Professional Pickpocket Apollo Robbins Explains the Art of Misdirection
You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two, boys
You’ve got to pick-a-pocket or two.
Unlike the Artful Dodger and other light-fingered urchins brought to life by Charles Dickens and, more recently, composer Lionel Bart, professional pickpocket Apollo Robbins confines his practice to the stage.
Past exploits include relieving actress Jennifer Garner of her engagement ring and basketball Hall-of-Famer Charles Barkley of a thick bankroll. In 2001, he virtually picked former U.S. president Jimmy Carter’s Secret Service detail clean, netting badges, a watch, Carter’s itinerary, and the keys to his motorcade. (Robbins wisely steered clear of their guns.)
How does he does he do it? Practice, practice, practice… and remaining hyper vigilant as to the things commanding each individual victims’s attention, in order to momentarily redirect it at the most convenient moment.
Clearly, he’s a put lot of thought into the emotional and cognitive components. In a TED talk on the art of misdirection, above, he cites psychologist Michael Posner’s “Trinity Model” of attentional networks. He has deepened his understanding through the study of aikido, criminal history, and the psychology of persuasion. He understands that getting his victims to tap into their memories is the best way to temporarily disarm their external alarm bells. His easygoing, seemingly spontaneous banter is but one of the ways he gains marks’ trust, even as he penetrates their spheres with a predatory grace.
Watch his hands, and you won’t see much, even after he explains several tricks of his trade, such as securing an already depocketed wallet with his index finger to reassure a jacket-patting victim that it’s right where it belongs. (Half a second later, it’s dropping below the hem of that jacket into Robbins’ waiting hand.) Those paws are fast!
I do wonder how he would fare on the street. His act depends on a fair amount of chummy touching, a physical intimacy that could quickly cause your average straphanger to cry foul. I guess in such an instance, he’d limit the take to one precious item, a cell phone, say, and leave the wallet and watch to a non-theoretical “whiz mob” or street pickpocket team.
Though he himself has always been scrupulous about returning the items he liberates, Robbins does not withhold professional respect for his criminal brothers’ moves. One real-life whiz mobber so impressed him during a television interview that he drove over four hours to pick the perp’s brains in a minimum security prison, a confab New Yorker reporter Adam Green described in colorful detail as part of a lengthy profile on Robbins and his craft.
One small detail does seem to have escaped Robbins’ attention in the second demonstration video below, in which reporter Green willingly steps into the role of vic’. Perhaps Robbins doesn’t care, though his mark certainly should. The situation is less QED than XYZPDQ.
While you’re taking notice, don’t forget to remain alert to what a potential pickpocket is wearing. Such attention to detail may serve you down at the station, if not onstage.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. The sleeping bag-like insulating properties of her ankle-length faux leopard coat make her very popular with the pickpockets of New York. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...The Open Syllabus Project Gathers 1,000,000 Syllabi from Universities & Reveals the 100 Most Frequently-Taught Books
Earlier this week, we highlighted The 20 Most Influential Academic Books of All Time, according to a recent poll conducted in Britain.
Now comes the Syllabus Explorer, a new website created by the Open Syllabus Project at Columbia University. Impressively, the Syllabus Explorer has gathered 1,ooo,ooo+ syllabi published on university websites, then extracted and aggregated the data found in those documents, all for one reason: to determine the mostly frequently-taught books in university classrooms.
Writing in The New York Times, Joe Karaganis and David McClure, two directors at the Open Syllabus Project, explained that the Syllabus Explorer “is mostly a tool for counting how often texts [have been] assigned over the past decade.” Using frequency as a proxy for influence, the Project assigns an overall ‘Teaching Score’ to each text, providing another metric for gauging the impact of certain books.
According to Karaganis and McClure, the “traditional Western canon dominates the top 100, with Plato’s Republic at No. 2, The Communist Manifesto at No. 3, and Frankenstein at No. 5, followed by Aristotle’s Ethics, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Oedipus and Hamlet.” What’s No. 1? The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. (Find them all in our collection of Free eBooks.)
As for the most frequently-taught novels written during the past 50 years, they add:
Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” ranks first, at No. 43, followed by William Gibson’s “Neuromancer,” Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” Ms. Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Sandra Cisneros’s “The House on Mango Street,” Anne Moody’s “Coming of Age in Mississippi,” Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony” and Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.”
It’s worth noting that, despite its name, the Syllabi Explorer doesn’t currently give you access to actual syllabi for reasons having to do with privacy and copyright. You only get access to the statistical aggregation of data extracted from the syllabi. That’s where things stand right now.
When you visit The Syllabi Explorer, check out this visual graph and be sure to zoom into the visuals.
If you’re a teacher, you can share your syllabi here. If you have money to spare, consider making a donation to this valuable open source resource.
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Read More...Nietzsche Lays Out His Philosophy of Education and a Still-Timely Critique of the Modern University (1872)
In a recent entry in the New York Times’ philosophy blog “The Stone,” Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle locate a “momentous turning point” in the history of philosophy: its institutionalization in the research university in the late 19th century. This, they argue, is when philosophy lost its way—when it became subject to the dictates of the academy, placed in competition with the hard sciences, and forced to prove its worth as an instrument of profit and progress. Well over a hundred years after this development, we debate a wider crisis in higher education, as universities (writes Mimi Howard in the Los Angeles Review of Books) “increasingly resemble global corporations with their international campuses and multibillion dollar endowments. Tuition has skyrocketed. Debt is astronomical. The classrooms themselves are more often run on the backs of precarious adjuncts and graduate students than by real professors.”
It’s a cutthroat system I endured for many years as both an adjunct and graduate student, but even before that, in my early undergraduate days, I remember well watching public, then private, colleges succumb to demand for leaner operating budgets, more encroachment by corporate donors and trustees, and less autonomy for educators. Universities have become, in a word, high-priced, high-powered vocational schools where every discipline must prove its value on the open market or risk massive cuts, and where students are treated, and often demand to be treated, like consumers. Expensive private entities like for-profit colleges and corporate educational companies thrive in this environment, often promising much but offering little, and in this environment, philosophy and the liberal arts bear a crushing burden to demonstrate their relevance and profitability.
Howard writes about this situation in the context of her review of Friedrich Nietzsche’s little-known, 1872 series of lectures, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, published in a new translation by Damion Searls with the pithy title Anti-Education. Nietzsche, an academic prodigy, had become a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at only 24 years of age. By 27, when he wrote his lectures, he was already disillusioned with teaching and the strictures of professional academia, though he stayed in his appointment until illness forced him to retire in 1878. In the lectures, Nietzsche excoriates a bourgeois higher education system in terms that could come right out of a critical article on the higher ed of our day. In a Paris Review essay, his translator Searls quotes the surly philosopher on what “the state and the masses were apparently clamoring for”:
as much knowledge and education as possible—leading to the greatest possible production and demand—leading to the greatest happiness: that’s the formula. Here we have Utility as the goal and purpose of education, or more precisely Gain: the highest possible income … Culture is tolerated only insofar as it serves the cause of earning money.
Perhaps little has changed but the scale and the appearance of the university. However, Nietzsche did admire the fact that the school system “as we know it today… takes the Greek and Latin languages seriously for years on end.” Students still received a classical education, which Nietzsche approvingly credited with at least teaching them proper discipline. And yet, as the cliché has it, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; or rather, a little knowledge does not an education make. Though many pursue an education, few people actually achieve it, he believed. “No one would strive for education,” wrote Nietzsche, “if they knew how unbelievably small the number of truly educated people actually was, or ever could be.” For Nietzsche, the university was a scam, tricking “a great mass of people… into going against their nature and pursuing an education” they could never truly achieve or appreciate.
While it’s true that Nietzsche’s critiques are driven in part by his own cultural elitism, it’s also true that he seeks in his lectures to define education in entirely different terms than the utilitarian “state and masses”—terms more in line with classical ideals as well as with the German concept of Bildung, the term for education that also means, writes Searls, “the process of forming the most desirable self, as well as the end point of the process.” It’s a resonance that the English word has lost, though its Latin roots—e ducere, “to lead out of” or away from the common and conventional—still retain some of this sense. Bildung, Searls goes on, “means entering the realm of the fully formed: true culture is the culmination of an education, and true education transmits and creates culture.”
Nietzsche the philologist took the rich valence of Bildung very seriously. In the years after penning his lectures on the educational system, he completed the essays that would become Untimely Meditations (including one of his most famous, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life”). Among those essays was “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in which Nietzsche calls the gloomy philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer his “true educator.” However, writes Peter Fitzsimons, the “image” of Schopenhauer “is more a metaphor for Nietzsche’s own self-educative process.” For Nietzsche, the process of a true education consists not in rote memorization, or in attaining cultural signifiers consistent with one’s class or ambitions, or in learning a set of practical skills with which to make money. It is, Fitzsimons observes, “rather an exhortation to break free from conventionality, to be responsible for creating our own existence, and to overcome the inertia of tradition and custom”—or what Nietzsche calls the universal condition of “sloth.” In “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Nietzsche defines the role of the educator and explicates the purpose of learning in deliberately Platonic terms:
…for your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be. Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is, something in itself ineducable and in any case difficult of access, bound and paralysed: your educators can be only your liberators.
As in Plato’s notion of innate knowledge, or anamnesis, Nietzsche believed that education consists mainly of a clearing away of “the weeds and rubbish and vermin” that attack and obscure “the real groundwork and import of thy being.” This kind of education, of course, cannot be formalized within our present institutions, cannot be marketed to a mass audience, and cannot serve the interests of the state and the market. Hence it cannot be obtained by simply progressing through a system of grades and degrees, though one can use such systems to obtain access to the liberatory materials one presumably needs to realize one’s “true nature.”
For Nietzsche, in his example of Schopenhauer, achieving a true education is an enterprise fraught with “three dangers”—those of isolation, of crippling doubt, and of the pain of confronting one’s limitations. These dangers “threaten us all,” but most people, Nietzsche thinks, lack the fortitude and vigor to truly brave and conquer them. Those who acquire Bildung, or culture, those who realize their “true selves,” he concludes “must prove by their own deed that the love of truth has itself awe and power,” though “the dignity of philosophy is trodden in the mire,” and one will likely receive little respite, recompense, or recognition for their labors.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Artist Turns Famous Paintings, from Raphael to Monet to Lichtenstein, Into Innovative Soundscapes
I’ve long wondered what it would feel like to have synesthesia, the neurological phenomenon — this straight from Wikipedia — “in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.” A synesthete, in other words, might “see” certain colors when they read certain words, or “hear” certain sounds when they see certain colors. Non-synesthetes such as myself have trouble accurately imagining such an experience, but we can get one step closer with the work of Greek artist-musician-physicist Yiannis Kranidiotis, who, in his “Ichographs” series, turns the colors of famous paintings into sound.
“Examining the relationship between color and sound frequencies,” writes Hyperallergic’s Claire Voon, “Kranidiotis has recently composed a soundscape for Raphael’s ‘Madonna del Prato’ (1505), or ‘Madonna of the Meadow.’ His resulting video work, ‘Ichographs MdelP,’ visualizes the breaking up of the painting into 10,000 cubic particles that correspond to various sounds, honing in on specific parts of the canvas to explore the different tones of different colors.” You can view that video at the top of the post, and see even more at Kranidiotis’ Vimeo channel.
Voon quotes Kranidiotis as explaining the basic idea behind the project: “Each color of a painting can be an audio frequency. Each particle, like a pixel in our computer screen, carries a color and at the same time an audio frequency (sinusoidal wave).” He chose a Renaissance painting “to generate a high contrast between the classical aesthetics and the digital transformations that occur,” as well as to make use of its “blue and red colors that help to create a complex and interesting audio result.”
The artist has more to say at The Creators Project, explaining that “there are areas of sound and color (light) that humans can perceive with their eyes and ears (hearing and visible range) and areas where we need special equipment (like infrasound—ultrasound and infrared—ultraviolet ranges). As a physicist, I was always fascinated by these common properties and I was investigating ways to highlight and juxtapose them.”
You can enjoy more Ichographic experiences in the other two videos embedded here, the first an overview of the process as applied to a variety of paintings from a variety of eras, and then a piece focused on transforming into sound the colors of Claude Monet’s 1894 “Rouen Cathedral, West Facade.” While Kranidiotis’ process doesn’t draw from these works of visual art anything you’d call music, per se, the sonic textures do make for an intriguingly incongruous ambient accompaniment to these well-known canvases. If the Louvre offered his “compositions” loaded onto those little audio-tour devices, maybe I’d actually use one.
via Hyperallergic/The Creators Project
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Attention K‑Mart Shoppers: Hear 90 Hours of Background Music & Ads from the Retail Giant’s 1980s and 90s Heyday
Back in high school, I worked part-time at the Gap, a job that, for all its discomforts — the late-night restocking, the Sisyphean folding and re-folding, those headsets — really only left a bitter memory because of the music. Each month, the store received a new disc of background shopping soundtrack, but only an hour-long soundtrack, to be played on loop over over and over again, and so to be heard by me six or seven times per shift. Needless to say, the start of a new month, and, with this, the arrival of a new mix of bland pop hits, felt like a salvation.
This sort of programmatic musical engineering already had plenty of precedent by that point, as thoroughly documented by Mark Davis, who spent the late 1980s and early 1990s working at K‑Mart’s customer service desk and — perhaps foreseeing both the future ease of sharing audiovisual materials over the internet and the waves of nostalgia for the recent past that ease would enable — pocketed all the shoppping-soundtrack cassette tapes that passed through his hands, building the impressive collection you can see in the video above.
“Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly,” writes Davis. “Then, they were replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was introduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether. The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around 1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs. The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That’s because they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse.”
The highly deliberate, near-frictionless mildness; the interspersed spoken-word advertisements and their hypnotically repetitive emphasis on low, low prices; the wobble and hiss of the battered recording media; all of it adds up to a listening experience historically and aesthetically like no other. (If you enjoy this sort of thing and haven’t yet heard of the movement called “vaporwave,” hie thee to Google, look it up, and prepare for astonishment.) You can hear over 90 hours of it at Attention K‑Mart Shoppers, Davis’ digitized repository of his cassettes at the Internet Archive.
If you have any memories of shopping at K‑Mart twenty to thirty years ago, these tapes may bring on a rush of Proustian recollection. But not all of them scored the average shopping day. One, for example, came just for play on March 1st, 1992, K‑Mart’s 30th anniversary. “This was a special day at the store where employees spent all night setting up for special promotions and extra excitement. It was a real fun day, the store was packed wall to wall, and I recall that the stores were asked to play the music at a much higher volume,” a program which included “oldies and all sorts of fun facts from 1962.” Finally, a way to feel nostalgia for one era’s nostalgia of another era. How’s that for a 21st-century experience?
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...David Bowie Sells Ice Cream, Sake, Coke & Water: Watch His TV Commercials from the 1960s Through 2013
As the mourning period for David Bowie continues this week, for which I am very much taking part (my favorite Bowie is the Berlin trilogy Bowie in case you’re interested), the Internet continues through its own stages of grief. First brief news stories and anecdotes from fellow artists, then long think-pieces (some very good), then to best-of lists, and now to interesting ephemera.
For an artist who saw both sides of commercial success, Bowie’s television commercial appearances number less than a dozen over his life. Part of that comes from his mastery and control over his image–he knew when to go out, and when to stay in, to get things done, you might say–and part may come from his early history behind the scenes where the commercial sausage gets made.
In 1963, Bowie left school to go work at Nevin D. Hirst Advertising on London’s Bond Street, where he worked as a storyboard artist for about a year, a job he took to please his father. Although he was dismissive of that time doing his 9‑to‑5, it was later clear to friends, band mates, and biographers that he had picked up a lot from advertising–how to package himself, how to manipulate feeling, the power of image and words.
Jump forward to 1967 and a long haired Davy Jones makes one of his earliest appearances in this ice cream ad for Luv “The Pop Ice Cream,” directed by another up-and-comer, Ridley Scott, who had recently made his first short film, “A Boy and a Bicycle.” It’s groovy, but, as Luv’s not around any more, apparently didn’t move enough units.
And then Davy Jones turns into Major Tom and the ‘70s belonged to him. He finally agrees in 1980 to do a commercial, but only in Japan. In this minimal ad for Crystal Jun Rock Sake, Bowie looks beautiful, handsome, and sleek, right at the height of his sophisticated Lodger-era glamour. He plays a piano, gazes at a post-modern Mt. Fuji, and utters one word: “Crystal.” Bowie wrote the music, an outtake from the Lodger sessions, and it was released as a single in Japan, and a b‑side in the West. Bowie commented that “the money is a useful thing” for doing ads like this, out of sight from the West.
The next time Bowie appears is in 1983, calling out for Americans to demand their MTV in a series of rotoscoped and colorized ads near the dawn of the network. (This is a badly edited compilation of Bowie’s spots).
If Bowie had yet to “sell out” it was only four years later, during the Glass Spider Tour, that he did, with this re-worded, re-recorded version of “Modern Love,” duetting with Tina Turner. At the time it felt like the end of a career that had turned Bowie into an overly coiffed parody of himself. In retrospect, if you can look past the soda, it’s a cute commercial, with the star looking a bit like “Blinded by Science”-era Thomas Dolby.
Then more silence and, by the time Bowie reappears in 2001, it is literally as the man who falls to earth in an ad for XM satellite radio. (Bowie made yet another appearance in an XM ad in 2005.)
In 2004, he appears again, shilling Vittel water. Here Bowie’s in full career retrospective mode, making peace with his chameleon self and appreciating it all. Set to the Reality track “Never Get Old” (our dear wish that was not to be), it features Bowie tribute performer David Brighton trying on every outfit from the Starman’s crowded wardrobe in a house filled with incarnations.
That leaves us with his final television ad appearance in 2013, seen at the top of this post, still looking fit, and performing a baroque version of The Next Day track “I’d Rather Be High” for a Venetian ball-set ad for Louis Vuitton. Fitting to go out surrounded by beauty and glamor, but check those lyrics:
I stumble to the graveyard and I
Lay down by my parents, whisper
Just remember duckies
Everybody gets got
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Plato’s Cave Allegory Animated Monty Python-Style
There’s something about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave that inspires people to get creative. Orson Welles once narrated an animated adaptation of the Cave allegory. The folks at Bullhead Entertainment brought to life the allegory appearing in Book VII of Plato’s Republic using some fine claymation. And Alex Gendler recently crafted a version in an aesthetic that calls Dr. Seuss to mind. Now, comes another one by The School of Life, done in a style reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s cut-out animations for Monty Python. It’s part of a series of 22 animated philosophy videos, which takes you from the Ancients (Aristotle, Plato, and the Stoics) straight through to the Moderns (Sartre, Camus, and Foucault). Find a complete playlist here.
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Read More...An Introduction to the World of Haruki Murakami Through Documentaries, Stories, Animation, Music Playlists & More
Some of you may wonder what inspires such devotion among the fans of Haruki Murakami, the world’s most internationally popular novelist. The rest of you — well, you’ll probably already know that today is the man’s birthday. Whichever group you fall into, you might like to use the day as an excuse to either deepen your Murakami fandom, or to finally have a look across his singular literary landscape, made up of books like A Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and 1Q84, with its prose at once styleless and ultra-distinctive, its scope of reference Japanese and global, and the material of its stories thoroughly strange as well as mundane.
Haruki Murakami: In Search of this Elusive Writer, the BBC documentary at the top of the post, provides a fine introduction to Murakami, his work, and the fans who love it. For a shorter and more impressionistic glance into the author’s biography (in which the young Murakami famously transformed from a jazz bar owner to a novelist by watching a home run at a baseball game), see psychologist, writer, and filmmaker Ilana Simons’ video “About Haruki Murakami” just above. But soon, you’ll want to have the experience without which nobody can really grasp the Murakami appeal: reading his work. The New Yorker offers six of his stories in their archive, readable even by non-subscribers (as long as they haven’t hit their six-article-per-month paywall yet).
If you haven’t read any Murakami before, those stories may well start to give you a sense of why his fans (a group that includes no small number of other artists, like Patti Smith) go so deep into his work. What do I mean by going deep? Not just reading his books over and over again — though they, or rather we, do indeed do that — but gathering together in a particular Tokyo jazz cafe (we’ve even got a Murakami-themed book cafe here in Seoul, where I live), putting together playlists of not just the jazz but all the other music referenced in his books, writing in to his advice column by the thousands, and even documenting the locations in Tokyo important in both his fiction and his real life.
Somehow, Murakami’s highly personal work has won not just the sometimes obsessive love of its readers, but worldwide commercial success as well: the publication of each new novel comes as a nearly holiday-like event, brands like J. Press have commissioned stories from him, and over in Poland they stock his books in vending machines. It gets even those who don’t connect with his writing deeply curious: how does he do it? The modest Murakami, while not especially given to public appearances (though he did once give an English-language reading at the 92nd Street Y), has in recent years shown more willingness to discuss his process. What does it take to be like Murakami? He considers three qualities essential to the work of the novelist (or to running, which he took up not long after turning novelist): talent, focus, and endurance.
As far as the writing itself, he puts it simply: “I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else.” Many of his enthusiasts would say the same about their experience of reading his books. If all this has piqued your interest, don’t hesitate to plunge down the well of Murakami’s reality, where, on the vintage jazz-soundtracked streets, at the train stations, and down the secret passageways of Tokyo by night, you’ll meet talking cats, precocious teenagers, and mysterious women (and their ears), discover parallel worlds — and ultimately become quite good at Murakami bingo.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...David Bowie Gives Graduation Speech At Berklee College of Music: “Music Has Been My Doorway of Perception” (1999)
I have little to add to the tidal wave of remembrances and tributes in the wake of David Bowie’s death. Seems nearly everyone has a story about how his music, his persistence, his generosity, his genius, his unabashed weirdness changed their lives. What he taught me as a young teenager was that the phrase “just be yourself” can just as well mean “be whoever you can dream up,” and damn the predetermined roles and meaningless stigma. Harder than it sounds, but Bowie pulled it off like no one before or since.
Bowie was, writes Sara Benincasa, the “patron saint of… weirdos of all stripes, and that most dangerous creature of all: the artist.” He did not shy away from pretense; he embraced it as his special métier. In 1999, Bowie delivered the commencement address at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he received an honorary doctorate along with Wayne Shorter. In his speech, he says, he learned early on that “authenticity and the natural form of expression wasn’t going to be my forte.”
In fact, what I found that I was good at doing, and what I really enjoyed the most, was the game of “what if?” What if you combined Brecht-Weill musical drama with rhythm and blues? What happens if you transplant the French chanson with the Philly sound? Will Schoenberg lie comfortably with Little Richard? Can you put haggis and snails on the same plate? Well, no, but some of the ideas did work out very well.
Thus began his experiments with identity that first took shape in the fantastic creature, Ziggy Stardust, his “crusade,” as he calls it, “to change the kind of information that rock music contained.” Speaking of Ziggy, Bowie tells a story about playing “grotty… workingman’s clubs” in “full, battle finery of Tokyo-spaceboy and a pair of shoes high enough that it induced nose bleeds.”
Informed by the promoter at one such bar that the only bathroom was a filthy sink at the end of the hall, Bowie balked. “Listen son,” said the promoter, “If its good enough for Shirley Bassey, it’s good enough for you.” From this experience, he says, he learned that “mixing elements of bad taste with good would often produce the most interesting results.”
The speech is packed with witty anecdotes like this and self-deprecating asides. Most of the stories, as you can hear in the video excerpt at the top of the post, are about Bowie’s “greatest mentor,” John Lennon. Lennon, says Bowie, “defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fabric of pop and imbue it with elements from other artforms, often producing something extremely beautiful, very powerful and imbued with strangeness.” Indulging his love for high and low culture, Bowie undercuts his elevated talk of art-pop by describing his and Lennon’s conversations as “Beavis and Butthead on ‘Crossfire.’”
Bowie ends his speech with a heartfelt, and dare I say, authentic summary of his life in music. His only piece of advice, writes Boston.com: he urges the Berklee graduates to “pursue their musical passion as if it were a sickness.”
Music has given me over 40 years of extraordinary experiences. I can’t say that life’s pains or more tragic episodes have been diminished because of it. But it’s allowed me so many moments of companionship when I’ve been lonely and a sublime means of communication when I wanted to touch people. It’s been both my doorway of perception and the house that I live in.
I only hope that it embraces you with the same lusty life force that it graciously offered me. Thank you very much and remember, if it itches, play it.
Read the full transcript of the speech here, or below the jump:
Read More...Björk Takes Us Inside Her Creative Process and Explains How She Writes a Song
Some songs are so straightforward there’s no need to debate their meanings with friends and Reddit users. Others remain opaque, despite fans’ best attempts to crack lyrical codes.
“Stonemilker,” the first track on Björk’s self-described “complete heartbreak album” Vulnicura, seems to fall into the former category:
Show me emotional respect, oh respect, oh respect
And I have emotional needs, oh needs, oh ooh
I wish to synchronize our feelings, our feelings, oh ooh
“Probably the most obvious lyrics I’ve ever written” she remarks in her above appearance on Hrishikesh Hirway’s Song Exploder, a podcast wherein musicians deconstruct a song’s meaning, origin, and recording process.
Björk was walking on a beach when the simple lyrics of “Stonemilker” popped into her head. She quickly realized that she should steer clear of the impulse to make them more clever, and chose the primal over the poetic.
As to its inspiration, she diplomatically refrains from naming her ex-husband, filmmaker Matthew Barney, on the podcast, saying only that “Stonemilker”’s narrator has achieved emotional clarity, unlike “the person” to whom she is singing, someone who prefers for things to stay foggy and complex.
She strove for arrangements that would support that feeling of clarity, waiting for the right microphone, hammering out every beat with producer Alejandro “Arca” Ghersi, and releasing a second, strings only version.
“I decided to become a violin nerd,” she told Pitchfork:
I had like twenty technological threads of things I could have done, but the album couldn’t be futuristic. It had to be singer/songwriter. Old-school. It had to be blunt. I was sort of going into the Bergman movies with Liv Ullmann when it gets really self-pitying and psychological, where you’re kind of performing surgery on yourself, like, What went wrong?
The accompanying 360-degree virtual reality music video, above, can now be viewed online as well as with Oculus Rift. Every instrument was miked and if you can’t get clear on an Icelandic beach, well then…
As for those plaintive, crystalline vocals, Björk intentionally held off, waiting for the sort of day when impulsiveness reigns. (I know she’s a classically trained musician, but isn’t that pretty much every day when you’re Björk?)
Having some insights into what the artist was aiming for can guide listeners toward deeper appreciation. Björk obligingly offers Song Exploder listeners a vast buffet. Surely something will resonate:
A tower of equilibrium…
Smooth cream-like perfection…
A net…
A cradle…
Compare those simple goals to Flavorwire’s Moze Halperin’s analysis of what he calls “Vulnicura’s most tragic track — and perhaps the saddest Björk has ever written”:
“Stonemilker” has the grandiose sound of having been sung in a cathedral, but like one tiny person confronted by the largeness of ideas of God or the architectural complexity of one such structure, Björk’s voice sounds distant, echoing, fighting not to get sucked in by the threat of a vast abyss. When, in the coming songs, she actually confronts the abyss, her voice becomes stronger. The crushing sadness of this song is that it’s the beginning of the end, and in listening to it, we feel at once closest to the love that was recently lost, while also being aware of the turmoil ahead.
The song’s near-nonchalant melancholy — its false impression that it can afford nonchalance because the lovers’ disconnect is just a bump in the road — makes it more unbearably sad than the rest of the album. In this song, she carries all of her previous work on her back like arrows in a quiver, pulling references out one by one and shooting them at listeners to remind them of the manifold ways she once documented the complexities of her love. For now, she’s about to document the complexities of its disappearance.
Basically, if you wind up feeling like you’re “lying at home in the moss looking at the sky,” Björk’s mission has been accomplished.
Want more? You can unpack other artists’ definitive meanings and song midwifery by subscribing to Song Exploder.
Related Content:
Hear the Album Björk Recorded as an 11-Year-Old: Features Cover Art Provided By Her Mom (1977)
Watch Björk’s 6 Favorite TED Talks, From the Mushroom Death Suit to the Virtual Choir
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday
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