Colin Winterbottom specializes in taking photographs that offer a fresh perspective on America’s capital, Washington DC. As his web site tells us, his photos seek to express “not just what a place looks like, but how it feels to be there.” A point that also comes across in a video he shot several years ago.
He introduces the video above, entitled “Stained glass time lapse, Washington National Cathedral,” with these background words:
I am primarily a black and white architectural still photographer, but while documenting post-earthquake repairs at Washington National Cathedral I was impressed by the drama of the vibrant colors the windows “painted” on stone and scaffold. With just weeks before a related exhibition was to open I began mounting cameras to scaffold to take advantage of rare vantage points. The opening and closing view, for example — with Rowan LeCompte’s remarkable west rose window at eye-level and centered straight ahead within the nave — cannot be recreated now that scaffold is down.
The photographs in the exhibition “Scaling Washington” (which was at the National Building Museum in 2015) often played off the unexpected harmony between the Cathedral architecture and scaffold, both having engaging rhythmic structural repetitions. Thus the inclusion of wonderfully painted scaffold herein. For the purpose of the exhibition (which had much other content) the video was left silent and had remained so for several years until composer Danyal Dhondy recently offered to write an original score for it. It fits so well and complements the rhythms of the original edit so perfectly. Now the piece has new dimension and life outside the original exhibition.
It’s good to know there’s still some beauty and tranquility somewhere in Washington. Do enjoy.
Claudio aka Doctor Mix runs a YouTube channel where he uploads tutorials on mixing and producing music, reviews of audio gear and instruments, and hawks his online mixing and mastering service. But the above video caught our attention. Using just one synthesizer, the brand new *analog* Arturia MatrixBrute (what a name!), Doctor Mix recreates the Kraftwerk hit “The Robots.” (Which, if you are a longtime reader of this site, you know we love.)
Doctor Mix builds up the song piece by piece, and while the original band used several different synths to create the track, the MatrixBrute is able to handle everything, as it has a sequencer/drum pads built in, and programmable sounds that in this supplemental video, Doctor Mix will sell to you. (He even is able to use a vocoder with the machine to intonate its Russian lyrics: “Ja tvoi sluga / Ja tvoi rabotnik”)
Along with that and electronic-drum pads (first seen on TV in 1975), the band also used the Moog Mini-Moog, the ARP Odyssey, and a Roland Space-Echo, which provided the vocoder sounds.
At the time, band member Ralf Hütter said of the making of the album: “We are playing the machines, the machines play us, it is really the exchange and the friendship we have with the musical machines which make us build a new music.”
But we’ll hand it to Doctor Mix: the Arturia MatrixBrute is a good ol’ fashioned analog machine, and a lot of the new gear reviewed on his site shows that the warm tones of analog equipment is having a renaissance. Warm up those vaccuum tubes, kids, the other sound of the ‘70s is back!
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.
What place does the paper book have in our increasingly all-digital present? While some utilitarian arguments once marshaled in its favor (“You can read them in the bathtub” and the like) have fallen into disuse, other, more aesthetically focused arguments have arisen: that a work in print, for example, can achieve a state of beauty as an object in and of itself, the way a file on a laptop, phone, or reader never can. In a sense, this case for the paper book in the 21st century comes back around to the case for the paper book from the 12th century and even earlier, the age of the illuminated manuscript.
Bookmakers back then had to concentrate on prestige products, given that they couldn’t make books in anything like the numbers even the humblest, most antiquated printing operation can run off today.
In the video above, the Getty Museum reveals the painstaking physical process behind the medieval illuminated manuscript: the sourcing, soaking, and stretching of animal skin for the parchment; the conversion of feathers into the quills and nuts into the ink with which scribes would write the text; the application of gold leaf and other colors by the illuminator as they drew in their designs; and the sewing of the binding before encasing the whole package tightly between clasped leather covers.
Some illuminated manuscripts also bear elaborate cover designs sculpted of precious metal, but even without those, these elaborate books — what with all the art and craft that went into them, not to mention all those pricey materials — came out even more valuable, at the time, than even the most coveted laptop, phone, reader, or other consumer electronic device today. Most of us in the developed world can now buy one of those, but the non-institutional patrons willing and able to commission the most splendid illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance included mostly “society’s rulers: emperors, kings, dukes, cardinals, and bishops.”
To fully understand the making of the devices we use to read electronically today would require years and years of study, and so there’s something satisfying in the fact that we can grasp so much about the making of illuminated manuscripts with relative ease: see, for example, the two-minute Getty video just above, “The Structure of a Medieval Manuscript.” A fuller understanding of the nature of illuminated manuscripts, both in the sense of their construction and their place in society, makes for a fuller understanding of how rare the chance was to own beautiful books of their kind in their own time — and how much rarer the exact combination of skills needed to create that beauty.
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.
Carl Spitzweg’s 1839 painting The Poor Poet is an odd canvas, one which, the German History in Documents and Images project writes, “testifies to a general mid-century unease with the extremes of Romantic idealization.” On the one hand, it pokes fun at its subject, a “cliché of the artist as an otherworldly genius who must suffer for his art.” (The poet’s stove appears to be fueled by his own manuscripts.) On the other hand, the painting shows a sense of defiance in its figure of the bohemian: “antibourgeois, destitute, but inspired,” argues the Leopold Museum of another version of the painting. The Poor Poet’s ambiguity is “expressed in the iconography of the pointed cap… for during the French Revolution the so-called Jacobin or liberty cap was used as a symbol of republican resistance.”
Spitzweg’s painting was one of the most beloved of the period, and it cemented the reputation of the middle class former pharmacist as a foremost artist of the era.
It also happens to have been Adolf Hitler’s favorite painting, a fact that rather tainted its reputation in the post-war 20th century, but did not prevent its proud display in Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, where, in 1976, German artist Ulay—partner of Marina Abramović from 1976 to 1988—walked in, took the painting and walked out again. “Ulay drove—with the museum guards at his heels—to Kreuzberg, which was known as a ghetto for immigrants,” writes the Louisiana Channel in their introduction to the 2017 interview with the artist above.
Here, Ulay ran through the snow with the painting under his arm, to a Turkish family, who had agreed to let him shoot a documentary film in their home—however unaware that it involved a stolen painting. Before entering the family’s home, the artist called the police from a phone booth and asked for the director of the museum to pick up the painting. He then hung up the painting in the home of the family “for the reason to bring this whole issue of Turkish discriminated foreign workers into the discussion. To bring into discussion the institute’s marginalization of art. To bring a discussion about the correspondence between art institutes from the academy to museums to whatever.”
You can see Ulay’s film, “Action in 14 Predetermined Sequences: There is a Criminal Touch to Art” at Ubuweb. The “action,” as he calls it, did indeed elicit the kind of inflamed responses the artist desired. Ulay puts several of the headlines before the camera, such as “Madman steals world-famous Spitzweg painting in Berlin” and “Poor Poet to Adorn the Living-Room of Turks.” The last headline hints at the kind of bigotry Ulay hoped to expose. “This particular painting, you could say,” he tells us in his interview, “was a German identity icon, besides it was Hitler’s favorite painting.”
Ulay’s art robbery underscores the multiple thematic and political tensions already embodied in The Poor Poet—a shrewd choice for his attempt “to give a really strong signal of what I am about as an artist.” An artist does not seclude himself in his garret with Romantic dreams of revolution, Ulay suggests, all the while representing “bourgeois tastes,” writes Lisa Beisswanger at Schirnmag, in “the temple of bourgeois high culture, for the artistic pleasure of the social establishment”—pleasing everyone from art critics, to solid German citizens who still hang the reproductions in “living rooms full of the same upholstered furniture and wall-to-wall oak-fronted cupboards,” to a genocidal dictator who played on the prejudices of the German people to accomplish the unthinkable.
Of what aesthetic value is this kind of performance art? Does Ulay’s outrage at the situation of Turkish workers, which he calls “not acceptable,” warrant the “action” of hanging stolen artwork in the home of one such immigrant family? We might not see “art theft as artwork,” as Beisswanger argues, but we can still see Ulay’s action as composed of multiple meanings, including radical critiques not only of racism and exploitation, but of the marginal, perhaps criminal, status of art and of the artist in a complacently xenophobic, exploitative society.
When you hear the phrase Art of Noise, surely you think of the sample-based avant-garde synth outfit whose instrumental hit “Moments in Love” turned the sound of quiet storm adult contemporary into a hypnagogic chill-out anthem? And when you hear about “noise music,” surely you think of the dramatic post-industrial cacophony of Einstürzende Neubauten or the deconstructed guitar rock of Lightning Bolt?
But long before “noise” became a term of art for rock critics, before the recording industry existed in any recognizably modern form, an Italian futurist painter and composer, Luigi Russolo, invented noise music, launching his creation in 1913 with a manifesto called The Art of Noises.
“In antiquity,” he writes (in Robert Filliou’s translation), “life was nothing but silence.” After presenting an almost comically brief history of sound and music coming into the world, Russolo then declares his thesis, in bold:
Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility…. Nowadays musical art aims at the shrillest, strangest and most dissonant amalgams of sound. Thus we are approaching noise-sound. This revolution of music is paralleled by the increasing proliferation of machinery sharing in human labor.
Not quite so radical as one might think, but bear in mind, this is 1913, the year Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” provoked a riot in Paris upon its debut. Russolo took an even more shocking swerve away from tradition. Pythagorean theory had stifled creativity, he alleged, “the Greeks… have limited the domain of music until now…. We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.”
To accomplish his grand objective, the experimental artist created his own series of instruments, the Intonarumori, “acoustic noise generators,” writes Thereminvox, that could “create and control in dynamic and pitch several different types of noises.” Working long before digital samplers and the electronic gadgetry used by industrial and musique concrete composers, Russolo relied on purely mechanical devices, though he did make several recordings as well from 1913 to 1921. (Hear “Risveglio Di Una Città” from 1913 above, and many more original recordings as well as new Intonarumori compositions, at Ubuweb.)
Russolo’s musical contraptions, 27 different varieties, were each named “according to the sound produced: howling, thunder, crackling, crumpling, exploding, gurgling, buzzing, hissing, and so on.” (Stravinsky was apparently an admirer.) You can see reconstructions at the top of the post in a 2012 exhibition at Lisbon’s Museu Coleção Berardo. Many of his own compositions feature string orchestras as well. Russolo introduced his new instrumental music over the course of a few years, debuting an “exploder” in Modena in 1913, staging concerts in Milan, Genoa, and London the following year, and in Paris in 1921.
One 1917 concert apparently provoked explosive violence, an effect Russolo seemed to anticipate and even welcome. The Art of Noise derived its influence from every sound of the industrial world, “and we must not forget the very new noises of Modern Warfare,” he writes, quoting futurist poet Marinetti’s joyful descriptions of the “violence, ferocity, regularity, pendulum game, fatality” of battle. His noise system, which he enumerates in the treatise, also consists of “human voices: shouts, moans, screams, laughter, rattlings, sobs….” It seems that if he didn’t supply these onstage, he was happy for the audience to do so.
After Russolo’s first Art of Noise concert in 1913, Marinetti violently defended the instruments against assaults from those whom the composer called “passé-ists.” Other receptions of the strange new form were more enthusiastically positive. Nonetheless, notes a 1967 “Great Bear Pamphlet” that reprints The Art of Noises, the effects aren’t exactly what Russolo intended: “Listening to the harmonized combined pitches of the bursters, the whistlers, and the gurglers, no one remembered autos, locomotives or running waters; one rather experienced an intense emotion of futurist art, absolutely unforeseen and like nothing but itself.”
It’s probably no stretch to say that mass disinformation campaigns and rampant anti-intellectualism will constitute an increasing amount of our political reality both today and in the future. As Hannah Arendt wrote, the political lie has always been with us. But its global reach, particular vehemence, and blatant contempt for verifiable reality seem like innovations of the present.
Given the embarrassing wealth of access to information and educational tools, maybe it’s fair to say that the first and last line of defense should be our own critical reasoning. When we fail to verify news—using resources we all have in hand (I assume, since you’re reading this), the fault for believing bad information may lie with us.
But we so often don’t know what it is that we don’t know. Individuals can’t be blamed for an inadequate educational system, and one should not underestimate the near-impossibility of conducting time-consuming inquiries into the truth of every single claim that comes our way, like trying to identify individual droplets while getting hit in the face with a pressurized blast of targeted, contradictory info, sometimes coming from shadowy, unreliable sources.
Carl Sagan understood the difficulty, and he also understood that a lack of critical thinking did not make people totally irrational and deserving of contempt. “It’s not hard to understand,” for example, why people would think their relatives are still alive in some other form after death. As he writes of this common phenomenon in “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” most supernatural beliefs are just “humans being human.”
In the essay, a chapter from his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan proposes a rigorous but comprehensible “baloney detection kit” to separate sense from nonsense.
Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives.
Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.
If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified…. You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.
Calling his recommendations “tools for skeptical thinking,” he lays out a means of compensating for the strong emotional pulls that “promise something like old-time religion” and recognizing “a fallacious or fraudulent argument.” At the top of the post, in a video produced by Big Think, you can hear science writer and educator Michael Shermer explain the “baloney detection kit” that he himself adapted from Sagan, and just above, read Sagan’s own version, abridged into a short list (read it in full at Brain Pickings).
Like many a science communicator after him, Sagan was very much concerned with the influence of superstitious religious beliefs. He also foresaw a time in the near future much like our own. Elsewhere in The Demon-Haunted World, Sagan writes of “America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time…. when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few.” The loss of control over media and education renders people “unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true.”
This state involves, he says a “slide… back into superstition” of the religious variety and also a general “celebration of ignorance,” such that well-supported scientific theories carry the same weight or less than explanations made up on the spot by authorities whom people have lost the ability to “knowledgeably question.” It’s a scary scenario that may not have completely come to pass… just yet, but Sagan knew as well or better than anyone of his time how to address such a potential social epidemic.
You don’t need to go to Oxford to study philosophy. Not when it will come to you. Above, find a playlist that features 41 lectures from Oxford’s course called General Philosophy. Here’s what it has to offer:
A series of lectures delivered by Peter Millican to first-year philosophy students at the University of Oxford. The lectures comprise of the 8‑week General Philosophy course, delivered to first year undergraduates. These lectures aim to provide a thorough introduction to many philosophical topics and to get students and others interested in thinking about key areas of philosophy. Taking a chronological view of the history of philosophy, each lecture is split into 3 or 4 sections which outline a particular philosophical problem and how different philosophers have attempted to resolve the issue. Individuals interested in the ‘big’ questions about life such as how we perceive the world, who we are in the world and whether we are free to act will find this series informative, comprehensive and accessible.
Philosophers covered in the course include Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.
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!
I passed Malcolm Gladwell on the street a few years ago, on the final stop of a road trip I took from Los Angeles to Raleigh, North Carolina. At the time I wondered why the unmistakable New York-based writer, speaker, and interpreter of big ideas had come to town. But now that I know a little bit about his personal and professional habits, I can at least say with some confidence where he was going: a coffee shop. That Gladwell’s work has, over the years, occasionally touched on the subject of coffee suggests he may well enjoy a good brew, but in that same time he’s also stated, explicitly and repeatedly, that cafés are where he does the work itself.
“I loved the newsroom,” Gladwell, who got his start in one, once told The Guardian. “When I left it I wanted to recreate the newsroom and the closest thing to a newsroom is any kind of random active social space.” The best coffee shop offers what he calls “the right kind of distraction. There has to be some sort of osmotic process,” just as happens with journalists together in the office. “I don’t particularly think coffee shops are amazing places to write,” he more recently said in a podcast interview with economist Tyler Cowen (embedded below). “But I do think that simply being around people who are not my age is really useful.”
“The coffee-shop writer needs to be, as the sociologists would say, an outlier and not a pioneer,” Gladwell writes in the Wall Street Journal. (Even in a personal essay, it seems, he can’t resist applying an academic concept to everyday life.) “You don’t want to be the laptop cowboy who signals to other laptop cowboys that this is the place to be. You want the club that won’t have you as a member.” He goes on to recommend the rigorous likes of Manhattan’s laptop-banning Café Grumpy and Zurich’s La Stanza: “no comfy chairs, no Wi-Fi, no outlets, and coffee so ridiculously expensive that it functions as a tax on lingering.”
Other Gladwell-approved writing cafés include Fernandez and Wells in London, Chez Prune in Paris (until, that is, it flooded with “Vassar girls with their Gitanes cigarettes and their Thomas Mann”), and “the back booths in the Swan Restaurant on Queen Street West” in Toronto. These far-flung spots align well with the other personal writing strategy Gladwell explained to Cowen: “I travel a lot. And that’s a really, really useful way of breaking out of bad intellectual habits, and to remind yourself about what the rest of the world is like.” As a hard-writing habitué of the coffee shops of Seoul, I second Gladwell’s advice, but I should note that following it won’t necessarily get you to his level of popularity and acclaim; combine it with his new Masterclass on writing, though, and hey, who knows.
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.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
