The Restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Begins: Watch the Painstaking Process On-Site and Online

in Art | July 10th, 2019

Are col­lectibles mar­kets dri­ven by arbi­trary stan­dards? Of course. Just note the com­par­isons between the art world and world of vin­tage base­ball cards. Don’t see any sig­nif­i­cant sim­i­lar­i­ties? You must not be an econ­o­mist. As Tim Schnei­der points out at Art­net, the two mar­kets may be more alike than not, but they “diverge vio­lent­ly when it comes to the con­cept of restora­tion.” Base­ball cards, no mat­ter how tat­tered, stained, and torn, should nev­er be tam­pered with to improve their con­di­tion one bit. One could say the same of many oth­er “posi­tion­al goods,” to use the prop­er­ly econ­o­mistic term.

But econ­o­mists don’t make cat­e­gories with aes­thet­ic cri­te­ria in mind, and most of us aren’t gallery own­ers, cura­tors, or bil­lion­aire col­lec­tors, but lovers and appre­ci­a­tors of art. Do the vast major­i­ty of peo­ple who vis­it Rembrandt’s mon­u­men­tal­ly famous The Night Watch at the Rijksmu­se­um care about the fluc­tu­a­tions in the paint­ing’s mar­ket val­ue? Like­ly not, espe­cial­ly since a work as trea­sured as the offi­cial­ly-titled Mili­tia Com­pa­ny of Dis­trict II under the Com­mand of Cap­tain Frans Ban­ninck Cocq has no mar­ket val­ue. “It will nev­er be sold,” writes trav­el writer Kier­an Meeke. The Night Watch is “lit­er­al­ly ‘price­less.’

“Like many oth­er such paint­ings in nation­al col­lec­tions, there is also no rea­son to insure it as it makes more finan­cial sense to spend the pre­mi­ums on improv­ing secu­ri­ty.” Oth­er rea­sons to spend on secu­ri­ty include the three vio­lent attacks the paint­ing has endured at the hands of angry and trou­bled would-be art assas­sins allowed to get too close. This dam­age, rang­ing from severe to mild, and the rav­ages of time, have also neces­si­tat­ed many expen­sive restora­tion efforts, and the lat­est under­tak­ing is the biggest yet, espe­cial­ly since it has been turned into a heav­i­ly-pro­mot­ed live event called “Oper­a­tion Night Watch.”

Last year, we brought you news of this upcom­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty to see the painting’s vibrant col­ors emerge from the accu­mu­lat­ed grime; this month, the project began, with an intro­duc­tion on Mon­day by muse­um direc­tor Taco Dib­bets. This is “the largest research and restora­tion project ever for ‘the Night Watch,’” the Rijksmu­se­um reports, “and you can be part of it.” You do not need a tick­et to the Nether­lands, though if you buy one, you’ll also need to buy a tick­et for entry to the muse­um, where the paint­ing will be on full dis­play dur­ing its restora­tion. If, how­ev­er, you decide to watch from home, your seats are free.

The pro­jec­t’s name is only part­ly tongue-in-cheek. “It is like a mil­i­tary oper­a­tion in the plan­ning,” said Dib­bets, and it has required the utmost pre­ci­sion and expert teams of restor­ers, data experts, art his­to­ri­ans, and the pro­fes­sion­als who moved the enor­mous paint­ing into the glass case it will occu­py dur­ing this intense peri­od. The crew of restor­ers will work from dig­i­tal images tak­en with a macro X‑ray flu­o­res­cence scan­ner, a tech­nique, says Dib­bets, that allowed them to “make a full body scan” and “dis­cov­er which pig­ments [Rem­brandt] used.”

This restora­tion project will great­ly expand our under­stand­ing of the paint­ing’s cre­ation, and renew our awe for its grandeur. There may be no way to cal­cu­late The Night Watch’s mon­e­tary val­ue, out­side of the unlike­ly event that the Rijksmu­se­um decides to sell, but what restor­ers, his­to­ri­ans, gallery visitors—and mil­lions of art lovers around the world, who only know the paint­ing in reproductions—truly want to know is: what exact­ly did this beloved art­work look like when it was first made, and what might we have been miss­ing in the almost 400 years we’ve been admir­ing it?

We’ll get the chance to see not only the fin­ished prod­uct of the restora­tion, but every painstak­ing step of the process as well. You can mon­i­tor the progress of the restora­tion online, and, fur­ther up, see a time-lapse video of the labor-inten­sive oper­a­tion required to move the mas­sive can­vas.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

300+ Etch­ings by Rem­brandt Now Free Online, Thanks to the Mor­gan Library & Muse­um

Enter an Online Inter­ac­tive Doc­u­men­tary on Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and Learn About the Painting’s Many Hid­den Secrets

What Makes The Night Watch Rembrandt’s Mas­ter­piece

Late Rem­brandts Come to Life: Watch Ani­ma­tions of Paint­ings Now on Dis­play at the Rijksmu­se­um

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

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Arnold Schoenberg, Avant-Garde Composer, Creates a System of Symbols for Notating Tennis Matches

in Music, Sports | July 10th, 2019

This time each sum­mer, as the con­clu­sion of this year’s fort­night-long cham­pi­onship at Wim­ble­don approach­es, even the most pri­vate of the ten­nis enthu­si­asts in all of our cir­cles make them­selves known. Love of that par­tic­u­lar game runs down all walks of life, but seems to exist in par­tic­u­lar­ly high con­cen­tra­tions among cul­tur­al cre­ators: not just writ­ers like Mar­tin Amis, Geoff Dyer, and David Fos­ter Wal­lace, all of whose bod­ies of work con­tain elo­quent thoughts on ten­nis, but com­posers of music as well.

Take Arnold Schoen­berg, who well into his old age con­tin­ued not just to cre­ate the inno­v­a­tive music for which we remem­ber him, but to spend time on the court as well. Though born in Vien­na, Schoen­berg even­tu­al­ly land­ed in the right place to enjoy ten­nis on the reg­u­lar: south­ern Cal­i­for­nia, to which he fled in 1933 after being informed of how inhos­pitable his home­land would soon become to per­sons of Jew­ish her­itage. Few famous com­posers of that time had less in com­mon than Schoen­berg and George Gersh­win, but their shared enjoy­ment of ten­nis made them into fast part­ners.

Accord­ing to Howard Pol­lack­’s life of Gersh­win, fel­low com­pos­er Albert Sendrey left a “reveal­ing account” of one of the week­ly match­es between “the thir­ty-eight-year-old Gersh­win and the six­ty-two-year-old Schoen­berg, con­trast­ing the alter­nate­ly ‘ner­vous’ and ‘non­cha­lant,’ ‘relent­less’ and ‘chival­rous’ Gersh­win, ‘play­ing to an audi­ence,’ with the ‘over­ly eager’ and ‘chop­py’ Schoen­berg who ‘has learned to shut his mind against pub­lic opin­ion.’ ” Any par­al­lels between play­ing style and musi­cal sen­si­bil­i­ty are, of course, entire­ly coin­ci­den­tal.

The cere­bral nature of Schoen­berg’s com­po­si­tions may not sug­gest a tem­pera­ment suit­ed for phys­i­cal activ­i­ty of any kind, but even in Aus­tria Schoen­berg had been a keen sports­man. And as a fair few ten­nis-lov­ing writ­ers have explained, the game does pos­sess an intel­lec­tu­al side, and one made more eas­i­ly ana­lyz­able, at least in the­o­ry, by a sys­tem of Schoen­berg’s inven­tion. “Toward the end of his life, Schoen­berg — always fas­ci­nat­ed by rules, analy­sis, and inven­tion — would come up with a form of nota­tion to tran­scribe the ten­nis match­es of his ath­lete son Ronald,” writes Mark Berry in Arnold Schoen­berg. You can see this sys­tem laid out on the sheet above, recent­ly post­ed on Twit­ter by Hen­ry Gough-Coop­er.

The marks look vague­ly sim­i­lar to those of cer­tain dance nota­tion sys­tems, a nat­ur­al enough resem­blance con­sid­er­ing the kind of foot­work ten­nis demands. But ide­al­ly, Schoen­berg’s nota­tion would also have ren­dered a game of ten­nis as com­pre­hen­si­ble as one of chess — anoth­er pur­suit to which Schoen­berg applied his mind. He came up with “an expand­ed four-play­er, ten-square ver­sion of the tra­di­tion­al game,” writes Berry, “involv­ing super­pow­ers and less­er pow­ers all com­pelled to forge alliances, with new pieces such as air­planes, tanks, sub­marines, and so forth.” Schoen­berg’s “coali­tion chess,” as he called it, seems to have caught on no more than his ten­nis nota­tion sys­tem did. But then, the man who pio­neered the twelve-tone tech­nique nev­er did go in for mass accep­tance.

via and Hen­ry Gough-Coop­er on Twit­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arnold Schoen­berg Cre­ates a Hand-Drawn, Paper-Cut “Wheel Chart” to Visu­al­ize His 12-Tone Tech­nique

Vi Hart Uses Her Video Mag­ic to Demys­ti­fy Stravin­sky and Schoenberg’s 12-Tone Com­po­si­tions

John Coltrane Draws a Pic­ture Illus­trat­ing the Math­e­mat­ics of Music

Nota­tions: John Cage Pub­lish­es a Book of Graph­ic Musi­cal Scores, Fea­tur­ing Visu­al­iza­tions of Works by Leonard Bern­stein, Igor Stravin­sky, The Bea­t­les & More (1969)

Bob Dylan and George Har­ri­son Play Ten­nis, 1969

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and the Apollo 11 Moon Landing Turn 50 This Month: Celebrate Two Giant Leaps That Took Place 9 Days Apart

in History, Music | July 10th, 2019

One might call the explo­sion of “space rock” in the late 60s anoth­er kind of escapism, a turn from the heav­i­ness on plan­et Earth when the Age of Aquar­ius start­ed to get seri­ous­ly dark. Assas­si­na­tions, riots, ille­gal wars, blunt state repres­sion, coun­ter­cul­ture frag­men­ta­tion, vio­lence every­where, it seemed. Hal­lu­cino­gens played their part in guid­ing the music’s direc­tion, but who could blame bands and fans of bands like the Grate­ful Dead, Pink Floyd, Hawk­wind, or Hen­drix for turn­ing their gaze sky­wards and con­tem­plat­ing the stars?

One might also make the case that so-called “space rock”—psych-rock that direct­ly or indi­rect­ly ref­er­enced out­er space, space trav­el, and sci-fi themes, while sound­ing itself like the music of the spheres on acid—in fact, turned square­ly toward the most tech­no­log­i­cal­ly-advanced, ambi­tious proxy bat­tle of the entire Cold War. The very earth­ly space race made a fit­ting sub­ject for rock opera—a per­fect stage set for imag­i­na­tive songs about alien­ation, iso­la­tion, and tech­no­log­i­cal inhu­man­i­ty.

All of these themes come togeth­er in a celes­tial har­mo­ny in David Bowie’s 1969 sin­gle, “Space Odd­i­ty,” released on July 11th 1969 and inspired by Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, both cul­tur­al arti­facts that antic­i­pat­ed the dra­ma of the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing. The excite­ment Kubrick’s film and Bowie’s song helped gen­er­ate is odd, how­ev­er, con­sid­er­ing that both nar­ra­tives end with their pro­tag­o­nists lost in out­er space for­ev­er.

This didn’t stop the BBC from using “Space Odd­i­ty” to sound­track their Apol­lo cov­er­age, “despite its chill­ing con­clu­sion,” writes Jason Heller, author of Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Explod­ed. The song’s sce­nario “couldn’t have been fur­ther from the typ­i­cal cheer­lead­ing of the astro­nauts that was being con­duct­ed by the media. No one was more sur­prised than Bowie,” who com­ment­ed:

I’m sure they real­ly weren’t lis­ten­ing to the lyrics at all. It wasn’t a pleas­ant thing to jux­ta­pose against a moon land­ing…. Obvi­ous­ly, some BBC offi­cial said, ‘Oh, right then, that space song, Major Tom, blah blah blah, that’ll be great.’ ‘Um, but he gets strand­ed in space, sir.’ Nobody had the heart to tell the pro­duc­er that.

“Of course,” says Bowie, ”I was over­joyed that they did” run with the song. It had been his label’s intent to gar­ner this kind of expo­sure when they rushed the record’s release to “cap­i­tal­ize on the Apol­lo craze.” “Space Odd­i­ty” made it to num­ber five on the UK charts. But if Bowie was mak­ing any com­ment on the moon mis­sion, at first it seems he did so only indi­rect­ly, inspired more by cin­e­ma than cur­rent events. He found 2001 “amaz­ing,” he com­ment­ed, adding, “I was out of my gourd any­way, I was very stoned when I went to see it, sev­er­al times, and it was real­ly a rev­e­la­tion to me.”

The song, he says, came out of that enhanced view­ing expe­ri­ence. Heller writes of sev­er­al more of Bowie’s lit­er­ary sci-fi influ­ences, but not of a par­tic­u­lar inter­est in the Apol­lo pro­gram. Yet Bowie, who record­ed the first “Space Odd­i­ty” demo in Jan­u­ary of 1969, did say he want­ed the song “to be the first anthem of the Moon.” The lyrics also “came from a feel­ing of sad­ness,” he said, about the space pro­gram’s direc­tion. “It has been dehu­man­ized,” he said. “Space Odd­i­ty” rep­re­sent­ed a delib­er­ate “anti­dote to space fever,” which is maybe why the song did­n’t catch on in the U.S. until the ‘70s.

This was not a song about plant­i­ng a flag of con­quest. Jour­nal­ist Chris O’Leary remem­bers Bowie mak­ing even more point­ed com­men­tary, con­sid­er­ing “the fate of Major Tom to be the tech­no­crat­ic Amer­i­can mind com­ing face-to-face with the unknown and blank­ing out.” The song her­ald­ed not only a piv­otal sci­en­tif­ic achieve­ment but a cul­tur­al break: “It was prob­a­bly not hyper­bole to assert that the Age of Aquar­ius end­ed when man walked on the Moon,” writes soci­ol­o­gist Philip Ennis. Or as Camille Paglia inter­pret­ed events in Bowie’s song, “we sense that the ‘60s coun­ter­cul­ture has trans­mut­ed into a hope­less­ness about polit­i­cal reform.”

This may seem like a lot of inter­pre­ta­tion to lay on what Bowie him­self called a “song-farce,” but when we’re talk­ing about Bowie’s song­writ­ing, even throw­away lines seem filled with por­tent. And when it comes to that supreme­ly ambiva­lent cou­plet “Plan­et Earth is blue / And there’s noth­ing I can do,” we find our­selves legit­i­mate­ly ask­ing along with Heller, is this “anthem or requiem? Cel­e­bra­tion or decon­struc­tion?” It has been all these things—the “defin­ing song of the Space Age,” sung by astro­nauts them­selves while float­ing in the tin can of the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion, and soon to be broad­cast at the Kennedy Cen­ter in a new video cel­e­brat­ing the 50th anniver­sary of the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing.

The video at the NASA event on July 20th will com­mem­o­rate the event with “footage of David Bowie per­form­ing Space Odd­i­ty at his 50th birth­day con­cert at Madi­son Square Gar­den in 1997.” At the top of the post, see a lat­er video for the song (the first film Bowie made, in 1969, would not emerge until 1984); fur­ther up, see an excel­lent live per­for­mance as Zig­gy Star­dust and the Spi­ders from Mars; and just above, see a young, fresh, bell-bot­tomed, pre-glam Bowie play “Space Odd­i­ty” live on TV in 1969.

As we remem­ber the 50th anniver­sary of the moon land­ing this month, we also cel­e­brate the release of “Space Odd­i­ty” just nine days ear­li­er, the song that first launched Bowie’s career as a space­far­ing rock star. He couldn’t have pre­dict­ed the suc­cess of the Apol­lo 11 mis­sion, but now it seems we can­not prop­er­ly remem­ber it with­out also reflect­ing on his pre­scient pop critique—an attempt, he said, “to relate sci­ence and emo­tion.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Astro­naut Chris Had­field Sings David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” On Board the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

How “Space Odd­i­ty” Launched David Bowie to Star­dom: Watch the Orig­i­nal Music Video From 1969

NASA Dig­i­tizes 20,000 Hours of Audio from the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Mis­sion: Stream Them Free Online

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

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Lennon or McCartney? Scientists Use Artificial Intelligence to Figure Out Who Wrote Iconic Beatles Songs

in Music | July 10th, 2019

Do you ago­nize over the fact that you don’t know for cer­tain who wrote what per­cent­age of your favorite Bea­t­les songs? Do you need to know if a line or phrase is Lennon or McCartney’s before you can enjoy “A Hard Day’s Night,” “In My Life,” and oth­er time­less tunes? Have you lost sleep over the dis­put­ed author­ship of “Do You Want to Know a Secret”?

I hope not. As Lennon/McCartney them­selves wrote, in the end, the songs we love are equal to the love we give the songs…. or some­thing like that. How much we can say with cer­tain­ty who penned which lyric or melody or played which riff or rhythm part doesn’t add to our emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence. But that knowl­edge does add more to our appre­ci­a­tion than fod­der for forum wars or law­suits.

Pulling these icon­ic songs into their con­stituent parts helps con­firm our under­stand­ing of how those parts con­tributed dif­fer­ent­ly to mak­ing the whole evolve; how Lennon’s direct­ness and sim­plic­i­ty com­ple­ment­ed and con­trast­ed with McCartney’s use of “more non-stan­dard musi­cal motifs” and a high­er degree of com­plex­i­ty. Or, at least, that’s what an AI found when it ana­lyzed hun­dreds of Bea­t­les hits in an effort to “build a ‘musi­cal fin­ger­print’ for each song­writer,” reports Alex Matthews-King at the Inde­pen­dent.

After putting the machine learn­ing algo­rithm through an ini­tial train­ing phase of “lis­ten­ing” to a com­plete works, researchers at Har­vard “asked” the pro­gram to assess “icon­ic songs, or musi­cal frag­ments, record­ed between 1962 and 1966, where debate rages over who was the major influ­ence.” Much of that debate has been fueled by the song­writ­ers them­selves, whose mem­o­ries in inter­views con­flict, but who are gen­er­al­ly thought to have writ­ten most songs indi­vid­u­al­ly under their joint song­writ­ing part­ner­ship.

The sci­en­tists from Har­vard and Dal­housie Uni­ver­si­ty in Cana­da were able to gauge with some­where around 76 per­cent accu­ra­cy whether songs or parts of songs were writ­ten by Lennon or McCart­ney. (Spoil­er alert: The AI “was able to iden­ti­fy some, includ­ing ‘Ask Me Why’, ‘Do You Want to Know a Secret’ and the bridge to ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, as belong­ing to John Lennon with up to 90 per cent cer­tain­ty,” writes The Dai­ly Mail.) Senior lec­tur­er in sta­tis­tics at Har­vard and paper author Mark Glick­man explains the larg­er pur­pose of the project to the Finan­cial Times: “Our work is essen­tial­ly a blue­print for those want­i­ng to fol­low changes in music over time. Using our machine learn­ing mod­el, you could poten­tial­ly home in on all the dif­fer­ent influ­ences of a giv­en musi­cian.”

If you’re using their work to win argu­ments, be pre­pared to explain how the study obtained its results and why they are any more reli­able than decades of detec­tive work and expert lis­ten­ing by humans. As a non-sta­tis­tics per­son, I’ll leave that expla­na­tion to more qual­i­fied indi­vid­u­als. I’m sat­is­fied: whether McCart­ney wrote all of the music for “In My Life” or just the bridge, as Lennon claimed, won’t change the way it moves me one bit.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Every Place Ref­er­enced in The Bea­t­les’ Lyrics: In 12 Min­utes, Trav­el 25,000 Miles Across Eng­land, France, Rus­sia, India & the US

Watch The Bea­t­les Per­form Their Famous Rooftop Con­cert: It Hap­pened 50 Years Ago Today (Jan­u­ary 30, 1969)

A Brief His­to­ry of Sam­pling: From the Bea­t­les to the Beast­ie Boys

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

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The Simpsons Reimagined as a Russian Art Film

in Animation, Film | July 9th, 2019

Ani­ma­tor Lenivko Kvadratjić has re-cre­at­ed The Simp­sons’ famous open­ing scene. And it’s bleak–as in post-Cher­nobyl bleak. Watch at your own risk.

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via Neatora­ma

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When John Waters Appeared on The Simp­sons and Changed America’s LGBTQ Views (1997)

The Rise and Fall of The Simp­sons: An In-Depth Video Essay Explores What Made the Show Great, and When It All Came to an End

The Simp­sons Take on Ayn Rand: See the Show’s Satire of The Foun­tain­head and Objec­tivist Phi­los­o­phy

 

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When MAD Magazine Ruffled the Feathers of the FBI, Not Once But Three Times

in Comedy, History, Magazines | July 9th, 2019

Many of us grew up read­ing MAD, the soon-to-be-late illus­trat­ed satir­i­cal mag­a­zine. But only the gen­er­a­tions who went through their MAD peri­ods in the pub­li­ca­tion’s first cou­ple of decades, from the 1950s through the 1970s, enjoyed it at the height of its sub­ver­sive pow­ers. As hard as it may be to imag­ine in the 21st cen­tu­ry, there was even a time when MAD came under scruti­ny by no less pow­er­ful an orga­ni­za­tion than the Unit­ed States Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion, and faced the wrath of its first and most feared direc­tor J. Edgar Hoover at that. But did the heat stop its cre­ators from doing their nec­es­sary work of irrev­er­ence? Most cer­tain­ly not.

“In a memo dat­ed Novem­ber 30, 1957,” writes Men­tal Floss’ Jake Rossen, “an agent with the Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion iden­ti­fied as ‘A. Jones.’ raised an issue of crit­i­cal impor­tance.” That issue had to do with what the FBI file on the case described as sev­er­al com­plaints made “con­cern­ing the ‘Mad’ com­ic book,” and specif­i­cal­ly “a tongue-in-cheek game about draft dodg­ing. Play­ers who earned such sta­tus were advised to write to FBI Direc­tor J. Edgar Hoover and request a mem­ber­ship card cer­ti­fy­ing them­selves as a ‘full-fledged draft dodger.’ At least three read­ers, the agent report­ed, did exact­ly that.” Agent Jones also weighed in with a judg­ment of MAD itself: “It is rather unfun­ny.”

You can see all this for your­self in the doc­u­ments from the FBI file, excerpts of which are avail­able to down­load at thesmokinggun.com. “Crit­i­ciz­ing or lam­poon­ing the FBI has become stan­dard media fare,” says that site, “but when J. Edgar Hoover ran the joint, the bureau would­n’t stand for such swipes — and often retal­i­at­ed by inves­ti­gat­ing its foes. So that’s why it’s great to see that MAD mag­a­zine was­n’t intim­i­dat­ed by Hoover and seemed to take plea­sure in needling the Direc­tor.” It did it again in 1960, two years after pub­lish­er William Gaines promised nev­er to men­tion Hoover’s name in the pages of MAD, when it made fun of the FBI’s top man twice in a sin­gle issue, once in a faux adver­tise­ment for a vac­u­um clean­er called “The Hon­or­able J. Edgar Elec­trolux.”

The exchanges that ensued, says thesmokinggun.com, reveal the FBI’s pos­ses­sion of “one lousy sense of humor.” But they also reveal no small degree of courage on the part of a still-new humor mag­a­zine in the face of an intel­li­gence orga­ni­za­tion more than empow­ered to seri­ous­ly dis­rupt lives and careers. Not long there­after, MAD would become a rec­og­nized Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion in its own way, pok­ing fun at seem­ing­ly every phe­nom­e­non to pass, how­ev­er ephemer­al­ly, through the nation­al zeit­geist. But now that its own run, which adds up to a high­ly non-ephemer­al 67 years, has come to an end, we’d do well to reflect on what its his­to­ry tells us about satire and the state. The con­di­tion of that dynam­ic today may cause some of us to do just what MAD mas­cot Alfred E. Neu­man nev­er did — wor­ry.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The End of an Era: MAD Mag­a­zine Will Pub­lish Its Last Issue With Orig­i­nal Con­tent This Fall

Every Cov­er of MAD Mag­a­zine, from 1952 to the Present: Behold 553 Cov­ers from the Satir­i­cal Pub­li­ca­tion

FBI’s “Vault” Web Site Reveals Declas­si­fied Files on Hem­ing­way, Ein­stein, Mar­i­lyn & Oth­er Icons

Read 113 Pages of Charles Bukowski’s FBI File From 1968

The Exis­ten­tial­ism Files: How the FBI Tar­get­ed Camus, and Then Sartre After the JFK Assas­si­na­tion

Who Was Afraid of Ray Brad­bury & Sci­ence Fic­tion? The FBI, It Turns Out (1959)

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Most Disturbing Painting: A Close Look at Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”

in Art | July 9th, 2019

Progress is not a guar­an­tee. It can be stunt­ed, out­lawed, or usurped. And then you have to fight for it all over again. The Span­ish painter Fran­cis­co Goya (1746–1828) found this out over the course of his life as he saw the promise of the Enlight­en­ment fall to Napoleon’s forces and then to an auto­crat­ic monarch (Fer­di­nand VII). In his per­son­al life, Goya had gone from a hap­py exis­tence as a court painter to strug­gling with loss of hear­ing and pos­si­ble men­tal ill­ness.

As Evan Puschak aka Nerd­writer illus­trates in his creepy and well edit­ed video essay, it was around this time that the reclu­sive painter start­ed work on his “Black Paint­ings.” These 14 works were made in oil direct­ly onto the plas­ter walls of the con­vert­ed farm­house that had become his stu­dio. The sub­ject mat­ter was very dark: old age, mad­ness, witch­es. And the one paint­ing that Puschak sin­gles out as The Most Dis­turb­ing Paint­ing of All Time, “Sat­urn Eat­ing His Son,” is the dark­est of the lot.

As Puschak explains, artists had often turned to the sto­ry of Sat­urn (in Roman Mythol­o­gy) or Cronos (in Greek) for sub­ject mat­ter. Cronos ate his new­born sons after a prophe­cy warned that a future child would over­throw him. Despite the can­ni­bal­ism, painters ren­dered Cronos with a clas­si­cal, hero­ic physique. Goya, despite hav­ing paint­ed in this style ear­ly in his career, ren­ders Sat­urn as a beard­ed beast of a man, caught in the mid­dle of devour­ing not a baby, but a grown man. It’s the eyes that frighten–Goya paints them wide and wild, almost too big, full of shame, hor­ror, blood­lust and pret­ty much what­ev­er the view­er wants to read into it.

But here’s the kick­er, as Puschak says, this paint­ing along with the 13 oth­ers at his stu­dio, weren’t meant to be seen by any­one. Goya nev­er spoke about them, and peo­ple cer­tain­ly weren’t stop­ping by to see them. The Sat­urn paint­ing was on dis­play in his din­ing room. Bon appétit!

The Black Paint­ings now hang (after much labo­ri­ous trans­fer from their orig­i­nal walls) at the Pra­do Muse­um in Madrid where they chill and fas­ci­nate view­ers to this day. But we’ll nev­er know exact­ly why he paint­ed them and what was run­ning through his mind when he paint­ed Sat­urn. The Nerd­writer gives this work the expli­ca­tion it deserves.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Art Lovers Rejoice! New Goya and Rem­brandt Data­bas­es Now Online

The Pra­do Muse­um Cre­ates the First Art Exhi­bi­tion for the Visu­al­ly Impaired, Using 3D Print­ing

100 Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um Cura­tors Talk About 100 Works of Art That Changed How They See the World

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

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Deconstructing Stevie Wonder’s Ode to Jazz and His Hero Duke Ellington: A Great Breakdown of “Sir Duke”

in Music | July 8th, 2019

I nev­er real­ly liked the­o­ry class­es very much. To be hon­est, I was nev­er that good at them. I’ve def­i­nite­ly learned more from using my ears rather than my brain.  

- Musi­cian Jacob Col­lier

I too, find music the­o­ry con­found­ing, but unlike musi­cal poly­math Col­lier, I don’t have much of an ear to fall back on.

Which is pos­si­bly why I learned so much from his appear­ance on Vox’s Ear­worm, above. He lent me his ears.

Ten min­utes in, I think I maybe, sort-of under­stand what chro­mati­cism is.

Rather than pull exam­ples from a num­ber of sources, Col­lier con­cen­trates on his “musi­cal crush” Ste­vie Won­der’s chart top­ping 1976 trib­ute to jazz leg­end Duke Elling­ton, “Sir Duke.” As Col­lier told Time Out Israel’s Jen­nifer Green­berg:

I believe that when you lis­ten to music, it gives you this periph­ery of great stuff in your ears and then when you sit down to make music of your own, those are your teach­ers, those are your guid­ing forces. It’s bet­ter to have Ste­vie Won­der as a ref­er­ence point than say “this text­book that I read in class” …Ste­vie is my num­ber one. As a kid, he rep­re­sent­ed every­thing that I real­ly loved about music: he had all the chops, he had all the chords, he had all the funky stuff, all the groove, but then had that voice and behind the voice, he had this soul and feel­ings, and he also had this sense of humor mixed with this human­i­ty.

Col­lier has the innate know-how to break down those grooves, from the big band feel of the open­ing drums to the Motown sound back­beat of the verse.

Aid­ed by series pro­duc­er Estelle Caswell and some graph­ics that visu­al­ize such fun­da­men­tal­ly aur­al con­cepts as har­mo­ny and the pen­ta­ton­ic scale, Col­lier artic­u­lates in pure­ly musi­cal terms what makes this endur­ing hit so catchy.

Cer­tain­ly, the exu­ber­ant shout cho­rus doesn’t hurt.

Col­lier has delved into Wonder’s cat­a­logue before, leap­ing on the oppor­tu­ni­ty to har­mo­nize with him­self.

That’s him above, at age 17, per­form­ing an a cap­pel­la “Isn’t She Love­ly,” his melod­i­ca stand­ing in for Won­der’s icon­ic har­mon­i­ca solo.

And Wonder’s “Don’t You Wor­ry ‘Bout A Thing,” below, pre­sent­ed his great­est chal­lenge as an arranger, due to such quirks as “unex­pect­ed sus­pen­sion chords” and the dia­ton­ic descend­ing melody. Hold on to your hats at the 2:26 mark when the screen splits into over a dozen sec­tions, in an attempt to con­tain all the tal­ent on dis­play.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Con­cept of Musi­cal Har­mo­ny Explained in Five Lev­els of Dif­fi­cul­ty, Start­ing with a Child & End­ing with Her­bie Han­cock

See Ste­vie Won­der Play “Super­sti­tion” and Ban­ter with Grover on Sesame Street in 1973

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Visu­al­iza­tion of the Bass Line for the Motown Clas­sic, “Ain’t No Moun­tain High Enough”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Her hus­band was grat­i­fied to see Jacob Col­lier shares his affin­i­ty for Crocs. No shame. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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