A 1913 Children’s Book Lampoons Duchamp, Picasso & Other Avant-Garde Artists: Read The Cubies’ ABC Online

in Art, Books, History | December 3rd, 2020

Igor Stravin­sky’s The Rite of Spring pre­miered in 1913, and its vio­lent break from musi­cal and chore­o­graph­ic tra­di­tion, so the sto­ry goes, pushed the gen­teel Parisian audi­ence to vio­lent rebel­lion. That tale may have grown taller over the past cen­tu­ry, but pub­lic dis­taste for then-nov­el trends in all forms of “mod­ern art” has left a paper trail. Here we have a par­tic­u­lar­ly amus­ing exhib­it, and long an obscure one: The Cubies’ ABC, a pic­ture book by a cou­ple named Mary Mills and Earl Har­vey Lyall. They were inspired by anoth­er major cul­tur­al event of 1913, the Inter­na­tion­al Exhi­bi­tion of Mod­ern Art, or “Armory Show,” which offered the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca its first look at ground­break­ing work by Mar­cel Duchamp, Pablo Picas­so, and Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, among a host of oth­er for­eign artists.

The Lyalls, evi­dent­ly, were not impressed. In order to ridicule what they seem to have con­sid­ered the pre­ten­sions of the avant-garde, they came up with the Cubies, a trio of angu­lar, wild-haired trou­ble­mak­ers bent on dis­card­ing all estab­lished con­ven­tions in the name of Ego, the Future, and Intu­ition.

Those three con­cepts get their own pages in this alpha­bet­i­cal­ly orga­nized book, as do artists — not that the authors would uniron­i­cal­ly grant them the title — like Duchamp, “the Deep-Dyed Deceiv­er, who, draw­ing accor­dions, labels them stairs”; Kandin­sky, painter of “Kute ‘impro­vi­sa­tions’ ”; and even Gertrude Stein, “elo­quent scribe of the Futur­ist soul.” X stands, of course, for “the Xit,” a direc­tion “Xtreme­ly allur­ing when Cubies invite us to study their Art.”

“We tend to for­get, now that the Cubists and Futur­ists have become as inte­gral to the his­to­ry of art as the painters of the Dutch Gold­en Age and the Ital­ian Renais­sance, how hos­tile most peo­ple — even most artists — felt toward the non-rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al inno­va­tions of the artists on dis­play at the Armory,” says the Pub­lic Domain Review, where you can read The Cubies’ ABC in full.

You can also buy a copy of the reprint orga­nized by gal­lerist Fran­cis Nau­mann in com­mem­o­ra­tion of the Armory show’s cen­te­nary. “Peo­ple in those days thought that they could stop mod­ern art in its tracks,” says Nau­mann in a New York­er piece on the book. Did the Lyalls think the Cubies’ antics would land a deci­sive blow against abstrac­tion and sub­jec­tiv­i­ty? Then again, could they have imag­ined us enjoy­ing them more than a hun­dred years lat­er, in a time unknow­able to even the most far-sight­ed Futur­ist?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of the 1913 Exhi­bi­tion That Intro­duced Avant-Garde Art to Amer­i­ca

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

The Guggen­heim Puts Online 1700 Great Works of Mod­ern Art from 625 Artists

24,000 Vin­tage Car­toons from the Library of Con­gress Illus­trate the His­to­ry of This Mod­ern Art Form (1780–1977)

The Anti-Slav­ery Alpha­bet: 1846 Book Teach­es Kids the ABCs of Slavery’s Evils

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

When Sun Ra Went to Egypt in 1971: See Film & Hear Recordings from the Legendary Afrofuturist’s First Visit to Cairo

in Music | December 3rd, 2020

Sun Ra died in 1993 (or he returned to his home plan­et of Sat­urn, one or the oth­er). Twen­ty-sev­en years lat­er his Arkestra is still going strong. “No group in jazz his­to­ry has embod­ied the com­mu­nal spir­it like the Arkestra,” writes Peter Mar­gasak at The Qui­etus. “Their hard­core fans are the clos­est thing jazz has to Dead­heads.” We could fur­ther com­pare Sun Ra and Jer­ry Gar­cia as bandleaders—their embrace of extend­ed free form play­ing against a back­ground of tra­di­tion­al­ism. Folk, and coun­try in Garcia’s case and big band swing in the work of the man born Her­man Poole Blount in Birm­ing­ham, Alaba­ma in 1914.

But (all due respect to Jer­ry, and he earned it), Sun Ra had a vision that was wider than his ded­i­cat­ed fan­base. He har­nessed the pow­er­ful sym­bols of ancient Egypt and oth­er African king­doms to form the base of his Afro­fu­tur­ist mes­sage, a blend of “Black Nation­al­ism, ancient spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, and sci­ence fic­tion” for the jazz mass­es. Ra fleshed these themes out ful­ly in his 1974 film Space is the Place, a sci-fi fan­ta­sy in which he bat­tles his adver­saries in a plan to trans­port Black Amer­i­cans to a new plan­et.

What seems like a call for sep­a­ratism is real­ly an alle­go­ry cri­tiquing what schol­ar Daniel Kreiss calls the “ter­res­tri­al com­mu­ni­ty pro­grams” of the Black Pan­thers and the ills of pover­ty, racism, and exploita­tion. “Only the band’s use of tech­nol­o­gy and music will lib­er­ate the peo­ple by chang­ing con­scious­ness” the film sug­gests. Space, and ancient Egypt, are also places in the mind. Sun Ra had his own con­scious­ness changed a cou­ple year ear­li­er when he vis­it­ed the real Egypt for the first time in 1971. The result­ing record­ings—new­ly released—stand as “one of Sun Ra’s major works” Edwin Pouncey writes at Jazz­wise, and “would lead him to oth­er worlds of inner dis­cov­ery in the future.”

Film of the 22-mem­ber col­lec­tive at the pyra­mids (top), tak­en by Arkestra mem­ber Thomas Hunter, cre­ates “an audio-visu­al tele­por­ta­tion into their inter­stel­lar uni­verse,” The Vinyl Factory’s Gabriela Helfet remarks. Pre­vi­ous­ly unpub­lished pho­tographs of the Cairo con­certs com­plete the image of the band as a psy­che­del­ic pan-African space­ship made of music. Where will it take you? Wher­ev­er you need to go. In a record­ed Q&A held dur­ing one show, Sun Ra tells the audi­ence that his adopt­ed name is “my nat­ur­al, vibra­tional name,” his true iden­ti­ty.

Each per­son, Sun Ra sug­gests, has to find to find their own fre­quen­cy. “Pro­gres­sive music is keep­ing ahead of the times, you might say. In Amer­i­ca they call it avant-garde music. It’s sup­posed to stim­u­late peo­ple to think for them­selves.” The mes­sage and the music res­onat­ed, and the band would return to Egypt two more times in the com­ing decade after their first vis­it, as Brad­ford Bai­ley notes:

Beyond per­son­al appeal, the trip proved cre­ative­ly fruitful—introducing the entourage to fig­ures in Cairo’s grow­ing jazz scene. The most notable was Salah Ragab—founder of the sem­i­nal out­fits, The Cairo Jazz Band and The Cairo Free Jazz Ensem­ble, with whom they would col­lab­o­rate on their sec­ond and third vis­its, record­ings of which came to light on the 1983 LP, The Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab Plus The Cairo Jazz Band ‎– In Egypt. 

Hear “Watusa” from that LP, above, lis­ten to the full Egypt 1971 ses­sions at Band­camp (or below), and see sev­er­al more new­ly pub­lished pho­tographs at the Vinyl Fac­to­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Col­lec­tion of Sun Ra’s Busi­ness Cards from the 1950s: They’re Out of This World

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

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

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

An Introduction to Rap Battles: Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #71

in Comedy, Music, Podcasts, Poetry, Pretty Much Pop | December 3rd, 2020

Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are rejoined by our audio edi­tor and res­i­dent rap­per Tyler His­lop (rap name: “Sac­ri­fice”) to dis­cuss a form of enter­tain­ment close to his heart: Two peo­ple star­ing each oth­er in the face in front of a crowd and tak­ing lengthy turns insult­ing each oth­er in a loud voice using intri­cate rhymes, ref­er­ences, jokes and even some cul­tur­al com­men­tary and philo­soph­i­cal spit-balling.

So what are the rules? How does mod­ern bat­tle rap com­pare to free-styling, the beefs aired on rap albums, and clas­sic insult com­e­dy? What’s the appeal of this art form? Is it because of or despite the aggres­sion involved? Bat­tle rap is regard­ed as a free speech zone, where any­thing’s fair game, but does that real­ly make sense?

A few rel­e­vant films came up in the dis­cus­sion:

  • Bod­ied (2017), a film writ­ten by Alex Larsen (aka Kid Twist) and pro­duced by Eminem, fea­tur­ing sev­er­al cur­rent bat­tle rap­pers doing their thing along with dis­cus­sion by the char­ac­ters of the eth­i­cal issues involved
  • 8 Mile (2002), a semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal film star­ring Eminem, which dis­plays the old­er, free-styling over a beat type of bat­tle rap­ping
  • Rox­anne Rox­anne (2017) a biopic about Rox­anne Shante depict­ing hip-hop rival­ries of the 1980s.

Here are some match­es Tyler rec­om­mend­ed that also get men­tioned:

More resources:

Hear Tyler talk about his many rap albums on Naked­ly Exam­ined Music #24.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion you can access 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Internet Archive is Saving Classic Flash Animations & Games from Extinction: Explore Them Online

in Animation, Archives, Internet Archive, Software, Technology | December 2nd, 2020

Flash is final­ly dead, and the world… does not mourn. Because the announce­ment of its end actu­al­ly came three years ago, “like a guil­lo­tine in a crowd­ed town square,” writes Rhett Jones at Giz­mo­do. It was a slow exe­cu­tion, but it was just. So use­ful in Web 1.0 days for mak­ing ani­ma­tions, games, and seri­ous pre­sen­ta­tions, Flash had become a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, a viral car­ri­er that couldn’t be patched fast enough to keep the hack­ers out. “Adobe’s Flash died many deaths, but we can tru­ly throw some dirt on its grave and say our final good­byes because it’s get­ting the preser­va­tion treat­ment.” Like the ani­mat­ed GIF, Flash ani­ma­tions have their own online library.

All those love­ly Flash memes—the danc­ing bad­gers and the snake, peanut but­ter and jel­ly time—will be saved for per­plexed future gen­er­a­tions, who will use them to deci­pher the runes of ear­ly 2000’s inter­net-speak. How­ev­er sil­ly they may seem now, there’s no deny­ing that these arti­facts were once cen­tral con­stituents of pop cul­ture.

Flash was much more than a dis­trac­tion or frus­trat­ing brows­er crash­er. It pro­vid­ed a “gate­way,” Jason Scott writes at the Inter­net Archive blog, “for many young cre­ators to fash­ion near-pro­fes­sion­al-lev­el games and ani­ma­tion, giv­ing them the first steps to a lat­er career.” (Even if it was a career mak­ing “advergames.”)

A sin­gle per­son work­ing in their home could hack togeth­er a con­vinc­ing pro­gram, upload it to a huge clear­ing­house like New­grounds, and get feed­back on their work. Some cre­ators even made entire series of games, each improv­ing on the last, until they became full pro­fes­sion­al releas­es on con­soles and PCs.

Always true to its pur­pose, the Inter­net Archive has devised a way to store and play Flash ani­ma­tions using emu­la­tors cre­at­ed by Ruf­fle and the Blue­Max­i­ma Flash­point Project, who have already archived tens of thou­sands of Flash games. All those adorable Home­s­tar Run­ner car­toons? Saved from extinc­tion, which would have been their fate, since “with­out a Flash play­er, flash ani­ma­tions don’t work.” This may seem obvi­ous, but it bears some expla­na­tion. Where image, sound, and video files can be con­vert­ed to oth­er for­mats to make them acces­si­ble to mod­ern play­ers, Flash ani­ma­tions can only exist in a world with Flash. They are like Edison’s wax cylin­ders, with­out the charm­ing three-dimen­sions.

Scott goes into more depth on the rise and fall of Flash, a his­to­ry that begins in 1993 with Flash’s pre­de­ces­sor, SmartS­ketch, which became Future­Wave, which became Flash when it was pur­chased by Macro­me­dia, then by Adobe. By 2005, it start­ed to become unsta­ble, and could­n’t evolve along with new pro­to­cols. HTML5 arrived in 2014 to issue the “final death-blow,” kind of.… Will Flash be missed? It’s doubt­ful. But “like any con­tain­er, Flash itself is not as much of a loss as all the art and cre­ativ­i­ty it held.” The Archive cur­rent­ly hosts over 1,500 Flash ani­ma­tions from those turn-of-the-mil­len­ni­um inter­net days, and there are many more to come. Enter the Archive’s Flash col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The U.S. Nation­al Archives Launch­es an Ani­mat­ed GIF Archive: See Whit­man, Twain, Hem­ing­way & Oth­ers in Motion

36,000 Flash Games Have Been Archived and Saved Before Flash Goes Extinct: Play Them Offline

What the Entire Inter­net Looked Like in 1973: An Old Map Gets Found in a Pile of Research Papers

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like & How We Know It

in History | December 2nd, 2020

If you’ve seen any Hol­ly­wood movie set in ancient Egypt, you already know how its lan­guage sound­ed: just like Eng­lish, but spo­ken with a more for­mal dic­tion and a range of broad­ly Mid­dle-East­ern accents. But then there are many com­pet­ing the­o­ries about life that long ago, and per­haps you’d pre­fer to believe the lin­guis­tic-his­tor­i­cal take pro­vid­ed in the video above. A pro­duc­tion of Joshua Rud­der’s NativLang, a Youtube chan­nel pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for its videos on ancient Latin and Chi­nese, it tells the sto­ry of “the many forms of the long-lived Egypt­ian lan­guages,” as well as its “ances­tors and rel­a­tives,” and how they’ve helped lin­guists deter­mine just how the ancient Egyp­tians real­ly spoke.

Rud­der begins with a cer­tain arti­fact called — per­haps you’ve heard of it — the Roset­ta Stone. Dis­cov­ered in 1799 dur­ing Napoleon’s cam­paign in Egypt, it “bore two Egypt­ian scripts and, aus­pi­cious­ly, a rough trans­la­tion in per­fect­ly read­able Greek.” Using this infor­ma­tion, the schol­ar Jean-François Cham­pol­lion became the first to deci­pher ancient Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs. But as to the ques­tion of what they sound­ed like when pro­nounced, the stone had no answers. Cham­pol­lion even­tu­al­ly became con­vinced that the still-liv­ing Cop­tic lan­guage was “the Egypt­ian lan­guage, the very same one that stretch­es back con­tin­u­ous­ly for thou­sands of years.”

Though Cop­tic sounds and gram­mar could pro­vide clues about spo­ken ancient Egypt­ian, it could­n’t get Cham­pol­lion all the way to accu­rate pro­nun­ci­a­tion. One press­ing goal was to fill in the lan­guage’s miss­ing vow­els, an essen­tial type of sound that nev­er­the­less went unrecord­ed by hiero­glyphs. To the archives, then, which in Egypt were espe­cial­ly vast and con­tained doc­u­ments dat­ing far back into his­to­ry. These enabled a process of “inter­nal recon­struc­tion,” which involved com­par­ing dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the Egypt­ian lan­guage to each oth­er, and which ulti­mate­ly “result­ed in an explo­sion of hiero­glyph­ic knowl­edge.”

But the jour­ney to recon­struct the speak­ing of this “longest writ­ten lan­guage on Earth” does­n’t stop there: it there­after makes such side quests as one to a “pock­et of Ethiopia” where peo­ple speak “a clus­ter of lan­guages grouped togeth­er under the label Omot­ic.” Along with the Semit­ic, the Amazigh, the Chadic, and oth­ers, trace­able with Egypt­ian to a com­mon ances­tor, these lan­guages pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion essen­tial to the state of ancient Egypt­ian lin­guis­tic knowl­edge today. Giv­en the enor­mous amount of schol­ar­ship required to let us know what to call them, it’s enough to make you want ankhs to come back into fash­ion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Ancient Chi­nese Sound­ed Like — and How We Know It: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

What Did Etr­uscan Sound Like? An Ani­mat­ed Video Pro­nounces the Ancient Lan­guage That We Still Don’t Ful­ly Under­stand

What Did Old Eng­lish Sound Like? Hear Recon­struc­tions of Beowulf, The Bible, and Casu­al Con­ver­sa­tions

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia

Hear What the Lan­guage Spo­ken by Our Ances­tors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sound­ed Like: A Recon­struc­tion of the Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean Lan­guage

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Japanese Art Installation Lets People Play Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” As They Walk on Socially-Distanced Notes on the Floor

in Art, Life, Music | December 2nd, 2020

The glob­al pan­dem­ic has revealed the depths of sys­tem­at­ic cru­el­ty in cer­tain places in the world that have refused to com­mit resources to pro­tect­ing peo­ple from the virus or refused to even acknowl­edge its exis­tence. Oth­er respons­es show a dif­fer­ent way for­ward, one in which every­one con­tributes mean­ing­ful­ly through the prin­ci­pled actions of wear­ing masks and social dis­tanc­ing or the prin­ci­pled non-action of stay­ing home to slow the spread.

Then there’s the crit­i­cal role of art, design, and music in our sur­vival. As we have seen—from spon­ta­neous bal­cony ser­e­nades in Italy to poignant ani­mat­ed video poet­ry—the arts are no less cru­cial to our sur­vival than pub­lic health. Human beings need delight, won­der, humor, mourn­ing, and cel­e­bra­tion, and we need to come togeth­er to expe­ri­ence these things, whether online or in real, if dis­tant, life. Ide­al­ly, pub­lic health and art can work togeth­er.

Japan­ese design­er Eisuke Tachikawa has put his skills to work doing exact­ly that. When cas­es began spik­ing in his coun­try in April, Tachikawa and his design firm Nosign­er made some beau­ti­ful­ly designed, and very fun­ny, posters to encour­age social dis­tanc­ing as part of an ini­tia­tive called Pandaid. Then they cre­at­ed Super Mario Broth­ers coin stick­ers to place six feet (or two meters, or one tuna) apart. In its Eng­lish trans­la­tion, at least, the text on Nosigner’s site is direct about their inten­tions: “As this con­tin­ues we want­ed to val­ue-trans­late the social con­straints of social dis­tanc­ing into some­thing pos­i­tive and enjoy­able.”

Tachikawa and Nosign­er have “devel­oped a brand,” they announced recent­ly, called SOCIAL HARMONY “in order to spread the cul­ture of social dis­tanc­ing in a humor­ous way.” Their lat­est instal­la­tion, how­ev­er, does not incor­po­rate jokes or Nin­ten­do ref­er­ences. Rather it draws on one of the most pop­u­lar and beloved pieces of min­i­mal­ist clas­si­cal music, Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” (pro­claimed by Clas­sic FM as “the most flat-out relax­ing piece of piano music ever writ­ten”). “Peo­ple stand on a large music sheet on the floor and notes are played the moment you step on them. By respect­ing social dis­tances and going one note at a time, the pub­lic is able to play” Satie’s piece.

Even for such a suc­cinct com­po­si­tion, this must require a rig­or­ous amount of coor­di­na­tion. But it is nec­es­sary to play the notes in order: “Since the melody changes with every stop, one can cre­ate one’s own Gymnopédie No. 1, since the played melody changes with every step.” The piece was installed at the entrance hall to the Yoko­hama Minatomi­rai Hall for DESIGNART TOKYO 2020, where it will remain until the end of the year. Sure­ly there will be oth­er forms of “social har­mo­ny” to come from the Japan­ese design­ers. Like the prac­tice of social dis­tanc­ing itself, we can only hope such projects catch on and go glob­al, until the wide­spread vac­ci­na­tion and an end to the pan­dem­ic can bring us clos­er again.

via Spoon & Tam­a­go 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A New Dig­i­tal Archive Pre­serves Black Lives Mat­ter & COVID-19 Street Art

Watch How to Be at Home, a Beau­ti­ful Short Ani­ma­tion on the Real­i­ties of Social Iso­la­tion in 2020

2020: An Iso­la­tion Odyssey–A Short Film Reen­acts the Finale of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a COVID-19 Twist

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Quentin Tarantino’s Copycat Cinema: How the Postmodern Filmmaker Perfected the Art of the Steal

in Film | December 1st, 2020

You can call Quentin Taran­ti­no a thief. Call him uno­rig­i­nal, a copy­cat, what­ev­er, he doesn’t care. But if you real­ly want to get him going, call him a trib­ute artist. This, he insists, is the last thing he has ever been: great direc­tors, Taran­ti­no declares, “don’t do homages.” They out­right steal, from any­one, any­where, with­out regard to intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty or hurt feel­ings.

But great direc­tors don’t pla­gia­rize in the Taran­ti­no school of film­mak­ing. (Pay atten­tion stu­dents, this is impor­tant.) They don’t take ver­ba­tim from a sin­gle source, or even two or three. They steal every­thing. “I steal from every sin­gle movie ever made,” says Taran­ti­no, and if you don’t believe him, you’ll prob­a­bly have to spend a few years watch­ing his films shot by shot to prove him wrong, if that’s pos­si­ble.

But, of course, he’s over­stat­ing things. He’s nev­er gone the way of block­buster CGI epics. On the con­trary, Tarantino’s last film was an homage (sor­ry) to an old­er Hol­ly­wood, one on the cusp of great change but still behold­en to things like actors, cos­tumes, and sets. Maybe a para­phrase of his claim might read: he steals from every movie ever made worth steal­ing from, and if you’re Quentin Taran­ti­no, there are a lot of those most peo­ple haven’t even heard of.

The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy video essay above, “The Copy­cat Cin­e­ma of Quentin Taran­ti­no,” begins with a ref­er­ence not to a clas­sic work of cin­e­ma, but to a clas­sic album made two years before the time of Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood. The cov­er of the Bea­t­les’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band is “a sig­ni­fi­er of the artist’s sta­tus as an icon with­in a social milieu… this image more than any­thing explores the social ambiance in which some­one lives in pop cul­ture before becom­ing pop cul­ture them­selves.”

To sug­gest that the Bea­t­les weren’t already pop cul­ture icons in 1967 seems sil­ly, but the visu­al point stands. On the cov­er of Sgt. Pep­per’s they eclipse even their ear­li­er boy band image and fresh­ly insert them­selves into the cen­ter of 20th cen­tu­ry cul­tur­al his­to­ry up to their present. “Under­stand­ing this idea,” says nar­ra­tor Lewis Michael Bond, “is fun­da­men­tal to under­stand­ing the cin­e­ma of Quentin Taran­ti­no.” How so?

“All artists, con­scious­ly or uncon­scious­ly, take from their influ­ences, “but it’s the degree of self-aware­ness and inter­nal ref­er­enc­ing that would inevitably bring us to the con­cept of post­mod­ernism.” Taran­ti­no is noth­ing if not a post­mod­ern artist—rejecting ideas about truth, cap­i­tal T, authen­tic­i­ty, and the unique­ness of the indi­vid­ual artist. All art is made from oth­er art. There is no orig­i­nal and no orig­i­nal­i­ty, only more or less clever and skill­ful remix­es and restate­ments of what has come before.

Taran­ti­no, of course, knows that even his post­mod­ern approach to cin­e­ma isn’t orig­i­nal. He stole it from Godard, and named his first pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny A Band Apart, after Godard’s 1964 New Wave film Band of Out­siders, which is, Pauline Kael wrote, “like a rever­ie of a gang­ster movie as stu­dents in an espres­so bar might remem­ber it or plan it.” Tarantino’s films, espe­cial­ly his ear­ly films, are genre exer­cis­es made the way an adren­a­line-fueled video store clerk would make them—stuffing in every­thing on the shelves in art­ful pas­tich­es that rev­el in their dense allu­sions and in-jokes.

In this school of film­mak­ing, the ques­tion of whether or not a film­mak­er is “orig­i­nal” has lit­tle mean­ing. Are they good at rip­ping off the past or not? When it comes to exquis­ite, bloody mash ups of exploita­tion flicks and the revered high clas­sics of cin­e­ma, no one is bet­ter than Taran­ti­no.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Taran­ti­no Picks the 12 Best Films of All Time; Watch Two of His Favorites Free Online

An Analy­sis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Nar­rat­ed (Most­ly) by Quentin Taran­ti­no

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Salvador Dalí Gets Surreal with 1950s America: Watch His Appearances on What’s My Line? (1952) and The Mike Wallace Interview (1958)

in Art, Television | December 1st, 2020

When was the last time you saw a Sur­re­al­ist (or even just a sur­re­al­ist) painter appear on nation­al tele­vi­sion? If such a fig­ure did appear on nation­al tele­vi­sion today, for that mat­ter, who would know? Per­haps sur­re­al­ist paint­ing does not, in our time, make the impact it once did, but nor does nation­al tele­vi­sion. So imag­ine what a spec­ta­cle it must have been in 1950s Amer­i­ca, cra­dle of the “mass media” as we once knew them, when Sal­vador Dalí turned up on a major U.S. tele­vi­sion net­work. Such a fab­u­lous­ly incon­gru­ous broad­cast­ing event hap­pened more than once, and in these clips we see that, among the “big three,” CBS was espe­cial­ly recep­tive to his impul­sive, oth­er­world­ly artis­tic pres­ence.

On the quiz show What’s My Line?, one of CBS’ most pop­u­lar offer­ings through­out the 50s, con­tes­tants aimed to guess the occu­pa­tion of a guest. They did so wear­ing blind­folds, with­out which they’d have no trou­ble pin­ning down the job of an instan­ta­neous­ly rec­og­niz­able celebri­ty like Dalí — or would they? To the pan­el’s yes-or-no ques­tions, the only kind per­mit­ted by the rules, Dalí near­ly always responds flat­ly in the affir­ma­tive.

Is he asso­ci­at­ed with the arts? “Yes.” Would he ever have been seen on tele­vi­sion? “Yes.” Would he be con­sid­ered a lead­ing man? “Yes.” At this host John Charles Daly steps in to clar­i­fy that, in the con­text of the ques­tion, Dalí would not, in fact, be con­sid­ered a lead­ing man. One con­tes­tant offers an alter­na­tive: “He’s a mis­lead­ing man!” Few titles have cap­tured the essence of Dalí so neat­ly.

The artist, show­man, and human con­scious-alter­ing sub­stance lat­er appeared on The Mike Wal­lace Inter­view. Host­ed by the for­mi­da­ble CBS news­man well before he became one of the faces of 60 Min­utes, the show fea­tured a range of guests from Aldous Hux­ley and Frank Lloyd Wright to Eleanor Roo­sevelt and Ayn Rand. In this broad­cast, Wal­lace and Dalí dis­cuss “every­thing from sur­re­al­ism to nuclear physics to chasti­ty to what artists in gen­er­al con­tribute to the world,” as Brain Pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va describes it. A curi­ous if occa­sion­al­ly bemused Wal­lace, writes The Wall­break­ers’ Matt Weck­el, “asks Dalí such gems as ‘What is philo­soph­i­cal about dri­ving a car full of cau­li­flow­ers?’ and ‘Why did you lec­ture with your head enclosed in a div­ing hel­met?’ ” But they also seri­ous­ly dis­cuss “the fear of death, and their own mor­tal­i­ty,” top­ics to which Amer­i­can air­waves have hard­ly grown more accom­mo­dat­ing over the past six­ty years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sal­vador Dalí Gets Sur­re­al with Mike Wal­lace (1958)

Sal­vador Dalí Strolls onto The Dick Cavett Show with an Anteater, Then Talks About Dreams & Sur­re­al­ism, the Gold­en Ratio & More (1970)

A Soft Self-Por­trait of Sal­vador Dali, Nar­rat­ed by the Great Orson Welles

Q: Sal­vador Dalí, Are You a Crack­pot? A: No, I’m Just Almost Crazy (1969)

Sal­vador Dalí Explains Why He Was a “Bad Painter” and Con­tributed “Noth­ing” to Art (1986)

Sal­vador Dalí Goes Com­mer­cial: Three Strange Tele­vi­sion Ads

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast