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As a callow young art student in high school, I dearly wanted, and tried, to see the world with the same furious intensity as Vincent van Gogh, and to capture that kind of vision on paper and canvas. I later realized with chagrin as I stood in a line several blocks long for a wildly popular exhibit (Van Gogh’s Van Goghs at the National Gallery of Art) that I was but one of millions who wanted to see the world through Van Gogh’s eyes.
After waiting for what seemed like forever, not only could I barely get a glimpse of any of the paintings through the scrum of tourists and gawkers, but I felt—in my protective bubble of Van Gogh veneration—that these people couldn’t possibly get Van Gogh the way I got Van Gogh.
Well, everybody has their own version of Van Gogh, perhaps, but one I’ve outgrown is the mad, magical genius whose mental illness acted as a tragic but necessary condition for his transcendently passionate work. Maybe it’s age and some familiarity with life’s hardship, but I no longer romanticize Van Gogh’s suffering. And perhaps a more realistic view of what was likely debilitating bipolar disorder has given me an even greater appreciation for his accomplishments. During the brief 10-year period that Van Gogh pursued his art, he was as dedicated as it’s possible to be—producing nearly 900 canvases and over 1,100 works on paper, and altering the way we see the world, all while experiencing severely crippling bouts of depression, anxiety, and self doubt; having his neighbors ostracize and evict him from his home; and spending most of his final year in an institution.
Sadly, he felt himself a mediocrity at best, a failure at worst. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art writes, “in 1890,” the final year of his life, “he modestly assessed his artistic legacy as of ‘very secondary’ importance.” (This despite the appreciation he’d begun to receive from several gallery showings.) The posthumous reception of his work—ubiquitously reproduced and admired by countless throngs in exhibit after exhibit—can do nothing now to lift his spirits, but surely vindicates his prodigious effort. Van Gogh’s fame has had the unfortunate side effect of crowding out many students of his art from gallery exhibitions. Yet this difficulty need not now prevent them from surveying and seeing up close his huge body of work in digital archives like that of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the largest Van Gogh collection in the world.
By entering the collection, you can see, for example, Self Portrait with Straw Hat, at the top, from 1887, or the strikingly similar portrait of his brother and staunch supporter Theo from the same year, just below it. Further down is the darkly humorous Head of a Skeleton With a Burning Cigarette from 1886, and just above, see an 1882 letter to Theo, with a beautiful sketch of a Pollard Willow, an image he committed to canvas that year. Just below, see an interesting example of the very beginnings of Van Gogh’s posthumous canonization—an 1891 cover sketch and short tribute article in the French satirical magazine Les hommes D’Aujourd’hui.
You can search or browse the collection, and download and view these images, and many hundreds more paintings, sketches, drawings, letters, and much more, in resolution high enough to zoom in to every individual brushstroke and ink pen flourish. [When you click on an image in the collection, look for the down arrow ↓ that lets you start a download.] Missing from the experience is the three-dimensionality of Van Gogh’s heavily textural painting, but nowhere else will you have this level of accessibility to so much of his work and life.
And if you feel, as I once did, a need to get inside that life and walk around a bit, a new Art Institute of Chicago exhibit will allow you to do just that, with a three-dimensional recreation of his painting The Bedroom, including, writes This is Colossal, “all the details of the original painting, arranged in haphazard alignment to imitate the original room.” (The more morbidly curious can see a living replica of his infamous ear, recreated using his own DNA.) The room went up for rent on AirBnB yesterday. Best of luck getting a reservation.
Though the burials of ancient Egyptian rulers offer at least one notable exception, nearly all the world’s religions have agreed on one thing—if one thing only: you can’t take your stuff with you. You can leave it to the local church, mosque, or synagogue, your heirs, a charity of your choice, your dog; but your material possessions will not go wherever you might when it’s over.
However, should consciousness somehow survive the body, or get uploaded to a new one in some sci-fi future, perhaps you can take with you the experiences, memories, sensations, and ideas you’ve accumulated over a lifetime. And if that’s the case, we should all be greedy for knowledge and experience rather than property and consumer goods. And the “1,000… Before You Die” series of books, might be considered guides to curating your afterlife.
The series has recommended 1,000 places to see, 1,000 foods to eat, and, in 2012, 1,000 recordings to hear before you dent the bucket. Musician and critic Tom Moon, author of 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, has created a list that ranges far and wide, leaving seemingly no genre, region, or period out: from gangster rap, to opera, to krautrock, to country, to metal, to blues, to Zimbabwean folk, to… well, you name it, it’s probably in there somewhere.
For all the songs, artists, and albums I might have added to my own version of such a list, I was pleasantly surprised to find on Moon’s such indie classics as Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s haunting I See a Darkness, hardcore masterpieces as Bad Brains’ i against i, and seminal electronica as Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works. These less well-known recordings sit next to those of John Coltrane (see A Love Supreme featured above), Marian Anderson, Son House, Patsy Cline, The Beatles, Bach, Brahms, and virtually anyone else you might think of, and dozens more you wouldn’t.
One would have a very hard time making a case that Moon has any particular bias against one form of music or another. (See the complete list here, and browse by genre, title, or artist at the 1,000 Recordings website, where you can read Moon’s commentary on each selection.) When it came to selecting songs or albums from artists with embarrassingly rich catalogs, Moon told NPR that he went with his gut. “I didn’t want to have a standard criteria,” he said, “Within any given artist, you could go 10 different directions.” Agree or disagree with his choices, but marvel at his breadth and inclusiveness.
In the past, it would have taken you a lifetime just to track down all of these recordings, much less find time to listen to all of them. Now, you can hear 793 tracks from Moon’s 1,000 picks in the Spotify playlist above. (Brought to us by Ulysses Classical; download Spotify here if you need it). Spend the rest of your life not only mulling them over, but discovering 1,000s more. Despite the title’s reference to mortality, and my somewhat facetious introduction, Moon really means his “Listener’s Life List,” as he calls it, to be a guide for living—and for becoming immersed in music in a profoundly expansive way. (For this same purpose, I also thoroughly endorse The Guardian’s series “1,000 Albums to Hear Before You Die,” and its reader-sourced addenda. If anyone cares to turn the Guardian list into a Spotify playlist, we’ll feature it here too.)
As Moon summarizes his intent, “the more you love music, the more music you love.”
The first complete draft of the Princeton Bitcoin textbook is now freely available. We’re very happy with how the book turned out: it’s comprehensive, at over 300 pages, but has a conversational style that keeps it readable.
If you’re looking to truly understand how Bitcoin works at a technical level and have a basic familiarity with computer science and programming, this book is for you. Researchers and advanced students will find the book useful as well — starting around Chapter 5, most chapters have novel intellectual contributions.
Princeton University Press is publishing the official, peer-reviewed, polished, and professionally done version of this book. It will be out this summer. If you’d like to be notified when it comes out, you should sign up here.
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Where do superheroes come from? The concept didn’t just emerge fully formed into the world when, say, Superman showed up on the cover of Action Comics in 1938. Humanity has enjoyed stories of superhuman hero figures since time immemorial; you can find precedents for the superhero deep in the mythologies of a variety of cultures. When the Russian illustrator Roman Papsuev looked deep into the mythology of his own culture, he found plenty of material he could carry right over into a modern visual idiom. And what with the current Game of Thrones-driven wave of swords and sorcery in the global pop-culture zeitgeist, he picked the right time indeed to publish his elaborate drawings of Russian folklore heroes in the style of today’s high-fantasy comic books, movies, TV shows, and video games.
“The first characters were based on the author’s feelings and fantasies,” writes Daria Donina at Russia Beyond the Headlines. “He began, of course, with Ilya Muromets — the main Russian epic hero and the strongest bogatyr or warrior.” Then, “the more the author got immersed in the subject, the more accurate his pictures became.
He began to reread the tales and study the works of famous folklorists.” Donina quotes Papsuev himself: “ ‘What I like most is when people look at my pictures and then begin to read the tales and understand why, for instance, Vasilisa the Beautiful has a doll in her bag or why Vodyanoy rides a giant catfish. This grassroots revival of ancient folklore through my humble project gives me great pleasure.’ ”
You can browse all of these illustrations and more at Papsuev’s Instagram page, which includes not just finished pieces but works in progress as well, so you can get an idea of just what sort of process it takes to render a Russian hero for the 21st century. To a non-Russian, this all may seem like simply a neat art project, but any Russian will recognize these characters as central to a set of stories themselves central to the culture. “The tales are stamped in the subconscious from childhood,” Papsuev says in the Russia Beyond the Headline article, and as with any material with which people grew up, any reinterpreter takes them into his own hands at his peril.
“This project has no relation to real history or real life,” says the artist. “These are just tales, trapped in a world of games. It’s a fun project. Don’t take it too seriously.” But which enterprising Russian developer, I wonder, will take it seriously enough to go ahead and make an actual video game based on Papsuev’s too-heroic-to-waste folkloric characters?
Today, we discovered that there’s also an app (designed for iPhone, iPad and Android) that lets you take a virtual reality trip through the very same painting. Created as part of the 500th anniversary celebration of Bosch’s life, the app–previewed in the trailer above–lets you “ride on a flying fish into a Garden of Eden, be tempted by strange fruit and even stranger rituals in the Garden of Earthly Delights. And visit hell and hear the devil’s music.”
The app is free. And you can explore parts of Bosch’s famous triptych at no cost. It will cost you a small fee–$3.99–to unlock the remaining part.
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I don’t know why no one thought of this ages ago: an album of Walt Whitman’s poetry, set to moody, atmospheric electronic music and read by former Stooge and current American badass Iggy Pop. It makes perfect sense. Though Pop may lack Whitman’s verbal excesses, preferring more Spartan punk rock statements, he perfectly embodies—in a very literal way—Whitman’s fearless, sexually-charged “barbaric yawp.” And both artists are very much American originals: largely self-taught Whitman cast aside 19th-century decorum and formal constraints to write wildly expressive verse that celebrated the body, the individual, and American industrial noise; self-taught Pop cast aside 20th century rock formalism to create dangerously expressive music that celebrated… well, you get the idea.
I don’t know if he would have written “Now I wanna be your dog,” but in contrast to “the popular, well-educated poets of the time, those sensitive noblemen,” Whitman wrote—says Pop in his own distinctive paraphrase—“Fuc% as$.”
You know, I think he had something like Elvis. Like Elvis ahead of his time, one of the first manic American populists. You know you’re looking at pictures of him, and he was obviously someone who was very much involved with his own physical appearance. His poetry is always about motion and rushing ahead, and crazy love and blood pushing through the body. He would have been the perfect gangster rapper. Whitman says, even the most beautiful face is not as beautiful as the body. And to say that in the middle of the 19th century is outrageous. It’s a slap in the face.
Of the many rock and roll interpreters of literary greats we’ve featured on this site, I’d say Iggy Pop’s reading of, and commentary on, Whitman may be my favorite.
Unfortunately, we can only bring you a short excerpt, above, from Pop’s collaboration with instrumental duo Tarwater and German electronic artist Alva Noto (who recently scored Alejandro Iñárritu’s The Revenant with Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Ryuichi Sakamoto). This two-minute sample comes from a 2014 album these artists made together called Kinder Adams—Children of Adam, which features several abridged renditions in German of Whitman’s most famous book, Leaves of Grass by various voice actors, then a complete reading by Pop, set to a throbbing, haunting score.
Now, Pop, Alva Noto, and Tarwater have come together again to revisit Whitman with a seven-track EP simply titled Leaves of Grass. Like the early, self-published first edition of Whitman’s book, this work will only reach a few hands. “Released on Morr Music with no digital version planned,” reports Fact Mag, “Leaves of Grass is only available in a limited vinyl edition of just 500 copies, complete with embossed artwork.” You can purchase a copy of this artifact here (act fast), or—if you prefer your more traditional Iggy Pop without the literature, moody, post-rock soundscapes, and rarefied formats—wait for his new album in March with Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, sure to hit digital outlets near you. Whether or not he’s reading Whitman, he’s always channeling the poet’s energy.
Fans of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey will remember the scene: On a long journey through space, astronaut Frank Poole plays a casual game of chess with the HAL 9000 supercomputer … and loses decisively. No doubt about it. Watch it down below.
Passionate about chess and notoriously obsessed with detail, Kubrick based the scene on a chess match that took place in 1910, pitting the German chessmaster Willi Schlage against a fellow named A. Roesch. Whether Kubrick was personally familiar with the match, or simply found it by perusing Irving Chernev’s book The 1000 Best Short Games of Chess(p. 148), it’s not entirely clear. But what we do know is that Kubrick’s scene immortalized the Schlage — Roesch match played all of those years ago. And it inspired animator Riccardo Crocetta to recreate that 1910 match in the fine claymation above. The notes accompanying Crocetta’s filmon YouTube record all of the original moves. Apparently the ones featured in 2001 come after black’s 13th move.
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