Take an Online Course on Design & Architecture with Frank Gehry

in Architecture, Film | July 13th, 2017

FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

“Most of our cities are built with just face­less glass, only for economies and not for human­i­ties.” We’ve all heard many vari­a­tions on that com­plaint from many dif­fer­ent peo­ple, but sel­dom with the author­i­ty car­ried by the man mak­ing it this time: Frank Gehry, author of some of the most talked-about build­ings of the past thir­ty years. You may love or hate his work, the body of which includes such strik­ing, for­mal­ly and mate­ri­al­ly uncon­ven­tion­al build­ings as Bil­bao’s Guggen­heim Muse­um, Los Ange­les’ Walt Dis­ney Con­cert Hall, and Seat­tle’s Muse­um of Pop Cul­ture, but you can’t remain indif­fer­ent to it, and that alone tells us how deeply Gehry under­stands the pow­er of his craft.

And so when Gehry talks archi­tec­ture, we should lis­ten. Mas­ter­class, the online edu­ca­tion start­up that has pro­duced cours­es in var­i­ous dis­ci­plines with such high-pro­file prac­ti­tion­er-teach­ers as David Mamet, Her­bie Han­cock, Jane Goodall, Steve Mar­tin, and Wern­er Her­zog, has read­ied a rich oppor­tu­ni­ty to do so in the fall: “Frank Gehry Teach­es Design and Archi­tec­ture,” whose trail­er you can view above. The $90 course promis­es a look into the cre­ative process, as well as into the “nev­er-before-seen mod­el archive,” of this biggest of all “star­chi­tects” whose “vision for what archi­tec­ture could accom­plish” has reshaped not just our sky­lines but “the imag­i­na­tions of artists and design­ers around the world.”

As with any edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence, the more thor­ough­ly you pre­pare in advance, the more you’ll get out of it, and so, to that end, we sug­gest watch­ing Syd­ney Pol­lack­’s doc­u­men­tary Sketch­es of Frank Gehry, recent­ly made avail­able online by the Louis Vuit­ton Foun­da­tion. “Pol­lack is not usu­al­ly a doc­u­men­tar­i­an, and Gehry has nev­er been doc­u­ment­ed; they were friends, and Gehry sug­gest­ed Pol­lack might want to ‘do some­thing,’ ” wrote Roger Ebert in his review. “Because Pol­lack has his own clout and is not mere­ly a sup­pli­cant at Gehry’s altar, he asks pro­fes­sion­al ques­tions as his equal, sym­pa­thizes about big projects that seem to go wrong and offers insights.”

Pol­lack also “has access to the archi­tec­t’s famous clients, like Michael Eis­ner,” com­mis­sion­er of the Dis­ney Con­cert hall, “and Den­nis Hop­per, who lives in a Gehry home in San­ta Mon­i­ca” — just as Gehry him­self does, in the house whose rad­i­cal, qua­si-indus­tri­al mod­i­fi­ca­tion did much to make his name. Though he also brings in a few of the archi­tec­t’s many crit­ics to pro­vide bal­ance, “Pol­lack­’s opin­ion is clear: Gehry is a genius.” You may think so too, which would be a good a rea­son as any to take his Mas­ter­class. Even if you think the oppo­site, the phys­i­cal and cul­tur­al impact of Gehry’s work, as well as his endur­ing rel­e­vance and indus­tri­ous­ness — he con­tin­ues to design today, in his late eight­ies, espe­cial­ly for his long-ago adopt­ed home­town of Los Ange­les — has some­thing to teach us all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gehry’s Vision for Archi­tec­ture

On the Impor­tance of the Cre­ative Brief: Frank Gehry, Maira Kalman & Oth­ers Explain its Essen­tial Role

The ABC of Archi­tects: An Ani­mat­ed Flip­book of Famous Archi­tects and Their Best-Known Build­ings

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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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John Steinbeck Has a Crisis in Confidence While Writing The Grapes of Wrath: “I am Not a Writer. I’ve Been Fooling Myself and Other People”

in Literature, Writing | July 12th, 2017

In a 1904 let­ter, Franz Kaf­ka famous­ly wrote, “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,” a line immor­tal­ized in pop cul­ture by David Bowie’s “Ash­es to Ash­es.” Where Bowie referred to the frozen emo­tions of addic­tion, the arc­tic waste inside Kaf­ka may have had much more to do with the agony of writ­ing itself. In the year that he com­posed his best-known work, The Meta­mor­pho­sis, Kaf­ka kept a tor­tured jour­nal in which he con­fessed to feel­ing “vir­tu­al­ly use­less” and suf­fer­ing “unend­ing tor­ments.” Not only did he need to break the ice, but “you have to dive down,” he wrote on Jan­u­ary 30th, “and sink more rapid­ly than that which sinks in advance of you.”

Whether as writ­ers we find the evi­dence of Kafka’s crip­pling self-doubt to be a com­fort I can­not say. For many peo­ple, no mat­ter how suc­cess­ful, or pro­lif­ic, some degree of pain inevitably attends every act of writ­ing. And many, like Kaf­ka, have left per­son­al accounts of their most pro­duc­tive peri­ods. John Stein­beck strug­gled might­i­ly dur­ing the com­po­si­tion of his mas­ter­piece, The Grapes of Wrath. His jour­nal entries from the peri­od tell the sto­ry of a frayed and anx­ious man over­whelmed by the seem­ing enor­mi­ty of his task. But his exam­ple is instruc­tive as well: despite his frag­ile men­tal state and lack of con­fi­dence, he con­tin­ued to write, telling him­self on June 11th, 1938, “this must be a good book. It sim­ply must.” (See some of Stein­beck­’s hand­writ­ten entries in the image above, cour­tesy of Austin Kleon.)

In set­ting the bar so high—“For the first time I am work­ing on a real book,” he wrote—Steinbeck often felt crushed at the end of a day. “My whole ner­vous sys­tem in bat­tered,” he wrote on June 5th. “I hope I’m not head­ed for a ner­vous break­down.” He finds him­self a few days lat­er “assailed with my own igno­rance and inabil­i­ty.” He con­tin­ues in this vein. “Where has my dis­ci­pline gone?” he asks in August, “Have I lost con­trol?” By Sep­tem­ber he’s seek­ing per­spec­tive: “If only I wouldn’t take this book so seri­ous­ly. It is just a book after all, and a book is very dead in a very short time. And I’ll be dead in a very short time too. So to hell with it.” The weight of expec­ta­tion comes and goes, but he keeps writ­ing.

The “pri­vate fruit” of Steinbeck’s diary entries, writes Maria Popo­va, “is in many ways at least as impor­tant and moral­ly instruc­tive” as the nov­el itself. At least that may be so for writ­ers who are also beset by dev­as­tat­ing neu­roses. For Stein­beck, the diary (pub­lished here) was “a tool of dis­ci­pline” and “hedge against self-doubt.” This may sound coun­ter­in­tu­itive, but keep­ing a diary, even when the nov­el stalls, is itself a dis­ci­pline, and an acknowl­edge­ment of the impor­tance of being hon­est with one­self, allow­ing tur­bu­lence and dol­drums to be a con­scious part of the expe­ri­ence.

Stein­beck “feels his feel­ings of doubt ful­ly, lets them run through him,” writes Popo­va, “and yet main­tains a high­er aware­ness that they are just that: feel­ings, not Truth.” His con­fronta­tions with neg­a­tive capa­bil­i­ty can sound like “Bud­dhist scrip­ture,” antic­i­pat­ing Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writ­ing. We needn’t attribute any reli­gious sig­nif­i­cance to Steinbeck’s jour­nals, but they do begin to sound like con­fes­sions of the kind many mys­tics have record­ed over the cen­turies, includ­ing the imposter syn­drome many a saint and bod­hisatt­va has admit­ted to feel­ing. “I’m not a writer,” he laments in one entry. “I’ve been fool­ing myself and oth­er peo­ple.” Nonethe­less, no mat­ter how excru­ci­at­ing, lone­ly, and con­fus­ing the effort, he resolved to devel­op a “qual­i­ty of fierce­ness until the habit pat­tern of a cer­tain num­ber of words is estab­lished.” A rit­u­al act, of a sort, which “must be a much stronger force than either willpow­er or inspi­ra­tion.”

In the audio above, hear actor Paul Hecht read excerpts from Stein­beck­’s diaries in an episode of the Mor­gan Library’s Diary Pod­cast. You can read Stein­beck­’s diaries in the pub­lished vol­ume, Work­ing Days: The Jour­nal of The Grapes of Wrath, 1938–1941.

via Austin Kleon 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Franz Kaf­ka Ago­nized, Too, Over Writer’s Block: “Tried to Write, Vir­tu­al­ly Use­less;” “Com­plete Stand­still. Unend­ing Tor­ments” (1915)

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspir­ing Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

See John Stein­beck Deliv­er His Apoc­a­lyp­tic Nobel Prize Speech (1962)

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

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Send a Text Message to SFMOMA, and They’ll Send Works of Art to Your Mobile Phone

in Art | July 12th, 2017

The San Fran­cis­co Muse­um of Mod­ern Art–otherwise sim­ply known as SFMOMA–has 34,678 art­works in its col­lec­tions, only 5% of which it can put on dis­play at any giv­en time. That cre­ates an acces­si­bil­i­ty prob­lem. So the muse­um asked itself: “How can we pro­vide a more com­pre­hen­sive expe­ri­ence of our col­lec­tion?” And they devel­oped Send Me SFMOMA in response.

Send Me SFMOMA is “an SMS ser­vice that pro­vides an approach­able, per­son­al, and cre­ative method of shar­ing the breadth of SFMOMA’s col­lec­tion with the pub­lic.”  Here’s how it works:

Text 572–51 with the words “send me” fol­lowed by a key­word, a col­or, or even an emo­ji and you’ll receive a relat­ed art­work image and cap­tion via text mes­sage. For exam­ple “send me the ocean” might get you Pirkle Jones’ Break­ing Wave, Gold­en Gate; “send me some­thing blue” could result in Éponge (SE180) by Yves Klein; and “send me 💐” might return Yasumasa Morimura’s An Inner Dia­logue with Fri­da Kahlo (Col­lar of Thorns). Each text mes­sage trig­gers a query to the SFMOMA col­lec­tion API, which then responds with an art­work match­ing your request.

Give it a spin. See what piece of the SFMOMA col­lec­tion you get.

For more free art, vis­it this meta­col­lec­tion in our archive: 1.8 Mil­lion Free Works of Art from World-Class Muse­ums: A Meta List of Great Art Avail­able Online. And don’t miss the items in the Relat­eds below.

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!

via Coudal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 464 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

Down­load 200+ Free Mod­ern Art Books from the Guggen­heim Muse­um

School of Visu­al Arts Presents 99 Hours of Free Pho­tog­ra­phy Lec­tures

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100 Years of Cinema: New Documentary Series Explores the History of Cinema by Analyzing One Film Per Year, Starting in 1915

in Film | July 12th, 2017

Film has played an inte­gral part in almost all of our cul­tur­al lives for decades and decades, but when did we invent it? “We have evi­dence of man exper­i­ment­ing with mov­ing images from a time when we still lived in caves,” says the nar­ra­tor of the video series One Hun­dred Years of Cin­e­ma. “Pic­tures of ani­mals paint­ed on cave walls seemed to dance and move in the flick­er­ing fire­light.” From there the study of cin­e­ma jumps ahead to the work of stop-motion pho­tog­ra­phy pio­neer Ead­weard Muy­bridge, Louis Le Prince’s build­ing of the first sin­gle-lens movie cam­era, the inven­tion of the kine­to­scope, and the Lumière broth­ers’ first pro­jec­tion of a motion pic­ture before an audi­ence.

The birth of cin­e­ma, his­to­ri­ans gen­er­al­ly agree, hap­pened when these events did, around the last decade of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and the first decade of the twen­ti­eth, and so the first episode of 100 Years of Cin­e­ma cov­ers the years 1888 through 1914. But then, in 1915, comes D.W. Grif­fith’s ground­break­ing and still deeply con­tro­ver­sial fea­ture The Birth of a Nation, which the nar­ra­tor calls “one of the most impor­tant films in cin­e­ma his­to­ry.”

100 Years of Cin­e­ma thus gives The Birth of a Nation its own episode, and in each sub­se­quent episode it moves for­ward one year but adheres to the same for­mat, pick­ing out one par­tic­u­lar movie through which to tell that chap­ter of the sto­ry of film.

For 1916 we learn about 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the first pic­ture filmed under­wa­ter; for 1917, phys­i­cal come­di­an Buster Keaton’s debut The Butch­er Boy; for 1918, The Ghost of Slum­ber Moun­tain, which dared to inte­grate live actors with stop-motion clay ani­ma­tion. And so does 100 Years of Cin­e­ma tell the sto­ry of film’s first cen­tu­ry as the sto­ry of inno­va­tion after inno­va­tion after inno­va­tion, doing so through obscu­ri­ties as well as such pil­lars of the film-stud­ies cur­ricu­lum as Nanook of the North, Bat­tle­ship Potemkin, Metrop­o­lis, and Man with a Movie Cam­era.

The series, which began last April, has recent­ly put out about one new episode per month. Its most recent video cov­ers Scar­face — not Bri­an de Pal­ma’s tale of drug-deal­ing in 1980s Mia­mi whose poster still adorns dorm-room walls today, but the 1932 Howard Hawks pic­ture it remade. Here the orig­i­nal Scar­face gets cred­it­ed as one of the works that defined the Amer­i­can gang­ster film, lead­ing not just to the ver­sion star­ring Al Paci­no and his machine gun but to the likes of The God­fa­ther, Boyz N the Hood, and Reser­voir Dogs as well. Cinephiles, place your bets now as to whether 100 Years of Cin­e­ma will select any of those films for 1972, 1991, or 1992 — and start con­sid­er­ing what each of them might teach us about the devel­op­ment of the cin­e­ma we enjoy today.

You can view all of the exist­ing episodes, mov­ing from 1915 through 1931, below. And sup­port 100 Years of Cin­e­ma over at this Patre­on page.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Shots in Cin­e­ma Over the Past 100 Years

Take a 16-Week Crash Course on the His­to­ry of Movies: From the First Mov­ing Pic­tures to the Rise of Mul­ti­plex­es & Net­flix

Free MIT Course Teach­es You to Watch Movies Like a Crit­ic: Watch Lec­tures from The Film Expe­ri­ence

The His­to­ry of the Movie Cam­era in Four Min­utes: From the Lumiere Broth­ers to Google Glass

Cin­e­ma His­to­ry by Titles & Num­bers

Hol­ly­wood, Epic Doc­u­men­tary Chron­i­cles the Ear­ly His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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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Discover Dr. Seuss’s Audacious Advertisements from the 1930s & 40s: All on Display in a Digital Archive

in Business, Literature | July 12th, 2017

I well remem­ber learn­ing that Dr. Seuss’s real name was Theodor Geisel, most­ly because I found Theodor Geisel was just as much fun to say as “Dr. Seuss.” Both names rolled around in the mouth, did som­er­saults and back­flips off the tongue like the author’s mul­ti­tude of strange­ly rub­bery char­ac­ters. With his Rube Gold­berg machines, minis­cule Whos, enor­mous Hor­tons, and moun­tains of com­ic absur­di­ty, Seuss is like Swift for kids, his sto­ries full of fan­tas­tic satire along­side much good clean com­mon sense. Books like Hor­ton Hears a Who and The Grinch Who Stole Christ­mas are chock full of “pos­i­tive mes­sages,” writes Amy Chyao at the Har­vard Polit­i­cal Review, as well as tren­chant social cri­tique for five-year-olds.

Among the many lessons, “embrac­ing diver­si­ty is per­haps the sin­gle most salient one embed­ded in many of Dr. Seuss’s books.” Geisel did not always espouse this val­ue. There are those who read Hor­ton’s refrain, “a person’s a per­son no mat­ter how small,” as penance for work he did as a polit­i­cal car­toon­ist dur­ing World War II, when he drew what Jonathan Crow described in a pre­vi­ous post as “breath­tak­ing­ly racist” depic­tions of the Japan­ese, pro­mot­ing the big­otry that led to vio­lence and the intern­ment of Japan­ese Amer­i­cans, an action he vig­or­ous­ly sup­port­ed.

You can see many of his polit­i­cal car­toons at UC San Diego’s dig­i­tal library, “Dr. Seuss Went to War.” UCSD also hosts an online archive of Geisel’s adver­tis­ing work, which sus­tained him through­out much of the 30s and 40s, and not all of which has aged well either.

Geisel lat­er expressed regret for his blan­ket anti-Japan­ese atti­tudes after a trip to Japan in 1953. And he lat­er made sev­er­al anti-racist car­toons against Jim Crow laws and anti-Semi­tism. These might have been meant to atone for more of his less well-known work, adver­tise­ments fea­tur­ing crude, ugly stereo­types of Africans and Arabs.

You will find some of these ads in the USCD archive; Geisel did truck in some bla­tant­ly inflam­ma­to­ry images. But he most­ly drew innocu­ous, yet visu­al­ly excit­ing, car­toons like the one at the top, one of the dozens of ads he drew dur­ing a 17-year cam­paign for Flit, an insect repel­lant made by Stan­dard Oil.

Geisel did ads for Stan­dard Oil’s main prod­uct, pro­mot­ing Essol­ube motor oil, fur­ther up, with the kind of crea­ture that would lat­er inhab­it his children’s books. He got irrev­er­ent­ly high con­cept with a GE ad set in hell, pub­lished explic­it­ly under the pen name Dr. Theophras­tus Seuss. And just above, in a brochure for the Nation­al Broad­cast­ing Com­pa­ny, he intro­duces the visu­al aes­thet­ic of Horton’s jun­gle, with a troupe of stereo­typ­i­cal grass-skirt­ed Africans that might have come from one of Hergé’s offen­sive colo­nial­ist Tintin comics. (Both Seuss’s and Hergé’s ear­ly work are tes­ta­ments to the com­mon co-exis­tence of pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics with often con­temp­tu­ous or con­de­scend­ing treat­ment of non­white peo­ple in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.)

The Seuss adver­tise­ments archive shows us the artist’s devel­op­ment from visu­al puns and quirks to the ful­ly-fledged mechan­i­cal sur­re­al­ism of his mature style, as in the Nation­al Broad­cast­ing Com­pa­ny brochure above, with its musi­cal con­trap­tion the “Zim­ba­phone,” a pre­cur­sor to the many cacoph­o­nous, over­com­pli­cat­ed instru­ments to come. It is when he is at his most inven­tive that Geisel is at his best. When he aban­doned lazy, mean-spir­it­ed stereo­types, his work embraced a world of joy­ous pos­si­bil­i­ty and weird­ness.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japan­ese Car­toons Dur­ing WWII, Then Atones with Hor­ton Hears a Who!

Dr. Seuss’ World War II Pro­pa­gan­da Films: Your Job in Ger­many (1945) and Our Job in Japan (1946)

Neil Gaiman Reads Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham

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

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How Did the Romans Make Concrete That Lasts Longer Than Modern Concrete? The Mystery Finally Solved

in Architecture, History, Science | July 11th, 2017

An explo­sion in recent years of so-called “ruin porn” pho­tog­ra­phy has sparked an inevitable back­lash for its sup­posed fetishiza­tion of urban decay and eco­nom­ic dev­as­ta­tion. Doc­u­ment­ing, as the­o­rist Bri­an McHale writes, the “ruin in the wake of the dein­dus­tri­al­iza­tion of North Amer­i­can ‘Rust Belt’ cities” like Detroit, “ruin porn” shows us a world that only a few decades ago, thrived in a post-war eco­nom­ic boom that seemed like it might go on for­ev­er. Our mor­bid fas­ci­na­tion with images from the death of Amer­i­can man­u­fac­tur­ing offers a rich field for soci­o­log­i­cal inquiry. But when sci­en­tists look over what has hap­pened to so much of the archi­tec­ture from the ear­ly to mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, they’ve most­ly had one very press­ing ques­tion:

What is going on with the con­crete?

Or more specif­i­cal­ly, why do struc­tures built only a few years ago look like they’ve been weath­er­ing the ele­ments for cen­turies, when build­ings thou­sands of years old, like many parts of the Pan­theon or Trajan’s Mar­kets in Rome, look like they’re only a few years old? The con­crete struc­tures of the Roman Empire, writes Nicole Davis at The Guardian, “are still stand­ing more than 1,500 years after the last cen­tu­ri­on snuffed it.” Roman con­crete was a phe­nom­e­nal feat of ancient engi­neer­ing that until recent­ly had stumped sci­en­tists who stud­ied its dura­bil­i­ty. The Romans them­selves “were aware of the virtues of their con­crete, with Pliny the Elder wax­ing lyri­cal in his Nat­ur­al His­to­ry that it is ‘impreg­nable to the waves and every day stronger.”

The mys­tery of the Roman con­crete recipe has final­ly been revealed. Researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah have just pub­lished a study in Amer­i­can Min­er­al­o­gist show­ing how the com­pound of “vol­canic ash, lime (cal­ci­um oxide), sea­wa­ter and lumps of vol­canic rock” actu­al­ly did, as Pliny claimed, become stronger over time, through the very action of those waves. “Sea­wa­ter that seeped through the con­crete,” notes Davis, “dis­solved the vol­canic crys­tals and glass­es, with alu­mi­nous tober­morite and phillip­site crys­tal­iz­ing in their place.” These new crys­tals rein­force the con­crete, mak­ing it more imper­vi­ous to the ele­ments. Mod­ern con­crete, “by con­trast… is not sup­posed to change after it hardens—meaning any reac­tions with the mate­r­i­al cause dam­age.” (The short video above explains the process in brief.)

The recent study builds on pre­vi­ous work con­duct­ed by lead author, Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah geol­o­gist Marie Jack­son. In 2014, Jack­son, then at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, recre­at­ed the Roman con­crete recipe and dis­cov­ered one of the min­er­als with­in it that makes it supe­ri­or to the mod­ern stuff. But it took a cou­ple more years before she and her col­leagues fig­ured out the role of sea­wa­ter on form­ing the rare crys­tals. Now, they are rec­om­mend­ing that builders begin using Roman con­crete in the near future for sea­walls and oth­er marine struc­tures. The research “opens up a com­plete­ly new per­spec­tive for how con­crete can be made,” says Jack­son. “What we con­sid­er cor­ro­sion process­es can actu­al­ly pro­duce extreme­ly ben­e­fi­cial min­er­al cement and lead to con­tin­ued resilience, in fact, enhanced per­haps resilience over time.”

As we increas­ing­ly turn our post­mod­ern gaze toward the fail­ures of post­war industrialization–toward not only crum­bling cities but crum­bling dams and bridges–one secret for build­ing infra­struc­ture that can last for cen­turies comes to us not from an algo­rithm or an AI but from an ancient recipe com­bin­ing the primeval forces of vol­ca­noes and ocean waves.

via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Roman Archi­tec­ture: A Free Course from Yale 

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 C.E.

Ancient Rome’s Sys­tem of Roads Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

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

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Hand-Colored Photographs from 19th Century Japan: 110 Images Capture the Waning Days of Traditional Japanese Society

in History, Photography | July 11th, 2017

What we euphemisti­cal­ly refer to as the “Open­ing of Japan” cat­alyzed a peri­od of seis­mic upheaval for the proud for­mer­ly closed coun­try. Between the fall of the Toku­gawa shogu­nate in 1853 and the Mei­ji restora­tion in 1868, Japan­ese soci­ety changed rapid­ly due to the sud­den forced influx of for­eign cap­i­tal and influ­ence, much of it destruc­tive. “Unem­ploy­ment rose,” writes his­to­ri­an John W. Dow­er, “Domes­tic prices soared sky high…. Much of Japan was wracked by famine in the mid 1860s…. As if all this were not curse enough, the for­eign­ers also brought cholera with them.” They also brought pho­tog­ra­phy, and both West­ern and Japan­ese pho­tog­ra­phers doc­u­ment­ed not only the country’s pro­found trans­for­ma­tion, but also its tra­di­tion­al dress and cul­ture.

Closed for 200 years, Japan became a source of end­less fas­ci­na­tion for West­ern­ers as arti­facts made their way across the sea. Among them was “an exten­sive pho­to­graph­ic doc­u­men­ta­tion of Japan,” notes the New York Pub­lic Library, and “of inter­ac­tion between the Japan­ese and for­eign­ers” (Com­modore Perry’s expe­di­tion to Tokyo Bay includ­ed a daguerreo­type pho­tog­ra­ph­er.)

“In the broad­est sense, pho­tog­ra­phy entered Asia from Europe and Amer­i­ca as part of the process of colo­nial­ism, but soon took root in those regions with local pho­tog­ra­phers.”

The col­orized images you see here come from the NYPL’s large col­lec­tion of late 19th cen­tu­ry Japan­ese pho­tog­ra­phy, tak­en by pho­tog­ra­phers like the Ital­ian-British Felice Beato and his Japan­ese stu­dent Kim­bei, who “assist­ed Beato in the hand-col­or­ing of pho­tographs until 1863,” then “set up his own large and flour­ish­ing stu­dio in Yoko­hama in 1881.” The archive pro­vides “a rich resource for the under­stand­ing of the polit­i­cal, social, eco­nom­ic, and artis­tic his­to­ry of Asia from the 1870s to the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.” These images date from between 1890 and 1909, by which time much of Japan had already been exten­sive­ly west­ern­ized in dress, archi­tec­ture, and style of gov­ern­ment.

To many Japan­ese, the old ways, sus­tained through a cou­ple hun­dred years of iso­la­tion, must have seemed in dan­ger of slip­ping away. To many West­ern­ers, how­ev­er, the encounter with Japan offered a kind of cul­tur­al renew­al. As the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art points out, “a tidal wave of for­eign imports” from Asia, includ­ing “wood­cut prints by mas­ters of the ukiyo‑e school… trans­formed Impres­sion­ist and Post-Impres­sion­ist art.” Euro­pean col­lec­tors, traders, and artists dis­cov­ered a mania for all things Japan­ese, even as some of its cul­tur­al forms threat­ened to dis­ap­pear. Enter the NYPL’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion, Pho­tographs of Japan, here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold the Mas­ter­piece by Japan’s Last Great Wood­block Artist: View Online Tsukio­ka Yoshitoshi’s One Hun­dred Aspects of the Moon (1885)

What Hap­pens When a Japan­ese Wood­block Artist Depicts Life in Lon­don in 1866, Despite Nev­er Hav­ing Set Foot There

Japan­ese Kabu­ki Actors Cap­tured in 18th-Cen­tu­ry Wood­block Prints by the Mys­te­ri­ous & Mas­ter­ful Artist Sharaku

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

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How Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Boyhood) Tells Stories with Time: Six Video Essays

in Film | July 11th, 2017

The ever more crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed, ever more res­olute­ly Austin-based auteur Richard Lin­klater grounds each of his movies in a par­tic­u­lar place, but even more so in a par­tic­u­lar time. His sec­ond fea­ture Slack­er, which broke him into the world of Amer­i­can inde­pen­dent film in 1991, takes place not just in Austin, but in a sin­gle day in Austin. Its much big­ger-bud­get but also Austin-set fol­low-up Dazed and Con­fused takes place on May 28, 1976, the last day before grad­u­a­tion for its high-school-age char­ac­ters. 1995’s Before Sun­rise began a tril­o­gy of films released every nine years, each of which con­tin­ues the sto­ry of the cen­tral cou­ple by fol­low­ing them in near-real time around a dif­fer­ent place: first in Vien­na, then in Paris, then in Greece.

Lin­klater has main­tained his pen­chant for tem­po­ral speci­fici­ty, set­ting last year’s Every­body Wants Some!! in south­east Texas in 1980, specif­i­cal­ly on the day before the begin­ning of col­lege for its char­ac­ters. Before that, his low-key epic Boy­hood made cin­e­ma his­to­ry by hav­ing been shot over a peri­od of twelve years, demon­strat­ing defin­i­tive­ly that the direc­tor’s inter­est in time goes well beyond sim­ply evok­ing peri­ods or repli­cat­ing the real flow of events.

“It’s a big ele­ment, isn’t it, of our medi­um?” he asks in “On Cin­e­ma & Time,” the video essay made by “kog­o­na­da” for the British Film Insti­tute at the top of the post. “The manip­u­la­tion of time, the per­cep­tion of time, the con­trol of time — kind of the build­ing blocks of cin­e­ma.”

“What I’ll say is, like, ‘Carve out some­thing of real time,’ you know?” says Lin­klater, with his char­ac­ter­is­tic deliv­ery of artis­tic insight in a high­ly casu­al, Texas-inflect­ed locu­tion, in the Film Radar video essay “Richard Lin­klater and Time” (not view­able in all regions). “Some kind of hyper­re­al­i­ty, you know? Try­ing to make sense of the world in a movie way, of just how peo­ple live or think or inter­act.” But would his time-carv­ing, expert­ly though he does it, strike us as pow­er­ful­ly with­out he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors’ equal­ly high skill at craft­ing images (whether live-action or, occa­sion­al­ly, in ani­ma­tion, as in the roto­scop­ing of the philo­soph­i­cal dia­logue-dri­ven Wak­ing Life, or his Philip K. Dick adap­ta­tion A Scan­ner Dark­ly, exam­ined in Siob­han Cavanagh’s “Form and Func­tion”)?

You can see that skill on dis­play in the video essays “Cin­e­matog­ra­phy in the films of Richard Lin­klater” and “Silent Con­nec­tions” just above. In the lat­ter, fre­quent Lin­klater col­lab­o­ra­tor Ethan Hawke quotes the direc­tor: “I’ve nev­er been in a gun­fight. I’ve nev­er been involved in espi­onage. I’ve nev­er been involved in a heli­copter crash. And yet I feel like my life has been full of dra­ma, and the most dra­mat­ic thing that’s ever hap­pened to me is, real­ly, con­nect­ing with anoth­er human being. When you real­ly con­nect, you feel like your life is dif­fer­ent, and I want to make a movie about that con­nec­tion.” In a sense, Lin­klater has spent most of his career tak­ing dif­fer­ent approach­es to mak­ing that movie, always draw­ing on his vast breadth of film knowl­edge; the video essay “Real Time and New Wave Her­itage” just above looks at just a few of the par­al­lels between his work and that of his pre­de­ces­sors in cin­e­ma.

“It’s fun­ny, the way mem­o­ry works,” Lin­klater says in a ten-minute Inde­pen­dent Film Chan­nel fea­turette on the mak­ing of Boy­hood. “I’m kind of obsessed with that.” You can see a younger Lin­klater speak about his life as a film­mak­er, then only just begin­ning, in the 1991 Austin pub­lic-access tele­vi­sion clip just above. “I don’t get work,” he says. “For me, film­mak­ing’s not even a job, it’s not a career, it’s just some­thing I’m doing. For the first time it looks like I should be mak­ing mon­ey at it, but we’ll see.” Now we’ve seen what Lin­klater can do, though he’ll sure­ly sur­prise and impress us for decades to come with the ways he can dig, cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly, into his obses­sions — and the obses­sions his films have let us share. To quote a 23-year-old Hawke in Before Sun­rise, quot­ing Dylan Thomas read­ing W.H. Auden: “ ‘All the clocks in the city began to whirr and chime. Oh, let not time deceive you; you can­not con­quer time. In headaches and in wor­ry, vague­ly life leaks away, and time will have its fan­cy tomor­row or today.’ Some­thin’ like that.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Great Mix­tapes Richard Lin­klater Cre­at­ed to Psych Up the Actors in Dazed and Con­fused and Every­body Wants Some!!

Scenes from Wak­ing Life, Richard Linklater’s Philo­soph­i­cal, Fea­ture-Length Ani­mat­ed Film (2001)

Watch Matthew McConaughey’s Audi­tion Tape for Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Con­fused, the Indie Com­e­dy That Made Him a Star

In Dark PSA, Direc­tor Richard Lin­klater Sug­gests Rad­i­cal Steps for Deal­ing with Tex­ters in Cin­e­mas

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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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