Arts and Culture

As a famous first, Frank Zappa’s 1971 film 200 Motels set a standard for hundreds of wacky experimental, B-movies to come. The first full-length film shot entirely on videotape, the cheap alternative to film that had thus far been used primarily for TV shows and news broadcasts, the movie exploited the medium’s every possibility. “If there is more that can be done with videotape,” wrote Roger Ebert in his review at the time, “I do not want to be there when they do it.” The movie is not only a “joyous, fanatic, slightly weird experiment in the uses of the color videotape process"; it is also a visual encapsulation of Zappa’s most comically juvenile, most musically virtuosic sensibilities, with Ringo Star playing “Zappa as ‘a very large dwarf,’” the Mothers of Invention playing themselves, Keith Moon appearing as a nun, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra taking abuse from Zappa, and a series of rowdy, raunchy misadventures piled one atop the other. “It assaults the mind wi...

The American West has never been a place so much as a constellation of events—incursion, settlement, seizure, war, containment, and extermination in one order or another. These bloody histories, sanitized and seen through anti-indigenous ideology, formed the backdrop for the American Western—a genre that depends for its existence on creating a convincing sense of place. But where most Westerns are supposed to be set—Colorado, California, Texas, Kansas, or Montana—seems less important than that their scenery conform to a stereotype of what The West should look like. That image has, in film after film, been supplied by the towering buttes of Monument Valley. The Vox video above tells the story of how this particular place became the symbol of the American West, beginning with the ironic fact that Monument Valley isn’t actually part of the U.S., but a tribal park on the Navajo Nation reservation , inside the states of Utah and Arizona. “For centuries, only Native Americans, spec...

We hear many tragic stories of disappearing indigenous languages, their last native speakers dying out, and the symbolic and social worlds embedded in those languages going with them, unless they’re recorded (or recovered ) by historians and archived in museums. Such reporting, sad but necessary, can sometimes obscure the millions of living indigenous language speakers who suffer from systemic neglect around the world. The situation is beginning to change. The UN has called 2019 the Year of Indigenous Languages , not only to raise awareness of the loss of language diversity, but also to highlight the world’s continued linguistic richness. A 2015 World Bank report estimated that 560 different languages are spoken in Latin America alone. The South American language Quechua —once a primary language of the Incan empire—claims one of the highest number of speakers: 8 million in the Andean region, with 4 million of those speakers in Peru. Yet, despite continued widespread use, Que...

"Whatever you find weird, ugly, or nasty about a medium will surely become its signature," writes Brian Eno in his published diary  A Year with Swollen Appendices . "CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all these will be cherished as soon as they can be avoided." Eno wrote that in 1995, when digital audio and video were still cutting-edge enough to look, sound, and feel not quite right yet. But when DVD players hit the market not long thereafter, making it possible to watch movies in flawless digital clarity, few consumers with the means hesitated to make the switch from VHS. Could any of them have imagined that we'd one day look back on those chunky tapes and their wobbly, muddy images with fondness? Anyone with much experience watching Youtube has sensed the lengths to which its creators go in order to deliberately introduce into their videos the visual and sonic artifacts of a pre-digital age, from VHS color bleed...

Few artists have lived as many creative lifetimes as Miles Davis did in his 65 years, continuing to evolve even after his death with the posthumous release of a lost album Rubberband earlier this year. The album’s cover, featuring an original painting by Davis himself, may have turned fans on to another facet of the composer/bandleader/trumpeter’s artistic evolution—his career as a visual artist, which he began in earnest just a decade before his 1991 death. “During the early 1980s,” writes Tara McGinley at Dangerous Minds , Davis “made creating art as much a part of his life as making music…. He was said to have worked obsessively each day on art when he wasn’t touring and he studied regularly with New York painter Jo Gelbard.” Never one to do anything by half-measures, Davis turned out canvas after canvas, though he didn’t exhibit much in his lifetime. He painted mainly for himself. “It’s like therapy for me,” he said, “and keeps my mind occupied with something positive when I’m...

Ah, Florida… The Sunshine State. Tourists began flocking to it in earnest once the railroads expanded in the late 19th century, drawn by visions of sunset beaches, graceful palms, and plump citrus fruit in a warm weather setting. The fantasy gathered steam in the 1920s when citrus growers began affixing colorful labels to the fruit crates that shipped out over those same railroad lines, seeking to distinguish themselves from the competition with memorable visuals. These labels offered lovers of grapefruit and oranges who were stuck in colder climes tantalizing glimpses of a dreamy land filled with Spanish Moss and graceful long-legged birds. Words like “golden” and “sunshine” sealed the deal. (The reality of  citrus picking, then and now, is one of hard labor,  usually performed by underpaid, unskilled migrants.) The State Library of Florida’s  Florida Crate Label Collection has amassed more than 600 examples from the 1920s through the 1950s, many of which have ...