­sive­ly dan­ger­ous to women.

“What did you mean by that?” John asks. “ Peo­ple say­ing rap music with ‘my hos’ and stuff like that?”

“Oh, well, y’know, yeah,” Mitchell says, “Hos and booty, y’know, haha­hah.”

She may not seem over­ly fussed about it now, but don’t get her start­ed on what young women wear to the Gram­mys!

John also invit­ed Mitchell to dis­cuss three songs that have influ­enced her.

Her picks:

Lam­bert, Hen­dricks & Ross’s “Charleston Alley” (a musi­cal epiphany as a high school­er at a col­lege par­ty)

Edith Piaf’s “Les Trois Cloches” (a musi­cal epiphany as an 8‑year-old at a birth­day  par­ty)

And Chuck Berry’s “John­ny B. Goode” (danc­ing ‘round the juke­box at Saska­toon swim­ming pool)

Cir­cling back to “Both Sides Now,” Mitchell prefers the orches­tral arrange­ment she record­ed as an alto in 2002 to the orig­i­nal’s girl­ish sopra­no, with its pos­si­bly unearned per­spec­tive. (“It’s not a song for an ingenue…”)

When I per­formed it, the orches­tra gath­ered around me and I’ve played with clas­si­cal musi­cians before and they were always read­ing the Wall Street Jour­nal behind their sheet music and they always treat you like it’s a con­de­scen­sion to be play­ing with you, but every­body, the men — Eng­lish­men! — were weep­ing!

Per­haps you too will be moved to tears, as singer-song­writer Bran­di Carlile was dur­ing a per­for­mance of “Both Sides Now” as part of the 2022 New­port Folk Festival’s Joni Jam, Mitchell’s first show in 22 years, owing to a peri­od of major dis­il­lu­sion­ment with the music busi­ness as well as a 2015 brain aneurysm.

Tune into more episodes of Elton John’s Rock­et Hour here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Watch the Full Set of Joni Mitchell’s Amaz­ing Come­back Per­for­mance at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val

Songs by Joni Mitchell Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers & Vin­tage Movie Posters

Hear Demos & Out­takes of Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the 50th Anniver­sary of the Clas­sic Album

How Joni Mitchell Learned to Play Gui­tar Again After a 2015 Brain Aneurysm–and Made It Back to the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and the soon to be released Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Hear 149 Vintage Halloween Radio Shows from the Golden Age of Radio

in Radio | October 28th, 2022

As Hal­loween radio broad­casts go, it would be hard to dis­place in Amer­i­can cul­tur­al mem­o­ry the adap­ta­tion of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds that aired in 1938. Not every Hal­loween spe­cial can be direct­ed by a young Orson Welles, of course, but that’s hard­ly a rea­son to ignore the count­less oth­er Hal­loween broad­casts from the Gold­en Age of Radio. This year you can tune them in with the Youtube playlist above, which col­lects 149 such spook­i­est-time-of-the-sea­son episodes from such beloved shows as Lum and Abn­er, The Aldrich Fam­i­ly, Fib­ber McGee and Mol­ly, Our Miss Brooks, The Great Gilder­sleeve, The Jack Ben­ny Pro­gram, The Shad­ow, and more.

Whether com­e­dy, dra­ma, or anoth­er genre besides, old-time radio pro­grams tend­ed to seize upon the theme of every hol­i­day that came down the pike, and Hal­loween — with its cos­tume par­ties, ever-present threat of pranks, and door-to-door demands — offered their writ­ers and per­form­ers a once-in-a-year oppor­tu­ni­ty for unwont­ed degrees of mis­chief.

For nor­mal­ly light­heart­ed shows, it was also a chance to go at least a lit­tle bit dark; for a show like Sus­pense, whose long and often chill­ing run began with an Alfred Hitch­cock pro­duc­tion, most weeks were Hal­loween right up until the end of radio’s Gold­en Age. (This playlist fea­tures a broad­cast from August of 1961 that still enter­tains in Octo­ber of 2022.)

If you’d just like a sound­track straight from the clas­sic Amer­i­can air­waves for next Mon­day night (or a week­end par­ty before­hand), have a lis­ten to the new­ly uploaded vin­tage Hal­loween playlist just above. Its fif­teen tracks include sea­son­al­ly suit­able songs from Tom­my Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Bing Cros­by, Ella Fitzger­ald, Sam­my Davis Jr., and Sarah Vaugh­an (not to men­tion its open­er, a not-exactly-“Monster Mash” num­ber from Bob­by Pick­ett), with vin­tage adver­tise­ments and oth­er broad­cast ephemera in between. It was as true in radio’s hey­day of the late nine­teen-twen­ties through the ear­ly six­ties as it is now: Hal­loween is the time to let blur the bound­aries between light and dark, myth and real­i­ty, the ordi­nary and the grotesque — and to make more than a few corny gags while you’re at it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear Vin­cent Price, Hor­ror Film Leg­end, Read 8+ Hours of Scary Sto­ries

Hap­py Hal­loween! Louis Arm­strong Per­forms Skele­ton in the Clos­et (1936)

Hear 14 Hours of Weird H.P. Love­craft Sto­ries on Hal­loween: “The Call of Cthul­hu,” “The Dun­wich Hor­ror” & More

Hear 90+ Episodes of Sus­pense, the Icon­ic Gold­en Age Radio Show Launched by Alfred Hitch­cock

What Scares Us, and How Does this Man­i­fest in Film? A Hal­loween Pret­ty Much Pop Cul­ture Pod­cast (#66)

Hear Orson Welles’ Icon­ic War of the Worlds Broad­cast (1938)

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.

What Sex Was Like in Medieval Times?: Historians Look at How People Got It On in the Dark Ages

in History | October 26th, 2022

The adjec­tive medieval tends to con­jure up vivid and some­times off-putting images, not least when applied to sex. But how many of us have any sense at all of what the real peo­ple of the Mid­dle Ages got up to in bed? To get one, we could do worse than ask­ing his­to­ri­an Eleanor Jane­ga, teacher of the course Medieval Gen­der and Sex­u­al­i­ty and host of the His­to­ry Hit video above, “What Was Sex Real­ly Like For Medieval Peo­ple?” In it, Jane­ga has first to make clear that, yes, medieval Euro­peans had sex; if they had­n’t, of course, many of us would­n’t be here today. But we’d be for­giv­en for assum­ing that the seem­ing­ly absolute dom­i­nance of the Church quashed any and all of their erot­ic oppor­tu­ni­ties.

Accord­ing to the medieval Church, Jane­ga says, “the only time sex is accept­able is between two mar­ried peo­ple for pro­cre­ative pur­pos­es.” Its many oth­er restric­tions includ­ed “no sex on Sat­ur­days and Sun­days in case you’re too turned on dur­ing mass; only have sex in the mis­sion­ary posi­tion, because any­thing else sub­verts the nat­ur­al rela­tion­ship between men and women; don’t get ful­ly naked dur­ing sex, because it’s just too excit­ing; in short, dur­ing sex, you should be try­ing to have the least amount of fun pos­si­ble.” Strict and unam­bigu­ous though these rules were, “nobody real­ly lis­tened to them” — and what’s more, giv­en the lack of pri­vate spaces, “sex was almost a pub­lic affair in the Mid­dle Ages.”

So says Kate Lis­ter, who research­es the his­to­ry of sex­u­al­i­ty, and who turns up to bring her own knowl­edge of the sub­ject to the par­ty. “We tend to think about medieval peo­ple as being real prudes,” says Jane­ga, but even scant his­tor­i­cal records — and rather more copi­ous erot­ic man­u­script mar­gin­a­lia — show that “they were inter­est­ed in all kinds of sex and romance that we would find com­plete­ly unac­cept­able.” Lis­ter adds that, “in many ways, we’re not open like the medieval peo­ple were. We don’t have pub­lic com­mu­nal bathing. We don’t have sex in the same room as oth­er peo­ple. We don’t go to a high-brow din­ner par­ty and tell pubic-hair jokes.” Or we don’t, at least, if we haven’t devot­ed our careers to the sex­u­al­i­ty of the Mid­dle Ages, a field of his­to­ry clear­ly unfit for prudes.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Ear­li­est Known Appear­ance of the F‑Word, in a Bizarre Court Record Entry from 1310

Peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Prac­tice Was Redis­cov­ered

What Did Peo­ple Eat in Medieval Times? A Video Series and New Cook­book Explain

Why Butt Trum­pets & Oth­er Bizarre Images Appeared in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Medieval Monks Com­plained About Con­stant Dis­trac­tions: Learn How They Worked to Over­come Them

The Turin Erot­ic Papyrus: The Old­est Known Depic­tion of Human Sex­u­al­i­ty (Cir­ca 1150 B.C.E.)

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.

Hear Moby Dick Read in Its Entirety by Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry, John Waters & Many Others

in Audio Books, Literature | October 26th, 2022

“Moby-Dick is the great Amer­i­can nov­el. But it is also the great unread Amer­i­can nov­el. Sprawl­ing, mag­nif­i­cent, deliri­ous­ly digres­sive, it stands over and above all oth­er works of fic­tion, since it is bare­ly a work of fic­tion itself. Rather, it is an explo­sive expo­si­tion of one man’s inves­ti­ga­tion into the world of the whale, and the way humans have relat­ed to it. Yet it is so much more than that.”

That’s how Ply­mouth Uni­ver­si­ty intro­duces Her­man Melville’s clas­sic tale from 1851. And it’s what set the stage for their web project launched back in 2012. Called The Moby-Dick Big Read, the project fea­tured celebri­ties and less­er known fig­ures read­ing all 135 chap­ters from Moby-Dick — chap­ters that you can start down­load­ing (as free audio files) on iTunes, Sound­cloud, RSS Feed, or the Big Read web site itself.

The project start­ed with the first chap­ters being read by Til­da Swin­ton (Chap­ter 1), Cap­tain R.N. Hone (Chap­ter 2), Nigel Williams (Chap­ter 3), Caleb Crain (Chap­ter 4), Musa Okwon­ga (Chap­ter 5), and Mary Nor­ris (Chap­ter 6). John Waters, Stephen Fry, Simon Cal­low, Mary Oliv­er and even Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron read lat­er ones.

If you want to read the nov­el as you go along, find the text over at Project Guten­berg.

Til­da Swin­ton’s nar­ra­tion of Chap­ter 1 appears right below:

An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2012.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Illus­tra­tion of Every Page of Her­man Melville’s Moby Dick

How Ray Brad­bury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956)

Hear a Com­plete 24-Hour Read­ing of Moby-Dick, Record­ed at the South­bank Cen­tre in Lon­don (2015)

Meet the Physicist Who Has Created 1600+ Wikipedia Entries for Important Female & Minority Scientists

in Science, Wikipedia | October 17th, 2022

I find noth­ing more reward­ing, hon­est­ly, than see­ing peo­ple get rec­og­nized and cham­pi­oned for what they’ve done. — Dr. Jess Wade

As far as cen­turies go, the 21st one is a rel­a­tive­ly good time to be a girl with an inter­est in STEM.

Mod­ern sci­ence-lov­ing girls find them­selves born into a world where books and TV shows cel­e­brat­ing their inter­est pro­lif­er­ate. Their class­rooms are fes­tooned with posters of trail­blaz­ing female sci­en­tists. Even Bar­bie has ditched her bathing suit for a lab coat and a micro­scope.

You’d think Wikipedia would have kept pace in this cli­mate.

And it has…thanks almost entire­ly to the efforts of Dr. Jess Wade, a 33-year-old Impe­r­i­al Col­lege Research Fel­low who spends her days inves­ti­gat­ing spin selec­tive charge trans­port through chi­ral sys­tems in the Depart­ment of Mate­ri­als.

Her evenings, how­ev­er, belong to Wikipedia.

That’s when she drafts entries for under rec­og­nized female sci­en­tists and sci­en­tists of col­or.

“I had a tar­get for doing one a day, but some­times I get too excit­ed and do three,” she told The Guardian in 2018.

To date she’s added more than 1,600 names, striv­ing to make their biogra­phies as ful­ly fleshed out as any of the write ups for the white male sci­en­tists who flour­ish on the site.

This requires some foren­sic dig­ging. Dis­cov­er­ing a subject’s maid­en name is often the crit­i­cal step to find­ing her PhD the­sis and ear­ly influ­ences.

A hand­ful of Wade’s entries have been strick­en for the tru­ly mad­den­ing rea­son that their sub­jects are too obscure to war­rant inclu­sion.

Wade’s own Wikipedia entry notes the hypocrisy of this log­ic, refer­ring read­ers to a 2019 Chem­istry World arti­cle in which she’s quot­ed:

When you make a page and it is dis­put­ed for dele­tion, it is not only annoy­ing because your work is being delet­ed. It’s also incred­i­bly intru­sive and degrad­ing to have some­one dis­cuss whether someone’s notable enough to be on Wikipedia – a web­site that has pages about almost every pop song, peo­ple who are extras in films no one has ever heard of and peo­ple who were in sports teams that nev­er scored.

Below are just a few of the 1600+ female sci­en­tists she’s intro­duced to a wider audi­ence. While his­to­ry abounds with near­ly invis­i­ble names whose dis­cov­er­ies and con­tri­bu­tions have been inad­e­quate­ly rec­og­nized, or all too fre­quent­ly attrib­uted to male col­leagues, these women are all con­tem­po­rary.

Behold the World’s Oldest Animation Made on a Vase in Iran 5,200 Years Ago

in Animation, History | October 13th, 2022

By some accounts, the his­to­ry of ani­ma­tion stretch­es back to the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Since that time, ani­ma­tors have brought an astound­ing vari­ety of visions to artis­tic life. But looked at anoth­er way, this enter­prise — which has so far cul­mi­nat­ed in fea­ture-film spec­ta­cles by stu­dios like Pixar and Ghi­b­li — actu­al­ly has it roots deep in antiq­ui­ty. In order to find the first work of ani­ma­tion, broad­ly con­ceived, one must go to Shahr‑e Sukhteh, Iran’s famous “Burnt City.” Now a UNESCO World Her­itage site, it dates back more than five mil­len­nia, about four of which it spent under a lay­er of ash and dust, which pre­served a great many arti­facts of inter­est with­in.

Shahr‑e Sukhteh was first exca­vat­ed in 1967. About a decade lat­er, an Ital­ian archae­o­log­i­cal team unearthed the pot­tery ves­sel bear­ing designs now con­sid­ered the ear­li­est exam­ple of ani­ma­tion. “The arti­fact bears five images depict­ing a wild goat jump­ing up to eat the leaves of a tree,” says the web site of the Cir­cle of Ancient Iran­ian Stud­ies. “Sev­er­al years lat­er, Iran­ian archae­ol­o­gist Dr. Mansur Sad­ja­di, who became lat­er appoint­ed as the new direc­tor of the archae­o­log­i­cal team work­ing at the Burnt City dis­cov­ered that the pic­tures formed a relat­ed series.” The ani­mal depict­ed is a mem­ber of Capra aega­grus, “also known as ‘Per­sian desert Ibex’, and since it is an indige­nous ani­mal to the region, it would nat­u­ral­ly appear in the iconog­ra­phy of the Burnt City.”

Image by Eme­sik, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

This amus­ing­ly dec­o­rat­ed gob­let, now on dis­play at the Nation­al Muse­um of Iran, is hard­ly the only find that reflects the sur­pris­ing devel­op­ment of the ear­ly civ­i­liza­tion that pro­duced it. “The world’s first known arti­fi­cial eye­ball, with two holes in both sides and a gold­en thread to hold it in place, has been unearthed from the skele­ton of a woman’s body in Shahr‑e Sukhteh,” says Mehr News. Exca­va­tions have also turned up “the old­est signs of brain surgery,” as well as evi­dence that “the peo­ple of Shahr‑e Sukhteh played backgam­mon,” or at least some kind of table game involv­ing dice. But only the Burnt City’s pio­neer­ing work of flip-book-style art “means that the world’s old­est car­toon char­ac­ter is a goat.” His­to­ri­ans of ani­ma­tion, update your files accord­ing­ly.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Art on Ancient Greek Vas­es Come to Life with 21st-Cen­tu­ry Ani­ma­tion

The Ear­ly Days of Ani­ma­tion Pre­served in UCLA’s Video Archive

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

700 Years of Per­sian Man­u­scripts Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

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.

Why Monet Painted The Same Haystacks 25 Times

in Art, History | October 6th, 2022

In the nine­teen-twen­ties, as George Orwell remem­bers it, “Paris was invad­ed by such a swarm of artists, writ­ers, stu­dents, dilet­tan­ti, sight-seers, debauchees and plain idlers as the world has prob­a­bly nev­er seen. In some quar­ters of the town the so-called artists must actu­al­ly have out­num­bered the work­ing pop­u­la­tion.” Along stretch­es of the Seine, “it was almost impos­si­ble to pick one’s way between the sketch­ing-stools.” Legit­i­mate or oth­er­wise, these artists were gen­uine descen­dants of Claude Mon­et, at least in the sense that the lat­ter pio­neered paint­ing en plein air, dis­till­ing art direct­ly from the world all around him.

“When artists had to grind their own pig­ments or buy paints con­tained in frag­ile pig blad­ders,” says Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak in the video essay above, “it was much eas­i­er to work in a stu­dio. The advent of tubes of paint, like these flex­i­ble zinc tubes invent­ed by John Rand in 1841, in which the paint would not dry out, enabled a porta­bil­i­ty that made out­door paint­ing easy and fea­si­ble.” As usu­al in moder­ni­ty, a devel­op­ment in tech­nol­o­gy enabled a devel­op­ment in cul­ture, but to show what kind of pos­si­bil­i­ties had been opened up took an artist of rare vision as well as rare brazen­ness: more specif­i­cal­ly, an artist like Mon­et.

“Obsessed, most of all, with light and col­or, and the ways they reg­is­ter in the human mind,” Mon­et “reject­ed the pop­u­lar con­ven­tions of his time, which pri­or­i­tized line, col­or, and blend­ed brush­strokes that con­cealed the artist’s hand in favor of sev­er­al short, thick appli­ca­tions of sol­id col­or placed side by side, large­ly unblend­ed.” His paint­ings, which we now cred­it with launch­ing the Impres­sion­ist move­ment, show us not so much col­ors as “col­or rela­tion­ships that seem to change and vibrate as your eye scans across the can­vas.” But then, so does real life, whose con­stant­ly chang­ing light ensures that “every few min­utes, we expe­ri­ence a sub­tly dif­fer­ent col­or palette.”

For Puschak, nowhere is Mon­et’s artis­tic enter­prise more clear­ly demon­strat­ed than in the so-called “Haystacks.” The series con­sists of 25 paint­ings depict­ing just what that name sug­gests (and which, belong­ing to Mon­et’s neigh­bor in Giverny, were well placed to catch his eye), each paint­ed at a dif­fer­ent time of day. Each image rep­re­sents Mon­et’s attempt to cap­ture the light col­ors just as he per­ceived them at a par­tic­u­lar moment, straight from nature. Tak­en togeth­er, they con­sti­tute “maybe the defin­i­tive expres­sion of the Impres­sion­ist move­ment” — as well as a reminder that, haystack or water lily, we nev­er tru­ly set eyes on the same thing twice.

You can now pur­chase a copy of the Nerd­writer’s new book, Escape into Mean­ing: Essays on Super­man, Pub­lic Bench­es, and Oth­er Obses­sions.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Monet’s Water Lilies: How World War I Inspired Mon­et to Paint His Final Mas­ter­pieces & Cre­ate “the World’s First Art Instal­la­tion”

How to Paint Water Lilies Like Mon­et in 14 Min­utes

Rare 1915 Film Shows Claude Mon­et at Work in His Famous Gar­den at Giverny

1923 Pho­to of Claude Mon­et Col­orized: See the Painter in the Same Col­or as His Paint­ings

1,540 Mon­et Paint­ings in a Two Hour Video

A Quick Six Minute Jour­ney Through Mod­ern Art: How You Get from Manet’s 1862 Paint­ing, “The Lun­cheon on the Grass,” to Jack­son Pol­lock 1950s Drip Paint­ings

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.

When a Modern Director Makes a Fake Old Movie: A Video Essay on David Fincher’s Mank

in Film | October 6th, 2022

As of this writ­ing, Mank is David Fincher’s newest movie — but also, in a sense, his old­est. With Net­flix mon­ey behind him, he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors spared seem­ing­ly no expense in re-cre­at­ing the look and feel of a nine­teen-for­ties film using the advanced dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies of the twen­ty-twen­ties. The idea was not just to tell the sto­ry of Cit­i­zen Kane scriptwriter Her­man J. Mankiewicz, but to make the two pic­tures seem like con­tem­po­raries. As Fincher’s pro­duc­tion design­er Don­ald Gra­ham Burt once put it, the direc­tor “want­ed the movie to be like you were in a vault and came across Cit­i­zen Kane and next to it was Mank.”

Cin­e­maS­tix cre­ator Dan­ny Boyd quotes Burt’s remarks in the video essay above, “When a Mod­ern Direc­tor Makes a Fake Old Movie.” After estab­lish­ing Fincher’s sig­na­ture use of com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed imagery to cre­ate not large-scale spec­ta­cles but rel­a­tive­ly sub­tle and often peri­od-accu­rate details, Boyd explains the exten­sive dig­i­tal manip­u­la­tion involved in “aging” Mank.

Fincher’s artists added clouds, dust, “the gleam of vin­tage lamps,” grain and scratch­es, “lat­er­al wob­bling,” and much else besides. The cin­e­matog­ra­phy itself pays con­stant homage to Cit­i­zen Kane’s then-ground­break­ing angles and cam­era moves, even employ­ing “old-school tech­niques that dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy and a decent film bud­get have made increas­ing­ly obso­lete” such as shoot­ing day-for-night.

And yet, as most of the com­ments below Boy­d’s video point out, the result of these con­sid­er­able efforts falls short of con­vinc­ing. Maybe it’s all the shades of gray between its blacks and whites; maybe it’s the smooth­ness of every­thing, includ­ing the cam­era moves; maybe it’s all the mod­ern act­ing. (As the New York­er’s Richard Brody puts it, “Our actors are of their time, and can hard­ly rep­re­sent the past with­out invest­ing it with the atti­tudes of our own day, which is why most new peri­od pieces seem either thin or unin­ten­tion­al­ly iron­ic.”) If any film­mak­er could over­come all these chal­lenges, it would sure­ly be one with Fincher’s back­ground in visu­al effects, fas­ci­na­tion with Old Hol­ly­wood, and noto­ri­ous per­fec­tion­ism. For all its suc­cess in oth­er respects, Mank proves that one can no more make old movies than old friends.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Makes Cit­i­zen Kane a Great Film: 4 Video Essays Revis­it Orson Welles’ Mas­ter­piece on the 80th Anniver­sary of Its Pre­miere

How Did David Finch­er Become the Kubrick of Our Time? A New, 3.5 Hour Series of Video Essays Explains

Fight Club Came Out 20 Years Ago Today: Watch Five Video Essays on the Film’s Phi­los­o­phy and Last­ing Influ­ence

David Fincher’s Five Finest Music Videos: From Madon­na to Aero­smith

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.

Artist Makes Astonishing Armor for Cats & Mice

in Art, Design, History, Uncategorized, Video - Arts & Culture | October 5th, 2022

As a child, Jeff De Boer, the son of a sheet met­al fab­ri­ca­tor, was fas­ci­nat­ed by the Euro­pean plate armor col­lec­tion in Calgary’s Glen­bow Muse­um:

There was some­thing mag­i­cal or mys­ti­cal about that emp­ty form, that con­tained some­thing. So what would it con­tain? A hero? Do we all con­tain that in our­selves?

After grad­u­at­ing from high school wear­ing a par­tial suit of armor he con­struct­ed for the occa­sion, De Boer com­plet­ed sev­en full suits, while major­ing in jew­el­ry design at the Alber­ta Col­lege of Art and Design.

A sculp­ture class assign­ment pro­vid­ed him with an excuse to make a suit of armor for a cat. The artist had found his niche.

Using steel, sil­ver, brass, bronze, nick­el, cop­per, leather, fiber, wood, and his del­i­cate jew­el­ry mak­ing tools, DeBoer became the cats’ armor­er, spend­ing any­where from 50 to 200 hours pro­duc­ing each increas­ing­ly intri­cate suit of feline armor.  A noble pur­suit, but one that inad­ver­tent­ly cre­at­ed an “imbal­ance in the uni­verse”:

The only way to fix it was to do the same for the mouse.

“The suit of armor is a trans­for­ma­tion vehi­cle. It’s some­thing that only the hero would wear,” De Boer notes.

Fans of David Petersen’s Mouse Guard series will need no con­vinc­ing, though no real mouse has had the mis­for­tune to find its way inside one of his aston­ish­ing, cus­tom-made cre­ations.

Not even a taxi­dermy spec­i­men, he revealed on the Mak­ing, Our Way pod­cast:

It’s not an alto­geth­er bad idea. The only rea­son I don’t do it is that hol­low suit of armor like you might see in a muse­um, your imag­i­na­tion will make it do a mil­lion things more than if you stick a mouse in it will ever do. I have put armor on cats. I can tell you, it’s noth­ing like what you think it’s going to be. It’s not a very good expe­ri­ence for the cat. It does not ful­fill any fan­tasies about a cat wear­ing a suit of armor.

Though cats were his entry point, De Boer’s sym­pa­thies seem aligned with the under­dog — er, mice. Equip­ping hum­ble, hypo­thet­i­cal crea­tures with exquis­ite­ly wrought, his­tor­i­cal pro­tec­tive gear is a way of push­ing back against being per­ceived dif­fer­ent­ly than one wish­es to be.

Accept­ing an Hon­orary MFA from his alma mater ear­li­er this year, he described an armored mouse as a metaphor for his “ongo­ing cat and mouse rela­tion­ship with the world of fine art…a mis­chie­vous, rebel­lious being who dares to com­pete on his own terms in a world ruled by the cool cats.”

Each tiny piece is pre­ced­ed by painstak­ing research and many ref­er­ence draw­ings, and may incor­po­rate spe­cial mate­ri­als like the Japan­ese silk haori-himo cord lac­ing the shoul­der plates to the body armor of a Samu­rai mouse fam­i­ly.

Addi­tion­al cre­ations have ref­er­enced Mon­go­lian, glad­i­a­tor, cru­sad­er, and Sara­cen styles — this last per­fect for a Per­sian cat.

“I mean, “Why not?” he asks in his TED‑x Talk,Village Idiots & Inno­va­tion, below.

His lat­est work com­bines ele­ments of Maratha and Hus­sar armor in a ver­i­ta­ble puz­zle of minus­cule pieces.

See more of Jeff De Boer’s cat and mouse armor on his Insta­gram.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

What’s It Like to Fight in 15th Cen­tu­ry Armor?: A Sur­pris­ing Demon­stra­tion

Cats in Medieval Man­u­scripts & Paint­ings

A Record Store Designed for Mice in Swe­den, Fea­tur­ing Albums by Mouse Davis, Destiny’s Cheese, Dol­ly Pars­ley & More

- 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.

How Writing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Animated Map

in Maps | September 30th, 2022

The old­est known writ­ing sys­tems first emerged in Mesopotamia, between 3400 and 3100 BC, and Egypt, around 3250 BC. The Latin alpha­bet, which I’m using to write this post and you’re using to read it, grad­u­al­ly took the shape we know between the sev­enth cen­tu­ry BC and the Mid­dle Ages. Over the eras since, it has spread out­ward from Europe to become the most wide­ly used script in the world. These are impor­tant devel­op­ments in the his­to­ry of writ­ing, but hard­ly the only ones. It is with all known writ­ing sys­tems that his­tor­i­cal map ani­ma­tor Ollie Bye deals in the video above: not just those used today, but over the whole of the past five mil­len­nia.

The con­quests of Alexan­der the Great; the Gal­lic Wars; the col­o­niza­tion of Latin Amer­i­ca; the “scram­ble for Africa”: these and oth­er major his­tor­i­cal events are vivid­ly reflect­ed in the spread of cer­tain writ­ing sys­tems.

Up until 1492 — after the expi­ra­tion of eight and a half of the video’s eleven min­utes — the map con­cerns itself only with Europe, Asia, and the north­ern three-quar­ters of Africa (as well as an inlaid sec­tion depict­ing the civ­i­liza­tions of what is now Cen­tral Amer­i­ca). There­after it zooms out to include the New World, and indeed the whole world, though cen­turies pass before most of its blank spaces fill up with the col­ors that indi­cate the adop­tion of a dom­i­nant script.

Ara­bic and Per­sian appear in lime green, sim­pli­fied Chi­nese in red, and Cyril­lic in light blue. Before Bye’s ani­ma­tion reach­es the mid­dle twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, most of the world has turned medi­um blue, which rep­re­sents the now-mighty Latin alpha­bet. The use of these very let­ters for all writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tion by such a wide vari­ety of cul­tures mer­its a vol­umes-long his­to­ry by itself. But per­haps most intrigu­ing here is the per­sis­tence of rel­a­tive­ly minor scripts: Cree, used among the natives of north­ern Cana­da; hira­gana, katakana, and kan­ji in Japan; and also hangul in Korea — which I read and write myself every day of my life in Seoul, and to whose con­tin­ued dom­i­nance here I can con­fi­dent­ly attest.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Atlas of Endan­gered Alpha­bets: A Free Online Atlas That Helps Pre­serve Writ­ing Sys­tems That May Soon Dis­ap­pear

The Evo­lu­tion of the Alpha­bet: A Col­or­ful Flow­chart, Cov­er­ing 3,800 Years, Takes You From Ancient Egypt to Today

Dic­tio­nary of the Old­est Writ­ten Language–It Took 90 Years to Com­plete, and It’s Now Free Online

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

The Improb­a­ble Inven­tion of Chi­nese Type­writ­ers & Com­put­er Key­boards: Three Videos Tell the Tech­no-Cul­tur­al Sto­ry

You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs

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.