Svoboda | Graniru | BBC Russia | Golosameriki | Facebook



David Bowie on Why It’s Crazy to Make Art–and We Do It Anyway (1998)

in Art, Music, Television | June 22nd, 2021

Art is useless, Oscar Wilde declared. Yet faced with, say, a painting by Kandinsky, film by Malick, or great work by David Bowie, we may feel it “impossible to escape the impression,” as Sigmund Freud wrote, “that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.” However ambiguously, art can move us beyond the selfish boundaries of the ego to connect with intangibles beyond ideas of use and uselessness.

That experience of connectedness, what Freud called the “oceanic,” stimulated by a work of art can mirror the sublime feelings awakened by nature. “A work of art is useless as a flower is useless,” Wilde clarified in a letter to a perplexed reader. “A flower blooms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers.” It’s an imperfect analogy. The flower serves quite another purpose for the bee, and for the plant.  “All of this is I fear very obscure,” Wilde admits.




The point being, from the point of view of bare survival, art makes no sense. “It’s a loony kind of thing to want to do,” says Bowie himself, in the interview clip above from a 1998 appearance on The Charlie Rose Show. “I think the saner and rational approach to life is to survive steadfastly and create a protective home and create a warm loving environment for one’s family and get food for them. That’s about it. Anything else is extra. All culture is extra…. It’s unnecessary and it’s a sign of the irrational part of man. We should just be content with picking nuts.”

Why are we not content with picking nuts? Perhaps most of us are. Perhaps “being an artist,” Bowie wonders “is a sign of a certain kind of dysfunction, of social dysfunctionalism anyway. It’s an extraordinary thing to do, to express yourself in such… in such rarified terms.” It’s a Wildean observation, but one Bowie does not make to stigmatize individuals. As Rose remarks, he has “always resisted the idea that this creativity that you have comes from any form of dysfunction or… madness.” Perhaps instead it is the market that is dysfunctional, Bowie suggests in a 1996 interview, just above, with Rose and Julian Schnabel.

Art may serve no practical purpose in an ordinary sense, but it is not only the provenance of singular geniuses. “Once it falls into the hands of the proletariat,” says Bowie, “that the ability to make art is inherent in all of us, that demolishes the idea of art and commerce, and that’s no good for business.” Wilde also saw art and commerce in fundamental tension. “Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him,” he wrote. “But this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse,” an artificial elevation and enclosure, says Bowie, of expressions that belong to everyone.

Related Content: 

Bowie’s Bookshelf: A New Essay Collection on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life

When David Bowie Launched His Own Internet Service Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

David Bowie Songs Reimagined as Pulp Fiction Book Covers: Space Oddity, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

British Actor Bob Hoskins’ Helped Thousands Learn to Read in On the Move, a 1970s “Sesame Street for Adults”

in Education, Television | June 22nd, 2021

British character actor Bob Hoskins has been remembered for “playing Americans better than Americans,” as USA Today wrote when Hoskins passed away in 2014. Characters like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’s Eddie Valiant, Nixon’s J. Edgar Hoover, and The Cotton Club’s Owney Madden stand out as some of his best performances in Hollywood. But he began his career in British film and television, playing cops and gangsters. Helen Mirren, who starred opposite him in his first major role, The Long Good Friday, and onstage in The Duchess of Malfi, penned a glowing tribute for The Guardian. “London,” she wrote, “will miss one of her best and most loving sons, and Britain will miss a man to be proud of.”

Mirren’s sentiments were echoed by British actors everywhere. Shane Meadows called him “the most generous actor I have ever worked with.” Stephen Woolley described Hoskins as a working-class hero. “With his talent, Bob gatecrashed the world of celebrity, and made all of us ordinary people feel a little better about ourselves.” It was a role he was seemingly born to play, despite his range. Hoskins was “a great actor,” writes Woolley, “yet unlike many actors he was first and foremost a courteous, sweet and caring human being. He could make monsters human and wring a smile out of any situation without a whisker of embarrassment.”




Those are the very qualities that endeared viewers to Hoskins’ first breakout character, Alf Hunt, a furniture removal man who struggled with reading and writing in On the Move, a kind of “Sesame Street for adults” that ran in 1976 on the BBC. The 10-minute shorts ran on Sunday afternoons “as part of the BBC’s adult education remit,” Mark Lawson writes at The Guardian. Hoskins’ performance brought to life for viewers “a proud man who has desperately disguised his learning difficulties.” It met a serious need among the nation’s populace.

“The show attracted 17 million viewers a week, (way beyond the size of its target audience),” notes a MetaFilter user. On the Move “helped make Hoskins famous. It was also responsible for persuading 70,000 people to sign up for adult literacy programmes.” Hoskins treasured the letters he received from viewers who decided to change their lives after seeing the show. They may well have done so because he gave his all to the character, as Lawson writes:

Handed a working-class stereotype (not for the last time in his career), Hoskins gave Alf a vulnerability and poignancy far beyond the requirements of a public information short. Apart from its intended audience of adults struggling with reading and writing, On the Move gained a large secondary following among literate viewers because, even then, Hoskins’ expressive face and growly voice made you want to watch and listen.

In each episode, Alf revealed his struggles to his friend Bert, played by Donald Gee. The show also featured inspiring interviews with adults who had taken adult literacy classes and appearances by special guest stars like Patricia Hayes and Martin Shaw (who both appear in the episode at the top). While other famous actors may disown early television work, Hoskins never did. On the Move “shared the qualities of his best stuff. Whereas most footage in Before They Were Famous type shows is calculated to be bathetic or embarrassing,” Hoskins’ earliest work does quite the opposite, explaining why he “went on to become the star he did.”

On the Move may also have earned Hoskins another title, one he might have cherished as much as any acting plaudit. George Auckland, who later directed the BBC’s adult education program, called him “the best educator Britain has produced” because of his wide reach among adults struggling with literacy in 1970s Britain. See an episode of On the Move at the top of the post and hear what commenters call “the catchiest theme song ever” just above.

via Metafilter

Related Content: 

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Documentary Featuring Some of the World’s Most Beautiful Bookstores

Growing Up Surrounded by Books Has a Lasting Positive Effect on the Brain, Says a New Scientific Study

Take The Near Impossible Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote (1964)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Igor Stravinsky Appears on American Network TV & Tells Stories About His Unconventional Musical Life (1957)

in Music, Television | June 21st, 2021

One evening in 1957, viewers all across America tuned in to see Stravinsky. The broadcast wasn’t a performance of Stravinsky’s music, although those would continue to draw television audiences well into the following decade. It was a conversation with the man himself, Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, who even when he was still alive had become an institution by virtue of his industry and innovation. “For half a century, Stravinsky’s musical explorations have dominated modern music,” says the program’s narrator. “His nearly 100 works — ballets, symphonies, religious music, even jazz — have often outraged audiences at first hearing.”

The famously “riotous” audience reaction to the Paris debut of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring had happened 44 years earlier, back when the Russian-born composer was rising to international fame. But by 1957 he’d been an American citizen for years, and it’s in his Hollywood home — and on the eve of his 75th birthday — that NBC’s crew shot this episode of Wisdom.




Having debuted just that year, Wisdom would continue to run until 1965, broadcasting long-form interviews with figures like Marcel Duchamp, Pearl S. Buck, Robert Frost, Somerset Maugham, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Here Stravinsky speaks with his young protégé, the American conductor Robert Craft, who asks him to remember various chapters of his long musical life, which included encounters with the likes of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Dylan Thomas, and Pablo Picasso.

The story begins with Stravinsky’s first improvisations at the piano during his childhood in Russia (and his first lessons, taught by a woman of nineteen: “for me that was an old maid, but of course I was in love with this old maid”). All throughout, we see flashes of the invention-above-convention sensibility that made Stravinsky more a Homo faber, as he liked to say, than a Homo sapiens. “Who invented the scale?” he asks, rhetorically. “Somebody invented the scale. If somebody invented the scale, I can change something in the scale and invent something else.” And why is it, Craft asks, that every new work of yours arouses protests in the public? “Each time I have new problems, and this new problem requires a new approach,” Stravinsky explains, and but for the public, “the idea of a new approach, of a new problem, doesn’t come to their mind.” So you’re ahead of the public – including, implicitly, the American public viewing at home? “Inevitably.”

Related Content:

Igor Stravinsky Remembers the “Riotous” Premiere of His Rite of Spring in 1913: “They Were Very Shocked. They Were Naive and Stupid People.”

The Night When Charlie Parker Played for Igor Stravinsky (1951)

Stravinsky’s “Illegal” Arrangement of “The Star Spangled Banner” (1944)

Watch 82-Year-Old Igor Stravinsky Conduct The Firebird, the Ballet Masterpiece That First Made Him Famous (1965)

Hear Igor Stravinsky’s Symphonies & Ballets in a Complete, 32-Hour, Chronological Playlist

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch a Never-Aired TV Profile of James Baldwin (1979)

in Literature, Politics, Television | June 14th, 2021

In 1979, just a couple of months into his stint with 20/20, ABC’s fledgling television news magazine, producer and documentarian Joseph Lovett was “beyond thrilled” to be assigned an interview with author James Baldwin, whose work he had discovered as a teen.

Knowing that Baldwin liked to break out the bourbon in the afternoon, Lovett arranged for his crew to arrive early in the morning to set up lighting and have breakfast waiting before Baldwin awakened:

He hadn’t had a drop to drink and he was brilliant, utterly brilliant. We couldn’t have been happier.

Pioneering journalist Sylvia Chase conducted the interview. The segment also included stops at Lincoln Center for a rehearsal of Baldwin’s play, The Amen Corner, and the Police Athletic League’s Harlem Center where Baldwin (and perhaps the camera) seems to unnerve a teen reporter, cupping his chin at length while answering his question about a Black writer’s chances:

There never was a chance for a Black writer.  Listen, a writer, Black or white, doesn’t have much of a chance. Right? Nobody wants a writer until he’s dead. But to answer your question, there’s a greater chance for a Black writer today than there ever has been.

In the Manhattan building Baldwin bought to house a number of his close-knit family, Chase corners his mother in the kitchen to ask if she’d had any inkling her son would become such a success.




“No, I didn’t think that,” Mrs. Baldwin cuts her off. “But I knew he had to write.”

Baldwin speaks frankly about outing himself to the general public with his 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room and about what it means to live as a Black man in a nation that has always favored its white citizens:

The American sense of reality is dictated by what Americans are trying to avoid. And if you’re trying to avoid reality, how can you face it?

Nearly 35 years before Black Lives Matter’s formation, he tackles the issue of white fragility by telling Chase, “Look, I don’t mean it to you personally. I don’t even know you. I have nothing against you. I don’t know you personally, but I know you historically. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t swear to the freedom of all mankind and put me in chains.”

The finished piece is a superb, 60 Minutes-style profile that covers a lot of ground, and yet, 20/20 chose not to air it.

After the show ran Chase’s interview with Michael Jackson, producer Lovett inquired as to the delay and was told that no one would be interested in a “queer, Black has-been”:

I was stunned, I was absolutely stunned, because in my mind James Baldwin was no has-been. He was a classic American writer, translated into every language in the world, and would live on forever, and indeed he has. His courage and his eloquence continue to inspire us today.

On June 24, Joseph Lovett will moderate James Baldwin: Race, Media, and Psychoanalysis, a free virtual panel discussion centering on his 20/20 profile of James Baldwin, with psychoanalysts Victor P. Bonfilio and Annie Lee Jones, and Baldwin’s niece, author Aisha Karefa-Smart. Register here.

H/T to author Sarah Schulman

Related Content: 

Why James Baldwin’s Writing Stays Powerful: An Artfully Animated Introduction to the Author of Notes of a Native Son

Watch the Famous James Baldwin-William F. Buckley Debate in Full, With Restored Audio (1965)

James Baldwin’s One & Only, Delightfully-Illustrated Children’s Book, Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976)

Listen to James Baldwin’s Record Collection in a 478-track, 32-Hour Spotify Playlist

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #95 Considers Joss Whedon’s The Nevers

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi, Television | June 10th, 2021

Mark, Erica, and Brian discuss the HBO Max show out Victorian-era super-powered feminine outcasts, helmed and now abandoned by the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, etc. It’s jam packed with steampunk gadgets, fisticuffs, social injustice, and far too many characters and plot threads to keep track of. Given that the season was reduced to a half season in light of the pandemic, does it still work? Does knowing the complaints about Joss Whedon affect our consumption of the show? Is this a faux feminism where women must undergo torture to gain strength?

Here are a few articles we considered:

Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion 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 | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Bob Ross Virtual Art Gallery: A New Site Presents 403 Paintings from The Joy of Painting Series

in Art, Data, Technology, Television | June 7th, 2021

“We don’t make mistakes. We have happy accidents,” the late Bob Ross soothed fans painting along at home, while brushing an alarming amount of black onto one of his signature nature scenes.

His mellow on-camera demeanor and flowing, wet-on-wet oil painting style were perfectly calibrated to help tightly-wound viewers relax into a right-brained groove.

The creators of the Bob Ross Virtual Art Gallery take a more left brained approach.

Having collected data on Ross’ evergreen series, The Joy of Painting, they analyzed it for frequency of color use over the show’s 403 episodes, as well as the number of colors applied to each canvas.

For those keeping score, after black and white, alizarin crimson was the color Ross favored most, and 1/4 of the paintings made on air boast 12 colors.

The data could be slightly skewed by the contributions of occasional guest artists such as Ross’ former instructor, John Thamm, who once counseled Ross to “paint bushes and trees and leave portrait painting to someone else.” Thamm availed himself of a single color — Van Dyke Brown — to demonstrate the wipe out technique. His contribution is one of the few human likenesses that got painted over the show’s 11-year public television run.

The Bob Ross Virtual Art Gallery has several options for viewing the data.

Mouse over a grid of grey rectangles to see the 403 artworks presented in chronological order, along with titles and episode numbers.

(This has all the makings of a thumping good memory game, à la Concentration… flip all the rectangles, study them, then see if you can navigate back to all the cabins or meadows.)

A bar graph, similarly composed of rectangles, reveals the colors that went into each painting.

Another chart analyzes Ross’ use of color over time, as he moved away from Burnt Umber and eased up on Pfthalo Green.

 

Indian Red was accorded but a single use, in season 22’s first episode, “Autumn Images.” (“Let’s sparkle this up. We’re gonna have fall colors. Let’s get crazy.”)

For art lovers craving a more traditional gallery experience, site creator Connor Rothschild has installed a virtual bench facing a frame capable of displaying all the paintings in random or chronological order, with digital swatches representing the paints that went into them and YouTube links to the episodes that produced them.

And for those who’d rather gaze at data science, the code is available on GitHub.

Explore the Bob Ross Virtual Art Gallery here. Scroll down to take advantage of all the options.

Related Content: 

Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Painting Free Online: 403 Episodes Spanning 31 Seasons

The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross & Banksy: Watch Banksy Paint a Mural on the Jail That Once Housed Oscar Wilde

Experience the Bob Ross Experience: A New Museum Open in the TV Painter’s Former Studio Home

Bob Ross’ Christmas Special: Celebrate, Relax, Nod Off

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Join her Necromancers of the Public Domain: The Periodical Cicada, a free virtual variety show honoring the 17-Year Cicadas of Brood X. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

When Was the Pinnacle of Saturday Night Live? A YouTuber Watches One Episode from Each Season & Reports Back

in Television | June 4th, 2021

How do we evaluate a show like Saturday Night Live? And to what, exactly, can it be compared? Before its “lackluster” debut on October 11,1975, nothing quite like it existed on television, and since that debut, everything resembling SNL exists because of SNL. The show has launched a few dozen careers, but it has also been a veritable comedy graveyard. Co-founders Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol both quit at different times, both after begging NBC to move to pre-recorded content because SNL’s production schedule is so grueling. Whether or not its formula works during any given episode, it’s truly unlike any other show on television.

Given its unique, and in recent decades, socially vaunted, place in popular culture, we generally judge Saturday Night Live by comparing it to itself — or to earlier iterations of itself, when it was funner, edgier, less formulaic, pandering, or whatever the current criticism happens to be. Is this a fair standard? Are expectations for the show’s political relevance or comic consistency too high? The lack of any serious competition for the time slot means that SNL exists in a league of its own. The standards we apply to it are necessarily subjective, and subject to change given changing social climate and the show’s increasing topicality.




“So much of what Saturday Night Live wanted to be, or what I wanted it to be when it began, was cool,” says Ebersol. Try staying cool for 45 years. So why do we still care? Maybe because everyone born in the last few decades has nostalgic memories of a golden age of SNL that just happened to coincide with their adolescence. But nostalgia, says YouTuber Drew Gooden above, “is a drug that causes us to misconstrue our memories.” We want Saturday Night Live to be “good again,” by which we mean funny in ways it was. But measuring its goodness independently of memory proves difficult.

Rather than assuming, as so many viewers do, that the show peaked in the past (say the early 80s) and has steeply declined since then, Gooden hypothesizes that an accurate graph of its quality might just as well look like a jagged line full of peaks and valleys over the decades. Saturday Night Live, that is to say, has always been consistently full of great moments and terrible ones — within the same season and often the same episode. It’s in the very nature of live TV that some ideas work and others don’t on the day, and the sketches and characters we remember from our youth may not hold up well ten, twenty, thirty, even forty years later.

Gooden decided to withhold judgment on the overall quality curve of Saturday Night Live, his favorite show, before putting in the time and effort to watch at least one episode from every year in its run. See how the show comes out in his estimation after the experiment. He may not change anyone’s mind about the best, and worst, seasons, episodes, cast members, and hosts. But he does demonstrate an admirable willingness to dig into SNL’s history and give years of comedy positively antiquated by 21st century standards a fair shake.

Related Content: 

Saturday Night Live’s Very First Sketch: Watch John Belushi Launch SNL in October, 1975

Creating Saturday Night Live: Behind-the Scenes Videos Reveal How the Iconic Comedy Show Gets Made

Classic Punk Rock Sketches from Saturday Night Live, Courtesy of Fred Armisen

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Why Do Tech Billionaires Make for Good TV Villains? Pretty Much Pop #93 Considers “Made for Love,” et al.

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Sci Fi, Television | May 31st, 2021

The tech genius has become the go-to bad guy in recent films: They’re our modern mad scientists with all imaginable resources and science at their command, able to release dystopic technology to surveil, control, and possibly murder us. Even Lex Luthor was made into a “tech bro” in Batman v. Superman.

Your Pretty Much Pop hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian discuss the HBO Max series Made for Love starring Cristin Milioti, as well as Alex Garland’s Devs, Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley, and Jed Rothestein’s documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn. How does this trope work in comedy vs. serious media? How does it relate to real-life tech moguls? Can women be villains of this sort, or is a critique of toxic masculinity part of this sort of depiction?

To learn more, read what we read:

Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion 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 | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.