Gertrude Stein con-sid-ered her-self an exper-i-men-tal writer and wrote what The Poet-ry Foun-da-tion calls “dense poems and fic-tions, often devoid of plot or dia-logue,” with the result being that “com-mer-cial pub-lish-ers slight-ed her exper-i-men-tal writ-ings and crit-ics dis-missed them as incom-pre-hen-si-ble.” Take, for exam-ple, what hap-pened when Stein sent a man-u-script to Alfred C. Fifield, a Lon-don-based pub-lish-er, and received a rejec-tion let-ter mock-ing her prose in return. Accord-ing to Let-ters of Note, the man-u-script in ques-tion was pub-lished many years lat-er as her mod-ernist nov-el,The Mak-ing of Amer-i-cans: Being a His-to-ry of a Fam-i-ly’s Progress (1925). You can hear Stein read-ing a selec-tion from the nov-el below.
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In 2006, Sting released an album called Songs from the Labyrinth, a col-lab-o-ra-tion with Bosn-ian lutenist Edin Kara-ma-zov con-sist-ing most-ly of com-po-si-tions by Renais-sance com-pos-er John Dow-land. This was regard-ed by some as rather eccen-tric, but to lis-ten-ers famil-iar with the ear-ly music revival that had already been going on for a few decades, it would have been almost too obvi-ous a choice. For Dow-land had long since been redis-cov-ered as one of the late six-teenth and ear-ly sev-en-teenth cen-tu-ry’s musi-cal super-stars, thanks in part to the record-ings of clas-si-cal gui-tarist and lutenist Julian Bream.
“When I was a kid, I went to the pub-lic library in Fair-port, New York, where I’m from, and I got this Julian Bream record,” says music pro-duc-er and pop-u-lar Youtu-ber Rick Beato (pre-vi-ous-ly fea-tured here on Open Cul-ture) in the video above. Beato describes Bream as “one of the great-est clas-si-cal gui-tarists who ever lived” and cred-its him with hav-ing “pop-u-lar-ized the clas-si-cal gui-tar and the lute and renais-sance music.” The par-tic-u-lar Bream record-ing that impressed the young Beato was of a John Dow-land com-po-si-tion made exot-ic by dis-tance in time called “The Earl of Essex Gal-liard,” a per-for-mance of which you can watch on Youtube.
Half a cen-tu-ry lat-er, Beat-o’s enjoy-ment for this piece seems undi-min-ished — and indeed, so much in evi-dence that this prac-ti-cal-ly turns into a reac-tion video. Lis-ten-ing gets him rem-i-nisc-ing about his ear-ly Dow-land expe-ri-ences: “I would put on this Julian Bream record of him play-ing lute, just solo lute, and I would sit there and I would putt” — his father hav-ing been golf enthu-si-ast enough to have installed a small indoor putting green — and “imag-ine liv-ing back in the fif-teen-hun-dreds, what it would be like.” These pre-tend time-trav-el ses-sions matured into a gen-uine inter-est in ear-ly music, one he pur-sued at the New Eng-land Con-ser-va-to-ry of Music and beyond.
What a delight it would have been for him, then, to find that Sting had laid down his own ver-sion of “The Earl of Essex Gal-liard,” some-times oth-er-wise known as “Can She Excuse My Wrongs.” In one espe-cial-ly strik-ing sec-tion, Sting takes “the sopra-no-alto-tenor-bass part” and records the whole thing using only lay-ers of his own voice: “there’s four Stings here,” Beato says, refer-ring to the rel-e-vant dig-i-tal-ly manip-u-lat-ed scene in the music video, “but there’s actu-al-ly more than four voic-es.” Songs from the Labyrinth may only have been a mod-est-ly suc-cess-ful album by Sting’s stan-dards, but it has no doubt turned more than a few mid-dle-of-the-road pop fans onto the beau-ty of Eng-lish Renais-sance music. If Beat-o’s enthu-si-asm has also turned a few clas-sic-rock addicts into John Dow-land con-nois-seurs, so much the bet-ter.
Based in Seoul, Col-in Marshall writes and broad-casts on cities, lan-guage, and cul-ture. His projects include the Sub-stack newslet-terBooks on Cities, the book The State-less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen-tu-ry Los Ange-les and the video series The City in Cin-e-ma. Fol-low him on Twit-ter at @colinmarshall or on Face-book.
Found-ed in 1577, Kobaien remains Japan’s old-est man-u-fac-tur-er of sumi ink sticks. Made of soot and ani-mal glue, the ink stick—when ground against an ink-stone, with a lit-tle water added—produces a beau-ti-ful black ink used by Japan-ese cal-lig-ra-phers. And, often, a 200-gram ink stick from Kobaien can cost over $1,000.
How can soot and ani-mal glue com-mand such a high price? As the Busi-ness Insid-er video above shows, there’s a fine art to mak-ing each ingredient—an art honed over the cen-turies. Watch-ing the arti-sans make the soot alone, you imme-di-ate-ly appre-ci-ate the com-plex-i-ty beneath the appar-ent sim-plic-i-ty. When you’re done watch-ing how the ink gets made, you’ll undoubt-ed-ly want to watch the arti-sans mak-ing cal-lig-ra-phy brush-es, an art form that has its own fas-ci-nat-ing his-to-ry. Enjoy!
More than a quar-ter of a mil-len-ni-um after he com-posed his first pieces of music, dif-fer-ent lis-ten-ers will eval-u-ate dif-fer-ent-ly the spe-cif-ic nature of Wolf-gang Amadeus Mozart’s genius. But one can hard-ly fail to be impressed by the fact that he wrote those works when he was five years old (or, as some schol-ars have it, four years old). It’s not unknown, even today, for pre-co-cious, musi-cal-ly inclined chil-dren of that age to sit down and put togeth-er sim-ple melodies, or even rea-son-ably com-plete songs. But how many of them can write some-thing like Mozart’s “Min-uet in G Major”?
The video above, which traces the evo-lu-tion of Mozart’s music, begins with that piece — nat-u-ral-ly enough, since it’s his ear-li-est known work, and thus hon-ored with the K?chel cat-a-logue num-ber of KV 1. There-after we hear music com-posed by Mozart at var-i-ous ages of child-hood, youth, ado-les-cence, and adult-hood, accom-pa-nied by a piano roll graph-ic that illus-trates its increas-ing com-plex-i-ty.
And as with com-plex-i-ty, so with famil-iar-i-ty: even lis-ten-ers who know lit-tle of Mozart’s work will sense the emer-gence of a dis-tinc-tive style, and even those who’ve bare-ly heard of Mozart will rec-og-nize “Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major” when it comes on.
Mozart com-posed that piece when he was 32 years old. It’s also known as the “Sonata facile” or “Sonata sem-plice,” despite its dis-tinct lack of eas-i-ness for novice (or even inter-me-di-ate) piano play-ers. It’s now cat-a-loged as KV 545, which puts it toward the end of Mozart’s oeu-vre, and indeed his life. Three years lat-er, the evo-lu-tion-ary lis-ten-ing jour-ney of this video arrives at the “Requiem in D minor,” which we’ve pre-vi-ous-ly fea-tured here on Open Cul-ture for its exten-sive cin-e-mat-ic use to evoke evil, lone-li-ness, des-per-a-tion, and reck-on-ing. The piece, KV 626, con-tains Mozart’s last notes; the unan-swer-able but nev-er-the-less irre-sistible ques-tion remains of whether they’re some-how implied in his first ones.
Based in Seoul, Col-in Marshall writes and broad-casts on cities, lan-guage, and cul-ture. His projects include the Sub-stack newslet-terBooks on Cities, the book The State-less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen-tu-ry Los Ange-les and the video series The City in Cin-e-ma. Fol-low him on Twit-ter at @colinmarshall or on Face-book.
Every-body can sing. Maybe not well. But why should that stop you? That’s the basic phi-los-o-phy of Pub Choir, an orga-ni-za-tion based in Bris-bane, Aus-tralia. At each Pub Choir event, a con-duc-tor “arranges a pop-u-lar song and teach-es it to the audi-ence in three-part har-mo-ny.” Then, the evening cul-mi-nates with a per-for-mance that gets filmed and shared on social media. Any-one (18+) is wel-come to attend.
After about a cen-tu-ry of indi-rect com-pa-ny rule, India became a full-fledged British colony in 1858. The con-se-quences of this polit-i-cal devel-op-ment remain a mat-ter of heat-ed debate today, but one thing is cer-tain: it made India into a nat-ur-al des-ti-na-tion for enter-pris-ing Britons. Take the aspir-ing cler-gy-man turned Not-ting-ham bank employ-ee Samuel Bourne, who made his name as an ama-teur pho-tog-ra-ph-er with his pic-tures of the Lake Dis-trict in the late eigh-teen-fifties. When those works met with a good recep-tion at the Lon-don Inter-na-tion-al Exhi-bi-tion of 1862, Bourne real-ized that he’d found his true méti-er; soon there-after, he quit the bank and set sail for Cal-cut-ta to prac-tice it.
It was in the city of Shim-la that Bourne estab-lished a prop-er pho-to stu-dio, first with his fel-low pho-tog-ra-ph-er William Howard, then with anoth-er named Charles Shep-herd. (Bourne & Shep-herd, as it was even-tu-al-ly named, remained in busi-ness until 2016.) Bourne trav-eled exten-sive-ly in India, tak-ing the pic-tures you can see col-lect-ed in the video above, but it was his “three suc-ces-sive pho-to-graph-ic expe-di-tions to the Himalayas” that secured his place in the his-to-ry of pho-tog-ra-phy.
In the last of these, “Bourne enlist-ed a team of eighty porters who drove a live food sup-ply of sheep and goats and car-ried box-es of chem-i-cals, glass plates, and a portable dark-room tent,” says the Met-ro-pol-i-tan Muse-um of Art. When he crossed the Manirung Pass “at an ele-va-tion of 18,600 feet, Bourne suc-ceed-ed in tak-ing three views before the sky cloud-ed over, set-ting a record for pho-tog-ra-phy at high alti-tudes.”
Though he spent only six years in India, Bourne man-aged to take 2,200 high-qual-i-ty pic-tures in that time, some of the old-est — and indeed, some of the finest — pho-tographs of India and its near-by region known today.
In addi-tion to views of the Himalayas, he cap-tured no few archi-tec-tur-al won-ders: the Taj Mahal and the Ram-nathi tem-ple, of course, but also Raj-era cre-ations like what was then known as the Gov-ern-ment House in Cal-cut-ta (see below).
Colo-nial rule has been over for near-ly eighty years now, and in that time India has grown rich-er in every sense, not least visu-al-ly. It hard-ly takes an eye as keen as Bourne’s to rec-og-nize in it one of the world’s great civ-i-liza-tions, but a Bourne of the twen-ty-first cen-tu-ry prob-a-bly needs some-thing more than a cam-era phone to do it jus-tice.
Based in Seoul, Col-in Marshall writes and broad-casts on cities, lan-guage, and cul-ture. His projects include the Sub-stack newslet-terBooks on Cities, the book The State-less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen-tu-ry Los Ange-les and the video series The City in Cin-e-ma. Fol-low him on Twit-ter at @colinmarshall or on Face-book.
“We can say of Shake-speare,” wrote T.S. Eliot—in what may sound like the most back-hand-ed of com-pli-ments from one writer to another—“that nev-er has a man turned so lit-tle knowl-edge to such great account.” Eliot, it’s true, was not over-awed by the Shake-speare-an canon; he pro-nouncedHam-let “most cer-tain-ly an artis-tic fail-ure,” though he did love Cori-olanus. What-ev-er we make of his ambiva-lent, con-trar-i-an opin-ions of the most famous author in the Eng-lish lan-guage, we can cred-it Eliot for keen obser-va-tion: Shakespeare’s uni-verse, which can seem so sprawl-ing-ly vast, is actu-al-ly sur-pris-ing-ly spare giv-en the kinds of things it most-ly con-tains.
This is due in large part to the visu-al lim-i-ta-tions of the stage, but per-haps it also points toward an author who made great works of art from hum-ble mate-ri-als. Look, for exam-ple, at a search cloud of the Bard’s plays.
You’ll find one the front page of the Vic-to-ri-an Illus-trat-ed Shake-speare Archive, cre-at-ed by Michael John Good-man, an inde-pen-dent researcher, writer, edu-ca-tor, cura-tor and image-mak-er. The cloud on the left fea-tures a galaxy com-posed main-ly of ele-men-tal and arche-typ-al beings: “Ani-mals,” “Cas-tles and Palaces,” “Crowns,” “Flo-ra and Fau-na,” “Swords,” “Spears,” “Trees,” “Water,” “Woods,” “Death.” One thinks of the Zodi-ac or Tarot.
This par-tic-u-lar search cloud, how-ev-er, does not rep-re-sent the most promi-nent terms in the text, but rather the most promi-nent images in four col-lec-tions of illus-trat-ed Shake-speare plays from the Vic-to-ri-an peri-od. Goodman’s site hosts over 3000 of these illus-tra-tions, tak-en from four major UK edi-tions of Shake-speare’s Com-plete Works pub-lished in the mid-19th cen-tu-ry. The first, pub-lished by edi-tor Charles Knight, appeared in sev-er-al vol-umes between 1838 and 1841, illus-trat-ed with con-ser-v-a-tive engrav-ings by var-i-ous artists. Knight’s edi-tion intro-duced the trend of spelling Shakespeare’s name as “Shakspere,” as you can see in the title page to the “Come-dies, Vol-ume I,” at the top of the post. Fur-ther down, see two rep-re-sen-ta-tive illus-tra-tions from the plays, the first of Ham-let’s Ophe-lia and sec-ond Cori-olanus’ Roman Forum, above.
Part of a wave of “ear-ly Vic-to-ri-an pop-ulism” in Shake-speare pub-lish-ing, Knight’s edi-tion is joined by one from Ken-ny Mead-ows, who con-tributed some very dif-fer-ent illus-tra-tions to an 1854 edi-tion. Just above, see a Goya-like illus-tra-tion from The Tem-pest. Lat-er came an edi-tion illus-trat-ed by H.C. Selous in 1864, which returned to the for-mal, faith-ful real-ism of the Knight edi-tion (see a ren-der-ing of Hen-ry V, below), and includes pho-tograu-vure plates of famed actors of the time in cos-tume and an appen-dix of “Spe-cial Wood Engraved Illus-tra-tions by Var-i-ous Artists.”
The final edi-tion whose illus-tra-tions Good-man has dig-i-tized and cat-a-logued on his site fea-tures engrav-ings by artist John Gilbert. Also pub-lished in 1864, the Gilbert may be the most expres-sive of the four, retain-ing real-ist pro-por-tions and mise-en-scène, yet also ren-der-ing the char-ac-ters with a psy-cho-log-i-cal real-ism that is at times unsettling—as in his fierce por-trait of Lear, below. Gilbert’s illus-tra-tion of The Tam-ing of the Shrew’s Kathe-ri-na and Petru-chio, fur-ther down, shows his skill for cre-at-ing believ-able indi-vid-u-als, rather than broad arche-types. The same skill for which the play-wright has so often been giv-en cred-it.
But Shake-speare worked both with rich, indi-vid-ual char-ac-ter stud-ies and broad-er, arche-typ-al, mate-r-i-al: psy-cho-log-i-cal real-ism and mytho-log-i-cal clas-si-cism. What I think these illus-trat-ed edi-tions show us is that Shake-speare, who-ev-er he (or she) may have been, did indeed have a keen sense of what Eliot called the “objec-tive cor-rel-a-tive,” able to com-mu-ni-cate com-plex emo-tions through “a skill-ful accu-mu-la-tion of imag-ined sen-so-ry impres-sions” that have impressed us as much on the can-vas, stage, and screen as they do on the page. The emo-tion-al expres-sive-ness of Shakespeare’s plays comes to us not only through elo-quent verse speech-es, but through images of both the stark-ly ele-men-tal and the unique-ly per-son-al.
Spend some time with the illus-trat-ed edi-tions on Goodman’s site, and you will devel-op an appre-ci-a-tion for how the plays com-mu-ni-cate dif-fer-ent-ly to the dif-fer-ent artists. In addi-tion to the search clouds, the site has a head-er at the top for each of the four edi-tions. Click on the name and you will see front and back mat-ter and title pages. In the pull-down menus, you can access each indi-vid-ual play’s dig-i-tized illus-tra-tions by type—“Histories,” “Come-dies,” and “Tragedies.” All of the con-tent on the site, Good-man writes, “is free through a CC license: users can share on social media, remix, research, cre-ate and just do what-ev-er they want real-ly!”
Update: This post orig-i-nal-ly appeared on our site in 2016. Since then, Good-man has been reg-u-lar-ly updat-ing the Vic-to-ri-an Illus-trat-ed Shake-speare Archive with more edi-tions, giv-ing it more rich-ness and depth. These edi-tions include “one pub-lished by John Tallis, which fea-tures famous actors of the time in char-ac-ter.” This also includes “the first ever com-pre-hen-sive full-colour treat-ment of Shakespeare’s plays with the John Mur-doch edi-tion.” The archive, Good-man tells us, “now con-tains ten edi-tions of Shakespeare’s plays and is fair-ly com-pre-hen-sive in how peo-ple were expe-ri-enc-ing Shake-speare, visu-al-ly, in book form in the 19th Cen-tu-ry.”
This year has giv-en us occa-sion to revis-it the 1928 Dis-ney car-toon Steam-boat Willie, what with its entry — and thus, that of an ear-ly ver-sion of a cer-tain Mick-ey Mouse — into the pub-lic domain. Though it may look com-par-a-tive-ly prim-i-tive today, that eight-minute black-and-white film actu-al-ly rep-re-sents a great many advance-ments in the art and tech-nol-o-gy of ani-ma-tion since its incep-tion. You can get a sense of that entire process, just about, from the video above, “The Evo-lu-tion of Ani-ma-tion 1833–2017,” which ends up at The LEGO Bat-man Movie but begins with the hum-ble phenakistis-cope.
First intro-duced to the pub-lic in 1833, the phenakistis-cope is an illus-trat-ed disc that, when spun, cre-ates the illu-sion of motion. Essen-tial-ly a nov-el-ty designed to cre-ate an opti-cal illu-sion (the Greek roots of its name being phenakizein, or “deceiv-ing,” and óps, or “eye”), it seems to have attained great pop-u-lar-i-ty as a chil-dren’s toy in the nine-teenth cen-tu-ry, and it lat-er became capa-ble of pro-jec-tion and gained util-i-ty in sci-en-tif-ic research. Pio-neer-ing motion pho-tog-ra-ph-er Ead-weard Muy-bridge’s Zooprax-is-cope, now immor-tal-ized in cin-e-ma his-to-ry as a pre-de-ces-sor of the movie pro-jec-tor, was based on the phenakistis-cope.
The first moments of “The Evo-lu-tion of Ani-ma-tion” include a cou-ple of phenakistis-copes, but soon the com-pi-la-tion moves on to clips star-ring some-what bet-ter-known fig-ures from the ear-ly twen-ti-eth cen-tu-ry like Lit-tle Nemo and Ger-tie the Dinosaur. But it’s only after Steam-boat Willie that ani-ma-tion under-goes its real cre-ative explo-sion, bring-ing to whim-si-cal and hyper-ki-net-ic life not just human char-ac-ters but a host of ani-mals, trees, and non-liv-ing objects besides. After releas-ing the mon-u-men-tal Snow White in 1937, Dis-ney dom-i-nat-ed the form both tech-no-log-i-cal-ly and artis-ti-cal-ly for at least three decades. Though this video does con-tain plen-ty of Dis-ney, it also includes the work of oth-er stu-dios that have explored quite dif-fer-ent areas of the vast field of pos-si-bil-i-ty in ani-ma-tion.
Take, for exam-ple, the psy-che-del-ic Bea-t-les movie Yel-low Sub-ma-rine, the French-Czech sur-re-al-ist sci-ence-fic-tion fable Fan-tas-tic Plan-et, the stop-motion between-hol-i-days spec-ta-cle of The Night-mare Before Christ-mas, and of course, the depth and refine-ment of Hayao Miyaza-ki’s Stu-dio Ghi-b-li, begin-ning with Nau-si-ca? of the Val-ley of the Wind (which came before the for-ma-tion of the stu-dio itself). From the mid-nineties — with cer-tain notable excep-tions, like Wal-lace & Gromit: The Movie and Char-lie Kauf-man’s Anom-aL-isa — com-put-er-gen-er-at-ed 3D ani-ma-tion more or less takes over from the tra-di-tion-al vari-eties. This has pro-duced a num-ber of fea-tures wide-ly con-sid-ered mas-ter-pieces, most of them from the now-Dis-ney-owned Pixar. But after expe-ri-enc-ing the his-to-ry of the form in minia-ture, it’s tempt-ing to hope that the next stage of the ani-ma-tion’s evo-lu-tion will involve the redis-cov-ery of its past.
Based in Seoul, Col-in Marshall writes and broad-casts on cities, lan-guage, and cul-ture. His projects include the Sub-stack newslet-terBooks on Cities, the book The State-less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen-tu-ry Los Ange-les and the video series The City in Cin-e-ma. Fol-low him on Twit-ter at @colinmarshall or on Face-book.
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