“I was scared shitless,” the late Keith Emerson told Mojo in 2001, remembering the start of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s 1977 tour of America — at the time, the most extravagant rock tour ever assembled. The setup legendarily included drummer Carl Palmer’s karate instructor, an army of roadies and, least practical of all, a full […]
Any list of the twentieth century’s finest actors is incomplete without Alec Guinness. Yet it’s a name some might overlook because there was never anything remotely showy — or even particularly magnetic — about him. More than anything, Guinness relished the process of submerging himself completely in a role, disappearing into the characters he played. […]
Architecture and Painting – Two Interwoven Aesthetic Universes Renaissance theoreticians have given architecture a central place among the visual arts, but is there Renaissance art that has a clear architectural twist? We think of the brilliant examples of paintings where the religious or historical subjects become an anecdotal pretext for the depiction of spectacular architecture. […]
The Psychedelic Influence on Philosophy MMXVI Philosophy itself often arrives as a mind-altering experience, a new mode of perception unto our cosmos, at times so radical as to be hazardous. Thus can philosophy be seen as a psychoactive substance—yet the place of psychoactive substances in philosophy is not apparent. In this mildly chronological overview we […]
The grid system which the Roman republic exported all over Europe was never employed in the capital itself. The city has always lacked a coherent plan – save for the monumental temple that once towered over it. According to Tacitus, perhaps the greatest of all Roman historians, it was the great temple of Jupiter Optimus […]
Roger Ebert was widely regarded as one of the most prolific and influential film critics of all time. As the first film critic to win both the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and the first critic to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame his contribution to both the art of film criticism and the […]
Vertigo is the greatest motion picture of all time. Or so say the results of the latest round of respected film magazine Sight & Sound‘s long-running critics poll, in which Alfred Hitchcock’s James Stewart- and Kim Novak- (and San Francisco-) starring psychological thriller unseated Citizen Kane from the top spot. For half a century, Orson Welles’ directorial debut seemed like it would […]
It all started with an educational video. Benjamin Grant grew up as one of those kids fascinated by the idea of outer space, and our place in the universe. He ended up starting a “space club” at his first post-university job in New York, where everyone “ate lunch by themselves, at their desk, every day,” […]