in Music | January 25th, 2021
On the final August morning of Woodstock, after a previous day’s downpour had turned most of the field near the stage into mud, after an evening of blues and rock and the comedown of whatever drugs had peaked everybody earlier, as the sunlight crept over what was left of the 500,000 music lovers, now less than half in number, wrapped in blankets and still vibing, Jimi Hendrix took the stage. Now, the Star-Spangled Banner wasn’t his final song, but it was a finale of sorts, a coda for a three-day event where love triumphed for just a little while over war, that war raging across the ocean in the similar mud of Vietnam. Hendrix ripped the National Anthem, with its famous lyrics about bombs and its hidden stanzas about slaves, a new one. He turned that guitar into its own kind of weapon, sounding like those jet bombers raining fire and napalm down, interrupting Francis Scott Key’s melody like a protestor begging to differ at the Chicago convention. Hendrix was going to send his audience out into America, back into society, with something to chew on.
“All I did was play it. I’m American, so I played it,” Hendrix tells Dick Cavett in the above clip from September 9, 1969, less than a month after the concert. “They made me sing it in school, so it was a flashback, you know?”
But there was more to it than that. Hendrix himself was a veteran. He joined the 101st Airborne Division in 1961 under duress—it was either that or jail. He lasted a year, discharged for “behavior problems,” “little regard for regulations,” and “masturbating in platoon area while supposed to be on detail.” Even while there, he had time to play guitar. Did this give him a “buffer” to lambaste the war? Not really. Right wing Americans tend to be very touchy about the anthem, and anything that strays from the usual army band arrangement brings distrust and nasty letters, as Cavett notes in the video. (And being a person of color surely had something to do with it too.) To wit: folk singer José Feliciano performed a soulful version of the anthem before Game Five of the 1968 World Series in Detroit, where the Tigers played the Cardinals. Nowhere near the coruscating version of Hendrix, but still the audience, even the players themselves, were divided.
Hendrix raised the game and the ire. It was all journalists wanted to ask Hendrix, hoping to goad him into a statement about the war. Hendrix didn’t take the bait. “We’re all Americans,” he answered at a press conference after the concert. “…it was like ‘Go, America!’”
But then the more telling line followed. “We play it the way the air is in America today. The air is slightly static, see.”
Cavett is kinder, allowing Hendrix to correct him when he calls the version unorthodox.
“No, no. I thought it was beautiful,” the modest musician says. “But there you go, you know?”
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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 ) |
in Art, Technology | January 22nd, 2021
We admire Johannes Vermeer’sGirl with a Pearl Earringfor many reasons, not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece.
Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earringthan anyone has before through a newly released10 billion-pixel panorama. At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider, we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4‑microns per pixel.”
Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe “in order to evaluate the surface condition of the painting, measure cracks, and see the topography of various key areas while assessing past restorations,” the project required taking 9,100 photos, which “were automatically captured and stitched together to form one finished panorama image where one pixel equals 4.4 microns.”
You’ll understand what this means if youview the panoramaand click the plus symbol on the bottom control bar to zoom in — and click it again, and again, and again. (Or just click it and hold it down.)Before long,Girl with a Pearl Earringwill look less like a girl with a pearl earring than what she really is: centuries-old oil paints on a centuries-old canvas. The physicality of this work of art, one so often held up as the realization of aesthetic ideal, becomes even less ignorable if you click the “3D” button. This presents ten individual sections of the paintingscanned in three dimensions, which you can freely rotate and even light from all directions.
The 3D-scanned portions include the titular pearl earring, which appears to have a bit of a gouge in it. They’re more clearly visible in 5x topographical viewing mode (selectable on the top control bar). This official Hirox video offers a glimpse of the procedure required to achieve the kind of unprecedentedly high-resolution view of Girl with a Pearl Earring that allows us to behold details heretofore practically invisible. At more than 10,000 megapixels, the background reveals itself to be in fact a dark green curtain, and the girl herself has clearly defined eyelashes. But as for her long-speculated-about identity, well, there are some things microscopy can’t determine. Take a close look at Vermeer’s painting here. And if you’d like to take a similar look at Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, click here.
via Colossal
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Why is Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring Considered a Masterpiece?: An Animated Introduction
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Download All 36 of Jan Vermeer’s Beautifully Rare Paintings (Most in Brilliant High Resolution)
Based in Seoul,Colin Marshallwrites and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities,the bookThe Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angelesand the video seriesThe City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at@colinmarshall, onFacebook, or onInstagram.
by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |
in Film | January 22nd, 2021
Quentin Tarantino has never shied away from talking, at length and at a rapid clip, about his process. “In another life,” Colin Marshallwrites in a previous post on the subject, he might have become a “foremost practitioner” of the video essay on cinema. His meticulous analyses of not only his own films but also the hundreds he references–or outright steals from–can be dizzying, the ravings of an overactive creative mind that seems impossible to rein in.
Tarantino has also given us significant insight into his screenwriting process, saying “I was put on Earth to face the blank page” and claiming that he watches the entire film in his mind’s eye before putting pen to paper. He wrotePulp Fiction “off and on,”Mark Seal notes atVanity Fair, “in a one-room apartment with no phone or fax” in Amsterdam. Then he sought out veteran Hollywood typist Linda Chen, who agreed to type, and edit, the manuscript for free.
“His handwriting is atrocious,” says Chen. “He’s a functional illiterate. I was averaging about 9,000 grammatical errors per page. After I would correct them, he would try to put back the errors, because helikedthem.”
As a writer, Tarantino’s quirks don’t actually seem out of place. As a director, his process would not seem to lend itself to the most disciplined production. The final product of that error-ridden script, however, became what Roger Ebert called “the most influential” movie of the 90s, “so well written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it—the noses of those zombie writers who take ‘screenwriting’ classes that teach them the formulas for ‘hit films.’” Of course, great writing is an indispensable part of making a great film, but so too is great filmmaking.…
How did Tarantino go from feverishly hand-scribbled script to a “most influential” film as a director? He has worked within strict limitations, as on his directorial debut,Reservoir Dogs, with larger budgets and better sets, as onPulp Fiction,and on his most recent film, the $95 millionOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood. But he has always maintained a consistent visual style easily recognizable across all nine of his films.
In the video essay above from In Depth Cine, you can learn more of the story of how Tarantino accomplished his directorial visions, and how that style followed him from film to film.The video gets into technical details like the choice of 35mm cameras and the lighting placement. It also tells the story of how three films—Reservoir Dogs,Pulp Fiction, andOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood—used their vastly different budget levels, while all remaining true to each other and to their writer and director’s intentions.
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An Analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Narrated (Mostly) by Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino’s Copycat Cinema: How the Postmodern Filmmaker Perfected the Art of the Steal
Josh Jonesis a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at@jdmagness
by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |
in Music, Television | January 22nd, 2021
At one time, whatever else people did with it, they really did read Playboy for the articles. And whatever other vicarious thrills they might obtain from Hugh Hefner’s Playboy’s Penthouse variety show or its follow-up, Playboy After Dark, they definitely tuned in for the music. Guests included Ike & Tina Turner, The Byrds, Buddy Rich, Cher, Deep Purple, Fleetwood Mac, Steppenwolf, James Brown, and many more. On January 18, 1969, the Grateful Dead performed, and it went exactly as one might expect, meaning “things got totally out-of-hand,” Dave Melamed writes at Live for Live Music, “but everything wound up working out just fine.
Things worked out more than fine, despite, or because of, the fact that the band’s legendary sound-man Owsley “Bear” Stanley (at that time the largest supplier of LSD in the country) dosed the coffee pot on set. Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann tells the story in the Conan clip below. It all started, he says, during soundcheck, when he noticed that the crew was acting “kinda loose.” Knowing Stanley as he did, he immediately suspected the cause: “the whole crew, all of you” he says pointing toward the Conan camera operators, “was high on acid.”
There’s not much evidence of it in the footage. There don’t seem to be any technical problems in the clip at the top. In their brief, jovial interview, Hefner and Garcia seem plenty relaxed. Jerry tells the Playboy founder why the band has two drummers. (They “chase each other around, sort of like the serpent that eats its own tail” and “make a figure in your mind” if you stand between them.) Then he takes the stage and the band plays “Mountains of the Moon” and “St. Stephen.”
Hefner was so appreciative of whatever happened on set that he sent a personal letter of thanks the following month (below), addressed to each member of the band. “Your participation played an important part in the success of this particular show.” He enclosed a film of the performances and expressed his gratitude “for having made the taping session as enjoyable to do as I think it will be to watch.”
Kreutzmann relates some other anecdotes in his 2015 Conan interview, including a funny bit about how the band got its name. But the best part of the appearance is watching him imitate Hefner, who was apparently plastered to the wall by the end of the set, the coffee really starting to kick in.
This strange chapter of Grateful Dead history is one of many memorialized in the new graphic novel, Grateful Dead Origins.
via Laughing Squid
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Josh Jonesis a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at@jdmagness
by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |
in History, Science | January 21st, 2021
A curious thing happened at the end of the 19th century and the dawning of the 20th. As European and American industries became increasingly confident in their methods of invention and production, scientists made discovery after discovery that shook their understanding of the physical world to the core. “Researchers in the 19th century had thought they would soon describe all known physical processes using the equations of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell,” Adam Mann writes at Wired. But “the new and unexpected observations were destroying this rosy outlook.”
These observations included X‑rays, the photoelectric effect, nuclear radiation and electrons; “leading physicists, such as Max Planck and Walter Nernst believed circumstances were dire enough to warrant an international symposium that could attempt to resolve the situation.” Those scientists could not have known that over a century later, we would still be staring at what physicist Dominic Walliman calls the “Chasm of Ignorance” at the edge of quantum theory. But they did initiate “the quantum revolution” in the first Solvay Council, in Brussels, named for wealthy chemist and organizer Ernest Solvay.
“Reverberations from this meeting are still felt to this day… though physics may still sometimes seem to be in crisis” writes Mann (in a 2011 article just months before the discovery of the Higgs boson). The inaugural meeting kicked off a series of conferences on physics and chemistry that have continued into the 21st century. Included in the proceedings were Planck, “often called the father of quantum mechanics,” Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the proton, and Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes, who discovered superconductivity.
Also present were mathematician Henri Poincaré, chemist Marie Curie, and a 32-year-old Albert Einstein, the second youngest member of the group. Einstein described the first Solvay conference (1911) in a letter to a friend as “the lamentations on the ruins of Jerusalem. Nothing positive came out of it.” The ruined “temple,” in this case, were the theories of classical physics, “which had dominated scientific thinking in the previous century.” Einstein understood the dismay, but found his colleagues to be irrationally stubborn and conservative.
Nonetheless, he wrote, the scientists gathered at the Solvay Council “probably all agree that the so-called quantum theory is, indeed, a helpful tool but that it is not a theory in the usual sense of the word, at any rate not a theory that could be developed in a coherent form at the present time.” During the Fifth Solvay Council, in 1927, Einstein tried to prove that the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (and hence quantum mechanics itself) was just plain wrong,” writes Jonathan Dowling, co-director of the Horace Hearne Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Physicist Niels Bohr responded vigorously. “This debate went on for days,” Dowling writes, “and continued on 3 years later at the next conference.” At one point, Einstein uttered his famous quote, “God does not play dice,” in a “room full of the world’s most notable scientific minds,” Amanda Macias writes at Business Insider. Bohr responded, “stop telling God what to do.” That room full of luminaries also sat for a portrait, as they had during the first Solvay Council meeting. See the assembled group at the top and further up in a colorized version in what may be, as one Redditor calls it, “the most intelligent picture ever taken.”
The full list of participants is below:
Front row: Irving Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugène Guye, C.T.R Wilson, Owen Richardson.
Middle row: Peter Debye, Martin Knudsen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr.
Back row: Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Donder, Erwin Schrödinger, JE Verschaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Fowler, Léon Brillouin.
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Josh Jonesis a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at@jdmagness
by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |
in Fashion, Online Courses | January 21st, 2021
Savile Row is unfashionable. This, of course, is its great strength: not for nothing does that London street stand as the last word in timeless tailoring. Since at least the early 19th century, men have gone to Savile Row not just to commission handmade suits from their favorite shops, but to participate in as many fittings as necessary throughout the process of bringing those suits ever closer to perfection. The result, over decades and indeed generations of regular patronage, is the cultivation of not fashion but style. Even so, Savile Row figures in the Museum of Modern Art’s online course Fashion as Design,whose videos on the making of a bespoke three-piece suit you can see here.
It all happens at Anderson & Sheppard, a fixture on the Row since 1906. In the first video, “behind a drawn curtain, a master cutter” — whose job includes not just cutting the cloth but interacting with the client — “takes an initial series of 27 measurements: 20 for the jacket, 7 for the trousers. From these measurements, the cutter fashions a pattern in heavy brown paper.”
We then see the cloth cut to this pattern, “and the many pieces of fabric are rolled for each garment into tiny packages, which await the tailors.” The second, which begins in the back of the house, shows how these tailors “receive their bundles of fabric and set about deciphering the cutter’s notes. Three weeks after a client’s measurements have been taken, his suit will be ready for a first fitting.”
Emphasis on “first”: though the young man being fitted here only appears for one session, some bespoke suits can require two, three, or more, worn each time as a wearable rough draft held together with bright white thread and marked up for later correction. This reflects not the tailor’s inability to get it right the first time, but the rigorous desire of the Savile Row habitué for an ideal fit. (Anderson & Sheppard’s list of former clients include such notoriously perfectionist dressers as Fred Astaire, Bryan Ferry, and Prince Charles.) Watching this process from start finish underscores the truth of those famous words, “The difference between style and fashion is quality” — famous words spoken by no less a detractor of Savile Row than Giorgio Armani, but true ones nonetheless.
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Based in Seoul,Colin Marshallwrites and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities,the bookThe Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angelesand the video seriesThe City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at@colinmarshall, onFacebook, or onInstagram.
by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |
in Animation, Literature | January 21st, 2021
What do Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, and Modest Mussorgsky have in common? They stand alone among their peers for their darkly humorous sensibilities, fascination with the grotesque, imaginative takes on cultural traditions, and a predisposition for the proto-surreal. Like the odd figure lurching through the first movement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, they are gnomic artists: enigmatic and ambiguous, given to the aphoristic in stories and tone poems of monstrous and marvelous beings. It’s easy to imagine the three of them, or their works at least, in cryptic conversation with each other.
We might imagine that conversation as we watch three works by these major European artists—all of which we’ve featured on the site before—animated via the painstaking pinscreen method pioneered by husband-and-wife, Russian-and-French duo Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker.
The two invented the technique in the 1930s. Dedicated to this extremely labor-intensive process, they made 6 short films over a period of 50 years, including adaptations of Kafka’s “Before the Law,” narrated by Orson Welles, Gogol’s “The Nose,” and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.
We know the Mussorgsky piece as a terrifying vignette from Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Seven years before that marriage of classical music and animation came out in 1940, Alexeieff and Parker released their version, at the top. Steve Stanchfield at Cartoon Research calls it “one of the most unusual and unique looking animated films ever created.” Its “delightful and at times horrifying imagery… challenge the viewer to comprehend both their meaning and the mystery of how they were created.” The same could be said of “The Nose” (1963), whose improvised soundtrack by Hai-Minh adds dramatic tension to the eerie animation.
Each of these films uses the same method, a handmade pinscreen device in which thousands of pins are pushed by hand outward and inward for each frame to create areas of light or dark. The pair intended to move beyond the flatness of conventional cel animation techniques and capture the depth and contrast of chiaroscuro. They achieved this through the most achingly slow process imaginable, yet “the illusion of dimensional drawing in animation has rarely been created better,” Stanchfield writes, not even in the most sophisticated computer-generated imagery.
Alexeieff and Parker’s “Before the Law,” from a parable in Kafka’s The Trial, takes a picture-book approach to the animation that would reward younger viewers. Welles’ narration anchors the production with even more than his usual gravitas. In 1972, they returned to Mussorgsky, in the shortPictures at an Exhibition, above. Here, after a prologue in French and the stylizations of the opening Prelude, the figure of the “The Gnome” appears, a translucent homunculus hatching from an egg and dancing across the piano keys. I like to think Mussorgsky, Kafka, and Gogol would find this imagery irresistible.
Related Content:
Night on Bald Mountain: An Eery, Avant-Garde Pinscreen Animation Based on Mussorgsky’s Masterpiece
Nikolai Gogol’s Classic Story, “The Nose,” Animated With the Astonishing Pinscreen Technique (1963)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |
in Games, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | January 21st, 2021
The high level of interest in Netflix’s adaptation of the 1984 Walter Tevis novel, The Queen’s Gambithas brought this most popular game back to the forefront of pop culture.Chess expert/teacher J.J. (who’s also a grad student in philosophy) joins your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to consider chess culture, what gives this game its edge on other contenders (why not Terra Mystica?), player personality characteristics, and the effect of chess media.
We consider gender, genius, and other issues inGambit, plusPawn Sacrifice,Searching for Bobby Fisher,The Luzhin Defense, andThe Coldest Game.
A few articles and lists:
- “Five Myths About Chess” by Jennifer Shahade
- “Queen’s Gambit Beauty Debate Explained” by Constance Grady
- “The Fatal Flaw of the Queen’s Gambit” by Sarah Miller
- “16 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About ‘The Queen’s Gambit’” by Janaki Jitchotvisut
- “10 Essential Movies About Chess” by Tim Grierson
- “10 Movies to Watch About Chess if You Liked Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit” by Jake Dee
- “‘Genius’: 10 Films That Explore the Brilliant Mind” by Kat Sommers
Watch J.J. on stream on Twitch. Other interviews he’s done:Perpetual Chess,Friends and Enemies,Aakaash
Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includesbonus discussion about more chess films and other topics that you can access 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.
by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |
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