Let’s rewind the videotape and revisit a classic moment in The Dick Van Dyke Show. In the 1962 episode called “Hustling the Hustler,” Mary Tyler Moore (as Laura Petrie) plays pool and sinks three balls in a single shot. The original plan was to splice in footage of a professional pool player making the shot, but Moore surprised everyone, including herself, by nailing it on the first try. Watching Moore and Van Dyke recover from their astonishment and improvise through the scene is priceless—a perfect way to start your Monday.
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The story of Jean-Michel Basquiat has its unfortunate aspects: not just his premature death, but also the aggressive marketing of his work and persona in the years leading up to it. He became a vogue artist of the eighties in part because he could be taken as an unfiltered voice of the street, crafting his outsider-artistic visions on pure, untutored impulse. But despite genuinely having come from a poor, troubled background — and lived according to what seems to have been a strong anti-academic inclination — Basquiat’s professional development was much more serious and deliberate than many of his buyers could have imagined.
The other was Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit: Afro-American Art & Philosophy, which gave him a “guiding ideology” to get him past the inevitable artistic roadblocks: he could always return to “the under-representation of black art in the established art world,” and “when you have a message, art comes out of you easily.”
But Basquiat also had the advantage of being able to work very quickly indeed, which is what brought him to the attention of Andy Warhol: “When one of the most prolific artists of all time is jealous of your speed, you know you’re doing something right.” Thinking too much interrupts your flow, but if you create as fast as you can, thoughts won’t have a chance to intrude. And remember, “most of the flow that you will have while making art will come from all the things you are doing when you are not making art.” Sadly, Basquiat died before the age of the internet — but if he hadn’t, you can bet he’d be spending his downtime absorbing something more interesting than social media.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Hip-hop was once a subculture, but by now it’s long since been one of the unquestionably dominant forms of popular music — not just in America, and not just among young people. There are, of course, still a fair few hip-hop holdouts, but even they’ve come to know a thing or two about it through cultural osmosis alone. They’re aware, for example — whether or not they approve of it — that rappers usually perform over music constructed through sampling: that is, stitched together out of pieces of other songs. If you’re not sure how it works, you can see the process clearly visualized in the video above from sample provider Tracklib.
Offering a breakdown of sampling as it’s happened through “fifty years of hip-hop,” the video begins even before the genre really took shape, in 1973. It was then that DJ Kool Herc developed what he called “the ‘Merry-Go-Round’ Technique,” an early example of which involved using dual turntables to switch back and forth between the instrumental breaks of James Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” and the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Bongo Rock.” The original idea was to give dancers more time to do their thing, but when the MCs picked up their microphones and started getting creative, a new music took shape almost immediately.
Mainstream America got its first taste of hip-hop in 1979, with the release of “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang. In its repeating rhythm part, many would have recognized Chic’s “Good Times,” which actually wasn’t a sample but an interpolation, i.e. a re-recording. This drew a lawsuit — hardly the last of its kind in hip-hop — but it also set thousands of DJs-to-be digging through their record collections in search of usable breaks. Disco proved a fount of inspiration for early hip-hop, but so did jazz and even electronic music, as demonstrated by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force’s “Planet Rock,” which sampled Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express.”
As sampling goes, nothing is artistically off-limits; in some sense, the less immediately recognizable, the better. With the evolution of audio editing technology, hip-hop artists have long gone even further in making these borrowed clips their own by slowing them down; speeding them up; chopping them into pieces and rearranging them; and layering them one atop another. This sometimes causes problems, as when the difficulty of licensing De La Soul’s many and varied source materials kept their catalog out of official availability. Along with A Tribe Called Quest, also featured in this video, De La Soul are, of course, known as hip-hop groups beloved by music nerds. But if you seriously break down any major work of hip-hop, you’ll find that all its artists are music nerds at heart.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-bating police officer, by the name of William “Obie” Obanhein, arrested Arlo for littering. (Cultural footnote: Obie previously posed for several Norman Rockwell paintings, including the well-known painting, “The Runaway,” that graced a 1958 cover of The Saturday Evening Post.) In fairly short order, Arlo pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pays a $25 fine, and cleans up the thrash. But the story isn’t over. Not by a long shot.
Later, when Arlo (son of Woody Guthrie) gets called up for the draft, the petty crime ironically becomes a basis for disqualifying him from military service in the Vietnam War. Guthrie recounts this with some bitterness as the song builds into a satirical protest against the war: “I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” And then we’re back to the cheery chorus again: “You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.”
We have featured Guthrie’s classic during past years. But, for this Thanksgiving, we give you the illustrated version. As a sad post script, Alice Brock, the owner of Alice’s Restaurant–died last week at the age of 83.
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“Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28, 1986” first appeared in print inTornado Alley, a chapbook published by William S. Burroughs in 1989. Two years later, Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, Milk) shot a montage that brought the poem to film, making it at least the second time the director adapted the beat writer to film.
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If you’re not in the market for fancy letters, you can also browse the Plantin-Moretus woodcut archive through the categories of plants, animals, and sciences. Some of these illustrations are technical, and others more fanciful; in certain cases, the centuries have probably rendered them less realistic-looking than once they were.
Not all the more than 14,000 woodcuts now in the archive would seem to fit neatly in one of those categories, but if you take a look at particular entries, you’ll find that the museum has also labeled them with more specific tags, like “classical antiquity,” “map/landscape,” or “aureole” (the bright medieval-looking halo that marks a figure as holy).
All these woodcuts, in any case, have been made free to download (just click the cloud icon in the upper-right of the window that opens after you click on the image itself) and use as you please. Back in the sixteenth century, Christophe Plantin and Jan Moretus, for whom the Plantin-Moretus Museum was named, were well-placed to collect such things. The Plantin-Moretus Museum’s website describes them as “a revolutionary duo.
They were the first printers on an industrial scale — the Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg of their day.” And if these decontextualized artifacts of the print revolution strike us as a bit strange to us today, just imagine how our surviving internet memes will look four centuries hence. Enter the woodblock collection here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
A quick heads up: The filmmaker Ken Burns has just released his new documentary on Leonardo da Vinci. Running nearly four hours, the film offers what The New York Times calls a “thorough and engrossing biography” of the 15th-century polymath. Currently airing on PBS, the film can be streamed online through December 17th. If you reside in the US, you can watch Part 1 here, and Part 2 here. The film’s trailer appears above.
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If you happen to visit the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, do take the time to see the Musée Méliès located inside it. Dedicated to la Magie du cinéma, it contains artifacts from throughout the history of film-as-spectacle, which includes such pictures as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. Its focus on the evolution of visual effects guarantees a certain prominence to science fiction, which, as a genre of “the seventh art,” has its origins in France: specifically, in the work of the museum’s namesake Georges Méliès, whose A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune) from 1902 we now recognize as the very first sci-fi movie.
Everyone has seen at least one image from A Trip to the Moon: that of the landing capsule crashed into the irritated man-on-the-moon’s eye. But if you watch the film at its full length — which, in the version above, runs about fifteen minutes — you can better understand its importance to the development of cinema.
For Méliès didn’t pioneer just a genre, but also a range of techniques that expanded the visual vocabulary of his medium. Take the approach to the moon (played by the director himself) immediately before the landing, a kind of shot never before seen in those days of practically immobile movie cameras — and one that necessitated real technical inventiveness to pull off.
What someone watching A Trip to the Moon in the twenty-first century will first notice, of course, is less the ways in which it feels familiar than the ways in which it doesn’t. In an era when theater was still the dominant form of entertainment, Méliès adhered to theatrical forms of staging: he uses few cuts, and practically no variety in the camera angles. It would hardly seem worth noting that a film from 1902 is silent and in black-and-white, but what few know is that colorized prints — laboriously hand-painted, frame by frame, on an assembly line — existed even at the time of its original release; one such restored version appears just above.
In truth, Méliès opened up much deeper possibilities for cinema than most of us acknowledge. As pointed out in the A Matter of Film video above, the motion pictures made before this amounted to exhibits of daily life: impressive as technological demonstrations (and, so the legend goes, harrowing for the viewers of 1896, who feared a train approaching onscreen would run them over), but nothing as narratives. Like Méliès’ other work, A Trip to the Moon proved that a movie could tell a story. It also proved something more central to the medium’s power: that it could tell that story in such a way that its images linger more than 120 years later, even when the details of what happens have long since lost their interest.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Sir Isaac Newton, arguably the most important and influential scientist in history, discovered the laws of motion and the universal force of gravity. For the first time ever, the rules of the universe could be described with the supremely rational language of mathematics. Newton’s elegant equations proved to be one of the inspirations for the Enlightenment, a shift away from the God-centered dogma of the Church in favor of a worldview that placed reason at its center. The many leaders of the Enlightenment turned to deism if not outright atheism. But not Newton.
In 1936, a document of Newton’s dating from around 1662 was sold at a Sotheby’s auction and eventually wound up at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. The Fitzwilliam Manuscript has long been a source of fascination for Newton scholars. Not only does the notebook feature a series of increasingly difficult mathematical problems but also a cryptic string of letters reading:
Nabed Efyhik
Wfnzo Cpmfke
If you can solve this, there are some people in Cambridge who would like to talk to you.
But what makes the document really interesting is how incredibly personal it is. Newton rattles off a laundry list of sins he committed during his relatively short life – he was around 20 when he wrote this, still a student at Cambridge. He splits the list into two categories, before Whitsunday 1662 and after. (Whitsunday is, by the way, the Sunday of the feast of Whitsun, which is celebrated seven weeks after Easter.) Why he decided on that particular date to bifurcate his timeline isn’t immediately clear.
Some of the sins are rather opaque. I’m not sure what, for instance, “Making a feather while on Thy day” means exactly but it sure sounds like a long-lost euphemism. Other sins like “Peevishness with my mother” are immediately relatable as good old-fashioned teenage churlishness. You can see the full list below. And you can read the full document over at the Newton Project here.
Before Whitsunday 1662
1. Vsing the word (God) openly
2. Eating an apple at Thy house
3. Making a feather while on Thy day
4. Denying that I made it.
5. Making a mousetrap on Thy day
6. Contriving of the chimes on Thy day
7. Squirting water on Thy day
8. Making pies on Sunday night
9. Swimming in a kimnel on Thy day
10. Putting a pin in Iohn Keys hat on Thy day to pick him.
11. Carelessly hearing and committing many sermons
12. Refusing to go to the close at my mothers command.
13. Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them
14. Wishing death and hoping it to some
15. Striking many
16. Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.
17. Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer
18. Denying that I did so
19. Denying a crossbow to my mother and grandmother though I knew of it
20. Setting my heart on money learning pleasure more than Thee
21. A relapse
22. A relapse
23. A breaking again of my covenant renued in the Lords Supper.
24. Punching my sister
25. Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugar
26. Calling Dorothy Rose a jade
27. Glutiny in my sickness.
28. Peevishness with my mother.
29. With my sister.
30. Falling out with the servants
31. Divers commissions of alle my duties
32. Idle discourse on Thy day and at other times
33. Not turning nearer to Thee for my affections
34. Not living according to my belief
35. Not loving Thee for Thy self.
36. Not loving Thee for Thy goodness to us
37. Not desiring Thy ordinances
38. Not long {longing} for Thee in {illeg}
39. Fearing man above Thee
40. Vsing unlawful means to bring us out of distresses
41. Caring for worldly things more than God
42. Not craving a blessing from God on our honest endeavors.
43. Missing chapel.
44. Beating Arthur Storer.
45. Peevishness at Master Clarks for a piece of bread and butter.
46. Striving to cheat with a brass halfe crowne.
47. Twisting a cord on Sunday morning
48. Reading the history of the Christian champions on Sunday
Since Whitsunday 1662
49. Glutony
50. Glutony
51. Vsing Wilfords towel to spare my own
52. Negligence at the chapel.
53. Sermons at Saint Marys (4)
54. Lying about a louse
55. Denying my chamberfellow of the knowledge of him that took him for a sot.
56. Neglecting to pray 3
57. Helping Pettit to make his water watch at 12 of the clock on Saturday night
“This is a work of fiction,” declares the disclaimer we’ve all noticed during the end credits of movies. “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” In most cases, this may seem so trivial that it hardly merits a mention, but the very same disclaimer also rolls up after pictures very clearly intended to represent actual events or persons, living or dead. Most of us would write it all off as one more absurdity created by the elaborate pantomime of American legal culture, but a closer look at its history reveals a much more intriguing origin.
As told in the Cheddar video above, the story begins with Rasputin and the Empress, a 1932 Hollywood movie about the titular real-life mystic and his involvement with the court of Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia. Having been killed in 1916, Rasputin himself wasn’t around to get litigious about his villainous portrayal (by no less a performer than Lionel Barrymore, incidentally, acting alongside his siblings John and Ethel as the prince and czarina). It was actually one of Rasputin’s surviving killers, an exiled aristocrat named Felix Yusupov, who sued MGM, accusing them of defaming his wife, Princess Irina Yusupov, in the form of the character Princess Natasha.
The film casts Princess Natasha as a supporter of Rasputin, writes Slate’s Duncan Fyfe, “but the mystic, wary of her husband, hypnotizes and rapes her, rendering Natasha — by his logic, with which she agrees — unfit to be a wife. Yusupov contended that as viewers would equate Chegodieff with Yusupov, so would they link Natasha with Irina,” though in reality Irina and Rasputin never even met. In an English court, “the jury found in her favor, awarding her £25,000, or about $125,000. MGM had to take the film out of circulation for decades and purge the offending scene for all time,” though a small piece of it remains in Rasputin and the Empress’ original trailer.
Things might have gone in MGM’s favor had the film not included a title card announcing that “a few of the characters are still alive — the rest met death by violence.” The studio was advised that they’d have done well to declare the exact opposite, a practice soon implemented across Hollywood. It didn’t take long for the movies to start having fun with it, introducing jokey variations on the soon-familiar boilerplate. Less than a decade after Rasputin and the Empress, one nonsensical musical comedy previously featured here on Open Culture) opened with the disclaimer that “any similarity between HELLZAPOPPIN’ and a motion picture is purely coincidental” — a tradition more recently upheld by South Park.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
It’s possible to look at Pablo Picasso’s many formal experiments and periodic shifts of style as a kind of self-portraiture, an exercise in shifting consciousness and trying on of new aesthetic identities. The Spanish modernist made a career of sweeping dramatic gestures, announcements to the world that he was going to be a different kind of artist now, and everyone had better catch up. Even in his most abstract periods, his work radiated with an emotional energy as outsized as the man himself.
18 years old (1900)
Picasso’s animus and vitality even permeate his least inviting painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a brothel scene with five geometrical women, two with African and Iberian masks; “a painting of nudes in which there is scarcely a curve to be seen,” writes The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones, “elbows sharp as knives, hips and waists geometrical silhouettes, triangle breasts.” The 1907 self-portrait of Picasso at age 25 (below) comes from this period, when the artist began his radical Cubist break with everything that had gone before.
20 years old (1901)
An older version Les Demoiselles d’Avignon contained a male figure, “a stand-in for the painter himself.” Even when he did not appear, at least not in a final version, in his own work, Picasso saw himself there: his moods, his heightened perceptions of reality as he imagined it.
The somber Blue Period paintings, with their moodiness and “themes of poverty, loneliness, and despair,” correspond with his mourning over the suicide of a friend, Catalan artist Carlos Casagemas. The Picasso in the 1901 portrait further up looks gaunt, broken, decades older than his 20 years. In the 1917 drawing further down, however, the artist at 35 looks out at us with a haughty, smooth-cheeked youthful gaze.
24 years old (1906)
During this time, as World War I ended, he had begun to design sets for Diaghilev’s famed Ballets Russes, where he met his wife, ballerina Olga Khokhlova, and moved in comfortable circles, though he was himself desperate for money. Each portrait delivers us a different Picasso, as he sheds one mask and puts on another. Tracing his creative evolution through his portraiture means never moving in a straight line. But we do see his demeanor soften and round progressively over time in his portraits. He seems to grow younger as he ages.
25 years old (1907)
The severe youth of 15, further up, brooding, world-weary, and already an accomplished draughtsman and painter; the grimly serious romantic at 18, above—these Picassos give way to the wide-eyed maturity of the artist at 56 in 1938, at 83, 89, and 90, in 1972, the year before his death. That year he produced an intriguing series of eclectic self-portraits unlike anything he had done before. See these and many others throughout his life below.
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