Charles Bukowski Explains What Good Writing and the Good Life Have in Common

in Writing | September 12th, 2019

I have no pol­i­tics, I observe. I have no sides except the side of the human spir­it, which after all does sound rather shal­low, like a pitch­man, but which means most­ly my spir­it, which means yours too, for if I am not tru­ly alive, how can I see you?

—Charles Bukows­ki, Notes of. Dirty Old Man

In Notes of a Dirty Old Man, his week­ly col­umn for the under­ground L.A. news­pa­per Open City, Charles Bukows­ki became the com­mon man’s philoso­pher, issu­ing pro­fun­di­ties amidst wild vul­gar­i­ties and prov­ing that he did, in fact, have a pol­i­tics, as much as he had the­o­ries and con­trar­i­an half-thoughts and opin­ions aplen­ty. He took sides when it came to lit­er­a­ture, at least—the side of Celine, Dos­to­evsky, and Camus, for exam­ple, against Faulkn­er, Shake­speare, and George Bernard Shaw (“the most overblown fan­ta­sy of the Ages”).

Bukows­ki had no room for cool appre­ci­a­tion or mild pref­er­ence. With him, as with Cat­ul­lus, life was love and hate. Get him talk­ing on any sub­ject and those loves and hates would emerge, as would his ideas about mat­ters of most con­se­quence: life, death, drink­ing, sex, and, of course, writ­ing. In the inter­view clip above, for exam­ple, Bukows­ki is asked if he fears death. He answers, “No, in fact, I almost feel good at the approach of death.” This becomes a med­i­ta­tion on rep­e­ti­tion and dull­ness, and on the “juice” that a good life—and good writing—requires.

…. You see, as you live many years, things take on a repeat…. You under­stand? You keep see­ing the same thing over and over again… so you get a lit­tle bit tired of life. So as death comes, you almost say, okay, baby, it’s time, it’s good.

The answer puts the inter­view­er in mind of Mal­colm Lowry’s Under the Vol­cano, which sends Bukows­ki on one of his sig­na­ture cranky cri­tiques, also an intro­duc­tion to his the­o­ry of prose, which can be summed up in just three syl­la­bles, “BIM BIM BIM!”—the sound he makes to show the “quick­ness” of a well-writ­ten line. Good writ­ing needs “pace,” “life,” and “sun­light.” “Each line,” he says, “must be full of a deli­cious lit­tle juice, they must be full of pow­er, they must make you like to turn a page, bim bim bim!” Writ­ing like Lowry’s, he says, is “too leisure­ly.” There’s too much set­up, too lit­tle pay­off.

He may seem unfair to Lowry, but most writ­ers bore Bukows­ki. After pages of tedious buildup, “when they get to the grand emo­tion, there isn’t any,” he says. Bukows­ki has nev­er been one for sub­tle­ty, but no one can say his writ­ing lacks  “juice” or grand emo­tion. On the con­trary, he endears him­self to so many aspir­ing writ­ers (or aspir­ing male writ­ers, in any case) because his poet­ry and prose are so elec­tri­fy­ing­ly alive. He had a lim­it­ed range of sub­jects, most­ly con­fined to his own thoughts, feel­ings, and drunk­en mis­ad­ven­tures. Yet the voice that car­ries us through his vio­lent­ly fun­ny tales and rever­ies, wicked and maudlin and ten­der by turns, seems capa­ble of lim­it­less inven­tion.

“Writ­ing must nev­er be bor­ing,” says Bukows­ki. He set a high bar, and he met it. As writ­ers, we need not live his life to do the same. But we must each be “tru­ly alive” in our own way to make our lines go bim bim bim. “Each line,” he says, “must be an enti­ty unto itself.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inspi­ra­tion from Charles Bukows­ki: You Might Be Old, Your Life May Be “Crap­py,” But You Can Still Make Good Art

Is Charles Bukows­ki a Self-Help Guru? Hear Five of His Bru­tal­ly Hon­est, Yet Odd­ly Inspir­ing, Poems and Decide for Your­self

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance” 

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

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Expressionist Dance Costumes from the 1920s, and the Tragic Story of Lavinia Schulz & Walter Holdt

in Dance, History | September 12th, 2019

The most fruit­ful cre­ative part­ner­ships, long or short, have often been tem­pes­tu­ous. On the short­er side, and among the stormi­est, we have a hus­band-and-wife team who real­ized visions hith­er­to unseen onstage, and who very near­ly fell into total obscu­ri­ty after a mur­der-sui­cide brought their part­ner­ship to an end. But in the Ham­burg of the late 1910s and ear­ly 1920s, writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Alli­son Meier, Lavinia Schulz and Wal­ter Holdt “cre­at­ed wild, Expres­sion­ist cos­tumes that looked like retro robots and Bauhaus knights,” twen­ty of them, for per­for­mances accom­pa­nied by avant-garde music. After their death in 1924, Schulz and Holdt’s work went into stor­age, nev­er to be found again until the late 1980s.

The cos­tumes had been gift­ed to the Muse­um für Kun­st und Gewerbe, which in 1925 “staged an evening in mem­o­ry of Lavinia Schulz and Wal­ter Holdt,” writes blog­ger Jan Reet­ze.

“After this, the masks, pho­tos and draw­ings” — includ­ing dances dia­grammed in a sys­tem of Schulz’s own inven­tion — “went into a cou­ple of ‘acro­bat’s bag­gage’ box­es and fell into obliv­ion on the muse­um’s attic. They were not even inven­to­ried. Which turned out to be a stroke of luck because this way the objects did­n’t fall into the hands of the Nazis, who, with­out any doubt, would have seen these works as ‘degen­er­ate art’ and in all prob­a­bil­i­ty would have destroyed them.”

You can see the cos­tumes in action in the video at the top of the post, and more of the pho­tos tak­en by Minya Diez-Dührkoop in the last year of Schulz and Holdt’s lives at Hyper­al­ler­gic. Their per­for­mances began in the expres­sion­ism with which the Berlin-edu­cat­ed Schultz had been asso­ci­at­ed and moved toward “the sup­posed puri­ty of pre-Judeo-Chris­t­ian, Aryan-Nordic cul­ture,” as Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Paul Gal­lagher writes.

“Between 1920–24, the cou­ple per­formed their dance rou­tines to the bewil­dered and often antag­o­nis­tic audi­ences of Ham­burg. Though some crit­ics appre­ci­at­ed the pair’s tal­ent and star­tling orig­i­nal­i­ty, this praise was nev­er enough to pay the rent.”

“Accord­ing to con­tem­po­rary crit­ics, Lavinia seemed to be the more cre­ative one,” writes Reet­ze. “Wal­ter, on the oth­er hand, was the bet­ter and more dis­ci­plined dancer, he exact­ly knew his for­mal means and how to use them.” The coun­ter­part to Holdt’s rig­or was Schulz’s more pri­mal genius, a sen­si­bil­i­ty that man­i­fest­ed aes­thet­i­cal­ly — seen in her high­ly uncon­ven­tion­al use of every­day mate­ri­als like “wire, gyp­sum, papi­er mâché and indus­tri­al garbage” — and emo­tion­al­ly.

Reet­ze quotes from the auto­bi­og­ra­phy of com­pos­er Hans Heinz Stuck­en­schmidt, who briefly lived with the cou­ple: “Depri­va­tion, hunger, cold­ness, nordic land­scape with storm, ice, and cat­a­stro­phes: That was her world, and she had found her­self in it with Holdt.”

Schulz and Holdt also refused to be paid for their per­for­mances. “You can­not sell spir­i­tu­al ideas for mon­ey,” Schulz wrote. “Spir­it and mon­ey are two antag­o­nis­tic poles, and if you sell spir­i­tu­al ideas for mon­ey, you sold the spir­it to the mon­ey and lost the spir­it.” Even­tu­al­ly their pover­ty — as well as the unusu­al­ly volatile nature of their rela­tion­ship, said to spark phys­i­cal mar­i­tal spats on stage — reached a break­ing point. “Both were in their 20s, and had earned lit­tle mon­ey from their artis­tic work,” writes Meier. “In finan­cial ruin, on June 18, 1924, Schulz shot Holdt, and then turned the gun on her­self.” But against all odds, their still-star­tling cre­ativ­i­ty — the kind that can, per­haps, emerge only from the oppo­si­tion of two incom­pat­i­ble forces — lives on.

via Dan­ger­ous Mind

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kandin­sky, Klee & Oth­er Bauhaus Artists Designed Inge­nious Cos­tumes Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Before

Watch an Avant-Garde Bauhaus Bal­let in Bril­liant Col­or, the Tri­adic Bal­let, First Staged by Oskar Schlem­mer in 1922

1930s Fash­ion Design­ers Pre­dict How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

An Online Trove of His­toric Sewing Pat­terns & Cos­tumes

Har­vard Puts Online a Huge Col­lec­tion of Bauhaus Art Objects

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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American Cities Then & Now: See How New York, Los Angeles & Detroit Look Today, Compared to the 1930s and 1940s

in Architecture, History | September 11th, 2019

Palimpsest has become clichéd as a descrip­tor of cities, but only due to its truth. Repeat­ed­ly eras­ing and rewrit­ing parts of cities over years, decades, and cen­turies has left us with built envi­ron­ments that reflect every peri­od of urban his­to­ry at once. Or at least in an ide­al world they do: we’ve all felt the dull­ness of new cities built whole, or of old cities that have bare­ly changed in liv­ing mem­o­ry, dull­ness that under­scores the val­ue of places in which a vari­ety of forms, styles, and eras all coex­ist. Take New York, which even in the 1930s pre­sent­ed the gen­teel­ly his­tor­i­cal along­side the thor­ough­ly mod­ern. The New York­er video above places dri­ving footage from that era along­side the same places — the Brook­lyn Bridge, Cen­tral Park, Harlem, the West Side High­way— shot in 2017, high­light­ing what has changed, and even more so what has­n’t.

Los Ange­les has under­gone a more dra­mat­ic trans­for­ma­tion, as Kevin McAlester’s side-by-side video of Bunker Hill in the 1940s and 2016 reveals. “An area of rough­ly five square blocks in down­town Los Ange­les,” says The New York­er, Bunker Hill was from 1959 “the sub­ject of a mas­sive urban-renew­al project, in which ‘improve­ment’ was gen­er­al­ly defined by the peo­ple who stood to prof­it from it, as well as their back­ers at City Hall, at the expense of any­one stand­ing in their way.”

The 53-year process turned a neigh­bor­hood of “some of the city’s most ele­gant man­sions and hotels,” lat­er sub­di­vid­ed and “pop­u­lat­ed by a mix of pen­sion­ers, immi­grants, work­ers, and peo­ple look­ing to get lost,” into an attempt­ed acrop­o­lis of works by archi­tec­tur­al super­stars, includ­ing Frank Gehry’s Dis­ney Con­cert Hall, recent Pritzk­er-win­ner Ara­ta Isoza­k­i’s Muse­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art, and John Port­man’s (movie-beloved) Bonaven­ture Hotel.

Above the clas­sic Amer­i­can build­ings of Detroit stands anoth­er of Port­man’s sig­na­ture glass-and-steel cylin­ders: the Renais­sance Cen­ter, com­mis­sioned in the 1970s by Hen­ry Ford II as the cen­ter­piece of the city’s hoped-for revival. Three decades ear­li­er, says The New York­er, “Detroit was the fourth-largest city in Amer­i­ca, draw­ing in work­ers with oppor­tu­ni­ties for sta­ble employ­ment on the assem­bly lines at the Ford, Gen­er­al Motors, and Chrysler plants.” But soon “fac­to­ries closed, and jobs van­ished from the city that had been the cen­ter of the indus­try.” The Motor City’s down­ward slide con­tin­ued until its 2013 bank­rupt­cy, but some auto man­u­fac­tur­ing remains, as shown in this split-screen video of Detroit over the past cen­tu­ry along­side Detroit in 2018. It even includes footage of the QLine, the street­car that opened in the pre­vi­ous year amid the lat­est wave of inter­est in restor­ing Detroit to its for­mer glo­ry. As in any city, the most sol­id future for Detroit must be built, in part, with the mate­ri­als of its past.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lon­don Mashed Up: Footage of the City from 1924 Lay­ered Onto Footage from 2013

Paris, New York & Havana Come to Life in Col­orized Films Shot Between 1890 and 1931

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Record­ed in 1913: Caught Between the Tra­di­tion­al and the Mod­ern

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

The Old­est Known Footage of Lon­don (1890–1920) Fea­tures the City’s Great Land­marks

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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Animated Series Drawn & Recorded Tells “Untold Stories” from Music History: Nirvana, Leonard Cohen, Blind Willie Johnson & More

in Animation, Music | September 11th, 2019

Who hasn’t tast­ed the plea­sures, guilty or oth­er­wise, of VH1’s Behind the Music? The long-run­ning show, a juicy mix of tabloid gos­sip, doc­u­men­tary insight, and unabashed nos­tal­gia, debuted in 1997, a total­ly dif­fer­ent media age. Its orig­i­nal view­ers were the first gen­er­a­tion to use email, shop online, or down­load (usu­al­ly pirat­ed) music. Peo­ple were will­ing to sit through episodes of an hour or more, with­out a pause but­ton, whether they liked the music or not. (Some of the best shows pro­file the most ridicu­lous one-hit won­ders).

Behind the Music is still on, and you can stream old episodes all day long, paus­ing every few min­utes to check email or social media, stream anoth­er video, or down­load an album in sec­onds. But with so many dis­trac­tions, it’s easy to lose the thread of Huey Lewis and the News’ rise to star­dom or the thrilling life and times of Ice‑T. We need sto­ries like these, but we may need them in a small­er, more self-con­tained form.

Enter Drawn & Record­ed: Mod­ern Myths of Music, an online series that deliv­ers the fris­son of Behind the Music in a frac­tion of the time, with the added bonus of whim­si­cal, high-qual­i­ty ani­ma­tion and nar­ra­tion by T. Bone Bur­nett. Now in its fourth sea­son, the award-win­ning series, direct­ed and hand-drawn by ani­ma­tor Drew Christie for stu­dio Gun­pow­der & Sky, brings us anec­dotes “some­times hilar­i­ous, occa­sion­al­ly trag­ic, always com­pelling,” writes Ani­ma­tion Mag­a­zine.

Those sto­ries include “Leonard Cohen’s escape from Cuban author­i­ties after being detained under sus­pi­cion of espi­onage” (see the trail­er here) and the ori­gins of Kurt Cobain’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” (above), a sto­ry we cov­ered in a pre­vi­ous post. Drawn & Record­ed has dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed itself from the afore­men­tioned pop music doc­u­men­tary show not only in its length and aes­thet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties but also in its will­ing­ness to ven­ture deep­er into music his­to­ry.

The episode below, for exam­ple, fea­tures trag­ic blues­man Blind Willie John­son, who made mod­ern his­to­ry when his music trav­eled into out­er space on the Voy­ager Gold­en Record. Giv­en their lengths of under five min­utes, each Drawn & Record­ed must prune its sto­ry carefully—there’s no room for mean­der­ing or gra­tu­itous rep­e­ti­tion. Each of the vignettes promis­es an “untold sto­ry” from music his­to­ry, and while that may not always be the case, they are each well-told and sur­pris­ing and often as strange as Christie’s ani­ma­tions and Burnett’s haunt­ed, raspy bari­tone sug­gest.

In the episode below, coun­try leg­end Jim­mie Rogers, whose influ­ence “would range from Hank Williams to Louis Arm­strong to Bob Dylan,” arrived in Kenya a decade after his death, by way of British mis­sion­ar­ies tot­ing a phono­graph. The native peo­ple became fas­ci­nat­ed with the sound of Rogers’ music. They pro­nounced his name “Chemirocha,” a word that came to mean “any­thing new and dif­fer­ent.” This became a song called “Chemirocha,” about a half-man/half-ante­lope god.

It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing­ly odd lit­tle tale about cross-cul­tur­al con­tact, one that has lit­tle to do with the biog­ra­phy of Jim­mie Rogers, and hence might nev­er make it into your stan­dard-issue doc­u­men­tary. But Drawn & Record­ed is some­thing else—a hand­made arti­fact that streams dig­i­tal­ly, telling sto­ries about musi­cians famous, infa­mous, and rarely remem­bered. Oth­er episodes fea­ture a can­ny mix of the con­tem­po­rary, clas­sic, and gold­en age, includ­ing Grimes, David Bowie, the Bea­t­les, Sis­ter Roset­ta Tharpe, MF Doom, and more. Find them, notes Ani­ma­tion Mag­a­zine, “on the Net­work, avail­able on DirecTV, DirecTV Now and AT&T U‑verse” or find scat­tered episodes on Vimeo.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Nirvana’s Icon­ic “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Came to Be: An Ani­mat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by T‑Bone Bur­nett Tells the True Sto­ry

A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to Nick Drake, Whose Haunt­ing & Influ­en­tial Songs Came Into the World 50 Years Ago Today

How Talk­ing Heads and Bri­an Eno Wrote “Once in a Life­time”: Cut­ting Edge, Strange & Utter­ly Bril­liant

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

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Pretty Much Pop #10 Examines Margaret Atwood’s Nightmare Vision: The Handmaid’s Tale

in Literature, Pretty Much Pop, Television | September 11th, 2019

Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt take on both Mar­garet Atwood’s 1985 nov­el plus the Bruce Miller/Hulu TV series through sea­son 3. There’s also a graph­ic nov­el and the 1990 film.

We get into what’s need­ed to move a nov­el to the screen like that: The char­ac­ter can’t just remain pas­sive as in the nov­el in order to keep us suf­fer­ing with her past the first sea­son as sto­ry­telling beyond the book begins. We talk about Atwood’s fun­ny neol­o­gisms (like “pray­va­gan­za”) that didn’t make it into the show.

How does race play into the sto­ry, and how should it? Is the sto­ry pri­mar­i­ly a polit­i­cal state­ment or a self-con­tained work of art? Giv­en the bleak­ness of the sit­u­a­tion depict­ed, can there be com­ic relief? How can we have a nom­i­nal­ly fun­ny pod­cast about this work?

Some of the arti­cles we drew on or bring up include:

Plus Eri­ca brings up this video of Bill Moy­ers inter­view­ing Atwood about reli­gion. We also touch on Shindler’s List, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nau­sea, David Brin diss­ing Star Wars as anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic sto­ry­telling, and the many con­ser­v­a­tive dis­missals of the show as hys­ter­i­cal pro­pa­gan­da.

Buy the book, the graph­ic nov­el, or its new sequel The Tes­ta­ments.

You may be inter­est­ed in these relat­ed Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life episodes (Mark’s long-run­ning phi­los­o­phy pod­cast): #181 on Han­nah Arendt and the banal­i­ty of evil, #139 on bell hooks  and her his­tor­i­cal account of con­di­tions for black women not ter­ri­bly dis­sim­i­lar to the ones described by Atwood, #90 inter­view­ing David Brin about the con­nec­tions between spec­u­la­tive fic­tion, phi­los­o­phy, and polit­i­cal speech. PEL has also record­ed sev­er­al episodes on Sartreand Mark ran a sup­port­er-only  ses­sion that you could lis­ten to on Nau­sea in par­tic­u­lar. Also check out Brian’s Con­tel­lary Tales pod­cast #2 talk­ing about anoth­er breed­ing-relat­ed sci-fi sto­ry by Octavia But­ler.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

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What Would Michel Foucault Think of Social Media, Fake News & Our Post Truth World?

in Philosophy | September 10th, 2019

Dur­ing the late 70s, Michel Fou­cault gave a series of lec­tures at the Col­lege de France in which he defined the con­cept of biopol­i­tics, an idea Rachel Adams calls “polit­i­cal ratio­nal­i­ty which takes the admin­is­tra­tion of life and pop­u­la­tions as its sub­ject.” These ideas have come to have even more res­o­nance in the spread of bio­met­ric iden­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tems and mil­i­ta­rized pop­u­la­tion con­trol poli­cies.

Fou­cault begins his lec­ture series on biopol­i­tics with an account of the birth of Neolib­er­al­ism, the engi­neered pri­va­ti­za­tion of pub­lic goods and ser­vices and the con­cen­tra­tion of cap­i­tal and pow­er into the hands of a few. “Every­thing I do,” he once said, “I do in order that it might be of use.” What would he have to say about the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion? asks the BBC video above, a polit­i­cal land­scape per­me­at­ed by fake news, accu­sa­tions of fake news, and the gen­er­al admis­sion that we are now “post truth”?

In some sense, Fou­cault, argued, we have always lived in such a world—not one in which real news and actu­al truth did not exist, but in which we are con­di­tioned through lan­guage to adopt ide­o­log­i­cal per­spec­tives that may have lit­tle to do with fact. What counts as knowl­edge, Fou­cault showed, gets authen­ti­cat­ed to serve the inter­ests of pow­er. Lat­er in his career, he saw more space for resis­tance and self-trans­for­ma­tion emerge in pow­er relations—and he would have seen such spaces in social media too, the video claims.

After his infa­mous acid trip in Death Val­ley, Fou­cault report­ed­ly (and self-report­ed­ly) returned a changed man, with a much less gloomy, claus­tro­pho­bic out­look. The ear­li­er Fou­cault may have empha­sized the total­iz­ing mech­a­nisms of sur­veil­lance and con­trol in social media, per­haps to the exclu­sion of any poten­tial for lib­er­a­tion. The video doesn’t make these dis­tinc­tions between ear­ly and late or give us much in the way of a his­to­ry of his thought, though it acknowl­edges how crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant his­to­ry was to Fou­cault him­self.

We can’t know that he would say any of the things attrib­uted to him here. He was a con­trar­i­an thinker, who “didn’t believe in all-embrac­ing the­o­ries to explain the world,” the nar­ra­tor admits. Per­haps he would have seen social media as tech­ni­cal elab­o­ra­tion of biopow­er: har­vest­ing per­son­al data, track­ing everyone’s loca­tion, get­ting us all to watch each oth­er. Or as a ver­sion of Jere­my Ben­tham’s panop­ti­con, in which we nev­er know when some­one’s watch­ing us, so we inter­nal­ize the con­trol sys­tem. These are some of the pris­ons, Fou­cault might say, that appear under regimes of “secu­ri­ty, ter­ri­to­ry, pop­u­la­tion.”

The video fea­tures Ang­ie Hobbs, Pro­fes­sor of Pub­lic Under­stand­ing of Phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sheffield.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michel Fou­cault and Noam Chom­sky Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV (1971)

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Michel Fou­cault, “Philoso­pher of Pow­er”

Hear Hours of Lec­tures by Michel Fou­cault: Record­ed in Eng­lish & French Between 1961 and 1983

When Michel Fou­cault Tripped on Acid in Death Val­ley and Called It “The Great­est Expe­ri­ence of My Life” (1975)

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

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Watch an Archaeologist Play the “Lithophone,” a Prehistoric Instrument That Let Ancient Musicians Play Real Classic Rock

in History, Music | September 10th, 2019

Sure­ly each of us hears more music in a day than the aver­age pre­his­toric human being heard in a life­time. Then again, it depends on the def­i­n­i­tion of “music”: though what we lis­ten to is undoubt­ed­ly more com­plex than what our dis­tant ances­tors lis­tened to, our music descends from theirs just as we descend from them. And so it should­n’t come as too much of a sur­prise that the musi­cal instru­ments used in pre­his­toric times should sound vague­ly famil­iar to us. Take, for instance, archae­ol­o­gist and pre­his­toric music spe­cial­ist Jean-Loup Ringot’s per­for­mance on the semi­cir­cle of stones known as a litho­phone, or “rock gong.”

Litho­phones, wrote Josh Jones on the instru­men­t’s last appear­ance here on Open Cul­ture, “have been found all over the African con­ti­nent, in South Amer­i­ca, Aus­tralia, Azer­bai­jan, Eng­land, Hawaii, Ice­land, India, and every­where else pre­his­toric peo­ple lived. Not the cul­tur­al prop­er­ty of any one group, the rock gong came, rather, from a uni­ver­sal human insight into the nat­ur­al son­ic prop­er­ties of stone.”

A com­menter on the video of Ringot play­ing the litho­pone describes it as “rem­i­nis­cent of the bonang,” the col­lec­tion of small gongs set on strings that con­sti­tutes one of the defin­ing instru­ments of the tra­di­tion­al Javanese per­cus­sion ensem­ble known as game­lan.

Even if you’ve nev­er heard of game­lan or bonang, the sound of the litho­phone — and its resem­blance to that of instru­ments used in oth­er tra­di­tion­al musics — may well res­onate with you, so to speak. The main dif­fer­ence comes out of the mate­ri­als: the gongs, or ket­tles, of a bonang are made from bronze, iron, or mix­tures of oth­er met­als, while the litho­phone gen­er­ates sound with only what would have been avail­able to the Flint­stones. The use of such a nat­u­ral­ly abun­dant sub­stance has, of course, inspired many a mod­ern wag to Flintston­ian quips about litho­phone play­ers as the first “rock­ers.” Play­ers of the real clas­sic rock, in oth­er words — not like all the junk that has come out in the last few mil­len­nia. But then, don’t we all pre­fer the ear­ly stuff?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Mod­ern Drum­mer Plays a Rock Gong, a Per­cus­sion Instru­ment from Pre­his­toric Times

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Old­est Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

What Did Ancient Greek Music Sound Like?: Lis­ten to a Recon­struc­tion That’s ‘100% Accu­rate’

Vis­it an Online Col­lec­tion of 61,761 Musi­cal Instru­ments from Across the World

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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Sun Ra Applies to NASA’s Art Program: When the Inventor of Space Jazz Applied to Make Space Art

in Jazz, Music | September 10th, 2019

You may have seen the image above float­ing around, espe­cial­ly if you fol­low jazz lovers and writ­ers like Ted Gioia: the first page of Sun Ra’s appli­ca­tion to NASA’s art pro­gram. The pro­gram was “some­what of a glo­ri­fied PR cam­paign,” writes Shan­non Gorm­ley at Willamette Week, but one nonethe­less that has employed many promi­nent artists since its incep­tion in 1962, includ­ing Annie Lei­bovitz, Andy Warhol, Lau­rie Ander­son, and Nor­man Rock­well. NASA has “enlist­ed musi­cians, poets and oth­ers for more vari­ety,” the Admin­is­tra­tion notes. “Pat­ti LaBelle even record­ed a space-themed song.”

But Sun Ra—given name Her­man Blount; legal name (as he writes in paren­the­ses) Le Sony’r Ra—was not, it seems, con­sid­ered when he applied in the 1960s, even if he more or less invent­ed space jazz in the pre­vi­ous decade. After many years in Chica­go, he’d relo­cat­ed his free jazz big band, the Arkestra, to New York, where they influ­enced lat­er Beats and the ear­ly psy­che­del­ic scene (just as he was to influ­ence funk, prog, and fusion in the 70s, and come in for a major revival in the 90s through indie rock and hip hop.)

Like­ly, who­ev­er read his appli­ca­tion was unfa­mil­iar with the cre­ative idio­syn­crasies of his lan­guage, writ­ten just as he sang and played—with incan­ta­to­ry rep­e­ti­tion, syn­tac­ti­cal sur­pris­es, and ALL CAPS all the time. The prodi­gious, vision­ary band­leader pro­pos­es to con­tribute “music that enlight­ens and space ori­en­tate dis­ci­pline coor­di­nate.” One might cast a wary eye on this descrip­tion, from an appli­cant who lists their edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion as “space ori­en­ta­tion.” Unless you’d heard what Sun Ra meant by the phrase.

Take his ori­en­ta­tion in 1961’s “Space Jazz Rever­ie” from The Futur­is­tic Sounds of Sun Ra, record­ed just after he arrived in New York, on the thresh­old of push­ing the Arkestra fur­ther out into the solar sys­tem. The tune “osten­si­bly sounds like a large-ensem­ble take on hard bop,” writes Matthew Wuethrich at All About Jazz. “Mid-tem­po swing, strange-but-not-unheard-of-inter­vals and a string of solos.” But the com­po­si­tion starts to warp and wob­ble. “Ra’s comp­ing on the piano gen­er­ates an unset­tling back­drop.” A “bizarre bridge” after the solos throws things fur­ther off-kil­ter.

This is not cold, crys­talline music of the stars, but an emo­tion­al jour­ney into the exci­ta­tion, coor­di­na­tion (to take his phrase), and defa­mil­iar­iza­tion of space trav­el. Lis­ten­ing to Sun Ra almost inclines me to believe his tales of inter­stel­lar trav­el and alien abduction—or at least to feel, for a few min­utes, as though I had tak­en a cos­mic trip. NASA’s art pro­gram would have cer­tain­ly been enriched by his con­tri­bu­tions, though whether it would have raised either one’s pro­file is uncer­tain.

Ra’s appli­ca­tion “reads like a prophe­cy,” writes Gorm­ley. We need music, in space and oth­er­wise. “What is called man is very anar­chy-mind­ed at present,” he wrote. But Sun Ra him­self was “anar­chy-mind­ed,” in the best sense of the term—he gave his imag­i­na­tion free rein and did not cater to any author­i­ty. This ran­kled many of his jazz peers, who fre­quent­ly said he went too far. Sun Ra nev­er seemed to both­er about the crit­i­cism.

He may have tak­en the NASA snub a lit­tle hard. In his land­mark 1972 film Space is the Place, he dis­cuss­es the space pro­gram with a group of black Oak­land youth, say­ing, “I see none of you have been invit­ed.” Sun Ra and the young peo­ple to whom he brought the hope of out­er space could not have known about the hid­den his­to­ry of African Amer­i­can sci­en­tists and astro­nauts in the space pro­gram. In any case, Ra had his own space pro­gram. A one-band cul­tur­al rev­o­lu­tion that was too for­ward-look­ing for both jazz and NASA.

via Ted Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Lei­bovitz, Nor­man Rock­well & 350 Oth­er Artists to Visu­al­ly Doc­u­ment America’s Space Pro­gram

Star Trek‘s Nichelle Nichols Cre­ates a Short Film for NASA to Recruit New Astro­nauts (1977)

Stream 74 Sun Ra Albums Free Online: Decades of “Space Jazz” and Oth­er Forms of Inter­galac­tic, Afro­fu­tur­is­tic Musi­cal Cre­ativ­i­ty

Sun Ra’s Full Lec­ture & Read­ing List From His 1971 UC Berke­ley Course, “The Black Man in the Cos­mos”

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

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