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Friday, August 30th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | Lemony Snicket Reveals His Edward Gorey Obsession in an Upcoming Animated Documentary
Author Daniel Handler—aka Lemony Snicket—was but a child when he fortuitously stumbled onto the curious oeuvre of Edward Gorey. The little books were illustrated, hand-lettered, and mysterious. They alluded to terrible things befalling innocents in a way that made young Handler laugh and want more, though he shied from making such a request of his parents, lest the books constitute pornography. (His fear strikes this writer as wholly reasonable—my father kept a copy of The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary—aka Edward Gorey—stashed in the bathroom of my childhood home. Its perversions were many, though far from explicit and utterly befuddling to a third grade bookworm. The exceedingly economical text hinted at a multitude of unfamiliar taboos, and Gorey the illustrator understood the value of a well-placed ornamental urn.) Interviewed above for Christopher Seufert’s upcoming feature-length Gorey documentary, Handler is effusive about the depth of this early influence: The gothic setting. (Handler always fancied that an in-person meeting with Gorey would resemble the first 20 minutes of a Hammer horror movie.) The dark, unwinking humor arising from a plot as grim as that of The Hapless Child, or The Blue Aspic, the first title young Handler purchased with his own money. An intentionally murky pseudonym geared to ignite all manner of wildly readerly speculation as to the author’s lifestyle and/or true identity. (Gorey attributed various of his works to Dogear Wryde, Ms. Regera Dowdy, Eduard Blutig, O. Müde and the aforementioned Ogdred Weary, among others.) Even Lemony Snickett’s website carries a strong whiff of Gorey. In acknowledgment of this debt, Handler sent copies of the first two Snickett books to the reclusive author, along with a fan letter that apologized for ripping him off. Gorey died in April 2000, a couple of weeks after the package was posted, leaving Handler doubtful that it was even opened. Handler namechecks other artists who operate in Gorey’s thrall: filmmakers Tim Burton and Michel Gondry, musicians Amanda Palmer and Trent Reznor, and novelist Neil Gaiman. Perhaps owing to the spectacular popularity of Snickett’s Series of Unfortunate Events, Gorey has lately become a bit more of an above-ground discovery for young readers. Scholastic has a free Edward Gorey lesson plan, geared to grades 6-12. More information about Christopher Seufert’s Gorey documentary, with animations by Ben Wickey and the active participation of its subject during his final four years of life, can be found here. Related Content: Edward Gorey Talks About His Love Cats & More in the Animated Series, “Goreytelling” Edward Gorey Illustrates H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in His Inimitable Gothic Style (1960) The First American Picture Book, Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats (1928) Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inkyzine. Join her in NYC on Monday, September 9 for another season of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Lemony Snicket Reveals His Edward Gorey Obsession in an Upcoming Animated Documentary 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 Scandalous Painting That Helped Create Modern Art: An Introduction to Édouard Manet’s Olympia
Here in the 21st century, only the most sheltered among us could be shocked by the sight of a naked body. It would seem that the whole of human history has at least that in common with us: only certain societies at certain times have considered nudity a force worth suppressing. But then, has the problem ever been nudity in general, or rather the context, the nature, and the implications of particular instances of nudity? It's fair to say that Titian's Venus of Urbino has scandalized practically no one. Yet three centuries later, Édouard Manet's outwardly similar 1865 canvas Olympia sent shockwaves through the Paris art world. Why? The rules of the Paris Academy of Fine Arts at the time dictated that "great art was supposed to convey a moral or intellectual message," says the narrator of Vox's video essay on Olympia above. "All acceptable art fell into one of five categories, ranked by their capacity to deliver those messages." The lesser of these were still lifes and landscapes, in the middle fell genre paintings, and the greatest were portraits and historical works. And "equally important to what was painted was how it was painted," with more points going to "idolized, prettified visions of the world, smooth and beautiful with no body hair and flawless skin," all painted in a way "that follow the rules of depth and perspective, meaning it looks like it could exist in the real world." The Academy of Fine Arts would pay little regard, then, to the "stark and unnatural colors" of Olympia, its "rough and textured" brushstrokes, and its much "flatter and less complex" look than the Renaissance realism idolized in those days. That Manet would dare give his obvious "homage" to the Venus of Urbino a title like Olympia, a common nom de guerre for prostitutes in 19th-century Paris, caused some seriously ruffled feathers as well. So why did the Academy put Manet's painting on display in the first place? "It probably had something to do with his growing popularity. You can see his influence so clearly in what came next. He led the charge towards Modernism in the late 1800s, starting with the Impressionists — Monet, Degas — who adopted his penchant for modern themes and lucent brushstrokes." A more 20th-century reading of Olympia holds up the painting as proof that "no one entity gets to decide what art should look like." An episode of the ArtCurious podcast about Olympia goes further still, claiming for Manet's subject the status of a feminist icon. But even the painting's contemporary detractors saw something important in it. Émile Zola at first seemed to dismiss the work by writing, "You wanted a nude, and you chose Olympia, the first that came along." But he also admitted that Olympia captured something more genuine than even the most gloriously realistic paintings could: "When our artists give us Venuses, they correct nature, they lie. Édouard Manet asked himself why lie, why not tell the truth; he introduced us to Olympia, this fille of our time, whom you meet on the sidewalks." Related Content: The Most Disturbing Painting: A Close Look at Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” Van Gogh’s Ugliest Masterpiece: A Break Down of His Late, Great Painting, The Night Café (1888) 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 or on Facebook. The Scandalous Painting That Helped Create Modern Art: An Introduction to Édouard Manet’s Olympia 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. |
| 5:39p | How Marion Stokes, an Activist Librarian, Recorded 30 Years of TV News on 70,000 Video Tapes: It’s All Now Being Digitized and Put Online “Nothing is more important than television,” said J.D. Salinger (as impersonated, that is, in an episode of Bojack Horseman). A passive, pacifying medium—“cool,” as Marshall McLuhan called it—TV has also long been an easy target for punditry, for many decades before the perpetrator du jour, video games. Television spread ignorance, was “the drug of the nation," said Michael Franti, peddled fake heroes on “channel zero,” said Public Enemy, and would lead to an “electrical re-tribalization of the West,” McLuhan predicted (and further explained in this interview). Marion Stokes set out to do more than any of the men above who made pronouncements about television. She dedicated her life to preserving the evidence, taping television news for over 33 years, from 1979 “until the day she died,” writes the Internet Archive, who now hold Stokes’ “unique 71k+ video cassette collection” and intend to digitize all of it. Stokes “was a fiercely private African American social justice champion, librarian, political radical, TV producer, feminist, Apple Computer super-fan and collector like few others.” She “questioned the media’s motivations and recognized the insidious intentional spread of disinformation…. Ms. Stokes was alarmed. In a private herculean effort, she took on the challenge of independently preserving the news record of her times in its most pervasive and persuasive form—TV.” She also preserved three decades of televised critiques of television. She began making her archive at the beginning of the Iran Hostage Crisis on November 14, 1979. “She hit record and never stopped,” her son Michael Metelits says in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, “a newly released documentary,” reports Atlas Obscura, “about [Stokes] and the archival project that became her life’s work.” In one remarkable example of TV critique, at the top, we see William Davidon, professor of Physics at Haverford College, decrying television for spreading ignorance, social irresponsibility, and passive consumption, making people unable to participate in the political process. The roundtable discussion took place on a 1968 episode of Input. A little over a year later, writes the Internet Archive, Davidon “would take an action of great social consequence,” breaking into an FBI field office with seven others and stealing the evidence that “revealed COINTELPRO.” (They were never caught, and Davidon’s role only came out posthumously.) Then known as Marion Metelits, Stokes co-produced Input, a local Philadelphia Sunday morning talk show, with her future husband John S. Stokes Jr., and both of them appear on the program above (both credited as representing the Wellsprings Ecumenical Center). The conversation ranges widely, with Ms. Metelits and Davidon spiritedly defending “human potential” against too-rigid systems of classification and manipulation. There are a few dozen more episodes of Input currently at the Internet Archive, with panels featuring academics, activists, and clergy (such as the episode explaining, sort of, the “Wellsprings Ecumenical Center.”) It’s a hard-hitting, controversial show for a local broadcast, and it gives us a detailed view of a range of both popular and radical positions of the time, including Stokes’, which we can learn more about in the journals, notes, lists, newspaper and magazine clippings, pamphlets, leaflets, handbills, and more she collected since 1960, many of which have also been digitized at the Internet Archive. Stokes backed her views with action. She was “surveilled by the government for her early political activism,” Atlas Obscura writes, and “attempted to defect to Cuba” with her first husband Melvin Metelits. She kept her recording project private, “eschewed Tivo” and “never sent an email in her life.” She also made a small fortune in Apple stock, which funded her project and “the massive storage space she required as the sole force behind it.” Stokes left us no doubt as to why she documented thirty years of TV news. But those documents get to speak for themselves—or they will, at least. Stokes recorded far more than her own program, three decades more. And the Internet Archive is currently “endeavoring to help make sure” the entire collection “is digitized and made available online to everyone, forever, for free.” If television had, and maybe still has, the power ascribed to it by its many astute critics, then Marion Stokes’ painstaking archive offers an invaluable means of understanding how we got to where we are, if not how to change course. Stokes’ collection, and the documentary about her life, show "how the news was going to evolve into an addiction,” as Owen Gleiberman writes at Variety. The project took over her life and fractured her relationships. “Even if you’re obsessed with the inaccuracy of TV news, it has still entrapped you, like a two-way mirror that won’t let you see the other side.” If the medium is the message, the other side might always be more television. via Atlas Obscura Related Content: Hear Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage (1967) New Archive Makes Available 800,000 Pages Documenting the History of Film, Television & Radio Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness How Marion Stokes, an Activist Librarian, Recorded 30 Years of TV News on 70,000 Video Tapes: It’s All Now Being Digitized and Put Online 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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