A Beautiful Short Documentary Takes You Inside New York City’s Last Great Chess Store

in Games, Life, Philosophy, Travel | December 14th, 2018

Chess Forum in Green­wich Vil­lage is, like Gramer­cy Type­writer and the Upper East Side’s Ten­der But­tons, the sort of shop New York­ers feel pro­tec­tive of, even if they’ve nev­er actu­al­ly crossed the thresh­old.

“How can it still exist?” is a ques­tion left unan­swered by “King of the Night,” Lone­ly Leap’s love­ly short pro­file of Chess Forum’s own­er, Imad Khachan, above, but no mat­ter. We’re just glad it does.

The store, locat­ed a block and a half south of Wash­ing­ton Square, looks old­er than it is. Khachan, hung out his shin­gle in 1995, after five years as an employ­ee of the now-defunct Vil­lage Chess Shop, a rift that riled the New York chess com­mu­ni­ty.

Now, things are much more placid, though the film incor­rect­ly sug­gests that Chess Forum is the only refuge where chess lov­ing New York­ers can avail them­selves of an impromp­tu game, take lessons, and buy sets. (There are also shops in Brook­lyn, Harlem, and the Upper East Side.) That said, Chess Forum might not be wrong to call itself “New York’s last great chess store.” It may well be the best of the last.

The nar­row shop’s inte­ri­or trig­gers nos­tal­gia with­out seem­ing cal­cu­la­tion, an organ­ic reminder of the Village’s Bohemi­an past, when beret-clad folkies, artists, and stu­dents wiled away hours at bat­tered wood­en tables in its many cheap cafes and bars. (Two blocks away, sole sur­vivor Caf­fé Reggio’s ambi­ence is intact, but the prices have kept pace with the neigh­bor­hood, and the major­i­ty of its clien­tele are clutch­ing guide­books or the dig­i­tal equiv­a­lent there­of.)

Khachan, born in Lebanon to Pales­tin­ian refugees, gives a warm wel­come to tourists and locals alike, espe­cial­ly those who might make for an uneasy fit at tonier neigh­bor­hood estab­lish­ments.

In an inter­view with the Green­wich Vil­lage Soci­ety for His­toric Preser­va­tion, he recalled a “well-dressed and high­ly edu­cat­ed doc­tor who would come in wear­ing his Har­vard logo sweater, and lose repeat­ed­ly to a home­less man who was a reg­u­lar at Chess Forum and a chess mas­ter.”

The game also pro­vides com­mon ground for strangers who share no com­mon tongue. In Jonathan Lord’s rougher New York City chess-themed doc, Pass­port Play, Khachan points out how dia­grams in chess books speak vol­umes to expe­ri­enced play­ers, regard­less of the lan­guage in which the book is writ­ten.

The store’s mot­tos also bear wit­ness to the val­ue its own­er places on face-to-face human inter­ac­tion:

Cool in the sum­mer, warm in the win­ter and fuzzy all year long.

Chess Forum: An expe­ri­ence not a trans­ac­tion

Smart peo­ple not smart phones.  (You can play a game of chess on your phone, Khachan admits, but don’t fool your­self into think­ing that it’s giv­ing you a full chess expe­ri­ence.)

An hour of play costs about the same as a small lat­te in a cof­fee­house chain (whose preva­lence Khachan refers to as the Bostoniza­tion of NYC.) Senior cit­i­zens and chil­dren, both revered groups at Chess Forum, get an even bet­ter deal—from $1/hour to free.

Although the store’s offi­cial clos­ing time is mid­night, Khachan, sin­gle and child­less, is always will­ing to oblige play­ers who would stay lat­er. His soli­tary mus­ings on the neighborhood’s wee hours trans­for­ma­tion sup­ply the film’s title and med­i­ta­tive vibe, while remind­ing us that this gen­tle New York char­ac­ter was orig­i­nal­ly drawn to the city by the specter of a PhD in lit­er­a­ture at near­by NYU.

Read­ers who would like to con­tribute to the health of this inde­pen­dent­ly owned New York City estab­lish­ment from afar can do so by pur­chas­ing a chess or backgam­mon set online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When John Cage & Mar­cel Duchamp Played Chess on a Chess­board That Turned Chess Moves Into Elec­tron­ic Music (1968)

Chess Grand­mas­ter Gar­ry Kas­parov Relives His Four Most Mem­o­rable Games

Man Ray Designs a Supreme­ly Ele­gant, Geo­met­ric Chess Set in 1920–and It Now Gets Re-Issued

A Human Chess Match Gets Played in Leningrad, 1924

A Free 700-Page Chess Man­u­al Explains 1,000 Chess Tac­tics in Plain Eng­lish

Clay­ma­tion Film Recre­ates His­toric Chess Match Immor­tal­ized in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Play Chess Against the Ghost of Mar­cel Duchamp: A Free Online Chess Game

Chess Grand­mas­ter Mau­rice Ash­ley Plays Unsus­pect­ing Trash Talk­er in Wash­ing­ton Square Park

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City through Decem­ber 20th in the 10th anniver­sary pro­duc­tion of Greg Kotis’ apoc­a­lyp­tic hol­i­day tale, The Truth About San­ta. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How the Astonishing Sushi Scene in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs Was Animated: A Time-Lapse of the Month-Long Shoot

in Animation, Film, Food & Drink | December 14th, 2018

Since the moviego­ing pub­lic first start­ed hear­ing it twen­ty years ago, Wes Ander­son­’s name has been a byword for cin­e­mat­ic metic­u­lous­ness. The asso­ci­a­tion has only grown stronger with each film he’s made, as the live-action ones have fea­tured increas­ing­ly com­plex ships, trains, and grand hotels — to say noth­ing of the cos­tumes worn and accou­trements pos­sessed by the char­ac­ters who inhab­it them — and the stop-motion ani­mat­ed ones have demand­ed a super­hu­man atten­tion to detail by their very nature. It made per­fect sense when it was revealed that Isle of Dogs, Ander­son­’s sec­ond ani­mat­ed pic­ture, would take place in Japan: not only because of Japan­ese film, which opens up a vast field of new cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ences to make, but also because of tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese cul­ture, whose metic­u­lous­ness match­es, indeed exceeds, Ander­son­’s own.

Most of us first expe­ri­ence that tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese metic­u­lous­ness through food. And so most of us will rec­og­nize the form of the ben­to, or meal in a box, pre­pared step-by-step before our eyes in Isle of Dogs, though we may nev­er before have wit­nessed the actu­al process of carv­ing up the wrig­gling, scur­ry­ing sea crea­tures that fill it.

One view­ing of this 45-sec­ond shot is enough to sug­gest how much work must have gone into it, but this time-lapse of its 32-day-long shoot (with­in a longer sev­en-month process to make the entire sequence) reveals the extent of the labor involved. In it you can see ani­ma­tors Andy Bid­dle (who’d pre­vi­ous­ly worked on Ander­son­’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, and before that his ani­mat­ed The Fan­tas­tic Mr. Fox) and Tony Far­quhar-Smith painstak­ing­ly posi­tion­ing and repo­si­tion­ing each and every one of the ben­to’s ingre­di­ents — all of which had to be spe­cial­ly made to look right even when chopped up and sliced open — as well as the dis­em­bod­ied hands of the sushi mas­ter prepar­ing them.

Shoot­ing stop-motion ani­ma­tion takes a huge amount of time, and so does mak­ing sushi, as any­one who has tried to do either at home knows. Per­form­ing the for­mer to Ander­son­ian stan­dards and the lat­ter to Japan­ese stan­dards hard­ly makes the tasks any eas­i­er. But just as a well craft­ed ben­to pro­vides an enjoy­able and uni­fied aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence, one that would­n’t dare to remind the con­sumer of how much time and effort went into it, a movie like Isle of Dogs pro­vides thrills and laughs to its view­ers who only lat­er con­sid­er what it must have tak­en to bring such an elab­o­rate vision to life on screen. If you want to hear more about the demands it made on its ani­ma­tors, have a look at the Vari­ety video above, in which Andy Gent, head of Isle of Dogs’ pup­pet depart­ment, explains the process and its con­se­quences. “It took three ani­ma­tors, because it broke quite a few peo­ple to get it through the shot,” he says. “Sev­en months lat­er, we end up with one minute of ani­ma­tion.” But that minute would do even the most exact­ing sushi mas­ter proud.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the New Trail­er for Wes Anderson’s Stop Motion Film, Isle of Dogs, Inspired by Aki­ra Kuro­sawa

The Geo­met­ric Beau­ty of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Wes Anderson’s Films

Wes Ander­son & Yasu­jiro Ozu: New Video Essay Reveals the Unex­pect­ed Par­al­lels Between Two Great Film­mak­ers

The His­to­ry of Stop-Motion Films: 39 Films, Span­ning 116 Years, Revis­it­ed in a 3‑Minute Video

How to Make Sushi: Free Video Lessons from a Mas­ter Sushi Chef

The Right and Wrong Way to Eat Sushi: A Primer

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

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Carlos Santana & Tom Morello Launch Online Courses on How to Play the Guitar

in Music, Online Courses | December 14th, 2018

Thanks to two new cours­es from Mas­ter Class, you can now learn to play gui­tar from Car­los San­tana and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morel­lo. Launched yes­ter­day, Santana’s Mas­ter Class on the Art and Soul of Gui­tar “breaks down his cre­ative process and teach­es you his spir­i­tu­al take on mak­ing music,” cov­er­ing:

  • How to pull from mul­ti­ple musi­cal styles and influ­ences.
  • How to break down music you hear and use it to improve how you play.
  • Ideas for exer­cis­es in the styles of great blues musi­cians.
  • How he mar­ries har­monies with rhyth­mic accents.
  • His approach to writ­ing a melody for gui­tar.
  • How he cre­ates dia­logue between gui­tar parts when he writes songs.
  • Guid­ance for lead­ing a band and build­ing trust with band mem­bers.

For his part, Tom Morel­lo’s course on the elec­tric gui­tar will teach you, in 26 video lessons, the riffs, rhythms, and solos that launched his career. The course cov­ers every­thing from begin­ner music the­o­ry, to learn­ing how to impro­vise, solo and play with speed, to devel­op­ing an appre­ci­a­tion for lyrics and melody. Each course costs $90. For $180, you can get an annu­al pass to the 45 cours­es in Mas­ter­class’ course cat­a­logue.

FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gui­tar Sto­ries: Mark Knopfler on the Six Gui­tars That Shaped His Career

David Gilmour Talks About the Mys­ter­ies of His Famous Gui­tar Tone

A Brief His­to­ry of Gui­tar Dis­tor­tion: From Ear­ly Exper­i­ments to Hap­py Acci­dents to Clas­sic Effects Ped­als

Two Gui­tar Effects That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Rock: The Inven­tion of the Wah-Wah & Fuzz Ped­als

The Ency­clo­pe­dia Of Alter­nate Gui­tar Tun­ings

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The Evolution of The Great Wave off Kanagawa: See Four Versions That Hokusai Painted Over Nearly 40 Years

in Art, History | December 13th, 2018

Has any Japan­ese wood­block print — or for that mat­ter, any piece of Japan­ese art — endured as well across place and time as The Great Wave off Kana­gawa? Even those of us who have nev­er known its name, let alone those of us unsure of who made it and when, can bring it to mind it with some clar­i­ty, as sure a sign as any (along with the numer­ous par­o­dies) that it taps into some­thing deep with­in all of us. But though the artist behind it, 18th- and 19th-cen­tu­ry ukiyo‑e painter Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai, was undoubt­ed­ly a mas­ter of his tra­di­tion, even he did­n’t con­jure up The Great Wave off Kana­gawa in the form we know it on the first try.

In fact, he’d been pro­duc­ing dif­fer­ent ver­sions of it for near­ly forty years. On Twit­ter Tarin tkasasa­gi recent­ly post­ed four ver­sions of the Great Wave that Hoku­sai paint­ed over that peri­od. Here you see them arranged from top to bot­tom: the first from 1792, when he was 33; the sec­ond from 1803, when he was 44; the third from 1805, when he was 46; and the famous fourth from 1831, when he was 72.

Each time, Hoku­sai de-empha­sizes the human pres­ence and empha­sizes the nat­ur­al ele­ments, bring­ing out dra­ma from the water itself rather than from the peo­ple who regard or nav­i­gate it. In each ver­sion, too, the col­ors grow bold­er and the lines stronger.

The skill lev­el of a work­ing artist — espe­cial­ly an artist work­ing as hard as Hoku­sai — almost inevitably increas­es over time, and that must have some­thing to do with these changes, though it also looks like the process of an artis­tic per­son­al­i­ty set­tling into its sub­ject mat­ter. “From the time I was six, I was in the habit of sketch­ing things I saw around me,” says Hoku­sai him­self in a wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ed quo­ta­tion. “Around the age of 50, I began to work in earnest, pro­duc­ing numer­ous designs. It was not until my 70th year, how­ev­er, that I pro­duced any­thing of sig­nif­i­cance.”

In the artist’s telling, only at the age of 73, after the final Great Wave, did he begin to grasp “the under­ly­ing struc­ture of birds and ani­mals, insects and fish, and the way trees and plants grow. Thus if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a bet­ter under­stand­ing when I was 80 and by 90 will have pen­e­trat­ed to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a lev­el of divine under­stand­ing, and if I live decades beyond that, every­thing I paint — dot and line — will be alive.” The fact that he did­n’t make it to 100 will for­ev­er keep enthu­si­asts won­der­ing what mag­nif­i­cence an even old­er Hoku­sai might have achieved, but even so, the body of work he man­aged to pro­duce in his 88 years con­tains works that, like the ulti­mate form of The Great Wave off Kana­gawa, out­lived him and will out­live all of us.

via Ted Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Get Free Draw­ing Lessons from Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai, Who Famous­ly Paint­ed The Great Wave off Kana­gawa: Read His How-To Book, Quick Lessons in Sim­pli­fied Draw­ings

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

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

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

Down­load Hun­dreds of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters of the Tra­di­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

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David Byrne Curates a Playlist of Great Protest Songs Written Over the Past 60 Years: Stream Them Online

in Music | December 13th, 2018

When you hear the words “protest song,” what do you see? Is it a folkie like Bob Dylan or Joan Baez deliv­er­ing songs about injus­tice? Is it an earnest young thing with a gui­tar? Is it trapped in 1960s amber, while time has moved on to more ambi­gu­i­ty, more nihilism, more solip­sism?

British writers–and may we add ama­teur folksingers–Jonathan Lux­moore and Chris­tine Ellis made this lament over two years ago in the pages of The Guardian, in an opin­ion piece enti­tled, “Not talkin’ bout a rev­o­lu­tion: where are all the protest songs?” Here they blame the imme­di­a­cy of social media, the rise of aspi­ra­tional hip hop, and the decline of rad­i­cal pol­i­tics. They end, pre­scient­ly, with a Jere­my Cor­byn-shaped hope for change. Well, look where we are now. Things devel­oped rather quick­ly, did they not?

(And as a side note, I would sug­gest the 1980s as a way more protest-filled music decade than the 1960s. Because of the self-aggran­dize­ment of 1960s cura­tors, they claim more than they did. But near­ly every pop, rock, r’n’b, and hip hop act of the ‘80s has at least one polit­i­cal song in its discog­ra­phy.)

Enter David Byrne, whose mis­sion apart from his day job as a musi­cian is to bring hope to the mass­es with a deter­mined opti­mism. He’s here to say that the protest song nev­er went away, only our def­i­n­i­tion of it. And he’s brought the receipts, or rather the playlist above, to prove his point:

…in fact, they now come from all direc­tions in every pos­si­ble genre—country songs, giant pop hits, hip hop, clas­sic rock, indie and folk. Yes, maybe there weren’t many songs ques­tion­ing the wis­dom of invad­ing Iraq, but almost every oth­er issue has been addressed.

Stretch­ing over six decades, the playlist demon­strates the var­i­ous forms protest can take, from describ­ing racial vio­lence (Bil­lie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” to Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talm­bout”) to bemoan­ing eco­nom­ic injus­tice (The Spe­cials’ “Ghost Town”) and rail­ing against war and con­flict (U2’s “Sun­day Bloody Sun­day”, Edwin Starr’s “War”). Some­times declar­ing the pos­i­tive and gain­ing a voice is enough of a protest: you could argue that James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” did more for equal­i­ty than any song about racism. Biki­ni Kills’ “Rebel Girl” does sim­i­lar things for third-wave fem­i­nism.

But Byrne wise­ly gives voice to those who feel they’re swim­ming against any resis­tance tide:

I’ve even includ­ed a few songs that “protest the protests.” Buck Owens, the clas­sic coun­try artist from Bak­ers­field, for exam­ple, has two songs here. “Red­necks, White Socks and Blue Rib­bon Beer,” is a cel­e­bra­tion of Amer­i­cans who feel they are unno­ticed, left behind. One might call it a pop­ulist anthem, but I think the ref­er­ence to white socks is inten­tion­al­ly meant to be funny—in effect, it says: “we know who we are, we know how uncool white socks are.”

Look, it’s easy to believe that songs “changed the world” when they are eas­i­ly acces­si­ble to hear decades lat­er but the boots-on-the-ground march­es and rev­o­lu­tion­ary acts from which they sprang are now just pho­tographs, film reels, and fog­gy mem­o­ries. But who can deny the gut punch of this year’s “This Is Amer­i­ca” from Child­ish Gam­bi­no, the con­tin­ued excel­lence of Killer Mike and/or Run the Jew­els, and any num­ber of songs that doc­u­ment our out­rage? The songs of protest con­tin­ue as long as there is injus­tice.

And in the case of David Byrne, cov­er­ing a mod­ern protest song and adding to its list of names, is what can keep an idea, a mem­o­ry, and a feel­ing alive for a new audi­ence. Here he is at the encore of his cur­rent tour, cov­er­ing Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talm­bout,” a memo­r­i­al to all the black lives killed by law enforce­ment.

“Here was a protest song that doesn’t hec­tor or preach at us,” he said in an arti­cle for the Asso­ci­at­ed Press. “It sim­ply asks us to remem­ber and acknowl­edge these lives that have been lost, lives that were tak­en from us through injus­tice, though the song leaves that for the lis­ten­er to put togeth­er. I love a drum line, so that aspect of the song sucked me in imme­di­ate­ly as well. The song musi­cal­ly is a cel­e­bra­tion and lyri­cal­ly a eulo­gy. Beau­ti­ful.”

He also wise­ly asked per­mis­sion to cov­er such a recent song, espe­cial­ly when it’s an old­er white man lend­ing his voice to it. But Mon­ae gave her bless­ing:

“I thought that was so kind of him and of course I said yes. The song’s mes­sage and names men­tioned need to be heard by every audi­ence.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When South Africa Banned Pink Floyd’s The Wall After Stu­dents Chant­ed “We Don’t Need No Edu­ca­tion” to Protest the Apartheid School Sys­tem (1980)

Tom Waits Releas­es a Time­ly Cov­er of the Ital­ian Anti-Fas­cist Anthem “Bel­la Ciao,” His First New Song in Two Years

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

David Byrne Cre­ates a Playlist of Eclec­tic Music for the Hol­i­days: Stream It Free Online

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Take a Close Look at Basquiat’s Revolutionary Art in a New 500-Page, 14-Pound, Large Format Book by Taschen

in Art, Books | December 13th, 2018

At many a book­store and art gallery gift shop, you will find copies of writer and artist Java­ka Steptoe’s Radi­ant Child, a young person’s intro­duc­tion to Jean-Michel Basquiat. The book has deserved­ly won a Calde­cott Medal and the praise of adult read­ers who find as much or more to admire in it as their kids do. A sur­pris­ing­ly mov­ing short biog­ra­phy, it hits many of the major notes in Basquiat’s for­ma­tive years: His Brook­lyn child­hood and Hait­ian and Puer­to Rican her­itage; his love for his encour­ag­ing moth­er and heart­break at her insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion in a men­tal hos­pi­tal; his child­hood spent in New York art gal­leries plan­ning to be a famous artist, and his keen inter­est in anato­my text­books, jazz, and black his­to­ry….

But for a seri­ous­ly deep immer­sion in the artist’s his­to­ry and devel­op­ment, you will want to con­sult a new 500-page book from TASCHEN, Jean-Michel Basquiat XXL. Writ­ten by cura­tor Eleanor Nairne and edit­ed by Hans Wern­er Holzwarth, the “over­sized hard­cov­er,” notes This is Colos­sal,” is filled with large-scale repro­duc­tions of the artist’s draw­ings, paint­ings, and note­book pages. Sev­er­al essays guide the read­er year-by-year through Basquiat’s artis­tic career, from 1978 to his untime­ly death in 1988.”

The ten years the book cov­ers pro­vide enough mate­r­i­al for two or three vol­umes, and also hap­pen to tell the sto­ry of a cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion in which Basquiat was at the cen­ter, as TASCHEN writes:

The leg­end of Jean-Michel Basquiat is as strong as ever. Syn­ony­mous with New York in the 1980s, the artist first appeared in the late 1970s under the tag SAMO, spray­ing caus­tic com­ments and frag­ment­ed poems on the walls of the city. He appeared as part of a thriv­ing under­ground scene of visu­al arts and graf­fi­ti, hip hop, post-punk, and DIY film­mak­ing, which met in a boom­ing art world. As a painter with a strong per­son­al voice, Basquiat soon broke into the estab­lished milieu, exhibit­ing in gal­leries around the world.

Basquiat is now rec­og­nized—art schol­ar and cura­tor Dieter Buch­hart argues—as an artist who “eter­nal­ized… the exhil­a­rat­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties for art, music, and social cri­tique in New York.” But for all the high praise he has gar­nered after his trag­ic over­dose at 27, in life his work was often “’explained away’ by his Afro-Hait­ian and Puer­to Rican her­itage,” writes Kris­ten Foland at Swamp. “Some art his­to­ri­ans and crit­ics, includ­ing Sharon F. Pat­ton, cat­e­go­rized his work as ‘prim­i­tive’ and called him a ‘black graf­fi­ti artist,’ a term he found inher­ent­ly racist.”

Basquiat recoiled at the idea of being seg­re­gat­ed and sin­gled out as a “black artist”; but he proud­ly cel­e­brat­ed black life and cul­tur­al forms in nar­ra­tive works rich with sym­bol­ism and poet­ry, mourn­ing and tri­umph. Asked about his sub­ject mat­ter, he once replied, “roy­al­ty, hero­ism and the streets.” Grand themes and set­tings were what he had in mind, and Nairne fit­ting­ly titles her essay in the TASCHEN book, “The Art of Sto­ry­telling.”

Per­haps the rea­son Basquiat’s life makes such a good sto­ry, for kids and grownups alike, is that he him­self was such a pow­er­ful sto­ry­teller. He weaved his per­son­al his­to­ry seam­less­ly into the social and polit­i­cal fab­ric that enmeshed him in the leg­endary late-sev­en­ties/ear­ly-eight­ies down­town New York scene. The new large for­mat TASCHEN book lets you get a close-up look at the fine details of his rev­o­lu­tion­ary can­vas­es, draw­ings, col­lages, wood pan­el paint­ings, and street poet­ry and paint­ing.

You can pur­chase the book through Ama­zon.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Odd Cou­ple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986

130,000 Pho­tographs by Andy Warhol Are Now Avail­able Online, Cour­tesy of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty

Down­load 50,000 Art Books & Cat­a­logs from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art’s Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions

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

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Bertrand Russell’s Advice For How (Not) to Grow Old: “Make Your Interests Gradually Wider and More Impersonal”

in Life, Philosophy | December 12th, 2018

Advice on how to grow old fre­quent­ly comes from such banal or blood­less sources that we can be for­giv­en for ignor­ing it. Pub­lic health offi­cials who dis­pense wis­dom may have good inten­tions; phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies who do the same may not. In either case, the mes­sages arrive in a form that can bring on the despair they seek to avert. Elder­ly peo­ple in well-lit pho­tographs stroll down gar­den paths, ball­room dance, do yoga. Bul­let­ed lists punc­tu­at­ed by dry cita­tions issue gen­tly-word­ed guide­lines for sen­si­ble liv­ing. Inof­fen­sive bland­ness as a pre­scrip­tion for liv­ing well.

At the oth­er extreme are pro­files of excep­tion­al cases—relatively spry indi­vid­u­als who have passed the cen­tu­ry mark. Rarely do their sto­ries con­form to the mod­el of abstemious­ness enjoined upon us by pro­fes­sion­als. But we know that grow­ing old with dig­ni­ty entails so much more than diet and exer­cise or mak­ing it to a hun­dred-and-two. It entails fac­ing death as square­ly as we face life. We need writ­ers with depth, sen­si­tiv­i­ty, and elo­quence to deliv­er this mes­sage. Bertrand Rus­sell does just that in his essay “How to Grow Old,” writ­ten when the philoso­pher was 81 (six­teen years before he even­tu­al­ly passed away, at age 97).

Rus­sell does not flat­ter his read­ers’ ratio­nal­ist con­ceits by cit­ing the lat­est sci­ence. “As regards health,” he writes, “I have noth­ing use­ful to say…. I eat and drink what­ev­er I like, and sleep when I can­not keep awake.” (We are inclined, per­haps, to trust him on these grounds alone.) He opens with a dri­ly humor­ous para­graph in which he rec­om­mends, “choose your ances­tors well,” then he issues advice on the order of not dwelling on the past or becom­ing a bur­den to your chil­dren.

But the true ker­nel of his short essay, “the prop­er recipe for remain­ing young,” he says, came to him from the exam­ple of a mater­nal grand­moth­er, who was so absorbed in her life, “I do not believe she ever had time to notice she was grow­ing old.” “If you have wide and keen inter­ests and activ­i­ties in which you can still be effec­tive,” Rus­sell writes. “you will have no rea­son to think about the mere­ly sta­tis­ti­cal fact of the num­ber of years you have already lived, still less of the prob­a­ble short­ness of your future.”

Such inter­ests, he argues, should be “imper­son­al,” and it is this qual­i­ty that loosens our grip. As Maria Popo­va puts it, “Rus­sell places at the heart of a ful­fill­ing life the dis­so­lu­tion of the per­son­al ego into some­thing larg­er.” The idea is famil­iar; in Russell’s hands it becomes a med­i­ta­tion on mor­tal­i­ty as ever-time­ly as the so-often-quot­ed pas­sages from Donne’s “Med­i­ta­tion XVII.” Philoso­pher and writer John G. Messer­ly calls Russell’s con­clud­ing pas­sage “one of the most beau­ti­ful reflec­tions on death I have found in all of world lit­er­a­ture.”

The best way to over­come it [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your inter­ests grad­u­al­ly wider and more imper­son­al, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increas­ing­ly merged in the uni­ver­sal life. An indi­vid­ual human exis­tence should be like a riv­er: small at first, nar­row­ly con­tained with­in its banks, and rush­ing pas­sion­ate­ly past rocks and over water­falls. Grad­u­al­ly the riv­er grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more qui­et­ly, and in the end, with­out any vis­i­ble break, they become merged in the sea, and pain­less­ly lose their indi­vid­ual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suf­fer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will con­tin­ue. And if, with the decay of vital­i­ty, weari­ness increas­es, the thought of rest will not be unwel­come. I should wish to die while still at work, know­ing that oth­ers will car­ry on what I can no longer do and con­tent in the thought that what was pos­si­ble has been done.

Read Russell’s “How to Grow Old” in full here. And see many more elo­quent med­i­ta­tions on aging and death—from Hen­ry Miller, André Gide, Ursu­la K. Le Guin, and Grace Paley—at Brain Pick­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Bertrand Russell’s Advice to Peo­ple Liv­ing 1,000 Years in the Future: “Love is Wise, Hatred is Fool­ish”

Bertrand Rus­sell: The Every­day Ben­e­fit of Phi­los­o­phy Is That It Helps You Live with Uncer­tain­ty

Bertrand Rus­sell Author­i­ty and the Indi­vid­ual (1948) 

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

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Watch Andy Warhol Eat an Entire Burger King Whopper–While Wishing the Burger Came from McDonald’s (1981)

in Art, Film, Food & Drink | December 12th, 2018

In the ear­ly 1980s, Dan­ish exper­i­men­tal film­mak­er Jør­gen Leth came to Amer­i­ca intent on cap­tur­ing it live as it was actu­al­ly lived across that vast, still-new, and often strange coun­try. The result, 66 Scenes from Amer­i­ca, offers images of road­side motels and din­ers, desert land­scapes, the Man­hat­tan sky­line, miles of lone­ly high­way, and stars and stripes aplen­ty. Halfway through it all comes the longest, and per­haps most Amer­i­can, scene of all: Andy Warhol eat­ing a fast-food ham­burg­er. A few moments after he accom­plish­es that task, he deliv­ers the film’s most mem­o­rable line by far: “My name is Andy Warhol, and I just fin­ished eat­ing a ham­burg­er.”

“Leth did not know Warhol, but he was a bit obsessed with him so he def­i­nite­ly want­ed to have him in his movie,” writes Dai­l­yArt’s Zuzan­na Stan­s­ka. And so when Leth came to New York, he sim­ply showed up at Warhol’s Fac­to­ry and pitched him the idea of con­sum­ing a “sym­bol­ic” burg­er on film. “Warhol imme­di­ate­ly liked the idea and agreed to the scene – he liked it because it was such a real scene, some­thing he would like to do.”

When Warhol showed up at the pho­to stu­dio Leth had set up to shoot the scene, com­plete with a vari­ety of fast-food ham­burg­ers from which he could choose, he had only one ques­tion: “Where is the McDon­ald’s?” Leth had­n’t thought to pick one up from the Gold­en Arch­es as well, not know­ing that Warhol con­sid­ered McDon­ald’s pack­ag­ing “the most beau­ti­ful.”

Warhol had a deep inter­est in Amer­i­can brands. “What’s great about this coun­try is that Amer­i­ca start­ed the tra­di­tion where the rich­est con­sumers buy essen­tial­ly the same things as the poor­est,” he wrote in The Phi­los­o­phy of Andy Warhol. “You can be watch­ing TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the Pres­i­dent drinks Coke, Liz Tay­lor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of mon­ey can get you a bet­ter Coke than the one the bum on the cor­ner is drink­ing. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” Sure­ly the same could be said of any par­tic­u­lar fast-food burg­er, even if Warhol could­n’t have his pre­ferred brand on that par­tic­u­lar day in New York in 1981. In the event, he chose a Whop­per from Burg­er King, still a well-known brand if hard­ly as icon­ic as McDon­ald’s — or, for that mat­ter, as icon­ic as Warhol him­self.

Above, you can see Leth talk­ing years lat­er about his expe­ri­ence film­ing Warhol.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

130,000 Pho­tographs by Andy Warhol Are Now Avail­able Online, Cour­tesy of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty

When Steve Jobs Taught Andy Warhol to Make Art on the Very First Mac­in­tosh (1984)

Andy Warhol Dig­i­tal­ly Paints Deb­bie Har­ry with the Ami­ga 1000 Com­put­er (1985)

Warhol’s Cin­e­ma: A Mir­ror for the Six­ties (1989)

The Case for Andy Warhol in Three Min­utes

Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Ham­burg­er Recipe

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

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