Founded in 2003, The Believer magazine gained a reputation for being an off-beat literary magazine with a commitment “to journalism and essays that are frequently very long, book reviews that are not necessarily timely, and interviews that are intimate, frank and also very long.” Founded by authors Vendela Vida, Ed Park and Heidi Julavits, and originally published Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s, The Believer has featured contributions by Nick Hornby, Anne Carson, William T. Vollmann; columns by Amy Sedaris and Greil Marcus; and also interviews–like this one where director Errol Morris talks with filmmaker Werner Herzog.
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Even by the extreme standards of dystopian fiction, the premise of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451can seem a little absurd. Firemen whose job is to set fires? A society that bans all books? Written less than a decade after the fall of the Third Reich, which announced its evil intentions with book burnings, the novel explicitly evokes the kind of totalitarianism that seeks to destroy culture—and whole peoples—with fire. But not even the Nazis banned all books. Not a few academics and writers survived or thrived in Nazi Germany by hewing to the ideological orthodoxy (or at least not challenging it), which, for all its terrifying irrationalism, kept up some semblance of an intellectual veneer.
The novel also recalls the Soviet variety of state repression. But the Party apparatus also allowed a publishing industry to operate, under its strict constraints. Nonetheless, Soviet censorship is legendary, as is the survival of banned literature through self-publishing and memorization, vividly represented by the famous line in Mikhail Bulgokov’s The Master and Margarita, “Manuscripts don’t burn.”
Bulgakov, writes Nathaniel Rich at Guernica, is saying that “great literature… is fireproof. It survives its critics, its censors, and even the passage of time.” Bulgakov wrote from painful experience. When his diary was discovered by the NKVD in 1929, then returned to him, he “promptly burned it.” Sometime afterward, during the long composition of his posthumously published novel, he burned the manuscript, then later reconstructed it from memory.
These examples bring to mind the exiled intellectuals in Bradbury’s novel, who have memorized whole books in order to one day reconstruct literary culture. Europe’s totalitarian regimes provide essential background for the novel’s plot and imagery, but its key context, Bradbury himself noted in a 1956 radio interview, was the anti-Communist paranoia of the U.S. in the early 1950s. “Too many people were afraid of their shadows,” he said, “there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time.” Reading the novel as a chilling vision of a future when all books are banned and burned makes the artifact pictured above particularly poignant—an edition of Fahrenheit 451 bound in fireproof asbestos.
Released in 1953 by Ballantine in a limited run of two-hundred signed copies, the books were “bound in Johns-Manville Qinterra,” notes Lauren Davis at io9, “a chrysolite asbestos material.” Now the fireproof covers, with their “exceptional resistance to pyrolysis,” are “much sought after by collectors” and go for upwards of $20,000. A fireproof Fahrenheit 451, on the one hand, can seem a little gimmicky (its pages still burn, after all). But it’s also the perfect manifestation of a literal interpretation of the novel as a story about banning and book burning. All of us who have read the novel have likely read it this way, as a vision of a repressive totalitarian nightmare. As such, it feels like a product of mid-twentieth century fears.
Rather than fearing mass book burnings, we seem, in the 21st century, on the verge of being washed away in a sea of information (and dis- and mis-information). We are inundated with writing—in print and online—such that some of us despair of ever finding time to read the accumulating piles of books and articles that daily surround us, physically and virtually. But although books are still published in the millions, with sales rising, falling, then rising again, the number of people who actually read seems in danger of rapidly diminishing. And this, Bradbury also said, was his real fear. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture,” he claimed, “just get people to stop reading them.”
We’ve misread Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury told us in his later years. It is an allegory, a symbolic representation of a grossly dumbed-down society, hugely oppressive and destructive in its own way. The firemen are not literal government agents but symbolic of the forces of mass distraction, which disseminate “factoids,” lies, and half-truths as substitutes for knowledge. The novel, he said, is actually about people “being turned into morons by TV.” Add to this the proliferating amusements of the online world, video games, etc. and we can see Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451not as a dated representation of 40s fascism or 50s repression, but as a too-relevant warning to a distractible society that devalues and destroys education and factual knowledge even as we have more access than ever to literature of every kind.
“Whoever tries to imitate me is lost,” said the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov. Not so long ago, whoever tried to imitate him would also be in deep trouble. Persecuted by the Soviet authorities for the “subversive” nature of both his work and his lifestyle, he spent four years of the 1970s in a Siberian hard-labor camp. Nothing could speak more highly to his artistry than the fact that, even before his sentencing, Andrei Tarkovsky wrote a letter in his defense. “Artistically, there are few people in the entire world who could replace Parajanov,” argued the director of Mirror and Stalker. “He is guilty – guilty of his solitude. We are guilty of not thinking of him daily and of failing to discover the significance of a master.”
Alas, Tarkovsky’s protestations fell on deaf ears, as did those of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and other creators besides. Parajanov had earned their respect with two features, 1965’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and 1969’s The Color of Pomegranates, clips of which you can see here.
The powers that be actually looked kindly on the former, praising its poetic adaptation of a classic novel by Ukranian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. But the latter, a life of the 18th-century Armenian singer Sayat-Nova (the Georgia-born director was himself of Armenian heritage), seems to have gone too far in its break from the state-approved style of Socialist realism in which Parajanov once worked.
“Even when he was released, Parajanov was ‘silenced,’ as he said,” writes Messy Nessy. “He tried to get back on his movie making, but struggled for another ten years until the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1980s. When he died in 1990 at only 66, he left his final work unfinished, leaving the world to wonder what other visions of his were lost to time.” As the world has since slowly rediscovered the visions Parajanov did realize, his influence has here and there made itself felt. “I believe you have to be born a director,” he says in the interview clip above. “A director can’t be trained, not even in film school.” Directing, to his mind, “is basically the truth, transformed into images: sorrow, hope, love, beauty.” And as all those respected auteurs understood, no other filmmaker has ever seen the truth quite like he did.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Every serious guitarist learns to set up, repair, and maybe even customize their own instruments. It’s economical and fun and gives players insight into how and why their instruments sound the way they do, and how to make them sound better. Some amateur luthiers will even build their own instruments, at least those not famous enough to have custom guitars built for them by famous makers, an honor—maybe not unlike a basketball player having their own shoes—that tells the world they’re at the top of the game.
Everyone else labors away in basements, garages, and woodworking shops, leaning heavily on advice from master luthiers like Dan Erlewine. If you’re one of those lucky enough to have the space, tools, and know-how to make your own guitars, then the video above from Montreal-based master builder Michael Greenfield of Greenfield Guitars is for you. It shows every step in the process of his custom built acoustic guitars, and along the way shows you how you can build your own.
Electric guitars derive their sound from magnetic pickups, which can be affixed to everything from oil cans to plexiglass. Materials and workmanship can majorly affect tone and sustain, but not nearly to the degree they do in an acoustic guitar, in which the sound comes entirely from the instrument itself—from its shape, size, bracing style, wood selection, and even, believe it or not, the finish. The shaping, carving, and joining of each of the guitar’s structural parts—sides, top, back, and neck—makes its own unique contribution to the finished instrument’s tone.
Greenfield’s documentary isn’t only for the amateur—or professional, for that matter—luthier. It’s also an all-around fascinating look at how fine, hand-crafted acoustic guitars get made, of interest to anyone from woodworkers to sound engineers to music fans in general. Most consumer-grade guitars get an assembly-line factory build, turned out by the thousands to keep superstores like Guitar Center stocked. Master builders like Greenfield devote considerable time and attention to every individual instrument—the process documented here for a single guitar, he tells us, took place over a period of four to five months.
Want to hear the finished product? Skip ahead to 57:47 for a demonstration by Canadian Celtic-folk singer Lizzy Hoyt. Learn more about Michael Greenfield’s handcrafted guitars at greenfieldguitars.com.
For 65 years and counting, the pages of Mad magazine have entertained readers by satirizing all the cultural items, social fads, news items, and political issues of the moment. Throughout that span of time the covers of Mad magazine have done the same, except that they’ve entertained everyone, even those who’ve never opened an issue, whether they want it or not. Though on one level designed purely as disposable visual gags, Mad’s covers collectively provide a satirical history of America, and one you can easily browse at Doug Gilford’s Mad Cover Site, “a resource for collectors and fans of the world’s most important (ecch!) humor publication.”
Gilford started the site back in 1997, a year that saw Mad’s covers take on such phenomena as The X‑Files, the Spice Girls, the Tamagotchi, and Seinfeld. That last seizes the presumably irresistible opportunity to draw Jerry Seinfeld scowling in irritation at “Neuman” — not his nemesis-neighbor Newman, but Mad’s mascot Alfred E. Neuman, who appears in one form or another on almost all of the magazine’s covers.
These sort of antics had already been going on for quite some time, as evidenced, for instance, by the June 1973 cover above in which Neuman dons a Droog outfit to take the place of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange — or, in Mad’s, view, A Crockwork Lemon.
To see the archive’s covers in a large format, you need only scroll to the desired year, click on the issue number, and then click on the image that appears. (Alternatively, those with advanced Mad knowledge can simply pick an issue number from the pull-down “Select-a-Mad” menu at the top of the page.) Gilford keeps the site updated with covers right up to the latest issue: number three, as of this writing, since the magazine “rebooted” this past June as it relocated its offices from New York to California. Recent targets have included Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Donald Trump, and, of course, Donald Trump. Mad’s longevity may be surprising, but it certainly doesn’t look like America will stop providing the ridiculousness on which it has always survived any time soon.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you’re one of the 8.5 million people living in New York City, take note of this: When you sign up for a library card from the New York Public Library, you can get access to 30,000 free movies (including many from the Criterion Collection) and also some 300,000 Free eBooks. But that’s not all. A new initiative lets members of the New York Public Library (plus the Brooklyn and Queens libraries) to sign up for a Culture Pass and thereby gain free entrance to 33 museums across NYC. The list of participating museums includes some big ones–the Met, Morgan, Whitney, Frick and Guggenheim. Also the MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and more. Find a complete list below.
The Culture Pass website has more information about this new program. The website is also where you will need to actually make reservations to visit the museums. According to Hyperallergic, “Each cardholder is eligible for one pass per cultural institution annually and allowed to reserve two impending visits at any given time.”
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Participating Museums
Brooklyn Botanic Garden
Brooklyn Children’s Museum
Brooklyn Historical Society
Brooklyn Museum
Children’s Museum of Manhattan
Children’s Museum of the Arts
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
The Drawing Center
The Frick Collection
Historic Richmond Town
International Center of Photography
Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum
Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art
The Jewish Museum
Louis Armstrong House
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Morgan Library & Museum
Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1
Museum of Chinese in America
Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
Museum of the City of New York
New York Transit Museum
Noguchi Museum
Queens Historical Society
Queens Museum
Rubin Museum of Art
SculptureCenter
Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian
Perhaps the youthful Father of Psychology won’t be hooking up with his female sidekick—a medium (always so helpful in cases involving serial killers!)
Perhaps instead the real love interest will be the intriguingly named Kiss, a testy war veteran cop. As Freud wrote in a 1935 letter:
Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them. (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime –and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.
The eight-part German-language series will be directed by a Marvin Kren, who seems, in the translated press release, as if he might be equal to the task.
I more or less grew up underneath Sigmund Freud’s original sofa, meaning: in the same district in Vienna where he had his office. The difference: When I was born the world already profited from Sigmund Freud’s groundbreaking discoveries for almost a century. We, the modern human beings, live in post-Freudian times. It is very appealing and challenging for me to imagine a world in this series in which the ‘self’ was just a blind spot on the map of cognition, a world that hasn’t seen Sigmund Freud yet. I would like to emerge with ‘Freud’ into Vienna’s dark alleys before the turn of the century, to discover the reflection of the labyrinth of the human soul inspiring his life’s work. Abysmal, dubious and dangerous!
The series will debut on Austrian television. Netflix will control international streaming rights. Production is due to begin this fall.
Romsai the elephant wore a red rope around his neck to warn approaching humans that he was a danger to both them and elephants. A dark patch on his head from a temporin secretion indicated that he was in the musth cycle, which only heightened his aggression. His mahouts at the ElephantsWorld sanctuary in Kanchanaburi, Thailand observed that the old, blind elephant was growing more dangerous with age.
And yet, he is the personification of sweetness, as pianist Paul Barton serenades him with a performance of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathétique, repeating the melody section several times “as he seems to like it.”
In lieu of applause, Romsai places his trunk over the top of Barton’s upright piano again and again, in no way aggressive, more the gesture of a grateful audience member.
As Barton, a Yorkshireman who went to Thailand over twenty years ago for what he thought would be a short piano teaching stint only to wind up marrying a local artist and animal rights activist, said in an interview with YourStory:
All animals like music. Dogs, cats, etc. But elephants are the closest to human beings in the sense that they have the same neurons in the brains as us. Also they have a very good memory. If you are treated badly as a child, you are going to remember that all your life. It’s the same with elephants. The elephant shares that part of the brain with us which has flashbacks. They can never forget the terrible things they have seen and suffered… If you play classical music to an elephant, something soft and beautiful, something that human beings have been listening to for hundreds for hundreds of years, something that is timeless—and you play that to an elephant that is blind and they’ve never heard music before—the reaction is priceless. There is a special bond between you and the elephant. You are communicating with them in a different language. That language is neither ours nor theirs. There is something infinitesimally wonderful in a piece of Beethoven that connects me to that elephant and that feeling is otherworldly.
The impulse to play live concerts for Romsai and other blind sanctuary dwellers was partly born from seeing the positive effect music had on some blind children with whom Barton worked.
He also wanted to make amends for the deforestation of the elephant’s homeland, and the way the teak industry exploited their labor. It was while thus employed that many of them suffered scratched corneas and other eye injuries that blinded them, rendering them doubly vulnerable when the Thai government enacted a ban on commercial timber logging in 1989:
The elephant has worked for humans for too long. It was used in wars, it was used to deforest its own home. What is the little thing I can do as a human to say sorry, for my species for what we have done to them? I’ll carry this heavy thing myself and play some music for the elephant while it is having some breakfast.
Removed from the plush seats of a concert hall, Ravel feels right at home. A rooster crows, a nearby child pipes up, and Romsai wanders in and out of the frame, at times appearing to keep time with his trunk.
Cicadas underscore Schubert’s Serenade.
Another ElephantsWorld resident, Lam Duan’s (aka “Tree with Yellow Flowers”) stillness as she listens to Bach is reminiscent of Barton’s first musical outing with the elephants:
Elephants eat a lot of food. A lot. It is exhausting trying to procure that much food for so many elephants. When an elephant gets to eat, it’s a bit like a dog. A dog will eat its food so quickly because it’s not sure if it will ever eat again. And elephants are the same. Once they get their hands on some juicy leaves, they will eat and eat and nothing can tear them away from their food. That morning I brought the piano in early to the sanctuary. Pla-Ra was taken to a field full of juicy bamboo shoots and she began eating with a single minded dedication. I started to play Beethoven and she stopped eating. There was this half eaten bamboo shoot sticking out of her trunk while she stared at me. That was a reaction never seen before. An elephant stopped eating because of music.
Barton’slatest recording features 80-year-old Ampan, blind in one eye and near blind in the other, enjoying Debussy’s Clair de Lune.
The best part about watching videos of my favorite musicians talking about their playing is the moment they reveal that certain stylistic quirks–the ones that made them who they are–came about more-or-less by accident. Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis, for example, well-known for his huge, open chords as well as his long, expressive solos, recently told Matt Sweeney that he only learned to palm-mute (dampen the strings to muffle excessive ringing) a couple years ago. Maybe he was joking, but the idea that an essential element of his massive sound emerged because he didn’t know another way to play fills me with joy.
Another of my favorite players is also a self-confessed “complete autodidact,” Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club. As distinctive a player as Mascis, it’s impossible to mistake her style for anyone else’s. “I was only playing bass for five months when the band first played [live],” she told an audience in 2014 at the Red Bull Music Academy in Tokyo. “I did not take a lesson. Nobody taught me.” But unlike many of her self-taught male counterparts with roots in punk and a decades-long association with a band that defined an era, Weymouth, argues Carrie Courogen at PAPER, has been tragically under-recognized.
Yet “without her there would be no ‘Psycho Killer,’ no ‘Burning Down the House,’ no ‘Once in a Lifetime,’—grooves which are immediately recognizable.” It takes nothing away from the smarts of David Byrne’s songwriting to point out that Talking Heads was just as much a product of its top-notch rhythm section. Weymouth’s “basslines became the pulse of the band,” writes Courogen, “infusing downtown punk with a new sound: a danceable combination of the soulful, funky jams of Parliament and James Brown with the rock steadiness of Carol Kaye.” In the video above from Reverb.com, our host Jeremy walks us through the elements of Weymouth’s playing
As Jeremy points out, unlike many players, Weymouth’s sound was not defined by one particular instrument: throughout her long career, she played Fender Mustang and Jazz basses, a Hofner Club, and several custom basses. “She really used what she needed,” he says, “to fit the sound to the tune.” Jeremy himself demonstrates her basslines on a Fender Mustang. He gives her high praise indeed by comparing her simple yet melodic lines to those of greats Donald “Duck” Dunn and James Jamerson—long considered two of the best players in funk and soul. It’s a well-deserved comparison, and Weymouth has mentioned both as influences.
That she took their Motown and Memphis sounds and turned them into angular art-rock makes her all the more interesting a player to study, and a reason for her major influence on generations of bassists who draw as much from classic funk as from 80s New Wave. There may be no more perfect fusion of the two than in Weymouth’s playing—and in her songwriting too, as Tom Tom Club’s 1981 “Genius of Love” made abundantly clear. Jeremy covers this one as well, and if you’re a bass player, you should too.
As we get older, family and friends may pass away or leave us somehow, but for many of us creativity can be our solace. (Yes, it could also make us immortal, like Bach or Shakespeare, but we won’t be around to find out.) In the case of nonagenarian Inge Ginsberg that has been the case in the unlikeliest of outlets: death metal.
This charming New York Times documentary by Leah Galant details the unlikely team-up between Ginsberg–who spends her time between Switzerland and New York City–and the young musicians who became her friends and got her into performing her poems live with full death metal accompaniment.
Half earnest and half good-natured stunt, the center of it all is Ginsberg’s poems, which she has been writing for years, and only a tiny glimpse of which we get to hear. The poems take on heavy subjects of mortality, our destruction of the earth, loneliness. At one point Ginsberg was writing these with no audience, and, as she says in the doc, society is not interested in hearing from the elderly (especially when it’s this dark.) It took her younger friends to make the connection between her poems and the usual preoccupations of death metal and insist Ginsberg perform them in that hectoring, doom laden-style of the genre. She was game.
Galant’s mini doc rewinds history halfway through to explain Ginsberg’s upbringing: a “Jewish princess” who survived the Holocaust, fled to America, and wound up writing songs with her husband (Dean Martin’s “Try Me” was one of their hits). Tired of the war, they moved back to Zurich, and, well, fast forward three husbands and several decades later, Ginsberg was back in the spotlight, performing on the Swiss version of America’s Got Talent.
We won’t spoil the ending of the doc, as the band try to get Ginsberg to try out for the actual America’s Got Talent, because we’ve already said enough. But we’ll leave you with this quote from the singer herself: “My concept of heaven and hell is that in the moment of death you realize your life was full and good–that is heaven. And if you think, ‘Oh, I should have done this or that,’ I think that’s hell.”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Joni Mitchell, Keith Richards, Robert Johnson, Ani DiFranco, and Bob Dylan. What do they have in common? For one, they’ve experimented with alternate guitar tunings, going beyond the standard EADGBE tuning most commonly used by musicians. Keith Richards used the Open G tuning (GDGBD) to write some of the Stones’ classic tracks–“Honky Tonk Woman,” “Brown Sugar,” “Beast of Burden,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Happy,” and “Start Me Up.” Try playing them in a standard tuning and they’ll never sound quite right.
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