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Just about as long as I’ve written here at Open Culture, I’ve also hosted and produced Notebook on Cities and Culture, a world-traveling podcast dedicated to in-depth conversations with interesting people about the work they do and the world cities they do it in. Over five seasons so far, I’ve recorded each and every interview “on location,” from Los Angeles to Kyoto to London to Portland to Mexico City to Copenhagen to Vancouver to Seoul. Next comes the show’s sixth and most in-depth season yet: A Year in Seattle.
Think of that name, and you think of the city of rain, of grunge, of Microsoft and Amazon, of the Space Needle, of Frasier Crane, of Buddy Bradley, of Archie McPhee, of sleeplessness, of Starbucks. But having spent my own adolescence hanging out there, I know Seattle as even more than that, and it’s only grown more interesting since I’ve grown up. Now to explore the Notebook on Cities and Culture way, through a year of in-depth conversations with Seattle’s novelists, journalists, comic artists, filmmakers, broadcasters, explorers, gourmets, academics, architects, planners, cultural creators, internationalists, observers of the urban scene, and more.
As with every season, I’m raising the budget for Notebook on Citiesand Culture’s Year in Seattle on Kickstarter. If feel so inclined, you can have a look at its Kickstarter page and find out how you can help make it a happen, receive postcards from Seattle, or even get your project or message mentioned at the top of every show.
And as a special preview, I’ve just posted an interview with comic artist Peter Bagge, creator of the legendary alt-comic series Hate, author of the graphic novels Apocalypse Nerd, Other Lives, Reset, Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story, and just about as Seattle a figure as they come. There are 51 more where that came from — but only if we can successfully Kickstart the season by this Saturday morning at 10:00, Pacific time.
For a book about medieval theology and torture, filled with learned classical allusions and obscure characters from 13th century Florentine society, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, first book of three in his Divine Comedy, has had considerable staying power, working its way into pop culture with a video game, several films, and a baleful appearance on Mad Men. While the Mad Men reference may be the more literary, the former two may hint at the more prominent reason the Inferno has captivated readers, players, and viewers for ages: the lengthy poem’s intensely visual representation of human extremity makes for some unforgettable images. Like Achilles dragging Hector behind his chariot in Homer, who can forget the lake of ice Dante encounters in the ninth circle of Hell, in which (in John Ciardi’s modern translation), he finds “souls of the last class,” which “shone below the ice like straws in glass,” and, frozen to his chest, “the Emperor of the Universe of Pain,” almost too enormous for description and as hideous as he once was beautiful.
Like the rest of us, artists have been drawn to Dante’s extraordinary images and extensive fantasy geography since the Divine Comedy first appeared (1308–1320). In prolific French artist Gustave Doré’s rendering of the ninth circle scene, above, Satan is a huge, bearded grump with wings and horns. Doré so desperately wanted to illustrate the Divine Comedy (find in our collection of 700 Free eBooks) that he financed the first book in 1861 with his own money.
Afterwards, as Mike Springer wrote in a previous post on Dore’s illustrations, his publisher Louis Hachette agreed to put out the next two books with the telegram, “Success! Come quickly! I am an ass!” Doré’s eerie, beautiful drawings are just one such set of famous illustrations we’ve featured on the site previously.
Another artist perfectly suited to the task, William Blake, whose own poetry braved similar heights and depths as Dante’s, took on the Inferno at the end of his life. While he didn’t live to complete the engravings, his unsettling, yet highly classical, renderings of the poet the Italians call il Sommo Poeta—“The Supreme Poet”—certainly do justice to the vividness and horror of Dante’s descriptions. Above, see Blake’s 1827 interpretation of the thief Agnolo Brunelleschi attacked by a six-footed serpent in Canto twenty-five, a scene reprinted many times in color.
Like the makers of films and video games, artists have mainly chosen to focus on the most bizarre and harrowing of the three books, the Inferno. One modern artist who undoubtedly would have had a fascinating take on Dante’s hell instead illustrated his heaven, being chosen to imagine Paradiso by the Milan’s Nuages Gallery in 1999. I refer to graphic artist Jean Giraud, known in the world of fantasy, sci-fi, and comics as Mœbius. Despite some arguable artistic miscasting (Mœbius did after all make films like Alien and Tron “even weirder”), the French artist took what may be the least visually interesting of Dante’s three Divine Comedy books and created some incredibly striking images. See one above, and more at our previous post.
Other artists, like Alberto Martini, who worked on his Divine Comedy for over forty years, have produced terrifying images (above) and highly stylized ones—like these medieval illuminations from a 1450 manuscript. The range of interpretations all have one thing in common—their subject matter seems to allow artists almost unlimited freedom to imagine Dante’s weird cosmography. No vision of the Inferno or the loftier realms above it can go too far, it seems, even in the absurd video game finale you really have to see to believe. Somehow, I think Dante would approve… well… mostly.
If you have to ask what jazz is, Louis Armstrong supposedly said, you’ll never know. But the poet Langston Hughes, who in his 1955 First Book of Jazz reveals himself as a great enthusiast of Armstrong indeed, seems to have operated on a very different premise. Hughes pitched that book, which we featured last month, toward children, an audience that, at their best, embodies inquisitiveness: they have to ask what everything is. And before Hughes could explain jazz to them, he had to explain rhythm.
“Rhythm is something we share in common, you and I,” Hughes writes in 1954’s The First Book of Rhythm, “with all the plants and animals and people in the world, and with the stars and moon and sun, and all the whole vast wonderful universe beyond this wonderful earth which is our home.” It doesn’t just belong in music, he says; it belongs pretty much everywhere, from the realm of nature to those of athletics, machines, furniture — everything in “this wonderful world,” in his view, has its own rhythm.
If explaining jazz to kids strikes you as a daunting task, then just imagine explaining this more abstract foundational quality of jazz, finding it in a host of different domains, and then laying it all out in terms that will engage an elementary schooler. But only such a master of language and lover of sound like Hughes could do it with such overall vitality and concision, even if the subject, as Ariel S. Winter writes at We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie, moves Hughes to get “too lyrical, too abstract, caught up in his song of the world,” somehow drifting from an observation of the rhythm of knitting needles to the conclusion that everyone “should arrange her hair to suit the shape of her face.”
David Fincher is an auteur in the same way that Alfred Hitchcock is — you can tell a Fincher film from seeing a single frame. His shots are colored with inky blacks and sickly fluorescent greens and they are always compositionally perfect. His camera moves with an eerie disembodied smoothness that makes a Kubrick film seem down right warm and inviting. His movies mine the murky recesses of the human condition; you are more likely to see a grisly murder in a Fincher movie than a passionate kiss. Even movies that have a relatively low body count, like The Social Network, are imbued with a distinctly Finchersque grimness.
A growing number of critics are starting to pay attention. Above you can see Tony Zhou illustrate the director’s stylistic restraint in a video essay called “And the Other Way is Wrong.” Fincher himself once said, “They know you can do anything so the question is what don’t you do, not what do you do.” And Zhou elegantly shows what Fincher does not do, which is such staples of Hollywood filmmaking as hand-held cameras and close ups. He likes his camera locked down and aloof.
In another video essay series, Aaron Aradillas and the great Matt Zoller Seitz focus simply on the openings of Fincher’s films. The series starts with Fincher’s first, and most maligned, movie Alien3. Aradillas and Zoller Seitz argue that the film is distinctly different from the first two Alien films. Ridley Scott, director of Alien, kept the shots long and the edits largely invisible. Fincher, in contrast, used fast and jarring edits. He started as a music video director and was still in MTV mode when he made Alien3.
In a later episode on Zodiac, arguably his masterpiece, Aradillas and Zoller Seitz show that Fincher brilliantly packed the film’s two opening sequences with an impressive amount of exposition, setting up not just story elements but also the film’s complex, subjective point of view.
There are four videos in total in this series with a promise of a fifth. You can watch them all 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 badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Billie Holiday’s name has been in the news lately for some reasons that remind us of the tragedies she sang about and those she endured. First, there was the story of the rather appallingly tone-deaf PR firm who thought one of Holiday’s most well-known recordings, “Strange Fruit”—a song about lynching—would make a great name for their brand. Then there were the new details in Johann Hari’s book Chasing the Scream of how Holiday was hunted, haunted, and possibly framed by Federal Bureau of Narcotics head Harry Anslinger. These stories compound the image of Holiday as a tragic figure, a casualty of societal ills and personal demons.
Holiday may have documented her troubled life in her autobiography, but she would have preferred to be remembered for her music. Born 100 years ago today, the jazz songstress transmuted her personal pain into beauty; her interpretations of songs became standards in their own right, and became uniquely hers.
“God Bless the Child,” above, resonates with Holiday’s own difficult childhood, shadowed by neglect and loss, but she delivers it as though all had been forgiven and redeemed. She sang through abusive relationships and addiction and some pretty shabby treatment by a racist industry.
For example, Bret Primack tells the story in a JazzTimes article of the Fox Theatre in Detroit forcing Holiday to wear blackface in order to appear on stage with Count Basie’s Orchestra. As Lady Day herself remarked of the humiliating episode, “There’s no damn business like show business. You have to smile to keep from throwing up.” Toward the end of her life, in 1956, she gave one of her last of 22 concerts at Carnegie Hall (see her do her own composition “Fine and Mellow” above). The rehearsals—wrote New York Times critic Gilbert Millstein in the album liner notes—“had been desultory,” her voice “tinny and trailed off.” But at showtime, she appeared “poised and smiling,” singing “with strength undiminished.” In his liner remarks, Nat Hentoff described Holiday’s “assurance of phrasing and intonation” and “an outgoing warmth, a palpable eagerness to reach out and touch the audience,” a smile “often lightly evident on her lips and her eyes.”
In a retrospective essay, Hentoff refers to the sad fact that “Billie is most remembered as a victim—of herself, of society” as well as “the myth that, toward the end, Lady invariably sounded like a cracked husk of what she had been years before.” While it’s certainly true that she fell victim to others’ designs and her own bad judgment, she had her share of triumphs as well, most of them on the stage. Even in 1959, the year of her death, when her problems with alcohol had worsened to a soon-to-be fatal degree, and her voice had lost some of its vitality, she performed with swagger and grace. See her above sing “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” in one of her final live appearances. Holiday’s short, tragic life may have given us plenty to talk about, but her memory is best preserved by listening to her sing.
We all found it impressive when Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum put up 125,000 Dutch works of art online. “Users can explore the entire collection, which is handily sorted by artist, subject, style and even by events in Dutch history,” explained Kate Rix in our first post announcing it. ” “Not only can users create their own online galleries from selected works in the museum’s collection, they can download Rijksmuseum artwork for free to decorate new products.”
And so they’ve kept hard at work adding to their digital archive, which, as of this writing, offers nearly 361,000 works of art. This brings them within shouting distance of having doubled the collection in size since we first wrote about it.
You want the Dutch Masters? You got ’em. You want Rembrandt’s Self-portrait as the Apostle Paul? It’s in the archive, right alongside Night Watch. You want Vermeer’s View of Houses in Delft, better known as The Little Street? It’s in there too. But don’t stop now; the Rijksmuseum has put up a much greater breadth of Dutch art than that. You’ll also find important Dutch painters you may not have heard so much about before, such as the impressionist George Hendrik Breitner, whose Girl in a White Kimono appears just above. And it even includes high-resolution images of works of art and design in other media, such as Michel de Klerk’s 1918 suite of furniture for ‘t Woonhuys, whose armchair you see below. Looks almost good enough to sit in, doesn’t it? You can enter the collection here, or search the collection here.
The good people over at the New York Public Library compiled a list of books read by the characters of Mad Men, which just started the last half of its seventh and final season. Over the course of the series, the show’s characters drank several swimming pools worth of cocktails, engaged in a host of ill-advised illicit affairs and, on occasion, dreamed up a brilliant advertising campaign or two. As it turns out, they also read quite a bit.
All the books seem to say something about the inner life of each character. The show’s enigmatic main character, Don Draper, favored works like Dante’s Inferno and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury – books that point towards Draper’s series-long downward spiral. The whiny, insecure Pete Campbell read Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid classic The Crying of Lot 49. And Bert Cooper, the aristocratic bow-tie sporting patriarch of Sterling Cooper is apparently an Ayn Rand fan; he’s seen reading Atlas Shrugged early in the series. You can see the full reading list below or here in a beautiful PDF designed by the NYPL.
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 badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
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