Experience the Van Gogh Museum in 4K Resolution: A Video Tour in Seven Parts

in Art, Technology | April 16th, 2020

When we think of the most tech­no­log­i­cal­ly inclined artists of all time, we don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly think of Vin­cent van Gogh. Though he wrote of his deter­mi­na­tion to cre­ate “the art of the future,” when he got down to paint­ing he did so with tra­di­tion­al tools. What­ev­er Van Gogh’s own feel­ings about tech­nol­o­gy, tech­nol­o­gy cer­tain­ly seems to like him: take, for exam­ple, 2017’s Lov­ing Vin­cent, a fea­ture film about him ani­mat­ed with 65,000 paint­ings; the dig­i­tal exhi­bi­tion of his work that took place in Paris last year; his paint­ings brought to life with 3D ani­ma­tion and visu­al map­ping; and a vir­tu­al-real­i­ty ver­sion of The Night Cafe, all pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture — not to men­tion the 1,400 paint­ings and draw­ings by van Gogh made avail­able online by the Van Gogh Muse­um.

How­ev­er for­ward-look­ing its full-fea­tured online pres­ence made the Van Gogh Muse­um seem before, this par­tic­u­lar moment has made it look like an even more pre­scient insti­tu­tion. With it and so many oth­er brick-and-mor­tar muse­ums tem­porar­i­ly closed due to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, online is the only way any of us can enjoy them.

In addi­tion to its exist­ing resources on the web, the Van Gogh Muse­um has over the past month been upload­ing a pri­vate tour, all shot in 4K video. Much like the five-hour iPhone ad shot in the Her­mitage about which we post­ed last month, this series pro­vides a drift­ing, float­ing view of the muse­um’s gal­leries and the works they proud­ly dis­play, all quite unlike any expe­ri­ence one could ever have had there in per­son.

In the six parts of the series that have gone up so far, with a sev­enth and final install­ment to come next, not a sin­gle oth­er per­son appears to get between you and Van Gogh’s por­traits, Van Gogh’s still lifes, Van Gogh’s scenes urban and rur­al. But you do get some accom­pa­ni­ment in the form of a full musi­cal score, an ele­ment that has become quite impor­tant for this now-emerg­ing form of cin­e­mat­ic, high-res­o­lu­tion muse­um tour video.

Though brief, this Van Gogh Muse­um tour in 4K cov­ers a wide swath of the artist’s work, and will sure­ly only whet the appetite of view­ers who’ve been mean­ing to make the trip to Ams­ter­dam them­selves. Until then, we can take in Van Gogh’s “art of the future” using the tech­nol­o­gy of the present — the likes of which would­n’t have appeared in even his wildest visions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore 1400 Paint­ings & Draw­ings by Vin­cent van Gogh–and Much More–at the Van Gogh Museum’s Online Col­lec­tion

Near­ly 1,000 Paint­ings & Draw­ings by Vin­cent van Gogh Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online: View/Download the Col­lec­tion

Down­load Hun­dreds of Van Gogh Paint­ings, Sketch­es & Let­ters in High Res­o­lu­tion

13 Van Gogh’s Paint­ings Painstak­ing­ly Brought to Life with 3D Ani­ma­tion & Visu­al Map­ping

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

See Web Cams of Surreally Empty City Streets in Venice, New York, London & Beyond

in Current Affairs, Travel | April 16th, 2020

The lack of human pres­ence in major­ly pol­lut­ed cities these past cou­ple months has had some peo­ple see­ing utopias as the skies begin to clear. But emp­ty cities seem a lit­tle more dystopi­an to me. Dystopias are “a kind of sur­re­al­ism,” writes Kim Stan­ley Robin­son. They unearth the dream­like dread beneath the veneer of the nor­mal. No mat­ter when they’re set, dystopias don’t depict the future so much as “the feel­ing of the present… height­ened by exag­ger­a­tion to a kind of dream or night­mare.” The events in dystopi­an fic­tion approach the truth of someone’s sit­u­a­tion some­where in the world and make vis­i­ble what has been hid­den.

We know ghost cities exist as ancient dis­as­ters like Pom­peii and Her­cu­la­neum and mod­ern ones like Pripy­at, Ukraine, out­side Cher­nobyl. But there are more of them than many of us know. Gleam­ing cities like Ash­ga­bat, Turk­menistan, which broke ground in 1991 and con­tains the largest num­ber of mar­ble build­ings in the world.

The 4.5 mil­lion square meter metrop­o­lis has almost no inhab­i­tants, an enor­mous gov­ern­ment fol­ly. Towns and cities around the world have been aban­doned for for all sorts of rea­sons, and they con­tin­ue to as sea lev­els rise. Which is what makes view­ing live cam­era footage of some of the world’s most icon­ic streets—almost com­plete­ly emp­tied by the pan­dem­ic at the height of tourist season—so… sur­re­al.

It’s true that peo­ple haven’t fled these cities, but made cozy bunkers of their apart­ments. Yet see­ing the vacant streets live on cam­era, in Venice, Lon­don, New York, and else­where in the world,  I get the uncan­ny feel­ing of look­ing at pro­to-sur­re­al­ist painter Gior­gio de Chirico’s The Enig­ma of a Day, a depic­tion of a shad­owy, unin­hab­it­ed street through which we expect the Ital­ian ver­sion of a tum­ble­weed to roll. Sur­veil­lance tech­nol­o­gy has inad­ver­tent­ly become a medi­um of mod­ernist art.

There is so much beau­ty in the live view at the top of the Ponte delle Guglie in Venice from the Hotel Filù Venezia, and there is also such lone­ly melan­choly, depend­ing on the time of day and where the shad­ows fall. See a live view of Times Square, above, and anoth­er Times Square view at Earth­Cam, where you can also catch a feed of a most­ly emp­ty Abbey Road (some times of day emp­ti­er than oth­ers, as in the ear­ly-morn­ing screen­shot below). Sky­line Web­cams hosts even more live cam­era views of Venice, includ­ing feeds from the Rial­to Bridge and the Piaz­za San Mar­co, as well as live feeds from sev­er­al sites in Pad­ua and oth­er places in Italy.

These real-time visions are trans­port­ing in their strange­ness. Are we liv­ing in the present or the future? In a dystopi­an world, there isn’t any dif­fer­ence. All futures are fore­closed by cat­a­stro­phe, “all dis­tances in time and space are shrink­ing,” wrote Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, a thinker who under­stood dis­as­ter, and who fell in line behind it. In that same essay, “The Thing” (as trans­lat­ed by Albert Hof­s­tad­er), the Ger­man philoso­pher made his famous com­ment, “the ter­ri­ble has already hap­pened.”

The ter­ri­ble that has hap­pened to us is not only a dead­ly pan­dem­ic. The virus is not like­ly to dis­ap­pear on its own; who knows how long this will go on? But not far behind the cur­rent cri­sis are more cli­mate events that threat­en to emp­ty streets. If we emp­ty cities not only as indica­tive of tem­porar­i­ly social dis­tanc­ing, but as images of the pos­si­ble near-future, maybe we’ll be far less inclined to come out of this sur­re­al expe­ri­ence and get right back to busi­ness-as-usu­al.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Venice (Its Streets, Plazas & Canals) with Google Street View

Google Lets You Take a 360-Degree Panoram­ic Tour of Street Art in Cities Across the World

Spring Break vs. COVID-19: Map­ping the Real Impact of Ignor­ing Social Dis­tanc­ing

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Take a Long Virtual Tour of the Louvre in Three High-Definition Videos

in Art | April 16th, 2020

So, you’ve had to put off a trip to Paris, and a long-await­ed vis­it to the Lou­vre, which “will remain closed until fur­ther notice,” has been pushed into the indef­i­nite hori­zon. It could be worse, but the loss of engag­ing up close with cul­tur­al trea­sures is some­thing we should all grieve in lock­down. Art is so impor­tant to human well-being that UK Sec­re­tary of Health Matt Han­cock argued all doc­tors in the NHS should pre­scribe gallery vis­its and oth­er art activ­i­ties for every­thing from men­tal issues to lung dis­eases.

As you know from plan­ning your trip (ide­al­ly sev­er­al trips) to the famous museum—first opened to the pub­lic in 1793 on the first anniver­sary of Louis XVI’s imprisonment—you can lux­u­ri­ate in art for days on end once there, pro­vid­ed you can evade the mas­sive crowds.

The Lou­vre is immense, with 60,500 square meters of floor space and around 35,000 paint­ings, sculp­tures, and oth­er arti­facts. But with rough­ly 10 mil­lion vis­i­tors per year, who make it the world’s most vis­it­ed muse­um, it isn’t easy to find space for con­tem­pla­tion.

Video vis­its are no sub­sti­tute, but these days they’re the best we’ve got. If you’re eager to see what you’re missing—or what you could nev­er get to in per­son even with­out a pandemic—take a look at the 4K vir­tu­al tours here from Wan­der­lust Trav­el Videos. Yes, you’ll see the hero­ic mas­ter­works of Jacques-Louis David, Eugene Delacroix, and Théodore Géri­cault. You’ll see the famous glass pyra­mid, the trea­sures of Napoleon’s Apart­ments, and, yes, the Mona Lisa.

But you’ll also see hun­dreds and hun­dreds of works that don’t get the same kind of press, each one named in a time­stamped list on the YouTube pages. The expe­ri­ence is admit­ted­ly like vis­it­ing the muse­um in per­son, rush­ing through each gallery, peer­ing over and around the backs of heads to get a glimpse of the Fra Fil­ip­po Lip­pis, Cimabues, and Man­teg­nas. But you can mute the con­stant back­ground chat­ter and pause and rewind as much as you like.

After tour­ing a good bit of the muse­um, stroll around the Car­rousel Arc de Tri­om­phe, Jardin de l’infante, and the Pont Neuf, above. Judg­ing by the com­ments, these videos are prov­ing a balm to the psy­ches of home­bound art lovers around the world, whether they’ve been to the Lou­vre before, just scrapped their trav­el plans, or know they’ll prob­a­bly nev­er get the chance to vis­it.

The vir­tu­al oppor­tu­ni­ty to tour this mag­nif­i­cent col­lec­tion, or part of it, may refresh our exhaust­ed imag­i­na­tions. It may also soothe the part of us that real­ly miss­es huge crowds of peo­ple all talk­ing at once. Some­thing about the expe­ri­ence, even on the screen, feels so strange­ly com­pelling right now you might find your­self hop­ing if and when you final­ly get to the Lou­vre, it’s sim­ply mobbed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mona Lisa Self­ie: A Mon­tage of Social Media Pho­tos Tak­en at the Lou­vre and Put on Insta­gram

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of 30 World-Class Muse­ums & Safe­ly Vis­it 2 Mil­lion Works of Fine Art

Vis­it The Muse­um of Online Muse­ums (MoOM): A Mega Col­lec­tion of 220 Online Exhi­bi­tions

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Louis Armstrong Remembers How He Survived the 1918 Flu Epidemic in New Orleans

in History, Music | April 15th, 2020

Born into pover­ty in New Orleans in 1901, and grow­ing up dur­ing some of the most bru­tal years of seg­re­ga­tion in the South, Louis Arm­strong first lived with his grand­moth­er, next in a “Col­ored Waif’s Home” after drop­ping out of school at age 11, then with his moth­er and sis­ter in a home so small they had to sleep in the same bed. After already liv­ing through the first World War, he would go on to wit­ness the Span­ish Flu epi­dem­ic, the Great Depres­sion, World War II, the Cold War, and the tur­bu­lent 1960s and the Viet­nam con­flict.

That’s a lot for one life­time, though for much of it, Arm­strong was a star and liv­ing leg­end who beat the odds and rose above his ori­gins with will and tal­ent. Even so, he suf­fered some severe ups and downs dur­ing the hard times, tour­ing so much to cov­er his debts in the lean 1930s, for exam­ple, that he injured his lips and fin­gers, and final­ly mov­ing to Europe when the mob came after him.

Armstrong’s descrip­tions of his expe­ri­ence of the 1918 influen­za pandemic—as he remem­bers it in his 1954 mem­oir Satch­mo: My Life in New Orleans—are almost jaun­ty, as you can part­ly see in the type­script page above from the Louis Arm­strong House. But he remem­bered it from the per­spec­tive of a 17-year-old musi­cian in robust health—who seemed to have some kind of resis­tance to the flu.

He devotes no more than two para­graphs to the flu, which hit the city hard in Octo­ber of that year. Accord­ing to the Influen­za Ency­clo­pe­dia, an online project doc­u­ment­ing the flu in the U.S. between 1918–1919, New Orleans city author­i­ties “act­ed imme­di­ate­ly,” once they dis­cov­ered the out­break, arrived by car­go ship the month before.

On Octo­ber 9th, the New Orleans Super­in­ten­dent of Health, “with May­or Mar­tine Behrman’s con­sent and the bless­ing of state author­i­ties… ordered closed all schools (pub­lic, pri­vate, and parochial, as well as com­mer­cial col­leges), church­es, the­aters, movie hous­es, and oth­er places of amuse­ment, and [pro­hib­it­ed] pub­lic gath­er­ings such as sport­ing events and pub­lic funer­als and wed­dings.”

For a strug­gling young musi­cian mak­ing a liv­ing play­ing clubs and river­boats, the clo­sure of “oth­er places of amuse­ment” took a seri­ous toll. The loss of liveli­hood is what seems to have hurt Arm­strong the most when he returned to the city from tour­ing, still unsure if the Great War would end.

When I came back from Houma things were much tougher. The Kaiser’s mon­key busi­ness was get­ting worse, and, what is more, a seri­ous flu epi­dem­ic had hit New Orleans. Every­body was down with it, except me. That was because I was physic-mind­ed. I nev­er missed a week with­out a physic, and that kept all kinds of sick­ness out of me.

What­ev­er “physic” helped Armstrong’s avoid infec­tion, it wasn’t for lack of expo­sure. In lieu of play­ing the trum­pet he began car­ing for the sick, since all of the hos­pi­tals, even those that would take black patients, were com­plete­ly over­crowd­ed.

Just when the gov­ern­ment was about to let crowds of peo­ple con­gre­gate again so that we could play our horns once more the lid was clamped down tighter than ever. That forced me to take any odd jobs I could get. With every­body suf­fer­ing from the flu, I had to work and play the doc­tor to every­one in my fam­i­ly as well as all my friends in the neigh­bor­hood. If I do say so, I did a good job cur­ing them.

We might imag­ine some of those “odd jobs” were what we now call “essential”—i.e. low paid and high risk under the cir­cum­stances. He per­se­vered and final­ly got a gig play­ing a “honky-tonk” that avoid­ed a shut-down because it was “third rate,” and he “could play a lot of blues for cheap pros­ti­tutes and hus­tlers.” Few things could get Satch­mo down, it seemed, not even a flu pan­dem­ic, but he was one of the lucky ones—luckily for the future of jazz. Only, we don’t have to imag­ine how hard this must have been for him. We just have to take a look around.

Learn more about the 1918 influen­za epi­dem­ic in the U.S. at the Influen­za Ency­clo­pe­dia and read the rest of Armstrong’s account of his for­ma­tive years at the Inter­net Archive.

via Ted Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Only Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong in a Record­ing Stu­dio: Watch the Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered Film (1959)

Louis Arm­strong Plays His­toric Cold War Con­certs in East Berlin & Budapest (1965)

What Hap­pened to U.S. Cities That Practiced–and Didn’t Practice–Social Dis­tanc­ing Dur­ing 1918’s “Span­ish Flu”

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A Playlist of Songs to Get You Through Hard Times: Stream 20 Tracks from the Alan Lomax Collection

in Life, Music | April 15th, 2020

There’s an argu­ment to be made that folk music is always polit­i­cal, in a broad sense. It is music made by ordi­nary peo­ple strug­gling against over­whelm­ing forces: nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, oppres­sive gov­ern­ments, cor­rupt boss­es, job loss, the pains of mar­riage and illic­it rela­tion­ships… and epi­dem­ic infec­tious dis­eases. It’s music of con­so­la­tion and resilience. Folk music helps us navigate—as the title of a 20-song col­lec­tion of Alan Lomax’s record­ings new­ly released on Band­camp puts it—“hard times: up, over and through.”

At least,  the fact that we know of and can hear so much folk music from around the world has a good deal to do with polit­i­cal deci­sions made, for exam­ple, in the U.S., where Lomax began work­ing with his folk­lorist father John, col­lect­ing music and inter­views for the Library of Congress’s Archive of Amer­i­can Folk Song. This work was fund­ed on the premise that con­serv­ing the voice of the peo­ple had val­ue inde­pen­dent of its prof­itabil­i­ty.

But prof­itable it was: first cre­ative­ly, as Lomax’s record­ings inspired the Amer­i­can and British folk revivals of the mid-20th cen­tu­ry: then finan­cial­ly, as folk and folk-rock artists sold mil­lions of records. Giv­en the tenor of those times, it’s no won­der folk became main­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Civ­il Rights, labor, and anti-war move­ments. Yet as folk­lorists like Lomax showed, even after the Con­gres­sion­al fund­ing end­ed, folk songs from around the world have sto­ries to tell that we may nev­er have heard oth­er­wise.

A 20-track selec­tion of those songs, dat­ing between 1936 and 1982, can hard­ly be rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the mas­sive trove of record­ings Lomax col­lect­ed. It does show, a press release notes, “an enor­mous range of geo­graph­i­cal and styl­is­tic diver­si­ty across 50 years,” with artists rang­ing from “leg­ends of Amer­i­can ver­nac­u­lar music—Bessie Jones, Skip James, and Dock Bog­gs among them—to rur­al Ital­ian, Span­ish, and Scot­tish singers.” This music offers, “in these try­ing times, com­fort diver­sion, and his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive.”

Such per­spec­tive is crit­i­cal when the world seems to be falling apart. The strug­gles of “folk”—wherever they may be in the world—are inter­con­nect­ed and ongo­ing. Hear­ing how peo­ple respond­ed to dis­as­ter, both per­son­al and col­lec­tive, in decades past pro­vides a sense of con­ti­nu­ity. Things have been very bad before, and peo­ple have had rea­son to lament. To declare that “Mon­ey is King,” as a track by The Growl­ing Tiger tells us. To won­der plain­tive­ly, as Har­ry Cox does, “What will become of England/if things go on this way?”

But folk singers have also had rea­sons for joy, in the best and the bleak­est of times, and joy is also a kind of pol­i­tics, a show of strength in the face of what Rev. Pearly Brown plain­ly calls “A Mean Old World.” Stream the col­lec­tion, which includes six pre­vi­ous­ly unre­leased tracks, above, and buy indi­vid­ual tracks or the full dig­i­tal album for $5 at Band­camp.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Alan Lomax’s Mas­sive Music Archive Is Online: Fea­tures 17,000 His­toric Blues & Folk Record­ings

Hear 17,000+ Tra­di­tion­al Folk & Blues Songs Curat­ed by the Great Musi­col­o­gist Alan Lomax

Leg­endary Folk­lorist Alan Lomax: ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Vintage Advertising Film Intelligently Satirizes the Selling of the American Dream: Watch The Your Name Here Story (1960)

in Film, History | April 15th, 2020

When did the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca attain peak earnest­ness? It had to have hap­pened some­time in the long 1950s, begin­ning with vic­to­ry in the Sec­ond World War and end­ing with the cul­tur­al shifts of the ear­ly 60s. Though indi­vid­ual Amer­i­cans back then might express dis­con­tent and even cyn­i­cism about the nation, U.S. mass cul­ture kept the dial set to tri­umphant opti­mism. And in mid­cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca there was no cul­tur­al force quite as mass as adver­tis­ing, which broad­cast its mes­sages in not just the media of print, radio, tele­vi­sion, and bill­board, but film as well. This gold­en age of Amer­i­can earnest­ness coin­cides with the gold­en age of the Calvin Com­pa­ny, once the coun­try’s dom­i­nant mak­er of adver­tis­ing, edu­ca­tion­al, and indus­tri­al films.

Found­ed in Kansas City in 1931, the Calvin Com­pa­ny cap­i­tal­ized ear­ly on the adver­tis­ing poten­tial of 16-mil­lime­ter film. At first con­sid­ered suit­able only for “home movies,” the for­mat turned out to be ide­al for sales pitch­es, cor­po­rate train­ing ses­sions, and class­room screen­ings. Calv­in’s client list soon grew to include Gen­er­al Mills, Goodyear, Mon­san­to, West­ing­house, and Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­ni­ca, as well as the Navy, the Air Force, and the Office of Edu­ca­tion.

That we can still watch some of the com­pa­ny’s many pro­duc­tions today we owe to the efforts of Rick Prelinger, whose epony­mous film archives we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. At the Inter­net Archive you can watch such Calvin clas­sics as Cof­fee Break, Forty Bil­lion Ene­mies, Fifty Years of Pow­ered Flight, The Bright Young New­com­er, and Enforc­ing Rules and Pro­ce­dures.

None have the rep­u­ta­tion of The Your Name Here Sto­ry, pro­duced by Calvin in 1960 as “the first tru­ly all-pur­pose film.” While pre­vi­ous jobs were made to order, painstak­ing­ly tai­lored by an ever-expand­ing staff of film­mak­ers to the needs the com­mis­sion­ing clients, The Your Name Here Sto­ry is com­plete­ly gener­ic. “From the dawn of human his­to­ry, a bet­ter way of life has been man’s dream,” booms its nar­ra­tor, launch­ing into an open­ing whose epic form will be famil­iar to any­one who’s put off writ­ing a term paper until the night before. After telling the sto­ry of civ­i­liza­tion — espe­cial­ly Amer­i­can civ­i­liza­tion — in a brisk two min­utes, the film arrives in high-tech moder­ni­ty. Alas, “despite the world’s high­est liv­ing stan­dards, the aver­age Amer­i­can remained vague­ly dis­con­tent, aware that his goal of a bet­ter way of life had still not been ful­ly real­ized. There was some­thing miss­ing.”

“Gad, it’s iron­ic,” says a pro­to­typ­i­cal Amer­i­can hus­band of the day, lying awake along­side his wife, both of them sleep­less with dis­sat­is­fac­tion. “With all our tech­nol­o­gy and indus­tri­al know-how, we still don’t have the one thing that could give us a bet­ter way of life.” That “one thing” is any­thing the com­pa­ny that licens­es The Your Name Here Sto­ry hap­pens to make, footage of which they can eas­i­ly insert into the var­i­ous spaces pro­vid­ed through­out the film. “In count­less ways, direct­ly and indi­rect­ly, YOUR PRODUCT HERE serves the nation and its cit­i­zens,” says the nar­ra­tor, cred­it­ing what­ev­er it may be with play­ing a vital role in help­ing them to “achieve suc­cess,” “enjoy health­ful recre­ation,” “grow big­ger crops,” “strength­en our nation­al defense,” and of course “get real smok­ing sat­is­fac­tion.”

Some may now watch most of The Your Name Here Sto­ry before catch­ing on to the film’s satir­i­cal intent. That owes to the fact that the Calvin Com­pa­ny itself defined the look and feel of the orga­ni­za­tion­al cul­ture of the 1950s, at least as it remains in cul­tur­al mem­o­ry. Orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed as a bit of fun for the “Calvin Work­shop,” the com­pa­ny’s annu­al gath­er­ing of indus­tri­al film pro­duc­ers and tech­ni­cians, the film’s spoofs of what Sapi­ens author Yuval Noah Harari has termed the “mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al-sci­en­tif­ic com­plex” almost feel made for audi­ences of the future. Among the Calvin Com­pa­ny’s sur­viv­ing films we also find 1956’s A Mag­ic Bond, direct­ed by no less notable a son of Kansas City than Robert Alt­man. Know­ing what we now do of its self-aware cor­po­rate cul­ture, does it comes as a sur­prise that Calvin would have been the train­ing ground for Hol­ly­wood’s pre-emi­nent smart-aleck?

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the First Com­mer­cial Ever Shown on Amer­i­can TV, 1941

Eisen­how­er Answers Amer­i­ca: The First Polit­i­cal Adver­tise­ments on Amer­i­can TV (1952)

Before Mad Men: Famil­iar and For­got­ten Ads from 1950s to 1980s Now Online

A Gallery of Mad Magazine’s Rol­lick­ing Fake Adver­tise­ments from the 1960s

Sell & Spin: The His­to­ry of Adver­tis­ing, Nar­rat­ed by Dick Cavett (1999)

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Rare Grooves on Vinyl from Around the World: Hear Curated Playlists of Arabic, Brazilian, Bollywood, Soviet & Turkish Music

in Music | April 14th, 2020

Just as the cat­e­go­ry of “For­eign Lan­guage Film” has seri­ous prob­lems, so too does that of “World Music,” which names so many kinds of music that it names noth­ing at all. World music “might best be described by what it is not,” not­ed a 1994 Music Library Asso­ci­a­tion report. “It is not West­ern art music, nei­ther it is main­stream West­ern folk or pop­u­lar music.” The report adds some vague qual­i­fi­ca­tions about “eth­nic or for­eign ele­ments” then gives away the game: “It is sim­ply not our music, it is their music, music which belongs to some­one else.”

Per­haps one can see why the idea is now regard­ed by some as “out­dat­ed and offen­sive.” As the Uni­ver­si­ty of Minnesota’s Tim­o­thy Bren­nan argues in a his­tor­i­cal analy­sis of the term, “world music does not exist” except “as an idea in the mind of jour­nal­ists, crit­ics, and the buy­ers of records.”

But to whom can music belong? If Japan­ese musi­cians play jazz, are they play­ing Amer­i­can-owned music? Is it “Japan­ese jazz” or just jazz? Must it have Japan­ese instru­ments for it to be “World Music”?

How these ques­tions get answered can deter­mine whether most lis­ten­ers ever encounter the record­ed out­put of jazz musi­cians from Japan, such as that in an excel­lent thir­ty-minute sam­pler from the 1970s that we fea­tured just a few days back. In this mix, DJ Zag Erlat show­cas­es names that “will sound famil­iar,” wrote Open Culture’s Col­in Mar­shall, “to those of us who’ve spent years dig­ging crates around the world for Japan­ese jazz on vinyl.” That’s a select group, indeed, and one you may be inspired to join once you’ve heard Erlat’s mix.

The Turk­ish DJ has fur­ther done his part to dis­am­biguate World Music on his YouTube chan­nel My Ana­log Jour­nal. Here, you’ll find Erlat spin­ning sets of “Brazil­ian Grooves,” “Ara­bic Grooves,” “African Grooves,” “Bol­ly­wood Grooves,” and so much more—including a set of Jazz from the USSR in his tenth episode that is quite a reveal­ing lis­ten. Who knew such music exist­ed in the Sovi­et Union? Well, except for those Sovi­et jazz crate-dig­gers.

Now you know too, and you’ll learn a lot more about what the world’s been up to, music-wise. These are also, obvi­ous­ly, very broad cat­e­gories, and one might rea­son­ably object to them. But it’s a great start for get­ting to know some clas­sic pop sounds from spe­cif­ic regions in the world. Erlat does get more spe­cif­ic in some sets, as in his Japan­ese jazz from the 70s. (I’d espe­cial­ly rec­om­mend his “Turk­ish Female Singers from the 70s” mix.)

This is music of the mod­ern world—not “ours” or “theirs”—its basic ele­ments embed­ded in a glob­al cul­tur­al mar­ket­place. “It is 25 years since the con­cept of world music was cre­at­ed by enthu­si­asts in a north Lon­don pub,” wrote The Guardian’s Ian Bir­rell in 2012. “Per­haps it made sense then, as a mar­ket­ing device to pro­mote the sounds of the world that were lost in record shops and on the radio. But not now. Not in this mixed-up, messy and shrunk­en world.” Per­haps it did­n’t make sense then, when artists like Fela Kuti or Os Mutantes made music that was as much “West­ern” as it was African or South Amer­i­can.

It becomes increas­ing­ly impos­si­ble to seg­re­gate artists from dif­fer­ent coun­tries. Genre mashups rule, and the more furi­ous­ly artists from around the world pick up and put down glob­al styles, the more they attract the pos­i­tive notice of fans and crit­ics in pop music. But per­haps we’ll con­tin­ue to refer to indige­nous folk tra­di­tions as “World Music,” and per­haps that’s what the label has always been meant to describe. In that case, as one writer for the Grammy’s offi­cial blog put it, “some­thing tells me that the rest of the world has a dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion.”

Get famil­iar with sev­er­al oth­er groovy musics from else­where at Erlat’s My Ana­log Jour­nal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 30-Minute Intro­duc­tion to Japan­ese Jazz from the 1970s: Like Japan­ese Whisky, It’s Under­rat­ed, But Very High Qual­i­ty

Music Is Tru­ly a Uni­ver­sal Lan­guage: New Research Shows That Music World­wide Has Impor­tant Com­mon­al­i­ties

Stream a 144-Hour Discog­ra­phy of Clas­sic Jazz Record­ings from Blue Note Records: Miles Davis, Art Blakey, John Coltrane, Ornette Cole­man & More

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why is Vermeer’s “Girl with the Pearl Earring” Considered a Masterpiece?: An Animated Introduction

in Art, History | April 14th, 2020

Long­time Open Cul­ture read­ers will have encoun­tered Johannes Ver­meer here in var­i­ous forms: his paint­ings have appeared as ani­ma­tions, as the sub­ject of a doc­u­men­tary, and even free for the down­load in high res­o­lu­tion as well as view­able in aug­ment­ed real­i­ty. Though paint­ed in the mid-17th-cen­tu­ry Nether­lands, the Dutch mas­ter’s work now appeals to mod­ern view­ers every­where. Most who enter Ver­meer’s world pass through the gate­way of Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring, his 1665 por­trait of just that. What is it about that young lady against a plain black back­ground, so much sim­pler an image than the detailed domes­tic inte­ri­ors that con­sti­tute most of Ver­meer’s oeu­vre, that cap­ti­vates us?

In the TED-Ed les­son above, art his­to­ri­an James Ear­le places Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring in con­text with the rest of Ver­meer’s work, reveal­ing how it fits in as well as how it stands apart. “Instead of being like a set piece in a the­atri­cal nar­ra­tive scene, she becomes a psy­cho­log­i­cal object,” Ear­le says. “Her eye con­tact and slight­ly part­ed lips, as if she is about to say some­thing, draw us into her gaze” — one aspect of what’s made the paint­ing’s rep­u­ta­tion as “the Mona Lisa of the North.”

Though not a mem­ber of the nobil­i­ty or cler­gy, the tra­di­tion­al sources for sub­jects of por­trai­ture in Ver­meer’s day, this “anony­mous girl” is enno­bled by how the artist depicts her. This reflects the chang­ing polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic real­i­ties of the Nether­lands at the time, a coun­try that had “turned against the rul­ing aris­toc­ra­cy and the Catholic Church.”

Cities like Ver­meer’s home­town of Delft, Ear­le tells us, “were unsu­per­vised by kings or bish­ops, so many artists like Ver­meer were left with­out tra­di­tion­al patrons.” But the ascen­dant mer­chant class, dri­ven by the inno­va­tion of the Dutch East India Com­pa­ny, pro­duced new ones. These mid­dle-class patrons pre­ferred to be depict­ed with sym­bols of their own world­li­ness: maps hang­ing on the wall in domes­tic inte­ri­ors, or more osten­ta­tious­ly the “ori­en­tal tur­ban” worn by the sub­ject of Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring. They also tend­ed to appear with sym­bols of wealth of the kind almost par­o­died by the implau­si­bly large pearl ear­ring itself. “Like­ly just a glass or tin drop var­nished to look like a pearl,” the object nonethe­less appears to poss­es con­sid­er­able shape and weight” — at least before “a detailed view shows that it’s just a float­ing smudge of paint.” But what a smudge, in the behold­ing of which “we are remind­ed of Ver­meer’s pow­er as an illu­sion-mak­er.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load All 36 of Jan Vermeer’s Beau­ti­ful­ly Rare Paint­ings (Most in Bril­liant High Res­o­lu­tion)

Mas­ter of Light: A Close Look at the Paint­ings of Johannes Ver­meer Nar­rat­ed by Meryl Streep

Paint­ings by Car­avag­gio, Ver­meer, & Oth­er Great Mas­ters Come to Life in a New Ani­mat­ed Video

See the Com­plete Works of Ver­meer in Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty: Google Makes Them Avail­able on Your Smart­phone

Inge­nious Impro­vised Recre­ations of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring, Using Mate­ri­als Found Around the House

Meet Noto­ri­ous Art Forg­er Han Van Meegeren, Who Fooled the Nazis with His Coun­ter­feit Ver­meers

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.