We’ve featured 11-year-old Nandi Bushell here before. Perhaps you’ll recall her epic drum battle with Dave Grohl. Today she’s back, paying tribute to Charlie Watts and performing the individual tracks on the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.” First comes the guitar; then the bass, percussion and vocals; and next the drums–all the while she’s having fun. And you will too. Enjoy.
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George Carlin and Richard Pryor never got to star in a film together, so this appearance of the two on this 1981 Tonight Show clip is a great, rare chance to see two giants together. Actually, make that three, because host Johnny Carson shows why he set the standard in that very American genre, the late night talk show. It’s also an opportunity to see how much has changed in the world of late night.
Late night talk shows are almost exclusively a political affair these days. For many Americans, this is the place to get their satirical take on the news in the opening monologue, possibly their only take. Some nights you can watch the three main networks and several premium cable/streaming channels and find the same news item, riffed on a dozen different ways.
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson wasn’t a “simpler time,” but it was very different. More casual, definitely, and more personable. I think that’s what comes across in this clip. Carson knows both Carlin and Pryor and their particular talents.
Carlin’s routine is purely observational. Currently he is a meme on many a boomer’s feed, but always late-stage Carlin, the angry, nihilistic political comedian. (That’s not a bad thing, and interesting that he’s being claimed these days by both the Left and the Right). Here he’s still Class Clown Carlin, with an elastic face, delivering a version of his “stuff vs. crap” routine, capped off with an out-of-nowhere abortion joke. It’s political in the vaguest sense.
His sit down with Carson is more of a chance to riff on charity organization names, and Carson lets him at it.
Pryor is on to promote Bustin’ Loose, his oddly sentimental 1981 comedy. But all that’s on Carson’s and the audience’s mind is the aftermath of the freebasing incident, where he doused himself with rum and set himself on fire while high on cocaine. He nearly died.
The delicate interchange between Carson—who legitimately wants to know how Pryor is doing—and Pryor, who both mocks himself, admits too much, and retreats behind a wall of humor, makes this essential viewing. Pryor reminisces about his father and his time coming up through standup with Carlin at Greenwich Village’s Cafe au Go-Go. He even admits, because why not, to lifting his early jokes as a comic from Bill Cosby and Dick Gregory. The latter “used to have stuff in Jet Magazine, you know, and that’s how I started, reading his material. I’d do it on stage. And that was my first breakthrough. I got a lot of laughs with his material.”
Pryor rides that line between telling on yourself and telling a fib.
And that last fascinating shot: credits rolling over Carson, the guests, and Ed McMahon, standing around, having a chat, as if they’re waiting for the coat check attendant in the lobby.
Ramsey Ess, who wrote about the whole episode—including Carson’s decidedly non-political monologue— on Vulture in 2012, noted about the Pryor interview:
When Johnny asks Richard about his dreams, you forget about the audience, you forget about George Carlin sitting over there and you suddenly are brought into a place where this is an important question and you need to hear that answer, even though you never would have thought to wonder about such a thing on your own. This intimacy, for me, is what made Carson different.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
This past summer we featured a short video introduction to the Mona Lisa here on Open Culture. You’d think that if any painting didn’t need an introduction, that would be the one. But the video’s creator James Payne showed many of us just how much we still have to learn about Leonardo’s most famous work of art — and indeed, perhaps the most famous work by any artist. On his Youtube channel Great Art Explained, Payne offers clear and powerful analyses of paintings from van Gogh’s The Starry Night and Hopper’s Nighthawks to Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych and Picasso’s Guernica. But there are some images to which a fifteen-minute video essay can’t hope to do justice.
In those cases, Payne has been known to follow up with a deluxe expanded edition. Taking on Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, he followed up three individual fifteen-minute videos — for a triptych, a neat union of form and substance — with a full-length treatment of the whole work.
Payne’s full-length version of his Mona Lisa video more than doubles the length of the original. “This is the more comprehensive version I always wanted to do,” he notes, adding that it “uses some of the information from the first film (but in higher resolution with better sound and with clearer graphics), as well as answering the hundreds of questions: Why doesn’t she have eyebrows? Is it a self-portrait? Is she only famous because she was stolen? How do we know what he was thinking?”
This time around, Payne has more to say about how Leonardo created such a compelling portrait on a technical level, but also why he came to paint it in the first place. On top of that, the expanded format gives him time to examine the much more conventional portraits Leonardo’s contemporaries were painting at the time, as well as what’s known as the Prado Mona Lisa. A depiction of the same sitter that may even have been painted simultaneously by one of Leonardo’s students, it makes for an illuminating object of comparison. Payne also gets into the 1911 theft and recovery that ultimately did a great deal for the painting’s reputation, as well as its 1963 exhibition in America that, thanks to television, turned it into a mass-media icon. By now we’ve all had more glimpses of the Mona Lisa more times than we can remember, but it takes enthusiasm like Payne’s to remind us of all the ways we can truly see it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
No old stuff for me, no bestial copyings of arches and columns and cornices. Me, I’m new. — architect William Van Alen, designer of the Chrysler Building
It’s so crazy and vigorous in its execution, so breathtaking in its vision, so brilliantly eccentric.
Malkovich, who’s not shy about taking potshots at the city’s “violence and filth” in the BBC documentary short above, rhapsodizes over Detroit industrialist Walter P. Chrysler’s “latter day pyramid in Manhattan.”
Malkovich’s unmistakable voice, pegged by The Guardian as “wafting, whispery, and reedy” and which he himself poo poos as sounding like it belongs to someone who’s “labored under heavy narcotics for years,” pairs well with descriptions so plummy, one has to imagine he penned them himself. (No writer is credited.)
After showing us the open-to-the-public lobby’s “delicious Art Deco fittings,” ceiling mural, and intricate, veneered elevator doors, Malkovich gives us a tour of some off-limits upper floors.
Unlike the Empire State Building, which bested the Chrysler Building’s brief record as the world’s tallest building (1046 feet, 77 stories), you can’t purchase tickets to admire the view from the top.
He also has a wander around the barren Cloud Club, a supper club and speakeasy for gentleman one percenters. Its mishmash of styles represented a concession on architect Van Alen’s part. The building’s exterior was an elegant modernist homage to Chrysler’s hubcaps and hood ornaments, but between the 66th and 68th floor, the Cloud Club catered to the promiscuous tastes of the rich and powerful — Tudor, Olde English, Neo-Classical…
The New York Times reports that it boasted what“was reputed to be the grandest men’s room in all of New York.”
A Duke Ellington soundtrack and vintage footage featuring Van Alen costumed to resemble his famous creation supply a taste of the excitement that heralded the building’s 1930 opening, even if those with a fear of heights may swoon at the sight of pretty young things reclining on high beams and performing other feats of derring-do.
Malkovich, ever the cool customer, displays his lack of vertigo by casually propping a foot on the rooftop’s edge to commune with the iconic eagle-headed gargoyles.
The building’s unique flourishes caused a sensation, but not everyone was a fan.
Malkovich clearly savors his swipe at critics who decried the new building as too shiny:
Fortunately these critics are long dead so we can’t even call their offices and taunt them as they should be taunted.
He’s more temperate when it comes to author and social philosopher Lewis Mumford, whose beef with the skyscraper is understandable, given the historic context — the stock market crashed the day after the secretly constructed spire was riveted into place:
Such buildings show one of the real dangers of a plutocracy: it gives the masters of our civilization an unusual opportunity to exhibit their barbarous egos, with no sense of restraint or shame.
Nearly one hundred years later, barbarous egos continue to erect skyscraping temples to their own vanity, but as Malkovich points out, they’re far blander, if taller.
The Chrysler Building is now widely recognized as one of New York City’s most magnificent jewels, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission recently approved plans to construct a public observation deck on the Chrysler Building’s 61st floor, just above its iconic Art Deco eagles, though it’s too early to tell if it will be ready in time for a centennial celebration.
Until then, the general public must content itself with exploring the Chrysler Building’s lobby during weekday business hours.
Not many ancient statues are as well-known as Laocoön and His Sons. Masterfully sculpted some time between the first century BC and the first century AD, it depicts the eponymous Trojan priest in an agonizing struggle with the serpents that will kill one or both of his sons. The details of the tale vary depending on the teller: Virgil describes Laocoön as a priest of Poseidon who dared to attempt exposing the famous Trojan Horse ruse, and Sophocles describes him as a priest of Apollo who violated his vow of celibacy. Whichever version of the story he heard, the sculptor clearly drew from it powerful enough inspiration to impress Pliny the Elder, in whose Natural History the piece figures.
Even among the more artistically sophisticated beholders of the Renaissance, Laocoön and His Sons proved a captivating piece of work. Unearthed from a Roman vineyard in 1506, it looked to have weathered the intervening millennium and half with much less wear and tear than most large artifacts from antiquity — though Laocoön himself was, conspicuously, missing an arm. Commissioned by Pope Julius II, Vatican architect Donato Bramante “held a contest to see who could come up with the best version of the arm restoration,” writes Kaushik Patowary at Amusing Planet. “Michelangelo suggested that Laocoön’s missing arm should be bent back as if the Trojan priest was trying to rip the serpent off his back.”
Michelangelo wasn’t the only Renaissance man in competition: “Raphael, who was a distant relative of Bramante, favored an extended arm. In the end, Jacopo Sansovino was declared the winner, whose version with an outstretched arm aligned with Raphael’s own vision of how the statue should look.” Laocoön was thus eventually restored with his arm outstreched, and kept that way until, “in a strange twist of fate, an antique backward-bent arm was discovered in a Roman workshop in 1906, a few hundred meters from where the statue group had been found four hundred years earlier.” Positioned just as Michelangelo had suggested, this disembodied marble limb turned out unmistakably to have come from Laocoön and His Sons — but about three and a half centuries too late, alas, for Michelangelo to lord it over Raphael.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Despite creating two of the most famous paintings in the history of Western art, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci did not particularly think of himself as a painter. Sigmund Freud may have devoted several hundred words to showing that the Renaissance man par excellence rarely finished an artwork because of infantile psychosexual conflicts, but it seems more fitting to look at Leonardo’s approach to painting as of a piece with his approach to everything: He was simply far more interested in process than product. Even when the product was a masterpiece-in-the-making, and Leonardo’s patrons awaited, the artist’s restless mind was ready to move on before he finished a commission.
Such was the case with the Mona Lisa, which Leonardo never delivered to his client and instead brought with him to France. This painting, in all its unfinished mystery, may be Leonardo’s best-known work, but it is not — as Evan Puschak, a.k.a. The Nerdwriter, argues above — his best.
That honor should be reserved for a painting Leonardo began in the same year as the Mona Lisa, 1503: The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, which he worked on for seven years, never delivered to his client (most likely the King of France), and left unfinished at the time of his death in 1519.
The painting depicts a grouping of three figures: the infant Christ, wrestling a lamb, his mother, attempting to pull him away, and her mother, the apocryphal St. Anne, forming the stable base and apex of the triad. Behind her head towers a dense mountain range, a symbol of deep ecological time, says Puschak, just as the lamb in the foreground symbolizes the Passion to come. This transition from a pre-historic past (one far more ancient than the Biblical stories) to a redeemed future does not terminate with the lamb, says Puschak, but with us, the viewer.
The pyramidal composition recalls Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks from 1483. Such groupings were common in early Renaissance paintings, but The Virgin and Child with St. Anne represented a masterful refinement of the composition and of Leonardo’s famed sfumato technique. As Artdaily notes:
In Florence, where it was conceived, the Saint Anne quickly drew considerable attention and can be seen as a watershed moment in the evolution of artistic language, inspiring many disciples and colleagues who sought to emulate Leonardo’s style and technique in this work. Florentines were fascinated by the various cartoons executed by Leonardo and by the painted work, even in its rough outlines.
One preparatory work, the so-called “Burlington House Cartoon” (below), shows “the full expression of Leonardo’s first vision of the Saint Anne theme upon being awarded the commission.”
The work also shows the continued development of a theme that absorbed the artist throughout his life, expressed in earlier works such as The Virgin and Child with Cat and The Virgin of the Rocks. “These Virgin and Child compositions testify to Leonardo’s question to render in the most compelling manner the tenderness of the relationship between Jesus and the Virgin Mary,” and thus, between mother and son. Most of Freud’s observations in his Leonardo essay are nonsense, based on a mistranslation into German of the word “vulture” for a word that actually means “kite” (an error he later found particularly embarrassing). But his discussion of Leonardo’s childhood and his best, unfinished painting may strike us with particular poignancy.
[T]he smile which is playing on the lips of both women, although unmistakably the same as in the picture of Mona Lisa, has lost its sinister and mysterious character; it expresses a calm blissfulness.… Leonardo’s childhood was precisely as remarkable as this picture. He has had two mothers, the first his true mother, Caterina, from whom he was torn away between the age of three and five years, and a young tender step-mother, Donna Albiera, his father’s wife. By connecting this fact of his childhood… and condensing them into a uniform fusion, the composition of Saint Anne, Mary and the Child, formed itself in him.
Perhaps Freud was right, and The Virgin and Child with St. Anne was truly Leonardo’s most personal work, the apotheosis of a quest to integrate his personality through art. Whatever the case, we can say, along the psychoanalyst, that “on becoming somewhat engrossed in this picture it suddenly dawns upon the spectator that only Leonardo could have painted this picture.”
Whether we know it or not, we have all absorbed a cinematic vocabulary and set of film historical references through the film and television we’ve watched throughout our lives. We can leave it to the filmmakers, critics, and cinephiles to memorize glossaries of techniques. It’s enough that we understand what’s happening on screen because hundreds of visual narratives have been constructed in more or less the same way. This language did not come out of a primordial soup but took shape over the last 120 years or so: from the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès to Wes Anderson and Denis Villeneuve and so on — each stage along the way absorbing influences and ideas from the most innovative films.
Take, for example, My Dinner with Andre, an intensely philosophical film that consists of only two main characters, one setting, and no real plot to speak of. Instead, the film exploits the techniques of shot/reverse shot to their fullest, creating extraordinary intimacy between two characters, and the viewer, with the camera. Louis Malle’s 1981 film became a standard for filmed existential conversations. Yet behind it stands an even more iconic conversation, one literally concerned with life and Death. Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is a cinematic reference for countless movies, and a film that undoubtedly expanded the ways filmmakers could tell stories.
But there is another film we should see, says the Cinematic Cartography above, if we want to know where else the philosophical conversation in film might go: Hungarian director Zoltán Fábri’s 1976 The Fifth Seal, a grim morality play set in Nazi-occupied Hungary in which four friends in a bar propose a thought experiment that becomes terrifyingly real. The film cuts between the conversation on screen and scenes of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. “All through the film,” one critic writes, “an intelligent viewer will note the characters in the film constantly reassess their philosophical stance or points of view, according to circumstances.”
The entire movement of the film turns on a single question, a stark restatement of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic. Rather than a philosophical conversation between two stable points of view, The Fifth Seal shows us perspectives that shift according to the characters’ self-perceptions, our perceptions of them, and the influence of Bosch on what we see, adding layers of dramatic irony and extra-diegetic tension. Influential in its own way, if The Fifth Seal had been as widely seen as The Seventh Seal, we might have seen cinema take a different turn in the last few decades. Such is the case with all nine films discussed. See them listed below, learn about them in brief in “The Greatest Films You Don’t Know,” above, and imagine the directions cinema might go if it took more cues from these undervalued classics.
0:00 Introduction (Ashes and Snow, A Time to Live A Time to Die, Strangers In Good Company, Borom Sarat, Dead Man’s Letter’s, Killer of Sheep, Napoleon, Still Life) 1:50 The Fifth Seal — Az ötödik pecsét (Dir: Zoltán Fábri) 7:29 The House Is Black — خانه سیاه است (Dir: Forough Farrokhzad) 9:57 Tie Xi Qu: West of The Tracks — 铁西区 (Dir: Wang Bing) 14:12 As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (Dir: Jonas Mekas) 18:37 The Enclosed Valley — La vallée close (Dir: Jean-Claude Rousseau) 19:37 Pastoral: To Die in the Country — 田園に死す (Dir: Shūji Terayama) 23:44 Punishment Park (Dir: Peter Watkins) 28:03 The Cremator — Spalovač mrtvol (Dir: Juraj Herz) 30:28 O Pagador de Promessas (Dir: Anselmo Duarte) 31:39 Conclusion (Lucifer Rising, An Elephant Sitting Still, Marketa Lazarova, White Noise, Platform, The Burmese Harp)
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“Mali’s gifts to the world of music are lavish and legendary,” Nenad Georgievski writes at All About Jazz, though the world knew little about Malian music until American musicians began partnering with players from West Africa. In the 1980s, Stevie Wonder began touring with Amadou and Mariam, helping to popularize their form of Malian blues. In 1994, Ry Cooder recorded and released Talking Timbuktu with Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, whose “desert blues… was unconcerned with boundaries,” freely mixing languages and instrumentation with playing that drew comparisons to John Lee Hooker.
While audiences around the world encountered West African music as “world music” on the festival circuit, fans on the continent knew it as homegrown traditional sounds and contemporary African rock and pop. In 2001 they got the chance to gather for the first annual “Festival in the Desert” (Festival au désert) in Tin Essako, a rural village miles from the highway, as the Bandsplaining video above tells it. This brief explainer of the Festival’s impact and its tragic end in 2012 begins with references to Bono. But his role in the story is rather small.
More central are the Tuareg, or Kel Tamashek, nomadic people of Berber origin spread across several West African countries whose musicians have refined the sound of desert rock and turned it into rebel music. The sound was born in struggle, notes World of Music, in refugee camps and battlegrounds. The band Tinariwen — who formed in 1979 and have become “global musical nomads” since the first Festival — met in “military camps set up in Libya by Colonel Ghaddafi to train young Tamashek men how to fight. During the [Tuareg] rebellion Tinariwen became the pied pipers of the rebel movement, and their songs galvanized the young dispossessed Tamashek youth.” Then they turned to seeking peace at the Festival in 2001.
Put together by Tuareg organizer Manny Ansar, the Festival was “based on a centuries-old tradition,” notes PeacePrints, “a meeting where the Tuareg tribes of the region meet once a year to play and share music.” By contrast, the modern Festival included ethnic and tribal groups from all over the country, and the world, and “focused on bridging the gap between tradition and modernity and also between local custom and international cometogether.” It was the only festival of its kind in Africa and attracted thousands of African attendees and a few hundred visitors each year.
Tragically, the festival came to an end in 2012 when Tuareg rebels took control of Northern Mali, renaming it Azawad, and were overrun by Islamic separatist groups. The country was placed under Shariah Law, and Ansar was exiled to Burkina Faso for a time. Outside of his own country, he continued to promote peace by co-founding a traveling festival called Caravan culturelle pour la paix.
The artists represented at Festival in the Desert tell stories of the fusion of tradition and modernity, of brutal conflict and the hope for peace through the sharing and fusing of cultures. Mali may be one of the poorest countries in the world when it comes to material resources, but it is one of the most musically rich. “Mali has many people, living in their districts,” say one musician in the trailer above for the documentary film The Last Song Before the War, “but everyone comes together in this festival.”
Or, at least, they did until 2012. The filmmakers unwittingly captured the very last Festival in the Desert before it was shut down by militants who “ruined the material, plundered the stage, burned instruments,” says Ansar. “I had to go on.… It was no longer a question of festivity, but about the survival of a culture.” See his statement at the time in the “Festival in the Desert — In Exile” video further up. For a totally different view of the Festival, read former MTV exec Tom Freston’s account of traveling there with Jimmy Buffett, Chris Blackwell (founder of Island Records), and a handful of other industry bigwigs scouting the next West African sensation.
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