The Women of the Avant-Garde: An Introduction Featuring Audio by Gertrude Stein, Kathy Acker, Patti Smith & More
The story of the avant-garde is never just one story. But it tends to get told that way, and we tend to think we know how modernist and post-modern literature and music have taken shape: through a series of great men who thwarted convention and remade language and sound in ways their predecessors never dreamed. Arthur Rimbaud, Claude Debussy, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage… We could make many such lists, and we do, all the time, occasionally including the names of a few women—Yoko Ono, for example, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf….
But we might write it differently, indeed, for the simple reason that women have shaped the avant-garde just as much as men have, as prominent poets and composers, not simply spouses of famous men or guest stars in a mostly male revue. You can hear one version of such a story here, thanks to Ubuweb, “the learned and varietous online repository” of “all things avant-garde.” Their podcast Avant-Garde All the Time offers us two episodes called “The Women of the Avant-Garde,” hosted by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who admits the survey is a corrective for the podcast’s own blind spots. Through a small but select number of poets and musicians, Goldsmith aims “to show that there are dozens and dozens of great women artists on Ubuweb”—and everywhere else art lives.
Instead of a history, Goldsmith gives us something of a constellation of artists, many of them clustered tightly together in time and space. New York poets, writers, and musicians who came of age in the 70s and 80s—Kathy Acker, Lydia Lunch, Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith, Eileen Myles—all feature in Goldsmith’s account. Theirs was a time and place the poet Myles has described as “a moment” that was “very uncensored and really excited and it just made you feel like there was room for more.”
It’s a moment that saw a revival in the 90s, when riot grrrl arose to challenge the patriarchal establishment. Around this time, artists working in a more academic context directly and indirectly engaged with literary history ancient and modern. Scholar and poet Anne Carson has twisted and translated the texts of Ovid, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and the writers (and translators) of the King James Bible. And German-Norwegian-French experimental poet Caroline Bergvall, whom Goldsmith discusses in episode one above, rewrote Chaucer and rearranged Dante.
In episode two, Goldsmith reaches somewhat further back—to Yoko Ono and Denise Levertov—and farther away from New York, with work from Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad. Prominently featured in this second part of the series, and for good reason, is fierce patroness of early twentieth century avant-garde art and writing, Gertrude Stein. Stein’s own poetry radically disrupted the accepted, and acceptable, codes of speech and writing—setting a precedent for several decades of feminist writers and artists whose appearance in archives like Ubuweb, Goldsmith notes, increasingly come to match or outweigh those of their male counterparts. Hear Stein read from her own work at another such archive, PennSound, and visit the Poetry Foundation to stream and download more episodes of Ubuweb’s Avant-Garde all the Time, including an episode devoted to Stein called “Almost Completely Understanding.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...What is Love? BBC Philosophy Animations Feature Sartre, Freud, Aristophanes, Dawkins & More
The BBC’s recent series of Nigel Warburton-scripted, celebrity-narrated animations in philosophy haven’t shied away from the hard questions the discipline touches. How did everything begin? What makes us human? What is the self? How do I live a good life? In all those videos, Gillian Anderson, Stephen Fry, and Harry Shearer told us what history’s most thought-about thinkers have had to say on those subjects. But for the latest round, Warburton and The Hobbit’s Aidan Turner have taken on what some would consider, at least for our practical purposes, the trickiest one of all: what is love?
You might not turn to Jean-Paul Sartre, life partner of Simone de Beauvoir, as a first love consultant of choice, but the series devotes an entire video to the Being and Nothingness author’s theories on emotion. The freedom-minded Sartre sees the condition of love as a “hazardous, painful struggle,” one of either masochism or sadism: “masochism when a lover tries to become what he thinks his lover wants him to be, and in the process denies his own freedom; sadism when the lover treats the loved one as an object and ties her down. Either way, freedom is compromised.”
Have we any lighter philosophical perspectives on love here? Well, we have a variety of philosophical perspectives on love, anyway: Aristophanes’ creation myth of the “missing half,” Sigmund Freud and Edvard Westermarck’s disagreement over the Oedipus complex, and the conviction of “psychological egoists” from Thomas Hobbes to Richard Dawkins that no such thing as strictly selfless love exists. The philosophy of love, like love itself, can get complicated, but the clear and witty drawings accompanying the ideas discussed in these videos can help us envision the different ideas they encompass. Should you need even clearer (or less witty) illustrations on the subject, you could always turn to Love Is…, though I have a feeling you’d find that solution a bit too simple.
Watch all of the animated videos in the What is Love? playlist here.
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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Salvador Dalí Goes to Hollywood & Creates Wild Dream Sequences for Hitchcock & Vincente Minnelli
Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel reportedly carried rocks in their pockets during the premiere of their first film Un Chien andalou, anticipating a violent reaction from the audience.
It was a fair concern. The movie might be almost 90 years old but it still has the power to provoke – the film features a shot of a woman getting her eye slashed open with a straight razor after all. As it turned out, rocks weren’t needed. The audience, filled with such avant-garde luminaries as Pablo Picasso and André Breton liked the film. A disappointed Dalí later reported that the night was “less exciting” than he had hoped.
Un Chien andalou featured many of Dalí’s visual obsessions – eyeballs, ants crawling out of orifices and rotting animals. Dalí delighted in shocking and inciting people with his gorgeous, disturbing images. And he loved grandiose spectacles like a riot at a movie theater.
Dalí and Buñuel’s next movie, the caustic L’Age d’or, exposed the differences between the two artists and their creative partnership imploded in pre-production. Buñuel went on to make a string of subversive masterpieces like Land Without Bread, Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeois; Dalí largely quit film in favor of his beautifully crafted paintings.
Then Hollywood came calling.
Alfred Hitchcock hired Dalí to create a dream sequence for his 1945 movie Spellbound. Dalí crafted over 20 minutes of footage of which roughly four and a half minutes made it into the movie. “I wanted to convey the dream with great visual sharpness and clarity–sharper than film itself,” Hitchcock explained to Francois Truffaut in 1962. The sequence, which you can see immediately above, is filled with all sorts of Daliesque motifs – slashed eyeballs, naked women and phantasmagoric landscapes. It is also the most memorable part of an otherwise minor work by Hitchcock.
Dalí’s follow up film work was for, of all things, the Vincente Minnelli comedy Father of the Bride (1950). Spencer Tracy plays Stanley Banks whose beautiful daughter (Elizabeth Taylor, no less) is getting married. As Stanley’s anxiety over the impending nuptials spirals, he has one very weird nightmare. Cue Dalí. Stanley is late to the wedding. As he rushes down the aisle, his clothes mysteriously get shredded by the tiled floor that bounces and contorts like a piece of flesh.
This dream sequence, which you can see at the top of the article, has few of the visual flourishes of Spellbound, but it still has plenty of Dalí’s trademark weirdness. Those floating accusatory eyes. The way that Tracy’s leg seems to stretch. That floor.
Father of the Bride marked the end of Dalí’s work in Hollywood, though there were a couple potential collaborations that would have been amazing had they actually happened. Dalí had an idea for a movie with the Marx Brothers called Giraffes on Horseback Salad. The movie would have “included a scene of giraffes wearing gas masks and one of Chico sporting a deep-diving suit while playing the piano.” Though Harpo was reportedly enthusiastic about the proposed idea, Groucho wasn’t and the idea sadly came to nothing.
Later in life, Dalí became a fixture on the talk show circuit. On the Dick Cavett Show in 1970, he flung an anteater at Lillian Gish.
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A Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dali, Narrated by the Great Orson Welles
A Tour Inside Salvador Dalí’s Labyrinthine Spanish Home
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Read More...Ralph Steadman’s Evolving Album Cover Designs: From Miles Davis & The Who, to Frank Zappa & Slash (1956–2010)
Ralph Steadman will always best be known—and for good reason—as the visual interpreter of Hunter S. Thompson’s druggy gonzo vision of American excess and hubris. As Colin Marshall wrote in a previous post on Steadman and Thompson’s powerful collaborative relationship, it’s hard to imagine a more “suitable visual accompaniment to the simultaneously clear- and wild-eyed sensibility of Thompsonian prose.” But the British artist has had a long and distinguished career, pre- and post-Thompson: illustrating Lewis Carroll’s surrealist classic Alice in Wonderland; creating limited edition DVD covers for the dark cult hit TV show Breaking Bad; making bullet-riddled collage art with counterculture hero William S. Burroughs…. To name just a few of his offbeat assignments over the years.
Today we bring you a lesser-known facet of Steadman’s work: designing album covers. As artist and illustrator John Coulthart notes in a post on Steadman’s album designs, he’s been at it since the mid-fifties, when—for example—he illustrated a release of Conception (top), “an underappreciated masterpiece of cerebral cool jazz” featuring the likes of Miles Davis, Stan Getz, and Sonny Rollins. Steadman’s abstract expressionist-inspired jazz covers soon gave way to more Steadmanesque, though still relatively tame, covers like that above for The Who’s single “Happy Jack”/“I’ve Been Away” from 1966.
It’s not until the 70s, however—after he’d begun his collaboration with Thompson—that his album covers begin to take on the decidedly crazed look his work is known for, such as in the cover for Paul Brett’s Phoenix Future, above, from 1975.
By 1997, Steadman seems to have perfected his inimitable riot of grotesque imagery, wild color palette, and unhinged black lines and lettering, as in the cover for Closed On Account Of Rabies: Poems And Tales Of Edgar Allan Poe, a compilation of Poe readings by stars like Christopher Walken, Iggy Pop, Marianne Faithfull, Jeff Buckley, and Abel Ferrara, which we’ve featured on OC before. The artists represented here are—as in his work with Thompson and Burroughs—perfectly fitting for Steadman’s sensibility. So, of course, is the clean-living but otherwise totally bonkers Frank Zappa, whose 1997 Have I Offended Someone? received the Steadman treatment, as you can see below.
In the past few years, Steadman has mellowed a bit, if you could call it that, and his work has taken on a slightly more refined character. His Breaking Bad illustrations seem restrained by the standards of his work with Thompson or Zappa. And in a 2010 cover for Slash’s first official single, “By the Sword,” below, he reigns in some of his wilder graphic impulses while retaining all of the stylist signatures he developed over the decades.
Steadman has always been a one-of-a-kind illustrator. In his album cover design, we can perhaps best watch his work evolve. As Coulthart writes, “the style of the early sleeves is markedly different to the angry, splattery creations that made his name, and without a signature you’d be unlikely to recognise the artist.” See many more Steadman album covers over at Coulthart’s excellent blog.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Releases New Animated Video Inspired by Gustave Doré & Milton’s Paradise Lost
Next month, David Gilmour will release his first solo album since 2006 and launch his first tour since ’08. But right now, in the dead of August, you can watch a new animated video for his upcoming track, “Rattle That Lock.”
Created under the leadership of Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis (the design group that produced the iconic artwork for Dark Side of the Moon and other Pink Floyd LPs), the animation pays homage to Gustave Doré, whose illustrations of Dante, Poe and Cervantes we’ve featured here before. And the lyrics themselves, they draw inspiration from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, reports Rolling Stone. Gilmour, Doré, Milton — surely a trifecta for many OC readers.
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Read More...Ernest Hemingway & His Sister Dressed as Twin Girls Shown in Newly Digitized Scrapbooks From Hemingway’s Youth
It may be true that speculation about an author’s personal history can prove not especially illuminating to reading their books. We generally think it best to read a literary work on its own terms. But in certain cases, as in the well-worn case of Ernest Hemingway, the parallels between life and work are impossible to ignore or to pass over without comment, and, for many critics, this goes particularly for discussions about Hemingway’s gender and sexuality. Even Hemingway’s contemporaries had their commentary. Zelda Fitzgerald supposedly remarked that no one could be as masculine as Hemingway, for example, and Virginia Woolf referred to him as “self consciously virile.” Themes of homosexuality and gender anxiety crop up in Hemingway’s fiction, and more prominently in unpublished work unearthed in the 1980s.
For critics like Debra Moddelmog, author of Reading Desire: In Pursuit if Ernest Hemingway, the biographical interest begins with the hyper-macho modernist’s early childhood, during which his mother Grace raised him and his older sister Marcelline as twin girls, dressing them alike “in fancy dresses and flowered hats.” This apparently happened over a period of several years, until Hemingway was at least five years old, and Grace even held Marcelline back a year so that the two could attend the same grade. Though one of Hemingway’s younger sisters, Sunny, has “denied that the twinning ever took place” the evidence seems to show otherwise—in Marcelline’s reminisces and in photograph after photograph of young Ernest and Marcelline dressed exactly alike and having tea parties, riding in wagons, and holding bouquets. You can see them in 1901, in bonnets above and flowered hats below.
At the top of the post, see Hemingway in a girlish haircut identical to his sister’s, and below, see two photographs of him in a wide-shouldered dress. At the JFK Library website (click here and scroll to bottom), you can now view many more of these photographs from Hemingway’s first few years on up to the age of 18. The digitized collection of six childhood scrapbooks, the library writes, were “collected by Ernest Hemingway himself and donated to the John F. Kennedy Library by his widow, Mary Hemingway.” Many of the childhood photographs are fascinating for various reasons, though the “twinning” photographs have provoked the most interest and contributed to already rich theories of Hemingway’s identity as a person and an artist.
Looked at in the context of the time, these photographs don’t seem all that odd. As anyone who has flipped through family albums from the turn of the century (should they have them) will have noticed, little boys were routinely dressed in ambiguously girlish attire, their long hair often styled and curled. The fashion derived partly from a hugely popular character in children’s fiction named “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” the Harry Potter of his day, who had a rags-to-riches story that captivated American readers especially. The character has been the subject of film adaptations even as late as 1980, in which he was played by a young Ricky Schroeder. Fauntleroy had some influence on Grace Hemingway. (See Hemingway in a Lord Fauntleroy suit, with football, in a 1909 photograph below.)
Fauntleroy and other similar characters’ model of “genteel manhood” gained widespread currency. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Victorian novels featuring this character came at a time when childhood was viewed through a much different lens than it is today. (As we’ve seen in the photography of Lewis Carroll and many other artists of the time in which children appear as props and dolls, sometimes in strangely suggestive or androgynous poses that would not have seemed especially prurient or gender-bending to their original viewers.) The trend continued into the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, despite less rigid childhood gender norms, as Hemingway biographer Kenneth Schuyler Lynn writes, Grace Hemingway’s “elaborate pretense that little Ernest and his sister were twins of the same sex” was very unusual. Critics like Moddelmog and Mark Spilka have argued convincingly that Hemingway “rebelled against that identity,” a rebellion that “lasted a lifetime.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Endangered Species (Including Cecil the Lion) Projected Onto the Empire State Building
Anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account last week couldn’t avoid hearing about Walter James Palmer, the Minnesota dentist who allegedly went trophy hunting in Zimbabwe and killed Cecil the Lion, a local favorite who had been illegally lured away from a protected wildlife preserve. I won’t say anything more about it, other than that you can sign a petition to get Palmer extradited to Zimbabwe and let him defend his actions to local authorities.
Meanwhile, back in New York City, two artists Travis Threlkel and Louie Psihoyos were getting ready to turn The Empire State building into a Noah’s Ark of Endangered Animals. And that’s exactly what happened on Saturday night. Placing “40 stacked, 20,000-lumen projectors on the roof of a nearby building,” Threlkel and Psihoyos projected an array of endangered animals “onto a space 375 feet tall and 186 feet wide covering 33 floors,” reports The New York Times. You can see photos of the animals over at the Racing Extinction Twitter stream. Touchingly, there was an homage to Cecil the Lion. A video from the Times appears above; another from The New Yorker below.
To learn more about how Project Mapping works, and to see other examples of Threlkel’s work, see the videos on this page.
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Read More...Kurt Vonnegut Maps Out the Universal Shapes of Our Favorite Stories
Imagine a hat. Flip it upside down, and you’ve got yourself the outline of a story the public will never weary of, according to author Kurt Vonnegut, who maps it on out a chalkboard in the video above.
His Y‑axis charts a range between good and ill fortune. Vonnegut recommends positioning your main character slightly closer to the good (i.e. wealth and boisterous health) end of the spectrum, at least in the beginning. He or she will dip below midline soon enough.
As for the X‑axis, Vonnegut labels it B‑E, from beginning to end.
Now plot your points, remembering that it’s all about the curves.
Some popular themes include people getting in and out of trouble, and the evergreen boy gets girl. (The always progressive Vonnegut reminds his viewers that the genders in the latter scenario are always open to interpretation. Again, it’s the curves that count…)
Thinking about my favorite books and films, it seems that most do follow Vonnegut’s upside-down hat narrative arc.
Are there exceptions?
Horatio Alger’s rags to riches stories, for example. We should all be so lucky to find ourselves powering up such a steep uphill grade.
Of course there are exceptions!
Vonnegut himself identifies a particularly high profile one, whose geometry is less an elegant curve than a staircase that terminates in a free fall. (SPOILER: it involves a fairy godmother and ends in an infinity symbol.
Those weary of parsing story using the Hero’s Journey template should investigate Vonnegut’s graphic approach. It works!
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...Patti Smith Plays at CBGB In One of Her First Recorded Concerts, Joined by Seminal Punk Band Television (1975)
The picture of punk as the domain of boorish nihilists who can’t play their instruments has been as much a creation of marketing (via Malcolm McLaren) as it has been a virtue-of-necessity minimalist pose and a form of avant garde DIY experimentalism. But there have always been, since the coining of the term “punk” as a musical genre, stellar musicians and thoughtful, poetic lyricists shaping the scene. Of the former, we must mention Television, with their magnificent guitar interplay between leader Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. And, of the latter, we need look no further than the godmother of punk herself, Patti Smith, who has always commanded stage and studio with her smart, arresting lyricism and powerful set of pipes.
Years before the Sex Pistols invaded the States, these two bands played regularly at CBGBs (Television was, in fact, the very first band to play there) with a loose collection of misfits who re-invented rock and roll. In December, 1975, Smith released her first album, Horses, a hybrid of punk and spoken word produced by the Velvet Underground’s John Cale.
But before that record made her famous—in April of that year—the Patti Smith Group took the stage with Television, and two teenage fans were there to record both sets from both bands. First appearing as a bootleg CD generically titled “Early Gig ’75,” the disc has since been reissued as We Can’t Do Anymore… Cause I’m Just Too Tired!, with another set of Smith covers tacked on from a ’78 concert in Santa Monica.
We get classic tracks from both bands, such as Television’s “Marquee Moon” and “Little Johnny Jewell” and Smith’s cover of “Hey Joe” and Van Morrison’s “Gloria” as well as her own “Horses” and “Piss Factory.” At the top of the post, you can hear her do six songs from that night in 1975, the last three with Television joining her onstage: “We’re Going to Have a Real Good Time Together” (Velvet Underground cover), “Redondo Beach,” “Birdland,” “Space Monkey,” “Distant Fingers,” and “Gloria.” You’ll also hear the two young tapers chatting it up in the first few minutes of the tape.
Smith’s band, writes bootleg blog Doom & Gloom From the Tomb, “was transitioning from a cabaret-leaning trio to a fully-fledged rock band sound,” and the ramshackle performances show us a talented bunch of musicians still finding their footing as a group. The following year, Smith and band would appear in Stockholm after the release of Horses. As you can see and hear above (after a brief interview) they’d become a tighter, and somewhat more conventional, rock and roll machine, but the early performances at the top—for all the lo-fi murkiness and intrusive crowd noise—have a raw appeal only heightened by the fact that they are now important documents of a now-legendary musical era. See this review of the bootleg CD reissue for a blow-by-blow description of this historic ’75 concert from two seminal, and phenomenally talented, punk bands.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Brooklyn–Based Makers of Artisanal Water Let You Sip From America’s Great Cultural Waters
The Timmy Brothers, based in Brooklyn, create handcrafted water. It’s not just any water. It’s water that lets you travel to different cultural times and places. Want to drink water that evokes memories of Mark Twain’s Mississippi River? Or the great jazz that came out of New Orleans? Well, the Timmy Brothers have just the product for you.
If you’re in Brooklyn, also consider making a side trip to Beacon, NY where David Rees lovingly creates artisanal handcrafted pencils. You’ll never look at pencils the same way again. :-)
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