The Beatles: Ranking their Albums From Worst to Best

The Beatles: Ranking their Albums From Worst to Best

The Beatles are commonly considered to be the most important musical group of the 20th century, but even regardless of their historical significance, their original output is endlessly listenable. Within a span of only eight years in the 1960s, the Fab Four released a string of 11 studio LPs — more if you count the soundtrack […]

Peter Saville: “I never had to answer to anyone”

Peter Saville: “I never had to answer to anyone”

Mr. Saville, why did you want to be a graphic designer? I spent my time in school painting stuff and my art teacher said, “You could do graphic design.” Basically it looked like I could get a professional job doing what I liked doing in my spare time. I didn’t understand what it really meant. […]

David Lynch’s Elusive Language

David Lynch’s Elusive Language

One of the first video recordings of a David Lynch interview dates from 1979. The twenty-minute black-and-white segment was produced for a television course at the University of California, Los Angeles, and conducted in the oil fields of the Los Angeles Basin, one of the locations that constituted the barren wasteland of his first feature, “Eraserhead” (1977). […]

Goethe on the Psychology of Color and Emotion

Goethe on the Psychology of Color and Emotion

Color is an essential part of how we experience the world, both biologically and culturally. One of the earliest formal explorations of color theory came from an unlikely source — the German poet, artist, and politician Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in 1810 published Theory of Colors (public library; public domain), his treatise on the […]

How we made “The Usual Suspects”

How we made “The Usual Suspects”

Bryan Singer, director Chris McQuarrie rang me up after he’d written about 50 pages of the script and said: “What if the villain pulls the whole story off a bulletin board?” And I replied: “Now that’s a reason to make the damned movie!” A lot of the inspiration for Keyser Söze, the villain, came from […]

Sex, death and Rodin: the devilish bronze rediscovered after 100 years

Sex, death and Rodin: the devilish bronze rediscovered after 100 years

Auguste Rodin made sculpture modern by wrestling with its past. His art is a tangled sensual battle of old and new in which Michelangelo and the classical nude give birth to expressionism, surrealism and even dadaism. A “lost” work by Rodin that has just resurfaced in Switzerland after a century exemplifies how passionately he embraced […]