Watch: The Secret Animation Teachings of Terry Gilliam (1974)

Monty Python member, film director, screenwriter and animator Terry Gilliam shows the how to of his cut out animation style on British TV’s Bob Godfrey’s Do-It-Yourself Animation Show in 1974.

Godfrey’s show, which made animation accessible to the masses by taking the mystery out of the production process, was vastly influential and inspired an entire generation of kids in England, including Nick Park, who created Wallace & Gromit, Jan Pinkava, who directed the Pixar short Geri’s Game, and Richard Bazley, an animator on Pocahontas, Hercules, and The Iron Giant.

Below is a short BBC 2 documentary on Bob Godfrey.

New Music Video: Sandwitches “Back to Sea” (aka Women Who Bowl)

San Francisco’s Sandwitches have been plugging away at their craft for a couple years now, sprinkling their barbed, alluring electric folk briars across unsuspecting gardens in the Bay Area and beyond. Previous releases, such as the swampy ecstasy of How To Make Ambient Sadcake and last year’s more expansive EP, Duck Duck Goose!, captured distinct sides of the trio.  Their latest album Mrs. Jones’ Cookies, which features the single “Back to Sea”, continues to unify their uniquely whimsical and creepy vision.

Mrs. Jones’ Cookies is out now via Empty Cellar Records

From the video’s director Caitlin Durlak:

Last season my Grandma’s bowling team called it there last. I was lucky enough to be there with my video camera and capture a bit of history. This Friday Gram turns another year older and I made her this music video as a gift. I hope that it brings a smile to your face, I know it helps cheer me up!

Watch: This Is Modern Art (documentary)

This Is Modern Art is a series written and presented by the English art critic Matthew Collings for BBC.

The series, originally released in 1999, won several awards including a BAFTA. It became popular both because of its sometimes jokey and sometimes thoughtful explanations of the work and attitude of a new wave of artists that had been publicized in the British mass media, and because of its author’s witty and irreverent, though highly informed, commentary style.

Collings focuses on the current state of modern art, and looks back at Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol to see how they changed the definition of art, and reveals the ways modern art attempts to shock the audience.

Collings also investigates whether the once accepted view of art as merely a thing of beauty prevails today, examining the works of various artists.

We’ve embedded all six episodes into one youtube playlist for your viewing pleasure.

Episode 1 – “I am a Genius”, shortlists Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol for the “genius” category.
Episode 2 – “Shock! Horror!”, opens with Damien Hirst’s vitrines of cut-up cows and goes on to an in-depth and welcome discussion of Goya.
Episode 3 – “Lovely, Lovely”, examines the idea of beauty: is it still a valid idea in Modern art?
Episode 4 – “Nothing Matters”, is devoted largely to Minimalism, starting with Martin Creed’s roomful of white balloons…
Episode 5 – “Hollow Laughter” is all about Modern art jokes or perhaps jokes used in Modern art.
Episode 6 –  ”The Shock of the Now”, asks: “Could it be indeed that the Modern art ‘we’ have chosen is vacuous or empty?”

Artist Shout Out: Walter Inglis Anderson

Walter Inglis Anderson was an American painter, writer, naturalist and bicycle enthusiast.

Artist Bio:

Walter Inglis Anderson was born in 1903 in New Orleans to George Walter Anderson, a grain merchant, and Annette McConnell Anderson, an artist. His mother’s love of art, music, and literature strongly influenced Walter (called “Bob” by his friends and family) and his two brothers, Peter and Mac. Anderson was educated at a private boarding school, then attended the Parsons Institute of Design in New York and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where his drawings earned him a scholarship for study abroad. He traveled throughout Europe and was particularly impressed with the cave art he saw at Les Eyzies in France. His wide-ranging interests included extensive reading of poetry, history, natural science and art history. He pursued man’s search for meaning in books of folklore, mythology, philosophy, and epics of voyage and discovery.

Anderson returned to Ocean Springs and married a Radcliffe graduate, Agnes (Sissy) Grinstead, started a family, and went to work creating molds and decorating earthenware at Shearwater Pottery, founded by his brother Peter. Anderson felt that an artist should create affordable work that brought pleasure to others, and in return, the artist should be able to pursue his artistic passions. In the 1930s, he worked on regional Works Progress Administration mural projects and began to view his role in art as a muralist.

It was in the late 1930s that Anderson first succumbed to mental illness. He was diagnosed with severe depression and spent three years in and out of hospitals. Following his hospitalizations, Anderson joined his wife and small children at her father’s antebellum home in Gautier, Mississippi. The pastoral tranquillity of the “Oldfields” plantation provided an ideal setting for recuperation. During this period, he rendered thousands of disciplined and compelling works of art which reflected his training, intellect, and extraordinary grasp of the history of art.

In 1947, with the understanding of his family, Anderson left his wife and children and embarked on a private and very solitary existence. He lived alone in a cottage on the Shearwater compound, and increased his visits to Horn Island, one of a group of barrier islands along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He would row the 12 miles in a small skiff, carrying minimal necessities and his art supplies. Anderson spent long periods of time on this uninhabited island over the last 18 years of his life. There he lived primitively, working in the open and sleeping under his boat, sometimes for weeks at a time.

He endured extreme weather conditions, from blistering summers to hurricane winds and freezing winters. He painted and drew a multitude of species of island vegetation, animals, birds, and insects, penetrating the wild thickets on hands and knees and lying in lagoons in his search to record his beloved island paradise. Anderson’s obsession to “realize” his subjects through his art, to be one with the natural world instead of an intruder, created works that are intense and evocative.

Omitted from mainstream histories of American painting, Anderson’s work has not received sufficient critical attention, perhaps because he chose to live in a small Southern town, patiently acquiring what he called “definite knowledge” of local forms. Fiercely independent in spirit, indifferent to his own “career,” Anderson did nothing to cultivate fame or critical attention and sometimes seemed to flee them. When the Brooklyn Museum invited him to an exhibition of his linoleum block prints in 1948, he chose instead to travel to China, where he hoped to gaze upon unknown landscapes and examine Tibetan murals (the China trip ended, deep inland, when his passport and other belongings were stolen and Anderson returned, partly on foot, to his point of departure in Hong Kong.)

Among Anderson’s most vivid writings are logbooks recording his travels by bicycle to New York (1942), New Orleans (1943), Texas (1945), China (1949), Costa Rica (1951) and Florida (1960); an account of his life among the pelican colonies of North Key, in the Chandeleurs; and about 90 journals of his trips to Horn Island, off the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, in which he combines close observation of the natural world with reflection on art and nature. Another noteworthy log describes a walking tour to a colony of sand hill cranes north of Gautier, Mississippi in January 1944.

Walter Anderson died at the age of 62 in a New Orleans hospital of lung cancer. Much of the work survived only by chance; it was discovered in drifts, like autumn leaves, throughout his cottage after his death. Those found treasures present the viewer today with a fascinating opportunity to share Anderson’s vision.

In 2005 Hurricane Katrina damaged or destroyed much of Walter Anderson’s work which was housed in the concrete vault on the Anderson’s property in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. A group of professors and students from Mississippi State University (and others) volunteered their time and facilities to help save and preserve Anderson’s work.

See four more works by Anderson at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Form and Fantasy: The Block Prints of Walter Anderson features full-color and black-and-white reproductions of over 250 of the artist’s prints.

Bio taken from the Walter Anderson Museum of Art and Wikipedia.

“Hummingbirds”

“Blue Crabs” – 1960

“Frogs, Bugs Flowers” – 1960

“Thistle”

Music Archive: James Brown Live at the Boston Garden – April 5, 1968

This is the actual April 5, 1968 concert James Brown gave at the Boston Garden on the day following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jump ahead to to the 7:20 mark if you want to skip the introduction by MC Danny Ray.

According to the History Channel: 

On the morning after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., city officials in Boston, Massachusetts, were scrambling to prepare for an expected second straight night of violent unrest. Similar preparations were being made in cities across America, including in the nation’s capital, where armed units of the regular Army patrolled outside the White House and U.S. Capitol following President Johnson’s state-of-emergency declaration. But Boston would be nearly alone among America’s major cities in remaining quiet and calm that turbulent Friday night, thanks in large part to one of the least quiet and calm musical performers of all time. On the night of April 5, 1968, James Brown kept the peace in Boston by the sheer force of his music and his personal charisma.

Brown’s appearance that night at the Boston Garden had been scheduled for months, but it nearly didn’t happen. Following a long night of riots and fires in the predominantly black Roxbury and South End sections of the city, Boston’s young mayor, Kevin White, gave serious consideration to canceling an event that some feared would bring the same kind of violence into the city’s center. The racial component of those fears was very much on the surface of a city in which school integration and mandatory busing had played a major role in the recent mayoral election. Mayor White faced a politically impossible choice: anger black Bostonians by canceling Brown’s concert over transparently racial fears, or antagonize the law-and-order crowd by simply ignoring those fears. The idea that resolved the mayor’s dilemma came from a young, African American city councilman name Tom Atkins, who proposed going on with the concert, but finding a way to mount a free, live broadcast of the show in the hopes of keeping most Bostonians at home in front of their TV sets rather than on the streets.

Atkins and White convinced public television station WGBH to carry the concert on short notice, but convincing James Brown took some doing. Due to a non-compete agreement relating to an upcoming televised concert, Brown stood to lose roughly $60,000 if his Boston show were televised. Ever the savvy businessman, James Brown made his financial needs known to Mayor White, who made the very wise decision to meet them.

The broadcast of Brown’s concert had the exact effect it was intended to, as Boston saw less crime that night than would be expected on a perfectly normal Friday in April. There was a moment, however, when it appeared that the plan might backfire. As a handful of young, male fans—most, but not all of them black—began climbing on stage mid-concert, white Boston policemen began forcefully pushing them back. Sensing the volatility of the situation, Brown urged the cops to back away from the stage, then addressed the crowd. “Wait a minute, wait a minute now WAIT!” Brown said. “Step down, now, be a gentleman….Now I asked the police to step back, because I think I can get some respect from my own people.”

Brown successfully restored order while keeping the police away from the crowd, and continued the successful peacekeeping concert in honor of the slain Dr. King on this day in 1968.