30 Fans Joyously Sing the Entirety of Bob Marley’s Legend Album in Unison

in Art, Life, Music | September 9th, 2019

The thir­ty Bob Mar­ley super­fans who heed­ed artist Can­dice Bre­itz’s 2005 call to vis­it a Port Anto­nio, Jamaica record­ing stu­dio, to be filmed indi­vid­u­al­ly per­form­ing the entire­ty of Marley’s Leg­end album a capel­la, were not pro­pelled by show­biz dreams.

Rather, their par­tic­i­pa­tion was a way for them to con­nect with the beloved icon, in a man­ner as inti­mate as singing along in one’s teenaged bed­room.

They were giv­en no direc­tion as far as per­for­mance style or cos­tume, only that they stick with it for the dura­tion of the hour-long album, piped into their ears via dis­creet grey buds.

Some dart their eyes appre­hen­sive­ly, bare­ly mov­ing.

Oth­ers bob and weave with unbri­dled aban­don.

One man shucks his cap when dread­locks are men­tioned in “Buf­fa­lo Sol­dier.”

A young woman gri­maces and shrugs apolo­get­i­cal­ly as the final track’s many “jammin’s” get away from her.

Some nod and widen their eyes at per­son­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant lines, point­ing for empha­sis, as if to tell view­ers less famil­iar with Marley’s work to lis­ten up, because here­in the mes­sage lies.

In between songs, they sip from plas­tic bot­tles of water and soda, occa­sion­al­ly offer­ing impromp­tu com­men­tary (“I feel this one!”). The grey-beard­ed gent mops his brow.

Once these solos were in the can, Bre­itz arranged them into a choir, stacked Brady Bunch-style, six across, five down.

Every­one starts at the same moment, but with no instruc­tion as to how to approach back­ing vocals and the word­less aspects of Marley’s per­for­mance, inad­ver­tent soloists emerge, some­times as the result of a jumped gun.

(You try singing “I Shot the Sher­iff” with no karaoke prompts guid­ing you…)

Bre­itz, who has since cre­at­ed sim­i­lar work with Michael Jack­son, John Lennon, Madon­na, and Leonard Cohen fans, took pains to make sure the par­tic­i­pants left the stu­dio feel­ing good about the expe­ri­ence. It’s not a TV tal­ent con­test.

While cer­tain squares con­tain star qual­i­ty charis­ma, all thir­ty were nec­es­sary to achieve the goal of a com­pos­ite por­trait that eschews the “overt­ly icon­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion” of the sub­ject as “some kind of fixed, unchang­ing enti­ty.”

As art crit­ic Christy Lange observed in con­junc­tion with an inter­view with Bre­itz for Mod­ern Painters:

While Mar­ley, Madon­na and Jack­son may play a lop­sid­ed­ly cen­tral role in shap­ing their fans’ lives and iden­ti­ties, these fans play a rec­i­p­ro­cal part in res­ur­rect­ing the stars’ orig­i­nal appeal, which has been sub­sumed by the celebri­ty cul­ture that cre­at­ed them. The cul­ture of star­dom may thrive on a series of cheap imi­ta­tions, mim­ic­k­ing an elu­sive idea of ‘celebri­ty’, but even in this con­cate­na­tion of sim­u­lat­ed iden­ti­ties, a few authen­tic por­traits can still be dis­cov­ered.

Listen—and sing along—to Bob Marley’s Leg­end in its entire­ty on Spo­ti­fy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bob Marley’s “Redemp­tion Song” Played by Musi­cians Around the World

John­ny Cash & Joe Strum­mer Sing Bob Marley’s “Redemp­tion Song” (2002)

Watch a Young Bob Mar­ley and The Wail­ers Per­form Live in Eng­land (1973): For His 70th Birth­day Today

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Join her in NYC tonight, Sep­tem­ber 9, for the sea­son kick-off of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Medieval Monks Complained About Constant Distractions: Learn How They Worked to Overcome Them

in Life, Neuroscience, Psychology, Religion | September 6th, 2019

St. Bene­dict by Fra Angeli­co, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We might imag­ine that life in a monastery is one of the safest, most pre­dictable ways of life on offer, and there­fore one of the least dis­tract­ed. But “medieval monks had a ter­ri­ble time con­cen­trat­ing,” writes Sam Hasel­by at Aeon, “and con­cen­tra­tion was their life­long work!” They com­plained of infor­ma­tion over­load, for­get­ful­ness, lack of focus, and over­stim­u­la­tion. Their jumpy brains, fun­da­men­tal­ly no dif­fer­ent from those we use to nav­i­gate our smart phones, were the cul­prit, though, like us, the monks found oth­er sources to blame.

“Some­times they accused demons of mak­ing their minds wan­der. Some­times they blamed the body’s base instincts.” Giv­en the nature of their restric­tive vows, it’s no won­der they found them­selves think­ing “about food or sex when they were sup­posed to be think­ing about God.” But the fact remains, as Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia pro­fes­sor Jamie Krein­er says in an inter­view with PRI’s The World, monks liv­ing 1600 years ago found them­selves con­stant­ly, painful­ly dis­tract­ed.

It wasn’t even nec­es­sar­i­ly about tech at all. It was about some­thing inher­ent in the mind. The dif­fer­ence between us and them is not that we are dis­tract­ed and they aren’t, it’s that they actu­al­ly had savvi­er ways of deal­ing with dis­trac­tion. Ways of train­ing their minds the way we might train our bod­ies.

So, what did the wis­est monks advise, and what can we learn, hun­dreds of years lat­er, from their wis­dom? Quite a lot, and much of it applic­a­ble even to our online lives. Some of what medieval monks like the 5th cen­tu­ry John Cass­ian advised may be too aus­tere for mod­ern tastes, even if we hap­pen to live in a monastery. But many of their prac­tices are the very same we now see pre­scribed as ther­a­peu­tic exer­cis­es and good per­son­al habits.

Cass­ian and his col­leagues devised solu­tions that “depend­ed on imag­i­nary pic­tures” and “bizarre ani­ma­tions” in the mind,” Hasel­by explains. Peo­ple were told to let their imag­i­na­tions run riot with images of sex, vio­lence, and mon­strous beings. “Nuns, monks, preach­ers and the peo­ple they edu­cat­ed were always encour­aged to visu­al­ize the mate­r­i­al they were pro­cess­ing,” often in some very graph­ic ways. The gore may not be fash­ion­able in con­tem­pla­tive set­tings these days, but ancient meth­ods of guid­ed imagery and cre­ative visu­al­iza­tion cer­tain­ly are.

So too are tech­niques like active lis­ten­ing and non­vi­o­lent com­mu­ni­ca­tion, which share many sim­i­lar­i­ties with St. Benedict’s first rule for his order: “Lis­ten and incline the ear of your heart.” Bene­dict spoke to the mind’s ten­den­cy to leap from thought to thought, to pre­judge and for­mu­late rebut­tals while anoth­er per­son speaks, to tune out. “Basi­cal­ly,” writes Fr. Michael Ren­nier, Bene­dic­t’s form of lis­ten­ing “is tak­ing time to hear in a cer­tain way, with an atti­tude of open­ness, and com­mit­ment to devote your whole self to the process,” with­out doing any­thing else.

Benedict’s advice, Ren­nier writes, is “great… because obsta­cles are all around, so we need to be inten­tion­al about over­com­ing them.” We do not need to share the same inten­tions as St. Bene­dict, how­ev­er, to take his advice to heart and stop treat­ing lis­ten­ing as wait­ing to speak, rather than as a prac­tice of mak­ing space for oth­ers and mak­ing space for silence. “Bene­dict knew the ben­e­fits of silence,” writes Alain de Botton’s School of Life, “He knew all about dis­trac­tion,” too, “how easy it is to want to keep check­ing up on the lat­est devel­op­ments, how addic­tive the gos­sip of the city can be.”

Silence allows us to not only hear oth­ers bet­ter, but to hear our deep­er or high­er selves, or the voice of God, or the uni­verse, or what­ev­er source of cre­ative ener­gy we tune into. Like their coun­ter­parts in the East, medieval Catholic monks also prac­ticed dai­ly med­i­ta­tion, includ­ing med­i­ta­tions on death, just one of sev­er­al meth­ods “Cis­ter­cian monks used to reshape their own men­tal states,” as Julia Bourke writes at Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly.

“A medieval Cis­ter­cian and a mod­ern neu­ro­sci­en­tist” would agree on at least one thing, Bourke argues: “the prin­ci­ple that cer­tain feel­ings and emo­tions can be changed through med­i­ta­tive exer­cis­es.” No one devis­es numer­ous for­mal solu­tions to prob­lems they do not have; although their phys­i­cal cir­cum­stances could not have been more dif­fer­ent from ours, medieval Euro­pean monks seemed to suf­fer just as much as most of us do from dis­trac­tion. In some part, their lives were exper­i­ments in learn­ing to over­come it.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Med­i­ta­tion for Begin­ners: Bud­dhist Monks & Teach­ers Explain the Basics

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Con­cen­tra­tion

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

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Orson Welles Trashes Famous Directors: Alfred Hitchcock (“Egotism and Laziness”), Woody Allen (“His Arrogance Is Unlimited”) & More

in Film | September 6th, 2019

A bold artist acts first and thinks lat­er. In the case of Orson Welles, one of the bold­est artists pro­duced by 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca, that habit also found its way into his speech. This became espe­cial­ly true in the inter­views he gave lat­er in life, when he freely offered his opin­ions, solicit­ed or oth­er­wise, on the work of his fel­low film­mak­ers. The man who made Cit­i­zen Kane did­n’t hes­i­tate to roast, for instance, the Euro­pean auteurs who ascend­ed after his own career in cin­e­ma seemed to stall, and whose work he elab­o­rate­ly sat­i­rized in the posthu­mous­ly released The Oth­er Side of the Wind. His con­sid­ered remarks include the fol­low­ing: “There’s a lot of Bergman and Anto­nioni that I’d rather be dead than sit through.” No, Orson, tell us what you real­ly think.

“Accord­ing to a young Amer­i­can film crit­ic, one of the great dis­cov­er­ies of our age is the val­ue of bore­dom as an artis­tic sub­ject,” Welles says in anoth­er inter­view. If so, Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni “deserves to be count­ed as a pio­neer and found­ing father,” a mak­er of movies that amount to “per­fect back­grounds for fash­ion mod­els.” As for Bergman, “I share nei­ther his inter­ests nor his obses­sions. He’s far more for­eign to me than the Japan­ese.” Welles has kinder words for Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, whom he calls “as gift­ed as any­one mak­ing movies today,” but also “fun­da­men­tal­ly very provin­cial.” His pic­tures are “a small-town boy’s dream of the big city,” which is also the source of their charm, but the man him­self “shows dan­ger­ous signs of being a superla­tive artist with lit­tle to say.”

Welles esti­mat­ed the younger Jean-Luc Godard­’s gifts as a direc­tor as “enor­mous. I just can’t take him very seri­ous­ly as a thinker — and that’s where we seem to dif­fer, because he does. And though Godard may admire Woody Allen (him­self an admir­er of Bergman), Welles cer­tain­ly did­n’t: “I hate Woody Allen phys­i­cal­ly, I dis­like that kind of man,” he tells film­mak­er Hen­ry Jaglom. “That par­tic­u­lar com­bi­na­tion of arro­gance and timid­i­ty sets my teeth on edge.” When Jaglom objects that Allen isn’t arro­gant but shy, Welles dri­ves on: “Like all peo­ple with timid per­son­al­i­ties, his arro­gance is unlim­it­ed.” Allen “hates him­self, and he loves him­self, a very tense sit­u­a­tion. It’s peo­ple like me who have to car­ry on and pre­tend to be mod­est,” while, in Allen’s case, “every­thing he does on screen is ther­a­peu­tic.”

Allen has what Welles calls “the Chap­lin dis­ease,” and Welles’ inter­views also fea­ture severe crit­i­cisms of Chap­lin him­self. After ref­er­enc­ing the fact that, unlike his fel­low silent come­di­an Harold Lloyd, Chap­lin did­n’t write all his own jokes but used “six gag­men,” he declares that Mod­ern Times — regard­ed by many as Chap­lin’ mas­ter­piece — “does­n’t have a good moment in it.” Clear­ly Welles felt no more need to pull his punch­es on his elders than he did with the whip­per­snap­pers: John Ford “made very many bad pic­tures,” includ­ing The Searchers (“ter­ri­ble”); Cecil B. DeMille Welles cred­its with giv­ing Mus­soli­ni and Hitler the idea for the fas­cist salute; Elia Kazan will nev­er be for­giv­en for nam­ing names to the House Com­mit­tee on Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties (“it’s just inex­cus­able”); and even Sergei Eisen­stein, father of the mon­tage, is also “the most over­rat­ed great direc­tor of them all.”

You can read more of Welles’ choice words on his col­leagues in cin­e­ma in this thread of inter­view clips post­ed by a Twit­ter user who goes by John Franken­stein­er. It also includes Welles’ assess­ment of Alfred Hitch­cock, who declined into “ego­tism and lazi­ness,” mak­ing films “all lit like tele­vi­sion shows.” Welles sus­pects age-relat­ed cog­ni­tive issues — “I think he was senile a long time before he died,” in part because “he kept falling asleep while you were talk­ing to him” — but he also trash­es the work Hitch­cock did in his prime, such as Ver­ti­go. Sight & Sound’s last crit­ics poll named that film the great­est of all time, but Welles calls it even worse than Rear Win­dow, about which “every­thing was stu­pid.” But at least all these film­mak­ers, liv­ing and dead, can rest easy know­ing they did­n’t rank as low in Welles’ esti­ma­tion as John Lan­dis, “the ass­hole from Ani­mal House.” Jaglom, believ­ing he can influ­ence Lan­dis and mend their rela­tion­ship, asks what he can do to help. Welles’ sug­ges­tion: “Kill him.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ing­mar Bergman Eval­u­ates His Fel­low Film­mak­ers — The “Affect­ed” Godard, “Infan­tile” Hitch­cock & Sub­lime Tarkovsky

Jorge Luis Borges Reviews Cit­i­zen Kane — and Gets a Response from Orson Welles

Jean-Paul Sartre Reviews Orson Welles’ Mas­ter­work (1945): “Cit­i­zen Kane Is Not Cin­e­ma”

Andrei Tarkovsky Calls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey a “Pho­ny” Film “With Only Pre­ten­sions to Truth”

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Bob Odenkirk & Errol Morris Create Comedic Shorts to Help You Take Action Against Global Warming: Watch Them Online

in Comedy, Environment, Film, Life, Nature, Science | September 6th, 2019

My beach house must be some­where around here. I used to be able to see the ocean from it. I should be able to see it from the ocean. Ooo, that looks famil­iar. Lady Lib­er­ty. Ha ha! Hel­looo! All the best to you.     —Admi­ral Hor­a­tio Horn­tow­er

Are there any Bet­ter Call Saul fans among the glob­al warm­ing deniers?

A sce­nario in which one can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly pooh pooh the melt­ing of the polar ice caps and embrace The Thin Blue Line?

Direc­tor Errol Mor­ris and his star, Bob Odenkirk, may not change any minds with their Glob­al Melt­down spots they pro­duced in part­ner­ship with the Insti­tute for the Future, but hope­ful­ly the emphat­ic end cards will stir some fans to action.

The absur­dist 30-sec­ond shorts fea­ture Odenkirk, encrust­ed in epaulets and naval insignia, as the fic­tion­al Horn­tow­er, “an admi­ral of a fleet of one and per­haps the last man on Earth.” Marooned on a small block of ice, he rails against the inex­pert­ly ani­mat­ed wildlife encroach­ing on his domain.

(“You don’t even have the facil­i­ty of lan­guage!” he tells a pen­guin, and lat­er threat­ens a wal­rus that it will “get paint­ed out” of the final cut for “com­plain­ing all the time…”)

Cer­tain­ly a doc­u­men­tar­i­an of Mor­ris’ stature could have tak­en a length­i­er, more seri­ous approach to the sub­ject, but as he notes:

Log­ic rarely con­vinces any­body of any­thing. Cli­mate change has become yet anoth­er vehi­cle for polit­i­cal polar­iza­tion. If Al Gore said the Earth was round there would be polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion insist­ing that the Earth was flat. It’s all so pre­pos­ter­ous, so con­temptible.

Odenkirk also has some out-of-uni­form con­cerns about cli­mate change, as expressed in “Where I Got These Abs,” a 2011 Shouts & Mur­murs piece for The New York­er:

The mid­dle ab on the left (not my left, your left, if you are look­ing at me) is called Ter­rence. It’s a dig­ni­fied ab. It tens­es each time I read an op-ed arti­cle about glob­al warm­ing. The article’s point of view is imma­te­r­i­al; sim­ply being remind­ed that I can do noth­ing to stop the hor­rif­ic future of floods and cat­a­stro­phe gives this ab a taut yank that lingers, burn­ing calo­ries in my well-creased fore­head at the same time. 

Watch all of Mor­ris and Odenkirk’s Admi­ral Horn­tow­er spots, cur­rent­ly total­ing nine, with ten more to come, on Glob­al Melt­down’s YouTube chan­nel.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cli­mate Change Gets Strik­ing­ly Visu­al­ized by a Scot­tish Art Instal­la­tion

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

NASA Cap­tures the World on Fire

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC this Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for the new season’s kick­off of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Why Learn Latin?: 5 Videos Make a Compelling Case That the “Dead Language” Is an “Eternal Language”

in Education, Language Lessons, TED Talks | September 5th, 2019

“I tried to get Latin can­celed for five years,” says an exas­per­at­ed Max Fis­ch­er, pro­tag­o­nist of Wes Ander­son­’s Rush­more, when he hears of his school’s deci­sion to scrap Latin class­es. “ ‘It’s a dead lan­guage,’ I’d always say.” Many have made a sim­i­lar­ly blunt case against the study of Latin. But as we all remem­ber, Max’s edu­ca­tion­al phi­los­o­phy over­turns just as soon as he meets Miss Cross and brings up the can­cel­la­tion to make con­ver­sa­tion. “That’s a shame because all the Romance lan­guages were based on Latin,” she says, artic­u­lat­ing a stan­dard defense. “Nihi­lo sanc­tum estne?” Max’s reply, after Miss Cross clar­i­fies that what she said is Latin for “Is noth­ing sacred?”: “Sic tran­sit glo­ria.”

From ad hoc and bona fide to sta­tus quo and vice ver­sa, all of us know a lit­tle bit of Latin, even the “dead lan­guage’s” most out­spo­ken oppo­nents. But do any of us have a rea­son to build delib­er­ate­ly on that inher­it­ed knowl­edge? The video at the top of the post offers not just one but “Three Rea­sons to Study Latin (for Nor­mal Peo­ple, Not Lan­guage Geeks).”

As its host admits, “I could tell you that study­ing Latin will set you up to learn the Romance lan­guages or give you a base of knowl­edge for fine arts and lit­er­a­ture. I can tell you that you’ll be able to read Latin on old build­ings, hymns, state mot­toes, or that read­ing Cicero and Vir­gil in the orig­i­nal is divine­ly beau­ti­ful.” But the num­ber one rea­son to study Latin, he says, is that it will improve your lan­guage acqui­si­tion skills.

And lan­guage acqui­si­tion isn’t just the skill of learn­ing lan­guages, but “the skill of learn­ing oth­er skills.” It teach­es us that “thoughts them­selves are formed dif­fer­ent­ly in dif­fer­ent lan­guages,” and learn­ing even a sin­gle for­eign word “is the act of learn­ing to think in a new way.” Study a for­eign lan­guage and you enter a com­mu­ni­ty, just as you do “every time you learn a new pro­fes­sion, learn a new hob­by,” or when you “inter­act with his­to­ri­ans or philoso­phers, inter­act with the writ­ers of cook­books, or gar­den­ing books, or even writ­ers of soft­ware.” Latin in par­tic­u­lar will also make you bet­ter at speak­ing Eng­lish, espe­cial­ly if you already speak it native­ly. Not only are you “unavoid­ably blind to the weak­ness­es and strengths of your native mean­ing car­ry­ing sys­tem — your lan­guage — until you test dri­ve a new one,” the more com­plex, abstract half of the Eng­lish vocab­u­lary comes from Latin in the first place.

Above all, Latin promis­es wis­dom. Not only can it “train you to con­cep­tu­al­ize one thing in the con­text of many things and to see the con­nec­tions between all of them,” it can, by the time you’re under­stand­ing mean­ing as well as form, “grow you in big-pic­ture and small-pic­ture think­ing and give you the dex­ter­i­ty to move back and forth between both.” Just as you are what you eat, “your mind becomes like what you spend your time think­ing about,” and the rig­or­ous­ly struc­tured Latin lan­guage can imbue it with “log­ic, order, dis­ci­pline, struc­ture, pre­ci­sion.” In the TED Talk above, Latin teacher Ryan Sell­ers builds on this idea, call­ing the study of Latin “one of the most effec­tive ways of build­ing strong fun­da­men­tals in stu­dents and prepar­ing them for the future.” Among the time­less ben­e­fits of the “eter­nal lan­guage” Sell­ers includes its abil­i­ty to increase Eng­lish “word pow­er,” its “math­e­mat­i­cal” nature, and the con­nec­tions it makes between the ancient world and the mod­ern one.

Latin used to be more a part of the aver­age school cur­ricu­lum than it is now, but the debates about its use­ful­ness have been going on for gen­er­a­tions. Why Study Latin?, the 1951 class­room film above, cov­ers a wide swath of them in ten min­utes, from read­ing clas­sics in the orig­i­nal to under­stand­ing sci­en­tif­ic and med­ical ter­mi­nol­o­gy to becom­ing a sharp­er writer in Eng­lish to trac­ing mod­ern West­ern gov­ern­men­tal and soci­etal prin­ci­ples back to their Roman roots. And as the School of Life video below tells us, some things are still best expressed in Latin, an eco­nom­i­cal lan­guage that can pack a great deal of mean­ing into rel­a­tive­ly few words: Veni, vidi, vici. Carpe diem. Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. And of course, Latin makes every expres­sion sound weight­i­er — it gives a cer­tain grav­i­tas, we might say.

If all these argu­ments have sold you on the ben­e­fits of Latin, or at least got you intrigued enough to learn more, watch “How Latin Works” for a brief overview of the his­to­ry and mechan­ics of the lan­guage, as well as an expla­na­tion of what it has giv­en to and how it dif­fers from Eng­lish and the oth­er Euro­pean lan­guages we use today. You might then pro­ceed to the free Latin lessons avail­able at the the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas’ Lin­guis­tics Research Cen­ter, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. The more Latin you acquire, the more you’ll see and hear it every­where. You might even ask the same ques­tion Max Fis­ch­er pos­es to the assem­bled admin­is­tra­tors of Rush­more Acad­e­my: “Is Latin dead?” His moti­va­tions have more to do with romance than Romance, but there are no bad rea­sons to learn a lan­guage, liv­ing or oth­er­wise.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

Hip 1960s Latin Teacher Trans­lat­ed Bea­t­les Songs into Latin for His Stu­dents: Read Lyrics for “O Teneum Manum,” “Diei Duri Nox” & More

Why Should We Read Virgil’s Aeneid? An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

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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Yale Presents an Archive of 170,000 Photographs Documenting the Great Depression

in History, Philosophy, Yale | September 5th, 2019

dorothea lange

Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion, The Farm Secu­ri­ty Administration—Office of War Infor­ma­tion (FSA-OWI) hired pho­tog­ra­phers to trav­el across Amer­i­ca to doc­u­ment the pover­ty that gripped the nation, hop­ing to build sup­port for New Deal pro­grams being cham­pi­oned by F.D.R.‘s admin­is­tra­tion.

Leg­endary pho­tog­ra­phers like Dorothea Lange, Walk­er Evans, and Arthur Roth­stein took part in what amount­ed to the largest pho­tog­ra­phy project ever spon­sored by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. All told, 170,000 pho­tographs were tak­en, then cat­a­logued back in Wash­ing­ton DC. The Library of Con­gress became their even­tu­al rest­ing place.

walker evans

We first men­tioned this his­toric project back in 2012, when the New York Pub­lic Library put a rel­a­tive­ly small sam­pling of these images online. But now we have big­ger news.

Yale Uni­ver­si­ty has launched Pho­togram­mar, a sophis­ti­cat­ed web-based plat­form for orga­niz­ing, search­ing, and visu­al­iz­ing these 170,000 his­toric pho­tographs.

arthur rothstein

The Pho­togram­mar plat­form gives you the abil­i­ty to search through the images by pho­tog­ra­ph­er. Do a search for Dorothea Lange’s pho­tographs, and you get over 3200 images, includ­ing the now icon­ic pho­to­graph at the bot­tom of this post.

Pho­togram­mar also offers a handy inter­ac­tive map that lets you gath­er geo­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion about 90,000 pho­tographs in the col­lec­tion.

And then there’s a sec­tion called Pho­togram­mar Labs where inno­v­a­tive visu­al­iza­tion tech­niques and data exper­i­ments will grad­u­al­ly shed new light on the image archive.

Accord­ing to Yale, the Pho­togram­mar project was fund­ed by a grant from the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties (NEH). Direct­ed by Lau­ra Wexler, the project was under­tak­en by Yale’’s Pub­lic Human­i­ties Pro­gram and its Pho­to­graph­ic Mem­o­ry Work­shop.

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Top image: A migrant agri­cul­tur­al work­er in Marysville migrant camp, try­ing to fig­ure out his year’s earn­ings. Tak­en in Cal­i­for­nia in 1935 by Dorothea Lange.

Sec­ond image: Allie Mae Bur­roughs, wife of cot­ton share­crop­per. Pho­to tak­en in Hale Coun­ty, Alaba­ma in 1935 by Walk­er Evans.

Third image: Wife and chil­dren of share­crop­per in Wash­ing­ton Coun­ty, Arkansas. By Arthur Roth­stein. 1935.

Fourth image: Wife of Negro share­crop­per, Lee Coun­ty, Mis­sis­sip­pi. Again tak­en by Arthur Roth­stein in 1935.

Bot­tom image: Des­ti­tute pea pick­ers in Cal­i­for­nia. Moth­er of sev­en chil­dren. Age thir­ty-two. Tak­en by Dorothea Lange in Nipo­mo, Cal­i­for­nia, 1936.

lange bottom

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Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Har­vard Puts Online a Huge Col­lec­tion of Bauhaus Art Objects

Down­load for Free 2.6 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

130,000 Pho­tographs by Andy Warhol Are Now Avail­able Online, Cour­tesy of Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

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Hear the Very Moment When World War I Came to an End

in History | September 5th, 2019

Robert Graves’ poem “Armistice Day, 1918” begins with a riot of sound in a town in North East Eng­land. “What’s all this hub­bub and yelling, / Com­mo­tion and scam­per of feet,” he writes, “With ear-split­ting clat­ter of ket­tles and cans, / Wild laugh­ter down Mafek­ing Street?” The poem grows somber, then embit­tered, end­ing in a chill­ing silence for the “boys who were killed in the trench­es, / Who fought with no rage and no rant.” It’s a famil­iar con­trast from much World War I poetry—the hoot­ing civil­ian crowds and the grim, silent sol­diers count­ing their loss­es.

One project, cre­at­ed as part of the 100th anniver­sary of the Armistice last year, gave us a dif­fer­ent take on this WWI theme of sound and silence —using inno­v­a­tive tech­niques from 1918 that turned the final shelling of the war into visu­al data, then trans­lat­ing that data back into sound a cen­tu­ry lat­er. Rather than cel­e­bra­tion, the “ear-split­ting clat­ter” is the sound of mass death, and the silence, though sure­ly “uneasy,” as Matt Novak writes, must also have been rev­e­la­to­ry.

In the “graph­ic record” of the Armistice, just below, we can “see” the deaf­en­ing sounds of war and the first three silent sec­onds of its end, at 11 A.M. Novem­ber 11th, 1918. The film strip records six sec­onds of vibra­tion from six dif­fer­ent sources, as the graph­ic, from the Army Corps of Engi­neers, informs us. “The bro­ken char­ac­ter of the records on the left indi­cates great artillery activ­i­ty; the lack of irreg­u­lar­i­ties on the right indi­cates almost com­plete ces­sa­tion of fir­ing.”

You might notice a cou­ple lit­tle breaks in one line on the right—likely the result of an exu­ber­ant “dough­boy fir­ing his pis­tol twice close to one of the record­ing micro­phones on the front in cel­e­bra­tion of the dawn of peace.” But this was 1918—field record­ing tech­nol­o­gy bare­ly exist­ed, though a few bat­tle­field attempts were made (at least one sur­vives). The “micro­phones” in ques­tion were actu­al­ly “bar­rels of oil dug into the ground,” notes Jason Daley at Smith­son­ian.

This tech­nique, called “sound rang­ing,” worked by reg­is­ter­ing vibra­tion, sim­i­lar to a seis­mo­graph’s oper­a­tion, and helped spe­cial units locate ene­my fire, using “pho­to­graph­ic film to visu­al­ly record noise inten­si­ty.” The film above was part of the cen­te­nary exhi­bi­tion at London’s Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um, which also com­mis­sioned sound design­ers Coda to Coda to recon­struct the dra­mat­ic moment with an audio inter­pre­ta­tion. At the top of the post, hear what the sec­onds before and after the Armistice like­ly sound­ed like, as record­ed on the Amer­i­can front at the Riv­er Moselle.

Lis­ten­ing to the sec­onds of the war’s end from the bat­tle­field perspective—rather than streets filled with cheer­ing crowds—is rather chill­ing, “a sud­den reprieve from the stac­ca­to of weapons blast­ing,” Novak writes. The “graph­ic record” of the Armistice also shows us “just how hor­rif­i­cal­ly pre­cise and cru­el war can be.” The slaugh­ter could have been stopped in an instant, by the mutu­al decree of world lead­ers, at maybe any time dur­ing those har­row­ing four years.

On Novem­ber 11 at 11 A.M., “the guns fell silent,” writes the Impe­r­i­al War Muse­um, and “a new world began.” But as artists like Graves remind us, for the return­ing maimed and trau­ma­tized sol­diers and the hun­dreds of thou­sands of bereaved fam­i­lies, the war didn’t end when the noise final­ly stopped.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Jackson’s New Film on World War I Fea­tures Incred­i­ble Dig­i­tal­ly-Restored Footage From the Front Lines: Get a Glimpse

Hear the Sounds of World War I: A Gas Attack Record­ed on the Front Line, and the Moment the Armistice End­ed the War

Watch World War I Unfold in a 6 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1914 to 1918

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

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The Paul McCartney is Dead Conspiracy Theory, Explained

in History, Music | September 4th, 2019

Hoax­es used to be fun, I imag­ine, before the inter­net turned them into weapons of mass dis­in­for­ma­tion. One shud­ders to think what kind of luna­cy might have result­ed had the Paul McCart­ney-is-dead-and-has-been-replaced-by-a-looka­like hoax first spread on Face­book instead of col­lege news­pa­pers, local radio sta­tions, and good-old word of mouth. The hoax is emblem­at­ic not only of how mis­in­for­ma­tion spread dif­fer­ent­ly fifty years ago, but also how the coun­ter­cul­ture fig­ured out infor­ma­tion war­fare, and used it to pro­duce reams of satir­i­cal pro­to-viral con­tent.

Whether the author of the orig­i­nal 1969 arti­cle—“Is Bea­t­le Paul McCart­ney Dead?,” from the Drake Uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent news­pa­per the Times-Del­ph­ic—intend­ed to fool the pub­lic hard­ly mat­ters. His spec­u­la­tion reads like par­o­dy, like a star chart crossed with lurid tabloid gos­sip that, through a strange twist of fate cre­at­ed a net­work of peo­ple who believed that Paul was killed in a 1966 car crash and the band found an imposter named Bil­ly Shears to replace him.

It should be not­ed that Paul McCart­ney is very much alive and has not been played by an imper­son­ator for fifty years. There are no “two sides” to this sto­ry. There is the life of Paul McCart­ney and there is a strange and amus­ing rumor that nev­er harmed any­one, except the Paul McCart­ney of its imag­i­na­tion. “Paul is Dead” ranks high­ly among “music’s most WTF con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries,” also the title of the Rolling Stone video above, which aims to explain “the orig­i­nal insane rock n’ roll con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry.”

The Bea­t­les had a lot of fun with the con­spir­a­cy, dou­bly hoax­ing their fans by play­ing along occa­sion­al­ly. McCart­ney respond­ed with his clas­sic wit: “If I were dead, I’d be the last to know it.” But pub­licly con­firm­ing or deny­ing Paul McCartney’s body snatch­ing did­n’t mat­ter. Like those who claimed Stan­ley Kubrick staged the moon land­ing and left clues in The Shin­ing, true believ­ers found evi­dence every­where they looked.

The cov­er of Sgt. Pepper’s sup­pos­ed­ly rep­re­sents Paul’s funer­al; his dop­pel­gänger alleged­ly wears a patch with the let­ters O.P.D.—officially pro­nounced dead.” (It’s actu­al­ly O.P.P., “Ontario Provin­cial Police.”); lyrics played back­wards spell it out: “Paul is Dead.” As with most crack­pot the­o­ries, there is one cru­cial miss­ing ele­ment: motive. Why would the band not only cov­er up Paul’s death but leave trails of bread­crumbs on every sub­se­quent record?

Why does the vil­lain explain their entire plan to the hero as soon as they get the upper hand? Why do killers leave detailed, incrim­i­nat­ing doc­u­ments called “The Plan” on their hard dri­ves on Date­line? Who can say? In the world of weird con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, con­spir­a­tors are com­pelled to place cryp­tic but deci­pher­able clues all over the place. It’s like they want to be caught, or it’s like con­spir­a­cy fans des­per­ate­ly want to believe they do. Either way, as far as con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries go, “Paul is Dead” earns its “WTF” sta­tus. It also bears the dis­tinc­tion of nev­er actu­al­ly hav­ing involved anyone’s death.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the “Paul McCart­ney is Dead” Hoax Start­ed at an Amer­i­can Col­lege News­pa­per and Went Viral (1969)

The Band Every­one Thought Was The Bea­t­les: Revis­it the Klaatu Con­spir­a­cy of 1976

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Daugh­ter Vivian Debunks the Age-Old Moon Land­ing Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry

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

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