In advance of its May 2013 concert series, Carnegie Hall has created a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that will teach students how to listen to orchestras. The course, S4MU — short for Spring 4 Music University — is premised on the idea that “listening is an art itself,” and that you won’t overcome a tin ear by studying music theory alone. Starting on April 1, the four-week course will be taught by Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conductor Marin Alsop; ArtsJournal editor Douglas McLennan (seen above); composer Jennifer Higdon; vocalist Storm Large; and conductor Leonard Slatkin. Like all other MOOCs, the course is free. You can reserve your spot in the class right here.
Spring 4 Music University has been added to our complete list of MOOCs, where you will find 45 courses starting in April.
Thanks goes to Maxine for the heads up on this new offering.
Perhaps you haven’t given Ralph Ellison any thought since reading Invisible Man in high school. Watch the interview above, and you’ll have no choice but to consider his work and opinions again. Just past twenty minutes into this short documentary called USA: The Novel, he reads an excerpt from a work of his that you may not have read: Juneteenth, the book that would follow up Invisible Man — 47 years later. It saw publication only in 1999, 33 years after this film on Ellison’s “work in progress,” and five years after his death. He’d written over 2000 pages, and even then claimed to have lost portions of the manuscript in a fire. One of Ellison’s biographers, John F. Callahan, cut down and organized the remaining material. Another of his biographers, Arnold Rampersad, doubts that the fire destroyed much of the troubled novel at all.
Though Ellison’s work remains readily available — even Juneteenth reappeared in 2012 in the 1101-page expansion Three Days Before the Shooting…— the writer left behind fewer direct reflections than his fans and scholars might like. That makes footage like this all the more valuable, and, in it, he even addresses his tendency to not to speak publicly: “I’m fascinated by how the interviewer’s mind works, and I’m also aware that, for all my shunning of a public role which is divorced from my identity as a writer, any kind of statement I make, any time my face appears, there are a lot of people who are going to be interpreting my face, my statements in terms of my racial identity rather than in terms of the quality of what I have to say. Power for the writer, it seems to me, lies in his ability to reveal only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.”
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art houses the largest American collection of art west of Chicago. Developed as an “encyclopedic” museum—its collections represent nearly every human civilization since recorded time—LACMA’s eclectic holdings span from art of the ancient world to video installations. Like all great public collections, LACMA sees its mission as providing the greatest possible access to the widest range of art.
Two years ago LACMA made a relatively small number of its image holdings available for free download in an online library. From that beginning of 2,000 images, the museum recently expanded its downloadable collection by ten-fold, making 20,000 images of artwork available for free.
This represents about a quarter of all the art represented on LACMA’s site. They’ve chosen images of artworks the museum believes to be in the public domain and developed a robust digital archive with a richer search function than most museums.
LACMA’s online collection (80,000 images altogether, including restricted use and unrestricted) is sorted by the usual curatorial terms (“American Art,” “Art of the Pacific” and so on) but that’s just one of many filtering options.
A search for works related to the word “roses” can be done as a general search of all objects, turning up, among 268 other items, Toulouse-Lautrec’s Mlle Marcelle Lender. This item happens to be available for free download. (Note the bloom in the Madamoiselle’s cleavage to see why the image turned up in this search.)
But the collection can be searched more narrowly by object type and curatorial area. There’s also a cool option to search by what’s on view now right now. This choice allows users to zero in on a specific building or floor of the museum’s eight buildings. The collection can also be entered according to chronological era, from 10,000 BCE to the present day.
This is important for the public, but even more so for students and educators. Nine years ago Eastman Kodak stopped producing slide projectors. Since then the task of assembling quality images for the study of art history has become hopelessly daunting, with teachers and students searching a myriad websites to create digital “carousels” for class or study.
For whatever reason, in an age over-abundant with high resolution images of nearly everything, pictures of art itself are scattered and expensive.
Institutions like Google Art Projects, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and LACMA are among a few that offer extensive, free art images online.
Of course there are still copyright issues that all institutions must contend with. But it is to LACMA’s credit that they take their mission of public access seriously and put resources into making their wonderful collection available to the international community.
Here’s a curious scene from the 1969 cult film The Magic Christian. In the story, Peter Sellers plays an eccentric billionaire, Sir Guy Grand, who adopts a homeless man, played by Ringo Starr, and sets out to play a series of practical jokes on people, demonstrating that “everyone has their price.”
Sellers and Starr were at the hight of their fame when the movie was made, but John Cleese, who plays a snooty auction director at Sotheby’s, was still a few months away from the formation of Monty Python. The Magic Christian is based on a book of the same name by comedic novelist Terry Southern. Cleese and another future Python member, Graham Chapman, co-wrote an early version of the script, including this scene, which was not in the book.
The film was directed by Joseph McGrath and includes an assortment of bizarre cameo appearances, including Christopher Lee as a vampire, Racquel Welch as an S&M priestess and Yul Brynner as a transvestite cabaret singer. But perhaps the most enduring element of The Magic Christian is the hit song “Come and Get it,” which was written and produced for the film by Paul McCartney and performed by Badfinger.
We’ve written a fair amount on the various facets of Thomas Edison’s career, and somewhat less on his less-famous former employee-become-rival Nikola Tesla (who seems to polarize people in ways Edison doesn’t). Both inventors provoke all kinds of serious speculation, commentary, and debate. But even people having fun with these larger-than-life characters feel the need to pick sides. For example, there’s webcomic The Oatmeal’s “Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived,” which obviously comes down hard in favor of Tesla. Then there’s Tetsuya Kurosawa Biographical comic Thomas Edison: Genius of the Electric Age, which gives the edge to Edison.
Now, in another showdown between the pioneering geniuses of the electric age, we have Epic Rap Battles of History, Season 2, with Edison and Tesla spitting rhymes to prove who should wear the top inventor’s crown. Previous Epic Rap Battles of History episodes pit Gandhi against Martin Luther King, Obama vs. Romney, and Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates. They’re all pretty great, but this one goes out to the science history nerds (who have a sense of humor). The lyrics hit the high points of Edison and Tesla’s careers—Edison’s intellectual property theft, endless string of patents, use of direct current, and “stacking riches”; Tesla’s almost religious belief in the power of electricity, disinterest in business, grievances with Edison—and there are plenty of personal insults thrown into the mix.
Whether you’re a partisan of Edison or Tesla, or couldn’t care less either way, no doubt you’ll get a kick out of this. And for an added bonus, check out the “making of” video below.
Brian Eno, the well-known music producer, resident intellectual of rock, “non-musician” musician, “drifting clarifier,” and popularizer of ambient records, went to art school. (The Colchester Institute in Essex, specifically.) Anyone familiar with Eno’s career knows that English art school of the sixties must have perfectly suited his interests and inclinations. But read up on his generation of U.K. popular musicians, and you’ll find art school not a wholly unusual rite of passage. That background united several of the members of Roxy Music, the band in which Eno would hone his sonic craft (and build his notoriety) in the early seventies. Though music would offer him his highest peaks of fame and fortune, Eno never quite forgot that he’d originally entered art school with the intention of painting. Attending an exhibition of his 77 Million Paintings a few years back, I delighted in seeing his interest in technology and composition intersect with his penchant for the visual arts.
Rewind, now, to the eighties, where we find another, equally fascinating example of Eno continuing to “paint,” but in a technologically rethought manner. You can now watch his “video paintings” of that era on Youtube. Here you can see Thursday Afternoon, his series on the female form (some of which, despite approaching abstraction, could potentially be considered NSFW, though any mainstream gallery today would show them openly). Just above, you’ll find an excerpt from his series Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan. It may not look like much, and indeed, Eno’s initial process involved little more than accidentally leaving his camcorder recording on the windowsill. But bear in mind that the actual installation involved screening the piece right-side-up on a television itself turned on its side — a simple recontextualization, but as those who saw the original have assured me, a striking one. Rainy-day project: try replicating that setup at home. I think Eno would approve.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
While it did come as a shock to some of Philip Roth’s friends when the novelist announced his retirement from writing last year, one might imagine that after 31 novels, two National Book Awards, a Pulitzer, three PEN/Faulkner Awards and a host of other accolades, the man deserves a break. Roth celebrated his 80th birthday on Tuesday. New Yorker editor David Remnick writes in his account of Roth’s Newark birthday party that the writer “sensed that better books were not ahead” and quit rather than experience his powers failing. This is in character, writes Remnick, for a writer whose books “rage against the indignities and inevitabilities, the inescapability, the horrific cosmic joke of age, of death.”
Remnick’s observation reminds me of the two Roth characters who loom large in my memory of his work—both oversexed mama’s boys, driven by grim humor and narcissistic self-regard. First I think of grotesque old lecher Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath’s Theater, who ekes out his later years on tiny bits of sympathy, lascivious remembrances, and suicidal fantasies. At one point in the novel, he observes, “we are immoderate because grief is immoderate, all the hundreds and thousands of kinds of grief.”
If Sabbath is a projection of Roth’s fear of aging, he is an effectively terrifying portrait of dissolution and decay; for all his gallows humor, he can’t hide the fact that he just doesn’t know when to let go of former glories. If he’s an elderly Alexander Portnoy (perhaps), he’s a Portnoy gone to pot with a few hundred kinds of grief. Of course Portnoy— 33-year-old neurotic chronic masturbator and “lust-ridden, mother addicted young Jewish bachelor”— narrates the novel that made Roth a household name. You can see Roth read from Portnoy’s Complaintin the video above from PBS.
Since Portnoy’s 1969 publication, Roth has endured question after question about the autobiographical content in his novels. Surely he invested Portnoy and Sabbath with some measure of his raging Id, but his body of work takes in concerns far beyond sexually obsessive Jewish mother’s boys. To get a glimpse of the early, pre-Portnoy Roth, take a look at the 1958 and ‘59 short stories “Epstein” and “The Conversion of the Jews” at the Paris Review. Both stories appeared in Roth’s first book Goodbye, Columbus, for which he won his first National Book Award in 1960. And for a look at the aging writer wrestling with the brave new world of open source collaborative authorship, read his fascinating “An Open Letter to Wikipedia” from September of last year, a month before he announced his retirement.
Perhaps you noticed? During the past two years, the TED brand has morphed into something new. Once known for staging a couple of high-priced annual conferences, TED has recently launched a series of new products: TEDx conferences for the masses, TED Books, TED Radio, TED ED and Ads Worth Spreading. In the wake of all of this, some have questioned whether TED has grown too quickly, or to put it more colloquially, “jumped the shark.” There are days when TED feels like a victim of its own success. But there are other days — especially when it returns to its roots — where the organization can still be a vital force. That happens whenever TED wraps up its big annual conference, as it did two weeks ago, and puts some noteworthy talks online. (See, for example, Stewart Brand describing how scientists will bring extinct species back from the dead.) Or it happens when TED brings older talks from its archive to YouTube.
Which brings us to the talk above. Here we have David Christian, a professor at Australia’s Macquarie University, explaining the history of the world in less than 18 minutes, starting with the Big Bang and then covering another 13.7 billion years. Formally trained as a Russian historian, Christian began working on Big History in the 1980s, a meta discipline that “examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities.” Christian then popularized his newfangled way of telling history when he produced for the Teaching Company: Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity. It didn’t hurt that Bill Gates stumbled upon the lectures and gave backing to The Big History Project, an online initiative that experiments with bringing Big History to high school students. The Big History Project got its start at the 2011 TED conference, with the talk presented above.
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