Artists have used all sorts of odd media to create portraits, everything from guitar picks to dice to wooden eggs. Add to this list Brazilian type artist Álvaro Franca, who uses the typewriter. Instead of composing literary portraits of his heroes, Franca types out literal portraits. The principle of the pictures are the same grey-scale printing used in newspapers or, if you spent time in the computer lab in the 1990s, those dot matrix images that were such the rage among computer nerds. Using a computer, Franca breaks the image down into discrete pixels and adds one or more keystrokes to that pixel. ‘I’ and ‘O’ seem to work for lighter greys while visually dense letters like ‘x’and “m” are used for the darker end of the spectrum.
As he writes in on his website:
Typewritten Portraits is an experimental art project. During my exchange in the Cambridge School of Art, I developed a technique for imaging gray scale with the typewriter and, from there, I made portraits of five of my favorite authors in literature who worked on typewriters. The series is still ongoing and there are plans for five more pictures.
You can see a time-lapse video of Franca creating a portrait of beat icon Jack Kerouac above. And below you can see a few more pictures including Charles Bukowski and Jose Saramago here.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
We’ve shown you two exceedingly rare pieces of footage that capture jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker in action: one featuring him playing with Dizzy Gillespie, his fellow “founding father of bebop,” in 1952; and another, from two years before, where he plays with the likes of Coleman Hawkins, Buddy Rich, Lester Young, and Ella Fitzgerald. But since so little motion-picture material of Parker exists, his fans must have savored even seeing just the sheet music of his piece “Confirmation” animated when we posted it last year, alongside other such videos bringing to life the notation of works by greats like Miles Davis and John Coltrane. “To see it animated,” wrote Josh Jones, “is to see Parker dance a very different step than Miles’ post-bop cool, one filled with complex melodic paragraphs instead of chordal phrases.” Indeed.
And the source of those videos, Dan Cohen’s Youtube channel Animated Sheet Music, has even more Parker in store. Here you can also enjoy Cohen’s animations of “Au Privave,” that 1951 bebop standard with the mysteriously un-French French title, and Parker’s 1953 blues “Bloomdido.” These will, naturally, provide a rich watching and listening experience to those well-versed in the mechanics of both music notation and the forms of jazz, but even if you know nothing at all about either subject, these animations more than repay the short time spent. If you’d like to get less an explanation than a feel of how sheet music works, and indeed how jazz works, you could do much worse than getting it through a visualization of Parker’s inimitable playing — and you might well come away with just a little bit more of a grasp on what, exactly, makes it inimitable in the first place. “After spending several hours precisely timing Charlie Parker’s eighth and sixteenth notes,” writes Cohen, “I have come to the conclusion that the dude can swing.” Indeed.
We’ve written quite a bit in previous posts about French philosopher Michel Foucault’s time in Berkeley, California during the final years of his life, and for good reason. During these years he became something of an academic superstar in the United States, delivering lectures to packed halls at UC Berkeley, NYU, UCLA, and the University of Vermont, becoming feted in academic departments across the humanities, and receiving mention in TIME magazine. He also, sadly, contracted AIDS and passed away in 1984, leaving the intriguing fourth volume of his exhaustive History of Sexuality unfinished. It remains unpublished at his request.
The title of the mysterious fourth volume, Confessions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair), provides us with the connective tissue between his final project and the lectures Foucault recorded in English at Berkeley. Those lectures—including “The Culture of the Self” and “Truth and Subjectivity”—betray his obsession with confession, with truth-telling as an act of self-making.
In a sense, Foucault’s Berkeley lectures crystalized his life’s work. Just above, in his final Berkeley lecture series, “Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia,” Foucault delivers what may be the most plain-spoken statement of his general thesis: “My intention was not to deal with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth-teller or truth-telling as an activity.”
Such directness of speech is, in fact, the meaning of that obscure Greek term, parrhesia, with which Foucault frames his discussion. Meaning “free speech,” the word—rather than, as we might think, relating to the exercise of one’s first amendment rights—“refers to a type of relationship between the speaker and what he says.”
For in parrhesia, the speaker makes it manifestly clear and obvious that what he says is his own opinion. And he does this by avoiding any kind of rhetorical form which would veil what he thinks. Instead, the parrhesiastes uses the most direct words and forms of expression he can find.
Foucault, of course, reveals this kind of speech—as elaborated in Greek philosophy and the work of Euripides— to be a performance with its own complicated set of rules and codes. “Truth-telling as an activity,” Foucault concludes, presents the concept of truth as “true statements and sound reasoning” with a number of seemingly insurmountable problems. Put most plainly, our subjectivities, Foucault argues, make enormously complicated any notion of objectivity.
“Jazz is dead.” You can imagine how that statement, potentially inflammatory even today, shook things up when filmmaker Edward Bland dared to say it in 1958. He didn’t cause the stir so much by saying the words himself, but by putting them in the mouth of Alex, one of the main characters in his controversial “semi-documentary” The Cry of Jazz. Alex appears in the film as one of seven members of a racially mixed jazz appreciation society, stragglers who stay behind after a meeting and fall into a conversation about the nature, origin, and future of jazz music. “Thanks a lot, Bruce, for showing me how rock and roll is jazz,” says an appreciative Natalie, one of the white women, to one of the white men. Enter, swiftly, Alex, one of the black men:
“Bruce? Did you tell her that rock and roll was jazz?”
“Yeah, sure. That’s what I told her. Is there something wrong with that?”
“Bruce, how square can you get? Rock and roll is not jazz. Rock and roll is merely an offspring of rhythm and blues.”
Debate ensues, but Alex ultimately prevails, leaving all races present speechless with his ability to unite the narrative of jazz music with the narrative of the black American experience. We have here less a fiction film or a documentary than a type of heated didactic essay — a cry itself, in some sense — unlike any other motion picture on the subject. “The movie caused an uproar,” writes the New York Times’ Paul Vitello in Bland’s 2013 obituary. “Notable intellectuals took sides. The novelist Ralph Ellison called it offensive. The poet LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, called it profoundly insightful. An audience discussion after a screening in 1960 in Greenwich Village became so heated that the police were called. The British critic Kenneth Tynan, in a column for The London Observer, wrote that it ‘does not really belong to the history of cinematic art, but it assuredly belongs to history’ as ‘the first film in which the American Negro has issued a direct challenge to the white.’ ”
Where The Cry of Jazz operates most straightforwardly as a documentary, it captures the era’s extant styles of jazz (whether you consider them living or, as Alex insists, dead) as performed by the composer-bandleader Sun Ra and his Arkestra just a few years before his total self-transformation into a sci-fi pharaoh. This provides a “pulsating track of sound under the narration and serves to punctuate the protagonist’s long, engrossing lecture with appropriate segments of performance footage and musical counterpoint,” writes poet John Sinclair. “Inquisitive viewers may gain immensely from exposure to Bland’s fiercely iconoclastic exposition on the state of African American creative music on the historical cusp of the modern jazz era and the free jazz, avant garde, New Black Music movement of the 1960s.” And on the issue of the death of jazz, I submit for your consideration just four of the albums that would come out the next year: Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, Charles Mingus’ Mingus Ah Um, the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out, and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. A topic covered in the film, 1959: The Year that Changed Jazz.
In 2008, shortly after Bill Gates stepped down from his executive role at Microsoft, he often awoke in his 66,000-square-foot home on the eastern bank of Lake Washington and walked downstairs to his private gym in a baggy T‑shirt, shorts, sneakers and black socks yanked up to the midcalf. Then, during an hour on the treadmill, Gates, a self-described nerd, would pass the time by watching DVDs from the Teaching Company’s “Great Courses” series. On some mornings, he would learn about geology or meteorology; on others, it would be oceanography or U.S. history.
As Gates was working his way through the series, he stumbled upon a set of DVDs titled “Big History” — an unusual college course taught by a jovial, gesticulating professor from Australia named David Christian. Unlike the previous DVDs, “Big History” did not confine itself to any particular topic, or even to a single academic discipline. Instead, it put forward a synthesis of history, biology, chemistry, astronomy and other disparate fields, which Christian wove together into nothing less than a unifying narrative of life on earth.
Captivated by Dr. Christian’s ability to connect big and complex ideas, Gates thought to himself, “God, everybody should watch this thing!” And, soon enough, the philanthropist contacted the professor and suggested making “Big History” available as a course in high schools across the US (with Bill footing the bill.)
In 2011 the Big History Project, a course with a significant digital component, was piloted in five high schools. Now, a few years later, it’s being made freely available, says the Times, “to more than 15,000 students in some 1,200 schools, from the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies in New York to Greenhills School in Ann Arbor, Mich., to Gates’s alma mater, Lakeside Upper School in Seattle. And if all goes well, the Big History Project will be introduced in hundreds of more classrooms by next year and hundreds, if not thousands, more the year after that, scaling along toward the vision Gates first experienced on that treadmill.”
Hiroshima Mon Amour, Alain Resnais’s landmark 1960 meditation on war and memory, was Emmanuelle Riva’s first starring role. She plays a married actress (catch a scene here) who, while making a movie in Japan, has an affair with a Japanese architect played by Eiji Okada. Screenwriter Marguerite Duras chisels away at the actress’s Gallic reserve over the course of the film as memories of the war, not to mention guilt over the affair, overwhelm her. Resnais lingers on Riva’s face as she comes apart. Her performance is as brave as it is exact. French film critic Jean Domarchi once stated, “Hiroshima is a documentary on Emmanuelle Riva.”
As it turns out, Riva was documenting Hiroshima too. While filming on location, she took a series of photographs of everyday life of a city still recovering from the war. They are a fascinating slice of life from a Japan that has long disappeared. The Hiroshima Riva captured was still dominated by dirt roads and wooden buildings. People still regularly wore traditional geta wooden shoes.
Children seemed to be a favorite subject for Riva. She photographs a flock of elementary school students walking to school; a pair of boys fishing before the genbaku dome – ground zero for the bomb; and a gaggle of kids staring agog into the lens, no doubt curious at the sight of a stylish French woman with an expensive camera.
Years later, Riva’s pictures were collected into a book called Hiroshima 1958, which, sadly, seems to be available only in Japan. Riva, of course, went on to a celebrated acting career, including an Oscar-nominated turn in Michael Haneke’s harrowing love story Amour.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
It’s an old joke at this point—the hipster’s retro-obsession with vinyl is an affectation as bogus as louvered sunglasses and high-waisted acid washed jeans, right? Well, there are plenty of people who buy records and listen to them, too. There are even people who buy and listen to cassette tapes, imagine that! You can count me in both camps, and it isn’t because—or only because—I love the look and feel of these analog cultural artifacts or that I’m nostalgic for simpler times. It’s because I love the sound. Even cheapo cassette tapes can often sound better to me than the medium of music we’ve all grown so accustomed to over the last decade or so—the MP3.
Beginning in the CD era, the so-called “Loudness Wars” more or less killed the dynamics of recorded music, pushing every sound to the absolute limit—from the most delicately plucked acoustic guitar string to a black metal singer’s most demonic roar. Without the pleasing push-pull of musical dynamics, songs lose their depth and power. Once the music is released as product, it suffers another indignity in the data compression of MP3s and streaming services, formats that—according to high-end audio company Harmon—“have diminished the quality and flattened the emotion” of music. In the short film above, TheDistortion of Sound, Harmon brings together a number of engineers, producers, and musicians, including big names like Quincy Jones, Slash, Hans Zimmer, and Snoop Dogg to discuss what Harmon acoustic engineer Dr. Sean Olive, calls “the valley of sound quality” we’ve supposedly reached in the last five years.
Harmon’s Chief Engineer Chris Ludwig claims that data compression (not audio compression—a different technology), “removes up to 90% of the original song.” With our low-quality MP3s and cheap, tinny earbuds and laptop speakers, says Zimmer, we’ve become “a McDonald’s generation of music consumers.” It’s a depressing reality for audiophiles and musicians, but Harmon has the solution and Distortion of Sound is essentially an advertisement for it. Whether or not you buy in is your call, but along the way, you’ll get an interesting introduction to the recording process and the history of recorded music. Scroll down to the bottom of the “Distortion of Sound” page to see how Harmon is “bringing sound quality back.” They aren’t doing it with tape decks and turntables.
Winning a Nobel Prize has its perks. When you talk, people listen. And you end up doing a lot of talking. And travelling.
Reflecting on how the Nobel Prize changed his life, Walter Gilbert (1980 winner in Chemistry) commented, “You can find yourself spending years travelling and talking right after winning.”
And what if you want to take your Nobel Prize on the road with you? According to astrophysicist Brian Schmidt (winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics), that can present its own challenges. He recently told an audience in New York:
‘There are a couple of bizarre things that happen. One of the things you get when you win a Nobel Prize is, well, a Nobel Prize. It’s about that big, that thick [about the size of an Olympic medal], weighs a half a pound, and it’s made of gold.”
“When I won this, my grandma, who lives in Fargo, North Dakota, wanted to see it. I was coming around so I decided I’d bring my Nobel Prize. You would think that carrying around a Nobel Prize would be uneventful, and it was uneventful, until I tried to leave Fargo with it, and went through the X‑ray machine. I could see they were puzzled. It was in my laptop bag. It’s made of gold, so it absorbs all the X‑rays—it’s completely black. And they had never seen anything completely black.”
“They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’
I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’
They said, ‘What’s in the box?’
I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.
So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’
I said, ‘gold.’
And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’
‘The King of Sweden.’
‘Why did he give this to you?’
‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.’
At which point, they were beginning to lose their sense of humor. I explained to them it was a Nobel Prize, and their main question was, ‘Why were you in Fargo?’”
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