1930s Fashion Designers Predict How People Would Dress in the Year 2000

in Fashion, History, Technology | June 23rd, 2016

From 1930 to 1941, Pathetone Week­ly ran film clips that high­light­ed ‘the nov­el, the amus­ing and the strange.’ At some point dur­ing the 1930s (the exact date isn’t clear), Pathetone asked Amer­i­can design­ers to look rough­ly 70 years into the future and haz­ard a guess about how women might dress in Year 2000. Appar­ent­ly, fash­ion design­ers don’t make great futur­ists, and the designs fell rather wide of the mark — unless you want to count Lady Gaga’s wardrobe, in which case they didn’t do a half bad job. Or, for that mat­ter, the male con­nect­ed 24/7 to his phone and sundry gad­gets…

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:

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing the Future

Isaac Asimov’s 1964 Pre­dic­tions About What the World Will Look 50 Years Lat­er — in 2014

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

In 1900, Ladies’ Home Jour­nal Pub­lish­es 28 Pre­dic­tions for the Year 2000

Hear a 64-Hour Playlist of Sherlock Holmes Stories, With Performances by Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson & Many More

in Literature, Radio | June 23rd, 2016

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When I first read all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries, hav­ing found them col­lect­ed in full (not, of course, includ­ing last year’s “lost” sto­ry) in two old vol­umes at an antique store, I under­stood imme­di­ate­ly why they’d so quick­ly become so pop­u­lar with their first read­er­ship in the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­turies. Or rather, I should say that I felt it–that per­fect align­ment of form and sub­stance that only comes along in pop­u­lar art every few decades.

Whether that hap­pened as a result of Doyle’s crafts­man­ship or his luck I don’t know, but it turns out that the adven­tures of his con­sult­ing detec­tive play as well on the speak­ers as they do on the page, though in quite a dif­fer­ent way. You can expe­ri­ence that dif­fer­ence for your­self, and expe­ri­ence it exten­sive­ly, with Spo­ti­fy’s 64-hour, 163-track playlist of Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries per­formed aloud. (If you don’t have Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.)

The very first voice it presents is Doyle’s own, speak­ing briefly on Holmes and spir­i­tu­al­ism, which gives us time to set­tle in for a five-part ren­di­tion of the very first in the Holmes canon (and thanks to “more female inter­est than is usu­al,” one of Doyle’s per­son­al favorites), “A Scan­dal in Bohemia.” It comes per­formed by Sir John Giel­gud and Sir Ralph Richard­son, two of the most respect­ed actors in 20th-cen­tu­ry British the­ater. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured their por­tray­als, Giel­gud’s of Holmes and Richard­son’s of Wat­son (and we can hard­ly neglect to men­tion the one and only Orson Welles’, of Mori­ar­ty), on the New Adven­tures of Sher­lock Holmes radio dra­ma.

But this playlist pro­vides a wealth of oth­er voic­es from var­i­ous eras inter­pret­ing Doyle’s most beloved works as well, a vari­ety that cer­tain­ly suits its pro­tag­o­nist, the most-por­trayed lit­er­ary char­ac­ter of all time — which means that, unlike the col­lect­ed print canon of Sher­lock Holmes adven­tures (that “lost” sto­ry and its mys­te­ri­ous author­ship aside), the col­lect­ed audio adven­tures of Sher­lock Holmes will only grow longer and longer, so those who want to lis­ten to them all had best get on the case with­out delay.

You can find this playlist added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Also find Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries in our oth­er col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Vin­tage Sher­lock Holmes Radio Dra­ma, Star­ring John Giel­gud, Orson Welles & Ralph Richard­son

Watch the First Sher­lock Holmes Movie (1900), the Arrival of the Most Pop­u­lar Char­ac­ter in Cin­e­ma

Read the Lost Sher­lock Holmes Sto­ry That Was Just Dis­cov­ered in an Attic in Scot­land

Down­load the Com­plete Sher­lock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Mas­ter­piece

Arthur Conan Doyle Names His 19 Favorite Sher­lock Holmes Sto­ries

Arthur Conan Doyle Dis­cuss­es Sher­lock Holmes and Psy­chics in a Rare Filmed Inter­view (1927)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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.

Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and “Self Portrait” Painted on Dark Water, Using a Traditional Turkish Art Form

in Art | June 22nd, 2016

And now for some­thing a lit­tle whim­si­cal and fun.

Above, watch artist Garip Ay use a tra­di­tion­al Turk­ish art form, known as Ebru art, or mar­bling, to paint Van Gogh’s ‘Star­ry Night’ and ‘Self-Por­trait’ on water. Mar­bling, Ay told ABC News, is “the prac­tice of apply­ing paint to the sur­face of thick­ened water and cre­at­ing pat­terns and images by manip­u­lat­ing the paint.” “The water, in addi­tion to being thick­ened by car­rageenan pow­der, was col­ored black for this project.” Give the video four short min­utes, and you can watch Ay’s project unfold. Find many more mar­bling videos on the artist’s web­site.

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 ABC News/The Kids Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Hun­dreds of Van Gogh Paint­ings, Sketch­es & Let­ters in High Res­o­lu­tion

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

The Unex­pect­ed Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Star­ry Night”

Artist Turns a Crop Field Into a Van Gogh Paint­ing, Seen Only From Air­planes

Hear the Great Mixtapes Richard Linklater Created to Psych Up the Actors in Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!

in Film, Music | June 22nd, 2016

Richard Linklater’s films have become increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed as the 90s indie break­out writer-direc­tor has grown into his auteur­hood. From the loose ston­er vérité of Slack­ers (watch it online) to the loose but heady ani­ma­tion of Wak­ing Life to the painstak­ing­ly metic­u­lous “mod­el of cin­e­mat­ic real­ism” of Boy­hood, Lin­klater has a unique­ly Amer­i­can vision and the unde­ni­able tal­ent to real­ize it in full.

But most­ly when I think of Lin­klater, I think—excuse my language—of cock rock.

I think of Dazed and Con­fused’s super senior Wood­er­son, lean­ing against a mus­cle car, drawl­ing “alright, alright, alright,” and crank­ing Aero­smith. I think of wild-eyed Jack Black in School of Rock, strap­ping a Gib­son Fly­ing V on an uptight, sweater-vest­ed youth and teach­ing him Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” riff. And now, I think of a gang of short shorts-wear­ing col­lege base­ball dudes in the “cam­pus bro­mance” Every­body Wants Some!!, singing along (above) to Sug­ar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”…. wait…

So, okay, it ain’t all cock rock. But Linklater’s films are often so dude-cen­tric, and so informed by pop­u­lar music of cer­tain eras, that he titled two of his most per­son­al—Dazed and Con­fused and its recent “spir­i­tu­al sequel”—after anthems from the two most arche­typ­i­cal­ly cock rock bands, Led Zep­pelin and Van Halen.

Where Dazed and Con­fused’s high school milieu more or less stayed anchored in 70s hard rock, Every­body Wants Some!!—like its com­par­a­tive­ly adven­tur­ous col­lege jocks—takes sev­er­al musi­cal detours from beer-and-babes 80s clichés. The film’s sound­track, for exam­ple, includes “deep cuts” from Bri­an Eno, obscure local Texas punk rock band The Big Boys, and L.A.-based 80s New Wave/R&B band The Bus­boys.

It’s true, then, that the songs choic­es on Every­body Wants Some!!, which you can hear almost in their entire­ly (sans a few) above, are fair­ly diverse, genre-wise, com­pared to the cock-rock-heavy list of songs from Dazed and Con­fused (fur­ther up). And when it comes to Linklater’s musi­cal inspi­ra­tions for both films, we see that dif­fer­ence as well.

As the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion blog doc­u­ments—bring­ing us the 1992 let­ter above (read it here) from Lin­klater to his cast—the direc­tor put togeth­er “a thought­ful series of mix­tapes to get his cast into the mind-set” of Dazed and Con­fused. And Cri­te­ri­on put togeth­er the Spo­ti­fy playlist below of the songs Lin­klater gave his actors. As you’ll see, it’s most­ly balls-to-the-wall hard rock, with some oblig­a­tory 70s dis­co and a few cuts from Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Elton John. In his accom­pa­ny­ing let­ter, Lin­klater admits “a few of the songs are a lit­tle cheezy,” but also notes “there are a few places for iron­ic usage.” For the most part, he says, “this music… is like the movie itself—straightforward, hon­est and fun.”

When it came time to begin shoot­ing Every­body Wants Some!! (get the offi­cial sound­track here), Lin­klater again used the same method to get his cast in the mood, cir­cu­lat­ing the songs in the playlist below (though prob­a­bly not on cas­settes). Here we get a much more diverse, com­pre­hen­sive musi­cal sum­ma­ry of the decade in ques­tion, with Michael Jack­son sit­ting next to Elvis Costel­lo, Pat Benatar and Dire Straits next to Pink Floyd, Sis­ter Sledge, Queen, and Cha­ka Khan.

It’s an inter­est­ing tran­si­tion that may—musically—signal the move from teenage fan­dom to the more curi­ous, adven­tur­ous lis­ten­ing habits of ear­ly adult­hood. Col­lege, after all, is not only where young Amer­i­cans of the mod­ern era dis­cov­er new sex­u­al and chem­i­cal plea­sures, but also where they acquire new musi­cal tastes. And in the 80s espe­cial­ly, the bound­aries of pop music expand­ed.

“That’s just how it felt to me to be a young per­son at that time. It was cool to be into every­thing,” Lin­klater com­ment­ed to Cor­nelia Rowe at Yahoo: “There was a lot of new­ness in the era. You didn’t real­ly appre­ci­ate it at the time – it’s like, there are all these new bands! There’s this new wave, punk, par­ty, R&B – there’s a thing called rap music from New York!”

The ath­lete bros in Linklater’s lat­est, very male-ori­ent­ed piece of cin­e­mat­ic nos­tal­gia “at once embody and upend the stereo­type of the shal­low, sex­u­al­ly enti­tled jock,” writes A.O. Scott in his review. Roam­ing far afield of their com­fort zones, they “have a good time wher­ev­er they are.” That’s pret­ty much guar­an­teed, I think, with the fine­ly-curat­ed 80s gems in these playlists as their sound­track.

via the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Free Online: Richard Linklater’s Slack­er, the Clas­sic Gen‑X Indie Film

Scenes from Wak­ing Life, Richard Linklater’s Philo­soph­i­cal, Fea­ture-Length Ani­mat­ed Film (2001)

A Playlist of 172 Songs from Wes Ander­son Sound­tracks: From Bot­tle Rock­et to The Grand Budapest Hotel

Scenes from Wak­ing Life, Richard Linklater’s Philo­soph­i­cal, Fea­ture-Length Ani­mat­ed Film (2001)

Watch Heavy Met­al Park­ing Lot, the Cult Clas­sic Film That Ranks as One of the “Great Rock Doc­u­men­taries” of All Time

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

Surrealist Filmmaker Jan Švankmajer Is About to Make His Final Feature Film, and You Can Help Produce It

in Animation, Film | June 22nd, 2016

No film­mak­er com­bines live action with stop-motion quite like Jan Švankma­jer, and cer­tain­ly no film­mak­er has used that com­bi­na­tion to such imag­i­na­tive and trou­bling ends. An avowed sur­re­al­ist who got his start in ani­ma­tion more than half a cen­tu­ry ago in his home­land of the for­mer Czecho­slo­va­kia, he’s con­tin­ued to craft his dis­tinc­tive cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ences how­ev­er and when­ev­er pos­si­ble through the decades. His fil­mog­ra­phy now includes such endur­ing trips as Dimen­sions of Dia­logue (see below), which no less a vision­ary than Ter­ry Gilliam calls one of the best ani­mat­ed films of all time; Alice, his dark inter­pre­ta­tion of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land; and Lit­tle Otik, a mod­ern­iza­tion of a folk­tale about a tree stump that turns into a mon­strous baby.

But as well as he brings the bizarre to vivid life on screen, he’s always had high­er ambi­tions than that. “Švankma­jer is capa­ble of cre­at­ing dark yet play­ful worlds that dis­sect the very core of our soci­ety,” says the Indiegogo page now rais­ing the funds for his lat­est — and last — fea­ture film, Insects. “The civ­i­liza­tion we live in has lit­tle inter­est in authen­tic artis­tic cre­ation,” laments the film­mak­er. “What it needs is well-work­ing adver­tise­ment, the icono­graph­ic con­tem­po­rary art, push­ing peo­ple towards more and more mass con­sump­tion. It gets increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to fund inde­pen­dent art that scru­ti­nizes the very core of our soci­ety. Who would delib­er­ate­ly sup­port their own crit­ics?”

Now, in this age of crowd­fund­ing, you can sup­port one of its most enter­tain­ing crit­ics alive your­self. Insects has already suc­ceed­ed in rais­ing the first phase of its bud­get, but still has a way to go before it can assure its esteemed cre­ator and his col­lab­o­ra­tors full artis­tic free­dom (Švankma­jer is look­ing to raise $400,000 in total), so if you’d like to chip in, you can make your­self eli­gi­ble for such rewards as the first oppor­tu­ni­ty to down­load the film, its Blu-Ray edi­tion with an accom­pa­ny­ing art book, or even — if you’ve got $15,000 to put toward the cause — “a din­ner with Jan Švankma­jer at his man­sion in Czech Repub­lic and a com­ment­ed vis­it to his Kun­stk­abi­net.” Even now, work on Insects, its Indiegogo page assures us, is under­way, with Švankma­jer “very busy vis­it­ing ento­mo­log­i­cal auc­tions, buy­ing var­i­ous kinds of bugs, doing rehearsal shots with them and so on.”

If you’d like to learn more about the dra­ma that they’ll ulti­mate­ly act out, watch the pro­mo video at the top of the post. In it, Švankma­jer describes it as set in a pub, after hours, where an ama­teur the­ater group has gath­ered to rehearse The Insect Play by the Čapek broth­ers. But “as the rehearsal pro­gress­es, the char­ac­ters of the play are born and die with no regard to time,” and the actors “expe­ri­ence fright­en­ing trans­for­ma­tions.” Švankma­jer, who has planned not a direct adap­ta­tion of The Insect Play but a more com­plex work that draws inspi­ra­tion both from it and The Meta­mor­pho­sis by his oth­er well-known coun­try­man Franz Kaf­ka, puts the appeal of this sto­ry where “bugs behave as human beings, and peo­ple behave as insects” sim­ply: “The Čapek broth­ers’ play is very mis­an­throp­ic. I’ve always liked that.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mas­cot, Pio­neer­ing Stop Ani­ma­tion Film, by Wla­dys­law Starewicz

Dimen­sions of Dia­logue by Jan Svankma­jer (1982)

The Best Ani­mat­ed Films of All Time, Accord­ing to Ter­ry Gilliam

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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.

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

in Music | June 21st, 2016

My small city is still com­ing down from the ela­tion of last month’s Moogfest, a three-day extrav­a­gan­za of per­for­mances, work­shops, sem­i­nars, films, and oth­er activ­i­ties relat­ing to music made by the syn­the­siz­ers designed and influ­enced by Robert Moog.

This year’s fes­tiv­i­ties includ­ed sev­er­al per­for­mances from New Wave star Gary Numan; appear­ances by leg­ends like Devo’s Mark Moth­ers­baugh, Parliament-Funkadelic’s Bernie Wor­rell, Negativland’s Chris Grigg, and Can’s Mal­colm Moony; and trib­utes to recent­ly deceased Japan­ese synth mas­ter Isao Tomi­ta and British prog rock super­star Kei­th Emer­son…. And yes, many excel­lent younger female artists per­formed and gave work­shops and talks, but as a new­com­er to the scene, you’d be for­giv­en for think­ing that ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions of elec­tron­ic musi­cians were almost exclu­sive­ly male.

And that impres­sion would be entire­ly off the mark, even if it has been rein­forced again and again in ret­ro­spec­tives, doc­u­men­taries, and pop­u­lar his­to­ries. But per­spec­tives are shift­ing, and we’ve tried to high­light some of the alter­nate his­to­ries of elec­tron­ic music that doc­u­ment female artists’ indis­pens­able con­tri­bu­tions to the field.

Recent doc­u­men­taries about influ­en­tial BBC Radio com­pos­er and musi­cian Delia Der­byshire, for exam­ple, have rein­tro­duced her work to a new gen­er­a­tion. A wider appre­ci­a­tion came in the form of KPFA’s “Crack O’ Dawn” pro­gram broad­cast­ing sev­en hours of music by over two dozen impor­tant women com­posers and musi­cians from 1938–2014.

On the live cir­cuit, “’all-female bills,’” writes Jen­nifer Lucy Allan at The Guardian, “have gained trac­tion to address the stark gen­der imbal­ance in dance and elec­tron­ic music book­ings.” But “they can feel tokenist, where gen­der comes before tal­ent… not so at London’s South­bank Cen­tre next week­end: its Deep Min­i­mal­ism fes­ti­val presents com­po­si­tions by some of elec­tron­ic music’s ear­ly fron­trun­ners, going as far back as the 1950s. They just so hap­pen to be almost exclu­sive­ly female.”

One ear­ly fron­trun­ner, Daphne Oram, was a con­tem­po­rary and col­league of Delia Der­byshire. Oram, writes Allan, “noo­dled with mod­u­lar machines at the BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop in its ear­ly days, before the stu­dio cre­at­ed the sem­i­nal Doc­tor Who theme” (large­ly Derbyshire’s doing). That descrip­tion does­n’t do her jus­tice. Oram was in fact a co-founder of the huge­ly influ­en­tial Radio­phon­ic Work­shop, and her work deserves, and has begun to receive, the kind of crit­i­cal re-eval­u­a­tion that Der­byshire has attained recent­ly.

The Wire mag­a­zine cen­tered Oram’s work in a 2012 dis­cus­sion, “Attack of the Radio­phon­ic Women: How Syn­the­siz­ers Cracked Music’s Glass Ceil­ing.” They fea­ture much more info on Oram on their site, includ­ing a “Daphne Oram Por­tal” with links to arti­cles about her sophis­ti­cat­ed work. At the top of the post, you can hear the sub­tle drones, ring­ing, and echoes of Oram’s “Pulse Perse­phone,” and just above, lis­ten to a 2008, 40-minute radio doc­u­men­tary on her work called “Wee Have Also Sound-Hous­es,” made in cel­e­bra­tion of the Radio­phon­ic Workshop’s 50th anniver­sary.

Oram has been laud­ed by the BBC as “the unsung pio­neer of tech­no” and there is cur­rent­ly a Kick­starter cam­paign to repub­lish her book, An Indi­vid­ual Note: Of Music, Sound and Elec­tron­ics, and to “write Daphne Oram back into music his­to­ry.” Oram’s book explains her phi­los­o­phy of sound, which she called “Oram­ics.” Like many an ear­ly elec­tron­ic musi­cal pio­neer, she not only cre­at­ed orig­i­nal sound designs but designed orig­i­nal equip­ment to make them—in her case, an “opti­cal syn­the­siz­er” called the Oram­ics Machine (read about it here). Just above, see a clip from Atlantis Anew, a film about the Oram­ics Machine.

Anoth­er pio­neer­ing com­pos­er, Lau­rie Spiegel, is also an engi­neer and soft­ware design­er with a long resume that includes work­ing with syn­the­siz­er design­ers (and Moog com­peti­tors) Buch­la and Elec­tron­ic Music Lab­o­ra­to­ries. See her above in 1977 play­ing the Alles Machine, a very ear­ly dig­i­tal syn­the­siz­er she worked on with Hal Alles at Bell Labs. Spiegel worked for Bell Labs for sev­er­al years, cre­at­ing one of the first com­put­er draw­ing pro­grams in the mid-70s, and she is wide­ly known as the design­er of Music Mouse, a MIDI pro­gram cre­at­ed for Apple in 1985.

Spiegel, writes Allan, “pro­grammed synths before com­put­er-based con­trollers were a twin­kle in the tech­no DJ’s eye.” If her list of accom­plish­ments as an engi­neer seems impres­sive, her con­tri­bu­tions as a com­pos­er and musi­cian cer­tain­ly are as well. In 1977, her real­iza­tion of Johannes Kepler’s 17th cen­tu­ry com­po­si­tion “Har­mon­ices Mun­di” (“Har­mo­ny of the Worlds,” above) was cho­sen as the first musi­cal record­ing on the Voy­ager probe’s “Gold­en Record,” a cul­tur­al time cap­sule sent into space for ears of extrater­res­tri­als (“assum­ing they have ears,” writes Pitch­fork in a glow­ing pro­file of Spiegel).

Spiegel has com­posed sound­tracks for tele­vi­sion shows and films, includ­ing a 1980 PBS adap­ta­tion of Ursu­la K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heav­en. That same year, she released her acclaimed first album The Expand­ing Uni­verse, now a recent­ly re-released clas­sic. (Hear the album’s 28-minute title track here.)

And though it isn’t includ­ed in the offi­cial chart-top­ping sound­track album, Spiegel’s 1972 com­po­si­tion “Sed­i­ment,” just above, appears in the first Hunger Games score, a “left-field” devel­op­ment that Spiegel views very pos­i­tive­ly. “There are quite a few films and TV shows late­ly that have strong female pro­tag­o­nists who aren’t just co-stars to a male hero,” she told Wired, “We have yet to get to the point where we see a lot of female com­posers appear­ing in sound­track cred­its, but maybe that will change.”

Per­haps it already is, very, very slow­ly. The work of French com­pos­er and one­time Spiegel col­lab­o­ra­tor Éliane Radigue was among the two dozen elec­tron­ic, orches­tral, and avant-garde pieces on the sound­track for Ale­jan­dro Innaritu’s The Revenant, for exam­ple. Radigue began her career study­ing musique con­crete with exper­i­men­tal pio­neers Pierre Scha­ef­fer and Pierre Hen­ry in the 50s. She began mak­ing synth-based music in 1970 on a Buch­la syn­the­siz­er while she shared a stu­dio with Spiegel. “In the begin­ning,” says Radigue above in a doc­u­men­tary about her life and career, “there was a cer­tain music that I wished to make. It was this par­tic­u­lar music and no oth­er.” That music—slow, dron­ing, immersive—became reli­gious in nature when she con­vert­ed to Tibetan Bud­dhism.

Radigue’s Bud­dhist-inspired piece “Jet­sun Mila” (Hear Part One above, Part Two here)—excerpt­ed in The Revenant—is “deeply med­i­ta­tive,” writes Oth­er Music’s Michael Klaus­man, in its “explo­ration of inaudi­ble sub­har­mon­ics and over­tones,” which have a “way of phys­i­cal­ly chang­ing the land­scape of the room her music inhab­its.”

Radigue is a fanat­i­cal­ly patient com­pos­er, “an impor­tant, intrigu­ing fig­ure with­in the Euro­pean musi­cal avant-garde,” as Elec­tron­ic Beats describes her in a 2012 inter­view; her “work is defined by its painstak­ing cre­ation and sin­gu­lar method­ol­o­gy.” From 1970 to 2004, when she tran­si­tioned to writ­ing acoustic music, Radigue’s work was “cre­at­ed exclu­sive­ly on the unwieldy but bril­liant ARP 2500 mod­u­lar synth,” a machine inspired by Wendy Car­los’ use of Moog’s syn­the­siz­ers on her Switched on Bach album.

The three women pro­filed above rep­re­sent a small sam­pling of too-often-over­looked elec­tron­ic com­posers, musi­cians, engi­neers, and the­o­rists whose work deserves wider appre­ci­a­tion, not because it’s made by women, but because it’s inno­v­a­tive, tech­ni­cal­ly bril­liant, and beau­ti­ful music made by peo­ple who hap­pen to be women.

And yet, it’s like­ly the case that the work of Oram, Spiegel, and Radigue flies so far under the radar because so many his­to­ries of elec­tron­ic music focus almost exclu­sive­ly on men. One salient exam­ple is the exclu­sion of Pauline Oliv­eros from many of those his­to­ries. “A con­stant pres­ence” at the upcom­ing Deep Min­i­mal­ism fes­ti­val, Oliv­eros was “at the van­guard of elec­tron­ics, work­ing with tape machines,” writes Tom Ser­vice, and she “col­lab­o­rat­ed with Ter­ry Riley… and Mor­ton Subton­ick,” as well as Steve Reich, all very well-known exper­i­men­tal com­posers.

She also hap­pened to be a “friend, col­league, and per­former of John Cage and his music.” Oliv­eros’ phi­los­o­phy of “Deep Lis­ten­ing” had a pro­found influ­ence on Cage and many oth­ers, but her name rarely comes up in dis­cus­sions of exper­i­men­tal, impro­visato­ry min­i­mal­ist music. (Cul­tur­al the­o­rist Tra­cy McMullen has her own the­o­ry about Oliv­eros’ obscu­ri­ty rel­a­tive to Cage.) You can see Oliv­eros describe her phi­los­o­phy in the TED talk fur­ther up, lis­ten to her ear­ly, 1965 com­po­si­tion “Mnemon­ics III” just above, and learn much more about her fas­ci­nat­ing life and work in Ser­vice’s Guardian pro­file.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Doc­u­men­taries Intro­duce Delia Der­byshire, the Pio­neer in Elec­tron­ic Music

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

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

The Mas­ter­mind of Devo, Mark Moth­ers­baugh, Shows Off His Syn­the­siz­er Col­lec­tion

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

Andrei Tarkovsky Answers the Essential Questions: What is Art & the Meaning of Life?

in Film | June 21st, 2016

“An artist nev­er works under ide­al con­di­tions,” says Andrei Tarkovsky, who, even under his own set of less-than-ide­al con­di­tions, man­aged to make movies like Solaris, The Mir­ror, and Stalk­er. (Watch them free online here.) “If they exist­ed, his work would­n’t exist, for the artist does­n’t live in a vac­u­um. Some sort of pres­sure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not per­fect. Art would be use­less if the world were per­fect, as man would­n’t look for har­mo­ny but sim­ply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.”

Tarkovsky calls that the cen­tral issue of Andrei Rublev, his ear­li­er his­tor­i­cal dra­ma about the tit­u­lar 15th-cen­tu­ry icon painter, footage of which we see in the clip at the top. It comes extract­ed from the doc­u­men­tary A Poet in Cin­e­ma, essen­tial view­ing for those seek­ing to under­stand the mind behind all these sin­gu­lar cin­e­mat­ic visions. Tarkovsky used film in an art form in a way that no oth­er direc­tor did before or has quite done since, which will raise a cer­tain curios­i­ty in any of his view­ers: how, then, did he con­ceive of art itself?

Just before the begin­ning of the clip below, a dis­em­bod­ied voice put the ques­tion to him direct­ly: “Andrei, what is art?” Tarkovsky, look­ing even more pen­sive than usu­al, declares that “before defin­ing art — or any con­cept — we must answer a far broad­er ques­tion: what is the mean­ing of Man’s life on Earth?” An ambi­tious top­ic, cer­tain­ly, but he, in his own way, embod­ied the very con­cept of the ambi­tious film­mak­er. “Maybe we are here to enhance our­selves spir­i­tu­al­ly. If our life tends to this spir­i­tu­al enrich­ment, then art is a means to get there. Art should help man in this process.”

Reject­ing the idea “that art helps man to know the world like any oth­er intel­lec­tu­al activ­i­ty,” Tarkovsky made films from his lack of belief in the “pos­si­bil­i­ty of know­ing. Knowl­edge dis­tracts us from our main pur­pose in life. The more we know, the less we know. Get­ting deep­er, our hori­zon becomes nar­row­er. Art enrich­es man’s own spir­i­tu­al capa­bil­i­ties, and he can then rise above him­self, to use what we call ‘free will.’ ” Those who sub­scribe to these views of the world and of art will find that his work still serves this pur­pose. Even many of those who don’t accept Tarkovsky’s aus­tere philo­soph­i­cal premis­es have to admit that, if a per­fect world does­n’t con­tain his movies, we’d prob­a­bly rather not live in it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

Watch a Video Essay on the Poet­ic Har­mo­ny of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film­mak­ing, Then View His Major Films Free Online

A Poet in Cin­e­ma: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Film­mak­ing and Life

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Tran­scends Sci­ence Fic­tion

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Shot by Shot: A 22-Minute Break­down of the Director’s Film­mak­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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.

An Animated Introduction to Charles Dickens’ Life & Literary Works

in Animation, Literature | June 21st, 2016

The social role of the writer changes from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion, but at no time in the his­to­ry of lit­er­ary cul­ture have nov­el­ists and poets faced more com­pe­ti­tion for the atten­tion of their read­ers than they do today. Before visu­al media took over as the pri­ma­ry means of sto­ry­telling, how­ev­er, many writ­ers enjoyed the mea­sure of fame now giv­en to film and pop music stars. Or at least they did in the age of Charles Dick­ens, whose tire­less self-pro­mo­tion and pop­ulist sen­ti­ments endeared him to the pub­lic and made him one of the most famous men of his day.

Dick­ens was “a great show­man” says Alain de Bot­ton above in his School of Life intro­duc­tion to the author of Great Expec­ta­tions, Oliv­er Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and too many more great books to name. (Find them in our col­lec­tions of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.) He was a nat­ur­al celebri­ty before radio and tele­vi­sion and, to the dis­may of his more high-mind­ed col­leagues, “enter­tain­ment was at the heart of what Dick­ens was up to.”

But Dick­ens used his pub­lic plat­form not only to advance his career, but also to “get us inter­est­ed in some pret­ty seri­ous things: the evils of an indus­tri­al­iz­ing soci­ety, the work­ing con­di­tions in fac­to­ries, child labor, vicious social snob­bery, the mad­den­ing inef­fi­cien­cies of gov­ern­ment bureau­cra­cy.” Then and now, these are hard­ly sub­jects read­ers want to be remind­ed of. And yet, then as now, great sto­ry­tellers can make us care despite our apa­thy and desire for escapist plea­sure. And few writ­ers have made read­ers care more than Dick­ens.

His “genius was to dis­cov­er that the big ambi­tions to edu­cate a soci­ety about its fail­ings didn’t have to be opposed to what his crit­ics called ‘fun’—racy plots, a chat­ty style, clown­ish char­ac­ters, weepy moments, and hap­py end­ings.” Yet Dick­ens didn’t only seek to edu­cate, de Bot­ton argues; he “believed that writ­ing could play a big role in fix­ing the prob­lems of the world.” In this he was not entire­ly wrong, despite the anti-polit­i­cal sen­ti­ments of so many aes­thetes who have argued oth­er­wise, from Oscar Wilde to W.H. Auden.

Though he opposed many work­ing class move­ments and had no “coher­ent doc­trine” of social change, says Hugh Cun­ning­ham, pro­fes­sor of social his­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kent, Dick­ens “helped cre­ate a cli­mate of opin­ion” by emo­tion­al­ly mov­ing peo­ple to sym­pa­thize with the poor and to take action in con­tro­ver­sies already rag­ing in the zeit­geist. In this role, Dick­ens pre­ced­ed dozens of writ­ers who—like himself—began their careers in jour­nal­ism and sought through fic­tion to moti­vate com­pla­cent read­ers: nat­u­ral­ist nov­el­ists like Emile Zola, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreis­er, and muck­rak­ing real­ists like Upton Sin­clair all owe some­thing to Dick­ens’ mode of social protest through nov­el-writ­ing.

De Bot­ton goes on in his intro­duc­tion to explain some of the bio­graph­i­cal ori­gins of Dick­ens’ sym­pa­thy for the afflict­ed, includ­ing his own time spent as a child labor­er and his father’s con­fine­ment in debtor’s prison. The con­di­tions Dick­ens and his char­ac­ters endured are unimag­in­able to most priv­i­leged read­ers, but not to mil­lions of peo­ple in pover­ty around the world who still live under the kind of squalid oppres­sion the Vic­to­ri­an poor suf­fered. Whether any author in the 21st cen­tu­ry can bring the same kind of sym­pa­thet­ic atten­tion to their lives that Dick­ens did in his time is debat­able, but De Bot­ton uses Dick­ens’ exam­ple to argue that art and enter­tain­ment can “seduce” us into com­pas­sion and tak­ing action for oth­ers.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien

Cel­e­brate the 200th Birth­day of Charles Dick­ens with Free Movies, eBooks and Audio Books

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Jane Austen

Fyo­dor Dostoyevsky’s Life & Lit­er­a­ture Intro­duced in a Mon­ty Python-Style Ani­ma­tion

What Are Lit­er­a­ture, Phi­los­o­phy & His­to­ry For? Alain de Bot­ton Explains with Mon­ty Python-Style Videos

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

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

in Film, Literature | June 20th, 2016

Two rad­i­cal mod­ernists, James Joyce and Sergei Eisen­stein, once met in Paris in 1929 and, “depend­ing on who you read,” writes Dan McGinn, “are pur­port­ed to have dis­cussed a film ver­sion of ‘Ulysses’ and how Karl Marx’s ‘Das Kap­i­tal’ could be depict­ed onscreen.” For many years, an adap­ta­tion of Marx’s dense polit­i­cal-eco­nom­ic cri­tique seemed about as plau­si­ble as a film ver­sion of Joyce’s famous­ly dense nov­el, which takes place on a sin­gle day, June 16th—forever after known as Blooms­day.

A great admir­er of Joyce’s cin­e­mat­ic imag­i­na­tion, Eisen­stein once remarked that “for­mal­ly Joyce went as far as lit­er­a­ture could go.” Giv­en the con­ven­tion­al­ly nar­ra­tive, real­ist route film even­tu­al­ly trav­eled, Ulysses, with its recur­sive digres­sions and hyper­al­lu­sive inte­ri­or­i­ty, seemed unfilmable until Joseph Strick’s admirable effort in 1967.

Just as Eisen­stein admired Joyce’s lit­er­ary exper­i­men­ta­tion, Joyce was a lover of Eisen­stein’s exper­i­ments in film. He found­ed Ireland’s first movie house, the Vol­ta, in 1909, and though the ven­ture flopped a year lat­er, Joyce’s invest­ment in the aes­thet­ics of film sur­vived. Colm McAu­li­ffe observes that Ulysses “deployed a whole range of tech­niques such as mon­tage and rapid scene dis­solves which are more com­mon­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the cin­e­ma.” Eisen­stein “raved about the way Joyce had adopt­ed a sci­en­tif­ic approach to the sto­ry of a day in the life of one man,” writes McGinn, “putting almost every aspect of that day under the micro­scope.” After Joyce, Eisen­stein said, “the next leap is to film.”

But if Ulysses went as far as the nov­el could go, Finnegans Wake explod­ed the form alto­geth­er, dis­solv­ing the bound­aries between prose and poet­ry, sub­ject and object, his­to­ry and myth. Ulysses employed the tech­niques of film; Finnegans Wake imag­ined tech­nol­o­gy which did not even exist. It is a novel—if we are to call it such—written for the 21st cen­tu­ry, and per­haps the only way it can be adapt­ed in oth­er media is through the internet’s non­lin­ear, labyrinthine struc­tures; the online project First We Feel Then We Fall does just that, cre­at­ing a mul­ti­me­dia adap­ta­tion of Finnegans Wake that “trans­fers” the nov­el “to audio­vi­su­al lan­guage,” and demon­strates the nov­el as—in the words of The Guardian’s Bil­ly Mills—“the book the web was invent­ed for.”

Con­ceived and exe­cut­ed by Pol­ish artist Jakub Wróblews­ki and schol­ar Katarzy­na Bazarnik, the project’s “main goal,” its press release announces, “is to show com­plex­i­ty of nar­ra­tion, lan­guage and mean­ings includ­ed in this mas­ter­piece. Based on an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary analy­sis, the work trans­lates the text into the cin­e­mat­ic form.” As you can see in the short clips here, it’s a form much like we might imag­ine Eisen­stein adopt­ing to film Finnegans Wake, had Eisen­stein had access to web tech­nol­o­gy. Cen­tral to the project is “an inter­ac­tive video app… designed in order to enhance an expe­ri­ence of Joycean stream of con­scious­ness.”

Select­ed pas­sages and with­in them spe­cif­ic words, phras­es or sen­tences serve as the basis for video sequences. Shots illus­trat­ing a pas­sage are divid­ed into four sep­a­rate chan­nels. The view­ers have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to choose in real time which chan­nel they would like to watch…. This sys­tem is sup­posed to reflect the tenets of Joyce’s fic­tion: that the book can be read in dif­fer­ent ways, while the read­ers can solve its ver­bal puz­zles, yield to the melo­di­ous rhythm or look for hid­den mean­ings.

The project’s cre­ators base their adap­ta­tion on the novel’s con­cep­tu­al prin­ci­ples: “Based on a cycli­cal vision of his­to­ry, the book is a tex­tu­al mer­ry-go-round, too: it begins mid sen­tence and ends with anoth­er one bro­ken in the mid­dle, which finds it con­tin­u­a­tion on the first page: the same anew.” And although they don’t say so explic­it­ly, they also employ Eisen­stein’s the­o­ret­i­cal prin­ci­ples of mon­tage: “Pri­mo: pho­to-frag­ments of nature are record­ed; secun­do: these frag­ments are com­bined in var­i­ous ways.”

In addi­tion to a jum­ble of abstract images, the project’s short videos—as you can see in these excerpts—incorporate a wide range of voic­es, accents, and musi­cal and son­ic accom­pa­ni­ment. The only way to expe­ri­ence the full effect of First We Feel Then We Fall is to vis­it the site’s play­er and spend some time cycling through its dizzy­ing col­lec­tion of images and voic­es read­ing from the text, using the up and down arrows on your key­board to move from video to video. As a key to under­stand­ing Joyce’s work and their own adap­ta­tion, the project’s artists chose the Joycean words “Mean­der­tale” and “Meanderthalltale,”—“two of innu­mer­able puns mak­ing up the tex­tu­al labyrinth of Finnegans Wake,” neol­o­gisms that nudge us to read the book “as a ‘tall tale” wan­der­ing way­ward­ly, loop­ing back­ward and flash­ing for­ward, into the pre-his­toric past, and the ori­gins of the human species.”

If Ulysses seemed unfilmable, Finnegans Wake tru­ly is—at least in the con­ven­tion­al nar­ra­tive lan­guage film has set­tled into since Eisenstein’s time. But in using the abstract vocab­u­lary of avant-garde film and the post-mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy of the inter­net, First We Feel Then We Fall has cre­at­ed an adap­ta­tion that seems wor­thy of the book’s inno­va­tions, and that authen­ti­cal­ly trans­lates its ver­tig­i­nous­ly play­ful poet­ic strange­ness to the screen. Enter First We Feel Then We Fall here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Read Unabridged & Set to Music By 17 Dif­fer­ent Artists

Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er That James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Has an Amaz­ing­ly Math­e­mat­i­cal “Mul­ti­frac­tal” Struc­ture

James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Record­ings (1924/1929)

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

R Crumb, the Father of Underground Comix, Takes Down Donald Trump in a NSFW 1989 Cartoon

in Comedy, Comics/Cartoons, Politics | June 20th, 2016

Nature’s way is to take away from those that have too much and give to those that have too lit­tle. Man’s way, on the con­trary, is to take away from those who have too lit­tle to give more to those who already have too much. 

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, cir­ca 500 BC

Two and a half thou­sand years lat­er, the ancient sage’s quote con­tin­ues to res­onate, espe­cial­ly in this elec­tion year.

Lest we get too gloomy, there is anoth­er quote I would like to sub­mit:

And isn’t this a nut­ty kin­da coun­try where you can draw any irrev­er­ent, degrad­ing thing about the most pow­er­ful peo­ple and nobody cares! You don’t get jailed. You don’t get per­se­cut­ed. They just ice you out of the mar­ket­place. 

- R Crumb, Hup, 1989

Crumb is to under­ground comix as Lao Tzu was to Tao­ism, but the fame Crumb achieved in the late 60s and ear­ly 70s did not pro­tect him from the 80s, “an awful decade” as he told the Observ­er. His aston­ish­ing cre­ative out­put nev­er flagged, but he hat­ed the cul­ture and strug­gled to make ends meet:

…it all grad­u­al­ly fell apart through the 70s, and by the 80s with the rise of the yup­pies, Reagan’s elec­tion and the real estate boom. In Cal­i­for­nia it was always about real estate ever since the Gold Rush, but the 80’s saw a new explo­sion of it. They went crazy. Every­body was get­ting their real estate license. They kept on build­ing these hideous hous­ing devel­op­ments where we lived. It used to be farm­land there when we first arrived, then every­thing became a fight. Dow Chem­i­cal tried to come there, we fought that. Then the Super Col­lid­er, we fought that. It was this con­stant bat­tle against these forces of devel­op­ment and busi­ness. 

In 1991, he fled Amer­i­ca for a small vil­lage in South­ern France, a pre­scient move, giv­en “Point the Fin­ger,” a com­ic pub­lished two years ear­li­er in his short-lived Hup series. The semi-fic­tion­al five-pager pits Crumb him­self against real estate devel­op­er Don­ald Trump, billed as “one of the more vis­i­ble big time preda­tors who feed on soci­ety,” as well as “one of the most evil men alive.”

The then-42-year-old Trump is quick to take Crum­b’s bait, pil­ing on some insults of his own. He may not be famil­iar with the car­toon­ist’s work, but he knows how to mount an attack, with labels like “crass,” “venal,” “some kind of self-styled ter­ror­ist,” “the pic­ture of neg­a­tiv­i­ty,” and “filled with hate.” Had Crumb set this smack down on a beach, Trump would be the bul­ly kick­ing sand in the scrawny nerd’s face, as a cou­ple of hot babes look on, admir­ing­ly.

In fact, the com­ic comes very close to end­ing on such a note. Two of Crumb’s char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly pow­er­ful­ly-thigh­ed females are on hand, osten­si­bly as mem­bers of his camp. Their heads are quick­ly turned, how­ev­er, by an invi­ta­tion to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lav­ish Palm Beach estate. The Don­ald starts look­ing pret­ty good to Tra­cy and Marny, bedaz­zled by the promise of ban­quets, man­i­cures, world-class enter­tain­ment, and a hedo­nis­tic after-hours romp with Trump and his then-wife Ivana.

The car­toon­ist, defeat­ed, com­pares the tycoon to Tri­mal­chio, the vul­gar but loaded host of Petro­n­ius’ Satyri­con, before prepar­ing to take things out with the Lao Tzu quote at the top of this post.

It’s here that things take a turn for the meta, as Stan “the Man” Shnoot­er, the self-assured fic­tion­al pro­duc­er of Hup, ral­lies Crumb to assert autho­r­i­al con­trol.

Crumb rewinds to a piv­otal moment. In this redo, Tra­cy and Marny remain stead­fast. The bul­ly is frog­marched to the toi­let to be giv­en a taste of his own med­i­cine. The saga draws to a close with the sort of acro­bat­ic, ques­tion­ably con­sen­su­al, NSFW sex that has rained fem­i­nist ire on Crumb for years, as the unlike­ly con­quer­er savors vic­to­ry in his pre­ferred style.

Is it fan­ta­sy? Real­i­ty? All just a dream?

(Any way you slice it, I’m pret­ty sure Tra­cy and Marny aren’t the win­ners…)

You can check out Crumb’s 1989 Trump com­ic in its extreme­ly NSFW entire­ty here or buy Hup, Issue 3 to read it the old fash­ioned way. Some of the tamer pan­els can be sam­pled here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

R. Crumb Shows Us How He Illus­trat­ed Gen­e­sis: A Faith­ful, Idio­syn­crat­ic Illus­tra­tion of All 50 Chap­ters

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instant­ly Dis­cov­ered His Artis­tic Style

Noam Chom­sky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resem­bles the Rise of Fas­cism in 1930s Ger­many

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday