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Friday, May 31st, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | Metallica, REM, Led Zeppelin & Queen Sung in the Style of Gregorian Chant
Gregorian chants became a thing very briefly in the early 1990s, when German electronic group Enigma combined them with the Soul II Soul “Keep On Movin’” drum loop and that everpresent shakuhachi sample for “Sadness Part One”. And then that song was *everywhere* for the first half of the 90s, giving rise to chillout music like the Orb and The Future Sound of London.
Gregorian music faded away as a trend in dance music, but it’s never really gone away. Bolstered by some claims that the soothing voices help increase alpha waves in the brain, groups like Gregorian (created by Enigma’s Frank Peterson) set about arranging pop songs in the Gregorian style, starting in 1999.
Others have followed suit, or should I say followed cowl (such as Auscultate, which created the Queen cover below).
But Gregorian (the group) is the king of them all, and Petersen’s project has gone on to sell over 5.5 million albums.
Corny or not, the project is immensely popular worldwide, and has produced ten “Masters of Chant” albums, along with Christmas CDs and such. And while our current pop stars have to get into athletic condition for their Vegas-like shows, there’s something to be said for a group of blokes just standing around on stage singing in unison like they’re in a crypt. Looks like a decent gig. Here's a full concert:
Related Content: The History of Classical Music in 1200 Tracks: From Gregorian Chant to Górecki (100 Hours of Audio) Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. Metallica, REM, Led Zeppelin & Queen Sung in the Style of Gregorian Chant 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 | The Art & Cooking of Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali, Georgia O’Keeffe, Vincent Van Gogh & More
Mexican cuisine is as time-consuming as it is delicious. Frida Kahlo fans attracted to the idea of duplicating some dishes from the banquet served at her wedding to fellow artist Diego Rivera should set aside ample time, so as to truly enjoy the experience of making chiles rellenos and nopales salad from scratch. Sarah Urist Green’s Kahlo-themed cooking lesson, above, adapted from Marie-Pierre Colle and Frida’s stepdaughter Guadalupe Rivera’s 1994 cookbook Frida’s Fiestas: Recipes and Reminiscences of Life with Frida Kahlo, is refreshingly frank about the challenges of tackling these types of dishes, especially for those of us whose grandmas ran more toward Jell-O salad. Her self-deprecation should go a long way toward reassuring less-skilled cooks that perfection is not the goal. As she told Nuvo’s Dan Grossman: The art cooking videos are immensely fun to make… And what I’m trying to do is reach people who aren’t necessarily outwardly into art or don’t know whether they’re into art so they’re not going to click on a video that’s strictly about art. But if you can present art ideas through a cooking tutorial perhaps they’ll be more open to it. I love to cook. And I love to think about that side of art history. To that end, she takes a couple of bite-sized art breaks, to introduce viewers to Frida’s life and work, while the tomatoes are roasting.
As tempting as it is for old Frida hands to skip this well-charted terrain, doing so will not make dinner ready any faster. Why not enjoy the non-cooking related sections with the easiest item on the menu—a tequila shot? Don't trick yourself into thinking there's nothing more to learn. For instance, I did not know the Spanish for “I can’t get over this hangover,” but Frida’s pet parrot did. (Didn’t know that either.)
Green also offers some quick how-tos that could come in handy for other, less time-consuming dishes, like a sandwich or a plate of homemade pasta—everything from how to make homemade tomato sauce to denuding prickly pear cactus pads of their non-edible spines.
If you’re undaunted by the Frida recipes, perhaps you should proceed to Salvador Dali’s towering Bush of Crayfish in Viking herbs, or the Futurists’ highly suggestive Meat Sculpture. Other recipes come from Vincent Van Gogh and Georgia O'Keeffe. See above. Books referenced in the videos include: Dinner with Georgia O'Keeffe; A Painter's Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O'Keeffe; Dali's Les Diners de Gala; Van Gogh's Table at the Auberge Ravoux: Recipes From the Artist's Last Home and Paintings of Cafe Life; and again Frida’s Fiestas: Recipes and Reminiscences of Life with Frida Kahlo. View the full playlist of The Art Assignment’s Art Cooking episodes here. Related Content: The Futurist Cookbook (1930) Tried to Turn Italian Cuisine into Modern Art Salvador Dalí’s 1973 Cookbook Gets Reissued: Surrealist Art Meets Haute Cuisine Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in New York City this June for the next installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday. The Art & Cooking of Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali, Georgia O’Keeffe, Vincent Van Gogh & 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. |
| 2:00p | The First Museum Dedicated to Japanese Folklore Monsters Is Now Open
As any enthusiast of Godzilla movies knows, nobody does monsters quite like the Japanese. The cultural tradition of giant creatures laying waste to cities is known as kaij?, a combination of kai (?), "strange," and j? (?), "beast." The well of kaij? goes deep, but the well of Japanese monsterhood itself goes much deeper. Take y?kai, the category of monsters, spirits, and demons whose history goes all the way back to the first century. But it wasn't until the medieval era that depictions of y?kai —whose name combines the characters y? (?), with its connotations of attraction, bewitchment, and calamity, and kai (?), which can indicate something suspicious, a mystery, or an apparition — turned into popular entertainment. Most y?kai possess supernatural powers, sometimes used for good but often not so much. Some look human, while others, such as the turtle-like kappa and the intelligent if dissolute raccoons called tanuki (stars of Studio Ghibli animator Isao Takahata's Pom Poko), resemble animals. But the wide world of y?kai also includes shapeshifters as well as only seemingly inanimate objects. You can familiarize yourself with all of them — from the gong-banging bake ich? no sei who hang around under gingko trees to the cloth dragon shiro uneri born of a dishrag to the "temple-pecker" teratsutsuki who lives among Buddhist priests and on a diet of rage — at the English-language database Yokai.com. Demand for y?kai stories increased during the early 17th to the mid-18th century Edo period, which saw the introduction of the printing press to Japan. One popular tale of that era, Ino Mononoke Roku, tells of a young boy who must undergo 30 days of confrontations with various y?kai in the city of Miyoshi. It's no coincidence that the very first museum dedicated to y?kai has just opened in that same place. "The Miyoshi Mononoke Museum, or formally the Yumoto Koichi Memorial Japan Yokai Museum, opened in the city of Miyoshi after Koichi Yumoto, a 68-year-old ethnologist and yokai researcher in Tokyo, donated some 5,000 items from his collection in 2016," says the Japan Times. "The museum displays about 160 items from Yumoto’s collection, which includes a scroll painting of the famous folktale and crafts."
Located in Hiroshima Prefecture (also home to the Onomichi Museum of Art and its famous cats Ken-chan and Go-chan), the Miyoshi Mononoke Museum features "about 160 items from Yumoto’s collection, which includes a scroll painting of the famous folktale and crafts," an "interactive digital picture book of y?kai" as well as opportunities to "take photos with the monsters using a special camera set up at the site." You'll find a suitably odd animated promotional video for the museum, which turns into a y?kai dance party, at the top of the post. Whether or not you believe that these attractive, bewitching, calamitous, suspicious, mysterious apparitions really inhabit the world today, you have to acknowledge their knack for inhabiting every form of media that has arisen over the centuries. Related Content: Bambi Meets Godzilla: #38 on the List of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time Marilyn Monroe & Elvis Presley Star in an Action-Packed Pop Art Japanese Monster Movie Discover the Japanese Museum Dedicated to Collecting Rocks That Look Like Human Faces Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram. The First Museum Dedicated to Japanese Folklore Monsters Is Now Open 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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