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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg@theradr.bsky.social |
OK besides this below and DEVO coming out of the Kent State massacre, what are other facts you have about the evolution of art / music /etc that wouldn't be obvious if you didn't know but, retroactively, explain and/or illuminate a LOT ?
137 replies 124 reposts 614 likes
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Silly B Man
@lawnerd.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The headline is better than anything i could say to describe it
2 replies 10 reposts 81 likes
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The Abominable Dr Workman
@drpaulabominable.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The Baby Boomers are often given credit for culture in the 60s, but they were too young for that. The art and culture of the 1960s, was created by people who were children during WWII, and experienced rationing and dislocation during their early childhoods.
3 replies 13 reposts 122 likes
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Tom Dennis
@thomasadennis.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Also: - Paul Stanley of KISS is a big Rod Stewart fan, and wrote "Hard Luck Woman" as a tribute/possible cover song for Rod. - Paul Verhoeven's reimagining of Heinlein's Starship Troopers as fascist propaganda is due to his being in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation.
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Tom Dennis
@thomasadennis.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The look of the Predator in that movie franchise was due to Stan Winston (legendary SFX/makeup artist) was sitting next to James Cameron on a flight and Cameron said that he'd always wanted to see an alien with mandibles.
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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critter
@neocritter.com
[ View ] |
A significant portion of modern music plays over variations on a drum loop from 1969. Odds are good you recognize it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJf9...
1 replies 9 reposts 19 likes
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Gwen C. Katz
@gwenckatz.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Nearly all the French post-impressionists were anarchists. And a lot of them watched the military massacre tens of thousands of civilians during the fall of the Paris Commune in 1871. Many of them were young children at the time.
1 replies 4 reposts 39 likes
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Ben from Crudely Drawn Swords
@glenatron.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The Iowa Writers Workshop and the Paris Review were very significant in the development of the literary fiction genre in the second half of the twentieth century. Both were supported and funded by the CIA.
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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🌾 LJH 🌾
@greyscaleljh.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Rick James and Neil Young were in a band called the Mynah Birds.
2 replies 9 reposts 39 likes
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Paul Hostetler
@phostetlerart.bsky.social
[ View ] |
LSD jam bands like the Grateful Dead played rotating shows in a handful of San Francisco venues like the Fillmore. The 4-6 graphic designers of the posters for these shows, invented the art nouveau/vibrating color/bubble-lettering style that people think of as “60s”.
0 replies 0 reposts 18 likes
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Cindy White
@writewhite.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The reason summer is a big time for movie releases is because in the 1920s movie theaters were often the only public buildings that were reliably air-conditioned. The first modern air-conditioning system designed for humans was installed in the Rivoli Theater in NYC in 1925.
6 replies 11 reposts 69 likes
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Mansfield Mule
@mansfieldmule.bsky.social
[ View ] |
In 1816, Mary Shelly, Percy Bysshe Shelly, John Polidori, and Lord Byron had a competition to see who wrote the best horror story. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein. Polidori wrote a short story "The Vampyre" (1819), the first published modern vampire story.
2 replies 1 reposts 16 likes
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Seán-Patrick Burke
@jawsvthereturn.bsky.social
[ View ] |
This is a pretty obvious / already talked about one, but STAR WARS is space Vietnam.
2 replies 1 reposts 6 likes
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Kate Tuttle
@katekilla.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Westerns being about returning soldiers who try and often fail to re-integrate into peaceful communities after seeing and taking part in gruesome and unfathomable violence.
2 replies 1 reposts 19 likes
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I Still Use Winamp
@0j.io
[ View ] |
I heard a fascinating podcast episode a few years ago about how the interwar explosion in whodunnit fiction served a way to process death in a more manageable fashion.
2 replies 2 reposts 19 likes
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Décervelage
@decervelage.bsky.social
[ View ] |
It can be argued that most of the Universal horror pictures were a reaction to death in the trenches, maimed WWI vets, and Europe as “the menacing other”.
1 replies 0 reposts 12 likes
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Steve Horton
@stevehorton.bsky.social
[ View ] |
During a perfect recording of LIFE ON MARS, at the piano coda at the end, the studio phone rang, seemingly wrecking the take! But much to the consternation of the others, Bowie liked how it sounded. You can hear it ringing on the album.
0 replies 3 reposts 37 likes
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@ivory1.bsky.social
[ View ] |
When they were children, both Joni Mitchell and Neil Young had lengthy hospital stays after contracting polio.
1 replies 2 reposts 3 likes
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Country Jim
@countryjim.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The mullet was not known as the mullet until the mid-90s, when it was christened thus in the second issue of the Beastie Boys Grand Royal magazine.
2 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
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Wendy Qualls
@wendyqualls.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I did a fascinating paper in college on the evolution of techno music and how it’s inexplicably entwined with the spread of ecstasy. The music got brighter when E was available and darker when LSD was the main drug of choice at raves.
2 replies 10 reposts 60 likes
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tru
@tootru.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Dick Dale, father of surf rock, is of Lebanese descent and that heavily influenced his musical style.
youtu.be/ZIU0RMV_II8?...
2 replies 13 reposts 65 likes
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Brian Anderson
@bganderson.bsky.social
[ View ] |
A while back it occurred to me why all the anime tropes of missing or distant fathers would have developed in post-war Japan.
1 replies 5 reposts 99 likes
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Muppet for President
@lally.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Shel Silverstein wrote the lyrics to “A Boy Named Sue” and pretty much a whole album for Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show (gonna be on the over of Rolling Stone)
3 replies 3 reposts 23 likes
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Rodney Ascher
@rodneyascher.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Neil Young's atypical, largely electronic album 'Trans' was created for his disabled son.
www.pastpri.me/home/neil-yo....
1 replies 3 reposts 40 likes
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Elana Levin
@levin.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Early in the UK punk scene punk shows used to spin reggae between bands. So punk bands started playing covers but it didn’t gel till Specials founder Jerry Dahmers brought a Prince Buster record to practice & said “this is uptempo so it’s gonna work better”. Hence 2nd wave ska apple.co/44Sq8TI
2 replies 3 reposts 17 likes
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Freyaa🍉❤️🔥🇵🇸
@freyaa.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Twilight Zone came out of Rod Serling's attempts to talk about the murder of Emmett Till but he kept getting censored
1 replies 32 reposts 96 likes
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Weyodi OldBear
@weyodi.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I've always thought that the fact that so many early punks were the children of holocaust survivors shaped the music as a function of generational trauma.
1 replies 0 reposts 17 likes
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tweety fish
@sifu.tweety.fish
[ View ] |
The entire genre of dancehall (more or less) came about when a reggae producer repurposed a "rock" beat he accidentally discovered on a casio kid's toy keyboard. People recently discovered the long-anonymous Japanese woman who programmed the beat was in fact a huge reggae fan and scholar.
13 replies 165 reposts 424 likes
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Philip the Italic
@fernmonkey.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The jogging craze of the early 80s was sparked by the Sony Walkman. Going for a run is an entirely different proposition when you can listen to your own music right there in your ears.
1 replies 1 reposts 23 likes
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Robin Baraybar
@robinbaraybar.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I'm so glad you asked this question. The responses are amazing.
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Unfork Statistics
@btjo.bsky.social
[ View ] |
This is ace: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcG_...
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Mark Gilman
@markgilman.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Noir about post war truma, "vets w/ PTSD & combat skills: the cops & criminals would have proudly died for each other like a year ago so its super fucked up when they fight, those involved in crime on either side are failing to reintegrate into civilian life"
threadreaderapp.com/thread/17843...
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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@golvio.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The person responsible for the current form of deep dish pizza as we know it was a Black chef named Alice Mae Redmond, who rotated as head chef between 2-3 of Chicago’s favorite pizza restaurants, but never owned her own restaurant. youtu.be/5BbUNIAPbK8?...
2 replies 24 reposts 64 likes
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Messire Nicolas
@messirenicolas.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Much of impressionnism happened because of the ability to travel by train and paint outside.
5 replies 9 reposts 184 likes
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Guillaume Babey
@williambabey.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Engravings were probably the first true tool of art globalisation. They were the first means of art diffusion, reproduction, and preservation (if the original painting was lost or destroyed). Without engravings and etchings, el Greco would never have learned from the "modern" masters.
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Guillaume Babey
@williambabey.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Western art history mostly stems from Vasari's "Lives", which was primarily political propaganda to prove modernity in art originated in Tuscany, as to please Vasari's patron and protector, Cosimo di Medici, on his quest to become Duke. Academic interest in art was political from the get-go.
1 replies 3 reposts 15 likes
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Guillaume Babey
@williambabey.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Lots of Renaissance paintings that have strange proportions or forced perspectives were Altar pieces, where you would see them at a high angle. These compositional tricks were meant to compensate for that angle view.
0 replies 3 reposts 32 likes
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Guillaume Babey
@williambabey.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Impressionism and social realism wouldn't have emerged the way they did without the technological inovation that was tubed paint. It facilitated outdoors painting, natural and urban observation, and therefore a new focus on everyday subjects compared to classical painting bound by the workshop.
0 replies 9 reposts 35 likes
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Ward Q. Normal
@wardqnormal.bsky.social
[ View ] |
In the late-70s/early-80s, UK bands found it increasingly inconvenient to appear on "Top of the Pops," so they recorded music videos for the show instead. When MTV launched, there was a huge supply of new wave British bands' videos to show, which directly led to the "second British invasion."
0 replies 0 reposts 6 likes
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Anna Holmes
@annabookwriter.bsky.social
[ View ] |
JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis had an antagonist best frenemyship. Tolkien gave Lewis crap for his biblical allegories and Lewis was purported to say “not more ELVES” when Tolkien sent LOTR. Tolkien was also a professor who was known to give purposely terrible lectures so he could go back to writing.
8 replies 5 reposts 117 likes
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Anna Holmes
@annabookwriter.bsky.social
[ View ] |
George Lucas REALLY wanted to impress Spielberg, Coppola, et al, but the first time he showed them Star Wars they laughed him out of their little boys’ club. He then gave it to his ex-wife to edit, and she is the only reason it became a hit. She did not work on the prequels. Take it as you will.
9 replies 20 reposts 290 likes
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a rising cloud of gnats seen against the sunlight
@waspsarenotbees.bsky.social
[ View ] |
hammer-on and pull-off, guitarists' conventional terms for slurred notes, were originally coined by Pete Seeger in the 1940s when he wrote "How to Play the 5-String Banjo"
1 replies 1 reposts 8 likes
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A Wooloo for all seasons
@mockwooloo.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Boris Karloff had a very distinctive slow and careful way of speaking - even by the standards of actors in his era - that was a major part of his screen presence. This is something he developed because he had a stutter as a child.
3 replies 4 reposts 100 likes
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Rosamundi
@rosamundi.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Not art, sorry, but the bicycle caused a significant improvement in the health of the population because it became easier to travel further afield to find a partner, you weren't restricted to a nearby and possibly related dating pool.
cyclingmagazine.ca/sections/new...
0 replies 2 reposts 9 likes
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Alex Merz
@merz.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Chrissie Hynde, later to lead of The Pretenders, was also at Kent State that day, with her friends who would go on to found DEVO.
1 replies 2 reposts 35 likes
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Prairie Rose Clayton
@hooverdam.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The reason "football" in the US came to refer to the modified rugby version of the game, not the association rules, is because back when the two codes were imported over here, they were college sports. Harvard, king shit of college sports at the time, went with the gridiron one + everyone followed
1 replies 2 reposts 35 likes
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Dave "I Dissent" Conrad
@dconrad.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I don't know if it explains or illuminates anything, but the song Mony Mony got its title when Tommy James, of Shondells fame, saw the sign on the Mutual of New York insurance building.
0 replies 1 reposts 2 likes
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jjjk7
@jjjk7.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The D.I.Y. creation of hip hop is the result of the collapse of music and art programs in 1970s NYC public schools after white flight. Out of rubble and neglect, a new culture was formed.
1 replies 14 reposts 146 likes
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word
@words.bsky.social
[ View ] |
chet atkins had a bad back and had to sleep sitting up and would do so strumming a guitar
0 replies 0 reposts 7 likes
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Deramin
@deramin.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I started watching the silent film masterpiece Metropolis (1927) last night. The 2010 restored version is an absolute triumph of archival film research. Absolutely incredible to see where so many things in both Deco Futurism and the entire medium of film came directly from that film.
1 replies 0 reposts 7 likes
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antiprohibitionist
@antiprohibitionist.bsky.social
[ View ] |
David Bowie of the late 1970s: cocaine.
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Patrick Smith
@drpaddysmith.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Murano glass was uniquely clear because they were burning marsh samphire - which grows abundantly on the Venetian lagoon - for ash, instead of trees. Marsh samphire sequesters sodium to survive in a salty environment, giving soda ash which makes better glass.
0 replies 0 reposts 5 likes
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Mudgie
@mudgie.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Chumbawamba is a 1 hit wonder because they're anarchists who told people to pirate music and steal from corporations. They're who catalog is stuffed full of political music that continued after Tubthumping. They 1000% lived what they sang as well.
0 replies 1 reposts 9 likes
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Smash
@smash948.bsky.social
[ View ] |
1). The Archies was conceived by Don Kirshner as a result of relentless feuding between himself and the members of The Monkees. The members didn’t play on the early recordings and wanted desperately to do so. Kirshner, fed up, moved on and “formed” The Archies (a cartoon) [CONTINUED]
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Chris Adamson
@realinvalidname.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Pokémon GO arguably exists only because the USSR shot down a South Korean airliner that was off course and had drifted into Soviet airspace. President Reagan responded by opening up the in-the-works Global Positioning System to civilian use. Now we all have GPS. www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/spe...
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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David Seaver
@davidseaver.bsky.social
[ View ] |
IIRC, Lemmy became a roadie for The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and toured as such for a year or so. Supposedly, he and another British roadie were given thank-you gifts by Hendrix: valises full of Sandoz LSD. This sudden influx may be a bit of a hidden variable in the late 60s UK scene.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Madeline Ashby
@madelineashby.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The role of Gospel choirs as training grounds for popular musicians and vocalists.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Dan Lansdowne
@danlansdowne.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Despite being heavily populated by white people (Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, etc.), the genre of folk rock got a lot of its sound from Tom Wilson, a Black record producer.
1 replies 6 reposts 38 likes
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Ele Willoughby
@minouette.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The Victorian mauve fashion craze came about following Queen Victoria & Empress Eugénie's choice of mauve fashion because an 18yo undergrad chemist William Henry Perkin discovered what became the 1st synthetic organic dye when cleaning black sludge after a failed attempt to make quinine for malaria.
2 replies 5 reposts 27 likes
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Ele Willoughby
@minouette.bsky.social
[ View ] |
How Cubism breaks from a single favoured perspective or absolute frame of reference & attempts to break down subjects into geometrical shapes from multiple points of view can be tied to advancements in non-Euclidian geometry in math, special relativity & the revolution in early 20th century physics.
0 replies 0 reposts 7 likes
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Memento Rori
@roricomics.bsky.social
[ View ] |
House music was born in part from Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago: gimletmedia.com/shows/undone...
*deleted & reposted to correct an error
4 replies 4 reposts 39 likes
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Memento Rori
@roricomics.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Also, when trade was "opened up" with Japan in the 1860s, ukiyo-e prints became a sensation in Europe, forever changing Western composition style and in some ways birthing modern ephemera/ad poster style.
4 replies 6 reposts 61 likes
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Memento Rori
@roricomics.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Early modern art movements like cubism were inspired by (almost certainly pilfered) African Art Exhibits in Europe.
1 replies 1 reposts 42 likes
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James Harbeck
@sesquiotic.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The metal-and-studs look of heavy metal in the ’80s got its start from Judas Priest, and specifically its lead singer, Rob Halford, who—though he didn't publicly come out until 1998—was an avid member of the local gay leather scene, which is where the look came from. (Straight fans were oblivious.)
0 replies 1 reposts 10 likes
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Zone VI
@fredfred.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Dadaism and its nihilism comes directly from the experience of millions slaughtered in the Great War, and the mechanical means to do so. Also v political: “Dadaist artists … maintained political affinities with radical politics on the left-wing and far-left politics.”
1 replies 4 reposts 34 likes
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Charlie Stross
@cstross.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The Sex Pistols were a boy band created by Malcolm McLaren, to promote the clothes sold by the fashion boutique SEX which he ran with his then wife Vivienne Westwood. (So much for punk being authentic!)
3 replies 6 reposts 50 likes
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Kate Lingley 龍梅若
@klingley.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Chinese blue and white porcelain was developed for export to Western Asia and initially catered to an Islamic artistic taste, hence its visual complexity, vegetal/floral patterns, and color palette.
1 replies 7 reposts 52 likes
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אברה (wingeater)
@wingeater.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Mahler's success during his lifetime (and we'll say nothing of how much we know of detailed history because of Alma Mahler) allowed him to at various times support both Hugo Wolf and Arnold Schönberg tfw commitment to צדקה upholds huge shifts in music that nobody wanted to pay for at the time
1 replies 1 reposts 20 likes
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Tucker Drake
@tuckerdrake.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The comic book in the US is a creation of the Great Depression. The 1st ones were given away as a means to attract customers to a Buster Browns store in NYC during the Depression. The store was owned by Bill Gaines (creator of Mad Magazine).
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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jdreyfuss (he/him)
@jdreyfuss.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Quentin Tarantino, while working as a clerk at a video rental store, got free access to the movies no one was renting.
0 replies 0 reposts 8 likes
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Marty Olliff
@martyolliff.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Georges Escoffier created French haute cuisine and switched from table d'hote (all food at once) to service a la Russe (courses served at table) to take advantage of the "cult of speed" of fin de siecle France and England. Critics considered it as his genius move.
0 replies 5 reposts 50 likes
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Paddyboy
@hodag1977.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Two actors played Darth Vader in the original Star Wars - James Earl Jones was the voice & bodybuilder David Prowse wore the costume on film. Both were also in Stanley Kubrick movies - Jones in Dr Strangelove & Prowse in A Clockwork Orange.
0 replies 0 reposts 6 likes
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Sara Doan
@sdoanut.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Mozart's later operas were detailed social critique of Viennese aristocracy. They bombed in Vienna, but were massive hits in Prague.
0 replies 6 reposts 65 likes
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surly thaumaturge
@surlythaumaturg.bsky.social
[ View ] |
DEVO are criminally underrated.
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Random Dangling Mystery
@sidslang.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Extremely obvious one but with so many stone-dumb classical-art accounts going on about the degeneracy of modern art like the unreconstructed Nazis they are, art begins to move away from realist representation and into abstraction when it does because of the development of photography.
1 replies 5 reposts 28 likes
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Jamie McKelvie
@mckelvie.bsky.social
[ View ] |
"Classic" comic book art, especially the inking - black lines, hatching to indicate form and shadow, etc - exists because the printing process used back then couldn't reproduce anything more subtle. Printing quality has vastly improved but lots of the same techniques are still used.
1 replies 7 reposts 52 likes
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Ian
@ismathers.bsky.social
[ View ] |
William Frakes had Riker on Star Trek: TNG sit in chairs Like That because he had a bad back and it was easier for him
5 replies 5 reposts 94 likes
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Emily K
@heyemilyk.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Virtually every piece of modern comics/animation can be traced back to the Takarazuka Revue, a Japanese all-women theater that - while not explicitly queer - absolutely is part of queer culture. "God of Manga" Osamu Tezuka based his characters on the way performers stylized their make-up.
2 replies 2 reposts 15 likes
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Emily K
@heyemilyk.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Jews invented manga.
Ok not so simple, but "God of Manga" Osamu Tezuka's narrative style was profoundly influenced by Milt Gross's "He Done Her Wrong," one of the earliest examples of what we now call the "graphic novel."
(scholarly paper here) media.wix.com/ugd/aa7d16_7...
2 replies 4 reposts 18 likes
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Emily K
@heyemilyk.bsky.social
[ View ] |
According to my dad (double bassist, Phila. Orchestra)- Beethoven's 9th is, in its entirety, virtually unplayable at points. People can play more of it now than ever thanks to everyone being better at their instruments than in 1824, but "certain points I wouldn't want a mic held up to the basses."
4 replies 7 reposts 69 likes
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“Magneto Was Right” in Bio
@amosburtonrisen.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Many of the earliest superheroes (Superman, Captain America, etc) were created by first generation European Jews as direct responses to the rise of fascism in their parents’ homelands, and this tradition has carried on ever since, in characters like The Thing, Shadowcat, Moon Knight and Batwoman.
0 replies 1 reposts 9 likes
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nonbinary papa iv
@aardvarkwizard.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The word “commute” took on its modern meaning when trains in the US started running from suburbs to cities in the mid-1800s. Daily travelers got “commuted” (reduced) fares and were referred to as commuters
2 replies 14 reposts 98 likes
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Mannie Bothans
@oddman.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The entirety of western music theory developed out of a misunderstanding of Greek music theory
1 replies 2 reposts 25 likes
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Vieuxtemps
@vieuxtemps.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I read somewhere that the 60's TV show "The Munsters" was about integration and all i can say is that that's brilliant.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Tilly Bridges
@tillybridges.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Gene Roddenberry was a cop for a while for the notoriously corrupt LAPD, and serving under the often overly logical and emotionless Chief Parker (don’t lionize him, he abused his wife) was the direct inspiration for Spock
2 replies 3 reposts 48 likes
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Celeste Ng
@pronounced-ing.bsky.social
[ View ] |
📌
0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Celeste Ng
@pronounced-ing.bsky.social
[ View ] |
This isn’t a specific fact, but post-2020, I’ve noticed how virtually *every* work in the interwar period references and often wrestles with mass death, including both the 1918 flu and the huge death tolls of WWI. Everything! Sometimes it’s oblique, but often it’s just stated in there
7 replies 8 reposts 132 likes
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Orion Kidder
@orionkidder.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Macbeth was written just after James I became king of England after having already been king of Scotland. James I was obsessed with witches.
1 replies 1 reposts 22 likes
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Orion Kidder
@orionkidder.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Ancient Athenian theatres put the chorus be the audience and the stage, and the audience was mostly Athenian nobles (and their families) who all participated in governance. This means that when a kings gets into a discussion with the chorus, it's like he's addressing / consulting with that audience.
0 replies 0 reposts 12 likes
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Orion Kidder
@orionkidder.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The earliest film editors were women bc the pieces were stitched together, hence "women's work." When male filmmakers realized that *cutting* was central to the art form (and they found a way to glue the strips), they pushed those women aside to do it themselves.
1 replies 8 reposts 69 likes
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Orion Kidder
@orionkidder.bsky.social
[ View ] |
These aren't lesser known facts, but many of the "beat" poets were (a) WWII veterans, (b) gay/queer, and (c) absolutely in lust with consumer technology (typewriters and tape recorders); ie, cultural outsiders using tech to do art.
0 replies 4 reposts 25 likes
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Orion Kidder
@orionkidder.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Shakespeare's OTHELLO premiered just a few years after the crown and parliament seriously contemplated expelling all peoples of African descent, much like they had done to Jews ~1300.
1 replies 18 reposts 59 likes
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Brian Schoner
@bschoner.bsky.social
[ View ] |
"The Safety Dance" was written as a protest song against club owners who banned pogo dancing because it was dangerous.
2 replies 9 reposts 73 likes
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Tempvs Frangit
@tempvsfrangit.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Not related to evo of art, but trivia Radar O'Reilly played drums while Wonder Woman sang. "[Gary Burghoff] was the drummer for... The Relatives in 1968. Lynda Carter... was the band's singer. The group opened at the Sahara Hotel and Casino lounge in [LV] Nevada, and played there for [3] months."
0 replies 1 reposts 6 likes
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Pete Birkinshaw
@binaryape.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The use of E/MDMA & speed at raves largely grew from the Northern Soul fandom - when early House arrived in the UK there was a sort of starter-kit of dealers, clubs, rave-like events and dancers all ready to go.
0 replies 1 reposts 6 likes
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Kirk Rudell
@rudell.bsky.social
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📌
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Andrew D Thaler
@drandrewthaler.bsky.social
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The reason it seems like every movie and show for 70 years treated quicksand as, like, this everpresent deadly threat is that Grace McHugh and a cameraman died drowning in quicksand on the Arkansas river in the first on-set death in Hollywood history.
1 replies 17 reposts 102 likes
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Ed Martin
@edmartin.bsky.social
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Heavy metal would sound very different without Tony Iommi having a serious industrial accident in a Birmingham factory before getting famous.
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Jonah Bamel
@bamelawyer.bsky.social
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Hannah Gadsby in "Nanette" has a wonderful riff on why the brilliant yellows in van Gogh's "Sunflowers" were plausibly the result of an overdose on his epilepsy medication.
0 replies 2 reposts 47 likes
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Fnarf
@fnarf.bsky.social
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The British beat boom and the 60s cultural explosion got a huge boost when compulsory national service ("the draft") ended in 1960. Young men could stay home and play guitars, write books, make movies, etc. instead.
0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
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Tsundoku Puzzle
@tsundokupuzzle.bsky.social
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The modern art movement was a CIA psyop directed against the Soviet Union, and hugely successful
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Dave
@davebrowne.bsky.social
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Not sure if this counts, but the reason folks in Ireland speak English a bit differently (not just accent, but syntax, etc.) is because colonialism destroyed our native language (almost). What you're hearing is English words but Irish language grammar and syntax.
3 replies 5 reposts 56 likes
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Courtney Love Actually
@hexadecibelle.bsky.social
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We wouldn't have the Illuminatus trilogy (and later, the KLF) without a group of people pranking the Playboy letters page
1 replies 3 reposts 9 likes
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A Mule With A Spinning Wheel
@madjaymilton.bsky.social
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Prince obviously took inspiration from Jimi Hendrix and James Brown, but one of his favorite musicians was Joni Mitchell.
6 replies 2 reposts 70 likes
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Metroplex
@metroplex.bsky.social
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I know that reactionaries weird aversion to "degenerate" art was a historical coincidence. Art had undergone a shift toward different styles that oldheads didn't like, and the timing just happened to coincide with the Oktober revolution, so they blamed it on communism despite no connection.
0 replies 0 reposts 7 likes
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James and the GYAT 🍑
@enormouspeaches.bsky.social
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The early adoption of electrified instruments by blues and jazz musicians was mostly because of how gorram loud it was in the venues where they played.
Learned it from the same documentary I learned that bit about Devo! m.imdb.com/title/tt5363...
0 replies 3 reposts 14 likes
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Joseph Finn
@josephfinn.bsky.social
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Joe Esterzhas, before he was a screenwriter, got a lot of national attention for being a reporter writing about Kent State.
1 replies 3 reposts 33 likes
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J🌹❤️ ⚧️🏳️🌈
@theoraclej.bsky.social
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Freddie Mercury went to art college and designed the Queen crest!
2 replies 1 reposts 68 likes
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Lonepilgrim
@lonepilgrim.bsky.social
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Mary, Mother of Jesus is often portrayed in blue garments - with the colour associated with purity. However it dates back to Renaissance painters using blue pigment made from Lapis Lazuli - then more expensive than gold - to indicate her high status. Renaissance viewers would have understood this.
4 replies 9 reposts 89 likes
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Jellicoe Cats
@jellicoe-cats.bsky.social
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In 1815 Mount Tambora exploded. It threw so much gas and dust into the air that 1816 was called by some the year without a summer. Mary and Percy Shelly, Lord Byron and John Polidori where hanging out in Switzerland but weather was crap so they decided to have a story writing contest…
1 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
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Carl Ballard
@carlballard.bsky.social
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Maybe apocryphal, but French language novels have more dialogue than English because when they were serialized, writers were paid by the line instead of the word.
1 replies 2 reposts 19 likes
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Alison Smaalders
@vividwings.bsky.social
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British food has a reputation for boiling everything to death in part because they were one of the earliest countries to adopt coal as a cooking fuel. It's far hotter than wood and hard to "turn down", so water was used to moderate the cooking temperature.
2 replies 6 reposts 54 likes
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Chris Vermilion
@verm.me
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A ton of the kid lit millennials grew up on was written by closeted gay men sublimating their feelings into stories about animal friends -- Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad books being one notable example.
2 replies 9 reposts 56 likes
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Linds
@lindsayduff.bsky.social
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Mervyn Peake, the author of the Gormenghast trilogy, was a war artist in WW2, and as part of his work, he was one of the first British civilians to witness the horrors of the camp at Belsen.
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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fluorescent faye🐢🏠
@msplurabelle.bsky.social
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industrial music started with working class and often queer artists: throbbing gristle had a nonbinary frontperson, coil were two life partners, most of the british power electronics scene was dirt poor and used whatever synths or pedals they could get etc
2 replies 7 reposts 72 likes
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Brian Dilkes
@briandilkes.bsky.social
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Ellsworth Kelly was in the ghost army that used art to deceive the Nazis. So was Bill Blass.
0 replies 3 reposts 15 likes
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❝marti❞
@martienne17.bsky.social
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Gerard Way was inspired to start My Chemical Romance by his witnessing of 9/11 in NYC
3 replies 3 reposts 48 likes
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wade of mutilation
@waderockett.bsky.social
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Blues drummer Jim Osterberg realized that to grow as an artist he needed to write and sing the blues as he experienced them in his own life. He renamed himself Iggy Pop and wrote songs about boredom, anger, drugs, and sexual frustration like “No Fun” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog”.
1 replies 5 reposts 44 likes
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StatsJew
@statsjew.bsky.social
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In the 50s there was a huge explosion in movies where American men find a tribe/alien civilization /etc of all women and their arrival upends the structures of power. Almost certainly inspired by service members coming home after WWII and finding women dominating all spheres of life.
1 replies 4 reposts 39 likes
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James E
@grouchomerckx.bsky.social
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Early 20th century studio recording with valve amps, great care was taken to ensure white jazz/swing guitarists got a nice smooth sound with no breakup. Black musicians, no such time and effort: just crank the amp up. Hence breakup, distortion, and the entirety of rock'n'roll
0 replies 3 reposts 26 likes
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Drifting
@softapocalypse.bsky.social
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Late-medieval / early-modern European landscape painting developed to a significant degree out of religious painting, as biblical events were depicted in contemporary environments to be more immediately relatable (hence all those 16th/17th-century landscapes with some tiny bible scene in a corner).
0 replies 2 reposts 31 likes
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the feminine urge to 🔪 when wrath arrives
@anem0ne.net
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so much of Korean cinema's stylized violence and horror stems from having been censored until the late 90s/early 00s while also dealing with barely processed trauma responses from the Japanese occupation, the war, dictatorships, suffering under imperialism, and then rampant destructive capitalism
2 replies 11 reposts 142 likes
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Jay Schiavone
@jaytingle.bsky.social
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I’ve read Jerry Casale complaining about Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young putting out “Ohio,” but I haven’t heard anything more formative than that.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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Kari Dru
@karidru.bsky.social
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Two things turned Brian Eno's music into what it became: a terrible illness that confined him to bed left him unable to increase the volume on a record that played too quietly to hear all the notes, so what he heard was more unpredictable and less assertive over one's surroundings...
1 replies 1 reposts 11 likes
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Susan Bridges
@susanlbridges.bsky.social
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You can see quite clearly the effects of 9/11 on the later seasons of Star Trek: Enterprise. It explains so much why that show is the way it is.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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The Creatively Maladjusted
@tyrotcm.bsky.social
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The original Tron soundtrack was so distinctive in large part because it was made on a budget synthesizer, the Alpha Syntauri. Wendy Carlos leaned into its quirks - among other things, that's why the light disc and light cycle sounds are so distinctive.
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
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The Creatively Maladjusted
@tyrotcm.bsky.social
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Johnny Clegg had Scottish and E European Jewish ancestry, though he wasn't religious & rejected Jewish cultural traditions growing up. "Warsaw 1943" shows that he felt that connection, though.
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Elle Billing (she/they)
@elleandwink.bsky.social
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If I recall this correctly... Bill Murray accepted the voice acting role in Garfield without reading the script because it was written by one Joel Cohen, and he always wanted to be in a Coen Brothers (Ethan and Joel) movie. He had regrets.
1 replies 2 reposts 43 likes
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Elle Billing (she/they)
@elleandwink.bsky.social
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Pink Floyd financed Monty Python's The Life of Brian
3 replies 4 reposts 82 likes
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Helen Boyd (she/they)
@helenofboyd.bsky.social
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a lesbian couple were the first people to publish James Joyce.
0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
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Allison
@tortoiseandhound.bsky.social
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We think of Frankenstein’s creature as having green skin, despite him being described with a yellow (basically jaundiced) appearance in the novel because Jack Pierce used green makeup on Boris Karloff to achieve the on-screen look he wanted.
1 replies 5 reposts 61 likes
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Nick Hide
@nickhide.bsky.social
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a lot of prominent 90s UK artists and musicians got funding from a Conservative government scheme intended to support small businesses, including “Jarvis Cocker and Shaun Ryder; Tracey Emin, Jeremy Deller and Edmund de Waal” like an unintended Britpop subsidy amp.theguardian.com/culture/2023...
1 replies 6 reposts 29 likes
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Sockfuzz
@sockfuzz.bsky.social
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On the one hand, Pink Floyd kicked out Syd Barrett and spent the rest of their careers wishing they hadn't. He was fucking right - being a rockstar sucks. On the other hand, I don't think there's a chance you get Dark Side of the Moon, or The Wall, with Syd still in the band.
1 replies 0 reposts 7 likes
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Matti Price (he/him)
@matti.town
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“Cave aged” cheese (as well as cheese rubbed in ash, etc) is the result of farmers trying to hide production under the feudal system
2 replies 15 reposts 131 likes
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Evan Kirshenbaum
@evankirshenbaum.bsky.social
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📌
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Jeff Billington
@facesofjeff.bsky.social
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The nascent Soviet Union struggled to import or manufacture film stock, and so its filmmakers had to make use of short scraps, experimenting by combining them to produce different effects, thus inventing montage theory.
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
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Wilder Newyear
@wildernewyear.bsky.social
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Following a series of trademark lawsuits, Ben Kubelsky ultimately settled on the stage name Jack Benny in part due to his time in the Navy during WWI. Jack is a slang term for a sailor.
0 replies 1 reposts 10 likes
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Krista Koeller
@kristalerista.bsky.social
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A lot of the emo bands from the early 2000s like My Chemical Romance, and Taking Back Sunday grew up around but not in NYC. This is mostly because of Mayor Rudi Gulianis successful efforts to regulate against the nightlife scene. The kids needed music and found it just outside the city.
1 replies 4 reposts 38 likes