The Singer or the Song? Ken Stringfellow (Posies, R.E.M., Big Star) and Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #23 Discuss

in Music, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | December 18th, 2019

What’s your relationship to music? Do you just embrace the pure sound, or do you care about who made that sound? One way of seeing where you fall on this issue is whether you care more for singles or to whole albums or careers by artists.

Ken Stringfellow, who co-fronts The Posies and was a member of R.E.M. and Big Star, joins Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to talk about what actually grabs us about music, whether being a musician yourself is a key factor in whether you pay attention to the context of a song, how music gets to your ears, singers vs. songwriters, what we think about the notion of “genius,” and how this artist vs. song conflict relates to how we take in other media (e.g. favorite film directors).

The ideas for this discussion mostly came from reflecting on our own experiences and habits, but we did some warm-up research into:

Artists who hate their hit song: People, BBC, CheetSheet.com.
Articles about trends in music sales, such as “Will the Single Kill the Album” by Steven Guttenberg, CNet News
Various articles who call musicians “genius,” like this one about Britney Spears from The Guardian.
Also, Ric Ocasek (from The Cars) R.I.P.
Quincy Jones complaining about Taylor Swift

Listen to Mark interview Ken on Nakedly Examined Music, presenting specifically some of his solo, Posies, and Big Star songs. After that was recording, Ken sang some harmonies on a tune on Mark’s last album, Mark Lint’s Dry Folk.

Other references: “Midnight Confessions” by The Grass Roots, Lil Peep, Tom Waits’s most popular album, Lou Reed is not a one-hit wonder, the scene in Slacker with a fan getting Madonna’s pubic hair, Damien Rice is still working, the band Live reunited, REM on Sesame Street (no, Ken is not on camera), Ken being “world music” by playing solo in foreign countries.

This episode includes bonus discussion that you can only hear 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 or start with the first episode.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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

in Philosophy, Religion | December 17th, 2019

“In the West,” the I Ching, or the Book of Changes, “is mainly known as a divination manual,” writes philosopher and novelist Will Buckingham, “part of the wild carnival of spurious notions that is New Age spirituality.” But just as one can use the Tarot as a means of reading the present, rather than predicting future events, so too can the I Ching serve to remind us, again and again, of a principle we are too apt to forget: the critical importance of non-action, or what is called wu wei in Chinese philosophy.

Non-action is not passivity, though it has been mischaracterized as such by cultures that overvalue aggression and self-assertion. It is a way of exercising power by attuning to the rhythms of its mysterious source. In the religious and philosophical tradition that became known as Taoism, non-action achieves its most canonical expression in the Tao Te Ching, the classic text attributed to sixth century B.C.E. thinker Laozi, who may or may not have been a real historical figure.

The Tao Te Ching describes non-action as a paradox in which dualistic tensions like passivity and aggression resolve.

That which offers no resistance,
Overcomes the hardest substances.
That which offers no resistance
Can enter where there is no space.
Few in the world can comprehend
The teaching without words, or
Understand the value of non-action.

Wu wei is sometimes translated as “effortless action” or the “action of non-action,” phrases that highlight its dynamic quality. Arthur Waley used the phrase “actionless activity” in his English version of the Tao Te Ching. In the short video introduction above, “philosophical entertainer” Einzelgänger explains “the practical sense” of wu wei in terms of that which athletes call “the zone,” a state of “action without striving” in which bodies “move through space effortlessly.” But non-action is also an inner quality, characterized by its depth and stillness as much as its strength.

Among the many symbols of wu wei is the action of water against stone—a graceful organic movement that “overcomes the hardest substances” and “can enter where there is no space.” The image illustrates what Einzelgänger explains in contemporary terms as a “philosophy of flow.” We cannot grasp the Tao—the hidden creative energy that animates the universe—with discursive formulas and definitions. But we can meet it through “stillness of mind, curbing the senses, being humble, and the cessation of striving, in order to open ourselves up to the workings of the universe.”

The state of “flow,” or total absorption in the present, has been popularized by psychologists in recent years, who describe it as the secret to achieving creative fulfillment. Non-action has its analogues in Stoicism’s amor fati, Zen’s “backward step,” and Henri Bergson’s élan vital. In the Tao te Ching, the Way appears as both a metaphysical, if enigmatic, philosophy and a practical approach to life that transcends our individual goals. It is an improvisatory practice which, like rivers carving out their beds, requires time and persistence to master.

In a story told by Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi, a renowned butcher is asked to explain his seemingly effortless skill at carving up an ox. He replies it is the product of years of training, during which he renounced the struggle to achieve, and came to rely on intuition rather than perception or brute force. Embracing non-action reveals to us the paths down which our talents naturally take us when we stop fighting with life. And it can show us how to handle what seem like insoluble problems by moving through, over, and around them rather than crashing into them head on.

Albert Einstein Tells His Son The Key to Learning & Happiness is Losing Yourself in Creativity (or “Finding Flow”)

Slavoj Žižek: What Fullfils You Creatively Isn’t What Makes You Happy

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

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

Discover the Stendhal Syndrome: The Condition Where People Faint, or Feel Totally Overwhelmed, in the Presence of Great Art

in Art, History, Literature, Psychology, Travel | December 17th, 2019

Clutch imaginary pearls, rest the back of your hand on your forehead, look wan and stricken, begin to wilt, and most people will recognize the symptoms of your sarcasm, aimed at some pejoratively feminized qualities we’ve seen characters embody in movies. The “literary swoon” as Iaian Bamforth writes at the British Journal of General Practice, dates back much further than film, to the early years of the modern novel itself, and it was once a male domain.

“Somewhere around the time of the French Revolution (or perhaps a little before it) feelings were let loose on the world.” Rationalism went out vogue and passion was in—lots of it, though not all at once. It took some decades before the discovery of emotion reached the climax of Romanticism and denouement of Victorian sentimentality:

Back in 1761, readers had swooned when they encountered the ‘true voice of feeling’ in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse; by the end of the decade, all of Europe was being sentimental in the manner made fashionable a few years later by Laurence Sterne in his A Sentimental Journey. Then there was Goethe’s novella, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which made its author a celebrity.

It’s impossible to overstate how popular Goethe’s book became among the aristocratic young men of Europe. Napoleon “reputedly carried a copy of the novel with him on his military campaign.” Its swooning hero, whom we might be tempted to diagnose with any number of personality and mood disorders, develops a disturbing and debilitating obsession with an engaged woman and finally commits suicide. The novel supposedly inspired many copycats and “the media’s first moral panic.”

If we can feel such exaltation, disquiet, and fear when in the grip of romantic passion, or when faced with nature’s implacable behemoths, as in Kant’s Sublime, so too may we be overcome by art. Napoleonic novelist Stendhal suggested as much in a dramatic account of such an experience. Stendhal, the pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle, was no inexperienced dreamer. He had traveled and fought extensively with the Grand Army (including that fateful march through Russia, and back) and had held several government offices abroad. His realist fiction didn’t always comport with the more lyrical tenor of the times.

Photo of the Basilica of Santa Croce by Diana Ringo, via Wikimedia Commons

But he was also of the generation of young men who read Werther while touring Europe, contemplating the varieties of emotion. He had held a similarly unrequited obsession for an unavailable woman, and once wrote that “in Italy… people are still driven to despair by love.” During a visit to the Basilica of Santa Croce in 1817, he “found a monk to let him into the chapel,” writes Bamforth, “where he could sit on a genuflecting stool, tilt his head back and take in the prospect of Volterrano’s fresco of the Sibyls without interruption.” As Stendhal described the scene:

I was already in a kind of ecstasy by the idea of being in Florence, and the proximity of the great men whose tombs I had just seen. Absorbed in contemplating sublime beauty, I saw it close-up—I touched it, so to speak. I had reached that point of emotion where the heavenly sensations of the fine arts meet passionate feeling. As I emerged from Santa Croce, I had palpitations (what they call an attack of the nerves in Berlin); the life went out of me, and I walked in fear of falling.

With the recording of this experience, Stendhal “brought the literary swoon into tourism,” Bamforth remarks. Such passages became far more commonplace in travelogues, not least those involving the city of Florence. So many cases similar to Stendhal’s have been reported in the city that the condition acquired the name Stendhal syndrome in the late seventies from Dr. Graziella Magherini, chief of psychiatry at the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital. It presents as an acute state of exhilarated anxiety that causes people to feel faint, or to collapse, in the presence of art.

Magherini and her assistants compiled studies of 107 different cases in 1989. Since then, Santa Maria Nuova has continued to treat tourists for the syndrome with some regularity. “Dr. Magherini insists,” writes The New York Times, that “certain men and women are susceptible to swooning in the presence of great art, especially when far from home.” Stendhal didn’t invent the phenomenon, of course. And it need not be solely caused by sufferers’ love of the 15th century.

The stresses of travel can sometimes be enough to make anyone faint, though further research may rule out other factors. The effect, however, does not seem to occur with nearly as much frequency in other major cities with other major cultural treasures. “It is surely the sheer concentration of great art in Florence that causes such issues,” claims Jonathan Jones at The Guardian. Trying to take it all in while navigating unfamiliar streets and crowds.… “More cynically, some might say the long queues do add a layer of stress on the heart.”

There’s also no discounting the effect of expectation. “It is among religious travelers that Stendhal’s syndrome seems to have found its most florid expression,” notes Bamforth. Stendhal admitted that his “ecstasy” began with an awareness of his “proximity of the great men whose tombs I had just seen.” Without his prior education, the effect might have disappeared entirely. The story of the Renaissance, in his time and ours, has impressed upon us such a reverence for its artists, statesmen, and engineers, that sensitive visitors may feel they can hardly stand in the actual presence of Florence’s abundant treasures.

Perhaps Stendhal syndrome should be regarded as akin to a spiritual experience. A study of religious travelers to Jerusalem found that “otherwise normal patients tended to have ‘an idealistic subconscious image of Jerusalem’” before they succumbed to Stendhal syndrome. Carl Jung described his own such feelings about Pompeii and Rome, which he could never bring himself to visit because he lived in such awe of its historical aura. Those primed to have symptoms tend also to have a sentimental nature, a word that once meant great depth of feeling rather than a callow or mawkish nature.

We might all expect great art to overwhelm us, but Stendhal syndrome is rare and rarified. The experience of many more travelers accords with Mark Twain’s 1869 The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress, a fictionalized memoir “lampooning the grandiose travel accounts of his contemporaries,” notes Bamforth. It became “one of the best-selling travel books ever” and gave its author’s name to what one researcher calls Mark Twain Malaise, “a cynical mood which overcomes travelers and leaves them totally unimpressed with anything UNESCO has on its universal heritage list.” Sentimentalists might wish these weary tourists would stay home and let them swoon in peace.

1.8 Million Free Works of Art from World-Class Museums: A Meta List of Great Art Available Online

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

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

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

Seven Videos Explain How Edward Hopper’s Paintings Expressed American Loneliness and Alienation

in Art | December 17th, 2019

Though born in the late 19th century and partially shaped by a few sojourns to Europe, Edward Hopper was an artist fundamentally of early 20th-century America. He took life in that time and place as his subject, but he also once said that “an artist paints to reveal himself through what he sees in his subject,” meaning that he in some sense embodied early 20th-century America. Royal Academy of the Arts Artistic Director Tim Marlow quotes that line in the 60-second introduction to Hopper above, then points to a common thread in the painter’s “enigmatic works”: a “profound contemplation of the world around us” that turns each of his paintings into one captured “moment of stillness in a frantic world.”

Much of Hopper’s work came out of the Great Depression, “a period of great uncertainty and anxiety, but also a time of deep national self-imagination about the very idea of American-ness.” To look at the figures who inhabit Hopper’s thoroughly American settings — a gas station, a hotel room, inside a train car, an all-night diner — self-reflection would seem to be their main pastime.

“A woman sits alone drinking a cup of coffee,” says the School of Life’s head of Art and Architecture Hanna Roxburgh of Hopper’s 1927 Automat in the video above. “She seems slightly self-conscious and a little afraid. Perhaps she’s not used to sitting alone in a public space. Something seems to have gone wrong. The view is invited to invent stories for her of betrayal or loss.”

Loneliness, isolation, even despair: these words tend to come up in discussion of the moods of Hopper’s characters, as well as of his paintings themselves. In the in-depth exploration above, Colin Wingfield focuses on a single emotion expressed in Hopper’s work: alienation. A product of the “machine age” in late 19th- and early 20th century America, Hopper expressed an uneasy view of the ways in which accelerating industrialization and automation were altering the lives lived around him into unrecognizability. This view would turn out to have an enormous cultural resonance, as detailed in Edward Hopper and the Blank Canvas, the hourlong documentary below.

Touching on the Hopper influences seen in the work of directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Terrence Malick as well as television shows like Mad Men and The Simpsons, Edward Hopper and the Blank Canvas also brings in cultural figures like the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, an avowed Hopper enthusiast with much to say about the painter’s vision in America. More creators from the world of cinema appear in the video below to offer their personal perspectives on Hopper’s considerable influence on their art form — an art form that had considerable influence on Hopper, an avid moviegoer since he first watched a motion picture in Paris in 1909.

No single painting of Hopper’s has had as much influence on film as 1942’s Nighthawks, by far the painter’s best-known work. How exactly he achieved his own cinematic effects in a still image, such as the “storyboarding” technique with which he developed its composition, is a subject we’ve featured before here on Open Culture. In the video essay “Nighthawks: Look Through the Window,” Evan Puschak — better known as the Nerdwriter — seeks out the sources of the painting’s enduring power, from its “clean, smooth, and almost too real” aesthetic to its rigorous composition to its host of visual elements meant to both compel and unsettle the viewer.

Hopper explains his way of working in his own words in the short video from the Walker Art Center below. “It’s a long process of gestation in the mind and a rising emotion,” he says, followed by “drawings, quite often many drawings”: “various small sketches, sketches of the thing that i wish to do, also sketches of details in the picture.” As for the themes of “loneliness, isolation, modern man and his man-made environment” so often ascribed to the final products, “those are the words of critics. It may be true and it may not be true. It’s how the viewer looks at the pictures, what he sees in them.”

Edward Hopper’s Iconic Painting Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Introduction

9‑Year-Old Edward Hopper Draws a Picture on the Back of His 3rd Grade Report Card

10 Paintings by Edward Hopper, the Most Cinematic American Painter of All, Turned into Animated GIFs

How Famous Paintings Inspired Cinematic Shots in the Films of Tarantino, Gilliam, Hitchcock & More: A Big Supercut

60-Second Introductions to 12 Groundbreaking Artists: Matisse, Dalí, Duchamp, Hopper, Pollock, Rothko & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 ) |

Jimi Hendrix Hosts a Jam Session Where Jim Morrison Sings Drunkenly; Jimi Records the Moment for Posterity (1968)

in Music | December 16th, 2019

Two psych rock superstars at the height of their fame, both notorious for epic drug and alcohol consumption, and neither particularly suited to the other’s sensibility, Jim Morrison and Jimmy Hendrix might have been an oddly consonant musical pairing, or not. Morrison, the egomaniac, looked inward, mining his dark fantasies for material. Hendrix, the introvert, ventured into the reaches of outer space in his expansive imagination.

What might come of a musical meeting? We know only what transpired one night at Manhattan’s Scene Club in 1968, and let’s just say it didn’t go particularly well. It seems unfair to lob criticism at a bootlegged, one-off, improvised performance. But that hasn’t stopped critics from doing so. The recording has appeared under several names, including Sky High, Bleeding Heart, Morrison/Hendrix/Winter (under the assumption Johnny Winter played on it), and as the very resonantly titled Woke up this morning and found myself dead.

Eventually, some anonymous distributer settled on Morrison’s Lament, “an apt title,” Ron Kretsch writes at Dangerous Minds, “if by ‘lament’ one means ‘drunken, formless discharge of inane profanities.” Morrison, it seems, invited himself onstage, and Hendrix, who made the tape himself, seems not to mind the intrusion. At one point, you can hear him tell the Doors’ singer to “use the recording mic.” Some bootlegs credit Morrison for the harmonica playing, while others credit Lester Chambers.

Hendrix starts with his go-to blues jam, “Red House.” He’s backed—depending on which liner notes you read—by either Band of Gypsys’ drummer Buddy Miles or McCoy’s drummer Randy Zehringer. Rick Derringer may have played rhythm guitar. Johnny Winter reportedly denied having been there, but the Scene Club was owned by his manager, Steve Paul. “Jimi was a frequent visitor here,” writes Hendrix biographer Tony Brown in the notes for a 1980 copy of the session. “He loved he atmosphere and also loved to jam and as he always had a tape machine on hand, that night was captured forever.”

That’s a very mixed blessing. “Some of the tracks kinda kick ass,” writes Kretsch, including the effortlessly brilliant “Red House” Hendrix and band play in the first six minutes or so at the top. Then Morrison steps onstage and begins to howl—sounding like a random inebriated audience member who’s lost all inhibition, instead of the eerily cool singer of “Riders on the Storm.” Maybe there’s good reason to hear Morrison bellowing “save me, woman!” as a serious cry for help.

But there’s little reason to take this performance seriously. If that still leaves you wondering—what might have resulted from a sober, well-rehearsed session between these two?—you’ll have to make-do with the mashup above, which convincingly combines Morrison’s “Riders on the Storm” vocals with Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” playing. Listen at least until the solo at around 1:20 to hear Ray Manzarek’s organ trickle in. Now that would have been a great collaboration. If you every come across any bootlegged Manzarek and Hendrix jams, send them our way.…

Hear the Last Time the Jimi Hendrix Experience Ever Played Together: The Riotous Denver Pop Festival of 1969

The Doors’ Ray Manzarek Walks You Through the Writing of the Band’s Iconic Song, “Riders on the Storm”

Jimi Hendrix Plays the Beatles: “Sgt. Pepper’s,” “Day Tripper,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”

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

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

How Andrew Wyeth Made a Painting: A Journey Into His Best-Known Work Christina’s World

in Art | December 16th, 2019

Andrew Wyeth died a decade ago, but his status as a beloved American painter was assured long before. He painted his best-known work Christina’s World in 1948, a time in American painting when images of immediately recognizable fields, farmhouses, and middle-aged women were not, to put it mildly, in vogue. But Christina’s World has survived right alongside, say, Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings from the very same year. How it has done so — and what way of seeing enabled Wyeth to paint it with such confidence in the first place — constitutes the subject of this new video essay by Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter (whose investigations into Picasso, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Hopper and others we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture).

“Being realistic and dramatic, Christina’s World more easily fits the shape of our memories, our dreams, our fears and cravings,” says Pucshak. “In other words, it resembles a story.” Not only does the painting’s combination of the familiar and the unknown fire up our imagination, getting us to generate narratives to apply to it, it also guides our vision, taking us on a journey from woman to house to barn and back again. But for all its appearance of pastoral reverie, it also has a certain darkness about it, hinted at by the colors, which are muted, reflecting the particular austerity of New England landscapes, a common image in early American art and thought,” as well as the body of Christina herself, lifted from the earth only by “thin and contorted arms.”

The real Christina, as is now common art-historical knowledge, suffered from a disease of the nervous system that robbed her of her ability to walk; her preference of crawling rather than using a wheelchair meant that she navigated her world in a much different manner than most of us do. But even as Wyeth shows us one variety of little-acknowledged human limitation, he also shows us another variety of little-acknowledged human ability. Puschak suggests that Wyeth was “looking for a secret in nature,” and in the search became the transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “transparent eye-ball,” which contains nothing yet sees everything.

“He sees in the nature around him, even in the barren landscapes of new England, something profoundly real,” says Puschak. “As an artist, he helps us to see it too.” He also reminds us 21st century urbanites, who dwell as much in the digital realm as the physical one, of the “piece of us in the land, in the trees, in the sky, and a sense of wholeness waits for us when we can remember not to forget it.” The idea may sound as unfashionable as realism looked in Wyeth’s day, but to the artist’s own mind, he was never a realist at all. “My people, my objects breathe in a different way,” he once said. “There’s another core — an excitement that’s definitely abstract. My God, when you really begin to peer into something, a simple object, and realize the profound meaning of that thing — if you have an emotion about it, there’s no end.”

What Makes The Night Watch Rembrandt’s Masterpiece

Van Gogh’s Ugliest Masterpiece: A Break Down of His Late, Great Painting, The Night Café (1888)

What Makes The Death of Socrates a Great Work of Art?: A Thought-Provoking Reading of David’s Philosophical & Political Painting

Edward Hopper’s Iconic Painting Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Introduction

You Can Sleep in an Edward Hopper Painting at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: Is This the Next New Museum Trend?

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 ) |

The Prado Museum Digitally Alters Four Masterpieces to Strikingly Illustrate the Impact of Climate Change

in Art, Current Affairs, Education, Environment, Science | December 16th, 2019

According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels between 2030 and 2052 should it continue to increase at its current rate.

What does this mean, exactly?

A catastrophic series of chain reactions, including but not limited to:

–Sea level rise
–Change in land and ocean ecosystems
–Increased intensity and frequency of weather extremes
–Temperature extremes on land
–Drought due to precipitation deficits
–Species loss and extinction

Look to the IPCC’s 2018 Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5°C for more specifics, or have a gander at these digital updates of masterpieces in Madrid’s Museo del Prado’s collections.

The museum collaborated with the World Wildlife Fund, choosing four paintings to be altered in time for the recently wrapped Madrid Climate Change Conference.

Artist Julio Falagan brings extreme drought to bear on El Paso de la Laguna Estigia (Charon Crossing the Styx) by Joachim Patinir, 1520 — 1524

Marta Zafra raises the sea level on Felipe IV a Caballo (Philip the IV on Horseback) by Velázquez, circa 1635.

The Parasol that supplies the title for Francisco de Goya’s El Quitasol of 1777 becomes a tattered umbrella barely sheltering miserable, crowded refugees in the sodden, makeshift camp of Pedro Veloso’s reimagining.

And the Niños en la Playa captured relaxing on the beach in 1909 by Joaquín Sorolla now compete for space with dead fish, as observed by artist Conspiracy 110 years further along.

None of the original works are currently on display.

It would be a public service if they were, alongside their drastically retouched twins and perhaps Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, to further unnerve viewers about the sort of hell we’ll soon be facing if we, too, don’t make some major alterations.

For now the works in the +1.5ºC Lo Cambia Todo (+1.5ºC Changes Everything) project are making an impact on giant billboards in Madrid, as well as online.

#LoCambiaTodo

via Colossal

Climate Change Gets Strikingly Visualized by a Scottish Art Installation

A Century of Global Warming Visualized in a 35 Second Video

Perpetual Ocean: A Van Gogh-Like Visualization of our Ocean Currents

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Monday, January 6 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domaincelebrates Cape-Coddities by Roger Livingston Scaife (1920). Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Blues Musician Plays a Soul-Stirring Version of “Amazing Grace” at His Mother’s Funeral

in Life, Music | December 16th, 2019

The Dust to Digital Facebook page sets the scene: “Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram, play[s] an amazing and touching version of “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of his mother, Princess Pride, today. She was a great supporter of her son, and would have turned 50 tomorrow.” Amazing and touching indeed. Make sure you play it all of the way through. And when you start the video, manually move up the volume icon at the bottom right of the video.

In case it’s not already clear, Kingfish is a professional blues musician. You can catch his videos on Youtube, including this sweet version of “I Put A Spell On You.” Very sorry for your loss, Kingfish…

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Neil Gaiman Talks Dreamily About Fountain Pens, Notebooks & His Writing Process in His Long Interview with Tim Ferriss

in Writing | December 15th, 2019

Last February, Neil Gaiman sat down for a 90-minute interview with author, entrepreneur and podcaster Tim Ferriss. At the 13:30 mark, the conversation turns to Gaiman’s writing process, and there begins a long and lovely detour into the world of fountain pens (the Pilot 823, Viscontis, and the New York Fountain Pen Hospital in NYC), notebooks (why he prefers Leuchtturm German notebooks to Moleskines), and how he writes his novels out by hand. It’s all carefully thought out:

Tim Ferriss: Are there any other rules or practices that you also hold sacred or important for your writing process?

Neil Gaiman: Some of them are just things for me. For example, most of the time, not always, I will do my first draft in fountain pen, because I actually enjoy the process of writing with a fountain pen. I like the feeling of fountain pen. I like uncapping it. I like the weight of it in my hand. I like that thing, so I’ll have a notebook, I’ll have a fountain pen, and I’ll write. If I’m doing anything long, if I’m working on a novel, for example, I will always have two fountain pens on the go, at least, with two different colored inks, at least, because that way I can see at a glance, how much work I did that day. I can just look down and go, “Look at that! Five pages in brown. How about that? Half a page in black. That was not a good day. Nine pages in blue, cool, what a great day.”

You can just get a sense of are you working, are you making forward progress? What’s actually happening. I also love that because it emphasizes for me that nobody is ever meant to read your first draft. Your first draft can go way off the rails, your first draft can absolutely go up in flames, it can — you can change the age, gender, number of a character, you can bring somebody dead back to life. Nobody ever needs to know anything that happens in your first draft. It is you telling the story to yourself.

Then, I’ll sit down and type. I’ll put it onto a computer, and as far as I’m concerned, the second draft is where I try and make it look like I knew what I was doing all along.

Tim Ferriss: Do you edit, then, as you’re looking or translating from the first draft on the page to the computer, or do you get it all down as is in the computer and then edit —

Neil Gaiman: No, that’s my editing process. I figure that’s my second draft is typing into the computer. Also, I love — backing up a bit here. When I was, what was I? 27, 28? In the days when we were still in typewriters and we were just a handful of people with word processors, which were clunky things with disks which didn’t hold very much and stuff, I edited an anthology and enjoyed editing my anthology.

Most of the stories that came in were about 3,000 words long. Move forward in time, not much, five, six, seven years. Mid ‘90s, everybody is now on computer, and I edited another short story anthology. The stories that were coming in tended to be somewhere between six- and 9,000 words long. They didn’t really have much more story than the 3,000 word ones, and I realized that what was happening is it’s a computer‑y thing, is if you’re typing, putting stuff down is work. If you’ve got a computer, adding stuff is not work. Choosing is work. It expands a bit, like a gas. If you have two things you could say, you say both of them. If you have the stuff you want to add, you add it, and I thought, “Okay, I have to not do that, because otherwise my stuff is going to balloon and it will become gaseous and thin.”

What I love, if I’ve written something on a computer, and I decide to lose a chunk, it feels like I’ve lost work. I delete a page and a half, I feel like there’s a page and half that just went away. That was a page and a half’s worth of work I’ve just lost. If I’ve been writing in a notebook and I’m typing it up, I can look at something and go, “Oh, I don’t need this page and a half.” I leave it out, I just saved myself work, and it feels like I’m treating myself.

I’m just trying to always have in my head the idea that maybe I’m somehow, on some cosmic level, paying somebody by the word in order to be allowed to write, but if they’re there, they should matter, they should mean something. It’s always important to me.

Tim Ferriss: You mentioned distraction earlier and your dangerously adorable son, which I certainly agree with. I had read somewhere, actually, before I get to that, this might seem like a very, very mundane question, but what type of notebooks do you prefer? Are they large legal pads or are they leather bound? What type of notebooks?

Neil Gaiman: When they came out, I really liked — I’ve used a whole bunch of different ones. I bought big drawing ones, which actually turned out to be a bit too big, though I liked how much I could see on the page. Those are the ones I wrote Stardust and American Gods in, big size, but they weren’t terribly portable. I went over to the Moleskines, and I loved them when they first came out, and then they dropped their paper quality. Dropping paper quality doesn’t matter, unless you’re writing in fountain pen, because all of a sudden it’s bleeding through, and all of a sudden you’re writing on one page, leaving a page blank because it’s bled through and then writing on the next page.

Joe Hill, about six or seven years ago, Joe Hill, the wonderful horror fantasy writer, suggested the Leuchtturm to me. My usual notebook right now is a Leuchtturm, because I really like the way you can paginate stuff in them and the thickness of the paper, and they’re just like Moleskines, but the Porsche of Moleskines. They’re just better.

I also have been writing, I wrote The Graveyard Book and I’m writing the current novel in these beautiful books that I bought in a stationery shop in Venice, built into a bridge. Somewhere in Venice there’s a little stationery shop on a bridge, and they have these beautiful leather-bound blank books that just look like hardback books, but they’re blank pages. I wrote The Graveyard Book in one of those. I bought four of them, and now I’m using the next one on the next novel, and it may well go into another one. I’m not sure.

Then, at home, I say at home, my house in Wisconsin, which is where my stuff is, I’ve got my — we live in Woodstock, but I have an entire life’s worth of stuff still sitting in my house in Wisconsin, and it’s become archives. It’s actually kind of fabulous having a house that is an archive, but waiting for me in that house is a book that I bought for myself about 25 years ago, and before I die, I plan to write a novel in it. It’s an accounts book from the mid-19th century. It’s 500 pages long. Every page is numbered. It’s lined with accounts lines, but really faint so it would be nice to write a book in it, and it is engineered so that every single page lies flat.

It’s huge and it’s heavy and it just looks like a book that Dickens or somebody would’ve written a novel in and I’ve just been waiting until I have an idea that is huge and weird and Dickensian enough, and whether or not I actually get to write it in dip pen, I’m not sure, but I definitely want to write it in an old Victorian, something slightly copper plating. One of those old flex nib pens that they stopped making when carbon paper came in, just so I can get that spidery Victorian handwriting.

Tim Ferriss: I’m just imagining you putting pen to the first page. When you finish the first page and what that will feel like. That’s going to be a good day.

Neil Gaiman: It will be either a good day or an incredibly bad day. When you get to the end of the first page, it’s “Oh no! I had this pristine — ” it is the thing that I tell young writers, and by young writers, a young writer can be any age. You just have to be starting out, which is anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it, because there’s nothing there to fix.

Tim Ferriss: You mentioned a word, and it might be that I’m a little slow moving because I’m from Long Island, but Leuchtturm? What is that word?

Neil Gaiman: L‑E-I-C‑H, I think it’s T‑U-R‑M, and then 1917, I think is — their Twitter handle is definitely Leuchtturm1917.

Tim Ferriss: Leuchtturm, and I’ll put that in the show notes for folks, so you’ll be able to find it. Since you gave me — I’m not intending to turn this episode into a shopping list, but I’ve never used fountain pens.

Neil Gaiman: Really?

Tim Ferriss: I have not. My assistant, my dear assistant does. She loves using fountain pens. She enjoys the act. I’ve had a few sloppy false starts and then been rather impatient, but if I wanted to give it a shot, are there any particular fountain pens or criteria that you would use in picking a good pen?

Neil Gaiman: The biggest criteria I would use in picking, if you have the choice, is go somewhere like New York’s Fountain Pen Hospital.

Tim Ferriss: Is that a real place?

Neil Gaiman: It’s a real place. It’s called The Fountain Pen Hospital. They sell lots of new pens, they recondition old pens, they look after pens for you. And try them out, because the lovely thing about fountain pens is they are personal. You go, “No, no, no.” And then you find the one. I tend to suggest to people who are just nervously — “I’ve never used a fountain pen, what should I do?” I will point them at Lamy, L‑A-M‑Y, who have some fabulous starter pens, and they’re not very expensive, and they’re good. They do a pen called The Safari, but they have a bunch of good starter pens, and they’re just nice to get into the idea of, “Do I like doing this?”

Let’s see, what am I using right now? What have I got in here? This one here is a Pilot. It’s a Namiki, and it’s a flexing nib ever so slightly when you put down weight on it, the nib will spread. It’s a beautiful, beautiful pen. That one’s a Pilot. I think this one here is the Namiki. It’s really weird because Namiki is Pilot, so I don’t quite understand that.

Tim Ferriss: Maybe it’s a Toyota/Lexus thing?

Neil Gaiman: I think it is. It’s that kinda thing. This one here is called a Falcon, and again, you put a little bit of weight on it, and the line will just spread and thicken, which is part of the fun of fountain pens. I’ll go and play. There’s a lovely Italian one. I’ve got my agent, I did a thing some years ago when I realized that I was losing a lot of actual writing time to signing foreign contracts.

Tim Ferriss: This is for books?

Neil Gaiman: This is for books, or occasionally for stories or things being reprinted around the world. The contracts would come in and there would be big sheaves of them because they get printed all around the world, and foreign contracts, a lot of them you have to sign a lot. You have to do a lot of initialing and I would sit there going, “I have just spent 90 minutes signing a pile of contracts, and I love that I got to sign it, but —” I contacted my agent. I said, “Can I give you power of attorney? Would you mind? Would you just sign these things for me?”

She was like, “Absolutely!” Great. I got her — she’d never used a fountain pen and I got her a fountain pen. I actually went to The New York Fountain Pen Hospital with her, and did the thing of showing her pens, “What do you like?” I got her a Visconti, which are just these lovely Italian pens. Mostly I love, there’s a slightly fetishistic bit of having bottles of beautifully colored ink. When you start talking to fountain pen people, they really — they pretend to be interested in what pen you like, but they don’t care, because they’ve found their own pens that they love.

They say, “What do you use?”

I use Pilot 823s for signing. Actually now, I’ve got a Pilot 823, ’cause it’s just a fantastic signing pen. It’s a workhorse, it keeps going, and I got one in 2012 and it was my signing pen. I signed through Ocean at the End of the Lane. Before the book had come out, I had already pre-signed, written my signature 20,000 times with this pen.

Tim Ferriss: I have some footage of you icing your hand after said signings.

Neil Gaiman: That was a signing tour that I really got into icing my hand and wrist and arm. I did the numbers, and as far as I can tell, I’ve signed about one and a half million signatures with that pen, which remained, and I had to send it off to Pilot at one point, not because the nib was in trouble, because the plunger mechanism was starting to stick, and they fixed it for me and sent it back. Then my three-year-old son found a place behind a cast iron fireplace in our house in Woodstock where if you just insert your father’s Pilot 823 pen, which you have found on the table, just to see if it would go in there, you can actually guarantee that without disassembling the house, we actually have to take the entire house apart to uninstall a cast iron fireplace from 1913 to get at the pen. That pen now has been given as a sacrifice to the house gods, so I need to get a new one.

Tim Ferriss: Its strikes me, at least it seems as we’re talking that many of the decisions you’ve made, the tools you’ve found and enlisted, act to make not writing unappealing, or at least boring after five minutes, and to enhance the act of writing to make it something that is enjoyable. I don’t know if that’s true.

Neil Gaiman: That is true, but they also exist for another reason, which is kind of weird, which is to try and trivialize what I’m doing and not make it important and freighted down with weight, because that paralyzes me. When I started writing I had a typewriter. It was a manual typewriter. When I sold my first book, I had the money to buy an electric typewriter.

Tim Ferriss: What was that first book?

Neil Gaiman: Gosh. I actually don’t remember whether I bought the electric typewriter with the money from a book called Ghastly Beyond Belief, a book of science fiction and fantasy quotations I did with Kim Newman, or whether it was for the Duran Duran biography that I did. Either way, I was just 23. What I would do back then is I would do my rough draft on scrap paper, single spaced so that it couldn’t be used, and also so that I could get as many words on. Paper was expensive. I could always do that. I remember the joy of getting my first computer, and just the idea that I wasn’t making paper dirty. Nothing mattered until I pressed print, and that was absolutely and utterly liberating.

And then, a decade on, picking up a notebook, it was for Stardust, which I’d decided that I wanted the rhythms of Stardust to be very antiquated rhythms, and I thought there’s probably a difference to the way that one writes with a fountain pen. 17 century writing, 17th, 18th century writing, you notice tends to go in very, very long sentences and long paragraphs. My theory about this is that one reason why you get this is because you’’re using dip pens, and if you pause, they dry up. You just have to keep going. It forces you to do a kind of writing where you’re going for a very long sentence and you’re going to go for a long paragraph and you’re going to keep moving in this thing, and you’re thinking ahead.

If you’re writing on a computer, you’ll think of the sort of thing that you mean, and then write that down and look at it and then fiddle with it and get it to be the thing that you mean. If you’re writing in fountain pen, if you do that, you just wind up with a page covered with crossings out, so it’s actually so much easier to just think a little bit more. You slow up a bit, but you’re thinking the sentence through to the end, and then you start writing.

You write that, and then you pause and then you write the next one. At least that was the way that I hypothesized that I might be writing, and I wanted Stardust to feel like it had been written in the late 1920s. I thought to do that I should probably get myself a fountain pen and a book, so that was how I started writing that. Again, what I loved was suddenly feeling liberated. Saying, “Ah, I’m not actually making words that are not going down in phosphor on a computer screen.”

Watch the full interview above. Stream it as a podcast. Or read the complete transcript here.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Meet the Americans Who Speak with Elizabethan English Accents: An Introduction to the “Hoi Toiders” from Ocracoke, North Carolina

in English Language | December 13th, 2019

I remember sitting in on a conversation with some old timers in the British village my parents grew up in, and one man remembered a time, very early on in the 20th century, where villages were so isolated you could tell where somebody was from in a radius of about 20 miles. That doesn’t exist so much these days, as radio, television, and now the internet exposes us more and more to accents at an early age.

So that’s why I found the above footage so fascinating. Taken from a documentary on regional accents (possibly this one) from the North Carolina coast, I could hear a bit of that East Anglia accent from my grandparents…but then a few words that sounded like Somerset or Devon in the south-west of England…and then some straight up southern American twang. And that was in one sentence! What’s going on here?

Isolation, that’s what. The island of Ocracoke has over the centuries developed its own dialect, “Hoi Toide” (as in “high tide”), that is also the name for a way of life. Even now, it takes a boat to reach the island–ferries only started arriving in 1957–and back in the 18th century it was a refuge for pirates.

One of them, William Howard, purchased the island in 1759 for £105, after King George I pardoned all pirates. Ocracoke, its name already a bastardization of a Native American word, became a fishing community, a mix of English, Scottish, and Irish settlers, natives, and pirates. The resulting mish-mash of borrowed and made-up words, along with pirate slang, make Hoi Toide one of the few American dialects not identified as American, as it also has its own peculiar grammar.

With a population of just over 900, Ocracoke has its own pace to life, which does attract tourists trying to get away from it all. As this BBC article points out:

Instead of cinemas, there are outdoor theatre groups. Local teashops, spice markets and other family-owned stores take the place of chain supermarkets. Cars are allowed on the 16 mile-long island, but most people just park them and walk everywhere. The island’s children all attend one school, while residents work as everything from fishermen to brewery owners to woodworkers.

Modern life is threatening the dialect, inevitably so, even as the community remains close-knit. By all accounts it will be gone in a few more generations, so let’s celebrate this particularly American brogue, born out of necessity, individuality, and most importantly, a lovely melting pot.

The Speech Accent Archive: The English Accents of People Who Speak 341 Different Languages

Why Do People Talk Funny in Old Movies?, or The Origin of the Mid-Atlantic Accent

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Traditional Inuit Thoat Singing and the Modern World Collide in This Astonishing Video

in Life, Music, Travel, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society | December 13th, 2019

Let’s just get this out of the way…

Musically speaking, Inuit throat singing—or katajjaq—is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

For all those who find this traditional form mesmerizing, there are others who get antsy with no lyrics or easily discernible melody on which to hang their hat, or who experience the bleak sound of the Arctic wind coupled with the singers’ preliminary breathing as a horror movie soundtrack.

If, as a member of one of the latter camps, you feel inclined to bail after a minute or so of Wapikoni Mobile’s Sundance-endorsed video above—you get it, it’s something akin to Mongolian or Tuvan throat-singing, it’s circular breathing, there’s a lot of picturesque snow up there—we beg you to reconsider, on two counts.

1) In an era of autotuned “everyone’s‑a-star” perfection, Katajjaq is a hearty hold-out, a community-spirited singing game whose competitors seek neither stardom nor riches, but rather, to challenge themselves and amuse each other without screens throughout the long winter nights.

Practitioner Evie Mark breaks it down thusly:

One very typical example is when the husbands would go on hunting trips. The women would gather together when they have nothing to do, no more sewing to do, no more cleaning to do, they would just have fun, and one of the ways of entertaining themselves is throat-singing.

It goes like this. Two women face each other very closely, and they would throat sing like this:

If I would be with my partner right now, I would say A, she would say A, I would say A, she would say A, I say C, she says C. So she repeats after me. It would be a sort of rolling of sounds. And, once that happens, you create a rhythm. And the only way the rhythm would be broken is when one of the two women starts laughing or if one of them stops because she is tired. It’s a kind of game. We always say the first person to laugh or the first person to stop is the one to lose. It’s nothing serious. Throat singing is way of having fun. That’s the general idea, it’s to have fun during gatherings. It is also a way to prove to your friends around you or your family that if you are a good throat-singer, you’re gonna win the game.

Throat-singing is a very accurate technique in a sense that when you are singing fast, the person who is following the leader has to go in every little gap the leader leaves for her to fill in. For instance, if I was to say 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, the ones being what I sing and the pluses the gaps, she would go in-between the ones, singing on the pluses. Then, if I change my rhythm, this woman has to follow that change of rhythm and fill in the gaps of that new rhythm. She has to be very accurate. She has to have a very good ear and she has to follow visually what I am doing.

Throat singing is not exactly easy on your diaphragm. You are using a lot of your muscles in your diaphragm for breathing in and breathing out. I have to find a space between sounds to breath in in order for me to throat-sing for 20 minutes or more. 20 minutes has been my maximum length of time to throat-sing. You have to focus on your lungs or your diaphragm. If you throat-sing using mainly breathing, you are gonna hyperventilate, you’re gonna get dizzy and damage your throat.

2) The video, starring Eva Kaukai and Manon Chamberland from Kangirsuk in northern Québec (population: 394), deflates conventional notions of traditional practices as the provenance of somewhere quaint, exotic, taxidermied…

Beginning around the 90-second mark, the singers are joined by a drone that surveys the surrounding area. Viewers get a glimpse of what their Arctic homeland looks like in the warm season, as well as some hunters flaying their kill prior to loading it into a late model pick up, presumably bound for a building in a wholly suburban seeming neighborhood, complete with telephone poles, satellite dishes, and—gasp—electric light.

Via Aeon

An MRI Shows How a Singer Sings Two Tones at Once (With the Music of Mozart and Brian Eno)

How to Sing Two Notes At Once (aka Polyphonic Overtone Singing): Lessons from Singer Anna-Maria Hefele

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC for the new season of her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

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Neil Gaiman Talks Dreamily About Fountain Pens, Notebooks & His Writing Process in His Long Interview with Tim Ferriss

Meet the Americans Who Speak with Elizabethan English Accents: An Introduction to the “Hoi Toiders” from Ocracoke, North Carolina

Traditional Inuit Thoat Singing and the Modern World Collide in This Astonishing Video

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