The 1925 premiere of Wozzeck, the first opera by the Austrian composer ALBAN BERG (1885-1935), was the moment at which twelve-tone musical composition was transformed into accessible art. Arnold Schoenberg pioneered the twelve-tone technique, which daringly freed music from the shackles of classical cadence resolution and strict conformity to an anchoring key; but Berg gave [...]

The very top of Mt. Pop Olympus is still occupied by the Beatles. Other gods have been added on either side, but the Fab Four still stand astride the great middle.

[The Elgin Marbles, detail, British Museum]
But although they were not made of marble (yet?) they were made of mythology. In addition to worshipful popularity, [...]

I hadn’t considered Courtney Love for several years. It wasn’t through any fault of either of us. No huge falling out, no back stabbing, no cat fight. We had just grown apart.
Until… Twitter!
Now I can keep up with the latest styles:

Makeup Trends:

Travel Tips:

And words of wisdom:
Celebrity Twitter stalking FTW!
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Artists in residence archive.

ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911-79) wrote many great poems, but “The Fish” is both my favorite and her best. She grew to dislike it, so requested and anthologized did it become; she told Robert Lowell that she wanted to rewrite it as a sonnet. Without rhyme or regular scansion, it is a tour de force of precise [...]

Before Slow Food, French thinkers and writers championed Slow Walking. One strolls — ambulates, that is to say, in a manner that is purposeful but not rushed, neither speeded up nor slowed down — therefore, one is.
[A slightly different version of this item originally appeared at the Boston Globe Ideas section's blog, Brainiac, in July [...]

ALFRED ADLER (1870-1937) was present at the conception, gestation, and birth of psychoanalysis, thrashing out the details with Freud and a handful of other Viennese medical intellectuals at a weekly get-together. But rather than stay focused strictly on the internal mental world, he adopted a holistic view of the psyche emphasizing the importance of external, [...]

We continue to see a phenomenal response to the superhuman microfiction contest. As a mid-contest thanks to all who’ve entered—and inspiration to those who have not—we want to share this short film with superhuman overtones (via tor.com)

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

If you haven’t composed your microtale, there’s still time! We’re accepting entries until [...]

MARY LEAKEY (1913-96) once recounted how, after the “quite loud” explosion she intentionally set off in her chemistry class at a London convent school, “quite a lot of nuns came running, which will have been good for some of them.” Her prank led to her second expulsion (the first came when she refused to recite [...]

Members of the generational cohort born from 1944-53 were in their teens and 20s during the Sixties (1964-73, not to be confused with the the 1960s), and in their 20s and 30s during the Seventies (1974-83). Though this cohort is easily distinguished from its immediate juniors (whom I’ve dubbed the Original Generation X, born 1954-63), [...]

Even as a young man, WILLIAM BURROUGHS (1914-97) looked like a member of the raincoat brigade, his apparent respectability ceding to a suggestion of limitless vice if you stared long enough. He sounded like W. C. Fields’ accountant nephew from Babbittville, and he had a fine way with maxims that instantly sounded like old saws: [...]

When did murder in a bookshop or library become a middlebrow meme? Example:

After all, although some bookshops and libraries may be middlebrow, there’s nothing inherently middlebrow about these institutions. It’s their sentimentalization by “booklovers” that’s the problem.

The question, then, is when did booklovers (and “film buffs,” for that matter) first emerge? Was it during [...]

Mali Sastri is the singer of the Boston and New York-based band Jaggery . I sat down with her to chat about an obsession that has taken her from the deepest archives of the New York Public Library all the way to rural Kansas and is informing her soul as much as her music.
Edrie: What [...]

GEORGE A. ROMERO’s (born 1940) movies are charming, because they aren’t ashamed to send the same counterintuitive message, again and again. Before Romero, “zombie” was strictly a voodoo term; in horror movies, zombies were slaves — the embodiment of a disenfranchised people. Beginning with the unimpeachable Night of the Living Dead (1968), which was released [...]

If you build it (to look real) they will come, seems to be the mantra of current big budget animation. Think blow-out live action mixed with fantastical worlds like Avatar and the upcoming Alice in Wonderland. Though I’m as fond of nearly naked blue ladies and rabbits with pocket watches as the next gal, this [...]

It’s difficult to know exactly what to make of SIMONE WEIL (1909-43). The Franco-Jewish quasi-Christian gnostic philosopher, anti-Communist labor activist, and rifle-toting pacifist suffered, according to ex-comrade Georges Bataille’s paradoxical quip, from a “blind passion for lucidity.” Weil’s is “the most comical life I have ever read about, and the most truly tragic and terrible,” [...]

Here PROSPERO discovers FERDINAND and MIRANDA playing at chess
MIRANDA: Sweet lord, you play me false.
FERDINAND: No, my dearest love,
I would not for the world.
MIRANDA: Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle,
And I would call it fair play.
ALONZO: If this prove
A vision of the island, one dear son
Shall I twice lose.
SEBASTIAN: A most high [...]

A visual representation of what the next month of Artist in Residence posts will bring.
I was having a beer one night, and I saw “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, [...]

The greatest comic novel ever written? Depends on your definition of “funny” but, for many, JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) lays fair claim to three of the funniest. While few today will argue against Portrait of an Artist a Young Man (1916), not everyone who first read it serialized in The Egoist magazine of 1914-15 was laughing, [...]

Once More With Feeling
Hilo­brow.com asks you kindly to forgive us our Buffy reference, but it couldn’t be more appropriate here as we introduce our second Artist in Residence: Edrie, who combines ninja-like zombie/vampire fighting skills with writing and accordion playing. Just as with our inaugural Artist in Residence, Peggy Nelson, because we admire Edrie’s [...]

Audio recordings of LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-67) are disarmingly contemporary. On those recordings, he sounds like no one more than his least likely heir, Allen Ginsberg, who borrowed both his incorporation of loose musical forms from blues and jazz and Walt Whitman’s poetic voice. They’re a reminder of how thoroughly Hughes belonged to the century in [...]

“The planet has a fever,” Al Gore told Republican skeptics in Congress on March 21. “If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says, ‘You have to intervene here,’ you don’t say, ‘Well, I read a science fiction novel that says this isn’t important.’”
[A slightly different version of this [...]

Darwin’s dangerous idea does more than explain the existence of life in its myriad forms and set forth a materialist worldview that makes Biblical literalists foam at the mouths. It’s also as meme with enormous mindshare, which advertisers do well to exploit. What follows is a quick curation of advertisements that make use of notable [...]

GRANT MORRISON’s (born 1960) house was on a distinguish­ed street in Glasgow, purchased with the proceeds from his 1989 Batman graphic novel, Arkham Asylum. In the attic was a replica of his teenage bedroom; downstairs lurked the cellar in which, he told me, he summoned the giant floating head of John Lennon. These two rooms [...]

During science fiction’s Radium Age, writers dreamed up mechanical and quasi-organic humanoids so compelling that they continue to haunt today’s scifi, forcing us to ask what it means to be human.
[A version of this item first appeared on Gawker's sci-fi blog io9.com, on Jan. 12, 2009. The first episode of Hilobrow.com's podcast, "Parallel Universe: Pazzo," [...]