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Friday, August 18th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | The Paintings of Jim Carrey: “Painting Frees Me, from the Past and Future, from Regret and Worry”
In his top-grossing comedies, actor Jim Carrey displayed an antic quality that seemed to rule over his personal life as well. While other stars used interviews as opportunities to normalise themselves to the civilians in the audience, clown prince Carrey was relentless, an uncontrollable fire hose of funny faces and voices that felt not unlike demons. All that output was exhausting, and caused many to wonder if the man was capable of calming down long enough to receive any meaningful input. His performances in films such as the Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind suggested that perhaps he was… As did the revelation that he spent a lot of his childhood in his bedroom drawing - the flip side to his crazy living room performances, staged, in part, to keep an emotionally troubled family from sinking any lower. He also drew in school, aggravating teachers with unauthorised portraits. As Carrey recalled in a 2011 interview:
These days, the funny man seems to have turned his back on performing in favor of a more contemplative visual arts practice. His most recent acting credit is over a year old. As David Bushell’s documentary short, I Needed Color, above reveals, the quantity of Carrey’s output is still impressive, but there’s a qualitative difference where the artist is concerned. His face and body are calm, and the crazed imperative to entertain seems to have left him. Watching him go about his work, one is reminded of cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry’s observations about the neurological connection between the ability to go down the rabbit hole of art and a child’s mental health: I think it’s what keeps us sane. I think about how, if I’m sitting here with a kid who’s four years old and I have all these markers and I say, do you want to draw, and that kid’s too freaked out to draw, we’d be worried about that kid a little bit, wouldn’t you? We’d be worried about them emotionally. OK, on this side I have a 40-year-old, same situation, she’s too scared to draw, but we’re not worried about her. Why? Because there is a tacit understanding that something is going on when kids are playing or [drawing] that has something to do with their mental health. All of us know that if a kid is not allowed to play till he’s 21, he’s going to be a nut. He’s going to be a psychopath, actually. The brain studies they’ve done of kids in deep play show that their brains are identical to an adult’s brain that is in creative concentration. We know that play is essential for mental health. I would argue that so is drawing. Art saves lives, right? Carrey’s earlier success affords him the luxury of time and money to immerse himself in his new vocation without limiting himself to any one style or medium. Giant paintings, tiny sculptures, works that involve black light, squeegees, or shredded canvas stitched back together with wire are all cricket. Given his movie star status, nasty reviews are to be expected, but approval is no longer what Carrey is seeking: When I paint and sculpt it stops the world for me, as if all time has been suspended. My spirit is completely engaged, my heart is engaged, and I feel completely free. I think I just like creating. All of it is a portal into present, into absolute, quiet, gentle, stillness. This involvement, this presence, is freedom from concern. That’s harmony with the universe. Those who can’t make it to Signature Galleries in Las Vegas this September 23 for a $10,000 per couple opening of Carrey’s paintings can take a gander at his work for free here.
Related Content: Jim Carrey Sings a Pretty Damn Good Cover of The Beatles “I Am the Walrus” Art Exhibit on Bill Murray Opens in the UK Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday. The Paintings of Jim Carrey: “Painting Frees Me, from the Past and Future, from Regret and Worry” 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.  |
| 11:00a | Hear the Beach Boys’ Angelic Vocal Harmonies in Four Isolated Tracks from Pet Sounds: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B” & “Good Vibrations” 
I didn’t get the Beach Boys for a while. They had provided the soundtrack to an alien world, one I knew mostly from chewing gum commercials. They were “uncool—cornball,” writes Ben Ratliff, “unenlightened” purveyors of “beach privilege.” The “narrators of Beach Boys songs used their time as they liked: amusement parks, surfing, drag racing, dating, sitting in their rooms.” They had no cares, no real burdens, just shallow summer loves and heartaches. They came off as some of the blandest, safest-sounding people on earth. Then, in a puzzling turn in the nineties, indie artists like Neutral Milk Hotel, Jim O’Rourke, and The Sea and Cake began experimenting with the complex arrangements, odd instrumentation, and sunny melodies of 60s pop artists like The Beach Boys and Burt Bacharach. This is music that can seduce us into thinking it is simplistic, childish, uninspired vanilla. Its use as background muzak in supermarkets and shopping malls confirms the impression. But critical listening explodes it. (Dig the phrasing in the otherwise silly, Bacharach/Hal David-composed “Do You Know the Way to San Jose.”)
Yes, it took a retro-hip return to '60s lounge music, bossa nova, and surf pop for many people to reconsider the Beach Boys as serious artists. And while the trend became a little cloying, once I put on the headphones and gave the radical Pet Sounds a few dozen spins, as so many songwriters I admired had gushed about doing, I got it. Of course. Yes. The arrangements, and those harmonies…. It isn’t only the technical wizardry, though there’s that. It’s how thoroughly weird those classically-inspired arrangements are. Perhaps a better way to put it would be, totally counterintuitive. What nearly any other pop arranger would naturally do with a harmony or rhythm part—just to get the house in order and showcase more important “lead” parts—Brian Wilson almost never does. As the minimalist composer John Adams put it, “more than any other songwriter of that era, Brian Wilson understood the value of harmonic surprise.” At least in Pet Sounds and the long-unfinished “labyrinth of melody” SMiLE, each part of the song sustains its own individual interest without breaking away from the miniature symphonic whole.
Even within the harmonies, there is a strange tension, an off-kilter wobbling as in a machine whose gears are all just a bit off-center. Instruments and voices go in and out of key, tempos slow and quicken. The vocal harmonies are angelic, but troubled, uncertain, maudlin, and underlined with unexpected intensity given the innocuousness of their lyrics. In the isolated vocal tracks here for “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B,” and “Good Vibrations,” you may catch it, or not. It isn’t foreboding, exactly, but a kind of uneasy recognition that the pleasures these songs celebrate will soon pass away. An Arcadian theme in the California pastoral. The tension is there in Wilson’s idol Phil Spector’s compositons as well, but the contrast is remarkably greater in Pet Sounds, of longing, nostalgia, and youth at its peak. The utopia they imagine may only appeal to a specific subset of boomer Americans, but their intricate, melodically complex, yet harmoniously appealing soundworld belongs to everyone. As Zack Schonfeld observed in a sadly prophetic review of Wilson’s Pet Sounds performance in Brooklyn last summer, “it is hard to imagine modern indie or indie-pop—or pop in general—without Pet Sounds.” (That includes, of course The Beatles, who answered with Sgt. Peppers.) “A world without Pet Sounds is a frightening dystopia,” he writes, “like imagining a world without beaches or one in which Donald Trump is president.” Maybe as you sit back and listen to the otherworldly beauty of these naked harmonies, think of all those lovely beaches we still have left.
Related Content: 89 Essential Songs from The Summer of Love: A 50th Anniversary Playlist Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear the Beach Boys’ Angelic Vocal Harmonies in Four Isolated Tracks from Pet Sounds: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “Sloop John B” & “Good Vibrations” 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. |
| 2:00p | How TV Addles Kids’ Brains: A Short Film Directed by Godfrey Reggio (Maker of Koyaanisqatsi) & Scored by Philip Glass
On October 4, 1982, "more than 5,000 people filled the Radio City Music Hall to experience a remarkable event. That event was the world premiere of Koyaanisqatsi." So says the poster for the wide release of that film, an experimental documentary without spoken words on the natural and manmade environment that neither looked nor sounded — nor felt — like anything many of its viewers had ever experienced in a movie theater before. Unable to muster any of their standard reactions, they had no choice but to sit and observe as, in slow motion and fast motion and every speed in between, waterfalls thundered, chasms yawned, skyscrapers soared, commuters scurried, and rockets launched before their eyes — all to the music of Philip Glass. You might say that Koyaanisqatsi (see trailer below), as well as its formally similar sequels Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi, puts its viewers in an altered state of mind. The trilogy's director, a former monk-in-training named Godfrey Reggio, might say the same thing about television, whose flickering blueish presence emerges from time to time in his work, but he wouldn't mean it in a good way. In 1995, between Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi, he made a short called Evidence which, in the words of koyaanisqatsi.org, "looks into the eyes of children watching television - in this case Walt Disney’s Dumbo. Though engaged in a daily routine, they appear drugged, retarded, like the patients of a mental hospital." httvs://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PirH8PAD Accompanying and in a sense commenting on their glazed, often slack-jawed expressions, we once again, as in Reggio's transfixing feature documentaries, have a Glass-composed score. Unlike moviegoers in a theater, "television viewers become prey to the television’s own light impulses, they go into an altered state — a transfixed condition where the eyes, the mind, the breathing of the subject is clearly under the control of an outside force. In a poetic sense and without exaggerating one might say that the television technology is eating the subjects who sit before its gaze." In the more than two decades since, this kind of criticism of television has given way to a more general criticism of electronic media, most of whose currently popular forms didn't exist in 1995; Reggio and Glass' most recent collaboration, 2013's Visitors, deals with "humanity's trancelike relationship with technology." You and your children may have escaped the "tractor beam that holds its subjects in total control" as Evidence depicts it, but in the 21st century the number of tractor beams has greatly multiplied. And so the question remains worth asking: which ones have you under their control? Related Content: Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. How TV Addles Kids’ Brains: A Short Film Directed by Godfrey Reggio (Maker of Koyaanisqatsi) & Scored by Philip Glass 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. |
| 6:57p | Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Because of Pink Floyd, I’ve Spent Decades Undoing the Idea That There’s a Dark Side of the Moon” In 1973, Pink Floyd released their influential concept album, The Dark Side of the Moon, which garnered both critical and commercial success. The album sold some 45 million copies, and remained on Billboard's Top LPs & Tapes chart for 741 weeks (from 1973 to 1988). All of which was great for Pink Floyd. But not so much for science and education. As Neil deGrasse Tyson explains above. "That Pink Floyd had an album with that title meant I spent decades having to undo [that fact] as an educator." That's because "there is no dark side of the moon." "There's a far side and there's a near." "But all sides of the moon receive sunlight across the month." To delve deeper into this, it's worth reading this short article (Mythbusters: Is There Really a Dark Side of the Moon?) from Yale Scientific Magazine. There, they elaborate:
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