Art Trips: Visit the Art of Cities Around the World, from Los Angeles & London, to Venice and New York

in Art, Travel | September 17th, 2019

When first we visit a city, even a small one, we can’t hope to see all of it. Hence the need for strategies of approach and exploration: do we walk its main streets? Eat its food and drink its drinks? Visit its most beloved bookstores? Sarah Urist Green gets into cities through their art, hardly a surprising habit for the creator of the PBS Digital Studios series The Art Assignment. We first featured The Art Assignment five years ago here on Open Culture, and Green and her collaborators have kept up the good work ever since. In that time their mission of “traveling around the country, visiting artists and asking them to give you an art assignment” has expanded, taking them outside America as well. On the road they’ve collected not just material for regular episodes, but for special Art Trips as well.

Their first Art Trip to Los Angeles, for instance, takes Green and company to the Hammer Museum, the galleries of Culver City (one of which has a show up of Andy Warhol’s shadow paintings), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (where they walk under Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass and through Chris Burden’s much-Instagrammed Urban Light), and the then-newly-opened Broad Art Museum. In between they take side trips for refreshment at the noted ice cream sandwich shop Coolhaus (named in honor of the Dutch architect) and deep into the Inland Empire city of Bakersfield. This combination of places expected and unexpected comes not without the occasional tourist cliche, such as Green’s description of “the most quintessential of Los Angeles experiences: driving.”

The Art Assigment’s return visit to the southern Californian metropolis focuses on “the Los Angeles hiding in plain sight” with Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a series of exhibitions all over the city on Latino and Latina artists at institutions like the Craft and Folk Art Museum, the Los Angeles Central Library, and the Geffen Contemporary. All the while Green and her team eat plenty of tacos, as any Angeleno would advise, and the final night of their stay finds them in Grand Park among the shrine-like handmade offerings set up for Día de los Muertos, all of them crafted with an eeriness matched only by their good humor.

Los Angeles has become an acknowledged art capital over the past half-century, but London, fair to say, has a bit more history behind it. The Art Assignment’s time in the English capital coincides with Frieze Week, when galleries from all over the world descend on Regent’s Park to show off their most striking artistic wares. Not coincidentally, the museums and galleries based in the city use the same part of the year to schedule some of their most anticipated shows, turning the few days of this Art Trip in London into a mad rush from Trafalgar Square to the National Portrait Gallery to the Royal Academy of Arts to the Courtauld Institute of Art, by which point Green admits the onset of “masterpiece overload ” — but also has several galleries, not to mention the main event of Frieze itself, to go.

Frieze Week doesn’t come to Detroit, the onetime capital of American auto manufacturing whose population peaked in the middle of the 20th century and whose subsequent hard times, culminating in the city’s 2013 bankruptcy, have been chronicled with both fascination and despair. But The Art Assignment finds a Detroit apart from the ruined factories, theaters, and train stations, the stuff of so many internet slideshows, at the Motown Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts (home to Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals), as well as in folk-art environments like the famous Heidelberg Project and public-art environments like downtown Detroit, whose recent revival has proven as compelling as its long decline. But many ruins remain, and artists like Scott Hocking have found in them not just their subjects but their materials as well.

More striking than Detroit’s urban desolation is that of another unlikely The Art Assignment destination, Marfa, Texas. In his essay “The Republic of Marfa,” Sean Wilsey describes it as “a hardscrabble ranching community in the upper Chihuahuan desert, sixty miles north of the Mexican border, that inhabits some of the most beautiful and intransigent countryside imaginable.” In the mid-1970s “the minimalist artist Donald Judd moved to Marfa, exiling himself from what he termed the ‘glib and harsh’ New York art scene, in order to live in a sort of high plains laboratory devoted to building, sculpture, furniture design, museology, conservation, and a dash of ranching,” and his influence — as well as the presence of his large-scale installations — helped to make Marfa “a sort of city-state of cattlemen, artists, writers, fugitives, smugglers, free-thinkers, environmentalists, soldiers and secessionists.”

In Marfa Green explores the monumental work Judd left behind as well as the monumental work other artists have since contributed, including a project in a converted military barracks by neon artist Dan Flavin and a fake Prada store. Other Art Trip destinations include the likes of Chicago and Columbus, Indiana (modern-architecture mecca and setting of the recent feature film by video essayist Kogonada) as well as Tijuana and the Venice Biennale, all of which you can find on one playlist. Green has even done an Art Trip right where she lives, the “bland-leaning, chain restaurant-loving” Midwestern city of Indianapolis — which boasts the Museum of Psychphonics, an under-freeway art installation by Vito Acconci, and a fair few bike-share book-share stations as well. We can never fully know the cities we don’t live in, but nor can we ever fully know the cities we do live in either — which, if we nevertheless enjoy the attempt as much as Green does, is no bad thing at all.

American Cities Then & Now: See How New York, Los Angeles & Detroit Look Today, Compared to the 1930s and 1940s

Tour the World’s Street Art with Google Street Art

Electric Guitars Made from the Detritus of Detroit

Video Essayist Kogonada Makes His Own Acclaimed Feature Film: Watch His Tributes to Its Inspirations Like Ozu, Linklater & Malick

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 Faceboo k.

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25 John Lennon Fans Sing His Album, Working Class Hero, Word for Word, and Note for Note

in Art, Music | September 16th, 2019

A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero well just follow me

- John Lennon, “Working Class Hero”

Artist Candice Breitz knows that a true fan’s connection to a beloved musical artist is a source of power, however lopsided the “relationship” may be.

Favorite albums are touchstones that get us through good times and bad.

They pin us to a particular place and time.

There are patches when it feels like a singer we’ve never met is the only one in the world who truly knows us. Just ask your average teenager.

A dime will net you dozens upon dozens of Beatles fans, but a person who knows all the words to John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band, the 1970 solo album that followed hard on the heels of the Fab Four’s break up inhabits a far more rarified strata of fandom.

That person has earned the mantle of tried-and-true John fan.

And 25 of those earned a spot in Breitz’s 2006 “Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon),” above, a multi-channel singalong of the aforementioned John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band.

As with Breitz’s previous portraits of Bob Marley, Madonna, and Michael Jackson, the singer is the elephant in the room, the only voice absent from the choir that forms when the participants’ solo recording sessions are played simultaneously, as they are in the finished piece.

Recruited by notices in papers throughout the UK, including the Liverpool Echo, the fans’ degree of devotion, as evidenced by their responses to an in-depth questionnaire, mattered far and above training, talent, or appearance:

I want people who’ve been fans for 30 years or more, who aren’t shy in front of a camera and want to pay tribute to John Lennon.

We’d love some Scousers, it would be a great pity not to have a group of Liverpudlians.

Those who made the cut were reimbursed for travel to a recording studio at Newcastle University, and filmed wearing their own clothes, free to emote or not as they saw fit. Some may have fallen shy of the “30 years or more” requirement, and indeed, may not even have been born at the time of Lennon’s 1980 murder.

Just more proof of this legend’s staying power.

Their stamina is to be congratulated. It’s no easy feat to open with “Mother,” a literal screamer born of Lennon’s forays into Primal Therapy.

And the tenderness they bring to quieter numbers like “Love” and “Hold On” is touching indeed. It’s not hard to guess who they’re singing to.

(It’s also really fun to witness them fumbling through “Hold On”’s ad-libbed “cookies,” a salute to Cookie Monster that also harkens to the childhood regression Lennon underwent as part of his Primal Therapy.)

Readers, if you were given the opportunity to contribute to one of Candice Breitz’s composite celebrity portraits, who would you want to pay tribute to, living or dead?

Hear the Original, Never-Heard Demo of John Lennon’s “Imagine”

John Lennon’s Report Card at Age 15: “He Has Too Many Wrong Ambitions and His Energy Is Too Often Misplaced”

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inkyzine. Join her in NYC on Monday, October 7 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domaincelebrates the art of Aubrey Beardsley. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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How Sergio Leone Made Music an Actor in His Spaghetti Westerns, Creating a Perfect Harmony of Sound & Image

in Film, Music | September 16th, 2019

Nearly everyone who’s heard music has also received intense feelings from music. “We know that music activates parts of the brain that regulate emotion, that it can help us concentrate, trigger memories, make us want to dance,” says Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, in his latest video essay. “Music fits so well with the patterns of thought, it’s almost as if that lyrical quality is latent in life, or reality, or both. In film, no one understood this better than Sergio Leone, the Italian director of operatic spaghetti Westerns.” And though you may not have seen any spaghetti Westerns yourself — even Leone’s Clint Eastwood-starring trilogy of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — you’ve surely heard their music.

The fame of the spaghetti Western score owes mostly to composer Ennio Morricone, whose collaboration with Leone “is arguably the most successful in all of cinema,” thanks to “the deep respect Leone had for Morricone’s work, but also his general feeling for how music should function in film.” Unlike most filmmakers, who then, as now, commissioned a picture’s score only after they completed the shooting, and sometimes even the editing, Leone would get Morricone’s music first, “then design shots around those compositions.

The music, for Leone, really was a kind of script.” Using scenes from Once Upon a Time in the West, Puschak shows that music was also an actor, in the sense that Leone brought it to the set so his human actors could react to it during the shoot. Often the music we hear in the background is also what the actors were hearing in the background, and what Leone used to orchestrate their actions and expressions.

Puschak calls the result “a perfect harmony of sound and image,” whether the visual element may be a soaring crane shot or the kind of extended close-up he favored of a human face. Among living filmmakers, the spaghetti Western-loving Quentin Tarantino has most clearly followed in Leone’s footsteps, to the point that he incorporated Morricone’s music in several films before commissioning an original score from the composer for his own western The Hateful Eight. He goes in no more than Leone did for the “temp score,” the standard Hollywood practice of filling the soundtrack of a movie in production with existing music and then asking a composer to write replacement music that sounds like it — a major cause of all the bland film scores we hear today. To go back to Once Upon a Time in the West, or any other of Leone’s Westerns, is to understand once again what role music in film can really play.

The Music in Quentin Tarantino’s Films: Hear a 5‑Hour, 100-Song Playlist

Hear 5 Hours of Ennio Morricone’s Scores for Classic Western Films: From Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns to Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight

Ukulele Orchestra Performs Ennio Morricone’s Iconic Western Theme Song, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.” And It’s Pretty Brilliant

Watch the Opening of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Original, Unused Score

Why Marvel and Other Hollywood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Painting Explains the Perils of the “Temp Score”

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 Faceboo k.

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John Milton’s Hand Annotated Copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio: A New Discovery by a Cambridge Scholar

in Literature | September 16th, 2019

Perhaps the most well-read writer of his time, English poet John Milton “knew the biblical languages, along with Homer’s Greek and Vergil’s Latin,” notes the NYPL. He likely had Dante’s Divine Comedy in mind when he wrote Paradise Lost. His own Protestant epic, if not a theological response to the Divine Comedy, had as much literary impact on the English language as Dante’s poem did on Italian. Milton would also have as much influence on English as Shakespeare, his near contemporary, who died eight years after the Paradise Lost author was born.

In some sense, Milton can be called a direct literary heir of Shakespeare, though he wrote in a different medium and idiom (almost a different language), and with a very different set of concerns.

Milton’s father was a trustee of the Blackfriar’s Theatre, where Shakespeare’s company of actors, the King’s Men, began performing in 1609, the year after Milton’s birth. And Milton’s first published poem appeared anonymously in the 1632 second folio of Shakespeare’s plays under the title “An Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare.”

Now known as “On Shakespeare,” the poem laments the sorry state of Shakespeare’s legacy—his monument a “weak witness,” his work an “unvalued book.” It may be difficult to imagine a time when Shakespeare wasn’t revered, but his reputation only began to spread beyond the theater in the early 17th century. Milton’s poem was one of the first to proclaim Shakespeare’s greatness, as a poet who should lie “in such pomp” that “kings for such a tomb would wish to die.”

Now, it seems that significant further evidence of Milton’s admiration, and critical appreciation, of Shakespeare has emerged: in the form of Milton’s own, personal copy of the 1623 First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays, with annotations in Milton’s own hand. Moreover, it seems this evidence has been sitting under scholar’s noses for decades, housed in the public Free Library of Philadelphia’s Rare Book Department, one of over 230 extant copies of the First Folio.

In a blog post at the Centre for Material Texts, the University of Cambridge’s Jason Scott-Warren makes his case that the annotated First Folio is Milton’s own, primarily, he writes, on the basis of paleography, or handwriting analysis. “This just looks like Milton’s hand,” he says, then walks through several comparisons with other known Milton manuscripts, such as his commonplace book and annotated Bible.

There is also the copious evidence for dating the book to the time Milton would have owned it, from the many marginal references to contemporary works like Samuel Purchas’ 1625 Pilgrimes and John Fletcher’s The Bloody Brother. Milton “added marginal markings to all of the plays except for Henry VI 1–3 and Titus Andronicus,” notes Scott-Warren. His corrections—from the Quarto—emendations, and “smart cross-references” are “intelligent and assiduous.”

Anticipating blowback for his Milton theory, Scott-Warren asks, “wouldn’t his copy be bristling with cross-references, packed with smart observations and angrily censorious comments?” It would indeed, and “several distinguished Miltonists” have agreed with Scott-Warren’s analysis, many contacting him, he writes in a postscript, to say they’re “confident that this identification is correct.” He adds that he has “been roundly rebuked for understating the significance of the discovery.”

This kind of self-reported validation isn’t exactly peer review, but we don’t have to take his word for it. Said scholars have made their approval publicly, enthusiastically, known on Twitter. And Penn State Assistant Professor of English Claire M.L. Bourne has written a congratulatory essay on her blog. It was Bourne who spurred on Scott-Warren’s investigation with her own essay “Vide Supplementum: Early Modern Collation as Play-Reading in the First Folio,” published just months earlier this year.

Bourne was one of the first few scholars to thoroughly examine the Free Library of Philadelphia’s copy of the First Folio. But, she admits, she completely missed the Milton connection. “You can work for a decade,” she writes ruefully, “as I did, on a single book… and still be left with gaping holes in the narrative.” This new scholarship may not only have filled in the mystery of the book’s first owner and annotator; it may also show the full degree to which Milton engaged with Shakespeare, and give Milton scholars “a new and significant field of reference” for reading his work.

via MetaFilter

3,000 Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Complete Works from Victorian England, Neatly Presented in a New Digital Archive

Spenser and Milton (Free Course)

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

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Imagined Medieval Comics Illuminate the Absurdities of Modern Life

in Art, Comedy, Comics/Cartoons, Fashion, History, Museums | September 16th, 2019

In 2005, the U.S. Department of Agriculture revised its famous food pyramid, jettisoning the familiar hierarchical graphic in favor of vertical rainbow stripes representing the various nutritional groups. A stick figure bounded up a staircase built into one side, to reinforce the idea of adding regular physical activity to all those whole grains and veggies.

The dietary information it promoted was an improvement on the original, but nutritional scientists were skeptical that the public would be able to parse the confusing graphic, and by and large this proved to be the case.

Artist Tyler Gunther, however, was inspired:

I started thinking about the messaging school children in 1308 were force fed to believe was part of a heart healthy diet, only to have the rug pulled out from under them 15 years later when some monk rearranged the whole thing.

In other words, you’d better dig into that annual goose pie, kids, while you’ve still got 6 glasses of ale to wash it down.

The imagined overlap between the modern and the medieval is a fertile vein for Gunter, whose MFA in Costume Design is often put to good use in his hilarious historical comics:

Modern men’s fashion is so incredibly boring. A guy wears a pattered shirt with a suit and he gets lauded as though he won the super bowl of fashion. But back in the Middle Ages men made bold, brave fashion choices and I admire them greatly for this. It’s so exciting to me to think of these inventive, strange, fantastic creations being a part of the everyday masculine aesthetic.

The shapes and structures of women’s headwear in the dark ages are truly inspiring. Where were these milliners drawing inspiration from? How were they engineered? How comfortable were they to wear? How did they fit through the majority of doorways? What was it like to sit behind a particularly large one in church? I’m still scrolling through many an internet history blog to find the answers.

Kathryn Warner’s Edward II blog has proved a helpful resource, as has Anne H. van Buren’s book Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands.

The Brooklyn-based, Arkansas-born artist also makes periodic pilgrimages to the Cloisters, where the Metropolitan Museum houses a vast number illuminated manuscripts, panel paintings, altar pieces, and the famed Unicorn Tapestries:

On my first trip to The Cloisters I saw a painting of St. Michael and the devil almost immediately. I don’t think my life or art has been the same since. None of us know what the devil looks like. But you wouldn’t know that based on how confidently this artist portrays his likeness. After gazing at this painting for an extended period of time I wanted so badly to understand the imagination of whoever could imagine an alligator arms/face crotch/dragon ponytail combo. I don’t think I’ve come close to scratching the surface.

Every time I go to that museum I think, “Wow it’s like I’m on Game of Thrones” and then I have to remind myself kindly that this was real life. Almost everything there was an object that people interacted with as part of their average daily life and that fascinates me as someone who lives in a world filled with mass produced, plastic objects.

Gunther’s drawings and comics are created (and aged) on that most modern of conveniences—the iPad.

The British monarchy and the First Ladies are also sources of fascination, but the middle ages are his primary passion, to the point where he recently costumed himself as a page to tell the story of Piers Gaveston, 1st Earl of Cornwall and Edward II’s darling, aided by a garment rack he’d retooled as a medieval pageant cart-cum-puppet theater.

See the rest of Tyler Gunther’s Medieval Comics on his website and don’t forget to surprise your favorite hygienist or oral surgeon with his Medieval Dentist print this holiday season.

All images used with permission of artist Tyler Gunther

Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How They Worked to Overcome Them

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inkyzine. Join her in NYC on Monday, October 7 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domaincelebrates the art of Aubrey Beardsley, with a special appearance by Tyler Gunther. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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

Bob Moog Demonstrates His Revolutionary Moog Model D Synthesizer

in Music | September 13th, 2019

There are far better players of Bob Moog’s wonderous analog synthesizers than Bob Moog himself–from Wendy Carlos, who reinterpreted Bach for the newfangled instrument in the 60s to Rick Wakeman and Richard Wright to Giorgio Moroder to Gary Numan, to virtually anyone who has ever recorded music with a Moog. Bob Moog was not a musician, he was an engineer who took piano lessons before earning his B.A. in physics, M.A. in electrical engineering, and Ph.D. in engineering physics from Cornell.

Academic credentials have no bearing on what moves us musically, but it’s always worth noting that the Moog synthesizers—which did more to change the sound of modern music than perhaps any instrument since the electric guitar—came out of decades of dogged scientific research, beginning when Moog was only 14 years old and built a homemade Theremin from plans he found printed in the magazine Electronics World. That was 1949. Almost thirty years later, the Minimoog Model D appeared, the revolutionary portable version of studio-sized machine Carlos used to reimagine classical music in the late 60s.

“It’s an analogue monophonic synthesizer,” says Moog in the video above. “That means it makes the waveforms by electronic means and it plays one note at a time.” Sounds rather primitive by our standards, but watch the demonstration below by Marc Doty, who walks us through the sweeping range of functions in the compact machine, made between 1970 and 1981 (and reissued for a limited run in 2016). Its banks of waveform selectors, oscillators, filters, and envelopes produce “something sweeter,” says Doty, than your average synthetic sounds, though he can’t quite put his finger on what it is.

We’ve all heard the difference, whether we know it or not, and discriminating ears can pick a Minimoog out of any lineup of analogue synths. It is, Doty declares in the description for his video, “perhaps the most beautiful, beautiful sounding, and functional synthesizer ever produced.” Called the Model D because it was the fourth iteration of previous versions made in-house between 1969–70, it was truly, says author and composer Albert Glinsky, “the first portable synthesizer where everything is contained in one unit. It really is the prototype, the ancestor, of every portable keyboard in every music shop today.”

One of its innovations, the pitch wheel, now standard issue on almost all of those mass-produced successors of the Minimoog, was the first of its kind. If Moog “had patented [the pitch wheel],” says David Borden, one of the first musicians to play the Minimoog live, “he would have been an extremely wealthy man.” Others have made similar observations about Moog’s pioneering sound-shaping technologies, but as Richard Leon points out at Sound on Sound, it’s a good thing for us all that the inventor wasn’t motivated by profit.

Competition nearly buried the company Moog sold in the mid-70s (only reacquiring rights to his own name in 2002), but had Moog “tried to create a monopoly on these fundamentals,” Leon writes, “it’s likely the synth industry as we know it today would never have happened.”

Hear Glenn Gould Sing the Praise of the Moog Synthesizer and Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach, the “Record of the Decade” (1968)

A 10-Hour Playlist of Music Inspired by Robert Moog’s Iconic Synthesizer: Hear Electronic Works by Kraftwerk, Devo, Stevie Wonder, Rick Wakeman & More

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

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Watch Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig Taking Batting Practice in Strikingly Restored Footage (1931)

in Film, History, Sports | September 13th, 2019

How would Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and other famous ballplayers of bygone eras fare if put on the diamond today? Variations on that question tend to come up in conversation among enthusiasts of baseball and its history, and different people bring different kinds of evidence to bear in search of an answer: statistics, eyewitness accounts, analogies between particular historical players and current ones. But the fact remains that none of us have ever actually seen the likes of Ruth, who played his last professional game in 1935, and Gehrig, who did so in 1939, in their prime. But now we can at least get a little closer by watching the film clip above, which shows both of the titanic Yankees at batting practice on April 11, 1931.

What’s more, it shows them moving at real-life speed. “Fox Movietone sound cameras made slow-motion captures of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig at batting practice during an exhibition practice in Brooklyn, New York,” writes uploader Guy Jones (whose other baseball videos include Ruth hitting a home run on opening day the same year and Ruth’s last appearance at bat a decade later). “With modern technology, we can witness this footage adjusted to a normal speed which results in a very high framerate.”

In other words, the film shows Ruth and Gehrig not just moving in the very same way they did in real life, but captured with a smoothness uncommon in newsreel footage from the 1930s. For comparison, Jones includes at the end of the video “more footage of the practice (shot at typical fps) and the original un-edited slow-mo captures.”

Unfortunately, what this film reveals doesn’t impress observers of modern baseball. “Ruth and Gehrig in no way look like a modern ballplayer,” writes The Big Lead’s Kyle Koster. “Ruth is off-balance, falling into his swing. Gehrig routinely lifts his back foot off the ground. Again, it’s batting practice so the competitive juices weren’t flowing. But even by that standard, the whole exercise looks sloppy and inefficient.” Cut4’s Jake Mintz gets harsher, as well as more technical: “Tell me Ruth’s cockamamie swing mechanics would enable him to hit a 98-mph heater.” As for the Iron Horse, his “hack is a little better,” but still “absurdly low” by today’s standards. It goes to show, Mintz writes, that “these two legends, while undeniably transcendent in their time, would be good Double‑A hitters at best if they played today.” We evolve, our technologies evolve, and so, it seems, do the games we play.

Read Online Haruki Murakami’s New Essay on How a Baseball Game Launched His Writing Career

Fritz Lang’s M: The Restored Version of the Classic 1931 Film

Immaculately Restored Film Lets You Revisit Life in New York City in 1911

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 Faceboo k.

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How Eric Clapton Created the Classic Song “Layla”

in Music | September 13th, 2019

The story of Eric Clapton and “Layla” has always bothered me because to understand it is to understand how fallible and crazed any of us can be when it comes to love. We understand that our rock gods are human, but there’s something about Clapton falling in love with the wife (Pattie Boyd) of one of his best mates (George Harrison, a freakin’ Beatle, man!) and then writing a whole album about it, that is just unsettling. Is this something tawdry writ epic? Or is this something epic that has the wafting aroma of tawdriness?

Polyphonic takes on the behind the scenes story of this rock masterpiece and rewinds several centuries to the source of Layla’s name: “Layla and Majnun,” a romantic poem from 12th century Persian poet Niẓāmi Ganjavi based on an actual woman from the 6th Century who drove her poet paramour mad. Lord Byron called the tragic poem “The Romeo and Juliet of the East,” as unrequited love leaves both Majnun and Layla dead after the latter’s father forbids her to be with the poet.

Eric Clapton heard of the poem from his Sufi friend Abdalqadir as-Sufi (formerly Ian Dallas), and so when he wrote a slow ballad about his unrequited love for Patti, “Layla” made perfect sense as a name.

The song might have stayed a ballad–think of Clapton’s slowed down version from his MTV “Unplugged” special–if it wasn’t for Duane Allman of the Allman Brothers. The two had yet to meet, but were aware of each other. Allman had grabbed Clapton’s attention with his fiery solo work at the end of Wilson Pickett’s cover of “Hey Jude”:

When Clapton and Allman did meet, the two set to jamming and Allman made the history-changing decision to speed up Clapton’s ballad and use a riff taken from Albert King. “Layla” was born. Allman’s bottleneck slide style met Clapton’s string bending, and the track is a conversation between the two, where no words are needed.

“It’s in the tip of their fingers,” says engineer Tom Dowd, listening to the isolated tracks in the video below. “It’s not in a knob, it’s not in how loud they play, it’s touch.”

Over this, Clapton delivers his desperate lyrics, sung by a man at his wits end, much like Majnun of the poem.

And then, that coda, which takes up half the song. Drummer Jim Gordon was working on the piano piece for a solo album in secret. When Clapton discovered Gordon was recording on the sly, he wasn’t angry. Instead he insisted it be added to the end of the rocking first half. The song is a perfect balance between frantic rock and romantic ballad.

But in the real world, “Layla” didn’t do the job. Clapton played the album for Pattie Boyd three weeks later, and though she understood its beauty, Boyd was embarrassed by its message.

“I couldn’t believe I was the inspiration for putting this together,” she said in an interview. “I didn’t want this to happen.” She was also mortified thinking that everybody would know exactly who “Layla” was about.

“It didn’t work,” Clapton recalled. “It was all for nothing.”

The song was a flop in the charts, especially as it was cut in half for the single. It would find its audience three years later when the full version appeared on both a Clapton anthology and a best of collection of Duane Allman’s work. Finally it rocketed up the charts, and it’s kind of stayed in classic rock playlists ever since.

And as for Boyd, she actually did leave George Harrison in 1974 to marry Clapton in 1979, a marriage that lasted 10 years. Not all marriages last. The original flame dies out. It’s just that, in “Layla“ ‘s case, the flame is there every time the needle drops into the groove.

Hear Eric Clapton’s Isolated Guitar Track From the Beatles’ ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ (1968)

Eric Clapton Tries Out Guitars at Home and Talks About the Beatles, Cream, and His Musical Roots

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 ( 6 ) |

How E.E. Cummings Writes a Poem

in Poetry | September 12th, 2019

Most of us encounter E.E. Cummings at an early age; his poems for adults regularly appear in poetry anthologies for children. We derive great pleasure from his brazen misspellings, portmanteaus, neologisms, and “typographical high jinks,” as Paul Muldoon writes at The New Yorker. Look at this famous writer breaking all the rules, and thereby giving us occasion to talk about the rules, about how poetry is different, about how, among poets, E.E. Cummings stands alone.

Only someone with a keen facility for language can bend it to their individual will, something we may recognize when reading Cummings in high school, when we also recognize the irony and grim satire in his poems. The inventive whimsy had veiled something darker. In 1960, then-high-school student Peter Carlton got the chance to interview Cummings about his poem “Humanity, I love you,” then posted the exchange online 37 years later. “I, for one, do not love humanity,” the poet told him, “I feel that humanity itself is cruel and unjust.”

A common sentiment among modernists, especially those, like Cummings, who had served in World War I. But few of his contemporaries, who included James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, had his ability to speak to so many different audiences. It’s almost shocking to see the shift in voice between Cummings’ interview with young Carlton and a letter he wrote to Pound 20 years earlier, full of the usual Cummings coinages (“innulluxuls”) and vicious literary barbs (Archibald MacLeish becomes “the macarchibald maclapdog macleash”).

Was Cummings a radical? A romantic? A literary naïf? An outsider? A savvy, cynical player of the game? He contained multitudes. From Eliot he “learned to distrust the hierarchical in every aspect of life,” writes Muldoon, “beginning with his own being. In his poetry, ‘I’ becomes ‘i.’” Whatever attitudes he expresses, Cummings always forces us to wrestle with language—its durability and malleability, its familiar strangenesses—first.

In his most accessible poem, “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in,” Cummings draws our attention to the simplicity of his archetypal images, as if to smirkingly announce, “this is a universal love poem.” Standard fare. But such obvious mirroring of form and content does not diminish the poem’s accomplishment, argues Evan Puschak, the Nerdwriter, in the video above. On the contrary, simple repetitions lead us into far more complicated recursions inside the poem.

Puschak quotes lines from Yeats to illustrate the deftness of Cummings’ deceptive simplicity: “A line will take us hours maybe; / yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” While many a poet has made the art seem easy, few have made it seem so playful or irreverent as Cummings, or have delighted so many people of so many ages and walks of life—so few of whom may suspect the conceptual heft and rigor that went into his work.

To read Cummings’ poetry yourself, pick up a copy of his complete poems.

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

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

Charles Bukowski Explains What Good Writing and the Good Life Have in Common

in Writing | September 12th, 2019

I have no politics, I observe. I have no sides except the side of the human spirit, which after all does sound rather shallow, like a pitchman, but which means mostly my spirit, which means yours too, for if I am not truly alive, how can I see you?

—Charles Bukowski, Notes of. Dirty Old Man

In Notes of a Dirty Old Man, his weekly column for the underground L.A. newspaper Open City, Charles Bukowski became the common man’s philosopher, issuing profundities amidst wild vulgarities and proving that he did, in fact, have a politics, as much as he had theories and contrarian half-thoughts and opinions aplenty. He took sides when it came to literature, at least—the side of Celine, Dostoevsky, and Camus, for example, against Faulkner, Shakespeare, and George Bernard Shaw (“the most overblown fantasy of the Ages”).

Bukowski had no room for cool appreciation or mild preference. With him, as with Catullus, life was love and hate. Get him talking on any subject and those loves and hates would emerge, as would his ideas about matters of most consequence: life, death, drinking, sex, and, of course, writing. In the interview clip above, for example, Bukowski is asked if he fears death. He answers, “No, in fact, I almost feel good at the approach of death.” This becomes a meditation on repetition and dullness, and on the “juice” that a good life—and good writing—requires.

…. You see, as you live many years, things take on a repeat…. You understand? You keep seeing the same thing over and over again… so you get a little bit tired of life. So as death comes, you almost say, okay, baby, it’s time, it’s good.

The answer puts the interviewer in mind of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which sends Bukowski on one of his signature cranky critiques, also an introduction to his theory of prose, which can be summed up in just three syllables, “BIM BIM BIM!”—the sound he makes to show the “quickness” of a well-written line. Good writing needs “pace,” “life,” and “sunlight.” “Each line,” he says, “must be full of a delicious little juice, they must be full of power, they must make you like to turn a page, bim bim bim!” Writing like Lowry’s, he says, is “too leisurely.” There’s too much setup, too little payoff.

He may seem unfair to Lowry, but most writers bore Bukowski. After pages of tedious buildup, “when they get to the grand emotion, there isn’t any,” he says. Bukowski has never been one for subtlety, but no one can say his writing lacks “juice” or grand emotion. On the contrary, he endears himself to so many aspiring writers (or aspiring male writers, in any case) because his poetry and prose are so electrifyingly alive. He had a limited range of subjects, mostly confined to his own thoughts, feelings, and drunken misadventures. Yet the voice that carries us through his violently funny tales and reveries, wicked and maudlin and tender by turns, seems capable of limitless invention.

“Writing must never be boring,” says Bukowski. He set a high bar, and he met it. As writers, we need not live his life to do the same. But we must each be “truly alive” in our own way to make our lines go bim bim bim. “Each line,” he says, “must be an entity unto itself.”

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

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

Expressionist Dance Costumes from the 1920s, and the Tragic Story of Lavinia Schulz & Walter Holdt

in Dance, History | September 12th, 2019

The most fruitful creative partnerships, long or short, have often been tempestuous. On the shorter side, and among the stormiest, we have a husband-and-wife team who realized visions hitherto unseen onstage, and who very nearly fell into total obscurity after a murder-suicide brought their partnership to an end. But in the Hamburg of the late 1910s and early 1920s, writes Hyperallergic’s Allison Meier, Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt “created wild, Expressionist costumes that looked like retro robots and Bauhaus knights,” twenty of them, for performances accompanied by avant-garde music. After their death in 1924, Schulz and Holdt’s work went into storage, never to be found again until the late 1980s.

The costumes had been gifted to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, which in 1925 “staged an evening in memory of Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt,” writes blogger Jan Reetze.

“After this, the masks, photos and drawings” — including dances diagrammed in a system of Schulz’s own invention — “went into a couple of ‘acrobat’s baggage’ boxes and fell into oblivion on the museum’s attic. They were not even inventoried. Which turned out to be a stroke of luck because this way the objects didn’t fall into the hands of the Nazis, who, without any doubt, would have seen these works as ‘degenerate art’ and in all probability would have destroyed them.”

You can see the costumes in action in the video at the top of the post, and more of the photos taken by Minya Diez-Dührkoop in the last year of Schulz and Holdt’s lives at Hyperallergic. Their performances began in the expressionism with which the Berlin-educated Schultz had been associated and moved toward “the supposed purity of pre-Judeo-Christian, Aryan-Nordic culture,” as Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher writes.

“Between 1920–24, the couple performed their dance routines to the bewildered and often antagonistic audiences of Hamburg. Though some critics appreciated the pair’s talent and startling originality, this praise was never enough to pay the rent.”

“According to contemporary critics, Lavinia seemed to be the more creative one,” writes Reetze. “Walter, on the other hand, was the better and more disciplined dancer, he exactly knew his formal means and how to use them.” The counterpart to Holdt’s rigor was Schulz’s more primal genius, a sensibility that manifested aesthetically — seen in her highly unconventional use of everyday materials like “wire, gypsum, papier mâché and industrial garbage” — and emotionally.

Reetze quotes from the autobiography of composer Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, who briefly lived with the couple: “Deprivation, hunger, coldness, nordic landscape with storm, ice, and catastrophes: That was her world, and she had found herself in it with Holdt.”

Schulz and Holdt also refused to be paid for their performances. “You cannot sell spiritual ideas for money,” Schulz wrote. “Spirit and money are two antagonistic poles, and if you sell spiritual ideas for money, you sold the spirit to the money and lost the spirit.” Eventually their poverty — as well as the unusually volatile nature of their relationship, said to spark physical marital spats on stage — reached a breaking point. “Both were in their 20s, and had earned little money from their artistic work,” writes Meier. “In financial ruin, on June 18, 1924, Schulz shot Holdt, and then turned the gun on herself.” But against all odds, their still-startling creativity — the kind that can, perhaps, emerge only from the opposition of two incompatible forces — lives on.

via Dangerous Mind

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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 Faceboo k.

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

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