Bohemian Rhapsody’s Bad Editing: A Breakdown

in Film | March 18th, 2019

Bohemi­an Rhap­sody may have won the Oscar for Best Edit­ing. But video essay­ist Thomas Flight isn’t per­suad­ed. In a 13-minute video, Flight decon­structs a 104-sec­ond clip from the biopic, reveal­ing the exces­sive 60 cuts that make up the scene. That trans­lates into a dizzy­ing cut every 1.8 sec­onds on aver­age.

For Thomas Flight, Bohemi­an Rhap­sody is noth­ing short of a “mas­ter­class in bad edit­ing.” For you, Flight’s video offers a nice short crash course in film edit­ing.

Accord­ing to The Wash­ing­ton Post, the pub scene decon­struct­ed in Flight’s video was actu­al­ly edit­ed by Dex­ter Fletcher–and not John Ottman, the film edi­tor who helped sal­vage the film and then won top hon­ors at the Oscars. Asked about the botched scene, Ottman told WaPo: “When­ev­er I see it, I want to put a bag over my head. Because that’s not my aes­thet­ic. If there’s ever an extend­ed ver­sion of the film where I can put a cou­ple scenes back, I will recut that scene!”

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Film Thought: A Close Look at the Mas­ter­ful Edit­ing of Sher­lock, Star­ring Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch

The Alche­my of Film Edit­ing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Han­nah and Her Sis­ters, The Empire Strikes Back & Oth­er Films

Scenes from Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Com­pared to Real Life: A 21-Minute Com­pi­la­tion

Hear How Queen’s “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody” Would Sound If Sung by John­ny Cash, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Frank Sina­tra & 38 Oth­er Artists

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An Animated Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Life & Thought

in Philosophy | March 15th, 2019

There’s no shame if you’ve nev­er known how to pro­nounce Friedrich Niet­zsche’s name cor­rect­ly. Even less if you nev­er remem­ber how to spell it. If these hap­pen to be the case, you may be less than famil­iar with his phi­los­o­phy. Let Alain de Botton’s ani­mat­ed School of Life video briefly intro­duce you, and you’ll nev­er for­get how to say it: “Knee Cha.” (As for remem­ber­ing the spelling, you’re on your own.) You’ll also get a short biog­ra­phy of the dis­grun­tled, dys­pep­tic Ger­man philoso­pher, who left a promis­ing aca­d­e­m­ic career at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Basel in his mid-20s and embarked to the Swiss Alps to write his vio­lent­ly orig­i­nal books in soli­tude before suc­cumb­ing to a men­tal break­down at 44 when he saw a cart dri­ver beat­ing a horse.

Niet­zsche died after remain­ing almost entire­ly silent for 11 years. In these years and after his death, thanks to the machi­na­tions of his sis­ter Eliz­a­beth, his thought was twist­ed into a hate­ful car­i­ca­ture. He has since been reha­bil­i­tat­ed from asso­ci­a­tions with the Nazis, but he still calls up fear and loathing for many peo­ple because of his relent­less cri­tiques of Chris­tian­i­ty and rep­u­ta­tion for star­ing too long into abysses. Maybe we can’t help but hear fascis­tic over­tones in his con­cept of the uber­men­sch, and his ideas about slave moral­i­ty can make for uncom­fort­able read­ing. Those steeped in Nietzsche’s thought may not feel that de Botton’s com­men­tary gives these ideas their prop­er crit­i­cal due.

Like­wise, Niet­zsche him­self is treat­ed as some­thing of an uber­men­sch, an approach that pulls him out of his social world. Impor­tant fig­ures who had a tremen­dous impact on his per­son­al and intel­lec­tu­al life—like Arthur Schopen­hauer, Richard and Cosi­ma Wag­n­er, Lou Salomé, and Nietzsche’s sister—don’t even receive a men­tion. But this is a lot to ask from a six-minute sum­ma­ry. De Bot­ton hits some of philo­soph­i­cal high­lights and explains some mis­con­cep­tions. Yes, Niet­zsche held no brief for Chris­tian­i­ty at all, but this was because it caused tremen­dous suf­fer­ing, he thought, by mak­ing peo­ple moral­ly stunt­ed and bit­ter­ly resent­ful.

Instead, he argued, we should embrace our desires, and use so-called sin­ful pas­sions like envy to lever­age our ambi­tions. Niet­zsche is not a seduc­er, cor­rupt­ing the youth with promis­es of great­ness. You may very well fail, he admit­ted, and fail mis­er­ably. But to deny your­self is to nev­er become who you are. Niet­zsche schol­ar Babette Babich has described this aspect of the philosopher’s thought as the ethics of the sup­port­ive friend. She quotes David B. Alli­son, who writes that Nietzsche’s advice comes to us “like a friend who seems to share your every concern—and your aver­sions and sus­pi­cions as well. Like a true friend, he rarely tells you what you should do.”

Except that he often does. Babich also writes about Niet­zsche as edu­ca­tor, and indeed he con­sid­ered edu­ca­tion one of the high­est human goods, too pre­cious to be squan­dered on those who do not appre­ci­ate it. His phi­los­o­phy of edu­ca­tion is con­sis­tent with his views on cul­ture. Since God is Dead, we must replace scrip­ture and litur­gy with art, lit­er­a­ture, and music. So far, so many a young Niet­zsche enthu­si­ast, pur­su­ing their own form of Niet­zschean edu­ca­tion, will be on board with the philosopher’s pro­gram.

But as de Bot­ton also explains, Niet­zsche, who turned Diony­sus into a philo­soph­i­cal ide­al, might have issued one pre­scrip­tion too many for the aver­age col­lege stu­dent: no drink­ing. If that’s too much to stom­ach, we should at least take seri­ous­ly that stuff about star­ing into abysses. Niet­zsche meant it as a warn­ing. Instead, writes Peter Pre­vos at The Hori­zon of Rea­son, “we should go beyond star­ing and brave­ly leap into the bound­less chasm and prac­tice philo­soph­i­cal base jump­ing.” No mat­ter how much Niet­zsche you read, he’s nev­er going to tell you that means. We only become who we are, he sug­gests, when we fig­ure it on our own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

How Did Niet­zsche Become the Most Mis­un­der­stood & Bas­tardized Philoso­pher?: A Video from Slate Explains

Niet­zsche Lays Out His Phi­los­o­phy of Edu­ca­tion and a Still-Time­ly Cri­tique of the Mod­ern Uni­ver­si­ty (1872)

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

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

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The CIA’s Rectal Tool Kit for Spies–Created for Truly Desperate Situations During The Cold War

in History, Technology | March 15th, 2019

Though glob­al espi­onage remains a going con­cern in the 21st cen­tu­ry, some­how the pop­u­lar sto­ries we tell about it return again and again to the Cold War. Maybe it has to do with the demand those most­ly pre-dig­i­tal decades made upon the phys­i­cal inge­nu­ity of spies as well as the tools of spy­craft. Take, for instance, one par­tic­u­lar­ly inge­nious CIA-issued tool kit on dis­play at the Inter­na­tion­al Spy Muse­um in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. “Filled with escape tools,” says the Spy Muse­um’s web site, “this kit could be stashed inside the body where it would not be found dur­ing a search.” Take one guess as to where inside the body, exact­ly, it could be stashed.

You can get a clos­er look at the rec­tal tool kit in the Atlas Obscu­ra video above. This “tight­ly sealed, pill-shaped con­tain­er full of tools that could aid an escape from var­i­ous sticky sit­u­a­tions,” as that site’s Lizzie Philip describes it, “was issued to CIA oper­a­tives dur­ing the height of the Cold War.”

Built to con­tain a vari­ety of escape tools like “drill bits, saws and knives,” it pre­sent­ed quite an engi­neer­ing chal­lenge: its mate­ri­als, one needs hard­ly add, “could not splin­ter or cre­ate sharp edges that could injure users,” and “it had to seal tight­ly to not let any­thing seep in or poke out.” Upon see­ing an item like this, which com­mands so much atten­tion at the Spy Muse­um, one won­ders whether all the spy­ing that went on dur­ing Cold War was real­ly so glam­orous after all.

Has it crossed the mind of, say, John Le Car­ré, his writ­ing career a near­ly six­ty-year-long defla­tion of the pre­ten­sions of spy­craft, to write about the ins and outs of rec­tal tool kits? But then, per­son­al expe­ri­ence has grant­ed him much more knowl­edge about the tac­tics of British espi­onage than those of the Amer­i­can vari­ety. As sure­ly as he knows the MI5’s offi­cial mot­to, “Reg­num Defende,” he must also know the unof­fi­cial mot­to that pokes fun at the orga­ni­za­tion’s aggres­sive cul­ture of blame avoid­ance, “Rec­tum Defende” — words that, in light of the knowl­edge about just where the agents of Britain’s main ally were stor­ing their tools, take on a whole new mean­ing.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The CIA’s For­mer Chief of Dis­guise Show How Spies Use Cos­tumes in Under­cov­er Oper­a­tions

How the CIA Helped Shape the Cre­ative Writ­ing Scene in Amer­i­ca

Read the CIA’s Sim­ple Sab­o­tage Field Man­u­al: A Time­less, Kafkaesque Guide to Sub­vert­ing Any Orga­ni­za­tion with “Pur­pose­ful Stu­pid­i­ty” (1944)

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

The C.I.A.’s “Bes­tiary of Intel­li­gence Writ­ing” Sat­i­rizes Spook Jar­gon with Mau­rice Sendak-Style Draw­ings

19-Year-Old Stu­dent Uses Ear­ly Spy Cam­era to Take Can­did Street Pho­tos (Cir­ca 1895)

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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Leonard Bernstein Awkwardly Turns the Screws on Tenor Jose Carreras While Recording West Side Story (1984)

in Music, Opera, Theatre | March 15th, 2019

What have we here?

Evi­dence that the Mae­stro is a mon­ster?

Or a behind the scenes reminder that Arrest­ed Devel­op­ment’s wannabe actor Tobias Fünke is not too far off base when he says that to make it in “this busi­ness of show, you have to have the heart of an angel and the hide… of an ele­phant.”

Both? Nei­ther? Any way you slice it, the record­ing ses­sion above is not for your typ­i­cal cast album.

West Side Sto­ry, with a book by Arthur Lau­rents, music by Leonard Bern­stein, and lyrics by Stephen Sond­heim, opened on Broad­way in 1957.

The film, star­ring Natal­ie Wood and Richard Beymer as star-crossed lovers Maria and Tony, came along four years lat­er.

After which it’s been an end­less round of com­mu­ni­ty, col­lege, and high school pro­duc­tions.

Are you a Jet or a Shark?

The cel­e­brat­ed tenor José Car­reras does not make a par­tic­u­lar­ly believ­able Jet.

While untold num­bers of white kids have attempt­ed Puer­to Rican accents to play Maria, Bernar­do, Ani­ta, and Chi­no, that knife has sel­dom cut the oth­er way.

Per­haps a dialect coach could have trans­formed Car­reras’ thick Span­ish accent into Tony’s New York street punk ver­nac­u­lar, but the prep time for these Sep­tem­ber 1984 record­ing ses­sions was min­i­mal, and not tied to any actu­al pro­duc­tion.

Car­reras was also, at 38, a bit long in the tooth to be tack­ling the part.

But what might have been deal break­ers for a Broad­way revival were per­mis­si­ble for this week­long spe­cial event in which world-cal­iber artists, “whose main rea­son for exist­ing,” accord­ing to Bern­stein, was their singing, would be lay­ing down the score in the stu­dio, backed by a full orches­tra.

As he told his asso­ciate and even­tu­al biog­ra­ph­er, clas­si­cal music tele­vi­sion pre­sen­ter Humphrey Bur­ton:

l’d always thought of West Side Sto­ry in terms of teenagers and there are no teenage opera singers, it’s just a con­tra­dic­tion in terms. But this is a record­ing and peo­ple don’t have to look 16, they don’t have to be able to dance or act a rather dif­fi­cult play eight times a week. And there­fore we took this rather unortho­dox step of cast­ing num­ber-one world-class opera singers. I sup­pose the only fore­see­able prob­lem was that they might sound too old—but they don’t, they just sound mar­velous!

Bernstein’s approv­ing mood is nowhere in evi­dence in the above clip, in which he hec­tors Car­reras for screw­ing up the tem­po, as the instru­men­tal­ists and sound engi­neers squirm.

Car­reras’ dis­com­fort and cha­grin is so pal­pa­ble that you can find the sequence on YouTube under the title “Tenor Keeps Screw­ing Up while Bern­stein Con­ducts—Awk­ward Sequence,” as if he were some weedy upstart, still wet behind the ears, when in fact, he had just flown in from Verona, where he’d been appear­ing as Don José in Car­men.

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Car­reras’ Maria, sup­plied a taste of what it was like to sing for the com­pos­er:

He’s a man of many emo­tions. You can see his moods, his frus­tra­tions, his hap­pi­ness, his want­i­ng to per­form to peo­ple. That’s the thing that makes the man inter­est­ing. One is con­stant­ly try­ing to read him, but he’s on anoth­er plan­et!

In the end, Bern­stein declared him­self pleased with what had been accom­plished, or at least with the endur­ing pow­er of the mate­r­i­al.

But read­ers with an anti-author­i­tar­i­an streak may not feel sat­is­fied until they’ve seen the clip below, in which a rogue BBC Orches­tra trum­pet isn’t quite so def­er­en­tial in the face of the Maestro’s crit­i­cism.

Lis­ten to the 1984 record­ing of West Side Sto­ry for free on Spo­ti­fy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Bern­stein Intro­duces the Moog Syn­the­siz­er to the World in 1969, Play­ing an Elec­tri­fied Ver­sion of Bach’s “Lit­tle Fugue in G”

Watch Leonard Bern­stein Con­duct the Vien­na Phil­har­mon­ic Using Only His Eye­brows

Leonard Bern­stein Presents “The Great­est 5 Min­utes in Music Edu­ca­tion”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain in New York City this April. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Natalie Portman Teaches a MasterClass in Acting

in Film, Online Courses | March 14th, 2019

This week, Mas­ter­Class rolled out its lat­est course–Natal­ie Port­man teach­ing a 20-les­son class on act­ing. The upstart edu­ca­tion­al ven­ture writes:

One of her generation’s most ver­sa­tile per­form­ers, Acad­e­my Award-win­ning actor Natal­ie Port­man has been cap­ti­vat­ing audi­ences for decades. Since her on-screen debut at age 12, she’s worked with some of cinema’s most cel­e­brat­ed direc­tors and show­cased her skills through unfor­get­table roles in Black Swan, Jack­ie, and the Star Wars fran­chise.

Hav­ing nev­er tak­en an act­ing class, Natal­ie devel­oped her craft over 25 years of obser­va­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and count­less bold exper­i­ments. The con­sum­mate dra­mat­ic shapeshifter, she has worked across gen­res and his­tor­i­cal peri­ods, imbu­ing each per­for­mance with an authen­tic­i­ty she attrib­ut­es to intense research, prepa­ra­tion, and an eye for human behav­ior.

And now, in her first-ever act­ing class, she “shows how empa­thy is at the core of every great per­for­mance, how to bring real-life details into every role, and how to build your own cre­ative process.”

You can enroll in Port­man’s new class (which runs $90) here. You can also pay $180 to get an annu­al pass to the entire­ty of Mas­ter­Class’ cours­es–a cat­a­log of about 50 cours­es, which includes oth­er act­ing class­es by Jodie Fos­ter, Samuel L. Jack­son and more.

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:

450+ Movie Scenes Where Actors Break the Fourth Wall, Pre­sent­ed in Two Big Super­cuts

What Made Robin Williams a Unique­ly Expres­sive Actor: A Video Essay Explores a Sub­tle Dimen­sion of His Com­ic Genius

Movie Accent Expert Ana­lyzes 31 Actors Play­ing Oth­er Famous Peo­ple: Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles, Natal­ie Port­man as Jack­ie Kennedy, Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan, and More

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When William Faulkner Set the World Record for Writing the Longest Sentence in Literature: Read the 1,288-Word Sentence from Absalom, Absalom!

in Books, Literature, Writing | March 14th, 2019

Image by Carl Van Vecht­en, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“How did Faulkn­er pull it off?” is a ques­tion many a fledg­ling writer has asked them­selves while strug­gling through a peri­od of appren­tice­ship like that nov­el­ist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk “My Faulkn­er.” Barth “reorches­trat­ed” his lit­er­ary heroes, he says, “in search of my writer­ly self… down­load­ing my innu­mer­able pre­de­ces­sors as only an insa­tiable green appren­tice can.” Sure­ly a great many writ­ers can relate when Barth says, “it was Faulkn­er at his most invo­lut­ed and incan­ta­to­ry who most enchant­ed me.” For many a writer, the Faulkner­ian sen­tence is an irre­sistible labyrinth. His syn­tax has a way of weav­ing itself into the uncon­scious, emerg­ing as fair to mid­dling imi­ta­tion.

While study­ing at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty, Barth found him­self writ­ing about his native East­ern Shore Mary­land in a pas­tiche style of “mid­dle Faulkn­er and late Joyce.” He may have won some praise from a vis­it­ing young William Sty­ron, “but the fin­ished opus didn’t fly—for one thing, because Faulkn­er inti­mate­ly knew his Snopses and Comp­sons and Sar­toris­es, as I did not know my made-up denizens of the Mary­land marsh.” The advice to write only what you know may not be worth much as a uni­ver­sal com­mand­ment. But study­ing the way that Faulkn­er wrote when he turned to the sub­jects he knew best pro­vides an object les­son on how pow­er­ful a lit­er­ary resource inti­ma­cy can be.

Not only does Faulkner’s deep affil­i­a­tion with his char­ac­ters’ inner lives ele­vate his por­traits far above the lev­el of local col­or or region­al­ist curios­i­ty, but it ani­mates his sen­tences, makes them con­stant­ly move and breathe. No mat­ter how long and twist­ed they get, they do not wilt, with­er, or drag; they run riv­er-like, turn­ing around in asides, out­rag­ing them­selves and dou­bling and tripling back. Faulkner’s inti­ma­cy is not earnest­ness, it is the uncan­ny feel­ing of a raw encounter with a nerve cen­ter light­ing up with infor­ma­tion, all of it seem­ing­ly crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant.

It is the extra­or­di­nary sen­so­ry qual­i­ty of his prose that enabled Faulkn­er to get away with writ­ing the longest sen­tence in lit­er­a­ture, at least accord­ing to the 1983 Guin­ness Book of World Records, a pas­sage from Absa­lom, Absa­lom! consist­ing of 1,288 words and who knows how many dif­fer­ent kinds of claus­es. There are now longer sen­tences in Eng­lish writ­ing. Jonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club ends with a 33-page long whop­per with 13,955 words in it. Entire nov­els hun­dreds of pages long have been writ­ten in one sen­tence in oth­er lan­guages. All of Faulkner’s mod­ernist con­tem­po­raries, includ­ing of course Joyce, Wolff, and Beck­ett, mas­tered the use of run-ons, to dif­fer­ent effect.

But, for a time, Faulkn­er took the run-on as far as it could go. He may have had no inten­tion of inspir­ing post­mod­ern fic­tion, but one of its best-known nov­el­ists, Barth, only found his voice by first writ­ing a “heav­i­ly Faulkner­ian marsh-opera.” Many hun­dreds of exper­i­men­tal writ­ers have had almost iden­ti­cal expe­ri­ences try­ing to exor­cise the Oxford, Mis­sis­sip­pi modernist’s voice from their prose. Read that one­time longest sen­tence in lit­er­a­ture, all 1,288 words of it, below.

Just exact­ly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back think­ing Mad impo­tent old man who real­ized at last that there must be some lim­it even to the capa­bil­i­ties of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his sit­u­a­tion as that of the show girl, the pony, who real­izes that the prin­ci­pal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fid­dle and drum but from a clock and cal­en­dar, must have seen him­self as the old wornout can­non which real­izes that it can deliv­er just one more fierce shot and crum­ble to dust in its own furi­ous blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still with­in his scope and com­pass and saw son gone, van­ished, more insu­per­a­ble to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be dif­fer­ent and those to call him by it strangers and what­ev­er dragon’s out­crop­ping of Sut­pen blood the son might sow on the body of what­ev­er strange woman would there­fore car­ry on the tra­di­tion, accom­plish the hered­i­tary evil and harm under anoth­er name and upon and among peo­ple who will nev­er have heard the right one; daugh­ter doomed to spin­ster­hood who had cho­sen spin­ster­hood already before there was any­one named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to suc­cor her in bereave­ment and sor­row found nei­ther but instead that calm absolute­ly impen­e­tra­ble face between a home­spun dress and sun­bon­net seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chick­ens while Jones was build­ing the cof­fin and which she wore dur­ing the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own gar­ments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excus­ing what help they had from Jones who lived with his grand­daugh­ter in the aban­doned fish­ing camp with its col­laps­ing roof and rot­ting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sut­pen was to lend him, make him bor­row to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not veg­etable weeds ‑would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indig­na­tion had swept her back to town to live on stolen gar­den truck and out o f anony­mous bas­kets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daugh­ters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watch­ing from her dis­tance as the two daugh­ters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient vari­cose and despair­ing Faus­tus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoul­der, run­ning his lit­tle coun­try store now for his bread and meat, hag­gling tedious­ly over nick­els and dimes with rapa­cious and pover­ty-strick­en whites and negroes, who at one time could have gal­loped for ten miles in any direc­tion with­out cross­ing his own bound­ary, using out of his mea­gre stock the cheap rib­bons and beads and the stale vio­lent­ly-col­ored can­dy with which even an old man can seduce a fif­teen-year-old coun­try girl, to ruin the grand­daugh­ter o f his part­ner, this Jones-this gan­gling malar­ia-rid­den white man whom he had giv­en per­mis­sion four­teen years ago to squat in the aban­doned fish­ing camp with the year-old grand­child-Jones, part­ner porter and clerk who at the demon’s com­mand removed with his own hand (and maybe deliv­ered too) from the show­case the can­dy beads and rib­bons, mea­sured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the grand­daugh­ter to fash­ion a dress to walk past the loung­ing men in, the side-look­ing and the tongues, until her increas­ing bel­ly taught her embar­rass­ment-or per­haps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who dur­ing the next four years got no near­er than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and veg­eta­bles on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daugh­ter (and Clytie too, the one remain­ing ser­vant, negro, the one who would for­bid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depend­ed on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite fre­quent now) after­noons when the demon would sud­den­ly curse the store emp­ty of cus­tomers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his order­ly or even his house ser­vants when he had them (and in which he doubt­less ordered Jones to fetch from the show­case the rib­bons and beads and can­dy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sit­ting now who in the old days, the old dead Sun­day after­noons of monot­o­nous peace which they spent beneath the scup­per­nong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the ham­mock while Jones squat­ted against a post, ris­ing from time to time to pour for the demon from the demi­john and the buck­et of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squat­ting again, chortling and chuck­ling and say­ing ‘Sho, Mis­ter Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drink­ing turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sit­ting but reach­ing after the third or sec­ond drink that old man’s state of impo­tent and furi­ous unde­feat in which he would rise, sway­ing and plung­ing and shout­ing for his horse and pis­tols to ride sin­gle-hand­ed into Wash­ing­ton and shoot Lin­coln (a year or so too late here) and Sher­man both, shout­ing, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Ker­nel; sho now’ and catch­ing him as he fell and com­man­deer­ing the first pass­ing wag­on to take him to the house and car­ry him up the front steps and through the paint­less for­mal door beneath its fan­light import­ed pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alter­ation in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bed­room and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down him­self on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘fly­er I am, Ker­nel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the reg­i­ment when the grand­daugh­ter was only eight years old would tell peo­ple that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and nig­gers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and per­haps in time came to believe the lie him­self, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Ker­nel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest dur­ing that first furi­ous peri­od while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable will­ing the Sutpen’s Hun­dred which he remem­bered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hope­less-blind Jones who appar­ent­ly saw still in that furi­ous lech­er­ous wreck the old fine fig­ure of the man who once gal­loped on the black thor­ough­bred about that domain two bound­aries of which the eye could not see from any point.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

5 Won­der­ful­ly Long Lit­er­ary Sen­tences by Samuel Beck­ett, Vir­ginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzger­ald & Oth­er Mas­ters of the Run-On

Sev­en Tips From William Faulkn­er on How to Write Fic­tion

William Faulkn­er Reads from As I Lay Dying

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

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Watch an Animated Score for Steve Reich’s Minimalist Piece “Clapping Music“–and Try Your Hardest to Follow Along

in Music | March 14th, 2019

Steve Reich’s Clap­ping Music is one of the sim­plest scores of mod­ern clas­si­cal music, and as you might soon find out, one of the most dif­fi­cult to per­form. Writ­ten in 1972 while on a Euro­pean tour and after a night of mediocre fla­men­co, Clap­ping Music is for two play­ers. One claps a steady rhythm (tech­ni­cal­ly an African Bell Rhythm).

A sec­ond per­former claps in uni­son in the same pat­tern for eight bars. At the end of the eighth bar, the sec­ond per­former goes out of sync for one eighth note and after anoth­er eight bars, goes out of sync again. This con­tin­ues until both play­ers are back in uni­son. (The above video explains this tech­nique visu­al­ly).

For Reich it was a sim­pler evo­lu­tion of “phase” com­po­si­tions that he had been cre­at­ing since 1965. The ear­li­er exam­ple was “It’s Gonna Rain,” which used two tape loops of a Pen­te­costal street preacher’s rant going slow­ly out of sync with each oth­er, reveal­ing first an echo and then, as the two loops wind up 180 degrees out of sync, pure apoc­a­lyp­tic cacoph­o­ny.

The sync issues were due to the vagaries of the ana­log machines them­selves, but Reich moved on to recre­at­ing phase music with actu­al instru­ments. In 1967 he com­posed “Piano Phase,” in which a sim­ple melody is played by two musi­cians first in uni­son, and then slow­ly out of sync. Reich fol­lowed up with “Reed Phase” and “Vio­lin Phase,” the lat­ter of which was set to dance by Anne Tere­sa of Keers­maek­er.

Asked about per­form­ing “Clap­ping Music” live, Reich told Clas­sicFM:

It’s a piece that I’m always stand­ing up there doing, and it makes me ner­vous every time because you’re very exposed, as it’s just you and the oth­er guy. If you make one lit­tle hes­i­ta­tion you can find your­self at a place in the piece where you have to fig­ure out where you are to get things right. So it nev­er ceas­es to be a chal­lenge; it’s easy on one lev­el, but it’s chal­leng­ing on anoth­er.

If you’d like to have a go at Clap­ping Music, there is a free app from the Lon­don Sin­foni­et­ta and Touch­press that plays the steady loop while you try to go out of phase. (It tracks and rates your per­for­mance, with the hope you’ll per­fect it.) I haven’t had a chance myself to try it out, but if you have, let us know in the com­ments.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steve Reich is Call­ing: A Min­i­mal­ist Ring­tone for the iPhone

Hear Steve Reich’s Min­i­mal­ist Com­po­si­tions in a 28-Hour Playlist: A Jour­ney Through His Influ­en­tial Record­ings

Watch Ani­mat­ed Scores to Music by Radio­head, Talk­ing Heads, LCD Soundsys­tem, Photek & Oth­er Elec­tron­ic/­Post-Punk/A­vant-Garde Musi­cians

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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Jack Kerouac’s “Beat Paintings:” Now Gathered in One Book and Exhibition for the First Time

in Art, Literature | March 14th, 2019

Most of us enter Jack Ker­ouac’s world through his 1959 nov­el On the Road. Those of us who explore it more deeply there­after may find much more than we expect­ed to: Ker­ouac’s inner life came out not just in his for­mi­da­ble body of writ­ten work, but in spo­ken-word jazz albums, fan­ta­sy base­ball mate­ri­als, and even paint­ings. Though Ker­ouac has now been gone for near­ly half a cen­tu­ry, it was­n’t until just last year that his works of visu­al art were brought togeth­er: Ker­ouac: Beat Paint­ing did it in book form, and the Museo Maga near Milan put on an exhi­bi­tion of the more than 80 pieces it could find, begin­ning with his first self-por­trait, drawn at the age of nine.

Ker­ouac had an inter­est in por­trai­ture in gen­er­al: the book, the Inde­pen­dent’s David Bar­nett writes, “begins with a series of por­traits of peo­ple Ker­ouac knew or admired. They also high­light Ker­ouac’s com­pli­cat­ed spir­i­tu­al­i­ty: brought up a Catholic, he lat­er embraced Bud­dhism and devel­oped an almost ‘holy fool’ per­sona.” Car­di­nal Gio­van­ni Mon­ti­ni, lat­er to become Pope Paul VI, counts as one par­tic­u­lar­ly notable sub­ject of a Ker­ouac por­trait; anoth­er is Ker­ouac’s fel­low cul­ture-defin­ing writer Tru­man Capote (above), who at the time Ker­ouac paint­ed him had already crit­i­cized On the Road pub­licly, and harsh­ly. San­d­ri­na Ban­dera, a cura­tor of the exhi­bi­tion and edi­tor of Ker­ouac: Beat Paint­ing, ascribes to the Capote por­trait “a dynam­ic, almost vio­lent qual­i­ty.”

The same could per­haps be said of all of Ker­ouac’s cre­ative out­put, and cer­tain­ly of much of his best-known writ­ing. And like many a cre­ator known for his vis­cer­al nature, Ker­ouac made strict rules and built sys­tems to work with­in: his 1959 man­i­festo for paint­ing includes the com­mand­ments “use only one brush” and “stop when you want to ‘improve’… it’s done.” Detrac­tors of Ker­ouac’s work will cer­tain­ly see a con­nec­tion between his visu­al art and his ver­bal art in his self-direct­ed com­mand­ment to “pile it on,” but who could call the “beat paint­ing” of this Beat Gen­er­a­tion fig­ure­head not of an aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al piece with every­thing else that Ban­dera describes, unim­prov­ably, as “that potent enti­ty known as Jack Ker­ouac.”

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitch­hik­ing Trip Nar­rat­ed in On the Road

Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spo­ken-World Albums: A Sub­lime Union of Beat Lit­er­a­ture and 1950s Jazz

Jack Ker­ouac Lists 9 Essen­tials for Writ­ing Spon­ta­neous Prose

Jack Ker­ouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

Jack Ker­ouac Was a Secret, Obses­sive Fan of Fan­ta­sy Base­ball

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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