An Introduction to the Sublime, Entrepreneurial Art of Christo & Jeanne-Claude (Courtesy of Alain de Botton’s School of Life)

in Art | June 4th, 2020

Of all the work that made Chris­to and Jeanne-Claude the most famous instal­la­tion artists of the past fifty years, none still exists. If you want­ed to see the Reich­stag wrapped in sil­ver fab­ric, you’d have to have been in Berlin in the sum­mer of 1995. If you want­ed to see Cen­tral Park thread­ed with Shin­to shrine-style gates, you’d have to have been in New York in the win­ter of 2005. If you want­ed to see an enor­mous Mesopotami­an masta­ba made out of 7,506 oil bar­rels, you’d have to have been in Lon­don in the sum­mer of 2018. Though often cel­e­brat­ed for its “ephemer­al” nature, Chris­to and Jeanne-Claude’s art neces­si­tat­ed a for­mi­da­ble amount of polit­i­cal, orga­ni­za­tion­al, logis­ti­cal, and man­u­al work to pull it off — and in that con­trast lies its sub­lim­i­ty.

“To oper­ate real­is­ti­cal­ly on a large scale, they need­ed to deploy many of the skills tra­di­tion­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with busi­ness and which we think of as the domain of the entre­pre­neur,” says the arti­cle on Chris­to and Jeanne-Claude at The Book of Life, a prod­uct of Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life. The two “had to nego­ti­ate with city coun­cils and gov­ern­ments; they had to draw up busi­ness plans, arrange large scale finance, employ the tal­ents and time of hun­dreds even thou­sands of peo­ple, coor­di­nate vast efforts and deal with mil­lions of users or vis­i­tors. And all the while, they held on to the high ambi­tions asso­ci­at­ed with being an artist.” What’s more, since the cou­ple nev­er took grants or pub­lic mon­ey of any kind, they had to turn enough of a prof­it from each project to finance the next, even more majes­tic (and to some, fool­hardy) one.

You can see more of Chris­to and Jeanne-Claude’s projects, and footage of those projects under con­struc­tion, in the School of Life video at the top of the post. It also shows Chris­to cre­at­ing the prepara­to­ry mate­ri­als that made their work pos­si­ble, not only in that they pre­sent­ed the visions of the wrapped-up pieces of infra­struc­ture or val­leys full of umbrel­las to come, but that the sale of the plans and draw­ings financed the process of mak­ing those visions real. All this in the ser­vice of what Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, called “works of art of joy beau­ty,” and through Chris­to depart­ed the realm of exis­tence him­self last Sun­day, the rest of us have anoth­er such work to look for­ward to: L’Arc de Tri­om­phe, Wrapped. Based on an idea that came to Chris­to when he and Jeanne-Claude lived in Paris in the late 1950s and ear­ly 60s (and recent­ly delayed one more year due to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic), it will pro­vide more than rea­son enough to be in Paris in the fall of 2021.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Vision­ary Artist Chris­to (RIP) Changed the Way We See the World

Cli­mate Change Gets Strik­ing­ly Visu­al­ized by a Scot­tish Art Instal­la­tion

Pi in the Sky: The World’s Largest Ephemer­al Art Instal­la­tion over Beau­ti­ful San Fran­cis­co

This Huge Crash­ing Wave in a Seoul Aquar­i­um Is Actu­al­ly a Gigan­tic Opti­cal Illu­sion

Alain de Bot­ton Shows How Art Can Answer Life’s Big Ques­tions in Art as Ther­a­py

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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Watch Martin Scorsese’s Brand New Short Film, Made Entirely in His Office Under Quarantine

in Current Affairs, Film | June 3rd, 2020

Most who saw the last fea­ture by Mar­tin Scors­ese, 2019’s The Irish­man, saw it at home. That had to do with the fact that the bud­get came from Net­flix, which sure­ly aimed to get its not incon­sid­er­able mon­ey’s worth by offer­ing the film on its own stream­ing ser­vice as soon as pos­si­ble. If The Irish­man’s financ­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion was a sign of the times, Scors­ese’s new short is even more so: shot on a smart­phone by the famed direc­tor him­self, it recent­ly pre­miered on Mary Beard’s BBC spe­cial about “lock­down cul­ture.” See­ing as the coro­n­avirus isn’t known to spare famous auteurs — and indeed does seem dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly to harm indi­vid­u­als over age 70 — Scors­ese has spent a great deal of time at home over the past few months. But like all true cre­ators, he has­n’t stopped doing what he does.

“Been quite a while, now, that I’ve been quar­an­tined,” says Scors­ese, turn­ing his cam­era away from a screen­ing of Alfred Hitch­cock­’s The Wrong Man on his office wall. “We had been work­ing so hard on so many dif­fer­ent projects, and things were spin­ning and spin­ning and spin­ning, and sud­den­ly there was a crash. And a stop.” At first, “there was a day or so of a kind of relief. I did­n’t have to go any­where or do any­thing. I mean, I had to do every­thing, but I did­n’t have to do it then.” Then, “the anx­i­ety set in.” But as time passed, and as he tru­ly felt that time pass­ing, “a sense of relief set­tled in. And a real sense of free­dom, because you can’t do any­thing else. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be in this room. I don’t know when we’re going to be able to actu­al­ly start pro­duc­tion in this film.”

By “this film” Scors­ese means Killers of the Flower Moon, a $200 mil­lion true-crime West­ern set in 1920s Okla­homa that will bring Leonar­do DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, the direc­tor’s lead­ing men of choice, togeth­er in a Scors­ese fea­ture for the first time. As a joint pro­duc­tion between Apple and Para­mount, notes the Observ­er’s Bran­don Katz, the pic­ture “will receive all the nec­es­sary fund­ing it needs while still receiv­ing a world­wide the­atri­cal roll­out,” but the ques­tion of when its shoot can start — and indeed, when movie­go­ers will return to the­aters — remains open. “I do know that, giv­en the grace of time and life, we will be in pro­duc­tion some­how,” says Scors­ese in his lock­down short, after a few shots of the mem­o­ra­bil­ia on his shelves.

Toward the end of this per­son­al dis­patch, Scors­ese remem­bers his final con­ver­sa­tion with the Iran­ian film­mak­er Abbas Kiarosta­mi. “We were at a din­ner in Lyon a few years ago and he looked at me and said, ‘Don’t do any­thing you don’t want to do.’ He knew. He under­stood. One can’t depend on time. One does­n’t know. Ulti­mate­ly that time has to be worth it, even if it’s just exist­ing. Even if it’s just being alive, breath­ing — if you can, under these cir­cum­stances.” But as we’ve all learned, cir­cum­stances can change, and sud­den­ly; it falls to us only to make best use of the sit­u­a­tion in which we find our­selves. To under­score that last truth, Scors­ese char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cites a clas­sic Amer­i­can movie. Though our lives may be restrict­ed, as we see in Robert Siod­mak’s Hem­ing­way adap­ta­tion The Killers, noth­ing’s stop­ping us from keep­ing our eyes on the stars.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Film­mak­ing of Mar­tin Scors­ese Demys­ti­fied in 6 Video Essays

How Mar­tin Scors­ese Directs a Movie: The Tech­niques Behind Taxi Dri­ver, Rag­ing Bull, and More

What Makes Taxi Dri­ver So Pow­er­ful? An In-Depth Study of Mar­tin Scorsese’s Exis­ten­tial Film on the Human Con­di­tion

Mar­tin Scors­ese Explains the Dif­fer­ence Between Cin­e­ma and Movies

Mar­tin Scorsese’s Very First Films: Three Imag­i­na­tive Short Works

11-Year-Old Mar­tin Scors­ese Draws Sto­ry­boards for His Imag­ined Roman Epic Film, The Eter­nal City

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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Spike Lee Debuts the Short Film “3 Brothers”: A Remake of Do the Right Thing for Our Dark Times

in Current Affairs, Film | June 3rd, 2020

When beloved actor Bill Nunn died in Sep­tem­ber of 2016, two months before the elec­tion, his pass­ing felt prophet­ic of more bad things to come. Best known as the boom­box-tot­ing, ulti­mate Pub­lic Ene­my fan Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing, Nunn’s char­ac­ter is mur­dered by a gang of cops, who put him in a choke­hold and suf­fo­cate him. At the time, Raheem’s death was a fic­tion­al restate­ment of what had come before, as Lee explains above in the 30th anniver­sary com­men­tary on the film.

“I’m renam­ing this ‘Anato­my of a Mur­der,’” he says, explain­ing how he based the scene of Raheem’s death on the 1983 killing of graf­fi­ti artist Michael Stew­art, who was stran­gled by 11 NYC tran­sit offi­cers. “The things that are hap­pen­ing in this film,” he says, “are still rel­e­vant today.” Lee then ref­er­ences the death of Eric Gar­ner, killed in exact­ly the same way as Raheem. Now we have seen the mur­der of George Floyd, asphyx­i­at­ed with a knee to the neck. These on-cam­era killings are trau­mat­ic, but Lee has not shied away from the pow­er of doc­u­men­tary images.

He reclaimed his place as a big-bud­get inter­preter of Amer­i­can racism with Black­kKlans­man, a fic­tion­al­ized film that ends with extreme­ly hard-to-watch (espe­cial­ly for those who were there) real footage of the mur­der of anti-racist activist Heather Hey­er in Char­lottesville. Lee faced a good deal of crit­i­cism over the use of this video, but he has again tak­en real-life footage of racial­ly-moti­vat­ed killings, this time by the police, and cut them togeth­er with fic­tion, edit­ing togeth­er the death of Raheem with the deaths of Gar­ner and Floyd.

Call­ing the short “3 Broth­ers,” he opens with the ques­tion, “Will His­to­ry Stop Repeat­ing Itself?” Lee Debuted the film on the CNN spe­cial “I Can’t Breathe: Black Men Liv­ing & Dying in Amer­i­ca.” The cumu­la­tive effects of his­to­ry are crit­i­cal to under­stand­ing the moment we are in, he says. The rage and protest on streets around the world are not a reac­tion to a sin­gle event—they are a con­fronta­tion with hun­dreds of years of vio­lent con­trol over black bod­ies, a state of affairs always includ­ing mur­der with impuni­ty. “The attack on black bod­ies has been here from the get-go,” Lee says.

Lee’s short is hard to watch, and I don’t blame any­one who nev­er wants to see this footage again (I don’t). The mur­ders of indi­vid­ual, unarmed black men by groups of offi­cers take on an eerie monot­o­ny in their same­ness over time. “The killings caught on cam­era,” writes his­to­ri­an Robert Greene II, “offer a dis­turb­ing reminder of the numer­ous pho­tographs of lynch­ings dis­persed through­out the nation in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Some were cat­a­logued by the NAACP and dis­played as exam­ples of Amer­i­can bru­tal­i­ty and bar­barism. Oth­ers, how­ev­er, were fea­tured on post­cards and sent to white Amer­i­cans through­out the coun­try, small trin­kets of white ter­ror.”

This chill­ing his­to­ry gives rise to an under­stand­able ambiva­lence about shar­ing videos of police killings. Are these evi­dence of bar­barous injus­tice or racist snuff films run­ning on an end­less loop? As in the lynch­ing pho­tographs, it depends on the audi­ence and the con­text in which the videos are shown. But when Spike Lee made Do the Right Thing—pre-Rod­ney King and cell phone cameras—hardly any­one out­side of heav­i­ly policed black neigh­bor­hoods wit­nessed first­hand the kind of bru­tal­i­ty that is now so depress­ing­ly famil­iar in our news­feeds.

The death of Radio Raheem was shock­ing to audi­ences, as it was dev­as­tat­ing to the char­ac­ters and remains, for those who grew up with the film, a mov­ing cin­e­mat­ic touch­stone of the time. It is tru­ly heart­break­ing and enrag­ing that such scenes have become com­mon cur­ren­cy on social media, instead of his­toric exam­ples of the bru­tal­i­ty of the past—a sto­ry, as one per­son wrote of the 1968 police killing of poet Hen­ry Dumas, of “gen­er­a­tions of lost poten­tial.”

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Spike Lee Shares His NYU Teach­ing List of 87 Essen­tial Films Every Aspir­ing Direc­tor Should See

How Spike Lee Got His First Big Break: From She’s Got­ta Have It to That Icon­ic Air Jor­dan Ad

Spike Lee Directs, “Wake Up,” a Five-Minute Cam­paign Film for Bernie Sanders

Gil Scott-Heron Spells Out Why “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised”

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

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Why Should We Read Melville’s Moby-Dick? A TED-Ed Animation Makes the Case

in Literature | June 3rd, 2020

Her­man Melville’s Moby-Dick is a major 19th epic and a “Great Amer­i­can Nov­el” that rou­tine­ly appears on best-of-all-time lists next to Homer and Dante. This grand lit­er­ary judg­ment descends from ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry crit­ics who res­cued the nov­el from obscu­ri­ty after decades of scorn and neglect. When the book first appeared in 1851, no one knew what to make of Melville’s cos­mic whal­ing revenge tale. Reviews were high­ly mixed, sales dis­mal, the book flopped.

This Moby-Dick revival hap­pened to coin­cide with a peri­od of mod­ernist exper­i­men­ta­tion with nar­ra­tive struc­ture in the work of writ­ers like James Joyce and Vir­ginia Woolf. Sud­den­ly, Moby-Dick didn’t seem so strange any­more. More like a bril­liant, pro­to-mod­ernist tragedy. But if you expect straight­for­ward sea­far­ing adven­ture, as the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above by Sascha Mor­rell points out, it’s a hard slog. The exhaus­tive lessons on whales and whal­ing, chap­ter-length solil­o­quies, lan­guage so dense, col­or­ful, and allu­sive.… Leonard Woolf became so frus­trat­ed in a 1929 review, he called the book’s prose “the most exe­crable Eng­lish.”

Melville wrote bad sen­tences, Woolf pro­nounced. “His sec­ond great­est vice is rant or rhetoric…. I can­not see the slight­est point in this kind of bom­bast, and, when it raves on for page after page, I almost pitch the book into the waste-paper bas­ket and swear that I will not read anoth­er line, how­ev­er many peo­ple vouch for the author’s genius.” This con­trar­i­an­ism sounds an awful like Vir­ginia Woolf’s take on Joyce’s Ulysses. Like that book, Moby-Dick inspires wide­spread guilt among those who have been told they should read it, but who can’t bring them­selves to fin­ish or even begin.

Who was right: Melville’s ear­ly crit­ics and read­ers (and Leonard Woolf)? Or the mil­lions who have since seen in the nov­el some­thing pro­found and prophet­ic, though no one can say exact­ly what that is? Why should we read Moby-Dick? For many, many rea­sons, but most of all the lan­guage. The word “rich” doesn’t begin to describe the lay­er­ing of images: “A moun­tain sep­a­rat­ing two lakes,” Mor­rell says in a strik­ing exam­ple, “a room papered floor to ceil­ing with bridal satins, the lid of an immense snuff box. These seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed images take us on a tour of a sperm whale’s head.”

The sym­bols them­selves invite us into oth­er cryp­tic alle­gories. Chap­ter 99, “The Dou­bloon,” com­petes with Achilles’ shield in The Ili­ad for metaphor­ic den­si­ty, yet like a mod­ernist nov­el, it frag­ments into mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives, each one exam­in­ing ideas of cur­ren­cy, con­quest, myth, rit­u­al, etc., as Ahab bul­lies and pro­vokes the crew into inter­pret­ing a coin nailed to the Pequod’s mast.

If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the sun stands in some one of these signs. I’ve stud­ied signs, and know their marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch in Copen­hagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe sign; for there it is, right oppo­site the gold. And what’s the horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign- the roar­ing and devour­ing lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee.

What Woolf saw as exces­sive bom­bast seems to me more like form mir­ror­ing func­tion. Melville writes sen­tences that must echo over the squalls and talk through mad­den­ing lulls that bring on strange hal­lu­ci­na­tions. Like Joyce’s, his lan­guage mir­rors the dis­cur­sive tics of Ahab and Ish­mael’s modes of thought—nautical, the­o­log­i­cal, polit­i­cal, soci­o­log­i­cal, myth­ic, his­toric, nat­u­ral­ist, sym­bol­ist: explo­rations into a bloody, cru­el, eco­log­i­cal­ly dev­as­tat­ing enter­prise that dri­ves its dement­ed captain—violently obsessed with a great white beast that has crip­pled and enraged him—to wreck the ship and kill every­one aboard except our nar­ra­tor.

Learn about Melville and Moby-Dick in the addi­tion­al resources at the TED-Ed les­son page.

Relat­ed Con­tent:   

Hear Moby Dick Read in Its Entire­ty by Til­da Swin­ton, Stephen Fry, John Waters & Oth­ers

How to Mem­o­rize an Entire Chap­ter from “Moby Dick”: The Art and Sci­ence of Remem­ber­ing Every­thing

An Illus­tra­tion of Every Page of Her­man Melville’s Moby Dick

A View From the Room Where Melville Wrote Moby Dick (Plus a Free Celebri­ty Read­ing of the Nov­el)

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

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What Is a “Casual Game?” Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #46 Talks to Nick Fortugno, Creator of “Diner Dash”

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Video Games | June 3rd, 2020

Famed game design­er Nick joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to con­sid­er fun­da­men­tal ques­tions about the activ­i­ty of gam­ing (Nick calls games “arbi­trary lim­its on mean­ing­less goals”) and what con­sti­tutes a casu­al game: Is it one that’s easy (maybe not easy to win, but at least you don’t die), one meant to be played in short bursts, or maybe one with a cer­tain kind of art style, or just about any game that runs on a phone? Nick­’s most famous cre­ation is the casu­al Din­er Dash, which can be very stress­ful. Vast­ly dif­fer­ent games from very hard but very short action games and very involved but sooth­ing strat­e­gy games get lumped under this one label.

Our con­ver­sa­tion touch­es on every­thing from cross­words to Super Meat Boy, plus the rela­tion between psy­chol­o­gy and game design, whether casu­al games real­ly play less than hard­core gamers, the stig­ma of an activ­i­ty that was for mar­ket­ing rea­sons at one point brand­ed as being just for ado­les­cent boys, and even heuris­tics for beat­ing slot machines.

Some sources we looked at include:

Just so you don’t have to write them down, our rec­om­men­da­tions at the end were:

You can fol­low Nick @nickfortugno.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. 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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When Al Capone Opened a Soup Kitchen During the Great Depression: Another Side of the Legendary Mobster’s Operation

in History | June 2nd, 2020

In response to the words “Amer­i­can gang­ster,” one name comes to mind before all oth­ers: Al Capone. (Apolo­gies to Rid­ley Scott.) Though few Amer­i­cans could now describe the full scope of his empire’s crim­i­nal activ­i­ties, many know that he grew that empire boot­leg­ging dur­ing Pro­hi­bi­tion and that he was even­tu­al­ly brought down on the rel­a­tive­ly mild charge of tax eva­sion. A media spec­ta­cle by the stan­dards of the day, the tri­al that con­vict­ed Capone in 1931 was in some sense the nat­ur­al last act of his pub­lic­i­ty-com­mand­ing career. Most Capo­ne­ol­o­gists place the begin­ning of the mob boss’ fall at the 1929 “Saint Valen­tine’s Day Mas­sacre” of sev­en of Capone’s rivals. Lat­er that year came the stock mar­ket crash that set off the Great Depres­sion, which offered Chicago’s “Pub­lic Ene­my No. 1” one last chance to win back that pub­lic’s favor.

Hav­ing long trad­ed on a Robin Hood-esque image, Capone opened a soup kitchen in his home base of Chica­go to serve the unfor­tu­nates sud­den­ly dis­pos­sessed by the dev­as­tat­ed Amer­i­can econ­o­my. “Capone’s soup kitchen served break­fast, lunch and din­ner to an aver­age of 2,200 Chicagoans every day,” writes History.com’s Christo­pher Klein. “Inside the soup kitchen, smil­ing women in white aprons served up cof­fee and sweet rolls for break­fast, soup and bread for lunch and soup, cof­fee and bread for din­ner. No sec­ond help­ings were denied. No ques­tions were asked, and no one was asked to prove their need.”

Capone’s will­ing­ness to sat­is­fy human needs and desires out­side the law kept him rich, and thus more than able to run such an oper­a­tion, even as the Depres­sion set in; still, he “may not have paid a dime for the soup kitchen, rely­ing instead on his crim­i­nal ten­den­cies to stock­pile his char­i­ta­ble endeav­or by extort­ing and brib­ing busi­ness­es to donate goods.”

Capone’s soup kitchen may have helped keep Chica­go fed, but it could only do so much to clean up his dete­ri­o­rat­ing pub­lic image, asso­ci­at­ed as it had become with smug­gling, extor­tion, and vio­lence. “Capone’s soup kitchen closed abrupt­ly in April 1932,” writes Men­tal Floss’ Shoshi Parks. “The pro­pri­etors claimed that the kitchen was no longer need­ed because the econ­o­my was pick­ing up, even though the num­ber of unem­ployed across the coun­try had increased by 4 mil­lion between 1931 and 1932.” Two months lat­er, “Capone was indict­ed on 22 counts of income tax eva­sion; the charges that even­tu­al­ly land­ed him in San Francisco’s Alca­traz Fed­er­al Pen­i­ten­tiary. Though Capone vowed to reopen his soup kitchen dur­ing his tri­al, its doors stayed shut.” You can learn more about Capone’s soup kitchen at My Al Capone Muse­um and The Vin­tage News, and even vis­it its loca­tion at 935 South State Street today — though you won’t find any oper­a­tion more ambi­tious than a park­ing lot.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map of Chicago’s Gang­land: A Cheeky, Car­to­graph­ic Look at Al Capone’s World (1931)

Yale Presents an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

1,600 Rare Col­or Pho­tographs Depict Life in the U.S Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion & World War II

Con­fi­dence: The Car­toon That Helped Amer­i­ca Get Through the Great Depres­sion (1933)

What Pris­on­ers Ate at Alca­traz in 1946: A Vin­tage Prison Menu

New Archive Presents The Chicagoan, Chicago’s Jazz-Age Answer to The New York­er (1926 to 1935)

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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Gil Scott-Heron Spells Out Why “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”

in Current Affairs, Music, Politics | June 2nd, 2020

Con­sid­er the influ­ence of tele­vi­sion, even in the dig­i­tal age. Con­sid­er the pow­er that net­works like Fox and CNN con­tin­ue to wield over that neb­u­lous thing called pub­lic opin­ion; the con­tin­ued dom­i­nance of NBC and CBS. These giants don’t real­ly inform so much as sell pack­aged ide­o­log­i­cal con­tent paid for and approved by cor­po­rate spon­sors. There’s real­ly no need to update poet and musi­cian Gil Scott-Heron’s rad­i­cal, 1971 clas­sic “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised,” unless we want­ed to change the names. His voice still speaks direct­ly to the moment we live in.

We exist on a con­tin­u­um of con­di­tions that have wors­ened since the late 1960s—despite promis­es and appear­ances to the contrary—until they have become intol­er­a­ble. Scott-Heron wrote and sang about those con­di­tions since his fiery 1970 debut.

“Dubbed the ‘God­fa­ther of Rap,’” notes Brook­lyn Rail in a 2007 inter­view, “Scott-Heron has become a ubiq­ui­tous and prac­ti­cal­ly de rigueur influ­ence for every­one from hip hop­pers and indie rock­ers to aging literati and dyed-in-the-wool aca­d­e­mics.”

One might think Scott-Heron’s clas­sic spo­ken-word tes­ta­ment “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised” speaks for itself by now, but it still cre­ates con­fu­sion in part because peo­ple still mis­con­strue the nature of the medi­um. Why can’t you sit at home and watch jour­nal­ists cov­er protests and revolts on TV? If you think you’re see­ing “the Rev­o­lu­tion” instead of curat­ed, maybe spu­ri­ous, con­tent designed to tell a sto­ry and gin up views, you’re fool­ing your­self.

But Scott-Heron also had some­thing else in mind—you can’t see the rev­o­lu­tion on TV because you can’t see it at all. As he says above in a 1990s inter­view:

The first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move. The thing that’s going to change peo­ple is some­thing that nobody will ever be able to cap­ture on film. It’s just some­thing that you see and you’ll think, “Oh I’m on the wrong page,” or “I’m on I’m on the right page but the wrong note. And I’ve got to get in sync with every­one else to find out what’s hap­pen­ing in this coun­try.”

If we real­ize we’re out of sync with what’s real­ly hap­pen­ing, we can­not find out more on tele­vi­sion. The infor­ma­tion is where the bat­tles are being fought, at street lev­el, and in the mech­a­nisms of the legal process. “I think that the Black Amer­i­cans are the only real die-hard Amer­i­cans here,” Scott-Heron goes on, “because we’re the only ones who’ve car­ried the process through the process…. We’re the ones who marched… we’re the ones who tried to go through the courts. Being born Amer­i­can didn’t seem to mat­ter.” It still doesn’t, as we see in the killings of George Floyd and Bre­on­na Tay­lor and so many before them, and in the griev­ous injuries and deaths from uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, mil­i­tary-grade police esca­la­tions nation­wide since.

Scott-Heron asked us to ques­tion the nar­ra­tives. “How do they know?” he sang in “There’s a War Going On” at Wood­stock 94, above. How do the self-appoint­ed guardians of infor­ma­tion know what’s real­ly going on? Tele­vi­sion spreads igno­rance and mis­in­for­ma­tion, as does radio and, of course, social media. This much we should know. But we’ve mis­in­ter­pret­ed “The Rev­o­lu­tion Will Not Be Tele­vised” if we think it’s real­ly about mass media, Scott-Heron always main­tained. Before we can engage mean­ing­ful­ly with cur­rent events, a rev­o­lu­tion­ary change must hap­pen from the inside out. No one’s broad­cast­ing the truths we first, most need to hear.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gil Scott-Heron, God­fa­ther of Rap, Rest in Peace

Nina Simone’s Live Per­for­mances of Her Poignant Civ­il Rights Protest Songs

How Nina Simone Became Hip Hop’s “Secret Weapon”: From Lau­ryn Hill to Jay Z and Kanye West

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

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When Afrobeat Legend Fela Kuti Collaborated with Cream Drummer Ginger Baker

in Music | June 2nd, 2020

At the end of the 60s, super­star drum­mer and angri­est man in rock Gin­ger Bak­er was on the verge of col­lapse. Strung out on hero­in, deeply griev­ing Jimi Hendrix’s death, and alien­at­ed from his for­mer Cream and Blind Faith band­mates, he need­ed a new direc­tion. He found it in Nige­ria, where he decamped after dri­ving a Range Rover from Alge­ria across the Sahara Desert. (A mad­cap adven­ture cap­tured in the 1971 doc­u­men­tary Gin­ger Bak­er in Africa). Once in Lagos, Bak­er start­ed jam­ming with Afrobeat leg­end Fela Kuti.

The meet­ing of these two musi­cal forces of nature pro­duced a suite of record­ings. “Baker’s drum­ming appeared on sev­er­al albums along­side the Niger­ian king of afrobeat,” writes Okay Africa, “includ­ing Why Black Man Dey Suf­fer (1971), Live! (1972) and Stratavar­i­ous (1972).”

Kuti’s long­time drum­mer and arranger—and inven­tor of the “afrobeat”—Tony Allen was high­ly impressed with Bak­er’s range, and Nige­ri­ans, as Jay Bul­ger writes at Rolling Stone, loved him.

Arriv­ing in Lagos, Nige­ria, Bak­er set up west Africa’s first 16-track record­ing stu­dio and formed a life­long friend­ship with Afrobeat star Fela Kuti. Per­form­ing with the musi­cal icon for crowds of 150,000, Bak­er became famous through­out Nige­ria as the “Oyin­bo” (White) Drum­mer. “If Gin­ger wants to play jazz, he plays jazz,” says the Niger­ian drum­mer Tony Allen. “If he wants to play rock, he starts Cream. If he wants to play Afrobeat, he moves to Nige­ria. What­ev­er he plays, he brings his own pulse and sound. He under­stands the African beat more than any oth­er West­ern­er.”

High praise, but Bak­er didn’t seek the spot­light, his enor­mous ego off­stage notwith­stand­ing. He trained and he learned. Always a col­lab­o­ra­tive play­er, by his own descrip­tion, Bak­er adapt­ed him­self to the needs of the music. In Kuti’s band, he found a well-drilled ensem­ble and in Fela him­self, a kin­dred spir­it with a per­son­al­i­ty as grandiose and cap­ti­vat­ing as his own, though Baker’s par­tic­u­lar charms were maybe best appre­ci­at­ed at a dis­tance. Hear the loose, sprawl­ing Live! above, with anno­ta­tions telling the sto­ry of the two leg­ends in brief.

Bak­er and Kuti first met in the ear­ly 60s in Lon­don when Fela stud­ied at Trin­i­ty Col­lege of Music. Once they final­ly con­nect­ed musi­cal­ly, the sound was explo­sive, thanks to Baker’s record­ing stu­dio and Fela’s New Afri­ka Shrine, the per­for­mance space where the live mag­ic hap­pened night after night. Then there are the war stories—not only sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but also the actu­al Niger­ian Army try­ing to shut down Fela’s com­pound, which he called the Kalaku­ta Repub­lic, and which housed his 27 back­up singers and his stu­dio. The band­leader was beat­en and jailed over and over, and the com­mune was final­ly burned to the ground in 1977.

The video above from YouTu­ber Band­splain­ing gives an enter­tain­ing syn­op­sis of the Baker/Fela sto­ry, though beware, as sev­er­al com­menters have point­ed out, it con­tains sev­er­al inac­cu­ra­cies, includ­ing at the out­set the sug­ges­tion that Fela has only recent­ly received wide­spread recog­ni­tion. This, of course, is total­ly false—Latin Amer­i­can musi­cians have cel­e­brat­ed his fusion of African polyrhythms, big band funk, and psy­che­del­ic rock for decades; in Nige­ria and else­where in Africa, Fela was as big a musi­cal god as Clap­ton in Eng­land, as well as a pow­er­ful spir­i­tu­al and polit­i­cal sym­bol of Pan-African social­ism; and in the US and UK, New Wave bands like Talk­ing Heads made entire albums build­ing on Fela’s inspi­ra­tion.

One might think of Baker’s col­lab­o­ra­tion with Fela Kuti and the Afri­ka ‘70 as an ear­ly inter­na­tion­al super­group, of the kind that would become com­mon­place in lat­er decades. But Bak­er didn’t use Fela’s music as a back­drop for his own brand. He was thrilled just to be there in the band.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Why Gin­ger Bak­er (RIP) Was One of the Great­est Drum­mers in Rock & World Music

An Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Music of Fela Kuti: Rad­i­cal Niger­ian Band­leader, Polit­i­cal Hero, and Cre­ator of Afrobeat

Who Are the Best Drum Soloists in Rock? See Leg­endary Per­for­mances by Neil Peart (RIP), John Bon­ham, Kei­th Moon, Ter­ry Bozzio & More

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

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