The Untold Story of Disco and Its Black, Latino & LGBTQ Roots

in Dance, Gender, History, Life, Music | December 5th, 2022

As a white Mid­west­ern child of the ‘70s, I received two mes­sages loud and clear: dis­co was a breath­tak­ing­ly glam­orous, sexy urban scene, and “dis­co sucks.”

Cul­tur­al­ly, the lat­ter pre­vailed.

It was the opin­ion voiced most loud­ly by the pop­u­lar boys.

Dis­senters pushed back at their own per­il.

I didn’t know what YMCA was about, and I’m not con­vinced the ski jack­et­ed, puka-neck­laced alpha males at my school did either.

(My father, who sang along joy­ful­ly when­ev­er it came on the car radio, def­i­nite­ly did.)

Disco’s been dead for a long time now.

In the four plus decades since dis­grun­tled Chica­go radio DJ Steve Dahl com­man­deered a base­ball sta­di­um for a Dis­co Demo­li­tion Night where fans tossed around homo­pho­bic and racist epi­thets while destroy­ing records, there’s been notable social progress.

This progress is the lens that makes Noah Lefevre’s Poly­phon­ic video essay The Untold His­to­ry of Dis­co, and oth­er inves­ti­ga­tions into the racial and sex­u­al under­pin­nings of dis­co pos­si­ble.

I cer­tain­ly nev­er heard of Stonewall as a kid, but many con­tem­po­rary view­ers, com­ing of age in a coun­try that is, on the whole, much more LGBTQ-friend­ly than the world of their par­ents and grand­par­ents, are famil­iar with it as a gay rights mile­stone.

Lefevre ties the birth of dis­co to the 1969 Stonewall Upris­ing, and a sub­cul­ture born of neces­si­ty, where­in gay men impro­vised under­ground dance clubs where they could cut freely loose with same sex part­ners.

Instead of live dance music, these venues boast­ed DJs, crate dig­gers open to any groove that would keep the par­ty going on the dance floor: psy­che­del­ic, clas­sic soul, pro­gres­sive soul, jazz fusion, Latin Amer­i­can dance music, African pop…

(Thus the name dis­cotheque)

A dis­co sound began to coa­lesce around exist­ing hits as the O‑jays’ Love Train and Isaac Hayes’ Theme from Shaft.

You can hear it in Jim­my Nolen’s chick­en scratch lead gui­tar for James Brown and ses­sion drum­mer Earl Young’s open high hat and four-to-the-floor beat on Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ The Love I Lost.

In the begin­ning, crowds were pri­mar­i­ly Black, Lati­no and gay at New York City dis­cos like The Loft, which start­ed out as a rent par­ty, and The Sanc­tu­ary, housed in a decon­se­crat­ed mid­town Ger­man Bap­tist church. Map­plethor­pe mod­el Leigh Lee recalled The Sanctuary’s cachet to the Vil­lage Voice’s Peter Braun­stein:

It was sup­posed to be a secret, but I don’t know how secret it could have been when fag­gots and les­bians can come out of a church from mid­night till sun­rise.

As dis­cotheque DJs began dri­ving the record charts, main­stream pro­duc­ers took note, open­ing the gates for such mon­ster hits as the Bar­ry White-helmed Love Unlim­it­ed Orchestra’s Love’s Theme, Don­na Summer’s Love to Love Ya, and Chic’s Le Freak.

A glit­ter-bedecked nude man rode a white horse into Bian­ca Jagger’s birth­day par­ty at Stu­dio 54 on the stroke of mid­night, while hin­ter­land squares did The Hus­tle at their local Hol­i­day Inns. 

By the time celebs like the Rolling Stones and Rod Stew­art start­ing horn­ing in on the act, dis­co had already reached its tip­ping point.


Lit­tle twerps like me, whose moth­ers wouldn’t let them see the R‑rated Sat­ur­day Night Fever bought Bee Gees 45s from our local Peach­es and sang along to Glo­ria Gaynor’s I Will Sur­vive, as did some of our dads…

(An unex­pect­ed plea­sure of Lefevre’s video is see­ing all those famil­iar record labels spin­ning just the way they did on our pre­cious stere­os — Atlantic! Casablan­ca! Poly­dor! RSO!  Some­body pass me a Dr. Pep­per and a yel­low plas­tic insert!)

Radio DJ Rick Dees’ nov­el­ty hit with Dis­co Duck seemed so harm­less at the time, but it was sure­ly music to the main­stream “dis­co sucks” crowd’s ears. (Good luck to any punk who betrayed a fond­ness for Dis­co Duck )

Disco’s reign was brief — Lefevre notes that its end coin­cides with the begin­ning of the AIDS cri­sis — but its impact has been greater than many assume at first blush.

Disco’s empha­sis on turnta­bles and long play ver­sions influ­enced hip hop and elec­tron­ic dance music.

Near­ly half a cen­tu­ry after dis­co­ma­nia seized the land, its deep con­nec­tion to Black, Lati­no and LGBTQ his­to­ry must not be tossed aside light­ly.

Watch more of Noah Lefevre’s Poly­phon­ic video essays here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Dis­co Demo­li­tion Night: Scenes from the Night Dis­co Died (or Did It?) at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, 1979

Two Decades of Fire Island DJ Sets Get Unearthed, Dig­i­tized & Put Online: Stream 232 Mix­tapes Online (1979–1999)

How Gior­gio Moroder & Don­na Summer’s “I Feel Love” Cre­at­ed the “Blue­print for All Elec­tron­ic Dance Music Today” (1977)

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo. Her Indi­ana ties result­ed in an invi­ta­tion to Rick “Dis­co Duck” Dees’ 1977 wed­ding. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Why Jorge Luis Borges Hated Soccer: “Soccer is Popular Because Stupidity is Popular”

in Literature, Sports | December 5th, 2022

Image by Grete Stern, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I will admit it: I’m one of those oft-maligned non-sports peo­ple who becomes a foot­ball (okay, soc­cer) enthu­si­ast every four years, seduced by the col­or­ful pageantry, cos­mopoli­tan air, nos­tal­gia for a game I played as a kid, and an embar­rass­ing­ly sen­ti­men­tal pride in my home coun­try’s team. I don’t lose all my crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties, but I can’t help but love the World Cup even while rec­og­niz­ing the cor­rup­tion, deep­en­ing pover­ty and exploita­tion, and host of oth­er seri­ous sociopo­lit­i­cal issues sur­round­ing it. And as an Amer­i­can, it’s sim­ply much eas­i­er to put some dis­tance between the sport itself and the jin­go­is­tic big­otry and violence—“sentimental hooli­gan­ism,” to use Franklin Foer’s phrase—that very often attend the game in var­i­ous parts of the world.

In Argenti­na, as in many soc­cer-mad coun­tries with deep social divides, gang vio­lence is a rou­tine part of fut­bol, part of what Argen­tine writer Jorge Luis Borges termed a hor­ri­ble “idea of suprema­cy.” Borges found it impos­si­ble to sep­a­rate the fan cul­ture from the game itself, once declar­ing, “soc­cer is pop­u­lar because stu­pid­i­ty is pop­u­lar.” As Shaj Math­ew writes in The New Repub­lic, the author asso­ci­at­ed the mass mania of soc­cer fan­dom with the mass fer­vor of fas­cism or dog­mat­ic nation­al­ism. “Nation­al­ism,” he wrote, “only allows for affir­ma­tions, and every doc­trine that dis­cards doubt, nega­tion, is a form of fanati­cism and stu­pid­i­ty.” As Math­ews points out, nation­al soc­cer teams and stars do often become the tools of author­i­tar­i­an regimes that “take advan­tage of the bond that fans share with their nation­al teams to drum up pop­u­lar sup­port [….] This is what Borges feared—and resented—about the sport.”

There is cer­tain­ly a sense in which Borges’ hatred of soc­cer is also indica­tive of his well-known cul­tur­al elit­ism (despite his roman­ti­ciz­ing of low­er-class gau­cho life and the once-demi­monde tan­go). Out­side of the huge­ly expen­sive World Cup, the class dynam­ics of soc­cer fan­dom in most every coun­try but the U.S. are fair­ly uncom­pli­cat­ed. New Repub­lic edi­tor Foer summed it up suc­cinct­ly in How Soc­cer Explains the World: “In every oth­er part of the world, soccer’s soci­ol­o­gy varies lit­tle: it is the province of the work­ing class.” (The inver­sion of this soc­cer class divide in the U.S., Foer writes, explains Amer­i­cans’ dis­dain for the game in gen­er­al and for elit­ist soc­cer dilet­tantes in par­tic­u­lar, though those atti­tudes are rapid­ly chang­ing). If Borges had been a North, rather than South, Amer­i­can, I imag­ine he would have had sim­i­lar things to say about the NFL, NBA, NHL, or NASCAR.

Nonethe­less, being Jorge Luis Borges, the writer did not sim­ply lodge cranky com­plaints, how­ev­er polit­i­cal­ly astute, about the game. He wrote a spec­u­la­tive sto­ry about it with his close friend and some­time writ­ing part­ner Adol­fo Bioy Casares. In “Esse Est Per­cipi” (“to be is to be per­ceived”), we learn that soc­cer has “ceased to be a sport and entered the realm of spec­ta­cle,” writes Math­ews: “rep­re­sen­ta­tion of sport has replaced actu­al sport.” The phys­i­cal sta­di­ums crum­ble, while the games are per­formed by “a sin­gle man in a booth or by actors in jer­seys before the TV cam­eras.” An eas­i­ly duped pop­u­lace fol­lows “nonex­is­tent games on TV and the radio with­out ques­tion­ing a thing.”

The sto­ry effec­tive­ly illus­trates Borges’ cri­tique of soc­cer as an intrin­sic part of a mass cul­ture that, Math­ews says, “leaves itself open to dem­a­goguery and manip­u­la­tion.” Borges’ own snob­beries aside, his res­olute sus­pi­cion of mass media spec­ta­cle and the coopt­ing of pop­u­lar cul­ture by polit­i­cal forces seems to me still, as it was in his day, a healthy atti­tude. You can read the full sto­ry here, and an excel­lent crit­i­cal essay on Borges’ polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy here.  For those inter­est­ed in explor­ing Franklin Foer’s book, see How Soc­cer Explains the World: An Unlike­ly The­o­ry of Glob­al­iza­tion.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

via The New Repub­lic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Video: Bob Mar­ley Plays a Soc­cer Match in Brazil, 1980

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Nor­ton Lec­tures On Poet­ry (And Every­thing Else Lit­er­ary)

Jorge Luis Borges Draws a Self-Por­trait After Going Blind

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The 100 Greatest Films of All Time According to 1,639 Film Critics & 480 Directors: See the Results of the Once-a-Decade Sight and Sound Poll

in Film | December 2nd, 2022

Chan­tal Aker­man’s Jeanne Diel­man, 23 quai du Com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles is a three-and-a-half hour film in which noth­ing hap­pens. That, in any case, will be the descrip­tion offered by many who will view it for the first time in the com­ing months. Their curios­i­ty will have been piqued by its tri­umph in the just-released results of Sight and Sound mag­a­zine’s crit­ics poll to deter­mine the great­est films of all time. Con­duct­ed just once per decade since 1952, it has only seen two oth­er top-spot upsets in that time: when Cit­i­zen Kane dis­placed Bicy­cle Thieves in 1962, and when Ver­ti­go dis­placed Cit­i­zen Kane half a cen­tu­ry lat­er.

The top ten on this year’s Sight and Sound crit­ics poll is as fol­lows:

  1. Jeanne Diel­man 23, quai du Com­merce, 1080 Brux­elles (Chan­tal Aker­man, 1975)
  2. Ver­ti­go (Alfred Hitch­cock, 1958)
  3. Cit­i­zen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
  4. Tokyo Sto­ry (Yasu­jirō Ozu, 1953)
  5. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000)
  6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stan­ley Kubrick, 1968)
  7. Beau tra­vail (Claire Denis, 1998)
  8. Mul­hol­land Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
  9. Man with a Movie Cam­era (Dzi­ga Ver­tov, 1929)
  10. Sin­gin’ in the Rain (Gene Kel­ly and Stan­ley Donen, 1952)

Since 1992, the mag­a­zine has also run a sep­a­rate poll that col­lects the votes of not crit­ics but film direc­tors, which this year placed 2001 at num­ber one. Its top ten also includes such selec­tions as Fed­eri­co Fellini’s 8½, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mir­ror, and Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up.

The direc­tors ranked Jeanne Diel­man at a respectable num­ber four, tied with Tokyo Sto­ry. “On the side of con­tent, the film charts the break­down of a bour­geois Bel­gian house­wife, moth­er and part-time pros­ti­tute over the course of three days,” writes film the­o­rist Lau­ra Mul­vey on Sight and Sound’s page for the film.

“On the side of form, it rig­or­ous­ly records her domes­tic rou­tine in extend­ed time and from a fixed cam­era posi­tion.” As you may already imag­ine, these ele­ments — as well as the fact that the title char­ac­ter is played by no less grand a movie star than Del­phine Seyrig — make for a sin­gu­lar view­ing expe­ri­ence.

That title isn’t with­out a cer­tain irony, giv­en how much of the film Aker­man devotes to straight­for­ward depic­tions of a mid­dle-aged woman per­form­ing house­hold chores — tak­ing us far indeed from the domain of, say, Jer­ry Bruck­heimer. “Shot in sta­t­ic, long takes, the film’s pace and tone may first seem slow or dull,” writes Adam Cook in the IndieWire video essay “Chan­tal Aker­man’s Jeanne Diel­man Is a True Action Movie,” but “in observ­ing these house­hold tasks free of periph­ery, they take on a dra­matur­gy of their own.” Only with time and rep­e­ti­tion do “the nuances in Del­phine Seyrig’s expres­sions con­vey vast­ly dif­fer­ent con­no­ta­tions” and “the small­est details take on nar­ra­tive pow­er and sig­nif­i­cance.”

“Her life is orga­nized to allow no gaps in the day,” Aker­man told a tele­vi­sion chat-show audi­ence in 1975, when Jeanne Diel­man had just come out. But “her very struc­tured uni­verse starts to unrav­el,” and “her sub­con­scious express­es itself through a series of lit­tle slip-ups.” In a 2009 inter­view for the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, Aker­man drew con­nec­tions between her char­ac­ter’s reg­i­men­ta­tion and the strict Jew­ish rit­u­als she her­self observed in child­hood: “Know­ing every moment of every day, what she must do the next moment, brings a sort of peace.” When the rou­tine is dis­rupt­ed, “a sus­pense builds, because I think that deep down, we know that some­thing’s going to hap­pen.” On this emo­tion­al lev­el, Jeanne Diel­man is more con­ven­tion­al than it may seem. And to those who can immerse them­selves in it, it feels like the only film in which any­thing does hap­pen.

See the Sight and Sound poll results here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

100 Over­looked Films Direct­ed by Women: See Selec­tions from Sight & Sound Magazine’s New List

103 Essen­tial Films By Female Film­mak­ers: Clue­less, Lost in Trans­la­tion, Ishtar and More

The Ten Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 358 Film­mak­ers

The Ten Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 846 Film Crit­ics

The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Cen­tu­ry (So Far) Named by 177 Film Crit­ics

The Top 100 Amer­i­can Films of All Time, Accord­ing to 62 Inter­na­tion­al Film Crit­ics

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Chemist Alice Ball Pioneered a Treatment for Leprosy in 1915–and Then Others Stole the Credit for It

in Gender, Health, History, Science | December 2nd, 2022


It’s bit­ter­sweet when­ev­er a pio­neer­ing, long over­looked female sci­en­tist is final­ly giv­en the recog­ni­tion she deserves, espe­cial­ly so when the sci­en­tist in ques­tion is a per­son of col­or.

Chemist Alice Ball’s youth and dri­ve — just 23 in 1915, when she dis­cov­ered a gen­tle, but effec­tive method for treat­ing lep­rosy — make her an excel­lent role mod­el for stu­dents with an inter­est in STEM.

But in a move that’s only shock­ing for its famil­iar­i­ty, an oppor­tunis­tic male col­league, Arthur Dean, fina­gled a way to claim cred­it for her work.

We’ve all heard the tales of female sci­en­tists who were inte­gral team play­ers on impor­tant projects, who ulti­mate­ly saw their role vast­ly down­played upon pub­li­ca­tion or their names left off of a pres­ti­gious award.

But Dean’s claim that he was the one who had dis­cov­ered an injectable water-sol­u­ble method for treat­ing lep­rosy with oil from the seeds of the chaul­moogra fruit is all the more galling, giv­en that he did so after Alice Ball’s trag­i­cal­ly ear­ly death at the age of 24, sus­pect­ed to be the result of acci­den­tal poi­son­ing dur­ing a class­room lab demon­stra­tion.

Not every­one believed him.

Ball, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hawaii chem­istry department’s first Black female grad­u­ate stu­dent, and, sub­se­quent­ly, its first Black female chem­istry instruc­tor, had come to the atten­tion of Har­ry T. Holl­mann, a U.S. Pub­lic Health Offi­cer who shared her con­vic­tion that chaul­moogra oil might hold the key to treat­ing lep­rosy.

After her death in 1916, Holl­mann reviewed Dean’s pub­li­ca­tions regard­ing the high­ly suc­cess­ful new lep­rosy treat­ment then referred to as the Dean Method and wrote that he could not see “any improve­ment what­so­ev­er over the orig­i­nal [method] as worked out by Miss Ball:”

After a great amount of exper­i­men­tal work, Miss Ball solved the prob­lem for me by mak­ing the eth­yl esters of the fat­ty acids found in chaul­moogra oil.

Type “the Dean Method lep­rosy” into a search engine and you’ll be reward­ed with a sat­is­fy­ing wealth of Alice Ball pro­files, all of which go into detail regard­ing her dis­cov­ery of what became known as the Ball Method, in use until the 1940s.

Kath­leen M. Wong’s arti­cle on this trail­blaz­ing sci­en­tist in the Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine delves into why Hollmann’s pro­fes­sion­al efforts to posthu­mous­ly con­fer cred­it where cred­it was due were insuf­fi­cient to secure Ball her right­ful place in sci­ence his­to­ry.

That began to change in the 1990s when Stan Ali, a retiree research­ing Black peo­ple in Hawaii, found his inter­est piqued by a ref­er­ence to a “young Negro chemist” work­ing on lep­rosy in The Samar­i­tans of Molokai.

Ali teamed up with Paul Wer­mager, a retired Uni­ver­si­ty of Hawaii librar­i­an, and Kathryn Wad­dell Takara, a poet and pro­fes­sor in the Eth­nic Stud­ies Depart­ment. Togeth­er, they began comb­ing over old sources for any pass­ing ref­er­ence to Ball and her work. They came to believe that her absence from the sci­en­tif­ic record owed to sex­ism and racism:

Dur­ing and just after her life­time, she was believed to be part Hawai­ian, not Black. (Her birth and death cer­tifi­cates list both Ball and her par­ents as white, per­haps to “make trav­el, busi­ness and life in gen­er­al eas­i­er,” accord­ing to the Hon­olu­lu Star-Bul­letin.) In 1910, Black peo­ple made up just 0.4 per­cent of Hawaiʻi’s pop­u­la­tion.

“When [the news­pa­pers] real­ized she was not part Hawai­ian, but [Black], they felt they had made an embar­rass­ing mis­take, for­get­ting about it and hop­ing it would go away,” Ali said. “It did for 75 years.”

Their com­bined efforts spurred the state of Hawaii to declare Feb­ru­ary 28 Alice Ball Day. The Uni­ver­si­ty of Hawaii installed a com­mem­o­ra­tive plaque near a chaul­moogra tree on cam­pus. Her por­trait hangs in the university’s Hamil­ton Library, along­side a posthu­mous­ly award­ed Medal of Dis­tinc­tion.

(“Mean­while,” as Car­lyn L. Tani dry­ly observes in Hon­olu­lu Mag­a­zine, “Dean Hall on the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hawai‘i Mānoa cam­pus stands as an endur­ing mon­u­ment to Arthur L. Dean.)

Fur­ther afield, the Lon­don School of Hygiene and Trop­i­cal Med­i­cine cel­e­brat­ed its 120th anniver­sary by adding Ball’s, Marie Sklodowska-Curie’s and Flo­rence Nightingale’s names to a frieze that had pre­vi­ous­ly hon­ored 23 emi­nent men.

And now, the God­moth­er of Punk Pat­ti Smith has tak­en it upon her­self to intro­duce Ball to an even wider audi­ence, after run­ning across a ref­er­ence to her while con­duct­ing research for her just released A Book of Days.

As Smith notes in an inter­view with Numéro:

Things have real­ly changed. I think we are liv­ing in a very beau­ti­ful peri­od of time because there are so many female artists, poets, sci­en­tists, and activists. Through books espe­cial­ly, we are redis­cov­er­ing and valu­ing the women who have been unjust­ly for­got­ten in our his­to­ry. Dur­ing my research, I came across a young black sci­en­tist who lived in Hawaii in the 1920s. At that time, there was a big lep­er colony in Hawaii. She had dis­cov­ered a treat­ment using the oil from the seeds of a tree to relieve the pain and allow patients to see their friends and fam­i­ly. Her name was Alice Ball, and she died at just 24 after a ter­ri­ble chem­i­cal acci­dent dur­ing an exper­i­ment. Her research was tak­en up by a pro­fes­sor who removed her name from the study to take full cred­it. It is only recent­ly that peo­ple have dis­cov­ered that she was the one who did the work.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Joce­lyn Bell Bur­nell Changed Astron­o­my For­ev­er; Her Ph.D. Advi­sor Won the Nobel Prize for It

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

How the Female Sci­en­tist Who Dis­cov­ered the Green­house Gas Effect Was For­got­ten by His­to­ry

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Per­son to Win Twice, and the Only Per­son in His­to­ry to Win in Two Dif­fer­ent Sci­ences

 

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch Neil Young & Crazy Horse Play & Record the New 15-Minute Track “Chevrolet” for the First Time

in Music | December 1st, 2022

“Chevro­let,” a new track on Neil Young’s 42nd stu­dio album World Record, takes you on a long, ram­bling road trip, cov­er­ing a lot of dif­fer­ent ter­rain over 15 min­utes, with some vers­es last­ing more than two min­utes. Above, you can watch Neil Young and Crazy Horse (Nils Lof­gren, Bil­ly Tal­bot and Ralph Moli­na) play the song for the very first time.  It’s also the same cut that appears on the album. It’s a pret­ty remark­able dis­play of musi­cian­ship, and a great new Neil Young track.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

Neil Young Plays “Hey, Hey, My, My” with Devo: Watch a Clas­sic Scene from the Impro­vised Movie Human High­way (1980)

Neil Young Releas­es a Nev­er-Before-Heard Ver­sion of His 1979 Clas­sic, “Pow­derfin­ger”: Stream It Online

When Neil Young & Rick “Super Freak” James Formed the 60’s Motown Band, The Mynah Birds

“More Barn!” The Sto­ry of How Neil Young First Played Har­vest for Gra­ham Nash (1972)

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A Chinese Painter Specializing in Copying Van Gogh Paintings Travels to Amsterdam & Sees Van Gogh’s Masterpieces for the First Time

in Art | December 1st, 2022

There are many rea­sons to look down on art forgery, from its ille­gal­i­ty to its lack of orig­i­nal­i­ty. But much like any oth­er human endeav­or, you need a great deal of skill and sta­mi­na to do it well. Cer­tain indi­vid­ual forg­ers have lived on in his­to­ry: Han Van Meegeren, say, who tricked the Nazis with his Ver­meers, or Elmyr de Hory, whose skills at imi­tat­ing the styles of Picas­so, Matisse, Modigliani, and Renoir land­ed him in Orson Welles’ F for Fake. If Zhao Xiaoy­ong does­n’t yet fig­ure among the names of the best-known art forg­ers, it’s not because nobody’s made a movie about him.

That movie is Yu Hai­bo and Kiki Tian­qi Yu’s doc­u­men­tary Chi­na’s Van Goghs, which you can watch just above. Much of it takes place in the vil­lage of Dafen in Chi­na’s Guang­dong province, home to thou­sands and thou­sands of oil painters, all of whom make their liv­ing mak­ing repli­cas (in var­i­ous sizes) of famous paint­ings by the likes of Leonar­do, Rem­brandt, Dalí, Basquiat, and — above all, it seems — Van Gogh. It speaks to the speed and scale of mod­ern Chi­nese indus­try that this activ­i­ty began only in 1989, but grew such that, at one point, Dafen was sup­ply­ing 60 per­cent of the oil paint­ings in the world.

Zhao arrived in Dafen in the ear­ly nine­teen-nineties, but still got into its nascent indus­try quite ear­ly on. “Back then, paint­ing in the vil­lage hadn’t scaled up yet,” he writes in an essay at The World of Chi­nese. “I was moved the first time I saw the oil paint­ings there. They were so del­i­cate. The people’s eyes and skin looked so vivid, so alive.” In Dafen’s small fac­to­ries, “all of the painters there were rush­ing to fill orders, so nobody was going to hold my hand.” After his first batch of sales, he made him­self a promise to “mas­ter the works of Van Gogh.”

At the time, Zhao would have had no way of know­ing how close he would even­tu­al­ly get to those works. Even when he estab­lished him­self to the point that he could start his own stu­dio, the dream of vis­it­ing Van Gogh’s home­land — as opposed to sell­ing copies of Van Gogh’s art to Van Gogh’s own coun­try­men — must have seemed far off. But then the doc­u­men­tar­i­ans came call­ing: “They want­ed to make a film about my life. With their encour­age­ment and sup­port, I made a trip to Ams­ter­dam.” (In the film, that trip begins at the 46:23 mark.)

See­ing the very same Van Goghs he’d copied count­less many times before, Zhao encoun­tered more “del­i­cate brush­strokes and sub­dued col­ors” than he’d ever noticed before, among oth­er phys­i­cal signs that Van Gogh “must have been try­ing dif­fer­ent things all the time.” After get­ting back to Chi­na, he found that his expe­ri­ence in Ams­ter­dam had moti­vat­ed him to paint not Van Gogh’s work but his own. “My wife had been with me for so many years, and we’d paint­ed for so long, but she didn’t have a paint­ing of her­self, Zhou writes. “The first orig­i­nal paint­ing I did was of my wife.” The future of Dafen may be in doubt, but Zhou’s com­mit­ment to art cer­tain­ly isn’t.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Anato­my of a Fake: Forgery Experts Reveal 5 Ways To Spot a Fake Paint­ing by Jack­son Pol­lock (or Any Oth­er Artist)

Meet Noto­ri­ous Art Forg­er Han Van Meegeren, Who Fooled the Nazis with His Coun­ter­feit Ver­meers

What Hap­pens When a Cheap Ikea Print Gets Pre­sent­ed as Fine Art in a Muse­um

Illus­tra­tions for a Chi­nese Lord of the Rings in a Stun­ning “Glass Paint­ing Style”

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Succession Star Brian Cox Teaches Hamlet’s Soliloquy to a 2‑Year-Old Child

in Theatre | December 1st, 2022

Per­haps you’ve seen Scot­tish actor Bri­an Cox per­form with the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny in crit­i­cal­ly-acclaimed per­for­mances of The Tam­ing of The Shrew and Titus Andron­i­cus. Or, more like­ly, you’ve seen him in the block­buster HBO series, Suc­ces­sion. But there’s per­haps anoth­er role you haven’t seen him in: tutor of tod­dlers. A num­ber of years back, Cox taught Theo, then only 30 months old, the famous solil­o­quy from Ham­let, hop­ing to show there’s a Shake­speare­an actor in all of us. Lat­er, Cox talked to the BBC about his “mas­ter­class” with Theo and what he took away from the expe­ri­ence. Watch him muse right below:

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bri­an Cox of “Suc­ces­sion” Read Hunter S. Thompson’s Pro­fan­i­ty-Laden Let­ter

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

The His­to­ry of Ancient Rome in 20 Quick Min­utes: A Primer Nar­rat­ed by Bri­an Cox

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back
Quantcast