Martin Luther King Jr. Explains the Importance of Jazz: Hear the Speech He Gave at the First Berlin Jazz Festival (1964)

in History, Music | October 21st, 2019

Mar­tin Luther King Jr.’s dream of full inclu­sion for Black Amer­i­cans still seems painful­ly unre­al fifty years after his death. By most sig­nif­i­cant mea­sures, the U.S. has regressed. De fac­to hous­ing and school seg­re­ga­tion are entrenched (and wors­en­ing since the 60s and 70s in many cities); vot­ing rights erode one court rul­ing at a time; the racial wealth gap has widened sig­nif­i­cant­ly; and open dis­plays of racist hate and vio­lence grow more wor­ri­some by the day.

Yet the move­ment was not only about win­ning polit­i­cal vic­to­ries, though these were sure­ly the con­crete basis for its vision of lib­er­a­tion. It was also very much a cul­tur­al strug­gle. Black artists felt forced by cir­cum­stances to choose whether they would keep enter­tain­ing all-white audi­ences and pre­tend­ing all was well. “There were no more side­lines,” writes Ashawn­ta Jack­son at JSTOR Dai­ly. This was cer­tain­ly the case for that most Amer­i­can of art forms, jazz. “Jazz musi­cians, like any oth­er Amer­i­can, had the duty to speak to the world around them, and to oppose the bru­tal con­di­tions for Black Amer­i­cans.”

Many of those musi­cians could not stay silent after the mur­der of Emmett Till, the 16th Street Bap­tist Church bomb­ing in Birm­ing­ham, and a string of oth­er high­ly pub­li­cized and hor­rif­ic attacks. Jazz was chang­ing. As Amiri Bara­ka wrote in a 1962 essay, “the musi­cians who played it were loud­ly out­spo­ken about who they thought they were. ‘If you don’t like it, don’t lis­ten’ was the atti­tude.” That atti­tude came to define post-Civ­il Rights Black Amer­i­can cul­ture, a defi­ant turn away from appeas­ing white audi­ences and ignor­ing racism.

As jazz musi­cians embraced the move­ment, so the move­ment embraced jazz. While King him­self is usu­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the gospel singers he loved, he had a deep respect for jazz as a form that spoke of “some new hope or sense of tri­umph.” Jazz, wrote King in his open­ing address for the 1964 Berlin Jazz Fes­ti­val, “is tri­umphant music…. When life itself offers no order and mean­ing, the musi­cian cre­ates an order and mean­ing from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instru­ment. It is no won­der that so much of the search for iden­ti­ty among Amer­i­can Negroes was cham­pi­oned by Jazz musi­cians.”

Jazz not only gave order to chaot­ic, “com­pli­cat­ed urban exis­tence,” it also pro­vid­ed crit­i­cal emo­tion­al sup­port for the Move­ment.

Much of the pow­er of our Free­dom Move­ment in the Unit­ed States has come from this music. It has strength­ened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich har­monies when spir­its were down.

King’s take on jazz par­al­leled his artic­u­la­tions of the move­men­t’s goals—he always under­stood that the par­tic­u­lar strug­gles of Black Amer­i­cans had spe­cif­ic his­tor­i­cal roots, and required spe­cif­ic polit­i­cal reme­dies. But ulti­mate­ly, he believed that every­one should be treat­ed with dig­ni­ty and respect, and have access to the same oppor­tu­ni­ties and the same pro­tec­tions under the law.

Jazz is export­ed to the world. For in the par­tic­u­lar strug­gle of the Negro in Amer­i­ca there is some­thing akin to the uni­ver­sal strug­gle of mod­ern man. Every­body has the Blues. Every­body longs for mean­ing. Every­body needs to love and be loved. Every­body needs to clap hands and be hap­py. Every­body longs for faith.

Jazz music, said King, “is a step­ping stone towards all of these.” Wrought “out of oppres­sion,” it is music, he said, that “speaks for life,” even in the midst of what could seem like death and defeat. Read King’s full address at WCLK 91.9. And at the top of the post, hear the speech read by San Fran­cis­co Bay Area artists for a 2012 cel­e­bra­tion on King’s birth­day.

The 1964 Berlin Jazz Fes­ti­val (poster above) was the first in the illus­tri­ous annu­al event. See many oth­er stun­ning posters from the series here.

via JSTOR Dai­ly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.’s Hand­writ­ten Syl­labus & Final Exam for the Phi­los­o­phy Course He Taught at More­house Col­lege (1962)

The His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al Jazz: Hear a Tran­scen­dent 12-Hour Mix Fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock & More

In the 1920s Amer­i­ca, Jazz Music Was Con­sid­ered Harm­ful to Human Health, the Cause of “Neuras­the­nia,” “Per­pet­u­al­ly Jerk­ing Jaws” & More

The Internet Archive Makes 2,500 More Classic MS-DOS Video Games Free to Play Online: Alone in the Dark, Doom, Microsoft Adventure, and Others

in Games, Internet Archive | October 21st, 2019

Back in 2015 we let you know that the Inter­net Archive made 2,400 com­put­er games from the era of MS-DOS free to play online: titles like Com­man­der Keen, Scorched Earth, and Prince of Per­sia may have brought back fond 1990s gam­ing mem­o­ries, as well as promised hours of more such enjoy­ment here in the 21st cen­tu­ry. That set of games includ­ed Id Soft­ware’s Wolfen­stein 3D, which cre­at­ed the genre of the first-per­son shoot­er as we know it, but the Inter­net Archive’s lat­est DOS-game upload — an addi­tion of more than 2,500 titles — includes its fol­low-up Doom, which took com­put­er gam­ing itself to, as it were, a new lev­el.

The Inter­net Archive’s Jason Scott calls this “our biggest update yet, rang­ing from tiny recent inde­pen­dent pro­duc­tions to long-for­got­ten big-name releas­es from decades ago.” After detail­ing some of the tech­ni­cal chal­lenges he and his team faced in get­ting many of the games to work prop­er­ly in web browsers on mod­ern com­put­ers — “a lot has changed under the hood and pro­grams were some­times only writ­ten to work on very spe­cif­ic hard­ware and a very spe­cif­ic set­up” — he makes a few rec­om­men­da­tions from this newest crop of games.

Scot­t’s picks include Microsoft Adven­ture, the DOS ver­sion of the very first com­put­er adven­ture game; the 1960s-themed rac­er Street Rod; and Super Munch­ers, one in a line of edu­ca­tion­al titles all of us of a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion will remem­ber from our class­room com­put­ers. Odd­i­ties high­light­ed by clas­sic game enthu­si­asts around the inter­net include Mr. Blob­by, based on the epony­mous char­ac­ter from the BBC com­e­dy show Noel’s House Par­ty; the undoubt­ed­ly thrilling sim­u­la­tor Pres­i­dent Elect — 1988 Edi­tion; and Zool, the only nin­ja-space-alien plat­former spon­sored by lol­lipop brand Chu­pa Chups.

This addi­tion of 2,500 com­put­er games to the Inter­net Archive also brings in no few undis­put­ed clas­sics whose influ­ence on the art and design of games is still felt today: Alone in the Dark, for exam­ple, prog­en­i­tor of the entire sur­vival-hor­ror genre; Microsoft Flight Sim­u­la­tor, inspi­ra­tion for a gen­er­a­tion of pilots; and Sim­C­i­ty 2000, inspi­ra­tion for a gen­er­a­tion of urban plan­ners. Among the adven­ture games, one of the strongest gen­res of the MS-DOS era, we have Dis­c­world, based on Ter­ry Pratch­et­t’s comedic fan­ta­sy nov­els, and from the mind of Har­lan Elli­son the some­what less comedic I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. One glance at the Inter­net Archive’s updat­ed com­put­er game col­lec­tion reveals that, no mat­ter how many games you played in the 90s, you’ll nev­er be able to play them all.

Get more infor­ma­tion on the new batch of games at the Inter­net Archive.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inter­net Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vin­tage Video Games in Your Web Brows­er (Free)

Free: Play 2,400 Vin­tage Com­put­er Games in Your Web Brows­er

Play a Col­lec­tion of Clas­sic Hand­held Video Games at the Inter­net Archive: Pac-Man, Don­key Kong, Tron and MC Ham­mer

1,100 Clas­sic Arcade Machines Added to the Inter­net Arcade: Play Them Free Online

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.

Banksy Launches a New Online Store: Make Purchases Through October 28

in Art | October 18th, 2019

Has Banksy sold out? Fans and crit­ics alike of the street-art provo­ca­teur-turned-glob­al­ly rec­og­niz­able brand can argue that ques­tion end­less­ly. But we do know, at least, that Banksy sells: ear­li­er this month he broke his own record when his 2009 paint­ing Devolved Par­lia­ment went for £9.88 mil­lion (about $12.20 mil­lion USD) at Sothe­by’s. Not all the fol­low­ers attract­ed by Banksy’s anti-cap­i­tal­is­tic, anti-cor­po­rate, anti-wealth image can afford to pay quite so much for a Banksy of their own, but if they can come up with any­thing from £10 to £850.00, they stand as much of a chance as any­one else of mak­ing a pur­chase from the artist’s new­ly opened online store, Gross Domes­tic Prod­uct, the sec­ond phase of a project that began, as many of Banksy’s ven­tures have, on a Lon­don street.

In this case it was­n’t a mur­al but a shop, or rather, an instal­la­tion designed to look like a shop, “opened” right in time for Frieze Week, when the art world pass­es through the city. “Tak­ing up large win­dows fac­ing the street, the shop, ‘where art irri­tates life,’ is a clas­sic dis­play of the artist’s inge­nu­ity and razor-sharp sense of rea­son and humor,” writes Jux­tapoz’s Sasha Bogo­jev.

Its stock includ­ed a “baby crib sur­veil­lance mobile toy, along with ‘ear­ly learn­ing count­ing set’ con­sist­ing of wood­en fig­ures of refugees, wel­come mats made from life vests sal­vaged from the shores of the Mediter­ranean, dis­co ball made from old police hel­mets, plates/clocks with run­ning rats, works on can­vas, cush­ions, and even bad­ly done ‘Banksky’ T‑shirts, mugs and plates.” Much to the dis­may of many a Frieze-goer, noth­ing in Banksy’s brick-and-mor­tar store was avail­able for sale.

But every­thing in Banksy’s online store is: “GrossDomesticProduct.com offers a wide range of house­hold prod­ucts, art­works and basi­cal­ly a whole range of Banksy™ knick-knacks,” writes Bogo­jev. “From mugs for which ‘the artist got the kids to do it, then signed the result,’ sculp­tur­al edi­tion made in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Escif, learn­ing sets, t‑shirts” — one mod­eled after Girl with Bal­loon, shred­ded bot­tom half and all — “soft toys, clocks, all the way to two new print edi­tions.” Such is Banksy’s pop­u­lar­i­ty that you might well assume every­thing has already run out, but no: each hope­ful buy­er can reg­is­ter to pur­chase one item — but just one — until Octo­ber 28th, at which point a lot­tery process will deter­mine which of them will actu­al­ly have the priv­i­lege of mak­ing their desired pur­chas­es. In the high­ly like­ly event of “demand out­strip­ping sup­ply,” Gross Domes­tic Prod­uct will use as a deter­min­ing fac­tor appli­cants’ respons­es, con­sist­ing of fifty words or few­er, to the ques­tion, “Why does art mat­ter?”

One hopes that when this lat­est Banksy stunt has fin­ished, the win­ning respons­es to that ques­tion will be made pub­lic; the art-world com­men­tari­at would cer­tain­ly make much of an answer from Banksy him­self. But Banksy-watch­ers know that the artist, what­ev­er his real iden­ti­ty, is always on the move: no soon­er have we learned of his lat­est piece of work, what­ev­er form it takes, than he’s primed the next one to drop. Banksy has described Gross Domes­tic Prod­uct as legal­ly moti­vat­ed, prompt­ed by a greet­ing card com­pa­ny’s attempts “to seize legal cus­tody of the name Banksy from the artist, who has been advised the best way to pre­vent this is to sell his own range of brand­ed mer­chan­dise.” If any­one makes Banksy greet­ing cards, it’s going to be Banksy. And if he were to announce his own Hall­mark Store, lines would sure­ly start form­ing right away.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behind the Banksy Stunt: An In-Depth Break­down of the Artist’s Self-Shred­ding Paint­ing

Banksy Strikes Again in Venice

Watch Dis­ma­land — The Offi­cial Unof­fi­cial Film, A Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney Through Banksy’s Apoc­a­lyp­tic Theme Park

Banksy Cre­ates a Tiny Repli­ca of The Great Sphinx Of Giza In Queens

Pat­ti Smith Presents Top Web­by Award to Banksy; He Accepts with Self-Mock­ing Video

The Always Bank­able Banksy

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.

Watch Teenage Kurt Cobain and Friends’ Horror Movie from 1984

in Film | October 18th, 2019

Because Kurt Cobain died so young (and some would say so mys­te­ri­ous­ly) his pre-Nir­vana works can be over-exam­ined as har­bin­gers of his fate. Maybe death was always rid­ing hard on his tail, these works can tell us, though any num­ber of pro­to-grunge teens in the Pacif­ic North­west would have been writ­ing about death and the dev­il. That’s the cool stuff, man.

A Super 8 film made by a 17-year-old Cobain, Dale Crover (future drum­mer of the Melvins) and Nir­vana bass play­er Krist Novosel­ic popped up among boot­leg col­lec­tors in 1998, and dates from 1984. Fans dubbed it “Kurt’s Bloody Sui­cide” to juice its val­ue, back in the days when you actu­al­ly had to buy bootlegs and then lat­er be very dis­ap­point­ed. Now it’s up on YouTube as “Kurt Cobain Hor­ror Movies.”

Crover has described it as “fuck­ing around with a cam­era,” which indeed it is, but with some intent. It fea­tures Kurt in a Mr. T mask, light­ing can­dles in a pen­ta­gram and snort­ing up a pile of cocaine (no doubt using a hid­den vac­u­um clean­er). Then some odd shots of a Mr. T pup­pet, somebody’s mom at the win­dow, a black labrador, very brief attempts at stop motion, somebody’s grand­dad, shots of down­town Aberdeen, Wash­ing­ton, and more goof­ing off (with a gui­tar!).

Then we get to the “mon­ey shot,” so to speak, with Cobain fake slit­ting his throat and stab­bing him­self. There’s some more knife vio­lence, then a shot of a cat, a shot of a dog, some fake gun vio­lence, plen­ty of shots of a pet tur­tle, and final­ly back to a hor­ror movie: a bloody Vir­gin Mary, and some stab­bings and some decent fake wounds. (How­ev­er, the trav­el­ing shot of the run­ning dog gets my vote for most skill­ful.)

Should we read any­thing into the gore and Satanism? (“This kid was a tick­ing time bomb,” says one YouTu­ber.)

I’d say no…and yes. There’s some­thing fun about watch­ing these bored teens mak­ing a film for their own enter­tain­ment. It’s sil­ly, unfo­cused, but def­i­nite­ly an indi­ca­tion that these guys want­ed out of their bor­ing town and they’d have to cre­ate some­thing to do that. Nir­vana was right around the cor­ner…

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Kurt Cobain Con­front­ed Vio­lence Against Women in His “Dark­est Song”: Nevermind‘s “Pol­ly”

How Nirvana’s Icon­ic “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Came to Be: An Ani­mat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by T‑Bone Bur­nett Tells the True Sto­ry

Ani­mat­ed Video: Kurt Cobain on Teenage Angst, Sex­u­al­i­ty & Find­ing Sal­va­tion in Punk Music

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Chill Out to 70 Hours of Oceanscape Nature Videos Filmed by BBC Earth

in Biology, Environment, Life, Nature, Science, Television | October 18th, 2019

Those who har­bor a deep-seat­ed fear of the water may want to look for oth­er meth­ods of stress relief than BBC Earth’s relax­ing 10-hour video loops, but every­one else is encour­aged to take a dip in these stun­ning nat­ur­al worlds, pre­sent­ed with­out com­men­tary or back­ground music.

All sev­en 10-hour playlists are salt-water based: coral reefs, coast­lines, deep ocean, open ocean, frozen seas, ocean sur­faces, and sea forests.

As in most com­pelling nature doc­u­men­taries, non-human crea­tures loom large, but unlike such BBC Earth offer­ings as Creepi­est Insect Moments or Ants Attack Ter­mite Mounds, there’s a benign, live-and-let-live vibe to the pro­ceed­ings.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the pho­tog­ra­phy is breath­tak­ing, and the uses of these marathon-length por­traits are man­i­fold: med­i­ta­tion tool, sleep aid, child soother, social media decom­pres­sor, trav­el­ogue, and—less calmingly—call to action.

Sci­ence tells us that many of these life forms, and the ocean in which they dwell, are in seri­ous dan­ger, thanks to decades of human dis­re­gard for the envi­ron­ment. This is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to immerse our­selves in what we stand to lose while it’s still pos­si­ble to do some­thing about it.

If that thought seems too depress­ing, there’s also strong sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence that nature doc­u­men­taries such as these pro­mote increased feel­ings of well­be­ing

What are you wait­ing for?

Click here to trav­el the oceans with polar bears, jel­ly­fish, dol­phins, sea­hors­es, bright­ly col­ored trop­i­cal fish and oth­er crea­tures of the deep, com­pli­ments of BBC’s Earth’s Ocean­scapes playlists.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch­ing Nature Doc­u­men­taries Can Pro­duce “Real Hap­pi­ness,” Finds a Study from the BBC and UC-Berke­ley

Bob Odenkirk & Errol Mor­ris Cre­ate Comedic Shorts to Help You Take Action Against Glob­al Warm­ing: Watch Them Online

Do Octopi Dream? An Aston­ish­ing Nature Doc­u­men­tary Sug­gests They Do

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Novem­ber 4 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Louise Jor­dan Miln’s “Woo­ings and Wed­dings in Many Climes (1900). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

How to Paint Like Willem De Kooning: Watch Visual Primers from the Museum of Modern Art

in Art | October 17th, 2019

Before you learn how to paint like Dutch Amer­i­can Abstract Expres­sion­ist Willem de Koon­ing, you might ask, why should you paint like Willem De Koon­ing? Shouldn’t every artist have his or her own inim­itable per­son­al style? We might ask, why learn to play piano like Nina Simone or write prose like William Faulkn­er? If you stop at mere imi­ta­tion, there may be no good rea­son to mim­ic the mas­ters.

But if you take their tech­niques and make them yours—steal, if you will, their best parts for your work—then, with enough tal­ent and per­sis­tence, you might be on your way toward an inim­itable per­son­al style of your own. Or, you could sim­ply watch these videos on how to paint like De Koon­ing to get a vivid, live-action demon­stra­tion of how the artist him­self did it.

You need nev­er have held a paint­brush to appre­ci­ate the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art’s “How to Paint Like” series, fea­tur­ing videos of MoMA edu­ca­tor and con­ser­va­tor Cory D’Augustine, who shows us how to imi­tate the meth­ods of not only of De Koon­ing, but also Jack­son Pol­lock, Mark Rothko, and Agnes Mar­tin. All of these tuto­ri­als come from D’Augustine’s Cours­era class “In the Stu­dio: Post­war Abstract Paint­ing.”

And as his oth­er videos, here D’Augustine offers a com­pre­hen­sive overview of the artist’s tools and tech­niques: low-vis­cos­i­ty oil paint held in large quan­ti­ties in bowls, rather than small blobs of paint on a palette; the big pow­er­ful full-body ges­tures to achieve “action paint­ing.” If you are try­ing this at home, be advised, D’Augustine moves fast, assum­ing a lot of pri­or expe­ri­ence and a seri­ous artist’s col­lec­tion of sup­plies.  Think more Bob Vila than Bob Ross—you will need a good set of tools. But if you’re aspir­ing to paint like De Koon­ing, odds are you’ve got it cov­ered.

D’Augustine has also been respon­sive to crit­ics in the com­ments, releas­ing the fol­low up Part 2 video, above, to address the absur­di­ty of actu­al­ly “doing a De Koon­ing-esque paint­ing in a day.” Addi­tion­al­ly, as he notes above, De Koon­ing “rein­vent­ed him­self again and again and again,” mean­ing “there cer­tain­ly isn’t one way, there cer­tain­ly aren’t a hun­dred ways, to make a De Koon­ing since he was relent­less­ly inven­tive.”

That is to say, we’re see­ing a curat­ed selec­tion of De Kooning’s mate­ri­als and appli­ca­tion tech­niques, which still may be quite enough to influ­ence a bud­ding painter on the way to a unique tech­nique of her own—or to inform De Koon­ing fans who do not paint, but who have stood before his fear­ful­ly, bru­tal­ly ener­getic can­vas­es and won­dered how they came to be.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The MoMA Teach­es You How to Paint Like Pol­lock, Rothko, de Koon­ing & Oth­er Abstract Painters

Jack­son Pol­lock 51: Short Film Cap­tures the Painter Cre­at­ing Abstract Expres­sion­ist Art

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

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

The Politics & Philosophy of the Bauhaus Design Movement: A Short Introduction

in Art, Design, History, Politics | October 17th, 2019

This year marks the cen­ten­ni­al of the Bauhaus, the Ger­man art-and-design school and move­ment whose influ­ence now makes itself felt all over the world. The clean lines and clar­i­ty of func­tion exhib­it­ed by Bauhaus build­ings, imagery, and objects — the very def­i­n­i­tion of what we still describe as “mod­ern” — appeal in a way that tran­scends not just time and space but cul­ture and tra­di­tion, and that’s just as the school’s founder Wal­ter Gropius intend­ed. A for­ward-look­ing utopi­an inter­na­tion­al­ist, Gropius seized the moment in the Ger­many left ruined by the First World War to make his ideals clear in the Bauhaus Man­i­festo: “Togeth­er let us call for, devise, and cre­ate the con­struc­tion of the future, com­pris­ing every­thing in one form,” he writes: “archi­tec­ture, sculp­ture and paint­ing.”

In about a dozen years, how­ev­er, a group with very lit­tle time for the Bauhaus project would sud­den­ly rise to promi­nence in Ger­many: the Nazi par­ty. “Their right-wing ide­ol­o­gy called for a return to tra­di­tion­al Ger­man val­ues,” says reporter Michael Tapp in the Quartz video above, “and their mes­sag­ing car­ried a type­face: Frak­tur.” Put forth by the nazis as the “true” Ger­man font, Frak­tur was “based on Goth­ic script that had been syn­ony­mous with the Ger­man nation­al iden­ti­ty for 800 years.” On the oth­er end of the ide­o­log­i­cal spec­trum, the Bauhaus cre­at­ed “a rad­i­cal new kind of typog­ra­phy,” which Muse­um of Mod­ern Art cura­tor Bar­ry Bergdoll describes as “polit­i­cal­ly charged”: “The Ger­mans are prob­a­bly the only users of the Roman alpha­bet who had giv­en type­script a nation­al­ist sense. To refuse it and redesign the alpha­bet com­plete­ly in the oppo­site direc­tion is to free it of these nation­al asso­ci­a­tions.”

The cul­ture of the Bauhaus also pro­voked pub­lic dis­com­fort: “Locals railed against the strange, androg­y­nous stu­dents, their for­eign mas­ters, their sur­re­al par­ties, and the house band that played jazz and Slav­ic folk music,” writes Dar­ran Ander­son at City­lab. “News­pa­pers and right-wing polit­i­cal par­ties cyn­i­cal­ly tapped into the oppo­si­tion and fueled it, inten­si­fy­ing its anti-Semi­tism and empha­siz­ing that the school was a cos­mopoli­tan threat to sup­posed nation­al puri­ty.” Gropius, for his part, “worked tire­less­ly to keep the school alive,” pre­vent­ing stu­dents from attend­ing protests and gath­er­ing up leaflets print­ed by fel­low Bauhaus instruc­tor Oskar Schlem­mer call­ing the school a “ral­ly­ing point for all those who, with faith in the future and will­ing­ness to storm the heav­ens, wish to build the cathe­dral of social­ism.” In their zeal to purge “degen­er­ate art,” the Nazis closed the Bauhaus’ Dessau school in 1932 and its Berlin branch the fol­low­ing year.

Though some of his fol­low­ers may have been fire­brands, Gropius him­self “was typ­i­cal­ly a mod­er­at­ing influ­ence,” writes Ander­son, “pre­fer­ring to achieve his social­ly con­scious pro­gres­sivism through design rather than pol­i­tics; cre­at­ing hous­ing for work­ers and safe, clean work­places filled with light and air (like the Fagus Fac­to­ry) rather than agi­tat­ing for them.” He also open­ly declared the apo­lit­i­cal nature of the Bauhaus ear­ly on, but his­to­ri­ans of the move­ment can still debate how apo­lit­i­cal it remained, dur­ing its life­time as well as in its last­ing effects. A 2009 MoMA exhi­bi­tion even drew atten­tion to the Bauhaus fig­ures who worked with the Nazis, most notably the painter and archi­tect Franz Ehrlich. But as Ander­son puts it, “there are many Bauhaus tales,” and togeth­er “they show not a sim­ple Bauhaus-ver­sus-the-Nazis dichoto­my but rather how, to vary­ing degrees of brav­ery and caprice, indi­vid­u­als try to sur­vive in the face of tyran­ny.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

How the Rad­i­cal Build­ings of the Bauhaus Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture: A Short Intro­duc­tion

The Bauhaus Book­shelf: Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books, Jour­nals, Man­i­festos & Ads That Still Inspire Design­ers World­wide

An Oral His­to­ry of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Inter­views (in Eng­lish) with Wal­ter Gropius, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe & More

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

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.

How Magazine Pages Were Created Before Computers: A Veteran of the London Review of Books Demonstrates the Meticulous, Manual Process

in Design, History, Magazines | October 16th, 2019

The Lon­don Review of Books is cel­e­brat­ing its 40th anniver­sary, but some­how the mag­a­zine has always felt old­er than that: not like the prod­uct of a stuffi­er age, but of a more tex­tu­al­ly and intel­lec­tu­al­ly lav­ish one than the late 1970s. Pick up an ear­ly issue and you’ll see that, as much as it has evolved in the details, the basic project of the LRB remains the same: pub­lish­ing essays of the high­est qual­i­ty on a vari­ety of sub­jects lit­er­ary, polit­i­cal, and oth­er­wise, allow­ing their writ­ers a length suf­fi­cient for prop­er engage­ment of both sub­ject and read­er, and — per­haps most admirably of all — refus­ing, in this age of inter­net media, to bur­den them with semi-rel­e­vant pic­tures and click­bait head­lines.

“Much in those ear­ly num­bers still looks fresh,” writes Susan­nah Clapp, who worked at the LRB dur­ing its first thir­teen years. “But the appa­ra­tus and sur­round­ings that pro­duced them seem antique. Type­writ­ers. Let­ters cov­ered in blotch­es of Tipp-Ex, for which the office name was ‘eczema.’ No screens; hand-drawn maps for lay­out; tins of Cow Gum.” The cow gum was an essen­tial tool of the trade for Bry­ony Dale­field, who since 1982 has worked “pret­ty near con­tin­u­ous­ly” for the LRB as what’s called a “paste-up artist.” In the video above, she describes how her job — whose title remains “pleas­ing­ly still in the vocab­u­lary in the dig­i­tal age” — once involved “lit­er­al­ly cut­ting up copy and past­ing it onto a board so it could be sent to the print­ers and pho­tographed for print­ing.”

Dale­field does­n’t just recount the process but per­forms it, sum­mon­ing a pre­sum­ably long-dor­mant but well-honed suite of skills to paste up a cur­rent page of the LRB just as she did it in the 80s. First she takes the text of an arti­cle, fresh from the print shop, and cuts it into columns with scis­sors. Then she spreads the Cow Gum, with its “strong petrol smell,” to fix the columns to the board, fear­ing all the while that she’ll stick them on out of order. Even in order, they usu­al­ly require the addi­tion or removal of words to fit just right on the page, and at the LRB, a pub­li­ca­tion to whose metic­u­lous edit­ing process each and every con­trib­u­tor can attest, anoth­er round of edits fol­lows the first past­ing. We then see why X‑ACTO knives are called that, since using one to replace indi­vid­ual words and phras­es on paper demands no small degree of exac­ti­tude.

With the wrong bits cut out and the right ones past­ed in and held down with Mag­ic Tape, the com­plet­ed page is ready to be sent back to the print­er. Past­ing-up, which Dale­field frames as a mar­ry­ing of the work of edi­tors and typog­ra­phers, will seem aston­ish­ing­ly labor-inten­sive to most any­one under the age of 50, few of whom even know how mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers put togeth­er their pages before the advent of desk­top pub­lish­ing. But the very word “desk­top,” in the com­put­er-inter­face sense, speaks to the metaphor­i­cal per­sis­tence of the old ways through what Dale­field calls the “falling out of trades” in the dig­i­tal age. I myself have done a fair bit of “cut­ting,” “copy­ing,” and “past­ing” writ­ing this very post — but I sup­pose I nev­er did say, “Oh, that’s very sticky” while doing so.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The End of an Era: A Short Film About The Last Day of Hot Met­al Type­set­ting at The New York Times (1978)

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Writ­ten With a Type­writer

The Art of Mak­ing Old-Fash­ioned, Hand-Print­ed Books

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

J.G. Ballard’s Exper­i­men­tal Text Col­lages: His 1958 For­ay into Avant-Garde Lit­er­a­ture

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.

Watch a Newly-Created “Epilogue” For Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

in Film | October 16th, 2019

If after watch­ing Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, you imme­di­ate­ly want more 2001: A Space Odyssey, then you are a true fan—especially if you don’t con­sid­er the sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Con­tact, to be any­thing of the kind, Arthur C. Clarke’s impri­matur notwith­stand­ing.

But how will true fans react to the three-and-a-half minute, “epi­logue” to Kubrick­’s film, above, set 203 years after 2001 and fol­low­ing astro­naut Frank Poole’s body as it tra­vers­es Jupiter’s space and encoun­ters a mono­lith?

Poole (played by Gary Lock­wood), you’ll remem­ber, was killed by the HAL 9000 com­put­er when he became an incon­ve­nience to the AI. In 3001, the final book of Clarke’s tril­o­gy, his body is found, pre­served, 1000 years lat­er and brought to life. Here, things turn out a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly. No fan of Kubrick’s film will care much about the depar­ture from canon.

But what about the cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage? Is the epilogue’s cre­ator, Steve Begg, a pro­fes­sion­al visu­al effects artist, able to con­vinc­ing­ly mim­ic the master’s touch? I’d say he comes as close as any­one could, though the final shot does not feel par­tic­u­lar­ly Kubrick­ian to me. This labor of love was also a labor of cin­e­mat­ic art, “using prac­ti­cal mod­els and dig­i­tal ver­sions of the tricks used in the orig­i­nal,” as Begg writes on the project’s Vimeo page.

He offers his imag­i­na­tive adden­dum “with respect to Stan­ley K., Wal­ly Veev­ers and Doug Trum­bull” (the prac­ti­cal visu­al effects mas­ter­minds of the orig­i­nal film). Begg also admits to “ignor­ing 2010 and 3001 sor­ry, A.C. Clarke.” You’ll rec­og­nize the music as that of Richard Strauss and Gyor­gi Ligeti from Kubrick’s orig­i­nal score. The musi­cal cues, silences, abrupt edits and shifts in per­spec­tive, rhythm, and tem­po, and the ambi­tious grandeur all ring true.

If you don’t con­sid­er it a sac­ri­lege (and if so, fair enough), you might see Begg’s epi­logue as a work of art all its own, one that impres­sive­ly res­ur­rects the chilly epic feel of the 1968 clas­sic using dig­i­tal tools from fifty years lat­er.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick Explains the Mys­te­ri­ous End­ing of 2001: A Space Odyssey in a New­ly Unearthed Inter­view

Watch the Open­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Orig­i­nal, Unused Score

Watch Steven Soderbergh’s Re-Edit­ed Ver­sion of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Free Online

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

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

in Film | October 15th, 2019

“Kipling is in the pecu­liar posi­tion of hav­ing been a byword for fifty years,” writes George Orwell in a 1942 essay on the author of The Jun­gle Book and “Man­dalay.” “Dur­ing five lit­er­ary gen­er­a­tions every enlight­ened per­son has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlight­ened per­sons are for­got­ten and Kipling is in some sense still there.” A sim­i­lar truth holds for Fight Club, David Fincher’s film adap­ta­tion of the Chuck Palah­niuk nov­el, which over the past twen­ty years to the day since its wide release has out­last­ed all the seri­ous, intel­li­gent, and indeed enlight­ened cri­tiques mount­ed against it. Fight Club has long been a byword, if not since its finan­cial­ly dis­ap­point­ing run in the the­aters, then at least since its deluxe DVD release. But what does that byword sig­ni­fy?

For many, it sig­ni­fies the tastes and atti­tudes of a cer­tain kind of twen­tysome­thing male — and giv­en the unabat­ed preva­lence of Fight Club posters in fresh­man dorm rooms and fra­ter­ni­ty hous­es, hard­ly with­out cause. At first glance, its sub­ject mat­ter also looks geared straight toward angry young men, telling as it does of a white-col­lar cor­po­rate drone who breaks out of his office dystopia by get­ting togeth­er with sim­i­lar­ly alien­at­ed late-20th-cen­tu­ry men and beat­ing one anoth­er sense­less. Before long, these “fight clubs” cohere into a nation­wide ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion bent on destroy­ing con­sumer soci­ety. For some view­ers, the movie would seem to have it all: vio­lence, of course, but also sex, spe­cial effects, and satire aplen­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly at the icons of so-called “late cap­i­tal­ism.” (Leg­end has it that Finch­er worked a Star­bucks cup into near­ly every scene.)

Oth­er view­ers argue — mak­ing what Orwell, writ­ing on Kipling, calls a “shal­low and famil­iar charge” — that Fight Club is “fas­cist.” They see it as glo­ri­fy­ing the act of rais­ing a shaven-head­ed, black-clad, repet­i­tive­ly chant­i­ng army under a charis­mat­ic leader, in this case a Niet­zschean Über­men­sch by the name of Tyler Dur­den. Por­trayed by Brad Pitt in per­haps the most mem­o­rable role of his career, Dur­den emerges from the mind of Fight Club’s name­less nar­ra­tor (an increas­ing­ly pale and wast­ed Edward Nor­ton) in order to set him on his jour­ney. “He’s tried to do every­thing he was taught to do, tried to fit into the world by becom­ing the thing he isn’t,” Finch­er has said of that nar­ra­tor’s jour­ney. “He can­not find hap­pi­ness, so he trav­els on a path to enlight­en­ment in which he must ‘kill’ his par­ents, god, and teacher.”

The nar­ra­tor cre­ates Tyler, his teacher, and “kills his god by doing things they are not sup­posed to do. To com­plete the process of matur­ing, the nar­ra­tor has to kill his teacher.” Writ­ing at philo­soph­i­cal sub­red­dit The Motte, Red­di­tor Dormn111 sums up Tyler’s world­view as fol­lows: “Men are suf­fer­ing today because they are inher­ent­ly unsuit­ed for the social demands of moder­ni­ty.” Evolved to be “vio­lent, aggres­sive, and dri­ven by their very real bio­log­i­cal urges,” men are now “told that these aspects of them­selves are bar­bar­ic, evil, and wor­thy of con­dem­na­tion.” There is no place in Fran­cis Fukuya­ma’s post-strug­gle “end of his­to­ry” for “the gut-lev­el desires that men feel in their bones. There is no vic­to­ry, no pow­er, no dom­i­nance. Every­thing the man is sup­posed to do builds towards some sort of high­er sta­tus, but the gains are illu­so­ry.”

Par­tic­i­pa­tion in a fight club is “an act of self-destruc­tion to counter the soci­etal obses­sion with self-improve­ment,” since it “makes men ugly, injured, tired, late for work, and shifts their pri­or­i­ties from the fem­i­nine social hier­ar­chy tread­mill to a nar­cot­ic-like rush of mas­cu­line grat­i­fi­ca­tion.” It gives them “a real sense of stakes in their lives, like the sort that mor­tal com­bat would have giv­en them in the past.” In the words of the Wise­crack video on the phi­los­o­phy of Fight Club at the top of the post, which draws on thinkers like Jacques Der­ri­da, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, these men rebel against a sys­tem that “favors effi­cien­cy over tra­di­tion, cus­tom, or indi­vid­ual desires” and pro­duces stul­ti­fy­ing lives in which is every­thing is “designed for a spe­cif­ic pur­pose, mass-pro­duced and unre­lent­ing­ly pre­dictable.”

The same cre­ators break down the act of inter­pre­ta­tion, using the tools of semi­otics and prag­ma­tism, in their video on the mean­ing of Fight Club and why we still can’t agree on it. Fans and detrac­tors alike come to espe­cial­ly dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions about the film’s end­ing in which the nar­ra­tor kills his teacher, a scene The Take attempts to explain in its own video essay. And despite being idea-dri­ven, Fight Club also offers one of the more vis­cer­al view­ing expe­ri­ences (and for some, an entire­ly too-vis­cer­al view­ing expe­ri­ence) in all of cin­e­ma, thanks not only to visu­als that strug­gle against con­tain­ment by the very medi­um of film, but also to the work of foley artists revealed in Film Radar’s video on the movie’s sound design — the crafts­men tasked with mak­ing the impact of a punch sound, unlike in most Hol­ly­wood pic­tures, as if it actu­al­ly hurts.

Fight Club con­tin­ues to make an impact of its own, as exam­ined in the Fan­dor video just above. It names among the film’s lovers Quentin Taran­ti­no and among its haters Paul Thomas Ander­son, so whichev­er side you take on it, you’ll share an opin­ion with one of the most respect­ed film­mak­ers alive today. But then, Fincher’s own auteur sta­tus should give pause to any­one who dis­miss­es Fight Club out of hand. As the rel­e­vant chap­ter of Cameron Beyl’s Direc­tors Series video essay tells it, mak­ing the movie was itself an act of rebel­lion against “the sys­tem,” specif­i­cal­ly the stu­dio sys­tem, and even more specif­i­cal­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Fox, the stu­dio that ruined his fea­ture debut Alien 3 with its inter­fer­ence. After Finch­er bounced back with hits Sev­en and The Game, Fox want­ed him back to direct an adap­ta­tion of Palah­niuk’s nov­el. Despite describ­ing him­self as a“non-reader,” Finch­er devoured the book, which shared some of his own pet themes, includ­ing nihilism and anti-com­mer­cial­ism.

Fox, see­ing the ben­e­fit in smooth­ing out their rela­tion­ship with a film­mak­er who showed signs of becom­ing a box office-friend­ly Alfred Hitch­cock crossed with Stan­ley Kubrick, allowed Finch­er a near-carte blanche, cre­ative­ly speak­ing. “Once Finch­er knew how to play his med­dle­some exec­u­tives to his ben­e­fit,” Beyl says, “he became tru­ly unstop­pable.” Finch­er and his col­lab­o­ra­tors, most notably screen­writer Jim Uhls, did­n’t make the kind of rad­i­cal changes to Palah­niuk’s nov­el that film adap­ta­tions usu­al­ly do to their source mate­r­i­al. The Cine­Fix video below goes point-by-point through all the dif­fer­ences between book and film, many of which have to to with the char­ac­ter of Tyler Dur­den: the book presents him as more of a psy­chot­ic killer, while the film presents him as a kind of an ide­al­ist: down-and-dirty yet high-mind­ed.

But does it also make him too hand­some, too cool, too quotable? No exam­i­na­tion of Fight Club, no mat­ter how close, con­clu­sive­ly deter­mines the film’s own posi­tion on Tyler or any oth­er char­ac­ter, let alone its judg­ment of broad eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, and ide­o­log­i­cal con­cepts like cap­i­tal­ism and fas­cism (put on screen, in one of the film’s many ironies, by a for­mer com­mer­cial direc­tor and a Hol­ly­wood heart­throb). “I love this idea that you can have fas­cism with­out offer­ing any direc­tion or solu­tion,” Finch­er once said. Fas­cism insists on going in one par­tic­u­lar direc­tion, “but this movie could­n’t be fur­ther from offer­ing any kind of solu­tion.” Fight Club endures because it resists straight­for­ward inter­pre­ta­tion, ensur­ing that dis­agree­ments about it will nev­er be set­tled. And indeed, now that its themes hap­pen to dove­tail with so many of today’s vogue terms — “patri­archy,” “bro cul­ture,” “tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty” — the argu­ments have grown more heat­ed than ever. 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Why 1999 Was the Year of Dystopi­an Office Movies: What The Matrix, Fight Club, Amer­i­can Beau­ty, Office Space & Being John Malkovich Shared in Com­mon

Watch Author Chuck Palah­niuk Read Fight Club 4 Kids

The Truth Behind Jane Austen’s Fight Club: Female Prize Fights Were a Thing Dur­ing the 18th Cen­tu­ry

How Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner Illu­mi­nates the Cen­tral Prob­lem of Moder­ni­ty

Wes Anderson’s Break­through Film, Rush­more, Revis­it­ed in Five Video Essays: It Came Out 20 Years Ago Today

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.