Listen to the Whistleblower Complaint released by the House Intelligence Committee, as read by Saskia Maarleveld. Stream or download it above. Find more of Maarleveld’s narrated books on Audible.
Vox’s Phil Edwards dispenses with that status quickly in the above video for Overrated, a series that unpacks the reasons behind iconic works’ lasting fame.
By his reckoning, American Gothic’s success hinges on the dual nature of its creator, a native Iowan who traveled extensively in Europe, gravitating to such sophisticated fare as Impressionism, Pointillism, and the work of Flemish master Jan van Eyck.
In the early 1930s, many Iowa farmers suspected that Wood was making fun of them in American Gothic, that he was a pictorial H. L. Mencken castigating a Midwestern “booboisie.” (He had, after all, lived in Paris briefly and even grew a beard there!) But by 1933, when American Gothic was exhibited in conjunction with the Chicago Century of Progress Fair, the painting had become a beloved national symbol, second only to Whistler’s portrait of his mother in the affections of the public.
Wood, who staged the painting using his sister, his dentist and a “cardboardy frame house” typical of Iowa farms as models, admitted that his intentions weren’t entirely noble:
There is satire in it, but only as there is satire in any realistic statement. These are types of people I have known all my life. I tried to characterize them truthfully—to make them more like themselves than they were in actual life.
As the Art Institute of Chicago’s Judith Barter observes in an audio guide accompanying the painting, the dour, overall-clad farmer betrays a bit of vanity, gussying up in a dress shirt and Sunday-Go-To-Meeting jacket while his female companion—Wood never revealed if she was sister, wife, or daughter—accessorizes her tidy apron with a cameo brooch in anticipation of having their likeness captured.
Author Christopher Morley, who first saw American Gothic in 1930, when it won the Norman Wait Harris Bronze Medal at the forty-third Art Institute of Chicago Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, later wrote:
In those sad and yet fanatical faces may be read much of what is Right and what is Wrong with America.
Perhaps we are drawn to the reflection of our own foibles, whether we’re ascetic everyday folks or big-for-our-britches country-born city slickers…
And when in Eldon, Iowa be sure to pose in front of the historic American Gothic House, with props kindly supplied by the adjacent American Gothic House Center.
All books in the public domain are free. Most books in the public domain are, by definition, on the old side, and a great many aren’t easy to find in any case. But the books now being scanned and uploaded by libraries aren’t quite so old, and they’ll soon get much easier to find. They’ve fallen through a loophole because their copyright-holders never renewed their copyright, but until recently the technology wasn’t quite in place to reliably identify and digitally store them.
Now, though, as Vice’s Karl Bode writes, “a coalition of archivists, activists, and libraries are working overtime to make it easier to identify the many books that are secretly in the public domain, digitize them, and make them freely available online to everyone.” These were published between 1923 and 1964, and the goal of this digitization project is to upload all of these surprisingly out-of-copyright books to the Internet Archive, a glimpse of whose book-scanning operation appears above.
“Historically, it’s been fairly easy to tell whether a book published between 1923 and 1964 had its copyright renewed, because the renewal records were already digitized,” writes Bode. “But proving that a book hadn’t had its copyright renewed has historically been more difficult.” You can learn more about what it takes to do that from this blog post by New York Public Library Senior Product Manager Sean Redmond, who first crunched the numbers and estimated that 70 percent of the titles published over those 41 years may now be out of copyright: “around 480,000 public domain books, in other words.”
The first important stage is the conversion of copyright records into the XML format, a large part of which the New York Public Library has recently completed. Bode also mentions a software developer and science fiction author named Leonard Richardson who has written Python scripts to expedite the process (including a matching script to identify potentially non-renewed copyrights in the Internet Archive collection) and a bot that identifies newly discovered secretly public-domain books daily. Richardson himself underscores the necessity of volunteers to take on tasks like seeking out a copy of each such book, “scanning it, proofing it, then putting out HTML and plain-text editions.”
This work is now happening at American libraries and among volunteers from organizations like Project Gutenberg. The Internet Archive’s Jason Scott has also pitched in with his own resources, recently putting out a call for more help on the “very boring, VERY BORING (did I mention boring)” project of determining “which books are actually in the public domain to either surface them on @internetarchive or help make a hitlist.” Of course, many more obviously stimulating tasks exist even in the realm of digital archiving. But then, each secretly public-domain book identified, found, scanned, and uploaded brings humanity’s print and digital civilizations one step closer together. Whatever comes out of that union, it certainly won’t be boring.
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.
“All my jokes are Indianapolis,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “All my attitudes are Indianapolis. My adenoids are Indianapolis. If I ever severed myself from Indianapolis, I would be out of business. What people like about me is Indianapolis.” He delivered those words to a high-school audience in his hometown of Indianapolis in 1986, and a decade later he made his feelings even clearer in a commencement speech at Butler University: “If I had to do it all over, I would choose to be born again in a hospital in Indianapolis. I would choose to spend my childhood again at 4365 North Illinois Street, about 10 blocks from here, and to again be a product of that city’s public schools.” Now, at 543 Indiana Avenue, we can experience the legacy of the man who wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, and Breakfast of Championsat the newly permanent Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.
The museum’s founder and CEO Julia Whitehead “conceived the idea for a Vonnegut museum in November of 2008, a year and a half after the author’s death, writes Atlas Obscura’s Susan Salaz. “The physical museum opened in a donated storefront in 2011, displaying items donated by friends or on loan from the Vonnegut family” — his Pall Malls, his drawings, a replica of his typewriter, his Purple Heart.
But the collection “has been homeless since January 2019.” A fundraising campaign this past spring raised $1.5 million in donations, putting the museum in a position to purchase the Indiana Avenue building, one capacious enough for visitors to, according to the museum’s about page, “view photos from family, friends, and fans that reveal Vonnegut as he lived; “ponder rejection letters Vonnegut received from editors”; and “rest a spell and listen to what friends and colleagues have to say about Vonnegut and his work.”
The newly re-opened Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library will also pay tribute to the jazz-loving, censorship-loathingveteran of the Second World War with an outdoor tunnel playing the music of Wes Montgomery and other Indianapolis jazz greats, a “freedom of expression exhibition” that Salaz describes as featuring “the 100 books most frequently banned in libraries and schools across the nation,” and veteran-oriented book clubs, writing workshops, and art exhibitions. In the museum’s period of absence, Vonnegut pilgrims in Indianapolis had no place to go (apart from the town landmarks designed by the writer’s architect father and grandfather), but the 38-foot-tall mural on Massachusetts Avenue by artist Pamela Bliss. Having known nothing of Vonnegut’s work before, she fell in love with it after first visiting the museum herself, she’ll soon use its Indiana Avenue building as a canvas on which to triple the city’s number of Vonnegut murals.
You can see more of the new Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, which opened its doors for a sneak preview this past Banned Books Week, in the video at the top of the post, as well as in this four-partlocalnewsreport. Though Vonnegut expressed appreciation for Indianapolis all throughout his life, he also left the place forever when he headed east to Cornell. He also satirically repurposed it as Midland City, the surreally flat and prosaic Midwestern setting of Breakfast of Champions whose citizens only speak seriously of “money or structures or travel or machinery,” their imaginations “flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of awful truth.” I happen to be planning a great American road trip that will take me through Indianapolis, and what with the presence of an institution like the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library — as well as all the cultural spots revealed by the Indianapolis-based The Art Assignment— it has become one of the cities I’m most excited to visit. Vonnegut, of all Indianapolitans, would surely appreciate the irony.
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.
The phrase “history is written by the victors” is a cliché, which means that it is at least half true; official histories are, to a significant degree “written,” or dictated, by ruling elites. But as far as the actual writing down, and excavating, narrating, arguing about, and revising of history goes… well, that is the work of historians, who may work for powerful institutions but who are not themselves—with several notable exceptions, of course—politicians, generals, or captains of industry.
This is all to the good. Historians, and Twitterstorians, can tell stories and present evidence that the victors might rather see disappear. And they can tell stories we never knew that we were missing, but which humanize the past by restoring the lives of ordinary people with ordinary concerns. Stories of everyday ancient Romans and Egyptians, for example, or of ancient Romans in Egypt, visiting and vandalizing the pyramids.
In one such poignant story, circulating on Twitter, a Roman woman named Terentia carved into the limestone facing of the Great Pyramid sometime around 120 AD a touching poem for her brother, who had just recently died. Astold by medievalist, linguist, and Senior Editor at History Today Dr. Kate Wiles, the poem might have been lost to the ages had it not been discovered by German pilgrim Wilhelm von Boldensele in 1335.
Knowing Latin, Von Boldensele read the poem, found it moving, and copied it down. (See his manuscript at the top.) Wiles quotes a part of the prose English translation:
I saw the pyramids without you, my dearest brother, and here I sadly shed tears for you, which is all I could do. And I inscribe this lament in memory of our grief. May thus be clearly visible on the high pyramid the name of Decimus Gentianus….
We can surmise that Terentia must have had some means to travel, but in Wiles’ abridged Twitter version of the story, we also might assume she could be anyone at all, grieving the loss of a close relative. Terentia’s grief is no less moving or real when we learn that the inscription goes for on several lines Wiles cut for brevity.
In his anthology Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome, Ian Michael Plant provides even more historical context. Of Terentia, we know little to nothing save the Von Boldensele’s copy of her six hexameters (and possibly more that he ignored). Of Decimus Gentianus, however, we know that he not only served as a consul under Trajan but also as governor of Macedonia under Hadrian. Terentia “chose the pyramid for her epitaph to provide a suitably grand and everlasting site for her tribute to him,” writes Plant. (Cue Shelly’s “Ozymandias.”)
Not only is the poem about a victor, but it appears to shift its address from him to the ultimate victor, Emperor Trajan, in its final lines. Should this change our appreciation of the story as a slice of Roman tourist life and example of ancient women’s writing? No, but it shows us something about what history gets preserved and why. Despite historians’ best efforts, especially in public-facing work, to make the past more accessible and relatable, they, too, are limited by what other cultures chose to preserve and what to pass over.
Hemelrijk admits, “the poem is no literary masterpiece,” but Von Boldersele saw enough merit in its sentiments to record it for posterity. He also made a judgment about the inscription’s historical import, given its references, which is probably the reason we have it today.
There is a right way to eat every dish, as an ever-increasing abundance of internet videos daily informs us. But how did we navigate our first encounters with unfamiliar foods thirty, forty, fifty years ago? With no way to learn online, we had no choice but to learn in real life, assuming we could find a trusted figure well-versed in the ways of eating from whom to learn — a sensei, as they say in Japanese, the kind of wise elder depicted in the film clip above, a scene that takes place in a ramen shop. “Master,” asks the young student, “soup first or noodles first?” The ramen master’s reply: “First, observe the whole bowl. Appreciate its gestalt. Savor the aromas.”
Behold the “jewels of fat glittering on its surface,” the “shinachiku roots shining,” the “seaweed lowly sinking, the “spring onions floating.” The eater’s first action must be to “caress the surface with the chopstick tips” in order to “express affection.” The second is to “poke the pork” — don’t eat it, just touch it — then “pick it up and dip it into the soup on the right of the bowl.” The most important part? To “apologize to the pork by saying, ‘See you soon.’ ” Then the eating can commence, “noodles first,” but “while slurping the noodles, look at the pork. Eye it affectionately.” After then sipping the soup three times, the master picks up a slice of pork “as if making a major decision in life,” and taps it on the side of the bowl. Why? “To drain it.” To those who know Japanese food culture for the value it places on aesthetic sensitivity and adherence to form, this scene may look perfectly realistic.
But those who know Japanese cinema will have recognized immediately the opening of Tampopo, the beloved 1985 comedy that satirizes through food both Japanese culture and humanity itself. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert describes the ramen-master vignette as depicting “a kind of gastronomic religion, and director Juzo Itami creates a scene that makes noodles in this movie more interesting than sex and violence in many another.” Not that Tampopo, for all its cheerfulness (Ebert calls it “a bemused meditation on human nature in which one humorous situation flows into another offhandedly, as if life were a series of smiles”) doesn’t also contain plenty of sex and violence. Walter Benjamin once said that every great work of art destroys or creates a genre. Tampopo creates the “ramen Western,” rolling a couple of cowboyish truckers (seen briefly in the clip above) into booming 1980 Tokyo to get a widow’s failing ramen shop into shape.
Through parody and slyer forms of allusion, Tampopo references cinema both Western and Eastern, and its cast includes actors who were or would become iconic: the student of ramen is played by Ken Watanabe, now known to audiences worldwide for his roles in Hollywood pictures like The Last Samurai and Inception. The master is played by Ryûtarô Ôtomo, a mainstay of samurai films from the late 1930s through the 1960s, who chose this as his very last role: the very day after shooting his scene, he committed suicide by jumping from the top of a building. (Itami would die under similar circumstances in 1997, some say with the involvement of the Yakuza.) Now that internet videos and other forms of 21st-century media are disseminating the relevant knowledge, we can all study to become masters of ramen, or for that matter of any dish we please — but can any of us hope to rise to the example of elegance, and hilariousness, laid down by Ôtomo’s final act on film?
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.
If you’re reading this, chances are good that you live in the modern world, or at least visit it from time to time. But what do I mean by “modern”? It’s a too-broad term that always requires a definition. Sometimes, for brevity’s sake, we settle for listing the names of artists who brought modernity into being. When it comes to the truly modern in industrial design, we get two names in one—the husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames.
The design world, at least in the U.S., may have been slower to catch up to other modernist trends in the arts. That changed dramatically when several European artists like Walter Gropius immigrated to the country before, during and after World War II. But the American Eames left perhaps the most lasting impact of them all.
The first home they designed and built together in 1949 as part of the Case Study House Program became “a mecca for architects and designers from both near and far,” notes the Eames Office site. “Today it is considered one of the most important post-war residences anywhere in the world.” “Famous for their iconic chairs,” writes William Cook at the BBC, the streamlined objetsthat “transformed our idea of modern furniture,” they were also “graphic and textile designers, architects and filmmakers.”
The Eames’ film legacy may be less well-known than their revolutions in interior design. We’ve all seen or interacted with innumerable versions of Eames-inspired designs, whether we knew it or not. The pair stated their desire to make universally useful creations in their succinct mission statement: “We want to make the best for the most for the least.” They meant it. “What works good,” said Ray, “is better than what looks good because what works good lasts.”
When design “works good,” the Eames understood, it might be attractive, or purely functional, but it will always be accessible, unobtrusive, comfortable, and practical. We might notice its contours and wonder about its principles, but it works equally well, and maybe better, if we do not. The Eames films explain how one accomplishes such design. “Between 1950 and 1982,” the Eames “made over 125 short films ranging from 1–30 minutes in length,” notes the Eames Office site, declaring: “The Eames Films are the Eames Essays.”
If this statement has prepared you for dry, didactic short films filled with jargon, prepare to be surprised by the breadth and depth of the Eames’ curiosity and vision. Here, we have compiled some of the Eames films, and you can see many, many more (15 in total) with the playlist embedded at the bottom of the post. At the top, see a brief introduction the designers’ films. Then, further down, we have the “brilliant tour of the universe” that is 1977’s Powers of Ten; 1957’s Day of the Dead, their exploration of the Mexican holiday; and 1961’s “Symmetry,” one of five shorts in a collection made for IBM called Mathematica Peep Shows.
Just above, see the Eames short House, made after five years of living in their famed Case Study House #8. The design on display here shows how the Eames “brought into the world a new kind of Californian indoor-outdoor Modernism,” as Colin Marshall wrote in a recent post here on famous architects’ homes. Their house is “a kind of Mondrian painting made into a livable box filled with an idiosyncratic arrangement of artifacts from all over the world.” Unlike most of the Eames designs, the Case Study house was never put into production, but in its elegant simplicity, we can see all of the creative impulses the Eames brought to their redesign of the modern world.
See many more of the Eames filmic essays in this YouTube playlist. There are 15 in total.
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