Hear the 20 Favorite Punk Albums of Black Flag Frontman Henry Rollins

The punk move­ment gave birth to hun­dreds of bands in a small amount of time, like a petri dish that just explodes under the right con­di­tions. Forty years lat­er, we are still liv­ing in the after­math of that explo­sion and sort­ing things out. Lists need to be made. And if you con­sid­er garage rock to be pro­to-punk, the list can be very long.

Four years ago, L.A. Week­ly cre­at­ed a list of the Top 20 punk albums of all time, but purists might despair to see Green Day on there or just any­thing after the ‘90s.

But they also turned to their colum­nist, Black Flag vocal­ist, intense spo­ken word per­former, and radio dee­jay Hen­ry Rollins, and asked him to cre­ate his own list. See them below, and hear them above (via this playlist).

In his brief intro, Rollins mulls over the eter­nal genre question–where does punk stop and post-punk begin?

Could Wire, also be con­sid­ered Post Punk? Where do you put bands like PIL, Joy Divi­sion, Tele­vi­sion, Pat­ti Smith, Sui­cide, and Killing Joke? What about Gang of Four, 999 and the Ban­shees? For me, as a lean def­i­n­i­tion, I go by the clas­sic UK 1977 grad­u­at­ing class, Pis­tols, Clash, etc., and go from there.

The list, he says, is in no par­tic­u­lar order, but it’s not a sur­prise to see the first Clash album at the top, fol­lowed by the debut albums of the Ramones, the Sex Pis­tols, The Damned, X, Wire, The Buz­zcocks, The Saints, The Germs, X‑Ray Spex, The Adverts, and Stiff Lit­tle Fin­gers. Very few on that list went on to top their debut, or even–such as the Pis­tols and The Germs–record a fol­low-up.

Rollins talked about this in an essay (also for the L.A. Week­ly) on why he loves anoth­er band on his list, the U.K. Subs.

How some of those bands were able to fol­low up with anoth­er album is a fas­ci­nat­ing bit of musi­cal his­to­ry, as well as a study of tal­ent, vision and integri­ty. It is where the rub­ber tru­ly meets the road. After the explo­sive excite­ment of the ini­tial batch of songs has set­tled, the band often is left with a suc­cess-derived self-aware­ness that hangs like a cloud over the prac­tice room. The awful­ness of expec­ta­tion enters the equa­tion, and the results are not always good.

Rollins is a fan of the first four U.K. Subs LPs–“they are like desert island LPs. Records you can’t do with­out,” he once said.

Oth­er inter­est­ing choic­es on Rollins’ list: the shame­less Ramones-copy­ists The Lurk­ers, The Minutemen’s first album (instead of the undis­put­ed clas­sic Dou­ble Nick­els on the Dime), the less­er-known Eater, the Ruts, and the Fall’s Hex Enduc­tion Hour, which is punk in aes­thet­ic, but cer­tain­ly not in pro­duc­tion.

For a man who usu­al­ly has some­thing to say, it would have been cool to have some com­men­tary from Rollins on his choic­es. On the oth­er hand, maybe he’d just tell us to shut up. The music speaks for itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016

Down­load 50+ Issues of Leg­endary West Coast Punk Music Zines from the 1970–80s: Dam­age, Slash & No Mag

Punk & Heavy Met­al Music Makes Lis­ten­ers Hap­py and Calm, Not Aggres­sive, Accord­ing to New Aus­tralian Study

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

How Arabic Translators Helped Preserve Greek Philosophy … and the Classical Tradition

In the ancient world, the lan­guage of philosophy—and there­fore of sci­ence and medicine—was pri­mar­i­ly Greek. “Even after the Roman con­quest of the Mediter­ranean and the demise of pagan­ism, phi­los­o­phy was strong­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Hel­lenic cul­ture,” writes phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor and His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy with­out any Gaps host Peter Adam­son. “The lead­ing thinkers of the Roman world, such as Cicero and Seneca, were steeped in Greek lit­er­a­ture.” And in the east­ern empire, “the Greek-speak­ing Byzan­tines could con­tin­ue to read Pla­to and Aris­to­tle in the orig­i­nal.”

Greek thinkers also had sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence in Egypt. Dur­ing the build­ing of the Library of Alexan­dria, “schol­ars copied and stored books that were bor­rowed, bought, and even stolen from oth­er places in the Mediter­ranean,” writes Aileen Das, Pro­fes­sor of Mediter­ranean Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan. “The librar­i­ans gath­ered texts cir­cu­lat­ing under the names of Pla­to (d. 348/347 BCE), Aris­to­tle and Hip­pocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BCE), and pub­lished them as col­lec­tions.” The scroll above, part of an Aris­totelian tran­scrip­tion of the Athen­ian con­sti­tu­tion, was believed lost for hun­dreds of years until it was dis­cov­ered in the 19th cen­tu­ry in Egypt, in the orig­i­nal Greek. The text, writes the British Library, “has had a major impact in our knowl­edge of the devel­op­ment of Athen­ian democ­ra­cy and the work­ings of the Athen­ian city-state in antiq­ui­ty.”

Alexan­dria “rivalled Athens and Rome as the place to study phi­los­o­phy and med­i­cine in the Mediter­ranean,” and young men of means like the 6th cen­tu­ry priest Sergius of Reshaina, doc­tor-in-chief in North­ern Syr­ia, trav­eled there to learn the tra­di­tion. Sergius “trans­lat­ed around 30 works of Galen [the Greek physi­cian]” and oth­er known and unknown philoso­phers and ancient sci­en­tists into Syr­i­ac. Lat­er, as Syr­i­ac and Ara­bic came to dom­i­nate for­mer Greek-speak­ing regions, the Greek texts became intense objects of focus for Islam­ic thinkers, and the caliphs spared no expense to have them trans­lat­ed and dis­sem­i­nat­ed, often con­tract­ing with Chris­t­ian and Jew­ish schol­ars to accom­plish the task.

The trans­mis­sion of Greek phi­los­o­phy and med­i­cine was an inter­na­tion­al phe­nom­e­non, which involved bilin­gual speak­ers from pagan, Chris­t­ian, Mus­lim, and Jew­ish back­grounds. This move­ment spanned not only reli­gious and lin­guis­tic but also geo­graph­i­cal bound­aries, for it occurred in cities as far apart as Bagh­dad in the East and Tole­do in the West.

In Bagh­dad, espe­cial­ly, by the 10th cen­tu­ry, “read­ers of Ara­bic,” writes Adam­son, “had about the same degree of access to Aris­to­tle that read­ers of Eng­lish do today” thanks to a “well-fund­ed trans­la­tion move­ment that unfold­ed dur­ing the Abbasid caliphate, begin­ning in the sec­ond half of the eighth cen­tu­ry.” The work done dur­ing the Abbasid period—from about 750 to 950—“generated a high­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed sci­en­tif­ic lan­guage and a mas­sive amount of source mate­r­i­al,” we learn in Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press’s The Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion. Such mate­r­i­al “would feed sci­en­tif­ic research for the fol­low­ing cen­turies, not only in the Islam­ic world but beyond it, in Greek and Latin Chris­ten­dom and, with­in it, among the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tions as well.”

Indeed this “Byzan­tine human­ism,” as it’s called, “helped the clas­si­cal tra­di­tion sur­vive, at least to the large extent that it has.” As ancient texts and tra­di­tions dis­ap­peared in Europe dur­ing the so-called “Dark Ages,” Ara­bic and Syr­i­ac-speak­ing schol­ars and trans­la­tors incor­po­rat­ed them into an Islam­ic philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion called fal­safa. The moti­va­tions for fos­ter­ing the study of Greek thought were com­plex. On the one hand, writes Adam­son, the move was polit­i­cal; “the caliphs want­ed to estab­lish their own cul­tur­al hege­mo­ny,” in com­pe­ti­tion with Per­sians and Greek-speak­ing Byzan­tine Chris­tians, “benight­ed as they were by the irra­tional­i­ties of Chris­t­ian the­ol­o­gy.” On the oth­er hand, “Mus­lim intel­lec­tu­als also saw resources in the Greek texts for defend­ing, and bet­ter under­stand­ing their own reli­gion.”

One well-known fig­ure from the peri­od, al-Kin­di, is thought to be the first philoso­pher to write in Ara­bic. He over­saw the trans­la­tions of hun­dreds of texts by Chris­t­ian schol­ars who read both Greek and Ara­bic, and he may also have added his own ideas to the works of Plot­i­nus, for exam­ple, and oth­er Greek thinkers. Like Thomas Aquinas a few hun­dred years lat­er, al-Kin­di attempt­ed to “estab­lish the iden­ti­ty of the first prin­ci­ple in Aris­to­tle and Plot­i­nus” as the the­is­tic God. In this way, Islam­ic trans­la­tions of Greek texts pre­pared the way for inter­pre­ta­tions that “treat that prin­ci­ple as a Cre­ator,” a cen­tral idea in Medieval scholas­tic phi­los­o­phy and Catholic thought gen­er­al­ly.

The trans­la­tions by al-Kin­di and his asso­ciates are grouped into what schol­ars call the “cir­cle of al-Kin­di,” which pre­served and elab­o­rat­ed on Aris­to­tle and the Neo­pla­ton­ists. Thanks to al-Kindi’s “first set of trans­la­tions,” notes the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, “learned Mus­lims became acquaint­ed with Pla­to’s Demi­urge and immor­tal soul; with Aris­totle’s search for sci­ence and knowl­edge of the caus­es of all the phe­nom­e­na on earth and in the heav­ens,” and many more ancient Greek meta­phys­i­cal doc­trines. Lat­er trans­la­tors work­ing under physi­cian and sci­en­tist Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his son “made avail­able in Syr­i­ac and/or Ara­bic oth­er works by Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, Theophras­tus, some philo­soph­i­cal writ­ings by Galen,” and oth­er Greek thinkers and sci­en­tists.

This tra­di­tion of trans­la­tion, philo­soph­i­cal debate, and sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery in Islam­ic soci­eties con­tin­ued into the 10th and 11th cen­turies, when Aver­roes, the “Islam­ic schol­ar who gave us mod­ern phi­los­o­phy,” wrote his com­men­tary on the works of Aris­to­tle. “For sev­er­al cen­turies,” writes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado’s Robert Pas­nau, “a series of bril­liant philoso­phers and sci­en­tists made Bagh­dad the intel­lec­tu­al cen­ter of the medieval world,” pre­serv­ing ancient Greek knowl­edge and wis­dom that may oth­er­wise have dis­ap­peared. When it seems in our study of his­to­ry that the light of the ancient phi­los­o­phy was extin­guished in West­ern Europe, we need only look to North Africa and the Near East to see that tra­di­tion, with its human­is­tic exchange of ideas, flour­ish­ing for cen­turies in a world close­ly con­nect­ed by trade and empire.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Intro­duc­tion to Ancient Greek His­to­ry: A Free Online Course from Yale

Free Cours­es in Ancient His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture & Phi­los­o­phy 

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

See New York City in the 1930s and Now: A Side-by-Side Comparison of the Same Streets & Landmarks

The New York­er has post­ed a very neat split-screen tour of the same streets in New York City, let­ting you see the Big Apple in the 1930s and today. Times Square, Cen­tral Park, the Brook­lyn Bridge–they’re all on dis­play. What a dif­fer­ence 80 years make.

Below you can find oth­er his­tor­i­cal videos and pho­tos of NYC … and Lon­don and Berlin too. Enjoy.

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, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Breath­tak­ing Pho­tos of His­toric New York City

1905 Video Shows New York City Sub­way Trav­el­ing From 14th St. to 42nd Street

Ear­ly Films of New York City

New York City: A Social His­to­ry (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U.)

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

1927 Lon­don Shown in Mov­ing Col­or

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How Russian Artists Imagined in 1914 What Moscow Would Look Like in 2259

In the days of pop­u­lar retro­fu­tur­ism—say, the first half of the twen­ti­eth century—people tend­ed to imag­ine the world of tomor­row look­ing very much like the world of today, only with a lot more fly­ing cars, mono­rails, and video­phones. This is true whether those doing the imag­in­ing were titans of indus­try, mar­ket­ing mavens, ide­al­is­tic Sovi­ets, or sub­jects of the Tsar, though we might think that peo­ple liv­ing under an ancient monar­chi­cal sys­tem might not expect much change. In some ways we might be right, but as we can see in the 1914 post­cards here—printed as Rus­sia entered World War I—the coun­try did antic­i­pate a mod­ern, tech­no­log­i­cal future, though one that still close­ly resem­bled its present.

Per­haps few but the most far-sight­ed of Rus­sians pre­dict­ed what the ail­ing empire would endure in the years to come—the dis­as­ter of the Great War, and the waves of Rev­o­lu­tion and Civ­il War. Cer­tain­ly, who­ev­er paint­ed these images fore­saw no such cat­a­stroph­ic upheaval.

Although pur­port­ing to show us a view of Moscow in the 23rd cen­tu­ry, they show the city very hap­pi­ly “still under monar­chi­cal rule,” writes A Jour­ney Through Russ­ian Cul­ture, going about its dai­ly life just as it did over three hun­dred years ear­li­er, “with the addi­tion of every­thing from sub­ways to air­borne pub­lic trans­porta­tion, things prob­a­bly seen as stan­dard meth­ods of trans­port for the future.”

Of course, there would be hot-rod­ded sleds on St. Peters­burg High­way with head­lights, fan­cy wind­shields, and what look like Christ­mas elves perched in them. Lubyan­s­ka Square, fur­ther up, would still host mil­i­tary parades of men on horse­back, as chil­dren whizzed by on motor­bikes and sub­way trains rum­bled under­neath. The Cen­tral Rail­way Sta­tion, above, might seem entire­ly unchanged, until one looks up, and sees ele­vat­ed trams stream­ing out of the ter­mi­nal like spider’s silk. Red Square, how­ev­er, just below, would appar­ent­ly host drag races, while peo­ple in trams and giant diri­gi­bles looked on from above.

The images have a children’s book qual­i­ty about them and the fes­tive air of hol­i­day cards. (If you read Russ­ian, you can learn more about them here and here.) They were appar­ent­ly redis­cov­ered only recent­ly when a choco­late com­pa­ny called Eyinem reprint­ed them on their pack­ag­ing. Like so much retro­fu­tur­ism, these seem—in their bustling, yet safe, cheer­ful orderliness—tailor-made for nos­tal­gic trips through Petro­vsky Park, rather than imag­i­na­tive leaps into the great unknown. For that, we must turn to Russ­ian Futur­ism, which, both before and after World War and the Rev­o­lu­tion, imag­ined, helped bring about, but did­n’t quite sur­vive the mas­sive tech­no­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal dis­rup­tion of the next two decades.

See more of these Tsarist-futur­ist post­cards at the site Meet the Slavs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sovi­et Artists Envi­sion a Com­mu­nist Utopia in Out­er Space

How the Sovi­ets Imag­ined in 1960 What the World Would Look in 2017: A Gallery of Retro-Futur­is­tic Draw­ings

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

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

Take Free Philosophy Courses from The Institute of Art and Ideas: From “The Meaning of Life” to “Heidegger Meets Van Gogh”

Back in 2014, we told you about how The Insti­tute of Art and Ideas (IAI) launched IAI Acad­e­my — an online edu­ca­tion­al plat­form that fea­tures free cours­es from world-lead­ing schol­ars “on the ideas that mat­ter.” They have since put online a num­ber of phi­los­o­phy cours­es, many striv­ing to address ques­tions that affect our lives today. We’ve list­ed a num­ber of them below, and added them to our list of 150+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy cours­es. For a com­plete list of IAI Acad­e­my cours­es, vis­it this page.

  • Hei­deg­ger Meets Van Gogh: Art, Free­dom and Tech­nol­o­gyWeb video — Simon Glendin­ning, Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics
  • Dark Mat­ter of the MindWeb video — Daniel Everett, Bent­ley Uni­ver­si­ty
  • Fear and Trem­bling in the 21st Cen­tu­ryWeb video — Clare Carlisle, King’s Col­lege Lon­don
  • Knowl­edge and Ratio­nal­i­tyWeb Video — Corine Besson, Uni­ver­si­ty of Sus­sex
  • Life, Mean­ing and Moral­i­tyWeb video — Christo­pher Hamil­ton, King’s Col­lege, Lon­don
  • Minds, Moral­i­ty and AgencyWeb video — Mark Row­lands, Uni­ver­si­ty of Mia­mi
  • On Roman­tic LoveWeb video — Berit Bro­gaard, Uni­ver­si­ty of Mia­mi
  • The Human Com­passWeb video — Janne Teller
  • The Mean­ing of LifeWeb video — Steve Fuller, Uni­ver­si­ty of War­wick
  • The Uni­verse As We Find ItWeb video — John Heil, Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St Louis
  • Unveil­ing Real­i­tyWeb video — Bryan Roberts, Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics
  • Why the World Does Not ExistWeb video — Markus Gabriel, Freiburg Insti­tute of Advanced Study.

Note: The cours­es are all free. How­ev­er, to take a course you will need to cre­ate a user account.

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, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

The Great War and Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course

Søren Kierkegaard: A Free Online Course on the “Father of Exis­ten­tial­ism”

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Meet Alexander Graham Bell, Inventor of the Telephone and Popular TV Pitchman

Mr. Wat­son, come here! I want you to tell me why I keep show­ing up in tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials. Is it because they think I invent­ed the tele­vi­sion?

- The ghost of Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell

Not at all, my dear Mr. Bell. A sec­ond’s worth of research reveals that a 21-year-old upstart named Phi­lo Tay­lor Farnsworth invent­ed tele­vi­sion. By 1927, when he unveiled it to the pub­lic, you’d already been dead for five years.

You invent­ed the telephone, a fact of which we’re all very aware.

Though you might want to look into intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty law.… His­toric fig­ures make pop­u­lar pitch­men, espe­cial­ly if — like Lin­coln, Coper­ni­cus, and a red hot Alexan­der Hamil­ton, they’ve been in the grave for over 100 years. (Hint — you’ve got five years to go.)

Or you could take it as a com­pli­ment! You’ve made an impres­sion so last­ing, the briefest of estab­lish­ing shots is all we tele­vi­sion audi­ences need to under­stand the adver­tis­er’s premise.

Thus­ly can you be co-opt­ed into sell­ing the Amer­i­can pub­lic on the appar­ent­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary con­cept of chick­en for break­fast, above.

And that’s just the tip of the ice­berg!

Mr. Wat­son gets a cameo in your 1975 ad for Care­free Gum. You def­i­nite­ly come off the bet­ter of the two.

You’re an obvi­ous choice for a recent AT&T spot trac­ing a line from your rev­e­la­to­ry moment to 20-some­thing  hip­sters wield­ing smart­phones and sparklers on a Brook­lyn rooftop. Their devices aren’t the only thing con­nect­ing you. It’s also the beards…

Apolo­gies for the beard­less­ness of this 10 year old, low-bud­get spot for Able Com­put­ing in Papua New Guinea. Pos­si­bly the cos­tumer thought Ein­stein invent­ed the phone? Or maybe the cre­ative direc­tor was count­ing on the local view­ing audi­ence not to sweat the small stuff. Your inven­tion mat­ters more than your facial hair.

Lego took a cue from the 80s Mup­pet Babies craze by send­ing you back to child­hood. They also sad­dled you and your mom  with Amer­i­can accents, a regret­tably com­mon prac­tice. I bet you would’ve liked Legos, though. They’re like blocks.

As for this one, your guess is as good as mine.

Read­ers, please share your favorite ads fea­tur­ing his­toric fig­ures in the com­ments below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Voice of Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell for the First Time in a Cen­tu­ry

Hear Kurt Von­negut Vis­it the After­life & Inter­view Dead His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures: Isaac New­ton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998)

Thomas Edison’s Silent Film of the “Fartiste” Who Delight­ed Crowds at Le Moulin Rouge (1900)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City in Paul David Young’s Faust 3, an indict­ment of the Trump admin­is­tra­tion that adapts and man­gles Goethe’s Faust (Parts 1 and 2) and the Gospels in the King James trans­la­tion, as well as bits of Yeats, Shake­speare, Christ­mas car­ols, Stephen Fos­ter, John Donne, Hein­er Müller, Julia Ward Howe, and Abel Meeropol. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Japanese Kabuki Actors Captured in 18th-Century Woodblock Prints by the Mysterious & Masterful Artist Sharaku

“Kabu­ki,” as a cul­tur­al ref­er­ence, has trav­eled aston­ish­ing­ly far beyond the ear­ly sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry Japan in which the form of kabu­ki the­atre orig­i­nat­ed. Even 21st-cen­tu­ry West­ern­ers are quick to use the word when describ­ing any­thing elab­o­rate­ly per­for­ma­tive or melo­dra­mat­ic: in the neg­a­tive sense, it crit­i­cizes an exces­sive arti­fi­cial­i­ty; in the pos­i­tive one, it prais­es com­plex, nuance-laden mas­tery. Many schol­ars of kabu­ki will dis­agree about when, exact­ly, kabu­ki had its hey­day, but none would doubt the immor­tal­i­ty, for a kabu­ki actor of the late eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, grant­ed by a Sharaku por­trait.

Also known to us as Tōshū­sai Sharaku (prob­a­bly not his real name), Sharaku worked in the form of yakusha‑e wood­block prints, a kind of ukiyo-e focus­ing on actors, but only for a scant ten months in 1794 and 1795, and not always to a warm pub­lic recep­tion.

“Renowned for cre­at­ing visu­al­ly bold prints that gave rare reveal­ing glimpses into the world of kabu­ki,” says the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, “he was not only able to cap­ture the essen­tial qual­i­ties of kabu­ki char­ac­ters, but his prints also reveal, often with unflat­ter­ing real­ism, the per­son­al­i­ties of the actors who were famous for per­form­ing them.” Break­ing some­what from ukiyo‑e por­traitist tra­di­tion, “Sharaku did not ide­al­ize his sub­jects or attempt to por­tray them real­is­ti­cal­ly. Rather, he exag­ger­at­ed facial fea­tures and strove for psy­cho­log­i­cal real­ism.”

Nobody knows much about this mys­te­ri­ous artist’s back­ground or his life after yakusha‑e. Dur­ing it, he designed over 140 prints, and poten­tial­ly many more, giv­en the num­ber that remain unver­i­fi­able as his work. Though he did occa­sion­al por­traits of sumo wrestlers and war­riors, the major­i­ty of his por­traits depict actors, and sel­dom in an ide­al­ized fash­ion.

That sense of height­ened real­i­ty also brought with it a cer­tain vital­i­ty to that point unseen in yakusha‑e; art his­to­ri­an Muneshige Naraza­ki wrote that Sharaku could, with­in a sin­gle print of a kabu­ki actor or scene, depict “two or three lev­els of char­ac­ter revealed in the sin­gle moment of action form­ing the cli­max to a scene or per­for­mance.”

At the top of the post, we have three prints from the fourth and final peri­od of Sharaku’s short career: Ichikawa Ebizō as Kudō Sae­mon Suket­suneIchikawa Dan­jūrō VI as Soga no Gorō Tokimune, and Sawa­mu­ra Sōjūrō III as Sat­suma Gen­gob­ei. Below that, from top to bot­tom, appear Ōtani Oni­ji III in the Role of the Ser­vant EdobeiSegawa Kiku­jurō III as Oshizu, Wife of Tan­abe (one of the many female roles played with­out excep­tion by male actors after the kabu­ki the­atre attained its cur­rent form), Naka­mu­ra Nakazō II as the farmer Tsuchizō, actu­al­ly Prince Kore­ta­ka, and Arashi Ryūzō I as Ishibe Kin­kichi, which set an auc­tion record for an ukiyo‑e print by sell­ing for  €389,000 at Piasa in 2009.

If you want to learn a lit­tle more about kabu­ki the­atre itself, have a look at TED-Ed’s four-minute primer on its his­to­ry. Though many of us may now regard kabu­ki as a high clas­si­cal art form, it began as a “peo­ple’s” ver­sion of the aris­to­crat­ic noh the­atre, and an avant-garde one at that. Its very name appears to derive from the Japan­ese verb kabuku, which means “to lean” or “to be out of the ordi­nary.” Sharaku must have seen how inci­sive­ly this the­atre of the unusu­al, already long estab­lished by this day, could present the ele­ments of real life; did he con­sid­er it his mis­sion, dur­ing his wood­block-design­ing stint, to bring the ele­ments of real life into its por­trai­ture?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

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

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

Splen­did Hand-Scroll Illus­tra­tions of The Tale of Gen­jii, The First Nov­el Ever Writ­ten (Cir­ca 1120)

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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.

The Art of the Marbler: An Enchanting Film on the Centuries-Old Craft of Making Handmade Marbled Paper

The cur­rent mode of scan­dal in busi­ness and pol­i­tics involves email and tweets rather than mem­o­ran­da. But we do not yet live a paper­less world, even if you haven’t dust­ed your print­er in months. Book pro­duc­tion and sales con­tin­ue to rise, for exam­ple, defy­ing pre­dic­tions of a few years back that eBooks would over­take print. Even if we have to some­day make paper in lab­o­ra­to­ries rather than forests and mills, it’s hard to imag­ine read­ers ever let­ting go of the plea­sures of its tex­tures and smells, or of sim­ple, yet sat­is­fy­ing acts like plac­ing a favorite paper book­mark in the creas­es.

We do, how­ev­er, seem to live in a large­ly sta­tion­ary-less world, and we have for some time. As the fine art of mak­ing arti­sanal papers recedes into his­to­ry, so too does the print­ing of books with mar­bled cov­ers and pages.

Yet, if you have on your shelf hard­back books any­where from 30 to 130 years old, you no doubt have a few with mar­bled pat­terns on them or in them. And if you’ve ever won­dered about this strange art form, won­der no more. The 1970 British edu­ca­tion­al film, “The Art of the Mar­bler,” above, offers a broad overview of this fas­ci­nat­ing “mate­r­i­al which has cov­ered books for many cen­turies.”

Pro­duced by Bed­ford­shire Record Office of Cock­erell Mar­bling and direct­ed by K.V. Whit­bread, the short film is a mar­vel of quaint­ness. It effort­less­ly achieves the kind of quirk Wes Anderson’s films strive for sim­ply by being itself. We learn that every mar­bled paper, unlike Christ­mas wrap­ping paper, is a “sep­a­rate and unique orig­i­nal.” And that the process is pre­cious and spe­cial­ized, and near­ly all done by hand. Lest we become too enam­ored of the idea that mar­bling is strict­ly a his­tor­i­cal curios­i­ty these days, the mes­mer­iz­ing video above from 2011 by Sey­it Uygur shows us up close how his par­ents per­form the art of Ebru, Turk­ish for paper mar­bling.

Mar­bling, the “print­mak­ing tech­nique that basi­cal­ly looks like cap­tur­ing a galaxy on a page,” as Emma Dajs­ka writes at Rook­ie, became quite pop­u­lar in the Islam­ic world, where intri­cate pat­terns stood in lieu of por­traits. But the process orig­i­nat­ed nei­ther in Eng­land nor Turkey, but in Chi­na and, lat­er, Japan, where it is known as Sum­i­na­gashi, or “float­ing ink.” The Japan­ese tech­nique, as you can see in the video tuto­r­i­al above from Chrys­tal Shaulis, is very dif­fer­ent from British Mar­bling or Turk­ish Ebru, seem­ing to com­bine the meth­ods of Jack­son Pol­lack with those of the Zen gar­den­er. How­ev­er it’s done, the results, as “The Art of the Mar­bler” tells and shows us, are each one a “unique orig­i­nal.”

“The Art of the Mar­bler” will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

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

How Ink is Made: The Process Revealed in a Mouth-Water­ing Video

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

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