The Jazz Loft Project

Wired lofts, 1,447 rolls of film, and what pimps and Salvador Dalí have in common.

In 1957, 38-year-old magazine photographer W. Eugene Smith, most likely undergoing a creative midlife crisis, left his well-paying job at Life, his comfortable home, his wife and four children, and moved into a 4th-floor loft in a run-down 45-story building at 821 Sixth Avenue, between 38th and 39th streets, in the wholesale flower district of New York.

Why? Smith had been struck with the inspiration for his life’s most aspirational project — to create a monumental photo-essay about the city of Pittsburgh.

But 821 Sixth Avenue was a peculiar place to work. Late at night, the dilapidated building blossomed into a thriving epicenter of the jazz music scene, with underground legends and mainstream greats alike — from Zoot Sims to Bill Evans to Thelonious Monk — roaming the decaying halls. At the heart of this chaos and glory, Smith’s ambitions for the Pittsburgh project dissolved into his fascination with the loft’s secret life and he redirected his artistic focus towards this newfound inspiration.

Thelonious Monk and his Town Hall band in rehearsal, February 1959

Photos credit W. Eugene Smith. Collection Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. © The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith

For the following 8 years, Smith went through 1,447 rolls of film, resulting in some 40,000 photographs of everything from the nocturnal jazz scene to street life in the flower district outside, observed Hitchcock-style from his loft window. And he didn’t stop at image — he secretly wired the building with recording equipment, producing over 4,000 hours of stereo and mono audiotapes on 1,740 reels. The recordings captured more than 300 of the era’s greatest musicians, from Alice Coltrane to Roy Haynes to Sonny Rollins, as well as piano masters like Eddie Costa, legendary drummers like Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist Lin Hallday, and multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart.

Loft interior, fifth floor (ca. 1964)

Photos credit W. Eugene Smith. Collection Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. © The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith

The cultural landscape Smith documented spread far beyond the immediate circles of jazz, spanning icons like Salvador Dalí, Robert Frank, Doris Duke and Henri Cartier-Bresson, as well as local cops, photography students and a vibrant array of the city’s less reputable practitioners — pimps, prostitutes, junkies and drug dealers.

White Rose Bar sign from the 4th floor window of 821 Sixth Avenue (ca. 1957-1964)

Photos credit W. Eugene Smith. Collection Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. © The Heirs of W. Eugene Smith

In 1998, Sam Stephenson discovered Smith’s jazz loft photographs and tapes, which had remained unseen for 40 years, and spent the following seven years cataloging, archiving, selecting, and editing Smith’s materials for a brilliantly ambitious book, The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965.

Today, the book is finally out.

Here, Stephenson speaks about the project and the cultural import of Smith’s endeavor.

The book’s eclectic mix of characters and callings, of cultural icons and little details of daily life, offers the colorful threads that weave the fabric of an era. With its superb photography and vintage enigma, The Jazz Loft Project is a slice of life from a time long gone but never forgotten, an epoch that left a permanent mark on the culture of music, celebrity and New-Yorkism.

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Buy Nothing: No, Really, It’s For Sale

What the hottest gift this holiday season is, or how to dodge your modern addictions.

Let’s face it, we live in a material world. And this week is its annual pinnacle, the frantic shopping bonanza known as Black Friday. But it’s also the 10th international Buy Nothing Day — Friday in the U.S. and Saturday everywhere else. It’s a chance to detox from the omnivorous toxicity of conspicuous consumption, to seek some brief redemption from our wasteful and unsustainable more-more-more modus operandi. (Come on, did you really need that Steve Jobs bobblehead?)

Our friends at Do The Green Thing are doing something quite ingenious — they’re selling nothing. Really. Their Buy Nothing campaign is a clever reminder that we all buy stuff, often just for the sake of buying, while sticking with what we’ve got can make more sense. So in their Amazero store, an Amazon mock-up, you can literally purchase Nothing, which costs, well, nothing — they’ve got the standard e-commerce checkout procedure, from the Buy It Now button to the email confirmation after your purchase. (We’ve worked out a special deal for Brain Pickings readers — you can purchase Nothing for 30% off using this link.)

The point, of course, isn’t to completely eradicate consumption — that would be absurd — but, rather, to help us be more mindful of what it is we actually need versus what we buy just for the new-stuff thrill of it.

The effort is a simple yet powerful reminder that, over the holidays, we often end up giving and getting lots of useless stuff. (Green Thing did a survey, which found — unsurprisingly — that 96% of people have gotten a useless gift at some point. We can attest with what’s now a vast collection of annual reindeer figurines from grandma.) That stuff takes energy and precious resources to make, creating unfortunate waste as it ends up in landfills.

And if you think you’re immune to the buybuybuy messaging of the ad industry, you can test just how stealthy its impact is in the All Spin No Substance game, where you get to guess the brand advertised based solely on its logoless visual communication — we bet you’d be surprised how many you get right.

Buy Nothing promotes one of Green Thing’s 7 green actions, stick with what you got, as an antidote to our reckless and thoughtless material habits. And with testimonials from an impressive line-up of celebrities (including one of our favorite British indie bands, The Noisettes) swearing by Nothing, it’s not hard to buy into it.

And if you still feel the compulsion to buy — because, let’s face it, we’ve been so powerfully conditioned for it by today’s media environment — Green Thing’s got your back. Dr. Will Powers, retail therapist, can help you dodge any temptation to buy with some grounded professional advice. You can email him for help in taming your shopaholic urges, or tweet your concerns to @DrWillPowers.

We love both the clever campaign and what it aims to achieve. (We’ve even offered Green Thing some ad space on Brain Pickings — look right — for the attractive price of Nothing.) So exorcise your shopping urges this weekend by buying yourself some Nothing — we vouch for it with a full money-back guarantee.

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Super-Smart Learning

Why playing Oregon Trail is like learning basic Japanese, or how to beat the Ebbinghaus Curve.

For a scientifically inclined utopian, technology is the potential antidote to all of society’s ills. Techno-optimists believe every challenge, from cancer to cleanliness, has an applied-science solution. Most of us approach technology with significantly more skepticism, of course. But as 21st-century citizens, we’ve come to understand that our progressively more complex problems require more than machines alone.

As it turns out, though, simpler challenges—like, say, memorizing the names of world capitals—are in fact being better addressed by new technologies every day. So goes the story behind two learning programs, Smart.fm and SuperMemo, both garnering attention as we increasingly look to gadgets and gizmos to improve our lifestyles. (Call it the Wii Fit phenomenon.)

Smart.fm and SuperMemo aim, and claim, to help you memorize and retain knowledge in more efficient ways. Both products are based on a well-proven finding known as the Ebbinghaus, or forgetting, curve, first deduced by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. The curve is an equation (, to be specific) that describes how our brains forget things over time.

Essentially, Ebbinghaus found that memory retention of newly acquired knowledge declines unless we consciously review that knowledge. Subsequent scientific studies (mostly in the 1930s and late 1960s) revealed even more about the nature of memory and learning: If we review an item right before we’re about to forget it, immediately prior to our brains’ contact with the curve, we actually improve our ability to retain that item in memory. The way to ensure remembrance, then, is to increase the length of time between these information reviews, a technique otherwise known as spaced repetition.

When computers became more common in the 1980s, researchers began to experiment with algorithms for automating the spacing of repeated knowledge over time.

Fast forward to the future and the tantalizing promises of technology for better living. Just as exercise has its own digital assistant, so too can learning. If all it takes to remember something is a well-timed reminder, then why not leave your learning to a robot? And now not only can we automate such simple processes, we can make them fit in the palm of a hand. Smart.fm‘s newly released iPhone app promises to do just that — make learning a portable experience — as illustrated in a cheeky short its creators made to highlight the app’s features and functionality.

The iPhone app is based on Smart.fm‘s online-learning platform, which itself grew out of an adaptive-learning system called iKnow. Cerego, a Japanese venture-backed think tank, created all of the products and had already popularized iKnow’s use in Japan before introducing an English-language version. We were fascinated to see how this earlier incarnation of Smart.fm developed into its intuitive, present-day user experience, a process satisfyingly documented as a case study by the über-smart design firm Adaptive Path, which partnered with Cerego on these multiple orders of translation.

Where Smart.fm is sexy and supple in design, SuperMemo is, well, not. (Consider it the Craig’s List of online learning.) What it does have, however, is a storied pedigree documented by Wired and other ahead-of-the-curve pubs (pun unfortunately intended). SuperMemo‘s creator, Piotr Wozniak, is its ultimate evangelist because he’s also its Ur-user — he created the platform for his personal use. Wozniak developed the software behind SuperMemo in the mid-1980s without prior knowledge of Ebbinghaus’s repetitive trials. Its user interface seems like it’s changed little since Wozniak wrote his first programs, but perhaps this is SuperMemo‘s charm. In fact, a kind of cottage industry of both white-label versions and ad-hoc, pirated programs sprang up as soon as the Internet allowed for easy file sharing.

What Smart.fm hides under the hood, however, SuperMemo makes accessible. All of the statistical breakdowns driving the program’s prompts are available for your perusal, should you get excited by indices and intervals. (No need to be shy–we’re very sympathetic to such symptoms here at Brain Pickings.) For the person who wants to see and directly manipulate a product’s inner workings, SuperMemo allows for much more hands-on interaction than the plug-and-play approach designed by Adaptive Path. What both Smart.fm and SuperMemo share is a pliability in their ultimate purposes. You can use preprogrammed language-learning modules, but you can also personalize each by adding your own information for spaced repetition.

So while neither Smart.fm nor SuperMemo can cure the common cold, consider exploring technologically augmented learning for your next mental exercise–like that taxonomy of Tolkein characters you’ve been meaning to commit to memory.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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