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German Expressionism: we’ve all heard of it, and though only some would even try to define it, we all, like old Potter Stewart, know it when we see it. Or do we? The movements under the umbrella of German Expressionism bore vivid and influential fruits in architecture, painting, sculpture and especially film — The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, and Metropolis, to say nothing of their countless descendants,will come right to the minds of most movie-lovers — but the circumstance from which it first arose remain not particularly well-understood by the public, or at least those of the public who haven’t seen the brief Crash Course video on German Expressionism above (and the even shorter No Film School explainer below).
Though it also stands perfectly well alone, this primer comes as the seventh chapter of the sixteen-part Crash Course Film History, which we first featured back in April. Here host Craig Benzine addresses the question of just what makes The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, and Metropolis in particular so memorable by examining each film and its auteur director — Robert Wiene, F.W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang, respectively — in turn.
The creativity of German Expressionist film, like so much creativity, arose from limitations: Germany had just lost World War I, most of its film industry had undergone state-sponsored consolidation, and independent filmmakers who didn’t want to make large-scale costume dramas (the genre of choice to distract the public from the country’s poverty and disorder) had to find a new way not just to get their movies made, but to give audiences a reason to watch them. With 1920’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(which you can watch below along with Nosferatu), a small studio named Decla led the way.
“Written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer,” says Benzine, “this film was thematically based on their experiences as soldiers in World War I and their distrust of authoritarian leadership.” It innovated by presenting its story “expressionistically, rather than realistically. That is, instead of making things like the sets, costumes, and props as realistic as possible,” the filmmakers “deliberately distorted everything within the frame,” all “designed to look deliberately artificial and throw you off balance.” This “highly subjective” cinematic sensibility, developed in Germany and then elsewhere (especially the countries to which German artists moved in flight from fascism) throughout the 1920s, still appears in modern film, well beyond the work of avowed fan Tim Burton: Benzine finds that, “from Silence of the Lambs to Don’t Breathe to anything M. Night Shyamalan has ever put on film, the techniques of German Expressionism are creeping us out to this very day.”
On what he deemed the 30th anniversary of hip hop, in 2004, Village Voice critic Greg Tate wrote that the music’s “ubiquity has created a common ground and a common vernacular for Black folk from 18 to 50 worldwide.” Its global reach, however, has made it a rich site for “corporate exploitation.” The complicated relationship of hip hop and capitalism is something of a “bitter trick.” The music “represents Black culture and Black creative license in unique ways to the global marketplace, no matter how commodified it becomes.” And yet it “has now become a seller’s market, in which what does or does not get sold as hiphop to the masses is whatever the boardroom approves.”
Tate’s argument that the music and culture of hip hop are inseparable from globalized capitalism may partly explain why it roared into life in the eighties as a “convergence of ex-slaves and ch-hing,” just as the global consumer marketplace began to take its modern shape. Young, artistic entrepreneurs begged, borrowed, and stole records and equipment, sensing the opportunity for fame and riches in the creative recuperation of old sounds with new technology. Theirs was a language of ambition and desire, a celebration of sex and power—the language of modernity written in complex rhyme and call-and-response. A language spoken over generations and nations, and—now over ten years after Tate’s essay—spoken for over forty years of ever-increasing market share.
The origins of hip hop have provided ample material for entertaining fictionalizations like Baz Luhrmann’s The Get Down and popular histories like the documentary Hip-Hip Evolution. These linear accounts present the genre to us in formats we find easily digestible. Even as Luhrmann’s series attempts to mimic the hyperkinetic pace of rap, it tells a story as conventional as they come. To experience the past 40 years of hip hop on the genre’s own terms—its perpetual callbacks to its ancestors, its seamless interweaving of past and present—it’s almost as though you’d need to experience it all at once. And so you can, in the incredible mash-up video above from The Hood Internet.
Taking over 150 songs from over 100 artists, the video puts them all in conversation with each other “40 Years of Hip Hop” mashes up “rappers from different eras finishing each other’s rhymes over intersecting beats, all woven together to make one song.” It’s an impressive technical achievement, and one that throws into relief not only hip hop’s smooth, shiny hyper-capitalist embrace of technology but also, as theorist and Black Atlantic author Paul Gilroy wrote, its counter-cultural core as a “means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation.”
It’s hard to conceive of director Stanley Kubrick choosing a more perfect song for Dr. Strangelove’s final mushroom cloud montage than Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again.”
More recently, the New Zealand-based music blog Off the Tracks proclaimed it “god-awful,” suggesting that the CIA could surgically implant its “obnoxious” keyboard riff to trigger assassins, and asserting that it (“and those fucking sweatbands”) were the demise of Dire Straits.
Such critical evaluations are immaterial where Salomone’s The Walk of Life Project is concerned. Over the course of a couple months, he has gleefully applied it to the final minutes of over five dozen films, leaving the visuals unmolested.
There are no sacred cows in this realm. Casablanca and The Godfather are subjected to this aural experiment, as, somewhat mystifyingly, are Nanook of the North and Chaplin’s City Lights. Horror, Disney, musicals…Salomone dabbles in a wide variety of genres.
For my money, the most successful outcomes are the ones that impose a commercial send-em-up-the-aisles-smiling sensibility on deliberately bleak endings.
Director Danny Boyle may have allowed audiences to decompress a bit with heartwarming footage of the real life Aron Ralston, whose autobiographical account of a life-changing accident inspired the film 127 Hours, but Salomone’s choice to move the playhead to the moment shocked hikers encounter a dazed and dehydrated James Franco clutching his mutilated arm is sublime. That helicopter could not be more perfectly timed:
Salomone told Gizmodo that he’s taking a break from the project, so if there’s a film you think would benefit from the Walk of Life treatment, you’ll have to do it yourself, with his blessing. Fan stabs at Scarface, The Silence of the Lambs and Gone with the Wind suggest that the trick is not quite as easy to pull off as one might think.
You can view the complete collection on The Walk of Life Project’s website or YouTube channel.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She’ll is currently appearing as one of the clowns in Paul David Young’s Faust 3, opening this weekend in New York City.Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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If you find yourself near State and Washington streets in Chicago, look up and you’ll see a mural of bluesman Muddy Waters rising 10 stories high. It was painted, theChicago Tribune tells us, by Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra and fellow painters. And it was officially dedicated yesterday, at the beginning of the Chicago Blues Festival. Respect.
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Sasha Trubetskoy, an undergrad at U. Chicago, has created a “subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD.” Drawing on Stanford’s ORBIS model, The Pelagios Project, and the Antonine Itinerary, Trubetskoy’s map combines well-known historic roads, like the Via Appia, with lesser-known ones (in somes cases given imagined names). If you want to get a sense of scale, it would take, Trubetskoy tells us, “two months to walk on foot from Rome to Byzantium. If you had a horse, it would only take you a month.”
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What is classical music? It may seem like a remedial question, but it is a serious one. Leonard Bernstein took it seriously enough to design an entire program around it. His “Young People’s Concerts” with the New York Philharmonic—broadcast on TV from Carnegie Hall in 1959—began with an admission of how unclear the term’s usage had become in popular culture. “You see,” he told his young audience, “everybody thinks he knows what classical music is… People use this word to describe music that isn’t jazz or popular songs or folk music, just because there isn’t any other word that seems to describe it better.”
Classical music is often thought of in even more nebulous, and perhaps elitist, terms as “art music,” over and above these other forms. Yet Bernstein goes on to define classical music in more precise ways: A classical composer “puts down the exact notes that he wants, the exact instruments or voices that he wants to play or sing those notes—even the exact number of instruments or voices; and he also writes down as many directions as he can think of” about tempo, dynamics, etc. What might sound like a straightjacket for musicians instead offers an interpretive challenge: “No performance can be perfectly exact.… But that’s what makes the performer’s job so exciting–to try and find out from what the composer did write down as exactly as possible what he meant.”
This working definition, while devoid of technical jargon for the sake of Bernstein’s untrained audience, still manages to give us a good sense of the parameters he set for the “classical.” They do not stretch widely enough to include improvisatory modernism (though he had a high regard for jazz as a separate category). But they do include much instrumental and choral European music from the start of the medieval period into the 20th century. The definition could be a much narrower one. “One of the first things you learn when you’re introduced to classical music,” Jay Gabler writes at online radio station Classical MPR, “is that the term ‘classical’ most properly describes music composed from about 1750 to 1820.”
This means Mozart and Haydn, most of Beethoven, but not Bach, Wagner, Debussy, or Copland. And certainly not aleatory experimentalists like John Cage, minimalists like Steve Reich, or atonal oddballs like Arnold Schoenberg. While Bernstein seems to settle the issue with relative ease, “musicologists,” Gabler notes, “can stay up all night talking about the shape and trajectory of classical music, debating questions like the importance of the score, the role of improvisation, and the nature of musical form.” These are the kinds of discussions one might have over the 1200-track Spotify playlist above, “The History of Classical Music–From Gregorian Chant to Górecki.” (If you need Spotify’s software, download it here.)
We begin with the 11th century church music of Leonin and Perotin, two composers associated with Notre Dame who are credited with “the beginning of modern music” for their use of polyphony and various rhythmic modes. (Hear the especially haunting “Viderunt Omnes” by Leonin at the top of the post.) The playlist, created by a curator who goes by Ulysses Classical, then takes us through the late Medieval and Renaissance periods and into the Baroque, exemplified by Handel, Bach, Vivaldi, Pachelbel, Scarlatti, and others. Beethoven and Mozart get their due, but not more so than Dvořák and Tchaikovsky.
By the time we reach the 20th century, we begin to move quite far from the formalism of Bernstein’s definition and into the strange realms of Schoenberg, Messiaen, Ligeti, Reich, and Philip Glass, with whom this history ends. Obviously the strict periodization Gabler mentions cannot contain all of what we mean by classical music, but just how much can the designation encompass atonal experimental modernism and still be a coherent concept? Let the musicologists debate. For those of us who approach this music as a form of pure pleasure, it’s enough just to sit back and listen.
No one art form has done more to shape the world’s sense of traditional Japanese aesthetics than the woodblock print. But not so very long ago, in historical terms, no such works had ever left Japan. That changed when, according to the Library of Congress, “American naval officer Matthew Calbraith Perry (1794–1858) led an expedition to Japan between 1852 and 1854 that was instrumental in opening Japan to the Western world after more than 200 years of national seclusion.” As travelers, materials, and products began flowing between Japan and the West, so did art.
This flow happened, of course, by sea, and so Japanese artists working in woodblock and other forms soon found that the port city of Yokohama had become “an incubator for a new category of images that straddled convention and novelty.”
In their depictions of modern Yokohama, “bewhiskered men and crinoline-clad women were shown striding through the city, clambering on and off ships, riding horses, enjoying local entertainments, and interacting with an endless array of objects from goblets to locomotives.” This new genre in an established tradition took on the name “Yokohama‑e,” or “pictures of Yokohama.”
Hundreds of years earlier, during the Tokugawa Period that began in the year 1600, that tradition had already produced the now well-known genre of “Ukiyo‑e,” or “pictures of the floating world,” woodblock depictions of the pleasure districts of Edo, now called Tokyo. “Various forms of entertainment, particularly kabuki theater and the pleasure quarters, lured monied patrons who were eager in turn to acquire the vivid images of celebrated actors and beautiful courtesans.” Later, “travel became a popular form of leisure and the pleasures of the natural environment, interesting landmarks, and the adventures encountered en route also became favorite Ukiyo‑e themes.” Ukiyo‑e also looked to “Japanese myth, legend, literature, history, and daily life” for subjects, and so its prolific artists captured the culture nearly whole.
You can come as close as possible to experiencing that culture by viewing, and downloading, more than 2,500 Japanese woodblock prints and drawings at the Library of Congress’ online collection “Fine Prints: Japanese, pre-1915.” It includes work from such prolific Ukiyo‑e artists as Hokusai Katsushika (whose Teahouse at Koishikawa the Morning After a Snowfall appears at the top of the post), Andō Hiroshige (Minakuchi below that), Isoda Koryūsai (Kisaragi, third from the top), and Utagawa Yoshifuji (whose Amerikajin Yūgyō, one of his depictions of Americans, appears just above). As much as Japan has changed since the heyday of the Yokohama‑e, much less the Ukiyo‑e, any visitor to the country in the 21st century will first notice not how much the surfaces of Japan’s real urban and natural landscapes, domestic interiors, and public scenes differ from those in classical woodblock prints, but how deeply they’ve remained the same.
We know they’re coming. The robots. To take our jobs. While humans turn on each other, find scapegoats, try to bring back the past, and ignore the future, machine intelligences replace us as quickly as their designers get them out of beta testing. We can’t exactly blame the robots. They don’t have any say in the matter. Not yet, anyway. But it’s a fait accompli say the experts. “The promise,” writes MIT Technology Review, “is that intelligent machines will be able to do every task better and more cheaply than humans. Rightly or wrongly, one industry after another is falling under its spell, even though few have benefited significantly so far.”
The question, then, is not if, but “when will artificial intelligence exceed human performance?” And some answers come from a paper called, appropriately, “When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts.” In this study, Katja Grace of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford and several of her colleagues “surveyed the world’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence by asking them when they think intelligent machines will better humans in a wide range of tasks.”
You can see many of the answers plotted on the chart above. Grace and her co-authors asked 1,634 experts, and found that they “believe there is a 50% chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years.” That means all jobs: not only driving trucks, delivering by drone, running cash registers, gas stations, phone support, weather forecasts, investment banking, etc, but also performing surgery, which may happen in less than 40 years, and writing New York Times bestsellers, which may happen by 2049.
That’s right, AI may perform our cultural and intellectual labor, making art and films, writing books and essays, and creating music. Or so the experts say. Already a Japanese AI program has written a short novel, and almost won a literary prize for it. And the first milestone on the chart has already been reached; last year, Google’s AI AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the South Korean grandmaster of Go, the ancient Chinese game “that’s exponentially more complex than chess,” as Cade Metz writes at Wired. (Humane video game design, on the other hand, may have a ways to go yet.)
Perhaps these feats partly explain why, as Grace and the other researchers found, Asian respondents expected the rise of the machines “much sooner than North America.” Other cultural reasons surely abound—likely those same quirks that make Americans embrace creationism, climate-denial, and fearful conspiracy theories and nostalgia by the tens of millions. The future may be frightening, but we should have seen this coming. Sci-fi visionaries have warned us for decades to prepare for our technology to overtake us.
In the 1960s Alan Watts foresaw the future of automation and the almost pathological fixation we would develop for “job creation” as more and more necessary tasks fell to the robots and human labor became increasingly superfluous. (Hear him make his prediction above.) Like many a technologist and futurist today, Watts advocated for Universal Basic Income, a way of ensuring that all of us have the means to survive while we use our newly acquired free time to consciously shape the world the machines have learned to maintain for us.
What may have seemed like a Utopian idea then (though it almost became policy under Nixon), may become a necessity as AI changes the world, writes MIT, “at breakneck speed.”
Somehow you have to imagine that, from its very opening — “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix” — Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” simply emerged fully formed and launched itself permanently into American culture. But deep down we all know that no work, poetic or otherwise, actually does that, no matter how widely read it becomes, no matter how vividly it captures a time and a place, no matter how many generations look to it as an example. Ginsberg had to work on “Howl,” and now, thanks to Stanford Libraries, we have an up-close way to see some of that work in progress.
“From its first public reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in October 1955 to the notorious obscenity trial that followed in the wake of its first publication in 1956,” writes Stanford Curator for American and British Literature Rebecca Wingfield, “the poem is indelibly tied to the Beat Generation and their critique of the staid morals and customs of Eisenhower-era America.”
Before all that, it began with a seven-page first draft written in Ginsberg’s North Beach apartment, gained a second section before that now-legendary Six Gallery reading, and finally, after Ginsberg tried out different compositional techniques and followed different suggestions in search of a way to capture America as he saw it, evolved into a long poem comprising three sections and a footnote, published alongside other works by City Lights Books as the paperback that made him famous.
“The ‘Howl’ manuscripts and typescripts in the Allen Ginsberg Papers,” which you can view online at Stanford Libraries, “document the formal development of the poem, tracing Ginsberg’s experiments with different structures and wording in each of the poem’s sections.” These pre-“Howl” “Howl“s, manuscripts and typescripts both, retain the corrections and annotations that reveal details about Ginsberg’s distinctive creative process. But given the most well-known aspect of the poem’s construction, that each line lasts as long as exactly one breath, a full understanding can only come from hearing it as well as reading it. You can hear Ginsberg’s earliest recorded performance of the poem, at Portland’s Reed College (alma mater of Ginsberg’s Beat colleague Gary Snyder) in 1956, at the top of the post, and a later reading on record here. (The text of the completed poem can be viewed here.) Look and listen closely, and you’ll find that a cri de coeur, especially as Ginsberg cried it,demands deliberate craftsmanship.
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