Hear the Only Instrumental Ever Banned from the Radio: Link Wray’s Seductive, Raunchy Song, “Rumble” (1958)

in Music | April 18th, 2017

Link Wray’s 1958 song “Rum­ble” remains the most dan­ger­ous-sound­ing instru­men­tal blues vamp ever record­ed, unmatched in its raw, slinky cool until, per­haps, John Lee Hooker’s End­less Boo­gie or the Vel­vet Underground’s White Light/White Heat. But unlike Lou Reed, Wray didn’t need lyrics about hero­in addic­tion and sado­masochism to freak out the par­ents and turn on the kids. All he need­ed was his fuzzed-out gui­tar, soak­ing in reverb and tremo­lo, and a rhythm sec­tion with the min­i­mal­ist instincts of Bo Diddley’s band, who were mak­ing a sim­i­lar kind of sound at the same time “Rum­ble” hit the air­waves. But where Diddley’s songs invit­ed lis­ten­ers to dance, Wray’s “ragged, omi­nous chords, over­driv­en and dragged to a crawl,” wrote Rolling Stone, “sound­ed like an invi­ta­tion to a knife fight.”

The song’s title cap­i­tal­ized on fifties pan­ic over juve­nile delin­quen­cy and gang vio­lence, anx­i­eties respon­si­ble for the pop­u­lar­i­ty of enter­tain­ments like The Wild One, West Side Sto­ry, and Black­board Jun­gle. Wray’s men­ac­ing, seduc­tive song made the kids “go ape,” he said, the very first time he played it, impro­vis­ing on the spot at a 1957 dance in Fred­er­icks­burg, Vir­ginia, after the band received a request for a hit song they didn’t know how to play. Instead “Rum­ble” was born. In order to recre­ate the rau­cous, dis­tort­ed sound of that first night in the stu­dio, Wray famous­ly punched holes in the speak­er of his gui­tar amp and turned it into a fuzzbox, the first of its kind.

The grit­ty tune is said to be, writes crit­ic and cura­tor at the Library of Con­gress Cary O’Dell, “the con­nect­ing force between ear­ly blues gui­tarists and the lat­er gui­tar gods of the 1960s (Hen­drix, Clap­ton, Page.)” Wray was “the father of dis­tor­tion and fuzz, the orig­i­na­tor of the pow­er chord and the god­fa­ther of met­al. He seems to be as well the rea­son the world ‘thrash’ was invent­ed, or at least applied to music.” These are large claims indeed, but Wray’s raunchy, shim­mer­ing gui­tar sounds like noth­ing that had come before it, and a har­bin­ger of so much to come. Jim­my Page has described hear­ing “Rum­ble” as a piv­otal moment. Iggy Pop cred­its it as the rea­son he became a musi­cian.

Like all the best rock and roll, Wray’s brief mas­ter­piece had the pow­er to shock and upset the squares. The song was banned from radio sta­tions in New York and Boston for fear it might actu­al­ly incite gang violence—the first and only instru­men­tal song to be banned from the air. “Rum­ble” acquired its name from the step­daugh­ter of Archie Bley­er, who released it on his Cadence Records. It remind­ed her, she said, of West Side Sto­ry’s gang fights, por­trayed in the mem­o­rable Act I dance scene called “Rum­ble.” No oth­er piece of music lived up bet­ter to radio net­work Mutu­al Broad­cast­ing System’s 1958 descrip­tion of the “dis­tort­ed, monot­o­nous, noisy music” they want­ed to get rid of. The net­work meant these as deroga­to­ry terms, but they are high virtues in so much great rock and roll, and few songs have embod­ied them bet­ter than Wray’s biggest hit.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Gui­tar Effects That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Rock: The Inven­tion of the Wah-Wah & Fuzz Ped­als

The Bizarre Time When Frank Zappa’s Entire­ly Instru­men­tal Album Received an “Explic­it Lyrics” Stick­er

A His­to­ry of Rock ‘n’ Roll in 100 Riffs

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Coffee Revolt of 1674: When Women Campaigned to Prohibit “That Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor Called COFFEE”

in Food & Drink, History | April 18th, 2017

We denizens of the craft-roast­ing, wi-fi-con­nect­ed 21st cen­tu­ry know well how to drink volu­mi­nous quan­ti­ties of cof­fee and argue our opin­ions. In 17th-cen­tu­ry Lon­don, how­ev­er, such pur­suits could look shock­ing and dan­ger­ous, espe­cial­ly since they hap­pened in cof­fee hous­es, the new urban spaces where, accord­ing to Res Obscu­ra’s Ben­jamin Breen, you could “bet on bear fights, warm your legs by the fire, wit­ness pub­lic dis­sec­tions (human and ani­mal), solic­it pros­ti­tutes (male and female), buy and sell stocks, pur­chase tulips or porno­graph­ic pam­phlets, observe the activ­i­ties of spies, dis­si­dents, mer­chants, and swindlers, and then read your mail, deliv­ered direct­ly to your table.”

The patrons, while engag­ing in all that, par­took of “a new drug from the Mus­lim world—black, odif­er­ous, fright­en­ing, bewitch­ing — called ‘cof­fee.’ ” Quick­ly find­ing itself sub­ject to a great deal of sci­en­tif­ic research and every­day argu­ment as to its mer­its and demer­its, the drink set off the satir­i­cal “Cof­fee Revolt of 1674,” which began that year with a pam­phlet called “The Wom­ens Peti­tion Against Cof­fee,” pur­port­ing to offer “The Hum­ble Peti­tions and Address of Sev­er­al Thou­sands of Bux­ome Good-Women, Lan­guish­ing in Extrem­i­ty of Want.”

It seems that Eng­land, once “a Par­adise for Women” thanks to “the brisk Activ­i­ty of our men, who in for­mer Ages were just­ly esteemed the Ablest Per­form­ers in Chris­ten­dome,” had, for the non-cof­fee-drink­ing sex, become a deeply unsat­is­fy­ing place:

The dull Lub­bers want a Spur now, rather than a Bri­dle: being so far from dow­ing any works of Super­erre­ga­tion that we find them not capa­ble of per­form­ing those Devoirs which their Duty, and our Expec­ta­tions Exact. The Occa­sion of which Insuf­fer­able Dis­as­ter, after a furi­ous Enquiry, and Dis­cus­sion of the Point by the Learned of the Fac­ul­ty, we can Attribute to noth­ing more than the Exces­sive use of that New­fan­gled, Abom­inable, Hea­then­ish Liquor called COFFEE, which Rif­fling Nature of her Choic­est Trea­sures, and Dry­ing up the Rad­i­cal Mois­ture, has so Eunucht our Hus­bands, and Crip­ple our more kind Gal­lants, that they are become as Impo­tent as Age, and as unfruit­ful as those Desarts whence that unhap­py Berry is said to be brought.

Cof­fee, so insist the Bux­ome Good-Women, ren­ders the men of Eng­land “as Lean as Famine, as Rivvel’d as Envy, or an old mea­ger Hagg over-rid­den by an Incubus. They come from it with noth­ing moist but their snot­ty Noses, noth­ing stiffe but their Joints, nor stand­ing but their Ears.” These charges drew a response in the form of the “Mens Answer to the Wom­ens Peti­tion Against Cof­fee, Vin­di­cat­ing Their own Per­for­mances, and the Vertues of that Liquor, from the Unde­served Asper­sions late­ly cast upon them by their SCANDALOUS PAMPHLET.” In it, the “men” ask the “women,” among oth­er ques­tions,

Why must inno­cent COFFEE be the object of your Spleen? That harm­less and heal­ing Liquor, which Indul­gent Prov­i­dence first sent amongst us, at a time when Brim­mers of Rebel­lion, and Fanat­ick Zeal had intox­i­cat­ed the Nation, and we want­ed a Drink at once to make us Sober and Mer­ry: ‘Tis not this incom­pa­ra­ble set­tle Brain that short­ens Natures Stan­dard, or makes us less Active in the Sports of Venus, and we won­der you should take these Excep­tions, since so many of the lit­tle Hous­es, with the Turk­ish Woman stradling on their Signs, are but Emblems of what is to be done with­in for your Con­ve­nien­cies, meer Nurs­eries to pro­mote the petu­lant Trade, and breed up a stock of hope­ful Plants for the future ser­vice of the Republique, in the most thriv­ing Mys­ter­ies of Debauch­ery; There being scarce a Cof­fee-Hut but affords a Tawdry Woman, a won­ton Daugh­ter, or a Bux­ome Maide, to accom­mo­date Cus­tomers; and can you think that any which fre­quent such Dis­ci­pline, can be want­i­ng in their Pas­tures, or defec­tive in their Arms?

“The extrav­a­gant claims for cof­fee made by men’s-health hand­bills exposed the com­mod­i­ty to satire,” writes Mark­man Ellis, author of The Cof­fee-House: A Cul­tur­al His­to­ry, but “that cof­fee might have a dele­te­ri­ous effect on male viril­i­ty was a the­o­ry accord­ed con­sid­er­able sci­en­tif­ic respect.” Still, pam­phlets like the “Wom­ens Peti­tion” took as their tar­get less the bio­log­i­cal effects of cof­fee than “the new urban man­ners of mas­cu­line socia­bil­i­ty that cof­fee rep­re­sents. The satirist accus­es cof­fee-house habitués of being ‘effem­i­nate’ because they spend their time talk­ing, read­ing, and pur­su­ing their busi­ness rather than carous­ing, drink­ing, and whor­ing.” If any women of the 21st cen­tu­ry would real­ly pre­fer that men go back to those old ways — well, it would at least make for an inter­est­ing argu­ment.

You can read online “The Wom­ens Peti­tion Against Cof­fee,” and “Mens Answer to the Wom­ens Peti­tion Against Cof­fee.”

For more back­ground on the ear­ly days of cof­fee, see The Pub­lic Domain Review’s arti­cle, “The Lost World of the Lon­don Cof­fee House.”

via Res Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Virtues of Cof­fee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethar­gy, Scurvy, Drop­sy, Gout & More

If Cof­fee Com­mer­cials Told the Unvar­nished Truth

How Cof­fee Affects Your Brain: A Very Quick Primer

A Rol­lick­ing French Ani­ma­tion on the Per­ils of Drink­ing a Lit­tle Too Much Cof­fee

Black Cof­fee: Doc­u­men­tary Cov­ers the His­to­ry, Pol­i­tics & Eco­nom­ics of the “Most Wide­ly Tak­en Legal Drug”

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.

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Read Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Children’s Book Whom Should I Be?: A Classic from the “Golden Age” in Soviet Children’s Literature

in Art, Books, History, K-12 | April 18th, 2017

In the first decade or so of the Sovi­et Union’s exis­tence, “avant-garde exper­i­menters emerged from obscu­ri­ty to ben­e­fit from actu­al state spon­sor­ship,” writes Har­vard pro­fes­sor of Russ­ian Lit­er­a­ture Ains­ley Morse. Their  “aes­thet­ic rad­i­cal­ism jibed nice­ly with polit­i­cal tur­moil.” Among these artists were Futur­ists and For­mal­ists, poets, painters, actors, direc­tors, and many who fit into all of these cat­e­gories. Most famous among them—the rak­ish roman­tic poet, writer, artist, actor, play­wright, and film­mak­er Vladimir Mayakovsky—had already achieved a great deal of noto­ri­ety by 1917. After the Rev­o­lu­tion, he threw him­self, “whole­heart­ed­ly” into cre­at­ing play­ful, opti­mistic agit­prop for the Par­ty and “became a foghorn for social­ism.”

At least at first. “In hind­sight,” Morse laments, it’s hard to see the careers of these ear­ly Sovi­et artists “with­out winc­ing: all of these artists and writ­ers get­ting cozy with the state machine that would short­ly bring about their men­tal and phys­i­cal destruc­tion: impris­on­ment, exile, star­va­tion, and sui­cide.” Sad­ly, the last of these was to be Mayakovsky’s fate; he killed him­self in 1930, as Stalin’s para­noid total­i­tar­i­an­ism began to gain strength. Yet through­out the 1920s, Mayakovsky was “dri­ven by ide­o­log­i­cal com­mit­ment,” as well as “finan­cial exi­gency,” writes Robert Bird at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chicago’s “Adven­tures in the Sovi­et Imag­i­nary.” The wild­ly imag­i­na­tive and ide­al­is­tic poet “trans­formed the pop­u­lar media land­scape of Rus­sia” under Lenin.

Though he was harsh­ly crit­i­cized by oth­er artists for his work as a pro­pa­gan­dist, “under his pen Russ­ian poet­ry began to speak with a more flex­i­ble and expres­sive (even anar­chic) play of sound and rhythm.” Maykovsky applied his tal­ents not only to posters and poet­ry for adults, but to works for chil­dren as well. “The ear­ly years of the Sovi­et Union were a gold­en age for children’s lit­er­a­ture,” notes the New York Review of Books in their descrip­tion of The Fire Horse, an ear­ly exam­ple of Sovi­et ped­a­gogy from Mayakovsky and fel­low poets Osip Man­del­stam and Dani­il Kharms. The pages you see here come from the first edi­tion of anoth­er clas­sic Mayakovsky children’s work—a long poem called Whom Shall I Be?, first pub­lished, with illus­tra­tions by Nis­son Shifrin, in 1932, two years after the author’s death.

In these vers­es, Mayakovsky exhorts his read­ers to choose their own path, “cre­ate their own iden­ti­ties,” even as the book chan­nels their desires “into spe­cif­ic exist­ing roles” pre­de­ter­mined by a seem­ing­ly very lim­it­ed num­ber of pro­fes­sion­al choic­es (all for men). Nev­er­the­less, in final lines of Whom Shall I Be? Mayakovsky writes, “All jobs are fine for you: / Choose / for your own taste!” The book illus­trates what Ruxi Zhang calls the “inef­fec­tive­ness of Sovi­et ped­a­gogy” in its ear­li­est stages. Lenin and his even more iron-fist­ed suc­ces­sor desired a “gen­er­a­tion of faith­ful work­ers.” Instead, children’s books like Mayakovsky’s “over­played Sovi­et fan­ta­sy,” often advo­cat­ing for “free­dom that fun­da­men­tal­ly coun­tered Sovi­et expec­ta­tions for chil­dren to fol­low direc­tions from the regime with­out ques­tion­ing or inter­pret­ing them.”

In Mayakovsky’s ear­li­er children’s sto­ry, The Fire Horse, sev­er­al crafts­men get togeth­er to make a beau­ti­ful toy horse—which can­not be bought at the store—for a young boy who dreams of being a cav­al­ry­man. The book, writes Morse, is “trans­par­ent­ly didac­tic,” explain­ing “in detail how the horse is made, and at the cost of whose labor.” Nonethe­less, its sto­ry sounds less like an exem­plar from the state’s idea of a worker’s par­adise and more like a vignette from anar­chist, aris­to­crat, and nat­u­ral­ist Peter Kropotkin’s soci­ety of “mutu­al aid.” It’s only nat­ur­al that Mayakovsky and his com­rades’ children’s books would reflect their styl­is­tic dar­ing, indi­vid­u­al­ism, and wit. “It wasn’t much of a leap” for Futur­ist artists whose “main­stay” had been artist’s books with “inter­de­pen­dent text and illus­tra­tions.” Even­tu­al­ly, how­ev­er, avant-garde artists like Mayakovsky were purged or “tamed” by the new regime.

Bird demon­strates this with the pages below from a 1947 edi­tion of Whom Should I Be? These cor­re­spond to the pages above from 1932, show­ing an engi­neer. In addi­tion to the replac­ing of an enthu­si­as­tic adult work­er with an obe­di­ent, duti­ful child, “the abstract depic­tions of con­struc­tivist build­ings are replaced by real­is­tic ren­der­ings of neo-clas­si­cal edi­fices.” In 1932, Social­ist Real­ism had only just become the offi­cial style of the Sovi­et Union. By 1947, its absolute author­i­ty was most­ly unques­tion­able. Browse (and read, if you read Russ­ian) all of Mayakovsky’s Whom Should I Be? at the Inter­net Archive, or at the top of this post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Russ­ian Futur­ist Vladimir Mayakovsky Read His Strange & Vis­cer­al Poet­ry

Down­load Russ­ian Futur­ist Book Art (1910–1915): The Aes­thet­ic Rev­o­lu­tion Before the Polit­i­cal Rev­o­lu­tion

Watch Russ­ian Futur­ist Vladimir Mayakovsky Star in His Only Sur­viv­ing Film, The Lady and the Hooli­gan (1918)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Oscar-Winning Actress Viola Davis Reads the Children’s Story, Rent Party Jazz, for Jazz Appreciation Month

in Film, K-12, Music | April 18th, 2017

FYI: In hon­or of Jazz Appre­ci­a­tion Month, Vio­la Davis treats us to a read­ing of Rent Par­ty Jazz, a chil­dren’s book writ­ten by William Miller and illus­trat­ed by Char­lotte Riley-Webb. Here’s a quick syn­op­sis of the sto­ry:

This sto­ry is set in New Orleans in the 1930s. Son­ny and his moth­er are scrap­ing by to pay their rent. Mama works in a fish can­ning fac­to­ry, and Son­ny works for the coal man before school each morn­ing. When Mama los­es her job, they no longer have enough mon­ey for the rent and fear that the land­lord will turn them out. One day Son­ny meets Smilin’ Jack, a jazz musi­cian who is play­ing his trum­pet in Jack­son Square. Smilin’ Jack offers to play at a par­ty at Sonny’s house to help raise mon­ey for the rent. The neigh­bors all come to sing and dance and before they leave, drop some coins in a buck­et. Son­ny learns how peo­ple can help one anoth­er “if they put their minds and hearts to it.”

For any­one not famil­iar with them, rent par­ties start­ed in Harlem dur­ing the 1920s, when jazz musi­cians would play at a friend’s apart­ment to help them raise enough mon­ey to pay the rent. If you hop over to the web­site of Yale’s Bei­necke Library, you can see a col­lec­tion of rent cards that belonged to Langston Hugh­es.

This video comes from the Sto­ry­line Online Youtube Chan­nel, spon­sored by the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s children’s lit­er­a­cy web­site. The chan­nel fea­tures cel­e­brat­ed actors “read­ing children’s books along­side cre­ative­ly pro­duced illus­tra­tions, help­ing to inspire a love of read­ing in chil­dren.”

Vio­la Davis’ read­ing will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Stars Read Clas­sic Children’s Books: Bet­ty White, James Earl Jones, Rita Moreno & Many More

Enter an Archive of 6,000 His­tor­i­cal Children’s Books, All Dig­i­tized and Free to Read Online

Langston Hugh­es Reveals the Rhythms in Art & Life in a Won­der­ful Illus­trat­ed Book for Kids (1954)

Mis­ter Rogers Turns Kids On to Jazz with Help of a Young Wyn­ton Marsalis and Oth­er Jazz Leg­ends (1986)

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200 Haunting Videos of U.S. Nuclear Tests Now Declassified and Put Online

in History, Technology | April 18th, 2017

Last month, Lawrence Liv­er­more Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry put on YouTube 200 now-declas­si­fied videos doc­u­ment­ing Amer­i­can nuclear tests con­duct­ed between 1945 and 1962. Accord­ing the Lab, “around 10,000 of these films sat idle, scat­tered across the coun­try in high-secu­ri­ty vaults. Not only were they gath­er­ing dust, the film mate­r­i­al itself was slow­ly decom­pos­ing, bring­ing the data they con­tained to the brink of being lost for­ev­er.”

In the first video above, weapon physi­cist Greg Sprig­gs dis­cuss­es how a team of experts sal­vaged these decom­pos­ing films, with the hope that they can “pro­vide bet­ter data to the post-test­ing-era sci­en­tists who use com­put­er codes to help cer­ti­fy that the aging U.S. nuclear deter­rent remains safe, secure and effec­tive.”

If you click the for­ward but­ton, the playlist will skip to the next video, the first of 63 nuclear tests. Sev­er­al of those clips you can watch below:

Oper­a­tion Hard­tack

Oper­a­tion Plumb­bob

Oper­a­tion Teapot

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Gives a Ser­mon on the Fool­ish­ness of Nuclear Arms: It’s Time­ly Again (Cathe­dral of St. John the Divine, 1982)

Haunt­ing Unedit­ed Footage of the Bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki (1945)

53 Years of Nuclear Test­ing in 14 Min­utes: A Time Lapse Film by Japan­ese Artist Isao Hashimo­to

How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Sur­vive the Atom­ic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954

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Discover “Unpaywall,” a New (and Legal) Browser Extension That Lets You Read Millions of Science Articles Normally Locked Up Behind Paywalls

in Education, Magazines, Science | April 17th, 2017

Ear­li­er this month, Impact­sto­ry, a non­prof­it sup­port­ed by grants from the Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion and the Alfred P. Sloan Foun­da­tion, launched, Unpay­wall, a free brows­er exten­sion that helps you “find open-access ver­sions of pay­walled research papers, instant­ly.”

As the co-founders of Impact­sto­ry describe it, Unpay­wall is “an exten­sion for Chrome and Fire­fox that links you to free full-text as you browse research arti­cles. Hit a pay­wall? No prob­lem: click the green tab and read it free!”

Their FAQ gets into the mechan­ics a lit­tle more, but here’s the gist of how it works: “When you view a pay­walled research arti­cle, Unpay­wall auto­mat­i­cal­ly looks for a copy in our index of over 10 mil­lion free, legal full­text PDFs. If we find one, click the green tab to read the arti­cle.”

While many sci­ence pub­lish­ers put a pay­wall in front of sci­en­tif­ic arti­cles, it’s often the case that these arti­cles have been pub­lished else­where in an open for­mat. “More and more fun­ders and uni­ver­si­ties are requir­ing authors to upload copies of their papers to [open] repos­i­to­ries. This has cre­at­ed a deep resource of legal open access papers…” And that’s what Unpay­wall draws on.

This seems like quite a boon for researchers, jour­nal­ists, stu­dents and pol­i­cy­mak­ers. You can down­load the Unpay­wall exten­sion for Chrome and Fire­fox, or learn more about the new ser­vice at the Unpay­wall web­site.

Note: Over at Metafil­ter, you can find a good list of sources of, or meth­ods for, obtain­ing free aca­d­e­m­ic con­tent.

via Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics/Metafil­ter

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Behold the Masterpiece by Japan’s Last Great Woodblock Artist: View Online Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (1885)

in Art | April 17th, 2017

Uruguayan-French poet Jules Laforgue, one of the young T.S. Eliot’s favorites, pub­lished his major work, The Imi­ta­tion of Our Lady the Moon, in 1886, two years before his untime­ly death at 27 from tuber­cu­lo­sis. It is “a book of poems,” notes Wuther­ing Expec­ta­tions, “about clowns who live on the moon… wear black silk skull­caps and use dan­de­lions as bou­tonieres.” The Pier­rots in his poems, Laforgue once wrote in a let­ter, “seem to me to have arrived at true wis­dom” as they con­tem­plate them­selves and their con­flicts in the light of the moon’s many faces.

I can­not help but think of Laforgue when I think of anoth­er artist who, around the same time, began on the oth­er side of the world what is often con­sid­ered the great­est work of his career. The artist, Japan­ese print­mak­er Tsukio­ka Yoshi­toshi, also stood astride an old world and a rapid­ly mod­ern­iz­ing new one. And his visu­al rumi­na­tions, though lack­ing Laforgue’s arch com­e­dy, beau­ti­ful­ly illus­trate the same kind of dreamy con­tem­pla­tion, lone­li­ness, melan­choly, and weary res­ig­na­tion. The moon, as Laforgue wrote—a “Cat’s‑eye of bright / Redeem­ing light”—both com­forts and taunts us: “It comes with the force of a body blow / That the Moon is a place one can­not go.”

Yoshitoshi’s prints fea­ture a fix­a­tion on the moon’s mys­ter­ies, and a the­atri­cal device to aid in the con­tem­pla­tion of its mean­ings: char­ac­ters from Chi­nese and Japan­ese folk­lore and heroes from nov­els and plays, all of them staged just after key moments in their sto­ries, in sta­t­ic pos­tures and in silent dia­logue with the night. Heav­i­ly invest­ed with lit­er­ary allu­sions and deeply laden with sym­bol­ism, the 100 prints, writes the Fitzwilliam Muse­um, “con­jure a refined poet­ry to give a new twist to tra­di­tion­al sub­jects.”

The por­traits, most­ly soli­tary, wist­ful, and brood­ing, “pen­e­trat­ed deep­er into the psy­chol­o­gy of his sub­jects” than pre­vi­ous work in Yoshi­toshi’s Ukiyo‑e style, one soon to be altered per­ma­nent­ly by West­ern influ­ences flood­ing in between the Edo and Mei­ji peri­ods. Yoshi­toshi both incor­po­rat­ed and resist­ed this influ­ence, using fig­ures from Kabu­ki and Noh the­ater to rep­re­sent tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese arts, yet intro­duc­ing tech­niques “nev­er seen before in Japan­ese wood­block prints,” writes J. Noel Chi­ap­pa, break­ing con­ven­tion by “show[ing] peo­ple freely, from all angles,” rather than only in three-quar­ter view, and by using increased real­ism and West­ern per­spec­tives.

Yoshi­toshi began pub­lish­ing these prints in 1885, and they proved huge­ly pop­u­lar. Peo­ple lined up for new addi­tions to the series, which ran until 1892, when the artist died after a long strug­gle with men­tal ill­ness. In these last years, he pro­duced his great­est work, which also includes a kabu­ki-style series based on Japan­ese and Chi­nese ghost sto­ries, New Forms of 36 Ghost Sto­ries. “In a Japan that was turn­ing away from its own past,” Chi­ap­pa writes, Yoshi­toshi, “almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly man­aged to push the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese wood­block print to a new lev­el, before it effec­tive­ly died with him.

His tumul­tuous career, after very suc­cess­ful begin­nings, had fall­en into dis­re­pair and he had been pub­lish­ing illus­tra­tions for sen­sa­tion­al­ist news­pa­pers, an erot­ic por­trait series of famous cour­te­sans, and macabre prints of vio­lence and cru­el­ty. These pre­oc­cu­pa­tions become com­plete­ly styl­ized and psy­chol­o­gized in his final works, espe­cial­ly in One Hun­dred Aspects of the Moon, an extra­or­di­nary series of prints. View them all, with short descrip­tions of each sub­ject, here, or at the Ronin Gallery, who pro­vide infor­ma­tion on the size and con­di­tion of each of its prints and allow view­ers to zoom in on every detail. The images have also been pub­lishished in a 2003 book, One Hun­dred Aspects of the Moon: Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Yoshi­toshi.

While it cer­tain­ly helps to under­stand the lit­er­ary and cul­tur­al con­text of each print in the series, it is not nec­es­sary for an appre­ci­a­tion of their exquis­ite visu­al poet­ry. Per­haps the artist’s memo­r­i­al poem after his death at age 53 pro­vides us with a mas­ter key for view­ing his One Hun­dred Aspects of the Moon.

hold­ing back the night
with increas­ing bril­liance
the sum­mer moon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Hap­pens When a Japan­ese Wood­block Artist Depicts Life in Lon­don in 1866, Despite Nev­er Hav­ing Set Foot There

Down­load Hun­dreds of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters of the Tra­di­tion

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Take a 16-Week Crash Course on the History of Movies: From the First Moving Pictures to the Rise of Multiplexes & Netflix

in Film, History | April 17th, 2017

Almost all movies tell sto­ries, even the ones that don’t intend to. Put every movie ever made togeth­er, and they col­lec­tive­ly tell anoth­er sto­ry: the sto­ry of cin­e­ma. Of course, not just one “sto­ry of cin­e­ma” exists to tell: crit­ic Mark Cousins told one to great acclaim a few years ago in the form of his book and doc­u­men­tary series The Sto­ry of Film, as Jean-Luc Godard had done ear­li­er in his Histoire(s) du ciné­ma, whose very title acknowl­edges the mul­ti­plic­i­ty of pos­si­ble nar­ra­tives in the his­to­ry of the mov­ing image. Now, with a lighter but no doubt equal­ly strong per­spec­tive, comes the lat­est mul­ti­part video jour­ney through it: Crash Course Film His­to­ry.

“Movies haven’t always looked like they do now,” says host Craig Ben­zine (bet­ter known as the Youtu­ber Wheezy­Wait­er) in the trail­er above. “There was a real long process to fig­ure out what they… were. Were they spec­ta­cles? Doc­u­men­taries? Short films? If so, how short? Long films?

If so, how long? Is black and white bet­ter than col­or? Should sound be the indus­try stan­dard? And where should we make them?” And even though we’ve now seen over a cen­tu­ry of devel­op­ment in cin­e­ma, those issues still seem up for grabs — some of them more than ever.

In the first episode, Ben­zine dives right into his search for the source of the pow­er of movies, “one of the most influ­en­tial forms of mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion the world has ever known,” a “uni­ver­sal lan­guage that lets us tell sto­ries about our col­lec­tive hopes and fears, to make sense of the world around us and the peo­ple around us.” To do so, he must begin with the inven­tion of film — the actu­al image-cap­tur­ing cel­lu­loid sub­stance that made cin­e­ma pos­si­ble — and then goes even far­ther back in time to the very first mov­ing images, “illu­sions” in their day, and the sur­pris­ing qual­i­ties of human visu­al per­cep­tion they exploit­ed.

All this might seem a far cry from the spec­ta­cles you’d see at the mul­ti­plex today, but Crash Course Film His­to­ry (which comes from the same folks who gave us A Crash Course in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture and A Crash Course in World His­to­ry) assures us that both of them exist on the same spec­trum — the ride along that spec­trum being the sto­ry of movies. It will last six­teen weeks, after which Crash Course and PBS Dig­i­tal Stu­dios will con­tin­ue their col­lab­o­ra­tive explo­ration of film with a course on pro­duc­tion fol­lowed by a course on crit­i­cism. Take all three and you’ll no doubt come out impressed not just by the size of the cre­ative space into which film has expand­ed, but also by how much it has yet to touch.

As new install­ments of Crash Course Film His­to­ry come out, they will be added to this playlist. Check back for updates.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hol­ly­wood, Epic Doc­u­men­tary Chron­i­cles the Ear­ly His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma

World Cin­e­ma: Joel and Ethan Coen’s Play­ful Homage to Cin­e­ma His­to­ry

A Crash Course in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture: A New Video Series by Best-Sell­ing Author John Green

A Crash Course in World His­to­ry

Cin­e­ma His­to­ry by Titles & Num­bers

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.

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