Three Days in Twin Peaks: An In-Depth Journey Through the Evocative Locations of David Lynch’s TV Series

in Film, Television, Travel | November 3rd, 2020

After a time of great personal loss, a friend of mine set off on a road trip around the United States. When I later asked what part of the country had made the deepest impression on him, he named a few towns about thirty miles east of Seattle: the shooting locations, he hardly needed tell a fellow David Lynch fan, of Twin Peaks. Raised in Spokane, Washington, among a variety of other modest American cities, Lynch saw clearly the look and feel of the titular setting by the time he co-created the show with writer Mark Frost. He eventually found it in the Washingtonian towns of Snoqualmie, North Bend and Fall City, which even today offer a friendly reception to the occasional Twin Peaks pilgrim — at least according to my friend.

This was more recently corroborated by Jeremiah Beaver, creator of Youtube “Twin Peaks theory and analysis show” Take the Ring. Thirty years after the premiere of the famously cryptic yet transfixing original series, the Indianapolis-based Beaver made the trip to Washington to visit its every remaining location — as well as those used in the 1992 prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return, and even these productions’ deleted scenes.

Into the half-hour-long “Three Days in Twin Peaks” Beaver fits a great deal of information related to Twin Peaks’ production and mythos as well as the real-life history of the relevant places. “It was at times hard to distinguish the Twin Peaks that lived in my imagination versus the ground beneath my feet,” he admits.

Beaver makes his way to locations both major and minor, from the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department (now the DirtFish Rally Racing School) and the Double R diner (Twede’s Cafe, “one of the few spots in Washington state that really owns its Peakness”) to the shack of the Book House biker club and the bench in E.J. Roberts Park once sat upon by the late Harry Dean Stanton’s Carl Robb. Some real buildings played dual roles: both Twin Peaks’ Blue Pine Lodge and Great Northern Hotel are in reality different parts of Poulsbo’s Kiana Lodge, and the Mt. Si Motel appears as “two different motels with elements of the supernatural,” first in Fire Walk with Me, then even more seedily in The Return. “That fresh mountain air and smell of trees is no joke,” says Beaver, words to heed if you plan on making your own Twin Peaks pilgrimage — and if you do, you can surely guess how he describes the coffee and cherry pie at Twede’s.

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

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Martin Luther King: “You Know Who to Vote For. I’m Just Asking You to Vote!” (1964)

in History | November 3rd, 2020

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

At another turning point in U.S. history–when LBJ ran against Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election–Martin Luther King, Jr. urged voters to stand up and be counted. To set the scene, the UCLA Film & Television Archive writes:

King, who had just been named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his commitment to nonviolent resistance, embarked on a cross-country get-out-the-vote campaign in support of incumbent Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson. Republican challenger Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in favor of states’ rights and represented, for King, a setback for the civil rights movement and “a great dark night of social destruction” (Los Angeles Times). King also advocated for more African American representation in Congress and spoke against ballot measures that would perpetuate discrimination. To vote was not only a civic duty, it was a moral imperative.

His words speak to our moment today as much, if not more, than they did to the events of 56 years ago. Speaking to a crowd in LA, King said:

“Suffice it to say that we stand in one of the most momentous periods of human history. And in these days of emotional tension, when the problems of the world are gigantic in extent and chaotic in detail, all men of good will must make the right decisions.”

“We must decide whether … we will allow our nation to be relegated to a second-rate power in the world with no moral voice.”

“We must decide next Tuesday whether America will take the high road of justice and peace, compassion for the poor and underprivileged, or whether this nation will tread the low road of man’s inhumanity to man, of injustice, of short-sightedness.”

“Each of us has a moral responsibility, if we are of voting age and if we are registered, to participate in that decision. I come here to urge every person under the sound of my voice to go to the polls on the 3rd of November and vote your convictions.”

Amen.

Martin Luther King Jr. Explains the Importance of Jazz: Hear the Speech He Gave at the First Berlin Jazz Festival (1964)

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The Iconic Photography of Gordon Parks: An Introduction to the Renaissance American Artist

in Photography | November 3rd, 2020

I felt the need for me to somehow or another, use humanity to get people to become aware of how people suffered. That was what drove me to it.

Poet, novelist, jazz pianist, classical composer, co-founder of Essence magazine, and first Black director of a major Hollywood film, based on a book he himself wrote.… Oh, and he also directed Shaft, the high watermark of Blaxploitation film and a production, says Evan Puschak, the Nerdwriter, above, “that helped to save MGM and the larger studio system from bankruptcy.” Gordon Parks lived “enough for ten lives,” but the resume above misses out on Parks’ “greatest contribution to American art in the 20th century… his photography.”

The self-taught Parks began taking pictures at 25, inspired by newsreel footage of the bombing of an American gunship. After seeing the film, he purchased his first camera and soon moved to Chicago, where he honed his craft in the early 40s and developed the skills that would bring him to the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration. There he worked under the legendary Roy Stryker, the former Columbia economist who also hired Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Edwin Rosskam, and other photographers who went on to have long careers in photojournalism.

None of these Depression-era government photographers neglected the Black experience in America; under Stryker’s direction, the FSA did its best to faithfully document working-class and poor Americans of all backgrounds. Before being commissioned to do so, however, Parks, the only Black photographer in the group, was already seeking out candid, intimate images of life on the South Side of Chicago. When he began working for the FSA, he produced one of the most iconic images of the period, “American Gothic,” a solo restaging of the Grant Woods painting featuring a cleaning woman named Ella Watson, broom in one hand, mop in the other.

Stryker, one of the most daring photo editors of the time, helped establish the bold documentary style that dominated in the coming decades of Look and Life magazines. But even he saw Parks’ “American Gothic” as too incendiary. As Parks remembers in a clip above, “he says, ‘Well, you’re getting the idea, but you’re going to get us all fired. (Laughs) He says, ‘This is a government agency, and that picture is an indictment against America.’” Parks did not get fired. Instead, he went on to work for the FSA’s successor, the Office of War Information, and photographed the Tuskegee Airmen.

Parks’ skills as an artist were wide-ranging: his vision took in everything. He documented the Black experience in the 20th century with more sensitivity and depth than any other photographer. His photo essay of a Harlem gang leader earned him the first staff appointment for a Black photographer at Life in 1948. He would go on to document the Civil Rights movement and both celebrated and ordinary people around the country and the world for the next several decades, returning often to the fashion photography in which he got his start. He was a renaissance artist with an activist’s heart. Parks once called the camera a “weapon against poverty and racism,” but he tended to wield it much more like a paintbrush.

You can view galleries of Parks’ photographic work at The Gordon Parks Foundation website.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

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A Quay Brothers Animation Explains Anamorphosis, the Renaissance Illusion That Hides Pictures within Pictures

in Animation, Art, Religion, Science | November 2nd, 2020

First appearances can be deceiving.

Take physicist Emmanuel Maignan’s 1642 fresco in a corridor of Rome’s Trinità dei Monti monastery.

Viewed head on, it appears to be a somewhat unconventional landscape in which one of the few remaining branches of a mutilated tree spreads over a city, far in the distance. Streaky clouds suggest heavy weather is brewing.

Stroll to the end of the corridor and take another look. You’ll find that the tree has contracted, and the clouds have reconfigured themselves into a portrait of Saint Francesco of Paola, praying beneath its boughs.

It’s a prime example of oblique anamorphosis, an image that has been deliberately distorted by an artist well versed in perspective, with the end result that the image’s true nature will only be revealed to those viewing the work from an unconventional point.

The Quay Brothers’ documentary short, above, a collaboration with art historian Roger Cardinal, uses a combination of their delightfully creepy signature puppet stop motion, as well as animated 3‑D cut outs, to lift the curtains on how the human eye can be manipulated, using principles of perspective.

Anamorphosis may not seem like such a feat in an age when a number of software programs can provide a major assist, but why would Renaissance artists put themselves to so much extra trouble?

The Quay Brothers delve into this too.

Perhaps the artist was injecting a bit of social criticism, like Hans Holbein the Younger, whose 1533 portrait, The Ambassadors, includes a secret anamorphic skull. This could be taken as a jab at the excesses of the wealthy young diplomats who provide the painting’s subject, except that the one who commissioned the work, Jean de Dinteville, prized the motto “Memento mori.”

Maybe he knowingly ordered up the naked death’s head to go along with his ermine and bling, an example of having one’s cake and eating it too, and yet another dizzying head trip for those viewing the painting from the intended angle.

(Betcha didn’t have to work too hard to guess the skull’s location, though…)

Or an artist might choose to employ anamorphosis as a brown paper wrapper of sorts, as in the case of Erhard Schön’s erotic woodblock prints.

Elsewhere, the goal was to emphasize patience, reflection, and cleaving to a pious path by rewarding those who craned their necks toward a spiritual peephole with an appropriately religious view.

(Pity the poor pilgrim who stepped up expecting Erhard Schön…)

For a 21st-century take on anamorphic art, have a look at the work of the graffiti collective TRULY | Urban Artists here.

The Quay Brothers’ short film, “De Artificiali Perspectiva, or Anamorphosis,” has been made available on The Met Museum’s YouTube channel.

via Aeon

Watch Marcel Duchamp’s Hypnotic Rotoreliefs: Spinning Discs Creating Optical Illusions on a Turntable (1935)

The Anatomical Drawings of Renaissance Man, Leonardo da Vinci

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

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

in History, Music, Politics | November 2nd, 2020

When Louis Armstrong appeared in his hometown of New Orleans for the first time in nine years in 1965, it was, Ben Schwarz writes, “a low point for his critical estimation.” A younger generation saw his refusal to march on the front lines of the civil rights movement, risking life and limb, as a “racial cop-out,” as journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote at the time. Armstrong was seen as “a breezy entertainer with all the gravitas of a Jimmy Durante or Dean Martin.”

The criticism was unfair. Armstrong only played New Orleans in 1965 after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, having boycotted the city in 1956 when it banned integrated bands. In 1957 after events in Little Rock, Arkansas, Armstrong refused a State Department-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union over Eisenhower’s handling of the situation. He spoke out forcefully, used words you can’t repeat on NPR, called governor Orval Faubus an “ignorant plowboy” and the president “two-faced.”

But he preferred touring and making money to marching, and was happy to play for the State Department and PepsiCo on a 1960 tour of the African continent to promote, ostensibly, the opening of five new bottling plants. When he arrived in Leopoldville, capital city of the Congo, in late October, he even stopped a civil war, managing “to call a brief intermission in a country that had been unstable before his arrival,” Jayson Overby writes at the West End Blog.

Unstable is an understatement. The newly-independent country’s first elected president, Patrice Lumumba, had just been deposed in a coup by anti-communist Joseph Mobutu, survived a “bizarre” assassination attempt by the C.I.A., and would soon be on his way to torture and execution after the UN turned its back on him. The country was coming apart when Armstrong arrived. Then, it stopped. As he put it in a later interview, “Man, they even declared peace in The Congo fighting the day I showed up in Leopoldville.”

“Just for that day,” writes Overby, “he blew his horn and played with his band the sweet sound of jazz for a large crowd. But no sooner after Louis departed, the war resumed.” This being a joint state/commerce operation during the Cold War, there is of course much more to the story, some which lends credence to criticism of Armstrong as a government pawn used during “goodwill” tours to test out various forms of cultural warfare. That was, at least, the official stance of Moscow, according to the AP newsreel at the top of the post.

The Soviets “blasted Armstrong’s visit as a diversionary tactic,” and it was. Ricky Riccardi at the Louis Armstrong House Museum covers the event in great detail, including highlighting several declassified State Department memos that show the planning. In one, from October 14th, the first U.S. ambassador to the country, Clare Hayes Timberlake, argues that “cooperation with private firm might soften propaganda implications.”

After the October 27th performance, Timberlake judged the appearance “highly successful from standpoint over-all psychological impact on this troubled city.” Clearly, the 10,000 Congolese who showed up to see Satchmo play needed the break. But the diplomats misread the audience reaction, thinking they didn’t like the music when they started to leave at dusk. “Given the climate in Leopoldville,” Riccardi writes, “one can’t blame the locals for not wanting to stay out longer than they had to.” But it was, nonetheless, the State Department declared, the “first happy event” in the city since the country’s independence.

via @ArmstrongHouse

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

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Before Creating the Moomins, Tove Jansson Drew Satirical Art Mocking Hitler & Stalin

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, History, Magazines | November 2nd, 2020

Much of the world has only recently discovered the Moomins, those lovable hippopotamus-like figures — given, it must be said, to moments of startling brusqueness and complexity — created in the 1940s by Finnish artist Tove Jansson. In forms ranging from dolls and school supplies to neck pillows and cellphone cases, they’ve lately become a full-blown craze in South Korea, where I live. Like any massively successful (and highly merchandisable) characters, the Moomins overshadow the rest of Jansson’s oeuvre. Hence exhibitions like Tove Jansson (1914–2001) at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, which “aims to rectify the fact that less attention has generally been paid to her range as a visual artist.”

That description comes from Simon Willis’ review of the show in the New York Review of Books. “In October 1944, Tove Jansson drew a cover for Garm, a Finnish satirical magazine, showing a brigade of Adolf Hitlers as pudgy little thieves,” Willis writes. These drawer-rifling, house-burning caricatures “were not unusual for Jansson, who had been belittling Stalin and Hitler in the magazine since the early days of World War II.” But “peeking out at the chaos from behind the magazine’s title,” there was also a “tiny pale figure with a long nose”: a proto-Moomin making an appearance the year before the publication of the first Moomin book. (And even he was forged in mockery, having first been drawn by Jansson, so the story goes, as a caricature of Immanuel Kant.)

Having started contributing to Garm, according to the official Moomin web site, “in 1929 at the young age of 15 (her mother Signe Hammarsten-Jansson had worked for the publication since it started),” she kept on doing so until the magazine folded in 1953.

“During that period she drew more than 500 caricatures, a hundred cover images and countless other illustrations for the magazine.” In them, writes Glasstire’s Caleb Mathern, “angels appear on battlefields. Reindeer prepare to rain TNT. An effete, undersized Hitler cries instead of eating slices of cake. Jansson even impugns Stalin’s manhood with an oversized scabbard/undersized sword joke.” To the young Jansson, the best part was the chance, as she later put it, “to be beastly to Stalin and Hitler.”

Even after the success of the Moomins, Jansson continued to draw on the imagery and emotions of war: “The first time we meet young Moomintroll and his Moominmamma in The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945), they are refugees, crossing a strange and threatening landscape in search of shelter. Moominpappa, meanwhile, is absent, as fathers often were during the war,” writes Aeon’s Richard W. Orange. In the next book “the world is threatened by a comet that sucks the water out of the sea, leaving an apocalyptic landscape in its wake.” With the Cold War heating up, the allegory would hardly have gone unnoticed. Like all master satirists, Jansson went on to transcend the solely topical — and indeed, so the increasingly Moomin-crazed world has demonstrated, the boundaries of time and culture.

via Aeon/Moomin

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Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japanese Cartoons During WWII, Then Atones with Horton Hears a Who!

The Sublime Alice in Wonderland Illustrations of Tove Jansson, Creator of the Globally-Beloved Moomins (1966)

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

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Why Masks Work: A Slow Motion Demonstration (Plus a Guest Appearance by Dr. Fauci)

in Science | November 1st, 2020

The Slo Mo Guys specialize in taking everyday occurrences and slowing them down … way down, so that we can see them in a new way. In this clip, they let you see what happens when you talk without a mask, and then with a mask–all in order to demonstrate why a mask helps prevent the transmission of COVID-19, a disease that’s mainly spread when people are exposed to respiratory droplets carrying infectious virus. Around the 4 minute mark, the host is joined by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who offers commentary on the footage.

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Sean Connery (RIP) Reads C.P. Cavafy’s Epic Poem “Ithaca,” Set to the Music of Vangelis

in Film, Music, Poetry | October 31st, 2020

This video combines three things that make me happy: the voice of Sean Connery (who passed away today), the music of Vangelis (Blade Runner, Chariots of Fire), and the poetry of C.P. Cavafy. Put them all together and you get a blissful soundscape of rolling synth lines, rolling Scottish R’s, and a succession of Homeric images and anaphoric lines. And the video’s quite nice as well.

Cavafy, whose work, I’m told, is really untranslatable from the original Greek, always seems to come out pretty well to me in English. “Ithaca,” one of his most popular poems, expresses what in lesser hands might be a banal sentiment akin to “it’s the journey, not the destination.” But in Cavafy’s poem, the journey is both Odysseus’s and ours; it’s epic where our lives seem small, and it translates our minor wanderings to the realm of mythic history.

Anyway, it seems rude to say much more and drown the poem in commentary. So, follow along with Sean Connery.

Find the text of the poem after the jump. (more…)

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The Official Trailer for the New Frank Zappa Documentary Is Now Online

in Film, Music | October 30th, 2020

Mark it on your calendars. Alex Winter’s new Zappa documentary will be released on November 23. To whet your appetite, here’s the official trailer for the film: “With unfettered access to the Zappa family trust and all archival footage, ZAPPA explores the private life behind the mammoth musical career that never shied away from the political turbulence of its time. Alex Winter’s assembly features appearances by Frank’s widow Gail Zappa and several of Frank’s musical collaborators including Mike Keneally, Ian Underwood, Steve Vai, Pamela Des Barres, Bunk Gardner, David Harrington, Scott Thunes, Ruth Underwood, Ray White and others.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

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

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The Legend of How Bluesman Robert Johnson Sold His Soul to the Devil at the Crossroads

in History, Music | October 30th, 2020

We remember the bluesman Robert Johnson as the Jimi Hendrix of the 1930s, a guitarist of staggering skill who died before age thirty. Both found mainstream success, but Johnson’s came posthumously: in fact, his music and Hendrix’s first music hit it big in the same decade, the 1960s. King of the Delta Blues Singers, an album of Johnson’s songs released by Columbia Records in 1961, had a great influence on the likes of Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Robert Plant, and Eric Clapton, who calls Johnson “the most important blues singer that ever lived.” How did this poor young Mississippian come by his formidable abilities? Why, he sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads, of course.

Or at least that’s what we all seem to have heard. And indeed, doesn’t the legend make the opening line of “Cross Road Blues,” King of the Delta Blues’ opening number, that much more evocative? “I went down to the crossroads,” he sings. “Fell down on my knees. Asked the Lord above for mercy, ‘Take me, if you please.’ ” Well, it could’ve been the Lord, or it could have been the other one. But in fact we have precious little record of Johnson’s life, and no direct references at all to his bargain with Beelzebub (animations of which we previously featured here on Open Culture). Why has the legend stuck? Music Youtube series Polyphonic addresses that question in the video essay above.

An earlier episode covered deals with the devil throughout the history of music. This time, the subject is the crossroads itself, the setting of Johnsonian lore no one ever fails to mention. “Of all the marks that humans make on the earth, crossroads are among the simplest and most enduring,” says narrator Noah Lefevre. “As long as humans organize ourselves in towns and cities, crossroads will remain, and so will the legends of their dark powers and of the strange spirits who occupy them.” The mythology of the crossroads goes back at least to the Greek goddess Hecate, who rules over “liminal space, the transition from the known to the great unknown beyond.” In the Mississippi Delta, the mythology of the crossroads intersects, as it were, with the realm of Haitian voodoo.

“A religion that mixes Roman Catholic influences with West African spiritual traditions” — and the one that gave us zombies — voodoo has “one all-powerful god, but you can only speak to him through spirits known as loa.” And to talk to loa, you’ve got to go through Papa Legba, the loa of the crossroads. From the late 18th century, voodoo began making its way through the American South, the cradle of the blues. Out of this rich setting came Johnson’s predecessor Tommy Johnson (no relation), a singer and guitarist who based his persona on the claim of having sold his own soul to the devil. Even Robert Johnson’s mentor Ike Zimmerman was said to have practiced guitar in graveyards at midnight.

“Johnson is seen today as the grandfather of rock-and-roll,” says Lefevre. “That comes not just from his virtuoso playing, but also from his mythology.” (Consider this legacy in light of how often rock-and-roll was in decades past called “the devil’s music.”) Today, in songs like “Hellhound on My Trail,” we can hear both references to voodoo-inspired rituals and other forms of the occult as well as conditions of life in a South removed only a generation or two from slavery. This Polyphonic episode may convince you that “the myth of Johnson and the crossroads may have been birthed out of sheer accident,” but that’s no reason not to give King of the Delta Blues Singers a spin this Halloween — or any other day besides.

A Brief History of Making Deals with the Devil: Niccolò Paganini, Robert Johnson, Jimmy Page & More

Jimi Hendrix Arrives in London in 1966, Asks to Get Onstage with Cream, and Blows Eric Clapton Away: “You Never Told Me He Was That F‑ing Good”

Jimi Hendrix Plays the Delta Blues on a 12-String Acoustic Guitar in 1968, and Jams with His Blues Idols, Buddy Guy & B.B. King

Covering Robert Johnson’s Blues Became a Rite of Rock ‘n’ Roll Passage: Hear Covers by The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Howlin’ Wolf, Lucinda Williams & More

Robert Johnson Finally Gets an Obituary in the New York Times 81 Years After His Death

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

The Sublime Alice in Wonderland Illustrations of Tove Jansson, Creator of the Globally-Beloved Moomins (1966)

in Art, Literature | October 30th, 2020

Sometimes describing a classic work of literature as “timeless” draws attention, when we revisit it, to how much it is bound up with the conventions of its time. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland emerged from a very specific time and place, the bank of the Thames in 1862 where Charles Lutwidge Dodgson first composed the tale for Alice Liddell and her sister. The future Lewis Carroll’s future bestseller became one of the most widely adapted and adopted works of literature in history. It never needs to be revived—Alice is always contemporary.

Those who have read the book to children know that Carroll’s nonsense story, though filled with archaic terms and outdated ideas about education, requires little additional explanation: indeed, it cannot be explained except by reference to the strange leaps of logic, rapid changes in scale and direction, and anthropomorphism familiar to everyone who has had a dream. Dodgson was a pretty weird character, and prim Victorian Alice is not exactly an everygirl, but every reader imagines themselves tumbling right down the rabbit hole after her.

As far as illustrators of Carroll’s timeless classic go, it’s hard to find one who is more universally beloved, and more Alice-like, than Tove Jansson, inventor of the Moomins, the Finnish series of children’s books and TV shows that is, in parts of the world, like a religion. How are her Alice illustrations not better known? It’s hard to say. Jansson’s Bohemian biography is as endearing as her characters, and she would make a wonderful subject for a children’s story herself. As James Williams tells it at Apollo Magazine:

The artist, Tove Jansson (1914–2001), was a great colourist who lived a richly plural life. Born into Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority to a Swedish mother and a Finnish father, both artists, she grew up on both sides of the Baltic. Jansson trained as a painter and illustrator in Stockholm and Paris, and made an early living through commissions and piecework. She was an acerbic and witty anti-fascist cartoonist during the Second World War, sending up Hitler and Stalin in covers for the Swedish-language periodical Garm. Descended on the one hand from a famous preacher, and on the other from a pioneer of the Girl Guide movement, she was raised on the Bible and on tales of adventure (Tarzan, Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe). In her thirties she built a log cabin on an island and was a capable sailor. She lived visibly and courageously with her partner, the Finnish artist Tuulikki Pietilä, at a time when lesbian relationships did not enjoy public acceptance. She considered emigrating at various times to Tonga and Morocco but, despite travelling widely, remained rooted in Finland where she became (dread accolade) a ‘national treasure.’ She wrote a picture book for children about the imminent end of the world and spare, tender fiction for adults about love and family. She never stopped drawing and painting. She was Big in Japan.

We’ll find dream logic woven into all of Jansson’s work, from her early Moomin-like creature paintings from the 1930s to her illustrations for The Hobbit and Alice decades later. Her Alice, in Swedish, was first published in 1966, then released in an American edition in 1977. Sadly, her illustrations “did not receive such a great reception,” notes Moomin.com. “Readers already had their own imaginations in their minds about these classics.”

Blame Disney, I suppose, but there is never a bad time to re-imagine Alice’s journey, and the artist has left us with an excellent way to do so, “crafting a sublime fantasy experience,” Maria Popova writes, “that fuses Carroll’s Wonderland with Jansson’s Moomin Valley.” See more of Jansson’s timelessly weird drawings at Brain Pickings.

Behold Lewis Carroll’s Original Handwritten & Illustrated Manuscript for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1864)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Illustrated by Salvador Dalí in 1969, Finally Gets Reissued

Ralph Steadman’s Warped Illustrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on the Story’s 150th Anniversary

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Three Days in Twin Peaks: An In-Depth Journey Through the Evocative Locations of David Lynch’s TV Series

Martin Luther King: “You Know Who to Vote For. I’m Just Asking You to Vote!” (1964)

The Iconic Photography of Gordon Parks: An Introduction to the Renaissance American Artist

A Quay Brothers Animation Explains Anamorphosis, the Renaissance Illusion That Hides Pictures within Pictures

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

Before Creating the Moomins, Tove Jansson Drew Satirical Art Mocking Hitler & Stalin

Why Masks Work: A Slow Motion Demonstration (Plus a Guest Appearance by Dr. Fauci)

Sean Connery (RIP) Reads C.P. Cavafy’s Epic Poem “Ithaca,” Set to the Music of Vangelis

The Official Trailer for the New Frank Zappa Documentary Is Now Online

The Legend of How Bluesman Robert Johnson Sold His Soul to the Devil at the Crossroads

The Sublime Alice in Wonderland Illustrations of Tove Jansson, Creator of the Globally-Beloved Moomins (1966)

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