10-Story High Mural of Muddy Waters Goes Up in Chicago

in Art, Music | June 9th, 2017

Image by Ter­ence Fair­cloth, via Flickr Com­mons

If you find your­self near State and Wash­ing­ton streets in Chica­go, look up and you’ll see a mur­al of blues­man Mud­dy Waters ris­ing 10 sto­ries high. It was paint­ed, the Chica­go Tri­bune tells us, by Brazil­ian street artist Eduar­do Kobra and fel­low painters. And it was offi­cial­ly ded­i­cat­ed yes­ter­day, at the begin­ning of the Chica­go Blues Fes­ti­val. Respect.

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

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

via Ted Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mud­dy Waters and Friends on the Blues and Gospel Train, 1964

Clas­sic Blues Songs By John Lee Hook­er, B.B. King & Mud­dy Waters Played on the Gayageum, a Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Instru­ment

The His­to­ry of the Blues in 50 Riffs: From Blind Lemon Jef­fer­son (1928) to Joe Bona­mas­sa (2009)

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Ancient Rome’s System of Roads Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps

in History, Maps | June 8th, 2017

Sasha Tru­bet­skoy, an under­grad at U. Chica­go, has cre­at­ed a “sub­way-style dia­gram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD.” Draw­ing on Stanford’s ORBIS mod­el, The Pela­gios Project, and the Anto­nine Itin­er­ary, Tru­bet­skoy’s map com­bines well-known his­toric roads, like the Via Appia, with less­er-known ones (in somes cas­es giv­en imag­ined names). If you want to get a sense of scale, it would take, Tru­bet­skoy tells us, “two months to walk on foot from Rome to Byzan­tium. If you had a horse, it would only take you a month.”

You can view the map in a larg­er for­mat here. And if you fol­low this link and send Tru­bet­skoy a few bucks, he promis­es to email you a crisp PDF for print­ing. Enjoy.

via coudal

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

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Won­der­ground Map of Lon­don Town,” the Icon­ic 1914 Map That Saved the World’s First Sub­way Sys­tem

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

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

Watch the Destruc­tion of Pom­peii by Mount Vesu­vius, Re-Cre­at­ed with Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion (79 AD)

Fash­ion­able 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well

The Rise & Fall of the Romans: Every Year Shown in a Time­lapse Map Ani­ma­tion (753 BC ‑1479 AD)

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The History of Classical Music in 1200 Tracks: From Gregorian Chant to Górecki (100 Hours of Audio)

in Music | June 8th, 2017

What is clas­si­cal music? It may seem like a reme­di­al ques­tion, but it is a seri­ous one. Leonard Bern­stein took it seri­ous­ly enough to design an entire pro­gram around it. His “Young People’s Con­certs” with the New York Philharmonic—broadcast on TV from Carnegie Hall in 1959—began with an admis­sion of how unclear the ter­m’s usage had become in pop­u­lar cul­ture. “You see,” he told his young audi­ence, “every­body thinks he knows what clas­si­cal music is… Peo­ple use this word to describe music that isn’t jazz or pop­u­lar songs or folk music, just because there isn’t any oth­er word that seems to describe it bet­ter.”

Clas­si­cal music is often thought of in even more neb­u­lous, and per­haps elit­ist, terms as “art music,” over and above these oth­er forms. Yet Bern­stein goes on to define clas­si­cal music in more pre­cise ways: A clas­si­cal com­pos­er “puts down the exact notes that he wants, the exact instru­ments or voic­es that he wants to play or sing those notes—even the exact num­ber of instru­ments or voic­es; and he also writes down as many direc­tions as he can think of” about tem­po, dynam­ics, etc. What might sound like a straight­jack­et for musi­cians instead offers an inter­pre­tive chal­lenge: “No per­for­mance can be per­fect­ly exact.… But that’s what makes the per­former’s job so exciting–to try and find out from what the com­pos­er did write down as exact­ly as pos­si­ble what he meant.”

This work­ing def­i­n­i­tion, while devoid of tech­ni­cal jar­gon for the sake of Bern­stein’s untrained audi­ence, still man­ages to give us a good sense of the para­me­ters he set for the “clas­si­cal.” They do not stretch wide­ly enough to include impro­visato­ry mod­ernism (though he had a high regard for jazz as a sep­a­rate cat­e­go­ry). But they do include much instru­men­tal and choral Euro­pean music from the start of the medieval peri­od into the 20th cen­tu­ry. The def­i­n­i­tion could be a much nar­row­er one. “One of the first things you learn when you’re intro­duced to clas­si­cal music,” Jay Gabler writes at online radio sta­tion Clas­si­cal MPR, “is that the term ‘clas­si­cal’ most prop­er­ly describes music com­posed from about 1750 to 1820.”

This means Mozart and Haydn, most of Beethoven, but not Bach, Wag­n­er, Debussy, or Cop­land. And cer­tain­ly not aleato­ry exper­i­men­tal­ists like John Cage, min­i­mal­ists like Steve Reich, or aton­al odd­balls like Arnold Schoen­berg. While Bern­stein seems to set­tle the issue with rel­a­tive ease, “musi­col­o­gists,” Gabler notes, “can stay up all night talk­ing about the shape and tra­jec­to­ry of clas­si­cal music, debat­ing ques­tions like the impor­tance of the score, the role of impro­vi­sa­tion, and the nature of musi­cal form.” These are the kinds of dis­cus­sions one might have over the 1200-track Spo­ti­fy playlist above, “The His­to­ry of Clas­si­cal Music–From Gre­go­ri­an Chant to Górec­ki.” (If you need Spo­ti­fy’s soft­ware, down­load it here.)

We begin with the 11th cen­tu­ry church music of Leonin and Per­otin, two com­posers asso­ci­at­ed with Notre Dame who are cred­it­ed with “the begin­ning of mod­ern music” for their use of polypho­ny and var­i­ous rhyth­mic modes. (Hear the espe­cial­ly haunt­ing “Viderunt Omnes” by Leonin at the top of the post.) The playlist, cre­at­ed by a cura­tor who goes by Ulysses Clas­si­cal, then takes us through the late Medieval and Renais­sance peri­ods and into the Baroque, exem­pli­fied by Han­del, Bach, Vival­di, Pachel­bel, Scar­lat­ti, and oth­ers. Beethoven and Mozart get their due, but not more so than Dvořák and Tchaikovsky.

By the time we reach the 20th cen­tu­ry, we begin to move quite far from the for­mal­ism of Bern­stein’s def­i­n­i­tion and into the strange realms of Schoen­berg, Mes­si­aen, Ligeti, Reich, and Philip Glass, with whom this his­to­ry ends. Obvi­ous­ly the strict peri­odiza­tion Gabler men­tions can­not con­tain all of what we mean by clas­si­cal music, but just how much can the des­ig­na­tion encom­pass aton­al exper­i­men­tal mod­ernism and still be a coher­ent con­cept? Let the musi­col­o­gists debate. For those of us who approach this music as a form of pure plea­sure, it’s enough just to sit back and lis­ten.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Bernstein’s Mas­ter­ful Lec­tures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Record­ed at Har­vard in 1973)

Stream 58 Hours of Free Clas­si­cal Music Select­ed to Help You Study, Work, or Sim­ply Relax

The World Con­cert Hall: Lis­ten To The Best Live Clas­si­cal Music Con­certs for Free

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

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

in Art | June 8th, 2017

No one art form has done more to shape the world’s sense of tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese aes­thet­ics than the wood­block print. But not so very long ago, in his­tor­i­cal terms, no such works had ever left Japan. That changed when, accord­ing to the Library of Con­gress, “Amer­i­can naval offi­cer Matthew Cal­braith Per­ry (1794–1858) led an expe­di­tion to Japan between 1852 and 1854 that was instru­men­tal in open­ing Japan to the West­ern world after more than 200 years of nation­al seclu­sion.” As trav­el­ers, mate­ri­als, and prod­ucts began flow­ing between Japan and the West, so did art.

This flow hap­pened, of course, by sea, and so Japan­ese artists work­ing in wood­block and oth­er forms soon found that the port city of Yoko­hama had become “an incu­ba­tor for a new cat­e­go­ry of images that strad­dled con­ven­tion and nov­el­ty.”

In their depic­tions of mod­ern Yoko­hama, “bewhiskered men and crino­line-clad women were shown strid­ing through the city, clam­ber­ing on and off ships, rid­ing hors­es, enjoy­ing local enter­tain­ments, and inter­act­ing with an end­less array of objects from gob­lets to loco­mo­tives.” This new genre in an estab­lished tra­di­tion took on the name “Yokohama‑e,” or “pic­tures of Yoko­hama.”

Hun­dreds of years ear­li­er, dur­ing the Toku­gawa Peri­od that began in the year 1600, that tra­di­tion had already pro­duced the now well-known genre of “Ukiyo‑e,” or “pic­tures of the float­ing world,” wood­block depic­tions of the plea­sure dis­tricts of Edo, now called Tokyo. “Var­i­ous forms of enter­tain­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly kabu­ki the­ater and the plea­sure quar­ters, lured monied patrons who were eager in turn to acquire the vivid images of cel­e­brat­ed actors and beau­ti­ful cour­te­sans.” Lat­er, “trav­el became a pop­u­lar form of leisure and the plea­sures of the nat­ur­al envi­ron­ment, inter­est­ing land­marks, and the adven­tures encoun­tered en route also became favorite Ukiyo‑e themes.” Ukiyo‑e also looked to “Japan­ese myth, leg­end, lit­er­a­ture, his­to­ry, and dai­ly life” for sub­jects, and so its pro­lif­ic artists cap­tured the cul­ture near­ly whole.

You can come as close as pos­si­ble to expe­ri­enc­ing that cul­ture by view­ing, and down­load­ing, more than 2,500 Japan­ese wood­block prints and draw­ings at the Library of Con­gress’ online col­lec­tion “Fine Prints: Japan­ese, pre-1915.” It includes work from such pro­lif­ic Ukiyo‑e artists as Hoku­sai Kat­sushi­ka (whose Tea­house at Koishikawa the Morn­ing After a Snow­fall appears at the top of the post), Andō Hiroshige (Minakuchi below that), Iso­da Koryū­sai (Kisara­gi, third from the top), and Uta­gawa Yoshi­fu­ji (whose Amerika­jin Yūgyō, one of his depic­tions of Amer­i­cans, appears just above). As much as Japan has changed since the hey­day of the Yokohama‑e, much less the Ukiyo‑e, any vis­i­tor to the coun­try in the 21st cen­tu­ry will first notice not how much the sur­faces of Japan’s real urban and nat­ur­al land­scapes, domes­tic inte­ri­ors, and pub­lic scenes dif­fer from those in clas­si­cal wood­block prints, but how deeply they’ve remained the same.

Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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)

The (F)Art of War: Bawdy Japan­ese Art Scroll Depicts Wrench­ing Changes in 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan

Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Char­ac­ters Reimag­ined in the Style of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Wood­block Prints

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Experts Predict When Artificial Intelligence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writing Essays, Books & Songs, to Performing Surgery and Driving Trucks

in Economics, Life, Science, Technology | June 7th, 2017

Image via Flickr Com­mons

We know they’re com­ing. The robots. To take our jobs. While humans turn on each oth­er, find scape­goats, try to bring back the past, and ignore the future, machine intel­li­gences replace us as quick­ly as their design­ers get them out of beta test­ing. We can’t exact­ly blame the robots. They don’t have any say in the mat­ter. Not yet, any­way. But it’s a fait accom­pli say the experts. “The promise,” writes MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review, “is that intel­li­gent machines will be able to do every task bet­ter and more cheap­ly than humans. Right­ly or wrong­ly, one indus­try after anoth­er is falling under its spell, even though few have ben­e­fit­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly so far.”

The ques­tion, then, is not if, but “when will arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence exceed human per­for­mance?” And some answers come from a paper called, appro­pri­ate­ly, “When Will AI Exceed Human Per­for­mance? Evi­dence from AI Experts.” In this study, Kat­ja Grace of the Future of Human­i­ty Insti­tute at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford and sev­er­al of her col­leagues “sur­veyed the world’s lead­ing researchers in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence by ask­ing them when they think intel­li­gent machines will bet­ter humans in a wide range of tasks.”

You can see many of the answers plot­ted on the chart above. Grace and her co-authors asked 1,634 experts, and found that they “believe there is a 50% chance of AI out­per­form­ing humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automat­ing all human jobs in 120 years.” That means all jobs: not only dri­ving trucks, deliv­er­ing by drone, run­ning cash reg­is­ters, gas sta­tions, phone sup­port, weath­er fore­casts, invest­ment bank­ing, etc, but also per­form­ing surgery, which may hap­pen in less than 40 years, and writ­ing New York Times best­sellers, which may hap­pen by 2049.

That’s right, AI may per­form our cul­tur­al and intel­lec­tu­al labor, mak­ing art and films, writ­ing books and essays, and cre­at­ing music. Or so the experts say. Already a Japan­ese AI pro­gram has writ­ten a short nov­el, and almost won a lit­er­ary prize for it. And the first mile­stone on the chart has already been reached; last year, Google’s AI Alpha­Go beat Lee Sedol, the South Kore­an grand­mas­ter of Go, the ancient Chi­nese game “that’s expo­nen­tial­ly more com­plex than chess,” as Cade Metz writes at Wired. (Humane video game design, on the oth­er hand, may have a ways to go yet.)

Per­haps these feats part­ly explain why, as Grace and the oth­er researchers found, Asian respon­dents expect­ed the rise of the machines “much soon­er than North Amer­i­ca.” Oth­er cul­tur­al rea­sons sure­ly abound—likely those same quirks that make Amer­i­cans embrace cre­ation­ism, cli­mate-denial, and fear­ful con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and nos­tal­gia by the tens of mil­lions. The future may be fright­en­ing, but we should have seen this com­ing. Sci-fi vision­ar­ies have warned us for decades to pre­pare for our tech­nol­o­gy to over­take us.

In the 1960s Alan Watts fore­saw the future of automa­tion and the almost patho­log­i­cal fix­a­tion we would devel­op for “job cre­ation” as more and more nec­es­sary tasks fell to the robots and human labor became increas­ing­ly super­flu­ous. (Hear him make his pre­dic­tion above.) Like many a tech­nol­o­gist and futur­ist today, Watts advo­cat­ed for Uni­ver­sal Basic Income, a way of ensur­ing that all of us have the means to sur­vive while we use our new­ly acquired free time to con­scious­ly shape the world the machines have learned to main­tain for us.

What may have seemed like a Utopi­an idea then (though it almost became pol­i­cy under Nixon), may become a neces­si­ty as AI changes the world, writes MIT, “at break­neck speed.”

via Big Think/MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Pre­dic­tion That Automa­tion Will Neces­si­tate a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Pro­gram Tries to Write a Bea­t­les Song: Lis­ten to “Daddy’s Car”

Hayao Miyaza­ki Tells Video Game Mak­ers What He Thinks of Their Char­ac­ters Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: “I’m Utter­ly Dis­gust­ed. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: A Free Online Course from MIT

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

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Allen Ginsberg’s Howl Manuscripts Now Digitized & Put Online, Revealing the Beat Poet’s Creative Process

in Poetry | June 7th, 2017

Some­how you have to imag­ine that, from its very open­ing — “I saw the best minds of my gen­er­a­tion destroyed by mad­ness, starv­ing hys­ter­i­cal naked, drag­ging them­selves through the negro streets at dawn look­ing for an angry fix” — Allen Gins­berg’s poem “Howl” sim­ply emerged ful­ly formed and launched itself per­ma­nent­ly into Amer­i­can cul­ture. But deep down we all know that no work, poet­ic or oth­er­wise, actu­al­ly does that, no mat­ter how wide­ly read it becomes, no mat­ter how vivid­ly it cap­tures a time and a place, no mat­ter how many gen­er­a­tions look to it as an exam­ple. Gins­berg had to work on “Howl,” and now, thanks to Stan­ford Libraries, we have an up-close way to see some of that work in progress.

“From its first pub­lic read­ing at the Six Gallery in San Fran­cis­co in Octo­ber 1955 to the noto­ri­ous obscen­i­ty tri­al that fol­lowed in the wake of its first pub­li­ca­tion in 1956,” writes Stan­ford Cura­tor for Amer­i­can and British Lit­er­a­ture Rebec­ca Wing­field, “the poem is indeli­bly tied to the Beat Gen­er­a­tion and their cri­tique of the staid morals and cus­toms of Eisen­how­er-era Amer­i­ca.”

Before all that, it began with a sev­en-page first draft writ­ten in Gins­berg’s North Beach apart­ment, gained a sec­ond sec­tion before that now-leg­endary Six Gallery read­ing, and final­ly, after Gins­berg tried out dif­fer­ent com­po­si­tion­al tech­niques and fol­lowed dif­fer­ent sug­ges­tions in search of a way to cap­ture Amer­i­ca as he saw it, evolved into a long poem com­pris­ing three sec­tions and a foot­note, pub­lished along­side oth­er works by City Lights Books as the paper­back that made him famous.

“The ‘Howl’ man­u­scripts and type­scripts in the Allen Gins­berg Papers,” which you can view online at Stan­ford Libraries, “doc­u­ment the for­mal devel­op­ment of the poem, trac­ing Ginsberg’s exper­i­ments with dif­fer­ent struc­tures and word­ing in each of the poem’s sec­tions.” These pre-“Howl” “Howl“s, man­u­scripts and type­scripts both, retain the cor­rec­tions and anno­ta­tions that reveal details about Gins­berg’s dis­tinc­tive cre­ative process. But giv­en the most well-known aspect of the poem’s con­struc­tion, that each line lasts as long as exact­ly one breath, a full under­stand­ing can only come from hear­ing it as well as read­ing it. You can hear Gins­berg’s ear­li­est record­ed per­for­mance of the poem, at Port­land’s Reed Col­lege (alma mater of Gins­berg’s Beat col­league Gary Sny­der) in 1956, at the top of the post, and a lat­er read­ing on record here. (The text of the com­plet­ed poem can be viewed here.) Look and lis­ten close­ly, and you’ll find that a cri de coeur, espe­cial­ly as Gins­berg cried it, demands delib­er­ate crafts­man­ship.

See the Howl man­u­scripts online here.

via Stan­ford News/Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Record­ing of Allen Gins­berg Read­ing “Howl” (1956)

Allen Gins­berg Reads His Famous­ly Cen­sored Beat Poem, “Howl” (1959)

James Fran­co Reads a Dream­i­ly Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’

Allen Ginsberg’s “Celes­tial Home­work”: A Read­ing List for His Class “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats”

Allen Gins­berg Record­ings Brought to the Dig­i­tal Age. Lis­ten to Eight Full Tracks for Free

Allen Ginsberg’s Hand­writ­ten Poem For Bernie Sanders, “Burling­ton Snow” (1986)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Everything You Need to Know About Modern Russian Art in 25 Minutes: A Visual Introduction to Futurism, Socialist Realism & More

in Art | June 7th, 2017

Few things fas­ci­nat­ed me as a child more than Rus­sia. I wasn’t alone in this. Every­one expe­ri­enced it. And it wasn’t only the Sovi­et Union—though it played the bogey­man in Cold War films, loomed over his­to­ry text­books, and seemed to exist in a for­bid­den par­al­lel uni­verse in Reagan’s Amer­i­ca. But what came before it was equal­ly out­sized and trag­ic: the Romanovs, Rasputin, Cather­ine the Great, Peter the Great, Ivan the Ter­ri­ble.… Russia’s mod­ern his­to­ry came into focus through its novelists—the intri­cate social dis­tinc­tions and com­pli­cat­ed fam­i­ly dynam­ics, the palace intrigues, the gal­lows humor, dis­con­tent, and res­ig­na­tion of ordi­nary Rus­sians….

After 40 years of uneasy détente with the world’s oth­er super­pow­er, Amer­i­cans found the pieces of their view of Rus­sia falling into place almost imper­cep­ti­bly. But nothing—I repeat, nothing—prepared The West for Russ­ian mod­ernism. It drove the CIA to such dis­trac­tion that they secret­ly fun­neled mon­ey to jazz artists and Abstract Expres­sion­ists to fight a cul­ture war. It made no sense to us. “This is com­plete­ly ridicu­lous!” says Bri­an Cox above, express­ing a sen­ti­ment shared by many when they encounter Russ­ian For­mal­ism, or Supre­ma­tism, or Futur­ism, and oth­er avant-gardisms.

Cox, nar­rat­ing the “Quick­est His­to­ry of 20th Cen­tu­ry Art in Rus­sia,” does an excel­lent job of con­vey­ing the shock, excite­ment, and bewil­der­ment we feel when we encounter Male­vich and Mayakovsky, the star­tling folk Neo­clas­si­cism of Russ­ian Art Nouveau—where the film begins—the Con­cep­tu­al­ists of the Thaw, and the out­ra­geous per­for­mance artists of the post-Sovi­et era. None of this, to quote Tris­tan Tzara, is art made to “cajole the nice nice bourgeois”—with the iron­ic excep­tion of Social­ist Real­ism, which out­lawed the Russ­ian avant-garde and said “look, every­thing we have is so grand, abun­dant! We have every­thing aplen­ty!”

Social­ist Real­ism resem­bles noth­ing so much as Amer­i­can mag­a­zine adver­tis­ing of the Life mag­a­zine and Nor­man Rock­well eras, a reminder of one way the two bel­liger­ent empires came to increas­ing­ly resem­ble each oth­er over time. “Social­ist Real­ism,” says Cox, “is almost a car­i­ca­ture, only with incred­i­ble pathos.” It is “the first ten­den­cy to rule out crit­i­cism com­plete­ly.” It absorbed cri­tique and turned it into cel­e­bra­tion and denun­ci­a­tion, both of them noble acts of State. Where Amer­i­can didac­tic art sold hun­dreds of prod­ucts and a hand­ful of ide­o­log­i­cal pos­es, the Sovi­et vari­ety sold one thing: the Par­ty. This does not, how­ev­er, mean that Social­ist Real­ism is “bad”—not entire­ly. It is, instead, like so much mod­ern Russ­ian Art to non-Russ­ian eyes… uncan­ny.

The 25-minute “Quick­est His­to­ry of 20th Cen­tu­ry Art in Rus­sia” comes from a series of “Crash Cours­es” from Arza­mas Acad­e­my that includes “Ancient Rome in 20 min­utes” and “Ancient Greece in 18 min­utes.” All of them fea­ture the wry, mel­liflu­ous voice of Cox, and I high­ly rec­om­mend them all.

via Coudal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

Down­load 144 Beau­ti­ful Books of Russ­ian Futur­ism: Mayakovsky, Male­vich, Khleb­nikov & More (1910–30)

The His­to­ry of Rus­sia in 70,000 Pho­tos: New Pho­to Archive Presents Russ­ian His­to­ry from 1860 to 1999

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

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Lou Reed Curates an Eclectic Playlist of His Favorite Songs During His Final Days: Stream 27 Tracks Lou Was Listening To

in Music | June 6th, 2017

Lou Reed was a vora­cious lis­ten­er. Rather than con­sume music, he imbibed it, drank it down in draughts, then sweat­ed it out through his pores. His inex­haustible thirst for songs result­ed in a body of work that has always sound­ed inti­mate­ly famil­iar, even when it takes us to places no song­writ­ers had before: the bit­ter, ten­der, vio­lent under­side of glam­our, art, and romance.

But where, exact­ly, did Reed’s wry, bleak, yet ten­der sen­si­bil­i­ty come from? How did he man­age so much com­plex emo­tion­al res­o­nance in such seem­ing­ly sim­ple songs as “Sun­day Morn­ing” and “Per­fect Day”? Part of the answer comes from his ven­er­a­tion of Beat poets and writ­ers like Allen Gins­berg and William Bur­roughs, as well as his one-time men­tor Del­more Schwartz. “I thought if you could do what those writ­ers did,” he said, “and put it to drums and gui­tar, you’d have the great­est thing on earth.”

This was no easy accom­plish­ment. It took some­one like Reed, steeped in pop, folk, rock, and jazz songcraft, to pull it off in such a way that Rolling Stone could call the Vel­vet Under­ground “the most influ­en­tial Amer­i­can rock band of all time”—largely, writes the Dai­ly Dot, “because of Reed’s son­ic and lyri­cal con­tri­bu­tions.” For most of Reed’s career, how­ev­er, dis­cov­er­ing the sources of his mag­ic could be dif­fi­cult.

Reed’s inter­view moods ranged from iras­ci­bly con­fronta­tion­al to dis­dain­ful­ly tac­i­turn to face­tious­ly gar­ru­lous. “Every­thing is jokes to this bibu­lous bozo,” remarked Lester Bangs in a 1973 inter­view. “He real­ly makes a point of havin’ some fun!” But age, it seems, and the inter­net, mel­lowed him out and made him more like­ly to share. He opened up about his love for Kanye West’s Yeezus and oth­er things. He appeared on Sat­ur­day Night Live to dis­pute inter­net rumors that he had died in 2001.

And when he did die, in 2013, he left behind the Spo­ti­fy account “he was curat­ing… him­self,” keep­ing “playlists of songs he liked from the radio,” and show­ing both seri­ous and casu­al stu­dents of Lou Reed that “the best online source on Lou Reed is… Lou Reed.” In the two vol­ume playlist above called “What I’m Lis­ten­ing To,” Reed shows us just how seri­ous he was about soak­ing up all of the sounds around him.

Nic­ki Minaj, Prince, Way­lon Jen­nings, indie funk/soul Cana­di­ans King Khan & BBQ, psy­che­del­ic indie cham­ber pop band Of Mon­tre­al, Tom Waits, Miles Davis, Deer­hoof, post-hard­core band Fucked Up, bril­liant neo-soul singer/rapper/songwriter Geor­gia Anne Muldrow, Cap­tain Beef­heart… and that’s just vol­ume one. Name a genre—Reed has found what he clear­ly con­sid­ers its per­fect exem­plar. You can almost see him tak­ing notes, scowl­ing with envy, smirk­ing with appre­ci­a­tion for how his own influ­ence has per­me­at­ed the past few the decades.

Famous musi­cians aren’t always the most inter­est­ing peo­ple, though Reed’s pri­vate life was sen­sa­tion­al enough to war­rant retelling. But many fans will find it much more inter­est­ing to get into the mind of Reed the artist. And for that, you’ll need to try and hear what he heard. Or, at least, lis­ten to what he lis­tened to.

If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here. Here are the direct links to the two Spo­ti­fy playlists: Playlist 1 — Playlist 2.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lou Reed Cre­ates a List of the 10 Best Records of All Time

Teenage Lou Reed Sings Doo-Wop Music (1958–1962)

An Ani­ma­tion of The Vel­vet Underground’s “Sun­day Morn­ing” … for Your Sun­day Morn­ing

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

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