Hear the Beach Boys’ Angelic Vocal Harmonies in Four Isolated Tracks from Pet Sounds: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B” & “Good Vibrations”

in Music | August 18th, 2017

I didn’t get the Beach Boys for a while. They had pro­vid­ed the sound­track to an alien world, one I knew most­ly from chew­ing gum com­mer­cials. They were “uncool—cornball,” writes Ben Ratliff, “unen­light­ened” pur­vey­ors of “beach priv­i­lege.” The “nar­ra­tors of Beach Boys songs used their time as they liked: amuse­ment parks, surf­ing, drag rac­ing, dat­ing, sit­ting in their rooms.” They had no cares, no real bur­dens, just shal­low sum­mer loves and heartaches. They came off as some of the bland­est, safest-sound­ing peo­ple on earth.

Then, in a puz­zling turn in the nineties, indie artists like Neu­tral Milk Hotel, Jim O’Rourke, and The Sea and Cake began exper­i­ment­ing with the com­plex arrange­ments, odd instru­men­ta­tion, and sun­ny melodies of 60s pop artists like The Beach Boys and Burt Bacharach.

This is music that can seduce us into think­ing it is sim­plis­tic, child­ish, unin­spired vanil­la. Its use as back­ground muzak in super­mar­kets and shop­ping malls con­firms the impres­sion. But crit­i­cal lis­ten­ing explodes it. (Dig the phras­ing in the oth­er­wise sil­ly, Bacharach/Hal David-com­posed “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.”)

Yes, it took a retro-hip return to ’60s lounge music, bossa nova, and surf pop for many peo­ple to recon­sid­er the Beach Boys as seri­ous artists. And while the trend became a lit­tle cloy­ing, once I put on the head­phones and gave the rad­i­cal Pet Sounds a few dozen spins, as so many song­writ­ers I admired had gushed about doing, I got it. Of course. Yes. The arrange­ments, and those har­monies…. It isn’t only the tech­ni­cal wiz­ardry, though there’s that. It’s how thor­ough­ly weird those clas­si­cal­ly-inspired arrange­ments are. Per­haps a bet­ter way to put it would be, total­ly coun­ter­in­tu­itive.

What near­ly any oth­er pop arranger would nat­u­ral­ly do with a har­mo­ny or rhythm part—just to get the house in order and show­case more impor­tant “lead” parts—Brian Wil­son almost nev­er does. As the min­i­mal­ist com­pos­er John Adams put it, “more than any oth­er song­writer of that era, Bri­an Wil­son under­stood the val­ue of har­mon­ic sur­prise.” At least in Pet Sounds and the long-unfin­ished “labyrinth of melody” SMiLE, each part of the song sus­tains its own indi­vid­ual inter­est with­out break­ing away from the minia­ture sym­phon­ic whole.

Even with­in the har­monies, there is a strange ten­sion, an off-kil­ter wob­bling as in a machine whose gears are all just a bit off-cen­ter. Instru­ments and voic­es go in and out of key, tem­pos slow and quick­en. The vocal har­monies are angel­ic, but trou­bled, uncer­tain, maudlin, and under­lined with unex­pect­ed inten­si­ty giv­en the innocu­ous­ness of their lyrics. In the iso­lat­ed vocal tracks here for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B,” and “Good Vibra­tions,” you may catch it, or not. It isn’t fore­bod­ing, exact­ly, but a kind of uneasy recog­ni­tion that the plea­sures these songs cel­e­brate will soon pass away. An Arca­di­an theme in the Cal­i­for­nia pas­toral.

The ten­sion is there in Wilson’s idol Phil Spector’s com­posi­tons as well, but the con­trast is remark­ably greater in Pet Sounds, of long­ing, nos­tal­gia, and youth at its peak. The utopia they imag­ine may only appeal to a spe­cif­ic sub­set of boomer Amer­i­cans, but their intri­cate, melod­i­cal­ly com­plex, yet har­mo­nious­ly appeal­ing sound­world belongs to every­one. As Zack Schon­feld observed in a sad­ly prophet­ic review of Wilson’s Pet Sounds per­for­mance in Brook­lyn last sum­mer, “it is hard to imag­ine mod­ern indie or indie-pop—or pop in general—without Pet Sounds.” (That includes, of course The Bea­t­les, who answered with Sgt. Pep­pers.) “A world with­out Pet Sounds is a fright­en­ing dystopia,” he writes, “like imag­in­ing a world with­out beach­es or one in which Don­ald Trump is pres­i­dent.” Maybe as you sit back and lis­ten to the oth­er­world­ly beau­ty of these naked har­monies, think of all those love­ly beach­es we still have left.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter Bri­an Wilson’s Cre­ative Process While Mak­ing The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds 50 Years Ago: A Fly-on-the Wall View

The Mak­ing (and Remak­ing) of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Arguably the Great­est Rock Album of All Time

89 Essen­tial Songs from The Sum­mer of Love: A 50th Anniver­sary Playlist

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

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Why Jim Carrey Needs to Paint: “Painting Frees Me, from the Past and Future, from Regret and Worry”

in Art, Comedy, Creativity, Film | August 18th, 2017

In his top-gross­ing come­dies, actor Jim Car­rey dis­played an antic qual­i­ty that seemed to rule over his per­son­al life as well. While oth­er stars used inter­views as oppor­tu­ni­ties to nor­malise them­selves to the civil­ians in the audi­ence, clown prince Car­rey was relent­less, an uncon­trol­lable fire hose of fun­ny faces and voic­es that felt not unlike demons.

All that out­put was exhaust­ing, and caused many to won­der if the man was capa­ble of calm­ing down long enough to receive any mean­ing­ful input.

His per­for­mances in films such as the Tru­man Show and Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind sug­gest­ed that per­haps he was…

As did the rev­e­la­tion that he spent a lot of his child­hood in his bed­room draw­ing — the flip side to his crazy liv­ing room per­for­mances, staged, in part, to keep an emo­tion­al­ly trou­bled fam­i­ly from sink­ing any low­er. He also drew in school, aggra­vat­ing teach­ers with unau­tho­rised por­traits.

As Car­rey recalled in a 2011 inter­view:

After I became famous, my sixth-grade teacher sent me sketch­es she had con­fis­cat­ed. She kept them because she thought they were cute. She also knew how to har­ness the ener­gy. If I was qui­et, she would give me 15 min­utes at the end of class to per­form. Today, I’d be on Rital­in, and Ace Ven­tu­ra would have nev­er been made.

These days, the fun­ny man seems to have turned his back on per­form­ing in favor of a more con­tem­pla­tive visu­al arts prac­tice. His most recent act­ing cred­it is over a year old. As David Bushell’s doc­u­men­tary short, I Need­ed Col­or, above reveals, the quan­ti­ty of Carrey’s out­put is still impres­sive, but there’s a qual­i­ta­tive dif­fer­ence where the artist is con­cerned.

His face and body are calm, and the crazed imper­a­tive to enter­tain seems to have left him. Watch­ing him go about his work, one is remind­ed of car­toon­ist and edu­ca­tor Lyn­da Barry’s obser­va­tions about the neu­ro­log­i­cal con­nec­tion between the abil­i­ty to go down the rab­bit hole of art and a child’s men­tal health:

I think it’s what keeps us sane. I think about how, if I’m sit­ting here with a kid who’s four years old and I have all these mark­ers and I say, do you want to draw, and that kid’s too freaked out to draw, we’d be wor­ried about that kid a lit­tle bit, wouldn’t you? We’d be wor­ried about them emo­tion­al­ly. OK, on this side I have a 40-year-old, same sit­u­a­tion, she’s too scared to draw, but we’re not wor­ried about her. Why? Because there is a tac­it under­stand­ing that some­thing is going on when kids are play­ing or [draw­ing] that has some­thing to do with their men­tal health. All of us know that if a kid is not allowed to play till he’s 21, he’s going to be a nut. He’s going to be a psy­chopath, actu­al­ly. The brain stud­ies they’ve done of kids in deep play show that their brains are iden­ti­cal to an adult’s brain that is in cre­ative con­cen­tra­tion. We know that play is essen­tial for men­tal health. I would argue that so is draw­ing.

Art saves lives, right?

Carrey’s ear­li­er suc­cess affords him the lux­u­ry of time and mon­ey to immerse him­self in his new voca­tion with­out lim­it­ing him­self to any one style or medi­um. Giant paint­ings, tiny sculp­tures, works that involve black light, squeegees, or shred­ded can­vas stitched back togeth­er with wire are all crick­et.

Giv­en his movie star sta­tus, nasty reviews are to be expect­ed, but approval is no longer what Car­rey is seek­ing:

When I paint and sculpt it stops the world for me, as if all time has been sus­pend­ed. My spir­it is com­plete­ly engaged, my heart is engaged, and I feel com­plete­ly free. I think I just like cre­at­ing. All of it is a por­tal into present, into absolute, qui­et, gen­tle, still­ness. This involve­ment, this pres­ence, is free­dom from con­cern. That’s har­mo­ny with the uni­verse.

Those who can’t make it to Sig­na­ture Gal­leries in Las Vegas this Sep­tem­ber 23 for a $10,000 per cou­ple open­ing of Carrey’s paint­ings can take a gan­der at his work for free here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold The Paint­ings of David Bowie: Neo-Expres­sion­ist Self Por­traits, Illus­tra­tions of Iggy Pop, and Much More

Jim Car­rey Sings a Pret­ty Damn Good Cov­er of The Bea­t­les “I Am the Wal­rus”

Art Exhib­it on Bill Mur­ray Opens in the UK

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Noam Chomsky Explains the Best Way for Ordinary People to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunting

in Politics | August 17th, 2017

The threat of wide­spread vio­lence and unrest descends upon the coun­try, thanks again to a col­lec­tion of actors vicious­ly opposed to civ­il rights, and in many cas­es, to the very exis­tence of peo­ple who are dif­fer­ent from them. They have been giv­en aid and com­fort by very pow­er­ful enablers. Vet­er­an activists swing into action. Young peo­ple on col­lege cam­pus­es turn out by the hun­dreds week after week. But for many ordi­nary peo­ple with jobs, kids, mort­gages, etc. the cost of par­tic­i­pat­ing in con­stant protests and civ­il actions may seem too great to bear. Yet, giv­en many awful exam­ples in recent his­to­ry, the cost of inac­tion may be also.

What can be done? Not all of us are Rosa Parks or Howard Zinn or Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. or Thich Nat Hanh or Cesar Chavez or Dolores Huer­ta, after all. Few of us are rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies and few may wish to be. Not every­one is brave enough or tal­ent­ed enough or knowl­edge­able enough or com­mit­ted enough or, what­ev­er.

The prob­lem with this kind of think­ing is a prob­lem with so much think­ing about pol­i­tics. We look to leaders—men and women we think of as supe­ri­or beings—to do every­thing for us. This can mean del­e­gat­ing all the work of democ­ra­cy to some­times very flawed indi­vid­u­als. It can also mean we fun­da­men­tal­ly mis­un­der­stand how demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ments work.

In the video above, Noam Chom­sky address­es the ques­tion of what ordi­nary peo­ple can do in the face of seem­ing­ly insur­mount­able injus­tice. (The clip comes from the 1992 doc­u­men­tary Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent.) “The way things change,” he says, “is because lots of peo­ple are work­ing all the time, and they’re work­ing in their com­mu­ni­ties or their work­place or wher­ev­er they hap­pen to be, and they’re build­ing up the basis for pop­u­lar move­ments.”

In the his­to­ry books, there’s a cou­ple of lead­ers, you know, George Wash­ing­ton or Mar­tin Luther King, or what­ev­er, and I don’t want to say that those peo­ple are unim­por­tant. Mar­tin Luther King was cer­tain­ly impor­tant, but he was not the Civ­il Rights Move­ment. Mar­tin Luther King can appear in the his­to­ry books ‘cause lots of peo­ple whose names you will nev­er know, and whose names are all for­got­ten and who may have been killed and so on were work­ing down in the South.

King him­self often said as much. For exam­ple, in the Pref­ace of his Stride Toward Free­dom he wrote—referring to the 50,000 most­ly ordi­nary, anony­mous peo­ple who made the Mont­gomery Bus Boy­cott happen—“While the nature of this account caus­es me to make fre­quent use of the pro­noun ‘I,’ in every impor­tant part of the sto­ry it should be ‘we.’ This is not a dra­ma with only one actor.”

As for pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als like him­self engaged in polit­i­cal strug­gle, Chom­sky says, “peo­ple like me can appear, and we can appear to be promi­nent… only because some­body else is doing the work.” He defines his own work as “help­ing peo­ple devel­op cours­es of intel­lec­tu­al self-defense” against pro­pa­gan­da and mis­in­for­ma­tion. For King, the issue came down to love in action. Respond­ing in a 1963 inter­view above to a crit­i­cal ques­tion about his meth­ods, he coun­ters the sug­ges­tion that non­vi­o­lence means sit­ting on the side­lines.

I think of love as some­thing strong and that orga­nizes itself into pow­er­ful, direct action…. We are not engaged in a strug­gle that means we sit down and do noth­ing. There’s a great deal of dif­fer­ence between non­re­sis­tance to evil and non­vi­o­lent resis­tance. Non­re­sis­tance leaves you in a state of stag­nant pas­siv­i­ty and dead­en­ing com­pla­cen­cy, where­as non­vi­o­lent resis­tance means that you do resist in a very strong and deter­mined man­ner.

Both Chom­sky, King, and every oth­er voice for jus­tice and human rights would agree that the peo­ple need to act instead of rely­ing on move­ment lead­ers. What­ev­er actions one can take—whether it’s engag­ing in informed debate with fam­i­ly, friends, or cowork­ers, writ­ing let­ters, mak­ing dona­tions to activists and orga­ni­za­tions, doc­u­ment­ing injus­tice, or tak­ing to the streets in protest or acts of civ­il disobedience—makes a dif­fer­ence. These are the small indi­vid­ual actions that, when prac­ticed dili­gent­ly and coor­di­nat­ed togeth­er in the thou­sands, make every pow­er­ful social move­ment pos­si­ble.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky & Har­ry Bela­fonte Speak on Stage for the First Time Togeth­er: Talk Trump, Klan & Hav­ing a Rebel­lious Heart

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

‘Tired of Giv­ing In’: The Arrest Report, Mug Shot and Fin­ger­prints of Rosa Parks (Decem­ber 1, 1955)

Howard Zinn’s “What the Class­room Didn’t Teach Me About the Amer­i­can Empire”: An Illus­trat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by Vig­go Mortensen

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence and Resis­tance Are Jus­ti­fied (1849)

Saul Alinsky’s 13 Tried-and-True Rules for Cre­at­ing Mean­ing­ful Social Change

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

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The Last Surviving Witness of the Lincoln Assassination Appears on the TV Game Show “I’ve Got a Secret” (1956)

in History, Television | August 17th, 2017


Let’s rewind the video­tape to 1956, to Samuel James Sey­mour’s appear­ance on the CBS tele­vi­sion show, “I’ve Got a Secret.” At 96 years of age, Sey­mour was the last sur­viv­ing per­son present at Ford’s The­ater the night Abra­ham Lin­coln was assas­si­nat­ed by John Wilkes Booth (April 14, 1865).

Only five years old at the time, Mr. Sey­mour trav­eled with his father to Wash­ing­ton D.C. on a busi­ness trip, where they attend­ed a per­for­mance of Our Amer­i­can Cousin. The young­ster caught a quick glimpse of the pres­i­dent, the play began, and the rest is, well, his­to­ry.

A quick foot­note: Samuel Sey­mour died two months after his TV appear­ance. His longevi­ty had some­thing to do, I imag­ine, with declin­ing those Win­stons over the years.

Find cours­es on the Civ­il War in our list of Free His­to­ry Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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!

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in August, 2011.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Errol Mor­ris Med­i­tates on the Mean­ing and His­to­ry of Abra­ham Lincoln’s Last Pho­to­graph

The Poet­ry of Abra­ham Lin­coln

Visu­al­iz­ing Slav­ery: The Map Abra­ham Lin­coln Spent Hours Study­ing Dur­ing the Civ­il War

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Legendary Animator Chuck Jones Creates an Oscar-Winning Animation About the Virtues of Universal Health Care (1949)

in Animation | August 17th, 2017

While our coun­try looks like it might be com­ing apart at the seams, it’s good to revis­it, every once in a while, moments when it did work. And that’s not so that we can feel nos­tal­gic about a lost time, but so that we can remind our­selves how, giv­en the right con­di­tions, things could work well once again.

One exam­ple from his­to­ry (and recent­ly redis­cov­ered by a num­ber of blogs dur­ing the AHCA deba­cle in Con­gress) is this gov­ern­ment pro­pa­gan­da film from 1949—the Har­ry S. Tru­man era—that pro­motes the idea of cra­dle-to-grave health care, and all for three cents a week. This mon­ey went to school nurs­es, nutri­tion­ists, fam­i­ly doc­tors, and neigh­bor­hood health depart­ments.

Direct­ed by Chuck Jones, bet­ter known for ani­mat­ing Bugs Bun­ny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and the Road Run­ner, “So Much for So Lit­tle” fol­lows our main char­ac­ter from infancy—where doc­tors help immu­nize babies against whoop­ing cough, diph­the­ria, rheumat­ic fever, and smallpox—through school to dat­ing, mar­riage, becom­ing par­ents, and set­tling into a nice, healthy retire­ment. Along the way, the gov­ern­ment has made sure that health care is noth­ing to wor­ry about.

The film won an Acad­e­my Award in 1950 for Doc­u­men­tary Short Subject—not best sci-fi, despite how rad­i­cal this all sounds.

So what hap­pened? John Maher at the blog Dot and Line puts it this way:

Par­ti­san­ship and cap­i­tal­ism and racist zon­ing poli­cies shat­tered its ide­al­is­tic dream that Amer­i­cans might actu­al­ly pay com­mu­nal­ly for their health as well as that of their neigh­bors and fel­low cit­i­zens.

Three cents per Amer­i­can per week wouldn’t cut it now in terms of uni­ver­sal health cov­er­age. But accord­ing to Maher, quot­ing a 2009 Kingsepp study on the orig­i­nal Afford­able Care Act, tax­pay­ers would have to pay $3.61 a week.

So folks, don’t get despon­dent, get ide­al­is­tic. The Great­est Gen­er­a­tion came back from WWII with a grand ide­al­ism. Maybe this cur­rent gen­er­a­tion just needs to fight and defeat Nazis all over again…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of Chuck Jones, the Artist Behind Bugs Bun­ny, Daffy Duck & Oth­er Looney Tunes Leg­ends: A Video Essay

How to Draw Bugs Bun­ny: A Primer by Leg­endary Ani­ma­tor Chuck Jones

This Amer­i­can Life Demys­ti­fies the Amer­i­can Health­care Sys­tem

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.

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The Color Palettes of Your Favorite Films: The Royal Tenenbaums, Reservoir Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, Blade Runner & More

in Film | August 17th, 2017

We tend to think of film as rough­ly divid­ed into the “black and white” and “col­or” eras, the lat­ter ush­ered in by such lav­ish Tech­ni­col­or pro­duc­tions as Gone with the Wind and The Wiz­ard of Oz. But we also know it’s not as sim­ple as that: those pic­tures came out in Hol­ly­wood’s “gold­en year” of 1939, but some film­mak­ers had already been exper­i­ment­ing with col­or, and the gold­en age of black-and-white film would con­tin­ue through the 1960s. Movies today still occa­sion­al­ly dare to ven­ture into the nev­er-entire­ly-shut­tered realm of the mono­chrome, but on the whole, col­or reigns supreme.

Even though most movies now use col­or, few use it to its fullest advan­tage. Col­or gives view­ers some­thing more to look at, of course, but it can also give a movie its visu­al iden­ti­ty. Think of the films you’ve seen that you can call back most vivid­ly to mind, almost as if you had a pro­jec­tor inside your head, and most of them will prob­a­bly have a dis­tinc­tive col­or palette.

The most mem­o­rable cin­e­mat­ic images, in oth­er words, will have been com­posed not just with any col­or they hap­pened to need, but with a very spe­cif­ic set of col­ors, delib­er­ate­ly assem­bled by the film­mak­ers for its par­tic­u­lar expres­sive­ness.

For a few years now, the Twit­ter account Cin­e­ma Palettes has drawn out and iso­lat­ed those col­ors, ten per film, for all to see. “Though based on a momen­tary still, each spec­trum of shades seems to encap­su­late its movie’s over­all mood,” writes My Mod­ern Met’s Leah Pel­le­gri­ni, point­ing to “the somber, oth­er­world­ly blues of Har­ry Pot­ter and the Death­ly Hal­lows: Part 2, the dream­like pinks and pur­ples of The Grand Budapest Hotel, the cloy­ing­ly pret­ty pas­tels of Edward Scis­sorhands, and the earth­ly, organ­ic greens and browns of Atone­ment.”

It will sur­prise nobody to see the work of Wes Ander­son, famed for the care he gives not just to col­or but every visu­al ele­ment of his film, appear more than once on the feed. Here we see Cin­e­ma Palettes’ selec­tions from The Roy­al Tenen­baums, as well as from Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Reser­voir Dogs, Stan­ley Kubrick­’s A Clock­work Orange, and Rid­ley Scot­t’s Blade Run­ner. The project reveals an aspect of film­mak­ing that few of us may think con­scious­ly about, but nev­er­the­less reflects the nature of cin­e­ma itself: the best films select not just the right col­ors but the right aspects of real­i­ty itself to present, to inten­si­fy, to dimin­ish, and to leave out entire­ly.

Explore more films and col­ors at Cin­e­ma Palettes.

via My Mod­ern Met and h/t Natal­ie W‑S

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Film­mak­ers Like Kubrick, Jodor­owsky, Taran­ti­no, Cop­po­la & Miyaza­ki Use Col­or to Tell Their Sto­ries

“Bleu, Blanc, Rouge”: a Strik­ing Super­cut of the Vivid Col­ors in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960s Films

Wes Ander­son Likes the Col­or Red (and Yel­low)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Obses­sion with the Col­or Red: A Super­cut

Ear­ly Exper­i­ments in Col­or Film (1895–1935)

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.

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Prince Gets an Official Purple Pantone Color

in Music | August 16th, 2017

Image by Ann Alt­house, via Flickr Com­mons

It was bound to hap­pen…

The Pan­tone Col­or Insti­tute has announced that they’ve cre­at­ed “a stan­dard­ized cus­tom col­or to rep­re­sent and hon­or inter­na­tion­al icon, Prince.” Called “Love Sym­bol #2”, the col­or (below) draws inspi­ra­tion from Prince’s Yama­ha pur­ple piano. Some­where, Marie Schrad­er is jeal­ous.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­ors: Dutch Book From 1692 Doc­u­ments Every Col­or Under the Sun

Goethe’s Col­or­ful & Abstract Illus­tra­tions for His 1810 Trea­tise, The­o­ry of Col­ors: Scans of the First Edi­tion

Hear Prince’s Per­son­al Playlist of Par­ty Music: 22 Tracks That Will Bring Any Par­ty to Life

Prince Plays Mind-Blow­ing Gui­tar Solos On “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” and “Amer­i­can Woman”

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Ralph Steadman’s Surrealist Illustrations of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1995)

in Art, Books, Literature | August 16th, 2017

As a nov­el­ist, George Orwell did not traf­fic in sub­tleties, but then nei­ther did the authors of Medieval moral­i­ty plays. The alle­gor­i­cal Ani­mal Farm per­forms a sim­i­lar, if sec­u­lar, func­tion, giv­ing us unam­bigu­ous vil­lainy and clear didac­tic intent. Orwell not­ed in his essay “Why I Write” that he meant the book to “fuse polit­i­cal pur­pose and artis­tic pur­pose into one whole.“ Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished with the sub­ti­tle A Fairy Sto­ry, the nov­el car­i­ca­tures Stal­in­ism and the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, and Orwell left no mys­tery as to his intent when he com­ment­ed in the pref­ace to a 1947 Ukrain­ian edi­tion that he meant the book to “end on a loud note of dis­cord” meant to sig­ni­fy what he saw as the insta­bil­i­ty of the Tehran Con­fer­ence.

Lead­en state­ments like these aside, Orwell swore he “did not wish to com­ment on the work,” writ­ing, “if it does not speak for itself, it is a fail­ure.” The book does indeed speak, in two par­tic­u­lar ways: its vivid­ly grotesque char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of the humans and ani­mals on the farm and its indeli­ble col­lec­tion of pro­pa­gan­dis­tic slo­gans.

These are the fea­tures best cap­tured by gonzo illus­tra­tor Ralph Stead­man, famous for his col­lab­o­ra­tions with Hunter S. Thomp­son. Pub­lished in 1995—with the Fairy Sto­ry sub­ti­tle restored—the Stead­man-illus­trat­ed 50th anniver­sary edi­tion real­izes anoth­er pre­vi­ous vari­a­tion on the book’s title: Ani­mal Farm: A Con­tem­po­rary Satire.

These images draw out the exag­ger­at­ed absur­di­ties of the nov­el as only an artist with Steadman’s twist­ed, sur­re­al­ist sense of visu­al humor could. They are pro­found­ly effec­tive, though there’s no telling what Orwell would have thought of them. Steadman’s car­i­ca­tures uni­ver­sal­ize the book’s dra­ma, pro­vid­ing the kind of stock char­ac­ters we find in folk­lore, “fairy sto­ries,” and reli­gious alle­go­ry. But Orwell wrote that he wished us not to mis­take his express polit­i­cal intent: “It was of the utmost impor­tance to me that peo­ple in West­ern Europe should see the Sovi­et regime for what it real­ly was…. I have been con­vinced that the destruc­tion of the Sovi­et myth was essen­tial if we want­ed a revival of the Social­ist move­ment.”

Stead­man, to his great cred­it, felt no need to lit­er­al­ize Orwell’s stat­ed inten­tions in his illus­tra­tions, but rather took the book’s bizarre world on its own terms. You can read more quotes from Orwell’s earnest, intend­ed pref­ace for the book, restored in the Stead­man edi­tion, at Brain Pick­ings, where you’ll also find a good num­ber of the illus­tra­tions as well. Copies of the out-of-print book can be pur­chased on Ama­zon and Abe’s books.

Stead­man not only applied his skill as a car­i­ca­tur­ist to Orwell’s fic­tion­al farm denizens, we should note, but also to the author him­self. He made sev­er­al sketch­es of Orwell, such as that below of the writer with a cage of rats around his neck. You can see sev­er­al more of Steadman’s draw­ings of Orwell at The Guardian.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Break­ing Bad Illus­trat­ed by Gonzo Artist Ralph Stead­man

Pink Floyd Adapts George Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm into Their 1977 Con­cept Album, Ani­mals (a Cri­tique of Late Cap­i­tal­ism, Not Stal­in)

Gun Nut William S. Bur­roughs & Gonzo Illus­tra­tor Ralph Stead­man Make Polaroid Por­traits Togeth­er

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

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