An Introduction to Nicolas Bourbaki, One of the Most Influential Mathematicians of All Time … Who Never Actually Lived

in Animation, Math, TED Talks | July 13th, 2021

In 20th-cen­tu­ry math­e­mat­ics, the renowned name of Nico­las Bour­ba­ki stands alone in its class — the class, that is, of renowned math­e­mat­i­cal names that don’t actu­al­ly belong to real peo­ple. Bour­ba­ki refers not to a math­e­mati­cian, but to math­e­mati­cians; a whole secret soci­ety of them, in fact, who made their name by col­lec­tive­ly com­pos­ing Ele­ments of Math­e­mat­ic. Not, mind you, Ele­ments of Math­e­mat­ics: “Bourbaki’s Ele­ments of Math­e­mat­ic — a series of text­books and pro­gram­mat­ic writ­ings first appear­ing in 1939—pointedly omit­ted the ‘s’ from the end of ‘Math­e­mat­ics,’ ” writes JSTOR Dai­ly’s Michael Barany, “as a way of insist­ing on the fun­da­men­tal uni­ty and coher­ence of a dizzy­ing­ly var­ie­gat­ed field.”

That’s mere­ly the tip of Bour­bak­i’s ice­berg of eccen­tric­i­ties. Formed in 1934 “by alum­ni of the École nor­male supérieure, a sto­ried train­ing ground for French aca­d­e­m­ic and polit­i­cal elites,” this group of high-pow­ered math­e­mat­i­cal minds set about rec­ti­fy­ing their coun­try’s loss of near­ly an entire gen­er­a­tion of math­e­mati­cians in the First World War. (While Ger­many had kept its bright­est stu­dents and sci­en­tists out of bat­tle, the French com­mit­ment to égal­ité could per­mit no such favoritism.) It was the press­ing need for revised and updat­ed text­books that spurred the mem­bers of Bour­ba­ki to their col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly pseu­do­ny­mous, indi­vid­u­al­ly anony­mous work.

“Yet instead of writ­ing text­books,” explains Quan­ta’s Kevin Hart­nett, “they end­ed up cre­at­ing some­thing com­plete­ly nov­el: free-stand­ing books that explained advanced math­e­mat­ics with­out ref­er­ence to any out­side sources.” The most dis­tinc­tive fea­ture of this already unusu­al project “was the writ­ing style: rig­or­ous, for­mal and stripped to the log­i­cal studs. The books spelled out math­e­mat­i­cal the­o­rems from the ground up with­out skip­ping any steps — exhibit­ing an unusu­al degree of thor­ough­ness among math­e­mati­cians.”  Not that Bour­ba­ki lacked play­ful­ness: “In fan­ci­ful and pun-filled nar­ra­tives shared among one anoth­er and allud­ed to in out­ward-fac­ing writ­ing,” adds Barany, “Bourbaki’s col­lab­o­ra­tors embed­ded him in an elab­o­rate math­e­mat­i­cal-polit­i­cal uni­verse filled with the abstruse ter­mi­nol­o­gy and con­cepts of mod­ern the­o­ries.”

You can get an ani­mat­ed intro­duc­tion to Bour­ba­ki, which sur­vives even today as a still-pres­ti­gious and at least nom­i­nal­ly secret math­e­mat­i­cal soci­ety, in the TED-Ed les­son above. In the decades after the group’s found­ing, writes les­son author Pratik Aghor, “Bour­rbak­i’s pub­li­ca­tions became stan­dard ref­er­ences, and the group’s mem­bers took their prank as seri­ous­ly as their work.” Their com­mit­ment to the front was total: “they sent telegrams in Bour­bak­i’s name, announced his daugh­ter’s wed­ding, and pub­licly insult­ed any­one who doubt­ed his exis­tence. In 1968, when they could no longer main­tain the ruse, the group end­ed their joke the only way they could: they print­ed Bour­bak­i’s obit­u­ary, com­plete with math­e­mat­i­cal puns.” And if you laugh at the math­e­mat­i­cal pun with which Aghor ends the les­son, you may car­ry a bit of Bour­bak­i’s spir­it with­in your­self as well.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beau­ti­ful Equa­tions: Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Beau­ty of Ein­stein & Newton’s Great Equa­tions

The Math­e­mat­ics Behind Origa­mi, the Ancient Japan­ese Art of Paper Fold­ing

The Unex­pect­ed Math Behind Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night

Can You Solve These Ani­mat­ed Brain Teasers from TED-Ed?

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

Why the World’s Best Math­e­mati­cians Are Hoard­ing Japan­ese Chalk

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

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Watch Blondie Perform a Classic Concert During The Breakout Year: “Dreamin,” “One Way Or Another,” “Heart of Glass” & More (1979)

in Music | July 13th, 2021

When Blondie took the stage at Con­ven­tion Hall in Asbury Park, NJ in 1979, the audi­ence knew the band as a vehi­cle for for­mer Play­boy bun­ny-turned-punk-singer Deb­bie Har­ry. “Deb­bie put on that sexy per­sona with kind of a wink, say­ing ‘This is what you want from me, I’ll kind of give it to you, but I’m also going to give you what I want to give you,’’” says biog­ra­ph­er Cathay Che. “The Blondie char­ac­ter,” as Har­ry called her onstage per­sona, “embod­ied female sex­u­al­i­ty as part threat, part unat­tain­able goal, part par­o­dy,” as Ann Pow­ers writes at The New York Times.

Cast in the role of sex­u­al­ized object since her ear­ly teen years, she had also per­formed in bands since the late 60s, and had sur­vived sex­u­al assault and a near abduc­tion in New York City in the 70s. She was a world-weary per­former in con­trol of her image, but the char­ac­ter drew so much focus from Blondie the band that oth­er mem­bers got a bit defen­sive. “I remem­ber the tour Blondie was doing in April 1978,” punk pho­tog­ra­ph­er There­sa Kereakes writes:

All the posters, t‑shirts, and but­tons you saw were black with hot pink writ­ing that pro­claimed: BLONDIE IS A GROUP! Excla­ma­tion point. No one knew dur­ing that tour in April 1978 — not the band, not their fans, and prob­a­bly not their hope­ful record com­pa­ny — that the record Blondie would release in just six months would be the one to break them into the stratos­phere. They went from Plas­tic Let­ters to Par­al­lel Lines and from the DIY scene to the big time.

Blondie was most def­i­nite­ly a group. By 1979, they had grown into a for­mi­da­ble six-piece, adding gui­tarist Frank Infante and bassist Nigel Har­ri­son to the orig­i­nal line­up of Har­ry, Chris Stein, Jim­my Destri, and Clem Burke. On the cusp of major main­stream suc­cess, they had also hit a peak in terms of musi­cian­ship and song­writ­ing — pow­er­house drum­mer Burke hold­ing the machin­ery togeth­er while each mem­ber played a vital part.

The focus on Har­ry didn’t only detract from her male band mem­bers. “Ms. Har­ry must have felt a bit like… the object of some­one else’s prof­itable fan­ta­sy” at times,” writes Pow­ers, trapped in the role of punk-rock Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe. As key­board play­er Destri put it, “no one real­ly paid atten­tion to Debbie’s singing style and how great a writer she was, because they couldn’t get past the image,”

They would pay atten­tion after Par­al­lel Lines and fol­low-ups Eat to the Beat and Autoamer­i­can. Songs like “Dream­ing,” revamped dis­co hit “Heart of Glass,” and dance­floor clas­sics “Call Me” and “Rap­ture” made Har­ry an inter­na­tion­al super­star and left the rest of the band dis­en­chant­ed. Before law­suits and long­stand­ing resent­ments broke them up, Blondie was an incred­i­ble live band. See them prove it in the full show at the top, the first set of the night. They played a sec­ond, dupli­cate set lat­er, adding Marc Bolan’s “Bang a Gong” at the end of the night. See them tear through it just above and see a full setlist with time­stamps on YouTube.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Blondie’s Deb­bie Har­ry Learned to Deal With Super­fi­cial, Demean­ing Inter­view­ers

Watch Blondie’s Deb­bie Har­ry Per­form “Rain­bow Con­nec­tion” with Ker­mit the Frog on The Mup­pet Show (1981)

Blondie Plays CBGB in the Mid-70s in Two Vin­tage Clips

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

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A Billion Years of Tectonic-Plate Movement in 40 Seconds: A Quick Glimpse of How Our World Took Shape

in History, Science | July 12th, 2021

We all remem­ber learn­ing about tec­ton­ic plates in our school sci­ence class­es. Or at least we do if we went to school in the 1960s or lat­er, that being when the the­o­ry of plate tec­ton­ics — which holds, broad­ly speak­ing, that the Earth­’s sur­face com­pris­es slow­ly mov­ing slabs of rock — gained wide accep­tance. But most every­one alive today will have been taught about Pangea. An impli­ca­tion of Alfred Wegen­er’s the­o­ry of “con­ti­nen­tal drift,” first pro­posed in the 1910s, that the sin­gle gigan­tic land­mass once dom­i­nat­ed the plan­et.

Despite its renown, how­ev­er, Pangea makes only a brief appear­ance in the ani­ma­tion of Earth­’s his­to­ry above. Geo­log­i­cal sci­en­tists now cat­e­go­rize it as just one of sev­er­al “super­con­ti­nents” that plate tec­ton­ics has gath­ered togeth­er and bro­ken up over hun­dreds and hun­dreds of mil­len­nia. Oth­ers include Kenor­land, in exis­tence about 2.6 bil­lion years ago, and Rodinia, 900 mil­lion years ago; Pangea, the most recent of the bunch, came apart around 175 mil­lion years ago. You can see the process in action in the video, which com­press­es a bil­lion years of geo­log­i­cal his­to­ry into a mere 40 sec­onds.

At the speed of 25 mil­lion years per sec­ond, and with out­lines drawn in, the move­ment of Earth­’s tec­ton­ic plates becomes clear­ly under­stand­able — more so, per­haps, than you found it back in school. “On a human timescale, things move in cen­time­ters per year, but as we can see from the ani­ma­tion, the con­ti­nents have been every­where in time,” as Michael Tet­ley, co-author of the paper “Extend­ing full-plate tec­ton­ic mod­els into deep time,” put it to Euronews. Antarc­ti­ca, which “we see as a cold, icy inhos­pitable place today, actu­al­ly was once quite a nice hol­i­day des­ti­na­tion at the equa­tor.”

Cli­mate-change trends sug­gest that we could be vaca­tion­ing in Antarc­ti­ca again before long — a trou­bling devel­op­ment in oth­er ways, of course, not least because it under­scores the imper­ma­nence of Earth­’s cur­rent arrange­ment, the one we know so well. “Our plan­et is unique in the way that it hosts life,” says Diet­mar Müller, anoth­er of the paper’s authors. “But this is only pos­si­ble because geo­log­i­cal process­es, like plate tec­ton­ics, pro­vide a plan­e­tary life-sup­port sys­tem.” Earth won’t always look like it does today, in oth­er words, but it’s thanks to the fact that it does­n’t look like it did a bil­lion years ago that we hap­pen to be here, able to study it at all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Plate Tec­ton­ic Evo­lu­tion of the Earth Over 500 Mil­lion Years: Ani­mat­ed Video Takes You from Pangea, to 250 Mil­lion Years in the Future

A Map Shows Where Today’s Coun­tries Would Be Locat­ed on Pangea

Paper Ani­ma­tion Tells Curi­ous Sto­ry of How a Mete­o­rol­o­gist The­o­rized Pan­gaea & Con­ti­nen­tal Drift (1910)

What Earth Will Look Like 100 Mil­lion Years from Now

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

 

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Hear Louis Armstrong’s Last Reel-to-Reel Tape, Made Hours Before His Death (1971)

in Music | July 12th, 2021

When Louis Arm­strong first record­ed “Hel­lo, Dol­ly!”, in 1963, he “found the song trite and life­less,” says his biog­ra­ph­er Lau­rence Bergreen, a sur­pris­ing fact since it became one of his sig­na­ture tunes. “Arm­strong had trans­formed the song, infus­ing it with irre­press­ible spir­it and swing,” Marc Sil­ver writes at NPR. He did so all the way to the end of his life, play­ing “Hel­lo, Dol­ly!” after accept­ing an award at the Nation­al Press Club in one of his final per­for­mances on Jan­u­ary 29, 1971. “He sang in a voice more grav­el­ly than ever” and per­formed despite the fact that he “was under doctor’s orders not to break out his trum­pet” after a heart attack that near­ly felled the jazz giant. He died five months lat­er on the morn­ing of July 6th.

Arm­strong spent July 5th, 1971, his final night, at home, relax­ing and record­ing reel-to-reel tapes in his den at his home in Coro­na, Queens. Trans­fer­ring his music to tape and mak­ing cov­ers with his own col­lage art had been a decades-long hob­by for Arm­strong, a life­long archivist and mem­oirist. “

It appears,” the Louis Arm­strong House notes, “his [tape] num­ber­ing sys­tem got well into the 400s.” In 2009, Arm­strong House Archivist Ricky Ric­car­di ran across an odd­i­ty, an unnum­bered tape with no art on the cov­er. The only iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion came from a note on the box in Arm­strong’s wife’s Lucille’s hand­writ­ing, “Last Tape record­ed by Pops. 7/5/71.”

As Ric­car­di explains in a post here (from a longer series on the last two years of Arm­strong tapes), it would take five more years before he dis­cov­ered the con­tents of the final Arm­strong tape — an audio doc­u­ment of the LPs Satch­mo lis­tened to just hours before his death.

“Final­ly,” Ric­car­di writes, “around 11 a.m. on an ear­ly Feb­ru­ary day [in 2013], I was ready. I explained to my vol­un­teer, Har­vey Fish­er, what was about to hap­pen. I went into the stacks, grabbed the tape, sat at the tape deck and loaded the tape onto the hub. I hit ‘Play’ and held my breath as it start­ed spin­ning.” What came out was “Lis­ten to the Mock­ing­bird” from Armstrong’s 1952 col­lab­o­ra­tion with Gor­don Jenk­ins, Satch­mo in Style.

“I felt tears in my eyes while dub­bing it,” Ric­car­di writes. After record­ing this song, Arm­strong flipped the record over, record­ed the sec­ond side, then went on to record the entire 2‑LP set of Satch­mo at Sym­pho­ny Hall, “prob­a­bly with fond mem­o­ries of the musi­cians and friends on that album who were no longer liv­ing.” Final­ly, Arm­strong put on his first, 1956 col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ella Fitzger­ald, an album, writer and musi­cian Tom Maxwell argues, that made a “cul­tur­al leap [in] the mid­dle of that tumul­tuous cen­tu­ry, that two black per­form­ers could be con­sid­ered the best inter­preters of white show tunes, and that the extem­po­ra­ne­ous heart of jazz could ele­vate the whole to icon­ic sta­tus, deseg­re­gat­ing Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture in just eleven songs.”

After the final song, “Louis left his den and head­ed down the hall­way to his bed­room,” Ric­car­di writes, where, Lucille says, he “was feel­ing frisky and tried to ini­ti­ate ‘the vonce.’ She declined, fear­ing for his health. He went to sleep. About 5:30 in the morn­ing of July 6, Louis Arm­strong passed away in his sleep…. Can you think of a bet­ter way to go out?” It was a peace­ful end to a hard life lived in devo­tion to spread­ing his musi­cal joy. You can hear a playlist com­piled by Ric­car­di of most of the music from Armstrong’s 1969–1971 tapes above. It starts with “Hel­lo Dol­ly!” and ends with the last song on Ella and Louis, and on Armstrong’s final reel-to-reel tape, the last song he ever heard: “April in Paris.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Only Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong in a Record­ing Stu­dio: Watch the Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered Film (1959)

Louis Arm­strong Remem­bers How He Sur­vived the 1918 Flu Epi­dem­ic in New Orleans

When Louis Arm­strong Stopped a Civ­il War in The Con­go (1960)

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

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The Life & Art of Hilma Af Klint: A Short Art History Lesson on the Pioneering Abstract Artist

in Art, Religion, Sci Fi | July 12th, 2021

Like many artists whose abstrac­tions cement­ed their lega­cy, Hilma af Klint was trained to paint por­traits, botan­i­cals, and land­scapes.

The nat­u­ral­ist works of her ear­ly adult­hood depict bour­geois, late-19th cen­tu­ry Swedish life, and, by asso­ci­a­tion, the sort of sub­ject mat­ter and approach that were deemed most fit­ting for a female artist, even in a soci­ety where women were allowed to work along­side men.

But some­thing else was afoot with Hilma, as artist and edu­ca­tor Paul Priest­ley points out in the above episode from his Art His­to­ry School series.

Her 10-year-old sister’s death from the flu may have caused her to lean into an exist­ing inter­est in spir­i­tu­al­ism, but as Iris Müller-West­er­mann, direc­tor of Mod­er­na Museet Malmö told The Guardian’s Kate Kell­away, the “math­e­mat­i­cal, sci­en­tif­ic, musi­cal, curi­ous” teen was like­ly moti­vat­ed by her own thirst for knowl­edge as by this fam­i­ly tragedy:

 You have to under­stand this was the age when nat­ur­al sci­ences went beyond the vis­i­ble: Hein­rich Hertz dis­cov­ered elec­tro­mag­net­ic waves [1886], Wil­helm Rönt­gen invent­ed the x‑ray [1895]…Hilma is like Leonar­do – she want­ed to under­stand who we are as human beings in the cos­mos.

Her inter­est in the occult did not make her an out­sider. Spir­i­tu­al­ism was con­sid­ered a respectable intel­lec­tu­al pre­oc­cu­pa­tion. Abstract painters Vasi­ly Kandin­sky, Piet Mon­dri­an, Kasimir Male­vich and Fran­tisek Kup­ka were also using their art to try and get at that which the eye could not see.

All but Hilma were hailed as pio­neers.

The New York Times review of Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art’s 1986 exhib­it The Spir­i­tu­al in Art: Abstract Paint­ing 1890–1985, men­tions some of their spir­i­tu­al bona fides:

They were gen­er­at­ed by such ven­tures into mys­ti­cism as Theos­o­phy, Anthro­pos­o­phy, Rosi­cru­cian­ism, East­ern phi­los­o­phy, and var­i­ous East­ern and West­ern reli­gions. Spir­i­tu­al ideas were not periph­er­al to these artists’ lives, not some­thing that hap­pened to pop into their minds as they stood by their can­vas. Kup­ka par­tic­i­pat­ed in seances and was a prac­tic­ing medi­um. Kandin­sky attend­ed pri­vate fetes involved with mag­ic, black mass­es and pagan rit­u­als. Mon­dri­an was a mem­ber of the Dutch Theo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety and lived briefly in the quar­ters of the French Theo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety in Paris. He said once that he ”got every­thing from the Secret Doc­trine” of Theos­o­phy, which was an attempt by its founder Hele­na Petro­v­na Blavatsky to do noth­ing less than read, digest and syn­the­size all reli­gions. It has been known for some time how much of Mon­dri­an’s sym­bol­ism — includ­ing the ubiq­ui­tous ver­ti­cal and hor­i­zon­tal lines — and how much of his utopi­anism, was shaped by Theo­soph­i­cal doc­trine.

Review­er Michael Bren­son devotes one sen­tence to Hilma, “a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown Swedish artist whose some­what mechan­i­cal abstract paint­ings and draw­ings of organ­ic, geo­met­ri­cal forms were marked by Theos­o­phy and Anthro­pos­o­phy.”

Thir­ty-five years lat­er, she’s receiv­ing much more cred­it. As Priest­ley says in his video biog­ra­phy, Hilma, and not Kandin­sky, is now hailed as the first painter to exper­i­ment with abstrac­tion.

Would Hilma have wel­comed such a dis­tinc­tion?

She main­tained that she was but a receiv­ing instru­ment for Amaliel, a “high mas­ter” from anoth­er dimen­sion, who made con­tact dur­ing the séances she par­tic­i­pat­ed in reg­u­lar­ly with four friends who met week­ly to prac­tice auto­mat­ic draw­ing and writ­ing.

Amaliel charged her with cre­at­ing the art­work for the inte­ri­or of a tem­ple that was part of the high mas­ters’ vision. The Guggenheim’s class­room mate­ri­als for The Paint­ings for the Tem­ple note that her friends warned Hilma against accept­ing this oth­er­world­ly com­mis­sion, “that the inten­si­ty of this kind of spir­i­tu­al engage­ment could dri­ve her into mad­ness.”

But Hilma threw her­self into the assign­ment, pro­duc­ing 111 paint­ings dur­ing a one-and-a-half year peri­od, claim­ing:

The pic­tures were paint­ed direct­ly through me, with­out any pre­lim­i­nary draw­ings and with great force. I had no idea what the paint­ings were sup­posed to depict; nev­er­the­less, I worked swift­ly and sure­ly, with­out chang­ing a sin­gle brush­stroke.

For what­ev­er rea­son, the paint­ings proved too much for Rudolph Stein­er, the founder of the Anthro­po­soph­i­cal Soci­ety, whom she had invit­ed to view them, pay­ing his trav­el expens­es in hope that he would pro­vide a detailed analy­sis and inter­pre­ta­tion of the images. Instead, he coun­seled her that no one would under­stand them, and that the only course of action would be to keep the paint­ings out of sight and out of mind for fifty years. To do oth­er­wise might endan­ger her health.

A dis­ap­point­ing response that ulti­mate­ly led to the paint­ings being socked away for an even longer peri­od.

Good news for Kandin­sky… and pos­si­bly for Stein­er.

At any rate, the com­pe­ti­tion was coerced into elim­i­nat­ing her­self, inad­ver­tent­ly plant­i­ng the seeds for some major, if delayed art world excite­ment. Hilma, who died more than forty years before the L.A. Coun­ty Muse­um show, was not able to bask in the atten­tion on any earth­ly plane.

For those curi­ous in a take that is not entire­ly root­ed in the art world, Light­forms Art Cen­ter in Hud­son, New York host­ed a recent Hilma Af Klint exhib­it. Their strong ties to the Anthro­po­soph­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty make for some inter­est­ing exhib­it com­men­tary.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Com­plete Works of Hilma af Klint Are Get­ting Pub­lished for the First Time in a Beau­ti­ful, Sev­en-Vol­ume Col­lec­tion

New Hilma af Klint Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Life & Art of the Trail­blaz­ing Abstract Artist

Dis­cov­er Hilma af Klint: Pio­neer­ing Mys­ti­cal Painter and Per­haps the First Abstract Artist

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

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Hunter Thompson Explains What Gonzo Journalism Is, and How He Writes It (1975)

in Writing | July 9th, 2021

There’ve been any num­ber of aspir­ing “gonzo jour­nal­ists” over the past half-cen­tu­ry, but there was only one Hunter S. Thomp­son. Hav­ing orig­i­nat­ed with his work in the ear­ly 1970s, this sense of gonzo made it into the Ran­dom House Dic­tio­nary with­in his life­time. “Filled with bizarre or sub­jec­tive ideas, com­men­tary, or the like,” says its first def­i­n­i­tions. And its sec­ond: “Crazy; eccen­tric.” Thomp­son seems to have approved, see­ing as he kept a copy of this very edi­tion, put on dis­play at the Owl Farm Pri­vate Muse­um (run by the Gonzo Foun­da­tion) after his death in 2005. Thir­ty years ear­li­er, he had the ques­tion put to him in the inter­view above: “What is gonzo jour­nal­ism?”

“That word has real­ly plagued me,” Thomp­son says. But he also cred­its it with putting dis­tance between him­self and the recent­ly ascen­dant “New Jour­nal­ists” like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Joan Did­ion: “I was­n’t sure I was doing that, but I was sure I was­n’t doing what we call straight jour­nal­ism.” Indeed, few pieces could have seemed less “straight” than “The Ken­tucky Der­by Is Deca­dent and Depraved,” first pub­lished in Scan­lan’s Month­ly in 1970. Assem­bled in des­per­a­tion out of pages pulled straight from Thomp­son’s note­book and illus­trat­ed by Ralph Stead­man (the begin­ning of a long and fruit­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion), the piece struck some read­ers as a rev­e­la­tion. A friend of Thomp­son’s declared it “pure gonzo” — an uncon­ven­tion­al name for an uncon­ven­tion­al form.

“Christ,” Thomp­son remem­bers think­ing, “if I made a break­through, we’ve got to call it some­thing.” Why not use a label with at least one instance of prece­dent? (It also appealed, he admits, to his inner “word freak.”) As for the sub­stance of gonzo, he attrib­ut­es to it “a mix­ture of humor and a high, stomp­ing style, a bit more active than your nor­mal jour­nal­ism” — as well as what­ev­er gets him past his innate hatred of writ­ing. “All I can real­ly get off on,” he says, is “when I can let my mind run. I start to laugh. I under­stand that Dick­ens used to laugh at his type­writer. I don’t laugh at my type­writer until I hit one of those what I con­sid­er pure gonzo break­throughs. Then it’s worth it.”

Pub­lished three years ear­li­er, Thomp­son’s best-known book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas marked the cul­mi­na­tion of a par­tic­u­lar writ­ing project: “to elim­i­nate the steps, or the blocks, between the writer and the page. That’s why I always get the fastest and newest type­writer. If they make one that costs twelve mil­lion dol­lars, I’ll write a bad check and get it for a while.” Reg­u­lat­ing this sig­na­ture gonzo direct­ness is a rig­or­ous styl­is­tic dis­ci­pline. “That’s the one book of mine that I’ve even read,” Thomp­son says, thanks to the “four or five rewrites” he per­formed on the man­u­script. “There’s not a word in there — I mean, there might be fif­teen or twen­ty, but that’s about all — that don’t have to be there.”

Inter­view­ing Thomp­son is vet­er­an jour­nal­ist Har­ri­son Sal­is­bury, the New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief in the 1940s and 50s. He also wrote many books includ­ing The Shook-Up Gen­er­a­tion, a 1958 study of juve­nile delin­quen­cy (and a vol­ume found in Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe’s per­son­al library) that could have primed his inter­est in Thomp­son’s debut Hel­l’s Angels when it came out a decade lat­er. Appear though he may to be the kind of estab­lish­ment fig­ure who’d have lit­tle enthu­si­asm for gonzo jour­nal­ism, Sal­is­bury’s ques­tions sug­gest a thor­ough knowl­edge and under­stand­ing of Thomp­son’s work, right down to the “ten­sion” that dri­ves it. “It could be drug-induced, or adren­a­line-induced, or time-induced,” Thomp­son says of that ten­sion. “I’ve been told by at least one or two con­fi­dent spe­cial­ists that the kind of ten­sion I main­tain can­not be done for any length of time with­out… I’ll either melt or explode, one of the two.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 9 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

How Hunter S. Thomp­son Gave Birth to Gonzo Jour­nal­ism: Short Film Revis­its Thompson’s Sem­i­nal 1970 Piece on the Ken­tucky Der­by

“Gonzo” Defined by Hunter S. Thompson’s Per­son­al Copy of the Ran­dom House Dic­tio­nary

Hunter S. Thomp­son Chill­ing­ly Pre­dicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Com­ing Revenge of the Eco­nom­i­cal­ly & Tech­no­log­i­cal­ly “Obso­lete” (1967)

Hunter S. Thomp­son Talks with Kei­th Richards in a Very Mem­o­rable and Mum­ble-Filled Inter­view (1993)

A Young Hunter S. Thomp­son Appears on the Clas­sic TV Game Show, To Tell the Truth (1967)

Read Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as It Was Orig­i­nal­ly Pub­lished in Rolling Stone (1971)

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

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Leon Theremin Advertises the First Commercial Production Run of His Revolutionary Electronic Instrument (1930)

in History, Music | July 9th, 2021

“The theremin specif­i­cal­ly, and Leon Therem­in’s work in gen­er­al is the biggest, fat­test, most impor­tant cor­ner­stone of the whole elec­tron­ic music medi­um. That’s were it all began.” — Robert Moog

In the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the theremin — patent­ed by its name­sake inven­tor Leon Theremin (Lev Sergeye­vich Ter­men) in 1928 — became some­thing of a nov­el­ty, its sound asso­ci­at­ed with sci-fi and hor­ror movies. This is unfor­tu­nate giv­en its pedi­gree as the first elec­tron­ic musi­cal instru­ment, and the only musi­cal instru­ment one plays with­out touch­ing. Such facts alone were not enough to sell the theremin to its first poten­tial play­ers and lis­ten­ers. The inven­tor and his pro­tege Clara Rock­more real­ized they had proved the theremin was not only suit­able for seri­ous music but for the most beloved and well-known of com­po­si­tions, a strat­e­gy not unlike the Moog synthesizer’s pop­u­lar­iza­tion on Wendy Car­los’ Switched on Bach.

Pho­to by Sci­ence Muse­um Group
© The Board of Trustees of the Sci­ence Muse­um, shared under Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion Non­Com­mer­cial-Share­Alike 4.0 License

For Theremin and Rock­more, demon­strat­ing the new instru­ment meant more than mak­ing records. When he arrived in the Unit­ed States in 1928, the inven­tor had just wrapped a long Euro­pean tour. He showed off his new musi­cal device in the U.S. at the New York Phil­har­mon­ic. “At first, Therem­in’s instru­ments were lim­it­ed to just a few that the inven­tor him­self per­son­al­ly made,” notes RCATheremin.

He then “trained a small group of musi­cians in the art of play­ing them.” The sound began to catch on with such pop­u­lar musi­cians as croon­er Rudy Val­lée, “who devel­oped such a fond­ness for the theremin,” writes Theremin play­er Char­lie Drap­er, “that he com­mis­sioned his own cus­tom instru­ment from Leon Theremin, and fea­tured it in per­for­mances of his orches­tra, The Con­necti­cut Yan­kees.”

Pho­to by Sci­ence Muse­um Group
© The Board of Trustees of the Sci­ence Muse­um, shared under Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion Non­Com­mer­cial-Share­Alike 4.0 License

In the same year that Val­lée and Charles Hen­der­son released their pop­u­lar song “Deep Night,” Theremin grant­ed pro­duc­tion rights to the instru­ment to RCA, and the com­pa­ny pro­duced a lim­it­ed test run of 500 machines. As RCATheremin points out, these were hard­ly acces­si­ble to the aver­age per­son:

Fac­to­ry-made RCA Theremins were first demon­strat­ed in music stores in sev­er­al major U.S. cities on Octo­ber 14, 1929 and were mar­ket­ed pri­mar­i­ly in 1929 and 1930. Theremins were lux­u­ry items, priced at $175.00, not includ­ing vac­u­um tubes and RCA’s rec­om­mend­ed Mod­el 106 Elec­tro­dy­nam­ic Loud­speak­er, which brought the total cost of buy­ing a com­plete theremin out­fit up to about $232.00. This trans­lates to about $3,217 in today’s cur­ren­cy.

The pro­hib­i­tive price of the RCA Theremin would doom the design when the stock mar­ket crashed lat­er that year. Oth­er fac­tors con­tributed to its demise, such as a “sig­nif­i­cant mis­cal­cu­la­tion on the part of RCA,” who encour­aged “the per­cep­tion that the theremin was easy to play.” Adver­tis­ing copy claimed it involved “noth­ing more com­pli­cat­ed than wav­ing one’s hands in the air!”

As mas­ter­ful play­ers, Theremin and Rock­more might have made it look easy, but as with any musi­cal instru­ment, true skill on the there­in requires tal­ent and prac­tice. To adver­tise the new com­mer­cial design by RCA, Theremin him­self appeared in “the rel­a­tive­ly new medi­um of sound film” in 1930, play­ing Hen­der­son and Val­lée’s “Deep Night” (top). Drap­er and pianist Paul Jack­son recre­ate the moment just above, on a ful­ly restored RCA theremin nick­named “Elec­tra.”

Only around 136 of the RCA theremins sur­vive, some of them made by Theremin him­self and oth­ers by dif­fer­ent engi­neers. They are now among the rarest elec­tric devices of any kind. See one of them, ser­i­al num­ber 100023, fur­ther up, a res­i­dent of the Nation­al Sci­ence and Media Muse­um in Brad­ford, UK, and learn much more about the rare RCA Theremins here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Clara Rock­more, the Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Who First Rocked the Theremin in the Ear­ly 1920s

Watch Jim­my Page Rock the Theremin, the Ear­ly Sovi­et Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment, in Some Hyp­not­ic Live Per­for­mances

Wendy Car­los Demon­strates the Moog Syn­the­siz­er on the BBC (1970)

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

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Eastern Philosophy Explained: From the Buddha to Confucius and Haiku to the Tea Ceremony

in Philosophy, Religion | July 9th, 2021

There was a time, not so long ago in human his­to­ry, when prac­ti­cal­ly no West­ern­ers looked to the East for wis­dom. But from our per­spec­tive today, this kind of philo­soph­i­cal seek­ing has been going on long enough to feel nat­ur­al. When times get try­ing, you might turn to the Bud­dha, Lao Tzu, or even Con­fu­cius for wis­dom as soon as you would to any oth­er fig­ure, no mat­ter your cul­ture of ori­gin. And here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, intro­duc­tions to their thought lie clos­er than ever to hand: on The School of Life’s “East­ern phi­los­o­phy” Youtube playlist, you’ll find primers on these influ­en­tial sages and oth­ers besides, all play­ful­ly ani­mat­ed and nar­rat­ed by Alain de Bot­ton.

De Bot­ton him­self has writ­ten on many sub­jects, but has found some of his great­est suc­cess in one par­tic­u­lar area: pre­sent­ing the work of writ­ers and thinkers from bygone eras in a man­ner help­ful to mod­ern-day audi­ences. That his best-known books include The Con­so­la­tions of Phi­los­o­phy and How Proust Can Change Your Life sug­gests a per­son­al incli­na­tion toward the West­ern, but through­out sub­se­quent projects his purview has widened.

With the School of Life’s Youtube chan­nel he’s cast an espe­cial­ly wide cul­tur­al and intel­lec­tu­al net, which has pulled in not just the ideas of Pla­to, Kant, and Fou­cault but the prin­ci­ples of rock appre­ci­a­tion, kintsu­gi, and wu wei as well.

Who among us could­n’t stand to cul­ti­vate a lit­tle more appre­ci­a­tion for rocks, or indeed for the oth­er seem­ing­ly mun­dane ele­ments of the world we pass our days ignor­ing? And sure­ly we could all use a bit of the world­view behind kintsu­gi, the art of repair­ing bro­ken pot­tery in such a way as to bril­liant­ly high­light the cracks rather than hide them, or wu wei, a kind of flex­i­bil­i­ty of being com­pa­ra­ble to slight drunk­en­ness.

If these con­cepts appeal to you, you can go slight­ly deep­er with the School of Life’s intro­duc­tions to such his­tor­i­cal per­son­ages as Zen poet Mat­suo Bashō, acknowl­edged as the mas­ter of haiku, and Sen no Rikyū, who devel­oped the Japan­ese “way of tea.” These would once have seemed unlike­ly sub­jects to inter­est peo­ple from the oth­er side of the world; but as the pop­u­lar­i­ty of these videos under­scores, that era has passed. And as the School of Life expands, might it not find an even more robust audi­ence of East­ern­ers get­ting into West­ern phi­los­o­phy?

Watch nine videos here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Phi­los­o­phy of “Flow”: A Brief Intro­duc­tion to Tao­ism

In Basho’s Foot­steps: Hik­ing the Nar­row Road to the Deep North Three Cen­turies Lat­er

Bud­dhism 101: A Short Intro­duc­to­ry Lec­ture by Jorge Luis Borges

What Ancient Chi­nese Phi­los­o­phy Can Teach Us About Liv­ing the Good Life Today: Lessons from Harvard’s Pop­u­lar Pro­fes­sor, Michael Puett

A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Kintsu­gi, the Japan­ese Art of Repair­ing Bro­ken Pot­tery and Find­ing Beau­ty in Imper­fec­tion

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beau­ty of Tra­di­tion­al Japan

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

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Watch L’Inferno (1911), Italy’s First Feature Film and Perhaps the Finest Adaptation of Dante’s Classic

in Film | July 8th, 2021

In its sec­ond decade, cin­e­ma strug­gled to evolve. The first films by the Lumière Broth­ers and Thomas Edi­son were short and gim­micky — shots of trains rac­ing towards the screen, cou­ples kiss­ing and cute kit­tens get­ting fed. A quick rush. A bit of fun. Its cre­ators didn’t see much past the nov­el­ty of cin­e­ma but then oth­er film­mak­ers like Georges Méliès, Edwin S Porter, Alice Guy-Blaché and D.W. Grif­fith start­ed inject­ing this new medi­um with ele­ments of sto­ry. It start­ed aspir­ing towards art.

To this end, film­mak­ers start­ed to expand the can­vas on which they cre­at­ed. Films that were just two to eight min­utes length­ened in dura­tion as their sto­ries grew in com­plex­i­ty. The first fea­ture-length movie came in 1906 with the Aus­tralian movie The Sto­ry of the Kel­ly Gang.

In 1915, D.W. Grif­fith pre­miered his racist dra­ma The Birth of a Nation, which crys­tal­lized film lan­guage and proved that longer movies could be finan­cial­ly suc­cess­ful. In between those two movies came L’Inferno (1911) – per­haps the finest cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion of Dan­te’s Infer­no out there and the first fea­ture-length Ital­ian movie ever.

LInferno-1024x505

Like Grif­fith, the mak­ers of L’Inferno — Francesco Bertoli­ni, Adol­fo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro – sought to raise cin­e­ma to the ranks of lit­er­a­ture and the­ater. Unlike Grif­fith, they didn’t real­ly do much to for­ward the lan­guage of cin­e­ma. Through­out L’Inferno, the cam­era remains wide and locked down like the prosce­ni­um of a stage. Instead, they focused their efforts on cre­at­ing glo­ri­ous­ly baroque sets and cos­tumes. Much of the film looks like it was pulled straight from Gus­tave Dorè’s famed illus­tra­tions of The Divine Com­e­dy. Yet see­ing a pic­ture in a book of a demon is one thing. See­ing it leap around lash­ing the naked backs of the damned is some­thing else entire­ly. If you were ever tempt­ed by the sin of simo­ny, you’ll think twice after see­ing this film.

L’Inferno — now added to our col­lec­tion of 1,000+ Free Movies Online — became both a crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial hit world­wide, rak­ing in over $2 mil­lion (rough­ly $48 mil­lion in today’s mon­ey) in the US alone. “We have nev­er seen any­thing more pre­cious and fine than those pic­tures. Images of hell appear in all their great­ness and pow­er,” gushed famed Ital­ian nov­el­ist and reporter Matilde Serao when the film came out.

Amer­i­can film crit­ic for The Mov­ing Pic­ture World, W. Stephen Bush, was even more effu­sive:

“I know no high­er com­men­da­tion of the work than men­tion of the fact that the film-mak­ers have been exceed­ing­ly faith­ful to the words of the poet. They have fol­lowed, in let­ter and in spir­it, his con­cep­tions. They have sat like docile schol­ars at the feet of the mas­ter, con­sci­en­tious­ly and to the best of their abil­i­ty obey­ing every sug­ges­tion for his genius, know­ing no inspi­ra­tion, except such as came from the foun­tain­head. Great indeed has been their reward. They have made Dante intel­li­gi­ble to the mass­es. The immor­tal work, whose beau­ties until now were acces­si­ble only to a small band of schol­ars, has now after a sleep of more than six cen­turies become the prop­er­ty of mankind.”

Of course, the film’s com­bi­na­tion of ghoul­ish­ness and nudi­ty made it ripe to be co-opt­ed by shady pro­duc­ers who had less that lofty motives. Scenes from L’Inferno were cut into such exploita­tion flicks as Hell-O-Vision (1936) and Go Down, Death! (1944).

You can watch the full movie above. Be sure to watch to the end where Satan him­self can be seen devour­ing Bru­tus and Cas­sius.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gus­tave Doré’s Haunt­ing Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

A Free Course on Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Why Should We Read Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy? An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

What David Lynch Can Do With a 100-Year-Old Cam­era and 52 Sec­onds of Film

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. 

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Watch Footage of the Allies Rolling Through a Defeated German Town in April, 1945: Restored & Colorized with AI

in History | July 8th, 2021

Ear­ly April, 1945. The Sovi­ets are clos­ing in on Ger­many, lib­er­at­ing War­saw, Krakow, and Budapest. Amer­i­can troops have crossed the Rhine. Adolf Hitler won’t live to see May. World War II is com­ing to an end. This footage, tak­en from film by Amer­i­can troops in and around Nord­hausen, Ger­many, shows the wreck­age of a defeat­ed nation. Enhanced by AI into 60fps, with col­or and atmos­pher­ic sound added, it’s anoth­er of YouTube’s increas­ing library of old footage that looks like it was shot yes­ter­day. (Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the video has changed the film’s ratio, widen­ing all the humans in it.)

The orig­i­nal film—you can watch it here at the Unit­ed States Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Muse­um—has an inter­est­ing his­to­ry itself. Shot by a mem­ber of the US Army Sig­nal Corps, the film was kept in the Nation­al Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion until being unearthed by Dou­glas Hack­ney while research­ing his grand­fa­ther who served in the war. (Appar­ent­ly he is seen in one of the oth­er films in the orig­i­nal col­lec­tion.) The dig­i­ti­za­tion was then gift­ed to the Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Muse­um.

The 60fps ver­sion is assem­bled from sev­er­al reels. We see fight­ing in a for­est out­side Nord­hausen, then a gath­er­ing of cap­tured Nazi sol­diers, then troops cel­e­brat­ing with freed pris­on­ers with some shots of liquor, a bit of morn­ing down­time, and the effects of allied bomb­ing.

Nord­hausen was the sight of the Dora-Mit­tel­bau con­cen­tra­tion camp, built in August of 1943 so Nazis could use its pris­on­ers as slave labor, dig­ging tun­nels into the near­by hill­side for Ger­man fac­to­ries relat­ed to the V‑2 rock­et pro­gram.

Accord­ing to the Holo­caust his­to­ry web­site, remember.org:

On April 11th, the 104th Infantry Divi­sion entered the Dora camp and the 3rd Armored Divi­sion entered the Boel­cke-Kaserne sub­camp. Although mem­bers of the VII Corps had been fore­warned there was a prison camp, they cer­tain­ly could not have expect­ed the inhu­mane atroc­i­ties they were about to wit­ness. The dead and near-dead were every­where, piled upon one anoth­er, and imme­di­ate med­ical atten­tion was giv­en to the few sur­vivors. There were 3000 corpses and 750 ema­ci­at­ed sur­vivors that were aban­doned by the SS.

Of the 60,000 pris­on­ers to enter the Dora-Mit­tel­bau camps, it is esti­mat­ed that 13,000–18,000 died in the camp. Com­mon caus­es of death includ­ed tuber­cu­lo­sis, pneu­mo­nia, star­va­tion, dysen­tery, and trau­ma.

One can hope these 60fps enhanced videos con­tin­ue to be uploaded to YouTube. Per­son­al­ly, the col­oriza­tion adds lit­tle, but as a win­dow into time real­ly not that long ago (and with neo-Nazis still kick­ing around) we need reminders of where it can all lead with­out our vig­i­lance.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Real D‑Day Land­ing Footage, Enhanced & Col­orized with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (June 6, 1944)

Dra­mat­ic Footage of San Fran­cis­co Right Before & After the Mas­sive­ly Dev­as­tat­ing Earth­quake of 1906

Watch the Only Known Footage of Anne Frank

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.

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Watch the Tate Modern Restore Mark Rothko’s Vandalized Painting, Black on Maroon: 18 Months of Work Condensed Into 17 Minutes

in Art | July 8th, 2021

“The peo­ple who weep before my pic­tures are hav­ing the same reli­gious expe­ri­ence I had when I paint­ed them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their col­or rela­tion­ship, then you miss the point.” — Mark Rothko

In 2012, a Russ­ian artist call­ing him­self Vladimir Umanets wrote his name and the words “A poten­tial piece of yel­low­ism” in black mark­er on the cor­ner of Mark Rothko’s 1958 can­vas Black on Maroon. The dam­age to the paint­ing, housed at the Tate Mod­ern since 1970, was sub­stan­tial, and it turned out to be one of the museum’s most chal­leng­ing restora­tion projects, as well as one of its most suc­cess­ful — “far more suc­cess­ful than any of us dared hope,” said Tate direc­tor Nicholas Sero­ta. The paint­ing went back on dis­play in May of 2014.

Due to Rothko’s lay­ered tech­nique, the painting’s “sur­face is real­ly del­i­cate and it turned out that most of the sol­vent sys­tems that could dis­solve and remove the ink could poten­tial­ly dam­age the paint­ing as well.” Patri­cia Smithen, the Tate’s head of con­ser­va­tion, told The Guardian. The video above from the muse­um shows the art and sci­ence that went into restor­ing the famous work, an eigh­teen-month-long process that involved some reverse engi­neer­ing from a can­vas donat­ed by the Rothko fam­i­ly.

Black on Maroon seemed like an odd choice for a protest, as a blog­ger at Art His­to­ry Abroad wrote the fol­low­ing day: “‘Why Rothko?’. His paint­ings [are] often crit­i­cised by those who don’t favour their abstrac­tion, but rarely deemed polit­i­cal­ly or social­ly moti­vat­ed to a point that they might pro­voke van­dal­ism.” The pres­ence of Black on Maroon and oth­er Sea­gram Murals at the Tate, in fact, mark an act of protest by Rothko him­self (who com­mit­ted sui­cide the day the paint­ings arrived at the Lon­don muse­um).

The Sea­gram Murals were orig­i­nal­ly com­mis­sioned for the Four Sea­sons restau­rant in the Sea­gram build­ing in New York, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip John­son. Sev­en paint­ings were com­mis­sioned, Rothko made 30. He report­ed­ly told Harper’s edi­tor John Fis­ch­er he want­ed to cre­ate “some­thing that will ruin the appetite of every son-of-a-bitch who ever eats in that room.” When he final­ly got the chance to dine at the com­plet­ed restau­rant, he was dis­gust­ed, with­drew his work, and returned his com­mis­sion, writ­ing, “it seemed clear to me at once that the two were not for each oth­er.” He spent the next decade think­ing about how and where to dis­play the paint­ings.

Umanets did not seem to care much about the his­to­ry of the murals in the Tate’s Rothko Room and claims his choice had no mean­ing. “I didn’t sin­gle out Rothko to make my state­ment,” he wrote in a pub­lic let­ter of apol­o­gy pub­lished after he spent a year and a half in prison. “I would have done the same had the artist been Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin. It was a spon­ta­neous deci­sion and noth­ing per­son­al.” Like­wise, his Dada-esqe “Man­i­festo of Yel­low­ism” out­lines a pro­gram with a dis­tinct lack of con­cern for speci­fici­ty and a vague­ly satir­i­cal desire to flat­ten art into one col­or, one pur­pose, one mean­ing.

Even as he pub­licly abjured his act of protest (maybe by order of the court?), Umanets also expressed a gen­uine con­cern for the future of art, “Art has become a busi­ness, which appears to serve only the needs of the art mar­ket. As a result the art world no longer has rad­i­cal thinkers and polemi­cists will­ing to scythe new and dif­fer­ent path­ways. Every­one is play­ing safe.” He might have made his point more clear­ly by going after Jeff Koons. Rothko was a rad­i­cal thinker, and his Sea­gram Murals rep­re­sent a final refusal to com­pro­mise with the demands of the art mar­ket.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Short Doc­u­men­tary on Artist Jeff Koons, Nar­rat­ed by Scar­lett Johans­son

Watch an Art Con­ser­va­tor Bring Clas­sic Paint­ings Back to Life in Intrigu­ing­ly Nar­rat­ed Videos

The MoMA Teach­es You How to Paint Like Pol­lock, Rothko, de Koon­ing & Oth­er Abstract Painters

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

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

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