We’ve seen 1999 members of Choir! Choir! Choir! perform “When Doves Cry,” a moving, mass tribute to Prince. And they’re now back, 1500 strong, with Rufus Wainwright at the helm, singing Leonard Cohen’s beloved and oft-covered song, Hallelujah.” Performed at the Hearn Generating Station in Toronto, it must have been a wonderful thing to experience live in person.
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Everyone loves a love story—especially a love affair. We may think ourselves above a juicy scandal…, but who are we kidding? Tragically, however, for many famous people of the past—from Oscar Wilde to Alan Turing to Tab Hunter—affairs could not only end careers and reputations, they could end lives. People who would much rather not have to hide their love have been forced to do so by rigid social propriety, religious moralism, and repressive law.
In other famous cases, however—like that of Virginia Woolf and her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West—an affair doesn’t end in tragedy but simply in a cooling of passions into a beautiful, lasting friendship.
While prudish outsiders may have been scandalized, neither Woolf’s nor Sackville-West’s husband found the relationship shocking. Leonard Woolf, his wife reported, regarded the affair as “rather a bore… but not enough to worry him.” Vita and her aristocratic husband Harold Nicolson, writes the Virginia Woolf blog, “were both bisexual and… had an open marriage.” Furthermore, the bohemian artistic circle in which the Woolfs moved—the Bloomsbury group—hardly troubled itself about such mundane goings-on as a steamy affair between two married women. So much for social scandal and soap-operatic theatrics.
But while their love was not forbidden, what passion they had while it lasted! One need only read their letters to each other, collected in The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Many of those epistles document the heated period between the mid-1920s, when their affair began, and 1929, when it ended on amiable terms (in a friendship the letters document until Woolf’s suicide in 1941).
“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia,” writes Sackville-West in a 1926 letter to Woolf, “You have broken down my defences. And I really don’t resent it… Please forgive me for writing such a miserable letter.” The brief, agonized letter captures the exquisite pangs and pinions of romantic infatuation. Woolf, in response, is the more reserved, but also the more colorful, with playful, cryptic images that hint at who knows what:
“Always, always, always I try to say what I feel,” she writes, “I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you. And if you don’t believe it, you’re a longeared owl and ass…. Open the top button of your jersey and you will see, nestling inside, a lively squirrel with the most inquisitive habits, but a dear creature all the same—”
In her diary, Woolf described Sackville-West on their first meeting in 1923 as “a pronounced sapphist…. Snob as I am, I trace her passions – 500 years back, & they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.” Woolf was ten years older than Sackville-West, and seemed to feel inferior to her lover, comparing herself unfavorably in a sexy 1925 diary entry:
Vita shines in the grocers shop in Sevenoaks…pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung…There is her maturity and full-breastedness: her being so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity I mean to take the floor in any company, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood…her in short (what I have never been) a real woman.
The two had other lovers, and Woolf, “as the older woman in the relationship,” the Virginia Woolf blog writes, felt “unwanted and dowdy” as Sackville-West strayed. But though the love affair ended, it not only produced a close friendship, but a novel, Woolf’s Orlando, which Vita’s son Nigel called “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”
Their love and friendship will also soon produce a film, Vita and Virginia, directed by Chanya Button and written by Dame Eileen Atkins. And, if you were wondering what Vita and Virginia’s passionate exchanges would sound like in a 21st century idiom, have a look at “The Collected Sexts of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West” at The New Yorker. The eloquence of an epistolary romance may be a thing of the past, but email and text have their own efficient charms:
Vita: Hey girl Virginia: Hey Vita: Sup? Virginia: In bed Vita: Hot Virginia: Come visit? Vita: Mmm can’t. Have a toothache.
Cute. But what could ever replace one of Woolf’s last letters to her friend and former lover, written in 1940 while Britain endured German air bombardments: “there you sit with the bombs falling around you. What can one say– except that I love you and I’ve got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone. Dearest—let me have a line…You have given me such happiness….”
Elie Wiesel not only survived the Holocaust but went on to live a full life with a prolific career, the fruits of which included 57 books, most famously 1960’s Night, a short and formally distinctive work drawn from his experience in the concentration camps. “The only role I sought was that of witness,” he wrote in 1978. “I believed that having survived by chance, I was duty-bound to give meaning to my survival, to justify each moment of my life.” And even before his death this past Saturday at age 87, the Nobel Peace Prize winner had learned much about what it means to come to life’s end.
“The body is not eternal, but the idea of the soul is,” Wiesel writes in Open Heart, the 2012 memoir he wrote after undergoing another brush with death, late in life, which necessitated emergency open-heart surgery. “The brain will be buried, but memory will survive it.” Oprah Winfrey reads those words back to him in an interview from that same year, a clip from which you can see above. “Now that you’ve had all this time to think about it,” she asks, “what do you think happens when we die?”
“Somehow,” he replies, “I will become a child. Childhood, for me, is a theme in all my work. Will I meet my parents again? I want to know that.” Winfrey expresses special interest in the visions of his own family he had in the hospital, such as that of his father who had died at Buchenwald, just weeks before the camp’s liberation, and the sight of whose face he had previously glimpsed, just for a moment, during his Nobel award ceremony in 1986. His father’s second posthumous appearance made him think death might not be so bad after all, but “that is the danger. You feel it’s so good to be with the dead, then why not join them?”
But Wiesel, who had done so much already, felt he “had more and more things to do. I haven’t even begun.” Indeed, continuing in his capacity as the “Conscience of the World,” he received four more awards and honors between 2012 and 2014, made many appearances, and surely wrote pages that will see publication in the years, or even decades, to come. But for all his accomplishments, he himself found nothing more unusual, as he said to Winfrey in a previous talk sixteen years ago, than his own normality, “that I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life — that is what is abnormal.”
Why not liberate yourself from the tyranny of the traditional by spending a portion of the day indoors, communicating affection to your clothing, as organizational expert, Marie Kondo, author of the best selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, does in the instructional video, above?
Most of us who dwell in small New York City apartments are already familiar with her teachings. Hers is a take-no-prisoners approach to clutter control. Any item that doesn’t “spark joy”—be it a pair of stretched-out sweatpants, a long ago graduation present, a ream of children’s artwork, or a nearly full bottle of slightly funky-smelling conditioner—must be discarded immediately.
(Note to self: ask Mom whatever became of my Spirit of ’76 watercolor. She had it framed because it won a prize. Best Bicentennial Observance by a 4th Grader or some such. Things like that don’t just vanish into thin air, unless…)
The total makeover Kondo proposes is an arduous, oft-emotional, week-long task. Don’t blow your entire July 4th holiday trying to complete the job.
Instead, take an hour or two to refold your clothes. New Yorkers’ drawers are where Kondo’s influence is felt most deeply. Whether or not we subscribe to her practice of treating each garment like a treasured friend, our underwear definitely has more room to breathe, when not on active duty.
See below for a graphic demonstration of how to best fold shirts, pants, and several species of undies, using Kondo’s Kon-Marie method.
And don’t be tempted to decamp to the backyard barbecue when you run across challenges like overalls or baby onesies. Watch below as Kondo tackles a shirt with kimono sleeves, a pair of Edo-style mata hike pants, and a sweater with a marked resemblance to a Thneed.
If you aren’t seriously disturbed, even alarmed, that we in the U.S. have a presidential candidate from a major political party who succeeds by whipping up xenophobic fervor and telling us the country must not only reinstitute torture, but must do “the unthinkable”… well…. I don’t really know what to say to you. Perhaps more symptom than cause of a global turn toward tribal hatred, the GOP candidate has lent his name to a phenomenon characterized by cultish devotion to an authoritarian strongman, serial falsehood, and easy, uncritical scapegoating. We needn’t look far back in time to see the historical analogues, whether in the early 20th century, at the end of the 19th, or during any number of historical moments before and after.
We also needn’t look very far back to find a history of resistance to authoritarian bigotry, and not only from Civil Rights campaigners and leftists, but also, as you can see above, from the U.S. War Department. In 1947, the Department released the short propaganda film, “Don’t Be a Sucker!”, aimed at middle-class American Joes. Shot at Warner Studios, the film opens with some typical noirish crime scenarios, complete with convincingly noir lighting and camera angles, to visually set up the character of the “sucker” who gets taken in by sinister but seductive characters—“people who stay up nights trying to figure out how to take away” what the everyman has. What do naïve potential marks in this analogy have to lose? American plenty: “plenty of food, big factories to make things a man can use, big cities to do the business of a big country, and people, lots of people.”
“People,” the narrator says, working the farms and factories, digging the mines and running the businesses: “all kinds of people. People from different countries with different religions, different colored skins. Free people.” Is this disingenuous? You bet. We’re told this aggregate of people is “free to vote”—and we know this to be largely untrue in practice for many, necessitating the Voting Rights Act almost twenty years later. Free to “pick their own jobs”? Employment discrimination, segregation, and sexism effectively prevented that for millions. But the sentiments are noble, even if the facts don’t fully fit. As our average Joe wanders along, contemplating his advantages, he happens upon a reactionary streetcorner demogague haranguing against foreigners, African-Americans, Catholics, and Freemasons (?) on behalf of “real Americans.” Sounds plenty familiar.
The voice of reason comes from a naturalized Hungarian professor who witnessed the rise of Nazism in Berlin and who explains to our everyman the strategy of fanatics and fascists—divide and rule. “We human beings are not born with prejudices,” says the wise professor, “always they are made for us. Made by someone who wants something. Remember that when you hear this kind of talk. Somebody’s going to get something out of it. And it isn’t going to be you.” The remainder of the film mostly consists of the Hungarian professor’s recollections of how the Nazis won over ordinary Germans.
“Don’t Be a Sucker!” uses a clever rhetorical strategy, appealing to the self-interest and vanity of the everyman while couching that appeal in egalitarian values. The very recent historical example of fascist Europe carries significant weight, where too often today that history gets treated like a joke, turned into crude and muddled memes. This film would have had real impact on the viewing audience, who would have seen it before their feature in theaters across the country.
It’s worth noting that this film came out during a period of increasing American prosperity and comparative economic equity. The jobs “Don’t Be a Sucker!” lists with pride have disappeared. Today’s everyman, we might say, has even more reason for susceptibility to the demagogue’s appeals. The Internet Archive notes an irony here “in the light of Cold War anti-Communist politics, which really came into their own in the year this film was made.” The streetcorner populist calls to mind people like Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover (and he looks like George Wallace)—powerful government authorities who cast suspicion on every movement for Civil Rights and social equality.
“Don’t Be a Sucker!” may seem like an outlier, but it’s reminiscent of another piece of patriotic, anti-racist-and-religious-bigotry propaganda—the Superman cartoon above, which first appeared in 1949, distributed to school children as a book cover by something called The Institute for American Democracy. You may have seen versions of a full-color poster, reprinted in subsequent years. Here, Superman expresses the same egalitarian values as “Don’t Be a Sucker!” only instead of calling racism a con-job, he calls it “Un-American,” using the favorite denunciation of HUAC and other anti-Communist groups.
History and the present moment may often prove otherwise—showing us just how very American racism and bigotry can be, but so too are numerous counter-movements on the left and, as these examples show, from more conservative, establishment corners as well.
You may have followed the story in the news lately–the song, “Happy Birthday to You,” has officially entered the public domain, thanks to a court battle fought by the documentary filmmaker Jennifer Nelson. The battle started years ago when Nelson was billed $1,500 to use “Happy Birthday to You” in a documentary–the price of licensing a song still under copyright. Wait, what? Flabbergasted that “the world’s most popular song,” which could be traced back to 1893, could still be under copyright, Nelson filed a class action suit against Warner/Chappell Music, the group claiming rights to “Happy Birthday.” And won.
In this new short documentary from The Guardian, Nelson tells the story of the song and her four-year struggle to give “Happy Birthday” back to the world. With a little luck, “This Land is Your Land,” will be next.
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Phillumeny — the practice of collecting matchboxes — strikes me as a fun and practical hobby. As a child, I was fascinated with the contents of a large glass vase my grandparents had dedicated to this pursuit. Their collection was an ersatz record of all the hotels and nightclubs they had apparently visited before transforming into a dowdy older couple who enjoyed rocking in matching Bicentennial themed chairs, monitoring their bird feeder.
As any serious phillumenist will tell you, one need not have a personal connection to the items one is collecting. Most matchbox enthusiasts are in it for the art, a microcosm of 20th century design. The urge to preserve these disposable items is understandable, given the amount of artistry that went into them. It was good business practice for bars and restaurants to give them to customers at no charge, even if they never planned to strike so much as a single match.
Or you could stay at home, trawling the Internet for some of the most glorious, and sought after examples of the form — those produced in Japan between the two World Wars. As author Steven Heller, co-chair of the School of Visual Arts’ MFA Design program, writes in Print magazine:
The designers were seriously influenced by imported European styles such as Victorian and Art Nouveau… (and later by Art Deco and the Bauhaus, introduced through Japanese graphic arts trade magazines, and incorporated into the design of matchbox labels during the late 1920s and ’30s). Western graphic mannerisms were harmoniously combined with traditional Japanese styles and geometries from the Meiji period (1868–1912), exemplified by both their simple and complex ornamental compositions. Since matches were a big export industry, and the Japanese dominated the markets in the United States, Australia, England, France, and even India, matchbox design exhibited a hybrid typography that wed Western and Japanese styles into an intricate mélange.
Find something that catches your eye? It shouldn’t cost more than a buck or two to acquire it, though Japanese clutter-control guru, Marie Kondo, would no doubt encourage you to adopt cartoonist Roz Chast’s approach to matchbook appreciation.
Earlier this spring, Chast shared her passion with readers of The New Yorker, collaging some of her favorites into an autobiographical comic wherein she revealed that she doesn’t collect the actual objects, just the digital images. Those familiar with Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant, Chast’s hilariously painful memoir about her difficult, aging parents’ “golden years,” will be unsurprised that she opted not to add to the unwelcome pile of “crap” that gets handed down to the next generation when a collector passes away.
As I recall, if you asked men in the 1990s to describe ideal the woman, a great many would have made references to Uma Thurman, who spent that decade playing high-profile roles in acclaimed movies like Pulp Fiction and Gattaca—as well as less-acclaimed movies like The Avengers and Batman & Robin (but hey, you can’t pick winners all the time). But animator, director, American Monty Python member and all-around visionary Terry Gilliam made use of the powerful appeal of Thurman’s presence even earlier, when—making The Adventures of Baron Munchausen—-he needed just the right young lady for a scene recreating Sandro Botticelli’s Renaissance painting The Birth of Venus.
“The casting director in L.A. said, ‘You’ve got to meet this girl,’ ” Gilliam remembers in the clip from this year’s BBC Arts documentary Botticelli’s Venus: The Making on an Iconat the top of the post. “There she was: statuesque, beautiful, intelligent—incredibly intelligent.” He compares the original canvas itself to a “widescreen cinema,” as well as, just as aptly, to a lower art form entirely: “The winds are blowing, her hair starts billowing out, the dressing girl is bringing in the robe — it’s a really funny painting, looking at it again, because she’s there, static, elegant, naked, sexy. The robe wouldn’t look so good if the winds weren’t blowing, nor would her hair look so beautiful. It’s like, this is a commercial for shampoo!”
As Monty Python fans all know, Gilliam had worked with The Birth of Venus before, using his signature cutout animation technique, which defined much of the look and feel of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to make Venus dance. “I like testing how much I like something, or how beautiful something is, by making fun of it,” he says to his BBC interviewer. “If it withstands my silliness, it’s really great art.” Further props to Botticelli come at the end of the clip, when she asks Gilliam if he thinks Venus represents “the ultimate male fantasy.” “Oh, why not?” he immediately replies. “You don’t do much better than that. I think he really cracked that one.”
Regular readers of Open Culture know us to gush over our favorite celebrity couples now and then: John and Yoko, Jean-Paul and Simone, Frida and Diego…. Not your usual tabloid fare, but the juicy details of these amorous partners’ lives also happen to intersect with some of our favorite art, music and literature. One cultural power couple we haven’t covered much, surprisingly, well deserves the “power” adjective: Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, two personalities whose influence on the art and music of the last several decades can hardly be overstated.
Has Reed’s reputation at times been inflated, and Anderson’s underplayed? Maybe. She doesn’t get nearly enough credit for the witty, profound, moving work she’s done, year after year (with one lengthy hiatus) since the 70s. Reed’s career since the 70s consisted of more misses than hits. But put them together (in 1992) and you get a harmonious meeting of Reed’s raw, gut-level assertions and Anderson’s curious, playful concepts.
Witness their personal strength together in the Charlie Rose excerpt at the top of the post. Reed, who was often a difficult interview subject, to put it mildly, and who gained a reputation as a brutally unpleasant, abusive rock and roll diva (immortalized lovingly in Bowie’s “Queen Bitch”), comes off in this sit-down with Anderson as almost warm and fuzzy. Did she make him want to be a better person? I don’t know. But Anderson’s short obituary after his 2013 death remembered Reed as a “prince and fighter,” her longer obit as a “generous” soul who enjoyed butterfly hunting, meditation, and kayaking. No reason he wasn’t all those things too.
When it came to music, Reed could pull his partner into the orbit of his sweet R&B songcraft, as in their duet of “Hang on to Your Emotions,” further up, and she could pull him out of it—like John Cale and Nico had done in the Velvet Underground—and into the avant-garde drone of her experimental scene (as above in the pair’s collaboration with composer and saxophonist John Zorn). Just this past Spring, in one of the most touching musical tributes I’ve ever seen, Anderson recreated Reed’s abrasive screw-you to his record label, Metal Machine Music, as a conceptual art piece called Drones, leaning several of his guitars against several fully-cranked vintage amps, letting the feedback ring out for five days straight.
None of us can be Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson; every couple is happy, or unhappy, in their own way. But what, in the grand tradition of mining celebrity couple’s lives for advice, can we learn from them? I guess the overall message—as Anderson herself suggested in her Rock & Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech for Reed (above, in shaky audience video)—is this: keep it simple. Kansas State English ProfessorPhilip Nel points out Anderson’s “wise… thoughtful” words on the subject of living well, delivered in her speech at the 8:55 mark:
I’m reminded also of the three rules we came up with, rules to live by. And I’m just going to tell you what they are because they come in really handy. Because things happen so fast, it’s always good to have a few, like, watchwords to fall back on.
And the first one is: One. Don’t be afraid of anyone. Now, can you imagine living your life afraid of no one? Two. Get a really good bullshit detector. And three. Three is be really, really tender. And with those three things, you don’t need anything else.
Can you imagine Lou Reed as “really, really tender”? He certainly was in song, if not always in person. In any case, these three rules seem to me to encapsulate a personal philosophy built solidly on fearless integrity and compassion. Difficult to live by, but well worth the effort. And because I’m now feeling super warm and fuzzy about Lou and Laurie, I’ll leave you with the short WNYC interview clip below, in which she reveals her favorite Lou Reed song, which he happened to write about her.
Bringing her down-home North Carolina background to the world of funk, Betty Mabry spent a better part of the sixties trying to make it big in the music scene, while also modeling to pay the rent. She ran in the same crowds as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, and Hugh Masekela (who she dated), and she wrote her own songs, selling one to the Chambers Brothers, and then got a couple of singles on Capitol Records.
And then Miles Davis stepped in the picture. First as a whirlwind romance and marriage, then as a producer who was going to launch Betty Davis as the queen of funk (and refurbish his image in the process.) He had already dedicated two songs to her and put her on the cover of his 1968 album Filles de Kilimanjaro. And now he was set to produce her solo debut.
That album is finally being released. Betty Davis: The Columbia Years 1968–1969drops tomorrow. To hear Light in the Attic’s video press release above breathlessly tell it, “music fans have long debated the truth about one legendary session recorded in 1969 at Columbia’s 52nd Street Studios.” Personally I don’t know what was actually debated, but yes, Betty Davis recorded tracks for a funk album using members of Jimi Hendrix’s Experience band (Mitch Mitchell, drums) and his Band of Gypsies (Billy Cox, bass), along with guitarist John McLaughlin, keyboardist Herbie Hancock, Harvey Brooks on bass, Wayne Shorter on sax, and Larry Young on organ. Teo Macero co-produced with Miles Davis.
If this sounds like most of the band that went on to make Miles’ Bitches Brew (a record title suggested by Betty), then you’re right. It could be seen as a session that got the wheels spinning in Miles’ mind about a new direction to take his own work. And it’s that moment that so fascinates music fans.
Columbia passed on the Betty Davis album and buried it in its vaults. It would take four years until Betty Davis was able to get a solo album out on her own terms. That eponymous 1973 album and the two that followed were poor sellers, but earned cult status due to Betty Davis’ unabashed and unapologetic sexuality, feminism, and ferocity on stage—the same factors that scared radio operators and concert venues.
“She was the first Madonna, but Madonna was like Donny Osmond by comparison,” Carlos Santana once quipped about her.
The Light in the Attic site has very brief clips from the songs on the new release, but since they are all from the openings of the tracks, they give little indication of the funky stew to follow, from the Cream and Creedence Clearwater Revival covers (“Politician Man,” “Born on the Bayou”) to her own songs. The CD and LP package looks gorgeous of course, with liner notes and photos.
Davis retired from music after her fourth album went nowhere but she is still around, and, according to the Light in the Attic website, a documentary is in the works on this influential funky icon who needs rediscovering.
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.
Want to teach me physics? Make it interesting. Better yet, use a cup of coffee as a prop. Now you’ve got my attention.
Created by Charlotte Arene while interning at the University of Paris-Sud’s Laboratory of Solid State Physics, Physics & Caffeine uses a shot of espresso to explain key concepts in physics. Why does coffee cool off so quickly when you blow on it? It comes down to understanding heat and thermodynamics. Why does coffee stay in a cup at all? That seemingly simple question is explained by quantum mechanics and even Newtonian physics and special relativity. You might want to watch that section twice.
Shot image by image, this stop motion film took three long months to create. Pretty impressive when you consider that 5,000 images went into making the film.
Get more information on the film, and even download it, from this page. And find more physics primers below.
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