Last week, we featured the free digital edition of the The History of Cartography. Or what’s been called “the most ambitious overview of map making ever undertaken.” The three-volume series contains illustrations of countless maps, produced over hundreds of years. And it, of course, references this fine specimen: A gift given to England’s Charles II in 1660, The Klencke Atlas featured state-of-the-art maps of the continents and various European states. It was also notable for its size. Standing six feet tall and six feet wide (when opened), the volume remains 355 years later the largest atlas in the world. Learn more about it with the BBC clip below.
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For some time now it has been fashionable to diagnose dead famous people with mental illnesses we never knew they had when they were alive. These postmortem clinical interventions can seem accurate or far-fetched, and mostly harmless—unless we let them color our appreciation of an artist’s work, or negatively influence the way we treat eccentric living personalities. Overall, I tend to think the state of a creative individual’s mental health is a topic best left between patient and doctor.
In the case of one Herman Poole Blount, aka Sun Ra—composer, bandleader of free jazz ensemble the Arkestra, and “embodiment of Afrofuturism”—one finds it tempting to speculate about possible diagnoses, of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, for example. Plenty of people have done so. This makes sense, given Blount’s claims to have visited other planets through astral projection and to himself be an alien from another dimension. But ascribing Sun Ra’s enlightening, enlivening mytho-theo-philosophy to illness or dysfunction truly does his brilliant mind a disservice, and clouds our appreciation for his completely original body of work.
In fact, Sun Ra himself discovered—fairly early in his career when he went by the name “Sonny”—that his music could perhaps alleviate the suffering of mental illness and help bring patients back in touch with reality. In the late 50’s, the pianist and composer’s manager, Alton Abraham, booked his client at a Chicago psychiatric hospital. Sun Ra biographer John Szwed tells the story:
Abraham had an early interest in alternative medicine, having read about scalpel-free surgery in the Philippines and Brazil. The group of patients assembled for this early experiment in musical therapy included catatonics and severe schizophrenics, but Sonny approached the job like any other, making no concessions in his music.
Sun Ra had his faith in this endeavor rewarded by the response of some of the patients. “While he was playing,” Szwed writes, “a woman who it was said had not moved or spoken for years got up from the floor, walked directly to his piano, and cried out ‘Do you call that music?’” Blount—just coming into his own as an original artist—was “delighted with her response, and told the story for years afterwards as evidence of the healing powers of music.” He also composed the song above, “Advice for Medics,” which commemorates the mental hospital gig.
It is surely an event worth remembering for how it encapsulates so many of the responses to Sun Ra’s music, which can—yes—confuse, irritate, and bewilder unsuspecting listeners. Likely still inspired by the experience, Sun Ra recorded an album in the early sixties titled Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, a collection of songs, writes Allmusic, that “outraged those in the jazz community who thought Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane had already taken things too far.” (Hear the track “And Otherness” above.) But those willing to listen to what Sun Ra was laying down often found themselves roused from a debilitating complacency about what music can be and do.
Javier Jensen, an artist living down in Santiago, Chile, has breathed a little life into some beloved book covers. And when I say little, I mean little. His animated touches are nicely understated, hardly distracting from the original cover designs.
“I used to be OBSESSED with Japanese culture,” wrote an uncommonly thoughtful Youtube commenter. “I miss that part of me. Trying to search for it again. That’s when I was the happiest.” Many of us westerners — or really, many of us non-Japanese — go through similar periods of affinity and avidity for all things Japanese. Some of us put it away with our childish things; some of us make Japanese culture a lifelong interest, or even the stuff of our professions. I myself got into Japan early, at some point found myself put off by the just slightly too obsessive Japanese pop-culture fan community in the West (though I admittedly read that comment below a music video with four million views), and later returned with a much more serious intent to understand.
But to understand what? The Japanese language, certainly, and Japanese film, Japanese cities, Japanese aesthetics, Japanese technology — all the fruits of the culture that stoke in the rest of the world both deep envy and, sometimes, faint suspicion. Why do they persist in using writing systems that, despite their considerable beauty, come with such aggravating difficulty? The comprehensive subway networks in metropolises like Tokyo and Osaka function day in and day out with astonishing reach and reliability, but why do their riders tolerate crowdedness even to the point of getting uncomplainingly crammed inside the cars by white-gloved attendants? And why, despite the Japanese love for elegant design and advanced consumer technology, do their web sites look so jumbled and confusing?
NHK World can put you on the road to understanding these and other questions with Japanology, their series of English-language documentaries exploring the things large and small, all surprising to the foreigner, that make up the fabric of Japanese life. BEGIN Japanology, their series for the Japan-intrigued but not necessarily Japan-experienced, has come to six seasons so far.
At the top of the post, you can see its episode on bento, those painstakingly prepared lunch boxes, simplified versions of which even those who know nothing of Japan have seen at grocery stores the world over. To learn more about bento’s place in Japanese culture, proceed on to the relevant episode of Japanology Plus, NHK’s series for the even more insatiably curious Japanophile. And couple with an episode on Ramen above.
Japanology Plus also dedicates one of its half-hour programs to the Shinkansen, commonly known as the “bullet train,” that quintessentially Japanese mode of transportation that, with its impeccable half-century record of speed, safety, and punctuality, has become the pride of the land. (I, for one, hold out hope that Obama will make The Onion’s “Ambitious Plan to Fly Americans to Japan to Use Their Trains” a reality.) But if you don’t feel quite ready yet to board a Shinkansen, much less learn about its inner workings, try the Begin Japanology Special Mini series, which offers five-minute distilled documentaries on such icons of Japan as tea gardens, hot springs, and Mount Fuji. Watching all these, I feel glad indeed that I’ve already got the tickets booked for my next flight over there. Do you have yours?
Living in New York, it’s not unusual to encounter ardent theater lovers who’ve carefully preserved decades worth of programs, tickets, and ephemera from every play they’ve ever seen. These collections can get a bit hoarder‑y, as anyone who’s ever sorted through the belongings of a recently departed lifelong audience member can attest.
If theater is dead — as gloomy Cassandras have been predicting since the advent of screens — these monoliths of Playbills and stubs constitute one hell of a tomb.
(Go ahead, toss that 1962 program to The Sound of Music…and why not drive a stake through poor Uncle Maurice’s cold, dead heart while you’re at it? All he ever wanted was to sit, eyes shining in the dark, and maybe hang around the stage door in hopes of scoring Academy Award winner, Warner Baxter’s autograph, below. )
For those of us who conceive of theatre as a still-living entity, the New York Public Library’s recent decision to start digitizing its Billy Rose Theatre Division archive is cause for celebration. Such grand scale commitment to this art form’s past ensures that it will enjoy a robust future. Hopefully someday all of the approximately 10 million items in the Billy Rose archive can be accessed from anywhere in the world. But, for now, you can start with over 100,000 items. The comparatively small percentage available now is still a boon to directors, designers, writers, and performers looking for inspiration.
It’s also wildly fun for those of us who never made it much past playing a poinsettia in the second grade holiday pageant.
Truly, there’s something for everyone. The library singles out a few tantalizing morsels on its website:
A researcher can examine a 1767 program for a performance of Romeo and Juliet in Philadelphia, study Katharine Hepburn’s personal papers (ed. note: witness the many moods of Kate, above), review Elia Kazan’s working script and notes for the original production of A Streetcar Named Desire, examine posters for Harry Houdini’s performances, read a script for an episode of Captain Kangaroo, view set designs for the original production of Guys & Dolls and costume designs for the Ziegfeld Follies, analyze a videotape of the original production of A Chorus Line, and find rich subject files and scrapbooks that document the most popular and obscure performances from across the centuries.
You might also prowl for Halloween costumes. What kid wouldn’t want to trick or treat as one of Robert Ten Eyck Stevenson’s 1926 designs for the Greenwich Village Follies?
There’s certainly no shame in mooning over a forgotten star… for the record, the one above is Alla Nazimova in Salomé.
And there’s something galvanizing about seeing a familiar star escaping the confines of her best known role, the only one for which she is remembered, truth be told…
For me, the hands down pearl of the collection is the telegram at the top of the page. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt sent it Gypsy Rose Lee to herald the re-opening of Gypsy, the musical based on her life.
For the uninitiated, telegrams were once an opening night tradition, as was staying up to read the review in the early edition, hot off the press.
More information on visiting the archive, online or in person, can be found here.
I first encountered bongo-playing physicist Richard Feynman in a college composition class geared toward science majors. I was not, mind you, a science major, but a disorganized sophomore who registered late and grabbed the last available seat in a required writing course. Skeptical, I thumbed through the reading in the college bookstore. As I browsed Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!—the first of many popular memoirs released by the affable contrarian scientist—the humanist in me perked up. Here was a guy who knew how to write; a theoretical physicist who spoke the language of everyday people.
Feynman cultivated his populist persona to appeal to those who might be otherwise turned off by abstract, abstruse scientific concepts. Like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, his name has come to stand for the best examples of popular science communication. It is often through one of Feynman’s accessible, non-specialist books or presentations that people learn of his work with the Manhattan project, his contributions to quantum mechanics, and his Nobel Prize. But Feynman’s extracurricular pursuits—from safe-cracking to drumming to experimenting with LSD—were also genuine expressions of his idiosyncratic character, as was another of his passions for which he is not very well known: art.
Feynman took up the pursuit at the age of 44, and continued to draw and paint for the rest of his life, signing his work “Ofey.” Many of his drawings display the awkward, off-kilter perspective of the beginner, and a great many others look very accomplished indeed. In an introductory essay to a published collection of his artwork, Feynman describes what motivated him to take up this particular avocation:
I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world. It’s difficult to describe because it’s an emotion. It’s analogous to the feeling one has in religion that has to do with a god that controls everything in the universe: there’s a generality aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so different and behave so differently are all run ‘behind the scenes’ by the same organization, the same physical laws. It’s an appreciation of the mathematical beauty of nature, of how she works inside; a realization that the phenomena we see result from the complexity of the inner workings between atoms; a feeling of how dramatic and wonderful it is. It’s — of scientific awe — which I felt could be communicated through a drawing to someone who had also had that emotion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feeling about the glories of the universe.
As you can see above, he took his work seriously. Most of his drawings consist of portraits and nudes, with the occasional landscape or still life. You can see more extensive galleries of Feynman’s art at AmusingPlanet, Museum Syndicate and Brain Pickings.
Feynman’s preoccupation—and full immersion—in the relationship between the arts and sciences marks him as a Renaissance man in perhaps the purest definition of the term: his approach closely resembles that of Leonardo da Vinci, a likeness that comes to the fore in the work below, which is either a collection of sketches doodled over with formulae, or a collection of formulae covered with doodles. Either way, it’s a perfect representation of the visionary mind of Feynman and his regard for ordinary language, people, and objects—and for “scientific awe.”
Most film-lovers must long for the next Stanley Kubrick, a new thematically adventurous, aesthetically rigorous, big budget-commanding, and take-after-take perfectionistic cinematic visionary for our time. But some film-lovers believe our time already has its own Stanley Kubrick in David Fincher, director of such highly acclaimed pictures as Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, The Game, and Seven — excuse me, Se7en. And just like Kubrick, Fincher didn’t start off at that level of the game. No, his career first gathered momentum with commercials, a bunch of music videos for the likes of The Motels, Paula Abdul, and Rick Springfield, and of course, Alien 3 — excuse me,Alien3.
So what exactly went wrong with that critically savaged yet (we now realize) auteur-directed chapter of the Alien franchise? That question gets addressed in detail early on in the latest multi-part video essay from Cameron Beyl’s Directors Series.
You may remember that we featured the Directors Series’ previous essay in April, but if you don’t, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that it examined the Kubrick oeuvre. Beyl ended it with a declaration of his own membership in the aforementioned Fincher-Is-Our-Kubrick club, and cinephiles all over the internet thrilled to his announcement of Fincher as his next object of analysis.
To date, five episodes of The Directors Series: David Fincher have come out, which deal with Fincher’s career as follows:
“Baptism By Fire” (Rick Springfield’s music videos and The Beat of the Life Drum, assorted music videos and commercials, Alien 3)
Even though the series hasn’t yet reached The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Gone Girl, you won’t come away from the case Beyl has assembled so far unconvinced of Fincher’s influences, preferences, and obsessions: crime, decay, punk, obsolete technology, architecture, surveillance, corporate and personal wealth, unusual illustrative visual effects, colors like blue and orange in high contrast, nihilism, predecessors like Ridley and Tony Scott — the list goes on, and will go on as long as Fincher’s career does. It says a great deal about his filmmaking skill and style that his work has become so widely known for both its overwhelmingly “gritty, grimy” and overwhelmingly “cold, clinical” look and feel. But if any director can ever arrive at this sort of towering, contradictory reputation, Fincher can, and if any video essays can explain how he did, the Directors Series can.
In the real, “meatspace” world of organic things, it’s a little bit harder. In January 2011, a YouTuber by the name of “mcwolles” posted the video above. In it, a man pours water in a scale model of Escher’s 1961 Waterfall. The contraption, using blue water, actually seems to work. The water runs uphill through several sharp angles and finishes by tumbling off the top into the paddlewheel below, where its begins its journey again. “Mcwolles” ends the video staring into the camera as he tries to find the off switch…but also dares viewers to figure out how he did it.
The Internet had a viral freakout—check out the 9.3 million views—and promptly set about trying to offer solutions. “Look how the shadows fall!” several people pointed out. The locked-down camera was another clue.
In May of 2011, “mcwolles” offered a 360 tour of the creation in his garage that offered some suggestions, and that was all that was needed for user “LookingMercury3D” to offer their explanation of how the trick was done. (Hint: editing).
Since then, “mcwolles” has only posted two more videos: one of him losing weight and one of a dog having its way with a stuffed animal. Maybe he’s busy working on his next piece of Escher-inspired art.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
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