Arts and Culture

The Sopranos premiered on January 10, 1999, and television did not change forever — or rather, not right away. Though its treatment of the life of mid-level New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano drew large numbers of dedicated viewers right away, few could have imagined during the show's eight-year run how completely its success would eventually rewrite the rules of dramatic TV. More than twenty years later, nearly all of us place the beginning of our ongoing televisual "golden age" at the broadcast of  The Sopranos ' first episode. You can hear that epoch-making 50 minutes discussed in depth on the first episode of the new podcast Talking Sopranos ( YouTube - Apple - Spotify ), whose hosts Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa know the series more intimately than most — not least because they were on it. Fans know Imperioli and Schirripa as Tony's protégé Christopher Moltisanti and Tony's brother-in-law Bobby Baccalieri. On  Talking Sporanos th...

When American rock and roll made its way to the UK in the 1950s and 60s, along with a burgeoning folk and blues revival, many young British fans hadn’t been conditioned to think of music in the same way as their U.S. counterparts. “Unlike racially segregated Americans,” for example, “the Beatles didn’t see—or hear—the difference between Elvis and Chuck Berry,” writes Joseph Tirella , “between the Everly Brothers and the Marvelettes.” They also couldn’t see playing to segregated audiences as just one of those social customs one politely observes when touring abroad. In 1964, at the height of Beatlemania, the band was booked to play Florida’s Gator Bowl in Jacksonville just after a devastating hurricane and months after the introduction of the Civil Rights Act into Congressional deliberations. Major political shifts were happening in the country and would have happened with or without the Beatles taking a stand for integration. But they took a stand nonetheless and used their ...

Romantic poets told us that great art is eternal and transcendent. They also told us everything made by human hands is bound to end in ruin and decay. Both themes were inspired by the rediscovery and renewed fascination for the arts of antiquity in Europe and Egypt. It was a time of renewed appreciation for monumental works of art, which happened to coincide with a period when they came under considerable threat from looters, vandals, and invading armies. One work of art that appeared on the itinerary of every Grand Touring aristocrat, Leonardo’s da Vinci’s fresco The Last Supper in Milan, was made especially vulnerable when the refectory in which it was painted became an armory and stable for Napoleon’s troops in 1796. The soldiers scratched out the apostles’ eyes and lobbed rocks at the painting. Later, in 1800, Goethe wrote of the room flooding with two feet of water, and the building was also used as a prison. As every curator and conservationist knows well, grand ideas abou...

The Beastie Boys’ record-shattering Licensed to Ill is thirty-four years old. This fact might mean nothing to you, or it might mean that you are thirty-four years older than the moment the album came out in November of 1986, and suburban parents around the country, maybe even your parents, freaked out in unison. The album was a stroke of genius from producer Rick Rubin, delivering hip-hop safe for white kids while also giving them permission to be as obnoxious as possible. Ostensibly a rap record, the first ever to hit number one , Licensed to Ill also rode in on the crest of the mid-80s Satanic Panic. Rubin's decision to set its exaggeratedly juvenile rhymes to samples of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin made a defiant statement—and bringing in Slayer’s Kerry King to play guitar on “No Sleep till Brooklyn” really rubbed it in. He was simultaneously producing Slayer’s Reign in Blood , and both albums managed to terrify, and appeal to, many of the same people. Lyrically, L...

Milton Glaser died last week at the age of 91, a long life that included decade upon decade as the best-known name in graphic design. Within the profession he became as well-known as several of his designs did in the wider world: the Bob Dylan poster , logos for companies like DC Comics, the Glaser Stencil font , and above all  I ? NY . Glaser may have become an icon, but he didn't become a brand — "one of my most despised words," he says in the interview clip above . He also acknowledges that specialization, "having something no one else has," is the sine qua non of "financial success and notoriety." But "the consequence of specialization and success is that it hurts you. It hurts you because it basically doesn't aid in your development." When we succeed we usually do so because people come to rely on us to do one particular thing, and to do it well — in other words, never to fail at it. But as Glaser reminds us, "developmen...

Handwritten notes on the inside cover of one of Octavia E. Butler’s commonplace books, 1988 I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining. — Octavia E. Butler Like many authors, the late  Octavia E. Butler  took up writing at a young age. At 11, she was churning out tales about horses and romance. At 12, she saw  Devil Girl from Mars , and figured (correctly) she could tell a better story than that, using 2 fingers to peck out stories on the Remington typewriter her mother bought at her request. At 13, she found a copy of  The Writer  magazine abandoned on a bus seat, and learned that it was possible to submit her work for publication. After a decade’s worth of rejection slips, she sold her first two stories, thanks in part to her association with  the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop ,...