We owe the way we see California today in part to the painter Richard Diebenkorn, “whose deeply lyrical abstractions evoked the shimmering light and wide-open spaces” of the state “where he spent virtually his entire life.” Those words come from his 1993 New York Times obituary, which suggested that Diebenkorn’s resistance to brief aesthetic movements and art-world fads (a resistance aided by the distance between California and New York) would ensure that the influence of his vision long survive him. Now, thanks to Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, we can look more closely than ever at what went into that vision in a new online exhibition of Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks.
“Throughout his long career,” writes the Stanford Report’s Anna Koster, “Diebenkorn, AB ’49, kept a sketchbook – a ‘portable studio,’ as he called it – to capture his ideas. These books, now in the Cantor’s collection, span 50 years and represent the range of styles and subjects he explored, including deeply personal portraits of his wife, studies of the figure, landscape studies and compositions that point to Diebenkorn’s signature blend of figuration and abstraction.” The sketchbooks, donated by the artist’s widow and the Diebenkorn Foundation, currently sit on display at the Cantor’s exhibition Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed, which runs through August 22, 2016.
But if you can’t make it to northern California before then, you can have a look at all of them online and behold in detail their 1,045 drawings spanning fifty years of Diebenkorn’s life. They give not only an insight into how he rendered the material for so many of our California dreams, but how he handled his famously contrarian oscillations between styles, from Abstract Expressionism to figuration and back to the abstract again, with some of his richest work in-between. “I was never throwing things away when I switched from one way of painting to another,” he once said. “You can see a continuum from representation to abstraction, although I must say it never felt like a smooth transition while I was in the middle of it.”
Some of you may wonder what inspires such devotion among the fans of Haruki Murakami, the world’s most internationally popular novelist. The rest of you — well, you’ll probably already know that today is the man’s birthday. Whichever group you fall into, you might like to use the day as an excuse to either deepen your Murakami fandom, or to finally have a look across his singular literary landscape, made up of books like A Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and 1Q84, with its prose at once styleless and ultra-distinctive, its scope of reference Japanese and global, and the material of its stories thoroughly strange as well as mundane.
Haruki Murakami: In Search of this Elusive Writer, the BBC documentary at the top of the post, provides a fine introduction to Murakami, his work, and the fans who love it. For a shorter and more impressionistic glance into the author’s biography (in which the young Murakami famously transformed from a jazz bar owner to a novelist by watching a home run at a baseball game), see psychologist, writer, and filmmaker Ilana Simons’ video “About Haruki Murakami” just above. But soon, you’ll want to have the experience without which nobody can really grasp the Murakami appeal: reading his work. The New Yorkeroffers six of his stories in their archive, readable even by non-subscribers (as long as they haven’t hit their six-article-per-month paywall yet).
If you haven’t read any Murakami before, those stories may well start to give you a sense of why his fans (a group that includes no small number of other artists, like Patti Smith) go so deep into his work. What do I mean by going deep? Not just reading his books over and over again — though they, or rather we, do indeed do that — but gathering together in a particular Tokyo jazz cafe (we’ve even got a Murakami-themed book cafe here in Seoul, where I live), putting together playlists of not just the jazz but all the other music referenced in his books, writing in to his advice column by the thousands, and even documenting the locations in Tokyo important in both his fiction and his real life.
Somehow, Murakami’s highly personal work has won not just the sometimes obsessive love of its readers, but worldwide commercial success as well: the publication of each new novel comes as a nearly holiday-like event, brands like J. Press have commissioned stories from him, and over in Poland they stock his books in vending machines. It gets even those who don’t connect with his writing deeply curious: how does he do it? The modest Murakami, while not especially given to public appearances (though he did once give an English-language reading at the 92nd Street Y), has in recent years shown more willingness to discuss his process. What does it take to be like Murakami? He considers three qualities essential to the work of the novelist (or to running, which he took up not long after turning novelist): talent, focus, and endurance.
As far as the writing itself, he puts it simply: “I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else.” Many of his enthusiasts would say the same about their experience of reading his books. If all this has piqued your interest, don’t hesitate to plunge down the well of Murakami’s reality, where, on the vintage jazz-soundtracked streets, at the train stations, and down the secret passageways of Tokyo by night, you’ll meet talking cats, precocious teenagers, and mysterious women (and their ears), discover parallel worlds — and ultimately become quite good at Murakami bingo.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Months ago, I stumbled upon this pretty wonderful video of David Bowie playing an “acoustic” version of “Heroes,” one of my favorite songs, and I thought I’d quickly share it today. Why wait?
Appearing at Neil Young’s annual Bridge School Benefit concert in October 1996, Bowie gives us a stripped-down version of the moving song he co-wrote with Brian Eno in 1977. Flanked by Reeves Gabrels on guitar and Gail Ann Dorsey on bass, Bowie strums his acoustic guitar. All the while, he taps his foot, letting a bottle cap, taped to shoe, assist in creating a percussive beat. It’s all kept elegantly simple. Hope you enjoy.
Donations to The Bridge School, which helps physically challenged children overcome their impairments via the use of technology, can be made here.
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Memorably synthesized by Wendy Carlos (and memorably beloved by A Clockwork Orange’s Alex DeLarge), J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos epitomize the playful verve of so much Baroque music. The Concertos “display the lighter side of Bach’s imperishable genius,” writes NPR; “few musical works are as loved—and as often performed” as the six sprightly instrumental pieces. And of those six works, the fourth, Concerto in G major, is perhaps the most beloved, and most recognizable, of all. Thus it makes a fitting early entry in the expanding archive that is (or will be) All of Bach, a site intending to feature live performances of all 1080 of Johann Sebastian Bach’s works, performed by the Netherlands Bach Society. We’ve drawn your attention to the admirable effort before, and we happily do so again to celebrate their 150th offering, a performance of Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan (see a short, celebratory video announcement below).
The last time we checked in with All of Bach back in April, the site had uploaded only 53 performances. Since that time, they’ve added other popular favorites like The Well-Tempered Clavier (a “maelstrom in a minor key”—also beautifully adapted to the Moog by Wendy Carlos), and the glorious Magnificat, Bach’s first large choral work after his 1723 appointment in Leipzig (hear “Deposuit” below).
The Concerto in G major, which you can see and hear performed at the top of the post, shows us the composer “continually misleading us” as to “which instruments are the real soloists.” Two recorders initially take the lead, then a violin, then the recorders again until “they are soon trumped by the violin, which steals the show in a whirlwind of dizzying notes…. The roles are always ambiguous,” and our attention always riveted on the virtuoso interplay. “Bach deliberately obscures the usually clear contrast between soloists and ensemble,” All of Bach observes, and “his play on the characteristic elements of the concerto form draws to a close in a suitably subversive and boundary-blurring way.”
I have little to add to the tidal wave of remembrances and tributes in the wake of David Bowie’s death. Seems nearly everyone has a story about how his music, his persistence, his generosity, his genius, his unabashed weirdness changed their lives. What he taught me as a young teenager was that the phrase “just be yourself” can just as well mean “be whoever you can dream up,” and damn the predetermined roles and meaningless stigma. Harder than it sounds, but Bowie pulled it off like no one before or since.
Bowie was, writes Sara Benincasa, the “patron saint of… weirdos of all stripes, and that most dangerous creature of all: the artist.” He did not shy away from pretense; he embraced it as his special métier. In 1999, Bowie delivered the commencement address at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he received an honorary doctorate along with Wayne Shorter. In his speech, he says, he learned early on that “authenticity and the natural form of expression wasn’t going to be my forte.”
In fact, what I found that I was good at doing, and what I really enjoyed the most, was the game of “what if?” What if you combined Brecht-Weill musical drama with rhythm and blues? What happens if you transplant the French chanson with the Philly sound? Will Schoenberg lie comfortably with Little Richard? Can you put haggis and snails on the same plate? Well, no, but some of the ideas did work out very well.
Thus began his experiments with identity that first took shape in the fantastic creature, Ziggy Stardust, his “crusade,” as he calls it, “to change the kind of information that rock music contained.” Speaking of Ziggy, Bowie tells a story about playing “grotty… workingman’s clubs” in “full, battle finery of Tokyo-spaceboy and a pair of shoes high enough that it induced nose bleeds.”
Informed by the promoter at one such bar that the only bathroom was a filthy sink at the end of the hall, Bowie balked. “Listen son,” said the promoter, “If its good enough for Shirley Bassey, it’s good enough for you.” From this experience, he says, he learned that “mixing elements of bad taste with good would often produce the most interesting results.”
The speech is packed with witty anecdotes like this and self-deprecating asides. Most of the stories, as you can hear in the video excerpt at the top of the post, are about Bowie’s “greatest mentor,” John Lennon. Lennon, says Bowie, “defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fabric of pop and imbue it with elements from other artforms, often producing something extremely beautiful, very powerful and imbued with strangeness.” Indulging his love for high and low culture, Bowie undercuts his elevated talk of art-pop by describing his and Lennon’s conversations as “Beavis and Butthead on ‘Crossfire.’”
Bowie ends his speech with a heartfelt, and dare I say, authentic summary of his life in music. His only piece of advice, writes Boston.com: he urges the Berklee graduates to “pursue their musical passion as if it were a sickness.”
Music has given me over 40 years of extraordinary experiences. I can’t say that life’s pains or more tragic episodes have been diminished because of it. But it’s allowed me so many moments of companionship when I’ve been lonely and a sublime means of communication when I wanted to touch people. It’s been both my doorway of perception and the house that I live in.
I only hope that it embraces you with the same lusty life force that it graciously offered me. Thank you very much and remember, if it itches, play it.
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I don’t have any data, but I think it’s close enough to fact to say that exponentially more people have heard of William S. Burroughs—have even come to revere Burroughs—than have read Burroughs. The phenomenon is unavoidable with a figure as hugely influential throughout the last half of 20th century counterculture. His close association with the Beats; his influence on the 60s through Frank Zappa, The Beatles, and more; his popularity among punks and 70s art rockers and experimentalists; his close affinity with 90s “alternative” bands, Queer writers, and postmodernists; his importance to the druggy rave subcultures of the 90s and oughties…. In almost any creative counterculture you wish to name from the 50s to today, you will find enshrined the name of Burroughs. He was “indeed a man of the 20th Century,” writes Chal Ravens at The Quietus, “he was alive for most of it, after all—and his life and works form the very fabric of the counterculture, seeping into literature, painting, film, theatre and most of all music like a drop of acid on a sugar cube.”
In Burroughs’ case, the life and work are inseparable. His “quixotic and shocking life story should not be dismissed when assessing his legacy,” writes Bearded magazine. That strange life, which did not include writing until he turned 40, “defined him to such a degree that it was many decades before his literary achievements were taken seriously” by the establishment. Nonetheless, in the 50s, “Burroughs opened the doors for sex, drugs, alternative lifestyles and radical politics to be palatable concerns in mainstream culture.” While such themes became palatable through the artists Burroughs influenced, his own writing continues to shock and surprise. Burroughs may have moved in and through so many of the cultures named above, but he was not of them.
He appeared even to the Beats as a mentor, an “outlaw guru,” and he wrote like a man possessed. Burroughs, The New Yorker remarks, wrote in the “voice of an outlaw reveling in wickedness,” a voice that “bragged of occult power….. He always wrote in tones of spooky authority—a comic effect, given that most of his characters are, in addition to being gaudily depraved, more or less conspicuously insane.” Burroughs in fact described his impulse to write as a kind of insanity or possession. The most outrageous story about him—that he shot his wife Joan Vollmer in Mexico in a supposed William Tell-like stunt—is true. In the introduction to 1985’s Queer, Burroughs confessed:
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.
Personal obsessions with death, addiction, legal and social control, the occult, and his troubled sexuality drove all of Burroughs’ work—and drove the themes of 20th Century cultural revolt against conformity and conservatism. But though he may have been “a man of the 20th Century,” Burroughs’ most immediate predecessors come largely from the 19th: in decadent poets like Arthur Rimbaud, troubled adventurers like Joseph Conrad, fearless satirists like Ambrose Bierce, and genuine outlaws like Jack Black (who wrote in the 20s of his criminal exploits in the 1880s and 90s). It is in part, perhaps, his transmission of these voices to postwar artists and writers and beyond that granted him such authority. Burroughs’ writing always carried with it the voices of the dead.
Burroughs was obsessed with voices—recorded, cut-up, rearranged; he believed in their power to disrupt, influence, and corrupt. Fittingly, he left us acres of tape of his own ominous monotone: reading his work, offering commentary on technique, spinning bizarre, half-serious conspiracy theories, and distorting literature beyond all recognition through his cut-up technique. Though we all know Burroughs’ name, we can now—no matter our level of familiarity with his writing—become equally familiar with his voice in the playlist above, featuring seven hours of Burroughs recordings from five spoken word albums available on Spotify: The Best of William Burroughs, Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, Dead City Radio, Break Through in Grey Room, and Call Me Burroughs. (If you don’t already have it, download Spotify here to listen to the playlist.)
Though “we should not underestimate the direct influence of his writing” on counter- and pop culture, Bearded magazine points out (see this list for example), we should also not discount the spooky influence of Burroughs’ haunting recorded voice.
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