A Hypnotic Look at How Japanese Samurai Swords Are Made

in History | May 2nd, 2017

Paper, books, wood­en joints, tea whisks — Japan­ese cul­ture has, for seem­ing­ly all of its long record­ed his­to­ry, great­ly esteemed the mak­ing of objects. But no one object rep­re­sents the Japan­ese ded­i­ca­tion to crafts­man­ship, and with­in that the eter­nal pur­suit of approach­able but nev­er quite attain­able per­fec­tion, than the sword. You can see what it takes to make a katana, the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese sword of the kind car­ried by the armed mil­i­tary class of the samu­rai between rough­ly the 8th and 19th cen­turies, in the 26-minute video above, which offers a close look at each stage of the sword­mak­ing process: the Shin­to bless­ing of the forge, the ham­mer­ing of the red-hot met­al, the tem­per­ing of the fresh­ly shaped blade, the con­struc­tion of the scab­bard and hilt, the final assem­bly, and every painstak­ing step in between.

Orig­i­nal­ly pro­duced for the Unit­ed King­dom’s Nation­al Muse­um of Arms and Armour and Port­land Art Muse­um’s col­lab­o­ra­tive 2013 spe­cial exhi­bi­tion “Samu­rai! Armor from the Ann and Gabriel Bar­bi­er-Mueller Col­lec­tion,” the video’s word­less but cer­tain­ly not silent por­tray­al of this ancient and con­tin­u­ing prac­tice has a kind of hyp­not­ic qual­i­ty.

But if you’d like a more ver­bal expla­na­tion to accom­pa­ny your views of the mak­ing of a tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese sword, you’ll get it in the 50-minute doc­u­men­tary above, The Secret World of the Japan­ese Sword­smith, a por­trait of the high­ly respect­ed Yoshin­do Yoshi­hara, one of only thir­ty full-time sword­smiths cur­rent­ly prac­tic­ing in Japan. If you then feel up to a Japan­ese sword­smithing triple-bill, give Samu­rai Sword: Mak­ing of a Leg­end a watch as well.


This 50-minute pro­gram tells the sto­ry of the katana itself, begin­ning with this breath­less nar­ra­tion: “For over one thou­sand years, one weapon has dom­i­nat­ed the bat­tle­fields of Japan, a weapon so fear­some that it can split a man from throat to groin — yet it spawned an an entire­ly new art form and spir­i­tu­al way of life. A sword so tech­no­log­i­cal­ly per­fect in struc­ture, so beau­ti­ful in cre­ation, that it gave rise to an aris­to­crat­ic war­rior creed.” It also gave rise to no small num­ber of samu­rai movies, a tra­di­tion that many a cinephile among us can cer­tain­ly appre­ci­ate. Though inex­tri­ca­bly tied to a spe­cif­ic time and place in his­to­ry, and an even more spe­cif­ic class that arose from the pecu­liar polit­i­cal cir­cum­stances of that time and place, the katana con­tin­ues to fas­ci­nate — and in this dig­i­tal, hands-free age, its mak­ers draw a more intense kind of respect than ever.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Japan­ese Crafts­man Spends His Life Try­ing to Recre­ate a Thou­sand-Year-Old Sword

Female Samu­rai War­riors Immor­tal­ized in 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Pho­tos

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

How Japan­ese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bam­boo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How the Soviets Imagined in 1960 What the World Would Look in 2017: A Gallery of Retro-Futuristic Drawings

in Sci Fi | May 2nd, 2017

In one of the most impas­sioned and beau­ti­ful­ly writ­ten defens­es of Burkean con­ser­vatism I have ever read, the poet Wen­dell Berry took gov­ern­ment projects of both the left and right to task, pro­claim­ing in 1968 that the emer­gence of a mas­sive bureau­cra­cy was a trag­ic sign of the “loss of the future.” His argu­ment is sim­i­lar to one made over twen­ty years ear­li­er by the Trot­sky­ist-turned-con­ser­v­a­tive writer James Burn­ham, whose 1941 book The Man­age­r­i­al Rev­o­lu­tion pre­dict­ed “at each point,” wrote George Orwell in a thor­ough review, “a con­tin­u­a­tion of the thing that is hap­pen­ing.” A “man­age­r­i­al” cen­tral state, Burn­ham also argued, inevitably brought about a “loss of the future.”

Nei­ther the con­tem­pla­tive Berry nor the inci­sive Burn­ham have been able to account for one his­tor­i­cal­ly inescapable fact: the peri­ods in which 20th cen­tu­ry soci­eties imag­ined the future most vivid­ly were those most dom­i­nat­ed by bureau­crat­ic, tech­no­crat­ic, cen­tral­ized polit­i­cal economies. This is true under con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ments like that of the U.S. under Eisen­how­er, in which huge infra­struc­ture projects—from the high­way sys­tem to hydro­elec­tric dams— rearranged the lives of mil­lions.

And it was true under Khrushchev’s Sovi­et state, whose Vir­gin Lands cam­paign did the same. Indeed, mid-cen­tu­ry Sovi­et “expec­ta­tions were pret­ty sim­i­lar to the futur­is­tic pre­dic­tions of Amer­i­cans,” writes Matt Novak, “with a touch more Com­mu­nism, of course.” Unsur­pris­ing, per­haps, giv­en that the two nations were locked in com­pe­ti­tion over the dom­i­na­tion of both earth and space.

Novak’s under­state­ment is ful­ly war­rant­ed. Although the peo­ple in images like those you see here tend to appear in more col­lec­tive arrange­ments, their sci-fi sur­round­ings almost mir­ror those in the images from the U.S. that were par­o­died by The Jet­sons two years after this 1960 col­lec­tion. These detailed sce­nar­ios come from a “retro-futur­is­tic film­strip, which would have been played through a Diafilm,” a kind of slide pro­jec­tor. It’s a vision, it just so hap­pens, of our time, 2017, but it looks back­ward to get there, both in its tech­nol­o­gy and its design. The illus­tra­tion above, for exam­ple, “was almost cer­tain­ly inspired by the Futu­ra­ma exhib­it from the 1939 New York World’s Fair.” (Itself built, we may note, on the shoul­ders of Roosevelt’s New Deal.)

You can see many more of these illus­tra­tions at Pale­o­fu­ture, and at the top of the post watch a video ver­sion with “jazzy music and star wipes.” You may find these visions quaint, charm­ing in their naiveté and inaccuracy—yet often quaint­ly pre­scient as well. Retro-futurism’s appeal to us seems to rest prin­ci­pal­ly in how sil­ly it can seem in hind­sight, even when it gets things right. Per­haps it is the case that the most ful­ly-real­ized, total­iz­ing visions of tomor­row are as far-fetched as the con­trol­ling soci­eties that pro­duce them are unsus­tain­able. As Bob Dug­gan writes at Big Think, for exam­ple, we are bound to asso­ciate the “undead art move­ment” of Ital­ian Futur­ism with the very short-lived regime of Ital­ian Fas­cism. Maybe the degree to which a gov­ern­ment lacks a future is in inverse pro­por­tion to the inten­si­ty of its retro-futur­ism.

So what exact­ly is the rela­tion­ship between state pow­er and utopi­an futur­ism? The ques­tion invites a dis­ser­ta­tion, and sure­ly many have been writ­ten, as they have on the symp­to­mol­o­gy of the tech­no-dystopi­an and urban apoc­a­lyp­tic forms of futur­ism. We might begin by won­der­ing what our actu­al 2017 will look like 57 years from now. What will peo­ple in 2074 make of our end­less cul­ture of revival­ism, from zom­bie steam­punk to retreads and remakes of every­thing from Ghost in the Shell, to The Matrix, to Star Wars? Who can say. Per­haps, for what­ev­er soci­o­log­i­cal rea­son, we are suf­fer­ing, as Berry put it, from a loss of the future.

 

via Pale­o­fu­ture

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sovi­et Artists Envi­sion a Com­mu­nist Utopia in Out­er Space

“Glo­ry to the Con­querors of the Uni­verse!”: Pro­pa­gan­da Posters from the Sovi­et Space Race (1958–1963)

Down­load 144 Beau­ti­ful Books of Russ­ian Futur­ism: Mayakovsky, Male­vich, Khleb­nikov & More (1910–30)

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

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John F. Kennedy Explains Why Artists & Poets Are Indispensable to American Democracy (October 26th, 1963)

in Poetry, Politics | May 2nd, 2017

The Greek word poe­sis did not con­fine itself to the lit­er­ary arts. Most broad­ly speak­ing, the word meant “to make”—as in, to cre­ate any­thing, god­like, out of the stuff of ideas. But the Eng­lish word “poet­ry” has always retained this grander sense, one very present for poets steeped in the clas­sics, like Per­cy Shel­ley, who famous­ly called poets the “unac­knowl­edged leg­is­la­tors of the world” in his essay “A Defence of Poet­ry.” Shel­ley argued, “If no new poets should arise to cre­ate afresh the asso­ci­a­tions which have been thus dis­or­ga­nized, lan­guage will be dead to all the nobler pur­pos­es of human inter­course.”

It can feel at times, watch­ing cer­tain of our lead­ers speak, that lan­guage may be dying for “nobler pur­pos­es.” But cer­tain poets would seek to con­vince us oth­er­wise. As Walt Whit­man wrote of his coun­try­men in an intro­duc­tion to Leaves of Grass, “pres­i­dents shall not be their com­mon ref­er­ee so much as their poets shall.”

Whit­man lived in a time that val­ued rhetor­i­cal skill in its lead­ers. So too did anoth­er of the country’s revered nation­al poets, Robert Frost, who accept­ed the request of John F. Kennedy to serve as the first inau­gur­al poet in 1961 with “his sig­na­ture ele­gance of wit,” com­ments Maria Popo­va. Frost, 86 years old at the time, read his poem “The Gift Out­right” from mem­o­ry and offered Kennedy some full-throat­ed advice on join­ing “poet­ry and pow­er.”

Kennedy, an “arts patron in chief,” as the L.A. Times’ Mark Swed describes him, was so moved that two years lat­er, after the poet’s death, he deliv­ered an elo­quent eulo­gy for Frost at Amherst Col­lege that picked up the poet’s theme, and acknowl­edged the pow­er of poet­ry as equal to, and per­haps sur­pass­ing, that of pol­i­tics. “Our nation­al strength mat­ters,” he began, “but the spir­it which informs and con­trols our strength mat­ters just as much.” That ani­mat­ing spir­it for Kennedy was not reli­gion, civ­il or super­nat­ur­al, but art. Frost’s poet­ry, he said, “brought an unspar­ing instinct for real­i­ty to bear on the plat­i­tudes and pieties of soci­ety.”

His sense of the human tragedy for­ti­fied him against self-decep­tion and easy con­so­la­tion… it is hard­ly an acci­dent that Robert Frost cou­pled poet­ry and pow­er, for he saw poet­ry as the means of sav­ing pow­er from itself. When pow­er leads men towards arro­gance, poet­ry reminds him of his lim­i­ta­tions. When pow­er nar­rows the areas of man’s con­cern, poet­ry reminds him of the rich­ness and diver­si­ty of his exis­tence. When pow­er cor­rupts, poet­ry cleans­es. For art estab­lish­es the basic human truth which must serve as the touch­stone of our judg­ment.

The tragedy of hubris and cel­e­bra­tion of diver­si­ty, how­ev­er, we can see not only in Frost, but in Shel­ley, Whit­man, and per­haps every oth­er great poet whose “per­son­al vision… becomes the last cham­pi­on of the indi­vid­ual mind and sen­si­bil­i­ty against an intru­sive soci­ety and an offi­cious state.” Kennedy’s short speech, with great clar­i­ty and con­ci­sion, makes the case for using the country’s resources to “reward achieve­ment in the arts as we reward achieve­ment in busi­ness or state­craft.” But just as impor­tant­ly, he argues against any kind of state impo­si­tion on an artist’s vision: “If art is to nour­ish the roots of our cul­ture, soci­ety must set the artist free to fol­low his vision wher­ev­er it takes him. We must nev­er for­get that art is not a form of pro­pa­gan­da; it is a form of truth.”

You can hear Kennedy deliv­er the speech in the audio above, read a full tran­script in Eng­lish here and in 12 oth­er lan­guages here. In the audi­ence at Amherst sat poet and crit­ic Archibald MacLeish, who, in his “Ars Poet­i­ca,” had sug­gest­ed that poet­ry should not be stripped of its sounds and images and turned into a didac­tic tool. Kennedy agrees. “In free soci­ety art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ide­ol­o­gy.” Yet poet­ry is not a lux­u­ry, but a neces­si­ty if a body politic is to flour­ish. “The nation which dis­dains the mis­sion of art,” Kennedy warned, “invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of hav­ing ‘noth­ing to look back­ward to with pride, and noth­ing to look for­ward to with hope.’”

Kennedy’s is a point of view, per­haps, that might get under a lot of peo­ple’s skin. It’s worth con­sid­er­ing, as a less opti­mistic crit­ic argued at the time, whether an over­abun­dance of didac­tic polit­i­cal state­ments in art may be as cul­tur­al­ly dam­ag­ing as the absence of art in pol­i­tics. Or whether art like Frost’s is ever “dis­in­ter­est­ed,” in Kennedy’s phras­ing, or apo­lit­i­cal, or can oper­ate inde­pen­dent­ly as a check to pow­er. Frost him­self may express ambiva­lence in his embrace of “human tragedy.” But in his doubt he ful­fills the poet­’s role, enter­ing into the kind of crit­i­cal dialec­tic Kennedy claims for poet­ry and democ­ra­cy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Robert Frost Read ‘The Gift Out­right,’ the Poem He Recit­ed from Mem­o­ry at JFK’s Inau­gu­ra­tion

New Film Project Fea­tures Cit­i­zens of Alaba­ma Read­ing Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a Poet­ic Embod­i­ment of Demo­c­ra­t­ic Ideals

Theodor Adorno’s Rad­i­cal Cri­tique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Viet­nam War Protest Move­ment

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

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A Free Course from Yale on the U.S. Civil War

in History | May 2nd, 2017

If there’s a sil­ver lin­ing to the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, it’s that it pro­vides some teach­able moments for his­to­ri­ans and stu­dents. Just days after the inau­gu­ra­tion, Trump com­ment­ed at a cel­e­bra­tion of Black His­to­ry Month, “Fred­er­ick Dou­glass is an exam­ple of some­body who’s done an amaz­ing job and is get­ting rec­og­nized more and more, I notice.” Enter the his­to­ri­ans, who quick­ly remind­ed us that the great abo­li­tion­ist, ora­tor and writer had died back in 1895. There’s no present tense here, only past.

And now there’s this: Yes­ter­day, the pres­i­dent spec­u­lat­ed in an odd inter­view that the Civ­il War could have been avert­ed if Andrew Jack­son had been there to stop it:

I mean, had Andrew Jack­son been a lit­tle lat­er, you would­n’t have had the Civ­il War. He was a very tough per­son, but he had a big heart, and he was real­ly angry that he saw what was hap­pen­ing with regard to the Civ­il War. He said, “There’s no rea­son for this.” Peo­ple don’t real­ize, you know, the Civ­il War, you think about it, why?

His­to­ri­ans were quick to point out that Jack­son end­ed his pres­i­den­cy in 1837 and died in 1845–respectively, 24 and 16 years before the start of the Civ­il War. How Jack­son would have han­dled the lead up to the Civ­il War is pure spec­u­la­tion. Just as it would be spec­u­la­tion to say how FDR or Tru­man would have dealt with the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis.

David Blight, a Yale his­to­ri­an and expert on slav­ery and the Civ­il War, had a bit stronger reac­tion to Trump’s com­ments, telling Moth­er Jones:

So he real­ly said this about Jack­son and the Civ­il War? All I can say to you is that from day one I have believed that Don­ald Trump’s great­est threat to our soci­ety and to our democ­ra­cy is not nec­es­sar­i­ly his author­i­tar­i­an­ism, but his essen­tial ignorance—of his­to­ry, of pol­i­cy, of polit­i­cal process, of the Con­sti­tu­tion. Say­ing that if Jack­son had been around we might not have had the Civ­il War is like say­ing that one strong, aggres­sive leader can shape, pre­vent, move his­to­ry how­ev­er he wish­es. This is sim­ply 5th grade under­stand­ing of his­to­ry or worse.

Today, as with the past, Trump seems to be fig­ur­ing out (the hard way) that one per­son can’t change the course of a nation by force of will–not when there are so many oth­er forces and play­ers that shape things. A lot of hubris and inflat­ed rhetoric came into White House in Jan­u­ary. Whether Trump is actu­al­ly learn­ing the physics of pol­i­tics remains to be seen.

But here’s one thing you don’t have to wait for. David Blight has made avail­able a free course on the Civ­il War. In 27 lec­tures, his course “explores the caus­es, course, and con­se­quences of the Amer­i­can Civ­il War, from the 1840s to 1877,” look­ing at how the Unit­ed States was trans­formed on mul­ti­ple lev­els: racial­ly, social­ly, polit­i­cal­ly, con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly and moral­ly. You can access the 27 free lec­tures, pre­sent­ed in audio and video, via YouTube, iTunes, and the Yale web site (plus a syl­labus). We also have it on the list of our Free His­to­ry Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ani­mat­ed Map Lets You Watch the Unfold­ing of Every Day of the U.S. Civ­il War (1861–1865)

“The Civ­il War and Recon­struc­tion,” a New MOOC by Pulitzer-Prize Win­ning His­to­ri­an Eric Fon­er

The His­to­ry of the World in 46 Lec­tures From Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle (A Free Course from Stan­ford)

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Why Should We Read Tolstoy’s War and Peace (and Finish It)? A TED-Ed Animation Makes the Case

in Literature | May 1st, 2017

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy’s epic nov­el of Rus­sia in the Napoleon­ic wars, has for some time borne the unfor­tu­nate, if mild­ly humor­ous, cul­tur­al role as the ulti­mate unread doorstop. (At least before David Fos­ter Wal­lace’s Infi­nite Jest or Karl Ove Knaus­gaard’s My Strug­gle.) The daunt­ing length and com­plex­i­ty of its nar­ra­tive can seem unique­ly for­bid­ding, though it’s equaled or exceed­ed in bulk by the books of ear­ly Eng­lish nov­el­ist Samuel Richard­son or lat­er mas­ter­works by the Ger­man Robert Musil and French Mar­cel Proust (not to men­tion the 8,000 page, 27-vol­ume roman Men of Good­will by Jules Romains.)

But where it may be nec­es­sary in cer­tain cir­cles to have a work­ing knowl­edge of À la recherche du temps per­du’s “madeleine moment,” one needn’t have read every vol­ume of the painstak­ing work to get the main fla­vor for this ref­er­ence. Tolstoy’s nov­el, on the oth­er hand, is all of a piece, an oper­at­ic text of so many dis­parate threads that it’s near­ly impos­si­ble to fol­low only one of them. And “any­one who tells you that you can skip the ‘War’ parts and only read the ‘Peace’ parts is an idiot,” writes Philip Hen­sh­er at The Guardian. (Now he tells me….) Hen­sh­er also swears one can read War and Peace “in 10 days max­i­mum.” Very like­ly, if you approach it with­out fear or prej­u­dice, and take some vaca­tion time. (But “could you read War and Peace in a week,” Tim Dowl­ing teased in those same pages?)

Tolstoy’s mas­sive psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trait of Tsarist Rus­sia in thrall to the French emper­or remains a cor­ner­stone of world, and of course, Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture. With­out it, there may have been no Doc­tor Zhiva­go or August 1914. “War and Peace is a long book, sure,” con­cedes the TED-Ed video above from Bren­dan Pel­sue, “but it’s also a thrilling exam­i­na­tion of his­to­ry, pop­u­lat­ed with some of the deep­est, most real­is­tic char­ac­ters you’ll find any­where.” Like most hulk­ing nov­els of the peri­od, the book was orig­i­nal­ly seri­al­ized in a magazine—the pre-HBO means of dis­sem­i­nat­ing com­pelling drama—but Tol­stoy had not intend­ed for it to grow to such a length or take up five years of his life. One story—that of the Decembrists—led to anoth­er. Grand, sweep­ing views of his­to­ry emerged from exam­i­na­tions of “the small lives that inhab­it those events.”

Pel­sue makes a per­sua­sive rhetor­i­cal case, but also—for most type‑A, over-employed, or high­ly dis­tractible read­ers, at least—inadvertently makes the coun­ter­ar­gu­ment. There are no main char­ac­ters in the book. No Anna Karen­i­na or Ivan Ilyich to fol­low from start to bit­ter end. “Instead, read­ers enter a vast inter­lock­ing web of rela­tion­ships and ques­tions” about the nature of love and war. Maybe you’ve already got one of those—like—in all the time you spend not read­ing nov­els. So (snaps fin­gers), what’s the pay­off? The upshot? The “made­line moment”? (No offense to Proust.) Well, no one can—or should attempt to—summarize a com­plex lit­er­ary work in such a way that we don’t need to read it for our­selves. Nor, can any inter­pre­ta­tion be in any way defin­i­tive. To his cred­it Pel­sue doesn’t try for any­thing of the kind.

Instead, he offers up Tolstoy’s “large, loose bag­gy mon­ster,” in Hen­ry James’ famous­ly dis­mis­sive phrase, not as a nov­el, nor, as Tol­stoy coun­tered, an epic poem or his­tor­i­cal chron­i­cle, but as a dis­tinct­ly Russ­ian form of lit­er­a­ture and “the sum total of Tolstoy’s imag­i­na­tive pow­ers, and noth­ing less.” A blurb that needs some work? We’re only going to miss the point unless we meet the work itself, whether we read it over 10 days or 10 years. The same can be said for so many epic works that lazy peo­ple like… well, all of us at times… com­plain about. There is absolute­ly no sub­sti­tute for read­ing Moby Dick from start to fin­ish at least twice, I’ve told peo­ple with such con­vic­tion they’ve rolled their eyes, snort­ed, and almost kicked me, but I haven’t myself been able to digest all of War and Peace, nor even pre­tend­ed to. Tolstoy’s great­est work has sad­ly come to most of us as a book it’s per­fect­ly okay to skim (or watch the movie).

It’s a frus­trat­ing work, some­times bor­ing and dis­agree­able, didac­tic and annoy­ing. It has “the worst open­ing sen­tence of any major nov­el,” opines Philip Hen­sh­er, and “the very worst clos­ing sen­tence by a coun­try mile.” And it is also per­haps, “the best nov­el ever written—the warmest, the round­est, the best sto­ry and the most inter­est­ing.” Tol­stoy not only enter­tains, but he accom­plish­es his inten­tion, argues Alain de Bot­ton, of increas­ing his read­ers’ “emo­tion­al intel­li­gence.” I wouldn’t take anyone’s word for it. We are free to reject Tol­stoy, as Tol­stoy him­self reject­ed Shake­speare, call­ing the ven­er­a­tion of the Bard “a great evil.” But we’d have to read him first. There must be some good rea­sons why peo­ple who have actu­al­ly read War and Peace to the end refuse to let the rest of us for­get it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Leo Tol­stoy, and How His Great Nov­els Can Increase Your Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence

Tol­stoy Calls Shake­speare an “Insignif­i­cant, Inartis­tic Writer”; 40 Years Lat­er, George Orwell Weighs in on the Debate

Watch War and Peace: The Splen­did, Epic Film Adap­ta­tion of Leo Tolstoy’s Grand Nov­el (1969)

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

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An Aging Louis Armstrong Sings “What a Wonderful World” in 1967, During the Vietnam War & The Civil Rights Struggle

in Jazz, Life, Music | May 1st, 2017


It’s not uncom­mon to have a knee jerk response to Bob Thiele and George David Weiss’ now-ubiq­ui­tous “What a Won­der­ful World.”

The qual­i­ty of your reac­tion is like­ly deter­mined by your world­view.

A misty-eyed bride-to-be brows­ing tunes for her upcom­ing reception’s father-daugh­ter dance will not be com­ing at things from the same angle as the direc­tors of Bowl­ing for Columbine, Good Morn­ing, Viet­nam, and—unexpectedly—Mada­gas­car.

The first ver­sion, sung by an aging Louis Arm­strong, remains defin­i­tive, though it was dis­missed at first by record execs, who hoped for anoth­er rol­lick­ing chart top­per along in the “Hel­lo, Dol­ly!” mod­el.

As Jack Doyle notes on the Pop His­to­ry Dig, Arm­strong dug the song, and per­formed it often, hop­ing to strike a chord of hope and opti­mism dur­ing a peri­od of great civ­il unrest:

Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s so bad but what we’re doing to it, and all I’m say­ing is: see what a won­der­ful world it would be if only we’d give it a chance. Love, baby, love.  That’s the secret…

The song’s white authors shared his view, and hoped his crossover appeal would pro­mote feel­ings of racial har­mo­ny on all sides of the record-buy­ing pub­lic. It was a hit in the UK, but a slow starter in the US, not real­ly catch­ing on until its appear­ance on Good Morn­ing, Viet­nam’s sound­track (1987).

Half a cen­tu­ry after its release, “What a Won­der­ful World” has entered the pan­theon, as any­one with a tele­vi­sion and ears can attest.

Its sim­ple lyrics involv­ing ros­es, rain­bows, and babies have result­ed in a num­ber of hideous­ly syrupy cov­ers. With so many choic­es, it’s almost impos­si­ble to pick a least-favorite. Their gooey­ness does a dis­ser­vice to the pow­er of the orig­i­nal.

What’s so poignant about the per­for­mance, above, are the moments where the dark­ness cuts through the trea­cle, ever so briefly. Check out Armstrong’s expres­sions at :25, :50, and 1:49, and inter­pret it how you will.

It’s worth not­ing that the night­ly news was monop­o­lized by reports of the war in Viet­nam and the strug­gle for civ­il rights at home. Arm­strong’s health was in decline. The real­i­ties of his own New Orleans child­hood were far more com­plex than the cray­on-bright vision paint­ed by the lyrics.

A mon­tage of bomb­ings and peace­ful demon­stra­tors being stomped under­foot would’ve seemed pre­ma­ture at such an ear­ly stage in the song’s his­to­ry, so Arm­strong smiled through, as he laid the ground­work for lat­er per­form­ers’ lay­ered inter­pre­ta­tions. Some of the ones we find most com­pelling are below:

Nick Cave & the Pogues’ Shane Mac­Gowan unhap­pi­ness has them reel­ing off their stools, even as they shake hands to com­ic effect.

Ministry’s sin­is­ter take opens with a love­ly lone­ly piano that, like the listener’s eardrums, gets plowed under by a mas­sive attack of indus­tri­al noise.

Joey Ramone had already been diag­nosed with the can­cer that cut his life short when he record­ed his ver­sion, that ends on a note of unabashed pop-punk joy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Clean­est Record­ings of 1920s Louis Arm­strong Songs You’ll Ever Hear

The Only Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong in a Record­ing Stu­dio: Watch the Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered Film (1959)

“What a Won­der­ful World,” Louis Armstrong’s Clas­sic, Per­formed with Tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese Instru­ments

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Montblanc Unveils a New Line of Miles Davis Pens … and (Kind of) Blue Ink

in Business, Music | May 1st, 2017


Got spare cash burn­ing a hole in your pock­et? An urge to com­mod­i­fy your favorite jazz artist? The need for an admit­ted­ly beau­ti­ful writ­ing instru­ment? All of the above, you say? Good, because Mont­blanc recent­ly unveiled a new line of Miles Davis pens. They’ve got the Miles Davis ball­point pen, foun­tain pen, and roller pen. But sure­ly the pièce de résis­tance is the Miles Davis Lim­it­ed Edi­tion 1926 Foun­tain Pen, which “tells the sto­ry of one of the great­est jazz per­son­al­i­ties.” “The sur­face of the cap and bar­rel is engraved with sym­bol­ic motifs that refer to the five major jazz peri­ods he helped to cre­ate.” What’s more, “a star, set with a dia­mond, is engraved on the bar­rel, and Miles Davis’s famous album Kind of Blue is reflect­ed in the blue col­or on the cone.” Swank.

And what’s a pen with­out ink? It’s blue, of course. Get a close up view of that here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead in 1970: Hear the Com­plete Record­ings

Watch Miles Davis Impro­vise Music for Ele­va­tor to the Gal­lows, Louis Malle’s New Wave Thriller (1958)

The Paint­ings of Miles Davis

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The Career of Paul Thomas Anderson: A 5‑Part Video Essay on the Auteur of Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love, The Master, and More

in Film | May 1st, 2017

For at least the past decade and a half, each of Paul Thomas Ander­son­’s movies has arrived in the­aters as a major cin­e­mat­ic event. By pure chance, I got an espe­cial­ly pow­er­ful taste of this a few years ago in Los Ange­les when, after a revival screen­ing of The Shin­ing, we in the audi­ence were told to stay right there in our seats for the rest of the night’s sur­prise dou­ble-fea­ture, the sec­ond half being Ander­son­’s as yet unre­leased and almost com­plete­ly unseen The Mas­ter — pro­ject­ed in 70-mil­lime­ter. Need­less to say, nobody left, so pal­pa­ble was the desire to expe­ri­ence the next phase of the cin­e­mat­ic vision of the auteur who has, to that point, giv­en us Hard Eight, Boo­gie Nights, Mag­no­lia, Punch-Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood.

So what makes Ander­son­’s cin­e­mat­ic vision so com­pelling? Video essay­ist Cameron Beyl, cre­ator of The Direc­tors Series (whose explo­rations of Stan­ley Kubrick, David Finch­er, and the Coen broth­ers we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), attempts an answer in this analy­sis of Ander­son­’s films, each of whose chap­ters reflect a chap­ter of the auteur’s jour­ney to his cur­rent promi­nence. The first of them finds him, at sev­en­teen after a child­hood in the San Fer­nan­do Val­ley, shoot­ing a porn-star mock­u­men­tary called The Dirk Dig­gler Sto­ry, ele­ments of which would lat­er shape his 1997 porn-indus­try epic Boo­gie Nights. Hav­ing ditched film school after just two days, the slight­ly old­er Ander­son set out to make Cig­a­rettes & Cof­fee, a short tale of low life told in high style that would expand into his first fea­ture, the mis­treat­ed but redis­cov­ered Hard Eight.

Beyl’s minis­eries of video essays, which runs near­ly three hours in total, con­tin­ues from Ander­son­’s ear­ly Sun­dance suc­cess (a suc­cess that did much to raise the pro­file of the fes­ti­val itself) to his much larg­er-bud­get “Cal­i­for­nia chron­i­cles” Boo­gie Nights and Mag­no­lia, his “con­cept come­dies” Punch-Drunk Love and var­i­ous oth­er shorts made at the time, his “por­traits of pow­er” There Will Be Blood and The Mas­ter, and his ascent to “high­er states” in the Thomas Pyn­chon adap­ta­tion Inher­ent Vice and the doc­u­men­tary Jun­jun.

Beyl describes Ander­son as unde­ni­ably “born to be a film­mak­er,” and so it stands to rea­son that, though his favorite themes includ­ing fam­i­ly, pow­er, and sex­u­al dys­func­tion remain con­stant, each new phase of the direc­tor’s life results in a new phase in his film­mak­ing — or indeed, the oth­er way around. And so every­one who takes film seri­ous­ly eager­ly awaits his next chap­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Hid­den Secrets in “Day­dream­ing,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s New Radio­head Music Video

Two Short Films on Cof­fee and Cig­a­rettes from Jim Jar­musch & Paul Thomas Ander­son

What Makes a Coen Broth­ers Movie a Coen Broth­ers Movie? Find Out in a 4‑Hour Video Essay on Bar­ton Fink, The Big Lebows­ki, Far­go, No Coun­try for Old Men & More

Dis­cov­er the Life & Work of Stan­ley Kubrick in a Sweep­ing Three-Hour Video Essay

How Did David Finch­er Become the Kubrick of Our Time? A New, 3.5 Hour Series of Video Essays Explains

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.