Watch Jean Cocteau’s Short Film About the Elegant House He Painted/“Tattooed” on the French Riviera (1952)

in Art, Film | July 25th, 2018

“Villa Santo-Sospir belongs to Madame Alec Weisweiller,” says the narrator. “It dominates Cape Santo Sospir, the last point on the map before arriving on Cape Ferrat. The villa is situated on the road to the lighthouse and its rocks descend to the sea.” So far this could be any of the myriad popular television houses about big, expensive houses in exotic places. Then it turns personal: “It looks out on Antibes, Cannes, Nice, and to the right, Villefranche, where I have lived for a long time.” The narrator is avant-garde writer, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau; the house is one he and other artists spent twelve years “tattooing.”

Weisweiller, writes Vogue’s Stephen Todd, was “a Parisian socialite and patron of Yves Saint Laurent,” and the cousin of Nicole Stéphane, Elisabeth in Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles. “It was Stéphane who introduced the two during filming. It was un coup de foudre, the pair of eccentrics hitting it off right away.” Invited in 1949 to stay at Weisweiller’s Riviera house for a week, Cocteau soon found himself, as he put it, “tired of idleness,” and asked Weisweiller’s permission to paint the head of the Greek god Apollo above the living-room fireplace. ”

So delighted were the new pals with the result that they decided Cocteau should carry on,” writes Todd, quoting Cocteau: “I was imprudent enough to decorate one wall and Matisse said to me, ‘If you decorate one wall of a room, you have to do them all.’”

Matisse contributed to the decoration of the house, as did Picasso and Chagall. You can see it in La villa Santo Sospir, the 40-minute film he made about the project in 1952, with more recent images available at Atlas Obscura. Most of the house’s imagery comes from Greek mythology, even the entryway mosaics, one of which depicts the head of Orpheus. Eight years later, Cocteau would return to both Orpheus and Villa Santo-Sospir to shoot his final film Testament of Orpheus. “We have tried to overcome the spirit of destruction that dominates the time; we decorated the surfaces that men dreamed to demolish,” says Cocteau in the earlier film. “Perhaps, the love of our work will protect them against bombs.” And even if Villa Santo-Sospir should fall, cinema has preserved it for all time.

via Dangerous Minds

Jean Cocteau’s Avante-Garde Film From 1930, The Blood of a Poet

The Postcards That Picasso Illustrated and Sent to Jean Cocteau, Apollinaire & Gertrude Stein

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Is ASMR? Watch the The New Yorker’s Introduction to the Whispering & Crinkling Sounds That Help Calm Anxiety and Induce Euphoria

in Life, Psychology | July 25th, 2018

ASMR… is it a medical condition? A sexual fetish? A desire for peace and quiet coupled with an inability to turn off YouTube? Maybe all or none of the above?

Maybe you caught Act One of This American Life’s “Tribes” episode, in which novelist Andrea Seigel describes her passionate need for whispering, and finds a community of people who need the same. She discovered the “tingle” early in life, when a friend came over to inspect her shell collection, describing each item in a gentle whisper and provoking in Seigel an “autonomous sensory meridian response,” a euphoric reaction thousands crave as though it were a drug. They get their fix, as we learn in the New Yorker video above, from videos in which male and female “ASMR artists” gently handle, manipulate, and describe objects in low murmurs.

Sensual sibilance, the sounds of a brush through hair, scissors clipping, plastic quietly crinkling, tapping, spraying… all producing the same effect as Bob Ross’s happy little clouds and trees, a pioneering source of ASMR, though it had not yet been identified as such.

Many of Ross’s viewers were not, in fact, aspiring artists, but people who responded to his calming demeanor and the swishing sounds of his brush on the canvas. (Watch all episodes of his show here.) ASMR artist Maria of the YouTube channel “Gentle Whispering” is not only a purveyor of ASMR sounds, she’s also a client who herself shivers at fingertips on paper and breathy whispers. See one of her videos below (and many more here).

“No one’s been able to unravel the biochemistry or the exact physiological experience that people are having,” says Shenandoah University’s Craig Richard, an ASMR enthusiast. Oxytocin—the “love hormone”—seems to be involved, which may explain why many ASMR videos have a slightly sexy feel to them. Sensation, touch, and closeness define the genre (often hosted by young, conventionally attractive women). ASMR videos may adhere to some specific cultural constructions, but the phenomenon seems real enough. And it has a psychological nemesis, misophonia, “an extreme dislike of certain sounds,” such as just those that set ASMR folks a‑tingling.

“How can a sound be so relaxing for group A,” asks Richard, “and really make group B angry?” Maybe there is a genetic component, he speculates. And maybe the popularity of ASMR videos shows a softer, G‑rated side of how lonely people meet a need online. ASMR artists “tend to be people with really kind and caring dispositions,” says Richard. “You’re brought into this world and this moment with you and another person. And this person just seems to really care about you.” Role-playing plays a big role in ASMR videos, which can make them seem even more like adult movies.

But it’s not at all about sex, but about intimacy, calm, and connection, which many people understandably hunger for in a noisy, alienating world. As Richard points out, many say that ASMR videos help with anxiety and insomnia. Stressed-out students, single mothers, veterans with PTSD—all have reported finding peace through ASMR. “Our society has become quicker in every possible way,” says Maria. “Everything is pushed to the top, to the limit. ASMR slows down your perception of everything.” It’s a meditative art, she suggests, and an antidote to the brain-scrambling disorientation of contemporary life.

10 Hours of Ambient Arctic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Meditate, Study & Sleep

Hear “Weightless,” the Most Relaxing Song Ever Made, According to Researchers (You’ll Need It Today)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hunter S. Thompson’s Many Strange, Unpredictable Appearances on The David Letterman Show

in Literature, Television | July 24th, 2018

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An old quote from Joseph de Maistre gets thrown around a lot lately: Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite—“every nation gets the government it deserves.” As a historical claim it is impossible to verify. But the aphorism has an authoritative ring, the unmistakable sound of truism.

What if we put it another way? Every age gets the journalism it deserves. How does that sound?

I offer as exhibit one Hunter S. Thompson. Only a gonzo time like the late 60s and 70s could have produced the gonzo journalist, just as only such a time could have nurtured the journalistic writing of Tom Wolfe, Terry Southern, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, etc.

Do we find our current crop of journalists lacking in moral courage, righteous fury, death-defying risk-taking, gallows humor, literary reach, thoroughgoing independence of thought? The failing industry may be to blame, one might argue, and with good reason.

Or perhaps, with deference to de Maistre, we have not deserved better.

The New Journalism from which Thompson emerged dispensed with any pretense to “polite neutrality,” as novelist Hari Kunzru writes at the London Review of Books. And “no one took the voice of the journalist further away from ‘neutral background’ (or seemed less able to stop himself from doing it) than Hunter S. Thompson.” He exemplified Esquire editor Lee Eisenberg’s description of the sixties New Journalist as “a liberated army of one.”

Thompson’s “ability to articulate the undercurrent of ‘fear and loathing’ running through America”—not as a cynical spokesperson, but as somehow both an embodiment and a surprisingly lucid, moralistic observer—“ultimately led to his adoption as a kind of soothsaying holy fool for the counterculture.” In his later years, the legend turned his reputation for excess into a kind of schtick. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the culture changed but Hunter didn’t, for better or worse.

As Kunzru points out, “later in his career the ‘story’ as independent entity was to disappear almost entirely from his work, which became a fractured series of tales about Hunter (mad, bad and dangerous) and his behavior (inspired, erratic, paranoid).” While this shift (and his daily diet) may have dulled his journalistic edge, it made him an ideal late-night talk show guest, and such he remained, reliably, on the David Letterman show for many years.

In the clips here, you can see many of those appearances, first, at the top, from 1987, then below it, from 1988. Further up, see Letterman interview Thompson in an ‘87 episode inexplicably conducted in a Times Square hotel room. The show was “a strange beast,” writes Vulture’s Ramsey Ess. “For most of the episode it feels unruly, nerve-wracking, and a little dangerous,” all adjectives Thompson could have trademarked. Just above, Thompson meets Letterman to discuss his just-published The Rum Diary, the novel he worked on for forty years, “a hard-bitten story,” writes Kunzru, “of love, journalism and heavy drinking.”

All of Thompson’s appearances are unpredictable and slightly unnerving, and become more so in later years. “Thompson would become more dramatic and more twisted,” writes Jason Nawara. “Whatever led up to the moment Thompson stepped on stage was probably far more astonishing (or terrifying) than anything caught on camera. Why is his hand bandaged? Why is he so paranoid? What is happening? When have you slept last, Hunter?” If late night television has become safe and boring, full of pandering patter largely devoid of true surprises, perhaps it is because Hunter S. Thompson has passed on. And perhaps, as Nawara seems to suggest, every generation gets the late-night TV it deserves.

Hunter S. Thompson’s Decadent Daily Breakfast: The “Psychic Anchor” of His Frenetic Creative Life

How Hunter S. Thompson Gave Birth to Gonzo Journalism: Short Film Revisits Thompson’s Seminal 1970 Piece on the Kentucky Derby

Hunter S. Thompson Chillingly Predicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Coming Revenge of the Economically & Technologically “Obsolete” (1967)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Watch the Original TV Coverage of the Historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Recorded on July 20, 1969

in History, Science, Television | July 24th, 2018

During a recent dinner a few friends and I found ourselves reminiscing about formative moments in our collective youth. The conversation took a decidedly downbeat turn when a nationally televised moment we all remembered all too well came up: the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Like millions of other schoolkids at the time we had been glued to the live broadcast, and became witnesses to horror. “It was NASA’s darkest tragedy,” writes Elizabeth Howell at Space.com, an accident that “changed the space program forever.”

The contrast with our parents’ indelible memories of a televised space broadcast from seventeen years earlier could not be starker. On July 20, 1969, the nation witnessed what could easily be called NASA’s greatest triumph, the Apollo 11 moon landing, which not only really happened, but was broadcast live on CBS, with commentary by Walter Cronkite and former astronaut Wally Schirra and live audio from Mission Control in Houston and Buzz Aldrin himself, “whose job during the landing,” Jason Kottke writes, “was to keep an eye on the LM (lunar module)’s altitude and speed.”

We don’t hear much from Neil Armstrong—“he’s busy flying and furiously searching for a suitable landing site. But it’s Armstrong that says after they land, ‘Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.’” Kottke’s fascinating description of the events points out details that heighten the drama, such as the fact that Armstrong’s heartrate “peaked at 150 beats per minute at landing” (his resting heartrate was 60 bpm). At around 10 minutes to landing, the astronauts link to Mission Control cut out briefly, which must have been terrifying.

“Then there were the intermittent 1201 and 1202 program alarms, which neither the LM crew nor Houston had encountered in any of the training simulations.” These turn out “to be a simple case,” notes NASA, “of the computer trying to do too many things at once.” Given that the Lunar Module’s computer only had 4KB of memory, this is hardly a surprise. What is astonishing is that such a relatively primitive machine could handle the task at all.

The film viewers saw on their screens was not, of course, a live feed—CBS did not have cameras in space or on the moon—but rather an animation.

The CBS animation shows the fake LM landing on the fake Moon before the actual landing — when Buzz says “contact light” and then “engine stop”. The animation was based on the scheduled landing time and evidently couldn’t be adjusted. The scheduled time was overshot because of the crater and boulders situation mentioned above.

There were, however, cameras mounted on the Lunar Module, and that 16mm footage of the landing, which you can see above, was later released. And then there’s that moon walk (which really happened), which you can see below—blurry and indistinct but no less amazing.

Just a little over eight years “since the flights of Gagarin and Shepard,” NASA writes, “followed quickly by President Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon before the decade is out,” it happened. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Michael Collins landed on the moon. Armstrong and Aldrin walked around and collected samples for two hours, then returned safely to Earth. In a post-flight press conference, Armstrong called the successful mission “a beginning of a new age,” and it was, though his optimism would seem almost quaint when a couple decades later, the U.S. turned its sights on weaponizing space.

Read more about this extraordinary event at NASA and Kottke.

via Kottke

The Source Code for the Apollo 11 Moon Landing Mission Is Now Free on Github

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin & Michael Collins Go Through Customs and Sign Immigration Form After the First Moon Landing (1969)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

The Discipline of D.E.: Gus Van Sant Adapts a Story by William S. Burroughs (1978)

in Film, Literature | July 24th, 2018

Everyone who’s read Jack Kerouac knows what it means to go visit the sage Old Bill Lee. And even many who haven’t read Kerouac know who Old Bill Lee really was: innovative writer, Beat Generation elder statesman, and substance enthusiast William S. Burroughs. Gus Van Sant, who had imbibed from the counterculture early on, paid his own visit to Old Bill Lee a few years after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. On a recent episode of WTF, Van Sant tells Marc Maron how, having read a Burroughs essay called “The Discipline of DE” back in Providence, he looked Burroughs up in the New York City phone book, called him, and paid him a visit — not just because Kerouac’s characters did it, but because he wanted the rights to turn the story into a film.

The resulting nine-minute short puts images to Burroughs’ words. “DE is a way of doing,” says its narrator Ken Shapiro, who had directed the television-satrizing cult film The Groove Tube a few years earlier. “DE simply means doing whatever you do in the easiest most relaxed way you can manage, which is also the quickest and most efficient way, as you will find as you advance in DE.”

We then see various cinematically illustrated examples of DE in action, including “the art of ‘casting’ sheets and blankets so they fall just so,” picking up an object by dropping “cool possessive fingers onto it like a gentle old cop making a soft arrest,” and even gun fighting in the old west as practiced by Wyatt Earp, the only gun fighter who “ever really grasped the concept of DE.”

Van Sant completed The Discipline of DE, his sixth short film, in 1978. Just over a decade later he would cast Burroughs in a highly Old Bill Lee-like role in his second feature Drugstore Cowboy, bringing him back a few years later for Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Van Sant adapted both of those films from novels, as he’s done in much of his filmography. Traveling Europe with a film club after college, he told Maron, he got the chance to visit famed auteurs like Federico Fellini, Lina Wertmüller, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. It was Pasolini to whom he explained his own ambition in filmmaking: “to translate literature into film.” Paolini’s less-than-encouraging response: “Why would you do that? Why would you bother?” Yet Van Sant’s drive to make cinema “more malleable, like the novel,” has served him well ever since, as — if he adheres to it — has the discipline of DE.

William S. Burroughs’ “The Thanksgiving Prayer,” Shot by Gus Van Sant

William S. Burrough’s Avant-Garde Movie ‘The Cut Ups’ (1966)

William S. Burroughs’ Home Movies, Featuring Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Steve Buscemi & Cats

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Is Stoicism? A Short Introduction to the Ancient Philosophy That Can Help You Cope with Our Hard Modern Times

in Life, Philosophy | July 23rd, 2018

The word “stoic” (from the Greek stoa) has come to mean a few things in popular parlance, most of them related directly to the ancient Greek, then Roman, philosophy from which the term derives. Stoic people seem unmovable. They stay cool in a crisis and “keep calm and carry on” when others lose their heads. For several, perhaps obvious, reasons, these qualities of “calm, resilience, and emotional stability” are particularly needed in a time like ours, says Alain de Botton in his School of Life video above.

But how do we acquire these qualities, according to the Stoics? And what philosophers should we consult to learn about them? One of the most prolific of Stoic philosophers, the Roman writer and statesman Seneca, advised a typical course of action. In a letter to his friend Lucilius, who feared a potentially career-ending lawsuit, Seneca counseled that rather than resting in hopes of a happy outcome, his friend should assume that the worst will come to pass, and that, no matter what, he can survive it.

The goal is not to make Debbie Downers of us all, but to convince us that we are stronger than we think—that even our worst fears needn’t mean the end of the world. Seneca’s stoicism is a thoroughgoing realism that asks us to account for the entire range of possible outcomes—even the absolute worst we can imagine—rather than only those things we want or have previously experienced. In this way, we will not be caught off-guard when bad things come to pass, because we have already made a certain peace with them.

Rather than a pessimistic philosophy, Seneca’s thought seems entirely practical, a means of piercing our pleasant illusions and comfortable bubbles of self-regard, and considering ourselves just as subject to misfortune as anyone else in the world, and just as capable of enduring it as well.

To partake of Seneca’s wisdom yourself, consider reading this online three-volume collection of his letters, The Tao of Seneca. And for a longer list of Stoic thinkers, ancient and modern, see this post from Ryan Holiday of the Daily Stoic, a blog that offers useful Stoic advice for contemporary people.

An Animated Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Philosophical Recipe for Getting Over the Sources of Regret, Disappointment and Suffering in Our Lives

An Animated Introduction to Epicurus and His Answer to the Ancient Question: What Makes Us Happy?

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Rare Photos of Frida Kahlo, Age 13–23

in Art, History, Photography | July 23rd, 2018

“Before they were famous” photos are a clickbait staple, especially if they reveal a heretofore unseen side of someone whose image is tightly controlled:

The smoldering activist-actress-director as a gawky, open-faced sophomore, her hair moussed to the very limits of her modeling school test shots?

The rising political star, pimple-faced and center-parted, posing with the other three members of his high school’s Dungeons and Dragons Club?

What about evergreen art star Frida Kahlo?

Though her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, was the one who urged her to adopt the traditional Tehuana dress of their native Mexico as a uniform of sorts, Frida engineered her image by placing herself center stage in dozens of allegorical, intimate self-portraits.

Much of her work alludes to the horrific accident she suffered at 18, and the tortuous treatments and surgeries she underwent as a result for the rest of her life.

It shaped the way she saw herself, and, in turn, the way we see her. Her enduring appeal is such that even those who aren’t overly familiar with her work feel they have a pretty good handle on her, thanks to her ubiquity on totebags, apparel, and various gift related items—even Frida Kahlo action figures and paper dolls.

We know this lady, right?

What a pleasure to get to know her better. A collection of photos that has recently come to light introduces us to a younger, more candid Frida—both before and after the accident, when she returned to her studies at National Preparatory School.

Taken together with the portraits made by her photographer father, they show early evidence of the forceful personality that would dominate and define her public image, Mary Jane-style pumps with socks, a middy blouse, and a variety of blunt bobs aside.

Some of the later photos in this batch speak to her increasing interest in distinguishing herself from her female peers. Her experiments in cross dressing ensured she would stand out in every group photo, a dashing figure in suit, tie, and slicked back hair.

Though this period of her life is less a matter of public record, it gets its due in the 2017 graphic novel Frida: The Story of Her Life by Vanna Vinci. Some of the others in these photos, including her sisters and her first boyfriend, Alejandro Gómez Arias, appear as characters, as does Death in the form of printmaker José Guadalupe Posada’s La Calavera Catrina—perhaps the only image formidable enough to hold its own against the fabulous Frida.

Frida Kahlo The Story of Her Life p. 22–23

1933 Article on Frida Kahlo: “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art”

The Frida Kahlo Action Figure

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Kraftwerk Perform a Real-Time Duet with a German Astronaut Living on the International Space Station

in Music, Technology | July 23rd, 2018

Last Friday, Alexander Gerst, an astronaut living aboard the International Space Station, welcomed Kraftwerk and 7500 attendees to the Jazz Open Festival in Stuttgart. There, writes the European Space Agency, “Kraftwerk founding member Ralf Hütter and Alexander played a special duet version of the track Spacelab, for which Alexander had a tablet computer configured with virtual synthesizers on board.” You can watch the far-out scene play out above.

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via Consequence of Sound

Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Performed by German First Graders in Adorable Cardboard Robot Outfits

Kraftwerk’s First Concert: The Beginning of the Endlessly Influential Band (1970)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Jean Cocteau’s Short Film About the Elegant House He Painted/“Tattooed” on the French Riviera (1952)

What Is ASMR? Watch the The New Yorker’s Introduction to the Whispering & Crinkling Sounds That Help Calm Anxiety and Induce Euphoria

Hunter S. Thompson’s Many Strange, Unpredictable Appearances on The David Letterman Show

Watch the Original TV Coverage of the Historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Recorded on July 20, 1969

The Discipline of D.E.: Gus Van Sant Adapts a Story by William S. Burroughs (1978)

What Is Stoicism? A Short Introduction to the Ancient Philosophy That Can Help You Cope with Our Hard Modern Times

Rare Photos of Frida Kahlo, Age 13–23

Watch Kraftwerk Perform a Real-Time Duet with a German Astronaut Living on the International Space Station

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