A Radical Map Puts the Oceans–Not Land–at the Center of Planet Earth (1942)

in Maps | October 9th, 2018

We all learn the names, loca­tions, and even char­ac­ter­is­tics of the oceans in school. But unless we go into oceanog­ra­phy or some oth­er body-of-water-cen­tric pro­fes­sion, few of us keep them at our com­mand. Maybe the loss of that knowl­edge has to do with our land-cen­tric­i­ty as a species: not only do we live on the stuff, we also put it before water intel­lec­tu­al­ly. You can see how by tak­ing a glance at the design of most any world map, whose fram­ing, details, and col­or scheme all work togeth­er to high­light the land, not the water. Only the map above, the “Spilhaus Pro­jec­tion,” dares to reverse that scheme, putting Earth­’s water at the cen­ter and turn­ing it from neg­a­tive space into pos­i­tive.

Named for its cre­ator, the South African-born oceanog­ra­ph­er, geo­physi­cist, inven­tor, urban design­er (hav­ing come up with Min­neapo­lis Sky­way Sys­tem), and com­ic artist Athel­stan Spilhaus, the Spilhaus Pro­jec­tion “revers­es the land-based bias of tra­di­tion­al car­to­graph­ic pro­jec­tions,” writes Big Think’s Frank Jacobs, plac­ing “the poles of the map in South Amer­i­ca and Chi­na, rip­ping up con­ti­nents to show the high seas as one inter­rupt­ed whole.” The result­ing “earth-sea” is “per­fo­rat­ed by Antarc­ti­ca and Aus­tralia, and fringed by the oth­er land mass­es.” If you look close­ly at the top and low­er right of the map, you’ll find tri­an­gu­lar sym­bols indi­cat­ing the Bering Strait, per­haps the best land­mark to ori­ent your per­cep­tion of this rad­i­cal­ly new view of plan­et Earth.

But the view pro­vid­ed by the Spilhaus Pro­jec­tion (ren­dered here by graph­ic design­er Clara Deal­ber­to for Libéra­tion) isn’t as new as it may look. Spilhaus designed it back in 1942, as a side project while work­ing on the inven­tion for which he is per­haps most remem­bered: the bathyther­mo­graph, a device for mea­sur­ing ocean depths and tem­per­a­tures from mov­ing ves­sels like boats and sub­marines. But Jacobs cred­its it with a new rel­e­vance today: “Our oceans pro­duce between 50% and 85% of the world’s oxy­gen and are a major source of food for human­i­ty. But they are in mor­tal dan­ger, from over­fish­ing, acid­i­fi­ca­tion, plas­tic pol­lu­tion and cli­mate change. Mar­itime ‘dead zones’ – with zero oxy­gen and zero marine life – have quadru­pled since the 1950s.”

In oth­er words, our world and the oceans that cov­er more than 70 per­cent of its sur­face already look quite a bit dif­fer­ent than they did when Spilhaus designed this re-pri­or­i­tized way of visu­al­iz­ing them. Spilhaus lived until 1998, long enough to see the emer­gence of cur­rent ideas about cli­mate change, but one does won­der whether we in the 21st cen­tu­ry have devel­oped the kind of ocean-con­scious­ness for which he must have hoped. Per­haps our times call for even more dras­tic map­ping action, not just show­ing the cen­tral­i­ty of the oceans but, as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, show­ing what might hap­pen if they change much more.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map Shows What Hap­pens When Our World Gets Four Degrees Warmer: The Col­orado Riv­er Dries Up, Antarc­ti­ca Urban­izes, Poly­ne­sia Van­ish­es

A Cen­tu­ry of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in a 35 Sec­ond Video

Coun­tries and Coast­lines: A Dra­mat­ic View of Earth from Out­er Space

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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 or on Face­book.

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Aphex Twin’s Massive Catalog, Including Rare Unreleased Tracks, Is Now Free to Stream Online

in Music | October 9th, 2018

Few things con­nect the elec­tron­ic music of the 90s to that of today like Aphex Twin. The long career of Richard D. James—he of the sin­is­ter grin­ning face plas­tered on bux­om mod­els and a gang of vio­lent chil­dren in his ear­ly NSFW videos—anticipated and in some ways invent­ed the glitchy, clat­ter­ing, squelch­ing, cacoph­o­nous, alien sound of the dig­i­tal 21st cen­tu­ry. The release of his entire cat­a­log, includ­ing sev­er­al unre­leased tracks, on his web­site to buy or stream for free shows his clear aware­ness of how sem­i­nal his music has been for over three decades.

James became a crossover super­star in the late 90s, grew irri­tat­ed with imi­ta­tors, got lumped in with so-called IDM (“intel­li­gent dance music”), and threat­ened retire­ment many times. Then he did retire the Aphex Twin name in 2001 after releas­ing Drukqs and mak­ing music for the next few years under oth­er monikers. He also claimed he’d nev­er release his most inno­v­a­tive music “because I don’t want peo­ple rip­ping me off.”

In the mean­while, a cou­ple or so major glob­al eco­nom­ic changes came about, new younger fans came of age, and bed­room pro­duc­ers armed with lap­tops instead of the bat­tery of syn­the­siz­ers James com­mand­ed sprang up around the world. It might have seemed—as it did for a num­ber of peo­ple who grew up mak­ing, buy­ing, and danc­ing to elec­tron­ic music at the end of the 20th century—that it was time to pass the baton to anoth­er rave gen­er­a­tion.

Instead, James returned in 2014—after his infa­mous logo popped up on NYC sidewalks—with a new album, Syro, a huge suite of songs that won Aphex Twin near-unan­i­mous crit­i­cal ado­ra­tion and a Gram­my. The her­met­ic musi­cian had pre­vi­ous­ly summed up his rela­tion­ship with his audi­ence by telling an inter­view­er he hat­ed them. He appeared to hate the press even more. Return­ing thir­teen years lat­er as a 43-year-old father seemed to have mel­lowed him.

James is pos­i­tive­ly chat­ty in a lengthy Pitch­fork inter­view. He begins by explain­ing the ori­gin of the word “syro.” It came from his son, who “doesn’t know what it means, either. But it means some­thing. And it sounds cool.” He might have been talk­ing about the titles of near­ly every track on the album, his lat­est EP, or his retire­ment album, Druqks.

For James, a blan­ket con­tempt for the sta­tus quo man­i­fests in scram­blings of sense and sound.  Syro’s only deci­pher­able title, “minipops 67 [120.2] [source field mix],” may or may not refer to the 1983 British children’s show fea­tur­ing pre­teens singing con­tem­po­rary pop songs while dressed up like the orig­i­nal per­form­ers. Could be a pis­stak­ing nod to his gen­er­a­tion or an earnest vis­it to child­hood mem­o­ries through the por­tal of his own kids’ non­sense word, or both.

The Aphex Twin come­back saw James open­ing up about his process in inter­views and releas­ing a list of synth instru­ments used on Syro in the form of a dense info­graph­ic, above. (The dots in con­cen­tric cir­cles “line up with the track list,” notes Syn­th­topia, “so they graph­i­cal­ly indi­cate the gear that was used on each track.”). These ges­tures to his fans pre­saged the release of his entire cat­a­log for stream­ing on his site, “a near-com­plete col­lec­tion of James record­ing out­put since 1991,” as Ars Tech­ni­ca writes, includ­ing “hours of pre­vi­ous­ly unre­leased mate­r­i­al from pret­ty much every phase of his career.”

Check out the site here to stream Aphex Twin’s record­ed out­put in chrono­log­i­cal or ran­dom order, buy each track in a num­ber of for­mats, includ­ing the unre­leased rar­i­ties, and read the exten­sive Aphex Twin inter­view at Pitch­fork, a con­ver­sa­tion that sees him mus­ing on aban­don­ing all pre­vi­ous human influ­ences and mak­ing music from out­er space.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music Visu­al­ized on a Cir­cuit Dia­gram of a 1950s Theremin: 200 Inven­tors, Com­posers & Musi­cians

Free, Open Source Mod­u­lar Synth Soft­ware Lets You Cre­ate 70s & 80s Elec­tron­ic Music—Without Hav­ing to Pay Thou­sands for a Real-World Syn­the­siz­er

The 50 Best Ambi­ent Albums of All Time: A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

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

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How the Ancient Mayans Used Chocolate as Money

in Economics, Food & Drink, History | October 8th, 2018

We’ve had hun­dreds and hun­dreds of years to get used to mon­ey in the form of coins and bills, though exact­ly how long we’ve used them varies quite a bit from region to region. Of course, some spots on the globe have yet to adopt them at all, as any­one who’s heard the much-told sto­ry of the Yap islanders and their huge lime­stone discs knows. But the his­to­ry of mon­ey is, in essence, the his­to­ry of bar­ter­ing — trad­ing some­thing you have for some­thing you want — becom­ing more and more abstract; now, with dig­i­tal cryp­to-cur­ren­cies like Bit­coin, it looks like mon­ey will ascend one lev­el of abstrac­tion high­er. But to imag­ine what a tru­ly non-abstract cur­ren­cy looks like, just look at the ancient Mayan civ­i­liza­tion, the mem­bers of which paid their debts with choco­late.

“The ancient Maya nev­er used coins as mon­ey,” writes Sci­ence’s Joshua Rapp Learn. “Instead, like many ear­ly civ­i­liza­tions, they were thought to most­ly barter, trad­ing items such as tobac­co, maize, and cloth­ing.” Thanks to the work of archae­ol­o­gist Joanne Baron, a schol­ar of murals, ceram­ic paint­ings, carv­ings and oth­er objects depict­ing life in the Clas­sic Maya peri­od which ran from around 250 BC to 900 AD, we’ve now begun to learn how choco­late took on a major, mon­ey-like role in the Maya’s econ­o­my.

Some images depict cups of choco­late itself, which the Mayans usu­al­ly enjoyed in the form of a hot drink, being accept­ed as pay­ment, and oth­ers show choco­late trad­ed in the coin-like form of “fer­ment­ed and dried cacao beans.” In many scenes, Maya lead­ers receive their trib­utes (or tax­es) most often in the form of “pieces of woven cloth and bags labeled with the quan­ti­ty of dried cacao beans they con­tain.”

Cacao beans even­tu­al­ly became such a valu­able cur­ren­cy “that it was evi­dent­ly worth the trou­ble to coun­ter­feit them,” writes Smith­son­ian’s Josie Garth­waite in an arti­cle about the ear­ly his­to­ry of choco­late (a sub­ject about which you can learn more in the TED-ed video above). “At mul­ti­ple archae­o­log­i­cal sites in Mex­i­co and Guatemala,” she quotes anthro­pol­o­gist Joel Pal­ka as say­ing, “researchers have come across remark­ably well-pre­served ‘cacao beans’ ” that turn out to be made of clay. “Some schol­ars believe drought led to the down­fall of the Clas­sic Maya civ­i­liza­tion,” Learn notes, and accord­ing to Baron, “the dis­rup­tion of the cacao sup­ply which fueled polit­i­cal pow­er may have led to an eco­nom­ic break­down in some cas­es.” That may sound strange­ly famil­iar to those of us who — even here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, among the many who have gone near­ly cash­less and may soon not even need a cred­it card — have break­downs of our own when we can’t get our choco­late.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mar­velous Health Ben­e­fits of Choco­late: A Curi­ous Med­ical Essay from 1631

Mak­ing Choco­late the Tra­di­tion­al Way, From Bean to Bar: A Short French Film

The Ups & Downs of Ancient Rome’s Economy–All 1,900 Years of It–Get Doc­u­ment­ed by Pol­lu­tion Traces Found in Greenland’s Ice

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Bit­coin, the New Decen­tral­ized Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cy, Demys­ti­fied in a Three Minute Video

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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 or on Face­book.

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You’re Only As Old As You Feel: Harvard Psychologist Ellen Langer Shows How Mental Attitude Can Potentially Reverse the Effects of Aging

in Harvard, Health, Psychology, Science | October 8th, 2018

You’re only as old as you feel, right? The plat­i­tude may be true. In a sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly ver­i­fi­able sense, “feeling”—a state of mind—may not only deter­mine psy­cho­log­i­cal well-being but phys­i­cal health as well, includ­ing the nat­ur­al aging process­es of the body.

Har­vard psy­chol­o­gist Ellen Langer has spent decades test­ing the hypoth­e­sis, and has come to some inter­est­ing con­clu­sions about the rela­tion­ship between men­tal process­es and bod­i­ly aging. In order to do the kind of work she has for decades, she has had to put aside the thorny “mind-body” problem—a long­stand­ing philo­soph­i­cal and prac­ti­cal impasse in fig­ur­ing out how the two inter­act. “Let’s for­get about how you get from one to the oth­er,” she tells CBS This Morn­ing in a 2014 inter­view above, “and in fact see those as just words…. Wher­ev­er you’re putting the mind, you’re nec­es­sar­i­ly putting the body.”

What hap­pens to the one, she the­o­rized, will nec­es­sar­i­ly affect the oth­er. In a 1981 exper­i­ment, which she called the “coun­ter­clock­wise study,” she and her research team placed eight men in their late 70s in a monastery in New Hamp­shire, con­vert­ed to trans­port them all to 1959 when they were in their prime. Fur­ni­ture, décor, news, sports, music, TV, movies: every cul­tur­al ref­er­ence dat­ed from the peri­od. There were no mir­rors, only pho­tos of the men in their 20s. They spoke and act­ed as though they had trav­eled back in time and got­ten younger.

The results were extra­or­di­nary, almost too good to be true, she felt. “On sev­er­al mea­sures,” The New York Times report­ed in 2014, “they out­per­formed a con­trol group that came ear­li­er to the monastery but didn’t imag­ine them­selves back into the skin of their younger selves, though they were encour­aged to rem­i­nisce.” The “coun­ter­clock­wise” par­tic­i­pants “were sup­pler, showed greater man­u­al dex­ter­i­ty and sat taller…. Per­haps most improb­a­bly, their sight improved” as well as their hear­ing.  Giv­en the seem­ing­ly mirac­u­lous out­comes, tiny sam­ple size, and the unortho­doxy of the exper­i­ment, Langer decid­ed not to pub­lish at the time but con­tin­ued to work on sim­i­lar stud­ies look­ing at how the mind affects the body.

Then, almost thir­ty years lat­er, the BBC con­tact­ed her about stag­ing a tele­vised recre­ation of the monastery exper­i­ment, “with six aging for­mer celebri­ties as guinea pigs,” who were trans­port­ed back to 1975 by sim­i­lar means. The stars “emerged after a week as appar­ent­ly reju­ve­nat­ed as Langer’s sep­tu­a­ge­nar­i­ans in New Hamp­shire.” These exper­i­ments and sev­er­al oth­ers Langer has con­duct­ed over the years strong­ly sug­gest that chrono­log­i­cal age is not a lin­ear clock push­ing us inex­orably toward decline. It is, rather, a col­lec­tion of vari­ables that include psy­cho­log­i­cal well-being and some­thing called an “epi­ge­net­ic clock,” a mech­a­nism that UCLA geneti­cist Steve Hor­vath has dis­cov­ered direct­ly cor­re­lates with the aging process, and may show us how to change it.

But while Hor­vath has yet to answer sev­er­al press­ing ques­tions about how cer­tain genet­ic mech­a­nisms inter­act, Langer has put such ques­tions aside in favor of test­ing the mind-body con­nec­tion in a series of exper­i­ments, which engage the aging—or peo­ple with spe­cif­ic conditions—in stud­ies that stretch their minds. By cre­at­ing illu­sions like the monastery time machine, Langer has found that per­cep­tion has a sig­nif­i­cant effect on aging. If we per­ceive our­selves to be younger, health­i­er, more capa­ble, more vibrant, despite the mes­sages about how we should look and act at our chrono­log­i­cal age, then our cells and tis­sues get the mes­sage. Not only can a change in per­cep­tion affect aging, but also, Langer the­o­rizes, obe­si­ty, can­cer, dia­betes, and oth­er chron­ic or life-threat­en­ing con­di­tions. Much of her research here gets spelled out in her book, Coun­ter­clock­wise: Mind­ful Health and the Pow­er of Pos­si­bil­i­ty.

“Whether it’s about aging or any­thing else,” says Lager, “if you are sur­round­ed by peo­ple who have cer­tain expec­ta­tions for you, you tend to meet those expec­ta­tions, pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive.” The social expec­ta­tion for the aging is that they will get weak­er, less capa­ble, and more prone to dete­ri­o­ra­tion and ill­ness. Ignor­ing these expec­ta­tions and chang­ing our per­cep­tion of what chrono­log­i­cal age means—and doesn’t mean—Langer says, seems to actu­al­ly slow or par­tial­ly reverse the decline and to ward off dis­ease. Those psy­cho­log­i­cal changes can come about through inter­ven­tions like car­ing for chil­dren, plants, or ani­mals and using mind­ful­ness prac­tices to learn how to be atten­tive to change.

You can read more about Langer and Horvath’s spe­cif­ic find­ings on aging, psy­chol­o­gy, and epi­ge­net­ics at Nau­tilus.

Note: you can get Langer’s book–Coun­ter­clock­wise Mind­ful Health and the Trans­for­ma­tive Pow­er of Pos­si­bil­i­ty–as a free audio­book through Audible.com’s free tri­al pro­gram. Get more details on the free tri­al here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Bak­ing, Cook­ing & Oth­er Dai­ly Activ­i­ties Help Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness and Alle­vi­ate Depres­sion and Anx­i­ety

How Mind­ful­ness Makes Us Hap­pi­er & Bet­ter Able to Meet Life’s Chal­lenges: Two Ani­mat­ed Primers Explain

How the Japan­ese Prac­tice of “For­est Bathing”—Or Just Hang­ing Out in the Woods—Can Low­er Stress Lev­els and Fight Dis­ease

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

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Banksy Shreds His $1.4 Million Painting at Auction, Taking a Tradition of Artists Destroying Art to New Heights

in Art, Comedy, Life | October 8th, 2018

The first time van­dals defaced his sculp­ture, Dirty Cor­ner, at Ver­sailles, artist Anish Kapoor wrote an essay in which he con­sid­ered his options:

Should the paint that has been thrown all over the sculp­ture be removed? Or should it remain and be part of the work? Does the polit­i­cal vio­lence of the van­dal­ism make Dirty Cor­ner “dirt­i­er”? Does this dirty polit­i­cal act reflect the dirty pol­i­tics of exclu­sion, mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion, elit­ism, racism, Islam­o­pho­bia?

The ques­tion I ask of myself is: can I, the artist, trans­form this crass act of polit­i­cal van­dal­ism and vio­lence into a cre­ative act? Would this not be the best revenge?

Some­times artists are the ones behind the van­dal­ism.

Ai Wei­wei starred in a 1995 black-and-white pho­to trip­tych that doc­u­ments his inten­tion­al destruc­tion of a Han Dynasty urn from his pri­vate col­lec­tion.

Broth­ers Jake and Dinos Chap­man pur­chased a mint con­di­tion set of Goya’s The Dis­as­ters of War, painstak­ing­ly re-ren­dered the vic­tims’ heads as grotesque­ly cute, col­or­ful car­toons, and exhib­it­ed the altered etch­ings under the title Insult to Injury.

Robert Rauschen­berg sought and received per­mis­sion to erase a draw­ing that his fel­low Abstract Expres­sion­ist Willem de Koon­ing had giv­en him, at his request.

Cer­tain­ly, artists of all stripes have been known to erad­i­cate their own work in fits of pique, pas­sion, and self-reproach.

But until last week, no artist had ever van­dal­ized their own work with such a dis­pas­sion­ate, pre-med­i­tat­ed sense of fun as Banksy, the anony­mous clown prince of street art and mas­sive scale pranks.

As you’ve like­ly heard by now, with­in sec­onds of his icon­ic Girl With Bal­loon (2006) sell­ing at Sotheby’s for £1,042,000—$1.4 million—the paint­ing began to self-destruct, thanks to a cus­tom-built shred­der the artist had pre-loaded into its frame.

No one seemed par­tic­u­lar­ly dis­tressed about it.

Auc­tion atten­dees quick­ly scram­bled to cap­ture the moment with their cell phones.

Auc­tion­eer Oliv­er Bark­er looks on in admirably mild con­fu­sion.

No self-appoint­ed hero rushed for­ward to jam the works with an umbrel­la or broom han­dle.

The as-yet-uniden­ti­fied buy­er was not in the room, no doubt to their ever-last­ing regret. Imag­ine los­ing out on those brag­ging rights!

While Sotheby’s and the buy­er ham­mer out their unprece­dent­ed next steps, some art experts have stat­ed that it would be pos­si­ble, giv­en the clean geom­e­try of the cuts, to restore the can­vas.

Though who would want to, giv­en the spec­u­la­tion that this stunt imme­di­ate­ly increased the val­ue of the work, any­where from 50% to near dou­ble the pur­chase price?

Per­haps the buy­er will choose to fin­ish the job and sell it off strip-by-strip.

Office sup­ply stores will see an uptick in shred­der sales to ven­dors sell­ing Banksy knock-offs sten­cilled on sub­way maps.

Sotheby’s senior direc­tor, Alex Branczik, insist­ed that no one there was in on the joke, but The New York Times smells a rat:

The frame would pre­sum­ably have been rather heavy and thick for its size, some­thing an auc­tion house spe­cial­ist or art han­dler might have noticed. Detailed con­di­tion reports are rou­tine­ly request­ed by the would-be buy­ers of high-val­ue art­works. Unusu­al­ly, this rel­a­tive­ly small Banksy had been hung on a wall, rather than placed by porters on a podi­um for the moment of sale. 

The fact that Girl with Bal­loon was the final item on the block is either a great piece of luck, or a bit of can­ny stage man­age­ment on the auc­tion house’s part. Recap­tur­ing the atten­dees’ atten­tion after that stunt would be an uphill bat­tle.

It’s doubt­ful that buy­ers will shy away from Sotheby’s as a place where high­ly val­ued art­work starts to devour itself the moment the gav­el comes down. That kind of light­ning strikes but once.

What may cir­cle back to bite the ven­er­a­ble firm in its well padded rear is the ease with which some­one in the crowd was able to acti­vate the may­hem, using a device con­cealed in his bag. What’s worse, lax secu­ri­ty or maybe lying about fore­knowl­edge of the prank? It’s hard not to raise those as pos­si­bil­i­ties.

The man with the bag was escort­ed out. Not even the con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists are peg­ging him as Banksy.

As for the steady-hand­ed fel­low anoth­er attendee caught calm­ly zoom­ing in on his phone from the per­fect angle… well, let’s just say the tabloids have picked up on his resem­blance to Robin Gun­ning­ham, oft thought to be Clark Kent to Banksy’s Super­man.

Banksy’s post-mortem, unlike Kapoor’s, does not sug­gest a man tor­tured by unre­solved ques­tions.

“A few years ago I secret­ly built a shred­der into a paint­ing, in case it was ever put up for auc­tion,” he wrote on his Insta­gram. “Going, going, gone.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Robert Rauschen­berg Asked Willem De Koon­ing for One of His Paint­ings … So That He Could Erase It

Watch Dis­ma­land — The Offi­cial Unof­fi­cial Film, A Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney Through Banksy’s Apoc­a­lyp­tic Theme Park

Pat­ti Smith Presents Top Web­by Award to Banksy; He Accepts with Self-Mock­ing Video

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Octo­ber 15 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Emperor of Japan, Akihito, Is Still Publishing Scientific Papers in His 80s

in Science | October 5th, 2018

State Depart­ment pho­to by William Ng, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

On April 30, 2019, Emper­or Aki­hi­to of Japan will abdi­cate, and pass the throne to his son, Crown Prince Naruhi­to. What will he do in his retire­ment? Prob­a­bly the same thing he has done most of his life: make “tax­o­nom­ic stud­ies of gob­ies,” as the Min­istry of For­eign Affairs of Japan reports, “small fish found in fresh, brack­ish and marine waters.” Aki­hi­to has been a mem­ber of Japan’s Ichthy­olog­i­cal Soci­ety of Japan for decades and “pub­lished 30 papers in the society’s jour­nal between 1963 and 1989.”

Aki­hi­to ascend­ed the throne in 1989, at age 56, and yes, Japan still has an emper­or, though—since the post-war Con­sti­tu­tion of 1947—the con­sti­tu­tion­al monarch has no polit­i­cal pow­er and serves only a cer­e­mo­ni­al role. This has left Aki­hi­to with a lot of time to fill with sci­en­tif­ic pur­suits: to become an hon­orary mem­ber of the Lin­nean Soci­ety of Lon­don, Zoo­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Lon­don, and Research Insti­tute for Nat­ur­al Sci­ence of Argenti­na, and a research asso­ciate at the Aus­tralian Muse­um.

Emper­or Aki­hi­to remained an active sci­en­tist in his emper­or­ship, pub­lish­ing a his­to­ry of sci­ence arti­cle in Nature titled “Lin­naeus and tax­on­o­my in Japan” in 2007. In 2016, Aki­hi­to appeared as first author in a study pub­lished in Gene. The sec­ond author is his younger son, Crown Prince Fumi­hi­to Akishi­no, who stud­ied fish tax­on­o­my at St. John’s Col­lege, Oxford, then com­plet­ed a doc­tor­al degree in ornithol­o­gy. The prince now serves as the pres­i­dent of the Yamashina Insti­tute for Ornithol­o­gy and the Japan­ese Asso­ci­a­tion of Zoo­log­i­cal Gar­dens and Aquar­i­ums.

The family’s inter­est in sci­ence goes beyond the dab­bling of bored aris­to­crats or a sense of noblesse oblige. Fumi­hi­to intro­duced tilapia to Thai­land as an impor­tant food source and has helped Thai sci­en­tists expand their aqua­cul­tur­al research. The Emperor’s broth­er, Prince Masahi­to, is a can­cer researcher who has been rec­og­nized for mak­ing sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to the field, pub­lish­ing in jour­nals like Can­cer Research and the Jour­nal of the Inter­na­tion­al Union Against Can­cer.

The Impe­r­i­al fam­i­ly may rep­re­sent an out­mod­ed and archa­ic insti­tu­tion, one humankind can do just as well with­out. But it’s refresh­ing to see peo­ple with such vast resources and priv­i­lege use them for the pur­suit of intel­lec­tu­al inquiry and the bet­ter­ment of human and ani­mal life. You can read the first page of one of Emper­or Akihito’s papers, “Ear­ly Cul­ti­va­tors of Sci­ence in Japan” at Sci­ence in which he makes a case for the glob­al shar­ing of knowl­edge.

“Through my own study of ichthy­ol­o­gy,” Aki­hi­to writes, “I have come to feel strong­ly the impor­tance of inter­na­tion­al coop­er­a­tion in con­duct­ing sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies. I recall with a sense of grat­i­tude that behind each one of the papers I have pub­lished there has been the unspar­ing coop­er­a­tion of peo­ple abroad.”

via Sha­haf Peleg

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Entire His­to­ry of Japan in 9 Quirky Min­utes

How the Japan­ese Prac­tice of “For­est Bathing”—Or Just Hang­ing Out in the Woods—Can Low­er Stress Lev­els and Fight Dis­ease

After­math of the Tsuna­mi in Japan

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

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“Lynchian,” “Kubrickian,” “Tarantinoesque” and 100+ Film Words Have Been Added to the Oxford English Dictionary

in English Language, Film | October 5th, 2018

Image via Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary

Get inter­est­ed enough in any­thing, and you soon dis­cov­er its lan­guage. Each sub­ject, pur­suit, and area of cul­ture has its own slang, its own jar­gon, even its own gram­mar: that goes as well for physics and fish­ing as it does for cook­ing and cin­e­ma. Though quite spe­cial­ized, the vast lex­i­con of that last has also con­tributed a great deal to Eng­lish as gen­er­al­ly used. The lat­est update to the ven­er­a­ble Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary has added more than 100 of these terms, from already well-known expres­sions like “edge-of-your-seat,” “not in Kansas any­more,” and “blink and you’ll miss it” to the less-com­mon likes of kai­ju (the Japan­ese bat­tling-mon­ster genre that gave us Godzil­la), and Foley (the art of adding inci­den­tal sounds to movies in post-pro­duc­tion), and gore­hound (an enthu­si­ast of the gorefest, a genre whose sen­si­bil­i­ty you can well imag­ine).

Many of the new entries have to do with par­tic­u­lar direc­tors and their styles. “The list runs through a range of gen­res and loca­tions, from the wide land­scapes of the Amer­i­can West evoked by For­dian to Swedish soul-search­ing with Bergmanesque,” writes the OED’s Craig Ley­land. The old­est, Keatonesque, “dates from 1921, near the start of an extra­or­di­nary run of suc­cess for the com­ic actor and film-mak­er, and typ­i­cal­ly refers to Keaton’s famous dead­pan expres­sion and pen­chant for phys­i­cal com­e­dy. The most recent is Taran­ti­noesque, first seen in 1994 – the year Pulp Fic­tion appeared in cin­e­mas,” which refers to qual­i­ties like “graph­ic and styl­ized vio­lence, cinelit­er­ate ref­er­ences, non-lin­ear sto­ry­lines, sharp dia­logue, and more – and is a reminder of the impact these films had on cin­e­ma in the 1990s.”

Oth­er auteur-spe­cif­ic addi­tions include Spiel­ber­gian (“fan­tas­ti­cal or human­ist themes or a sen­ti­men­tal feel”), Lynchi­an (“not­ed for jux­ta­pos­ing sur­re­al or sin­is­ter ele­ments with mun­dane, every­day envi­ron­ments”), and of course Kubrick­ian (“metic­u­lous per­fec­tion­ism, mas­tery of the tech­ni­cal aspects of film-mak­ing, and atmos­pher­ic visu­al style in films across a range of gen­res”). Sev­er­al terms denot­ing broad­er move­ments and styles have also made it in, includ­ing mum­blecore, “a style of low-bud­get film typ­i­cal­ly char­ac­ter­ized by nat­u­ral­is­tic and (appar­ent­ly) impro­vised per­for­mances and a reliance on dia­logue rather than plot or action” which emerged about a decade ago, and Ham­mer, denot­ing the hor­ror films made from the 1950s to the 70s by British pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny of that name, “still famous and loved for their lurid, melo­dra­mat­ic style.”

Mas­ter these words and you’ll sure­ly hold your own in casu­al cinephile con­ver­sa­tion. But you can only get so deep into talk­ing about movies if you can’t con­fi­dent­ly bring out terms like arc shot, diegetic, and mise-en-scène. As one of the most capa­cious art forms, cin­e­ma brings togeth­er a num­ber of lan­guages all at once, includ­ing the visu­al lan­guage as defined by direc­tors like Sovi­et mon­tage pio­neer Sergei Eisen­stein (he of Eisen­stein­ian) and the lan­guage the screen­play gives its char­ac­ters to speak (an espe­cial­ly dis­tinc­tive ele­ment in the case of film­mak­ers like Taran­ti­no). But those are essen­tial­ly soli­tary plea­sures, enjoyed in a dark­ened the­ater or liv­ing room. Isn’t one of the most endur­ing joys of film­go­ing talk­ing about the movies with oth­er peo­ple lat­er — and to sound as expert as pos­si­ble while doing so?

via OED/Indiewire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

Colum­bia U. Launch­es a Free Mul­ti­me­dia Glos­sary for Study­ing Cin­e­ma & Film­mak­ing

Vin­tage Film Shows How the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary Was Made in 1925

Ter­ry Gilliam on the Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick & Spiel­berg: Kubrick Makes You Think, Spiel­berg Wraps Every­thing Up with Neat Lit­tle Bows

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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 or on Face­book.

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Was Jackson Pollock Overrated? Behind Every Artist There’s an Art Critic, and Behind Pollock There Was Clement Greenberg

in Art, Magazines | October 5th, 2018

Abstract expres­sion­ist Jack­son Pol­lock is one of the few painters whose work is eas­i­ly iden­ti­fied by peo­ple who don’t care much for mod­ern art.

More often than not, they’ll cite him as a prime rea­son they don’t want to spend a sun­ny Sat­ur­day at MoMA with you.

They’re enti­tled to their opin­ions, just as author Phil Edwards, host of the Vox series Over­rat­ed and a Pol­lock fan, is enti­tled to his.

In the most recent episode of Over­rat­ed, above, Edwards exam­ines the dri­ving force behind Pollock’s endur­ing fame.

His con­clu­sion?

The mus­cu­lar sup­port of a high­ly influ­en­tial art crit­ic, Clement Green­berg, who was chum­my enough with Pol­lock and his wife, Lee Kras­ner, to frol­ic with them in the Hamp­tons.

(Jef­frey Tam­bor appeared to have a ball play­ing him in Ed Har­ris’ Pol­lock biopic.)

Green­berg said one glimpse of Pollock’s 1943 “Mur­al” was all it took to real­ize that “Jack­son was the great­est painter this coun­try has pro­duced.”

Green­berg was inter­est­ed in what he called “Amer­i­can-Type” paint­ing and Pol­lock, with his high­ly phys­i­cal, booze-soaked macho swag­ger, was a “rad­i­cal­ly Amer­i­can” poster boy.

He was one of the first to men­tion Pol­lock in print:

He is the first painter I know of to have got some­thing pos­i­tive from the mud­di­ness of col­or that so pro­found­ly char­ac­ter­izes a great deal of Amer­i­can paint­ing.

His cheer­lead­ing result­ed in a LIFE mag­a­zine pro­file, “Jack­son Pol­lock: Is he the great­est liv­ing painter in the Unit­ed States?,” that took a trav­el­ogue approach to the artist’s drip paint­ing process.

Their stars rose togeth­er. Though Green­berg’s atten­tion even­tu­al­ly wan­dered away to new­er favorites, Pol­lock­’s career owed much to his force­ful ear­ly cham­pi­on.

We remem­ber the artist bet­ter than the crit­ic because of those giant, splat­tered canvases—so acces­si­ble to those look­ing for illus­tra­tions of why they hate mod­ern art.  The critic’s art is more ephemer­al, and unlike­ly to show up on umbrel­las, tote bags, and oth­er gift shop swag.

Those with an inter­est in Pollock—pro or con—would do well to fol­low Edwards’ sug­ges­tion to bol­ster their under­stand­ing of Greenberg’s taste, and his role in pro­mot­ing both Pol­lock and his fel­low Abstract Expres­sion­ists.

Watch Sea­sons 1 and 2 of Over­rat­ed free online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack­son Pol­lock 51: Short Film Cap­tures the Painter Cre­at­ing Abstract Expres­sion­ist Art

Watch Por­trait of an Artist: Jack­son Pol­lock, the 1987 Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed by Melvyn Bragg

The MoMA Teach­es You How to Paint Like Pol­lock, Rothko, de Koon­ing & Oth­er Abstract Painters

60-Sec­ond Intro­duc­tions to 12 Ground­break­ing Artists: Matisse, Dalí, Duchamp, Hop­per, Pol­lock, Rothko & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Octo­ber 15 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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