When Henri Matisse Was 83 Years Old, He Couldn’t Go to His Favorite Swimming Pool, So He Created a Swimming Pool as a Work of Art

in Art | June 19th, 2023

I will die from the heat, take me home. I will make my own Pool. — Hen­ri Matisse

Rep­re­sent­ing water is an elu­sive propo­si­tion for many artists, espe­cial­ly when it’s not pos­ing placid­ly on a wind­less, moon­lit evening.

In the sum­mer of 1952, Hen­ri Matisse head­ed to a favorite Cannes swim­ming pool with his stu­dio assis­tant (and favored mod­el), Lydia Delec­torskaya.

Short­ly after their arrival, the octo­ge­nar­i­an became over­whelmed by the heat, and the two dou­bled back to his home in Nice, where he instruct­ed Delec­torskaya to pin white paper to the burlap wall treat­ment of his din­ing room, until it ringed the room at head lev­el.

This tab­u­la rasa became the pool that he filled with swim­mers, divers and marine crea­tures he cut from paper his assis­tants had col­ored ultra­ma­rine blue with gouache.

His shapes were both sim­ple and evoca­tive, sug­gest­ing all the exu­ber­ant life­forms splash­ing in a swim­ming pool on a swel­ter­ing summer’s day.

They adorned the walls of his din­ing room until his death, two years lat­er.

His wid­ow super­vised its removal, mak­ing sure that the place­ment of the indi­vid­ual cut outs could be dupli­cat­ed on fresh white paper pinned to new burlap pan­els.

The Muse­um of Mod­ern Art acquired The Swim­ming Pool, Matisse’s first and only self-con­tained, site-spe­cif­ic cut-out in 1975, exhibit­ing it to great acclaim.

Wel­come sum­mer by tak­ing a stroll through the instal­la­tion with mem­ber­ship guest spe­cial­ist Josephine McReynolds, above.

McReynolds, a 2019 grad­u­ate of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas, finds in the work a blur­ring of the bound­aries between ear­ly child­hood and old age, draw­ing on our col­lec­tive mem­o­ries of sum­mer to “pro­vide the life force in this pool.”

While we’re at it, we should thank MoMA’s con­ser­va­tors for their efforts to restore and pre­serve The Swim­ming Pool after deter­min­ing it had suf­fered extreme dam­age from the acid­i­ty of the burlap, and expo­sure to light and atmos­pher­ic pol­lu­tion.

Senior con­ser­va­tor Karl Buch­berg esti­mates that it took some 2000 hours just to sep­a­rate the paper ele­ments from the burlap using a scalpel, rotary tool, and, in places, dis­man­tling the burlap strand by strand by pulling on indi­vid­ual threads.

The con­ser­va­tors restored the col­or bal­ance to the best of their abil­i­ties and rein­stalled the work at its intend­ed height, in a con­fig­u­ra­tion that mim­ics the archi­tec­ture of the Matiss­es’ din­ing room.

Read more about the con­ser­va­tion of Matisse’s The Swim­ming Pool here.

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

What Is Gender Theory? Berkeley Professor Judith Butler Explains

in Philosophy | June 19th, 2023

Nobody who keeps up with cur­rent dis­course could fail to notice that gen­der has become a fraught top­ic in recent years. This con­di­tion can hard­ly have gone unfore­seen by the the­o­rist Judith But­ler, who pub­lished the now-well-known vol­ume Gen­der Trou­ble: Fem­i­nism and the Sub­ver­sion of Iden­ti­ty back in 1990. “Every­body has a the­o­ry of gen­der,” But­ler says in the new Big Think video above. “Every­body has cer­tain assump­tions going about what gen­der is or should be. And at a cer­tain point in life, we ask our­selves, ‘Wow, where’d that assump­tion come from?’ ” But­ler’s career has, in part, focused on the search for the roots of these very assump­tions.

This expe­ri­ence places But­ler well to com­ment on the heat­ed argu­ments about gen­der being stoked even now in the polit­i­cal realm, on social media, and else­where besides. “We have a whole range of dif­fer­ences, bio­log­i­cal in nature, so I don’t deny them, but I don’t think they deter­mine who we are in some sort of final way.”

As with many con­tro­ver­sies — not least philo­soph­i­cal ones — a core prob­lem has to do with dif­fer­ing def­i­n­i­tions of words and con­cepts. At issue here in par­tic­u­lar is “the dis­tinc­tion between sex and gen­der,” achiev­ing a full under­stand­ing of which, to But­ler’s mind, requires delv­ing into all the rel­e­vant his­to­ry, includ­ing the work of the­o­rists like Gayle Rubin, Juli­et Mitchell, and Simone de Beau­voir.

Accord­ing to But­ler, the “basic point” of de Beau­voir’s The Sec­ond Sex is that “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one, that the body is not a fact.” This pos­si­bil­i­ty opened by de Beau­voir — that of “a dif­fer­ence between the sex you’re assigned and the sex you become” — has been much explored since the book’s pub­li­ca­tion near­ly three quar­ters of a cen­tu­ry ago. Some of those explo­rations have involved the idea of the “per­for­ma­tive.” “We do enact who we are,” But­ler says. “There are per­for­mances that we do in our lives that are not mere per­for­mance; they’re not fake.” Fol­low­ing on that, “what if we were to say that, in act­ing our lives as a par­tic­u­lar gen­der, we are actu­al­ly real­iz­ing that gen­der anew?” For many read­ers of gen­der the­o­ry, this rais­es a host of thrilling new pos­si­bil­i­ties, but behind it lies per­haps the old­est philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion of all: what, now, will you do?

Relat­ed con­tent:

The­o­rist Judith But­ler Explains How Behav­ior Cre­ates Gen­der: A Short Intro­duc­tion to “Gen­der Per­for­ma­tiv­i­ty”

Judith But­ler on Non­vi­o­lence and Gen­der: Hear Con­ver­sa­tion with The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life

Judy!: 1993 Judith But­ler Fanzine Gives Us An Irrev­er­ent Punk-Rock Take on the Post-Struc­tural­ist Gen­der The­o­rist

A Short Ani­mat­ed Film Explores the Flu­id­i­ty of Gen­der in the Thought of Simone de Beau­voir and Judith But­ler

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Fem­i­nist Phi­los­o­phy of Simone de Beau­voir

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.

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Discover The Plastics, the Influential Japanese New Wave Band from the 1980s

in Music, Television | June 16th, 2023

Bri­an Eno famous­ly said of the Vel­vet Under­ground that, though their debut album did­n’t sell well, every­one who bought a copy start­ed a band. One could, per­haps, make a sim­i­lar remark about a new wave band called The Plas­tics, who formed a decade or so lat­er on the oth­er side of the Pacif­ic. They record­ed for only five years, from the mid-nine­teen-sev­en­ties to the ear­ly eight­ies, but wide swaths of all Japan­ese pop­u­lar music released since bear marks of their influ­ence. Accord­ing to Under­ground, co-founder Toshio Nakan­ishi, who sang and played gui­tar, is “now con­sid­ered one of the most well-known Japan­ese musi­cians of all time.”

“One day in 1976,” writes Neo­japon­is­me’s W. David Marx, the 20-year-old Nakan­ishi “gath­ered his friends at Harajuku’s most famous cafe, Leon, and decid­ed they need­ed to form a band. They did not own any instru­ments, but music seemed an obvi­ous means of expres­sion.” They began by cov­er­ing the likes of Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Par­ty” and Con­nie Fran­cis’ “Vaca­tion” at fash­ion par­ties, but were soon advised by the vis­it­ing David Bowie to write songs of their own; sub­se­quent well-timed encoun­ters with the work of bands like the Sex Pis­tols and Devo gave them an idea of how to do it.

“The Plas­tics’ reliance on the lat­est West­ern musi­cal trends was a com­mon prac­tice in the Tokyo music scene, but unlike their pre­de­ces­sors, the band was able to be in dia­logue with their favorite West­ern artists in real time.”

Marx quotes Nakan­ishi writ­ing in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy that “YMO’s record label plot­ted to make them inter­na­tion­al, but we forged all of those devel­op­ments our­selves and the label just fol­lowed up.” Those devel­op­ments includ­ed the mem­bers’ asso­ci­a­tions with West­ern musi­cal fig­ures as var­i­ous as Mark Moth­ers­baugh, Bri­an Fer­ry, Bob Mar­ley, and Iggy Pop. When the group’s gui­tarist Hajime Tachibana, who also worked as a graph­ic design­er, cre­at­ed Japan­ese tour pro­grams for Talk­ing Heads, David Byrne end­ed up with a Plas­tics demo tape in hand, which he passed along to the B‑52s, who passed it along to their man­ag­er, who signed them. The height of their expo­sure to West­ern audi­ences came in 1982, when SCTV aired the music video for their song “Top Secret Man” on its “Mid­night Video Spe­cial.”

Clad in checker­board-and-neon retro fash­ions, singing non­sen­si­cal­ly catchy lyrics, and bust­ing extrav­a­gant­ly herky-jerky dance moves against void-like back­drops, the mem­bers of The Plas­tics come off in the “Top Secret Man” as near-par­o­d­ic embod­i­ments of the new wave musi­cal aes­thet­ic. That they also hap­pened to be Japan­ese sure­ly added, for West­ern view­ers those four decades ago, a cer­tain lay­er of cross-cul­tur­al absur­di­ty. “Indeed, is the dis­par­i­ty between the East and West which sets the Plas­tics apart from their con­tem­po­raries,” says Unde­ground, “their lyrics cit­ing Bauhaus and Russ­ian avant-garde, tech­nol­o­gy and Amer­i­can con­sumerism through their remote, Japan­ese lens.” (Marx quotes Byrne’s obser­va­tion that “the very name Plas­tics was a tip off: an iron­ic take on the com­mon West­ern per­cep­tion of Japan­ese prod­ucts being ‘plas­tic,’ and there­fore infe­ri­or copies of bet­ter made West­ern items.”)

Hav­ing spent the decade since the war both absorb­ing West­ern pop­u­lar cul­ture and achiev­ing an almost futur­is­ti­cal­ly advanced lev­el of devel­op­ment, the Japan of the ear­ly eight­ies had actu­al­ly become an ide­al place to devel­op new wave’s sig­na­ture incon­gruity of D.I.Y and high tech. Plas­tics Masahide Saku­ma even worked on the devel­op­ment of Roland’s TR-808, and before that drum machine went on to shape the sound of entire gen­res of music around the world, his band owned the very first mod­el. Alas, Saku­ma and Nakan­ishi both died in the twen­ty-tens, and with them the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a true Plas­tics reunion. But it would be a sur­prise if their three albums — Wel­come Plas­tics, Ori­ga­to Plas­ti­co, and the West-ori­ent­ed set of remakes Wel­come Back — don’t still have more than a few new bands, East­ern or West­ern, to inspire.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Meet Les Ral­lizes Dénudés, the Mys­te­ri­ous Japan­ese Psych-Rock Band Whose Influ­ence Is Every­where

How Youtube’s Algo­rithm Turned an Obscure 1980s Japan­ese Song Into an Enor­mous­ly Pop­u­lar Hit: Dis­cov­er Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plas­tic Love”

Ryuichi Sakamo­to, RIP: Watch Him Cre­ate Ground­break­ing Elec­tron­ic Music in 1984

The Roland TR-808, the Drum Machine That Changed Music For­ev­er, Is Back! And It’s Now Afford­able & Com­pact

How Talk­ing Heads and Bri­an Eno Wrote “Once in a Life­time”: Cut­ting Edge, Strange & Utter­ly Bril­liant

The Clash Live in Tokyo, 1982: Watch the Com­plete Con­cert

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

What Did Music in Ancient Rome Sound Like?

in History, Music | June 15th, 2023

Almost all of ancient lit­er­a­ture is lost to us, as clas­si­cal-his­to­ry Youtu­ber Gar­rett Ryan explains in a video pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. But we have even less ancient music, giv­en that for­m’s essen­tial ephemer­al­i­ty as well as the not-incon­sid­er­able fact that the ancients did­n’t have tape recorders. Still, that has­n’t stopped Ryan from describ­ing to us what music would have sound­ed like in the hey­day of the Roman Empire in the video above, for his chan­nel Told in Stone. Not only does he intro­duce the instru­ments played by the pop­u­lar musi­cians of ancient Rome, he also evokes the atmos­phere of ancient Roman con­certs, which had their own “equiv­a­lent of rock stars, noto­ri­ous for sell­ing out the­aters, spark­ing riots, and talk­ing back to emper­ors.”

They did all of this by mas­ter­ing what look to us like sim­ple tools indeed. The dom­i­nant exam­ples of these were the cithara, a kind of lyre ampli­fied by a sound box; the tib­ia or aulos, whose two pipes could be played at once (thus pro­duc­ing “a flut­ter­ing coun­ter­point that audi­ences found wild­ly excit­ing”); and the hydraulis or water organ, the rare instru­ment that could be heard even over a loud crowd.

Though Roman musi­cians could be vir­tu­osic in their tech­nique, some still con­sid­er them “hacks, con­tent to bor­row Greek music with­out any­thing sub­stan­tial to it.” Ryan acknowl­edges that in music, as in cer­tain oth­er realms, Romans did indeed pick up where the Greeks left off, but “over time they evolved both a dis­tinc­tive musi­cal cul­ture and dis­tinc­tive tastes in musi­cal spec­ta­cle.”

Despite the afore­men­tioned lack of tapes — to say noth­ing of CDs, MP3 play­ers, or stream­ing ser­vices — music was “every­where in ancient Rome.” One would hear it at reli­gious rit­u­als, sac­ri­fices includ­ed; at fes­ti­vals, where hymns were sung in hon­or of the gods; dur­ing glad­i­a­to­r­i­al com­bat, when the organs “roared as men and beasts bat­tled in the blood­stained sands”; in pri­vate gar­dens and din­ing rooms; on street cor­ners and plazas, full of the ancient ver­sion of buskers; often the the­ater and less often at musi­cal con­tests judged by the emper­or him­self. But it was the most skilled soloists who became renowned across the empire and “inspired some­thing like Beat­le­ma­nia, dri­ving aris­to­crat­ic ladies to fight for cast-off plec­trums and lyre strings.” For those besieged Roman rock stars, alas, it was a cou­ple thou­sand years too ear­ly to make a Bea­t­les-style retreat into the stu­dio.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is “100% Accu­rate”

Hear the “Seik­i­los Epi­taph,” the Old­est Com­plete Song in the World: An Inspir­ing Tune from 100 BC

The Evo­lu­tion of Music: 40,000 Years of Music His­to­ry Cov­ered in 8 Min­utes

Hear the Old­est Song in the World: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years Ago

A Street Musi­cian Plays Pink Floyd’s “Time” in Front of the 1,900-Year-Old Pan­theon in Rome

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How Carole King Revolutionized ’70s Music

in Gender, Music | June 15th, 2023

In 1960, The Shirelles became the first Black female group to have a #1 US  hit with “Will You Love Me Tomor­row?”.

The song also rep­re­sent­ed a big break for its com­pos­er, 17-year-old Car­ole King, and her then-hus­band, lyri­cist Ger­ry Gof­fin.

The two set up shop in New York City’s Brill Build­ing, a pre-British Inva­sion hotbed of song­writ­ing teams, crank­ing out pop tunes for oth­ers to record.

King and Goffin’s col­lab­o­ra­tion was a fruit­ful one for both them­selves and the artists they sent climb­ing the charts:

Bob­by Vee with “Take Good Care of My Baby”.

The Chif­fons with “One Fine Day”.

The Mon­kees with “Pleas­ant Val­ley Sun­day”.

“Lit­tle Eva” Boyd (the couple’s babysit­ter) with “The Loco-Motion”.

Aretha Franklin with “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Nat­ur­al Woman”.

The late 60s ush­ered in both a musi­cal and social rev­o­lu­tion.

As King writes in her mem­oir, A Nat­ur­al Woman, “Had I been forty-two and Ger­ry forty-five, I might have under­stood his yearn­ing for the Bohemi­an lifestyle he’d nev­er had:”

But I was a twen­ty-two year old wife and moth­er los­ing my twen­ty-five year old hus­band to avant-garde ideas. I want­ed my life back. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, yes­ter­day had a no return pol­i­cy, and today wasn’t where I want­ed to be. I could only hope tomor­row would be bet­ter.

The cou­ple split in 1968, and King left New York for LA, set­tling in Lau­rel Canyon, anoth­er hive of musi­cal activ­i­ty. Here, how­ev­er, singers like Joni Mitchell, James Tay­lor, and Neil Young wrote their own songs, shar­ing inti­mate details of their lives and rela­tion­ships in the name of cre­ative expres­sion.

King began to explore these avenues, too, though as Poly­phon­ic’s Noah Lefevre observes in the above video essay on her sem­i­nal sec­ond album, 1971’s Tapes­try, the Brill Building’s high bar for sol­id song craft and catchy hooks had become part of her DNA.

Her first solo record­ing was lit­tle her­ald­ed, but Tapes­try was a smash from the get go, nab­bing King Gram­mys for both record and song of the year, the first female solo act to be so rec­og­nized:

Tapes­try changed my life. In an imme­di­ate way, it gave me finan­cial inde­pen­dence, which was real­ly won­der­ful. Less imme­di­ate and in an ongo­ing way, it opened doors.

Released as sec­ond wave fem­i­nism was crest­ing, Tapes­try’s lyrics res­onat­ed with many women who, raised on dreams of mar­riage and moth­er­hood, found them­selves seek­ing ful­fill­ment else­where, whether by choice or cir­cum­stance.

Com­pared to Joni Mitchell’s con­fes­sion­al Blue, Polyphonic’s Lefevre sees Tapes­try as a work of “qui­et resilience.”

It mod­eled the soft rock sound that became a 70s sta­ple, and its cov­er art eschewed the idea of artist as glam­orous being, in favor of an approach­able human-scale indi­vid­ual.

It also afford­ed King the oppor­tu­ni­ty for time­ly rein­ter­pre­ta­tions of “Will You Still Love Me Tomor­row” and “A Nat­ur­al Woman,” this time as a singer-song­writer.

Lis­ten to Car­ole King’s Tapes­try here.

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Some of the Oldest Photos You Will Ever See: Discover Photographs of Greece, Egypt, Turkey & Other Mediterranean Lands (1840s)

in History, Photography, Travel | June 14th, 2023

Begin­ning in the late sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, aris­to­crat­ic Eng­lish­men or con­ti­nen­tal Euro­peans came of age and went on a Grand Tour. Last­ing any­thing from few a months to a few years, such trips were meant direct­ly to expose their young tak­ers to the lega­cy of the Renais­sance and antiq­ui­ty. Nat­u­ral­ly, most Grand Tour itin­er­aries placed the utmost impor­tance on Italy and Greece; some even went to the Holy Land, as sat­i­rized by Mark Twain in The Inno­cents Abroad. By the time that book was pub­lished in 1869, the Grand Tour was out of high fash­ion — but a cou­ple of decades ear­li­er, Joseph-Philib­ert Girault de Prangey had pre­served many of its des­ti­na­tions with a piece of cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy known as the cam­era.

Girault de Prangey went on his first pho­to­graph­ic “Grand Tour” in 1841, when he was in his late thir­ties. Hav­ing already trav­eled exten­sive­ly and received an edu­ca­tion in both art and law, he was hard­ly a cal­low youth in need of refine­ment. But he was an aris­to­crat, the sole inher­i­tor of his fam­i­ly for­tune, and thus able to “devote his life to his pas­sions: trav­el, arts, and pub­lish­ing.”

So says the nar­ra­tor of the Kings and Things video above, which tells the sto­ry of how Girault de Prange man­aged to leave us the ear­li­est known pho­tographs of a large swath of the world. This project “took him from Italy to Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and the Lev­ant, he cap­tured over 1,000 pho­tographs, with sub­jects rang­ing from streetscapes and archi­tec­tur­al details to nature and land­scapes and por­traits of local peo­ple.”

Not that pho­tog­ra­phy per se was Girault de Prangey’s goal; for him, tak­ing a pic­ture con­sti­tut­ed mere­ly an ear­ly step in the cre­ation of a draw­ing or paint­ing. “Although he only intend­ed to use them as a sort of sketch to refer to back home in his stu­dio,” he “arranged his pic­tures so as to pro­duce a sense of dra­ma or mys­tery, and this artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty sets him apart from many oth­er pio­neers of pho­tog­ra­phy, who were pri­mar­i­ly tech­ni­cians or inven­tors.” The age of the Grand Tour was end­ing even in Girault de Prangey’s day, but 180 years lat­er (and about a cen­tu­ry after their redis­cov­ery in one of his estate’s store­rooms), his pho­tographs send us on a very dif­fer­ent kind of trip: not just across the world, but — much more thrilling­ly — deep back in time as well.

via Aeon

Relat­ed con­tent:

The First Pho­to­graph Ever Tak­en (1826)

See the First Pho­to­graph of a Human Being: A Pho­to Tak­en by Louis Daguerre (1838)

Take a Visu­al Jour­ney Through 181 Years of Street Pho­tog­ra­phy (1838–2019)

Behold the Pho­tographs of John Thom­son, the First West­ern Pho­tog­ra­ph­er to Trav­el Wide­ly Through Chi­na (1870s)

Rome Comes to Life in Pho­tochrom Col­or Pho­tos Tak­en in 1890: The Colos­se­um, Tre­vi Foun­tain & More

The First Sur­viv­ing Pho­to­graph of the Moon (1840)

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Three Punctuation Rules of Cormac McCarthy (RIP), and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

in Literature, Writing | June 13th, 2023

Note: Today nov­el­ist Cor­mac McCarthy (All the Pret­ty Hors­es, The Road and No Coun­try for Old Men) passed away at the age of 89. Below, we’re revis­it­ing a favorite post from our archive that focus­es on punc­tu­a­tion, a dis­tinc­tive ele­ment of McCarthy’s writ­ing.

Cor­mac McCarthy has been—as one 1965 review­er of his first nov­el, The Orchard Keep­er, dubbed him—a “dis­ci­ple of William Faulkn­er.” He makes admirable use of Faulkner­ian traits in his prose, and I’d always assumed he inher­it­ed his punc­tu­a­tion style from Faulkn­er as well. But in his very rare 2008 tele­vised inter­view with Oprah Win­frey, McCarthy cites two oth­er antecedents: James Joyce and for­got­ten nov­el­ist MacKin­lay Kan­tor, whose Ander­son­ville won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Joyce’s influ­ence dom­i­nates, and in dis­cus­sion of punc­tu­a­tion, McCarthy stress­es that his min­i­mal­ist approach works in the inter­est of max­i­mum clar­i­ty. Speak­ing of Joyce, he says,

James Joyce is a good mod­el for punc­tu­a­tion. He keeps it to an absolute min­i­mum. There’s no rea­son to blot the page up with weird lit­tle marks. I mean, if you write prop­er­ly you shouldn’t have to punc­tu­ate.

So what “weird lit­tle marks” does McCarthy allow, or not, and why? Below is a brief sum­ma­ry of his stat­ed rules for punc­tu­a­tion:

1. Quo­ta­tion Marks:

McCarthy does­n’t use ’em. In his Oprah inter­view, he says MacKin­lay Kan­tor was the first writer he read who left them out. McCarthy stress­es that this way of writ­ing dia­logue requires par­tic­u­lar delib­er­a­tion. Speak­ing of writ­ers who have imi­tat­ed him, he says, “You real­ly have to be aware that there are no quo­ta­tion marks, and write in such a way as to guide peo­ple as to who’s speak­ing.” Oth­er­wise, con­fu­sion reigns.

2. Colons and semi­colons:

Care­ful McCarthy read­er Oprah says she “saw a colon once” in McCarthy’s prose, but she nev­er encoun­tered a semi­colon. McCarthy con­firms: “No semi­colons.”

Of the colon, he says: “You can use a colon, if you’re get­ting ready to give a list of some­thing that fol­lows from what you just said. Like, these are the rea­sons.” This is a spe­cif­ic occa­sion that does not present itself often. The colon, one might say, gen­u­flects to a very spe­cif­ic log­i­cal devel­op­ment, enu­mer­a­tion. McCarthy deems most oth­er punc­tu­a­tion uses need­less.

3. All oth­er punc­tu­a­tion:

Aside from his restric­tive rationing of the colon, McCarthy declares his styl­is­tic con­vic­tions with sim­plic­i­ty: “I believe in peri­ods, in cap­i­tals, in the occa­sion­al com­ma, and that’s it.” It’s a dis­ci­pline he learned first in a col­lege Eng­lish class, where he worked to sim­pli­fy 18th cen­tu­ry essays for a text­book the pro­fes­sor was edit­ing. Ear­ly mod­ern Eng­lish is noto­ri­ous­ly clut­tered with con­found­ing punc­tu­a­tion, which did not become stan­dard­ized until com­par­a­tive­ly recent­ly.

McCarthy, enam­ored of the prose style of the Neo­clas­si­cal Eng­lish writ­ers but annoyed by their over-reliance on semi­colons, remem­bers par­ing down an essay “by Swift or some­thing” and hear­ing his pro­fes­sor say, “this is very good, this is exact­ly what’s need­ed.” Encour­aged, he con­tin­ued to sim­pli­fy, work­ing, he says to Oprah, “to make it eas­i­er, not to make it hard­er” to deci­pher his prose. For those who find McCarthy some­times mad­den­ing­ly opaque, this state­ment of intent may not help clar­i­fy things much. But lovers of his work may find renewed appre­ci­a­tion for his stream­lined syn­tax.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Wern­er Her­zog Reads From Cor­mac McCarthy’s All the Pret­ty Hors­es

Cor­mac McCarthy Explains Why He Worked Hard at Not Work­ing: How 9‑to‑5 Jobs Lim­it Your Cre­ative Poten­tial

Wern­er Her­zog and Cor­mac McCarthy Talk Sci­ence and Cul­ture

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 13 ) |

Charlie Chaplin’s Final Speech in The Great Dictator: A Statement Against Greed, Hate, Intolerance & Fascism (1940)

in Film, History, Politics | June 13th, 2023

The nar­row “tooth­brush mus­tache” caught on in the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, first in the Unit­ed States and soon there­after across the Atlantic. When Char­lie Chap­lin put one on for a film in 1914, he became its most famous wear­er — at least until Adolf Hitler rose to promi­nence a cou­ple of decades lat­er. By that point Chap­lin had become the most famous com­e­dy star in the world, which may have inspired the Nazi Par­ty leader, a known fan of Chap­lin’s work, to adopt the same mus­tache as a kind of tool of self-advance­ment. Chap­lin him­self could hard­ly have approved of his new dop­pel­gänger, and it trou­bled him to dis­cov­er their oth­er shared qual­i­ties: their births in April of 1889, their poor child­hoods, their love of Wag­n­er.

Still, as an invet­er­ate enter­tain­er, Chap­lin grasped the comedic poten­tial of his and Hitler’s par­al­lel icon­ic sta­tus. The result, released in 1940, was The Great Dic­ta­tor, his first gen­uine sound film. Chap­lin had con­tin­ued mak­ing silent pic­tures, and refin­ing his sig­na­ture visu­al humor, well into the era of “talkies.”

But he could only have done so much to ridicule Hitler, who had come to pow­er in large part through speech­es broad­cast over the radio, with­out being able to use his voice as well. Yet he deliv­ers his most mem­o­rable lines not in the role of Hitler sur­ro­gate Ade­noid Hynkel, but that of the unnamed Jew­ish bar­ber who — through, of course, sev­er­al absurd turns of events — ends up mis­tak­en for Hynkel and made to address the nation.

“I’m sor­ry, but I don’t want to be an emper­or,” says Chap­lin-as-the-Bar­ber-as-Hynkel. “That’s not my busi­ness. I don’t want to rule or con­quer any­one. I should like to help every­one — if pos­si­ble — Jew, Gen­tile, black man, white. We all want to help one anoth­er. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s hap­pi­ness, not by each other’s mis­ery.” Through­out the three-and-a-half-minute mono­logue, he speaks against “greed,” “clev­er­ness,” “nation­al bar­ri­ers,” and “the hate of men”; he advo­cates for “kind­ness and gen­tle­ness,” “uni­ver­sal broth­er­hood,” “a world of rea­son,” and “the love of human­i­ty.” These may not be espe­cial­ly pre­cise terms, but, know­ing his pub­lic well — much bet­ter, indeed, than Hitler ever knew his — Chap­lin also knew just when to go broad.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Did Hitler Rise to Pow­er? : New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Pro­vides a Case Study in How Fas­cists Get Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly Elect­ed

When Mahat­ma Gand­hi Met Char­lie Chap­lin (1931)

Carl Jung Psy­cho­an­a­lyzes Hitler: “He’s the Uncon­scious of 78 Mil­lion Ger­mans.” “With­out the Ger­man Peo­ple He’d Be Noth­ing” (1938)

When Char­lie Chap­lin Entered a Chap­lin Look-Alike Con­test & Came in 20th Place

The Famous Down­fall Scene Explained: What Real­ly Hap­pened in Hitler’s Bunker at the End?

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.

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Destruction of Penn Station: How New York City Lost Its Majestic Beaux-Arts Rail Terminal

in Architecture, History | June 13th, 2023

In the New York of old, “one entered the city like a god. One scut­tles in now like a rat.” When he wrote those words, archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Vin­cent Scul­ly issued what has end­ed up as the defin­i­tive judg­ment of Penn­syl­va­nia Sta­tion. Or rather, of the Penn­syl­va­nia Sta­tions: the majes­tic orig­i­nal build­ing from 1910, as well as its util­i­tar­i­an replace­ment that has stood in Mid­town Man­hat­tan since 1968. But then, the word “stood” does­n’t quite apply to the lat­ter, since it resides entire­ly under­ground, below Madi­son Square Gar­den. Over the years, New York­ers have come more and more open­ly to resent the Penn Sta­tion they have and lament the Penn Sta­tion they lost, which archi­tect Michael Wyet­zn­er intro­duces to us in the Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above.

“A con­jec­tur­al recon­struc­tion of Impe­r­i­al Rome’s Baths of Cara­calla of 212–216 AD,” writes New York Review of Books archi­tec­ture crit­ic Mar­tin Filler, the orig­i­nal Penn Sta­tion con­sti­tut­ed “a har­mo­nious syn­the­sis of two diver­gent and sup­pos­ed­ly irrec­on­cil­able archi­tec­tur­al approach­es, the Clas­si­cal and the indus­tri­al.”

It was com­mis­sioned by the Penn­syl­va­nia Rail­road, which in the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry was “the country’s largest busi­ness enter­prise, with a bud­get sec­ond only to that of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment,” writes the New York­er’s William Finnegan, and which at that time had a for­mi­da­ble engi­neer­ing prob­lem to solve: “Its tracks end­ed, like those of every rail­road approach­ing New York from the west, in New Jer­sey, on the banks of the Hud­son Riv­er. In 1900, nine­ty mil­lion pas­sen­gers were oblig­ed to trans­fer to fer­ries to reach Man­hat­tan.”

To run the Penn­syl­va­nia Rail­road­’s tracks into the cen­ter of New York City required dig­ging a set of tun­nels under the Hud­son, where, says one his­to­ri­an on PBS’ Amer­i­can Expe­ri­ence doc­u­men­tary on the rise and fall of Penn Sta­tion, “nobody thought tun­nels could be built. It’s almost as though they were going to go to the moon.” The tech­no­log­i­cal achieve­ment was matched by the aes­thet­ic: “Its main wait­ing room, pan­eled in Ital­ian traver­tine, with flut­ed columns and cof­fered ceil­ings a hun­dred and fifty feet high, was the world’s largest room,” Finnegan writes. “The train shed was equal­ly grand, with arch­ing steel gird­ers, stag­gered mez­za­nines, and glass-block floors that let sun­light through to the tracks. ” Like oth­er major urban rail ter­mi­nals of its era, writes Tony Judt, Penn Sta­tion “spoke direct­ly and delib­er­ate­ly to the com­mer­cial ambi­tions and civic self-image of the mod­ern metrop­o­lis.”

By the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry, how­ev­er, trains were fac­ing aggres­sive com­pe­ti­tion from both the pri­vate car and the air­plane, which dis­placed their sta­tions from the cen­ter of mod­ern life. “Between 1955 and 1975,” Judt writes, “a mix of anti­his­tori­cist fash­ion and cor­po­rate self-inter­est saw the destruc­tion of a remark­able num­ber of ter­mi­nal sta­tions.” But prospects for rail of one kind or anoth­er in Amer­i­ca have looked up in recent years, and “we are no longer embar­rassed by the roco­co or neo-Goth­ic or Beaux-Arts excess­es of the great rail­way sta­tions of the indus­tri­al age and can see such edi­fices instead as their design­ers and con­tem­po­raries saw them: as the cathe­drals of their age.” Hence, in New York, the preser­va­tion of Grand Cen­tral Sta­tion — as well as the bit­ter and pro­tract­ed strug­gle (cov­ered exten­sive­ly in Finnegan’s New York­er piece) over whether and how to turn the unloved Penn Sta­tion into a cathe­dral of our age.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Immer­sive Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of New York City’s Icon­ic Grand Cen­tral Ter­mi­nal

An Archi­tect Breaks Down the Design of New York City Sub­way Sta­tions, from the Old­est to Newest

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

A Sub­way Ride Through New York City: Watch Vin­tage Footage from 1905

Famous Archi­tects Dress as Their Famous New York City Build­ings (1931)

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Hear Demos of Madonna Performing Punk Songs with Her Pre-Fame Band, Breakfast Club (1979)

in Music | June 12th, 2023

Isn’t it won­der­ful when long-for­got­ten record­ings get dust­ed off and exposed to a much wider audi­ence, thrust­ing lit­tle-remem­bered artists into the spot­light, per­haps for the first time in their lives?

Think Con­nie Con­verse…

The Shag­gs…

Madon­na…

Wait, who?

Short­ly after the aspi­rant dancer ditched Michi­gan for New York City in 1976, mak­ing ends by wait­ress­ing, mod­el­ing nude and work­ing the counter at Dunkin’ Donuts, she formed the band, Break­fast Club with her boyfriend Dan Gilroy and his broth­er, Ed.

“I was sick of being an out-of-work dancer, so he taught me how to play gui­tar,” she recalled in her 2008 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induc­tion speech.

“It was a sur­prise that she men­tioned me, like right away, like that was great,” Dan mused in the 2019 docu­d­ra­ma Madon­na and the Break­fast Club:

It was won­der­ful, in fact and it changed my whole … in town, the musi­cians in town were like, “Did you see that?” Sud­den­ly, again, it’s like we were with Madon­na. It’s like she threw the spot­light.

Boys far out­num­bered girls in the scrap­py late-70’s New York City scene, but Madon­na held her own, work­ing hard and look­ing the part in full-skirt­ed thrift store dress­es from an ear­li­er era.

(If you’ve resist­ed the Queen of Pop’s charms, thus far, this ear­li­est incar­na­tion may be the one that final­ly hooks you.)

Before gui­tar, the broth­ers turned her onto drums in the base­ment of the for­mer Queens syn­a­gogue the three called home. (She habit­u­al­ly stuck her gum on one of the kit’s met­al stands.)

Dan Gilroy observed that her dance train­ing served her well as a musi­cian:

..she was always into count­ing, you know, every­thing, eight counts, and it fit right into drum­ming, so it was a very smooth tran­si­tion from danc­ing to drumming…She already could keep the beat, so nat­u­ral­ly, she want­ed to get more into music than just drum­ming, not that drum­ming isn’t music.

Break­fast Club fea­tured Madon­na on drums, the broth­ers out front with gui­tars, and, briefly Madonna’s friend Ang­ie Smit on bass, though their roles weren’t set in stone.

Accord­ing to Nor­ris Bur­roughs, author of MY MADONNA: My Inti­mate Friend­ship With The Blue Eyed Girl On Her Arrival In New York:

It kind of felt like it was gonna be the sort of band where, like a Fleet­wood Mac thing where you’d have Lind­sey Buck­ing­ham and Steve Nicks and Chris­tine McVie tak­ing turns on vocals or they would har­mo­nize.

Even a frac­tion of a Fleet­wood Mac-like lev­el of recog­ni­tion would have been heady stuff, but as Ang­ie Smit’s replace­ment, bassist Gary Burke unequiv­o­cal­ly states, “Madon­na want­ed to be famous:”

That was her thing, man. And she didn’t care if she got it…through dance, through rock and roll, what­ev­er. She want­ed to be famous. She would be so squir­rel­ly, like, “I wan­na be famous!” She want­ed to be famous now, man. And she was like, you could just see it in her body lan­guage, it’s like, “Ooh, when’s it gonna hap­pen!?

SPOILER: It hap­pened.

Just a cou­ple of years after leav­ing both the band and Dan Gilroy, she had a record con­tract and a debut sin­gle that she pro­mot­ed tire­less­ly with live club appear­ances. 1983 saw the release of a first album so packed with hits, it was only a mat­ter of months til she became a house­hold name.

But the street cred of her Break­fast Club demo is a hard one to beat:

0:01 Shit On The Ground-Safe Neigh­bor­hood 

1:35 Shine A Ligh

3:13 Lit­tle Boy

4:47 l Love Express

Lis­ten to Break­fast Club’s post-Madon­na work on Spo­ti­fy.

via Flash­bak

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Mys­ti­cal Poet­ry of Rumi Read By Til­da Swin­ton, Madon­na, Robert Bly & Cole­man Barks

Sex Pis­tols Front­man John­ny Rot­ten Weighs In On Lady Gaga, Paul McCart­ney, Madon­na & Katy Per­ry

David Fincher’s Five Finest Music Videos: From Madon­na to Aero­smith

Kurt Cobain’s Home Demos: Ear­ly Ver­sions of Nir­vana Hits, and Nev­er-Released Songs

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Dire Straits’ “Sultans Of Swing” Performed on the Gayageum, a Korean Instrument Dating Back to the 6th Century

in Music | June 12th, 2023

Every now and then, we check in on the fas­ci­nat­ing musi­cal world of Luna Lee–a musi­cian who per­forms West­ern music on the Gayageum, a tra­di­tion­al Kore­an stringed instru­ment which dates back to the 6th cen­tu­ry. Over the years, we’ve shown you her adap­ta­tions of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile;’ David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World;” Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah;” blues clas­sics by John Lee Hook­er, B.B. King & Mud­dy Waters; and Pink Floy­d’s “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall” & “Great Gig in the Sky.” To keep the tra­di­tion going, today we bring you Luna’s vir­tu­oso take on Dire Straits’ “Sul­tans Of Swing.”

Accord­ing to Gui­tar Play­er, Mark Knopfler orig­i­nal­ly wrote the song on a Nation­al Steel gui­tar in an open tun­ing. “I thought it was dull, but as soon as I bought my first Strat[ocaster] in 1977, the whole thing changed.” “It just came alive as soon as I played it on that ’61 Strat.” Above, you can hear Luna play the song on a very vin­tage Gayageum. Be sure to catch that solo at the 1:28 mark. Enjoy…

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Knopfler Gives a Short Mas­ter­class on His Favorite Gui­tars & Gui­tar Sounds

Gui­tar Sto­ries: Mark Knopfler on the Six Gui­tars That Shaped His Career

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |


« Newer Entries | Older Entries »

  • Great Lectures

  • Sign up for Newsletter

  • About Us

    Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.


    Advertise With Us

  • Great Recordings

  • Book Lists By

  • Syllabi

  • Favorite Movies

  • Archives

  • Search

    • Quantcast
    Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.