Japanese Restaurants Show You How to Make Traditional Dishes in Meditative Videos: Soba, Tempura, Udon & More

in Food & Drink, Travel | July 19th, 2022

Despite having recently begun to admit tour groups, Japan remains inaccessible to most of the world’s travelers. Having closed its gates during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the country has shown little inclination to open them up again too quickly or widely. The longer this remains the case, of course, the more intense everyone’s desire to visit Japan becomes. Though different travelers have different interests to pursue in the Land of the Rising sun — temples and shrines, trains and cafés, anime and manga — all of them are surely united by one appreciation in particular: that of Japanese food.

Wherever in the world we happen to live, most of us have a decent Japanese restaurant or two in our vicinity. Alas, as anyone with experience in Japan has felt, the experience of eating its cuisine anywhere else doesn’t quite measure up; a ramen meal can taste good in a California strip mall, not the same as it would taste in a Tokyo subway station.

At least the twenty-first century affords us one convenient means of enjoying audiovisual evocations of genuine Japanese eateries: Youtube videos. The channel Japanese Noodles Udon Soba Kyoto Hyōgo, for instance, has captivated large audiences simply by showing what goes on in the humble kitchens of western Japan’s Kyoto and Hyōgo prefectures.

Hyōgo contains the coastal city of Kobe as well as Himeji Castle, which dates back to the fourteenth century. The prefecture of Kyoto, and especially the onetime capital of Japan within it, needs no introduction, such is its worldwide renown as a site of cultural and historical richness. Right up until the pandemic, many were the foreigners who journeyed to Kyoto in search of the “real Japan.” Whether such a thing truly exists remains an open question, but if it does, I would locate it — in Kyoto, Hyōgo, or any other region of the country — in the modest restaurants of its back alleys and shotengai market complexes, the ones that have been serving up bowls of noodles and plates of curry for decade upon decade.

Ideally the décor never changes at these establishments, nor do the proprietors. The video at the top of the post visits a “good old diner” in Kobe to show the skills of a “hard working old lady” with the status of a “veteran cook chosen by God.” In another such neighborhood restaurant, located near the main train station in the city of Amagasaki, a “super mom” prepares her signature udon noodles. But even she looks like a newcomer compared to the lady who’s been making udon over in Kyoto for 58 years at a diner in existence for a century. Soba, tonkatsu, oyakodon, tempura, okonomiyaki: whichever Japanese dish you’ve been craving for the past couple of years, you can watch a video on its preparation — and make your long-term travel plans accordingly.

Cookpad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launches New Site in English

How Soy Sauce Has Been Made in Japan for Over 220 Years: An Inside View

The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders: A Tokyo Restaurant Where All the Servers Are People Living with Dementia

Watch Teeny Tiny Japanese Meals Get Made in a Miniature Kitchen: The Joy of Cooking Mini Tempura, Sashimi, Curry, Okonomiyaki & More

The Proper Way to Eat Ramen: A Meditation from the Classic Japanese Comedy Tampopo (1985)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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Brian Eno’s Ambient Album Music for Airports Performed by Musicians in an Airport

in Music | July 18th, 2022

Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

In the original liner notes to Brian Eno’s founding document of Ambient music — 1978’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports — the artist explains that he named his genre after “an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.”

In defining “environmental music,” Eno takes great pains to distinguish his new work from the makers of Muzak. Rather than recreating the familiar with instrumental schmaltz, and “stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty,” Ambient should stimulate listeners’ minds without disturbing or distracting them, inducing “calm and a space to think.” Rolling Stone at the time coined the derisive, but not wholly inaccurate, phrase “aesthetic white noise.”

Reverb Machine painstakingly shows in a deconstruction how Eno himself introduced as much uncertainty into the compositional process as possible. Music for Airports is not, that is to say, a composition, but layers of tape loops with snippets of recorded music. These loops he set running and “let them configure in whichever way they wanted to.” Acting as initial selector of sounds and engineer, Eno’s role as composer and player of the piece involved “hardly interfering at all,” he’s said.

How could such a composition translate to a traditional performance setting, in which musicians, elevated on a stage, play instruments for audience members who face them, listening intently? The situation seems antithetical to Eno’s design. And yet, somehow, the musicians who make up the Bang on a Can All Stars ensemble have made it work beautifully, performing Music for Airports’s first track, the nondescriptly named “1/1,” in an arrangement by the group’s Michael Gordon, above, for an appreciative audience at the San Diego Airport Terminal.

Bang on a Can is a group committed, like Eno, to “making music new.” Since 1987, they have (unlike Eno) done so in a live performance-based way, holding 12-hour marathon concerts, for example. These performances have included their rendition of Music for Airports in full. The Village Voice described a 2007 performance in New York City for hundreds of attentive fans as “beautiful,” a word that often gets applied to Eno’s masterwork of randomness. Eno himself described the results as “very, very nice,” and he’s maybe the last person to be surprised that a live performance of the first so-called Ambient record works so well.

“The interesting thing is that it doesn’t sound at all mechanical as you would imagine,” he wrote of these early tape loop experiments. “It sounds like some guy is sitting there playing the piano with quite intense feeling. The spacing and dynamics of ‘his’ playing sound very well organized.” See a quintet of “guys” just above — on cello, bass, keyboard, percussion, and guitar — recreate the mildly disjointed mood of standing around in the liminal space of an airport, for a crowd of people who, presumably, came there for the express purpose of hearing background music.

via Metafilter

A Six-Hour Time-Stretched Version of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports: Meditate, Relax, Study

The Therapeutic Benefits of Ambient Music: Science Shows How It Eases Chronic Anxiety, Physical Pain, and ICU-Related Trauma

Discover the Ambient Music of Hiroshi Yoshimura, the Pioneering Japanese Composer

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Never-Seen Vincent Van Gogh Self-Portrait Discovered Behind an Earlier Painting

in Art, History | July 18th, 2022

The name of Vincent Van Gogh is one of the very best known in the history of painting, and indeed the history of art. But that doesn’t mean the man himself enjoyed any success in his short lifetime. Though he was convinced that he was creating “the art of the future,” and seemingly right to believe it, the buyers of nineteenth-century European art didn’t see it quite that way. Consequently impoverished, Van Gogh had to resort to unconventional strategies to maintain his artistic productivity. Instead of professional models, for example, he hired peasants and people from the streets. And when he couldn’t paint them, he painted himself.

Van Gogh would also economize by re-using his canvases, a practice not unknown in his day. “However, instead of painting over earlier works,” writes Jordan Ogg at National Galleries Scotland, “he would turn the canvas around and work on the reverse.”

It seems he did this with the National Galleries Scotland’s own Head of a Peasant Woman, whose back side turns out to bear a hitherto unknown self-portrait hidden by “layers of glue and cardboard” for well over a century. X‑ray analysis has revealed “a bearded sitter in a brimmed hat with a neckerchief loosely tied at the throat. He fixes the viewer with an intense stare, the right side of his face in shadow and his left ear clearly visible.”

Even in its ghostly lack of detail, this face seems to be unmistakable. If it belongs to who we think it does, it will become the 36th known Van Gogh self-portrait. It would have been painted before 1884’s Head of a Peasant Woman, “during a key moment in Van Gogh’s career, when he was exposed to the work of the French impressionists after moving to Paris.” You can learn about the ongoing process of this lost self-portrait’s rediscovery in the video at the top of the post. Van Gogh expressed conviction that he was painting for later generations, but surely even he would be astounded at the excitement of twenty-first century curators about finding another of his self portraits — and one he saw fit to give the cardboard treatment at that.

Behold the Newly Discovered Sketch by Vincent van Gogh Sketch, “Study for Worn Out” (1882)

Watch as Van Gogh’s Famous Self-Portrait Morphs Into a Photograph

Discovered: The Only Known Picture of Vincent Van Gogh as an Adult Artist? (Maybe, Maybe Not)

AI & X‑Rays Recover Lost Artworks Underneath Paintings by Picasso & Modigliani

A Restored Vermeer Painting Reveals a Portrait of a Cupid Hidden for Over 350 Years

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

30,000 Photographs of Black History & Culture Are Available Online in a New Getty Images Archive

in Archives, History, Photography | July 15th, 2022

Image of Charles S.L. Baker with his Superheating Demonstration

Black History Month is February in the United States and Canada, and October in the United Kingdom and Europe. It may be July right now, but if you’re interested in a subject, there’s no reason not to get more deeply into it all year round. This is underscored by the opening, this month, of Getty Images’ Black History and Culture Collection. As Petapixel’s Matt Growcoot writes, it contains “30,000 rarely seen images of the Black diaspora in the United Kingdom and the United States that date back to the 19th century,” drawing from the domains of “politics, sport, music, culture, military, and celebrity.”

In the Black History and Culture Collection you’ll find pictures of cultural figures like Duke Ellington and Jay‑Z, Jack Johnson, Venus and Serena Williams, Sojourner Truth, and Bernardine Evaristo. These names only hint at the range of the archive, which you can also browse by category tags: “civil rights,” “governance,” and “sports,” to name a few examples, but also “families,” “fashion,” and “hair.”

There are, of course, an enormous number of photos filed under “American Culture,” which would itself be unimaginable without the contributions of the people documented. But the same could be said of the other side of the pond; hence the inclusion of a “Black British Culture” label as well.

Creating the Black History and Culture Collection involved more than just tagging photos. You can learn more about what went into it in the short video above, which includes the voices of collaborators like NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Deborah Willis and the University of Pennsylvania’s Tukufu Zuberi. The artist Renata Cherlise speaks of the value of the images of famous people, but also those of everyday life as it was lived in places and times like Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in the nineteen-forties. Whether or not your own heritage is tied into this history, you stand to learn a great deal from it. As Zuberi put sit, “Black culture is the original human culture, so there is no culture that is alien to black culture. The future of black culture is the future of human culture. Let’s go.”

via Petapixel/Colossal

The Names of 1.8 Million Emancipated Slaves Are Now Searchable in the World’s Largest Genealogical Database, Helping African Americans Find Lost Ancestors

The Black Film Archive: A New Site Highlights 200+ Noteworthy Black Films Made Between 1915–1979

Hear the Voices of Americans Born in Slavery: The Library of Congress Features 23 Audio Interviews with Formerly Enslaved People (1932–75)

Photos of 19th-Century Black Women Activists Digitized and Put Online by The Library of Congress

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Walter Benjamin Explains How Fascism Uses Mass Media to Turn Politics Into Spectacle (1935)

in Film, History, Politics | July 15th, 2022

Image via Wikimedia Commons

In his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” influential German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin introduced the term “aura” to describe an authentic experience of art. Aura relates to the physical proximity between objects and their viewers. Its loss, Benjamin argued, was a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon caused by mass media’s imposition of distance between object and viewer, though it appears to bring art closer through a simulation of intimacy.

The essay makes for potent reading today. Mass media — which for Benjamin meant radio, photography, and film — turns us all into potential actors, critics, experts, he wrote, and takes art out of the realm of the sacred and into the realm of the spectacle. Yet it retains the pretense of ritual. We make offerings to cults of personality, expanded in our time to include influencers and revered and reviled billionaires and political figures who joust in the headlines like professional wrestlers, led around by the chief of all heels. As Benjamin writes:

The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity.

Benjamin’s focus on the medium as not only expressive but constitutive of meaning has made his essay a staple on communications and media theory course syllabi, next to the work of Marshall McLuhan. Many readings tend to leave aside the politics of its epilogue, likely since “his remedy,” writes Michael Jay — “the politicization of art by Communism — was forgotten by all but his most militant Marxist interpreters,” and hardly seemed like much of a remedy during the Cold War, when Benjamin became more widely available in translation.

Benjamin’s own idiosyncratic politics aside, his essay anticipates a crisis of authorship and authority currently surfacing in the investigation of a failed coup that includes Twitter replies as key evidence — and in the use of social media more generally as a dominant form of political spectacle.

With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.

Benjamin’s analysis of conventional film, especially, leads him to conclude that its reception required so little of viewers that they easily become distracted. Everyone’s a critic, but “at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.” Passive consumption and habitual distraction does not make for considered, informed opinion or a healthy sense of proportion.

What Benjamin referred to (in translation) as mechanical reproducibility we might now just call The Internet (and the coteries of “things” it haunts poltergeist-like). Later theorists influenced by Benjamin foresaw our age of digital reproducibility doing away with the need for authentic objects, and real people, altogether. Benjamin himself might characterize a medium that can fully detach from the physical world and the material conditions of its users — a medium in which everyone gets a column, public photo gallery, and video production studio — as ideally suited to the aims of fascism.

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

The logical result of turning politics into spectacle for the sake of preserving inequality, writes Benjamin, is the romanticization of war and slaughter, glorified plainly in the Italian Futurist manifesto of Filippo Marinetti and the literary work of Nazi intellectuals like Ernst Junger. Benjamin ends the essay with a discussion of how fascism aestheticizes politics to one end: the annihilation of aura by more permanent means.

Under the rise of fascism in Europe, Benjamin saw that human “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.” Those who participate in this spectacle seek mass violence “to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology.” Distracted and desensitized, they seek, that is, to compensate for profound disembodiment and the loss of meaningful, authentic experience.

You can read Benjamin’s essay here, or find it in this collected volume.

Toni Morrison Lists the 10 Steps That Lead Countries to Fascism (1995)

Are You a Fascist?: Take Theodor Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality Test Created to Combat Fascism (1947)

The Story of Fascism: Rick Steves’ Documentary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Century

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Restores the Original Colors to Ancient Statues

in Art, History | July 14th, 2022

The idea that the human species can be neatly bracketed into racial groups based on superficial characteristics like skin, hair, and eye color only developed in the 18th century, and mainly took root as a pseudo-scientific justification for slavery and colonialism. Central to that idea was the Classical Ideal of Beauty, a standard supposedly set by Greek and Roman statuary from antiquity. As beliefs in regional supremacy in Western Europe transformed in the modern era into “White” supremacy, the stark whiteness of antique statuary became a specific point of pride. But ancient people did not think in terms of race, and ancient sculptors never intended their creations to stand around in public without color. “For the ancient Greeks and Romans,” Elaine Velie writes at Hyperallergic, “white marble was not considered the final product, but rather a blank canvas.”

As Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Seán Hemingway says, “White supremacists have latched onto this idea of white sculpture — it’s not true but it serves their purposes.” Art historians and conservators have known for decades that statues from antiquity were once covered in paint, silver and gilding, a process known as polychromy. Over time, the colors dulled, faded, then disappeared, leaving behind only the faintest traces.

Husband-and-wife research team Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrich Koch-Brinkmann have spent over 40 years studying polychromy and reconstructing ancient sculptures as they would have appeared to their first viewers. “Their Gods in Color exhibition has been touring since 2003,” Velie writes, “and their replicas have been included in museums around the world.”

Now fourteen of those reconstructions, as well as a couple dozen more created by Met conservators, scientists, and curators, are scattered throughout the Met’s sculpture halls, with a small upstairs gallery dedicated to an exhibit. The exhibition explains how researchers determined the statues’ colors, “the result of a wide array of analytical techniques, including 3D imaging and rigorous art historical research,” writes the Met. As Artnet notes, the “richly colored version of the Met’s Archaic-period Sphinx finial,” which you can see at the top of the post, “serves as the centerpiece of the show” – one of the only pieces placed adjacent to its original so that visitors can compare the two (using an Augmented Reality app to do so; see video above).

Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, which opened on July 5th, disabuses us of old ideas about the blank whiteness of antiquity, but that’s hardly its only intent. As it does today, color “helped convey meaning in antiquity.” The colors of ancient statues were not simply decorative surfaces – they were integral to the presentation of these works. Now, color can again be part of how we understand and appreciate classical statuary. And the full acceptance of polychromy in major collections like the Met can begin to put to rest false notions about a classical devotion to whiteness as some ideal of perfection. Learn more about the 40 reconstructions in the exhibition at the Met here, and learn more about polychromy and ancient uses of color at the links below.

via Hyperallergic

How Ancient Greek Statues Really Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Colors and Patterns

The Met Digitally Restores the Colors of an Ancient Egyptian Temple, Using Projection Mapping Technology

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

The Homes of 2020 Imagined in 1989: Wireless Audio Systems, Smart Heating, Windows That Turn Into TVs & More

in Architecture | July 14th, 2022

Many trends in architecture and home design have come and gone over the past thirty years, and some have not spread as far as they might have. The green architectural movement in much of Asia, for example, in which skyscrapers practically drip with growing things, hasn’t caught on in congested cities in the West, and perhaps it never will. Granted, few urban areas have such concerns about air quality as cities in China where green buildings have taken hold recently — where 2/3rds of the population is slated to live in cities by 2050; and where a massive population boom in the last twenty years has required four to five million new buildings. But even if we don’t live in a burgeoning city with an urgent mandate to reduce carbon emissions for basic public health, it’s time for brand-new building standards everywhere.

The creators of the 1989 BBC episode of Tomorrow’s World had a sense of environmental urgency, though it wasn’t first on their list of home improvements for the buildings of 2020. After casually wondering whether the homes of the future will “protect the environment,” presenter Judith Hann turns things over to Christine McNulty of the Applied Futures project, who surveyed people to learn “what people would want from their homes.” What will they want? “All the benefits of modern technology” with few of the drawbacks, such as the unwieldy boxes and tangled wires that constituted audio systems of yore (archaic-looking here even by 1989 standards).

We got what we wanted: audio/visual systems can integrate seamlessly into our homes, with bluetooth and wireless and unobtrusive components. We are living in a golden age of consumer entertainment. We are also living in a glorious time of home automation, which co-host Howard Stableford introduces in the next segment. Stableford shows how we will be able to walk from room to room and have lights turn off and on as we go, technology currently available at your local big box store. Later, David Button of Pilkington Glass introduces futuristic tech that could change windows or walls into a TV, something we do not see in homes today and for which few consumers seem to clamor.

Finally, in the last two segments, we get to projections about energy management and smart heating. “Homes are going to have to change,” says Stableford, to meet what McNulty calls “enormous pressure to cut down on our burning of fossil fuels.” Hann introduces building materials that could “bring heating bills down to zero.” Stableford returns to the idea of automation for energy efficient “smart heating.” There is no mention of the need for cooling homes in a rapidly warming world, especially in parts reaching average temperatures inhospitable to human life. 1989 had a pretty good read on what we would want in our individual homes, but it could not foresee how those desires would overrun care for the one home we share.

How Previous Decades Predicted the Future: The 21st Century as Imagined in the 1900s, 1950s, 1980s, and Other Eras

In 1922, a Novelist Predicts What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wireless Telephones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

“Downton Abbey” and the Allure of Historical Drama — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #127

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | July 14th, 2022

We discuss the appeal of this Julian-Fellowes-penned British historical drama in light of the new film. Is this really “a new era” or just more of the same, and is that bad?

Your Pretty Much Pop host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by returning guest Jon Lamoreaux (host of The Hustle music podcast), plus a couple: former newscaster Corrinne MacLeod (whom Mark SCANDOLOUSLY went on one date with at age 12) and her husband, the photographer Michael MacLeod.

We talk about the excellent casting and how such a big cast gets juggled, the appeal of this particular historical setting, revolutions against the class system in the show, and the soapy plots. How can a film give us enough of such a big cast? We also touch on The Gilded Age, Bridgerton, Howard’s End, Gosford Park, The Great, Poldark, and more.

A few relevant articles we looked at include:

“Downton Abbey: How the Period Franchise Has Remained Popular” by Jessica Brajer
“Downton Abbey: A New Era Is Really the Same Old Downton Abbey” by Jen Chaney
“‘Downton Abbey’ reminds us what ‘conservatism’ really means” by Max Boot
“‘Downton Abbey’ 602: What Are This Show’s Politics, Anyway?” By Meghan O’Keefe
“How Downton Abbey went from great to awful to pretty good again” by Constance Grady
“Thomas Barrow, Iconic Chaotic Gay, Gets Bland but Happy Ending in ‘Downton Abbey: A New Era’—Happy Pride Month” by Princess Weekes

Hear more Pretty Much Pop, including recent episodes on Jackass, This Is Us, and The Expanse. Support the show at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choosing a paid subscription through Apple Podcasts. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

John Waters’ Comical & Inspiring Commencement Speech: “You Too Can Fail Upwards” (2022)

in Art, Film | July 13th, 2022

John Waters hasn’t made a movie in quite some time, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone quiet. In fact he’s remained as visible a cultural figure as ever by working in other forms: writing a new novel, acting on television, delivering commencement addresses. His dedication to that last pursuit is such that he even kept it up in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. That year he delivered his commencement speech for New York’s School of Visual Arts not at Radio City Music Hall, as scheduled, but in front of a green screen in Baltimore — which, of course, only enriched the Watersesque sensibility of the proceedings.

Having been forced into the role of “virtual keynote speaker,” Waters made up for it this year by delivering, in person, a make-up commencement address for the SVA classes of both 2020 and 2021. And he did it onstage at Radio City, a venue “known for family movies and the Rockettes. What the hell am I doing here?” As usual in this phase of his career, Waters expresses surprise to find himself in the role of elder statesman.

“In 2020, the School of Visual Arts gave me an honorary degree for, I guess, causing trouble,” he says. “This year, the National Film Registry — yes, that’s part of the Library of Congress, the U.S. Government, for god’s sake — selected my film Pink Flamingos, which New York magazine once called ‘beyond pornography,’ to its annual list of 25 culturally historic films.”

Safe to say that, half a century after its release, Waters’ most notorious motion picture doesn’t repel the establishment as it once did. And indeed, here in the 2020s, how can an artist get transgressive at all? Waters has much encouragement and advice for young people in search of new boundaries to violate. “Outsider old master paintings, narrative abstract expressionism, impenetrable pop, decorative minimalism, non-conceptualism, video folk art, appropriated NFT”: these are just a few of the artistic ventures not yet attempted that could turn their popularizers into cultural phenomena. “You too can fail upwards, if you try,” Waters insists, but you’ve got to do it with a sense of humor. “Mock yourself first. Then you can be as crazily righteous as you want.”

David Byrne’s Graduation Speech Offers Troubling and Encouraging Advice for Students in the Arts

An Anti, Anti-Smoking Announcement from John Waters

David Lynch Gives Unconventional Advice to Graduates in an Unusual Commencement Address

John Waters Talks About His Books and Role Models in a Whimsical Animated Video

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The First Photographs Taken by the Webb Telescope: See Faraway Galaxies & Nebulae in Unprecedented Detail

in Astronomy, Technology | July 13th, 2022

Late last year we featured the amazing engineering of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is now the largest optical telescope in space. Capable of registering phenomena older, more distant, and further off the visible spectrum than any previous device, it will no doubt show us a great many things we’ve never seen before. In fact, it’s already begun: earlier this week, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center released the first photographs taken through the Webb telescope, which “represent the first wave of full-color scientific images and spectra the observatory has gathered, and the official beginning of Webb’s general science operations.”

The areas of outer space depicted in unprecedented detail by these photos include the Carina Nebula (top), the Southern Ring Nebula (2nd image on this page), and the galaxy clusters known as Stephan’s Quintet (the home of the angels in It’s a Wonderful Life) and SMACS 0723 (bottom).

That last, notes Petapixel’s Jaron Schneider, “is the highest resolution photo of deep space that has ever been taken,” and the light it captures “has traveled for more than 13 billion years.” What this composite image shows us, as NASA explains, is SMACS 0723 “as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago” — and its “slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.”

All this can be a bit difficult to get one’s head around, at least if one is professionally involved with neither astronomy nor cosmology. But few imaginations could go un-captured by the richness of the images themselves. Sharp, rich in color, varied in texture — and in the case of the Carina Nebula or “Cosmic Cliffs,” NASA adds, “seemingly three-dimensional” — they could have come straight from a state-of-the-art science-fiction movie. In fact they outdo even the most advanced sci-fi visions, as NASA’s Earthrise outdid even the uncannily realistic-in-retrospect views of the Earth from space imagined by Stanley Kubrick and his collaborators in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But these photos are the fruits of a real-life journey toward the final frontier, one you can follow in real time on NASA’s “Where Is Webb?” tracker. “Webb was designed to spend the next decade in space,” writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert. “However, a successful launch preserved substantial fuel, and NASA now anticipates a trove of insights about the universe for the next twenty years.” That’s quite a long run by the current standards of space exploration — but then, by the scale of space and time the Webb telescope has newly opened up, even 100 millennia is the blink of an eye.

How to Take a Picture of a Black Hole: Watch the 2017 Ted Talk by Katie Bouman, the MIT Grad Student Who Helped Take the Groundbreaking Photo

How Scientists Colorize Those Beautiful Space Photos Taken By the Hubble Space Telescope

The Very First Picture of the Far Side of the Moon, Taken 60 Years Ago

The First Images and Video Footage from Outer Space, 1946–1959

The Beauty of Space Photography

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The German Cast of Hamilton Sings the Title Track, “Alexander Hamilton” in German

in Music, Theatre | July 12th, 2022

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is coming to Hamburg in October 2022. And this video gives audiences a taste of what awaits them: The title track “Alexander Hamilton” sung in German. Enjoy…

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The German Cast of Hamilton Sings the Title Track, “Alexander Hamilton” in German

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