Magnificent Ancient Roman Mosaic Floor Unearthed in Verona, Italy

in Architecture, History | June 1st, 2020

One often hears about renovation projects that tear up linoleum, shag carpet, or some equally unappealing flooring to discover a pristine (and now much more attractive) layer of hardwood or tile beneath. Any building of sufficient age becomes a palimpsest, a collection of era upon era of trends in architecture and design: a look under a floor or behind a wall can potentially become a trip back in time. The same holds for the land itself, at least in the parts of the world where civilization arrived first. “In former Mesopotamia there are hills in areas that should be entirely flat,” writes Myko Clelland, better known as the Dapper Historian, on Twitter. “They’re actually remains of entire towns, where residents built layer after layer until the whole thing became metres tall.”

Or take Negrar di Valpolicella, home of the eponymous wine varietal, one of whose vineyards has turned out to conceal an ancient Roman villa. The discovery at hand is an elaborate mosaic floor which The History Blog reports as “dating to around the 3rd century A.D.” So far, the dig under the Benedetti La Villa has revealed “long uninterrupted stretches of mosaic pavements with polychrome patterns of geometric shapes, guilloche, wave bands, floral vaults and the semi-circular pelta.”

Though the floor’s brilliance may have been unexpected, its presence wasn’t: that a Roman villa had once stood on the grounds “was known since the 19th century. Indeed, the name of the winery is taken from the name of the contrada (meaning neighborhood or district), evidence of culturally transmitted knowledge of a grand villa there.”

Announced just last week by Negrar di Valipocella, the discovery of this mosaic floor comes a result of the most recent of a series of archaeological digs that began in 1922. “Numerous attempts were made in subsequent decades to find the villa,” says The History Blog, “and another smaller mosaic was discovered in 1975 and covered back up with soil for its preservation.” Though interrupted by budgetary limitations, the work cycle of the still-operational vineyard, and this year’s coronavirus pandemic, the project has nevertheless managed to turn up a strong contender for the archaeological find of the year. With luck it will turn up much more of this 1,800-year-old domus, giving us all a chance to see what other unexpectedly tasteful design choices the ancient Romans made. The images in this post come via Myko Clelland, Dapper Historian on Twitter.

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

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How the Visionary Artist Christo (RIP) Changed the Way We See the World

in Art | June 1st, 2020

Husband and wife team Christo and Jeanne-Claude produced what is arguably the most grandiose body of work in modern history. Their temporary monuments to the very idea of hugeness were viewable from space and impossible to ignore on the ground: Entire islands wrapped in miles of pink fabric. Gargantuan yellow and blue umbrellas placed up and down the coasts of California and Japan. The Reichstag bundled up in white fabric like a massive, shiny Christmas gift.

These projects left an indelible impression on millions not only in the months after their unveiling, but decades later. The iconic sites the two artists transformed always bear the memory of having once served as a canvas for their creations.

After removing the wrapping from the Biscayne Bay islands, a project he called “my Water Lilies” in honor of Claude Monet,” Christo remarked that Surrounded Islands lived on, “in the mind of the people.” So too will Christo live on—remembered by millions as an artist who did things no one else would ever have conceived of, much less carried out.

The artist, who passed away from natural causes at age 84 yesterday, seemed to savor the controversy and bewilderment that met his incredibly labor-intensive outdoor sculptures. “If there are questions, if there’s a public outcry,” he said of their 2005 Central Park installation The Gates, “we know how the public can be angry at art, which I think is fantastic.” I remember walking through The Gates when it debuted and thinking, as most everyone does at some point in response to his massive outdoor installations, “but, why?”

The effect was undeniably striking, hundreds of saffron flags waving between rectangular steel archways. Spring bloomed around the rows of gates that twisted around the Park’s footpaths, 7,503 gates in all. From a short distance away from the park, The Gates could be breathtaking. Up close, it could be crowded and obtrusive, as masses of tourists and locals made their way through the gauntlet of orange steel structures.

Hardly does it occur to us in museums to ask why the art exists. We enter with lofty, readymade ideas about its value and importance. But we were never given scripts to make sense of Christo’s whimsical intrusions into the landscape. Instead, he and Jeanne-Claude invented new forms and new venues for art, and made the multi-year process of planning and building each work from scratch a part of the work itself.

That process included lobbying legislatures and bureaucracies, sketching and planning, and coordinating with thousands who installed and removed the finished products. Each Christo and Jeanne-Claude creation seemed more ostentatious than the last. “His grand projects,” writes William Grimes at The New York Times, “often decades in the making and all of them temporary, required the cooperation of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of landowners, government officials, judges, environmental groups, local residents, engineers and workers, many of whom had little interest in art and a deep reluctance to see their lives and their surroundings disrupted by an eccentric visionary.”

And yet, “again and again, Christo prevailed, through persistence, charm and a childlike belief that eventually everyone would see things the way he did.” This meant that everyone who had to live with Christo’s creations in their backyards had to see things his way too, for as long as the public art existed. Christo “remained stoic in the face of mounting criticism,” as Alex Greenberger at Artnews puts it. Associated early with Situationism and France’s Nouveau Réalisme movement, the artist shared the latter group’s goal of discovering “new ways of perceiving the real” and the former movement’s commitment to spectacle as a means of mass disruption.

In the short video introductions to some of Christo and Jean-Claude’s most famous works here, you can see how the two revealed new realities to the world, driving up tourism while spurning corporate dollars. Instead, the artists financed their own projects by selling off the drawings and plans used to conceive them. Their operation was a self-sustaining entity, a thriving, successful company of its own. What they made were “beautiful things,” the artist said, “unbelievably useless, totally unnecessary,” and also totally inspiring, infuriating, and unforgettable.

“Christo lived his life to the fullest,” a statement released by his office reads, “not only dreaming up what seemed impossible but realizing it. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s artwork brought people together in shared experiences across the globe, and their work lives on in our hearts and memories.” Christo hasn’t finished with us yet. The artist died while in the final planning stages of what will be his final work, L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (Project for Paris, Place de l’Étoile – Charles de Gaulle), first conceived in 1962. That project, which will swaddle Paris’s Arc de Triomphe in 269,097 feet of fabric, is still expected to debut in 2021.

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

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The Best Campaign Slogan of 2020 (So Far)

in Current Affairs | May 31st, 2020

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on The Best Campaign Slogan of 2020 (So Far) ) |

An Analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Narrated (Mostly) by Quentin Tarantino

in Film | May 29th, 2020

For nearly thirty years, the work of Quentin Tarantino has inspired copious discussion among movie fans. Some of the most copious discussion, as well as some of the most insightful, has come from no less avid a movie fan than Tarantino himself. Every cinephile has long since known that the man who made Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown — and more recently pictures like Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood — is one of their own. Now the subject of numerous video essays, Tarantino could, in another life, have become that medium’s foremost practitioner. In the Now You See It video essay above, we have the next best thing: an analysis of Tarantino’s work narrated, for the most part, by the man himself.

“It’s as if a couple of movie-crazy young Frenchmen were in a coffee house, and they’ve taken a banal American crime novel and they’re making a movie out of it based not on the novel, but on the poetry they’ve read between the lines.” So goes New Yorker critic Pauline Kael’s review of Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part — as remembered by Tarantino in an interview in the 2000s.

These and other such clips comprise “Quentin Tarantino and the Poetry Between the Lines,” or at least they comprise the parts that don’t come straight from Tarantino’s films or the films that inspired them. From Bande à part Tarantino took not just the name of his production company but also the imperfect style of dancing he had John Travolta and Uma Thurman show off in Pulp Fiction, one of the many acts of cinematic “stealing” to which he gladly cops.

In describing the rule-breaking work of Godard, the first big cinephile-filmmaker, Kael inadvertently bestowed a revelation upon Tarantino: “That’s my aesthetic!” he remembers thinking. “That’s what I want to achieve!” That goal has inspired Tarantino to a number of acts of cultural transposition, and this video essay also brings together the comments several other figures have made about his achievement: Inglourious Basterds star Christoph Waltz remarks on the characteristic way that Tarantino, “the product of the culture that made the Western possible at all,” would “take the genre once removed into the Italian and bring it back to America” as he does in his repatriated spaghetti Western The Hateful Eight. To that picture, and to Quentin Tarantino’s greater cinematic project, applies the observation Gene Siskel made on Pulp Fiction just as it was becoming a cultural phenomenon in its own right: “Like all great films, it criticizes other movies.”

Quentin Tarantino Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

Quentin Tarantino Picks the 12 Best Films of All Time; Watch Two of His Favorites Free Online

The Power of Food in Quentin Tarantino’s Films

How Jean-Luc Godard Liberated Cinema: A Video Essay on How the Greatest Rule-Breaker in Film Made His Name

How the French New Wave Changed Cinema: A Video Introduction to the Films of Godard, Truffaut & Their Fellow Rule-Breakers

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

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An Emotional Journey into the Heart of August Sander’s Iconic Photograph, “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance”

in Books, History, Photography | May 29th, 2020

The portrait is your mirror. It’s you. —August Sander

A picture is worth a thousand words, and compelling portraits that speak eloquently to a critical moment in history often earn many more than that.

Author John Green’s thoughtful Art Assignment investigation into Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, August Sanders’ 1914 photograph, taps into our need to interpret what we’re looking at.

The descriptive title (the piece is alternatively referred to as Young Farmers) offers some clues, as does the date.

The subjects’ youth and location—a remote village in the German Westerwald—suggest, correctly as it turns out, that they would soon be bound for what Green terms “another dance,” WWI.

Green has learned far more about the people in his favorite photo since he covered it in a 2‑minute segment for his vlogbrothers channel below.

Much of the shorter video’s narration carries over to the Art Assignment script, but this time, Green has the help of “a community of problem solvers” who contributed research that fleshed out the narrative.

We now know the young farmers’ identities, actual occupations, what they did in the war, and their eventual fate.

Ditto their connection to photographer Sanders, who lugged his equipment on foot to the remote mountain path the friends would be traveling in finery made possible by the Second Industrial Revolution.

A consummate storyteller, Greene makes a meal out of what he has learned.

It would provide the basis for a helluva book…though here another author has beaten Green to the punch. Richard Powers’ novel, also titled Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in 1985.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Here latest project is an animation and a series of free downloadable posters, encouraging citizens to wear masks in public and wear them properly. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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

This Is What The Matrix Looks Like Without CGI: A Special Effects Breakdown

in Film, Sci Fi, Technology | May 29th, 2020

Those of us who saw the The Matrix in the theater felt we were witness to the beginning of a new era of cinematically and philosophically ambitious action movies. Whether that era delivered on its promise — and indeed, whether The Matrix’s own sequels delivered on the franchise’s promise — remains a matter of debate. More than twenty years later, the film’s black-leather-and-sunglasses aesthetic may date it, but its visual effects somehow don’t. The Fame Focus video above takes a close look at two examples of how the creators of The Matrix combined traditional, “practical” techniques with then-state-of-the-art digital technology in a way that kept the result from going as stale as, in the movies, “state-of-the-art digital technology” usually has a way of guaranteeing.

By now we’ve all seen revealed the mechanics of “bullet time,” an effect that astonished The Matrix’s early audiences by seeming nearly to freeze time for dramatic camera movements (and to make visible the eponymous projectiles, of which the film included a great many). They lined up a bunch of still cameras along a predetermined path, then had each of the cameras take a shot, one-by-one, in the span of a split second.

But as we see in the video, getting convincing results out of such a groundbreaking process — which required smoothing out the unsteady “footage” captured by the individual cameras and perfectly aligning it with a computer-generated background modeled on a real-life setting, among other tasks — must have been even more difficult than inventing the process itself. The manual labor that went into The Matrix series’ high-tech veneer comes across even more in the behind-the-scenes video below:

In the third installment, 2003’s The Matrix Revolutions, Keanu Reeves’ Neo and Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith duke it out in the pouring rain as what seem like hundreds of clones of Smith look on. Viewers today may assume Weaving was filmed and then copy-pasted over and over again, but in fact these shots involve no digital effects to speak of. The team actually built 150 realistic dummies of Weaving as Smith, all operated by 80 human extras themselves wearing intricately detailed silicon-rubber Smith masks. The logistics of such a one-off endeavor sound painfully complex, but the physicality of the sequence speaks for itself. With the next Matrix film, the first since Revolutions, due out next year, fans must be hoping the ideas of the Platonically techno-dystopian story the Wachowskis started telling in 1999 will be properly continued, and in a way that makes full use of recent advances in digital effects. But those of us who appreciate the enduring power of traditional effects should hope the film’s makers are also getting their hands dirty.

The Matrix: What Went Into The Mix

Philip K. Dick Theorizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in “A Computer-Programmed Reality”

Daniel Dennett and Cornel West Decode the Philosophy of The Matrix

Why 1999 Was the Year of Dystopian Office Movies: What The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, Office Space & Being John Malkovich Shared in Common

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

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50 Songs from a Single Year, Mixed Together Into One 3‑Minute Song (1979–89)

in Music | May 28th, 2020

The concept of generations, as we currently use the term, would have made no sense to people living throughout most of human history. “Before the 19th century,” writes Sarah Leskow at The Atlantic, “generations were thought of as (generally male) biological relationships within families—grandfathers, sons, grandchildren and so forth.” The word did not describe common traits shared by, “as one lexicographer put it in 1863, ‘all men living more or less at the same time.’”

The theory was thoroughly ingested into mass culture, as anyone can tell from social media wars and the fixations of newspaper columnists. One such correspondent weighed in a few years ago with a contrarian take: “Your generational identity is a lie,” wrote Philip Bump at The Washington Post in 2015. (He makes an exception for Baby Boomers, for reasons you’ll have to read in his column.)

All this debunking is to the good. While scholars routinely investigate the origins of contemporary ideas, too often the rest of us take for granted that our present ways of seeing the world are timeless and eternal.

Yet, whether generations are a real phenomenon or a cultural construction, globalized mass media of the past several decades ensures that no matter where we come from, most people born around the same time will share some set of near-identical experiences—of listening to the same music, watching the same films, TV shows, etc. Given the way our thinking can be shaped by formative moments in pop culture, we’re bound to have a few things in common if we had access to Hollywood film and MTV. Maybe what most defines generations as we know them now is culture as commodity.

Take the video series featured here. Each one cuts together 50 songs released in a single year, beginning in 1979, along with video montages of some of the year’s most popular artists. Created by The Hood Internet, “a DJ and production duo from Chicago, known for their expertise in mashups and remixes,” the series could serve as a lab experiment to test the emotional reactions of people born at different times. We may have all heard these songs by now. But only those who heard them in their youth will have the nostalgic reactions we associate with generational memory, since music, as David Toop writes at The Quietus, is “a memory machine.”

Everyone else could stand to learn something about what the 80s looked and sounded like. As a historical period, it tends to get cast in a fairly narrow mold, with synthpop and hair metal defining the extent of 80s music. The pop music of the decade was fabulously diverse, with genres cross-pollinating in what turn out to be surprisingly harmonious ways in these mashup videos. The creators of the series worked their way up to 1987, and we get to see some dramatic shifts along the way that further complicate the idea of 80s music, even for those who heard these songs when they came out, and who have nine years of formative moments to go with them. See all of the videos on The Hood Internet’s YouTube channel.

A Soul Train-Style Detroit Dance Show Gets Down to Kraftwerk’s “Numbers” in the Late 80s

How a Recording Studio Mishap Created the Famous Drum Sound That Defined 80s Music & Beyond

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

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How Humphrey Bogart Became an Icon: A Video Essay

in Film | May 28th, 2020

According to film theorist David Bordwell, there was a major change in acting styles in the 1940s. Gone was the “behavioral acting” style of the 1930s (the first full decade of sound film), where mental states were demonstrated not just through the face, but through body movement, and how actors just held themselves. Instead, in the 1940s there is a “new interiority, a kind of neutralization, of the acting performance, that’s intense, almost silent film-style.”

Part of this is due to increasingly convoluted, psychological narratives, including lots of voice-overs. Some of it was also due to studios hoping to achieve the psychological depth of novel writing.

In short, whatever the reasons in the 1940s, we got to watch characters think.

In Nerdwriter’s latest video essay, Evan Puschak examines the icon of 1940s male acting: Humphrey Bogart, whose skill and opportunity placed him at the right place and the right time for such a shift in styles. Think of Bogart and you think of his eyes and yes, the many moments where the camera lingers on his face and…we watch him think.

In hindsight it feels like he was waiting for this moment. Puschak picks up the tale with 1939’s The Return of Dr. X, which features a badly miscast Bogart as a mad scientist. But the actor had spent most of the 1930s playing a selection of bad guys, mostly gangsters. He was good at it. He was also a bit tired of the typecasting.

Also tired of of playing gangsters was George Raft, and that turned out to be good thing, because Raft turned down the lead role in the John Huston-written, Raoul Walsh-directed High Sierra. Huston and Bogart were friends and drinking buddies, and it was their friendship, plus Bogart convincing both Raft to turn down the role and Walsh to hire him instead, that led to a career breakthrough.

As Puschak points out, though Bogart was playing a gangster again, he brought to the character of Mad Dog Roy Earl a world-weariness and a vulnerable interior, and we see it in his eyes more than through his dialog.

In the same year Bogart played private detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, also a role that George Raft turned down. Bogart brought over to the character the cynicism and coolness of his gangster roles; it feels repetitive to say it was an iconic role, but it’s true—it’s a performance that ripples across time to every actor playing a private detective, who are either borrowing from it or riffing on it or turning it on its head. You wouldn’t have Columbo. You wouldn’t have Breathless either.

Did George Raft ever realize he was a sort of guardian angel for Bogart? Because for a third time, a role he turned down became a Bogart classic: Rick Blain in Casablanca (1942). As Puschak points out, it’s a difficult role as Rick is decidedly passive and casually mean for the first half, leaving people to their fate. It only works because we can see every decision Rick makes roiling behind Bogart’s eyes, and we know that eventually he will break and do the right thing.

As he got older and the 40’s turned into the ‘50s, Bogart began to play with these kind of characters. His prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre turns wild-eyed with greed and madness; his writer in In a Lonely Place is suspected of murder, and Bogart plays him ever so slightly mad that we wonder if he might even be a killer. It is one of Bogart’s most uncomfortable performances, taking what had become familiar and friendly in his screen persona and twisting it.

He died in 1957, age 57, from the cancerous effects of a lifetime of smoking. What kind of roles might he have done if he had made it through the 60s and the 70s? Would the French New Wave directors have hired him? Would Scorsese or Altman or Coppola? Again, we can only wonder.

Lauren Bacall (1924–2014) and Humphrey Bogart Pal Around During a 1956 Screen Test

Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Albert Einstein Explains Why We Need to Read the Classics

in Education | May 28th, 2020

Two pieces of reading advice I’ve carried throughout my life came from two early favorite writers, Herman Melville and C.S. Lewis. In one of the myriad pearls he tosses out as asides in his prose, Melville asks in Moby Dick, “why read widely when you can read deeply?” Why spread our minds thin? Rather than agonize over what we don’t know, we can dig into the relatively few things we do until we’ve mastered them, then move on to the next thing.

Melville’s counsel may not suit every temperament, depending on whether one is a fox or a hedgehog (or an Ahab). But Lewis’ advice might just be indispensable for developing an outlook as broad-minded as it is deep. “It is a good rule,” he wrote, “after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”

Many other famous readers have left behind similar pieces of reading advice, like Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of notorious opener “It was a dark and stormy night.” As though refining Lewis’ suggestion, he proposed, “In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern. New books revive and redecorate old ideas; old books suggest and invigorate new ideas.”

Albert Einstein shared neither Lewis’ religion nor Bulwar-Lytton’s love of semicolons, but he did share both their outlook on reading the ancients. Einstein approached the subject in terms of modern arrogance and ignorance and the bias of presentism, writing in a 1952 journal article:

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. And what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous.

There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of mankind. We owe it to a few writers of antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, etc.) that the people in the Middle Ages could slowly extricate themselves from the superstitions and ignorance that had darkened life for more than half a millennium.

Nothing is more needed to overcome the modernist’s snobbishness.

Einstein himself read both widely and deeply, so much so that he “became a literary motif for some writers,” as Dr. Antonia Moreno González notes, not only because of his paradigm-shattering theories but because of his generally well-rounded public genius. He was frequently asked, and happy to volunteer, his “ideas and opinions”—as the title of a collection of his writing calls his non-scientific work, becoming a public philosopher as well as a scientist.

We might credit Einstein’s liberal attitude toward reading and education—in the classical sense of the word “liberal”— as a driving force behind his endless intellectual curiosity, humility, and lack of prejudice. His diagnosis of the problem of modern ignorance may strike us as grossly understated in our current political circumstances. As for what constitutes a “classic,” I like Italo Calvino’s expansive definition: “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

via Mental Floss

Virginia Woolf Offers Gentle Advice on “How One Should Read a Book”

The New York Public Library Creates a List of 125 Books That They Love

100 Novels All Kids Should Read Before Leaving High School

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

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

Is It Rude to Talk Over a Film? MST3K’s Mary Jo Pehl on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #45

in Comedy, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | May 28th, 2020

We live in a commentary culture with much appreciation for camp and snark, but something special happened in the early ’90s when Mystery Science Theater 3000 popularized this additive form of comedy, where jokes are made during a full-length or short film. Mary Jo Pehl was a writer and performer on MST3K and has since riffed with fellow MST3K alums for Rifftrax and Cinematic Titanic.

Mark, Erica, and Brian briefly debate the ethics of talking over someone else’s art and then interview Mary Jo about how riffs get written, developing a riffing style and a character that the audience can connect with (do you need to include skits to establish a premise for why riffing is happening?), riffing films you love vs. old garbage, the degree to which riffing has gone beyond just MST3K-associated comedians, VH-1’s Pop-Up Video, and more.

Follow Mary Jo @MaryJoPehl.

Here are a some links to get you watching riffing:

For MST3K newbies, you might want to watch some episodes, nearly all of which are on YouTube. The AV Club has recommended its top ten episodes. Mark thinks a great introduction to the show (from a late season that features Mary Jo as a regular cast member) is S10E03 riffing a rare contemporary film, 1996’s Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders. For a classic (i.e. featuring original host and creator Joel Hodgson) episode, S03E03’s Pod People is much beloved.
Watch samples of Bridget and Mary Jo riffing the blockbuster Gravity, Mary Jo with Rifftrax founder (and former MST3K host) Mike Nelson riffing Mariah Carey’s Glitter, the two of them doing a full short at a Rifftrax Live event, and with Cinematic Titanic Live taking on Rattlers.

Different teams have different styles of riffing, so if you hate MST3K, you might want to see if you just hate those guys or hate the art form as a whole. The alums themselves currently work as:

Rifftrax (Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett, who were the stars of the final MST3K seasons, but the new effort involves different writers. They riff both old B‑movies and Hollywood blockbusters like Twilight.
Rifftrax Presents includes Bridget and Mary Jo (who among other things, are able to effectively treat shorts and films that aim to discuss “women’s issues”) as well as the very British Matthew J. Elliot and Ian Potter, Janet Varney and Cole Stratton, and Rifftrax writers Conor Lastowka and Sean Thomason.
Joel Hodgson owns MST3K and recently did his final tour as a riffer, though that entirely new group will continue performing without him and just issued the Live Social Distancing Riff-Along Special. Joel led from behind the scenes the recent Netflix MST3K revival with host Jonah Rey.
Frank Coniff and Trace Beaulieu (who participated with Mary Jo and Joel in Cinematic Titanic) tour as “The Mads,” which doesn’t seem to have any clips posted, but you can hear their podcast Movie Sign with the Mads.
Groups influenced by MST3K that Mark checked out include Master Pancake Theater, Rangoon Riffs, The Guy with Glasses, Linkara, Snob Riffs, and The Last Angry Geek. Rifftrax allows groups like these to create and sell their own riffs.

Here are a few relevant articles:

“ ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ at 30: How a Cult TV Show Changed Pop Culture” by Noel Murray
“Color Commentary” by Tad Friend
“ ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ Returns with New Blood for the Turkey Day Marathon” by Meredith Woerner

Also, PROJECT: RIFF is the website/database we talk about where a guy named Andrew figured out how many riffs per minute are in each MST3K episode, which character made the joke, and other stuff.

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 or start with the first episode.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Expansive Vocal Range of Joni Mitchell: From the Early to Later Years

in Music | May 27th, 2020

It’s quite a testament to Joni Mitchell’s musicianship that her “voice is arguably the most underrated aspect of her music.” So writes a contributor to The Range Place, an online project that analyzes the vocal ranges of popular singers. This is not to say that Mitchell’s voice is underrated—far from it—but her adventurous, deeply personal lyricism and experimental songwriting are how she is most often distinguished from the cohort of 60s singer-songwriters who emerged from the folk scene. (She first became known as the writer of Judy Collins’ hit, “Both Sides, Now.”)

That said, there’s no mistaking her for any other singer. “With very wide vibrato, she would frequently reach into her upper register comfortably with a blissful falsetto while still being able to reach some smooth lower notes with ease.” You can hear examples of her vocal range above, in excerpts from dozens of songs, both studio and live versions, recorded throughout her career. “She was a mezzo-soprano through the late sixties and seventies, with her voice standing out among other singer-songwriters due to its unusual comfort in the fifth octave.”

There are many other qualities that set Mitchell’s voice apart, including her incredible sense of pitch and rhythm. As session singer and vocal coach Jaime Babbitt writes, “singers who study singing and play instruments that make chords are better than all the rest. Joni Mitchell played many: dulcimer, guitar, piano, and flute, even ukulele as a child.” Mitchell’s instrumental skill gave her precise vocal timing, “a critical and often overlooked singer-skill,” and one that contributes hugely to a vocal performance.

Her love of jazz infuses even her folkiest songs with rhythmic vocal patterns that run up and down the scale. (Hear an example in the isolated vocals from 1971’s “River,” just above.) Just as every singer’s voice will do, Mitchell’s range narrowed with age. “Her voice nowadays,” writes The Range Place (though she no longer performs), “is closer to that of a contralto than to that of a mezzo-soprano, having lowered substantially more than other singers from the seventies”—a likely outcome of her lifelong smoking habit.

It’s common to say of an older singer that “she can’t hit the high notes anymore,” but this judgment misses out on the richness of a mature voice. Mitchell’s “indomitable technique” never wavered in her later years, Paul Taylor argues at The Independent. Her later voice was “stunning (bereft, bewildered, stoical),” transformed from the ambitious, piercing falsetto to “radiant/rueful” and wise.

See Classic Performances of Joni Mitchell from the Very Early Years–Before She Was Even Named Joni Mitchell (1965/66)

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Woodstock,” the Song that Defined the Legendary Music Festival, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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