Learn How to Read Sheet Music: A Quick, Fun, Tongue-in-Cheek Introduction
You’re probably familiar with the scene in Milos Foreman’s Amadeus (or its brilliant 30 Rock parody). Thomas Hulce as the irreverent musical prodigy feverishly dictates the “Dies Irae” section of his final, unfinished Requiem Mass in D minor, conjuring it out of thin air. Mozart’s envious rival Salieri puts pen to paper, struggling to keep up (“You go too fast!”). The two composers hear exactly the same thing, the same piece of music the viewer hears playing. The Requiem flows through Mozart as though he were a divine avatar; we’re all supposed to hear it—the universal language of music, celestial and magnificent.
The cruel irony of the scene lies in its ability to convince us of just that, while showing us something far different. As his many perplexed moments demonstrate, Salieri doesn’t hear the music, he only sees Mozart’s gestures and hears him speaking a language most of us don’t know well, if at all. (It probably did not happen this way.) The sheet music in the film represents the music’s worldly mediation, through a language alien to the uninitiated, a collection of hieroglyphics as baffling as Cyrillic to the Telagu speaker and so on. But the uninitiated are rare. Most of us have had some musical education, however fleeting, whether at church, school, or home.
So none of us are Mozart—few of us are even Salieri—but we can all learn or relearn to decode and decipher the written language of music, even if we can’t hear it playing while we read it. As always, Youtube hosts its share of instructional videos of varying degrees of quality. The animated video at the top of the post might make the list of most entertaining, but bear in mind, it’s a tongue-in-cheek exercise, “a helpful guide created by an unqualified individual” (who initially declares himself a 12-year-old). Never had I seen an unreliable narrator in an instructional video before, but here you have it. On the whole, however, the video’s frustrated amateur creator Julian Cianciolo gets it right, and when he doesn’t, the few hundred musicians and teachers watching let him know. (Cianciolo promises to correct the bass clef in a follow-up.)
While Cianciolo gets to work on another video, you may want to check out some more straightforward resources. The playlist further up, from youcanplayit.com, offers a very thorough explanation of the staff, clefs, notes, time signatures, etc. It does not do so in the most exciting of ways, and many of its other lessons apply specifically to the piano or recorder. Just above, we have a lesson on the bass clef from the Music Theory Guy, who makes videos on, you guessed it, music theory, from beginner to advanced. His style is a bit more elliptical than that of youcanplayit, but his delivery more than makes up for it.
In a cheerful British accent, the Music Theory Guy gently coaxes us into a concept, like the bass clef, with simple but effective descriptions of the things around the bass clef. Another video, “The Importance of Middle C,” just above, does the same thing. These resources—even the fast-paced, deadpan “How to Read Sheet Music” at the top—all offer at the very least a refresher course on musical language comprehension. For many, they serve equally well as quality first introductions to musical symbols and some basic compositional theory.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Things to Come, the 1936 Sci-Fi Film Written by H.G. Wells, Accurately Predicts the World’s Very Dark Future
“We live in interesting, exciting, and anxious times,” declares the booming narration that opens the movie trailer above. Truer words were never spoken about our age — or about the mid-1930s, the times to which the narrator actually refers. But the picture itself tells a story about the future, one extending deep into the 21st century: a hundred-year saga of decades-long war, a new Dark Age, and, by the mid-2050s, a rebuilding of society as a kind of industrial Utopia run by a technocratic world government. It will surprise no one familiar with his sensibility that the screenplay for the film, Things to Come, came from the mind of H.G. Wells. Watch it in full on YouTube or Archive.org.
Welles had made his name long before with imaginative novels like The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds (find them in our list of Free eBooks), all published in the previous century. By the time the opportunity came around to make a big-budget cinema spectacle with producer Alexander Korda and director William Cameron Menzies, conceived in part as a rebuke to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the writer had settled into his role as a kind of “eminent fortune teller,” as New York Times critic Frank Nugent described him in his review of the collaboration’s final product.
“Typical Wellsian conjecture,” Nugent continues, “it ranges from the reasonably possible to the reasonably fantastic; but true or false, fanciful or logical, it is an absorbing, provocative and impressively staged production.” It included work from not just important figures in the history of filmmaking (Menzies, for instance, invented the job of production designer) but the history of art as well, such as the Bauhaus’ László Moholy-Nagy. You can watch and judge for yourself the free version of Things to Come available on YouTube or, much preferable to the cinephile, the restored and much-supplemented Criterion Collection edition, whose extras include unused footage that more fully shows Moholy-Nagy’s contributions.
At the time, this much-ballyhooed spectacle-prophecy drew responses not just from movie critics, but from other eminent writers as well. In his Criterion essay “Whither Mankind?”, Geoffrey O’Brien quotes those of both Jorge Luis Borges and George Orwell. “The heaven of Wells and Alexander Korda, like that of so many other eschatologists and set designers, is not much different than their hell, though even less charming,” Borges complained of the envisioned near-perfection of its distant future. Wells, like many 19th-century visionaries, instinctively associated technological progress with the moral variety, but Borges saw a different situation in the present, when “the power of almost all tyrants arises from their control of technology.”
Things to Come has, however, received retrospective credit for predicting global war just ahead. In its first act, the London-like Everytown suffers an aerial bombing raid which sets the whole civilization-destroying conflict in motion. Not long after the real Blitz came, Orwell looked back at the film and wrote, ominously, that “much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the concrete, the airplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.” Or, in Nugent’s chilling words of 1936, “There’s nothing we can do now but sit back and wait for the holocaust. If Mr. Wells is right, we are in for an interesting century.”
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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.
Read More...On Star Trek’s 50th Anniversary, Watch New Episodes of Star Trek Continues, the Acclaimed Fan-Made Sequel to the Original TV Show
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek, and the start of a love affair between fans and the show’s utopian promise. With only 79 episodes over three seasons in the original 1966–1969 series, it might have disappeared into pop culture history. Instead, it has lived long and prospered, with movies and sequels and New Generations, and reboots and more sequels. And that’s not counting the labor-of-love fan films that have spawned around the fringes.
Now, fan-created films usually fall down in the acting and effects department, or they try too hard. But even if you’re not a dedicated Trekkie, the independently-produced Star Trek Continues holds up as some great sci-fi that recreates the original series’ look to perfection, while skirting parody. (Plus it got the blessing of series creator Gene Roddenberry’s son, who said his father “would consider this canon.”)
When we first told you about Star Trek Continues in February, five hour-long episodes were viewable on YouTube or the show’s official website, funded through two Kickstarter campaigns and personal moneys from executive producer Vic Mignogna ($150,000) and co-executive producer Steven Dengler ($100,000). Above, you can check out the two new episodes, “Come Not Between the Dragons” (Episode 6) and “Embracing the Winds” (Episode 7). Or watch the entire series, from start to finish, below.
Despite Star Trek Continues’ not-for-profit status, other Star Trek fan films have raised the ire of CBS and Paramount’s legal divisions, and may end up harming the future of such endeavors. But remember, CBS had no faith in the original series back in the day, placing it in later and later time slots. It was syndication that made the show a cult hit, and it was those original fans that lovingly fanned the embers until the show reignited. For them on this half-century mark, they deserve as much a thank you as the original crew of the Starship Enterprise.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based 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.
Read More...Paul McCartney Shows You How to Make Mashed Potatoes (1998)
10 minutes of Macca making mash. That’s what’s on the menu today.
The clip above was shot back in December 1998, only eight months after Paul McCartney lost his wife Linda to breast cancer. Devastated by the loss, McCartney stayed out of the limelight for most of that year. And only with this show did he start entering public life again. A chance to remember Linda, an opportunity to experiment with this new thing called the internet, the show let Paul field questions from fans worldwide, reminisce about Linda, and make a recipe from her vegetarian cookbook, Linda McCartney on Tour: Over 200 Meat-Free Dishes from Around the World. The demo is pretty hands-on. He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty. It’s also comical and a joy to watch. And watch, you will.
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Read More...What Makes Vertigo the Best Film of All Time? Four Video Essays (and Martin Scorsese) Explain
Vertigo is the greatest motion picture of all time. Or so say the results of the latest round of respected film magazine Sight & Sound’s long-running critics poll, in which Alfred Hitchcock’s James Stewart- and Kim Novak- (and San Francisco-) starring psychological thriller unseated Citizen Kane from the top spot. For half a century, Orson Welles’ directorial debut seemed like it would forever occupy the head of the cinematic table, its status disputed only by the unimpressed modern viewers who, having attended a revival screening or happened across it on television, complain that they don’t understand all the critical fuss. The new champion has given them a different question to ask: what makes Vertigo so great, anyway?
Like Citizen Kane in 1941, Vertigo flopped at the box office in 1958, but Hitchcock’s film drew more negative reviews, its critics sounding baffled, dismissive, or both. Even Welles reportedly disliked it, and Hitchcock kept it out of circulation himself between 1973 and his death in 1980, a period when cinephiles — and cinephile-filmmakers, such as a certain well-known Vertigo enthusiast called Martin Scorsese — regarded it as a sacred document. Only in 1984 did Vertigo re-emerge, by which point it badly needed an extensive audiovisual restoration. It received just that in 1996, speeding up its ascent to acclaim, in progress at least since it first appeared on the Sight & Sound poll, in eighth place, in 1982.
“Why, after watching Vertigo more than, say, 30 times, are we confident that there are things to discover in it — that some aspects remain ambiguous and uncertain, unfathomably complex, even if we scrutinize every look, every cut, every movement of the camera?” asks critic Miguel Marías in an essay on the film at Sight & Sound. He lists many reasons, and many more exist than that. But nobody can appreciate a work with so many purely cinematic strengths without actually watching it, which perhaps makes the video essay a better form for examining the power of what we have come to recognize as Hitchcock’s masterpiece.
“Only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory — insane memory,” says the narrator of Chris Marker’s essay film Sans Soleil: “Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.” B. Kite and Alexander Points-Zollo’s three-part “Vertigo Variations” at the Museum of the Moving Image uses Marker’s interpretation, as well as many others, to see from as many angles as possible Hitchcock’s “impossible object: a gimcrack plot studded with strange gaps that nonetheless rides a pulse of peculiar necessity, a field of association that simultaneously expands and contracts like its famous trick shot, a ghost story whose spirits linger even after having been apparently explained away, and a study of obsession that becomes an obsessive object in its own right.”
The popular explainer known as the Nerdwriter looks at how Hitchcock blocks a scene by breaking down the visit by Stewart’s traumatized, retired police detective protagonist to the office of a former college classmate turned shipbuilding magnate. The conversation they have sets the story in motion, and Hitchcock took the placement of his actors and his camera in each and every shot as seriously as he took every other aspect of the film. Color, for instance: another video essayist, working under the banner of Society of Geeks, identifies Hitchcock’s use of rich Technicolor as a mechanism to heighten the emotions, with, as critic Jim Emerson writes it, “red suggesting Scottie’s fear/caution/hesitancy when it comes to romance, and its opposite green, suggesting the Edenic bliss (and/or watery oblivion) of his infatuation.” Ava Burke isolates another of Hitchcock’s visual devices in use: the mirroring that fills the viewing experience with visual echoes both faint and loud.
When he got to work on Vertigo, Hitchcock had already made more than forty films in just over three decades as a filmmaker. Though often labeled a “master of suspense” during his lifetime, he instinctively learned and deeply internalized a vast range of filmmaking techniques that film scholars, as well as his successors in filmmaking, continue to take apart, scrutinize, and put back together again. This most re-watchable of his pictures (and one that, according to several of the critics and video essayists here, transforms utterly upon the second viewing) makes use of the full spectrum of Hitchcock’s mastery as well as the full spectrum of his fixations. Whether or not you consider it the greatest motion picture of all time, if you love the art of cinema, you by definition love Vertigo.
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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.
Read More...Patti Smith’s New Haunting Tribute to Nico: Hear Three Tracks
Like Lou Reed, her reluctant co-leader in the Velvet Underground, German-born model-cum-singer Nico had a pronounced mean streak. Or, as Simon Reynolds writes in The Guardian, “talk of her dark side is accurate.” At a 1974 concert, Nico caused an audience riot by performing the German national anthem “complete with verses that had been banned after 1945 on account of their Nazi associations.” A 15-year-long addiction to heroin—“overwhelming,” as keyboardist James Young described it—did not help matters. “Being around Nico was kinda depressing,” recalls producer Joe Boyd, “She was a very tortured character.” When it comes to rock stars and artists, we typically gloss over social failings that would doom other professionals. That isn’t always easy to do in Nico’s case.
But it also isn’t easy to gloss over Nico’s musical legacy. Her flat, droning vocals on the Velvet’s debut album remain central to that band’s lasting influence. Songs like “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “I’ll be Your Mirror” defined the emerging underground sound of the late sixties that grew into punk and new wave in the seventies. Nico’s Chelsea Girl stands alone as an artistic achievement. Her and producer John Cale’s interpretations of songs like Jackson Browne’s “These Days” (memorably used in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums) served as neo-folk templates for decades to come.
When she began writing her own songs, inspired by onetime boyfriend Jim Morrison, Nico “eclipsed the Doors’ darkness” with her album The Marble Index, replacing “the summer of love with the winter of despair,” and delivering an album of profoundly beautiful bleakness—the songs, writes Reynolds, “glittering in their immaculate, lifeless majesty of someone cut off from the thawing warmth of human contact and fellowship.” A favorite of goths everywhere, The Marble Index frequently appears on lists of the most depressing albums of all time. Asked about the record’s dismal sales, Cale remarked, “you can’t sell suicide.”
Nico’s songs and Cale’s production gave us a completely European sound, “severed from rhythm-and-blues… harking back to something pre-Christian and atavistic.” That first album of original songs led to five more, culminating in 1985’s Camera Obscura. At what would fatefully be her final concert in 1988, Nico performed songs from that album, including the hypnotic, swirling “I Will Be Seven,” below. She died just a few months later while vacationing in Ibiza. Now, her final album forms the centerpiece of a tribute from another pioneering woman in pathbreakingly original underground music, Patti Smith.
Smith’s album, Killer Road—A Tribute to Nico, made with her daughter Jesse Paris Smith and the ambient trio Soundwalk Collective, includes the song “Fearfully in Danger,” which you can see live in Germany in the video at the top of the post. Below it, hear the title track, a chilling, atmospheric song meant to “approximate what the former Velvet Underground collaborator might have heard when she collapsed while bicycling in Ibiza in 1988,” writes Rolling Stone. Over the sounds of chirping insects and oscillating synths, Smith intones lyrics from Nico’s last album: “The Killer Road is waiting for you… I have come to die with you.”
As in her tributes to other artistic heroes like Virginia Woolf, Smith makes collage art from Nico’s words, weaving in strains of her own verse. In this case, she ties her fragmented phrases and Nico’s haunted lyricism to the specific moment of the singer’s death, giving lyrics like “I will be seven when I meet you in heaven” a resonance both mordant and vivid, made all the more so when we know that the birds, insects, breaking waves, and breezes that weave through Smith’s songs come from field recordings taken in sunny Ibiza at the site of Nico’s death. Hear Smith’s “cover” of “I Will Be Seven” below.
It’s a macabre concept album, to be sure, but Smith’s connection with Nico goes beyond morbid fascination. The two were mutual admirers—Nico called Smith “a female Leonard Cohen” for her successful integration of poetry and music, and Smith “later played an important role in Nico’s life,” buying back the singer’s prized harmonium at “‘an obscure shop’ in Paris, as Nico put it, after it had gone missing.” Nico remembered that Smith refused payment for the recovered instrument and “insisted the organ was a present.” The icy, depressive German singer was moved to tears. She would play the harmonium on her final album, and at her final concert—the perfect accompaniment to her strange, haunting voice and disturbing, dark lyricism.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The History of Stop-Motion Films: 39 Films, Spanning 116 Years, Revisited in a 3‑Minute Video
With the release of Kubo and the Two Strings, Vugar Efendi, a filmmaker in the UK, created The Evolution of Stop-Motion, a montage that brings together scenes from 39 stop-motion films, spanning 116 years. Although some trace the beginnings of stop-motion animation back to the 1898 film, The Humpty Dumpty Circus, Efendi’s montage takes The Enchanted Drawing (1900) as its starting point. Soon enough, we encounter Ladislas Starevich’s insect-filled film, The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912). And then onward we go, hurtling through time, eventually reaching a more familiar set of films (Beetlejuice, Wallace and Gromit, etc.). Find a complete list of films used in the montage below. And enjoy the ride.…
‑The Enchanted Drawing (1900)
‑Fun at the Bakery Shop (1902)
‑El Hotel Electrico (1905)
‑Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906)
‑The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912)
‑The Night before Christmas (1913)
‑Häxan (1922)
‑The Lost World (1925)
‑The Tale of Fox (1930 version)
‑King Kong (1933)
‑The New Gulliver (1935)
‑The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
‑It Came Beneath The Sea (1955)
‑Earth vs Flying Saucers (1956)
‑The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
‑Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
‑Closed Mondays (1975)
‑Star wars IV: A New Hope (1977)
‑Star Wars V: Empire Strikes Back (1980)
‑Clash of the Titans (1981)
‑The Terminator (1984)
‑Robocop (1987)
‑Beetlejuice (1988)
‑Wallace and Gromit: A grand day out (1990)
‑The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993)
‑The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
‑James and the Giant Peach (1996)
‑Chicken Run (2000)
‑Corpse Bride (2005)
‑Coraline (2009)
‑Mary and Max (2009)
‑Fantastic Mr.Fox (2009)
‑The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (2012)
‑Paranorman (2012)
‑Frankenweenie (2012)
‑Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
‑The Little Prince (2015)
‑Anomalisa (2015)
‑Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)
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Read More...Watch Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky Star in His Only Surviving Film, The Lady and the Hooligan (1918)
Tall and dashing, with the face of a boxer and glowering stare of a gangster, Russian Futurist poet, painter, director, and actor Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) came by his intimidating look honestly. As a teenage activist, he carried an unlicensed gun, freed female political prisoners, and “was dismissed from grammar school,” shortly after joining the Social Democratic Labor Party in 1908; “He spent much of the next two years in prison,” writes the Academy of American Poets, “due to his political activities.” A committed Bolshevik throughout his career, Mayakovsky celebrated the Revolution with poems and plays and devoted his talents to the Party, becoming a rare example of an avant-garde artist who makes populist art.
In many ways, Mayakovsky’s career seems representative, even exemplary, of the Futurist movement. Uncritically adopting Communist doctrine and embracing wholesale innovation, these artists fell victim to the same forces, as Socialist Realism increasingly became the official Soviet style and the rigid, bland arbiter of Party taste.
In 1912, Mayakovsky signed a manifesto with other Futurists “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” proposing, among other things, to “throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity.” Of other popular writers of the time, including Maxim Gorky and Ivan Bunin, the Futurists declared, “From the heights of skycrapers we gaze at their insignificance!…”
By 1918, Mayakovsky was a star. That year, he made three films, “for each of which he authored the scenario,” writes biographer Edward James Brown, “and played the principal part.” Two of the films have disappeared, the third, The Young Lady and the Hooligan, you can watch above. “A story of hopeless love,” the film stars Mayakovsky as the titular hooligan who falls for a new schoolmistress “sent into the slums to teach adult classes.” The hooligan enrolls and changes his ways, but is then killed tragically in a fight. Spoiler alert: “Before dying he begs his mother to have the teacher come to him. She comes, she kisses him on the lips, and he dies.”
The silent film, based on an 1885 Italian play called The Workers’ Young Schoolmistress, seems to have little to do with Soviet dogma, and yet it received tremendous acclaim, and became an instrument of propaganda, shown in mass screenings in Moscow and Leningrad on May Day of 1919. Film scholar Marina Burke suggests some of the reasons for its popularity: “many of the scenes are shot outdoors, and the film is rich in naturalistic details of current Soviet conditions”— the realist depiction of workers’ lives resonated widely with real-life workers. And yet, Mayakovsky’s film also displays those characteristics that make him a distinctly un-Soviet artist and would sometimes put him at odds with the State’s overbearing dogmatism.
Mayakovsky plays the hooligan in a “disconcertingly modern, disaffected-young-man style” that reminds critic Malcolm Le Grice of “a kind of precursor to Rebel Without a Cause, with Mayakovsky as a slightly improbable James Dean.” The poet was too much an individual to play an idealized everyman. Each of the protagonists in his three film draw from life—three versions of the artist who wrote critical poems like “A Talk with a Tax Collector” and satirical plays that made the State uneasy, even as he extolled its virtues at public events.
Mayakovsky would also not make strictly realist art, having disavowed its “filthy stigmas” the year previous in his Futurist Manifesto. The naturalist scenes in The Young Lady and the Hooligan “are interspersed,” writes Burke, “with flights of fancy that are almost surrealist in tone,” such as the schoolteacher menaced by dancing letters. Despite its conventional, sentimental plot and structure, Mayakovsky’s only surviving film presents us with a complicated, ambivalent work, almost “a parody of romantic fiction films,” and—like all of his work—the swaggering expression of a thoroughly individual artist.
The Young Lady and the Hooligan will be added to our collection of Silent Films, a subset of our meta list 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Good Morning, Mr. Orwell: Nam June Paik’s Avant-Garde New Year’s Celebration with Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Peter Gabriel & More
In his New York Times “TV Weekend” column of December 30, 1983, John O’Connor wrote up the scheduled “television festivities for the eve of 1984,” including the Guy Lombardo Orchestra at the Waldorf-Astoria; a special from CBS who, “looking for an updated image,” got Andy Williams to broadcast from the Plaza Hotel; Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve on NBC featuring Rick James, Culture Club, and Barry Manilow; and on a certain new “Music-TV channel,” live performances at the Savoy Club by Billy Idol, the Stray Cats, Cyndi Lauper, and the Thompson Twins, who couldn’t have made too late a night of it — they had to play again on New Year’s day, on a public television station planning to try “something considerably more ambitious.”
As 1984 began, a one-time-only broadcast (available on YouTube) brought together the avant-garde talents of Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, Yves Montand, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Beuys, Philip Glass, and Oingo Boingo.
What’s more, it all happened at the busily image-manipulating hands of video artist Nam June Paik, as writer, Paris Review editor, and sportsman George Plimpton played host. Its content came live via satellite from studios in New York, Paris, and San Francisco. Paik titled this technologically and aesthetically daring production Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, as a kind of scoff at the drab, dystopian 1984 from the more exciting real one. 25 million people tuned in.
Quoting Paik’s description of his broadcast as “symbolic of how television can cross borders and provide a liberating information-communications service,” O’Connor highlights such coming attractions as Anderson and Gabriel’s opening performance, cellist and longtime Paik collaborator Charlotte Moorman “recreating Mr. Paik’s famous, or notorious, ‘TV Cello,’ ” “Robert Rauschenberg, the artist, contributing commentary, “a performance by Urban Sax, consisting of 80 ‘futuristically costumed’ musicians, and, via videotape from West Germany, Salvador Dali and the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.”
Paik and his collaborators really do pack Good Morning, Mr. Orwell’s hour of television with an incredible amount of content. That content differed depending on whether you watched the version broadcast out of WNET in New York or the one out of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, sometimes according to plan, sometimes as a result of inevitable technical difficulties. The intersection of experimental art with still nearly experimental technology produces all the hitches, glitches, delays, and improvisations you’d expect.
The good-natured Paik considered it all part of the live-ness of the art, all just events in the “global disco” he’d built out of the latest electronic media technology. The son of a formerly well-to-do family who fled Korea for Japan at the outbreak of the Korean War, he went to Germany to study avant-garde composition after graduating from the University of Tokyo with a degree in aesthetics. He started working with televisions in the early 1960s, when he could buy old secondhand models cheaply. Using paint, neon, cameras, and much else besides, he turned these discarded sets into all manner of whimsical electronic sculptures.
“He’s made a TV buddha, he’s made a TV garden, he’s made a TV chair, a TV pyramid, a TV bra!” Moorman explains to Plimpton toward the end of this artistic extravaganza as she readies herself to play Paik’s TV cello. As it happens, I just last week laid eyes on the TV cello myself, still upright, glowing, and presumably ready to play a decade after Paik’s death (and a quarter-century after Moorman’s) at Seoul’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza. They’ve got a whole show dedicated to Paik’s work up and running through October, all of it as entertaining and prescient as ever. ”I never read Orwell’s book — it’s boring,” he once admitted, though that didn’t stop him from predicting things about the future the author of 1984 didn’t.
“Orwell portrayed television as a negative medium, useful to dictators for one-way communication. Of course, he was half-right,” said Paik, who wanted to “show its potential for interaction, its possibilities as a medium for peace and global understanding. It can spread out, cross international borders, provide liberating information, maybe eventually punch a hole in the Iron Curtain.’ ” (He even envisioned a now familiar-sounding “global university” where “vast quantities of up-to-date information on every conceivable subject can be stored, with computers to provide instant retrieval.”) The Iron Curtain would fall just five years later, but we’ve only just begun, after more than three decades, to explore the border-crossing, information-liberating potential of electronic media.
Find another version of Good Morning Mr. Orwell at UBUweb.
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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.
Read More...An Animated Introduction to French Philosopher Jacques Derrida
Since the bold arrival of his book Of Grammatology in 1967, French philosopher Jacques Derrida has been understood—or misunderstood—as many things: a radical relativist who ”rejects all of metaphysical history,” a fashionable intellectual playing language games, a brilliant phenomenologist of language…. One association he vehemently rejected was with the kind of ironic, laissez faire postmodernism represented by Seinfeld. But when it came to clarifying his work for puzzled readers and onlookers, Derrida could seem as willfully, frustratingly evasive in person as he was on the page. His work, writes Williams College professor Mark C. Taylor, can “seem hopelessly obscure… to people addicted to sound bites and overnight polls.”
Most people familiar with some of Derrida’s work know a few key terms of his thought: différance, trace, aporia, pharmakon. Those who’ve only heard the name probably know only one: Deconstruction, a “way of doing philosophy,” says Alain de Botton in his video introduction to Derrida above, that “fundamentally altered our understanding of many academic fields, especially literary studies.” But what exactly is “Deconstruction”? Rather than a method, Derrida himself described it as a process already occurring within a written work, one we can observe when we “do not assume that what is conditioned by history, institutions, or society is natural.”
Derrida’s meditations on the inability of language to contain or communicate natural or metaphysical truth developed in unique life circumstances. Born into a Jewish family in French colonial Algeria in 1930, the philosopher grew up very conscious of “having been in an inferior position at the nexus of three different religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which claimed to speak the truth,” says de Botton. Upon arriving in Paris to study in 1949, Derrida found himself even further on the social margins. “Though Derrida was not an autobiographical writer, it’s hard not to read his work as a response to bigotry and exclusion.”
The claim that the philosopher—whose name has almost become synonymous with post-modernism, for good or ill—was not an autobiographical writer may seem strange to some. One of his most-read books in college courses, Monolingualism of the Other, proceeds from an investigation into his fraught relationship with the French language because of his upbringing as a religious minority in a European colony. Later, Derrida delivered a ten-hour address to a conference called The Autobiographical Animal, published posthumously (and excerpted here).
Nonetheless, Derrida would not have made much of his place as the author, this being only a rhetorical occasion for analysis. Derrida, writes Nazenin Ruso at Philosophy Now, argued that “once the text is written, the author’s input loses its significance.” The person of the author—his or her physical presence, biographical experiences, emotions, desires, and intentions—becomes irretrievable for readers, one of many absences in the text that we mistake for presence.
It’s hard to see, then, how we can speak of what Derrida’s “hope” was for his readers’ self-improvement, as de Botton says in his video introduction. This being the School of Life, we are treated to a rather utilitarian reading of the philosopher, one he would perhaps reject. But Derrida bristled at the idea that language could suffice to tell us how and who to be in the world. His suspicion of logocentrism, “an over-hasty, naïve devotion to reason, logic, and clear definition,” says de Botton, means he felt that “many of the most important things we feel can never be expressed in words.” To hear Derrida talk about the problem of privileging language over other means of expression with an artist who uniquely agreed with his position, read his interview with jazz great Ornette Coleman.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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