How does one define a masterpiece? Is it personally subjective, or it is just another word we use for status symbols? In an essay on bass player Jaco Pastorius’ 1976 self-titled debut album, scholar Uri González offers an older definition: “in the old European guild system, the aspiring journeyman was expected to create a piece of handicraft of the highest quality in order to reach the status of ‘master.’ One was then officially allowed to join the guild and to take pupils under tutelage.”
Pastorius’ debut album certified him as a master musician; he leapt from “anonymity to jazz stardom, earning admiration both from the average musically uneducated concert-goer to the hippest jazz cat,” and he gained a following among an “ever growing number of adept students that, still today, study his solos, licks, compositions and arrangements.” Pastorius’ solo on his version of the Charlie Parker tune “Donna Lee,” especially, helped redefine the instrument by, first, inventing the electric bass solo.
The “Donna Lee” solo, Pat Metheny writes, is “one of the freshest looks at how to play on a well traveled set of chord changes in recent jazz history — not to mention that it’s just about the hippest start to a debut album in the history of recorded music.”
Whether you like Jaco Pastorius’ music or not, it’s beyond question that his playing changed musical history through a transformative approach to the instrument. In the video at the top, producer Rick Beato explains the importance of the “Donna Lee” solo, an interpretation of a jazz standard played on a fretless bass Pastorius made himself, and creating a sound no one had heard before.
Beato’s is a technical explanation for those with a background in music theory, and it highlights just how intimidating Pastorius’ playing can be for musicians and non-musicians alike. But technique, as Herbie Hancock noted in a blurb on Jaco Pastorius, means little without the musical sensibilities that move people to care, and Pastorius had it in abundance. “He had this wide, fat swath of a sound,” wrote one of his most famous collaborators, Joni Mitchell, in tribute. “He was an innovator…. He was changing the bottom end of the time, and he knew it.”
One of those changes, from “Donna Lee” to the end of Pastorius’ tumultuous life and career in 1987 involved moving the electric bass into a melodic role it had not played before. This not only meant leaving the lower root notes, but also crafting a bright, round, lively tone that for those upper registers. “In the Sixties and Seventies,” writes Mitchell, “you had this dead, distant bass sound. I didn’t care for it. And the other thing was, I had started to think, ‘Why couldn’t the bass leave the bottom sometimes and go up and play in the midrange and then return?’” She found the answer to her questions in Jaco.
Hear Pastorius’ original recording of “Donna Lee” further up, and see a live version from 1982 above to take in what Mitchell called his “joie de vivre.” The song, which already had a venerable jazz history, is now considered, González writes, “the quintessential bass players’ manifesto.” Or, as conga player Don Alias, the only accompanist during Pastorius’ famous solo, put it, “every bass player I know can now cut ‘Donna Lee’ thanks to Jaco.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Graphic artist Todd Alcott has endeared himself to Open Culture readers by retrofitting midcentury pulp paperback covers and illustrations with classic lyrics from the likes of David Bowie, Prince, Bob Dylan, and Talking Heads.
Although he’s dabbled in the abstractions that once graced the covers of psychology, philosophy, and science texts, his overarching attraction to the visual language of science fiction and illicit romance speak to the premium he places on narrative.
And with hundreds of “mid-century mashups” to his name, he’s become quite a master of bending existing narratives to his own purposes.
Recently, Alcott turned his attention to the creation of the Pulp Tarot deck he is funding on Kickstarter.
A self-described “clear-eyed skeptic as far as paranormal things” go, Alcott was drawn to the “simplicity and strangeness” of Pamela Colman Smith’s “bewitching” Tarot imagery:
Maybe because they were simply the first ones I saw, I don’t know, but there is something about the narrative thread that runs through them, the way they delineate the development of the soul, with all the choices and crises a soul encounters on its way to fulfillment, that really struck a chord with me. You lay out enough Tarot spreads and they eventually coalesce around a handful of cards that really seem to define you. I don’t know how it happens, but it does, every time: there are cards that come up for you so often that you think, “Yep, that’s me,” and then there are others that turn up so rarely that, when they do come up, you have to look them up in the little booklet because you’ve never seen them before.
One such card for Alcott is the Page of Swords. In the early 90s, curious to know what the Tarot would have to say about the young woman he’d started dating, he shuffled and cut his Rider-Waite-Smith deck “until something inside said “now” and he flipped over the Page of Swords:
I looked it up in the booklet, which said that the Page of Swords was a secret-keeper, like a spy. I thought about that for a moment; the woman I was seeing was nothing like a spy, and had no spy-like attributes. I shrugged and began the process again, shuffling and cutting and shuffling and cutting, until, again, something inside said “now,” and turned up the card again. It was the Page of Swords, again. My heart leaped, I put the deck back in its box and quietly freaked out for a while. The next day, I asked the young lady if the Page of Swords meant anything to her, and she said “Oh sure, when I was a kid, that was my card.” Anyway, I’m now married to her.
The Three of Pentacles is another favorite, one that presented a particular design challenge.
The Smith deck shows a stonemason, an architect and a church official, collaborating on building a cathedral. Now, there are no cathedrals in the pulp world, so I had to think, well, in the pulp world, pentacles represent money, so the obvious choice would be to show three criminals planning a heist. I couldn’t find an image anything close to the one in my head, so I had to build it: the room, the table, the map of the bank, the plan, the people involved, and then stitch it all together in Photoshop so it ended up looking like a cohesive illustration. That was a really joyful moment for me: there were the three conspirators, the Big Cheese, the Dame and The Goon, their roles clearly defined despite not seeing anyone’s face. It was a real breakthrough, seeing that I could put together a little narrative like that.
Smith imagined a medieval fantasy world when designing her Tarot deck. Alcott is drawing on 70 years of pop-culture ephemera to create a tribute to Smith’s vision that also works as a deck in their own right “with its own moral narrative universe, based on the attitudes and conventions of that world.”
Before drafting each of his 70 cards, Alcott studied Smith’s version, researching its meaning and design as he contemplates how he might translate it into the pulp vernacular. He has found that some of Smith’s work was deliberately exacting with regard to color, attitude, and costume, and other instances where specific details took a back seat to mood and emotional impact:
Once I understand what a card is about, I look through my library to find images that help get that across. It can get really complicated! A lot of times, the character’s body is in the right position but their face has the wrong expression, so I have to find a face that fits what the card is trying to say. Or their physical attitude is right, but I need them to be gripping or throwing something, so I have to find hands and arms that I can graft on, Frankenstein style. In some cases, there will be figures in the cards cobbled together from five or six different sources.
These cards are easily the most complex work I’ve ever done in that sense. The song pieces I do are a conversation between the piece and the song, but these cards are a conversation between me, Smith, the entire Tarot tradition, and the universe.
Visit Todd Alcott’s Etsy shop to view more of his mid-century mash ups, and see more cards from The Pulp Tarot and support Kickstarter here.
All images from the Pulp Tarot used with the permission of artist Todd Alcott.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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Some marble statues, even when stripped of their color by the sands of time since the heyday of Greece and Rome, look practically alive. But they began their “lives,” their appearance often makes us forget, as rough-hewn blocks of stone. Not that just any marble will do: following the example of Michelangelo, the discerning sculptor must make the journey to the Tuscan town of Carrara, “home of the world’s finest marble.” So claims the video above, a brief look at the process of Hungarian sculptor Márton Váró. That entire process, it appears, takes place in the open air: mostly in his outdoor studio space, but first at the Carrara quarry (see bottom video) where he picks just the right block from which to make his vision emerge.
Like Michelangelo, Váró has a manifestly high level of skill at his disposal — and unlike Michelangelo, a full set of modern power tools as well. But even today, some sculptors work without the aid of angle cutters and diamond-edged blades, as you can see in the video from the Getty above.
In it a modern-day sculptor introduces traditional tools like the point chisel, the tooth chisels, and the rasp, describing the different effects achievable with them by using different techniques. If you “lose your ego and just flow into the stone through your tools,” he says, “there’s no end of possibilities of what you can do inside that space” — the space of limitless possibilities, that is, afforded by a simple block of marble.
In the video above, sculptor Stijepo Gavrić further demonstrates the proper use of such hand tools, painstakingly refining a roughly human form into a lifelike version of an already realistic clay model — and one that holds up quite well alongside the original model, when she shows up for a comparison. The Great Big Story documentary short below takes us back to Tuscany, and specifically to the town of Pietrasanta, where marble has been quarried for five centuries from a mountain first discovered by Michelangelo.
It’s also home to hardworking sculptors well known for their ability to replicate classic and sacred works of art. “Marble is my life, because in this area you feed off marble,” says one who’s been at such work for about 60 years. If stone gives the artist life, it does so only to the extent that he breathes life into it.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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Each of us now commands more technological power than did any human being alive in previous eras. Or rather, we potentially command it: what we can do with the technology at our fingertips — and how much money we can make with it — depends on how well we understand it. Luckily, the development of learning methods has more or less kept pace with the development of everything else we now do with computers. Take the online-education platform Udacity, which offers “nanodegree” programs in areas like programming, data science, and cybersecurity. While the nanodegrees themselves come with fees, Udacity doesn’t charge for the constituent courses: in other words, you can earn what you need to know for free.
Above you’ll find the introduction to Udacity’s Product Design course by Google (also creator of the Coursera professional-certificate programs previously featured here on Open Culture). “Designed to help you materialize your game-changing idea and transform it into a product that you can build a business around,” the course “blends theory and practice to teach you product validation, UI/UX practices, Google’s Design Sprint and the process for setting and tracking actionable metrics.”
This is a highly practical learning experience at the intersection of technology and business, as are many other of Udacity’s 193 free courses, like App Marketing, App Monetization, How to Build a Startup, and Get Your Startup Started.
If you have no particular interest in founding and running the next Google, Udacity also hosts plenty of courses that focus entirely on the workings of different branches of technology, from programming and artificial intelligence to 2D game development and 3D graphics. (In addition to the broad introductions, there are also relatively advanced courses of a much more specific focus: Developing Android Apps with Kotlin, say, or Deploying a Hadoop Cluster.) And if you’d simply like to get your foot in the door with a job in tech, consider such offerings as Refresh Your Résumé, Strengthen Your LinkedIn Network & Brand, and a variety of interview-preparation courses for jobs in data science, machine learning, product management, virtual-reality development, and other subfields. And however cutting-edge their work, who couldn’t another spin through good old Intro to Psychology?
Find a list of 193 Free Udacity courses here. For the next week Nanodegrees are 75% off (use code JULY75). Find more free courses in our list, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Udacity. If readers enroll in certain Udacity courses and programs that charge a fee, it helps support Open Culture.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...It’s impossible to resist a Spinal Tap joke, but the creators of the complete scale model of England’s ancient Druidic structure pictured above had serious intentions — to understand what those inside the circle heard when the stones all stood in their upright “henge” position. A research team led by acoustical engineer Trevor Cox constructed the model at one-twelfth the actual size of Stonehenge, the “largest possible scale replica that could fit inside an acoustic chamber at the University of Salford in England, where Cox works,” reports Bruce Bower at Science News. The tallest of the stones is only two feet high.
This is not the first time acoustic research has been carried out on Stonehenge, but previous projects were “all based on what’s there now,” says Cox. “I wanted to know how it sounded in 2200 B.C., when all the stones were in place.” The experiment required a lot of extrapolation from what remains. The construction of “Stonehenge Lego” or “Minihenge,” as the researchers call it, assumes that “Stonehenge’s outer circle of standing sarsen stones — a type of silcrete rock found in southern England — had originally consisted of 30 stones.” Today, there are 17 sarsen stones in the outer circle among the 63 complete stones remaining.
“Based on an estimated total 157 stones placed at the site around 4,200 years ago, the researchers 3‑D printed 27 stones of all sizes and shapes,” Bower explains. “Then, the team used silicone molds of those items and plaster mixed with other materials to re-create the remaining 130 stones. Simulated stones were constructed to minimize sound absorption, much like actual stones at Stonehenge.” Once Cox and his team had the model completed and placed in the acoustic chamber, they began experimenting with sound waves and microphones, measuring impulse responses and frequency curves.
What were the results of this sonic Stonehenge recreation? “We expected to lose a lot of sound vertically, because there’s no roof,” says Cox. Instead, researchers found “thousands upon thousands of reflections as the sound waves bounced around horizontally.” Participants in ritual chants or musical celebrations inside the circle would have heard the sound amplified and clarified, like singing in a tiled bathroom. For those standing outside the monument, or even within the outer circle of stones, the sound would have been muffled or dampened. Likewise, the arrangement would have dampened sound entering the inner circle from outside.
Indeed, the effect was so pronounced that “the placement of the stones was capable of amplifying the human voice by more than four decibels, but produced no echoes,” notes Artnet. This suggests that the site’s acoustic properties were not accidental, but designed as part of its essential function for an elite group of participants, “even though the site’s construction would have required a huge amount of manpower.” This is hardly different from other monumental ancient religious structures like pyramids and ziggurats, built for royalty and an elite priesthood. But it’s only one interpretation of the structure’s purpose.
While Cox and his team do not believe acoustics were the primary motivation for Stonehenge’s design — astrological alignment seems to have been far more important — it clearly played some role. Other scholars have their own hypotheses. Research still needs to account for environmental factors — or why “Stonehenge hums when the wind blows hard,” as musicologist Rupert Till points out. Some have speculated the stones may have been instruments, played like a giant xylophone, a theory tested in a 2013 study conducted by researchers from the Royal College of Art, but this, too, remains speculative.
As the great Stonehenge enthusiast Nigel Tufnel once sang, “No one knows who they were, or what they were doing.” But whatever it sounded like, Cox and his colleagues have shown that the best seats were inside the inner circle. Read the research team’s full article here.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...What’s the best way to make sure you never miss a post from Open Culture? Easy answer: sign up for our daily email! Each weekday, you will receive an email that tidily wraps up everything we’ve featured on the site over a 24 hour period. Sign up below!
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Read More...Most of us know Rembrandt’s masterpiece by the name The Night Watch, but it has a longer original title: Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. By the same token, the version of the painting we’ve all seen — whatever we happen to call it — is smaller than the one Rembrandt originally painted in 1642. “In 1715, the monumental canvas was cut down on all four sides to fit onto a wall between two doors in Amsterdam’s Town Hall,” writes The New York Times’ Nina Siegal. “The snipped pieces were lost. Since the 19th century, the trimmed painting has been housed in the Rijksmuseum, where it is displayed as the museum’s centerpiece, at the focal point of its Gallery of Honor.”
In recent years, the Rijksmuseum has honored The Night Watch further with a thoroughgoing restoration called Operation Night Watch. This ambitious undertaking has so far produced attractions like the largest and most detailed photograph of the painting ever taken, zoom-in-able to the individual brushstroke.
That phase required high imaging technology, to be sure, but it may appear downright conventional compared to the just-unveiled recreation of the work’s three-centuries-missing pieces, which will hang on all four sides of the original at the Rijksmuseum for the next three months. This making-whole wouldn’t have been possible without a small copy made in the 17th century — or the latest artificial-intelligence technology of the 21st.
Image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum
“Rather than hiring a painter to reconstruct the missing pieces, the museum’s senior scientist, Robert Erdmann, trained a computer to recreate them pixel by pixel in Rembrandt’s style,” writes Siegal. Erdmann used “a relatively new technology known as convolutional neural networks, a class of artificial-intelligence algorithms designed to help computers make sense of images.” The process, explained in more detail by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei at ARTNews, involved digitally “splitting up the painting into thousands of tiles and placing matching tiles from both the original and the copy side-by-side,” training multiple neural networks to complete the painting in a style as close as possible to Rembrandt’s rather than the copyist’s. The result, with a few new faces as well as a startlingly different compositional feel than the Night Watch we’ve all seen, would no doubt please Captain Banninck Cocq and his militiamen: this, after all, is the portrait they paid for.
You can watch videos on this Rijksmuseum page showing how the classic painting was restored.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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It was supposedly “the album that finally obliterates the thin line separating arty white pop music and deep black funk,” as David Fricke wrote on the release of Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues. The praise maybe oversells music that is more arty white pop than “deep black funk.” But there’s never been any denying the funkiness of Talking Heads, either, just as there’s never been any denying the soulfulness of Tom Jones. Not that they’re musically comparable artists, but both have incorporated Black musical styles into their own idioms, winning respect on either side of the industry’s segregated line for self-aware re-interpretations of the blues, funk, soul, and R&B, as well as Ghanian high life and Nigerian Afrobeat.
Jones’ late-career reinvention involved showing up on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, covering Prince, working with Wyclef Jean, and making music one might characterize as generally good-humored pop that showcased his still-got-it vocal abilities. In 1999, he took on Speaking in Tongues’ P‑Funk-inspired single “Burning Down the House” in a cover that can be called a slick dance-pop interpretation of an art-rock re-interpretation of funk music.
Joined by the Cardigans, Jones belts it out with his typical swagger, while Cardigans’ singer Nina Persson acts as the “foil” writes Patrick Garvin at Pop Culture Experiment in a roundup of the song’s many covers: “She sounded as monotone as he sounded maniacal. And he sounded pretty damn maniacal.”
But Jones doesn’t sound maniacal like David Byrne sounds maniacal. The original track came together from a jam session, with lyrics improvised by Byrne, who shouted random phrases until he found those that best fit the song, changing the Parliament-Funkadelic audience chant “burn down the house!” into “burning down the house,” a line which could mean anything at all. (At one point, he tells NPR, it changed to “Foam Rubber, U.S.A.”) Is it a threat? A panicked outcry? A celebration? A manic lamentation? In Byrne’s anguished yelps one can never tell.
Jones makes “burning down the house” sound like a come-on, set against the iciest of tightly syncopated arrangements, in the most 90s of music videos ever. (Contrast it with the live version above, with P‑Funk’s own Bernie Worrell on keyboards, from Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense.) Every cover of the song, and there are many, does its own thing. “The one consistent aspect,” Garvin writes, “is Byrne’s weird lyrics… because they don’t tell a story in a linear sense, they can take on any variety of meanings.”
According to Byrne himself, the song did take on added resonance for him, perfectly in keeping with the 90s rebirth of Tom Jones. “I didn’t really know at the time,” he said in 1984, “but to me… it implies ecstatic rebirth or transcending one’s own self…. In classic psychology, the house is the self. And burning it down is destroying yourself… And the assumption is you get reborn, like a Phoenix from the ashes. See? It’s all there.” Indeed.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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I am distressed, almost discouraged, and fatigued to the point of feeling slightly ill. What I am doing is no good, and in spite of your confidence I am very much afraid that my efforts will all lead to nothing.
To know anything about the school of painting called Impressionism, one must know Claude Monet, who gave the movement its name with his painting Impression, Sunrise and provided its method — an almost confrontational relationship with landscape in plein-air. “I have gone back to some things that can’t possibly be done: water, with weeds waving at the bottom,” Monet wrote in a letter to his friend Gustave Geffroy in 1890. “It is a wonderful sight, but it drives one crazy trying to paint it. But that is the kind of thing I am always tackling.”
That “kind of thing,” the compulsion to paint nature in motion, required working quickly, repeating the same experiments over and over, despairing of getting it right, producing in the attempt his glorious series of haystacks and water lilies. Monet began painting landscapes upon meeting artist Eugene Boudin, who taught him to paint in open air, and he never stopped, refining his brushstroke for almost seventy years: from his first canvas, 1858’s View from the banks of the Lezade, to his last, The Rose Bush, finished in 1926, the final year of his life.
Whatever else Impressionism might mean, when it comes to Monet, it entails a prodigious amount of drawing, sketching, and painting. Over 2,500 such works have been attributed to him. That number is probably much higher “as it is known that Monet destroyed a number of his own works and others have surely been lost over time,” notes the Monet Gallery. Around 2,000 of those works are paintings, now spread around the world, with the largest collection located at the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris, where Impression, Sunrise (above) is held.
While it may be nearly impossible to see all of Monet’s known works in one lifetime (just as it seems impossible that he could have made so many masterpieces in one life), you can see 1540 of them in the video at the top — in a presentation that may or may not suit your art viewing sensibilities. If zooming slowly into hundreds of Monet paintings for a few seconds leaves you feeling a little overwhelmed, you can also head to the Monet Gallery online to see over 1900 of the artist’s attempts at “following Nature,” as he put it, “without being able to grasp her.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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