Salvador Dalí had a thing for anteaters. They made for good schtick, especially in Europe, and Dalí never saw schtick that he didn’t like.
And yet maybe there’s something a little more to this picture taken in Paris, in 1969. Maybe there’s some kind of symbolism, or even a playful tribute, taking place in the photo above.
Surrealism officially came into being in 1924, when André Breton wrote Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (read an English translation here). First a literary movement, Surrealism later embraced painters, including figures like Dalí.
In 1930, Dalí created a bookplate for Breton called, “André Breton le tamanoir.” That translates to “André Breton the Anteater,” the nickname given to Breton by his fellow surrealists. Now consider the fact that the 1969 photo was taken three short years after Breton’s death, and perhaps we can read an homage into it.
What nickname did Breton give to Dalí, you might ask? “Avida Dollars.” An anagram for “Salvador Dalí,” “Avida Dollars” translates to “eager for dollars.” Pretty apt.
Chris Burden got shot with a rifle, closed up in a locker for five days, made to crawl across fifty feet of broken glass, crucified on a Volkswagen Beetle, and wedged for an extended period under a large piece of non-broken glass. But he did it all voluntarily, surviving these and other threats to life and limb, all undertaken in the name of art, only dying this past Sunday. That concluded a long and astonishingly varied career in which Burden produced work not just of the grim trapped-in-a-box and bullet-in-the-arm variety, but elaborate, even whimsical sculptures, models, and machines that captivate their viewers to this day.
Burden also, between the years of 1973 and 1977 (a period after the shooting and the locker entrapment), worked in the medium of television commercials, producing work that, aired late at night, surely captivated their own viewers (who, given the era, may have already entered their own states of altered consciousness). At the top of the post, you can watch all of them in a row, a program accompanied by textual commentary from Burden himself which details the nature of his self-assigned mission “to break the omnipotent stranglehold of the airwaves that broadcast television held.”
The 2013 video from the Museum of Contemporary Art just above features Burden remembering this daring project of buying and artistically repurposing Los Angeles commercial airtime. But Burden’s interest in television didn’t stop, or indeed start, with these commercials. At East of Borneo, Nick Stillman has an essay putting all the artist’s TV-related work in context. “By situating the television set and by using the commercial form as implicit vessels of authority,” Stillman writes, “Burden’s work about how television influences behavior asked the most penetrating and ethical question of any artist I can think of who used the medium: Do you believe in television?”
Though Burden’s commercials haven’t seen regular broadcast in nearly forty years, his spirit nevertheless enjoys strong prospects of living on through his later work, which reflects and inhabits not the mediated world around us, but the concrete one. In 2011, we featured his Metropolis II, a kinetic sculpture modeling the city of the future in swooping ramps, architecturally fantastical towers, and countless toy cars on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
And if you so much as pass by the museum on Wilshire Boulevard, you’ll see his installation of vintage lampposts known as Urban Light. Odds are you’ll also take a picture with it; from what I’ve seen, it has to rank has the most photographed place in the city. “Heat is life,” Burden blankly intoned in his 1975 commercial Poem for L.A. — but light seems to have a pretty fair claim as well.
Sometimes it can seem as though the more we think we know a historical figure, the less we actually do. Helen Keller? We’ve all seen (or think we’ve seen) some version of The Miracle Worker, right?—even if we haven’t actually read Keller’s autobiography. And Mark Twain? He can seem like an old family friend. But I find people are often surprised to learn that Keller was a radical socialist firebrand, in sympathy with workers’ movements worldwide. In a short article in praise of Lenin, for example, Keller once wrote, “I cry out against people who uphold the empire of gold…. I am perfectly sure that love will bring everything right in the end, but I cannot help sympathizing with the oppressed who feel driven to use force to gain the rights that belong to them.”
Twain took a more pessimistic, ironic approach, yet he thoroughly opposed religious dogma, slavery, and imperialism. “I am always on the side of the revolutionists,” he wrote, “because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.” While a great many people grow more conservative with age, Twain and Keller both grew more radical, which in part accounts for another little-known fact about these two nineteenth century American celebrities: they formed a very close and lasting friendship that, at least in Keller’s case, may have been one of the most important relationships in either figure’s life.
Twain’s importance to Keller, and hers to him, begins in 1895, when the two met at a lunch held for Keller in New York. According to the Mark Twain Library’s extensive documentary exhibit, Keller “seemed to feel more at ease with Twain than with any of the other guests.” She would later write, “He treated me not as a freak, but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties.”Twain was taken as well, surprised by “her quickness and intelligence.” After the meeting, he wrote to his benefactor Henry H. Rogers, asking Rogers to fund Keller’s education. Rogers, the Mark Twain Library tells us, “personally took charge of Helen Keller’s fortunes, and out of his own means made it possible for her to continue her education and to achieve for herself the enduring fame which Mark Twain had foreseen.”
Twain wrote to his wealthy friend, “It won’t do for America to allow this marvelous child to retire from her studies because of poverty. If she can go on with them she will make a fame that will endure in history for centuries.” Thereafter, the two would maintain a “special friendship,” sustained not only by their political sentiments, but also by a love of animals, travel, and other personal similarities. Both writers came to live in Fairfield County, Connecticut at the end of their lives, and she visited him at his Redding home, Stormfield, in 1909, the year before his death (see them there at the top of the post, and more photos here). Twain was especially impressed by Keller’s autobiography, writing to her, “I am charmed with your book—enchanted.” (See his endorsement in a 1903 advertisement, below.)
Twain also came to Keller’s defense, ten years later, after reading in her book about a plagiarism scandal that occurred in 1892 when, at only twelve years old, she was accused of lifting her short story “The Frost King” from Margaret Canby’s “Frost Fairies.” Though a tribunal acquitted Keller of the charges, the incident still piqued Twain, who called it “unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque” in a 1903 letter in which he also declared: “The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterance—is plagiarism.” What differs from work to work, he contends is “the phrasing of a story”; Keller’s accusers, he writes protectively, were “solemn donkeys breaking a little child’s heart.” (The exquisitely-worded letter is well worth reading in full at Letters of Note).
We also have Twain—not playwright William Gibson—to thank for the “miracle worker” title given to Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan. (See Keller, Sullivan, Twain, and Sullivan’s husband John Macy above at Twain’s home). As a tribute to Sullivan for her tireless work with Keller, he presented her with a postcard that read, “To Mrs. John Sullivan Macy with warm regard & with limitless admiration of the wonders she has performed as a ‘miracle-worker.’” In his 1903 letter to Keller, he called Sullivan “your other half… for it took the pair of you to make complete and perfect whole.”
Twain praised Sullivan effusively for “her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character, and the fine literary competencies of her pen.” But he reserved his highest praise for Keller herself. “You are a wonderful creature,” he wrote, “The most wonderful in the world.” Keller’s praise of her friend Twain was no less lofty. “I have been in Eden three days and I saw a King,” she wrote in his guestbook during her visit to Stormfield, “I knew he was a King the minute I touched him though I had never touched a King before.” The last words in Twain’s autobiography, the first volume anyway—which he only allowed to be published in 2010—are Keller’s; “You once told me you were a pessimist, Mr. Clemons,” he quotes her as saying, “but great men are usually mistaken about themselves. You are an optimist.”
Image used with permission by Mark Ostow/Yale Alumni Magazine
Author William Zinsser died at his Manhattan home on Tuesday, May 12, 2015. The 92-year-old left behind one of the classics of writing instruction manuals as his legacy, On Writing Well. Since its first printing in 1976, the book has sold 1.5 million copies, and Zinsser made sure to update the book often. He loved the revolution in writing that computers brought, calling it a miracle.
Never have so many Americans written so profusely and with so few inhibitions. Which means that it wasn’t a cognitive problem after all. It was a cultural problem, rooted in that old bugaboo of American education: fear.
Zinsser stressed simplicity and efficiency, but also style and enthusiasm. Here are 10 of his many tips for improving your writing.
1. Don’t make lazy word choices: “You’ll never make your mark as a writer unless you develop a respect for words and a curiosity about their shades of meaning that is almost obsessive. The English language is rich in strong and supple words. Take the time to root around and find the ones you want.”
2. On the other hand, avoid jargon and big words: “Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other. It’s impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English.”
3. Writing is hard work: “A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.”
4. Write in the first person: “Writing is an intimate transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and it will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.”
5. And the more you keep in first person and true to yourself, the sooner you will find your style: “Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it.
6. Don’t ask who your audience is…you are the audience: “You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for.”
7. Study the masters but also your contemporaries: “Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I’d say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.”
8. Yes, the thesaurus is your friend: “The Thesaurus is to the writer what a rhyming dictionary is to the songwriter–a reminder of all the choices–and you should use it with gratitude. If, having found the scalawag and the scapegrace, you want to know how they differ, then go to the dictionary.”
9. Read everything you write out loud for rhythm and sound: “Good writers of prose must be part poet, always listening to what they write.”
10. And don’t ever believe you are going to write anything definitive: “Decide what corner of your subject you’re going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop.”
Zinsser follows his own advice, in that this book (pick up a copy here) is a joy to read, with a rollicking humor and an infectious enthusiasm. May he rest in peace!
Finally, as someone who can’t stand to hear the word ‘unique’ modified, Zinsser has this to say: “…being ‘rather unique’ is no more possible than being rather pregnant.’”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Charles Guiteau, the man who assassinated James Garfield, tried to argue in court that he just shot the president — the doctors actually killed him. Though Guiteau was ultimately hanged for his crime in 1882, he did have a point. Garfield’s doctor, William Bliss, jammed his unsterilized fingers in the presidential wound in an attempt to pull out the bullet. So did a host of other specialists. President Garfield died 80 days later of, among other things, sepsis. It was later concluded that the president would have likely survived if the doctors had kept their hands to themselves.
Garfield’s death was one of the catalysts that helped popularize Joseph Lister’s ideas about bacteria, a concept that vastly improved the quality of medical care. A hundred years later, for example, Ronald Reagan suffered from almost an identical bullet wound and was back to work within weeks.
In the 19th century and centuries before, diseases weren’t well understood and death was mysterious and divine. In the evangelical revivals of the mid-19th century, the end of life was seen as something to embrace. After all, God was calling his believers back home. Then with a growing understanding of germs, that sense of wonder with our mortality changed. “God hadn’t called the individual to him,” writes Deborah Lutz, scholar of Victorian culture, in TheNew York Times this week. “Rather, a malady had overtaken the body. Rather than dying at home, the sick were carted off to hospitals.” Death, in other words, became divorced from everyday life.
So from our 21st century viewpoint, the Victorians’ (and their predecessors’) tendency to collect mementos of the dead, like death masks, might seem gruesome. But from their point of view, our panicked denial of death would probably seem foolish and perverse. Mortality, after all, is a fact of life.
Princeton University’s Laurence Hutton Collection has dozens of death masks of famous politicians, philosophers and authors. People like Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln and Leo Tolstoy. There’s something humbling about seeing these titans of Western culture captured at such an intimate moment. Stripped of all the markers of class and rank, they look like people you might see on the street.
Aside from a rather unconvincing effigy of Queen Elizabeth, the collection features few masks of great women. No Jane Austens or Emily Dickinsons here. The collection also, sadly, lacks a mask of James Garfield.
Above you can find death masks of literary figures from the 14th to early 20th centuries. From top to bottom, you will see James Joyce, Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dante and William Wordsworth.
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.
Think of radio plays, and you most likely think (or I most likely think) of the form’s American “golden age” in the first half of the 20th century. That time and place in radio drama conjures up a certain more or less defined set of sensibilities: rocketships hurtling toward unknown worlds, hard-bitten detectives sticking to their cases, suburban couples bickering about the behavior of their jalopy-driving children. By the 1950s, the conventions of radio plays had ossified too much even for old-time radio audiences. Who best to call to tear up the form and start it over again? Why, Samuel Beckett, of course.
“In 1955 the BBC, intrigued by the international attention being given to the Paris production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (see a version here), invited the author to write a radio play,” says the short history provided in the program of the Beckett festival of Radio Plays. Though hesitant, Beckett nevertheless wrote the following to a friend: “Never thought about radio play technique but in the dead of t’other night got a nice gruesome idea full of cartwheels and dragging of feet and puffing and panting which may or may not lead to something.’ ” That “gruesome idea” led, according to the program, not just to Beckett’s 1956 radio-play debut All That Fall, but four more to follow over the next twenty years.
At the top of the post, you can listen to that first 70-minute sonic tale of an old, obese Irish housewife, the blind husband she meets at the train station as a birthday surprise, and all the children, eccentrics, weather, and thoroughly Beckettian dialogue that give texture to the death-obsessed journeys from home and back to it. All That Fall received critical acclaim, but the later radio play just above, the next year’s 45-minute Embers, found a more mixed reception — to the delight, one imagines, of most Beckett fans, who tend to prefer the divisive stuff to an agreed-upon canon anyway.
Built out of two monologues, a dialogue, and the sounds of the sea, Embers’ “rather ragged” script (in the words of Beckett himself, who later took the blame for the“too difficult” text) presents us with an inarticulate protagonist who leaves us with many more questions than answers. But just as in the work acknowledged as Beckett’s best, the questions we come away with send us in more interesting directions than do the answers provided in mainstream radio drama — or in mainstream anything else, for that matter. And amid all this writing for tape rather than stage, what noted work did he come with in 1958 for the stage? Why, Krapp’s Last Tape, of course.
Angst. Nausea. Selbstüberwindung. All, surely, words we’ve used before, but have we paid attention to their proper philosophical contexts? The well-known and widely-read philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Friedrich Nietzsche used those words and others in very specific ways to express concepts essential to their certainly eccentric but even more certainly important philosophical writings. These brief, Alain de Botton-narrated video primers from The School of Life’s series on philosophy will get you started on coming to grips with just what these 19th- and 20th-century thinkers had to tell us about our own lives.
The new video on Wittgenstein concentrates on its subject’s lifelong grappling with the problems of linguistic communication, from his first conclusion that “language works by triggering within us pictures of how things are in the world” to his second that “language is like a kind of tool that we use to play different ‘games.’ ” The video on Sartre deals with the existentialist’s contentions that “things are weirder than we think,” that “we are free,” that “we shouldn’t live in bad faith,” and that “we are free to dismantle capitalism.” The video on Nietzsche explains just what it means to become an Übermensch — a goal achievable, for example, by using your capacity for selbstüberwindung to overcome your sklavenmoral.
Though watching these philosophic primers might well make you ever so slightly conversant in Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Nietzsche, The School of Life has clearly crafted them (using goofy cut-up visuals and a healthy rate of quips per minute) primarily as an entertaining means of whetting your intellectual appetite. If you’d like to know more about these modern philosophers, have a look at our links to other related posts below. And if you’d like to go broader before you go deeper, do watch the rest of the series, which will get you started on everyone from Aristotle and the Stoics to La Rochefoucauld and Heidegger.
Once in a lifetime there comes a motion picture which changes the whole history of motion pictures. A picture so stunning in its effect, so vast in its impact that it profoundly affects the lives of all who see it.
But then comes the self-effacing punchline delivered by another narrator in Japanese:
One such film is Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai.” Another was “Ivan the Terrible.” Then there are more run-of-the mill films like “Herbie Rides Again,” “La Notte” and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
… So, if you’re an intellectual midget and you feel like giggling, you could do worse than see Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Classic Python!
Now, if want a Python trailer that takes itself seriously, look no further than the clip above. Created last year, this trailer re-imagines Monty Python and the Holy Grail as a mainstream Hollywood film. No wit. All cheese. If you dig the concept, you can see similar reworkings of Stanley Kubrick films here.
Coltrane is, of course, one of the true giants of 20th century music. He first got attention playing with the Miles Davis Quintet in the mid-1950s on albums like Relaxin’,Cookin’ and Steamin’ before he released his seminal solo album Blue Train. But his career quickly faltered. He was hooked on heroin and Davis, a former junkie himself, fired him from the Quintet. When he cleaned himself up, Coltrane found he was a changed man. “In the year of 1957,” he writes in the liner notes for his masterpiece A Love Supreme, “I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening, which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life.”
Throughout the 60s, Coltrane sought to express his rapidly evolving sense of spirituality through music that grew ever more complex and avant-garde. Late period Coltrane is a far cry from the moody grace of Blue Train; it’s a cascade of frenzied notes that can be as sublime as it is discordant and challenging.
The piece above is a recording by Pacifica Radio reporter Frank Kofsky who talked with Coltrane in November 1966, just eight months before he died at the age of 40 of liver cancer.
At one point in the piece, Kofsky asks him how much he practices. Trane was famous for the manic intensity with which he played. He once reportedly spent ten hours perfecting the sound of a single note. 12-hour practice sessions were the routine. In the interview, however, Coltrane is nonchalant. “I find that it’s only when something is trying to come through you know that I really practice and then it’s just, I don’t know how many hours, it’s just all day. “
Later in the video, when Coltrane discusses switching from a tenor sax to a soprano, you get a glimpse of how driven he was by his muse.
The sound of that soprano was actually so much closer to me in my ear. I didn’t want admit this damn thing because I said well the tenor’s my horn, this is my baby but the soprano, there’s still something there, just the voice of it that I can’t… It’s just really beautiful. I really like it.
But the most poignant moment comes at the end of video when he describes what kind of person he wants to be.
I mean I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know that there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force, which is truly for good.
For Jazz fans everywhere, there is no question that he was a force for good. And it was all embodied in his music.
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 badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting, “The Night Cafe,” now hangs at the Yale University Art Gallery, accompanied by this description:
In a letter to his brother written from Arles in the south of France, van Gogh described the Café de l’Alcazar, where he took his meals, as “blood red and dull yellow with a green billiard table in the center, four lemon yellow lamps with an orange and green glow. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most disparate reds and greens.” The clashing colors were also meant to express the “terrible passions of humanity” found in this all-night haunt, populated by vagrants and prostitutes. Van Gogh also felt that colors took on an intriguing quality at night, especially by gaslight: in this painting, he wanted to show how “the white clothing of the café owner, keeping watch in a corner of this furnace, becomes lemon yellow, pale and luminous green.”
The canvas, though dry and mostly flat, does a perfectly good job of capturing the life force that ran through that 19th century French café. That’s an understatement, of course. But I suppose there’s no harm in animating the already animated scene with some new-fangled technology. Above, you can see Mac Cauley’s “immersive virtual reality” tribute to Van Gogh, which he created for Oculus’ Mobile VR Jam 2015. On a page dedicated to the project, Cauley writes:
My main goal with this project was to see what kinds of stylized 3D rendering could be experienced through VR. I have always been drawn to the paintings of Van Gogh and I imagined it would be amazing to be inside one of these colorful worlds. While the GearVR offered certain challenges with its technical limitations compared with a PC, it forced me to prioritize and really define what makes a Van Gogh painting unique.
While creating the environments of these paintings in 3D space I’ve had to expand on areas that can’t be seen; rooms behind doors, objects hidden from view, people turned away from the viewer. It’s been an interesting process in using reference material from Van Gogh and other expressionist painters but also imagining what might have been there, just off the edges of the canvas.
The winners of the Oculus Mobile VR Jam will be announced in June. More creative takes on famous paintings can be found below.
The modal experimentation in Miles Davis’ classic albums Milestones and, especially, 1959’s Kind of Blue seemed to come out of nowhere. Along with similarly groundbreaking releases at the end of the fifties, these records irrevocably changed the sound of jazz. But hardcore jazz fans, and cinephiles, would have seen the development coming, having heard Davis’ soundtrack to Louis Malle’s 1958 crime thriller Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud—trailer below). As the story goes, Davis happened to be in Paris in 1957 during the film’s postproduction to perform at the Club Saint-Germain. Malle’s assistant—perhaps inspired by the moody jazz soundtracks of films like Roger Vadim’s Does One Ever Know and Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success—suggested Davis to the director. After a private screening of the film, the trumpeter and composer agreed to take the gig. It was Davis’ first soundtrack and Malle’s first feature film.
At the top of the post, we have the great privilege of seeing—and hearing—Miles and his four sidemen record the soundtrack, live. The two-day session took place at Le Post Parisien Studio in Paris on December 4th and 5th. According to Discogs, “Davis only gave the musicians a few rudimentary harmonic sequences he had assembled in his hotel room, and once the plot was explained, the band improvised without any precomposed theme, while edited loops of the musically relevant film sequences were projected in the background.”
The filmed session is captivating; Davis and band stare intently at the screen and, on the spot, create the film’s mood. (In the second half of the clip, the filmmakers banter in French about the production while Davis plays in the background.) Seeing this footage, writes Dangerous Minds, is akin to “watching Picasso paint.” Furthermore, “it could be argued that Malle’s cinematic style and the unique pacing and character of this particular film—which Miles obviously had to conform to in order to score it properly—had a noticeable influence on his music.”
Miles would say as much, claims his biographer Ian Carr, telling Malle “a year or two later” that “the experience of making the music for the film had enriched him.” Critic Jean-Louis Ginibre wrote in Jazz magazine at the time that Davis “raised himself to greater heights” during the sessions, “and became aware of the tragic character of his music which, until then, had been only dimly expressed.” For his part, Malle remarked, “Miles’s commentary—which is of extreme simplicity—gives a really extraordinary dimension to the visual image.” Fans of the film will surely agree. Fans of Miles Davis may want to rush out and get their hands of a copy of the score. (You can find a diminished copy on Youtube here). It was never released in the U.S., but ten songs appeared stateside on an album called Jazz Track. While the soundtrack may not work as well without the images (Allmusic describes some numbers as “rather sterile”), it nonetheless provides us with a kind of missing link between Davis’ fifties hard bop and the cool jazz he pioneered the following decade in his most-lauded, best-selling album, Kind of Blue.
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