Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji: A Deluxe New Art Book Presents Hokusai’s Masterpiece, Including “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa”

in Art, Books, History | July 16th, 2021

Like most Japanese masters of ukiyo‑e woodblock art, Katsushika Hokusai is best known mononymously. But he’s even better known by his work — and by one piece of work in particular, The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Even those who’ve never heard the name Hokusai have seen that print, arresting in its somehow calm turbulence, or at least they’ve seen one of its countless modern parodies and tributes (most recently, a large-scale homage in the medium of LEGO). But when he died in 1849, the prolific and long-lived artist left behind a body of work amounting to more than 30,000 paintings, sketches, prints, and illustrations (as well as a how-to-draw book).

None of those 30,000 works are quite as famous as his Great Wave off Kanagawa, but very few indeed are as ambitions as the series to which it belongs, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. It is that two-year project, the artistic fruit of an obsession with Fuji and its environs, that Taschen has taken as the material for their new book Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

Produced in a 224-page “XXL edition,” it gathers “the finest impressions from institutions and collections worldwide in the complete set of 46 plates alongside 114 color variations” — all sewn together, appropriately, with “Japanese binding.”

Not only does the book reproduce Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji with Taschen’s signature attention to image quality, it presents The Great Wave off Kanagawa in a way few actually see it: in context. For that most widely published of all Hokusai prints launched the series, which continued on to Fine Wind, Clear Morning, Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit, and Kajikazawa in Kai Province, that last being an image held in especially high esteem by ukiyo‑e enthusiasts. One such enthusiast, east Asian art historian Andreas Marks, has performed this book’s editing and writing, as he did with Taschen’s previous Japanese Woodblock Prints (1680–1938). Experiencing the whole of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, more than one reader will no doubt become as transfixed by Hokusai as Hokusai was by his homeland’s most beloved mountain. You can pick up a copy of Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji here.

The Evolution of The Great Wave off Kanazawa: See Four Versions That Hokusai Painted Over Nearly 40 Years

The Met Puts 650+ Japanese Illustrated Books Online: Marvel at Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji and More

Get Free Drawing Lessons from Katsushika Hokusai, Who Famously Painted The Great Wave off Kanagawa: Read His How-To Book, Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawings

A Beautiful New Book of Japanese Woodblock Prints: A Visual History of 200 Japanese Masterpieces Created Between 1680 and 1938

See Classic Japanese Woodblocks Brought Surreally to Life as Animated GIFs

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

A Dancer Pays a Gravity-Defying Tribute to Claude Debussy

in Dance, Music, Physics | July 16th, 2021

Most dancers have an intuitive understanding of physics.

Choreographer Yoann Bourgeois pushes this science beyond the standard lifts, leaps, and pirouettes, drawing on his training at the Centre National Des Arts du Cirque for a piece marking the centenary of composer Claude Debussy’s death, above.

Given the occasion, the choice of Clair de Lune, Debussy’s best loved piano work, feels practically de rigueur, but the trampoline comes as a bit of a shock.

We may not be able to see it, but it plays such an essential role, it’s tempting to call this solo a pas de deux. At the very least, the trampoline is an essential collaborator, along with pianist Alexandre Tharau and filmmaker Raphaël Wertheimer.

Bourgeois’ expressiveness as a performer has earned him comparisons to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. His choreography shows that he also shares their work ethic, attention to detail, and love of jawdropping visual stunts.

Don’t expect any random boinging around on this tramp’.

For four and a half minutes, Bourgeois’ everyman struggles to get to the top of a stark white staircase. Every time he falls off, the trampoline launches him back onto one of the steps — higher, lower, the very one he fell off of…

Interpret this struggle how you will.

Psyche, a digital magazine that “illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophical understanding and the arts” found it to be “an abstracted interpretation of a childlike experience of time.” One viewer wondered if the number of steps — twelve — was significant.

It’s no stretch to conceive of it as a comment on the nature of life — a constant cycle of falling down and bouncing back.

It’s lovely to behold because Bourgeois makes it look so easy.

In an interview with NR, he spoke of how his circus studies led to the realization that “the relationship between physical forces” is what he’s most interested in exploring. The stairs and trampoline, like all of his sets (or devices, as he prefers to call them), are there to “amplify specific physical phenomenon”:

In science, we’d call them models – they’re simplifications of our world that enable me to amplify one particular force at a time. Together, this ensemble of devices, this constellation of constructed devices, tentatively approaches the point of suspension. And so, this makes up a body of research; it’s a life’s research that doesn’t have an end in itself.

The relationship with physical forces has an eloquent capacity that can be very big; it has the kind of expression that is universal.

Watch more of Youann Bourgeois’ physics-based choreography on his YouTube channel.

Quarantined Dancer Creates Shot-for-Shot Remake of the Final Dirty Dancing Scene with a Lamp as a Dance Partner

One of the Greatest Dances Sequences Ever Captured on Film Gets Restored in Color by AI: Watch the Classic Scene from Stormy Weather

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How American Bandstand Changed American Culture: Revisit Scenes from the Iconic Music Show

in Music, Television | July 16th, 2021

In a Pontiac advertisement that aired just before the 1969 episode of American Bandstand above, the year’s models are touted as “breakaway cars” — vehicles for escape without rebellion. The ad shows a handful of getaways, all ending at the dealership, presided over by a bland salesman who smiles and nods his approval. It’s an apposite choice for the program that follows — a show which, for 37 years, gave American audiences safe teenage rebellion in the wholesome container of Dick Clark’s fictional 50s record shop.

As the episode opens, the camera pans around the bodies of teenage dancers, as if they were this year’s newest models, then lands on the smiling, square-jawed Clark, the seemingly ageless host who gave approval to the proceedings for the folks back home. What was he selling?

Viewers could consume the latest dance trends and pop hits in their living rooms, then journey to the local record shop — just like the one on set! The show’s reach was huge, and most every artist who made an appearance crossed over into mainstream success.

American Bandstand began its life in 1952 on a local ABC affiliate station in Philadelphia. Then it was called Bandstandand its hosts were radio personality Bob Horn and former ad salesman Lee Stewart, whom, it was thought, “could bring some of his clients on board as advertisers,” as Steve Cohen writes at the Cultural Critic. “Stewart had no charisma and eventually was dropped from the program.” Horn continued until 1956, when he was fired from the show after a drunk-driving arrest. The show’s wholesome image belied sordid beginnings.

Clark joined at the young age of 26 to replace Horn, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking 40-year-old. Establishing an easy rapport with the show’s young dancers, who came from the local West Philadelphia Neighborhood, Clark helped return Bandstand to respectability, then pushed for it to go national, which it did in 1957, “beaming images of clean-cut, average teenagers,” notes History.com, “dancing to the not-so-clean-cut Jerry Lee Lewis’ ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ to 67 ABC affiliates across the nation.” (A grossly ironic musical choice.)

Renamed American Bandstand, the newly national program featured a number of new elements that became part of its trademark, including the high school gym-like bleachers and the famous segment in which teenage studio guests rated the newest records on a scale from 25 to 98 and offered such criticisms as “It’s got a good beat, and you can dance to it.” But the heart of American Bandstand always remained the sound of the day’s most popular music combined with the sight of the show’s unpolished teen “regulars” dancing and showing off the latest fashions in clothing and hairstyles.

Four years after becoming the show’s host, Clark became a millionaire at age 30. Hauled before Congress in 1960 to answer payola charges, he admitted to taking a few bribes, promised to divest, and skated away on charm while a business partner confessed and resigned. At the time, he described himself as “having an interest in 33 businesses,” Becky Krystal writes at The Washington Post, “ranging from music publishers to, as The New York Times reported, an operation that made and sold a stuffed kitten for sale on American Bandstand called the Platter-Puss.” His business model was decades ahead of the industry.

“A man with an unerring sense of what Americans wanted to hear and see,” Krystal writes (or a sense of who to ask), Clark “achieved his greatest renown for an ability to connect with the taste of the post-World War II baby-boom generation. By the show’s 30th anniversary, almost 600,000 teenagers and 10,000 performers had appeared on the program. Among those to make early national appearances included Buddy Holly, James Brown, Ike and Tina Turner, and Simon and Garfunkel. Dance crazes such as the Twist and the Watusi could be traced to the ‘Bandstand’ studio.”

American Bandstand didn’t only disseminate pop culture to the masses; it also has been credited with helping to integrate American culture with its integrated format. It’s a claim largely spread, his critics allege, by Clark himself. American Studies professor Matthew Delmont argues that, while the show sold an image of integration, allowing a few Black kids from the largely integrated West Philly neighborhood to appear, it also employed discriminatory tactics to exclude the majority of Black students who wanted to dance.

Clark may have bowed to the pressure of the times, but he was a consummate salesman who never lost a chance to make a buck. As Delmont says, he began touting the show’s history of integration when American Bandstand faced stiff competition in the 70s from upstart rival Soul Train,a show that taught a new, post-boomer, post-Civil Rights generation of kids how to dance, and whose smooth-voiced creator-host Don Cornelius made the square-jawed Clark look like a total square. See many more clips and edited episodes of American Bandstand from 1963–1970, before Soul Train considerably upped the ante for dance shows everywhere, on YouTube here.

Talking Heads’ First TV Appearance Was on American Bandstand, and It Was a Little Awkward (1979)

Dick Clark Introduces Jefferson Airplane & the Sounds of Psychedelic San Francisco to America: Yes Parents, You Should Be Afraid (1967)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear Isabella Rossellini Sing “Blue Velvet” in Its Entirety

in Film | July 15th, 2021

Blue had a big moment in 1990’s European arthouse cinema, in films like Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Blue and Derek Jarman’s auto-elegiac Blue, the last film the director made before his death in 1995; blue as a color of impossible love, loss, and death — moods and themes deeply intertwined with music in both films and both directors’ oeuvres. But where would the color blue in art house cinema be without David Lynch’s 1986 Blue Velvet, the surreal neo-noir that introduced Lynch to Brooklyn-born composer Angelo Badalamenti, and thus began one of most creative of art house relationships between cinema and music?

Badalamenti first joined the film’s production not as a composer but as a voice coach for star Isabella Rossellini, who played a risky role not only because of Blue Velvet’s sadomasochism and nudity, but also because she was cast as a lounge singer, even though, as Rossellini admits, she couldn’t sing. “My friend Peter Runflo said Lynch was shooting in North Carolina and Isabella Rossellini wasn’t happy with the people teaching her to sing,” Badalamenti tells Spirit and Flesh magazine.

“I said, ‘You can get anybody for that. I gotta wash my car.’ [laughs] I was more into arranging and orchestrating and didn’t know who David Lynch was. But he convinced me by saying it’s a Dino De Laurentiis movie – I knew that name. I met with Isabella and after a couple of hours with a piano and a little cassette recorder, we got a decent vocal.”

Lynch wanted Badalamenti to stick around and write a theme that sounded like the Cocteau Twins’ “Song of the Siren,” his favorite song at the time, which he couldn’t afford to license. The result was “Mysteries of Love,” sung by another stalwart Lynch musical collaborator, Julee Cruise. But it was the vocal stylings of Dorothy Vallens that gave the film its title and its prevailing mood. “Adorned in blue eyeshadow, carmine lipstick and a cheap wig, Dorothy sings in a joint called ‘The Slow Club,’ ” writes The New York Times’ Laurie Winer, “Performing only ballads with the word ‘blue’ in the title, she manages to put together a tattered glamour, like a remnant from a 40’s movie, that is palpably distressing when her stare floats out into the smoke-filled club.”

Lit in lurid blue light, Rossellini sings the film’s “Blue Velvet/Blue Star” medley in a smoky contralto, recalling Wassily Kandinsky’s observation, “the color blue can even cause a temporary paralysis.” In the video at the top, a YouTube user has reconstructed Rossellini’s full rendition of the titular song, a Number One hit in 1963 for Bobby Vinton and a breakout hit in 1951 for Tony Bennett. “Pardon the huge quality dip (and total mono for aural consistency),” the video’s creator notes, “but short of a new soundtrack release using the master, this is the most complete version of this we’ll be getting.”

The images and audio were cobbled together from the original 1990 soundtrack, German Filmmaker Peter Braatz’s 2016 documentary, Blue Velvet Revisited, a VHS copy of the film, and the original film audio. Like Nico, another heavily-European-accented former model whose monotone defined a new art movement, Rossellini’s tuneless lounge act announced a new surrealist aesthetic that would reach the mainstream with Blue Velvet’s prominence upon its release. The lasting impact of Lynch’s love of blue on the following decade’s cinema deserves a study all its own, and we should always mark Blue Velvet as the first meeting of two artists (two “brothers,” Badalamenti says) who did more to marry cinematic color and musical mood than perhaps any two collaborators in the art form.

The Surreal Filmmaking of David Lynch Explained in 9 Video Essays

David Lynch Posts His Nightmarish Sitcom Rabbits Online–the Show That Psychologists Use to Induce a Sense of Existential Crisis in Research Subjects

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Discover Japan’s Oldest Surviving Cookbook Ryori Monogatari (1643)

in Books, Food & Drink, History | July 15th, 2021

Maybe your interest in Japan was first stoked by the story of the seventeenth-century shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu and his campaign to unify the country. Or maybe it was Japanese food. Either way, culinary and historical subjects have a way of intertwining in every land — not to mention making countless possible literary and cultural connections along the way. For the curious mind, enjoying a Japanese meal may well lead, sooner or later, to reading Japan’s oldest cookbook. Published in 1643, the surviving edition of Ryori Monogatari (variously translated as “Narrative of Actual Food Preparation” or, more simply, “A Tale of Food”) resides at the Tokyo National Museum, but you can read a facsimile at the Tokyo Metropolitan Library.

Translator Joshua L. Badgley did just that in order to produce an online English version of the venerable recipe collection. In an introductory essay, he describes his translation process and offers some historical context as well. Ryori Monogatari was written early in the era of the Tokugawa shogunate, which had been founded by the aforementioned Ieyasu.

“For the previous 120 years, the country had been engulfed in civil wars,” but this “Age of Warring States” also “saw the first major contact with Europeans through the Portuguese, who landed in 1542, and later saw the invasion of Korea.” The foreigners “brought with them new ideas, and access to a new world of food, which continues to this day in the form of things like tempura and kasutera (castella).”

Consolidated by Ieyasu, Japan’s subsequent 250-year-long peace “saw an increased emphasis on scholarship, and many books on the history of Japan were written in this time. In addition, travel journals were becoming popular, indicating various specialties and delicacies in each village.” The now-unknown author of Ryori Monogatari seems to have gone around collecting recipes that had been passed down orally for generations — hence the sometimes vague and approximate instructions. But unusually, note publishers Red Circle, the book also “includes recipes for game at a time when eating meat was viewed by most as a taboo.” In it one finds instructions for preparing venison, hare, boar, and even raccoon dog.

Your fascination with Japan might not have begun with a meal of raccoon dog. But Ryori Monogatari also includes recipes for sashimi, sushi, udon and yakitori, all eaten so widely around the world today that their names no longer merit italics. Taken together, the book’s explanations of its dishes open a window on how the Japanese ate during the Edo period, named for the capital city we now know as Tokyo, which lasted from 1603 to 1863. (In the video just above, Tasting History vlogger Max Miller makes a typical bowl of Edo noodles, based on a recipe from the 1643 cookbook.) “From the mid-Edo period,” says the Tokyo National Museum, “restaurants began to emerge across Japan, reflecting a new trend toward enjoying food as recreation.” By the late Edo period, an era captured by ukiyo‑e master Hiroshige, eating out had become a national pastime. And not so long thereafter, going for Japanese food would become a culinary, historical, and cultural treat savored the world over.

Cookpad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launches New Site in English

1,000+ Historic Japanese Illustrated Books Digitized & Put Online by the Smithsonian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

Tasting History: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Other Places & Periods

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Available Online: Japanese, Italian, Thai & Much More

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

B.F. Skinner Demonstrates His “Teaching Machine,” the 1950s Automated Learning Device

in Education, History, Psychology | July 15th, 2021

The name B.F. Skinner often provokes darkly humorous references to such bizarre ideas as “Skinner boxes,” which put babies in cage-like cribs, and put the cribs in windows as if they were air-conditioners, leaving the poor infants to raise themselves. Skinner was hardly alone in conducting experiments that flouted, if not flagrantly ignored, the ethical concerns now central to experimentation on humans. The code of conduct on torture and abuse that ostensibly governs members of the American Psychological Association did not exist. Radical behaviorists like Skinner were redefining the field. His work has come to stand for some of its worst abuses.

But Skinner has been mischaracterized in the popularization of his ideas — a popularization, it’s true, in which he enthusiastically took part. The actual “Skinner box” was cruel enough — an electrified cage for animal experimentation — but it was not the infant window box that often goes by the name. This was, instead, called an “aircrib” or “baby-tender,” and it was loaded with creature comforts like climate control and a complement of toys. “In our compartment,” Skinner wrote in a 1945 Ladies Home Journal article, “the waking hours are invariably active and happy ones.” Describing his first test subject, his own child, he wrote, “our baby acquitted an amusing, almost apelike skill in the use of her feet.”

Skinner was not a soulless monster who put babies in cages, but he also did not understand mammalian babies’ need for physical touch. Likewise, when it came to education, Skinner had ideas that can seem contrary to what we know works best, namely a variety of methods that honor different learning styles and abilities. Educators in the 1950s embraced far more regimented practices, and Skinner believed humans could be trained just like other animals. He treated an early experiment in classroom technology just like an experiment teaching pigeons to play ping-pong. It was, in fact, “the foundation for his education technology,” says education journalist Audrey Watters, “that we’ll build machines and they’ll give students — just like pigeons — positive reinforcement and students — just like pigeons — will learn new skills.”

To this end, Skinner created what he called the Teaching Machine in 1954 while he taught psychology at Harvard. He was hardly the first to design such a device, but he was the first to invent a machine based on behaviorist principles, as Abhishek Solanki explains in a Medium article:

The teaching machine was composed of mainly a program, which was a system of combined teaching and test items that carried the student gradually through the material to be learned. The “machine” was composed of a fill-in-the-blank method on either a workbook or on a computer. If the student was correct, he/she got reinforcement and moved on to the next question. If the answer was incorrect, the student studied the correct answer to increasing the chances of getting reinforced next time.

Consisting of a wooden box, a metal lid with cutouts, and various paper discs with questions and answers written on them, the machine did adjust for different students’ needs, in a way. Skinner “noted that the learning process should be divided into a large number of very small steps and reinforcement must be dependent upon the completion of each step. He believed this was the best possible arrangement for learning because it took into account the rate of learning for each individual student.” He was again inspired by his own children, coming up with the machine after visiting his daughter’s school and deciding he could improve on things.

The method and means of learning, as you’ll see in the demonstration films above, were not individualized. “There was very, very little freedom in Skinner’s vision,” says Watters. “Indeed Skinner wrote a very well-known book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity in the early 1970s, in which he said freedom doesn’t exist.” While Skinner’s machine didn’t itself become widely used, his ideas about education, and education technology, are still very much with us. We see Skinner’s machine “taking new forms with adaptive teaching and e‑learning,” writes Solanki.

And we see the darker side of his design in classroom technology, says Watters, in an industry that profits from alienating, one-size-fits all ed-tech solutions. But she also sees “students who are resisting and communities who are building practices that serve their needs rather than serving the needs of engineers.” Skinner’s theories of conditioning were and are incredibly persuasive, but his reductive views of human nature seem to leave out more than they explain. Learn more about the history of teaching machines in Watters’ new book, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning.

Hermann Rorschach’s Original Rorschach Test: What Do You See? (1921)

A Brief Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Linguistic Theory, Narrated by The X‑Files‘ Gillian Anderson

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Do We Outgrow the Music of Our Youth? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #99

in Music, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | July 15th, 2021

What long-term effects do songs that we’re exposed to early have on our adult tastes? As children we (hopefully) learn to love music, but then our critical faculties and peer pressure kick in, and many early influences become unacknowledged or transformed into guilty pleasures. Is the generation gap in musical taste really just due to how styles change over time (and we old folks just don’t get the new sound), or are there more fundamental reasons why it’s easier for younger people to absorb new music?

Today’s panel includes your host Mark Linsenmayer plus Erica Spyres, Brian Hirt, and The Hustle podcast host Jon Lamoreaux. They share their own experiences, songs from yesteryear that they have complicated feelings about now, and get into related topics like the activities of former pop stars and nostalgia in film soundtracks.

A few particular tracks that we mention are Go West’s “King of Wishful Thinking,” Jo Boxers’ “Just Got Lucky,” Jethro Tull’s “Songs from the Wood,” and The Cars’ “Magic.” Can a pretty Steve Howe intro redeem this Asia cheesefest?

A few articles we consulted included:

“Why Old People Hate New Music” by Frank McAndrew
“We Stop Discovering New Music at Age 30, a New Survey Suggests — Here Are the Scientific Reasons Why This Could Be” by Linsay Dodgson
“Inside the Heads of People Who Don’t Like Music” by Divya Abhat

Follow Jon’s podcast @thehustlepod. To get an idea of the formats of The Hustle as compared to Mark’s Nakedly Examined Music, why not take a deep dive on Grand Funk Railroad’s amazing Mark Farner who appeared on both? …NEM, Hustle.

Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion that you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Carl Sagan Tells Johnny Carson What’s Wrong with Star Wars: “They’re All White” & There’s a “Large Amount of Human Chauvinism in It” (1978)

in Film, Sci Fi, Science, Television | July 14th, 2021

Is Star Wars science fiction or fantasy? Different fans make different arguments, some even opting for a third way, claiming that the ever-multiplying stories of its ever-expanding fictional universe belong to neither genre. Back in 1978, the year after the release of the original Star Wars film (which no one then called “A New Hope,” let alone “Episode Four”), the question was approached by no less a popular scientific personality than Carl Sagan. It happened on national television, as the astronomer, cosmologist, writer, and television host in his own right sat opposite Johnny Carson. “The eleven-year-old in me loved them,” Sagan says in the clip above of Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and other then-recent space-themed blockbusters. “But they could’ve made a better effort to do things right.”

Everyone remembers how Star Wars sets its stage: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” But right there, Sagan has a problem. Despite its remoteness from us, this galaxy happens also to be populated by human beings, “the result of a unique evolutionary sequence, based upon so many individually unlikely, random events on the Earth.”

So Homo sapiens couldn’t have evolved on any other planet, Carson asks, let alone one in another galaxy? “It’s extremely unlikely that there would be creatures as similar to us as the dominant ones in Star Wars.” He goes on to make a more specific critique, one publicized again in recent years as ahead of its time: “They’re all white.” That is, in the skins of most of the movie’s characters, “not even the other colors represented on the Earth are present, much less greens and blues and purples and oranges.”

Carson responds, as anyone would, by bringing up Star Wars’ cantina scene, with its rogue’s gallery of variously non-humanoid habitués. “But none of them seemed to be in charge of the galaxy,” Sagan points out. “Everybody in charge of the galaxy seemed to look like us. I thought there was a large amount of human chauvinism in it.” That no medal is bestowed upon Chewbacca, despite his heroics, Sagan declares an example of “anti-Wookiee discrimination” — with tongue in cheek, granted, but pointing up how much more interesting science fiction could be if it relied a little less on human conventions and drew a little more from scientific discoveries. Not that Star Wars is necessarily science fiction. “It was a shootout, wasn’t it?” Carson asks. “A Western in outer space.” Johnny never did hesitate to call ’em as he saw ’em.

The Complete Star Wars “Filmumentary”: A 6‑Hour, Fan-Made Star Wars Documentary, with Behind-the-Scenes Footage & Commentary

Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness” (1995)

Carl Sagan on the Importance of Choosing Wisely What You Read (Even If You Read a Book a Week)

Blade Runner: The Pillar of Sci-Fi Cinema that Siskel, Ebert, and Studio Execs Originally Hated

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 Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 13 ) |

Andy Warhol’s Art Explained: What Makes His Iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans & Marilyn Monroe Diptych Art?

in Art | July 14th, 2021

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn’t look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself. — Artist Roy Lichtenstein

By 2021, most of us accept that Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans are art, but there are some who are still not confident as to why.

No shame in that.

Art Historian Steven Zucker and the Khan Academy’s Sal Khan tackle the question head on in the below video, concluding that the work is not only a reflection of the time in which it was created, but that the enormity of its impact was made possible by that timing.

Forty-five years before Warhol escorted those lowly, instantly recognizable soup cans from the supermarket to the far loftier realm of museum and gallery, the art world was thrown into an uproar over Marcel Duchamp’s provocative readymade, Fountain, a prefabricated urinal submitted to the Society of Independent Artists inaugural exhibition as the work of the fictitious R. Mutt. The Tate Modern’s website summarizes its importance:

Fountain tested beliefs about art and the role of taste in the art world. Interviewed in 1964, Duchamp said he had chosen a urinal in part because he thought it had the least chance of being liked (although many at the time did find it aesthetically pleasing). He continued: ‘I was drawing people’s attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, exactly like an oasis appears in the desert. It is very beautiful until, of course, you are dying of thirst. But you don’t die in the field of art. The mirage is solid.’

Campbell’s soup cans possess a similar solidity.

The familiar label dates back to 1898 when a Campbell’s exec drew inspiration from Cornell University’s red and white football uniforms.

A full page magazine ad from 1934 introduces Cream of Mushroom and Noodle with Chicken (soon to become Chicken Noodle) by reminding readers to “Look for the Red-and-White Label.”

By 1962, Campbell’s had given consumers their pick of 32 flavors, and Warhol painted all 32 of them. Not the contents. Just those uniform cans.

Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery sold five of them before gallerist Irving Blum realized that their impact was greatest when all 32 were displayed together, to echo how consumers were used to seeing the real thing.

Warhol had a personal connection to his subject matter, but it wasn’t like he set out to rep a lifelong favorite. Rather, he was following up on a friend’s suggestion to paint something everyone would would recognize, with or without passionate feelings. (He seemed to be without:)

I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.

Warhol brought a successful commercial illustrator’s eye to his Campell’s Soup Cans, capitalizing on the public’s existing knowledge. The colors, the custom cursive logo over the sans serif flavor font, and the shape of the cans had couched themselves in the early-60s American consciousness.

As had industrialization as the overarching system by which most lives were ordered. The artist may not have offered overt comment on mass produced items, convenience foods, or brand loyalty. He just depended on the public to be so intimately acquainted with them, they had faded into the wallpaper of their daily lives.

Nor was the public overly accustomed to everyday objects reconceptualized as art. These days, we’re a bit blasé.

Warhol’s subject matter may have been prosaic, but his timing, Khan and Zucker tell us, could not have been better.

As Campbell’s is to soup, Marilyn Monroe is to celebrity — an enduring household name. Her sexy, youthful image is imprinted on fans born decades after her death.

The most universal Marilyn is the one from the Niagara publicity still, immortalized in acrylic and silkscreen in Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych. One of his most defining works, it was produced the same year as his soup cans (and Monroe’s suicide at the age of 36).

In considering this work for his ongoing series, Great Art Explained, gallerist James Payne delves into Warhol’s fascination with multiples, celebrity, religious iconography, machination, and death, noting that “both Warhol and Marilyn understood transformation”:

From early on in his career, Andy Warhol had an extraordinary ability of finding the sacred in the profane.… He was a product of the Eastern European immigrant experience who himself became an icon, a shy, gay, working class man who became the court painter of the 1970s, an artist who embraced consumerism, celebrity and the counterculture and changed modern art in the process.

Andy Warhol Explains Why He Decided to Give Up Painting & Manage the Velvet Underground Instead (1966)

Take a Virtual Tour of the Andy Warhol Exhibition at the Tate Modern

Ayun Halliday is an author, theatermaker, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Releases a Super Creepy Version of “Creep”

in Music | July 14th, 2021

Like many bands with a killer, career-launching debut single, Radiohead has had a long, love-hate relationship with 1992’s “Creep”. There’s no way they would have become stadium fillers without it, but they’re also understandably sick of it. According to setlist.fm, they played it over 310 times between 1992 and 1998, and then they kind of dropped it from their gigs once they entered their Kid A phase. Only in 2016, during the Moon Shaped Pool tours did they add it back into the set.

But man, 2016 seems like a lonnnnnng time ago, doesn’t it? Everybody’s still figuring out the future of live concerts. Nobody is sure how far ahead is safe enough to announce ticket sales. Will venues be open or shut again? Into the fray of uncertainty comes this oddity: a nine-plus minute version of “Creep” credited to Thom Yorke. (“Thom Yorke should collab with Radiohead more often” says one wag in the YouTube comments). You want Creep, ya say? Well, here’s a LOT of it.

Thom Yorke takes his vocals, stretches them out until they’re corrupted digitally, and fills the airy gaps with acoustic guitar, adding twice as many bars as the original. As NPR said, Yorke’s vocals sound like a “rant from a man who’s lost his mind to old age and isolation.” (Hence the “Very 2021 Remix” title). It was about 30 years ago, we have to add, though we hate to admit it. Electronic burbles and bass throbs enter halfway through and further disturb the already disturbing.

Yorke created the mix for fashion designer Jun Takahashi, whose animated artwork runs in a loop for the video. The song accompanies Takahashi’s UNDERWORLD Fall 2021 collection runway show.

As Pitchfork points out, Yorke has contributed music to fashion shows before:

n 2016, he contributed an original song called “Coloured Candy” to Rag & Bone’s 2017 Spring/Summer showcase. Years prior, he contributed the songs “Stuck Together” and “Twist” for another one of the fashion label’s shows.

Yorke, by the way, hasn’t been laying low during the plague year. In May of this year he debuted a new side band called The Smile at Glastonbury, called out the Johnson government as “spineless” regarding their response to COVID and the live music scene, and shared a 30-minute mix of new music on BBC Radio 6. What comes next? Stay tuned.

Radiohead Ballets: Watch Ballets Choreographed Creatively to the Music of Radiohead

Thom Yorke’s Isolated Vocal Track on Radiohead’s 1992 Classic, ‘Creep’

Introducing The Radiohead Public Library: Radiohead Makes Their Full Catalogue Available via a Free Online Web Site

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.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What the Eagles’ “Hotel California” Really Means

in Music | July 13th, 2021

During the Satanic panic of the 1980s, a new breed of witchfinder cast a dragnet through pop culture, scooping up songs, artists, and albums that were allegedly part of a demonic conspiracy to corrupt America’s youth. One song routinely appearing on such lists — “Hotel California” by the Eagles. Really? The Eagles? Biggest-selling rock band in the U.S.? Soft-rock superstars who paved the cocaine-colored way for even softer yacht rock superstars?

They were hardly Black Sabbath, but the band’s “Hotel California” was really about Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, it was said (just listen to it backwards). Depending on your feelings about Satanism and/or the Eagles, “the truth proves far less satisfying than the myriad rumors that have sprung up,” writes David Mikkelson at Snopes. “The song is usually interpreted as an allegory about hedonism and greed in Southern California in the 1970s.” It turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hotel California, the album, rocketed the Eagles beyond “success on a frightening level” and into total burnout. By the time they made their last album of the 70s, The Long Run, they felt trapped in a celebrity hell, one that would have to freeze over before they reunited, as Don Henley remarked (hence the title of 1994’s Hell Freezes Over). For the Eagles, hell was the other people in the band, the constant touring, and the incredible amounts of money thrown their way, more curse than blessing, apparently.

Despite these internal tensions, the Eagles produced a perfect soundtrack for the 70s. “They reflected the emerging musical style of a 70s post-war America, and the first truly sexually liberated generation…. had no trouble identifying with a band that sang like angels and partied like devils,” writes Marc Eliot. “Hotel California” has been so closely identified with American culture that “when a US spy plane made an emergency landing in China in 2001,” Mark Savage notes at the BBC, “the crew members were asked to recite the lyrics to prove their nationality.”

In truth, “Hotel California” is neither written in praise of Satan nor America. Its working title was “Mexican Reggae,” a nod to the unusual strumming pattern, which “followed a pattern closer to flamenco than to rock,” Savage writes, “but played on the off-beat.” The forbidding landscape in the song’s lyrics, an “atmosphere of a man in an unfamiliar rural setting, unsure about what he’s witnessing,” came from the 1965 novel The Magus by English author John Fowles, a countercultural favorite, says Glen Frey: “We decided to create something strange, just to see if we could do it.”

There was, of course, more to the song — the standard interpretation of “Hotel California” as a critique of 1970s excesses has been affirmed by Don Henley and Frey, who wrote most of the lyrics. The song, Henley said in a 1995 interview, “sort of captured the zeitgeist of the time, which was a time of great excess in this country and in the music business in particular…. Lyrically, the song deals with traditional or classical themes of conflict: darkness and light, good and evil, youth and age, the spiritual versus the secular. I guess you could say it’s a song about loss of innocence” — a feeling, as Joe Walsh says in the interview clip above, that came out of the experience of arriving and trying to make it in L.A. “Nobody was from California,” Walsh says. “Everybody was from Ohio.”

“Hotel California” also “hides” a dig at Eagles rivals Steely Dan in the lyrics, “they stab it with their steely knives” and barely conceals Henley’s contempt for his ex-girlfriend, L.A. jewelry designer Loree Rodkin, as he later admitted: “There’s some of every girl I’ve ever been with in all my songs; they’re combinations of characters, like fiction. Some of the more derogatory parts of ‘Hotel California,’ however, are definitely about Loree Rodkin – ‘Her mind is Tiffany twisted, she got the Mercedes bends/She got a lot of pretty boys that she calls friends’ – that’s about her, and I wouldn’t be crowing if I were Ms. Rodkin. As far as I’m concerned, she’s the Norma Desmond of her generation.”

Henley’s most trenchant commentary on the song comes from the 2013 documentary History of the Eagles, in which he talks frankly about the band’s critical take on their success and the culture that produced and embraced “Hotel California”:

On just about every album we made, there was some kind of commentary on the music business, and on American culture in general. The hotel itself could be taken as a metaphor not only for the myth-making of Southern California, but for the myth-making that is the American Dream, because it is a fine line between the American Dream, and the American nightmare.

As for those baroque guitar arrangements? For that part of the story, we must turn to Don Felder, who composed the song — after Walsh joined the band to replace Bernie Leadon — in order to showcase the talents of two lead players. See Felder talk about his major contribution at the top and see him play the “Hotel California” solo at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a clip from CBS’s Sunday Morning.

Just above, see an interview with Felder backstage at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in which he discusses the role of improvisation in his process, and how his background in jazz led him to write the “Mexican reggae” that would eventually play on American radio every 11 minutes, their most refined statement of the “themes that run through all our work,” Henley says: “loss of innocence, the cost of naiveté, the perils of fame, of excess; exploration of the dark underbelly of the American dream, idealism realized and idealism thwarted, illusion versus reality, the difficulties of balancing loving relationships and work, trying to square the conflicting relationship between business and art; the corruption in politics, the fading away of the Sixties dream of ‘peace, love and understanding.’”

David Bowie Dreamed of Turning George Orwell’s 1984 Into a Musical: Hear the Songs That Survived the Abandoned Project

What Makes This Song Great?: Producer Rick Beato Breaks Down the Greatness of Classic Rock Songs in His New Video Series

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji: A Deluxe New Art Book Presents Hokusai’s Masterpiece, Including “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa”

A Dancer Pays a Gravity-Defying Tribute to Claude Debussy

How American Bandstand Changed American Culture: Revisit Scenes from the Iconic Music Show

Hear Isabella Rossellini Sing “Blue Velvet” in Its Entirety

Discover Japan’s Oldest Surviving Cookbook Ryori Monogatari (1643)

B.F. Skinner Demonstrates His “Teaching Machine,” the 1950s Automated Learning Device

Do We Outgrow the Music of Our Youth? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #99

Carl Sagan Tells Johnny Carson What’s Wrong with Star Wars: “They’re All White” & There’s a “Large Amount of Human Chauvinism in It” (1978)

Andy Warhol’s Art Explained: What Makes His Iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans & Marilyn Monroe Diptych Art?

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke Releases a Super Creepy Version of “Creep”

What the Eagles’ “Hotel California” Really Means

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Sign up for Newsletter

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search