Take a Virtual Tour of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London

in History, iPad, Theatre | May 28th, 2018

The sto­ry of the Globe The­atre, the ances­tral home of Shakespeare’s plays, is itself very Shake­speare­an, in all of the ways we use that adjec­tive: it has deep roots in Eng­lish his­to­ry, a trag­ic back­sto­ry, and rep­re­sents all of the hodge­podge of Lon­don, in the ear­ly 17th cen­tu­ry and today, with the city’s col­or­ful street life, min­gling of inter­na­tion­al cul­tures, high and low, and its delight in the play and inter­play of lan­guages.

“The first pub­lic play­hous­es,” notes the British Library, “were built in Lon­don in the late 1500s. The­atres were not per­mit­ted with­in the bound­aries of the City itself”—theater not being con­sid­ered a respectable art—”but were tol­er­at­ed in the out­er dis­tricts of Lon­don, such as South­wark, where the Globe was locat­ed. South­wark was noto­ri­ous for its noisy, chaot­ic enter­tain­ments and for its sleazy low-life: its the­atres, broth­els, bear bait­ing pits, pick­pock­ets and the like.”

The Globe began its life in 1599, in a sto­ry that “might be wor­thy,” writes the Shake­speare Resource Cen­ter, “of a Shake­speare­an play of its own.” Built from the tim­bers of the city’s first per­ma­nent the­ater, the Burbage, which opened in 1576, the Globe burned down in 1613 “when a can­non shot dur­ing a per­for­mance of Hen­ry VIII ignit­ed the thatched roof in the gallery.” With­in the year, it was rebuilt on the same foun­da­tions (with a tiled roof) and oper­at­ed until the Puri­tans shut it down in 1642, demol­ish­ing the famed open-air the­ater two years lat­er.

In a twist to this so far very Eng­lish tale, it took the tire­less efforts of an expa­tri­ate Amer­i­can, actor-direc­tor Sam Wana­mak­er, to bring the Globe back to Lon­don. After more than two decades of advo­ca­cy, Wanamaker’s Globe Play­house Trust suc­ceed­ed in recre­at­ing the Globe, just a short dis­tance from the orig­i­nal loca­tion. Open­ing in 1997, three-hun­dred and fifty-five years after the first Globe closed, the new Globe The­atre recre­at­ed all of the orig­i­nal’s archi­tec­tur­al ele­ments.

The stage projects into the cir­cu­lar court­yard, designed for stand­ing spec­ta­tors and sur­round­ed by three tiers of seats. While the stage itself has an elab­o­rate paint­ed roof, and the seat­ing is pro­tect­ed from the weath­er by the only thatched roof in Lon­don since the 1666 Great Fire, the theater’s court­yard is open to the sky. How­ev­er, where the orig­i­nal Globe held about 2,000 stand­ing and 1,000 seat­ed play­go­ers, the recre­ation, notes Time­Out Lon­don, holds only about half that num­ber.

Still, the­ater-goers can “get a rich feel for what it was like to be a ‘groundling’ (the stand­ing rab­ble at the front of the stage) in the cir­cu­lar, open-air the­atre.” Short of that, we can tour the Globe in the vir­tu­al recre­ation at the top of the post. Move around in any direc­tion and look up at the sky. As you do, click on the tiny cir­cles to reveal facts such as “Prob­a­bly the first Shake­speare play to be per­formed at the Globe was Julius Cae­sar, in 1599,” and videos like Mark Antony’s famous “friends, Romans, coun­try­men” speech, per­formed at the Globe, above.

If you don’t have the lux­u­ry of vis­it­ing the new Globe, tak­ing a tour, or see­ing a per­for­mance lov­ing­ly-recre­at­ed with all of the cos­tum­ing (and even pro­nun­ci­a­tion) from Jacobean Eng­land, you can get the fla­vor of this won­drous achieve­ment in bring­ing cul­tur­al his­to­ry into the present with the vir­tu­al tour, also avail­able as an app for iPhone and iPad users. This inter­ac­tive tour super­sedes a pre­vi­ous ver­sion we fea­tured a few years back.

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

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear What Ham­let, Richard III & King Lear Sound­ed Like in Shakespeare’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

The 1,700+ Words Invent­ed by Shake­speare*

What Shakespeare’s Hand­writ­ing Looked Like

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

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Buckminster Fuller Appears on the Los Angeles New Age Cable TV Shows, Psychic Phenomena and Quest Four (1979–82)

in Television | May 28th, 2018

Has the world ever known a more com­pelling­ly eccen­tric cul­tur­al out­let than the fringes of Los Ange­les tele­vi­sion in the 1970s and 80s? For the most part a realm of false prophets, unhinged crack­pots, des­per­ate pitch­men, and Cal Wor­thing­ton, its air­waves also occa­sion­al­ly car­ried the thoughts of impor­tant minds. Take, for instance, the appear­ances on the pub­lic-access cable pro­grams Psy­chic Phe­nom­e­na: The World Beyond and Quest Four: The Fourth Dimen­sion of none oth­er than pro­lif­ic archi­tect-the­o­rist-inven­tor Buck­min­ster Fuller. You can watch both togeth­er, and there­by get an overview of the then already octo­ge­nar­i­an Fuller’s life and ideas in a fair­ly unusu­al con­text, in the videos of the Youtube playlist above.

On both pro­grams, the first of which aired in 1979 and the sec­ond in 1983, Fuller sits across from Damien Simp­son. The founder of an orga­ni­za­tion called the Uni­ver­sal Mind Sci­ence Church, Simp­son seems to have spent his life as some­thing of a seek­er. After time in the sem­i­nary, he lived for a peri­od in a monastery under a vow of silence.

In the years after start­ing his own church, he host­ed new-age tele­vi­sion and radio pro­grams whose guest lists includ­ed, accord­ing to his bio, every­one from Elis­a­beth Kübler-Ross to Den­nis Weaver. But Simp­son clear­ly con­sid­ered Fuller the catch to beat them all, more than once liken­ing him­self to “a kid in a can­dy store” as he rev­els in his chance to con­verse with the man who thought up the geo­des­ic dome and much else besides.

Born in the 19th cen­tu­ry, usu­al­ly dressed in a suit and tie, and con­stant­ly work­ing on the devel­op­ment and appli­ca­tion of ultra-prac­ti­cal ideas, Fuller hard­ly pro­ject­ed the image of a 70s new-ager. Yet he and the audi­ences of shows like Psy­chic Phe­nom­e­na and Quest Four shared more than a few habits of mind. Fuller, for instance, insist­ed on always con­sid­er­ing the world as not a col­lec­tion of nations but one whole sys­tem (one he mem­o­rably labeled “Space­ship Earth”), an exam­ple of “holis­tic think­ing” in the truest sense. He also believed, as he spells out in these inter­views, that human­i­ty faces an exis­ten­tial “final exam­i­na­tion,” a test of our col­lec­tive intel­lect and will to deter­mine whether we can bring about an era — quite lit­er­al­ly, a new age — of peace. It will demand much of us, he tells Simp­son and and his view­ers all across Los Ange­les, not least our naiveté: “Dare to be naive. That’s the only way you’ll ever learn any­thing.”

via Ubuweb

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Three-Minute Intro­duc­tion to Buck­min­ster Fuller, One of the 20th Century’s Most Pro­duc­tive Design Vision­ar­ies

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Buck­min­ster Fuller Tell Studs Terkel All About “the Geo­des­ic Life”

Bet­ter Liv­ing Through Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Utopi­an Designs: Revis­it the Dymax­ion Car, House, and Map

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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The Map of Philosophy: See All of the Disciplines, Areas & Subdivisions of Philosophy Mapped in a Comprehensive Video

in Philosophy | May 25th, 2018

In the intro­duc­tion to his sweep­ing His­to­ry of West­ern Phi­los­o­phy, Bertrand Rus­sell wastes no time get­ting to a def­i­n­i­tion of his sub­ject. “The con­cep­tions of life and the world which we call ‘philo­soph­i­cal,’” he writes in the first sen­tence, “are a prod­uct of two fac­tors: one, inher­it­ed reli­gious and eth­i­cal con­cep­tions; the oth­er, the sort of inves­ti­ga­tion which may be called ‘sci­en­tif­ic,’ using the word in its broad­est sense. … Phi­los­o­phy, as I shall under­stand the word, is some­thing inter­me­di­ate between the­ol­o­gy and sci­ence.” (Rus­sell makes a sim­i­lar argu­ment, in slight­ly dif­fer­ent terms, in the essay “Mys­ti­cism and Log­ic.”)

Although this dis­tinc­tion between broad­ly “the­o­log­i­cal” and broad­ly “sci­en­tif­ic” think­ing may not map direct­ly onto the mod­ern schism between “Con­ti­nen­tal” and “Ana­lyt­ic” phi­los­o­phy, a com­par­i­son still seems high­ly rel­e­vant. Though some con­ti­nen­tal thinkers may not wish to admit it, their cat­e­gories and modes of reasoning—or intu­it­ing, reflect­ing, spec­u­lat­ing, etc.—derive from the­o­log­i­cal thought denud­ed of its spe­cif­ic reli­gious con­tent or beliefs. Or as philoso­pher Thomas R. Wells writes at his blog The Philosopher’s Beard, the con­ti­nen­tal pro­ceeds from a “direct con­cern with the human con­di­tion, its ambi­tion, its reflex­iv­i­ty, its con­cern with the media as well as the mes­sage.”

The ana­lyt­ic, on the oth­er hand, strives for “uni­ver­sal scope, clar­i­ty and pub­lic account­abil­i­ty…. It tries to sys­tem­atize knowl­edge” and approx­i­mate sci­en­tif­ic meth­ods of inquiry (which also once mixed freely with the the­o­log­i­cal). Both approach­es can move too close to the poles Rus­sell identifies—can move too far away, that is, from phi­los­o­phy and toward the obscure and pure­ly mys­ti­cal or the inhu­mane­ly, unre­flec­tive­ly ratio­nal. Per­haps one way of think­ing about the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy is as a dance between this play of oppo­sites, with each approach offer­ing a cor­rec­tive to the other’s excess­es, some­times with­in the same thinker’s body of work.

But before apply­ing such abstrac­tions, we should con­sid­er the ways phi­los­o­phy devel­oped as a dis­ci­pline dis­tinct from the hard sci­ences and theology—and from art, psy­chol­o­gy, anthro­pol­o­gy, physics, math­e­mat­ics, lin­guis­tics, eco­nom­ics, etc. “Once upon a time,” notes the video at the top—a com­pre­hen­sive “map of phi­los­o­phy” made by Carneades.org— “Phi­los­o­phy was any­thing you can study. Every­thing in the realm of study was a type of phi­los­o­phy.” The break­ing off of oth­er fields into their own domains hap­pened over the course of sev­er­al hun­dred years. Nonethe­less, “phi­los­o­phy still had its fin­gers in all of those oth­er pies.”

One can think philo­soph­i­cal­ly about anything—philosophy can “put dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines on the same play­ing field to talk to each oth­er.” It is, the video’s intro­duc­tion declares, “the glue that holds all of acad­e­mia togeth­er” (hence, the top aca­d­e­m­ic degree, the Ph.D., or “doc­tor of phi­los­o­phy”). For rea­sons of his own train­ing, the video’s cre­ator, who sim­ply goes by the pseu­do­nym “Carneades,” leans more heav­i­ly on the ana­lyt­ic side of things, neglect­ing or only light­ly touch­ing on much of the con­ti­nen­tal thought that flour­ished in the wake of Hei­deg­ger, Hegel, Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and oth­ers. (Fur­ther up, you can see a video focused on one spe­cif­ic school of moral philosophy—Consequentialism. See more such videos at the Carneades.org YouTube chan­nel.)

Carneades admits his bias­es and blind spots and wel­comes cor­rec­tions from those bet­ter versed in oth­er tra­di­tions. To his cred­it, he includes Native Amer­i­can, African, Latin Amer­i­can, Afro-Caribbean, Poly­ne­sian, Japan­ese, Islam­ic, Tibetan, and many oth­er glob­al philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions in his exten­sive map—traditions that are usu­al­ly com­plete­ly ignored or deemed “unphilo­soph­i­cal” in oth­er such sur­veys. His sen­si­tiv­i­ty to glob­al thought may have some­thing to do with the fact that he is not based in a West­ern aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ment, but in West Africa, where he does human­i­tar­i­an work.

See a com­plete table of con­tents, with links to spe­cif­ic sec­tions, for the lengthy “Map of Phi­los­o­phy” just below, and an image of the full map just above (pur­chase a hard copy here). Carneades’ inten­tion to bring “these ideas back to the mod­ern ago­ra from the Ivory Tow­er” is a noble one. If you agree, and find these videos infor­ma­tive and intel­lec­tu­al­ly stim­u­lat­ing, you can donate to or become a patron of his efforts at the Carneades.org Patre­on page.

Table of Con­tents:

00:00 Intro­duc­tion
01:44 Log­ic and Philo­soph­i­cal Meth­ods
02:14 For­mal Clas­si­cal Log­ic
04:55 Non-Clas­si­cal Log­ic
06:35 Infor­mal Log­ic
08:00 Philo­soph­i­cal Meth­ods
10:20 The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy
13:30 Philo­soph­i­cal Tra­di­tions Around the World
20:55 Aes­thet­ics
22:35 Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy
23:34 Social Phi­los­o­phy
25:00 Moral The­o­ry & Ethics
28:08 Epis­te­mol­o­gy
30:34 Meta­physics
34:13 Phi­los­o­phy of Sci­ence
37:35 Phi­los­o­phy of Reli­gion
40:17 Phi­los­o­phy of Lan­guage
41:58 Phi­los­o­phy of Mind
43:49 Phi­los­o­phy of Action
44:57 Full Map

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy … With­out Any Gaps

350 Ani­mat­ed Videos That Will Teach You Phi­los­o­phy, from Ancient to Post-Mod­ern

Emi­nent Philoso­phers Name the 43 Most Impor­tant Phi­los­o­phy Books Writ­ten Between 1950–2000: Wittgen­stein, Fou­cault, Rawls & More

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times

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

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Discover the Lost Early Computer Art of Telidon, Canada’s TV Proto-Internet from the 1970s

in Art, Technology | May 25th, 2018

Most of us got hooked up to the inter­net in the 1990s or there­abouts, though the true ear­ly adopters did it when per­son­al com­put­ers first blew up in the 1980s. But cer­tain Cana­di­an house­holds got online even ear­li­er, in the late 1970s, although not quite on the inter­net as we know it: they had Telidon, a phone line-con­nect­ed video­tex/tele­tex sys­tem that used a reg­u­lar tele­vi­sion as a dis­play. “It is no exag­ger­a­tion to say that the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions mar­ket­place in Cana­da was gripped by Telidon fever from late 1979 to late 1982,” writes Don­ald Gilles in the Cana­di­an Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Fuel­ing that fever was “hope and belief in tech­nol­o­gy – sci­ence-based tech­nol­o­gy – as an agent of change, a bringer of nov­el­ty, and enhancer of life.”


When it first came avail­able, Telidon’s con­tent providers includ­ed “cor­po­ra­tions and inter­ests such as The Bay, Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­ni­ca and the Toron­to Star,” writes the CBC’s Chris Hamp­ton, but “a com­mu­ni­ty of arts-mind­ed elec­tron­ics wonks, tele­com prophets and oth­er curi­ous sorts coa­lesced around it, embrac­ing it as an art medi­um.”

You can see some of those Telidon cre­ators inter­viewed in the short Moth­er­board doc­u­men­tary at the top of the post. While busi­ness­es exper­i­ment­ed with pos­si­bil­i­ties of bank­ing and shop­ping through the sys­tem, artists pushed its bound­aries even fur­ther, using its now severe-seem­ing tech­no­log­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions as a cat­a­lyst for visu­al cre­ativ­i­ty. On some months, artist Bill Per­ry’s Telidon mag­a­zine Com­put­erese drew more view­ers than every oth­er provider com­bined.


Now, more than 30 years after its dis­con­tin­u­a­tion, Telidon has attract­ed atten­tion again. It turns out that its ear­ly-com­put­er-art aes­thet­ic has aged quite well, as seen in the exam­ples now being pulled from the archives and Insta­grammed by Toron­to new-media cen­ter Inter­Ac­cess. Orig­i­nal­ly found­ed to make Telidon devel­op­ment tools avail­able to the artist com­mu­ni­ty, Inter­Ac­cess launched this social media project as a way of cel­e­brat­ing its own 35th birth­day. Look­ing back on all the uses artists found for Telidon — every­thing from abstract qua­si-ani­ma­tions to a study of per­spec­tives on the Cold War — we can imag­ine how com­par­a­tive­ly bound­less the mod­ern inter­net would have seemed to them. But we might also won­der what that mod­ern inter­net would look like if it had a lit­tle more of their artis­ti­cal­ly and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly adven­tur­ous spir­it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

What the Entire Inter­net Looked Like in 1973: An Old Map Gets Found in a Pile of Research Papers

Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art Found on 30-Year-Old Flop­py Disks

Watch Bri­an Eno’s “Video Paint­ings,” Where 1980s TV Tech­nol­o­gy Meets Visu­al Art

The Sto­ry of Habi­tat, the Very First Large-Scale Online Role-Play­ing Game (1986)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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Explore Meticulous 3D Models of Endangered Historical Sites in Google’s “Open Heritage” Project

in Architecture, Data, Travel | May 25th, 2018

One brisk thump­ing by a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter, total­i­tar­i­an regime, or ter­ror­ist group is more than enough to reduce an awe-inspir­ing her­itage site to rub­ble.

With that sad fact in mind, Google Arts & Cul­ture has paired with CyArk, a non prof­it whose mis­sion is using the lat­est tech­nolo­gies to dig­i­tal­ly doc­u­ment and pre­serve the world’s sig­nif­i­cant cul­tur­al her­itage in an eas­i­ly share­able for­mat.

The result­ing project, Open Her­itage, is a mas­sive brows­able col­lec­tion of 3D her­itage data, already the largest of its kind, and cer­tain to increase as its cre­ators race against the clock.

As of this writ­ing, vis­i­tors can explore 3D mod­els of 27 her­itage sites from 18 coun­tries.

Even those of us who’ve had the good for­tune to vis­it these sites in per­son have much to gain from the drone’s eye view of the Cara­col obser­va­to­ry that’s part of Mexico’s ancient Mayan metrop­o­lis Chichén Itzá or Berlin’s icon­ic Bran­den­burg Gate.

Each mod­el is accom­pa­nied by an expe­di­tion overview that details the site’s his­to­ry and sig­nif­i­cance, as well as its loca­tion on a map. Time lapse pho­tos help give a sense of the site’s human traf­fic dur­ing the time it was being doc­u­ment­ed, as well as the nature of the work CyArk does on loca­tion. Sig­nif­i­cant details are high­light­ed, and their sym­bol­ism dis­cussed.

CyArk will share project data with view­ers who request it, using a Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion-Non­Com­mer­cial 4.0 Inter­na­tion­al License.

Equal­ly impor­tant is the role these com­pre­hen­sive 3D scans can play in cur­rent and future restora­tion efforts, by iden­ti­fy­ing areas of dam­age and doc­u­ment­ing exist­ing col­or and tex­ture with down-to-the-mil­lime­ter pre­ci­sion.

Begin your vir­tu­al explo­rations of such Open Her­itage sites as Greece’s Ancient Corinth, Lebanon’s Tem­ple of Echoun, and Ayut­thaya, Thailand’s Wat Si San­phet, here.

Learn more about aer­i­al pho­togram­me­try, 3D laser scan­ning, stereo­scop­ic 360 imagery, and oth­er tools of the dig­i­tal preser­va­tion trade here.

And stay abreast of CyArk’s work by sub­scrib­ing to their free month­ly newslet­ter here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it 890 UNESCO World Her­itage Sites with Free iPhone/iPad App

Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

Google Dig­i­tizes and Puts Online a Vast Archive of Lati­no Art­works and Arti­facts

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her solo show Nurse!, in which one of Shakespeare’s best loved female char­ac­ters hits the lec­ture cir­cuit to set the record straight pre­mieres in June at The Tank in New York City. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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

in Art | May 24th, 2018

How to make a name for one­self in the art world? Every up-and-com­ing artist has to face that intim­i­dat­ing ques­tion in one way or anoth­er, but Robert Rauschen­berg, now remem­bered as a lead­ing light of the pop art move­ment, came up with a par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable answer. When in 1953 he got the coun­ter­in­tu­itive idea to make a draw­ing not by draw­ing, but by eras­ing, he at first tried eras­ing images he’d drawn him­self. This brought him to the real­iza­tion that not only should his eras­ing con­sti­tute more than half the process — “I want­ed it to be the whole,” he lat­er said — but that, to make a real artis­tic impact, he’d have to erase the work of some­one impor­tant.

The log­i­cal choice at the time: Willem de Koon­ing, then already con­sid­ered a mas­ter of abstract expres­sion­ism. “I bought a bot­tle of Jack Daniels and went up and knocked on his door, pray­ing the whole time that he would­n’t be home,” says Rauschen­berg in the inter­view clip above, “but he was home.” Even­tu­al­ly he sold the old­er and more emi­nent artist on the idea of tak­ing a draw­ing, eras­ing it, and turn­ing that into art of his own, a pitch no doubt assist­ed by Rauschen­berg and de Koon­ing’s already friend­ly rela­tion­ship. (The already vast dif­fer­ence between their artis­tic styles also took the notion of artis­tic pat­ri­cide out of the ques­tion.)

De Koon­ing at first resist­ed, but then dou­bled down: “I want it to be some­thing I’ll miss,” Rauschen­berg remem­bers him say­ing before pick­ing out the sac­ri­fice. Erased de Koon­ing Draw­ing, the result of two months of eras­ing and count­less spent erasers, “essen­tial­ly remained an under­ground, art world phe­nom­e­non for more than ten years after it was com­plet­ed.” So writes SFMOMA cura­tor Sarah Roberts in an essay on the piece. “Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, it was exclud­ed from numer­ous impor­tant solo and group exhi­bi­tions in the late 1950s and ear­ly 1960s, cru­cial years when Rauschenberg’s rep­u­ta­tion was becom­ing estab­lished inter­na­tion­al­ly.”

But slow­ly, over the years, word spread through the art media and social scenes, and now the 27-year-old Rauschen­berg’s brazen artis­tic act has a place among the prog­en­i­tors of con­cep­tu­al art. “Yes, the era­sure was an act of destruc­tion,” writes Roberts, “but as a cre­ative ges­ture it was also an act of rev­er­ence or even devotion—to de Koon­ing, to draw­ing, to art his­to­ry, and to the idea of tak­ing a risk and being open to what­ev­er comes as a result.” Though prac­ti­cal­ly unknown for quite a long time, Erased de Koon­ing Draw­ing can now hard­ly be for­got­ten — which takes eras­ing a respect­ed fore­bear’s work off the table as a means of name-mak­ing for young artists today, each of whom will have to find their own way to set off a slow-burn shock.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Robert Rauschenberg’s 34 Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Infer­no (1958–60)

New Robert Rauschen­berg Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion Lets You Down­load Free High-Res Images of the Artist’s Work

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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All of the Rulers of Europe Over the Past 2,400 Years Presented in a Timelapse Map (400 B.C. to 2017 A.D.)

in History | May 24th, 2018

The­o­ries of pow­er, from Machi­avel­li and Hobbes to Locke and Jef­fer­son, have drawn their lessons from the tow­er­ing fig­ure of the Sov­er­eign, the prin­ci­ple actor in dra­mas of old Euro­pean state­craft. One philoso­pher advis­es cun­ning, anoth­er fear and awe. When we come to ideas of civ­il soci­ety based in prop­er­ty rights, we see the­o­rists argu­ing with pro­po­nents of monar­chi­cal divine right, or strug­gling, con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly, mil­i­tar­i­ly, with a mad king.

Maybe this sur­vey seems banal, passé, bor­ing, blah.

It can be dif­fi­cult for post-post-mod­erns to ful­ly appre­ci­ate the Sovereign’s once-crush­ing weight. (See John Mil­ton’s many defens­es of regi­cide and rev­o­lu­tion, for exam­ple.) Maybe, schooled in the work of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Fou­cault, George Orwell, Han­nah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, etc., we have learned to think of power—whether from below or above—as dif­fuse, inter­re­lat­ed, net­worked, spread across class­es, imper­son­al bureau­cra­cies, insti­tu­tion­al prac­tices.

The word “despot,” for exam­ple, sounds so exot­ic, an ossi­fied term from antiq­ui­ty. Study­ing the video above could bring it to life again, if dis­cours­es around cur­rent events haven’t. Sprint­ing through two-thou­sand, four-hun­dred, and sev­en­teen years of his­to­ry, this dra­mat­ic pre­sen­ta­tion names the names of every ruler in Europe, from 400 B.C.E. to 2017.

Despite its Euro­cen­tric asso­ci­a­tion with the East (as in the stereo­type of the “Ori­en­tal Despot”), West­ern his­to­ry offers hun­dreds of exam­ples of despo­tism. Put sim­ply, “despo­tism,” says Fou­cault in his lec­ture series The Birth of Biopol­i­tics, “refers any injunc­tion made by the pub­lic author­i­ties back to the sovereign’s will, and to it alone.”

Despo­tism, he argues, stands in con­trast to the police state, or absolute rule by admin­is­tra­tors and enforcers, and to the Rule of Law, in which rulers and ruled are both osten­si­bly bound by exter­nal char­ters and legal codes.

Watch the pro­ces­sion of emper­ors, kings, usurpers, tyrants…. Do we know the names of any of their func­tionar­ies? Do we need to? If Claudius or Con­stan­tine decreed, what does it mat­ter who car­ried out the order? When and where do those terms change—when do the names become a kind of synec­doche, stand­ing in for admin­is­tra­tions, par­ties, jun­tas, etc. rather than the sin­gu­lar will of indi­vid­u­als, benev­o­lent, enlight­ened, or oth­er­wise?

How many of these rulers’ names are unfa­mil­iar to us? Why haven’t we heard them? At what peri­od in his­to­ry does Europe become pre­dom­i­nant­ly ruled by oth­er forms of gov­ern­ment? Does despo­tism ever dis­ap­pear? Does it reap­pear in the 20th cen­tu­ry (were Lenin, Fran­co, or Mar­shall Tito despots?), or must we use anoth­er rubric to describe dic­ta­tors and auto­crats? (Does it make any sense to call con­tem­po­rary fig­ure­heads like Eliz­a­beth II “rulers of Europe”?)

Pick your own mode of analy­sis, explore the out­er edges and obscure inte­ri­ors of empires, and you might find your­self get­ting very inter­est­ed in Euro­pean his­to­ry (learn more here), or curi­ous about how “despo­tism” divid­ed, meta­mor­phosed, and metas­ta­sized into what­ev­er var­i­ous forms of rule the names “Merkel,” “Macron,” “Putin,” “Poroshenko,” or “Erdo­gan,” for exam­ple, rep­re­sent today.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es 

The His­to­ry of Europe: 5,000 Years Ani­mat­ed in a Time­lapse Map

Watch the His­to­ry of the World Unfold on an Ani­mat­ed Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today

Free: Euro­pean Cul­tur­al His­to­ry in 91 Lec­tures by Emi­nent His­to­ri­an George L. Mosse (1500–1920)

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

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An 82-Year-Old Japanese Audiophile Searches for the Best Sound by Installing His Own Electric Utility Pole in His Yard

in Music | May 24th, 2018

As a long­time record col­lec­tor (first because it was before CDs were invent­ed) and a bud­ding audio­phile (because vinyl does sound bet­ter than dig­i­tal, have at me in the com­ments if you must), I appre­ci­ate a good sto­ry about the search for per­fect sound. But Takeo Mori­ta takes it to a new lev­el.

In the Wall Street Jour­nal sto­ry above, we learn that the 82-year-old has installed a 42-foot util­i­ty pole next to his house. Why? To get that clean elec­tric­i­ty to his sys­tem, not that shared, filthy elec­tric­i­ty from a com­mon-as-muck util­i­ty pole. Elec­tric­i­ty is like blood, he explains, and the clean­er the blood, the bet­ter for the sys­tem.

Now this reminds me, while we’re here, to tell you about a show I once saw on Japan­ese TV and which I one day hope to see on YouTube. A news show pro­filed Japan’s num­ber one Bob Dylan col­lec­tor, who had every vinyl release of the musi­cian, even to redun­dan­cy. At one point he pulled out an album still in its shrink wrap that was no dif­fer­ent from the one next to it. “This has a green stick­er on it,” he said, point­ing to the right hand cor­ner. “But that’s just a stick­er,” said the host. Blank stare. Pause. “But this has a green stick­er on it.”

That’s the spir­it, I thought.

Also: Nev­er catch that spir­it, I thought.

This arti­cle at residentadvisor.net explores the world of Tokyo’s audio­phile under­ground, which is both a log­i­cal out­come for those into hear­ing the best music sys­tems and some­thing quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Japan­ese. I can’t imag­ine an audio­phile bar open­ing up in the States any­time soon. But the lis­ten­ing venue has a long his­to­ry in Japan:

It can be traced back to the rise of jazz kissa (jazz cafés) and meikyoku kissa (clas­si­cal music cafés) in the years fol­low­ing World War II, a time when import­ed records were pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive. This meant that, for many peo­ple, the kissat­en were the only places to hear good music from abroad. The focus at these cafés was on deep, con­cen­trat­ed lis­ten­ing.

As the arti­cle men­tions, there are as many mini clubs in Tokyo as there are gen­res, from clas­si­cal to drone/glitch. And it comes down to the idea, start­ed by Amer­i­can soci­ol­o­gist Ray Old­en­burg, of “The Third Place,” the place that is nei­ther home, nor work:

As civ­i­liza­tion has advanced, going to work and back home has become our rou­tine as humans,” Ari­izu­mi says. “The third place is not quite home, and it’s not work, but a com­mu­ni­ty where every­one can be wel­comed and relax, with a nice atmos­phere. I heard about the term ‘third place’ for the first time just when we opened Bridge, and I remem­ber think­ing, ‘This is exact­ly what I want to cre­ate.’ That’s what I want to do, cre­ate a third space. Peo­ple can come here and talk about their jobs or their love life, or they can come here and dance. It’s a place between work and home. Peo­ple need that.

Ques­tion is, dear read­er: do you have a third space?

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Steely Dan Wrote “Dea­con Blues,” the Song Audio­philes Use to Test High-End Stere­os

How Good Are Your Head­phones? This 150-Song Playlist, Fea­tur­ing Steely Dan, Pink Floyd & More, Will Test Them Out
The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

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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