Earlier this month, the Dutch unveiled “the largest Mondrian painting in the world.” Above, you can watch the City Hall building in The Hague (sometimes known as “The Ice Palace”) get painted Mondrian-style, with those iconic red, yellow and blue surfaces and straight lines.
It was 100 years ago, in 1917, that the Dutch art movement called “De Stijl” (The Style) took flight. Led by the artists Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, “De Stijl” embraced, notes The Art Story, “an abstract, pared-down aesthetic centered in basic visual elements such as geometric forms and primary colors.” To mark the centenary of “De Stijl,” the Hague is now staging a celebration, which includes 300 Mondrian works, all brought together for the first time, in an exhibition called “The Discovery of Mondrian.” It runs from 3 June to 24 September.
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The life of James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter Lucia requires no particular embellishment to move and amaze us. The “received wisdom,” writes Sean O’Hagan, about Lucia is that she lived a “blighted life,” as a “sickly second child” after her brother Giorgio. As a teenager, she “pursued a career as a modern dancer and was an accomplished illustrator. At 20, having abandoned both, she fell hopelessly in love with [Samuel] Beckett, a 21-year-old acolyte of her fathers.” He soon ended their one-sided relationship, an incident that may have triggered a psychotic break. Beckett was one of the few people to visit her later in the mental hospital where she died in 1982 after decades of institutionalization.
Before succumbing to her illness, Lucia was a highly accomplished artist who worked “with a succession of radically innovative dance teachers,” notes Hermione Lee in a review of a recent biography that “prove[s]… Lucia had talent.” (See her above in Paris in 1929.) Her promise renders her fall that much more dramatic, and her tragedy has inspired variously sensational biographies, plays, a novel and a graphic novel. Lucia also inspired an unflattering portrait in Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women and, most famously, perhaps provided a model for the language of Finnegans Wake. As Joyce once remarked, “People talk of my influence on my daughter, but what about her influence on me?”
The relationship between father and daughter has provided a subject of disturbing speculation, possibly warranted by Lucia’s “father-fixated… mental agonies,” as Stanford’s Robert M. Polhemus writes, and by “eroticized father-daughter, man-girl relationships” in Finnegans Wake that weave in Freud and Jung “with sexy nymphets on the couches of their secular confessionals.” At least in the excerpt Polhemus cites, Joyce uses the prurient language of psychoanalysis to seemingly express guilt, writing, “we grisly old Sykos who have done our unsmiling bits on ‘alices, when they were yung and easily freudened….”
Without inferring the worst, we can see the rest of this unsettling passage as parody of Jung and Freud’s ideas, of which, Louis Menand writes, he was “contemptuous.” And yet Joyce sent Lucia to see Carl Jung, “the Swiss Tweedledee,” he once wrote, “who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee.” His daughter’s behavior had become “increasingly erratic,” Lee writes, “she vomited up her food at table; she threw a chair at Nora [Barnacle, her mother] on Joyce’s 50th birthday… she cut the telephone wires on the congratulatory calls that friends were making about the imminent publication of ‘Ulysses’ in America; she set fire to things….”
After a succession of doctors and diagnoses and an “unwilling incarceration,” Jung agreed to analyze her. He had become acquainted with Joyce’s work, having written an ambivalent 1932 essay on Ulysses (calling it “a devotional book for the object-besotted white man”), which he sent to Joyce with a letter. Jung believed that both Lucia Joyce and her father were schizophrenics, but that Joyce, Menand writes, “was functional because he was a genius.” As Jung told Joyce biographer Richard Ellmann, Lucia and Joyce were “like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving.” Jung also, writes Lee, “thought her so bound up with her father’s psychic system that analysis could not be successful.” He was unable to help her, and Joyce reluctantly had her committed.
Much of the relationship between Joyce and his daughter remains a mystery because of the destruction of nearly all of their correspondence by Joyce’s friend Maria Jolas. (Likewise Beckett burned all of his letters from Lucia). This has not stopped her biographer Carol Loeb Shloss from writing about them as “dancing partners,” who “understood each other, for they speak the same language, a language not yet arrived into words….” What is clear is that “Joyce’s art surrounded” his daughter, “haunted her from birth,” and was part of the circumstances that led to her and her brother often living in extreme poverty and instability.
Lucia resented her father but was never able to fully separate herself from him after several failed relationships with other prominent figures, including American artist Alexander Calder. Whether we characterize her story as one of abuse or, as Lee writes of Shloss’ biography (Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake), one of “love and creative intimacy,” depends on what we make of the limited evidence available to us. The erasure of Lucia from her father’s life began not long after his death, and hers “is a story that was not supposed to be told,” writes Shloss. But it deserves to be, as best as it can. Had her life been different, she would doubtless be well-known as an artist in her own right. As one critic wrote of her skills as a performer, linguist, and choreographer in 1928, James Joyce “may yet be known as his daughter’s father.”
Was “air guitar” a thing back in 1891, when a photographer captured young Marcel Proust in this playful photograph? Probably not. Maybe it’s anachronistic to read the photograph this way. But you have to admit, it’s worth suspending disbelief for a moment and imagining what song Marcel was playing. Any clever guesses?
Keenan Wynn, who strove to keep America safe from “deviated preverts” in 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, was awarded the role of a lifetime nine years later, when Disney Studios was seeking vocal talent for VD Attack Plan, above, a 16-minute animation intended to teach high schoolers about the scourge of venereal disease.
Wynn (son of Ed) threw himself into the part with gusto, imbuing his badly-complected, Kaiser-helmeted germ commander with the sort of straight-talking charisma rarely seen in high school Health class.
A risky maneuver, given that Vietnam-era teens did not share their parent’s generation’s respect for military authority and VD Attack Plan was the first educational short specifically aimed at the high school audience. Prior to that, such films were geared toward soldiers. (Disney waded into those waters in 1944, with the training film, A Few Quick Facts No. 7—Venereal Disease, the same year Mickey Mouse appeared in LOOK magazine, waging war on gonorrhea with sulfa drugs.
Gonorrhea was well represented in the Wynn’s Contagion Corps. The ranks were further swelled by Syphilis. Both platoons were outfitted with paramilitary style berets.
The Sarge pumped them up for the coming sneak attack by urging them to maim or better yet, kill their human enemy. Shaky recruits were reassured that Ignorance, Fear, and Shame would have their backs.
Scriptwriter Bill Bosche had quite the knack for identifying what sort of sugar would make the medicine go down. The Sarge intimates that only a few of the afflicted are “man enough” to inform their partners, and while Ignorance and Shame cause the majority to put their faith in ineffectual folk remedies, the “smart ones” seek treatment.
Elementary psychology, but effectual nonetheless.
Today’s viewers can’t help but note that HIV and AIDS had yet to assert their fearsome hold.
On the other hand, the Sarge’s matter of fact delivery regarding the potential for same sex transmission comes as a pleasant surprise. His primary objective is to set the record straight. No, birth control pills won’t protect you from contracting the clap. But don’t waste time worrying about picking it up from public toilet seats, either.
A word of caution to those planning to watch the film over breakfast, there are some truly gnarly graphic photos of rashes, sores, and skin eruptions. Helpful to teens seeking straight dope on their worrisome symptoms. Less so for anyone trying to enjoy their breakfast links sans the specter of burning urination.
So here’s to the sergeants of the silver screen, and the hardworking actors who embodied them, even those whose creations resembled Pillsbury’s Funny Face drink mix mascots. Let’s do as the Sarge says, and make every day V‑D Day!
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City next week. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
A new computer-animated spectacle that makes us rethink the relationship between imagination and technology seems, now, to come out every few months. Audiences have grown used to various computer animation studios all competing to wow them, but not so long ago the very notion of entertaining animation made with computers sounded like science fiction. All that changed in the mid-1980s when a young animator named John Lasseter breathed life into the CGI stars of such now simple-looking but then revolutionary shorts as The Adventures of André and Wally B.andLuxo Jr., the latter being the first independent production by a certain Pixar Animation Studios.
We know Pixar today as the outfit responsible for Toy Story, The Incredibles, WALL‑E, and other groundbreaking computer-animated features, each one more impressive than the last. How do they do it? Why, with ever-larger and more highly skilled creative and technological teams, of course, all of whom work atop a basic foundation laid by Lasseter and his predecessors in the art of computer animation, in the search for answers to one question: how can we get these digital machines to convincingly simulate our world?
After all, even imaginary characters must emote, move around, and bump into one another with conviction, and do it in a medium of light, wind, water, and much else at that, all ultimately undergirded by the laws of physics.
Thanks to Pixar and their competition, not a few members of the past couple generations have grown up dreaming of mastering computer animation themselves. Now, in partnership with online educational organization Khan Academy, they have a place to start: Pixar in a Box, a series of short interactive courses on how to “animate bouncing balls, build a swarm of robots, and make virtual fireworks explode,” which vividly demonstrates that “the subjects you learn in school — math, science, computer science, and humanities — are used every day to create amazing movies.” The effects course gets deeper into the nitty-gritty of just how computer animators have found ways of taking real physical phenomena and “breaking them down into millions of tiny particles and controlling them using computer programming.”
It all comes down to developing and using particle systems, programs designed to replicate the motion of the real particles that make up the physical world. “Using particles is a simplification of real physics,” says Pixar Effects Technical Director Matt Wong, “but it’s an effective tool for artists. The more particles you use, the closer you get to real physics. Most of our simulations require millions and millions of particles to create believable water,” for instance, which requires a level of computing power scarcely imaginable in 1982, when Pixar’s own effects artist Bill Reeves (who appears in the one of these videos) first used a particle system for a visual effect in Star Trek II. These effects have indeed come a long way, but as anyone who takes this course will suspect, computer animation has only begun to show us the worlds it can realize.
For more Pixar/Khan Academy courses, please see the items in the Relateds below.
Today we’re adding to our list of Free Movies a 1930 Soviet silent film by director Alexander Dovzhenko. It’s called Earth, and it’s the third installment in Dovzhenko’s “Ukraine Trilogy.”
When The Guardian created its list of the Top 10 Silent Movies of all time, it put Earth in the #9 slot. About the film writer Pamela Hutchinson said:
Earth, capped by that avowedly secular title, is a lyrical, carnal movie about birth, death, sex and rebellion. Officially, this Soviet-era Ukrainian silent is a paean to collective farming, crafted around a family drama, but its director, Alexander Dovzhenko, was a born renegade, for whom plots were far less important than poetry…
Earth is the final part of Dovzhenko’s silent trilogy (following the nationalist fantasy Zvenigora (1928) and the avant-garde anti-war film Arsenal (1929), and is brimming with exuberant youth, but haunted by the shadow of death.…
Sketched as tribute to the boons of collectivisation, but released as those schemes were falling out of favour, Earth was condemned on its home turf on political grounds. It was also snipped by censors who objected to the nudity, and the infamous scene in which farmers urinate into their tractor’s radiator. But while there was dismay and censure in the Soviet Union, critics elsewhere were overawed…
It’s the latter impression that endures. Dovzhenko’s symbolism is both rich and audacious. His scope comprises vast pastoral landscapes, and intimate fleshy nakedness. Perhaps its most celebrated sequence is the magnificent opening scene: the painful counterpoint between a dying man, his infant grandchildren and the bursting fruit of his orchard. This is living cinema, as refreshing and vital as the film’s own climactic downpour.
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Even in death we are only limited by our imagination in how we want to go out. There are now ways to turn our corpse into a tree, or have our ashes shot into space, or pressing our ashes into diamonds–I believe Superman is involved in that last one. And now for the music lover, a company called And Vinyly will press your ashes into a playable vinyl record.
You like that punny company name? There’s more: the business lets the dear departed to “Live on from beyond the groove.” Hear that groan? That’s the deceased literally spinning in their grave…on a turntable.
The UK-based company has been around since 2009, when Jason Leach launched it “just for fun” at first. But a lot of people liked the idea and have kept him in business.
It will cost, however. The basic service costs around $4,000, which gets you 30 copies of the record, all of which contain the ashes. However, you cannot use copyright-protected music to fill up the 12 minutes per side, so no “Free Bird” or “We Are the Champions,” unfortunately. But you can put anything else: a voice recording, or the sounds of nature, or complete silence. For an additional fee, you can hire musicians through the company to record a track or tracks for you.
Other extras include cover art either supplied by the deceased or their family or painted by James Hague of the National Portrait Gallery in London and/or street artist Paul Insect; extra copies to be distributed worldwide through record shops (has anyone seen one? Let us know.); and a £10,000 “FUNeral,” where your record will be played at your funeral, surrounded by loved ones.
Joking aside, the service can provide comfort and a memory trigger for those left behind. The above video, “Hearing Madge” is a short doc about a son who took recordings of his mother and used And Vinyly to make a record out of them. It’s sweet.
“I’m sure a lot of people think that it’s creepy, a lot of people think it’s sacrilegious,” the man says. “But I know my mother wouldn’t have. She would’ve thought it was a hoot.”
Jason Leach, a musician and vinyl collector himself, talks of the immediacy of sound and what it means to many.
“Sound is vibrating you, the room, and it’s actually moving the air around you,” he says. “And that’s what’s so powerful about hearing someone’s voice on a record. They’re actually moving the air and for me that’s powerful.”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based 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.
Changing the minds of others has never counted among humanity’s easiest tasks, and it seems only to have become an ever-stiffer challenge as history has ground along. Increasingly many, as Yale professor David Bromwich recently argued in the London Review of Books, “have had no practice in using words to influence people unlike themselves. That is an art that can be lost. It depends on a quantum of accidental communication that is missing in a life of organised contacts.” We might find ourselves in reasonably fruitful debates with basically like-minded friends, acquaintances, and strangers on the internet, but can we ever convince, or be convinced by, someone truly different from us?
Bertrand Russell doubted it. In 1962, long before the structures of the internet allowed us to build tighter echo chambers than ever before, the Nobel-winning philosopher “received a series of letters from an unlikely correspondent — Sir Oswald Mosley, who had founded the British Union of Fascists thirty years earlier,” writes Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova.
“Mosley was inviting — or, rather, provoking — Russell to engage in a debate, in which he could persuade the moral philosopher of the merits of fascism.” Even at the age of 89, with little time and much else to do, Russell declined with the utmost force and clarity in a piece of correspondence featured on Letters of Note:
Dear Sir Oswald,
Thank you for your letter and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.
I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.
I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.
Yours sincerely,
Bertrand Russell
Russell passed on eight years later, in 1970, and Mosley a decade thereafter. “His final message to the British people appeared in a letter to the New Statesman written only a week earlier,” remembers journalist Hugh Purcell in that newspaper. It concerned an article’s description of the “Olympia rally,” the 1934 debacle that lost the British Union of Fascists much of what public support it enjoyed. “The largest audience ever seen at that time assembled to fill the Olympia hall and hear the speech,” Mosley insisted. “A small minority determined by continuous shouting to prevent my speech being heard. After due warning our stewards removed with their bare hands men among whom were some armed with such weapons as razors and knives. The audience were then able to listen to a speech which lasted for nearly two hours.”
The New Statesmen, printing Mosley’s letter posthumously, ran it under this introduction: “Throughout his life he was intent on persuading people that their view of history was mistaken.” Despite his unceasing efforts, he ultimately persuaded few — and it would hardly have required as keen an observer as Russell to see that someone like Mosley certainly wasn’t about to let himself be persuaded by anyone else.
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