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Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Cover for On the Road (1952)

Posted on October 22, 2017 by admin Posted in Culture and Heritage .

This falls under the category, “If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.”

In 1950, when Jack Kerouac released his first novel, The Town and the City, he was less than impressed by the book cover produced by his publisher, Harcourt Brace. (Click here to see why.) So, in 1952, when he began shopping his second novel, the great beat classic On the Road, Kerouac went ahead and designed his own cover. He sent it to a potential publisher A.A. Wyn, with a little note typed at the very top:

Dear Mr. Wyn:

I submit this as my idea of an appealing commercial cover expressive of the book. The cover for “The Town and the City” was as dull as the title and the photo backflap. Wilbur Pippin’s photo of me is the perfect On the Road one … it will look like the face of the figure below.

J.K.

Wyn turned down the novel, and it wouldn’t get published until 1957. It would, however, become a bestseller and be published with many different covers through the years. They’re all on display here.

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Note: This fine drawing appeared on our site back in 2012.

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Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Cover for <i>On the Road</i> (1952) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Tags: 1952, Cover, HandDrawn, Jack, Kerouac’s, Road .

The Art of Hand-Drawn Japanese Anime: A Deep Study of How Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira Uses Light

Posted on October 19, 2017 by admin Posted in Culture and Heritage .

Animation before the days of modern computer graphics technology may impress today for the very reason that it had no modern computer graphics technology, or CGI, at its disposal. But if we really think about it — and we really watch the animated masterpieces of those days — we’ll realize that much of it should impress us on many more levels than it already does. Take, for instance, Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 cyberpunk vision Akira, one of the most beloved Japanese animated films of all time and the subject of the Nerdwriter video essay above, “How to Animate Light.”

Akira, says Nerdwriter Evan Puschak, “is well known for its painstaking animation. Every frame of the film was composed with the closest attention to detail, and that gives it an unmatched richness and soul.”


But he points up one quality of the production in particular: “I see the film’s many lights, their different qualities and textures, as a powerful motif and symbol, and a vital element of its genius.” But animators, especially animators using traditional hand-painted cels, can’t just tell their directors of photography to set up a scene’s lighting in a certain way; they’ve got to render all the different types of light in the world they create by hand, manually creating its play on every face, every object, every surface.

“The lines between shadow and light are distinct and evocative in the same way that film noir lighting is,” Puschak elaborates, “and like in film noir, light in Akira is intimately connected to the city at night.” In the dystopian “Neo-Tokyo” of 2019, elaborately crafted by Otomo and his collaborators, “authority is as much a blinding spotlight as it is a gun or a badge” and neon “is the bitter but beautiful light that signifies both the colorful radiance and the gaudy consumerism of modernity.” And then we have Tetsuo, “at once the protagonist and the antagonist of the film, a boy who gains extraordinary psychic power” that “so often produces a disruption in the light around him.” When the end comes, it comes in the form of “a giant ball of light, one single uniform white light that erases the countless artificial lights of the city,” and Akira makes us believe in it. Could even the most cutting-edge, spectacularly big-budgeted CGI-age picture do the same?

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Facebook.

The Art of Hand-Drawn Japanese Anime: A Deep Study of How Katsuhiro Otomo’s <i>Akira</i> Uses Light is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Open Culture

Tags: Akira, Anime, Deep, HandDrawn, Japanese, Katsuhiro, Light, Otomo’s, Study, Uses .

An Oral History of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Interviews (in English) with Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe & More

Posted on October 16, 2017 by admin Posted in Culture and Heritage .

Image by Detief Mewes, via Wikimedia Commons

The Bauhaus, which operated as an influential school in Germany between 1919 and 1933 but lives on as a kind of aesthetic ideal, has its strongest associations with highly visual work, like textiles, graphic design, industrial design, and especially architecture. But a good deal of thought went into establishing the kind of rationality- and functionality-oriented philosophical basis that would produce all that visual work, and you can hear some of the leading lights of the Bauhaus discuss it, in English, on the record Bauhaus Reviewed: 1919 to 1933, now available on Spotify. (If you don’t have Spotify’s software, you can download it here.) You can also purchase your own copy online.


“The bulk of the narrative is by [Walter] Gropius, an articulate and passionate advocate for this remarkable experiment in education,” writes All Music Guide’s Stephen Eddins. “Artist Josef Albers and architect [Ludwig] Mies van der Rohe also contribute commentary. [LTM Records founder] James Nice is credited with ‘curating’ the CD, and it must be his editing that gives the album such a clear and informative narrative structure — one comes away with a vivid understanding of the development of the movement, both philosophically and pragmatically.”

In between the spoken passages on the origins of the Bauhaus, form and totality, handling and texture, utopianism, and other topics besides, Bauhaus Reviewed 1919-1933 offers musical compositions by such Bauhaus-associated composers as Arnold Schoenberg, Josef Matthias Hauer, and George Antheil. You can hear some of the sound from the record repurposed in Architecture as Language, the short about Mies by Swiss filmmaker Alexandre Favre just below. In it that pioneer of modernism discusses the Bauhaus as well as his own individual work, all of it interesting to anyone with an inclination toward midcentury European-American architecture and design, none of it ultimately more relevant than the final words the master speaks: “I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.”

via Monoskop

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Facebook.

An Oral History of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Interviews (in English) with Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe & More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Open Culture

Tags: Bauhaus, English, Gropius, Hear, History, Interviews, Ludwig, Mies, More, Oral, Rare, Rohe, Walter .

To Read This Experimental Edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, You’ll Need to Add Heat to the Pages

Posted on October 13, 2017 by admin Posted in Culture and Heritage .

The Jan van Eyck Academie, a “multiform institute for fine art, design and reflection” in Holland, has come up with a novel way of presenting Ray Bradbury’s 1953 work of dystopian fiction, Fahrenheit 451. On Instagram, they write:

This week our colleagues from Super Terrain are working in the Lab as a last stop on their all-over-Europe printing adventures. They showed us this remarkable book they made “Fahrenheit 451”. —

Want to see how the novel unfolds? Just add heat. That’s the idea.

Apparently they actually have plans to market the book. When asked on Instagram, “How can I purchase one of these?,” they replied “We’re working on it! Stay tuned.”

When that day comes, please handle the book with care.

Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. 

If you’d like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials.

via Twisted Sifter

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To Read This Experimental Edition of Ray Bradbury’s <i>Fahrenheit 451</i>, You’ll Need to Add Heat to the Pages is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Tags: Bradbury’s, Edition, Experimental, Fahrenheit, Heat, Need, Pages, Read, This, You’ll .

Kintsugi: The Centuries-Old Japanese Craft of Repairing Pottery with Gold & Finding Beauty in Broken Things

Posted on October 10, 2017 by admin Posted in Culture and Heritage .

We all grow up believing we should emphasize the inherent positives about ourselves. But what if we also emphasized the negatives, the parts we’ve had to work to fix or improve? If we did it just right, would the negatives still look so negative after all? These kinds of questions come to mind when one ponders the traditional Japanese craft of kintsugi, a means of repairing broken pottery that aims not for perfection, a return to “as good as new,” but for a kind of post-breakage reinvention that dares not to hide the cracks.

“Translated to ‘golden joinery,’ Kintsugi (or Kintsukuroi, which means ‘golden repair’) is the centuries-old Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with a special lacquer dusted with powdered gold, silver, or platinum” says My Modern Met.


“Beautiful seams of gold glint in the cracks of ceramic ware, giving a unique appearance to the piece. This repair method celebrates each artifact’s unique history by emphasizing its fractures and breaks instead of hiding or disguising them. Kintsugi often makes the repaired piece even more beautiful than the original, revitalizing it with new life.”

Kintsugi originates, so one theory has it, in the late 15th century under the culturally inclined shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, during whose reign the sensibilities of traditional Japanese art as we known them emerged. When Ashikaga sent one of his damaged Chinese tea bowls back to his motherland for repairs, it came back reassembled with ungainly metal staples. This prompted his craftsmen to find a better way: why not use that gilded lacquer to emphasize the cracks instead of hiding them? The technique was said to have won the admiration of famed (and not easily impressed) tea master Sen no Rikyū, major proponent of the imperfection-appreciating aesthetic wabi sabi.

You can hear and see these stories of kintsugi’s origins in the videos from Nerdwriter and Alain de Botton’s School of Life at the top of the post. The clip just above offers a closer look at the painstaking techniques of modern kintsugi, which not only survives but thrives today, having expanded to include other materials, repairing glassware as well as ceramics, for example, or filling the cracks with silver instead of gold. And what could underscore the current global relevance of kintsugi more than the fact that the craft has inspired not one but two TEDTalks, the first by Audrey Harris in Kyoto in 2015 and the second by Maddie Kelly in Adelaide last year. We all, it seems, want to repair our cracks; kintsugi shows the way to do it not just honestly but artfully.

h/t the nugget

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Facebook.

Kintsugi: The Centuries-Old Japanese Craft of Repairing Pottery with Gold & Finding Beauty in Broken Things is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Tags: Beauty, Broken, CenturiesOld, Craft, Finding, Gold, Japanese, Kintsugi, Pottery, Repairing, Things .

Hear Benedict Cumberbatch Read John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and Other Great Works by Shakespeare, Dante & Coleridge

Posted on October 7, 2017 by admin Posted in Culture and Heritage .

Would Benedict Cumberbatch have such ardent fans if he couldn’t read poetry so well? Almost certainly he would, although his way with verse still seems not like a bonus but an integral component of his dramatic persona. Though not easily explained, that relationship does come across if you hear any of the actor’s readings of poetry. In the video above, Cumberbatch performs “Ode to a Nightingale,” the longest and best-known of John Keats’ 1819 odes that casts into verse the poet’s discovery of “negative capability,” or as he defined it in a letter two years earlier, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Yet one senses that the Cumberbatch fans who put up these videos, such as the one accompanying “Ode to a Nightingale” with imagery reminiscent of a Tiger Beat pictorial, care less about his negative capability than certain other qualities. His voice, for instance: the uploader of the video combining five poems just above describes as “the velvety dulcet tones of a jaguar hiding in a cello.”


That compilation includes “Ode to a Nightingale” as well as Shakespeare’s “The Seven Ages of Man” (“All the world’s a stage”), Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” a piece of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” With Coleridge’s dream of Asia and Dante’s Italian vision of the afterlife, this poetic mix does get more exotic than it might seem (at least by the standards of the eras from which it draws).

But Cumberbatch, who in 2015 received the honor of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire from the Queen and even read at the reburial ceremony of King Richard III, clearly matches best with the canon of his native England. As a versatile performer, and thus one who presumably understands all about the need for negative capability, Cumberbatch and his cello-hidden jaguar delivery (a poetic description, in its own way) has done justice in the past to Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, and Moby-Dick. Still, one wonders what poem Cumberbatch could perform in order to achieve an unsurpassable state of peak Englishness. How long could it take for him to get around, for instance, to “If—”?

Cumberbatch’s reading of “Ode” will be added to our collection, 900 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Facebook.

Hear Benedict Cumberbatch Read John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and Other Great Works by Shakespeare, Dante & Coleridge is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Open Culture

Tags: “Ode, Benedict, Coleridge, Cumberbatch, Dante, Great, Hear, John, Keats’, Nightingale”, Read, Shakespeare, Works .

How Buddhism & Neuroscience Can Help You Change How Your Mind Works: A New Course by Bestselling Author Robert Wright

Posted on October 4, 2017 by admin Posted in Culture and Heritage .

Buddhist thought and culture has long found a comfortable home among hippies, beatniks, New Age believers, artists, occultists and mystics. Recently, many of its tenets and practices have become widely popular among very different demographics of scientists, skeptics, and atheist communities. It may seem odd that an increasingly secularizing West would widely embrace an ancient Eastern religion. But even the Dalai Lama has pointed out that Buddhism’s essential doctrines align uncannily with the findings of modern science

The Pali Canon, the earliest collection of Buddhist texts, contains much that agrees with the scientific method. In the Kalama Sutta, for example, we find instructions for how to shape views and beliefs that accord with the methods espoused by the Royal Society many hundreds of years later.


Robert Wright—bestselling author and visiting professor of religion and psychology at Princeton and Penn—goes even further, showing in his book Why Buddhism is True how Buddhist insights into impermanence, delusion, ignorance, and unhappiness align with contemporary findings of neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

Wright is now making his argument for the compatibility of Buddhism and science in a new MOOC from Coursera called “Buddhism and Modern Psychology.” You can watch the trailer for the course, which starts this week, just above.

The core of Buddhism is generally contained in the so-called “Four Noble Truths,” and Wright explains in his lecture above how these teachings sum up the problem we all face, beginning with the first truth of dukkha. Often translated as “suffering,” the word might better be thought of as meaning “unsatisfactoriness,” as Wright illustrates with a reference to the Rolling Stones. Jagger’s “can’t get no satisfaction,” he says, captures “a lot of the spirit of what is called the First Noble Truth,” which, along with the Second, constitutes “the Buddha’s diagnosis of the human predicament.” Not only can we not get what we want, but even when we do, it hardly ever makes us happy for very long.

Rather than impute our misery to the displeasure of the gods, the Buddha, Wright tells Lion’s Roar, “says the reason we suffer, the reason we’re not enduringly satisfied, is that we don’t see the world clearly. That’s also the reason we sometimes fall short of moral goodness and treat other human beings badly.” Desperate to hold on to what we think will satisfy us, we become consumed by craving, as the Second Noble Truth explains, constantly clinging to pleasure and fleeing from pain. Just above, Wright explains how these two claims compare with the theories of evolutionary psychology. His course also explores how meditation releases us from craving and breaks the vicious cycle of desire and aversion.

Overall, the issues Wright addresses are laid out in his course description:

Are neuroscientists starting to understand how meditation “works”? Would such an understanding validate meditation—or might physical explanations of meditation undermine the spiritual significance attributed to it? And how are some of the basic Buddhist claims about the human mind holding up? We’ll pay special attention to some highly counterintuitive doctrines: that the self doesn’t exist, and that much of perceived reality is in some sense illusory. Do these claims, radical as they sound, make a certain kind of sense in light of modern psychology? And what are the implications of all this for how we should live our lives? Can meditation make us not just happier, but better people?

As to the last question, Wright is not alone among scientifically-minded people in answering with a resounding yes. Rather than relying on the beneficence of a supernatural savior, Buddhism offers a course of treatment—the “Noble Eightfold Path”—to combat our disposition toward illusory thinking. We are shaped by evolution, Wright says, to deceive ourselves. The Buddhist practices of meditation and mindfulness, and the ethics of compassion and nonharming, are “in some sense, a rebellion against natural selection.”

You can see more of Wright’s lectures on YouTube. Wright’s free course, Buddhism and Modern Psychology, is getting started this week. You can sign up now.

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

How Buddhism & Neuroscience Can Help You Change How Your Mind Works: A New Course by Bestselling Author Robert Wright is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Open Culture

Tags: Author, Bestselling, Buddhism, Change, Course, Help, Mind, Neuroscience, Robert, Works, Wright .

Leonardo da Vinci’s Bizarre Caricatures & Monster Drawings

Posted on October 1, 2017 by admin Posted in Culture and Heritage .

The caricature was once a highly-regarded art form, before it was cornered on the upper end by the New York Review of Books and on the more pedestrian side by boardwalk and street fair artists. During the European Renaissance and the ensuing centuries of artistic development, nearly every artist had a caricature side project—if only in the margins of their sketchbooks—and some, like Leonardo da Vinci, were widely known and appreciated for their skill in the art.

Generally renowned these days for the high seriousness of his Mona Lisa, Last Supper, and Vitruvian Man, Leonardo does not tend to be associated with grotesque humor. Yet the caricatures “were some of his most popular and influential works,” writes Jonathan Jones at The Guardian, “from the 16th century up to the time of [William] Hogarth,” the hugely popular 18th century English visual satirist.

These caricatures connect Leonardo not only to graphic art of the future but to an earlier, Medieval world—the “hellish visions of Bosch and Bruegel.” They are “Gargoyles,” wrote critic Kenneth Clark, “the complement to saints; Leonardo’s caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal beauty.


And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions, the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings which are left in human nature when the divine has been poured away.” Clark tempers this characterization by noting that these drawings “in their expression of passionate energy, merge imperceptibly into the heroic.”

Indeed, Leonardo loved unusual faces and heads—he found odd-looking people of all kinds fascinating, and turned them into tragicomic figures fit for the stage. Giorgio Vasari, the 16th century biographer of Renaissance artists, wrote that Leonardo was “so delighted when he saw curious heads, whether bearded or hairy, that he would follow anyone who had thus attracted his attention for a whole day, acquiring such a clear idea of him that when he went home he would draw the head as well as if the man had been present.”

We can’t say that stalking exhibits much respect for the kinds of boundaries most people would prefer to maintain, but Leonardo’s behavior does display a reverence for interesting human physiognomy, both a source and a foil for his idealizations of the human form. Leonardo’s caricatures resonate into the late 20th century in the work of Ralph Steadman, the gonzo illustrator and political cartoonist.

In his satirical illustrated biography of Leonardo, Steadman remarked that the Renaissance artist who ennobled the human form also found “that man was not what he appeared to be, despite the prevailing atmosphere of fine thoughts and high aspirations.” Steadman quotes a passage from Leonardo’s notebooks that sounds much more Swiftian or Rabelaisian than high-minded Renaissance humanist:

His Holiness the Pope surrounded himself with none but craven guzzlers, gross pretenders and a host of fawning dignitaries who grimaced through their days at court with no more grace than beggars I had entertained in days gone by — though they had neither choice nor wit to rise above themselves and in that they had a reason.

Oh that I had ways to surely serve their putrid masquerades and twittery to make a dragon from the very menagerie within the Vatican itself.

If I could take for its head that of a mastiff or setter, for its eyes those of a cat, for its ears those of a greyhound, with the eyebrows of a lion, the temples of an old cock and the neck of a water tortoise. 

O vile monster! How much better it for men that thou shouldst go back to hell! For this the vast forests shall be stripped of their trees; for this an infinite number of creatures shall lose their lives.

Though the caricatures may not go as far as the horrifying hodgepodge in this description, they do portray human beings with rather less classical equanimity than the serene Mona Lisa or the very composed Christ. But due to the Leonardo’s skill and seemingly irrepressible love for the human form—even if he had a jaundiced view of human nature—the caricatures continue to be inspiring pieces of work.

Related Content:

Leonardo da Vinci’s Visionary Notebooks Now Online: Browse 570 Digitized Pages

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What Leonardo da Vinci Really Looked Like

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

Leonardo da Vinci’s Bizarre Caricatures & Monster Drawings is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Tags: Bizarre, Caricatures, Drawings, Leonardo, Monster, Vinci’s .

When John Cage & Marcel Duchamp Played Chess on a Chessboard That Turned Chess Moves Into Electronic Music (1968)

Posted on September 28, 2017 by admin Posted in Culture and Heritage .

Photograph by Lynn Rosenthal

When is a chess game not a chess game?

When it’s played between Marcel Duchamp and John Cage.

Both the man who turned a urinal into a piece of modern art and the man who reduced musical composition all the way down to silence were fans of taking things to absurd conclusions. And they were both fans of chess; Duchamp the grand master and Cage the dutiful student. Asked in 1974 whether Duchamp was a good teacher, Cage replied, “I was using chess as a pretext to be with him. I didn’t learn, unfortunately, while he was alive to play well.”

But Cage seemed to have little interest in competition. “Duchamp once watched me playing and became indignant when I didn’t win,” he said. “He accused me of not wanting to win.” Instead, he approached chess as he approached the piano—as a decoy, a feint, that leads into another kind of game entirely. In a 1944 tribute to Duchamp, he painted a chessboard that was actually a musical score, and, in 1968, he arranged a public game as a pretext for a musical performance called Reunion, performed in Toronto with Duchamp and his wife Teeny (we have no film of the game-slash-concert; you can see Cage play Teeny in the video above).

Cage was an admirer of the elder artist for over 20 years, playing chess with him frequently. But he “didn’t want to bother Duchamp with his friendship,” writes Sylvere Lotringer, “until he realized that Duchamp’s health was failing. Then he decided to actively seek his company.” Playing on an electronic chess board designed by Lowell Cross, known as the inventor of the laser light show, the two created an extemporaneous composition that lasted as long as the audience, and Duchamp, could tolerate. “The concert,” Cross remembered on the fortieth anniversary of the piece, “began shortly after 8:30 on the evening of March 5, 1968, and concluded at approximately 1:00 a.m. the next morning.”

Debunking a number of misconceptions about the chessboard, Cross explains that its operation “depended upon the covering or uncovering of its 64 photoresistors.” It also contained contact microphones so that “the audience could hear the physical moves of the pieces of the board.” When either player made a move, it triggered one of several electronic “sound-generating systems” created by composers David Behrman, Gordan Mumma, David Tudor, and Cross himself. Additionally, “oscilloscopic images emanated from… modified monochrome and color television screens, which provided visual monitoring of some of the sound events passing through the chessboard.”

As Lotringer describes the scene, the two modernist giants “played until the room emptied. Without a word said, Cage had managed to turn the chess game (Duchamp’s ostensive refusal to work) into a working performance…. Playing chess that night extended life into art—or vice versa. All it took was plugging in their brains to a set of instruments, converting nerve signals into sounds. Eyes became ears, moves music.” Duchamp had given the impression he was done making art. “Cage found a way to lure him into one final public appearance as an artist,” notes the Toronto Dreams Project blog.

Indeed, Cage may have been formulating the idea for over twenty years, each time he sat down to play a game with Duchamp, and lost. When Duchamp arrived in Canada for the performance at what was called the Sightsoundsystems Festival, he had no idea that he would be participating in the headlining event.

What he found when he arrived was a surreal scene. Two of the greatest artists of the twentieth century took their seats in the middle of the stage at the Ryerson Theatre, bathed in bright light and the gaze of the audience. Photographers circled around them, shutters snapping; a movie camera whirred. The stage was a mess of gadgets. There were wires everywhere; a tangle of them plugged right into side of the chessboard. A pair of TV screens was set up on either side of the stage. The Toronto Star called it “a cross between an electronic factory and a movie set.”

Cage lost, as usual, though he was more evenly matched when he played Duchamp’s wife. The three of them, wrote the Globe, were “like figures in a Beckett play, locked in some meaningless game. The audience, staring silently and sullenly at what was placed before it, was itself a character; and its role was as meaningless as the others. It was total non-communication, all around.” The wires running from the chessboard connected to “tuners, amplifiers and all manner of electronic gadgetry,” the Star wrote, filling the room with “screeches, buzzes, twitters and rasps.”

The Star pronounced the event “infinitely boring,” a widely shared critical assessment of the night. (Cage explains the Zen of boredom in his voice-over at the top.) But we can hardly expect most reviewers of either artist’s most experimental work to respond with less than bewilderment, if not outright hostility. It was to be Duchamp’s last public appearance. He passed away a few months later. For Cage, the evening had been a success. As Cross put it, Reunion was “a public celebration of Cage’s delight in living everyday life as an art form.”

Everyday life with Duchamp meant playing chess, and there were few greater influences than Duchamp on Cage’s conceptual approach to what music could be—and what could be music. “Like Duchamp,” writes PBS, “Cage found music around him and did not necessarily rely on expressing something from within.” Further up, see Cage’s 1944, Duchamp-inspired “Chess Pieces” performed on harp and accordion, and above hear a piece he wrote for Duchamp for a sequence in Hans Richter’s 1947 surrealist film Dreams that Money Can Buy.

Related Content:

Marcel Duchamp, Chess Enthusiast, Created an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Available via 3D Printer

Play Chess Against the Ghost of Marcel Duchamp: A Free Online Chess Game

The Music of Avant-Garde Composer John Cage Now Available in a Free Online Archive

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

When John Cage & Marcel Duchamp Played Chess on a Chessboard That Turned Chess Moves Into Electronic Music (1968) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Tags: 1968, Cage, Chess, Chessboard, Duchamp, Electronic, into, John, Marcel, Moves, Music, Played, Turned .

Martin Scorsese to Teach His First Online Course on Filmmaking

Posted on September 25, 2017 by admin Posted in Culture and Heritage .

If you need to make movies, if you feel like you can’t rest until you’ve told this particular story that you’re burning to tell, then Martin Scorsese has a course for you. Through MasterClass, the director of Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, and Mean Streets is now set to teach his first online course. According to the video trailer above, Scorsese will explore in 20+ lessons everything from cinematography and editing, to working with actors, on-set directing, and developing a personal filmmaking style. The $ 90 course won’t be released until early 2018, but anyone who pre-enrolls now will get early access to the class.

While you wait, you can also take Werner Herzog’s own course on filmmaking (also offered through MasterClass). Or explore Scorsese’s lists of recommended films that we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. Find them in the Relateds right below.

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Note: MasterClass is one of our partners. So if you sign up for a course, it benefits not just you and MasterClass. It benefits Open Culture too. So consider it win-win-win.

Other MasterClass courses worth exploring include:

  • Herbie Hancock on Jazz
  • Garry Kasparov on Chess
  • Dr. Jane Goodall on the Environment
  • David Mamet on Dramatic Writing
  • Steve Martin on Comedy
  • The West Wing & The Social Network) to Teach Online Course on Screenwriting This Summer" href="http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/aaron-sorkin-the-west-wing-the-social-network-to-teach-online-course-on-screenwriting-this-summer.html" rel="bookmark">Aaron Sorkin on Screenwriting
  • Gordon Ramsay on Cooking

Related Content:

Martin Scorsese Creates a List of 39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker

Martin Scorsese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspiring Filmmaker Needs to See

Martin Scorsese Names His Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection

Great Filmmakers Offer Advice to Young Directors: Tarantino, Herzog, Coppola, Scorsese, Anderson, Fellini & More

Werner Herzog Teaches His First Online Course on Filmmaking

 

Martin Scorsese to Teach His First Online Course on Filmmaking is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Tags: Course, Filmmaking, First, Martin, Online, Scorsese, Teach .
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