Leonard Cohen Has Passed at Age 82: His New and Now Final Album Is Streaming Free Online

in Music | October 21st, 2016

Update on Novem­ber 10: We just got news that Leonard Cohen has passed, only a short few weeks after releas­ing his final album, avail­able below. The sad news comes from his Face­book page. 

Leonard Cohen’s new album You Want It Dark­er is stream­ing free online for a lim­it­ed time, thanks to NPR’s First Lis­ten site. Now 82 years old, and sens­ing that time is run­ning short, Cohen offers, writes Rolling Stone, a “gift to music lovers: a real­is­ti­cal­ly grim, spir­i­tu­al­ly radi­ant and deeply poet­ic world­view, gen­er­al­ly spiked with a roman­tic thrum and an exis­ten­tial wink.”

Hear the title track above. And stream the com­plete album right below. You can pur­chase your own copy of Cohen’s album on Ama­zon and iTunes. We’d also encour­age you to read this new pro­file of Cohen, writ­ten by The New York­er’s long-time edi­tor David Rem­nick. It’s quite poignant.

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:

Young Leonard Cohen Reads His Poet­ry in 1966 (Before His Days as a Musi­cian Began)

A Day in the Life of Zen Monk Leonard Cohen: A 1996 Doc­u­men­tary

Ladies and Gen­tle­men… Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Poet-Musi­cian Fea­tured in a 1965 Doc­u­men­tary

Leonard Cohen Reads The Great World War I Poem, “In Flan­ders Fields”

An Immersive Audio Tour of the East Village’s Famed Poetry Scene, Narrated by Jim Jarmusch

in History, Life, Podcasts, Poetry | October 21st, 2016

Image by Michiel Hendryckx, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

A peek at the pho­tos on a realtor’s list­ing for a New York City one bed­room apart­ment for­mer­ly occu­pied by Beat poet Allen Gins­berg is a dispir­it­ing reminder of how much the East Vil­lage has changed.

And that list­ing is over six years old!

Daniel Mau­r­er, the edi­tor of Bed­ford + Bow­ery, and a Gins­berg fan whom his­to­ry has com­pelled to take over a por­tion of his hero’s for­mer­ly sprawl­ing digs, wrote amus­ing­ly of shod­dy ren­o­va­tions and his upstairs neigh­bor, punk rock icon Richard Hell:

Orlovsky’s name is still on the mail­box – which is just about the only thing still around from his day. After his death, the place was gut ren­o­vat­ed with lux­u­ri­ous mod­ern ameni­ties like a mini fridge that comes up to mid-thigh and a stove that’s so tiny and inef­fec­tu­al I just use it for cook­book stor­age. Soon after I moved in I took a trip to Ikea and rec­og­nized my kitchen cab­i­nets there.

That’s why I was amused to read a piece in the Wall Street Jour­nal … in which my upstairs neigh­bor, Richard Hell, talked about his rent-sta­bi­lized two-bed­room apart­ment and its “funk­i­ness that you don’t find in Man­hat­tan much any­more.”

Hell describes his “worn unvar­nished wood floors that groan when you walk on them, cracks in the plas­ter walls, sag­ging orig­i­nal mold­ings.” That’s exact­ly what I was look­ing for in an apart­ment two years ago.

Mau­r­er is far from alone in the desire to edge clos­er to a bygone cul­tur­al moment. Radio pro­duc­er Pejk Mali­novski spent three years craft­ing Pass­ing Stranger, a site-spe­cif­ic audio tour of the East Vil­lage poet­ry scene, below.

A Dane who relo­cat­ed to New York in 2003, Mali­novs­ki was intrigued by the scene-relat­ed anec­dotes of his friend, poet Ron Pad­gett, who point­ed out his for­mer haunts on strolls about the neigh­bor­hood. His inter­est piqued, Mali­novs­ki immersed him­self in Daniel Kane’s All Poets Wel­come, The Low­er East Side Poet­ry Scene in the 1960’s, anoth­er his­to­ry that comes for­ti­fied with archival audio clips.

Film­mak­er Jim Jar­musch, a long­time Low­er East Side res­i­dent who stud­ied with poet Ken­neth Koch in his youth, was tapped to pro­vide the audio tour’s nar­ra­tion, with music com­pli­ments of com­pos­er John Zorn, the artis­tic direc­tor of The Stone, an exper­i­men­tal East Vil­lage per­for­mance space. Below, Jar­musch explains what attract­ed him to the project:

No mat­ter if geo­graph­ic con­straints pre­vent you from down­load­ing Malinovski’s tour for a two mile, 90 minute amble around the much-changed East Vil­lage. In some ways, the vir­tu­al tour is bet­ter. Rather than try­ing to take it all in in a sin­gle, pre-plot­ted ses­sion, you’re free to wan­der at will, enjoy­ing such inter­ac­tive fea­tures as maps and pho­tos, in addi­tion to inter­views, read­ings, and rem­i­nis­cences.

The 10th stop on the tour deposits you across the street from 437 East 12th Street, Ginsberg’s afore­men­tioned for­mer res­i­dence, on the steps of a church that no longer exists. Mary Help of Chris­tians Roman Catholic Church was demol­ished short­ly after Pass­ing Stranger hit the streets, but its mem­o­ry lives on thanks to its cel­e­brat­ed appear­ance in Ginsberg’s work:

Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writ­ing Let­ters

Pigeons shake their wings on the cop­per church roof 

out my win­dow across the street, a bird perched on the cross 

sur­veys the city’s blue-grey clouds. Lar­ry Rivers 

‘ll come at 10 AM and take my pic­ture. I’m tak­ing 

your pic­ture, pigeons. I’m writ­ing you down, Dawn. 

I’m immor­tal­iz­ing your exhaust, Avenue A bus. 

O Thought, now you’ll have to think the same thing for­ev­er!

- Allen Gins­berg, New York, June 7, 1980

Gins­berg him­self is brought to vivid life by his sec­re­tary and fel­low poet, Bob Rosen­thal, who recalls how vis­i­tors would call up from the street, then wait for Gins­berg to toss down keys, wrapped in a dirty sock. He also name checks Mr. Buon­giorno, the 437 East 12th St neigh­bor who served as Mary Help of Chris­tians’ bell ringer.

You can hear those bells in the back­ground of your Pass­ing Stranger tour, though pro­duc­er Mali­novs­ki uses ambi­ent sound spar­ing­ly, to avoid over­whelm­ing those using the tour on the noisy streets of the actu­al East Vil­lage.

You can down­load the full walk­ing tour of Pass­ing Stranger—named for Walt Whitman’s open­ing salu­ta­tion in “To a Stranger”—here.

Explore Pass­ing Stranger’s triv­ia-filled inter­ac­tive website—featuring audio from Amiri Bara­ka, Het­tie Jones, Eileen Myles, and Jack Ker­ouac, among oth­ers—here.

Poems includ­ed on the Pass­ing Stranger audio tour of the East Vil­lage, in order of appear­ance:

Ken­neth Koch, “To my Audi­ence” (excerpt)

Frank O’Hara, Ode to Joy (To hell with it) (excerpt)

Ted Berrri­g­an “Dear Margie, Hel­lo”

Ron Pad­gett “Poe­ma del City from Tou­jours l’amour”

Walt Whit­man, “To a Stranger”

Tay­lor Mead, “Motor­cy­cles”

Bernadette May­or, “Son­net (You jerk, you did­n’t call me up)”

Diane Di Pri­ma, “Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Let­ters” (excerpt)

Gal­way Kin­nell, “The Avenue Bear­ing the Ini­tial of Christ” (excerpt)

Miquel Piñero, “A Low­er East Side Poem” (excerpt)

Jack Ker­ouac, “Amer­i­can Haiku” (excerpt)

Bill Berk­son / Frank O’Hara, “Song Heard Around St. Bridget’s”

John Ash­bery, “Just Walk­ing Around, from A Wave”

Joe Brainard, “I Remem­ber” (excerpt)

Alice Not­ley, “10 Best Com­ic Books”

WH Auden, “Sep­tem­ber 1, 1939” (excerpt)

Anne Wald­man, “Fast Speak­ing Woman” (excerpt)

Lewis Warsh, “Eye Con­tact” (excerpt)

Dick Gallup / Ted Berri­g­an, “80th Con­gress”

Abra­ham Lin­coln, “My Child­hood-Home I See Again” (excerpt)

Leroi Jones, “Bang, bang, out­ish­ly” (excerpt)

Het­tie Jones, “Ode to My Kitchen Sink”

Bren­da Coul­tas, “A Hand­made Muse­um” (excerpt)

ee cum­mings, ”i was sit­ting in mcsorley’s…”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare Footage of Allen Gins­berg, Jack Ker­ouac & Oth­er Beats Hang­ing Out in the East Vil­lage (1959)

Hear Allen Gins­berg Teach “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats”: Audio Lec­tures from His 1977 & 1981 Naropa Cours­es

Iggy Pop Con­ducts a Tour of New York’s Low­er East Side, Cir­ca 1993

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Meet the Memphis Group, the Bob Dylan-Inspired Designers of David Bowie’s Favorite Furniture

in Design, Music | October 21st, 2016

David Bowie, in his years at Brom­ley Tech­ni­cal High School before becom­ing David Bowie, stud­ied not just music but art and design as well. Despite becom­ing a rock star, he nev­er for­got about the impor­tance of the visu­al, a sen­si­bil­i­ty man­i­fest in the per­for­mances he put on, the per­son­ae he assumed, and the music videos in which he starred right up until his death ear­li­er this year. After his suc­cess, the artist also became a full-fledged art con­nois­seur, and next month Sothe­by’s will hold Bowie/Collector, a series of three auc­tions “encom­pass­ing over 350 works from the pri­vate col­lec­tion of the leg­endary musi­cian.”

The first two auc­tions will sell Bowie’s mod­ern and con­tem­po­rary art; the third will focus entire­ly on his col­lec­tion of fur­ni­ture and oth­er pieces of design by Ettore Sottsass and the Mem­phis Group. Even if you haven’t heard of the Mem­phis Group, you’ve cer­tain­ly seen their fur­ni­ture. “It’s Pee-Wee’s Play­house meets Mia­mi Vice,” in the words of Alis­sa Walk­er at Giz­mo­do. “It’s Saved By The Bell plus Beetle­juice.” As the post­mod­ern wing of the 1980s Art Deco revival, Mem­phis “com­bined overt­ly geo­met­ric shapes from a vari­ety of mate­ri­als in bright, con­trast­ing col­ors. Graph­ic pat­terns — usu­al­ly black and white — were not unusu­al.”

Image by Zanone, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Mem­phis, whose influ­ence has extend­ed far beyond the move­men­t’s offi­cial life­time of 1981 to 1988, began “when Ettore Sottsass, one of Italy’s archi­tec­tur­al grandees, met with a group of younger archi­tects in his apart­ment on Milan’s Via San Galdino,” accord­ing to Design Muse­um. (Sot­tass had made his name with, among oth­er things, Olivet­ti’s bright-red Valen­tine portable type­writer.) “They were there to dis­cuss Sottsass’ plans to pro­duce a line of fur­ni­ture with an old friend, Ren­zo Bru­go­la, own­er of a car­pen­try work­shop,” an idea that turned into “an exu­ber­ant two-fin­gered salute to the design estab­lish­ment after years in which col­or and dec­o­ra­tion had been taboo.”

Why call it Mem­phis? Dur­ing the meet­ing, the group put on Bob Dylan’s song “Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Mem­phis Blues Again),” which gave Sot­tass the inspi­ra­tion. “Every­one thought it was a great name,” wrote Mem­phis mem­ber, and lat­er Mem­phis chron­i­cler, Bar­bara Radice, with its evo­ca­tions of “Blues, Ten­nessee, rock’n’roll, Amer­i­can sub­urbs, and then Egypt, the Pharoahs’ cap­i­tal, the holy city of the god, Ptah.” This aes­thet­ic foment even­tu­al­ly pro­duced such items found in the Bowie col­lec­tion as Michele de Luc­chi’s Flamin­go side table, Peter Shire’s Bel Air arm­chair, Achille and Pier Gia­co­mo Cas­tiglion­i’s friend­ly-look­ing radio-phono­graph, and Sot­tass’ own Carl­ton room divider, the most pop­u­lar Mem­phis object and one still made today.

Always aes­thet­i­cal­ly polar­iz­ing, Mem­phis has under­gone a bit of a revival in recent years: younger design­ers have looked to the group for ideas, and its sur­viv­ing mem­bers have heard a new call for their spe­cial brand of bold col­ors and strik­ing geom­e­try. In the video at the top of the post, gal­lerists Leo Koenig, Mar­garet Liu Clin­ton, and Joe Shef­tel show and tell about Mem­phis, and in the sub­se­quent videos you can learn more about Sottsass’ life and times and the mem­o­ries of Mem­phis design­er Mattheo Thun. Call the fruits of the Mem­phis Group’s labors dat­ed if you like — “it just looks like the 80s,” writes Walk­er — but they’re dat­ed, like many a Bowie or Dylan record, in the best way: unde­ni­ably time-stamped, yet some­how always fresh.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Charles & Ray Eames’ Icon­ic Lounge Chair Debuts on Amer­i­can TV (1956)

David Bowie Paper Dolls Recre­ate Some of the Style Icon’s Most Famous Looks

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“We Suck” — When Yale Pranked Harvard at the 2004 Big Football Game

in Random, Sports | October 21st, 2016

On a com­plete­ly lighter note.

The blurb to the Youtube video above reads as fol­lows: “In 2004, 24 enter­pris­ing Yale stu­dents cre­at­ed the non-exis­tent “Har­vard Pep Squad” for the big Har­vard-Yale foot­ball game. As the Pep Squad pumped up the Har­vard fans, they dis­trib­uted 1800 pieces of red and white con­struc­tion papers with the under­stand­ing that when all the cards were held up, it would spell “GO HARVARD” See what hap­pens next!”

To get more of the back­sto­ry on what hap­pened that day, read this account by the mas­ter­mind of the prank as well as this account from a 2005 edi­tion of Yale Dai­ly News.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Prince­ton v. Yale, 1903: The Old­est Col­lege Foot­ball Game on Film

The Har­vard Clas­sics: Down­load All 51 Vol­umes as Free eBooks

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

How Movie Studios Rejected Scripts During the Silent-Film Era: A Cold, 17-Point Checklist Circa 1915

in Film | October 20th, 2016

Born dur­ing the era of silent movies, the Essanay Film Man­u­fac­tur­ing Com­pa­ny pro­duced a series of Char­lie Chap­lin films in 1915, most notably includ­ing The Tramp. The Essanay doc­u­ment above shows us one thing: It did­n’t take long for the film indus­try to mas­ter the cold rejec­tion let­ter. Film­mak­ers could pour their heart and soul into writ­ing a script. And what did they get in return? A list of 17 pos­si­ble rea­sons to reject a man­u­script, with a deflat­ing check mark next to a par­tic­u­lar item. That’s it. No fur­ther expla­na­tion offered.

Essanay closed in 1925, prob­a­bly to the delight of some. You can still find some of Essanay’s films in our col­lec­tion of 65 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online.

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!

via @tedgioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejec­tion Let­ter from Pub­lish­er (1912)

Read Rejec­tion Let­ters Sent to Three Famous Artists: Sylvia Plath, Kurt Von­negut & Andy Warhol

No Women Need Apply: A Dis­heart­en­ing 1938 Rejec­tion Let­ter from Dis­ney Ani­ma­tion

T.S. Eliot, as Faber & Faber Edi­tor, Rejects George Orwell’s “Trot­skyite” Nov­el Ani­mal Farm (1944)

MoMA’s Artists’ Cookbook (1978) Reveals the Meals of Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois & More

in Art, Books, Food & Drink | October 20th, 2016

If we can con­sid­er some cooks artists, sure­ly we can con­sid­er some artists cooks. Madeleine Con­way and Nan­cy Kirk sure­ly oper­at­ed on that assump­tion when they put togeth­er The Muse­um of Mod­ern Art Artists’ Cook­book, which col­lects 155 recipes from 30 such fig­ures not pri­mar­i­ly known for their culi­nary acu­men as Sal­vador Dalí, Willem de Koon­ing, Louise Bour­geois, Andy Warhol, Helen Franken­thaler, Roy Licht­en­stein, and Chris­to and Jeanne-Claude. (“Strange­ly,” write the wags at Phaidon, “there are no wraps.”)

Pub­lished in 1978, the Artists’ Cook­book has long since left print, though pricey sec­ond-hand copies of the MoMA-issued edi­tion and some­what more afford­able copies of the spi­ral-bound trade edi­tion still cir­cu­late: Nick Harvill Libraries, for instance offers one for $125.

“Sim­plic­i­ty is a recur­ring theme,” says their site of the recipes con­tained with­in, which include Dalí’s red sal­ad, de Koon­ing’s seafood sauce, Bour­geois’ French cucum­ber sal­ad, Andy Warhol’s per­haps pre­dictable boil­ing method for Camp­bel­l’s canned soup, Franken­thaler’s poached stuffed striped bass, Licht­en­stein’s not entire­ly seri­ous “pri­mor­dial soup” (involv­ing “8cc hydro­gen” and “5cc ammo­nia”), and Chris­to and Jeanne-Claude’s com­plete “quick and easy filet mignon din­ner par­ty.”

Tak­en as a whole, the project cap­tures not just a dis­tinc­tive moment in Amer­i­can cul­ture when you could pub­lish a cook­book with pret­ty much any theme — we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Dalí’s own, which came out in 1973, and the rock-star-ori­ent­ed Singers & Swingers in the Kitchen, from 1967 — but an equal­ly dis­tinc­tive moment, and place, in Amer­i­can art. MoMA, as you might expect, brought in the artists with whom they had the clos­est con­nec­tions, which in the mid-1970s meant a par­tic­u­lar­ly influ­en­tial cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions who most­ly rose to promi­nence, and stayed in promi­nence, in New York City.

That’s not to say that the con­trib­u­tors to The Muse­um of Mod­ern Art Artists’ Cook­book were born into the art world. Brain Pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va quotes excerpts of the book’s inter­views with the artists about their ear­ly culi­nary lives: Bour­geois rues the “wast­ed hours” spent cook­ing for her father (“in those days a man had the right to have his food ready for him at all times.” De Koon­ing recalls his child­hood in pover­ty in Hol­land where, “when you had din­ner, it was always brown beans.” Dalí and Warhol put their eccen­tric­i­ties on dis­play, the for­mer with his all-white table (“white porce­lain, white damask, and white flow­ers in crys­tal vas­es”) and the lat­ter with his dec­la­ra­tion that “air­plane food is the best food.” De gustibus, as they say in food and art alike, non dis­putan­dum est.

via Phae­don/Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sal­vador Dalí’s 1973 Cook­book Gets Reis­sued: Sur­re­al­ist Art Meets Haute Cui­sine

The Jean-Paul Sartre Cook­book: Philoso­pher Pon­ders Mak­ing Omelets in Long Lost Diary Entries

Alice B. Tok­las Reads Her Famous Recipe for Hashish Fudge (1963)

Ernest Hemingway’s Sum­mer Camp­ing Recipes

Leo Tolstoy’s Fam­i­ly Recipe for Mac­a­roni and Cheese

1967 Cook­book Fea­tures Recipes by the Rolling Stones, Simon & Gar­funkel, Bar­bra Streisand & More

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The 4′33″ App Lets You Create Your Own Version of John Cage’s Classic Work

in Music | October 20th, 2016

Image via iTunes

John Cage’s 4’33” is one of the most infa­mous works of the 20th cen­tu­ry and which still has the abil­i­ty to divide peo­ple. Three move­ments of silence, where the per­former does noth­ing, it forces the audi­ence to lis­ten to its sur­round­ings and be present, a dis­til­la­tion of zen thought if there ever was one. In an increas­ing­ly dis­tract­ed age, being silent and present is very dif­fi­cult for most peo­ple. A Men­tal Floss arti­cle on the piece’s lega­cy ref­er­enced a 2014 Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia study where hun­dreds of peo­ple sat in silence for a total of 15 min­utes. “25 per­cent of women and 67 per­cent of men opt­ed to endure painful elec­tric shocks rather than pass the time with­out any stim­u­la­tion,” says the arti­cle.

Two years ago, the John Cage Trust launched the 4’33” app, which sounds coun­ter­in­tu­itive. How can a phone app make one present?

Well, it doesn’t exact­ly do that. Instead, it offers a chance for mem­bers to record and share their own “per­for­mances” of Cage’s famous piece, once again demon­strat­ing Cage’s result-—there is no real silence. (Even in 1951, one year before 4’33”’s com­po­si­tion, when Cage sat in a sound dead­en­ing ane­choic cham­ber in Har­vard, he could still hear the blood rush­ing in his veins.)

The iPhone app, which costs 99 cents, is sim­ple and comes with a record­ing of the piece from John Cage’s New York apart­ment, which high­lights the traf­fic sounds and police sirens. Tap on the “World of 4’33”” but­ton at the bot­tom and a world map opens, show­ing green push­pins in var­i­ous loca­tions where users record­ed their own moments of silence. (The project is sim­i­lar to the 2008 inter­net project of field record­ings, “One Minute Vaca­tion”).

One user’s Kaloli, Hawaii record­ing is all trop­i­cal insects and birds busy com­pos­ing their own music. The one some­body record­ed down­town in my home city is of our shop­ping mall at Christ­mas, with pedes­tri­ans, far off car­ols, and the sounds of com­merce. In Japan, there’s a love­ly record­ing of Chi­tose air­port, espe­cial­ly if you find echoey tan­noy announce­ments roman­tic (I do). From urban to sub­ur­ban to coun­try­side, this is a por­trait of a world that is nev­er silent.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cage’s Silent, Avant-Garde Piece 4’33” Gets Cov­ered by a Death Met­al Band

John Cage Per­forms His Avant-Garde Piano Piece 4’33” … in 1’22” (Har­vard Square, 1973)

Lis­ten to John Cage’s 5 Hour Art Piece: Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Mat­ters Worse)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The U.S. National Archives Launches an Animated GIF Archive: See Whitman, Twain, Hemingway & Others in Motion

in Archives, Web/Tech | October 19th, 2016

Does it mat­ter to you if some peo­ple insist on pro­nounc­ing GIF with a hard “g” rather than say­ing “Jiff,” as if they were telling you when they’d get back from the store? (I freely admit, I’m one of those peo­ple.) Well then, you, read­er, cer­tain­ly belong to a core audi­ence for the Nation­al Archives and Records Administration’s online library of ani­mat­ed “jiffs.” Clear­ly NARA knows the cor­rect pro­nun­ci­a­tion, since they announce their new col­lec­tion with the dat­ed pun “Get­ting’ Giphy With It.” And they know what the inter­net needs most from them in times like these: “qual­i­ty ani­mat­ed GIFs from a rep­utable source.”

NARA’s archive of jerky, silent, dig­i­tal mov­ing pic­tures resides at their GIPHY chan­nel, and con­tains an “ani­mat­ed his­to­ry of all fla­vors includ­ing major his­toric events, celebri­ties, Nation­al Parks, news­reels, ani­mat­ed patents, danc­ing sailors,” etc…

“… wait, what’s that?,” you say, “ani­mat­ed patents”? Yes. Admit­ted­ly, not all of the collection’s GIFs make the quip­pi­est of reac­tion shots. The archive does, as Alli­son Meier writes at Hyper­al­ler­gic, “tell US his­to­ry in motion.” But ani­mat­ed images of sta­t­ic photos—some dat­ing from before the days of animation—tend to look a lit­tle stiff, as in the GIF below, made from two dif­fer­ent expo­sures of a Walt Whit­man por­trait. Or the already exceed­ing­ly stiff por­trait fur­ther down of a young Mark Twain and friend.

Meier com­pares these GIF anachro­nisms to the New York Pub­lic Library’s “Stere­ograni­ma­tor,” a neat online tool that allows us to expe­ri­ence a 19th cen­tu­ry mechan­i­cal ver­sion of the GIF. In that regard, they join anti­quar­i­an inter­est with dig­i­tal curios­i­ty. But when we think of ani­mat­ed GIFs, we gen­er­al­ly think of weird lit­tle vignettes, like the image at the top, which shows us archi­tect William Van Alen dressed as his famous Chrysler Build­ing, from a 1931 gath­er­ing of the Soci­ety of Beaux-Arts Archi­tects (which we’ve fea­tured in a pre­vi­ous post).

You’ll find plen­ty of nos­tal­gic GIFS, such as (if you’re a GenX’er) that of Woody the “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pol­lute” pub­lic ser­vice owl, above.

Nat­u­ral­ly, the archive con­tains its share of images with world his­tor­i­cal significance—like the explod­ing swasti­ka in Nurem­berg from the end of World War II, above—and cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance, such as the tip­pling Hem­ing­way and boy­ish Bea­t­les, below.

Scenes from clas­sic films and TV shows, adver­tise­ments and pub­lic ser­vice cam­paigns… the resource “cur­rent­ly has over 150 NARA GIFs,” writes Meier, “with more con­tin­u­ing to be added.” Is this a pub­lic­i­ty stunt? Absolute­ly. “GIFs help keep us rel­e­vant,” remarks Dar­ren Cole of the Nation­al Archives, “but also fur­ther the agency’s mis­sion of pro­vid­ing access to our hold­ings to the pub­lic.”

In light of the pop­u­lar­i­ty of “his­to­ry image accounts” on social media, notes Meier, the NARA GIFs “are a savvy ini­tia­tive to con­nect a wider audi­ence with the rich­ness of the Nation­al Archives”—a way that allows users to accu­rate­ly doc­u­ment sources and place images in con­text. Each GIF on the NARA chan­nel links back to the Nation­al Archives Cat­a­log, with var­i­ous lev­els of descrip­tion and sourc­ing infor­ma­tion. Gim­mick or no, it’s a pret­ty cool resource full of some pret­ty cool GIFs—even, believe it or not, those “ani­mat­ed patents.”

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defy­ing Stunts Cap­tured in Ani­mat­ed Gifs

The His­to­ry of Rus­sia in 70,000 Pho­tos: New Pho­to Archive Presents Russ­ian His­to­ry from 1860 to 1999

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

H.G. Wells Reads Finnegans Wake & Tells James Joyce: It’s “A Dead End,” “You Have Turned Your Back on Common Men” (1928)

in Letters, Literature | October 19th, 2016

Images via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I first heard the phrase “ter­mi­nal aes­thet­ic” in a class on T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who col­lab­o­rat­ed on the final ver­sion of Eliot’s post World War I edi­fice, The Waste Land. That poem, went the argu­ment, trav­eled so far out on the edge, with its frag­ment­ed lan­guage and incon­gru­ous lit­er­ary and his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences, that it couldn’t pos­si­bly serve as a basis for new forms of writ­ing. Instead, Eliot had walked to the end of a promon­to­ry, and plant­ed a flag to mark a cre­ative and, per­haps, spir­i­tu­al dead end.

I’m not sure I agree, but the idea has always fas­ci­nat­ed me, that a work of art could be so rar­i­fied, so ahead of its read­ers, so idio­syn­crat­ic, inac­ces­si­ble, and strange, that it might escape all attempts at imi­ta­tion and domes­ti­ca­tion. There may be no greater exam­ple of such a project than James Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake. For all the admi­ra­tion and obses­sion it has inspired, for the many artists who have learned from this strange book (includ­ing, notably, A Clock­work Orange’s Antho­ny Burgess), it remains for near­ly all of us, in the words of H.G. Wells, a repos­i­to­ry of “vast rid­dles.”

Wells wrote to Joyce in 1928, regard­ing what was then sim­ply known as the Irish author’s “Work in Progress.” Excerpts were just then appear­ing piece­meal in jour­nals and being “passed around in lit­er­ary cir­cles,” writes Let­ters of Note,” to a large­ly baf­fled audi­ence.” It seems that Wells had been asked—perhaps by Joyce himself—to offer pub­lic com­ment or a blurb of some sort. He declined. “I’ve been study­ing you and think­ing over you a lot,” he begins. “The out­come is that I don’t think I can do any­thing for the pro­pa­gan­da of your work.”

Wells pro­fess­es a “great per­son­al lik­ing” for Joyce, but then details the “absolute­ly dif­fer­ent cours­es” their lives and thought had tak­en: “Your men­tal exis­tence is obsessed by a mon­strous sys­tem of con­tra­dic­tions,” Wells writes, and elab­o­rates with some dis­taste on Joyce’s scat­o­log­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal obses­sions. Then he turns to the work at hand, which would become Finnegans Wake:

Now with regard to this lit­er­ary exper­i­ment of yours. It’s a con­sid­er­able thing because you are a very con­sid­er­able man and you have in your crowd­ed com­po­si­tion a mighty genius for expres­sion which has escaped dis­ci­pline. But I don’t think it gets any­where. You have turned your back on com­mon men — on their ele­men­tary needs and their restrict­ed time and intel­li­gence… What is the result? Vast rid­dles. Your last two works have been more amus­ing and excit­ing to write than they will ever be to read. Take me as a typ­i­cal com­mon read­er. Do I get much plea­sure from this work? … No. So I ask: Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many wak­ing hours of the few thou­sand I have still to live for a prop­er appre­ci­a­tion of his quirks and fan­cies and flash­es of ren­der­ing?

A fair enough ques­tion, I sup­pose, and fair enough critique—one we might expect from the self-described “sci­en­tif­ic, con­struc­tive” mind of Wells. “To me,” he writes, “it is a dead end.”

Finnegans Wake con­tin­ues to baf­fle and frus­trate con­tem­po­rary read­ers, and writ­ers like Michael Chabon, who once described it as “hulk­ing, chimeri­cal, gib­ber­ing to itself in an out­landish tongue, a fright­en­ing beast out of leg­end.” Does Finnegans Wake speak to us com­mon read­ers, or does it “gib­ber” only to itself, leav­ing the rest of us behind? Like Ulysses, it’s best to tra­verse the book with a guide. Burgess has writ­ten a few (and has even auda­cious­ly abridged the nov­el). We must also remem­ber that Finnegans Wake is as much about sound as sense, and should be heard as well as read. (Hear Joyce him­self read from the nov­el here.)

Then there are the “frac­tal” expli­ca­tions of the nov­el, like Ter­rence McKenna’s and that of a recent sci­en­tif­ic study of its “mul­ti­frac­tal­i­ty.” I doubt any of this would have moved Wells, who demand­ed a clar­i­ty of thought and expres­sion that was anath­e­ma to the lat­er Joyce, immersed as he was in a project to dis­as­sem­ble the roots and branch­es of lan­guage and his­to­ry and repur­pose them for his own means. For all his puz­zle­ment over Joyce’s “exper­i­ment,” how­ev­er, Wells does seem to have found exact­ly the right word to cap­ture Joyce’s rad­i­cal lit­er­ary aims, describ­ing the writer of Ulysses and the inscrutable Finnegans Wake as “insur­rec­tionary.”

Read Wells’ full let­ter at Let­ters of Note, who also bring us a let­ter from a “Vladimir Dixon,” writ­ten in imi­ta­tion of Finnegans Wake, and pos­si­bly penned by Joyce him­self.

via The Paris Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce Reads ‘Anna Livia Plura­belle’ from Finnegans Wake

Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Read­ing

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Gets Turned into an Inter­ac­tive Web Film, the Medi­um It Was Des­tined For

H.G. Wells Pans Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis in a 1927 Movie Review: It’s “the Sil­li­est Film”

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

John Cleese & Jonathan Miller Turn Profs Talking About Wittgenstein Into a Classic Comedy Routine (1977)

in Comedy, Philosophy | October 19th, 2016

Every­one inter­est­ed in phi­los­o­phy must occa­sion­al­ly face the ques­tion of how, exact­ly, to define phi­los­o­phy itself. You can always label as phi­los­o­phy what­ev­er philoso­phers do — but what, exact­ly, do philoso­phers do? Here the Eng­lish come­di­ans John Cleese of Mon­ty Python and Jonathan Miller of Beyond the Fringe offer an inter­pre­ta­tion of the life of mod­ern philoso­phers in the form of a five-minute sketch set in “a senior com­mon room some­where in Oxford (or Cam­bridge).”

There, Cleese and Miller’s philoso­phers have a wide-rang­ing talk about Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, sens­es of the word “yes,” whether an “unfetched slab” can be said to exist, and the very role of the philoso­pher in this “het­ero­ge­neous, con­fus­ing, and con­fused jum­ble of polit­i­cal, social, and eco­nom­ic rela­tions we call soci­ety.” They come to the ten­ta­tive con­clu­sion that, just as oth­ers dri­ve bus­es or chop down trees, philoso­phers “play lan­guage games” — or per­haps “games at lan­guage” — “in order to find out what game it is that we are play­ing.”

As inten­tion­al­ly ridicu­lous as that expla­na­tion may sound, it would­n’t come across as espe­cial­ly out­landish in many phi­los­o­phy-depart­ment com­mon rooms today. Cleese and Miller, no strangers to play­ing their own kinds of lan­guage games, get laughs not so much from mock­ing the non­sen­si­cal com­plex­i­ties of phi­los­o­phy — and indeed, most of their lines make per­fect sense on one lev­el or anoth­er — as they do from so vivid­ly express­ing the dis­tinc­tive man­ner of the “Oxbridge Philoso­pher” char­ac­ters they por­tray. It has every­thing to do with man­ner, both ver­bal and phys­i­cal, tak­en to as absurd an extreme as their lines of think­ing.

Cleese and Miller’s ver­sion of the Oxbridge Philoso­pher sketch here comes from the 1977 Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al ben­e­fit show and tele­vi­sion spe­cial An Evening With­out Sir Bernard Miles (also known as The Mer­maid Frol­ics), but oth­ers exist. It goes at least as far back as Beyond the Fringe’s days pio­neer­ing their huge­ly influ­en­tial brand of British satire on the stage in the 1960s; their ear­li­er per­for­mance just above fea­tures Miller and fel­low troupe mem­ber Alan Ben­nett. It can still make us laugh today, but we might well won­der whether any­one in the his­to­ry of human­i­ty has ever real­ly sound­ed like this — in which case, we should watch footage of real-life Oxford philoso­phers back in those days and judge for our­selves.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mon­ty Python Sings “The Philosopher’s Song,” Reveal­ing the Drink­ing Habits of Great Euro­pean Thinkers

Mon­ty Python’s Philosopher’s Foot­ball Match: The Epic Show­down Between the Greeks & Ger­mans (1972)

John Cleese Touts the Val­ue of Phi­los­o­phy in 22 Pub­lic Ser­vice Announce­ments for the Amer­i­can Philo­soph­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion

Athe­ism: A Rough His­to­ry of Dis­be­lief, with Jonathan Miller

The Mod­ern-Day Philoso­phers Pod­cast: Where Come­di­ans Like Carl Rein­er & Artie Lange Dis­cuss Schopen­hauer & Mai­monides

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.