Emerson, Lake and Palmer: 10 Essential Songs

Emerson, Lake and Palmer: 10 Essential Songs

“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 […]

Everything you need to know about the elusive but extraordinary Alec Guinness

Everything you need to know about the elusive but extraordinary Alec Guinness

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. […]

The Beautiful Intersection of Art and Architecture in Renaissance Painting

The Beautiful Intersection of Art and Architecture in Renaissance Painting

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. […]

Plato, Nietzsche, and 11 Other Philosophers Who Used Mind-Altering Drugs

Plato, Nietzsche, and 11 Other Philosophers Who Used Mind-Altering Drugs

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 15 Greatest Movie Directors Championed by Roger Ebert

The 15 Greatest Movie Directors Championed by Roger Ebert

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 […]

Zbigniew Preisner Reflects on Music for Films, and for Kieślowski Films

Zbigniew Preisner Reflects on Music for Films, and for Kieślowski Films

One challenge: ‘It is not possible to talk about music. It’s metaphysics.’ This week’s special opportunity to revisit Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog also brings an opportunity for a chat with one of the late director’s most frequent and distinguished collaborators, composer Zbigniew Preisner. They first worked together in 1985 on No End, a brutally intimate film about—to boil it down, rather unfairly—loss. […]