Watch the Full Set of Joni Mitchell’s Amazing Comeback Performance at the Newport Folk Festival

in Music | August 4th, 2022

“She’s doing something very, very brave right now for you guys. This is a trust fall, and she picked the right people to do this with.” — Brandi Carlile introducing Joni Mitchell at the Newport Folk Festival, 2022

Comeback queen Joni Mitchell stunned fans with her recent appearance at the Newport Folk Festival this summer, her first full public concert since 2000. In Newport tradition, surprise stars make an appearance every year. Former guests have included Dolly Parton, Chaka Khan, and Mitchell’s friend David Crosby. Mitchell’s arrival this year was a revelation. She appeared out of the blue, when most people reasonably assumed she’d never perform again after suffering a debilitating brain aneurysm in 2015 that left her unable to speak or walk.

Yet, as we pointed out in an earlier post, Mitchell’s return to the stage has been years in the making. Since her aneurysm, she has confounded even the neurosurgeons with her recovery, teaching herself to play guitar again by watching online videos and learning to sing again not long after she re-learned how to get out of bed. When Mitchell’s longtime friend Brandi Carlile announced her arrival on the stage with, “This scene shall forever be known henceforth as the Joni Jam!,” Carlile referred to years of recent musical get-togethers in Mitchell’s living room.

The “Joni Jams” at Mitchell’s Los Angeles home included “a very special circle of friends,” music writer and radio host Aimsel Ponti notes, including “Herbie Hancock, Paul McCartney, Elton John and Bonnie Raitt. Mostly, from the way Carlile described it, Joni would crack jokes and take it all in rather than participate all that much.” But she was listening, learning, and becoming inspired by her peers and the younger artists who joined her onstage: Carlile, Wynonna Judd, Marcus Mumford, and others. As Carlile finished her own Newport set, the stage filled with cushiony chairs and couches, and several more musicians.

“We’re here to invite you into the living room,” Carlile says in her passionate introduction (above), while the audience holds their breath awaiting the announcement of her special guest. Then Carlile “told us about all of Joni’s pets and her many orchids and the hidden door to the bathroom,” writes Ponti. “Then she told us how it doesn’t feel complete without Joni there to crack jokes and nod with approval.” Then her hero took the stage to gasps, in a blue beret and sunglasses, and hundreds of fans born too late to see her in her glory days wept as she joined with Carlile on the first song, “Carey.” The New York Times’ Lindsay Zoladz describes the moment:

When Mitchell first came out onstage, she seemed a tad overwhelmed, clinging to her cane and backing up Carlile, who took the lead on a breezy, celebratory “Carey.” But over the course of that song, a visible change came over Mitchell. Her shoulders loosened. She began to shimmy. And all at once she seemed to regain her voice — her voice, sonorous and light, seeming to dance over those balletic melodies at a jazzy tempo all her own.

The first time Mitchell took the stage at Newport in 1967, she came at the behest of Judy Collins. She was a young unknown, about to become a folk goddess. When she returned to Newport in 1969, she was a star in her own right. Over the decades, she has left fans with memories of her performances that they have guarded like treasures as they’ve aged with her. (The Guardian has collected a few of these poignant reminisces.) Now she’s an inspiration to an entirely new young generation and, one hopes, to older artists who might feel they have little left to contribute.

“The 78-year-old Mitchell’s performance,” Kirthana Ramisetti writes at Salon, “showcased an artist transcending the challenges of aging and serious health issues.… To hear music written in the full blossom of her youth, yet performed with a weightiness and knowing perspective from having weathered so much in her life, arguably gave these songs a greater power than when they were first recorded.”

Such is often the case with artists as they mature beyond youthful sentiments and grow into their youthful precocity. (It has been so for Paul Simon, whose own reappearance at Newport this year seems overshadowed by Mitchell’s comeback.) Ramisetti quotes Mitchell’s “The Circle Game,” with which she closed out her surprise set — “We’re captive on the carousel of time / We can’t return, we can only look behind from where we came.”

Watch Mitchell’s full live Newport set (in jumbled order) at the top of the post (or on this playlist), and see the setlist of originals and classic covers from her historic performance just below.

Carey

Come in From the Cold

Help Me

Case of You

Big Yellow Taxi

Just Like This Train

Why Do Fools Fall in Love

Amelia

Love Potion #9

Shine

Summertime

Both Sides Now

The Circle Game

Joni Mitchell Sings “Both Sides Now” at the Newport Folk Festival: Watch Clips from Her First Full Concert Since 2002

Hear Demos & Outtakes of Joni Mitchell’s Blue on the 50th Anniversary of the Classic Album

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

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How Paul Simon Wrote “The Boxer”

in Music | August 4th, 2022

The wordless chorus has become a gimmick in sing-along balladry and throwaway pop. Done badly, it sounds like lazy songwriting or — to take a phrase from Somerset Maugham — “unearned emotion.” At its best, a wordless chorus is a moment of sublimity, expressing beauty or tragedy before which language fails. Either way, it usually starts as a placeholder, in brackets. (As in, “we’ll put something better here when we get around to it.”) Only later in the songwriting process does it become a choice.

In what may be one of the greatest choices of wordless choruses on record, Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” channels its raw power in only two repeated syllables (and possibly a word?): “Lie-la-lie, Lie-la-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie.…” The chorus of Paul Simon’s hit from 1970’s Bridge Over Troubled Water needs no more elaboration than the “arresting whipcrack of a snare drum” (played by wrecking crew drummer Hal Blaine), Dan Einav writes at Financial Times:

[The Boxer] was the result of a painstaking and protracted recording process that took more than 100 hours, used numerous backing musicians and even spanned a number of locations — from Nashville, to St Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University, to the somewhat less ethereal setting of a hallway abutting an echoey elevator shaft at one of Columbia Records’ New York studios.

Simon’s epic narrative song was hardly like “the unvarnished, homespun records that were perhaps more closely associated with folk music at the time,” and that was exactly the idea.

Some saw the “lie-la-lie” as a dig at Bob Dylan’s inauthentic presentation as a Woody Guthrie-like figure. Simon debunked the theory in a 1984 interview quoted in the Polyphonic video at the top. “I think the song was about me: everybody’s beating me up.” He explained the theme of the beaten but unbowed contender as coming out of the figurative drubbing he and Art Garfunkel had taken from the critics:

For the first few years, it was just praise. It took two or three years for people to realize that we weren’t strange creatures that emerged from England but just two guys from Queens who used to sing rock ‘n’ roll. And maybe we weren’t real folkies at all! May we weren’t even hippies!”

He wisely steered the song away from a narrative about a guy who wasn’t even a hippie. And being a guy from Queens, he could tell a New York Story like few others could. Simon references his frustration at being misunderstood, but his protagonist’s struggle to make it in the big city is far more universal than a songwriter’s angst.

The boxer is an “archetypal character representative of the struggle and loneliness that can come with working class life,” notes Polyphonic. “The second verse is a careful portrait of this existence, depicting the boxer as a young man trying to find his footing in a harsh world.”

When I left my home and my family
I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of the railway station
Running scared
Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters
Where the ragged people go
Looking for the places
Only they would know

The middle-class Simon didn’t live this character’s life, nor did he pursue a boxing career. But his ability to imagine the lives of others through story-songs like “The Boxer” has been one of his greatest strengths as a writer. Simon’s narrative gift served him well over and over in his career, and has served his fans. We can feel the feelings of Simon’s schoolyard delinquent, his frustrated lover looking for a way out, and his bitter, down-and-out tragic hero trying to make it in the big city, whether or not we’ve been there ourselves.

In the videos above, you can learn more about the writing of this classic cry of desperation and struggle from Polyphonic; and, learn about the recording from musicians who played on it, including drummer Hal Blaine. Then, see Simon and Garfunkel fill out the song’s melody with their timeless harmonies live in Central Park, and, just above, see Simon by himself in 2020, playing a solo version dedicated to his fellow New Yorkers combating the fear and suffering of COVID during lockdown.

Paul Simon Tells the Story of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970)

Paul Simon Deconstructs “Mrs. Robinson” (1970)

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

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The Oldest Tattoos Ever Discovered on an Egyptian Mummy Date Back 5,000 Years

in History | August 3rd, 2022

Some histories tell us more about their narrators than their characters. The story of tattoos in ancient Egypt is one example. While tattoos and other forms of body modification have been part of nearly every ancient culture, Egyptologists have found many more tattooed female than male mummies at ancient burial sites. Since tattooing seemed to be an almost “exclusively female practice in ancient Egypt,” writes archeologist Joann Fletcher, “mummies found with tattoos were usually dismissed by the (male) excavators who seemed to assume the women were of ‘dubious status,’ described in some cases as ‘dancing girls.’ ”

There is no evidence, however, to suggest that tattoos in ancient Egypt specifically marked dancers, prostitutes, concubines, or individuals of a lower class (and thus of little interest to some early archaeologists). One mummy described as a concubine “was actually a high-status priestess named Amunet, as revealed by her funerary inscriptions.” Early archaeologists stubbornly clung to derogatory 19th-century assumptions about tattoos (and class, dancing, sex, and religion), even when discussing tattooed Egyptian women whose burials obviously showed they were priestesses or extended members of a royal family.

Until relatively recently, “the most conclusive evidence of Egyptian tattoos,” writes Joshua Mark at the World History Encyclopedia, “dates the practice to the Middle Kingdom” — spanning the 11th through the 13th Dynasties (approximately 2040 to 1782 BC). In 2018, however, researchers at the British Museum took another look at two naturally mummified 5,000-year-old Predynastic bodies, one male one female, dating from between 3351 and 3017 BC. They looked specifically for signs of body modification that might have gone unseen by earlier Egyptologists.

Known as the Gebelein predynastic mummies, these bodies are two of six excavated at the end of the 1800s by Egyptologist Sir Wallis Budge. Through the use of CT scanning, radiocarbon dating and infrared imaging, the British Museum has found that previously unexamined marks “push back the evidence for tattooing in Africa by a millennium,” the Museum blog notes, describing the findings in detail.

The male mummy, called “Gebelein Man A,” showed a design on his bicep:

Dark smudges on his arm, appearing as faint markings under natural light, had remained unexamined. Infrared photography recently revealed that these smudges were in fact tattoos of two slightly overlapping horned animals. The horned animals have been tentatively identified as a wild bull (long tail, elaborate horns) and a Barbary sheep (curving horns, humped shoulder). Both animals are well known in Predynastic Egyptian art. The designs are not superficial and have been applied to the dermis layer of the skin, the pigment was carbon-based, possibly some kind of soot.

The female mummy, or “Gebelein Woman,” showed more intelligible markings:

[A] series of four small ‘S’ shaped motifs can be seen running vertically over her right shoulder. Below them on the right arm is a linear motif which is similar to objects held by figures participating in ceremonial activities on painted ceramics of the same period. It may represent a crooked stave, a symbol of power and status, or a throw-stick or baton/clappers used in ritual dance. The ‘S’ motif also appears on Predynastic pottery decoration, always in multiples.

In Middle Kingdom tattooing practices, a series of marks seemed to provide protection, especially in fertility and childbirth rites, functioning as permanent amulets or a kind of practical magic. Even if their meanings remain unclear, Marks writes, it does, “seem evident that they had an array of implications and that women of many different social classes chose to wear them.” And it does seem clear that tattooing was important to ancient, Predynastic men and women, maybe for similar reasons. Tattooing tools have also been found dating from around the same time as the Gebelein mummies, excavated at Abydos and consisting of “sharp metal points with a wooden handle.”

The dating of Gebelein Man A and Gebelein Woman place them as approximate contemporaries of Ötzi, a naturally mummified man covered in tattoos. Discovered in 1991 on the border of Austria and Italy, Ötzi was previously considered the oldest tattooed mummy. You can learn more about how the British Museum re-examined the Gebelein bodies in the “Curator’s Corner” video above with curator of physical anthropology Daniel Antoine. Read more about the findings at the British Museum’s blog and the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The Met Digitally Restores the Colors of an Ancient Egyptian Temple, Using Projection Mapping Technology

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Original Colors Still In It

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

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The Evolution of Music: 40,000 Years of Music History Covered in 8 Minutes

in History, Music | August 3rd, 2022

“We’re drowning in music,” says Michael Spitzer, professor of music at the University of Liverpool. “If you were born in Beethoven’s time, you’d be lucky if you heard a symphony twice in your lifetime, whereas today, it’s as accessible as running water.” We shouldn’t take music, or running water, for granted, and the comparison should give us pause: do we need music –- for example, nearly any recording of any Beethoven symphony we can think of -– to flow out of the tap on demand? What does it cost us? Might there be a middle way between hearing Beethoven whenever and hearing Beethoven almost never?

The story of how humanity arrived at its current relationship with music is the subject of the Big Think interview with Spitzer above, in which he covers 40,000 years in 8 minutes: “from bone flutes to Beyoncé.” We begin with his thesis that “we in the West” think of music history as the history of great works and great composers. This misconception “tends to reduce music into an object,” and a commodity. Furthermore, we “overvalue the role of the composer,” placing the professional over “most people who are innately musical.” Spitzer wants to recover the universality music once had, before radios, record players, and streaming media.

For nearly all of human history, until Edison invents the phonograph in 1877, we had no way of preserving sound. If people wanted music, they had to make it themselves. And before humans made instruments, we had the human voice, a unique development among primates that allowed us to vocalize our emotions. Spitzer’s book The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth tells the story of humanity through the development of music, which, as Matthew Lyons points out in a review, came before every other metric of modern human civilization:

The earliest known purpose-built musical instrument is some forty thousand years old. Found at Geissenklösterle in what is now southeastern Germany, it is a flute made from the radial bone of a vulture. Remarkably, the five holes bored into the bone create a five-note, or pentatonic, scale. Which is to say, before agriculture, religion, settlement – all the things we might think of as early signs of civilisation – palaeolithic men and women were already familiar with the concept of pitch.

If music is so critical to our social development as a species, we should learn to treat it with the respect it deserves. We should also, Spitzer argues, learn to play and sing for ourselves again, and think of music not only as a thing that other, more talented people produce for our consumption, but as our own evolutionary inheritance, passed down over tens of thousands of years.

Listen to the Oldest Song in the World: A Sumerian Hymn Written 3,400 Years Ago

See Ancient Greek Music Accurately Reconstructed for the First Time

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

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The Women of the Bauhaus: See Hip, Avant-Garde Photographs of Female Students & Instructors at the Famous Art School

in Art | August 2nd, 2022

Take a look at photos of Bush Tetras — a three-girl-one-guy No Wave/Post-Punk band from the early 1980s downtown Manhattan scene. Now, look at the photograph above, “Marcel Breuer and His Harem,” by Bauhaus photographer Erich Consemüller, taken sometime around 1927. Except for the fact that Breuer looks more like Ron Mael of Sparks sans mustache than drummer Dee Pop, one might mistake this for a photo of the punk band. This raises a few questions: did art students Bush Tetras look to the women of the Bauhaus for their style? Or did the women of the Bauhaus look to the future and see punk? The second scenario seems more likely since the women of Bauhaus have not, until recently, been terribly well-known.

I personally feel cheated after studying art and art history in college many years ago and only now getting introduced to several significant artists of the radical German art school founded by Walter Gropius. All of its famous exponents and art stars are men, but it seems the gender ratio of the Bauhaus was closer to that of the general population (as was, in many cases, that of the early punk and post-punk scenes).

But we don’t tend to learn the names or see the work of these artists, and, in some cases, their work has been posthumously attributed to their male colleagues. Nor are we familiar with their progressive personal style, essential in Bauhaus’s total approach to revolutionizing the arts, including fashion, as a way to liberate humanity from the dogmas of the past.

How unfortunate that the memory of Bauhaus, like the memory of punk, replicated the same old rules its artists broke. The school’s gender equality was radical, hence the photograph’s satirical title, which “expresses the precise opposite of what the photo itself shows,” notes the site Bauhaus Kooperation: “the modernity, emancipation, equality, or even superiority, of the women in it.” The “junior master” of the carpentry workshop, Breuer looks at the three artists to his left “skeptically, with his arms crossed,” as if to say, “ ‘These are ‘my’ women?!’ ” The artists of the “harem,” from left to right, are Breuer’s wife Martha Erps, Katt Both, and the photographer’s wife, Ruth Hollós, who “seems to be suppressing laughter as she looks towards the photographer (her husband).”

Erich Consemüller, who taught architecture at the Bauhaus, had been tasked by Gropius with documenting the school and its life. Gropius partnered him with photographer Lucia Moholy, wife of László Moholy-Nagy (see a photo of her above, taken by her husband sometime between 1924–28). Moholy took mostly exterior shots like the photograph by her further up of Erps and Hollós on the roof of the Atelierhaus in Dessau in the mid 1920s. Consemüller mainly focused on interiors in his work, with experimental exceptions like the “Mechanical Fantasy” series seen here, which uses clothing, poses, and double exposures to visually emphasize a kind of uniformity of purpose, placing and joining male and female Bauhaus artists in almost typographical arrangements.

Indeed, nearly all of the artists of the Bauhaus — as was the school’s practice — tried their hand at photography, and many used the medium to document, in ways both casual and deliberate, the Bauhaus’ commitment to gender equity and the full inclusion of women artists in its programs, a statement painter and photographer T. Lux Feininger seems to underline in the group photograph below of the school’s weavers on the steps of the new Bauhaus building in 1927. (Artists in the shot: Léna Bergner, Gunta Stölzl, Ljuba Monastirsky, Otti Berger, Lis Beyer, Elisabeth Mueller, Rosa Berger, Ruth Hollós, and Lisbeth Oestreicher.)

Bauhaus artists, both men and women, were very much like early punks in some ways, inventing new ways to shake up the establishment and break out of prescribed roles. But instead of a downtown alternative to the status quo, they offered a recipe for its full transformation through art. Who can say how far that movement would have progressed had it not been splintered by the Nazis. “Together,” as Gropius wrote, “let us call for, devise, and create the construction of the future, comprising everything in one form, architecture, sculpture and painting,” and most everything else in the built and visual environments, he might have added.

via Barbara Hershey

The Politics & Philosophy of the Bauhaus Design Movement: A Short Introduction

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Documentary That Celebrates the 100th Anniversary of Germany’s Legendary Art, Architecture & Design School

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

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The Last Cigarette Commercial Ever Aired on American TV (1971)

in History, Television | August 2nd, 2022

The slogan “You’ve come a long way, baby” still has some pop-cultural currency. But how many Americans under the age of sixty remember what it advertised? The line was first rolled out in 1968 to promote Virginia Slims, the then-new brand of cigarettes marketed explicitly to women. “Every ad in the campaign put a woman front and center, equating smoking Virginia Slims with being independent, stylish, confident and liberated,” says the American Association of Advertising Agencies. “The slogan itself spoke directly about the progress women all over America were fighting for.”

Such was the zeitgeist power of Virginia Slims that they became the very last cigarette brand ever advertised on American TV, at 11:59 p.m on January 2, 1971, during The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon had signed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned cigarette advertisements on broadcast media, on April 1, 1970. But it didn’t take effect immediately, the tobacco industry having managed to negotiate for itself one last chance to air commercials during the college football games of New Year’s Day 1971.

“The Philip Morris company has bought all commercial time on the first half hour of all the network talk shows tonight,” says ABC’s Harry Reasoner on a newscast from that same day. “That is, the last half hour on which it is legal to sell cigarettes on radio or television in the United States. This marks, as we like to say, the end of an era.” In tribute, ABC put together an assemblage of past cigarette commercials. That some will feel oddly familiar even to those of us who wouldn’t be born for a decade or two speaks to the power of mass media in postwar America. More than half a century later, now that cigarettes are seldom glimpsed even on dramatic television, all this feels almost surrealistically distant in history.

Equally striking, certainly by contrast to the manner of news anchors in the twenty-twenties, is the poetry of Reasoner’s reflection on the just-closed chapter of television history. “It isn’t like saying goodbye to an old friend, I guess, because the doctors have convinced us they aren’t old friends,” he admits. “But we may be pardoned, I think, on dim winter nights in the future, sitting by the fire and nodding and saying, ‘Remember L.S./M.F.T.? Remember Glen Gray playing smoke rings for the Camel caravan? Remember ‘Nature in the raw is seldom mild’? Remember all those girls who who had it all together?’ ”

Related content:

When the Flintstones Peddled Cigarettes

Cigarette Commercials from David Lynch, the Coen Brothers and Jean Luc Godard

Two Short Films on Coffee and Cigarettes from Jim Jarmusch & Paul Thomas Anderson

Glorious Early 20th-Century Japanese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

How Edward Munch Signaled His Bohemian Rebellion with Cigarettes (1895): A Video Essay

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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As Star Trek’s Lieutenant Uhura, Nichelle Nichols (RIP) Starred in “TV’s First Interracial Kiss” in 1968

in History, Television | August 1st, 2022

The original Star Trek ran for only three seasons, but in that short time it had, to put it mildly, an outsized cultural impact. That partly had to do with the series having aired in the late nineteen-sixties, an era when a host of long-standing norms in American society (as well as in other societies across the world) seemed to have come up for re-negotiation. Through its science-fictional premises and twenty-third-century setting, Star Trek could deal with the present in ways that would have been difficult for other, ostensibly more realistic programs.

In “Plato’s Stepchildren,” an episode from 1968, several members of the Enterprise’s crew find themselves captive on a planet of telekinetic, ancient-Greece-worshipping sadists. It was there that Star Trek staged one of its most memorable moments, a kiss between William Shatner’s Captain Kirk and the late Nichelle Nichols’ Lieutenant Uhura. It arises not out of a relationship that has developed organically between the characters, but out of compulsion by the powers of their “Platonian” captors, who force the humans to perform for their entertainment.

Despite that narrative loophole, the scene nevertheless worried the management at NBC. They imagined that, given that Shatner was white and Nichols black, to show them kissing would provoke a negative reaction among viewers in parts of the country historically hostile to the idea of romantic relations between those races. Ensuring that the scene made it to the air as written (Nichols later remembered in her autobiography) necessitated such tactics as sabotaging the alternate takes shot without the kiss: “Bill shook me and hissed menacingly in his best ham-fisted Kirkian staccato delivery, ‘I! WON’T! KISS! YOU! I! WON’T! KISS! YOU!’ ”

The Kirk-Uhura kiss did occasion a great many responses, practically all of them positive. That Nichols and Shatner — not to mention Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and all their other collaborators – pulled it off in the right way at the right moment is evidenced by its being remembered more than 50 years later as “TV’s First Interracial Kiss.” In fact there had been interracial kisses on television for at least a decade (one, on a 1958 Ed Sullivan Show, involved Shatner himself), but none had made quite such a convincing statement, even to skeptics. “I am totally opposed to the mixing of the races,” as Nichols remembered one viewer writing in. “However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain’t gonna fight it.”

Star Trek‘s Nichelle Nichols Creates a Short Film for NASA to Recruit New Astronauts (1977)

Watch the First-Ever Kiss on Film Between Two Black Actors, Just Honored by the Library of Congress (1898)

Watch Edith+Eddie, an Intense, Oscar-Nominated Short Film About America’s Oldest Interracial Newlyweds

William Shatner in Tears After Becoming the Oldest Person in Space: ‘I’m So Filled with Emotion … I Hope I Never Recover from This”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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Watch a Complete Mini-Series Adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

in Film, Literature | August 1st, 2022

Not long after publishing his most beloved novel Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy gave away his wealth, renounced his aristocratic privileges, and embraced the life of a peasant. His extreme experiment in Christian anarchism notwithstanding, however, Tolstoy was fascinated by new technology and allowed himself to be photographed and filmed near the end of his life. On one occasion, he supposedly confessed a love of the cinema to his visitors and told them he was thinking of writing “a play for the screen” on a “bloody theme.”

“All the same,” argues Rosamund Bartlett at the OUP blog, Tolstoy “would probably have taken a dim view of the twenty odd screen adaptations of Anna Karenina.” The author died the year before the first filmed adaptation of his work, a silent French/Russian adaptation of Anna Karenina made in 1911. Five more would follow before Greta Garbo stepped into the role for a loose 1927 adaptation titled Love, then again a 1935 film version directed by Clarence Brown, with Fredric March as Vronsky and Garbo as the “most famous and critically-acclaimed of all the Annas Karenina,” Dan Sheehan writes at LitHub.

Garbo’s version is often considered the pinnacle of Tolstoy film adaptations — largely because of Garbo. Or as Graham Greene wrote then, “it is Greta Garbo’s personality which ‘makes’ this film, which fills the mold of the neat respectful adaptation with some kind of sense of the greatness of the novel.” The problem of adaptations — of great novels in general, and of Tolstoy’s in particular — is that they must reduce too much complexity, cut out too many characters and vital subplots, and boil down the wider themes of the book to focus almost solely on the tragic romance at its center.

Maybe this is what Tolstoy meant when he allegedly called the camera (“the little clicking contraption with the revolving handle”) a “direct attack on the old methods of literary art.” Novels were not meant to be films. They’re too loose and expansive. “We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine,” Tolstoy presciently noted, aware that film required an entirely different conception of narrative art. Adaptations of Anna continue to proliferate nonetheless in the 21st century, from Joe Wright’s 2012 adaptation with Kiera Knightley to, most recently, Netflix’s first Russian original drama series with Svetlana Khodchenkova as the title character.

Tolstoy scholars largely echo what I suspect Tolstoy himself might have thought of filmed versions of his novel. As Carol Apollonio put it in a recent online discussion, “If you want Anna Karenina, read it again (and again). If you want something else, then read or watch that, but don’t assume it has a lot to do with Tolstoy.” That said, we bring you yet another adaptation of Anna Karenina, just above, a mini-series from 2013 starring Vittoria Puccini, Santiago Cabrera, Benjamin Sadler, and Max von Thun. Its setting and costuming are period-correct, but does it meet the exacting literary standard of the original? Of course not.

Film versions of novels can’t approximate literature. But a good adaptation of Anna Karenina, whether set in 19th-century Russia, 21st-century Australia, or entirely — as in Joe Wright’s 2012 film — on a stage, can convey “the emotional tragedy of Anna’s story,” Apollonio writes. Adaptations shouldn’t just illustrate their sources faithfully, nor should they take so much license that the source becomes irrelevant. They are always tied in some way to the original, and thus in every cinematic Anna is a little bit of Tolstoy. But you’ll have to read, or reread, the novel to see how much of it the series above captures, and how much it frustratingly leaves out.

Watch the Hugely-Ambitious Soviet Film Adaptation of War and Peace Free Online (1966–67)

An Animated Introduction to Leo Tolstoy, and How His Great Novels Can Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

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

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The Inventive Artwork of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett

in Art, Music | August 1st, 2022

We’ve had fun at the expense of the multi-hyphenate: i.e. “I’m an actor-slash-drummer-slash-makeup-artist-slash-brand-ambassador,” etc…. And, fair enough. Few people are good enough at their one job to reasonably excel at two or three, right? But then again, we live in the kind of hyperspecialized world Henry Ford could only dream of, and consider ourselves highly favored if we’re allowed to be just the one thing long enough to retire and do nothing.

What if we could have multiple identities without being thought of as unserious, eccentric, or mentally ill?

Discussions of Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s founding singer and guitarist, never pass without reference to his mental illness and abrupt disappearance from the stage. But they also rarely engage with Barrett as an artist post-Pink Floyd: namely, his two underrated solo albums; and his output as a painter, the medium in which he began his career and to which he returned for the last thirty years of his life.

If Barrett were allowed a role other than crazy diamond (a role, we must allow, assigned to him by his former bandmates), we might see more of his work in gallery collections and exhibitions. One cannot say this about every famous musician who paints. For Barrett, art was not a hobby, and it called to him before music. It was in his student days at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology that he met David Gilmour. From Cambridge he moved to Camberwell College of Arts in London and began to produce and exhibit mature student work (see here).

Barrett’s work “shows some of the advantages of an art school training,” wrote a reviewer of a 1964 exhibition. “He is already showing himself a sensitive handler of oil paint who wisely limits his palette to gain richness and density.” (Barrett had displayed a prodigious early talent for achieving these qualities in watercolor — see, for example, an impressive, impressionistic still-life of orange dahlias, auctioned off in 2021, made when the artist was only 15.)

His training gave him the confidence to break away from formal exercises during this period and experiment with different styles and subjects, from the disturbing, primitivist Lions to the hollow-eyed, Munch-like Portrait of a Girl. Barrett’s first student period ended in the mid-sixties, as Pink Floyd began to take off and Barrett “turned into a songwriter” (then-manager Andrew King later wrote) “it seemed like overnight.”

After his spell with Pink Floyd and brief solo recording career came to an end, Barrett moved back to Cambridge with his mother in 1978, dropped the nickname “Syd” and began painting again as Roger Barrett, avoiding any mention of life in music. From that year until he died, he worked in several styles and different media, painting striking abstractions and landscapes and even making his own furniture designs.

While he burned many canvases, many from this time survive. See a selected chronology of his work in the video above and in the photos here. Try to put aside the story of Syd Barrett the tragic Pink Floyd frontman, and let the work of Roger Barrett the artist inspire you.

via BoingBoing

Understanding Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, Their Tribute to Departed Bandmate Syd Barrett

Watch David Gilmour Play the Songs of Syd Barrett, with the Help of David Bowie & Richard Wright

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Quentin Tarantino & Roger Avary Rewatch Cult-Classic Movies on Their New Video Archives Podcast

in Film, Podcasts | July 29th, 2022

Quentin Tarantino has countless fans all around the world, increasingly many of whom are too young to ever have rented a tape from a video store. But when those twenty-something cinephiles learn his origin story as a filmmaker, they must suspect they missed out on a valuable experience in the VHS era, whatever its inconveniences. When Tarantino broke out in the nineteen-nineties with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, he was publicly celebrated not just for those films, but for his having made them as a video-store-clerk-turned-auteur.

Indeed, it really does seem true that Tarantino’s cinematic sensibility owes something to the years he’d spent exercising his movie expertise behind the counter at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach. When the store closed in 1995, the freshly ascendant Tarantino seized the opportunity to buy up its thousands of VHS tapes. Roger Avary, his fellow Archives alumnus and collaborator on the screenplay for Pulp Fiction, bought the Laserdiscs. Though much of Avary’s collection has succumbed to the “disc rot” that notoriously afflicts that format, Tarantino’s collection has held up for more than a quarter-century.

Now Tarantino’s private tape stash provides the material for his and Avary’s latest collaboration: The Video Archives Podcast, to which you can listen on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Stitcher. On it, the two of them aim to re-create the vehemently cinephile environment of Video Archives by discussing the movies from its stock — after watching them on the actual VHS tapes the store once rented out. As Tarantino explains it, each episode of The Video Archives Podcast will feature three titles. But the conversations will go well beyond the films themselves, involving details of the particular home-video releases popped into the VCR as well as the history of the distributors that put them out.

Naturally, the hosts also get into their personal histories with these movies — which in some cases go back nearly 50 years — as film-lovers and filmmakers. Owing to the need to introduce the show itself, in the first episode they discuss only two pictures, both from the nineteen-seventies: John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon’s anti-establishment sci-fi comedy Dark Star, followed by Ulli Lommel’s rock-Mafia drama Cocaine Cowboys, which features a cameo from Andy Warhol. Representing a younger generation is Avary’s daughter Gala, producer of the podcast, who in a mid-show segment (and her own after-show) offers another perspective on the movies of the week. She clearly knows how to appreciate a cult classic, even if she’s never paid a late fee in her life.

via IndieWire

Quentin Tarantino Reviews Movies: From Dunkirk and King of New York, to Soul Brothers of Kung Fu & More

Quentin Tarantino Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

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

The Last Video Store: A Short Documentary on How the World’s Oldest Video Store Still Survives Today

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Scenes from The Wizard of Oz Remastered in Brilliant 4K Detail: Behold the Work of a Creative YouTuber

in Film | July 29th, 2022

The Wizard of Oz came out more than 80 years ago, but there must still be a few among us who remember seeing it in the theater. Only they would have felt completely the power of its famous scene when Dorothy leaves black-and-white Kansas and enters the colorful land of Oz. Much of the power of art comes from contrast, and this particular contrast could hardly have been a more persuasive advertisement for the power of Technicolor. After a development history of more than twenty years, that color motion-picture process had by 1939 reached the stage of its technological evolution called “Process 4,” which enabled studios to make use of not just some but all of the spectrum.

This final form of Technicolor enraptures viewers even today, reproducing colors as it did at intense, sometimes borderline-psychedelic depths of saturation. The process found its ideal material in the fantasy of The Wizard of Oz, with its yellow brick road (choosing whose exact shade inspired about a week of deliberation at MGM), its ruby slippers (calculatedly changed from the silver shoes in L. Frank Baum’s original novel), and its host of settings and characters with great chromatic potential.

You can appreciate this un-repeatably fortuitous intersection of content and technology again in these scenes from an unofficial 4K restoration of the film posted by Youtuber Oriel Malik.

This is surely the sharpest and most-detail rich version of The Wizard of Oz most of us have seen, and, in those respects, it actually outdoes the original prints of the film. For some the image may actually be too clear, making obvious as it does certain artificial-looking aspects of the backgrounds and costumes. But in a sense this may not run counter to the intentions of the filmmakers, who knew full well what genre they were working in: even on film, a musical must retain at least some of the look and feel of the stage. Yet it’s also true that the softer visual edges of the contemporary analog printing and projection technologies would have enhanced the dreamlike atmosphere created in part by all those surreally vivid hues — which, according to die-hard Technicolor enthusiasts, only really come through on film anyway.

via BoingBoing

The Complete Wizard of Oz Series, Available as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

The Wizard of Oz Broken Apart and Put Back Together in Alphabetical Order

Dark Side of the Rainbow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wizard of Oz in One of the Earliest Mash-Ups

Watch the Earliest Surviving Filmed Version of The Wizard of Oz (1910)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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Watch a Complete Mini-Series Adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

The Inventive Artwork of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett

Quentin Tarantino & Roger Avary Rewatch Cult-Classic Movies on Their New Video Archives Podcast

Scenes from The Wizard of Oz Remastered in Brilliant 4K Detail: Behold the Work of a Creative YouTuber

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