Here’s John Steinbeck Asking Marilyn Monroe for Her Autograph (1955)

in Film, Letters, Life, Literature | March 8th, 2019

When asking a celebrity for a special favor, it helps to be a bit of a celebrity yourself.

As Keith Ferrell details in his biography, John Steinbeck: The Voice of the Land, the Nobel laureate had little patience for autograph seekers, pushy young writers seeking help getting published, and “people who never read books but enjoyed meeting authors.”

The shoe went on the other foot when Mrs. Steinbeck let slip to her nephew that Uncle John had met the boy’s movie star crush, Marilyn Monroe.

Suddenly, an autographed photo seemed in order.

And not just some standard issue publicity shot, but ideally one showing the star of The Seven Year Itch and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in a “pensive girlish mood.”

Also, could she please inscribe it by name to nephew Jon, a young man with, his uncle confided, “one foot in the door of puberty”?

The star-to-star tone Steinbeck adopts for the above letter seems designed to ward off suspicion that this nephew could be a convenient invention on the part of someone desiring such a prize for himself.

Sixty years after a secretary typed it up, Steinbeck’s message fetched $3,520 at Julien’s Auctions, one of a wide range of items culled from hardcore Marilyn Monroe collector, David Gainsborough-Roberts as well as the estate of Monroe’s acting teacher, Lee Strasberg.

In addition to other correspondence, the Marilyn auction included annotated scripts, an empty prescription bottle, a ballerina paperweight, stockings and gowns, some pinup-type memorabilia, and a program from John F Kennedy’s 1962 birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden.

One lot that is conspicuous for its absence is Steinbeck’s promised “guest key to the ladies’ entrance of Fort Knox.”

Could it be that the boy never got his customized autograph?

We’d like to think that he did. Perhaps he’s still savoring it in private.

H/T Alan Goldwasser/Letters of Note/Flashbak

The 430 Books in Marilyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in New York City for the next installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain, this Monday, March 11. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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

The Cringe-Inducing Humor of The Office Explained with Philosophical Theories of Mind

in Comedy, Neuroscience, Photography, Television | March 8th, 2019

“I’m a friend first and a boss second,” says David Brent, middle manager at the Slough branch of paper company Wernham-Hogg. “Probably an entertainer third.” Those of us who’ve watched the original British run of The Office — and especially those of us who still watch it regularly — will remember that and many other of Brent’s pitiable declarations besides. As portrayed by the show’s co-creator Ricky Gervais, Brent constitutes both The Office’s comedic and emotional core, at once a fully realized character and someone we’ve all known in real life. His distinctive combination of social incompetence and an aggressive desperation to be liked provokes in us not just laughter but a more complex set of emotions as well, resulting in one expression above all others: the cringe.

“In David Brent, we have a character so invested in the performance of himself that he’s blocked his own access to others’ feelings.” So goes the analysis of Evan Puschak, a.k.a. the Nerdwriter, in his video interpreting the humor of The Office through philosophical theories of mind.

The elaborate friend-boss-entertainer song-and-dance Brent constantly puts on for his co-workers so occupies him that he lacks the ability or even the inclination to have any sense of what they’re thinking. “The irony is that Brent can’t see that a weak theory of mind always makes for a weak self-performance. You can’t brute force your preferred personality onto another’s consciousness: it takes two to build an identity.”

Central though Brent is to The Office, we laugh not just at what he says and does, but how the other characters (which Puschak places across a spectrum of ability to understand the minds of others) react — or fail to react — to what he says and does, how he reacts to their reactions, and so on. Mastery of the comedic effects of all this has kept the original Office effective more than fifteen years later, though its effect may not be entirely pleasurable: “A lot of people say that cringe humor like this is hard to watch,” says Puschak, “but in the same way that under our confidence, in theory of mind, lies an anxiety, I think that under our cringing there’s actually a deep feeling of relief.” When Brent and others fail to connect, their “body language speaks in a way that is totally transparent: in that moment the embarrassment is not only palpable, it’s palpably honest.” And it reminds us that — if we’re being honest — none of us are exactly mind-readers ourselves.

You can get the complete British run of The Office on Amazon here.

The Philosophy of Bill Murray: The Intellectual Foundations of His Comedic Persona

A Romp Through the Philosophy of Mind: A Free Online Course from Oxford

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear Patti Smith’s New Work With The Soundwalk Collective, a Tribute to the Avant-Garde Poet Antonin Artaud

in Music | March 7th, 2019

The Soundwalk Collective has made music art out of found sounds since 2004. They recorded 2012’s Medea while traversing the Black Sea and fishing for sounds using a scanner and high powered aerial antennas; 2014’s Last Beat used contact microphones on the architecture of a music club to collect vibrations instead of music; 2017’s Before Music There Is Blood collaged deep echoing recordings of classical music played in various halls. This time, in their upcoming The Peyote Dance, they have brought in poet and rock goddess Patti Smith for a trip into Mexico.

The above track “The New Revelations of Being” is a preview of what’s to come. The album title comes from a book by Antonin Artaud, the avant-garde theater director and author, who traveled to Mexico to explore revelatory visions with the Rarámuri people in 1936. Artaud was hoping that peyote would shake his opioid addiction. When he later returned to France, Artaud stayed and remained in an insane asylum, receiving electric shock therapy. His time with the Rarámuri stayed a touchstone of happiness during his darkest days.

With a shared belief that travel expands the mind, the Soundwalk Collective traveled to the same Sierra Tarahumarar region of Mexico as Artaud, visited the same places he stayed, and indeed also took peyote. They recorded instruments and soundscapes, and then back in the States, Patti Smith wrote and recorded poems based on Artaud’s book, his other works, and her own responses to the sound fields.

“The poets enter the bloodstream, they enter the cells. For a moment, one is Artaud,” Smith said about the recording. “You can’t ask for it, you can’t buy it, you can’t take drugs for it to be authentic. It just has to happen, you have to be chosen as well as choose.”

The album is the first in a trilogy with Smith about poets and travel. The other two albums will be based on works and journeys by Arthur Rimbaud and René Daumal, and feature sounds recorded at the Abyssinian valley of Ethiopia and the Himalayan Summit of India respectively.

This not the first time the group has collaborated with Patti Smith. In 2016, they released Killer Road a tribute to Nico and her final days on the island of Ibiza, where the singer plunged to her death on a bicycle ride. The album also featured vocals by Smith’s daughter Jessie Paris Smith.

Soundwalk Collective member Stephan Crasneanscki first met Patti Smith, fittingly, at an airport in Paris, as the two were returning from separate artistic travels: Crasneanscki from Eastern Europe and Russia, Smith from French Guiana and Tangiers.

The Peyote Dance will be released May 31 on Bella Union.

via Lithub

Patti Smith’s Award-Winning Memoir, Just Kids, Now Available in a New Illustrated Edition
Hear Antonin Artaud’s Censored, Never-Aired Radio Play: To Have Done With The Judgment of God (1947)

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.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

“Stay Free: The Story of the Clash” Narrated by Public Enemy’s Chuck D: A New 8‑Episode Podcast

in Music, Podcasts | March 7th, 2019

Spotify, in partnership with the BBC, has launched “Stay Free: The Story of the Clash,” an eight-part podcast on the iconic punk band, narrated by Public Enemy front man, Chuck D. It might seem like an unexpected pairing. And yet Spotify explains: “Like The Clash, Public Enemy openly challenged the status quo in a completely original way—this parallel and Chuck D’s personal experiences bring a surprising new dimension to the story of The Clash.” Reviewing the production in The New Yorker, Sarah Larson adds:

In [“Stay Free: The Story of the Clash”], we learn that Chuck D, a radio d.j. at the time, co-founded Public Enemy after a conversation, in 1986, with a friend at Def Jam, who wanted him to become “the hip-hop version of Joe Strummer,” of the Clash—to make music with “intellectual heft” that could also “rock the party.” And reader, he did. His presence as narrator adds appealing perspective and gravitas to the podcast, which begins with the story of the Clash’s origins, in a West London riot in 1976. With a skillfully layered presentation of punk music, seventies-London audio, and interview clips, the podcast so far thrills me the way that “Mogul,” the Spotify-Gimlet podcast about the late hip-hop mogul Chris Lighty, did; I’m eager to hear the rest.

Watch the podcast trailer above. Stream the podcast episodes–all eight–on Spotify here. Also the related playlist of music. And remember folks, The Clash, they’re still the only band that matters…

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Sleep or Die: Neuroscientist Matthew Walker Explains How Sleep Can Restore or Imperil Our Health

in Health, Neuroscience | March 7th, 2019

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could fix the work/life thing by chucking out the difference? At home, you’re in the office, at the office, you’re at home, always on and never off—sleep, optional. Two-four hours per 24-hour cycle should be enough, right? Wrong. We need proper sleep like we need good food, low stress, engaging pursuits, etc.—to thrive and live a long and happy life. If you wait until you’re dead to sleep, you’ll be dead sooner than you think. “Short sleep predicts a shorter life,” explains sleep researcher Matthew Walker in the RSA animation Sleep or Die, above. “Sleep,” he says, “is a non-negotiable biological necessity.“

The National Sleep Foundation recommends that adults sleep an average of eight hours a night. That number may vary from person to person, but fewer than six can be highly detrimental. Walker is something of a “sleep evangelist,” notes Berkeley News. Ask him about “the downside of pulling an all-nighter, and he’ll rattle off a list of ill effects that range from memory loss and a compromised immune system to junk food cravings and wild mood swings.” The neuroscientist tells Terry Gross on Fresh Air, “Every disease that is killing us in developed nations has causal and significant links to a lack of sleep.”

Walker has a lot more to say about sleep in the interview below, including tips for getting there, whether you can make up for lost sleep (you can’t), and why you shouldn’t yank teenagers out of bed on the weekends. Why should we listen to him? Well, he isn’t just any sleep scientist. “To be specific,” writes Rachel Cooke at The Guardian, “he is the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, a research institute whose goal—possibly unachievable—is to understand everything about sleep’s impact on us, from birth to death, in sickness and health.”

The benefits of sound sleep include enhanced creativity and concentration, lower blood pressure, better mood regulation, and higher immunity and fertility. Lack of sleep, however, is “increasing our risk of cancer, heart attack and Alzheimer’s,” notes Cooke. Indeed, “after just one night of only four or five hours’ sleep,” Walker tells The Guardian, “your natural killer cells—the ones that attack the cancer cells that appear in your body every day—drop by 70%.” Sleep deprivation has such serious outcomes that “the World Health Organisation has classed any form of night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen.”

Sleep holds many mysteries, but one thing scientists like Walker seem to know: poor sleep leaves us more in sickness than in health. And we are in the midst of a “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic.” “No one would look at an infant baby asleep, and say ‘What a lazy baby!” Walker observes. Yet adults have “stigmatized sleep with the label of laziness. We want to seem busy, and one way we express that is by proclaiming how little sleep we’re getting.” It’s a way to broadcast that we aren’t falling behind or missing out. But our bodies’ natural cycles and rhythms don’t speed up along with technology and global markets.

“As bedrooms everywhere glow from the screens of round-the-clock technology consumption,” Berkeley News writes, millions of people suffer physical, emotional, cognitive, and psychological stresses. Or, put more positively, “a growing body of scientific work” shows that “a solid seven to nine hours of sleep a night serves functions beyond our wildest imaginations.” Learn more about not only what’s gone wrong with sleep, but how to start addressing the problem in Walker’s book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.

Brian Eno Lists the Benefits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intelligence, and a Sound Civilization

10 Longevity Tips from Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara, Japan’s 105-Year-Old Longevity Expert

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Van Gogh’s Ugliest Masterpiece: A Break Down of His Late, Great Painting, The Night Café (1888)

in Art | March 7th, 2019

Ask passersby to name a Vincent van Gogh painting off the top of their heads, and most will come up with works like The Starry Night, The Potato Eaters, one of his self-portraits (probably with his ear bandaged), or maybe the one with the smoking skeleton David Sedaris used for a book cover. How many will mention 1888’s The Night Café, an interior, van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo from Arles (the town in the south of France where he had come in search of Japan-like surroundings), “of the café where I have a room, by gas light, in the evening,” the kind of place that never closes, accommodating the kind of “night prowlers” who “have no money to pay for a lodging, or are too drunk to be taken in”?

Promising subject matter for a painter, one might think. When Vincent wrote back to Theo after completing The Night Café, he described the painting “one of the ugliest I’ve done,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean he saw it as a failure, or indeed that we shouldn’t see it as a masterpiece. “At first glance, you can see what he meant,” says Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, in the explainer above. “This is a jarring image, even for van Gogh, especially when you compare it to his other famous scene of a café in Arles, Café Terrace at Night,” which “captures that romantic sense of European cafés on summer evenings where friends gather to talk and laugh.” And yet The Night Café is “a painting of anxiety,” offering the nightmare to Café Terrace at Night’s “dream of French night life.”

Just as van Gogh used color “to capture his emotional response to natural beauty” in other paintings, here he used color “to convey the uneasiness of a low-class barroom after midnight.” Puschak digs into the artist’s letters and finds clearly stated intent behind all this: “I’ve tried to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green,” wrote van Gogh. “Everywhere it’s a battle and an antithesis of the most different greens and reds.” Puschak goes on to break down all the elements van Gogh used to deliberately make The Night Café unsettling: making the wall of the space “a thick, oppressive ribbon the color of blood,” a color that clashes with the green of the ceiling and creates “a tension that trembles in the eye,” and using on the rest of the interior “a sulfur yellow that gets into everything.”

The mood is set by much more than color: the lack of shadows apart from that cast by the pool table, the hunched posture of the patrons and the scattered positions of the chairs and glasses, the “warped quality” of the perspective itself. “There’s no escape,” Puschak says, “not for the people inside the painting, not for the people outside it” — and not for van Gogh himself, who committed his famous act of ear-slicing mere months after finishing The Night Café. But through this inescapable painting we can see as well as or better than in any other how van Gogh’s artistic mastery really worked, and how mastery in service of something other than beauty remains mastery all the same.

13 Van Gogh’s Paintings Painstakingly Brought to Life with 3D Animation & Visual Mapping

Nearly 1,000 Paintings & Drawings by Vincent van Gogh Now Digitized and Put Online: View/Download the Collection

A Complete Archive of Vincent van Gogh’s Letters: Beautifully Illustrated and Fully Annotated

Download Vincent van Gogh’s Collection of 500 Japanese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Create “the Art of the Future”

Edward Hopper’s Iconic Painting Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Introduction

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Download the ModulAir, a Free Polyphonic Synthesizer, and Make Your Own Electronic Sounds

in Uncategorized | March 6th, 2019

Over the years, we’ve talked a fair share about electronic music–from the earliest days of the genre, through contemporary times. Now, we give you a chance to make your own electronic sounds.

According to Synthopia, a portal devoted to electronic music, “Full Bucket Music has released ModulAir 1.0 – a free polyphonic modular synthesizer for Mac & Windows.” (For the uninitiated, a polyphonic synthesizer–versus a monophonic one–can play multiple notes at once.) The ModulAir “is a modular polyphonic software synthesizer for Microsoft Windows (VST) and Apple macOS (VST/AU), written in native C++ code for high performance and low CPU consumption.” Watch a demo above, and download it here.

via Synthopia

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

The Mastermind of Devo, Mark Mothersbaugh, Presents His Personal Synthesizer Collection

Free, Open Source Modular Synth Software Lets You Create 70s & 80s Electronic Music—Without Having to Pay Thousands for a Real-World Synthesizer

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

100-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Helen Fagin Reads Her Letter About How Books Save Lives

in Books, History | March 6th, 2019

“Could you imagine a world without access to reading, to learning, to books?” Helen Fagin, who poses that question, doesn’t have to imagine it: she experienced that grim reality, and worse besides. “At twenty-one,” she continues, “I was forced into Poland’s World War II ghetto, where being caught reading anything forbidden by the Nazis meant, at best, hard labor; at worst, death.” There she operated a school in secret where she taught Jewish children Latin and mathematics, soon realizing that “what they needed wasn’t dry information but hope, the kind that comes from being transported into a dream-world of possibility.”

That hope, in Fagin’s wartime experience, came from books. “I had spent the previous night reading Gone with the Wind — one of a few smuggled books circulated among trustworthy people via an underground channel, on their word of honor to read only at night, in secret.”

The next day she retold the story of Margaret Mitchell’s novel in her clandestine classroom, where the students had expressed their desire for her to “tell us a book,” and one young girl expressed a special gratitude, thanking Fagin “for this journey into another world.” To hear how her story, and Fagin’s, turned out, you can listen to the 100-year-old Fagin herself read the letter that tells the tale in the video above, and you can follow along with the text at Brain Pickings.

Brain Pickings founder Maria Popova has included Fagin’s letter in the new collection A Velocity of Being: Illustrated Letters to Children about Why We Read by 121 of the Most Inspiring Humans in Our World. The book contains “original illustrated letters about the transformative and transcendent power of reading from some immensely inspiring humans,” Popova writes, from Jane Goodall and Marina Abramović to Yo-Yo Ma and David Byrne to Judy Blume and Neil Gaiman — the last of whom, as Fagin’s cousin, offered Popova the connection to this centenarian living testament to the power of reading. There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts,” writes Fagin, one suspects as much to the adult readers of the world as to the children. “To read a book and surrender to a story is to keep our very humanity alive.”

via Brain Pickings

96-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Fronts a Death Metal Band

Helen Keller Writes a Letter to Nazi Students Before They Burn Her Book: “History Has Taught You Nothing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas” (1933)

Brian Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuilding Civilization & 59 Books For Building Your Intellectual World

Stewart Brand’s List of 76 Books for Rebuilding Civilization

Ray Bradbury Explains Why Literature is the Safety Valve of Civilization (in Which Case We Need More Literature!)

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Here’s John Steinbeck Asking Marilyn Monroe for Her Autograph (1955)

The Cringe-Inducing Humor of The Office Explained with Philosophical Theories of Mind

Hear Patti Smith’s New Work With The Soundwalk Collective, a Tribute to the Avant-Garde Poet Antonin Artaud

“Stay Free: The Story of the Clash” Narrated by Public Enemy’s Chuck D: A New 8‑Episode Podcast

Sleep or Die: Neuroscientist Matthew Walker Explains How Sleep Can Restore or Imperil Our Health

Van Gogh’s Ugliest Masterpiece: A Break Down of His Late, Great Painting, The Night Café (1888)

Download the ModulAir, a Free Polyphonic Synthesizer, and Make Your Own Electronic Sounds

100-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Helen Fagin Reads Her Letter About How Books Save Lives

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