Back in April, we highlighted for you a trove of 110 illustrations by J.R.R. Tolkien, offering a rare glimpse of the author’s artistic talents. Tolkien didn’t just like to write books, as we saw. He also liked to draw illustrations for these books, which helped him to conceptualize the fantasy worlds he was creating.
Just this month, Houghton Mifflin released a new book called The Art of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, which brings together more than 180 drawings, inscriptions, maps, and plans–all drawn by Tolkien as part of his worldbuilding creative process. Most were never published until now.
And then we get this: a newly-discovered map annotated by Tolkien. Found in a copy of The Lord of the Rings thatoriginallybelonged to Pauline Baynes (the artist who illustrated Tolkien’s novels in print), the map intriguingly connects Tolkien’s fantasy world to real places on our globe. According to The Guardian, annotations on the map (click here to view the materials in a larger format) suggests that “Hobbiton is on the same latitude as Oxford [where Tolkien taught], and implies that the Italian city of Ravenna could be the inspiration behind the fictional city of Minas Tirith.” Belgrade, Cyprus, and Jerusalem also get listed as reference points. Discovered by Blackwell’s Rare Books, the rare map will be put on the market for an asking price of £60,000.
You can learn more about this map, considered “perhaps the finest piece of Tolkien ephemera to emerge in the last 20 years,” over at The Guardian.
At the lower range of hearing, it’s said humans can hear sound down to about 20 Hz, beneath which we encounter a murky sonic realm called “infrasound,” the world of elephant and mole hearing. But while we may not hear those lowest frequencies, we feel them in our bodies, as we do many sounds in the lower frequency ranges—those that tend to disappear when pumped through tinny earbuds or shopping mall speakers. Since bass sounds don’t reach our ears with the same excited energy as the high frequency sounds of, say, trumpets or wailing guitars, we’ve tended to dismiss the instruments—and players—who hold down the low end (know any famous tuba players?).
In most popular music, bass players don’t get nearly enough credit—even when the bass provides a song’s essential hook. As Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones joked at his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1995, “thank you to my friends for remembering my phone number.” And yet, writes Tom Barnes at Mic, “there’s scientific proof that bassists are actually one of the most vital members of any band…. It’s time we started treating bassists with the respect they deserve.” Research into the critical importance of low frequency sound explains why bass instruments mostly play rhythm parts and leave the fancy melodic noodling to instruments in the upper range. The phenomenon is not specific to rock, funk, jazz, dance, or hip hop. “Music in diverse cultures is composed this way,” says psychologist Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster University Institute for Music and the Mind, “from classical East Indian music to Gamelan music of Java and Bali, suggesting an innate origin.”
Trainor and her colleagues have recently published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggesting that perceptions of time are much more acute at lower registers, while our ability to distinguish changes in pitch gets much better in the upper ranges, which is why, writes Nature, “saxophonists and lead guitarists often have solos at a squealing register,” and why bassists tend to play fewer notes. (These findings seem consistent with the physics of sound waves.) To reach their conclusions, Trainer and her team “played people high and low pitched notes at the same time.” Participants were hooked up to an electroencephalogram that measured brain activity in response to the sounds. The psychologists “found that the brain was better at detecting when the lower tone occurred 50 MS too soon compared to when the higher tone occurred 50 MS too soon.”
The study’s title perfectly summarizes the team’s findings: “Superior time perception for lower musical pitch explains why bass-ranged instruments lay down musical rhythms.” In other words, “there is a psychological basis,” says Trainor, “for why we create music the way we do. Virtually all people will respond more to the beat when it is carried by lower-pitched instruments.” University of Vienna cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch has pronounced Trainor and her co-authors’ study a “plausible hypothesis for why bass parts play such a crucial role in rhythm perception.” He also adds, writes Nature:
For louder, deeper bass notes than those used in these tests, people might also feel the resonance in their bodies, not just hear it in their ears, helping us to keep rhythm. For example, when deaf people dance they might turn up the bass and play it very loud, he says, so that “they can literally ‘feel the beat’ via torso-based resonance.”
Painfully awkward revelers at weddings, on cruise ships, at high school reunions—they just can’t help it. Maybe even this dancing owl can’t help it. Some of us keep time better than others, but most of us feel and respond physically to low-frequency rhythms.
Bass instruments don’t only keep time; they also play a key role in a song’s harmonic and melodic structure. In 1880, an academic music textbook informed its readers that “the bass part… is, in fact, the foundation upon which the melody rests and without which there could be no melody.” As true as this was at the time—-when acoustic precursors to electric bass, synthesizers, and sub-bass amplification provided the low end—it’s just as true now. And bass parts often define the root note of a chord, regardless of what other instruments are doing. As a bass player, notes Sting, “you control the harmony,” as well as anchoring the melody. It seems the importance of rhythm players, though overlooked in much popular appreciation of music, cannot be overstated.
“How did this even get on the air?” Both the die-hard fans and bewildered haters asked that question about Twin Peaks, David Lynch and Mark Frost’s surreal television drama that famously aired on ABC primetime in 1990 and 1991. That such an unconventional vision — and one realized, at least throughout the first season, with such thorough commitment — ever made it to the mainstream airwaves now seems like a historical achievement in and of itself. So how, given the stultifying rigors of the entertainment industry, did Lynch and Frost actually sell this package of cryptic dreams, backward speech, small-town savagery, a murdered homecoming queen, and damn fine cherry pie?
First, Lynch drew a map. Knowing that no TV executive would understand Twin Peaks without understanding Twin Peaks, the fictional Washington town which gives the story its setting and title, he drew what you see above. Nigel Holmes included it in his out-of-print Pictorial Maps, commenting that “the peaks of the title, and the town they name, are clearly visible as white-topped mountains rising out of the modeled landscape.
By creating a sense of place, Lynch made the town all the more believable. A straightforward map would have been dull by comparison and might have suggested that there was something intrinsically interesting about the geography of the place. What was much more important to convey was the mood of the story, and it’s nicely captured in Lynch’s quirky drawing.”
The book also includes a quote from Lynch himself, on the utility of the map: “We knew where everything was, and it helped us decide what mood each place had, and what could happen there. Then the characters just introduced themselves to us and walked into the story.” As any Twin Peaks fan will notice, the map identifies a host of locations referenced in the show, such as White Tail and Blue Pine mountains (the peaks themselves), Ghostwood National Forest, and Lucky Highway 21. But “can you locate Sparkwood and 21, One-Eyed Jack’s and The Great Northern?” asks fan site Welcome to Twin Peaks. And if the much-discussed 21st-century Twin Peaks revival comes to fruition, will it dust off this trusty reference document and revive the askew but deep sense of place we (or at least some us) savored the first time around?
There has rarely ever been an artist more fully in command of as many different art forms as Orson Welles during his height — the late 1930s and early 40s. He revolutionized the stage, radio and cinema before the age of 26 and became a household name in the process.
Welles’s first brush with national fame came at the age of 20 when he staged an all-black production of Macbeth in Harlem. The 1936 play was groundbreaking both for its striking sets and its darling interpretation that set Shakespeare’s bloody tragic in Haiti. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this production was that it was done entirely with non-actors. Through sheer charisma and force of will, Welles coaxed and cajoled terrific performances out of day laborers and factory workers.
Two years later, in 1938, Welles ended up on the cover of TIME Magazine for his staging of Julius Caesar. He set the play in contemporary fascist Italy. It was a bold choice that turned a 340 year-old play into a work of great political urgency.
That same year, Welles also managed to freak out the nation with his brilliant, wildly irresponsible adaptation of War of the Worlds. Welles staged the beloved sci-fi novel as if it were a news report. The broadcast captured the drama and terror of an emerging calamity all too well; it caused a public panic.
Now you can listen to that infamous radio play along with 61 hours of other radio plays, all created by Welles for his 1930s radio show, The Mercury Theatre on the Air. The Spotify playlist, embedded below, includes AChristmas Carol, Heart of Darkness and even a rehearsal for Julius Caesar. Check it out. And if you need Spotify’s free software, download it here.
Or if Spotify isn’t your thing, you can listen to another big collection of Welles’s radio dramas below at archive.org. Start streaming that collection here:
The notoriety of Welles’ radio work landed him one of the most generous movie contracts in Hollywood studio history. This is doubly impressive because, at this stage in his life, Welles had no idea how to actually make a film. The resulting movie was a barbed, thinly veiled film à clef of one of the most powerful men in America – William Randolph Hearst. This proved to be a terrible career move; Hearst’s wrath derailed Welles’s career for years but it did produce a pretty good movie – Citizen Kane.
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.
Imagine if you will that it is the year 4515, and future people slowly begin excavating the musical remains of millennia past. Now add the following wrinkle to this scenario, courtesy of classics scholar Armand D’Angour: “all that survived of the Beatles songs were a few of the lyrics, and all that remained of Mozart and Verdi’s operas were the words and not the music.” Would it be possible to recover the rhythms and melodies from these scraps? Wouldn’t this music be forever lost to history?
Not necessarily, D’Angour tells us; we could “reconstruct the music, rediscover the instruments that played them, and hear the words once again in their proper setting.” Given the inexact, speculative nature of much ancient history, I imagine the reconstructed Beatles might end up sounding nothing like themselves, but then again, now that scholars have begun to recover the music of ancient Greek tragedy from a few fragments of text, surely those future historians could remake “Love Me Do”
Reconstructing Don Giovani might be a little trickier, and that’s often the scale academics like D’Angour are working with, since not only the love-poems of Sappho, but also “the epics of Homer” and “the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides—were all, originally, music. Dating from around 750 to 400 BC, they were composed to be sung in whole or part to the accompaniment of the lyre, reed-pipes, and percussion instruments.” This much we all likely know to some extent.
D’Angour goes on to describe in detail how scholars like himself use “patterns of long and short syllables” in the surviving verse to determine musical rhythm, and new revelations about ancient Greek vocal notation and tuning to reconstruct ancient melody.
The earliest surviving musical document “preserves a few bars of sung music” from fifth-century tragedian Euripides’ play Orestes. A “notoriously avant-garde composer,” Euripides—scholars presume—“violated the long-held norms of Greek folk-singing by neglecting word-pitch.” You can see the papyrus fragment above, written around 200 BC in Egypt and called “Katolophyromai” after the first word in the “stasimon,” or choral song. Above the words, notice the vocal and instrumental notation scholars have used to reconstruct the music. The lines describe Orestes’ guilt after murdering his mother:
I cry, I cry, your mother’s blood that drives you mad, great happiness in mortals never lasting, but like a sail of swift ship, which a god shook up and plunged it with terrible troubles into the greedy and deadly waves of the sea.
This translation comes from “Greek Reconstructionist Paganism” site Baring the Aegis, who also describe the song’s rhythm, Dochmius, and mode, Lydian, with a helpful explanation for non-specialists of what these terms mean. They also feature the live performance of the stasimon at the top of the post, just one interpretation by Spyros Giasafakis and Evi Stergiou of neofolk band Daemonia Nymphe. Below it, hear another interpretation by Petros Tabouris and Nikos Konstantinopoulos. And just below and at the bottom of the post are two more versions of the ancient song.
Given Euripides’ experimentalism, we can’t expect that this reconstructed song would be representative of most ancient Greek music. “However, we can recognize that Euripides adopted another principle,” setting words to falling and rising cadences according to their emotional import. As D’Angour puts it, “this was ancient Greek soundtrack music,” and it was apparently so well-received that historian Plutarch tells a story about “thousands of Athenian soldiers held prisoner” in Syracuse: “those few who were able to sing Euripides’ latest songs were able to earn some food and drink.”
As for “the greatest of ancient poet-singers,” Homer, it seems according to reconstructions by the late Professor Martin West of Oxford that Homeric tunes were “fairly monotonous,” explaining perhaps why “the tradition of Homeric recitation without melody emerged from what was originally a sung composition.”
In 1968, Charles Manson listened to The Beatles’ White Album and came away thinking that America was on the verge of an apocalyptic race war between whites and blacks. As Manson imagined it, the race war would be triggered by a shocking, chaotic event called “Helter Skelter” — a named borrowed from a song on the White Album. And, like most megalomaniacs, Manson put himself at the center of the drama. In the summer of 1969, Manson had members of his cult commit a series of infamous murders in Southern California, hoping that African-Americans would be blamed and the race war would begin. Instead, a lengthy police investigation led to Manson’s arrest on December 2, 1969 and his conviction soon thereafter, making him then, and now, one of America’s notorious inmates.
Through the 1980s, Manson, even though behind bars, remained a very public figure, giving high profile interviews to Tom Snyder, Charlie Rose, and Geraldo Rivera. But then, he began to fade from view, for whatever reasons. For the past 20 years, we haven’t heard much from him. Until this came along. Above, you can watch Leah Shore’s animation of never-before-heard phone conversations between Charles Manson and Marlin Marynick (who later published a best-selling biography called Charles Manson Now). Fittingly strange, the animation reminds us of the very odd things going on inside Manson’s mind. Off kilter as ever, he goes in all kinds of unexpected directions.
We also believe that you shouldn’t have to endure a Priceless Halloween — that is to say, a Halloween without Vincent Price. Though he proved his versatility in a wide variety of genres throughout his long acting career, history has remembered Price first and foremost for his work in horror, no doubt thanks in large part to his possession of a voice perfectly suited to the elegantly sinister. It also made him an ideal teller of Poe’s ingeniously macabre tales, which you can experience for yourself in the recordings we’ve posted of Price reading Poe, a playlist which also includes readings by Price’s equally versatile Basil Rathbone.
Rathbone may also have got to read Poe, the work, but despite his huge number of roles on stage and screen, he never actually played Poe, the man. But Price did, in the special An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe, the closest any of us will get to an audience with the troubled, brilliant, and terrifyingly inventive writer himself. In it, Price-as-Poe takes the stage and, over the course of an hour, weaves into his performance four of his most enduring stories: “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Sphinx,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Go on, join Edgar Allan Poe in his drawing room this Halloween by having Price bring him to life on your screen — it will guarantee you a memorable holiday evening.
Darwin had no real use for the original manuscript once galley proofs came back from the publisher. So one can imagine father Charles giving his kids the only worthwhile paper in the house to draw on. It seems flippant now, but at the time, it was perfectly normal.
Researchers surmise that the majority of the art comes from three of the 10 children, Francis, George, and Horace, all of whom went into the sciences as adults. The illustrations are colorful and witty, drawn in pencil and sometimes colored in watercolor. Birds and butterflies are drawn and colored with attention to detail. Some creatures are imaginary, like the green fish with legs carrying an umbrella, and there are short stories about fairies and battles too.
Overall, the drawings show a Darwin who was a family man and not a reclusive scientist. We’re just glad that the kids let dad do his work in relative silence.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
If you visited The Tate Modern in recent years, perhaps you saw the large, 130-foot art installation covering a concourse wall. Created by illustrator Sara Fanelli, the “Tate Artist Timeline” provided museumgoers with a sprawling roadmap showing the major artistic movements and important artists of the 20th century, moving from Art Nouveau to more contemporary Graffiti Art.
Nowadays, you can revisit Fanelli’s educational timeline by purchasing a copy in a handsome book format. You can also watch the timeline play out in the video above.
Or, happily we’ve been informed by the Tate, there’s now an updated, interactive version installed in the museum. The video below gives you a preview:
We’ve all been to a museum with that friend or family member who just doesn’t “get” modern art and suggests it’s all a con. Conceptual art? Abstract expressionism? What is that?! Impressionism? Who wants blurry, poorly drawn paintings?! Arrgh!
Hey, maybe some of us are that friend or family member. Maybe our complaints are even more specific—maybe some of us are members of a “cultural justice” movement called “Renoir Sucks at Painting.” Maybe we show up at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with signs parodying the cartoonishly terrible Westboro Baptist Church (“God Hates Renoir”) and demanding, with as much force as one can with a parody sign, that the Renoirs be removed from the company of worthier objets d’art.
One critical difference between the typical art hater and the Renoir Sucks crew: the latter do not object to Pierre-Auguste Renoir because his work is too hard to “get,” but because it’s too easy. Renoir, they say, painted “treacle” and “deformed pink fuzzy women.” As art critic Peter Schjeldahl writes in The New Yorker, “Renoir’s winsome subjects and effulgent hues jump in your lap like a friendly puppy.” Renoir is so far from avant-garde that Schjeldahl can peg his “exaggerated blush and sweetness” as an example of the “popular appeal” that “advanced the bourgeois cultural revolution that was Impressionism.” Ouch.
This kind of assessment gets no help from the painter’s great-great granddaughter, Genevieve, who responds to critics by quoting sales figures: “It is safe to say,” she writes, “that the free market has spoken and Renoir did NOT suck at painting.” By this measure, Thomas Kinkade and Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel were also artistic geniuses. The charges of “aesthetic terrorism” against Renoir come right out of the iconoclasm that functions in the art world as both meaningful dissent and successful gimmick (cf. Marcel Duchamp, or Ai Weiwei’s controversial, gallery-filling attacks on revered cultural artifacts.) But perhaps the honest question remains: does Renoir Suck at Painting?
Let us reserve judgment and take a look at another side of Renoir, a rarely seen excursion into book illustration—specifically the four illustrations he made for an 1878 edition of Emile Zola’s novel L’Assommoir (“The Dram Shop”). Described by the Art Institute of Chicago as “grittily realistic,” Zola’s naturalist depiction of what he called “the inevitable downfall of a working-class family in the polluted atmosphere of our urban areas” provoked many of its readers, who regarded the book as “an unforgivable lapse of taste on the part of its author.” It showed Parisians “an aspect of current life that most found frightening and repulsive.” Nonetheless, the novel became a popular success.
The four black-and-white engravings here—made from Renoir’s original drawings—are the impressionist’s contribution to Zola’s illlustrated novel. The choice of Renoir as one of several artists for this edition seems an odd one. (Zola, a friend of the painter’s, approached him personally.) Then, as now, Renoir had a reputation for sunny optimism: “he always looks on the bright side,” remarked one contemporary. Renoir’s “preference for creating images of beauty,” writes The Art Institute of Chicago, “made the illustration of the particularly seedy passages of the novel problematic, and some of the resulting drawings lack conviction.”
Instead of succumbing to the novel’s grim tone, Renoir’s original renderings, like the “loose wash drawing” in “warm, brown ink” at the top of the post, “gently subverted the dark undertones of Zola’s text.” Below the original drawing, see the engraving that appeared in the book. Book blog Adventures in the Print Trade concedes the plates “are of varying quality” and singles out the illustration just above as the most successful one, since “the subject-matter is perfect for Renoir, and the whole scene is brimming with life.”
As you can see from the two images at the top of the post, the translation from Renoir’s drawings to the final book engravings left many of his figures blurred and obscured, and introduce a dark heaviness to work undertaken with a much softer, lighter touch. Do these illustrations add anything to our understanding of whether Renoir Sucks at Painting? Who can say. It’s true that here, as in many of his well-known paintings, “the compositions tend to be slack,” as Schjeldahl writes. Nonetheless, the Art Institute of Chicago audaciously judges the brown ink wash drawing at the top of the post “one of the most important drawings the artist produced during the years of high Impressionism.”
They only add to my appreciation of Renoir, who does not, I think, suck. Even if his work can be, as Schjeldahl says, “high glucose,” I would argue that his sweetness and light provide just the right approach to Zola, whose novels, like those of other naturalists such as Theodore Dreiser or Thomas Hardy, contain much more than a hint of sentimentality.
Those who watch and dislike Chantal Akerman’s best-known film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, often complain that “nothing happens” in it. But in my experience of introducing it — nay, evangelizing for it — to friends, it usually only takes a solid viewing or two of that 1975 three-hour-and-twenty-minute tale of a Belgian single mother’s days and nights spent cooking (a short clip of which you can see above), cleaning, and possibly engaging in prostitution to feel — or at least in the immediate aftermath of viewing, feel — that in no movie but Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles does anything truly happen. Every other movie plays, by comparison, as if on fast-forward, or like a set of filmed Cliff’s Notes.
Clearly, Akerman saw, and realized, a wider storytelling potential in cinema than do most filmmakers. So much worse the loss, then, when she died earlier this month, leaving behind a filmography consisting of not just her early masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, which she directed at just 25 years of age, but a variety of feature films and shorts made between 1968 and this year. As a tribute, the cinephile-beloved home video company The Criterion Collection has, for a very limited time, made all of their Akerman films free to view on Hulu (unfortunately, for viewers in certain territories only), including 1978’s Les rendezvous d’Anna, embedded just above, 1972’s Hotel Monterey and La chambre, 1975’s Je tu il elle,1976’s News from Home…
… and of course, Jeanne Dielman. If you plan to enjoy a free Akerman marathon on Hulu thanks to Criteron, you’d better do it soon, since they’ll only remain free to view through the next day. And do invite all your most cinematically adventurous friends to join your side, as with most auteur films, the interest that doesn’t lie in watching them lies in arguing about their merits afterward. You can hear one such fun conversation on a 2011 episode of The Criterioncast, a podcast dedicated to films released by the Criterion Collection, just above. It actually features yours truly as the special guest, discussing Jeanne Dielman with the regular panelists. Do you side with the likes of an Akerman partisan like me, or does your opinion most closely resemble one of the others who doesn’t take quite such a rich experience from their every viewing? Today, you can find out where you stand on this and other of Akerman’s fascinating works for free. And you can always find many more free films in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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