Feel Strangely Nostalgic as You Hear Classic Songs Reworked to Sound as If They’re Playing in an Empty Shopping Mall: David Bowie, Toto, Ah-ha & More

in Life, Music, Psychology | March 19th, 2018

“…if he went away, as he had once upon a time, oth­er voic­es, oth­er rooms, voic­es lost and cloud­ed, strummed his dreams.” — Tru­man Capote, Oth­er Voic­es, Oth­er Rooms

Is there a word for the emo­tion­al flood­tide that wells up when a song from the past catch­es us alone and unawares?

The sen­sa­tion is too pri­vate to be writ­ten off as mere nos­tal­gia.

What­ev­er chem­i­cal phe­nom­e­non explains it, “Cecil Robert,” a 20-year-old from Kaukau­na, Wis­con­sin, has tapped into it in a big way, by mess­ing with the fre­quen­cies of pop songs from the 70s, 80s and 90s, until they sound like some­thing play­ing on the neighbor’s side of the wall, or the echo cham­ber of an emp­ty shop­ping mall.

The New Yorker’s Jia Tolenti­no wrote that his far­away remix of Toto’s ear­ly 80s soft rock hit, “Africa,” above, sound­ed like “long­ing and con­so­la­tion togeth­er, extend­ed into empti­ness, a shot of warmth com­ing out of a void.”

Fun­ny. That pret­ty much sums up how I feel lis­ten­ing to Cecil Robert’s take on Nena’s “99 Luft­bal­lons”…

It was released in 1983, the year that I grad­u­at­ed high school and in which “Africa”—which I con­fess leaves me cold—hit Num­ber One on Billboard’s Hot 100 list.

Were it a mat­ter of sheer gen­er­a­tional nos­tal­gia, Tolenti­no (one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for 2017) should be laid flat by Mac DeMarco’s “My Kind of Woman” “play­ing slow­ly from anoth­er room.”

And I’d be get­ting all gooey over “Africa.”

It doesn’t work that way.

But it def­i­nite­ly works, as evi­denced by the pletho­ra of com­ments that greet every new Cecil Robert upload:

This is what plays when I’m cry­ing in a bath­room of a par­ty and my crush comes in and com­forts me…

This is the song you lis­ten to dur­ing the after­math of a par­ty while every­one is passed out and some­one left the music play­ing…

This real­ly evokes the feel­ing of slow­ly bleed­ing out alone on the kitchen floor & all your sens­es slow­ly blur­ring togeth­er under the glare of the flu­o­res­cent light over­head set to the tune of the muf­fled music com­ing from the record play­er in the next room…

Such a deep con­nec­tion begs that requests be tak­en, and Cecil Roberts does his best to oblige, pri­or­i­tiz­ing those who make a mod­est dona­tion on his Patre­on page:

I need “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia” play­ing at an air­port restau­rant bar late at night…

I need U2—“Beautiful Day”  play­ing in a din­er while it’s rain­ing in the after­noon…

I need “Com­ing of Age” by Fos­ter the Peo­ple being played in a din­er while I eat a hot­dog and wait for my car to get out of the shop across the street…

(For the record, Tolenti­no asked for an anoth­er-room edit of Jai Paul’s dreamy 2011 elec­tro-soul hit “BTSTU.”)

Some of Cecil Robert’s source mate­r­i­al—Julee Cruise’s Twin Peaks theme, “Falling,” for instance—is so ethe­re­al that plac­ing it at the oth­er end of the son­ic tele­scope almost feels like overkill.

On the oth­er hand, it could add a wel­come lay­er for fans sub­con­scious­ly pin­ing for that lost sense of anticipation—for ear­ly 90s girls in 50s sad­dle shoes and pen­cil skirts, for episodes doled out one week at a time…

Get in a weird mood on Cecil Robert’s YouTube chan­nel.

Fast track a request for $2 on his Patre­on page.

Lis­ten to his orig­i­nal ambi­ent com­po­si­tions on Sound­cloud.

via The New York­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Shift­ed from Minor to Major Key, and Radiohead’s “Creep” Moved from Major to Minor

The Orig­i­nal Noise Artist: Hear the Strange Exper­i­men­tal Sounds & Instru­ments of Ital­ian Futur­ist, Lui­gi Rus­so­lo (1913)

Down­load 10,000 of the First Record­ings of Music Ever Made, Thanks to the UCSB Cylin­der Audio Archive

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC this Tues­day, March 20 for the sec­ond install­ment of Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain at The Tank. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How the Ornate Tapestries from the Age of Louis XIV Were Made (and Are Still Made Today)

in Art, History, Museums | March 16th, 2018

“Time is the warp and mat­ter the weft of the woven tex­ture of beau­ty in space, and death is the hurl­ing shut­tle.”

— Annie Dil­lard, Pil­grim at Tin­ker Creek

For the unini­ti­at­ed, the warp are the plain ver­ti­cal threads of a weav­ing or tapes­try, through which the col­or­ful, hor­i­zon­tal weft threads are passed, over and under, on wood­en nee­dle-shaped bob­bins (or shut­tles).

As Beat­rice Grisol, Head Weaver at Paris’ ven­er­a­ble Man­u­fac­ture Nationale des Gob­elins remarks, in The Art of Mak­ing a Tapes­try, above, weavers must pos­sess a love of draw­ing and an abun­dance of imag­i­na­tion in order to trans­late an artist’s vision using silken or woolen threads.

21st cen­tu­ry designs are more con­tem­po­rary, and dying equip­ment more pre­cise, but Les Gob­elins’s weavers’ process remains remark­ably unchanged since the days of the Sun King, Louis XIV.

As in the 17th-cen­tu­ry, giant looms are strung with white warp threads, in readi­ness for the threads expert dyers have col­ored accord­ing to the artist’s palette.

The col­ored weft threads are stored on spools, and even­tu­al­ly por­tioned out onto the bob­bins, which dan­gle from the back­side of the tapes­try, as the weaver works her mag­ic, con­stant­ly check­ing her progress in a mir­ror reflect­ing both the pro­jec­t’s front side and a print of the orig­i­nal design.

It’s worth not­ing that the pro­nouns here are exclu­sive­ly fem­i­nine. The lav­ish tapes­tries dec­o­rat­ing Louis XIV’s court hint­ed at years of unsung labor by high­ly skilled craftswomen. Tapes­tries were the ne plus ultra of prince­ly sta­tus, a tes­ta­ment to their owner’s eru­di­tion and taste. Louis XIV amassed some 2,650 pieces.

That’s a lot of bob­bins, and a lot of hard-work­ing female weavers.

Wit­ness the trans­for­ma­tion from artist Charles Le Brun’s 1664 study for the fig­ure who would become the seat­ed youth in The Entry of Alexan­der into Baby­lon…

…to the ful­ly real­ized oil on can­vas ren­der­ing from 1690…

…to its incar­na­tion as a tapes­try in the Sun King’s court:

Speed­ing ahead to the 21st-cen­tu­ry, Les Gob­elins appears to rival Brooklyn’s Etsy flag­ship as a pleas­ant­ly appoint­ed, well lit, and high­ly respect­ed Tem­ple of Craft.

View some of the high­lights of the Get­ty Museum’s 2016 exhi­bi­tion Woven Gold: Tapes­tries of Louis XIV here.

Or grab your hed­dles and plan an in-per­son vis­it to La Man­u­fac­ture Nationale des Gob­elins here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

Artis­tic Maps of Pak­istan & India Show the Embroi­dery Tech­niques of Their Dif­fer­ent Regions

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on March 20 for the sec­ond install­ment of Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain at The Tank. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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David Byrne Creates a Playlist of Creative Music From Africa & the Caribbean—or What One Nameless President Has Called “Shithole Countries”

in Music | March 16th, 2018

Image by LivePict, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

How­ev­er many shades of dis­gust that may have run through me when a cer­tain world leader referred to Haiti and coun­tries in Africa as “shit­holes,” with­in hours, my head was turned in every direc­tion by defi­ant, cre­ative respons­es to the moral­ly bank­rupt com­ment that exposed the think­ing behind it as com­plete­ly void of knowl­edge and respect for the vibran­cy of the coun­tries in ques­tion. How­ev­er weary­ing this dis­play of igno­rance, it only threw into high­er relief the vital­i­ty and resilien­cy of African and Caribbean coun­tries.

Few Amer­i­can artists have been as tuned into, and influ­enced by, that vital­i­ty as deeply and for as long as David Byrne. His decades-span­ning engage­ment with African, Caribbean, and Latin Amer­i­can music and his found­ing of world music label Lua­ka Bop give him as much cred­i­bil­i­ty on the sub­ject as any “col­o­niz­er” (as a cer­tain Black Pan­ther char­ac­ter might teas­ing­ly say). Byrne wrote on his web­site in sad­ness and anger in response to the infa­mous com­ment. In an attempt to co-opt the word, he shared a playlist of African and Caribbean music that he called “The Beau­ti­ful Shit­holes.” The ref­er­ence may seem triv­i­al­iz­ing, but his pur­pose was seri­ous, as he out­lined in his full com­ments.

The ques­tion Byrne asks is whether music can “help us empathize with its mak­ers?” Many cul­tur­al crit­ics might look around and shake their heads. Byrne leaves the ques­tion open. His angry note is direct and direc­tive, but even he admits that it’s a moment to vent, not to resolve a moral cri­sis. “Got that off my chest,” he con­cludes, “now maybe I can lis­ten to some music.” What­ev­er degree of pow­er we may or may not have to change cru­el, big­ot­ed poli­cies, we always have the choice to turn our backs to xeno­phobes and racists and our faces to the rest of the world. Byrne invites us to do just that.

The playlist starts with four tracks from Lua­ka Bop com­pi­la­tion albums of Cuban music, whose “Afro-Cuban musi­cal iden­ti­ty remained rec­og­niz­able,” the label’s descrip­tion notes, for “almost 500 years.” Then we’re off into 32 tracks of clas­sic and con­tem­po­rary African and Caribbean music from well-known leg­ends like Fela Kuti and Amadou & Miri­am, young upstarts like Niger­ian Afrobeat prodi­gy Wiz­Kid, and the relent­less­ly funky Tuareg rock stars Tinari­wen. Byrne has always seemed to believe in music as a site of uni­ver­sal cul­tur­al exchange. His curat­ed playlist and its unspar­ing title remind us that, while out­rage, and action, over injus­tice is war­rant­ed, we can also find solu­tions in cel­e­bra­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Byrne Launch­es the “Rea­sons to Be Cheer­ful” Web Site: A Com­pendi­um of News Meant to Remind Us That the World Isn’t Actu­al­ly Falling Apart

Stream 8,000 Vin­tage Afropop Record­ings Dig­i­tized & Made Avail­able by The British Library

New Doc­u­men­tary Brings You Inside Africa’s Lit­tle-Known Punk Rock Scene

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

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Stephen Hawking Picks the Music (and One Novel) He’d Spend Eternity With: Stream the Playlist Online

in Music | March 15th, 2018

Image by NASA, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In Aspen, Col­orado they hold a music fes­ti­val every year and, in 1995, Stephen Hawking—who joined the cos­mos this week—was there. This is where he first heard Fran­cis Poulenc’s Glo­ria, con­sid­ered by many the composer’s mas­ter­piece.

“You can sit in your office in the physics cen­tre there and hear the music with­out ever buy­ing a tick­et,” he said. “But on this occa­sion I was actu­al­ly in the tent to hear the Glo­ria. It is one of a small num­ber of works I con­sid­er great music.”

In 1992, the physi­cist was a guest on BBC Radio4’s long-run­ning “Desert Island Discs” pro­gram to nar­row down a list of music he’d take to the myth­i­cal island. Except for two pop songs, he chose clas­si­cal works. You can lis­ten to a Spo­ti­fy playlist we’ve made con­tain­ing the works below, or lis­ten to the full inter­view with excerpts of the music here.

“I first became aware of clas­si­cal music when I was 15,” he said in a Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty inter­view. “LPs had recent­ly appeared in Britain. I ripped out the mech­a­nism of our old wind-up gramo­phone and put in a turntable and a three-valve ampli­fi­er. I made a speak­er cab­i­net from an old book case, with a sheet of chip-board on the front. The whole sys­tem looked pret­ty crude, but it didn’t sound too bad.”

“At the time LPs were very expen­sive so I couldn’t afford any of them on a school­boy bud­get. But I bought Stravinsky’s Sym­pho­ny Of Psalms because it was on sale as a 10” LP, which were being phased out. The record was rather scratched, but I fell in love with the third move­ment, which makes up more than half the sym­pho­ny.” How­ev­er, on the BBC broad­cast, he says the first record he bought was Brahms’ Vio­lin Con­cer­to in D Major, and he made that one of his Island selec­tions.

The whole broad­cast is worth lis­ten­ing to for Hawking’s very per­son­al con­nec­tions to all his choic­es, from Wag­n­er to the Bea­t­les to his all-time favorite, Mozart’s Requiem. Final­ly the show also asks for Hawking’s favorite book—George Eliot’s Mid­dle­march—and a Lux­u­ry Choice, for which he choos­es creme brulee.

His two main plea­sures in life, he said, are physics and music.

But his final choice is the most poignant and sums up a life well lived, espe­cial­ly since doc­tors told him he had two years left…in 1963. He proved them wrong, and then some. As Edith Piaf sings, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Lighter Side of Stephen Hawk­ing: The Physi­cist Cracks Jokes and a Smile with John Oliv­er

The Big Ideas of Stephen Hawk­ing Explained with Sim­ple Ani­ma­tion
Stephen Hawking’s Lec­tures on Black Holes Now Ful­ly Ani­mat­ed with Chalk­board Illus­tra­tions

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Watch “Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on The 405,” the New Oscar-Winning Portrait of an Artist

in Film | March 15th, 2018

A quick fyi: IndieWire has made avail­able on its YouTube chan­nel “Heav­en Is a Traf­fic Jam on The 405,” a 40-minute doc­u­men­tary direct­ed by Frank Stiefel. A por­trait of a bril­liant 56 year old artist, the film won the Oscar for Best Doc­u­men­tary (Short Sub­ject) at the recent Acad­e­my Awards. Here’s the gist of what it’s about:

Mindy Alper is a tor­tured and bril­liant 56 year old artist who is rep­re­sent­ed by one of Los Ange­les’ top gal­leries. Acute anx­i­ety, men­tal dis­or­der and dev­as­tat­ing depres­sion have caused her to be com­mit­ted to men­tal insti­tu­tions under­go elec­tro shock ther­a­py and sur­vive a 10 year peri­od with­out the abil­i­ty to speak. Her hyper self aware­ness has allowed her to pro­duce a life­long body of work that express­es her emo­tion­al state with pow­er­ful psy­cho­log­i­cal pre­ci­sion. Through inter­views, reen­act­ments, the build­ing of an eight and a half foot papi­er-mache’ bust of her beloved psy­chi­a­trist, and exam­in­ing draw­ings made from the time she was a child, we learn how she has emerged from dark­ness and iso­la­tion to a life that includes love, trust and sup­port.

You can watch the com­plete film online. It will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky Demys­ti­fies Depres­sion, Which, Like Dia­betes, Is Root­ed in Biol­o­gy

Depres­sion & Melan­choly: Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain the Cru­cial Dif­fer­ence Between Every­day Sad­ness and Clin­i­cal Depres­sion

Watch Edith+Eddie, an Intense, Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Short Film About America’s Old­est Inter­ra­cial New­ly­weds

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H.P. Lovecraft Writes “Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance,” a Devastating Parody of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1923)

in Literature, Poetry | March 15th, 2018

Image by Lucius B. Trues­dell and Lady Mor­rell, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Howard Phillips Love­craft, as his ever-grow­ing fan base knows, sel­dom spared his char­ac­ters — or at least their san­i­ty — from the vast, unspeak­able hor­rors lurk­ing beneath his imag­ined real­i­ty. Not that he showed much more mer­cy as a crit­ic either, as his assess­ment of “The Waste Land” (1922) reveals. Though now near-uni­ver­sal­ly respect­ed, T.S. Eliot’s best-known poem failed to impress Love­craft, who, in his jour­nal The Con­ser­v­a­tive, wrote in 1923 that

We here behold a prac­ti­cal­ly mean­ing­less col­lec­tion of phras­es, learned allu­sions, quo­ta­tions, slang, and scraps in gen­er­al; offered to the pub­lic (whether or not as a hoax) as some­thing jus­ti­fied by our mod­ern mind with its recent com­pre­hen­sion of its own chaot­ic triv­i­al­i­ty and dis­or­gan­i­sa­tion. And we behold that pub­lic, or a con­sid­er­able part of it, receiv­ing this hilar­i­ous melange as some­thing vital and typ­i­cal; as “a poem of pro­found sig­nif­i­cance”, to quote its spon­sors.

Eliot’s work, Love­craft argued, sim­ply could­n’t hold up in the mod­ern world, where “man has sud­den­ly dis­cov­ered that all his high sen­ti­ments, val­ues, and aspi­ra­tions are mere illu­sions caused by phys­i­o­log­i­cal process­es with­in him­self, and of no sig­nif­i­cance what­so­ev­er in an infi­nite and pur­pose­less cos­mos.” Sci­ence, in his view, has made non­sense of tra­di­tion and “a rag-bag of unre­lat­ed odds and ends” of the soul. A poet like Eliot, it seems, “does not know what to do about it; but com­pro­mis­es on a lit­er­a­ture of analy­sis, chaos, and iron­ic con­trast.”

Look­ing on even this hatch­et job, Love­craft must have felt he’d failed to slay the beast, and so he com­posed a par­o­dy of “The Waste Land” enti­tled “Waste Paper” in late 1922 or ear­ly 1923. This “Poem of Pro­found Insignif­i­cance,” which Love­craft schol­ar S.T. Joshi calls the writer’s “best satir­i­cal poem,” begins thus:

Out of the reach­es of illim­itable light
The blaz­ing plan­et grew, and forc’d to life
Unend­ing cycles of pro­gres­sive strife
And strange muta­tions of undy­ing light
And bore­some books, than hell’s own self more trite
And thoughts repeat­ed and become a blight,
And cheap rum-hounds with moon­shine hootch made tight,
And quite con­trite to see the flight of fright so bright

You can read the whole thing, includ­ing its prob­a­bly apoc­ryphal half-epi­graph from the Greek poet Gly­con, at the H.P. Love­craft Archive. “In many parts of this quite lengthy poem,” Joshi writes, “he has quite faith­ful­ly par­o­died the insu­lar­i­ty of mod­ern poet­ry — its abil­i­ty to be under­stood only by a small coterie of read­ers who are aware of inti­mate facts about the poet.”

Love­craft also tried his hand at non-par­o­d­ic poet­ry, though his­to­ry remem­bers him much less for that than for strik­ing a more pri­mal chord with his sui gener­is “weird fic­tion,” whose para­me­ters he was deter­min­ing at the same time he was sav­aging his con­tem­po­rary Eliot. And though sci­en­tif­ic progress has marched much far­ther on since the 1920s, espe­cial­ly as regards the under­stand­ing of the human mind and what­ev­er now pass­es for a soul, both men’s bod­ies of work have only gained in res­o­nance.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

H.P. Lovecraft’s Mon­ster Draw­ings: Cthul­hu & Oth­er Crea­tures from the “Bound­less and Hideous Unknown”

H.P. Love­craft Gives Five Tips for Writ­ing a Hor­ror Sto­ry, or Any Piece of “Weird Fic­tion”

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

T.S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

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 Face­book.

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Enter Digital Archives of the 1960s Fluxus Movement and Explore the Avant-Garde Art of John Cage, Yoko Ono, John Cale, Nam June Paik & More

in Art | March 15th, 2018

When it comes to the influ­ence of the arts on every­day life, it can seem like our real­i­ty derives far more from Jeff Koons’ “aug­ment­ed banal­i­ty” than from the Fluxus move­ment’s play­ful exper­i­ments with chance oper­a­tions, con­cep­tu­al rig­or, and impro­visato­ry per­for­mance. But per­haps in a Jeff Koons world, these are pre­cise­ly the qual­i­ties we need. Main­ly based in New York, and “tak­ing shape around 1959,” notes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa’s Fluxus: A Field Guide, “the inter­na­tion­al cohort of artists known as Fluxus exper­i­ment­ed with—or bet­ter yet between—poet­ry, the­ater, music, and the visu­al arts.” Big names like John Cage and Yoko Ono might give the unini­ti­at­ed a sense of what the 60s art move­ment was all about. An “inter­dis­ci­pli­nary aes­thet­ic,” writes Ubuweb, that “brings togeth­er influ­ences as diverse as Zen, sci­ence, and dai­ly life and puts them to poet­ic use.”

Of course, there’s more to it than that… but Fluxus artists keep us won­der­ing what that might be, sug­gest­ing that ordi­nary expe­ri­ence and the stuff of every­day life pro­vide all the mate­r­i­al we need. Japan­ese artist Mieko Shio­mi describes Fluxus as a “prag­mat­ic con­scious­ness” that makes us “see things dif­fer­ent­ly in every­day life after per­form­ing or see­ing Fluxus works.”

The def­i­n­i­tions of Fluxus, you might notice, can begin to sound a bit cir­cu­lar, maybe because they are entire­ly beside the point. George Maci­u­nas, who named and co-found­ed the move­ment, called Fluxus “a way of doing things.” He called it a num­ber of oth­er things as well.

Maci­u­nas’ 1963 “Fluxus Man­i­festo” makes all the right man­i­festo moves, para­phras­ing Tris­tan Tzara’s “Dada Man­i­festo” in its promise to “purge the world of bour­geois sick­ness, ‘intel­lec­tu­al,’ pro­fes­sion­al & com­mer­cial­ized cul­ture,” and so on. He begins with a dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion of Fluxus, involv­ing the symp­toms of dysen­tery, and “the mat­ter just dis­charged.” But the art of Fluxus, aim­ing at a “non art real­i­ty,” seems mild-man­nered by con­trast with this iron­ic blus­ter.

Though it could also be dan­ger­ous at times, Fluxus was always a form of play, often seem­ing­ly con­tent­less, as in Nam June Paik’s “Zen for Film,” a silent, eight-minute film almost entire­ly com­posed of a fuzzy white screen or, in the most noto­ri­ous exam­ple, John Cage’s “musi­cal” com­po­si­tion, 4.33.

Fluxus has become so close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the musi­cal exper­i­ments and per­for­mance art of Cage and Ono that the cen­tral­i­ty of poet­ry and the visu­al arts to the move­ment can go unre­marked. Maci­u­nas him­self was a high­ly skilled graph­ic artist and an aspir­ing bour­geois pro­pri­etor: he first sought to turn Fluxus into a com­mer­cial cor­po­ra­tion and designed a num­ber of prod­ucts such as chess sets, posters, and a wood­en box filled with assem­blages of small art objects cre­at­ed by his fel­low Fluxus artists. He lat­er admit­ted, “no one was buy­ing it.” Of course, plen­ty of peo­ple did, just not in a way that returned on his siz­able cash invest­ment. See an “unbox­ing” of Maci­u­nas’ Flux Box 2, above and try not to think of Wes Ander­son.

Like their Dada fore­bears, Fluxus artists worked in every medi­um. At the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa Library’s Fluxus Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion, you can find visu­al art by Maci­u­nas and his col­leagues, like Joseph Beuy’s “Fluxus West” post­card, fur­ther up, George Brecht’s Fluxus Games and Puz­zles below it, and A‑Yo’s “Fin­ger Box,” above. At Mono­skop, you’ll find links to more art, film, music, and books by and about artists like Yoko Ono and Fluxus poet Dick Higgens.

At Ubuweb, you’ll find a Flux­film Anthol­o­gy, dat­ing from 1962–1970 and con­tain­ing short films by Paik, Ono, Maci­u­nas, George Brecht, and many more (includ­ing a 1966 short from John Cale). And at Ubuweb: Sound, you’ll find eight cas­settes worth of Fluxus and Fluxus-inspired music, from 1962 to 1992, like the Wolf Vostell “music sculp­ture,” Le Cri / The Cry, from 1990, above. The Fluxus approach may seem puck­ish­ly quaint, even pre­cious, next to the slick hyper­re­al­i­ty of Snapchat, but you will expe­ri­ence the every­day world around you quite dif­fer­ent­ly after immers­ing your­self in the con­cep­tu­al process-world of Fluxus.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yoko Ono Lets Audi­ence Cut Up Her Clothes in Con­cep­tu­al Art Per­for­mance (Carnegie Hall, 1965)

The Music of Avant-Garde Com­pos­er John Cage Now Avail­able in a Free Online Archive

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

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

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Stephen Hawking (RIP) Explains His Revolutionary Theory of Black Holes with the Help of Chalkboard Animations

in Life, Physics | March 14th, 2018

Stephen Hawk­ing died last night at age of 76. I can think of no bet­ter, brief social media trib­ute than that from the @thetweetofgod: “It’s only been a few hours and Stephen Hawk­ing already math­e­mat­i­cal­ly proved, to My face, that I don’t exist.” Hawk­ing was an athe­ist, but he didn’t claim to have elim­i­nat­ed the idea with pure math­e­mat­ics. But if he had, it would have been bril­liant­ly ele­gant, even—as he  used the phrase in his pop­u­lar 1988 cos­mol­o­gy A Brief His­to­ry of Time—to a the­o­ret­i­cal “mind of God.”

Hawk­ing him­self used the word “ele­gant,” with mod­esty, to describe his dis­cov­ery that “gen­er­al rel­a­tiv­i­ty can be com­bined with quan­tum the­o­ry,” that is, “if one replaces ordi­nary time with so-called imag­i­nary time.” In the best­selling A Brief His­to­ry of Time, he described how one might pos­si­bly rec­on­cile the two. His search for this “Grand Uni­fied The­o­ry of Every­thing,” writes his edi­tor Peter Guz­zar­di, rep­re­sent­ed “the quest for the holy grail of science—one the­o­ry that could unite two sep­a­rate fields that worked indi­vid­u­al­ly but whol­ly inde­pen­dent­ly of each oth­er.”

The physi­cist had to help Guz­zar­di trans­late rar­i­fied con­cepts into read­able prose for book­buy­ers at “drug­stores, super­mar­kets, and air­port shops.” But this is not to say A Brief His­to­ry of Time is an easy read. (In the midst of that process, Hawk­ing also had to learn how to trans­late his own thoughts again, as a tra­cheoto­my end­ed his speech, and he tran­si­tioned to the com­put­er devices we came to know as his only voice.) Most who read Hawking’s book, or just skimmed it, might remem­ber it for its take on the big bang. It’s an aspect of his the­o­ry that piqued the usu­al cre­ation­ist sus­pects, and thus gen­er­at­ed innu­mer­able head­lines.

But it was the oth­er term in Hawking’s sub­ti­tle, “from the Big Bang to Black Holes,” that real­ly occu­pied the cen­tral place in his exten­sive body of less acces­si­ble sci­en­tif­ic work. He wrote his the­sis on the expand­ing uni­verse, but gave his final lec­tures on black holes. The dis­cov­er­ies in Hawk­ing’s cos­mol­o­gy came from his inten­sive focus on black holes, begin­ning in 1970 with his inno­va­tion of the sec­ond law of black hole dynam­ics and con­tin­u­ing through ground­break­ing work in the mid-70s that his for­mer dis­ser­ta­tion advi­sor, emi­nent physi­cist Den­nis Scia­ma, pro­nounced “a new rev­o­lu­tion in our under­stand­ing.”

Hawk­ing con­tin­ued to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the­o­ret­i­cal physics through the study of black holes into the last years of his life. In Jan­u­ary 2016, he pub­lished a paper on arXiv.org called “Soft Hair on Black Holes,” propos­ing “a pos­si­ble solu­tion to his black hole infor­ma­tion para­dox,” as Fiona Mac­Don­ald writes at Sci­ence Alert. Hawking’s final con­tri­bu­tions show that black holes have what he calls “soft hair” around them—or waves of zero-ener­gy par­ti­cles. Con­trary to his pre­vi­ous con­clu­sion that noth­ing can escape from a black hole, Hawk­ing believed that this quan­tum “hair” could store infor­ma­tion pre­vi­ous­ly thought lost for­ev­er.

Hawk­ing fol­lowed up these intrigu­ing, but excep­tion­al­ly dense, find­ings with a much more approach­able text, his talks for the BBC’s Rei­th Lec­tures, which artist Andrew Park illus­trat­ed with the chalk­board draw­ings you see above. The first talk, “Do Black Holes Have No Hair?” walks us briskly through the for­ma­tion of black holes and the big names in black hole sci­ence before mov­ing on to the heavy quan­tum the­o­ry. The sec­ond talk con­tin­ues to sketch its way through the the­o­ry, using strik­ing metaphors and wit­ti­cisms to get the point across.

Hawk­ing’s expla­na­tions of phe­nom­e­na are as pro­found, verg­ing on mys­ti­cal, as they are thor­ough. He doesn’t for­get the human dimen­sion or the emo­tion­al res­o­nance of sci­ence, occa­sion­al­ly sug­gest­ing metaphysical—or meta-psychological—implications. Thanks in part to his work, we first thought of black holes as nihilis­tic voids from which noth­ing could escape. He left us, how­ev­er with a rad­i­cal new view, which he sums up cheer­ful­ly as “if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up, There’s a way out.” Or, even more Zen-like, as he pro­claimed in a 2014 paper, “there are no black holes.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D. The­sis, “Prop­er­ties of Expand­ing Uni­vers­es,” Now Free to Read/Download Online

Watch A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Errol Mor­ris’ Film About the Life & Work of Stephen Hawk­ing

The Big Ideas of Stephen Hawk­ing Explained with Sim­ple Ani­ma­tion

Free Online Physics Cours­es

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

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