When Shostakovich Adapted Gogol’s “The Nose” Into an Opera: Watch Giant Noses Tap Dancing on the Stage

in Dance, Literature, Music, Opera | October 2nd, 2020

The first-time read­er of a sto­ry called “The Nose” may expect any num­ber of things: a char­ac­ter with a keen sense of smell; a mur­der evi­denced by the tit­u­lar organ, dis­em­bod­ied; a broad­er iron­ic point about the things right in front of our faces that we some­how nev­er see. But giv­en its con­cep­tion in the imag­i­na­tion of Niko­lai Gogol, “The Nose” is about a nose — a nose that, on its own, lives, breathes, walks, and dress­es in fin­ery. The nose does this, it seems, in order to rise in rank past that of its for­mer own­er, the run-of-the-mill St. Peters­burg civ­il ser­vant Col­le­giate Asses­sor Kova­ly­ov.

Writ­ten in 1835 and 1836, “The Nose” sat­i­rizes the long era in Impe­r­i­al Rus­sia after Peter the Great intro­duced the Table of Ranks. Meant to ush­er in a kind of pro­to-mer­i­toc­ra­cy, that sys­tem assigned rank to mil­i­tary and gov­ern­ment offi­cers accord­ing, at least in the­o­ry, to their abil­i­ty and achieve­ments. The fact that those who attained high enough ranks would rise the to the lev­el of hered­i­tary nobles cre­at­ed an all-out sta­tus war across many sec­tions of soci­ety — a war, to the mind of Gogol the mas­ter observ­er of bureau­cra­cy, that could pit a man not just against his col­leagues and friends but against his own body parts.

Near­ly a cen­tu­ry after the sto­ry’s pub­li­ca­tion, a young Dmitri Shostakovich took it upon him­self to adapt “The Nose” into his very first opera. In col­lab­o­ra­tion with Alexan­der Preis, Geor­gy Ion­in, and Yevge­ny Zamy­atin (author of the endur­ing dystopi­an nov­el We), the com­pos­er ren­dered even more out­ra­geous­ly this tale of a nose gone rogue. Incor­po­rat­ing pieces of Gogol’s oth­er sto­ries like the “The Over­coat” and “Diary of a Mad­man” as well as the play Mar­riage and the diary Dead Souls — not to men­tion the writ­ings of oth­er Russ­ian mas­ters, includ­ing Dos­toyevsky’s The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov — the 1928 opera com­bines a wide vari­ety of musi­cal styles both tra­di­tion­al and exper­i­men­tal, and among its set pieces includes a num­ber per­formed by giant tap-danc­ing noses.

You can see that part per­formed in the video above. The venue is Lon­don’s Roy­al Opera House, the direc­tor is Bar­rie Kosky of Berlin’s Komis­che Oper, and the year is 2016, half a cen­tu­ry after The Nose’s revival. Though com­plet­ed in the late 1920s, it did­n’t pre­miere on stage in full until 1930, when Sovi­et cen­sor­ship con­cen­trat­ed its ener­gies on quash­ing such non-rev­o­lu­tion­ary spec­ta­cles. It would­n’t be staged again in the Sovi­et Union until 1974, near­ly a decade after its pre­miere in the Unit­ed States. (Just a cou­ple years before, Alexan­der Alex­eieff and Claire Park­er had adapt­ed the sto­ry into the pin­screen ani­ma­tion pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.) The sociopo­lit­i­cal con­cerns of Gogol’s ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry and Shostakovich’s ear­ly 20th may have passed, but the appeal of the for­mer’s sharp satire — and the sheer Pythonesque weird­ness of the lat­ter’s oper­at­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty — cer­tain­ly haven’t.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Niko­lai Gogol’s Clas­sic Sto­ry, “The Nose,” Ani­mat­ed With the Aston­ish­ing Pin­screen Tech­nique (1963)

Revered Poet Alexan­der Pushkin Draws Sketch­es of Niko­lai Gogol and Oth­er Russ­ian Artists

The Bizarre, Sur­viv­ing Scene from the 1933 Sovi­et Ani­ma­tion Based on a Pushkin Tale and a Shostakovich Score

George Saun­ders’ Lec­tures on the Russ­ian Greats Brought to Life in Stu­dent Sketch­es

Why You Should Read The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Bulgakov’s Rol­lick­ing Sovi­et Satire

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

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An Animated Reading of “The Jabberwocky,” Lewis Carroll’s Nonsense Poem That Somehow Manages to Make Sense

in Literature, Poetry | October 2nd, 2020

“I can explain all the poems that ever were in­ vented—and a good many that haven’t been invent­ed just yet.” —Hump­ty Dump­ty

“The Jab­ber­wocky,” Lewis Carroll’s clas­sic poem from Through the Look­ing Glass, and What Alice Found There—the sec­ond install­ment of the most famous­ly non­sen­si­cal adven­ture in lit­er­ary history—is “full of seem­ing­ly non­sen­si­cal words that some­how man­age to make sense,” says nar­ra­tor Jack Cut­more-Scott in the ani­mat­ed read­ing above from TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion. That word, non­sense, is asso­ci­at­ed with Carroll’s fan­ta­sy world more than any oth­er, but what does it mean for a sto­ry to be non­sense and be intel­li­gi­ble at the same time?

Car­roll, a math­e­mati­cian by train­ing, under­stood the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple of non­sense, which “T.S. Eliot remind­ed us, is not an absence of sense but a par­o­dy of it,” as J. Patrick Lewis writes at The New York Times. “Some of the port­man­teau words Car­roll invented—chortle, bur­ble, frab­jous and others—are now ful­ly vest­ed mem­bers of the lex­i­con. And the verse’s struc­ture is a mir­ror, as Alice dis­cov­ered, of clas­si­cal Eng­lish poet­ry.” Car­roll com­posed the first four lines ten years before Through the Look­ing Glass, as a par­o­d­ic “Stan­za of Anglo-Sax­on Poet­ry” to amuse his fam­i­ly.

It may help, or not, to keep in mind that Car­roll is not only mock­ing Eng­lish poet­ic forms and con­ven­tions, but a par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal form of Eng­lish that is most­ly unrec­og­niz­able to mod­ern read­ers, and cer­tain­ly to Alice. But the poem’s syn­tax and struc­ture are so famil­iar that we can eas­i­ly piece togeth­er a mon­ster-slay­ing nar­ra­tive in which, as Alice remarks, “some­body killed some­thing.”

The ever-hum­ble Hump­ty Dump­ty is hap­py to explain, as was Car­roll in his orig­i­nal com­po­si­tion, to which he attached a glos­sary very sim­i­lar to the egg’s def­i­n­i­tions and gave “the lit­er­al Eng­lish” of the first stan­za as:

“It was evening, and the smooth active bad­gers were scratch­ing and bor­ing holes in the hill side; all unhap­py were the par­rots, and the grave tur­tles squeaked out“.

There were prob­a­bly sun dials on the top of the hill, and the “boro­goves” were afraid that their nests would be under­mined. The hill was prob­a­bly full of the nests of “raths”, which ran out squeak­ing with fear on hear­ing the “toves” scratch­ing out­side. This is an obscure, but yet deeply affect­ing, rel­ic of ancient Poet­ry.

Does this help? It does explain the mood Car­roll is after, and he achieves it. The Jab­ber­wocky is fun­ny and play­ful and all the rest, but it is also deeply unset­tling in its obscure mys­ter­ies and fright­en­ing descrip­tions of its title char­ac­ter.

In John Tenniel’s famous illus­tra­tion of the beast, it appears as a scaly, leath­ery drag­on with a face some­where between a deep-sea fish and an over­grown sew­er rat. The ani­ma­tion by Sjaak Rood gives it a more clas­si­cal­ly drag­on-like appear­ance, in the crazed style of Ralph Stead­man, while the Ban­der­snatch looks like some­thing Paul Klee would have invent­ed. The choice of artis­tic influ­ences here shows Rood con­nect­ing deeply with the non­sense tra­di­tion in mod­ern art, one which also turns famil­iar forms into night­mar­ish beings that fill our heads with ideas.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

O Frab­jous Day! Neil Gaiman Recites Lewis Carroll’s “Jab­ber­wocky” from Mem­o­ry

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

Lewis Carroll’s Pho­tographs of Alice Lid­dell, the Inspi­ra­tion for Alice in Won­der­land

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

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

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Hear Readings of Albert Einstein’s Love Letters (and Chilly Divorce Letters) to His First Wife Mileva

in Letters, Science | October 1st, 2020

Beware the fake quo­ta­tion. They have become so ubiq­ui­tous they often appear in books and speech­es by politi­cians and their fam­i­ly mem­bers, not that any­one seems to care much. But most of us feel a mea­sure of shame at being duped, as Katharine Rose did when she found her­self moved by a let­ter sup­pos­ed­ly writ­ten by Albert Ein­stein to his daugh­ter, Lieserl, “regard­ing the ‘uni­ver­sal force’ of love.” The let­ter is a “beau­ti­ful read,” and it’s a fake. But many admir­ers of Ein­stein were eager to believe it.

Why? Like oth­er famous fig­ures to whom spu­ri­ous words are attrib­uted, Ein­stein isn’t just well-known, he is revered, a celebri­ty, and celebri­ties are peo­ple we feel we know inti­mate­ly. (A com­mon defense for fake-quote-shar­ing goes: “Well, if he didn’t say it, then it’s exact­ly the kind of thing he would say.”) Dis­cussing the theft of Einstein’s brain after his death, Ross Ander­son at Aeon observes that “an ordi­nary per­son can live and die pri­vate­ly, but a genius—and his grey matter—belongs to the world.” We might add, “and so do the inti­mate details of his pri­vate life.”

The details of Einstein’s mar­riage, and of his very unpleas­ant sep­a­ra­tion and divorce, from Mil­e­va Mar­ić have long been pub­lic knowl­edge. “Few pub­lic mar­riages have been sub­ject­ed to a more unnu­anced ver­dict,” Maria Popo­va writes at Brain Pick­ings. Their love let­ters first came to light in 1986, dis­cov­ered by Einstein’s grand­daugh­ter Eve­lyn. They were pub­lished in 1992 as The Love Let­ters, “a col­lec­tion of fifty-four mis­sives exchanged between the begin­ning of their romance” when they met as stu­dents in 1897 to their mar­riage in 1903. Dozens more are avail­able at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty’s online col­lec­tion of Ein­stein’s papers.

The let­ters are real, and they are “spicy,” as YouTu­ber Tibees shows us in the video at the top. No awk­ward pri­vate expres­sion is safe: we begin with let­ters Ein­stein wrote to his high school girl­friend, Marie Win­tel­er, includ­ing a breakup let­ter at 3:13. The excerpts here are all time­stamped on the video’s YouTube page, with help­ful sum­maries like “Einstein’s mom try­ing to break them up” (them being Albert and Mil­e­va), “Ein­stein hav­ing an affair with his cousin Elsa,” “Break­ing up with Elsa,” and “Get­ting back with Elsa.”

Elsa, you may know, was Einstein’s sec­ond wife, in addi­tion to being his cousin, and the cause of his sep­a­ra­tion and divorce from Mil­e­va, to whom he had pro­fessed undy­ing devo­tion. In the inter­est of ful­ly invad­ing the genius’s pri­va­cy, we have, above, some read­ings of his harsh “divorce let­ters” to Mil­e­va, with hits like “Sep­a­ra­tion,” “Propos­ing divorce,” and “Court pro­ceed­ings.” Love may or may not be a “uni­ver­sal force”—we do not, sad­ly, have Einstein’s thoughts on the matter—but we do know he found it a trou­bling­ly chaot­ic, unpre­dictable one.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Ein­stein Impos­es on His First Wife a Cru­el List of Mar­i­tal Demands

Hear Albert Ein­stein Read “The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence” (1941)

Albert Ein­stein Explains Why We Need to Read the Clas­sics

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

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Explore a Digital Archive of Student Notebooks from Around the World (1773-Present)

in Archives, Books, Education, History | October 1st, 2020

To bring back mem­o­ries of your school­days, there’s noth­ing quite like the sight of your old exer­cise books. This holds true whether you went to school in Ghana in the 2010s, Italy in the 90s, France in the 80s, Chi­na in the 70s, Japan in the 60s, or India in the 50s. All of these exam­ples and many more have come avail­able to view at the Exer­cise Book Archive, an “ever-grow­ing, par­tic­i­pa­to­ry archive of old exer­cise books that allows every­one to dis­cov­er the his­to­ry, edu­ca­tion, and dai­ly life of chil­dren and youth of the past.” All of the entries include the rel­e­vant book’s front cov­er — already a Prous­t­ian view­ing expe­ri­ence for any who had them grow­ing up — and some fea­ture scans of the inte­ri­or pages, stu­dent writ­ing and all.

“One girl’s note­book describes the bomb­ing of her small town in 1940s Switzer­land,” writes Col­lec­tors Week­ly’s Hunter Oat­man-Stan­ford. “Anoth­er boy’s jour­nal chron­i­cles dai­ly life in rur­al Penn­syl­va­nia dur­ing the 1890s; the diary of a Chi­nese teenag­er recounts his expe­ri­ences in prison dur­ing the 1980s.” The arti­cle quotes Thomas Pololi, co-founder of the orga­ni­za­tion behind the Exer­cise Book Archive, on the his­tor­i­cal val­ue of books con­tain­ing “com­po­si­tions about war, pro­pa­gan­da, or polit­i­cal events that we now rec­og­nize as ter­ri­ble.

But in the nar­ra­tion of chil­dren, there is often enthu­si­asm about the swasti­ka in Ger­many, or the Duce in Italy (dic­ta­tor Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni), or for Mao in Chi­na.” (Thanks to the work of vol­un­teers, these and oth­er exer­cise-book writ­ings have been tran­scribed and trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish.)

These young stu­dents “tend­ed to see the pos­i­tive side of trau­mat­ic things, per­haps because their main goal is to grow up, and they need­ed to do it the world they lived in.” Their exer­cise books thus offer reflec­tions of their soci­eties, in not just con­tent but design as well: “In Spain or in Chi­na,” for exam­ple, “you see beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions of pro­pa­gan­da themes. They are often aes­thet­i­cal­ly appeal­ing because they were meant to per­suade chil­dren to do or think some­thing.” Edu­ca­tion­al trends also come through: “Before, there were main­ly exer­cis­es of cal­lig­ra­phy with dic­tat­ed sen­tences about how you have to behave in your life, with phras­es like ‘Emu­la­tion sel­dom fails,’ ” which to Pololi’s mind “implies that if you are your­self, you risk fail­ing. That’s the oppo­site of what we teach chil­dren nowa­days.”

Some­how the most mun­dane of these stu­dent com­po­si­tions can also be among the most inter­est­ing. Take the jour­nal of a group of Finnish girl scouts from the ear­ly 1950s. “The train to Lep­pä­vaara arrived quick­ly,” writes the author of one entry from April 1950. “At the sta­tion it start­ed to rain. We walked to the youth house, where we sang ‘Exalt the joy’ etc. Then we went to the sauna where we had to be. We sang and prayed. We then ate some sand­wich­es.” Could she have pos­si­bly imag­ined peo­ple all around the world read­ing of this girl-scout day trip with great inter­est sev­en­ty years lat­er? And what would the young man doing his pen­man­ship near­ly a quar­ter-mil­len­ni­um ago in Shrop­shire think if he know how eager we were to look at his exer­cise book? Bet­ter us than his school­mas­ter, no doubt. Enter the Exer­cise Book Archive here.

via Col­lec­tors Week­ly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ancient Egypt­ian Home­work Assign­ment from 1800 Years Ago: Some Things Are Tru­ly Time­less

Muse­um Dis­cov­ers Math Note­book of an 18th-Cen­tu­ry Eng­lish Farm Boy, Adorned with Doo­dles of Chick­ens Wear­ing Pants

Down­load 20 Pop­u­lar High School Books Avail­able as Free eBooks & Audio Books

200 Free Kids Edu­ca­tion­al Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Web­sites & More

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

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Chris Frantz Breaks Down How He Crafted Songs for Talking Heads & Tom Tom Club: A Nakedly Examined Music Interview

in Music, Podcasts | October 1st, 2020

Chris found­ed Talk­ing Heads in the ear­ly ’70s with his wife Tina Wey­mouth and David Byrne, and he focus­es heav­i­ly on these ear­ly years of his career in his new mem­oir Remain in Love, describ­ing it as very much a group effort, even though they inten­tion­al­ly put the spot­light on David, who in turn pret­ty ear­ly on announced that he had to write all the lyrics, that he could­n’t sing oth­er peo­ple’s songs.

On the Naked­ly Exam­ined Music Pod­cast, Mark Lin­sen­may­er inter­views song­writ­ers about their cre­ative deci­sion-mak­ing, and in this inter­view, Chris tells how he and Tina and David col­lab­o­rat­ed on lyrics for their ear­ly sin­gle “Psy­cho Killer,” and then how Chris’ lyrics were used for “Warn­ing Sign,” a song (played in full as part of the pod­cast) that appeared on the Heads’ sec­ond album, 1978’s More Songs About Build­ings and Food.

Also sur­pris­ing is that Chris and Tina’s spin-off band, Tom Tom Club, formed in an inter­val when both David and the Heads’ lead gui­tarist Jer­ry Har­ri­son want­ed to pause Talk­ing Heads to record solo albums, actu­al­ly had its best-sell­ing sin­gle, “Genius of Love,” pri­or to the Talk­ing Heads real finan­cial suc­cess with hits like “Burn­ing Down the House” and “And She Was.”

The inter­view includes a detailed treat­ment of the com­po­si­tion and arrange­ment of two Tom Tom Club songs that are also played in full: “Bam­boo Town,” a reg­gae-inspired track from their sec­ond album Close to the Bone (1983); and “Who Feel­in’ It,” a dance track replete with record scratch per­cus­sion from The Good the Bad and the Funky (2000). This song was lat­er remixed by The inter­view con­cludes with a song that Chris sings: the title track from Tom Tom Club’s most recent release, Down­town Rock­ers (2012).

Both these last two tracks have as their main lyrics lists of artists that Chris and Tina want­ed to pay trib­ute to, both in influ­enc­ing their musi­cal sen­si­bil­i­ties and/or play­ing shows with them at CBG­B’s dur­ing their for­ma­tive years as Talk­ing Heads in New York City. Chris’ book gives us a vivid glimpse of that scene, as well as the excite­ment of their first album, work­ing with Bri­an Eno, their first Euro­pean tour, and oth­er mile­stones all the way up to their induc­tion into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, which was their first time play­ing togeth­er since the group’s split in 1991.

For more Naked­ly Exam­ined Music in-depth inter­views about song­writ­ing, arrange­ment, and the musi­cal life, vis­it nakedlyexaminedmusic.com.

Mark Lin­sen­may­er is also the host of The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast and Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast. He releas­es music under the name Mark Lint.

 

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What Would the World of Charlie Chaplin Look Like in Color?: Watch a Colorfully Restored Version of A Night at the Show (1915)

in Film | September 30th, 2020

When we imag­ine Char­lie Chap­lin, we imag­ine a man some­how exist­ing in black-and-white. The obvi­ous rea­son is that he became not just a movie star but a cul­tur­al icon in the 1910s and 20s, the era before sound came to the movies, let alone col­or. But to attain such suc­cess required skills tai­lored to the state of the medi­um at the time: that of mak­ing peo­ple laugh with­out say­ing a word, of course, but also of craft­ing an image instant­ly rec­og­niz­able in mono­chrome. Thus we don’t always feel we’re see­ing the “real” Char­lie Chap­lin in tech­ni­cal­ly more real­is­tic col­or pho­tographs, or even col­orized ones. But what would it feel like to watch one of his clas­sic come­dies in col­or?

You can find out by watch­ing the col­orized ver­sion of A Night in the Show above. Orig­i­nal­ly released in 1915, the 25-minute short was direct­ed by and stars Chap­lin, who plays the dual role of char­ac­ters called Mr. Pest and Mr. Row­dy. Both attend the same music-hall per­for­mance, and though Mr. Pest is of the upper crust and Mr. Row­dy is a work­ing man, both get equal­ly ine­bri­at­ed, their dis­parate social class­es pro­duc­ing dif­fer­ent styles of mis­chief-mak­ing.

The Eng­lish-born Chap­lin had pre­vi­ous­ly devel­oped these char­ac­ters on stage, hav­ing played the music-hall cir­cuit him­self since ado­les­cence. Safe to say that, by the time Hol­ly­wood came call­ing, he’d seen far worse than Pest and Row­dy him­self.

The qual­i­ty of this col­oriza­tion will per­haps not win the con­tro­ver­sial process any new con­verts, but it does give us a sense of what an evening at an Eng­lish music hall of the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry would actu­al­ly have looked like, a valu­able re-cre­ation now that none of us have mem­o­ries of this once-com­mon expe­ri­ence. We can more eas­i­ly imag­ine the kind of spec­ta­cles such estab­lish­ments would have offered, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to snake-charm­ing and bursts of fire, as well as its ram­shackle exag­ger­a­tions that Chap­lin so ener­get­i­cal­ly sat­i­rizes. We could also con­sid­er this his vale­dic­tion to that envi­ron­ment: the pre­vi­ous year’s-intro­duced the Tramp, who would go on to become his most beloved char­ac­ter of all, ensured that he would soon be able to put the music hall behind him for­ev­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

60+ Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

Col­orized Pho­tos Bring Walt Whit­man, Char­lie Chap­lin, Helen Keller & Mark Twain Back to Life

Char­lie Chap­lin Films a Scene Inside a Lion’s Cage in 200 Takes

Char­lie Chap­lin Does Cocaine and Saves the Day in Mod­ern Times (1936)

The Char­lie Chap­lin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Pho­tos & Doc­u­ments from the Life of the Icon­ic Film Star

When Ted Turn­er Tried to Col­orize Cit­i­zen Kane: See the Only Sur­viv­ing Scene from the Great Act of Cin­e­mat­ic Sac­ri­lege

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

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Ella Fitzgerald Imitates Louis Armstrong’s Gravelly Voice While Singing “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby”

in Music | September 30th, 2020

Are great artists born, or are they made? Prob­a­bly a lit­tle of both, but I sus­pect that deep down, even if we don’t like to admit it, we know it’s prob­a­bly a lit­tle more the for­mer. We can become skilled at most any­thing with ded­i­ca­tion and hard work. Tal­ent is anoth­er matter—a mys­te­ri­ous com­bi­na­tion of qual­i­ties we know when we hear but can’t always define. Ella Fitzger­ald had it when she first stepped on stage on ama­teur night at Harlem’s Apol­lo The­ater as a teenag­er, intend­ing to do a tap dance rou­tine.

She’d only done the per­for­mance on a dare, had no for­mal train­ing out­side of singing in church, her bed­room, and the Harlem streets, and she only chose to sing that night because the act before her did a tap dance and stole her thun­der.

She blew the audi­ence away—a tough New York crowd not known for being forgiving—and ren­dered even the bois­ter­ous teenagers in the bal­cony speech­less. “Three encores lat­er,” she wrote, “the $25 prize was mine.” Fitzgerald’s gold­en, three-octave voice, impec­ca­ble tim­ing, and impro­vi­sa­tion­al bril­liance are not exact­ly the kinds of things that can be taught.

She didn’t look the part of the typ­i­cal female jazz singer, at least accord­ing to pop­u­lar per­cep­tion, writes Hol­ly Glea­son at NPR. “A large woman who’d grown up rough,” includ­ing time spent in a New York State refor­ma­to­ry, she was reject­ed by band­lead­ers even after that first, rev­e­la­to­ry per­for­mance, and the press fre­quent­ly referred to her in terms that dis­par­aged her appear­ance. “Fitzger­ald rec­og­nized she didn’t pos­sess Bil­lie Holiday’s torchy allure,” Hol­ly Glea­son writes, or “Eartha Kitt’s fer­al sen­su­al­i­ty or Car­men McRae’s sex appeal. But that would not stop the woman who took her vocal cues from the horns, as well as from jazz singer Con­nee Boswell.”

It did­n’t stop her from win­ning a Gram­my in the Gram­my’s first year, or hav­ing a record label, Verve, found­ed just to put out her music. Ella’s range and pitch-per­fect ear meant she could imi­tate not only the horn sec­tion or her favorite singer Boswell but just about any­one else as well, from pop­u­lar jazz singer Rose Mur­phy, with her high, car­toon­ish voice, “chee chee” affec­ta­tions, and “brrrp” tele­phone sound effects, to the low, grav­el­ly rasp of Fitzgerald’s long­time duet part­ner Louis Arm­strong. See her do exact­ly that in the clip at the top, mov­ing effort­less­ly in “I Can’t Give You Any­thing but Love, Baby” from her own voice, to Murphy’s, to Armstrong’s in the space of just a few min­utes.

What­ev­er obsta­cles Fitzger­ald faced, her voice seemed to soar above it all. In becom­ing a glob­al jazz star and “The First Lady of Song,” says jazz writer Will Fried­wald, “she showed peo­ple that this is music Amer­i­cans should be proud of.”

via Ben Phillips

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ella Fitzgerald’s Lost Inter­view about Racism & Seg­re­ga­tion: Record­ed in 1963, It’s Nev­er Been Heard Until Now

Ella Fitzger­ald Sings ‘Sum­mer­time’ by George Gersh­win, Berlin 1968

How Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe Helped Break Ella Fitzger­ald Into the Big Time (1955)

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

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When R.E.M.‘s Michael Stipe Created the Lyrics for “The Voice of Harold” by Riffing on the Liner Notes of an Old Gospel Album (1983)

in Music | September 30th, 2020

R.E.M. is one of those bands that just think­ing about can send me into a rever­ie of mem­o­ries of the rooms of friends with whom I lis­tened to “Pret­ty Per­sua­sion,” “Rockville,” and the poet­ry of “7 Chi­nese Bros.”—one of Michael Stipe’s ear­ly, incom­pre­hen­si­ble songs, like “Swan Swan H,” whose cryp­tic lyrics one must seem­ing­ly take on faith. The song must mean some­thing, after all, to Stipe. Maybe the mys­tery of who, exact­ly, the “sev­en Chi­nese broth­ers swal­low­ing the ocean” were to him would be revealed some­day in an inter­view or stray ref­er­ence in a biog­ra­phy….

Now that we live in an age of instant infor­ma­tion grat­i­fi­ca­tion, we can skip the years of won­der and find the answer right away: the song was part­ly inspired, we learn at Song­facts, by a 1938 children’s book called The Five Chi­nese Broth­ers, based on a tra­di­tion­al folk tale of young broth­ers with super­nat­ur­al pow­ers. (It’s also part­ly a trib­ute to pho­tog­ra­ph­er Car­ol Levy, a friend who died in a car crash before the record­ing of Reck­on­ing.) Need­ing anoth­er syl­la­ble, maybe, Stipe changed the num­ber to sev­en, an odd­ly prophet­ic move giv­en that a new ver­sion of the sto­ry, pub­lished ten years lat­er, also fea­tured sev­en broth­ers.

The ref­er­ence shows how many great song­writ­ers work: pick­ing at bits and pieces from their mem­o­ries and what­ev­er cap­ti­vat­ing text hap­pens to be lay­ing around…. And Stipe is one of those singers, like Elton John, who can sell any line, no mat­ter how obscure or absurd.

In ear­ly songs, espe­cial­ly, he showed an uncan­ny abil­i­ty to invest incan­ta­to­ry com­bi­na­tions of words with haunt­ing pathos and urgency. He could sing from the phone book or the back of a cere­al box and make it com­pelling. In fact, the sto­ry of “7 Chi­nese Bros.” involves an almost sim­i­lar feat in the form of “Voice of Harold,” famil­iar to fans as the B‑side to “So. Cen­tral Rain” and part of the 1987 odds and ends col­lec­tion Dead Let­ter Office. What pos­si­ble expla­na­tion could there be for these non sequitur gospel lyrics, sung to the tune of… “7 Chi­nese Bros.”?

Was Stipe a secret Evan­ge­list, hop­ing to win con­verts by extolling “the pure tenor qual­i­ty of the voice of Harold Mont­gomery”? More teas­ing­ly vague themes emerge, along with ref­er­ences to fig­ures like the Rev­erend Bill Fun­der­burk, Charles Sur­ratt, John Bar­bee, and Rhon­da Mont­gomery (“That’s Rhon­da! An artist!”). Instead of “Sev­en Chi­nese broth­ers swal­low­ing the ocean,” the cho­rus intro­duces us to “The Rev­e­laires, A must / The Rev­e­laires / A must.” If you’re one of those who heard this song and thought, “What…?”, you can won­der no more.

The expla­na­tion comes to us from a 2009 inter­view pro­duc­er Don Dixon gave to Uncut mag­a­zine. (For some rea­son, Dixon refers to “7 Chi­nese Bros.” as “7 Chi­nese Blues,” nev­er a title of the song). The sto­ry begins with Stipe feel­ing down in the dumps in a stair­well out­fit­ted as a lounge for him in the stu­dio.

We were work­ing on the vocal for “7 Chi­nese Blues,” but Michael just was­n’t into it. He was down in his stair­well. I hit the talk-back to let him know I was com­ing through to make an adjust­ment… This was just an excuse to take a look at him, see if I could loosen him up a lit­tle. While I was in the attic, I’d noticed a stack of old records that had been tak­en up there to die, local R&B and gospel stuff most­ly. I grabbed the one off the top (a gospel record enti­tled The Joy of Know­ing Jesus by the Rev­e­laires) and as I passed Michael on the way to the Con­trol Room, I tossed it down to him. I thought he might be amused. When I fired up the tape a few sec­onds lat­er, Michael was singing, but not the lyrics to “7 Chi­nese Blues.” He was singing the lin­er notes to the LP I’d tossed him. When Michael began to sing these lin­er notes, he was much loud­er than he’d been ear­li­er and it took a few sec­onds for me to realise what was going on and adjust the lev­els. He made it all the way through the song, work­ing in every word on the back of that album! I rewound the tape, we had a chuck­le and pro­ceed­ed to sing the beau­ti­ful one-take vocal of the real words that you hear on Reck­on­ing. He seemed more con­fi­dent after that day.

Stipe didn’t just sing the words from the back of the album, he impro­vised cut-ups as he went, re-arrang­ing phras­es to fit the meter of the orig­i­nal song. “Voice of Harold” became a fan favorite for much the same rea­son as “7 Chi­nese Bros.” and “Swan Swan H”—it seemed to hide a mys­tery in plain view, its impas­sioned deliv­ery at odds with its non­sen­si­cal nar­ra­tive. Released after Reck­on­ing, it turns a spon­ta­neous moti­va­tion­al tool dur­ing the mak­ing of the album into a cre­ation all its own.

Jim Con­nel­ly explores the rela­tion­ship between “7 Chi­nese Bros.” and “Voice of Harold” even fur­ther in a post at Medi­alop­er, point­ing to the firm con­vic­tion that’s so “chill-induc­ing” in the lat­ter (and that comes through in the for­mer record­ing, made imme­di­ate­ly after­ward). They may be found words, serendip­i­tous­ly picked up and put togeth­er on the spot, but in Stipe’s voice we can tell that “He’s real. He means it,” what­ev­er the hell it is. See a video of “Voice of Harold” with lyrics, at the top, and fol­low along with the lin­er notes on the back of Rev­e­laires’ gospel album The Joy of Know­ing Jesus just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” Michael Stipe Pro­claims Again, and He Still Feels Fine

Why R.E.M.’s 1991 Out of Time May Be the “Most Polit­i­cal­ly Impor­tant Album” Ever

R.E.M.’s “Los­ing My Reli­gion” Reworked from Minor to Major Scale

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

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Mulan Re-Disneyfied: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#62) Discussion with Actor Michael Tow

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | September 30th, 2020

Is the new Mulan the equiv­a­lent for Asian-Amer­i­cans what Black Pan­ther was for African-Amer­i­cans? The largest enter­tain­ment machine we have fea­tured an all-Asian cast telling a tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese sto­ry aimed at the widest pos­si­ble audi­ence. Did it work?

Actor Michael Tow joins your hosts Eri­ca Spyres, Mark Lin­sen­may­er, and Bri­an Hirt to dis­cuss the devel­op­ment, aes­thet­ics, and polit­i­cal con­tro­ver­sies sur­round­ing the film. The vision of fem­i­nism changed between the orig­i­nal poem from ca. 550 C.E. (“When the two rab­bits run side by side, how can you tell the female from the male?”) to the present, and the “just be you” eth­ic (with your mag­i­cal chi!) is not the norm for Chi­na in any peri­od. Was the project in its very con­cep­tion doomed to fall short of some of its goals? Was the live-action an improve­ment over the 1998 ani­mat­ed ver­sion?

Read the poem, and watch a read­ing of the illus­trat­ed 1998 Robert San Souci book Fa Mulan that the films were based on. There have been many adap­ta­tions of the sto­ry in Chi­na.

Oth­er sources we read to pre­pare includ­ed:

Fol­low Michael on Twit­ter @michaelctow and check out his imdb cred­its. Michael host­ed a Q&A with the Mulan cast short­ly after the film’s release.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts

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Explore the Codex Zouche-Nuttall: A Rare, Accordion-Folded Pre-Columbian Manuscript

in History | September 29th, 2020

In the past two decades, the Latin Amer­i­can world has seen a tremen­dous resur­gence of indige­nous lan­guage study and lit­er­a­ture. Some Mex­i­can writ­ers are “ditch­ing Span­ish,” Dora Ballew writes, for “Zapotec, Tzotzil, Mayan and oth­er lan­guages spo­ken long before Euro­peans washed up on the shores of what is now Mex­i­co.” Large antholo­gies of such lit­er­a­ture have been pub­lished since 2001. The move is not a recov­ery of lost lan­guages and cul­tures, but an affir­ma­tion of “the num­ber of peo­ple flu­ent in both an indige­nous lan­guage and Span­ish,” schol­ars and writ­ers Earl and Sylvia Shorris explain.

“At least sev­er­al mil­lion” indige­nous lan­guage speak­ers in Mex­i­co alone ensure that “lit­er­a­ture has ample place in which to flour­ish.” Despite the incur­sions of both the Aztecs, then the Span­ish, speak­ers of Mix­tec, for exam­ple, sur­vived and now “inhab­it a vast ter­ri­to­ry of broad moun­tain ranges and small val­leys that stretch across the mod­ern-day states of Puebla, Guer­rero and Oax­a­ca,” writes Dr. Manuel A. Her­mann Lejarazu.

An expert on Mix­tec codices, Lejarazu ties the con­tem­po­rary cul­ture of Mix­tec speak­ing peo­ple back to the Post­clas­sic past, “a peri­od between the tenth and six­teenth cen­turies when polit­i­cal cen­tres pro­lif­er­at­ed, fill­ing the vac­u­um left after the col­lapse of large cities estab­lished in pre­ced­ing cen­turies.”

Much of the lit­tle that is known of the indige­nous Mix­tec lit­er­ary cul­ture comes from the Codex Zouche-Nut­tall, one of only a hand­ful of pre-Columbian man­u­scripts in exis­tence. Made of deer skin, the codex “con­tains two nar­ra­tives,” the British Muse­um notes. “One side of the doc­u­ment relates the his­to­ry of impor­tant cen­tres in the Mix­tec region, while the oth­er, start­ing at the oppo­site end, records the geneal­o­gy, mar­riages and polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary feats of the Mix­tec ruler, Eight Deer Jaguar-Claw.”

Although fin­ished around 1556, the pic­to­graph­ic fold­ing man­u­script “is con­sid­ered to be of pre-His­pan­ic ori­gin,” Lejarazu writes, “since it pre­serves a strong indige­nous tra­di­tion in its pic­to­graph­ic tech­niques, with no demon­stra­ble Euro­pean influ­ence.” The codex was first dis­cov­ered in 1854 in a Domini­can monastery in Flo­rence. It’s unclear exact­ly how and when it arrived in Europe, but sev­er­al such codices “reached the Old World as gifts or as part of the doc­u­ments sub­mit­ted to Span­ish courts that han­dled legal mat­ters in the Indies.”

Though sev­ered from its ori­gins, the Codex Zouche-Nut­tall is now freely avail­able online in a scanned 1902 fac­sim­i­le edi­tion at the British Muse­um and the Inter­net Archive. You can learn much more about these incred­i­bly rare doc­u­ments from Lejarazu’s arti­cle and Robert Lloyd Williams’ Com­plete Codex Zouche-Nutall, which explains how the pic­to­graph­ic record func­tions like a sto­ry­board, or out­line, for a com­plex nar­ra­tive tra­di­tion that tied Mix­tec rulers to the gods, to each oth­er, and to the past and future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Native Lands: An Inter­ac­tive Map Reveals the Indige­nous Lands on Which Mod­ern Nations Were Built

Speak­ing in Whis­tles: The Whis­tled Lan­guage of Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co

Peru­vian Schol­ar Writes & Defends the First The­sis Writ­ten in Quechua, the Main Lan­guage of the Incan Empire

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

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How Storyboarding Works: A Brief Introduction to How Ridley Scott, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson & Other Directors Storyboard Their Films

in Art, Film | September 29th, 2020

When you’re mak­ing a film with com­plex shots or sequences of shots, it does­n’t hurt to have sto­ry­boards. Though pro­fes­sion­al sto­ry­board artists do exist, they don’t come cheap, and in any case they con­sti­tute one more play­er in the game of tele­phone between those who’ve envi­sioned the final cin­e­mat­ic prod­uct and the col­lab­o­ra­tors essen­tial to real­iz­ing it. It thus great­ly behooves aspir­ing direc­tors to devel­op their draw­ing skills, though you hard­ly need to be a full-fledged drafts­man like Rid­ley Scott or even a pro­fi­cient com­ic artist like Bong Joon-ho for your work to ben­e­fit from sto­ry­board­ing.

You do, how­ev­er, need to under­stand the lan­guage of sto­ry­board­ing, essen­tial­ly a means of trans­lat­ing the rich lan­guage of cin­e­ma into fig­ures (stick fig­ures if need be), rec­tan­gles, and arrows — lots of arrows. Draw­ing on exam­ples from Star Wars and Juras­sic Park to Taxi Dri­ver and The Big Lebows­ki, the Rock­etJump Film School video above explains how sto­ry­boards work in less than ten min­utes.

As sto­ry­board artist Kevin Sen­za­ki explains how these draw­ings visu­al­ize a film in advance of and as a guide for film­mak­ing process, we see a vari­ety of sto­ry­boards rang­ing from crude sketch­es to near­ly com­ic book-lev­el detail, all com­pared to cor­re­spond­ing clips from the fin­ished pro­duc­tion.

These exam­ples come from the work of such direc­tors as Alfred Hitch­cock, Mar­tin Scors­ese, James Cameron, Wes Ander­son, and Christo­pher Nolan — all of whose films, you’ll notice, have no slight visu­al ambi­tions. When a shot or sequence requires seri­ous visu­al effects work, or even when a cam­era has to make just the right move to advance the action, sto­ry­boards are prac­ti­cal­ly essen­tial. Not that every suc­cess­ful direc­tor uses them: no less an auteur than Wern­er Her­zog has called sto­ry­boards “the instru­ments of the cow­ards,” those who can’t han­dle the spon­tane­ity of either film­mak­ing or life itself. Rather, he tells aspir­ing direc­tors to “read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read… read, read… read.” But then so did Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, who did­n’t just draw his movies in advance — he paint­ed them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rid­ley Scott Demys­ti­fies the Art of Sto­ry­board­ing (and How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Project)

How the Coen Broth­ers Sto­ry­board­ed Blood Sim­ple Down to a Tee (1984)

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Paint­ed the Sto­ry­boards For Scenes in His Epic Films: Com­pare Can­vas to Cel­lu­loid

How Bong Joon-ho’s Sto­ry­boards for Par­a­site (Now Pub­lished as a Graph­ic Nov­el) Metic­u­lous­ly Shaped the Acclaimed Film

The Art of Mak­ing Blade Run­ner: See the Orig­i­nal Sketch­book, Sto­ry­boards, On-Set Polaroids & More

Down­load New Sto­ry­board­ing Soft­ware That’s Free & Open Source

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

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