The Amazing Artistry & Ingenuity of the Furniture Enjoyed by 18th Century Aristocrats

in Design, History | January 15th, 2020

What­ev­er did peo­ple do with them­selves all day before social media and stream­ing video? Before TV, film, and radio? If you were most peo­ple in Europe, before var­i­ous rev­o­lu­tions, you worked from dawn to dusk and col­lapsed in bed, with rare hol­i­days to break up the monot­o­ny.

But if you were an aris­to­crat, you not only had the plea­sures of juicy gos­sip, live­ly cor­re­spon­dence, and bawdy nov­els to look for­ward to, but you might also—just as mil­lions do now—encounter such plea­sures while gam­ing.

The gam­ing tech­nol­o­gy of the time was all hand­craft­ed, and said aris­to­crats might find them­selves trad­ing wicked barbs while seat­ed around the height of tech above, a table that unfolds a series of leaves to reveal a felt sur­face for card games, a board for chess or check­ers, and a leather writ­ing sur­face that offers the option of a bookrest, for prop­ping up a scan­dalous book of verse.

If you think that’s impres­sive, the table hasn’t fin­ished yet. It fur­ther opens into a backgam­mon board, with slid­ing lids reveal­ing com­part­ments for game pieces. Then, the whole thing folds back to its size as a small side table, with detach­able legs that can be stored inside it for easy portage.

The ani­mat­ed video of the ulti­mate 18th cen­tu­ry gam­ing sys­tem at the top comes to us from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, demon­strat­ing a piece in their col­lec­tion designed by Ger­man cab­i­net­mak­er David Roent­gen that “once graced the inti­mate inte­ri­or of an aris­to­crat­ic Euro­pean home.” Not to be out­done, the Get­ty Muse­um brings us the 3D ani­ma­tion above of an 18th-cen­tu­ry French mechan­i­cal table, with intri­cate work­ings designed by Jean-François Oeben.

“An afflu­ent lady might spend hours at a fash­ion­able table, engaged in leisure or work,” notes a com­pan­ion video above. It illus­trates the point with a pair of ghost­ly ani­mat­ed hands com­pos­ing a let­ter on the table’s silk writ­ing sur­face.

One can imag­ine these hands spilling the ink while open­ing juniper-scent­ed draw­ers, and prop­ping up the book stand; los­ing their place in a book while search­ing through com­part­ments, ear­ly forms of scrolling or open­ing mul­ti­ple tabs.

We may now car­ry mechan­i­cal tables in our pock­ets and right­ly think of gam­ing sys­tems as por­tals to oth­er worlds, but there’s no deny­ing that these bespoke ances­tors of our devices offered plen­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ty for pleas­ant dis­trac­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Ladies & Gen­tle­men Got Dressed in the 18th Cen­tu­ry: It Was a Pret­ty Involved Process

The Sights & Sounds of 18th Cen­tu­ry Paris Get Recre­at­ed with 3D Audio and Ani­ma­tion

Restora­tion and 18th Cen­tu­ry Poet­ry: From Dry­den to Wordsworth (Free Course) 

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

Celebrating Women Composers: A New BBC Digital Archive Takes You from Hildegard of Bingen (1098) to Nadia Boulanger (1979)

in Gender, Music | January 15th, 2020

Recent­ly, we pub­lished a post about Nadia Boulanger, the 20th cen­tu­ry’s most influ­en­tial music teacher. While a com­pos­er and con­duc­tor in her own right—indeed, she was the first woman to con­duct major sym­phonies in Europe and the U.S.—Boulanger is best known for her list of illus­tri­ous stu­dents, includ­ing Aaron Cop­land, Leonard Bern­stein, Philip Glass, and Quin­cy Jones.

One read­er of the post right­ly point­ed out a not-so-glar­ing irony in the way Boulanger has been remem­bered. While cel­e­brat­ed as a pow­er­ful woman in music, in a sea of more famous men, her many dis­tin­guished female stu­dents go unmen­tioned, per­haps more due to igno­rance than prej­u­dice (though this may be no great excuse). Most peo­ple have nev­er heard of for­mer Boulanger stu­dents like Graży­na Bacewicz, Mar­i­on Bauer, Louise Tal­ma, Peg­gy Glanville-Hicks and Pri­aulx Rainier.

Not many have heard of Lili Boulanger, Nadia’s sis­ter, a child prodi­gy who died at 24, after com­pos­ing two dozen inno­v­a­tive choral and instru­men­tal works and becom­ing the first woman to win the Prix de Rome in 1913, at the age of 19, for her can­ta­ta Faust and Hélène, with lyrics, by Eugene Ade­nis, based on Goethe’s Faust (top).

Pol­ish com­pos­er Bacewicz, who began study­ing with Nadia Boulanger’s for­mer stu­dent Kaz­imierz Siko­rs­ki at 13, trav­eled to Paris to “learn from the great ped­a­gogue her­self,” notes the BBC Music Mag­a­zine.

Bacewicz was an incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed vio­lin­ist (see her fur­ther up in 1952) and a wide­ly admired com­pos­er, just one of many note­wor­thy female com­posers, of the past and present, who don’t often turn up in con­ver­sa­tion about clas­si­cal and avant-garde music. The BBC aims to cor­rect these major slights with their “Cel­e­brat­ing Women Com­posers” series, which fea­tures archival inter­view clips from leg­ends like Nadia Boulanger, Dame Ethel Smyth (pro­filed above), and Elis­a­beth Lutyens.

You’ll also find inter­views with dozens of con­tem­po­rary female com­posers, a series on com­posers’ rooms, pro­files of his­tor­i­cal greats, links to per­for­mance record­ings, and sev­er­al infor­ma­tive arti­cles on women com­posers past and present. Most of the com­posers pro­filed have found some mea­sure of fame in their life­time, and renown among those in the know, but are unknown to the gen­er­al pub­lic.

Some of the com­posers you’ll learn about, like the five in a fea­ture titled “The Women Erased from Musi­cal His­to­ry,” might have dis­ap­peared entire­ly were it not for the work of archivists. Learn about these redis­cov­ered fig­ures and much, much more at the BBC’s Cel­e­brat­ing Women Com­posers, one of many such projects mak­ing it hard­er to plead igno­rance of women’s pres­ence in clas­si­cal music.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Nadia Boulanger, “The Most Influ­en­tial Teacher Since Socrates,” Who Men­tored Philip Glass, Leonard Bern­stein, Aaron Cop­land, Quin­cy Jones & Oth­er Leg­ends

1200 Years of Women Com­posers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938–2014)

Meet Four Women Who Pio­neered Elec­tron­ic Music: Daphne Oram, Lau­rie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliv­eros

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

The New York Public Library Announces the Top 10 Checked-Out Books of All Time

in Books, K-12, Libraries | January 14th, 2020

Pub­lic libraries are unsung heroes of their com­mu­ni­ties. Many a busy work­ing adult can take their impor­tance for grant­ed. But par­ents of young chil­dren know—the library is a qui­et haven, place of won­der and dis­cov­ery, and free resource for all sorts of edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ences. Giv­en the impor­tance of libraries in kids’ lives, it’s no won­der that six of the top ten most-checked-out books—accord­ing to the New York Pub­lic Library—are children’s books.

The NYPL cal­cu­lat­ed the most checked out books in its his­to­ry in hon­or of its 125th anniver­sary. Giv­en that it hous­es the sec­ond largest col­lec­tion in the U.S., after the Library of Con­gress, and serves mil­lions in the most lin­guis­ti­cal­ly diverse city in the coun­try, its cir­cu­la­tion num­bers give us a rea­son­able sam­pling of near-uni­ver­sal tastes.

These include time­less clas­sics of children’s lit­er­a­ture: Ezra Jack Keats’ Calde­cott-win­ning The Snowy Day tops the list, “in print and in the Library’s cat­a­log con­tin­u­ous­ly since 1962”; The Cat in the Hat comes in at a close sec­ond. Where the Wild Things Are and The Very Hun­gry Cater­pil­lar round out the list of books for the very young.

Where is the stal­wart Good­night Moon, you may ask? Here we have a juicy bit of lore:

By all mea­sures, this book should be a top check­out (in fact, it might be the top check­out) if not for an odd piece of his­to­ry: extreme­ly influ­en­tial New York Pub­lic Library children’s librar­i­an Anne Car­roll Moore hat­ed Good­night Moon when it first came out. As a result, the Library didn’t car­ry it until 1972. That lost time bumped the book off the top 10 list for now. But give it time.

For now, Mar­garet Wise Brown’s 1947 clas­sic receives hon­or­able men­tion. Clas­sic kids’ books cir­cu­late a lot because they’re wide­ly read, but also because they’re short, which leads to more turnover, the Library points out. Length of time in print is also a fac­tor, which makes the pres­ence of Har­ry Pot­ter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, pub­lished in 1998, par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive.

1. The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats: 485,583 check­outs
2. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss: 469,650 check­outs
3. 1984 by George Orwell: 441,770 check­outs
4. Where the Wild Things Are by Mau­rice Sendak: 436,016 check­outs
5. To Kill a Mock­ing­bird by Harp­er Lee: 422,912 check­outs
6. Char­lot­te’s Web by E.B. White: 337,948 check­outs
7. Fahren­heit 451 by Ray Brad­bury: 316,404 check­outs
8. How to Win Friends and Influ­ence Peo­ple by Dale Carnegie: 284,524 check­outs
9. Har­ry Pot­ter and the Sor­cer­er’s Stone by J.K. Rowl­ing: 231,022 check­outs
10. The Very Hun­gry Cater­pil­lar by Eric Car­le: 189,550 check­outs

Like J.K. Rowling’s mod­ern clas­sic, all of the remain­ing books on the list are novels—save out­lier How to Win Friends and Influ­ence Peo­ple by Dale Carnegie—and all are nov­els read exten­sive­ly by mid­dle and high school stu­dents, a fur­ther sign of the sig­nif­i­cance of pub­lic libraries.

Some stu­dents may only be required to read a small hand­ful of nov­els in their school career, and whether they fol­low through, and maybe go on to read more and more books, and maybe write a few books of their own, may depend upon those nov­els con­stant­ly cir­cu­lat­ing for every­one through insti­tu­tions like the New York Pub­lic Library.

See the full list above and learn more about the project at NPR and the NYPL.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets Patrons Check Out Ties, Brief­cas­es & Hand­bags for Job Inter­views

The New York Pub­lic Library Puts Clas­sic Sto­ries on Insta­gram: Start with Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land and Read Kafka’s The Meta­mor­pho­sis Soon

What Are the Most Stolen Books? Book­store Lists Fea­ture Works by Muraka­mi, Bukows­ki, Bur­roughs, Von­negut, Ker­ouac & Palah­niuk

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

Art Record Covers: A Book of Over 500 Album Covers Created by Famous Visual Artists

in Art, Music | January 14th, 2020

The list of musi­cians who are also visu­al artists goes on and on. We’re all famil­iar with the biggest names: David Bowie, Pat­ti Smith, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Cap­tain Beef­heart, etc, etc, etc. Less­er-known alter­na­tive and indie artists like Stone Ros­es gui­tarist John Squire and Austin singer/songwriter Daniel John­ston cre­at­ed icon­ic imagery that adorned their album cov­ers and mer­chan­dise.

Such mul­ti­tal­ent­ed indi­vid­u­als embody the kin­ship of sound and vision. But so too do the many col­lab­o­ra­tions between musi­cians and fine artists—hun­dreds of whom have gift­ed their tal­ents to album cov­ers of every con­ceiv­able kind.

Aside from obvi­ous, his­toric exam­ples (Andy Warhol’s Vel­vet Under­ground cov­ers come imme­di­ate­ly to mind) such col­lab­o­ra­tions are often hid­ing in plain sight. Per­haps you did not know, for exam­ple, that the allur­ing yet mys­te­ri­ous deep blue pho­to­graph of Björk on the cov­er of her remix album Telegram is by Nobuyoshi Ara­ki, one of Japan’s most admired and pro­lif­ic fine art pho­tog­ra­phers.

Maybe you were unaware of how Con­cep­tu­al artist Bar­bara Kruger, whose work “speaks truth to pow­er,” con­tributed to the look of the 90s activist indus­tri­al hip-hop group Con­sol­i­dat­ed. Or how Yay­oi Kusama leant her eye-pop­ping dots to Towa Tei’s boun­cy, elec­tron­ic pop for the for­mer Deee-Lite DJ’s 2013 album Lucky.

We all know that Pat­ti Smith’s debut album, Hors­es, fea­tures an icon­ic cov­er pho­to by her friend Robert Map­plethor­pe. But did you know that the cov­er of Metallica’s 1996 album Load is a pho­to­graph­ic study by artist Andreas Ser­ra­no—of Piss Christ fame—that min­gles cow blood and his own semen between sheets of plex­i­glass?

You’ll find hun­dreds more such col­lab­o­ra­tions, though few as vis­cer­al, in Taschen’s new book Art Record Cov­ers, a cel­e­bra­tion of sound and vision in pop­u­lar music. True to the arts publisher’s rep­u­ta­tion for cof­fee table books the size of cof­fee tables, this sur­vey is a com­pre­hen­sive as they come.

The book presents 500 cov­ers and records by visu­al artists from the 1950s through to today, explor­ing how mod­ernism, Pop Art, Con­cep­tu­al Art, post­mod­ernism, and var­i­ous forms of con­tem­po­rary art prac­tice have all informed this col­lat­er­al field of visu­al pro­duc­tion and sup­port­ed the mass dis­tri­b­u­tion of music with defin­ing imagery that swift­ly and sug­ges­tive­ly evokes an aur­al encounter.

Along the way, we find Jean-Michel Basquiat’s urban hiero­glyphs for his own Tar­town record label, Banksy’s sten­ciled graf­fi­ti for Blur, Damien Hirst’s sym­bol­ic skull for the Hours, and a skew­ered Sal­vador Dalí but­ter­fly on Jack­ie Gleason’s Lone­some Echo.

Edi­tor Francesco Spamp­ina­to, an art his­to­ri­an study­ing at the Sor­bonne Nou­velle in Paris, has most­ly kept the focus on pop, rock, punk, met­al, alter­na­tive, and indie. Includ­ing the full breadth of jazz, avant-garde, and oth­er world musics would offer exam­ples enough to jus­ti­fy anoth­er vol­ume or two of Art Record Cov­ers.

The focus is suit­ably broad, nonethe­less, to show how “visu­al and music pro­duc­tion have had a par­tic­u­lar­ly inti­mate rela­tion­ship… since the dawn of mod­ernism…. From Lui­gi Russolo’s 1913 Futur­ist man­i­festo L’Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise) to Mar­cel Duchamp’s 1925 dou­ble-sided discs Rotore­liefs.” It’s also a great way to dis­cov­er new art and new music, and to see the inter­re­la­tion­ships between them in entire­ly new ways. Order a copy of Art Record Cov­ers here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

7 Rock Album Cov­ers Designed by Icon­ic Artists: Warhol, Rauschen­berg, Dalí, Richter, Map­plethor­pe & More

The Impos­si­bly Cool Album Cov­ers of Blue Note Records: Meet the Cre­ative Team Behind These Icon­ic Designs

Enter the Cov­er Art Archive: A Mas­sive Col­lec­tion of 800,000 Album Cov­ers from the 1950s through 2018

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

What the Earth Would Look Like If We Drained the Water from the Oceans

in Environment | January 14th, 2020

For­mer­ly a NASA Fel­low at the God­dard Space Flight Cen­ter, Dr James O’Donoghue now works as a plan­e­tary sci­en­tist at the Japan­ese space agency JAXA. He also hosts a video chan­nel on YouTube. Above, you can watch his high-res remake of a NASA ani­ma­tion pro­duced back in 2008. Here’s how NASA framed the orig­i­nal clip:

Three fifths of the Earth­’s sur­face is under the ocean, and the ocean floor is as rich in detail as the land sur­face with which we are famil­iar. This ani­ma­tion sim­u­lates a drop in sea lev­el that grad­u­al­ly reveals this detail. As the sea lev­el drops, the con­ti­nen­tal shelves appear imme­di­ate­ly. They are most­ly vis­i­ble by a depth of 140 meters, except for the Arc­tic and Antarc­tic regions, where the shelves are deep­er. The mid-ocean ridges start to appear at a depth of 2000 to 3000 meters. By 6000 meters, most of the ocean is drained except for the deep ocean trench­es, the deep­est of which is the Mar­i­anas Trench at a depth of 10,911 meters.

In 51 sec­onds, watch and see where the great drain­ing ends…

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:

A Rad­i­cal Map Puts the Oceans–Not Land–at the Cen­ter of Plan­et Earth (1942)

A Map Shows What Hap­pens When Our World Gets Four Degrees Warmer: The Col­orado Riv­er Dries Up, Antarc­ti­ca Urban­izes, Poly­ne­sia Van­ish­es

Per­pet­u­al Ocean: A Van Gogh-Like Visu­al­iza­tion of our Ocean Cur­rents

Leonardo da Vinci’s Inventions Come to Life as Museum-Quality, Workable Models: A Swing Bridge, Scythed Chariot, Perpetual Motion Machine & More

in History, Physics, Technology | January 14th, 2020

Per­pet­u­al motion is impos­si­ble. Even if we don’t know much about physics, we all know that to be true — or at least we’ve heard it from cred­i­ble enough sources that we might as well believe it. More accu­rate­ly, we might say that nobody has yet fig­ured out how to make a machine that keeps on going and going and going by itself, with­out any exter­nal ener­gy source. But it has­n’t been for lack of try­ing, and the effort has been on the part of not just crack­pots but some of the most impres­sive minds in human his­to­ry. Take char­ter mem­ber of that group Leonar­do da Vin­ci, the Renais­sance design­er of bridges, musi­cal instru­ments, war machines, and much else beside, whose fas­ci­na­tion with the sub­ject also had him imag­in­ing the occa­sion­al per­pet­u­al motion machine.

Our unflag­ging fas­ci­na­tion with Leonar­do has fueled the efforts of 21st-cen­tu­ry enthu­si­asts to build his inven­tions for them­selves, even those inven­tions that pre­vi­ous­ly exist­ed only in his note­books. In the video above you can see a series of such Leonar­do-imag­ined devices made real in func­tion­al mod­el form.

Some of them, like the fly­wheel, odome­ter, ver­ti­cal ball-bear­ing, and dou­ble-deck­er bridge, have become so com­mon in oth­er forms that we no longer even stop to con­sid­er their inge­nious­ness. Oth­ers, like the invad­er-repelling cas­tle wall defense mech­a­nism and some­thing called a “scythed char­i­ot” — a nasty-look­ing yet char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly grace­ful piece of work — remind of us that, at least in most of the world, we live in less war­like times than Leonar­do did.

The video comes from Valeriy Ivanov, who on Youtube spe­cial­izes in build­ing and demon­strat­ing “work­ing mod­els of per­pet­u­al motion machines” as well as “Da Vin­ci inven­tions” and “mar­ble machines.” (Leonar­do’s odome­ter, fea­tured in the video, makes a par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive use of mar­bles.) “My mod­els of per­pet­u­al motion machines are of motor­ized ver­sions that were built to illus­trate how they were sup­posed to work in the minds of inven­tors,” writes Ivanov. We see not only the mechan­ics Leonar­do and oth­er hope­ful inven­tors must have imag­ined, but the mes­mer­iz­ing ele­gance of Leonar­do’s designs in par­tic­u­lar, such as the video’s over­bal­anced wheel. On a note­book page from 1494, Leonar­do told the seek­ers of per­pet­u­al motion to “go and take your place with the alchemists.” But now, with the aid of tech­nol­o­gy unimag­ined in Leonar­do’s time — even by Leonar­do him­self — we can see just how com­pelling that vision must have been.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

MIT Researchers 3D Print a Bridge Imag­ined by Leonar­do da Vin­ci in 1502— and Prove That It Actu­al­ly Works

How to Build Leonar­do da Vinci’s Inge­nious Self-Sup­port­ing Bridge: Renais­sance Inno­va­tions You Can Still Enjoy Today

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

Watch Leonar­do da Vinci’s Musi­cal Inven­tion, the Vio­la Organ­ista, Being Played for the Very First Time

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Exist­ing Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ele­gant Design for a Per­pet­u­al Motion Machine

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Witness Rush Drummer Neil Peart’s (RIP) Finest Moments On Stage and Screen

in Music | January 13th, 2020

Rush drum­mer and lyri­cist Neil Peart died this past Tues­day at age 67. Trib­utes have poured in from bands like Tool, Foo Fight­ers, and Super­chunk and appeared in the pages of The New York­er, a tes­ta­ment to Peart’s sta­tus as both a musi­cian and writer. Drum­mers of all gen­res revere him, even if they don’t quite get the breadth of lit­er­ary, mytho­log­i­cal, and philo­soph­i­cal ref­er­ences in the band’s dense, epic song cycles.

Nor have Peart’s lit­er­ary admir­ers always under­stood his tech­ni­cal vir­tu­os­i­ty behind the kit. But it was nev­er nec­es­sary to ful­ly grok his bril­liant con­tri­bu­tions to Rush’s out­put to appre­ci­ate them—from his first album with the band, 1975’s Fly by Night, to his last, 2012’s Clock­work Angels. Cer­tain­ly not all Rush fans shared Peart’s one­time fond­ness for the work of Ayn Rand, which influ­enced the band’s 1976 break­out album, 2112. Peart lat­er claimed her work “no longer res­onat­ed with him,” as Annie Zales­ki writes at NPR, and called him­self a “bleed­ing heart lib­er­tar­i­an.”

Yet even fans who loathe Atlas Shrugged don’t seem to feel the influ­ence undu­ly com­pro­mised Peart’s cre­ativ­i­ty. His influ­ences were vast and his “love of lit­er­a­ture and rev­er­ence for his­to­ry deeply informed his song­writ­ing… he became known for his philo­soph­i­cal mus­ings on road life and rest­less souls; cri­tiques of pow­er and greed; fan­ta­sy-tinged vignettes; and inci­sive polit­i­cal and social com­men­tary, cloaked in metaphor.” For all their self-seri­ous­ness, Rush wasn’t immune to humor either.

2012 was all of these things, with a sprawl­ing, epic fan­ta­sy/s­ci-fi, 20-minute open­ing title track, fol­lowed by an ode to pot called “A Pas­sage to Bangkok,” in which Peart names “var­i­ous cities and coun­tries around the world where it is cul­ti­vat­ed,” The New York­er’s Aman­da Petru­sich writes, and pro­claims “We only stop for the best!” Rush could wink at their goofi­ness while also ful­ly embrac­ing it with­out reser­va­tion, in “a kind of fuck-it aban­don.”

Rush assem­bled an audi­ence not by “exten­sive radio play or crit­i­cal adu­la­tion or cor­po­rate posi­tion­ing” but good old word of mouth from dumb­struck fans. They did secure their first U.S. record deal through radio play, how­ev­er, right after Peart joined the band in 1974. Don­na Halper—then a DJ at Cleve­land radio sta­tion WMMS, now an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of media stud­ies at Les­ley Uni­ver­si­ty—played their sin­gle “Work­ing Man,” which “prompt­ly took off,” notes Zales­ki.

Halper explains why Peart earned the nick­name “The Pro­fes­sor,” say­ing that “above all, his lyrics made peo­ple think—Rush fans were lib­er­al, con­ser­v­a­tive, reli­gious, non-religious—but they all unit­ed around their respect for the band and their admi­ra­tion for how Neil could artic­u­late their expe­ri­ences, or give them a new way to look at an issue.”

As a musi­cian, Peart made thou­sands of drum­mers feel the same way. “I still vivid­ly remem­ber my first lis­ten of 2112, when I was young,” Dave Grohl wrote on the Foo Fight­ers Insta­gram page. “It was the first time I real­ly lis­tened to a drum­mer. And since that day, music has nev­er been the same.” Foo Fight­ers’ drum­mer Tay­lor Hawkins had a more suc­cinct state­ment: “Neil Peart had the hands of God. End of sto­ry.”

Peart’s own sto­ry may have end­ed but his musi­cal and lyri­cal lega­cy will out­live us all. See clips of his incred­i­ble per­for­mances over the years above—on stages around the world and the set of David Let­ter­man, in tours de force that show off not only his tech­ni­cal mas­tery, but also show how his drum­ming drew on as broad a range of influ­ences as his song­writ­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Who Are the Best Drum Soloists in Rock? See Leg­endary Per­for­mances by Neil Peart (RIP), John Bon­ham, Kei­th Moon, Ter­ry Bozzio & More

Iso­lat­ed Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Great­est: Bon­ham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr

Watch John Bonham’s Blis­ter­ing 13-Minute Drum Solo on “Moby Dick,” One of His Finest Moments Live Onstage (1970)

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

Discover the Apprehension Engine: Brian Eno Called It “the Most Terrifying Musical Instrument of All Time”

in Music | January 13th, 2020

Apart from the occa­sion­al Blair Witch Project, scary movies need scary scores. But much like mak­ing a gen­uine­ly scary movie, com­pos­ing gen­uine­ly scary music becomes more of a chal­lenge all the time. By now, even the most timid movie­go­ers among us have sure­ly grown inured to the throb­bing bass, the tense strings, and all the oth­er stan­dard, increas­ing­ly clichéd instru­men­tal tech­niques used to gen­er­ate a sense of omi­nous­ness. Giv­en the ever-grow­ing pres­sure to come up with more effec­tive­ly dread-induc­ing music, the inven­tion of the Appre­hen­sion Engine was sure­ly inevitable. A part of the stu­dio of film com­pos­er Mark Kor­ven, it looks unlike any oth­er musi­cal instru­ment in exis­tence, and sounds even more so.

With a nor­mal instru­ment, says Kor­ven in the Great Big Sto­ry Video above, “you’re expect­ing it to have a sound that is pleas­ing.” But with the Appre­hen­sion Engine, “the goal is to just pro­duce sounds that, in this case, are dis­turb­ing.” What we hear is less music than a son­ic approx­i­ma­tion of the abyss itself, which some­how emerges from his manip­u­la­tion of a vari­ety of strings, bars, wheels, and bows attached to a wood­en box — as ana­log a device as one would ever encounter in the 21st cen­tu­ry. “I orig­i­nal­ly com­mis­sioned the Appre­hen­sion Engine because I was tired of the same dig­i­tal sam­ples, which result­ed in a lot of same­ness,” says Kor­ven. “I was look­ing for some­thing more exper­i­men­tal, more acoustic, that would give me a lit­tle more of an orig­i­nal sound.”

Luthi­er Tony Dug­gan-Smith rose to the chal­lenge of craft­ing the Appre­hen­sion Engine. “You’re deal­ing with things that stir pri­mal emo­tions and feel­ings,” says Dug­gan-Smith of the sound of the instru­ment. Kor­ven thinks of it as “not music in the tra­di­tion­al sense at all,” but “it def­i­nite­ly evokes emo­tion, so I would call it music.” In a com­po­si­tion career more than three decades long,  Kor­ven has learned a thing or two about how to evoke emo­tion with sound. His best-known work so far is the score of Robert Eggers’ The Witch, which no less a hor­ror and sus­pense con­nois­seur than Stephen King has named as one of his favorite movies of all time. “The Witch scared the hell out of me,” King tweet­ed. “And it’s a real movie, tense and thought-pro­vok­ing as well as vis­cer­al.” And as the gui­tar-play­ing, music-lov­ing King under­stands, we react to noth­ing more vis­cer­al­ly than that which we hear.

Though the first Appre­hen­sion Engine was built by its very nature as a unique instru­ment, it has­n’t remained a one-off. The first Appre­hen­sion Engine begat an improved sec­ond ver­sion, or “V2,” and now, accord­ing to the instru­men­t’s offi­cial site, “there is an offi­cial V2+ mod­el which we are ready to pro­duce in small num­bers.” Upgrades include cus­tom mag­net­ic pick­ups, a “Hur­dy Gur­dy mech­a­nism,” and your choice of two dif­fer­ent mount­ing loca­tions for the reverb tank. A hand­made Appre­hen­sion Engine of your own won’t come cheap, and all pro­duc­tion runs will no doubt sell out as quick­ly as the first one did, but if you need to strike true hor­ror into the hearts of your lis­ten­ers, can you afford not to con­sid­er what Bri­an Eno, no stranger to the out­er lim­its of son­ic pos­si­bil­i­ty, has called “the most ter­ri­fy­ing musi­cal instru­ment of all time”?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Creepy 13th-Cen­tu­ry Melody That Shows Up in Movies Again & Again: An Intro­duc­tion to “Dies Irae”

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

Nick Cave Nar­rates an Ani­mat­ed Film about the Cat Piano, the Twist­ed 18th Cen­tu­ry Musi­cal Instru­ment Designed to Treat Men­tal Ill­ness

The Strange, Sci-Fi Sounds of Skat­ing on Thin Black Ice

A Big Archive of Occult Record­ings: His­toric Audio Lets You Hear Trances, Para­nor­mal Music, Glos­so­lalia & Oth­er Strange Sounds (1905–2007)

Meet the World’s Worst Orches­tra, the Portsmouth Sin­fo­nia, Fea­tur­ing Bri­an Eno

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Artist Ed Ruscha Reads From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in a Short Film Celebrating His 1966 Photos of the Sunset Strip

in Art, Books, Film, Literature, Philosophy | January 13th, 2020

In 1956, the Pop artist Ed Ruscha left Okla­homa City for Los Ange­les. “I could see I was just born for the job” of an artist, he would lat­er say, “born to watch paint dry.” The com­ment encap­su­lates Ruscha’s iron­ic use of cliché as a cen­ter­piece of his work. He called him­self an “abstract artist… who deals with sub­ject mat­ter.” Much of his sub­ject mat­ter has been com­mon­place words and phrases—decontextualized and fore­ground­ed in paint­ings and prints made with care­ful delib­er­a­tion, against the trend toward Abstract Expres­sion­ism and its ges­tur­al free­dom.

Anoth­er of Ruscha’s sub­jects comes with some­what less con­cep­tu­al bag­gage. His pho­to­graph­ic books cap­ture mid-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca gas sta­tions and the city he has called home for over 50 years. In his 1966 book, Every Build­ing on the Sun­set Strip, Ruscha “pho­tographed both sides of Sun­set Boule­vard from the back of a pick­up truck,” writes film­mak­er Matthew Miller. “He stitched the pho­tos togeth­er to make one long book that fold­ed out to 27 feet. That project turned into his larg­er Streets of Los Ange­les series, which spanned decades.”

Miller, inspired by work he did on a 2017 short film called Ed Ruscha: Build­ings and Words, decid­ed to bring togeth­er two of Ruscha’s long­stand­ing inspi­ra­tions: the city of L.A. and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which Ker­ouac sup­pos­ed­ly wrote as a con­tin­u­ous 120-foot long scroll—a for­mat, Miller noticed, much like Every Build­ing on the Sun­set Strip. (Ruscha made his own artist’s book ver­sion of On the Road in 2009). Miller and edi­tor Sean Leonard cut Ruscha’s pho­tographs togeth­er in the mon­tage you see above, com­mis­sioned by the Get­ty Muse­um, while Ruscha him­self read selec­tions from the Ker­ouac clas­sic.

The con­nec­tion between their style and their use of lan­guage feels real­ly strong, but at the end of the day, I sim­ply thought it’d be great to hear Ed Ruscha read On the Road. Some­thing about Ed’s voice just feels right. Some­thing about his work just feels right. It’s like the images, the words, and the forms he makes were always meant to be togeth­er.”

Miller describes the painstak­ing process of select­ing the pho­tos and “con­struct­ing a mini nar­ra­tive that evoked Ed’s sen­si­bil­i­ties” at Vimeo. The artist’s “per­spec­tive seemed to speak to the sig­nage and archi­tec­ture of the city, while Kerouac’s voice felt like it was pulling in all the live­ly char­ac­ters of the street.” It’s easy to see why Ruscha would be so drawn to Ker­ouac. Both share a fas­ci­na­tion with ver­nac­u­lar Amer­i­can speech and icon­ic Amer­i­can sub­jects of adver­tis­ing, the auto­mo­bile, and the free­doms of the road.

But where Ruscha turns to words for their visu­al impact, Ker­ouac rel­ished them for their music. “For a while,” Miller writes of his project, “it felt like the footage want­ed one thing and the voiceover want­ed anoth­er.” But he and Leonard, who also did the sound design, were able to bring image and voice togeth­er in a short film that frames both artists as mid-cen­tu­ry vision­ar­ies who turned the ordi­nary and seem­ing­ly unre­mark­able into an expe­ri­ence of the ecsta­t­ic.

173 works by Ruscha can be viewed on MoMA’s web­site.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Music from Jack Kerouac’s Clas­sic Beat Nov­el On the Road: Stream Tracks by Miles Davis, Dex­ter Gor­don & Oth­er Jazz Leg­ends

Roy Licht­en­stein and Andy Warhol Demys­ti­fy Their Pop Art in Vin­tage 1966 Film

A Brief His­to­ry of John Baldessari, Nar­rat­ed by Tom Waits

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

The First & Last Time Mister Rogers Sang “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” (1968–2001)

in K-12, Life, Television | January 13th, 2020

Mr. Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood, the icon­ic tele­vi­sion series that ran from 1968 to 2001, is a major child­hood touch­stone for so many.

Raise your hand if you have a Pavlov­ian response to the famil­iar open­ing seg­ment, in which Fred Rogers opens the front door to his hum­ble liv­ing room set, heads to the clos­et, singing, to exchange his jack­et for a com­fy cardi­gan sweater, and then sits on a wood­en deacon’s bench to swap out his street shoes for a pair of can­vas sneak­ers.

As per the show’s web­site, this rou­tine was a promise of sorts to view­ers:

I care about you, no mat­ter who you are and no mat­ter what you can or can­not do… Let’s spend this time togeth­er. We’ll build a rela­tion­ship and talk and imag­ine and sing about things that mat­ter to you.

Fans of all ages—some too young to have caught the show in its orig­i­nal run—have post­ed over 28,000 grate­ful, emo­tion­al com­ments on the video, above, which teams the open­ing seg­ment of the first episode, Feb­ru­ary 19, 1968, with that of the last episode, August 31, 2001.

The biggest change seems to be the move from black-and-white to col­or.

Oth­er­wise, the tweaks are decid­ed­ly minor.

The wood­en doors are replaced with sim­i­lar mod­els sport­ing cast iron hinges.

The win­dow seat gets some pil­lows.

The shut­ters give way to cafe cur­tains, open to reveal a bit of stu­dio foliage.

A fish tank is installed near the traf­fic light that sig­naled the start of every episode.

The clos­et fills with bright sweaters, many hand knit by Mr. Rogers’ mom—at some point, these tran­si­tioned from but­tons to zip­pers, which were eas­i­er to manip­u­late and were qui­eter near his body mic.

(Once, Mr. Rogers but­toned his sweater wrong, but opt­ed not to reshoot. Cast mem­ber David “Mr. McFeely” Newell recalled that his friend saw the on-cam­era boo boo as an oppor­tu­ni­ty “to show chil­dren that peo­ple make mis­takes.”)

There are the framed trol­ley prints and Pic­ture Pic­ture, as con­stant and unfash­ion­able as the braid­ed rug and Bicen­ten­ni­al rock­ing chairs that were a fea­ture of my grand­par­ents’ house.

It’s such a good feel­ing, a very good feel­ing, to see how loy­al Rogers and his pro­duc­ers were to these famil­iar ele­ments through­out the decades.

Brace your­self, friends.

Mr. Rogers was kind of over these open­ers.

As his wife, Joanne Rogers, told The New York Times in 2001, a few months before the final episode aired:

He does­n’t miss the show. I think he miss­es the Neigh­bor­hood of Make-Believe because he enjoyed work­ing with peo­ple around him. He real­ly loves all of them, and he’ll keep in touch. But he did not enjoy what he called ‘inte­ri­ors,’ the begin­ning and end­ings of the pro­grams. He had got­ten where he had real­ly dread­ed it so.

It wasn’t so much the repet­i­tive nature of the greet­ing as the need to put on make­up and con­tact lens­es, a telegenic con­sid­er­a­tion that didn’t fac­tor in to the old black-and-white days. Mr Rogers said that he would have pre­ferred pre­sent­ing him­self to the camera—and to the neigh­bors watch­ing at home—exactly as he did to his friends and neigh­bors in real life.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mr. Rogers’ Nine Rules for Speak­ing to Chil­dren (1977)

When Fred Rogers and Fran­cois Clem­mons Broke Down Race Bar­ri­ers on a His­toric Episode of Mis­ter Rogers’ Neigh­bor­hood (1969)

Mr. Rogers Takes Break­danc­ing Lessons from a 12-Year-Old (1985)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 3 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates New York, The Nation’s Metrop­o­lis (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.