The “Academic Tarot”: 22 Major Arcana Cards Representing Life in the Academic Humanities Under COVID-19

in Current Affairs, Education, Life | February 10th, 2021

“Spec­u­la­tions about the cre­ators of Tarot cards include the Sufis, the Cathars, the Egyp­tians, Kab­bal­ists, and more,” writes “expert car­tomancer” Joshua Hehe. All of these sup­po­si­tions are wrong, it seems. “The actu­al his­tor­i­cal evi­dence points to north­ern Italy some­time in the ear­ly part of the 1400s,” when the so-called “major arcana” came into being. “Con­trary to what many have claimed, there is absolute­ly no proof of the Tarot hav­ing orig­i­nat­ed in any oth­er time or place.”

A bold claim, yet there are prece­dents much old­er than tarot: “A few decades before the Tarot was born, ordi­nary play­ing cards came to Europe by way of Arabs, arriv­ing in many dif­fer­ent cities between 1375 and 1378. These cards were an adap­ta­tion of the Islam­ic Mam­luk cards,” with suits of cups, swords, coins, and polo sticks, “the lat­ter of which were seen by Euro­peans as staves.”

Whether the play­ing cards invent­ed by the Mam­luks were used for div­ina­tion may be a mat­ter of con­tro­ver­sy. The his­to­ry and art of the Mam­luk sul­tanate itself is a sub­ject wor­thy of study for the tarot his­to­ri­an. Orig­i­nal­ly a slave army (“mam­luk” means “slave” in Ara­bic) under the Ayyu­bid sul­tans in Egypt and Syr­ia, the Mam­luks over­threw their rulers and cre­at­ed “the great­est Islam­ic empire of the lat­er Mid­dle Ages.”

What does this have to do with tarot read­ing? These are aca­d­e­m­ic con­cerns, per­haps, of lit­tle inter­est to the aver­age tarot enthu­si­ast. But then, the aver­age tarot enthu­si­ast is not the audi­ence for the “Aca­d­e­m­ic Tarot,” a project of the Vision­ary Futures Col­lec­tive, or VFC, a group of 22 schol­ars “fight­ing for what high­er edu­ca­tion needs most,” Stephanie Malak writes at Hyper­al­ler­gic, “a bring­ing togeth­er of thinkers who ‘believe in the trans­for­ma­tion­al pow­er and vital impor­tance of the human­i­ties.’”

To that end, the Aca­d­e­m­ic Tarot fea­tures exact­ly the kinds of char­ac­ters who love to chase down abstruse his­tor­i­cal questions—characters like the low­ly, con­fused Grad Stu­dent, stand­ing in here for The Fool. It also fea­tures those who can make aca­d­e­m­ic life, with its end­less rounds of meet­ings and com­mit­tees, so dif­fi­cult: fig­ures like The Pres­i­dent (see here), doing duty here as the Magi­cian, and pic­tured shred­ding “cam­pus-wide COVID results.”

The VFC, found­ed in the time of COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and “in the midst of the long-over­due nation­al reck­on­ing led by the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment,” aims to “trace the con­tours of things that define our shared human con­di­tion,” says Col­lec­tive mem­ber Dr. Bri­an DeGrazia. In the case of the Aca­d­e­m­ic Tarot, the con­di­tions rep­re­sent­ed are shared by a spe­cif­ic sub­set of humans, many of whom respond­ed to “feel­ings sur­veys” put out by the VFC in a biweek­ly newslet­ter.

The sur­veys have been used to make art that reflects the expe­ri­ences of the grad stu­dents, pro­fes­sors, and pro­fes­sion­al staff work­ing the aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties at this time:

VFC artist-in-res­i­dence Claire Chenette, a Gram­my-nom­i­nat­ed Knoxville Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra musi­cian fur­loughed due to COVID-19, brought the tarot cards to life. What began as a three-card project to com­ple­ment the VFC newslet­ter grew in spir­it and in num­ber. 

“In tarot, the cards read us,” the VFC writes, “telling a sto­ry about our­selves that can pro­vide clar­i­ty, guid­ance and hope.” What sto­ry do the 22 Major Arcana cards in the Aca­d­e­m­ic Tarot tell? That depends on who’s ask­ing, as always, but one gets the sense that unless the quer­ent is famil­iar with life in a high­er-ed human­i­ties depart­ment, these cards may not reveal much. For those who have seen them­selves in the cards, how­ev­er, “the images made them laugh out loud,” says Chenette, or “they hit hard. Or… they even made them cry, but… it need­ed to hap­pen.”

Strug­gling through yet anoth­er pan­dem­ic semes­ter of attempt­ing to teach, research, write, and gen­er­al­ly stay afloat? The Aca­d­e­m­ic Tarot cards are cur­rent­ly sold out, but you can pre-order now for the sec­ond run.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Divine Decks: A Visu­al His­to­ry of Tarot: The First Com­pre­hen­sive Sur­vey of Tarot Gets Pub­lished by Taschen

Behold the Sola-Bus­ca Tarot Deck, the Ear­li­est Com­plete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

Sal­vador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Sur­re­al­ism in a Clas­sic Tarot Card Deck

Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Pro­vide Door­ways to the Uncon­scious, and Maybe a Way to Pre­dict the Future

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

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The Animations That Changed Cinema: The Groundbreaking Legacies of Prince Achmed, Akira, The Iron Giant & More

in Animation, Film | February 10th, 2021

Ani­ma­tion is child­ish. So believe those who nev­er watch ani­mat­ed films — but also, on anoth­er, deep­er lev­el, those who hold up ani­mat­ed films as the most com­plete form of cin­e­ma. What­ev­er our gen­er­a­tion, most of us alive today grew up watch­ing car­toons meant in every sense for chil­dren, and often artis­ti­cal­ly flim­sy ones at that. But even on such a low-nutri­tion view­ing reg­i­men, we could now and again glimpse the vast pos­si­bil­i­ties of the form. Or per­haps it was just our imag­i­na­tion — but then, as Stephen King once point­ed out, noth­ing is “just” our imag­i­na­tion in child­hood, a time when we occu­py “a secret world that exists by its own rules and lives in its own cul­ture.”

In order to nav­i­gate this real­i­ty apart, where noth­ing is entire­ly for real and noth­ing entire­ly pre­tend, chil­dren “think around cor­ners instead of in straight lines.” The best ani­ma­tors retain this abil­i­ty into adult­hood, har­ness­ing it to cre­ate a pur­er kind of cin­e­ma that reflects and engages the imag­i­na­tion in a way even the freest live-action films nev­er can. The work of such ani­ma­tors con­sti­tutes the sub­ject mat­ter of “The Ani­ma­tion that Changed Cin­e­ma,” a new essay from The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy. In just over half an hour, the series’ cre­ators Lewis Bond and Luiza Liz Bond explore ani­ma­tion pro­duced all over the world over near­ly the past cen­tu­ry in search of the films that have widened the bound­aries of the medi­um.

Though most video essays from The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy and its pre­de­ces­sor Chan­nel Criswell have focused on con­ven­tion­al film, Bond has already demon­strat­ed his pro­found under­stand­ing of ani­ma­tion in video essays on Stu­dio Ghi­b­li co-founder Hayao Miyaza­ki and the acclaimed cult ani­me series Cow­boy Bebop. “The Ani­ma­tion that Changed Cin­e­ma” spends a great deal of time on oth­er works from Japan, the one coun­try that has done more than any oth­er to ele­vate the ani­mat­ed film, includ­ing that of Miyaza­k­i’s Ghi­b­li part­ner Isao Taka­ha­ta, Per­fect Blue auteur Satoshi Kon, and Kat­suhi­ro Oto­mo, whose Aki­ra per­ma­nent­ly changed much of the world’s under­stand­ing of “car­toons” as cin­e­mat­ic art. But as with The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy’s pre­vi­ous “The Cin­e­matog­ra­phy that Changed Cin­e­ma,” the cul­tur­al-geo­graph­i­cal man­date ranges wide­ly.

Among these vision­ary ani­ma­tors are sev­er­al pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture: the Ger­man Lotte Reiniger, cre­ator of the all-sil­hou­ette The Adven­tures of Prince Achmed; Euro­peans from far­ther east (and pos­sessed of wilder sen­si­bil­i­ties) like Jan Švankma­jer; Amer­i­cans like Don Hertzfeldt, the Broth­ers Quay, and Wes Ander­son (whose fil­mog­ra­phy includes the stop-motion The Fan­tas­tic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs). That last group includes even Hol­ly­wood direc­tor Brad Bird, now best known for Pixar movies like The Incred­i­bles and Rata­touille, but here cel­e­brat­ed for The Iron Giant, a pic­ture that sank upon its release, but in the two decades since has come to be appre­ci­at­ed as just the kind of work of art that, as Bond puts it, “makes us for­get that we’re watch­ing mov­ing draw­ings” — what­ev­er age we hap­pen to be.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Ani­mat­ed Films: From Clas­sic to Mod­ern

How the Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Work Their Ani­mat­ed Mag­ic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

What Made Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Ani­ma­tor Isao Taka­ha­ta (RIP) a Mas­ter: Two Video Essays

The Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Cow­boy Bebop, the Cult Japan­ese Ani­me Series, Explored in a Thought­ful Video Essay

How Mas­ter Japan­ese Ani­ma­tor Satoshi Kon Pushed the Bound­aries of Mak­ing Ani­me: A Video Essay

The Cin­e­matog­ra­phy That Changed Cin­e­ma: Explor­ing Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, Stan­ley Kubrick, Peter Green­away & Oth­er Auteurs

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 or on Face­book.

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How Jazz Became the “Mother of Hip Hop”

in Music | February 9th, 2021

Jazz and hip hop have been in a live­ly con­ver­sa­tion in recent years, break­ing new ground for both forms, as the work of artists like Kendrick Lamar and his col­lab­o­ra­tors amply shows. Lamar cre­at­ed his major­ly-acclaimed albums To Pimp a But­ter­fly and Damn with the indis­pens­able play­ing and arrang­ing of jazz-fusion sax­o­phon­ist Kamasi Wash­ing­ton and his fre­quent side­man, bassist Stephen “Thun­der­cat” Bruner, who have con­tributed to the work of Fly­ing Lotus. That’s the artist name of Stephen Elli­son, nephew of Alice and John Coltrane, who has also been instru­men­tal, no pun intend­ed, in reshap­ing the sound of con­tem­po­rary hip hop.

“The influ­ence cuts both ways—from jazz to hip hop and back again,” writes John Lewis at The Guardian. Or as Wash­ing­ton puts it, “We’ve now got a whole gen­er­a­tion of jazz musi­cians who have been brought up with hip-hop. We’ve grown up along­side rap­pers and DJs, we’ve heard this music all our life. We are as flu­ent in J Dil­la and Dr Dre as we are in Min­gus and Coltrane.”

The fusion of avant-garde hip hop with live jazz impro­vi­sa­tion, instru­men­ta­tion, and arrang­ing may seem like a new phe­nom­e­non, though one could date it at least as far back as the Roots’ ear­ly 90s debut.

“Hip hop’s love affair with jazz goes back more than 30 years,” Lewis writes. The music was every­where in the 90s, in the fore­ground on the records of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Diga­ble Plan­ets and in more cut-and-paste ways in albums like Nas’ instant clas­sic Ill­mat­ic, pro­duced by Pete Rock, who craft­ed tracks like “N.Y. State of Mind” from lay­ered sam­ples of Ahmad Jamal, Don­ald Byrd, and lit­tle-known jazz-funk out­fits like Jim­my Gor­don & His Jaz­zn­pops Band. As pianist Robert Glasper shows above in the brief NPR Jazz Night in Amer­i­ca video at the top, “Jazz is the moth­er of hip-hop.”

Both jazz and hip hop were born out of oppres­sion, and both are forms of protest music, “going against the grain,” Glasper argues. But there’s more to it. Why do hip hop pro­duc­ers grav­i­tate toward jazz, chop­ping and lift­ing clas­sics and obscure rar­i­ties? For a wealth of melod­ic content—”for a mood, for a son­ic tim­bre, for a unique rhyth­mic com­po­nent,” writes inter­view­er Alex Ariff on YouTube; for a shared his­to­ry of strug­gle and cel­e­bra­tion and a desire to change the sound of music with each release. Glasper’s brief, three-minute demon­stra­tion is fas­ci­nat­ing and it could, as one YouTube com­menter points out, eas­i­ly extend to three hours.

Until he makes that video, you can find jazz sam­ples in hip hop records to your heart’s eter­nal con­tent at Whosampled.com and con­sid­er how the influ­ence of hip hop on jazz musi­cians has cre­at­ed new forms of fusion akin to Miles Davis’ exper­i­ments in the 70s. “I nev­er had a prob­lem mov­ing between jazz and hip hop,” says Wash­ing­ton. “Peo­ple like to com­part­men­tal­ize music, espe­cial­ly African-Amer­i­can music, but it’s real­ly one thing. One very wide thing…. When I first played some Coltrane-type stuff on the Pimp a But­ter­fly ses­sions, Kendrick got it imme­di­ate­ly. ‘I want it to sound like it’s on fire,’ he’d say. That’s the kind of com­mon ground that the best jazz and the best hip-hop have.”

via The Kids Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

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

The His­to­ry of Hip Hop Music Visu­al­ized on a Turntable Cir­cuit Dia­gram: Fea­tures 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

150 Songs from 100+ Rap­pers Get Art­ful­ly Woven into One Great Mashup: Watch the “40 Years of Hip Hop”

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

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Alan Watts Reads “One of the Greatest Things Carl Jung Ever Wrote”

in Photography, Religion | February 9th, 2021

Carl Jung found­ed the field of ana­lyt­i­cal psy­chol­o­gy more than a cen­tu­ry ago, and many ref­er­ence his insights into the human mind and con­di­tion still today. Alan Watts cer­tain­ly did his bit to keep the Jun­gian flame alive, what­ev­er the out­ward dif­fer­ences between a Swiss psy­chi­a­trist and an Eng­lish inter­preter of Tao­ism, Hin­duism, and Bud­dhism, espe­cial­ly of the Zen vari­ety. Both men believed in cast­ing a wide spir­i­tu­al net, all the bet­ter to expose the com­mon core ele­ments of seem­ing­ly dis­parate ancient tra­di­tions. And in so doing they could hard­ly afford to ignore the reli­gious under­pin­nings of the Euro­pean civ­i­liza­tion, broad­ly speak­ing, from which they emerged. In fact, Watts became an ordained Epis­co­pal priest at the age of 30 — though, owing to the com­plex­i­ties of his beliefs as well as his per­son­al life, he resigned the min­istry by age 35.

But Watts’ invest­ment in cer­tain tenets of Chris­tian­i­ty endured, and he named as one of Jung’s great­est writ­ings a lec­ture deliv­ered to a Swiss cler­gy group. “Peo­ple for­get that even doc­tors have moral scru­ples and that cer­tain patient’s con­fes­sions are hard even for a doc­tor to swal­low,” begins the speech as Watts reads it aloud in the video above. “Yet the patient does not feel him­self accept­ed unless the very worst in him is accept­ed too. No one can bring this about by mere words. It comes only through reflec­tion and through the doctor’s atti­tude towards him­self and his own dark side.” To help anoth­er per­son, in oth­er words, one must first accept that per­son as he is; but to accept anoth­er per­son as he is first requires tak­ing one­self straight, less-than-admirable qual­i­ties and all.

Accord­ing to Watts, Jung him­self demon­strat­ed this rare self-aware­ness. “He knew and rec­og­nized what I some­times call the ele­ment of irre­ducible ras­cal­i­ty in him­self,” says Watts in a talk of his own pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. “He knew it so strong­ly and so clear­ly, and in a way so lov­ing­ly, that he would not con­demn the same thing in oth­ers, and would there­fore not be led into those thoughts, feel­ings, and acts of vio­lence towards oth­ers which are always char­ac­ter­is­tic of the peo­ple who project the dev­il in them­selves upon the out­side, upon some­body else, upon the scape­goat.” As Jung puts it to his cler­i­cal audi­ence, “In the sphere of social or nation­al rela­tions, the state of suf­fer­ing may be civ­il war, and this state is to be cured by the Chris­t­ian virtue of for­give­ness and love of one’s ene­mies.”

What Chris­tian­i­ty holds as true of the out­er world goes just as well, Jung argues, for the inner one. “This is why mod­ern man has heard enough about guilt and sin. He is sore­ly beset by his own bad con­science and wants, rather, to know how he is to rec­on­cile him­self with his own nature, how he is to love the ene­my in his own heart and call the wolf his broth­er.” He “does not want to know in what way he can imi­tate Christ, but in what way he can live his own indi­vid­ual life, how­ev­er mea­gre and unin­ter­est­ing it may be.” Only by being allowed to fol­low this “ego­ism” to its con­clu­sion of “com­plete iso­la­tion” can he “get to know him­self and learn what an invalu­able trea­sure is the love of his fel­low beings”; it is only “in the state of com­plete aban­don­ment and lone­li­ness that we expe­ri­ence the help­ful pow­ers of our own natures.” With­out know­ing our own natures, we can hard­ly expect even the most time-test­ed belief sys­tems to put an end to the civ­il wars inside us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Zen Mas­ter Alan Watts Explains What Made Carl Jung Such an Influ­en­tial Thinker

Carl Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in a Rare Inter­view (1957)

Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Tech­nol­o­gy Can’t Grasp Real­i­ty

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’ (1959)

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

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 or on Face­book.

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A New Database Will Document Every Slave House in the U.S.: Discover the “Saving Slave Houses Project”

in Archives, History | February 9th, 2021

In cen­tral North Car­oli­na, not far from where I live, sits the Franklin­ton Cen­ter at Bricks, a 224-acre edu­ca­tion­al cam­pus and con­fer­ence cen­ter built on the remains of a his­toric “Agri­cul­tur­al, Indus­tri­al, and Nor­mal School,” then junior col­lege, for the descen­dants of enslaved peo­ple. These schools were them­selves built on the land of a for­mer cot­ton plan­ta­tion, on for­mer ter­ri­to­ry of the Tus­caro­ra Nation. The cam­pus acts as a palimpsest of South­ern U.S. his­to­ry. Each suc­ces­sive gen­er­a­tion on the site after the Civ­il War has built memo­ri­als along­side mod­ern insti­tu­tions of learn­ing and activism. The mod­el is rare. As his­to­ri­an Dami­an Par­gas of Lei­den Uni­ver­si­ty tells Atlas Obscura’s Sab­ri­na Imbler, “slav­ery is large­ly invis­i­ble in the [cur­rent] South­ern land­scape, and there­fore easy to ignore or for­get.”

Even at the Franklin­ton Cen­ter, the rem­nants of the slave past con­sist only of a whip­ping post, the focus of a remem­brance area on the cam­pus, and an ante­bel­lum slave ceme­tery a short dis­tance away. All traces of slave quar­ters and hous­es have been wiped away. Where they remain in the U.S., writes Imbler, such build­ings often “bear no vis­i­ble trace of their past; many have been con­vert­ed into garages, offices, or sometimes—unnervingly—bed-and-breakfasts. In some cas­es the struc­tures have fall­en into ruin or van­ished entire­ly, leav­ing behind a depres­sion in the ground.” Since 2012, Jobie Hill, a preser­va­tion archi­tect, has tried to change that with her project Sav­ing Slave Hous­es.

Hill is deter­mined to build a first-of-its-kind data­base that hon­ors and pre­serves these spaces in more than mem­o­ry, and to unite the hous­es with the sto­ries of peo­ple who once inhab­it­ed them. As she sees it, such a repos­i­to­ry is long over­due. “There has nev­er been a nation­al sur­vey of slave hous­es, except for the one I’m try­ing to do,” Hill says.

Hous­es, says Hill, in her TEDx talk above, “can tell us a lot about the peo­ple that lived there…. Each slave house has a valu­able sto­ry to tell.” A slave house, Hill writes, on the project’s site, “was a place where enslaved peo­ple found strength and com­fort from one anoth­er; but at the same time, it was a place that imposed phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions and psy­cho­log­i­cal trau­ma.”

The project grew out of Hill’s master’s the­ses in preser­va­tion archi­tec­ture and through an intern­ship for the His­toric Amer­i­can Build­ings Sur­vey (HABS), “a fed­er­al pro­gram estab­lished in 1933 to employ archi­tects and drafts­men” dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, Imbler notes. She has been able to iden­ti­fy slave hous­es by their small size, loca­tion on a prop­er­ty, “and if the build­ing has a fire­place or chim­ney,” she says, not­ing that such build­ings were rarely includ­ed in sur­veys. She has also cross-ref­er­enced sur­veys with the “largest, best-known col­lec­tion of inter­views from for­mer­ly enslaved peo­ple: the 1936–1938 WPA Slave Nar­ra­tive Col­lec­tion.”

These inter­views “paint a grim pic­ture of the cru­el and cramped quar­ters enslaved peo­ple were forced to live in.” But slave hous­es are not only mark­ers of a painful past. “A slave house simul­ta­ne­ous­ly embod­ies suf­fer­ing, yet per­se­ver­ance and strong fam­i­ly bonds,” writes Hill. They are sym­bols of sur­vival against daunt­ing odds, and like the mag­no­lia tree that marks the remem­brance site at the Franklin­ton Cen­ter, they can “serve as a reminder that we too must do more than sur­vive. We must find a way to thrive.” Learn more about Hill’s Sav­ing Slave Hous­es project here.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Hear the Voic­es of Amer­i­cans Born in Slav­ery: The Library of Con­gress Fea­tures 23 Audio Inter­views with For­mer­ly Enslaved Peo­ple (1932–75)

The Names of 1.8 Mil­lion Eman­ci­pat­ed Slaves Are Now Search­able in the World’s Largest Genealog­i­cal Data­base, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans Find Lost Ances­tors

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visu­al­ized in Two Min­utes: 10 Mil­lion Lives, 20,000 Voy­ages, Over 315 Years

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

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How Norman Rockwell Used Photographs to Create His Famous Paintings: See Side-by-Side Comparisons

in Art, History, Photography | February 9th, 2021


More than 40 years after Nor­man Rock­well’s death, the ques­tion of whether his paint­ings are real­is­tic or unre­al­is­tic remains open for debate. On one hand, crit­i­cal opin­ion has long dis­missed his Sat­ur­day Evening Post-adorn­ing visions of Amer­i­can life as sheer­est fan­ta­sy. “A lit­tle girl with a black eye, an elder­ly woman say­ing grace with her grand­son, a boy going to war: Rock­wellian scenes rep­re­sent a cer­tain sen­ti­men­tal Amer­i­ca — an ide­al Amer­i­ca, or at least Rock­well’s ide­al,” says a 2009 NPR sto­ry on his work.

On the oth­er hand, if Rock­well’s admir­ers give him a pass on this sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty, his detrac­tors often turn a blind eye to his obvi­ous tech­ni­cal mas­tery. Say what you will about his themes, the man might as well have been a cam­era.  Indeed, his process began with an actu­al cam­era. Accord­ing to that NPR piece, he “used pho­tos, tak­en by a rotat­ing cast of pho­tog­ra­phers, to make his illus­tra­tions — and all of his mod­els were neigh­bors and friends,” res­i­dents of his small town of Stock­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts.

The cam­era­men includ­ed a Ger­man immi­grant named Clemens Kalis­ch­er: “An artist-pho­tog­ra­ph­er him­self, Kalis­ch­er was at odds with the trac­ing tech­niques and sac­cha­rine sub­ject mat­ter in Rock­well’s work. After all, Rock­well nev­er paint­ed free­hand, and almost all of his paint­ings were com­mis­sioned by mag­a­zines and adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies.”

But “although he may not have clicked the shut­ter, Rock­well direct­ed every facet of every com­po­si­tion,” as you can see by exam­in­ing his paint­ings and ref­er­ence pho­tos togeth­er, fea­tured as they’ve been on sites like Petapix­el.

At Google Arts & Cul­ture, you can scroll through a short exhi­bi­tion of Rock­well’s late work on race rela­tions in Amer­i­ca that reveals how he had not just one but many pho­tographs tak­en as source mate­r­i­al for each paint­ing, which he would then com­bine into a sin­gle image. This qua­si-cin­e­mat­ic “edit­ing” process brings to mind the “sto­ry­board­ing” of Edward Hop­per, who stands along­side Rock­well as one of the most Amer­i­can painters of the 20th cen­tu­ry.

But while Hop­per gave artis­tic form to the coun­try’s alien­ation, Rock­well — whom his­to­ry has­n’t remem­bered as a par­tic­u­lar­ly hap­py man — cre­at­ed an “Amer­i­can sanc­tu­ary oth­ers wished to share.” And though nei­ther Hop­per nor Rock­well’s Amer­i­ca may ever have exist­ed, they were craft­ed from the pieces of Amer­i­can life the artists found every­where around them.

via Petapix­el/Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nor­man Rock­well Illus­trates Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer & Huck­le­ber­ry Finn (1936–1940)

NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Lei­bovitz, Nor­man Rock­well & 350 Oth­er Artists to Visu­al­ly Doc­u­ment America’s Space Pro­gram

Nor­man Rockwell’s Type­writ­ten Recipe for His Favorite Oat­meal Cook­ies

Edward Hopper’s Cre­ative Process: The Draw­ing & Care­ful Prepa­ra­tion Behind Nighthawks & Oth­er Icon­ic Paint­ings

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

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 or on Face­book.

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The Magic of the Beach Boys’ Harmonies: Hear Isolated Vocals from “Sloop John B.,” “God Only Knows,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” & Other Pet Sounds Classics

in Music | February 8th, 2021

Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to the Smith­son­ian.
                        —Bob Dylan on Bri­an Wil­son

The Beach Boys tar­nished their rep­u­ta­tion when they reformed in lat­er years and tried to “reclaim their whole­some­ness,” Dan Caf­frey writes at Con­se­quence of Sound, “only to find that it had all but dis­ap­peared.” But in the days when they sound­ed like the most whole­some thing on earth, they also had the dis­tinct advan­tage of sound­ing seri­ous­ly weird: “Weird­er than Waits, weird­er than Zap­pa, and def­i­nite­ly weird­er than the Bea­t­les. The immac­u­late vocal har­mo­ny that made them famous was their weird­est weapon of all; a sun­ny fortress of eupho­ny that shone through the dark­est of times and strangest of lyrics in their lat­ter days.”

The phe­nom­e­non could emerge “only out of the fer­ment that char­ac­ter­izes today’s pop music scene,” said Leonard Bern­stein when he heard “Surf’s Up.” Despite the sur­face-lev­el corni­ness, there were “real­ly deep, pro­found emo­tions” in the band’s music, emo­tions “that came out of a lot of pain,” Lin­da Ron­stadt remarked.

The full depths of Pet Sounds may nev­er be plumbed, yet one can also put it on and imme­di­ate­ly feel the SoCal sun­shine hit them square­ly in the face. Only a genius like Bri­an Wil­son could turn surf pop into clas­si­cal com­po­si­tion, with­out com­pro­mis­ing the sim­ple emo­tions of pop or the pro­fun­di­ty of a clas­si­cal arrange­ment. (“I fig­ure no one is edu­cat­ed musi­cal­ly ’til they’ve heard ‘Pet Sounds,’ ” says Paul McCart­ney.)

And only the Beach Boys as a group could pull off those har­monies. The rest of the band may not have quite grasped what their quixot­ic leader was up to. (Mike Love once famous­ly com­plained, “Who’s gonna hear this shit? The ears of a dog?”) But they knew how to sing togeth­er like no one else before or since. (When David Cros­by heard “In My Room,” he says, “I thought, ‘I give up–I can’t do that–I’ll nev­er be able to do that.’”) They were so good, they could pull off gor­geous a‑capella pas­sages like those in “Sloop John B,” Pet Sounds’ lead sin­gle. Hear it at the top in a full iso­lat­ed vocal ver­sion.

A tra­di­tion­al folk song that orig­i­nat­ed in the Bahamas and was record­ed in the six­ties by every­one from John­ny Cash to Lon­nie Done­gan to the Kingston Trio, the arrang­ing of the song took only 24 hours, Al Jar­dine remem­bers, from the time he brought it to Wil­son as a pos­si­ble cov­er to the time Wil­son com­plet­ed his ver­sion of the track. The vocals were anoth­er mat­ter. Jar­dine assumed he would sing lead, but Wil­son had a process:

It was like inter­view­ing for a job. Pret­ty fun­ny. He didn’t like any of us. My vocal had a much more mel­low approach because I was bring­ing it from the folk idiom. For the radio, we need­ed a more rock approach. Bri­an and Mike end­ed up singing it.

Those demand­ing vocal record­ing ses­sions, Jar­dine wrote in the Pet Sounds lin­er notes, could last 12–15 hours a day. The end results are an espe­cial­ly impres­sive feat con­sid­er­ing that the back­ing vocals were all record­ed at once, with no over­dub­bing or any of the dig­i­tal stu­dio wiz­ardry used today to nudge stray voic­es into the right pitch and rhythm:

At the vocal ses­sions, there was so much good ten­sion. At any one time, you would have four out of five of us get our parts just fine, and there would be one who would screw up. But it would­n’t be the same per­son each time. Then the next take, he would get it right, but some­body else would get it wrong. Kind of like the chaos the­o­ry at work. The more peo­ple you have in a giv­en sit­u­a­tion, the more chance there is for error. Then, there would be the mag­ic moment when it all came togeth­er, and then you had your take.

Just below, hear Pet Sounds’ sad­dest song, “Car­o­line, No,” in a vocal take fea­tur­ing only Wil­son. He thought of it as “prob­a­bly the best [song] I’ve ever writ­ten… a pret­ty love song about how this guy and this girl lost it and there’s no way to get it back. I just felt sad, so I wrote a sad song.” It’s also a song, for all its melan­choly, born from the sense of inno­cent long­ing the band brought to all their music in their prime, con­veyed in har­monies that would nev­er shine as bright­ly for any oth­er band at any oth­er time. Hear more of the Beach Boys, a‑cappella, in the YouTube playlist here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How the Beach Boys Cre­at­ed Their Pop Mas­ter­pieces: “Good Vibra­tions,” Pet Sounds, and More

The Beach Boys’ Bri­an Wil­son & Bea­t­les Pro­duc­er George Mar­tin Break Down “God Only Knows,” the “Great­est Song Ever Writ­ten”

The Mak­ing (and Remak­ing) of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Arguably the Great­est Rock Album of All Time

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

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A New Yorker Cartoonist Explains How to Draw Literary Cartoons

in Comedy, Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Magazines | February 8th, 2021

“I enjoy pok­ing fun at any­thing edu­cat­ed peo­ple do and civ­i­lized soci­ety per­pet­u­ates that is odd, frus­trat­ing, wacky, or hyp­o­crit­i­cal,” car­toon­ist Amy Kurzweil, above, recent­ly told the New York Pub­lic Library’s Mar­go Moore.

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, she’s been get­ting pub­lished in The New York­er a lot of late.

The process for get­ting car­toons accept­ed there is the stuff of leg­end, though report­ed­ly less gru­el­ing since Emma Allen, the magazine’s youngest and first-ever female car­toon edi­tor, took over. Allen has made a point of seek­ing out fresh voic­es, and work­ing with them to help mold their sub­mis­sions into some­thing in The New York­er vein, rather than “this end­less game of pre­sent­ing work and then hear­ing ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

Kurzweil has a fond­ness for lit­er­ary themes (and the same brand of pen­cils that John Stein­beck, Tru­man Capote, and Vladimir Nabokov pre­ferred—Black­wings—whether in her hand or, con­vers­ing with Allen on Zoom, above, in her ears.)

Get­ting the joke of a New York­er car­toon often depends on get­ting the ref­er­ence, and while both women seem tick­led at the first exam­ple, Kurzweil’s mash-up of Proust’s Remem­brance of Things Past and the pic­ture book If You Give a Mouse a Cook­ie, it may go over many read­ers’ heads.

The thing that holds it all togeth­er?

Madeleines, of course, though out­side France, not every Proust lover is able to iden­ti­fy an inked rep­re­sen­ta­tion of this evoca­tive cook­ie by shape.

Kurzweil states that she has nev­er actu­al­ly read the children’s book that sup­plies half the con­text.

(It’s okay. Like the idea that mem­o­ries can be trig­gered by cer­tain nos­tal­gic scents, its con­cept is pret­ty easy to grasp.)

Nor has she read philoso­pher Derek Parfit’s whop­ping 1,928-page On What Mat­ters. Her inspi­ra­tion for using it in a car­toon is her per­son­al con­nec­tion to the mas­sive, unread three-vol­ume set in her family’s library. Because both the size and the title are part of the joke, she directs the viewer’s eye to the unwieldy tome with a light water­col­or wash.

She also has a good tip for any­one draw­ing a library scene—go fig­u­ra­tive, rather than lit­er­al, vary­ing sizes and shapes until the eye is tricked into see­ing what is mere­ly sug­gest­ed.

A all-too-true lit­er­ary expe­ri­ence informs her sec­ond exam­ple at the 4:30 mark—that of a lit­tle known author giv­ing a read­ing in a book­store. Despite a pref­er­ence for draw­ing “fleshy things like peo­ple and ani­mals” she for­goes depict­ing the author or those in atten­dance, giv­ing the punch­line instead to the event posters in the store’s win­dow.

As she told the NYPL’s Moore:

A car­toon is always an oppor­tu­ni­ty to show­case a con­tem­po­rary phe­nom­e­non by exag­ger­at­ing it or plac­ing it in a dif­fer­ent con­text.

Over the last year, a huge num­ber of New York­er car­toons have con­cerned them­selves with the domes­tic dull­ness of the pan­dem­ic, but when Allen asked if she has a favorite New York­er car­toon cliché, Kurzweil went with “the Moby Dick trope, because whales are easy to draw, and I like a good metaphor for the unat­tain­able.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New York­er Car­toon Edi­tor Bob Mankoff Reveals the Secret of a Suc­cess­ful New York­er Car­toon

The Not York­er: A Col­lec­tion of Reject­ed & Late Cov­er Sub­mis­sions to The New York­er

Down­load a Com­plete, Cov­er-to-Cov­er Par­o­dy of The New York­er: 80 Pages of Fine Satire

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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