“A Great Day in Harlem,” Art Kane’s Iconic Photo of 57 Jazz Legends (with a Detailed Listing of Who Appears in the Photo)

in Jazz, Photography | November 12th, 2018

Image by Art Kane, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Six­ty years ago, Art Kane assem­bled one of the largest groups of jazz greats in his­to­ry. No, it wasn’t an all-star big band, but a meet­ing of vet­er­an leg­ends and young upstarts for the icon­ic pho­to­graph known as “A Great Day in Harlem.” Fifty-sev­en musi­cians gath­ered out­side a brown­stone at 17 East 126th St.—accompanied by twelve neigh­bor­hood kids—from “big rollers,” notes Jazz­wise mag­a­zine, like “Thelo­nious Monk, Charles Min­gus, Count Basie, Son­ny Rollins, Lester Young, Art Blakey, Horace Sil­ver, Dizzy Gille­spie, Cole­man Hawkins and Pee Wee Rus­sell to then up-and-com­ing names, Ben­ny Gol­son, Mar­i­on Mac­Part­land, Mary Lou Williams and Art Farmer.”

Son­ny Rollins was there, one of only two musi­cians in the pho­to still alive. The oth­er, Ben­ny Gol­son, who turns 90 next year, remem­bers get­ting a call from Vil­lage Voice crit­ic Nat Hentoff, telling him to get over there. Gol­son lived in the same build­ing as Quin­cy Jones, “but some­how he wasn’t called or he didn’t make it.”

Oth­er peo­ple who might have been in the pho­to­graph but weren’t, Gol­son says, because they were work­ing (and the 10 a.m. call time was a stretch for a work­ing musi­cian): “John Coltrane, Miles, Duke Elling­ton, Woody Her­man.” And Bud­dy Rich, whom Gol­son calls the “great­est drum­mer I ever heard in my life” (adding, “but his per­son­al­i­ty was hor­ri­ble.”)

The next year, every­thing changed—or so the sto­ry goes—when rev­o­lu­tion­ary albums hit the scene from the likes of Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Cole­man, and Charles Min­gus. These records pushed exper­i­men­tal forms, leav­ing behind the con­fines of both swing and bebop. But Kane’s jazz class pho­to shows us, Matthew Kessel writes at Vul­ture, “a por­trait of har­mo­ny, old and new guard alike peace­ably inter­min­gling. The pho­to sug­gests that jazz is as much about con­ti­nu­ity and tra­di­tion as it is about rad­i­cal change.” The pho­to has since become a tra­di­tion itself, hang­ing on the walls of thou­sands of homes, book­shops, record stores, bar­ber­shops, and restau­rants. (Get your copy here.)

Orig­i­nal­ly titled “Harlem 1958,”  Kane’s image has inspired some notable homages in black cul­ture. In 1998, XXL mag­a­zine tapped Gor­don Parks to shoot “A Great Day in Hip Hop” for a now-his­toric cov­er. And this past sum­mer, Net­flix gath­ered 47 black cre­atives behind more than 20 orig­i­nal Net­flix shows for the redux “A Great Day in Hol­ly­wood.” The pho­to also inspired a doc­u­men­tary of the same title in 1994 (at whose web­site you can click on each musi­cian for a short bio). At the Dai­ly News, Sarah Goodyear tells the sto­ry of how Kane con­ceived and exe­cut­ed the ambi­tious project for a spe­cial jazz edi­tion of Esquire.

It was his “first pro­fes­sion­al shoot­ing assign­ment and, with it, he end­ed up mak­ing his­to­ry by almost by acci­dent.” Goodyear quotes Kane’s son Jonathan, him­self a New York musi­cian, who remarks, “cer­tain things end up being big­ger than the orig­i­nal inten­tion. The pho­to­graph has become part of our cul­tur­al fab­ric.” For long­time res­i­dents of Harlem, the so-called Cap­i­tal of Black Amer­i­ca, and a spir­i­tu­al home of jazz, it’s just like an old fam­i­ly por­trait. See a ful­ly anno­tat­ed ver­sion of “A Great Day in Harlem” at Harlem.org, and at the Dai­ly News, an inter­ac­tive ver­sion with links to YouTube record­ings and per­for­mances from every one of the 57 musi­cians in the pic­ture.

This month, to com­mem­o­rate the 60th anniver­sary of the pho­to, Wall of Sound Gallery will pub­lish the book Art Kane: Harlem 1958, a ret­ro­spec­tive with out­takes from the pho­to ses­sion and text from Quin­cy Jones, Ben­ny Gol­son, Jonathan Kane, and Art him­self. “The impor­tance of this pho­to tran­scends time and loca­tion,” writes Jones in his for­ward, “leav­ing it to become not only a sym­bol­ic piece of art, but a piece of his­to­ry. Dur­ing a time in which seg­re­ga­tion was very much still a part of our every­day lives, and in a world that often point­ed out our dif­fer­ences instead of cel­e­brat­ing our sim­i­lar­i­ties, there was some­thing so spe­cial and pure about gath­er­ing 57 indi­vid­u­als togeth­er, in the name of jazz.”

  1. Hilton Jef­fer­son (1903–1968)
  2. Ben­ny Gol­son (1929-)
  3. Art Farmer (1928–2003)
  4. Wilbur Ware (1923–1979)
  5. Art Blakey (1919–1990)
  6. Chub­by Jack­son (1918–2003)
  7. John­ny Grif­fin (1928–2008)
  8. Dick­ie Wells (1909–1985)
  9. Buck Clay­ton (1911–1993)
  10. Taft Jor­dan (1915–1981)
  11. Zut­ty Sin­gle­ton (1898–1975)
  12. Hen­ry “Red” Allen (1908–1967)
  13. Tyree Glenn (1912–1972)
  14. Miff Mole (1898–1961)
  15. Son­ny Greer (1903–1982)
  16. J.C. Hig­gin­both­am (1906–1973)
  17. Jim­my Jones (1918–1982)
  18. Charles Min­gus (1922–1979)
  19. Jo Jones (1911–1985)
  20. Gene Kru­pa (1909–1973)
  21. Max Kamin­sky (1908–1994)
  22. George Wet­tling (1907–1968)
  23. Bud Free­man (1906–1988)
  24. Pee Wee Rus­sell (1906–1969)
  25. Ernie Wilkins (1922–1999)
  26. Buster Bai­ley (1902–1967)
  27. Osie John­son (1923–1968)
  28. Gigi Gryce (1927–1983)
  29. Hank Jones (1918–2010)
  30. Eddie Locke (1930–2009)
  31. Horace Sil­ver (1928–2014)
  32. Luck­ey Roberts (1887–1968)
  33. Max­ine Sul­li­van (1911–1987)
  34. Jim­my Rush­ing (1902–1972)
  35. Joes Thomas (1909–1984)
  36. Scov­ille Browne (1915–1994)
  37. Stuff Smith (1909–1967)
  38. Bill Crump (1919–1980s)
  39. Cole­man Hawkins (1904–1969)
  40. Rudy Pow­ell (1907–1976)
  41. Oscar Pet­ti­ford (1922–1960)
  42. Sahib Shi­hab (1925–1993)
  43. Mar­i­an McPart­land (1920–2013)
  44. Son­ny Rollins (1929-)
  45. Lawrence Brown (1905–1988)
  46. Mary Lou Williams (1910–1981)
  47. Emmett Berry (1915–1993)
  48. Thelo­nious Monk (1917–1982)
  49. Vic Dick­en­son (1906–1984)
  50. Milt Hin­ton (1910–2000)
  51. Lester “Pres” Young (1909–1959)
  52. Rex Stew­art (1907–1972)
  53. J.C. Heard (1917–1988)
  54. Ger­ry Mul­li­gan (1927–1995)
  55. Roy Eldridge (1911–1989)
  56. Dizzy Gille­spie (1917–1993)
  57. William “Count” Basie (1904–1984)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

The Cry of Jazz: 1958’s High­ly Con­tro­ver­sial Film on Jazz & Race in Amer­i­ca (With Music by Sun Ra)

Hear 2,000 Record­ings of the Most Essen­tial Jazz Songs: A Huge Playlist for Your Jazz Edu­ca­tion

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

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A Space of Their Own, a New Online Database, Will Feature Works by 600+ Overlooked Female Artists from the 15th-19th Centuries

in Art, Museums | November 9th, 2018

Many of the works we found—well, nobody knew they were there. Nobody knew any­thing about the artists. … They weren’t impor­tant, but rather behold­en to their fathers, moth­ers, and hus­bands. They had no voice.   

— Jane For­tune, Founder of Advanc­ing Women Artists (AWA)

The paint­ings, draw­ings, prints, and sculp­tures the late Jane For­tune refers to above were dis­cov­ered in muse­um stor­age spaces through­out Flo­rence.

Many of their female cre­ators were acclaimed dur­ing their life­times. By the time For­tune set about restor­ing their work—and vis­i­bil­i­ty —to the pub­lic view, they were vir­tu­al­ly unknown, even to muse­um staff.

Saint Cather­ine with Lily by Plau­til­la Nel­li

That may change as ear­ly as the fall of 2019, when A Space of Their Own, an illus­trat­ed online data­base of over 600 female artists work­ing in the US and Europe between the 15th and 19th cen­turies, launch­es.

In prepa­ra­tion for their rein­tro­duc­tion, many of the works appear­ing on A Space of Their Own have under­gone exten­sive restora­tion, cour­tesy of Jane For­tune’s non­prof­it Advanc­ing Women Artists.

David and Bathshe­ba by Artemisia Gen­tileschi

Inter­est­ing­ly, women make up the major­i­ty of art restor­ers in Flo­rence. This pro­fes­sion­al dom­i­nance can be traced back to the mid-60s, when a cat­a­stroph­ic flood laid waste to mil­lions of the city’s art trea­sures. “It was the first time women began wear­ing trousers in Flo­rence,” Lin­da Fal­cone, AWA’s cur­rent direc­tor told art­net. “Women’s lib­er­a­tion in Flo­rence is deeply linked to the art restora­tion effort.”

Many of the artists in the data­base were self-taught, barred from seek­ing for­mal train­ing or study­ing anato­my on account of their gen­der. They could not hope to make a liv­ing from their tal­ents when women were for­bid­den from issu­ing invoic­es. And then, of course, there are the demands of mar­riage and moth­er­hood.

Small won­der they have been so under­rep­re­sent­ed in muse­ums and art his­to­ry books.

Self-por­trait by Leonet­ta Pier­ac­ci­ni Cec­chi

Peruse a menu of paint­ings in need of restora­tion spon­sor­ship and learn more about the artists on AWA’s web­site. Sign up for the newslet­ter for updates in advance of A Space of Their Own’s grand open­ing.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Female Pio­neers of the Bauhaus Art Move­ment: Dis­cov­er Gertrud Arndt, Mar­i­anne Brandt, Anni Albers & Oth­er For­got­ten Inno­va­tors

The Icon­ic Uri­nal & Work of Art, “Foun­tain,” Wasn’t Cre­at­ed by Mar­cel Duchamp But by the Pio­neer­ing Dada Artist Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven

The Cre­ativ­i­ty of Female Graf­fi­ti & Street Artists Will Be Cel­e­brat­ed in Street Hero­ines, a New Doc­u­men­tary

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Novem­ber 12 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Download Digitized Copies of The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civil Rights Guide to Traveling Safely in the U.S. (1936–66)

in Books, History, Travel | November 9th, 2018

As an Amer­i­can liv­ing out­side Amer­i­ca, I’m often asked how best to see my home­land by peo­ple want­i­ng to vis­it it. I always sug­gest the same method: road-trip­ping, prefer­ably across the entire con­ti­nent — a way of expe­ri­enc­ing the U.S. of A guar­an­teed to at once to con­firm and shat­ter the vis­i­tor’s pre-exist­ing per­cep­tions of the coun­try. But even under the best pos­si­ble con­di­tions, such road trips have their ardu­ous stretch­es and even their dan­gers, a fact under­stood by nobody bet­ter than by the black trav­el­ers of the Green Book era. Pub­lished between 1936 and 1967, the guide offi­cial­ly known as The Negro Motorist Green Book informed such trav­el­ers of where in Amer­i­ca (and lat­er oth­er coun­tries as well) they could have a meal, stay the night, and get their car repaired with­out prej­u­dice.

You can learn more about the Green Book (which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) from the Vox explain­er video above. Then, to get a fuller idea of the books’ con­tent, head over to the New York Pub­lic Library’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tions, where you’ll find 23 issues from the Green Book’s more than 30-year run.

Dig­i­tized by the NYPL’s Schom­burg Cen­ter for Research in Black Cul­ture, they’re free to read online and down­load. Data drawn from this archive and released into the pub­lic domain has also giv­en rise to projects like “Nav­i­gat­ing the Green Book,” where you can explore its rec­om­mend­ed places laid out on a map and even plot a trip between any two cities in Amer­i­ca accord­ing to the Green Book’s 1947 or 1956 edi­tions.

Though the Green Book ceased pub­li­ca­tion not long after the pas­sage of the Civ­il Rights Act, inter­est in the Amer­i­ca they reflect has­n’t van­ished, and has in fact grown in recent years. Acad­e­mia has pro­duced more stud­ies of Jim Crow-era trav­el over the past decade or two, and this Thanks­giv­ing will see the wide release of Green Book, Peter Far­rel­ly’s fea­ture film about the friend­ship between black pianist Don Shirley and the chauf­feur who drove him through the Deep South in the 1960s. “To flip through a Green Book is to open a win­dow into his­to­ry and per­haps to see, the tini­est amount, through the eyes of some­one who lived it,” writes K Menick on the NYPL’s blog. “Read these books; map them in your mind. Think about the trips you could take, can take, will take. See how the size of the world can change depend­ing on the col­or of your skin.” 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Negro Trav­el­ers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civ­il Rights Guide to Trav­el­ing Safe­ly in the U.S. (1936–66)

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

Robert Penn War­ren Archive Brings Ear­ly Civ­il Rights to Life

Vin­tage 1930s Japan­ese Posters Artis­ti­cal­ly Mar­ket the Won­ders of Trav­el

Food­ie Alert: New York Pub­lic Library Presents an Archive of 17,000 Restau­rant Menus (1851–2008)

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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A Database of Paper Airplane Designs: Hours of Fun for Kids & Adults Alike

in Design | November 8th, 2018

Though we can trace the his­to­ry of paper air­craft back 2000 years to the Chi­nese and their kites, and into the 19th cen­tu­ry with the French and their imag­i­nary air­ships, the ori­gin of the mod­ern paper air­plane is shroud­ed in mys­tery. A San Diego Read­er arti­cle placed the birth some­where in 1910. By 1915, most Amer­i­can kids were already tor­ment­ing teach­ers. And Jack Northrup used paper mod­els to work on aero­dy­nam­ics at Lock­heed in the 1930s, but even that doesn’t do much to explain how such a ubiq­ui­tous object has con­tin­ued to be so hum­ble and ordi­nary while inspir­ing a recent upsurge of inter­est.

The data­base at Fold’n’Fly shows how much vari­ety there is beyond the basic “dart” style, and each air­plane comes with step-by-step fold­ing instruc­tions, a print­able pat­tern page, and a help­ful video.

You can choose by dif­fi­cul­ty lev­el, whether or not you will need scis­sors, or sort by dis­tance, acro­bat­ics, time aloft, or pure­ly dec­o­ra­tive.

One of the rea­sons for the renewed inter­est in paper air­planes is the use of CAD (com­put­er aid­ed design) in con­struct­ing pro­to­types, and that in itself is a response to the chal­lenge set by var­i­ous Guin­ness world records.

The cur­rent dis­tance record is 226 feet, 10 inch­es, set in March 2012 by a for­mer col­lege quar­ter­back Joe Ayoob. The plane was designed by tele­vi­sion pro­duc­er John Collins, who used Ayoob’s throw­ing arm strength to break the pre­vi­ous record hold­er by near­ly 20 feet.

The longest time a paper air­plane has been in the air is cur­rent­ly 27.6 sec­onds, set in 1998 by Ken Black­burn at the Geor­gia Dome. He was break­ing his own record for the third time.

Last­ly, the record for largest paper air­plane is 40 ft 10 inch­es, designed by stu­dents from the Tech­nol­o­gy Uni­ver­si­ty of Delft in 1995.

So, now you know what you’re up against. If you think you can do bet­ter, dive into this web­site and get fold­ing.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sci­ence of Beer: A New Free Online Course Promis­es to Enhance Your Appre­ci­a­tion of the Time­less Bev­er­age

NASA Puts 400+ His­toric Exper­i­men­tal Flight Videos on YouTube

NASA Releas­es a Mas­sive Online Archive: 140,000 Pho­tos, Videos & Audio Files Free to Search and Down­load

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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The First House Powered by Coffee

in Food & Drink, Technology | November 8th, 2018

Since 2006, Dunkin’ Donuts has used the tagline “Amer­i­ca Runs on Dunkin’,” pre­sum­ably allud­ing to the cof­fee and donuts that get mil­lions of Amer­i­cans through each morn­ing. But maybe, all along, they’ve had some­thing more in mind. Above, Dunkin’ presents a tiny home pow­ered by bio­fu­el made from spent cof­fee grounds, a process mas­ter­mind­ed by a com­pa­ny called Blue Mar­ble Bio­ma­te­ri­als. Work­ing with lux­u­ry tiny home­builder New Fron­tier Tiny Homes, they’ve cre­at­ed a process–notes a Dunkin’ press release–that works some­thing like this:

  • Step 1: Extract excess oils in the spent cof­fee grounds. There can be nat­ur­al oils left in spent cof­fee grounds, all depend­ing on the cof­fee bean type and orig­i­nal pro­cess­ing meth­ods.
  • Step 2: Mix and react. These oils are then mixed with an alco­hol to under­go a chem­i­cal reac­tion known as trans­es­ter­i­fi­ca­tion. This pro­duces biodiesel and glyc­erin as a byprod­uct.
  • Step 3: Refine. The biodiesel is washed and refined to cre­ate the final prod­uct.

When all is said and done, 170 pounds of used cof­fee grounds trans­lates into one gal­lon of fuel. From 65,000 pounds of cof­fee grounds, you got enough juice to pow­er a 275 square foot home, at least for a while.

Take a 360 degree inter­ac­tive tour of the tiny home here.

via New Atlas

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Make the World’s Small­est Cup of Cof­fee, from Just One Cof­fee Bean

A Rol­lick­ing French Ani­ma­tion on the Per­ils of Drink­ing a Lit­tle Too Much Cof­fee

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

David Lynch Directs a Mini-Sea­son of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japan­ese Cof­fee Com­mer­cials

J.S. Bach’s Com­ic Opera, “The Cof­fee Can­ta­ta,” Sings the Prais­es of the Great Stim­u­lat­ing Drink (1735)

“The Virtues of Cof­fee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethar­gy, Scurvy, Drop­sy, Gout & More

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Freddie Mercury’s Final Days: Watch a Poignant Montage That Documents the Last Chapter of the Singer’s Life

in Music | November 8th, 2018

The “biopic” has deliv­ered dra­mat­ic retellings of famous fig­ures’ lives since the very ear­li­est days of cin­e­ma. We hunger, it seems, to see more-or-less-faith­ful approx­i­ma­tions of our idols stride across the screen, enact­ing events wit­nessed by mil­lions and those hid­den away from every­one. In the case of pop­u­lar musi­cians, these tend to involve epic alco­hol and drug use, tumul­tuous love affairs, sta­di­um-sized tri­umphs and the crush­ing defeats of falling out of cul­tur­al favor. Such scenes can prove dif­fi­cult to recre­ate con­vinc­ing­ly, espe­cial­ly the music and sig­na­ture moves of world famous stars.

Con­dens­ing life­times into mar­ketable nar­ra­tive films that hit typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood beats also involves tak­ing a fair amount of license. And as a spate of arti­cles like “Every­thing Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Got Wrong About Fred­die Mercury’s Life” tes­ti­fy, the new biopic about Queen singer Fred­die Mer­cury, played in the film by Rami Malek, twists or total­ly changes key events in Mercury’s life. The film re-imag­ines, for exam­ple, how Mer­cury met his band­mem­bers, his girl­friend Mary, and Jim Hut­ton, his long­time and final part­ner.

And, odd­ly, it imag­ines Mer­cury telling Queen about his HIV diag­no­sis dur­ing rehearsals for their 1985 Live Aid appear­ance, which it stages as a reunion, show­ing the band as hav­ing been on hia­tus while mem­bers pur­sued solo projects. The truth, how­ev­er, is that Mer­cury didn’t receive his diag­no­sis until 1987, and his band­mates weren’t ful­ly aware of his ill­ness until 1989. And when the band came togeth­er to per­form at Live Aid, they had just toured the world in sup­port of their 1984 album The Works.

Such dis­tor­tions are a lit­tle per­plex­ing giv­en that Bri­an May and Roger Tay­lor served as cre­ative con­sul­tants, sit­ting in on set dur­ing the pro­duc­tion. The film has been also been accused of “straight­wash­ing” Mercury’s sex­u­al­i­ty and gloss­ing over his roots and reli­gion. You’ll have to eval­u­ate the mer­its of these charges for your­self, but the case remains that if we want to know what Mercury’s life was real­ly like, we need to sup­plant the enter­tain­ing fic­tion with the even more com­pelling truth.

The video above helps in some small part to fill gaps in our knowl­edge of Mercury’s last years, edit­ing togeth­er inter­views, TV clips, and per­for­mance footage. Although Mer­cury was very sick dur­ing this peri­od, you would hard­ly have known it, and most of the peo­ple around him didn’t. He con­tin­ued to write and record, work­ing hard on Queen’s last album, Innu­en­do, released in the final year of his life.

We learn that his clos­est friends, col­leagues, and band­mem­bers were in denial, “right up to the last minute,” as Bri­an May says, about the sever­i­ty of his dis­ease. “We sort of refused to know” how bad it was, May admits. Mer­cury him­self pushed the knowl­edge away, immers­ing him­self in his music to keep going. “The sick­er Fred­die got,” says Roger Tay­lor, “the more he seemed to need to record to give him­self some­thing to do, you know, some sort of rea­son to get up… so it was a peri­od of fair­ly intense work.”

Mercury’s ear­ly death was trag­ic, but he met it hero­ical­ly. And though his band­mates strug­gled to face the truth, they ral­lied around him in sup­port, both in life and in death. When the tabloid press vicious­ly slan­dered and attacked him, May and Tay­lor went on tele­vi­sion to defend their friend. “He had a very respon­si­ble atti­tude to every­one that he was close to and he was a very gen­er­ous and car­ing per­son to all the peo­ple that came through his life and more than that you can’t ask,” said May in a 1991 inter­view appear­ance after Mer­cury passed away. “I tell you we do feel absolute­ly bound to stick up for him,” added Tay­lor, “because he can’t stick up for him­self any­more, you know?”

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage From Fred­die Mercury’s Final Video Per­for­mance

A First Glimpse of Rami Malek as Fred­die Mer­cury, Com­pared with the Real Fred­die Mer­cury Per­form­ing at Live Aid in 1985

What Made Fred­die Mer­cury the Great­est Vocal­ist in Rock His­to­ry? The Secrets Revealed in a Short Video Essay

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

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The Disgusting Food Museum Curates 80 of the World’s Most Repulsive Dishes: Maggot-Infested Cheese, Putrid Shark & More

in Food & Drink, Museums | November 8th, 2018

Often we get to know each oth­er by talk­ing which foods we like. Per­haps even more often, we get to know each oth­er by talk­ing about which foods we hate. Enter­tain­ing dis­agree­ments tend to arise from such dis­cus­sions, usu­al­ly around tra­di­tion­al­ly divi­sive comestibles like anchovies, cilantro, brus­sel sprouts, or the Japan­ese dish of fer­ment­ed soy­beans known as nat­to. But how­ev­er many of us pre­fer to avoid them, these foods all look more or less con­ven­tion­al com­pared to the dish­es curat­ed by the Dis­gust­ing Food Muse­um, which the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Mau­ra Jud­kis describes as “the world’s first exhi­bi­tion devot­ed to foods that some would call revolt­ing.”

“The exhib­it has 80 of the world’s most dis­gust­ing foods,” says the muse­um’s offi­cial site. Adven­tur­ous vis­i­tors will appre­ci­ate the oppor­tu­ni­ty to smell and taste some of these noto­ri­ous foods. Do you dare smell the world’s stinki­est cheese? Or taste sweets made with met­al cleans­ing chem­i­cals?” Jud­kis notes that “the museum’s name and its con­tents are pret­ty con­tro­ver­sial — one culture’s dis­gust­ing is anoth­er culture’s del­i­ca­cy.

That goes for escamoles, the tree-ant lar­vae eat­en in Mex­i­co, or shi­rako, the cod sperm eat­en in Japan, or bird’s nest soup, a Chi­nese dish of nests made from bird sali­va.” It all goes to empha­size the Dis­gust­ing Food Muse­um’s stat­ed premis­es: “Dis­gust is one of the six fun­da­men­tal human emo­tions. While the emo­tion is uni­ver­sal, the foods that we find dis­gust­ing are not. What is deli­cious to one per­son can be revolt­ing to anoth­er.”

With inter­est in food seem­ing­ly at an all-time high — and not just food, but tra­di­tion­al food from all around the world — the cul­tur­al stud­ies wing of acad­e­mia has begun to get seri­ous mileage out of that propo­si­tion. But the Dis­gust­ing Food Muse­um has tak­en on a less intel­lec­tu­al and much more vis­cer­al mis­sion, plac­ing before its vis­i­tors duri­an fruit, banned from many a pub­lic space across Asia for its sheer stink­i­ness; casu marzu, which the muse­um’s site describes as “mag­got-infest­ed cheese from Sar­dinia”; and hákarl, which Jud­kis describes as “a putrid shark meat dish from Ice­land that the late Antho­ny Bour­dain said was one of the worst things he had ever tast­ed.”

You can learn more about these and the Dis­gust­ing Food Muse­um’s oth­er offer­ings from the Asso­ci­at­ed Press video at the top of the post, as well as at Smith­son­ian and the New York Times. If you’d like to see, smell, and even taste some of its exhibits for your­self, you’ll have to make the trek out to Malmö, Swe­den. The project comes from the mind of Samuel West, a Swede best known for cre­at­ing the Muse­um of Fail­ure (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), whose half-Amer­i­can parent­age has made him famil­iar with sev­er­al items of U.S. cui­sine that gross out non-Amer­i­cans, from Spam to Jell‑O pas­ta sal­ad (shades of James Lileks’ mid­cen­tu­ry mid­west-focused Gallery of Regret­table Food) to Rocky Moun­tain oys­ters. Despite being Amer­i­can myself, I’ve nev­er known any­one who likes that last, a dish made of bull tes­ti­cles, or at least no one has ever admit­ted to me that they like it. But if some­one did, I’d cer­tain­ly feel as if I’d learned some­thing about them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Muse­um of Fail­ure: A Liv­ing Shrine to New Coke, the Ford Edsel, Google Glass & Oth­er Epic Cor­po­rate Fails

Sal­vador Dalí’s 1973 Cook­book Gets Reis­sued: Sur­re­al­ist Art Meets Haute Cui­sine

What Pris­on­ers Ate at Alca­traz in 1946: A Vin­tage Prison Menu

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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An Atlas of Literary Maps Created by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island & More

in Books, Literature, Maps | November 7th, 2018

Plot, set­ting, char­ac­ter… we learn to think of these as dis­crete ele­ments in lit­er­ary writ­ing, com­pa­ra­ble to the strat­e­gy, board, and pieces of a chess game. But what if this scheme doesn’t quite work? What about when the set­ting is a char­ac­ter? There are many lit­er­ary works named and well-known for the unfor­get­table places they intro­duce: Walden, Wuther­ing Heights, Howards End…. There are invent­ed domains that seem more real to read­ers than real­i­ty: Faulkner’s Yok­na­p­a­tow­pha, Thomas Hardy’s Wes­sex… There are works that describe impos­si­ble places so vivid­ly we believe in their exis­tence against all rea­son: Ita­lo Calvino’s Invis­i­ble Cities, Chi­na Miéville’s The City and the City, Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Ter­tius”….

What sus­tains our belief in the integri­ty of fic­tion­al places? The fact that they seem to act upon events as much as the peo­ple who live in them, for one thing. And, just as often, the fact that so many authors and illus­tra­tors draw elab­o­rate maps of lit­er­ary set­tings, mak­ing their fea­tures real to us and embed­ding them in our minds.

A new book, The Writer’s Map, edit­ed by Huw Lewis-Jones, offers lovers of lit­er­ary maps—whether in non-fic­tion, real­ism, or fantasy—the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pore over maps of Thomas More’s Utopia (said to be the first lit­er­ary map), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Trea­sure Island, J.R.R Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth, Bran­well Brontë’s Ver­dopo­lis (above), and so many more.

The book is filled with essays about lit­er­ary map­ping by writ­ers and map-mak­ers, and it touch­es on the way authors them­selves view imag­i­na­tive map­ping. “For some writ­ers mak­ing a map is absolute­ly cen­tral to the craft of shap­ing and telling their tale,” writes Lewis-Jones. For oth­ers, mak­ing maps is also a way to avoid the painful task of writ­ing, which Philip Pull­man calls “a mat­ter of sullen toil.” Draw­ing, on the oth­er hand, he says, “is pure joy. Draw­ing a map to go with a sto­ry is mess­ing around, with the added fun of col­or­ing it in.” David Mitchell agrees: “As long as I was busy dream­ing of topog­ra­phy,” he says of his maps, “I didn’t have to get my hands dirty with the mechan­ics of plot and char­ac­ter.”

It may sur­prise you to hear that writ­ers hate to write, but writ­ers are peo­ple, after all, and most peo­ple find writ­ing tedious and dif­fi­cult in some part. What all of the writ­ers fea­tured in this col­lec­tion share is that they love indulging their imag­i­na­tions, mak­ing real their lucid dreams, whether through the diver­sion of draw­ing maps or the grind of gram­mar and syn­tax. Many of these maps, like Thoreau’s draw­ing of Walden Pond or Johann David Wyss’s illus­tra­tion of the desert island in The Swiss Fam­i­ly Robin­son, accom­pa­nied their books into pub­li­ca­tion. Many more remained secret­ed in authors’ note­books.

There are many such “pri­vate trea­sures” in The Writer’s Map, notes Atlas Obscu­ra: “J.R.R. Tolkien’s own sketch of Mor­dor, on graph paper; C.S. Lewis’s sketch­es; unpub­lished maps from the note­books of David Mitchell… Jack Kerouac’s own route in On the Road….” Do we read a lit­er­ary map dif­fer­ent­ly when it wasn’t meant for us? Can maps be sly acts of mis­di­rec­tion as well as whim­si­cal visu­al aids? Should we treat them as para­tex­tu­al and unnec­es­sary, or are they cen­tral, when an author choos­es to include them, to our under­stand­ing of a sto­ry? Such ques­tions, and many, many more, are tak­en up in The Writer’s Map, a long over­due sur­vey of this long­stand­ing lit­er­ary tra­di­tion.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

12 Clas­sic Lit­er­ary Road Trips in One Handy Inter­ac­tive Map

Map of Mid­dle-Earth Anno­tat­ed by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

William Faulkn­er Draws Maps of Yok­na­p­ataw­pha Coun­ty, the Fic­tion­al Home of His Great Nov­els

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

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