Watch the Trailer for Echo in the Canyon, the New Documentary on the 1960s Laurel Canyon Music Scene

in Film, Music | April 8th, 2019

Next month will mark the release of Echo in the Canyon. Direct­ed by Andrew Slater, the new doc­u­men­tary revis­its the 60s music scene that emerged in L.A.‘s Lau­rel Canyon–a fer­tile peri­od when folk went bril­liant­ly elec­tric. Find the brand new trail­er above, and a short sum­ma­ry below:

Echo In The Canyon cel­e­brates the explo­sion of pop­u­lar music that came out of LA’s Lau­rel Canyon in the mid-60s as folk went elec­tric and The Byrds, The Beach Boys, Buf­fa­lo Spring­field and The Mamas and the Papas gave birth to the Cal­i­for­nia Sound. It was a moment (1965 to 1967) when bands came to LA to emu­late The Bea­t­les and Lau­rel Canyon emerged as a hotbed of cre­ativ­i­ty and col­lab­o­ra­tion for a new gen­er­a­tion of musi­cians who would soon put an indeli­ble stamp on the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can pop­u­lar music.

Fea­tur­ing Jakob Dylan, the film explores the begin­nings of the Lau­rel Canyon music scene. Dylan uncov­ers nev­er-before-heard per­son­al details behind the bands and their songs and how that music con­tin­ues to inspire today. Echo in the Canyon con­tains can­did con­ver­sa­tions and per­for­mances with Bri­an Wil­son, Ringo Starr, Michelle Phillips, Eric Clap­ton, Stephen Stills, David Cros­by, Gra­ham Nash, Roger McGuinn and Jack­son Browne as well as con­tem­po­rary musi­cians they influ­enced such as Tom Pet­ty (in his very last film inter­view), Beck, Fiona Apple, Cat Pow­er, Regi­na Spek­tor and Norah Jones.

The film will be released in LA on May 24th and in NYC on May 31st.

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 and BlueSky.

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!

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Neurons as Art: See Beautiful Anatomy Drawings by the Father of Neuroscience, Santiago Ramón y Cajal

in Art, Neuroscience, Science | April 8th, 2019

Art depends on pop­u­lar judg­ments about the uni­verse, and is nour­ished by the lim­it­ed expanse of sen­ti­ment. . . . In con­trast, sci­ence was bare­ly touched upon by the ancients, and is as free from the incon­sis­ten­cies of fash­ion as it is from the fick­le stan­dards of taste. . . . And let me stress that this con­quest of ideas is not sub­ject to fluc­tu­a­tions of opin­ion, to the silence of envy, or to the caprices of fash­ion that today repu­di­ate and detest what yes­ter­day was praised as sub­lime.

- San­ti­a­go Ramón y Cajal

The above draw­ing is the sort of sub­lime ren­der­ing that attracts throngs of vis­i­tors to the world’s great mod­ern art muse­ums, but that’s not the sort of renown the artist, Nobel Prize-win­ning father of mod­ern neu­ro­science San­ti­a­go Ramón y Cajal (1852 ‑1934), active­ly sought.

Or rather, he might have back before his father, a pro­fes­sor of anato­my, coerced his wild young son into trans­fer­ring from a provin­cial art acad­e­my to the med­ical school where he him­self was employed.

After a stint as an army med­ical offi­cer, the artist-turned-anatomist con­cen­trat­ed on inflam­ma­tion, cholera, and epithe­lial cells before zero­ing in on his true muse—the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem.

At the time, retic­u­lar the­o­ry, which held that every­thing in the ner­vous sys­tem was part of a sin­gle con­tin­u­ous net­work, pre­vailed.

Ramón y Cajal was able to dis­prove this wide­ly held belief by using Gol­gi stains to sup­port the exis­tence of indi­vid­ual ner­vous cells—neurons—that, while not phys­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed, com­mu­ni­cat­ed with each oth­er through a sys­tem of axons, den­drites, and synaps­es.

He called upon both his artis­tic and med­ical train­ing in doc­u­ment­ing what he observed through his micro­scope. His metic­u­lous free­hand draw­ings are far more accu­rate than any­thing that could be pro­duced by the micro­scop­ic-image pho­to­graph­ic tools avail­able at the time.

His pre­ci­sion was such that his illus­tra­tions con­tin­ue to be pub­lished in med­ical text­books. Fur­ther research has con­firmed many of his sup­po­si­tions.

As art crit­ic Rober­ta Smith writes in The New York Times, the draw­ings are “fair­ly hard-nosed fact if you know your sci­ence”:

If you don’t, they are deep pools of sug­ges­tive motifs into which the imag­i­na­tion can dive. Their lines, forms and var­i­ous tex­tures of stip­pling, dash­es and faint pen­cil cir­cles would be the envy of any mod­ern artist. That they con­nect with Sur­re­al­ist draw­ing, bio­mor­phic abstrac­tion and exquis­ite doo­dling is only the half of it.

The draw­ings’ prag­mat­ic titles cer­tain­ly take on a poet­ic qual­i­ty when one con­sid­ers the con­text of their cre­ation:

Axon of Purk­in­je neu­rons in the cere­bel­lum of a drowned man

The hip­pocam­pus of a man three hours after death

Glial cells of the cere­bral cor­tex of a child

His spec­i­mens were not lim­it­ed to the human world:

Reti­na of lizard

The olfac­to­ry bulb of the dog

In his book Advice for a Young Inves­ti­gator, Ramón y Cajal took a holis­tic view of the rela­tion­ship between sci­ence and the arts:

The inves­ti­ga­tor ought to pos­sess an artis­tic tem­pera­ment that impels him to search for and admire the num­ber, beau­ty, and har­mo­ny of things; and—in the strug­gle for life that ideas cre­ate in our minds—a sound crit­i­cal judg­ment that is able to reject the rash impuls­es of day­dreams in favor of those thoughts most faith­ful­ly embrac­ing objec­tive real­i­ty.

Explore more of Ramón y Cajal’s cel­lu­lar draw­ings in Beau­ti­ful Brain: The Draw­ings of San­ti­a­go Ramón y Cajal, the com­pan­ion book to a recent trav­el­ing exhi­bi­tion of his work. Or immerse your­self at the neur­al lev­el by order­ing a repro­duc­tion on a beach tow­el, yoga mat, cell phone case, show­er cur­tain, or oth­er neces­si­ty on Sci­ence Source.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City April 15 for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Cinema Lovers Rejoice, the New Criterion Channel Launches Today: Get a 14-Day Free Trial

in Film | April 8th, 2019

If you lament­ed the demise of Film­struck last year, you’ll sure­ly wel­come the rise of the new Cri­te­ri­on Channel. It launch­es today. Accord­ing to Cri­te­ri­on, the “new ser­vice will host the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion and Janus Films’ ever-grow­ing library of more than 1,000 fea­ture films, 350 shorts, and 3,500 sup­ple­men­tary fea­tures, includ­ing trail­ers, intro­duc­tions, behind-the-scenes doc­u­men­taries, inter­views, video essays, com­men­tary tracks, and rare archival footage.” In addi­tion, you will get access to a “con­stant­ly refreshed selec­tions of Hol­ly­wood, inter­na­tion­al, art-house, and inde­pen­dent movies.”

The Cri­te­ri­on Chan­nel will launch in the U.S. and Cana­da. It can be accessed on desk­top browsers and also apps for Apple TV, Ama­zon Fire, Roku, iOS, and Android and Android TV devices. If you sign up now, you can get a 14 day free tri­al. Find more infor­ma­tion on the chan­nel here.

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 and BlueSky.

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!

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Deconstructing Steely Dan: The Band That Was More Than Just a Band

in Music | April 8th, 2019

How do you explain Steely Dan to some­one who’s nev­er heard of them? Two pre­ten­tious, per­fec­tion­is­tic, and very tal­ent­ed white guys who love Bebop and R&B meet in pass­ing at Bard Col­lege in 1967. They start a series of bands, one of them fea­tur­ing Chevy Chase on drums. They rub every­one the wrong way and write songs too com­pli­cat­ed for pop and TV but too good to go away, so they become a cel­e­brat­ed stu­dio unit, named after a fic­tion­al steam-pow­ered dil­do in a William S. Bur­roughs’ Naked Lunch.

They obsess over stu­dio pro­duc­tion, putting togeth­er a revolv­ing cast of high-end ses­sion musi­cians and push­ing them through take after take. They care­ful­ly edit songs togeth­er from hours and hours of tape. And some­how, they end up cre­at­ing some of the funki­est music of the 70s—the smoothest of smooth jazz, the yacht-iest of yacht rock… then, a gen­er­a­tion lat­er, they become per­haps the most sam­pled band of all time, their grooves a sine qua non of hip hop’s evo­lu­tion….

Hard­ly sounds plau­si­ble. But there it is: Don­ald Fagen and Wal­ter Becker—two super-fans of the gen­res they cre­ative­ly appropriated—made some incred­i­ble, snarling, cyn­i­cal, vicious­ly groovy easy lis­ten­ing music, and it has more than held up over the decades since they released their debut album Can’t Buy a Thrill in 1972. Despite decades of crit­i­cal praise and hit after hit, they also remain a pro­found­ly mis­un­der­stood band.

That is, if we can even call them a band. The Poly­phon­ic video above con­vinc­ing­ly argues oth­er­wise. Beck­er and Fagen main­tained total con­trol at all times over the project, and most­ly resist­ed tour­ing to focus on build­ing albums out of thou­sands of per­fect takes. They were curat­ing “an aes­thet­ic… one that relied on intense per­fec­tion­ism” and satir­i­cal, oblique lyri­cism. Some­thing of a con­cep­tu­al art project that nev­er once broke char­ac­ter.

The ele­ments were there from the beginning—in “Do it Again,” for exam­ple, from their first album—and they grew more sophis­ti­cat­ed and cal­cu­lat­ed through­out the decade. The band’s obses­sion with qual­i­ty cul­mi­nat­ed in their mas­ter­piece Aja and their swan song (before re-unit­ing 20 years lat­er), the slick and bit­ter Gau­cho. Their hyper-crit­i­cal detach­ment can be off-putting to peo­ple who pre­fer to see musi­cians tele­graph pas­sion­ate authen­tic­i­ty, but for Steely Dan fans, the aloof­ness is part of the appeal.

Major gui­tar-rock hit “Reel­in’ in the Years,” a song Fagen called “dumb, but effec­tive,” sat­i­rizes 60s nos­tal­gia long before that became a major cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non. The song mocks the very peo­ple who most respond to it, like Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” tips the sacred cows of many of its biggest fans. Even Steely Dan’s detrac­tors can’t help but admire their abil­i­ty to choose the per­fect play­ers for every song and to coax, or brow­beat, out of them the best pos­si­ble per­for­mances.

Their per­fec­tion­ism and stu­dio pol­ish, qual­i­ties you’ll learn much more about in the video, masked a dark, sub­ver­sive core. “For Fagen and Beck­er,” writes Chris Mor­ris at Vari­ety, “the beau­ti­ful­ly tooled music they made with their stu­dio cohorts served as the ulti­mate alien­ation effect. The true import of their work, which addressed for­bid­den impuls­es that moved to the edge of crime and fre­quent­ly beyond, was always garbed in satiny ele­gance; its sar­don­ic and hor­rif­ic essence was mar­ket­ed as the purest ear can­dy.”

Or, maybe, put dif­fer­ent­ly, if you get the dark humor of Patrick Bate­man earnest­ly extolling the virtues of Huey Lewis and the News, Whit­ney Hous­ton, and Phil Collins before a cap­tive audi­ence of his mur­der vic­tims in Mary Harron’s Amer­i­can Psy­cho, there’s a good chance you get Steely Dan. As Jay Black, lead singer of Jay and the Amer­i­cans, once said, Beck­er and Fagen were “the Man­son and Stark­weath­er of rock ‘n’ roll,” refer­ring, of course, to Charles Man­son and spree killer Charles Stark­weath­er. With that in mind, you might nev­er hear “Rik­ki Don’t Lose that Num­ber” the same way again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Steely Dan Went Through Sev­en Gui­tarists and Dozens of Hours of Tape to Get the Per­fect Gui­tar Solo on “Peg”

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

Steely Dan Cre­ates the Deadhead/Danfan Con­ver­sion Chart: A Wit­ty Guide Explain­ing How You Can Go From Lov­ing the Dead to Idol­iz­ing Steely Dan

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

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Watch Great Directors, a Documentary That Explores the Minds of 10 Great Auteurs: David Lynch, Agnès Varda, Richard Linklater & More

in Film | April 8th, 2019

When we first start watch­ing movies, often we decide what to watch by set­tling on a favorite genre, divi­sions first solid­i­fied by video-store shelves: action, com­e­dy, dra­ma, sci­ence fic­tion, and so on. When we’ve watched more movies, many of us move on to fol­low­ing the work of a par­tic­u­lar actor, which takes us across not just gen­res but eras as well. And prac­ti­cal­ly all cinephiles will remem­ber when it dawned on us that no fig­ure could bet­ter guide our view­ing than the direc­tor — about the same time we usu­al­ly learn the term auteur, which iden­ti­fies cer­tain direc­tors as the pri­ma­ry “authors” of their films. From that point on, we had only to mas­ter the knowl­edge of as many direc­tors’ fil­mo­gra­phies as pos­si­ble, then deter­mine those too whom we would pledge our alle­giance — thus forg­ing bonds with (or draw­ing bat­tle lines against) all oth­er film fans.

If the best movies come pri­mar­i­ly from the minds of their direc­tors, then there must be a great deal else of inter­est in those direc­to­r­i­al minds. Or so implic­it­ly argues Angela Ismai­los’ 2010 doc­u­men­tary Great Direc­tors, which con­sists of inter­views with ten auteurs of the late 20th and ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry whose work has not only drawn crit­i­cal acclaim but also pro­voked the full range of audi­ence opin­ion, even inspir­ing some view­ers to ded­i­cate them­selves to cin­e­ma.

“I want­ed to cov­er the French cin­e­ma and I love the con­tro­ver­sial cin­e­ma of Cather­ine Breil­li­at and how she por­trays the emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal tra­vails of women in her cin­e­ma,” Ismai­los says of the pro­jec­t’s ori­gin in an inter­view with Film­mak­er mag­a­zine. Then came Agnès Var­da, and after her a line­up includ­ing Bernar­do Bertoluc­ci, Lil­iana Cavani, Todd Haynes, Richard Lin­klater, John Sayles, Ken Loach, and Stephen Frears. “The last direc­tor I added to the film was David Lynch. He was the most dif­fi­cult to get.”

Put togeth­er, these ten fil­mo­gra­phies — con­tain­ing pic­tures from Mate­wan to My Beau­ti­ful Laun­drette, The Last Emper­or to Vel­vet Gold­mine, Poor Cow to Eraser­head, Fat Girl to Slack­er — con­tain an impres­sive­ly wide range of cin­e­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties. But what do the ten direc­tors, com­ing as they do from sev­er­al dif­fer­ent coun­tries and cul­tures, have in com­mon? “In their films they’re try­ing… to break moral stan­dards,” says Ismai­los. “They are not sur­ren­der­ing to pre­con­ceived notions of com­merce or audi­ence pop­u­lar­i­ty or pre­con­cep­tion of what cin­e­ma should be. I believe through the years they are con­stant­ly ask­ing their audi­ence to grow and face the uncer­tain­ties and unpre­dictabil­i­ty of adult life. This is the cin­e­ma I per­son­al­ly love.” She’s cer­tain­ly not the only one, and all the rest of us with an inter­est in films of that kind — and thus an inter­est in direc­tors of this kind — will cer­tain­ly be glad that she’s made Great Direc­tors free to view online.

Great Direc­tors will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

via Wel­come to Twin Peaks

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Direc­tors Series” Presents Free Immer­sive Stud­ies of Stan­ley Kubrick, the Coen Broth­ers, David Finch­er, Paul Thomas Ander­son & Christo­pher Nolan

Great Film­mak­ers Offer Advice to Young Direc­tors: Taran­ti­no, Her­zog, Cop­po­la, Scors­ese, Ander­son, Felli­ni & More

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Rare 1965 Inter­view with The New York­er

Lis­ten to Eight Inter­views of Orson Welles by Film­mak­er Peter Bog­danovich (1969–1972)

5 Hours of Free Alfred Hitch­cock Inter­views: Dis­cov­er His The­o­ries of Film Edit­ing, Cre­at­ing Sus­pense & More

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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700 Years of Persian Manuscripts Now Digitized and Available Online

in Archives, Art, Books, Literature, Poetry, Religion | April 5th, 2019

Too often those in pow­er lump thou­sands of years of Mid­dle East­ern reli­gion and cul­ture into mono­lith­ic enti­ties to be feared or per­se­cut­ed. But at least one gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tion is doing exact­ly the oppo­site. For Nowruz, the Per­sian New Year, the Library of Con­gress has released a dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of its rare Per­sian-lan­guage man­u­scripts, an archive span­ning 700 years. This free resource opens win­dows on diverse reli­gious, nation­al, lin­guis­tic, and cul­tur­al tra­di­tions, most, but not all, Islam­ic, yet all dif­fer­ent from each oth­er in com­plex and strik­ing ways.

“We nowa­days are pro­grammed to think Per­sia equates with Iran, but when you look at this it is a mul­ti­re­gion­al col­lec­tion,” says a Library spe­cial­ist in its African and Mid­dle East­ern Divi­sion, Hirad Dinavari. “Many con­tributed to it. Some were Indi­an, some were Tur­kic, Cen­tral Asian.” The “deep, cos­mopoli­tan archive,” as Atlas Obscura’s Jonathan Carey writes, con­sists of a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of manuscripts—only 155. That may not seem par­tic­u­lar­ly sig­nif­i­cant giv­en the enor­mi­ty of some oth­er online col­lec­tions.

But its qual­i­ty and vari­ety mark it as espe­cial­ly valu­able, rep­re­sen­ta­tive of much larg­er bod­ies of work in the arts, sci­ences, reli­gion, and phi­los­o­phy, dat­ing back to the 13th cen­tu­ry and span­ning regions from India to Cen­tral Asia and the Cau­cus­es, “in addi­tion to the native Per­sian speak­ing lands of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajik­istan,” the LoC notes.

Promi­nent­ly rep­re­sent­ed are works like the epic poem of pre-Islam­ic Per­sia, the Shah­namah, “likened to the Ili­ad or the Odyssey,” writes Carey, as well as “writ­ten accounts of the life of Shah Jahan, the 17th-cen­tu­ry Mughal emper­or who over­saw con­struc­tion of the Taj Mahal.”

The Library points out the archive includes the “most beloved poems of the Per­sian poets Saa­di, Hafez, Rumi and Jami, along with the works of the poet Niza­mi Gan­javi.” Some read­ers might be sur­prised at the pic­to­r­i­al opu­lence of so many Islam­ic texts, with their col­or­ful, styl­ized bat­tle scenes and group­ings of human fig­ures.

Islam­ic art is typ­i­cal­ly thought of as icon­o­clas­tic, but as in Chris­t­ian Europe and North Amer­i­ca, cer­tain sects have fought oth­ers over this inter­pre­ta­tion (includ­ing over depic­tions of the Prophet Moham­mad). This is not to say that the icon­o­clasts deserve less atten­tion. Much medieval and ear­ly mod­ern Islam­ic art uses intri­cate pat­terns, designs, and cal­lig­ra­phy while scrupu­lous­ly avoid­ing like­ness­es of humans and ani­mals. It is deeply mov­ing in its own way, rig­or­ous­ly detailed and pas­sion­ate­ly exe­cut­ed, full of math­e­mat­i­cal and aes­thet­ic ideas about shape, pro­por­tion, col­or, and line that have inspired artists around the world for cen­turies.

The page from a lav­ish­ly illu­mi­nat­ed Qur’ān, above, cir­ca 1708, offers such an exam­ple, writ­ten in Ara­bic with an inter­lin­ear Per­sian trans­la­tion. There are reli­gious texts from oth­er faiths, like the Psalms in Hebrew with Per­sian trans­la­tion, there are sci­en­tif­ic texts and maps: the Rare Per­sian-Lan­guage Man­u­script Col­lec­tion cov­ers a lot of his­tor­i­cal ground, as has Per­sian lan­guage and cul­ture “from the 10th cen­tu­ry to the present,” the Library writes. Such a rich tra­di­tion deserves care­ful study and appre­ci­a­tion. Begin an edu­ca­tion in Per­sian man­u­script his­to­ry here.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

15,000 Col­or­ful Images of Per­sian Man­u­scripts Now Online, Cour­tesy of the British Library

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

800+ Trea­sured Medieval Man­u­scripts to Be Dig­i­tized by Cam­bridge & Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ties

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

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The Fantastical Sketchbook of a Medieval Inventor: See Designs for Flamethrowers, Mechanical Camels & More (Circa 1415)

in History, Technology | April 5th, 2019

His­to­ry remem­bers, and will like­ly nev­er for­get, the name of Renais­sance Ital­ian inven­tor Leonar­do da Vin­ci. But what about the name of Renais­sance Ital­ian inven­tor Johannes de Fontana? Though he came along a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions before Leonar­do, Johannes de Fontana, also known as Gio­van­ni Fontana, seems to have had no less fer­tile an imag­i­na­tion. Where Leonar­do came up with every­thing from musi­cal instru­ments to hydraulic pumps to war machines to self-sup­port­ing bridges, Fontana’s inven­tions include “fire-breath­ing automa­tons, pul­ley-pow­ered angels, and the ear­li­est sur­viv­ing draw­ing of a mag­ic lantern device.”

Those words come from Port­land State Uni­ver­si­ty’s Ben­nett Gilbert, who takes a dive into Fontana’s note­book of “designs for a vari­ety of fan­tas­tic and often impos­si­ble inven­tions” at the Pub­lic Domain Review.

Filled some time between the years 1415 and 1420, its 68 draw­ings meant to entice poten­tial patrons include plans for “mechan­i­cal camels for enter­tain­ing chil­dren, mys­te­ri­ous locks to guard trea­sure, flame-throw­ing con­trap­tions to ter­ror­ize the defend­ers of besieged cities, huge foun­tains, musi­cal instru­ments, actors’ masks, and many oth­er won­ders.”

It would seem that Fontana lacked the sense of prac­ti­cal­i­ty pos­sessed by his suc­ces­sor Leonar­do — and Leonar­do dreamed up not just a vari­ety of fly­ing machines but a mechan­i­cal knight. That may have to do with the era in which Fontana lived, “more than two hun­dred years before the dis­cov­er­ies of New­ton,” a time “of tran­si­tion from medieval knowl­edge of the world to that of the Renais­sance, which many now regard as the ori­gin of ear­ly mod­ern sci­ence.” And so his designs, many of them lib­er­al­ly dec­o­rat­ed with unearth­ly-look­ing crea­tures and bursts of flame, strike us today as at most half plau­si­ble and at least half fan­tas­ti­cal.

Fontana’s draw­ing style, too, reflects the state of human knowl­edge in the ear­ly fif­teenth cen­tu­ry: “The tow­ers and rock­ets, water and fire, noz­zles and pipes, pul­leys and ropes, gears and grap­ples, wheels and beams, and grids and spheres that were an engineer’s occu­pa­tion at the dawn of the Renais­sance fill Fontana’s sketch­book. His way of illus­trat­ing his ideas, how­ev­er, is dis­tinct­ly medieval, lack­ing per­spec­tive and using a lim­it­ed array of angles for dis­play­ing machine works.” Yet this makes Fontana’s note­book all the more fas­ci­nat­ing to 21st-cen­tu­ry eyes, and throws into con­trast some of his more plau­si­ble inven­tions, such as “a mag­ic lantern device, which trans­formed the light of fire into emo­tive dis­play.”

Will some bold schol­ar of the ear­ly Renais­sance one day argue that Fontana invent­ed motion pic­tures? But per­haps the man who designed “an awe-inspir­ing fire-illu­mi­nat­ed spec­ta­cle, most like­ly serv­ing as a pro­pa­gan­da machine, for use in war and in peace” would­n’t approve of a medi­um quite so ordi­nary. We might say that the most valu­able lega­cy of Johannes de Fontana, more so than any of his inven­tions them­selves, is the glimpse his note­book gives us into the the human imag­i­na­tion in his day, when fact and fan­ta­sy inter­min­gled as they will nev­er do again. And in the case of some tech­nolo­gies, we should prob­a­bly feel relieved that they won’t: Fontana’s “life sup­port sys­tem for patients under­go­ing grue­some surg­eries” may be fas­ci­nat­ing, but I can’t say I’d be eager to make use of it myself.

See his man­u­script online here.

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

Buck­min­ster Fuller Cre­ates Strik­ing Posters of His Own Inven­tions

Mark Twain’s Patent­ed Inven­tions for Bra Straps and Oth­er Every­day Items

The 10 Com­mand­ments of Chindōgu, the Japan­ese Art of Cre­at­ing Unusu­al­ly Use­less Inven­tions

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

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An Animated History of Dogs, Inspired by Keith Haring

in Animation, Biology, Education, K-12, Nature, Science | April 5th, 2019

That quiv­er­ing teacup Chi­huahua…

The long-suf­fer­ing Labrador whose child-friend­ly rep­u­ta­tion has led to a life­time of ear tug­ging and tail pulling…

The wheez­ing French bull­dog, whose own­er has out­fit­ted with a full wardrobe of hood­ies, tutus, rain slick­ers, and paja­mas…

All descend­ed from wolves.

As anthro­pol­o­gist and sci­ence edu­ca­tor David Ian Howe explains in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son, A Brief His­to­ry of Dogs, above, at first glance, can­is lupus seemed an unlike­ly choice for man’s best friend.

For one thing, the two were in direct com­pe­ti­tion for elk, rein­deer, bison, and oth­er tasty prey wan­der­ing Eura­sia dur­ing the Pleis­tocene Epoch.

Though both hunt­ed in groups, run­ning their prey to the point of exhaus­tion, only one roast­ed their kills, cre­at­ing tan­ta­liz­ing aro­mas that drew bold­er wolves ever-clos­er to the human camps.

The ones who will­ing­ly dialed down their wolfish­ness, mak­ing them­selves use­ful as com­pan­ions, secu­ri­ty guards and hunt­ing bud­dies, were reward­ed come sup­per­time. Even­tu­al­ly, this mutu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial tail wag­ging became full on domes­ti­ca­tion, the first such ani­mal to come under the human yoke.

The intense focus on pure­breds did­n’t real­ly become a thing until the Vic­to­ri­ans began host­ing dog shows. The push to iden­ti­fy and pro­mote breed-spe­cif­ic char­ac­ter­is­tics often came at a cost to the ani­mals’ well­be­ing, as Neil Pem­ber­ton and Michael Wor­boys point out in BBC His­to­ry Mag­a­zine:

…the improve­ment of breeds towards ‘per­fec­tion’ was con­tro­ver­sial. While there was approval for the greater reg­u­lar­i­ty of type, many fanciers com­plained that stan­dards were being set on arbi­trary, large­ly aes­thet­ic grounds by enthu­si­asts in spe­cial­ist clubs, with­out con­cern for util­i­ty or the health of the ani­mal. This meant that breeds were chang­ing, and not always for the bet­ter. For exam­ple, the mod­ern St Bernard was said to be a beau­ti­ful ani­mal, but would be use­less in Alpine res­cue work.

Cat-fanciers, rest assured that the oppo­si­tion received fair and equal cov­er­age in a feline-cen­tric TED-Ed les­son, pub­lished ear­li­er this year.

And while we applaud TED-Ed for spark­ing our curios­i­ty with its “Brief His­to­ry of” series, cov­er­ing top­ics as far rang­ing as cheese, numer­i­cal sys­tems, goths, video games, and tea, sure­ly we are not the only ones won­der­ing why the late artist Kei­th Har­ing isn’t thanked or name checked in the cred­its?

Every canine-shaped image in this ani­ma­tion is clear­ly descend­ed from his icon­ic bark­ing dog.

While we can’t explain the omis­sion, we can direct read­ers toward Jon Nelson’s great analy­sis of Haring’s rela­tion­ship with dogs in Get Leashed:

They’re sym­bol­ic of unan­swered ques­tions, preva­lent in the 80s: “Can I do this?” “Is this right?” “What are you doing?” “What is hap­pen­ing?” Dogs stand by peo­ple, bark­ing or danc­ing along, some­times in pre­car­i­ous sce­nar­ios, even involved in some of Haring’s explic­it­ly sex­u­al work. Dogs are nei­ther approv­ing nor dis­ap­prov­ing of what peo­ple do in the images; their mouth angle is neu­tral or even hap­py. In some cas­es, human bod­ies wear a dog’s head, pos­si­bly stat­ing that we know only our own enjoy­ment, unaware, like a dog, of life’s next stage or the con­se­quences of our actions.

Vis­it Eth­no­cynol­o­gy, David Ian Howe’s Insta­gram page about the ancient rela­tion­ship between humans and dogs.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

Dis­cov­er David Lynch’s Bizarre & Min­i­mal­ist Com­ic Strip, The Angri­est Dog in the World (1983–1992)

Pho­tos of Famous Writ­ers (and Rock­ers) with their Dogs

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City April 15 for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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