In April of 1946, a camera crew recorded the scene as the great French artist Henri Matisse sat down at his easel to make a charcoal sketch of his grandson, Gerard, at his his home and studio in Nice. The brief clip above is from a 26-minute film by François Campaux which was commissioned by the French Department of Cultural Relations. Alas, we’ve been unable to find the entire film online, but you can watch a 15-minute German version on YouTube, or you can visit a Web page at the Art Institute of Chicago for a group of higher quality silent excerpts from the film, accompanied by explanatory captions. In the clip above, we hear Matisse speaking in French. Here is a translation:
Me, I believe that painting and drawing are the same thing. Drawing is a painting done in a simpler way [or with “limited/reduced resources”]. On a white surface, a sheet of paper, with a plume [or “pen”] and some ink, one creates a certain contrast with volumes; one can change the quality of the paper given supple surfaces, light [or clear] surfaces, hard surfaces without always adding shadow or light. For me, drawing is a painting with limited means/resources.
For another glimpse of Matisse at work, look below for a rare color clip (from an unknown source) of the artist at work creating one of his distinctive paper cut-outs.
“I think I was supposed to play jazz,” says Herbie Hancock. Hancock is one of the most noted jazz musicians of all time. He was born in Chicago in 1940, and it became apparent early on that he was a child piano prodigy. Herbie performed a Mozart piano concert with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age 11, then started playing jazz in high school and later double-majored in music and electrical engineering at Grinnell College. His fascination with musical gadgets led him to become one of the first jazz pianists to work with electronic keyboards. And his landmark albums blurred the boundaries of music, effortlessly mixing jazz with funk, soul, rhythm and the blues, forever changing the face of jazz. As Miles Davis once said, “Herbie was the step after Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, and I haven’t heard anybody yet who has come after him.”
The documentary above — Herbie Hancock: All That’s Jazz — was produced for KCET’s signature news series “SoCal Connected.” It retraces the most important steps in Hancock’s career and shows us his home, the office where his award-winning music is composed and his private rituals. Very few people know that Herbie is a very religious person — he has been a practicing Buddhist for over forty years.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
Fun fact about F. Scott Fitzgerald: he was a terrible speller. No, really. And his grammar wasn’t much better. Literary critic Edmund Wilson described his debut novel This Side of Paradise (find in our Free eBooks collection) as “one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published.” Hemingway couldn’t spell either, and neither could Faulkner. Without the patient revision of great editors like Maxwell Perkins, much of the prose of these American masters may well have been unreadable. Novelists are artists, not grammarians, and their manuscript quirks—of spelling, handwriting, grammatical mistakes—can often reveal a great deal more about them than the typical reader can glean from clean, typeset copies of their work.
Take, for example, the evolution of Fitzgerald’s signature (above). From the labored scrawls of a five year-old, to the practiced script of an eleven-year-old schoolboy, to the experimental teenaged poses, we see the lettering get looser, more stylized, then tighten up again as it assumes its own mature identity in the confidently elegant near-calligraphy of the 21-year-old Fitzgerald–an evolution that traces the writer’s creative growth from uncertain but passionate youth to disciplined artist. Alright, maybe that’s all nonsense. I’m no expert. The practice of handwriting analysis, or graphology, is generally a forensic tool used to identify the marks of criminal suspects and detect forgeries, not a mindreading technique, although it does get used that way. One site, for example, provides an analysis of one of Fitzgerald’s 1924 letters to Carl Van Vechten. From the minute characteristics of the Gatsby novelist’s script, the analyst divines that he is “creative,” “artistic,” and appreciates the finer things in life. Color me a little skeptical.
But maybe there is something to my theory of Fitzgerald’s growing maturity and self-conscious certainty as evidenced by his signatures. He published This Side of Paradise to great acclaim three years after the final signature above. In the prior signatures, we see him struggling for control as he wrote and revised an earlier unpublished novel called The Romantic Egotist, which Fitzgerald himself told editor Perkins was “a tedious, disconnected casserole.” The outsized, extravagant lettering of the artist in his late teens is nothing if not “romantic.” But Fitzgerald achieved just enough control in his short life to write a veritable treasure chest of stories (many brilliant and some just plain silly) and a handful of novels, including, of course, the one for which he’s best known. Most of the rest of the time, as most everyone knows, he was kind of a mess.
Try a little amateur handwriting analysis of your own on the last sentence of The Great Gatsby, written in Fitzgerald’s own hand below a portrait of the writer by artist Robert Kastor.
And for an added treat, watch journalist and sportswriter Bill Nack recite the final lines of Gatsby to his friend Roger Ebert. “Gatsby believed in the green light…”
via I always wanted to be a Tenenbaum
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
In the preface of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt recalls the day he encountered a translation of Lucretius’ 2000 year old poem, On the Nature of Things. He was a grad student back at Yale, living on modest means, when he ambled into a bookstore and found a copy marked down to ten cents. He picked it up, not having much to lose and not knowing what he’d find. Soon enough he was reading one of the most scandalous and groundbreaking texts from antiquity, a book that eventually traveled a long and winding road and changed our entire modern world. That story Greenblatt tells in The Swerve.
The ten cents Greenblatt spent in the 1960s may be roughly equivalent to the deal you can get today. Right now, The Swerve, the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, can be downloaded as an audio book for $5.95 via iTunes. Yes, we know, $5.95 is not free, and iTunes is not open, but it’s certainly a deal worth mentioning nonetheless.
But if you’re really hankering for something free, then don’t miss our meta lists of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks, which include a copy of Lucretius’ famous work. Or definitely check out Audible.com’s Free Trial offer, which lets you download pretty much any audio book you want (classic or modern) for free. Get details here.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here,” says Ray Bradbury above, in a lengthy interview with the The Big Read project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. Breaking the ice with this stock phrase, Bradbury–author of Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, and several dozen more fantasy and sci-fi novels and short story collections (and some truly chilling horror)–begins to talk about… Love. Specifically a love of books. “Love,” he says, “is at the center of your life. The things that you do should be things that you love, and the things that you love, should be things that you do.” That’s what books teach us, he says, and it becomes his mantra.
Bradbury, who passed away in June, was certainly an early inspiration for me, and several million other bookish kids whose warmest memories involve discovering some strange, life-altering book on the shelf of a library. As he recounts his childhood experiences with books, he’s such an enthusiastic booster for public libraries that you may find yourself writing a check to your local branch in the first ten minutes of his talk. And it’s easy to see why his most famous novel sprang from what must have been a very pressing fear of the loss of books. Bradbury was largely self-taught. Unable to afford college, he pursued his fierce ambition to become a writer immediately out of high school and published his first short story, “Hollerbochen’s Dilemma,” at the age of nineteen. As he says above, he became a writer because, “I discovered that I was alive.” But I’m not doing it justice. You have to watch him tell it to really feel the thrill of this epiphany.
The Big Read’s mission is to create a “Nation of Readers,” and to do so, it posts free audio guides for classics such as Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. They also feature video interviews with other authors, like Amy Tan, Ernest J. Gaines, and Tobias Wolff. Each of the interviews is fantastic, and the readers’ guides are superb as well. Bradbury’s, for example, narrated by poet and author Dana Gioia, also features sci-fi giants Orson Scott Card and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as several other writers who were inspired by his work.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
In April of 1959 the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell sat down with John Freeman of the BBC program Face to Face for a brief but wide-ranging and candid interview. Russell reminisced about his early attraction to mathematics. “I got the sort of satisfaction that Plato says you can get out of mathematics,” he said. “It was an eternal world. It was a timeless world. It was a world where there was a possibility of a certain kind of perfection.”
Russell, of course, distinguished himself in that rarified world as one of the founders of analytic philosophy and a co-author of Principia Mathematica, a landmark work that sought to derive all of mathematics from a set of logical axioms. Although the Principia fell short of its goal, it made an enormous mark on the course of 20th century thought. When World War I came along, though, Russell felt it was time to come down from the ivory tower of abstract thinking. “This world is too bad,” Russell told Freeman. “We must notice it.”
The half-hour conversation, shown above in its entirety, is of a quality rarely seen on television today. The interviewer Freeman was at that time a former Member of Parliament and a future Ambassador to the United States. Russell talks with him about his childhood, his views on religion, his political and social activism, even his amusing conviction that smoking extended his life. But perhaps the most famous moment comes at the end, when Freeman asks the old philosopher what message he would offer to people living a thousand years hence. In answering the question, Russell balances the two great spheres that occupied his life:
I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral:
The intellectual thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only and solely at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.
The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way, and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
“Truman Capote didn’t study to become expert in capital crime and its punishment,” says William F. Buckley on the Firing Line broadcast of September 3, 1968, “but his five and one half year engagement of the slaughter of the Clutter family, which went into the writing of In Cold Blood, left him with highly settled impressions in the matter.” You can hear Buckley elicit and Capote concisely lay out the position to which these impressions brought him in the clip above. Though remembered for his own conservative views, Buckley seemed ever eager to invite onto his show, frequently and without hesitation, public figures who strongly disagreed with him. This sense of controversy generated a stream of classically compelling televisual moments over Firing Line’s 33-year run, but for my money, all the direct conflicts have less to offer than the times a guest — or even the host — broke from standard ideological positions, as Capote does here.
Buckley opens by asking whether “systematic execution of killers over the preceding generation might have stayed the hand of the murderers of the Cutter family.” Capote replies that “capital punishment — which I’m opposed to, but for quite different reasons than are usually advanced — would in itself be a singularly effective deterrent, if it were, in fact, systematically applied. But because public sentiment is very much opposed to it and the courts have allowed this endless policy of appeal — to such a degree that a person can be eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen years under a sentence of capital punishment — it becomes, in effect, an extreme, unusual, and cruel punishment. If people really were sentenced to be executed and were within a reasonable period of time, the professional murderer knew the absolute, positive end of their actions would be their own death, I think it would certainly give them second thoughts.” This perhaps lends itself poorly to a sound bite, but Firing Line at its best never dealt in those.
When Mad Men kicked off its fifth season earlier this year, we encountered Don Draper and Peggy Olson brainstorming an advertising campaign for Heinz baked beans. The goal? To make this staple of the American diet sexier to a younger generation. It’s a perennial problem for many traditional brands, something that real-world companies contend with day in, day out. Take Campbell’s Soup for example. As part of a broader effort to make its products “more ethnic, more hip,” the company founded in 1869 plans to sell 1.2 million cans with artwork inspired by Andy Warhol.
Of course, Warhol is the artist who famously began producing silkscreens of Campbell’s soup cans back in 1962. When Andy first created these iconic pieces of pop art, Campbell’s was none too pleased. In fact, the company considered hitting him with a lawsuit. But, by 1964, they were sending him nice letters and free cases of soup, and they also commissioned him to make a painting for the firm’s retiring chairman. Now 50 years later, they’re hoping that Warhol’s pop art can get their sagging sales going again.
The soup cans will go on sale at Target, starting this Sunday, for 75 cents a pop. In the meantime, we’ll leave you with this — Sal Khan (Khan Academy) and Steven Zucker (Smarthistory) explaining what makes Warhol’s art, art. And, by the way, I spotted Sal at the local grocery store tonight. Should have said hi. It’s a small world.
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