The Seven Road-Tested Habits of Effective Artists

in Art, Computer Science, How to Learn for Free, Life, Philosophy, Software | November 15th, 2019

Fif­teen years ago, a young con­struc­tion work­er named Andrew Price went in search of free 3d soft­ware to help him achieve his goal of ren­der­ing a 3D car.

He stum­bled onto Blender, a just-the-tick­et open source soft­ware that helps users with every aspect of 3D creation—modeling, rig­ging, ani­ma­tion, sim­u­la­tion, ren­der­ing, com­posit­ing, and motion track­ing.

Price describes his ear­ly learn­ing style as “play­ing it by ear,” sam­pling tuto­ri­als, some of which he couldn’t be both­ered to com­plete.

Desire for free­lance gigs led him to forge a new iden­ti­ty, that of a Blender Guru, whose tuto­ri­als, pod­casts, and arti­cles would help oth­er new users get the hang of the soft­ware.

But it wasn’t declar­ing him­self an expert that ulti­mate­ly improved his artis­tic skills. It was hold­ing his own feet over the fire by plac­ing a bet with his younger cousin, who stood to gain $1000 if Price failed to rack up 1,000 “likes” by post­ing 2D draw­ings to Art­Sta­tion with­in a 6‑month peri­od.

(If he succeeded—which he did, 3 days before his self-imposed deadline—his cousin owed him noth­ing. Loss aver­sion proved to be a more pow­er­ful moti­va­tor than any car­rot on a stick…)

In order to snag the req­ui­site likes, Price found that he need­ed to revise some habits and com­mit to a more robust dai­ly prac­tice, a jour­ney he detailed in a pre­sen­ta­tion at the 2016 Blender Con­fer­ence.

Price con­fess­es that the chal­lenge taught him much about draw­ing and paint­ing, but even more about hav­ing an effec­tive artis­tic prac­tice. His sev­en rules apply to any num­ber of cre­ative forms:

 

Andrew Price’s Rules for an Effec­tive Artist Prac­tice:

  1. Prac­tice Dai­ly

A num­ber of pro­lif­ic artists have sub­scribed to this belief over the years, includ­ing nov­el­ist (and moth­er!) JK Rowl­ing, come­di­an Jer­ry Sein­feld, auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal per­former Mike Bir­bli­gia, and mem­oirist David Sedaris.

If you feel too fried to uphold your end of the bar­gain, pre­tend to go easy on your­self with a lit­tle trick Price picked up from music pro­duc­er Rick Rubin: Do the absolute min­i­mum. You’ll like­ly find that per­form­ing the min­i­mum posi­tions you to do much more than that. Your resis­tance is not so much to the doing as it is to the embark­ing.

  1. Quan­ti­ty over Per­fec­tion­ism Mas­querad­ing as Qual­i­ty

This harkens back to Rule Num­ber One. Who are we to say which of our works will be judged wor­thy. Just keep putting it out there—remember it’s all prac­tice, and law of aver­ages favors those whose out­put is, like Picasso’s, prodi­gious. Don’t stand in the way of progress by split­ting a sin­gle work’s end­less hairs.

  1. Steal With­out Rip­ping Off

Immerse your­self in the cre­ative bril­liance of those you admire. Then prof­it off your own improved efforts, a prac­tice advo­cat­ed by the likes of musi­cian David Bowie, com­put­er vision­ary Steve Jobs, and artist/social com­men­ta­tor Banksy.

  1. Edu­cate Your­self

As a stand-alone, that old chest­nut about prac­tice mak­ing per­fect is not suf­fi­cient to the task. Whether you seek out online tuto­ri­als, as Price did, enroll in a class, or des­ig­nate a men­tor, a con­sci­en­tious com­mit­ment to study your craft will help you to bet­ter mas­ter it.

  1. Give your­self a break

Bang­ing your head against the wall is not good for your brain. Price cel­e­brates author Stephen King’s prac­tice of giv­ing the first draft of a new nov­el six weeks to mar­i­nate. Your break may be short­er. Three days may be ample to juice you up cre­ative­ly. Just make sure it’s in your cal­en­dar to get back to it.

  1. Seek Feed­back

Film­mak­er Tai­ka Wait­i­ti, rap­per Kanye West, and the big goril­las at Pixar are not threat­ened by oth­ers’ opin­ions. Seek them out. You may learn some­thing.

  1. Cre­ate What You Want To

Pas­sion projects are the key to cre­ative longevi­ty and plea­sur­able process. Don’t cater to a fick­le pub­lic, or the shift­ing sands of fash­ion. Pur­sue the sorts of things that inter­est you.

Implic­it in Price’s sev­en com­mand­ments is the notion that some­thing may have to budge—your night­ly cock­tails, the num­ber of hours spent on social media, that extra half hour in bed after the alarm goes off… Don’t neglect your famil­ial or civic oblig­a­tions, but nei­ther should you short­change your art. Life’s too short.

Read the tran­script of Andrew Price’s Blender Con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dai­ly Habits of Famous Writ­ers: Franz Kaf­ka, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Stephen King & More

The Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing Some of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Book­stores

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Download Hellvetica, a Font that Makes the Elegant Spacing of Helvetica Look as Ugly as Possible

in Design | November 15th, 2019

Among typog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts, all non-con­trar­i­ans love Hel­veti­ca. Some, like film­mak­er Gary Hus­twit and New York sub­way map cre­ator Mas­si­mo Vignel­li, even made a doc­u­men­tary about it. Cre­at­ed by Swiss graph­ic design­er Max Miedinger with Haas Type Foundry pres­i­dent Eduard Hoff­mann and first intro­duced in 1957, Hel­veti­ca still stands as a visu­al def­i­n­i­tion of not just mod­ernism but moder­ni­ty itself. That owes in part to its clean, unam­bigu­ous lines, and also to its use of space: as all the afore­men­tioned typog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts will have noticed, Hel­veti­ca leaves lit­tle room between its let­ters, which imbues text writ­ten in the font with a cer­tain solid­i­ty. No won­der it so often appears, more than half a cen­tu­ry after its debut, on the sig­nage of pub­lic insti­tu­tions as well as on the pro­mo­tion of prod­ucts that live or die by the osten­si­ble time­less­ness of their designs.

But as times change, so must even near-per­fect fonts: hence Hel­veti­ca Now. “Four years ago, our Ger­man office [was] kick­ing around the idea of cre­at­ing a new ver­sion of Hel­veti­ca,” Charles Nix, type direc­tor at Hel­veti­ca-rights-hold­er Mono­type tells The Verge. “They had iden­ti­fied a short laun­dry list of things that would be bet­ter.” What short­com­ings they found arose from the fact that the font had been designed for an ana­log age of opti­cal print­ing, and “when we went dig­i­tal, a lot of that nuance of opti­cal siz­ing sort of washed away.” Ulti­mate­ly, the project was less about updat­ing Hel­veti­ca than restor­ing char­ac­ters lost in its adap­ta­tion to dig­i­tal, includ­ing “the straight-legged cap­i­tal ‘R,’ sin­gle-sto­ry low­er­case ‘a,’ low­er­case ‘u’ with­out a trail­ing serif, a low­er­case ‘t’ with­out a tail­ing stroke on the bot­tom right, a beard­less ‘g,’ some round­ed punc­tu­a­tion.”

The devel­op­ment of Hel­veti­ca Now also neces­si­tat­ed a close look at all the ver­sions of Hel­veti­ca so far devel­oped (the most notable major revi­sion being Neue Hel­veti­ca, released in 1983) and adapt­ing their best char­ac­ter­is­tics for an age of screens. Few of those char­ac­ter­is­tics demand­ed more atten­tion than the spac­ing — or to use the typo­graph­i­cal term, the kern­ing. But how­ev­er aston­ish­ing a show­case it may be, Hel­veti­ca Now does­n’t dri­ve home the impor­tance of the art of kern­ing in as vis­cer­al a man­ner as anoth­er new type­face: Hel­l­veti­ca, designed by New York cre­ative direc­tors Zack Roif and Matthew Wood­ward. Much painstak­ing labor has also gone into Hel­l­veti­ca’s kern­ing, but not to make it as beau­ti­ful as pos­si­ble: on the con­trary, Roif and Woodard have tak­en Hel­veti­ca and kerned it for max­i­mum ugli­ness.

The Verge’s Jon Porter describes Hel­l­veti­ca as “a self-aware Com­ic Sans with kern­ing that’s some­how much much worse.” If that most hat­ed Win­dows font has­n’t been enough to inflict psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tur­bance on the design­ers in your life, you can head to Hel­l­veti­ca’s offi­cial site and “expe­ri­ence it in all its uneven, gap­py glo­ry.” Roif and Woodard have made Hel­l­veti­ca free to use, some­thing that cer­tain­ly can’t be said of any gen­uine ver­sion of Hel­veti­ca. In fact, the sheer cost of licens­ing that most mod­ern of all fonts has, in recent years, pushed even the for­mer­ly Hel­veti­ca-using likes of Apple, Google, and IBM to come up with their own type­faces instead — all of which, telling­ly, resem­ble Hel­veti­ca. We can con­sid­er them all weapons in the life of a design­er, which, as Vignel­li put it, “is a life of fight. Fight against the ugli­ness.” Hap­py down­load­ing…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Com­ic Sans Turns 25: Graph­ic Design­er Vin­cent Connare Explains Why He Cre­at­ed the Most Hat­ed Font in the World

The His­to­ry of Typog­ra­phy Told in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

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

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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How Humans Migrated Across The Globe Over 200,000 Years: An Animated Look

in History, Maps | November 14th, 2019

Cov­er­age of the refugee cri­sis peaked in 2015. By the end of the year, note researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bergen, “this was one of the hottest top­ics, not only for politi­cians, but for par­tic­i­pants in the pub­lic debate,” includ­ing far-right xeno­phobes giv­en mega­phones. What­ev­er their intent, Daniel Trilling argues at The Guardian, the explo­sion of refugee sto­ries had the effect of fram­ing “these new­ly arrived peo­ple as oth­ers, peo­ple from ‘over there,’ who had lit­tle to do with Europe itself and were strangers.”

Such a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion ignores the cru­cial con­text of Europe’s pres­ence in near­ly every part of the world over the past sev­er­al cen­turies. And it frames mass migra­tion as extra­or­di­nary, not the norm. The cri­sis aspect is real, the result of dan­ger­ous­ly accel­er­at­ed move­ment of cap­i­tal and cli­mate change. But mass move­ments of peo­ple seek­ing bet­ter con­di­tions, safe­ty, oppor­tu­ni­ty, etc. may be the old­est and most com­mon fea­ture of human his­to­ry, as the Sci­ence Insid­er video shows above.

The yel­low arrows that fly across the globe in the dra­mat­ic ani­ma­tion make it seem like ear­ly humans moved by bul­let train. But when con­se­quen­tial shifts in cli­mate occurred at a glacial pace—and economies were built on what peo­ple car­ried on their backs—mass migra­tions hap­pened over the span of thou­sands of years. Yet they hap­pened con­tin­u­ous­ly through­out last 200,000 to 70,000 years of human his­to­ry, give or take. We may nev­er know what drove so many of our dis­tant ances­tors to spread around the world.

But how can we know what routes they took to get there? “Thanks to the amaz­ing work of anthro­pol­o­gists and pale­on­tol­o­gists like those work­ing on Nation­al Geographic’s Geno­graph­ic Project,” Sci­ence Insid­er explains, “we can begin to piece togeth­er the sto­ry of our ances­tors.” The Geno­graph­ic Project was launched by Nation­al Geo­graph­ic in 2005, “in col­lab­o­ra­tion with sci­en­tists and uni­ver­si­ties around the world.” Since then, it has col­lect­ed the genet­ic data of over 1 mil­lion peo­ple, “with a goal of reveal­ing pat­terns of human migra­tion.”

The project assures us it is “anony­mous, non­med­ical, and non­prof­it.” Par­tic­i­pants sub­mit­ted their own DNA with Nation­al Geographic’s “Geno” ances­try kits (and may still do so until next month). They can receive a “deep ances­try” report and cus­tomized migra­tion map; and they can learn how close­ly they are relat­ed to “his­tor­i­cal genius­es,” a cat­e­go­ry that, for some rea­son, includes Jesse James.

Do projects like these veer close to recre­at­ing the “race sci­ence” of pre­vi­ous cen­turies? Are they valid ways of recon­struct­ing the “human sto­ry” of ances­try, as Nation­al Geo­graph­ic puts it? Crit­ics like sci­ence jour­nal­ist Angela Sai­ni are skep­ti­cal. “DNA test­ing can­not tell you that,” she says in an inter­view on NPR, but it can “make us believe that iden­ti­ty is bio­log­i­cal, when iden­ti­ty is cul­tur­al.” Nation­al Geo­graph­ic seems to dis­avow asso­ci­a­tions between genet­ics and race, writ­ing, “sci­ence defines you by your DNA, soci­ety defines you by the col­or of your skin.” But it does so at the end of a video about a group of peo­ple bond­ing over their sim­i­lar fea­tures.

Despite the sig­nif­i­cance mod­ern humans have ascribed to vari­a­tions in phe­no­type, race is a cul­tur­al­ly defined cat­e­go­ry and not a sci­en­tif­ic one. argues Joseph L. Graves, pro­fes­sor of bio­log­i­cal sci­ences at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nano­engi­neer­ing.. “Every­thing we know about our genet­ics has proven that we are far more alike than we are dif­fer­ent. If more peo­ple under­stood that, it would be eas­i­er to debunk the myth that peo­ple of a cer­tain race are ‘nat­u­ral­ly’ one way or anoth­er,” or that refugees and asy­lum seek­ers are dan­ger­ous oth­ers instead of just like every oth­er human who has moved around the world over the last 200,000 years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Col­or­ful Ani­ma­tion Visu­al­izes 200 Years of Immi­gra­tion to the U.S. (1820-Present)

Where Did Human Beings Come From? 7 Mil­lion Years of Human Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in Six Min­utes

Ian McK­ellen Reads a Pas­sion­ate Speech by William Shake­speare, Writ­ten in Defense of Immi­grants

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

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The Velvet Underground as Peanuts Characters: Snoopy Morphs Into Lou Reed, Charlie Brown Into Andy Warhol

in Comics/Cartoons, Music | November 14th, 2019

peanut underground

The fun car­toon above was appar­ent­ly found in a “Guide to the Vel­vet Under­ground and Andy Warhol’s Fac­to­ry” pub­lished by the French mag­a­zine, Les Inrock­upt­ibles in 1990. It came around the same time the Fon­da­tion Carti­er pour l’art con­tem­po­rain (locat­ed in Paris) held an exhi­bi­tion ded­i­cat­ed to Andy Warhol. Of course, Warhol famous­ly took a break from paint­ing in the mid-1960s and, among oth­er things, threw his influ­ence behind the up-and-com­ing NYC band, The Vel­vet Under­ground. Serv­ing as the band’s man­ag­er, he “pro­duced” VU’s first album, which meant design­ing the album cov­er and giv­ing the band mem­bers — Lou Reed, John Cale, Ster­ling Mor­ri­son, Mau­reen Tuck­er and Nico — the free­dom to make what­ev­er album they pleased, up to a cer­tain point. Above, you can see these same musi­cians reimag­ined as Peanuts char­ac­ters.

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:

The Vel­vet Under­ground Cap­tured in Col­or Con­cert Footage by Andy Warhol (1967)

Andy Warhol Explains Why He Decid­ed to Give Up Paint­ing & Man­age the Vel­vet Under­ground Instead (1966)

A Sym­pho­ny of Sound (1966): Vel­vet Under­ground Impro­vis­es, Warhol Films It, Until the Cops Turn Up

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The First High-Resolution Map of America’s Food Supply Chain: How It All Really Gets from Farm to Table

in Food & Drink, Maps | November 14th, 2019

The phrase “farm to table” has enjoyed vogue sta­tus in Amer­i­can din­ing long enough to be fac­ing dis­place­ment by an even trendi­er suc­ces­sor, “farm to fork.” These labels reflect a new aware­ness — or an aspi­ra­tion to aware­ness — of where, exact­ly, the food Amer­i­cans eat comes from. A vast and fer­tile land, the Unit­ed States pro­duces a great deal of its own food, but giv­en the dis­tance of most of its pop­u­la­tion cen­ters from most of its agri­cul­tur­al cen­ters, it also has to move near­ly as great a deal of food over long domes­tic dis­tances. Here we have the very first high-res­o­lu­tion map of that food sup­ply chain, cre­at­ed by researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois study­ing “food flows between coun­ties in the Unit­ed States.”

“Our map is a com­pre­hen­sive snap­shot of all food flows between coun­ties in the U.S. – grains, fruits and veg­eta­bles, ani­mal feed, and processed food items,” writes Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Civ­il and Envi­ron­men­tal Engi­neer­ing Megan Konar in an explana­to­ry post at The Con­ver­sa­tion. (The top ver­sion shows the total tons of food moved, and the bot­tom one is bro­ken down to the coun­ty scale.)

“All Amer­i­cans, from urban to rur­al are con­nect­ed through the food sys­tem. Con­sumers all rely on dis­tant pro­duc­ers; agri­cul­tur­al pro­cess­ing plants; food stor­age like grain silos and gro­cery stores; and food trans­porta­tion sys­tems.” The map visu­al­izes such jour­neys as that of a ship­ment of corn, which “starts at a farm in Illi­nois, trav­els to a grain ele­va­tor in Iowa before head­ing to a feed­lot in Kansas, and then trav­els in ani­mal prod­ucts being sent to gro­cery stores in Chica­go.”

Konar and her col­lab­o­ra­tors’ research arrives at a few sur­pris­ing con­clu­sions, such as that Los Ange­les coun­ty is both the largest ship­per and receiv­er of food in the U.S. Not only that, but almost all of the nine coun­ties “most cen­tral to the over­all struc­ture of the food sup­ply net­work” are in Cal­i­for­nia. This may sur­prise any­one who has laid eyes on the sub­lime­ly huge agri­cul­tur­al land­scapes of the Mid­west “Corn­belt.” But as Konar notes, “Our esti­mates are for 2012, an extreme drought year in the Corn­belt. So, in anoth­er year, the net­work may look dif­fer­ent.” And of the grain pro­duced in the Mid­west, much “is trans­port­ed to the Port of New Orleans for export. This pri­mar­i­ly occurs via the water­ways of the Ohio and Mis­sis­sip­pi Rivers.”

Konar also warns of trou­bling frail­ties: “The infra­struc­ture along these waterways—such as locks 52 and 53—are crit­i­cal, but have not been over­hauled since their con­struc­tion in 1929,” and if they were to fail, “com­mod­i­ty trans­port and sup­ply chains would be com­plete­ly dis­rupt­ed.” The ana­lyt­i­cal minds at Hack­er News have been dis­cussing the impli­ca­tions of the research shown on this map, includ­ing whether the U.S. food sup­ply chain is real­ly, as one com­menter put it, “very brit­tle and con­tains many weak points.” The Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Civ­il Engi­neers, as Konar tells Food & Wine, has giv­en the coun­try’s civ­il engi­neer­ing infra­struc­ture a grade of D+, which at least implies con­sid­er­able room for improve­ment. But against what from some angles look like long odds, food keeps get­ting from Amer­i­can farms to Amer­i­can tables — and Amer­i­can forks, Amer­i­can mouths, Amer­i­can stom­achs, and so on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

View and Down­load Near­ly 60,000 Maps from the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS)

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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Pretty Much Pop #19 Discusses Race and the Target Audience w/ Rodney Ramsey

in Film, Pretty Much Pop, Television | November 14th, 2019

We’ve all felt at var­i­ous points (maybe at most points) that some media cre­ation has reached us by mis­take, that we are not the tar­get audi­ence. 20th cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can TV was aimed large­ly at a white major­i­ty, with a par­al­lel, under­fund­ed chan­nel of con­tent aimed at peo­ple of col­or.

So how have things changed? There still seem to be “black shows,” but how do they fit in to a land­scape where inclu­sive­ness is a tool by which shows attempt to appeal to every­one (i.e. get all the mon­ey)? Comedian/actor/writer/producer Rod­ney Ram­sey joins Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to dis­cuss the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing out­side your demo­graph­ic, whether iden­ti­fy­ing with char­ac­ters requires phys­i­cal com­mon­al­i­ties, “black voice,” and the evolv­ing TV land­scape.

We touch on Watch­men, Atlanta, Black Pan­ther, Inse­cure, Sor­ry to Both­er You, BlacK­kKlans­man, Tyler Per­ry, Dear White Peo­ple, Black Jesus, and the black Her­mi­none issue.

Some of the arti­cles we con­sid­ered includ­ed:

Fol­low Rod­ney @Rodney_Ramsey.

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

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John Cleese’s Eulogy for Monty Python’s Graham Chapman: ‘Good Riddance, the Free-Loading Bastard, I Hope He Fries’

in Comedy, Life | November 13th, 2019

The British come­di­an Gra­ham Chap­man delight­ed in offend­ing peo­ple. As a writer and actor with the leg­endary Mon­ty Python troupe, he pushed against the bound­aries of pro­pri­ety and good taste. When his writ­ing part­ner John Cleese pro­posed doing a sketch on a dis­grun­tled man return­ing a defec­tive toast­er to a shop, Chap­man thought: Bro­ken toast­er? Why not a dead par­rot? And in one par­tic­u­lar­ly out­ra­geous sketch writ­ten by Chap­man and Cleese in 1970,  Chap­man plays an under­tak­er and Cleese plays a cus­tomer who has just rung a bell at the front desk:

“What can I do for you, squire?” says Chap­man.

“Um, well, I won­der if you can help me,” says Cleese. “You see, my moth­er has just died.”

“Ah, well, we can ‘elp you. We deal with stiffs,” says Chap­man. “There are three things we can do with your moth­er. We can burn her, bury her, or dump her.”

“Dump her?”

“Dump her in the Thames.”

“What?”

“Oh, did you like her?”

“Yes!”

“Oh well, we won’t dump her, then,” says Chap­man. “Well, what do you think? We can bury her or burn her.”

“Which would you rec­om­mend?”

“Well, they’re both nasty.”

From there, Chap­man goes on to explain in the most graph­ic detail the unpleas­ant aspects of either choice before offer­ing anoth­er option: can­ni­bal­ism. At that point (in keep­ing with the script) out­raged mem­bers of the stu­dio audi­ence rush onto the stage and put a stop to the sketch.

Chap­man and Cleese had been close friends since their stu­dent days at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, and when Chap­man died of can­cer at the age of 48 on Octo­ber 4, 1989, Cleese was at his bed­side. Out of respect for Chap­man’s fam­i­ly, the mem­bers of Mon­ty Python decid­ed to stay away from his pri­vate funer­al and avoid a media cir­cus. Instead, they gath­ered for a memo­r­i­al ser­vice on Octo­ber 6, 1989 in the Great Hall at St. Bartholomew’s Hos­pi­tal in Lon­don. When Cleese deliv­ered his eulo­gy for Chap­man, he recalled his friend’s irrev­er­ence: “Any­thing for him, but mind­less good taste.” So Cleese did his best to make his old friend proud. His off-col­or but heart­felt eulo­gy that evening has become a part of Mon­ty Python lore, and you can watch it above. To see a longer clip, with mov­ing words from Michael Palin and a sing-along of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” led by Eric Idle, watch below:

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Feb­ru­ary 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cleese’s Advice to Young Artists: “Steal Any­thing You Think Is Real­ly Good”

John Cleese Revis­its His 20 Years as an Ivy League Pro­fes­sor in His New Book, Pro­fes­sor at Large: The Cor­nell Years

John Cleese on How “Stu­pid Peo­ple Have No Idea How Stu­pid They Are” (a.k.a. the Dun­ning-Kruger Effect)

 

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A Brief History of Chess: An Animated Introduction to the 1,500-Year-Old Game

in Games, History | November 13th, 2019

I have come to the per­son­al con­clu­sion that while all artists are not chess play­ers, all chess play­ers are artists.

 –Mar­cel Duchamp

“Over the rough­ly one and half mil­len­nia of its exis­tence, chess has been known as a tool of mil­i­tary strat­e­gy, a metaphor for human affairs, and a bench­mark of genius,” points out the TED-Ed ani­mat­ed his­to­ry of the game by Alex Gendler, above. The first records of chess date to the 7th cen­tu­ry, but it may have orig­i­nat­ed even a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er, in India, where we find men­tion of the first game to have dif­fer­ent moves for dif­fer­ent pieces, and “a sin­gle king piece, whose fate deter­mined the out­come.”

It was orig­i­nal­ly called “chat­u­ran­ga,” a word that Yoga prac­ti­tion­ers will rec­og­nize as the “four-limbed staff pose,” but which sim­ply meant “four divi­sions” in this con­text. Once it spread to Per­sia, it became “chess,” mean­ing “Shah,” or king. It took root in the Arab world, and trav­eled the Silk Road to East and South­east Asia, where it acquired dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter­is­tics but used sim­i­lar rules and strate­gies. The Euro­pean form we play today became the stan­dard, but it might have been a very dif­fer­ent game had the Japan­ese version—which allowed play­ers to put cap­tured pieces into play—dominated.

Chess found ready accep­tance every­where it went because its under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples seemed to tap into com­mon mod­els of con­test and con­quest among polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary elites. Though writ­ten over a thou­sand years before “chat­u­ran­ga” arrived in China—where the game was called xiangqi, or “ele­phant game”—Sun Tzu’s Art of War may as well have been dis­cussing the crit­i­cal impor­tance of pawns in declar­ing, “When the offi­cers are valiant and the troops inef­fec­tive the army is in dis­tress.”

Chess also speaks to the hier­ar­chies ancient civ­i­liza­tions sought to nat­u­ral­ize, and by 1000 AD, it had become a tool for teach­ing Euro­pean noble­men the neces­si­ty of social class­es per­form­ing their prop­er roles. This alle­gor­i­cal func­tion gave to the pieces the roles we know today, with the piece called “the advi­sor” being replaced by the queen in the 15th cen­tu­ry, “per­haps inspired by the recent surge of strong female lead­ers.”

Ear­ly Mod­ern chess, freed from the con­fines of the court and played in cof­fee­hous­es, also became a favorite pas­time for philoso­phers, writ­ers, and artists. Trea­tis­es were writ­ten by the hun­dreds. Chess became a tool for sum­mon­ing inspi­ra­tion, and per­form­ing the­atri­cal, often Punic games for audiences—a trend that ebbed dur­ing the Cold War, when chess­boards became proxy bat­tle­grounds between world super­pow­ers, and intense cal­cu­la­tion ruled the day.

The arrival of IBM’s Deep Blue com­put­er, which defeat­ed reign­ing cham­pi­on Gar­ry Kas­parov in 1996, sig­naled a new evo­lu­tion for the game, a chess sin­gu­lar­i­ty, as it were, after which com­put­ers rou­tine­ly defeat­ed the best play­ers. Does this mean, accord­ing to Mar­cel Duchamp’s obser­va­tion, that chess-play­ing com­put­ers should be con­sid­ered artists? Chess’s ear­li­est adopters could nev­er have con­ceived of such a ques­tion. But the game they passed down through the cen­turies may have antic­i­pat­ed all of the pos­si­ble out­comes of human ver­sus machine.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gar­ry Kas­parov Now Teach­ing an Online Course on Chess

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

Vladimir Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Mind-Bend­ing Chess Prob­lems

Chess Grand­mas­ter Gar­ry Kas­parov Relives His Four Most Mem­o­rable Games

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

Mar­cel Duchamp, Chess Enthu­si­ast, Cre­at­ed an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Avail­able via 3D Print­er

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

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