The History of the Guitar & Guitar Legends: From 1929 to 1979

in Music | September 19th, 2018

In the age of the Classical Education, students pored over and memorized the works of “authorities,” exemplars of grammar, rhetoric, logic, etc. Constellations in the night sky of ignorance, so to speak, these writers and thinkers showed the way to knowledge through their excellence. The method may have fallen out of favor in modern pedagogy, but it survives in popular culture, and in the videos here, producer and musician Rick Beato employs it as a way of teaching the history of guitar.

In the episode above, he names guitar players from 1929–1969 that “every serious guitarist should know.” Below, he does the same for the decade of the seventies. These guitarists exemplify Classical, Blues, Jazz, Country and Rock & Roll guitar, according to Beato, and yes, he knows he probably left off your favorite players, so go ahead and mention them in the comments.

Beato includes a brief film or audio clip of each player, with the unspoken assumption that serious students will seek out more of their recorded music and become more familiar with what made them unique. In the list below, you can see the 48 names he lists in his first video.

1. Andres Segovia
2. Julian Bream
3. Charley Patton
4. Robert Johnson
5. Lightnin Hopkins
6. Blind Lemon Jefferson
7. Leadbelly 8. Elmore James
9. Muddy Waters
10. Freddie King
11. Albert King
12. B.B. King
13. Buddy Guy
14. Otis Rush
15. Django Reinhardt
16. Charlie Christian
17. Wes Montgomery
18. Joe Pass
19. George Benson
20. Barney Kessel
21. Herb Ellis
22. George Van Eps
23. Kenny Burrell
24. Jim Hall
25. Grant Green
26. Tal Farlow
27. Antonio Carlos Jobim
28. Les Paul and Mary Ford
29. Chuck Berry
30. Hank Marvin
31. Dick Dale
32. George Harrison
33. Keith Richards
34. Steve Cropper
35. Chet Atkins
36. Jerry Reed
37. Glen Campbell
38. Jimi Hendrix
39. Eric Clapton
40. Jimmy Page
41. Jeff Beck
42. Peter Green
43. Mike Bloomfield
44. Johnny Winter
45. Carlos Santana
46. Jerry Garcia
47. Ritchie Blackmore
48. Frank Zappa

The period of 1970–1979 saw “some of the most significant developments for the role of the guitar,” brought about by the British Invasion, the influence of the blues, and the “sonic and technological advances of the guitar.” The period began with two great losses in the guitar world: jazz great Wes Montgomery in 1968 and Jimi Hendrix in 1970. But many more greats soon came to prominence, such as classical guitarists Christopher Parkening and John Williams and jazz adventurers Pat Metheny and Joe Pass.

Beato namechecks several guitarists well-known to most of the listening public and many more you may never have heard before. His rapid introduction will likely inspire guitarists to learn what they can from these authorities of the instrument, broadening both their historical knowledge and their technique. He promises more videos like this in the future, each covering a new decade. Who will Beato choose as most influential players of the eighties, nineties, and oughties? Subscribe to his channel to find out.

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

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Get a First Listen to David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti’s Long-Lost Album, Thought Gang

in Film, Music, Television | September 19th, 2018

All of David Lynch’s movies, television shows, music videos, and commercials — and also his paintings, photographs, and comic strips — express a consistent, and consistently Lynchian, vision. But that vision depends on more than just the visual: the sonic has also played a vital part in its development at least since the nightmarishly intricate sound design of Lynch’s 1977 debut feature Eraserhead. And just imagine how much impact later Lynch projects like Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, The Straight Story, and Mulholland Drive would have lost without the rich and often haunting scores of Angelo Badalamenti, a composer with whom Lynch has worked at seemingly every opportunity.

Lynch made his own official debut as a recording artist seven years ago with Crazy Clown Time, and this November he and Badalamenti will release their first collaborative album Thought Gang. According to its Bandcamp page, this “esoteric jazz side project of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti evolved from the seeds of Twin Peaks’ trademark slow cool jazz and blossomed into more experimental pastures: horizonless vistas of acid-soaked freejazz, laced with spoken word narratives and sprawling noisescapes.” If that sounds good to you, you can get a first taste of the album from the track “Woodcutters From Fiery Ships” above.

The Thought Gang sessions happened 25 years ago, between the end of Twin Peaks’ second season and the production of the Twin Peaks movie Fire Walk with Me. Out of those sessions came a quantity of music that Lynch describes as “sort of like jet-fueled jazz in a weird way… but it’s all based on stories.” Two of those tracks, “A Real Indication” and “The Black Dog Runs at Night,” appeared on the soundtrack of the movie, and two others, “Frank 2000” and “Summer Night Noise,” (as well as the instrumental mix of another, “Logic and Common Sense”) feature in Twin Peaks: The Return, which aired on Showtime last year. More connections to Lynch’s other work surface in “Woodcutters From Fiery Ships,” beginning with its title, which adorned a Lynch-themed, seemingly never-developed CD-ROM game twenty years ago.

Much of the Lynchian imagery that fills the song — talk-sung by Badalamenti himself, who, says the Bandcamp page, summoned “such a violent laughter-fueled excitement from Lynch that he literally induced a hernia” — may also sound familiar. A character called Pete “saw the girl next door take off her clothes last night and walk through her house nude.” At a diner, “he heard a man say that the doctors had cut him down his neck and into his chest.” A “grey man with big ears lit a big cigar” and “smoke drifted over Pete’s apple pie.” Badalamenti at one point declares that “things aren’t making sense. For instance, why is that boy bleeding from the mouth?” True fans will recognize that line as the title of one of Lynch’s paintings. And so the grand Lynchian project continues, somehow getting both weirder and more coherent all the time.

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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 ) |

Download Classic Japanese Wave and Ripple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japanese Artists from 1903

in Art, Books, Design, History | September 18th, 2018

Traditional Japanese art may please so many of us, even those of us with little interest in Japan itself, because of the way it inhabits the realm between representation and abstraction. But then, it doesn’t just inhabit that realm: it has settled those borderlands, made them its own, for much longer than most cultures have been doing anything at all. The space between art, strictly defined, and what we now call design has also seen few achievements quite so impressive as those made in Japan, going all the way back to the rope markings on the clay vessels used by the islands’ Jōmon people in the 11th century BC.

Those ancient rope-on-clay markings can easily look like predecessors of the “wave patterns” still seen in Japanese art and design today. Since time almost immemorial they have appeared on “swords (both blades and handles) and associated paraphernalia (known as ‘sword furniture’), as well as lacquerware, Netsuke, religious objects, and a host of other items.”

So says the Public Domain Review, which has featured a series of three books full of elegant wave and ripple designs originally published in 1903 and now available to download free at the Internet Archive (volume one, volume two, volume three).

Called Hamonshū, the books were produced by the artist Mori Yuzan, “about whom not a lot is known,” adds the Public Domain review, “apart from that he hailed from Kyoto, worked in the Nihonga style” — or the “Japanese painting” style of Japanese painting, which emerged during the Meiji period, a time of rapid Westernization in Japan.

He “died in 1917. The works would have acted as a kind of go-to guide for Japanese craftsmen looking to adorn their wares with wave and ripple patterns.” Though they do contain text, they require no knowledge of the Japanese language to appreciate the many illustrations they present.

Taken together, Mori’s books offer a complete spectrum from traditional Japanese-style representation — especially of land, water, mountains, sky, and other natural elements — to a taste of the infinite variety of abstract patterns that result. Such imagery remains prevalent in Japan more than a century after the publication of Hamonshū, as any visitor to Japan today will see.

But now that the Internet Archive has made the books freely available online (volume one, volume two, volume three), they’ll surely inspire work not just between representation and abstraction as well as between art and design, but between Japanese aesthetics and those of every other culture in the world as well.

via Public Domain Review

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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.

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R. Crumb Illustrates Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea: Existentialism Meets Underground Comics

in Art, Literature, Philosophy | September 18th, 2018

Sartre’s novel Nausea introduced his philosophical view as a form of illness to a WWII readership. “Nausea is existence revealing itself—and experience is not pleasant to see,” he wrote in his own summary of his first book, published in 1938. The novel’s dramatization of Historian Roquentin’ s crisis presents a case of existential sickness as mostly involuntary.

Though published before his many Marxist books and essays, Nausea connects the malaise to a certain class experience. “I have no troubles,” thinks Roquentin in Robert Crumb’s short adaptation of the book above, “I have money like a capitalist, no boss, no wife, no children; I exist, that’s all…. And that trouble is so vague, so metaphysical that I am ashamed of it.” Nausea, in one sense, is bourgeoise alienation, while Roquentin’s conversation partner, the Self-Taught Man, confesses a naïve humanist idealism.

The characters alone, some critics suggest, imbue the book with a subtle parody. As he listens to the Self-Taught Man’s troubles and ruminates on his own, Crumb’s Roquentin grows more Sartre-like. Significantly, the Self-Taught Man takes on a Crumb-like demeanor and aspect. Their dialogue moves briskly, the scene resembling My Dinner with Andre with less banter and more neurosis. Sartre’s tone lends itself well to Crumb’s obsessive, tightly-composed panels.

Crumb’s literary interpretations have gravitated toward other anxious writers like Charles Bukowski and Franz Kafka, as well as the murder and incest of the book of Genesis. The underground comics legend is right at home with Sartrean dread and despair. Crumb became famous for Fritz the Cat, an animated film version of his raunchy hipster, what many called his grossly sexist and racist sex fantasies, and the drawing and slogan “Keep on Truckin’.” He was a figure of 60s and 70s counterculture, but that’s never where he belonged.

Crumb was a Sartrean protagonist , even when he “often portrayed himself in his work as naked… and priapic.” In an an interview with Crumb The Guardian describes him:

his words are depressive and lugubrious, and yet he appears mellow, laughing easily through his existential nausea. The most terrible stories amuse him as much as they pain him. He tells me how a best friend killed himself by swallowing four bottles of paper correction fluid, and he chortles. He talks of his own despair, and giggles. He admits that he could never have imagined a life quite so fulfilled—with Aline, and his beloved daughter Sophie, also a cartoonist, and success and money—and says he’s still miserable as hell, and laughs.

He is a little Roquentin, a little bit Sartre, a little bit Self-Taught man, applying to his reading of literature and philosophy an LSD-assisted, sex-positive, and unavoidably controversial and depressive sensibility. See the full Crumb-illustrated Nausea here.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Paul McCartney Breaks Down His Most Famous Songs and Answers Most-Asked Fan Questions in Two New Videos

in Music | September 18th, 2018

Paul McCartney has played it safe for decades, relying on the brilliance of his songwriting and musicianship, which no one ever doubts and so he never has to prove. His songs usually fall into a formula familiar from Beatles’ days: “silly love songs,” writes Stephen Earlewine at Pitchfork, “mini-suites… polite political protests, and old-fashioned rockers.” But while the Beatles had each other, the experiments of George Martin, LSD, transcendental meditation, and a moment of perfect cultural kismet to twist and warp their music into all sorts of weird shapes, McCartney’s solo releases tend to stick to his established strengths, sometimes to the detriment of what can happen when he moves out of his comfort zone to get deeper and more vulnerable.

Yet as nearly every critic has so far noted of his newest album, Egypt Station—which he heavily promoted, for example, with an appearance on Carpool Karaoke and a “secret” show at Grand Central Station—McCartney lets listeners in on some surprising confessional darkness. The Nick Drake-like lyrics of opener “I Don’t Know” show him earnestly confronting aging, mortality, and depression, without any of the usual sunniness or comedic turns of phrase: “I got crows at my window/Dogs at my door/I don’t think I can take anymore.” The candid admission, Erlewine writes, “would be startling in any context, but what stings most is the tacit acknowledgment that 76-year-old McCartney realizes he’s nearing the end of his long, winding road.”

In interviews, like his latest with Rolling Stone, however, McCartney sounds as upbeat as ever. He describes sitting in Apple meetings after the breakup of the Beatles as “like seeing the death of your favorite pet,” but he also enthuses about his patched-up relationship with Yoko (“Now it’s like we’re mates”), love for his band—who have now been playing together longer than both the Beatles and Wings—and his pride in his musical legacy (“It’s a damn good job I did”). He sounds just as pleased to be onstage in his mid-70s as he was in his 20s—the genuine love of performing and engaging with fans hasn’t dulled one bit with age, just as his ability to write and sell hit records remains solid.

As for his time-tested formula, Erlewine comments, it only “makes the moments where Paul attempts something slightly new seem all the more apparent.” One new thing he’s gamely tried in recent years is making online videos for fans. A few years back, he dropped a few lessons showing how to play the bass and guitar parts on “Ever Present Past” from 2007’s Memory Almost Full. This year, McCartney’s fan service includes the two videos here. First at the top, he spends almost a half an hour discussing the best-known songs in his 60-year-career for GQ: “I Lost My Little Girl,” “Yesterday,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “And I Love Her,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “A Day in the Life,” “Hey Jude,” “Helter Skelter,” “Blackbird,” “Let It Be,” “Hi Hi Hi,” “Here Today,” “Jet,” and Egypt Station’s “I Don’t Know.”

Above, McCartney accept’s Wired’s “autocomplete challenge,” answering the internet’s most searched questions about himself, such as “Why is Paul McCartney’s nickname ‘Macca’?” and “Why did Paul McCartney write ‘Let it Be’?” (Answers: “Cause I’m from Liverpool, and they abbreviate everything in Liverpool” and he was “a bit stressed out”—and a little high—and his mother came to him in a dream with the advice: “just let it be.”) Is there always more learn about Paul McCartney? Yes, apparently there is. But even when he repeats himself, he’s still great fun to watch.

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

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This Man Flew to Japan to Sing ABBA’s “Mamma Mia” in a Big Cold River

in Random | September 18th, 2018

Austin Weber traveled to Kyoto and sang ABBA’s “Mamma Mia” in a big cold river. What made the resulting video so strangely compelling? Maybe, as one YouTube commenter noted, it’s that the “video has about 100 pixels but every one is used to their full potential.” Or maybe, as another YouTuber said, “it’s the synthy ABBA, the goofy zooms and editing, or the bittersweet premise combined with the song.” Or maybe it’s that the video simply “brings us back to the mid 2000’s,” when our YouTube culture all got started. It’s hard to know. But maybe we shouldn’t overthink it and just enjoy.

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Umberto Eco Explains Why We Make Lists

in History, Literature | September 17th, 2018

Creative Commons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the National Archives in Holland

We hate lists, which have told us what to do since at least the days Leonardo da Vinci, and which now, as “listicles,” constitute one of the lowest strata of internet content. But we also love lists: a great many of us click on those listicles, after all, and one might argue that the list, as a form, represents the beginning of written texts. “The list is the origin of culture,” said Umberto Eco in a 2009 Der Spiegel interview about the exhibition on the history of the list he curated at the Louvre. “It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often.”

How, as mere human beings, do we impose order when we gaze up into infinity, down into the abyss — pick your metaphor of the sublimely, incomprehensibly vast? We do it, Eco thought, “through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.” The breadth as well as depth of the knowledge he accumulated throughout his 84 years — which itself could seem sublimely and incomprehensibly vast, as anyone who has read one of his list-filled novels knows — placed him well to explain the origins, functions, and importance of the list. In the Spiegel interview he names Don Giovanni’s 2,063 lovers, the contents of Leopold Bloom’s drawers, and the many ships and generals specified in the Iliad as just a few of the classic lists and enumerations of Western culture.

Eco’s research into and/or obsession with lists produced not just the exhibition at the Louvre but also a book, The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay. Did it also lead him to any other answers about why, whether in the Middle Ages with its “very clear image of the universe,” the Renaissance and Baroque eras with their “worldview based on astronomy,” the “postmodern age” in which we live today, or any other time, “the list has prevailed over and over again?” Ultimately, we make lists whenever we experience a “deficiency of language,” such as when lovers describe one another (“Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone”) or when we remember the “very discouraging, humiliating limit” of death. Making lists of things that seem infinite is “a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”

Having died in 2016 himself, Eco left behind an immense personal library (his walkthrough of which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture). “It might actually be 50,000 books,” he said to the Spiegel interviewer, but he refused to put them on a list and find out for sure: “When my secretary wanted to catalogue them, I asked her not to. My interests change constantly, and so does my library.” If he were to try to list his interests, he would have had to keep scrapping the list and drawing up a new one; more than providing abundant material for his writing, this constant and lifelong circulation of fascinations (he mentioned first loving Chopin at 16, and again in his seventies) confirmed his engagement with the infinite world around him: “If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot.”

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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 ( 1 ) |

A Massive, Knitted Tapestry of the Galaxy: Software Engineer Hacks a Knitting Machine & Creates a Star Map Featuring 88 Constellations

in Astronomy | September 17th, 2018

The next time some non-crafty type disparages your hobby as a frumpy pursuit, show them software engineer Sarah Spencer’s “Stargazing.”

The 9’x 15’ knitted tapestry is an accurate equatorial star map featuring all 88 constellations as viewed by the naked eye, including the Milky Way and the Southern Cross, the best known star group in Spencer’s native Australia.

The project ate up 33 pounds of Australian wool in three shades, including the same ultramarine blue sported by a number of accomplished Australian women whose portraits are on display as part of the 2018 Archibald Prize.

While “Stargazing” is machine knit, its creation took longer than most hand-knitted projects.

What started as a lark, hacking and programming a 40-year-old, secondhand Empisal knitting machine, grew into something much larger when Spencer developed a computer algorithm that allowed one tri-colored knit stitch per pixel.

Years later, she was ready to start knitting her star map, a reflection of her interest in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

“Stargazing” is actually comprised of seven panels, each the result of dusk-to-dawn labor on the part of the hacked machine. Stitching them together required many more human hours.

The piece was unveiled at the UK’s tech-and-arts festival, Electromagnetic Field, on August 31. Spencer had calibrated the placement of the tapestry’s planets to correspond with their celestial counterparts’ locations that night.

For now, the tapestry is one-of-a-kind, but given its industrial origins, it’s not hard to foresee a future in which couples can cuddle under astronomically correct afghans, while gazing up at the stars.

via Atlas Obscura

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Monday, September 24 for another monthly installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The History of the Guitar & Guitar Legends: From 1929 to 1979

Get a First Listen to David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti’s Long-Lost Album, Thought Gang

Download Classic Japanese Wave and Ripple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japanese Artists from 1903

R. Crumb Illustrates Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea: Existentialism Meets Underground Comics

Paul McCartney Breaks Down His Most Famous Songs and Answers Most-Asked Fan Questions in Two New Videos

This Man Flew to Japan to Sing ABBA’s “Mamma Mia” in a Big Cold River

Umberto Eco Explains Why We Make Lists

A Massive, Knitted Tapestry of the Galaxy: Software Engineer Hacks a Knitting Machine & Creates a Star Map Featuring 88 Constellations

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