In early February 2016, museums and libraries worldwide took part in #ColorOurCollections–a campaign where they made available free coloring books, letting you color artwork from their collections and then share it on Twitter and other social media platforms, using the hashtag #ColorOurCollections. Below you can find a collection of free coloring books, which you can download and continue to enjoy. If you see any that we’re missing, please let us know in the comments, and we’ll do our best to update the page.
I don’t know about you, but when I’ve thought of chess grandmasters, I’ve often thought of Russians, northern Europeans, the occasional American, the guy on the Chessmaster box — purely by stereotype, in other words. I’ve never thought of anyone from, say, Jamaica, the country of birth of Maurice Ashley, not just a chess grandmaster but a chess commentator, writer, app and puzzle designer, speaker and Fellow at the Media Lab at MIT. Since we’ve only just entered February, known in the United States as Black History Month, why not highlight the Brooklyn-raised (and Brooklyn-park trained) Ashley’s status as, in the words of his official web site, “the first African-American International Grandmaster in the annals of the game”?
Given the impressiveness of his achievements, we might also ask what we can learn from him, whether or not we play chess ourselves. You can learn a bit more about Ashley, the work he does, and the work his students have gone on to do, in The World Is a Chess Board, the five-minute Mashable documentary at the top of the post. Even in that short runtime, he has much to say about how the game (which, he clarifies, “we consider an art form”) not only reflects life, and reflects the personalities of its players, but teaches those players — especially the young ones who may come from less-than-ideal beginnings — all about focus, determination, choice, and consequence. Perhaps the most important lesson? “You’ve got to be ready to lose.”
Ashley expounds upon the value of chess as a tool to hone the mind in “Working Backward to Solve Problems,” a clip from his TED Ed lesson just above. He begins by waving off the misperception, common among non-chess-players, that grandmasters “see ahead” ten, twenty, or thirty moves into the game, then goes on to explain that the sharpest players do it not by looking forward, but by looking backward. He provides a few examples of how using this sort of “retrograde analysis,” combined with pattern recognition, applies to problems in a range of situations from proofreading to biology to law enforcement to card tricks. If you ever have a chance to enter into a bet with this man, don’t.
That’s my advice, anyway. As far as Ashley’s advice goes, if we endorse any particular takeaway from what he says here, we endorse the first step of his chess-learning strategy for absolute beginners, which works equally well as the first step of a learning strategy for absolute beginners in anything: “The best advice I could give a young person today is, go online and watch some videos.” Stick with us, and we’ll keep you in all the videos you need.
Punk rock and heavy metal were two genres that evolved over the ‘70s, but seemed to run parallel to each other, despite sharing common fashion, sounds, and attitudes. But then there are moments in history, where everybody plays together in the same sandbox. For example, the above audio, which captures the Australian band AC/DC on their first American tour, playing New York’s CBGB, synonymous now with punk and new wave music.
The date is August 24, 1977, and AC/DC were on a cross-country trip that had taken in both club dates and arenas, where they supported—yes, hard to believe, I know—REO Speedwagon. Their album Let There Be Rock had just dropped in June. The band would be in the States until the winter.
This CBGB gig finds them on the same bill as Talking Heads and the Dead Boys, according to a poster from the time. And while there’s no video for this show, there are plenty of tasty photos over at Dangerous Minds, showing lead singer Bon Scott working the crowd and Angus Young—at the spritely age of 22—being carried through the crowd on the shoulders of Scott himself. You can feel the muggy New York summer in these photos, but also the excitement of an unforgettable gig.
At 15 minutes, the set is short, but still three minutes longer than the Ramones’ first set at the same club three years earlier. That’s pretty metal, man.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
When we think of Dada, we think of an art movement—or anti-art movement—that embraced chance operations, futurism, and experimentation and rejected all of the previous doctrines of the formal art world as moribund and fraudulent. As Dada artist and theorist Tristan Tzara wrote in his 1918 manifesto, the aims of the establishment art world had been “to make money and cajole the nice nice bourgeois.” This new breed would have none of it. In their attack on bourgeois artistic and political values, artists like Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters and others willfully trespassed formal boundaries, using any means or medium they happened to find of interest in the moment. We have Dada painting, sculpture, typography, and film; Dada poetry, theater, dance, and even Dadaist politics, so well represented by Tzara’s manifesto.
One medium we don’t often associate with Dada, however, is music. And yet, those same artists who waged war on the establishment with readymade urinals and rambling manifestos also did so with musical compositions that were as influential as the painting, film, and poetry.
Dada, and its immediate successor, surrealism, “exerted a pervasive influence on 20th-century music,” writes Matthew Greenbaum at New Music Box, but “the presence of Dada and surrealism is generally unrecognized or forgotten” in discussions of “mid-century avant-garde composers” in New York, like Stefan Wolpe, Morton Feldman, and John Cage. And yet, the repetitive, machine-like qualities we associate with mid-century minimalism come more or less directly from the Dadaists, as does the high concept experimentation.
Dada artists, adds Greenbaum, “paid close attention to advanced and developing technology, and the repetitive beauty of machines was a ubiquitous image.” Works like Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual musical “assemblages cunningly obscure the boundaries of text, music, representation, and notation a half-century before John Cage’s experiments in indeterminacy.” Greenbaum’s essay makes a strong case for this lineage, but the most direct way to trace the steps from Duchamp, et al., to Cage is to listen to the Dada artists’ experiments with music firsthand, and you can hear a selection of them here, excerpted from the 1985 compilation Dada For Now and brought to us courtesy of Ubuweb, who host the full album. Many of these compositions are experiments with language, theatrical performance, and text (the album is shelved in the “Spoken Word” category), though none of the composers would have drawn any lines between word and music.
At the top of the post, hear Antonio Russolo’s 1921 composition “Corale and Serenata,” which sounds like a rather traditional march, but for the ominous roaring that shadows the orchestration and occasionally breaks in to disrupt it entirely, sounding like the rush of tires on a highway or workings of a huge, industrial machine. Next is Hugo Ball’s 1916 composition “Karawane,” in which a trio of vocalists—Trio Exvoco—grows louder and more guttural as they chant in unison, their only accompaniment what sounds like a trolley bell. Further down, in Tristan Tzara and others’ “L’amiral cherche une maison a louer,” also from 1916, that same trio performs some sort of exuberant comedy, with accompanying whiz-bang sound effects that one would hear in radio plays of the succeeding decades. And just above, in Kurt Schwitters’ 1919 “Simultangedicht kaa gee dee,” Trio Exvoco begins a chant that soon devolves into staccato vocalizations and gibberish.
A few of these pieces, like the Russolo at the top, are original recordings. The rest are reconstructions. All of them are strange, as is to be expected, but it’s impossible to hear just how strange—and how tasteless and absurd, perhaps—they would have sounded to audiences one hundred years ago. As Greenbaum argues, what was once revolutionary in Dada became normative as it was integrated into the American art establishment in the later 20th century. But to hear it with fresh ears is to recapture how Dadaist art sounded as radical as it looked.
Blank on Blank returned this week with the latest episode in “The Experimenters,” a miniseries highlighting the icons of STEM. This new animation brings to life a 1983 interview featuring one trailblazer, Gloria Steinem, talking with another, Sally Ride, a physicist who became the first American woman in space, and endured a lot of gender stereotyping along the way. Other episodes in “The Experimenters” series have focused on Buckminster Fuller, Richard Feynman, and Jane Goodall.
Note: Gloria Steinem recently published a new memoir called My Life on the Road. You can download it as a free audiobook if you head over to Audible.com and register for a 30-day free trial. The trial lets you download two audiobooks for free. Then, when the trial is over, you can continue your subscription, or cancel it, and still keep the audio books. The choice is yours. Get more info here.
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Stanley Kubrick, the director of such beloved films as Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and The Shining, a man whose name remains, more than fifteen years after his death, almost a byword for the cinematic auteur, got into filmmaking because of a misunderstanding. While working as a photojournalist in his early twenties, he befriended an even younger fellow named Alex Singer, who would go on to become a well-known director of film and television himself, but back then he held a lowly position in the office of The March of Timenewsreels. Singer happened to mention that each newsreel cost the company something like $40,000 to produce, which got Kubrick researching the price of film and camera rentals, then thinking: couldn’t I make a documentary of my own for less?
Indeed; he and Singer put together $1,500 and collaborated on the boxing short-subject Day of the Fight, which played in theaters in 1951. But it didn’t turn a profit, since no distribution company offered the $40,000 he expected — nor had they ever offered The March of Time, whose newsreel business went under before long, enough to cover their own exorbitant costs. So Kubrick didn’t make money on his first film, but he did make a career, going on to do two more documentaries, then the low-budget features Fear and Desire, Killer’s Kiss, and TheKilling. Then came the critically acclaimed Paths of Glory starring Kirk Douglas, which eventually brought about an offer to Kubrick from the iconic actor to take the directorial reins on Spartacus. Next came Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and the rest is cinema history.
Of course, Kubrick didn’t know the full extent of the cinema history he would make back in 1966, on the set of 2001, when he sat down with physicist-writer Jeremy Bernstein, doing research for a New Yorker profile. The filmmaker brought out one of his tape recorders (devices he adopted early and used to write scripts) and recorded 77 minutes of his and Bernstein’s conversations, almost a half hour of which Jim Casey uses as the narration of the short documentary Stanley Kubrick: The Lost Tapes. Only recently rediscovered, these recordings feature Kubrick’s first-hand stories of growing up indifferent to all things academic and literary, honing his “general problem-solving method” as a photographer, getting into movies as a result of the aforementioned misconception, and building the career that film fans and scholars scrutinize to this day. It does make you wonder: what glorious work have we missed the chance to create because we ran the numbers a little too rigorously?
Here’s a variation on the parlor game question, “what famous person would you most like to have dinner with, and why?” What two famous people would you like to stick in a room together for ten minutes, and why? I imagine a fair number of readers might think of Hunter S. Thompson and Keith Richards, and the why is pretty obvious. Both impress us, writes Flavorwire, for “having remained alive” for oh so many years “after all those drugs” and crazed exploits. If Thompson was gonzo, Thompson plus Richards equals “double gonzo.”
Well, your wish is granted, in the almost ten-minute video above, in which Thompson and Richards have a mumble-off, discussing such subjects as J. Edgar Hoover’s reincarnation (he would return as “a fart,” Keith says), the Hell’s Angels, The Beatles, drugs, blood transfusions, and that Altamont incident.
In the first minute of tape, we have a rambling solo introduction from Thompson, and he assures us that he and Keith “have a sense of history you don’t.” Having put the viewer in their place (or the cameraman—more on that anon), Thompson promptly segues to the interview, which took place at the Ritz Carleton in Aspen.
Unfortunately, no one has thought to add subtitles to this bizarre exchange, which has circulated on Youtube for some time now. That was where the man who shot the interview, Wayne Ewing, first saw the grainy video of footage he shot for a 1993 ABC series called “In Concert.” The project was fraught from the beginning. The original plan was to have the two meet in New York, then have MTV shoot the interview and Ewing shoot the whole scene with a third camera “while Keith and Hunter emptied the mini-bar and chatted.” Instead, Thompson “came down with a virulent flu,” and the producers had to later lure Richards to Colorado.
So remembers Ewing in a 2009 introduction to notes he took down the day after the March 15th shoot. The journal reveals Thompson’s agitated state of mind in the week leading up to the shoot, as he lashed out at his staff, at Ewing, and at “college sophomores on ski vacations demanding autographs… holding out soiled napkins with pens for a record of their momentary brush with fame.” He’s clearly nervous about Richards’ arrival, obsessing over the state of the local shooting range, and when Ewing suggested “goofy ideas for the video with Keith,” Thompson growled, “it’s not your movie! It’s Keith’s!” Ewing’s notes are both amusing and a little distressing, given the position of Thompson’s beleaguered assistants.
Both of these figures represent the epitome of our tendency to romanticize writer/musician-addicts, but the effects on those around them don’t generally make for great stories (just ask their kids). And in Thompson’s case especially here, we can see the toll his drinking had taken on him at this stage in his life. But Richards is surprisingly lucid, as he continues to oftentimes be, remembering specific dates and details, and the whole interview is an interesting exercise in following the free-associative logic of two addled, but still brilliant and always entertaining personalities. No need to say more. Watch the tape.
It must come up in every single argument, from sophisticated to sophomoric, about the practicability of non-violent pacifism. “Look what Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were able to achieve!” “Yes, but what about Hitler? What do you do about the Nazis?” The rebuttal implies future Nazi-like entities looming on the horizon, and though this reductio ad Hitlerum generally has the effect of nullifying any continued rational discussion, it’s difficult to imagine a satisfying pacifist answer to the problem of naked, implacable hatred and aggression on such a scale as that of the Third Reich. Even Gandhi’s own proposal sounds like a joke: in 1940, Adolph Hitler abandons his plans to claim Lebensraum for the German people and to displace, enslave, or eradicate Germany’s neighbors and undesirable citizens. He adopts a posture of non-violence and “universal friendship,” and German forces withdraw from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, France, agreeing to resolve differences through international conference and committee.
Hitler may have been a vegetarian, but that’s likely where any sympathy between him and Gandhi began and ended. And yet, the above is precisely what Mahatma Gandhi asked of the Fuhrer, in a letter dated December 24, 1940. Engaged fully in the struggle for Indian independence, Gandhi found himself torn by the entry of Britain into the war against Germany. On the one hand, Gandhi initially pledged “nonviolent moral support” for the war, sensing an enemy–Germany–even more threatening to world peace and stability. (That stance would change in short order as the Indian National Congress revolted and resigned en masse rather than participate in the war). On the other hand, Gandhi did not see the British Empire as categorically different from the Nazis. As he put it in his letter to Hitler, whom he addresses as “Friend” (this is “no formality,” he writes, “I own no foes”): “If there is a difference, it is in degree. One-fifth of the human race has been brought under the British heel by means that will not bear scrutiny.”
Gandhi acknowledges the absurdity of his request: “I am aware,” he writes, “that your view of life regards such spoliations as virtuous acts.” And yet, he marshals a formidable argument for nonviolence as a force of power, not weakness, showing how it had weakened British rule: “The movement of independence has been never so strong as now,” he writes, through “the right means to combat the most organized violence in the world which the British power represents”:
It remains to be seen which is the better organized, the German or the British. We know what the British heel means for us and the non-European races of the world. But we would never wish to end the British rule with German aid. We have found in non-violence a force which, if organized, can without doubt match itself against a combination of all the most violent forces in the world. In non-violent technique, as I have said, there is no such thing as defeat. It is all ‘do or die’ without killing or hurting. It can be used practically without money and obviously without the aid of science of destruction which you have brought to such perfection. It is a marvel to me that you do not see that it is nobody’s monopoly. If not the British, some other power will certainly improve upon your method and beat you with your own weapon. You are leaving no legacy to your people of which they would feel proud. They cannot take pride in a recital of cruel deed, however skillfully planned. I, therefore, appeal to you in the name of humanity to stop the war.
As an alternative to war, Gandhi proposes an “international tribunal of your joint choice” to determine “which party was in the right.” His letter, Gandhi writes, should be taken as “a joint appeal to you and Signor Mussolini…. I hope that he will take this as addressed to him also with the necessary changes.”
Gandhi also references an appeal he made “to every Briton to accept my method of non-violent resistance.” That appeal took the form of an open letter he published that July, “To Every Briton,” in which he wrote:
You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.
When Gandhi visited England that year, he found the viceroy of colonial India “dumbstruck” by these requests, writes Stanley Wolpert in his biography of the Indian leader, “unable to utter a word in response, refusing even to call for his car to take the now more deeply despondent Gandhi home.”
Gandhi’s 1940 letter to Hitler was actually his second addressed to the Nazi leader. The first, a very short missive written in 1939, one month before the ill-fated Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, strikes a conciliatory tone. Gandhi writes that he resisted requests from friends to pen the letter “because of the feeling that any letter from me would be an impertinence,” and though he calls on Hitler to “prevent a war which may reduce humanity to a savage state,” he ends with, “I anticipate your forgiveness, If I have erred in writing to you.” But again, in this very brief letter, Gandhi appeals to the “considerable success” of his nonviolent methods. “There is no evidence,” The Christian Science Monitorremarks, “to suggest Hitler ever responded to either of Gandhi’s letters.”
As the war unavoidably raged, Gandhi redoubled his efforts at Indian independence, launching the “Quit India” movement in 1942, which—writes Open University—“more than anything, united the Indian people against British rule” and hastened its eventual end in 1947. Non-violence succeeded, improbably, against the British Empire, though certain other former colonies won independence through more traditionally warlike methods. And yet, though Gandhi believed non-violent resistance could avert the horrors of World War II, those of us without his level of total commitment to the principle may find it difficult to imagine how it might have succeeded against the Nazis, or how it could have appealed to their totalizing ideology of domination.
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