The history of the violin can be traced back to 1530, when a violin-like instrument first appeared in Gaudenzio Ferrari’s painting, “Madonna of the Orange Tree.” By the 1550s, Andrea Amati and his descendants began to craft priceless violins, in the form we know them today. And then followed other families closely associated with the golden age of these stringed instruments–the Bergonzi, the Guarneri, the Stradivari.
Shot by Baptiste Buob, the wordless documentary walks you through the making of a violin, from start to finish. A process that takes a luthier 3–4 weeks, working full-time, gets covered in 33 elegant minutes. Savor each and every one of them.
Bonus: Below, watch another film by Baptiste Buob–this one a 28-minute film detailing how French bow maker Roch Petitdemange practices his craft, again from beginning to end. A perfect complement.
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The wandering bards of old disappeared when the printing press came to town. So too have the great bandleaders largely vanished in the age of the super producer and jet-setting DJ. But for a time in the jazz and rock worlds, Olympian figures like Frank Zappa and Miles Davis played several important roles: finding and mentoring the best musicians; mastering old forms and making them new again; serving as curators, arbiters, and contrarians… issuing loud pronouncements on anything and everything as unsparing cultural critics.
Do we need tongues as sharp as Zappa and Davis’s in contemporary pop culture? Maybe, maybe not. They didn’t seem to enjoy much of anything they weren’t directly involved in creating. But man, was it fun to watch them dispense with the niceties and speak their brutal truths. We’ve heard from Zappa on everything from his loathing of the Velvet Underground to the fascism of the PMRC to the morbidity of the entire music industry. Davis’ observations were equally cutting. “His fascinating autobiography,” writes Kirk Hamilton at Kotaku, “is loaded with shit-talking, dismissals, and general acerbic jerkiness. It is fantastic.”
But you needn’t pick up Miles’ book to get an earful of his acid-tongued judgments. We need only revisit the series of “blindfold tests” he did for Downbeat magazine in the fifties and sixties. These experiments had famous musicians listen to new music, “try to pick out who is playing,” then offer their off-the-cuff takes. Davis’ first session, in 1955, began charitably enough, though not without some sweeping criticisms. He dismissed all of the soloists on Clifford Brown’s “Falling in Love with Love,” for example, except for a Swedish pianist whose name escaped him. But he gave the record four stars all the same. “The arrangement was pretty good.”
In 1958, Davis sat for his second blindfold test, with mixed results. He nearly obliterated Tiny Grimes and Coleman Hawkins’ “A Smooth One,” giving it “half a star just because… Hawkins is on it.” But in an effusive moment, he gushes over John Lewis’ “Waremeland (Dear Old Stockholm)” with a ten star rating. “All the stars are for John,” he says. By 1964, little evidence of that rare enthusiasm remained in the third blindfold test. Davis was at that moment, writes Richard Brody, “torn apart.” In a particularly irritable state of mind he “flung insults at Eric Dolphy,” Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, and a few more greats. His commentary “perfectly captures his general distaste,” writes Hamilton, “for, well, everything.”
Of Dolphy’s “Miss Ann” (above), he says, “nobody else could sound that bad!” Of the Jazz Crusaders’ “All Blues”: “What’s that supposed to be? That ain’t nothin’.” Of Duke Ellington, Max Roach and Charles Mingus’ “Caravan”: “What am I supposed to say to that? That’s ridiculous. You see the way they can fuck up music?” Like another infamous trash-talker who currently dominates every conversation with his unbelievable egomania, Davis tosses out the condescending adjective “sad” at every opportunity. Clark Terry’s “Cielito Lindo” is a “sad record.” Dolphy is “a sad motherfucker.” Cecil Taylor’s “Lena” is “some sad shit, man.”
It’s not all bad. Miles loves Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto’s “Desafinando,” giving the record five stars and its two star players the highest of praise. Four years later, his typical mood had not improved. In 1968, Davis sat for his last blindfold test. He tore into Ornette Coleman, mistaking him for Archie Shepp on “Funeral.” Of Freddie Hubbard’s “On the Que-Tee,” he says, “I wouldn’t even put that shit on a record.” Sun Ra’s “Brainville” gets a serious slam: “They must be joking—the Florida A&M band sounds better than that. They should record them, rather than this shit.” It ain’t all pure cattiness. Davis tends to like music that stays out of his musical lane, like The Electric Flag’s “Over Lovin’ You,”—a “nice record,” he says. “It’s a pleasure to get a record like that.” Likewise, the prologue from the Fifth Dimension’s Magic Garden gets a thumbs up.
When Downbeat’sLeonard Feather visited the irascible trumpet player in his hotel room for the last test, the critic “seemed shocked to find records by the Byrds, James Brown, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, and the Fifth Dimension scattered around his room,” notes Davis biographer John Szwed. “Miles seemed to have lost all interest in what was then considered jazz.” No doubt about it, no musician then or now would want to be on the receiving end of his critical barbs. Perhaps the only jazz player he never put down was the “young savant drummer” Tony Williams. Otherwise, “at some point or another,” writes Hamilton, “Davis lays low just about every other luminary in the history of jazz.” But behind the vitriol lay true genius. No one was as competitive—or as demanding of himself as he was of others—as Miles Davis.
Many connoisseurs of architecture are enthralled by the modernist philosophy of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and I M Pei, who shared a belief that form follows function, or, as Wright had it, that form and function are one.
Others of us delight in gas stations shaped like teapots and restaurants shaped like fish or doughnuts. If there’s a philosophy behind these insistently playful visions, it likely has something to do with joy…and pulling in tourists.
Art historian John Margolies (1940–2016), responding to the beauty of such quirky visions, scrambled to preserve the evidence, transforming into a respected, self-taught photographer in the process. A Guggenheim Foundation grant and the financial support of architect Philip Johnson allowed him to log over four decades worth of trips on America’s blue highways, hoping to capture his quarry before it disappeared for good.
Despite Johnson’s patronage, and his own stints as an Architectural Record editor and Architectural League of New York program director, he seemed to welcome the ruffled minimalist feathers his enthusiasm for mini golf courses, theme motels, and eye-catching roadside attractions occasioned.
On the other hand, he resented when his passions were labelled as “kitsch,” a point that came across in a 1987 interview with the Canadian Globe and Mail:
People generally have thought that what’s important are the large, unique architectural monuments. They think Toronto’s City Hall is important, but not those wonderful gnome’s‑castle gas stations in Toronto, a Detroit influence that crept across the border and polluted your wonderfully conservative environment.
As Margolies foresaw, the type of commercial vernacular architecture he’d loved since boyhood–the type that screams, “Look at me! Look at me”–has become very nearly extinct.
And that is a maximal shame.
Your children may not be able to visit an orange juice stand shaped like an orange or the Leaning Tower of Pizza, but thanks to the Library of Congress, these locales can be pitstops on any virtual family vacation you might undertake this July.
(Or eschew your computer entirely–go on a real road trip, and continue Margolies’ work!)
Whatever you decide to do with them, the archive’s homepage has tips for how to best search the 11,710 color slides contained therein. Library staffers have supplemented Margolies’ notes on each image with subject and geographical headings.
Video games have long attempted, to an ever more impressive degree of realism, to conjure up their own virtual realities. But then, so have filmmakers, for a much longer period of time and — at least so far — with more effective results. The most respected directors fully realize “virtual reality” with each film they make, and Stanley Kubrick stands as one of the best-known examples. During his almost fifty-year career, he immersed his audience in such distinctive cinematic worlds as those of Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket, leaving us in 1999 with the final, much puzzled-over feature Eyes Wide Shut.
The atmospherically uneasy story of a doctor who spends a night in New York City wandering into ever stranger and more erotically charged situations, Eyes Wide Shut both adapted material not well known in America, the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella “Dream Story,” and starred two of the biggest celebrities of the day, the then-married couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman playing the married couple Bill and and Alice Harford. Kubrick made use of these qualities and many others to deal with such traditional subjects as love, sex, infidelity, and secret cults while, in the words of Evan Puschak, better known as the video essayist Nerdwriter, “making our engagement with these things one-of-a-kind.”
“Reviewers complained that the Harfords were ciphers, uncomplicated and dull,” writes Tim Kreider in “Introducing Sociology,” his much-cited breakdown of Eyes Wide Shut. “These reactions recall the befuddlement of critics who complained that the computer in 2001 was more human than the astronauts, but could only attribute it (just four years after the unforgettable performances of Dr. Strangelove) to human error.” He argues that “to understand a film by this most thoughtful and painstaking of filmmakers, we should assume that this characterization is deliberate — that their shallowness and repression is the point.”
Puschak’s video essay “Eyes Wide Shut: The Game” names those qualities, especially as they manifest in Cruise’s protagonist, as among the techniques Kubrick uses to make the movie a kind of virtual reality experience for the viewer. “You’re experiencing the night from the perspective of Bill, but not from a position of empathy — or even sympathy for that matter. Instead, the viewer engages in what philosopher Alessandro Giovannelli calls ‘experiential identification,’ in which the result of occupying Bill’s perspective while not empathizing with him is that the perspective becomes your own.”
What Kreider sees as ultimately part of Eyes Wide Shut’s indictment of “the capital of the global American empire at the end of the American Century,” Puschak interprets as Kubrick’s “systematic effort to swap you in for the protagonist” in service of “an ode to the experience, to the raw impression, of seeing something marvelous.” But both viewers would surely agree that Kubrick, to a greater extent than perhaps any other filmmaker, made something more than movies. One might say he crafted experiences for his audience, and in the truest sense of the word: like experiences in real life, and unlike the experiences of so many video games, they allow for an infinitude of valid interpretations.
There are guitar players, who can play a handful of songs and pick out some pleasing riffs, and there are guitarists: players who’ve mastered several styles, have a back pocket full of standards, and tour and record for a living. And then there are guitar gods, goddesses, heroes, or whatever… men and women like St. Vincent, Joe Satriani, Jeff Beck, Nancy Wilson, Steve Vai, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Merle Travis, Jimi Hendrix, and Joe Bonamassa, electric blues wunderkind who, in a way, is a successor to some the past masters. Many guitar heroes are child prodigies, and many of them had the opportunity to learn from genius musicians in their youth. Bonamassa is no exception in either case, as you can see in the video up top, in which a 12-year-old “Smokin’ Joe Bonamassa” opens for B.B. King.
Bonamassa started playing at 4 and studied under the late, great Washington, DC guitarist Danny Gatton at 11, perhaps the most unsung, most naturally gifted guitarist of all time. In 1989, he had the opportunity to tour with King, playing over 20 shows, after he had already made a name for himself in “places like Buffalo and Scranton, PA,” writes Forgotten Guitar.
In the video above, you can see Bonamassa, 12 years old, destroy on Gatton’s signature butterscotch Telecaster. It takes him and the band a couple minutes to get going, and the skeptical audience begins to shuffle their feet impatiently. Then he proceeds to blow their minds, just as he blew the minds of television audiences who saw the news segment below on Bonamassa that same year.
At thirteen, Bonamassa attracted the national attention of a program called Real Life, hosted by Jane Pauley. In the clip below, we have the pleasure of seeing the awkward middle schooler in his other element, the locker-lined hallways and the libraries at his day job. But the live footage of Bonamassa removes any doubt about how extraordinary his abilities are.
An early childhood affinity for the instrument and parental urging has had a lot to do with Bonamassa’s phenomenal skill, but as he often acknowledges, so has his tutelage under some of the greatest guitar heroes to ever live. (See him pay tribute to B.B. King below.) And as everyone who plays guitar will acknowledge, what often distinguishes guitar players from guitarists and guitar heroes is an awful lot of practice. Read Bonamassa’s top 5 practice tips for guitarists here.
Fascination with the theremin, the otherworldly electronic musical instrument developed in the late 1910s and early 1920s out of Soviet research into proximity sensors, may never cease. Some of that has to do with the unusual nature of its touchless interface, consisting of twin antennas that the player moves their hands around in order to control the tone. More of it has to do with what the few who have dared to master the theremin have achieved with it, and no discussion of the masters of the theremin can be complete without the name Clara Rockmore.
“Born in Russia, March 9, 1911, Clara inherited the family trait of perfect pitch and could pick out melodies on the piano at age two,” says the Nadia Reisberg and Clara Rockmore Foundation’s biography. Accepted into the prestigious St. Petersburg Imperial Conservatory as a violin student at the unprecedentedly young age of four, it seemed like she’d already found her path to musical stardom — until the Russian Revolution got in the way.
The family fled to America, with Clara and her pianist sister Nadia giving concerts to make money throughout the arduous journey. They arrived in New York in December 1921, but before Clara could continue her studies there, “she developed an arthritic problem with her bow arm, and had to give up the violin.”
But all was not lost: she met Leon Theremin, inventor and namesake of the theremin (previously featured here), and found herself “fascinated by the aesthetic part of it, the visual beauty, the idea of playing in the air.” Soon developing “her own finger technique, allowing her infinitely greater control of pitch and phrasing” and later suggesting modifications to the instrument to improve its range and sensitivity, she could within years play classical pieces on the theremin, making sounds no classical composer could have imagined. Her performances, sometimes accompanied by Nadia and sometimes as a part of an orchestra, led to the release of her first album (recorded by Robert Moog, whose name also echoes down the halls of electronic music), The Art of the Theremin in 1977. (Stream it on Spotify below.)
Rockmore passed away in 1998, having been brought back into the public eye a few years earlier, at least to an extent, by Steve M. Martin’s documentary Theremin: an Electronic Odyssey. Just last year, countless many more of us learned not just the word theremin but the name Clara Rockmore when Google’s front-page “doodle” celebrated her 105 birthday. Those who clicked on it could receive a brief, game-like theremin lesson from an animated version of Rockmore herself, all while hearing sounds precisely engineered to replicate her distinctive playing style. You can see the real Rockmore playing Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan” at the top of the post. Anyone who’s heard the theremin knows that no other instrument sounds quite like it — and anyone who’s heard Rockmore playing the theremin knows no other theremin has ever sounded quite like hers.
It’s unlikely that reclusive poet Emily Dickinson would have wanted much fuss made over her birthday while still alive to celebrate it.
But with the lady safely ensconced in Amherst’s West Cemetery’s plot 53 for more than a century, fans can observe the day in the manner they see fit.
Poet Eleanor Heginbotham cited Dickinson’s letter to her editor, abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson–“Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?”–before priming the breakfast crowd on what they should expect from the 8 hour marathon:
We’re just going to have a day with no discussion beyond… And it will be frustrating that we can’t ask questions, we can’t stop and say, “Oh, my goodness. Let’s do that one over again.” We’re just going to read and read and read. And from this moment on, the voice of Emily Dickinson, through those of you in this room, that’s the only voice we’re going to hear, and won’t that be fun?
Yes, though you may want to pack a nutritious snack to keep your energy up. The reading slots were secured by means of an online sign up sheet, and while such egalitarianism is laudable, it does not necessarily confer performance chops on the inexperienced.
Naturally, there are stand outs.
Marianne Noble, Associate Professor of Literature at American University, is a highlight with Poem 75, (2:36:40, above). Her Emily Rocks t‑shirt is pretty rad too.
Last week, Green Day played a massive concert in London’s Hyde Park. But arguably the climax happened before the band even took the stage. Prior to the show, the stadium piped Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” through the speakers, at which point a massive singalong got underway. As one YouTuber put it, “Only Queen can rock a stadium without even being there,” a testament to their enduring influence. Enjoy the show.
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