We may never convince the greediest among us that money won’t buy happiness. But if we weren’t persuaded before the pandemic, it seems more of us are now, since thousands of workers refuse to return to exploitative conditions. “The Covid job market,” the Harvard Business Review admits, “is not like 2008, nor really like anything anyone has observed since the birth of modern capitalism.” This observation comes amidst a discussion of the factors influencing hiring, but most economist-speak avoids the emotional language we use to talk about our jobs.
The fact is, most of us are stressed out, unhappy, overworked, and underpaid, with little in terms of public policy or corporate benefits to help reduce the burdens on the average American worker. It’s far worse for other workers around the world. “The average US workweek is 38.6 hours,” notes Business Insider. “That may feel like forever to some people, but it’s nothing compared to some countries’ workweeks.” Workers in Colombia, for example, spend an average of 47.7 hours at work.
Much of that time could be spent caring for ourselves and our families, and lockdowns, quarantines, shelter-in-place and work-from-home orders have given us time to reconsider how we’ve been living. As we do, we might look to Finland and Denmark, where people profess some of the highest rates of happiness in the world, according to the most recent World Happiness Report, a series of measures co-created by Jeffrey Sachs, Director of Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development.
“In a lamentable year,” the report points out, “Finland again is the happiest country in the world.” Denmark isn’t far behind. What does this mean? “It’s not primarily a measure of whether one laughed or smiled yesterday,” says Sachs, “but how one feels about the course of one’s life.” This feeling is measured according to “six areas of life satisfaction,” CNBC notes in an introduction to the video above — a short documentary on Finnish and Danish happiness — including “income, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom, trust and generosity.”
“We need urgently to learn from Covid-19,” says Sachs. “The pandemic reminds us of our global environmental threats, the urgent need to cooperate, and the difficulties of achieving cooperation in each country and globally. The World Happiness Report 2021 reminds us that we must aim for wellbeing rather than mere wealth, which will be fleeting indeed if we don’t do a much better job of addressing the challenges of sustainable development.” Learn what makes the Finns and Danes so happy in the video above (spoiler: it isn’t exorbitant salaries) and learn more about why people in the “happiest” countries thrive at the World Happiness Report.
“Culture has come to prize this quality in creative work: the ability to grab people quickly,” and “above pretty much anything else” at that. So says Evan Puschak, who should know: as the Nerdwriter, he runs a popular eponymous channel on Youtube, where everything depends on getting and holding the viewer’s increasingly fleeting attention. Even under such pressures, Puschak has managed to maintain one of the most thoughtful cultural channels around, previously featured here on Open Culture for its video essays on everything from the films of Jean-Luc Godard to the paintings of Edward Hopper to the music of Fleetwood Mac.
But it is Frida Kahlo whom the Nerdwriter credits as a master manipulator of audience attention. “Yes, there’s a sensationalistic obsession with the drama of her life, but that wouldn’t arouse nearly as much interest if it weren’t for the drama of her art — which is also sensational, but in the good way.”
The sensationalistic quality of Kahlo’s paintings owes to the “intimacy of the images” they depict, especially when they communicate “her vulnerability, her physical and emotional pain, but also her defiance and self-confidence, and the pride she so clearly has in her culture.” This comes through with special clarity in the self-portraits she created quite prolifically, and in so doing defined herself as well as the new 20th-century Mexican culture with which she came of age.
“I really, really hesitate to bring up the word selfie,” says Puschak, but “insomuch as her self-portraits are always simultaneously a recording and a performance of identity, they’re bound to be relatable to modern audiences.” In the first half of the 20th century during which Kahlo lived, painting was a relatively efficient way to produce images of oneself. Today, many of us do it dozens of times a day, at the touch of a button, marshaling few artistic resources in the process. But if selfies lack the impact of Kahlo’s self-portraits, it may owe to the ironic reason that the selfies look too good. Kahlo’s painting “has a bit of an amateurish quality to it, in its flattening of depth and skewed perspectives and anatomy.” But she used that style on purpose, paying homage to the folk art of her homeland and also making you feel as if “someone you know” painted these works. Puschak, who refers to her on a first-name basis, seemingly feels that way; but then, he’s far from the only Frida fan to do so.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
What is it for a super-hero to represent America? Though the character created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in 1941 may have been a way to capitalize on WWII patriotism, it has since been used to ask questions about what it really means to be patriotic and how America’s ideals and its reality may conflict. We’re of course talking about race, a theme explored by Sam Wilson, formerly Cap’s side-kick, picking up the shield in the comics and now on TV (and in the forthcoming film).
Your Pretty Much Pop hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica, and Brian are joined by comic super-fan Anthony LeBlanc (returning from our ep. 56 on black nerds) to discuss the recent comic runs by Ta-Nehishi Coates and Nick Spencer and especially Truth: Red, White and Black, Marvel’s 2003 comics mini-series by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker that tells the story of American super-soldier experiments on unknowing black men (reminiscent of the real-life Tuskegee Syphilis Study). This was the source of the “first black Captain America” character Isaiah Bradley featured in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Disney+ show, which we also discuss.
Here are a few articles that fed into our discussion:
Yet most Americans still conceive of ramen as the pack of seasoning and dehydrated instant noodles that have long sustained broke artists and college students.
Add incarcerated persons to the list of packaged ramen’s most ardent consumers.
In the above episode of Vox’s series, The Goods, we learn how those ubiquitous cellophane packages have outstripped cigarettes and postage stamps as the preferred form of prison currency.
Ramen is durable, portable, packaged in standard units, available in the prison commissary, and highly prized by those with a deep need to pad their chow hall meals.
Ramen can be used to pay for clothing and hygiene products, or services like laundry, bunk cleaning, dictation, or custom illustration. Gamblers can use it in lieu of chips.
Ramen’s status as the preferred form of exchange also speaks to a sharp decline in the quantity and quality of food in American penal institutions.
Ethnographer Michael Gibson-Light, who spent a year studying homegrown monetary practices among incarcerated populations, notes that slashed prison budgets have created a culture of “punitive frugality.”
Called upon to model a demonstrably tough on crime stance and cut back on expenditures, the institutions are unofficially shunting many of their traditional costs onto the prisoners themselves.
In response, those on the inside have pivoted to edible currency:
What we are seeing is a collective response — across inmate populations and security levels, across prison cliques and racial groups, and even across states — to changes and cutbacks in prison food services…The form of money is not something that changes often or easily, even in the prison underground economy; it takes a major issue or shock to initiate such a change. The use of cigarettes as money in U.S. prisons happened in American Civil War military prisons and likely far earlier. The fact that this practice has suddenly changed has potentially serious implications.
Ramen may be a relatively new development in the prison landscape, but culinary experimentation behind bars is not. From Pruno prison wine to Martha Stewart’s prison grounds crabapple jelly, it’s a nothing ventured, nothing gained type of deal. Work with what you’ve got.
Gustavo “Goose” Alvarez, who appears in Vox’s video, collected a number of the most adventurous recipes in his book, Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories from Behind Bars. Anyone can bring some variety on the spur of the moment by sprinkling some of your ramen’s seasoning packet into your drinking water, but amassing the ingredients for an ambitious dish like Orange Porkies — chili ramen plus white rice plus ½ bag of pork skins plus orange-flavored punch — takes patience and perseverance.
Alvarez’s Egg Ramen Salad Sandwich recipe earns praise from actor Shia LeBoeuf, whose time served is both multiple and minimal.
Someone serving a longer sentence has a more compelling reason to search for the ramen-centered sense of harmony and wellbeing on display in Tampopo, the first “ramen western”:
Appreciate its gestalt. Savor the aromas.
Joe Guerrero, host of YouTube’s AfterPrisonShow, is not immune to the pleasures of some of his ramen-based concoctions, below, despite being on the outside for several years now.
You’re free to wrinkle your nose at the thought of snacking on a crumbled brick of uncooked ramen, but Guerrero points out that someone serving a long sentence craves variety in any form they can get. Experiencing it can tap into the same sense of pride as self-governance.
Guerrero’s recipes require a microwave (and a block of ramen).
Even if you’re not particularly keen on eating the finished product, there’s a science project appeal to his Ramen Noodle Cookie. It calls for no additional ingredients, just ten minutes cooking time, an outrageous prospect in a communal setting with only one microwave.
There’s no business like show business. Or maybe — as Bart Simpson once wrote on the blackboard — “there are plenty of businesses like show business.”
Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film, 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, follows aging TV star, Rick Dalton, being pushed into playing villainous character roles. Drunk and depressed, Dalton and his sidekick/hanger-on/stunt double Cliff Booth watch reruns of his show and get into a series of increasingly serious scrapes as the actor searches for a role that will redeem him. The film’s outline–shorn of historical references that made critics lionize it as “a love letter to old Hollywood”–sounds suspiciously like another media property in the middle of its final season that summer.
Called a Mad Men replacement, Netflix’s satirical adult cartoon series Bojack Horseman also follows an aging former TV star and his sidekicks/hanger(s)-on through their misadventures in Hollywood (“Hollywoo”). Along the way they confront issues that fall under the rubric of “toxic masculinity,” such as workplace harassment, emotional immaturity, and the abuse of power in an industry with wildly unequal power dynamics. The show makes clear that neither old, nor new, Hollywood deserves a love letter — no more than other industries that allow such behavior. (It also features a caricature of Tarantino.)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, by contrast, celebrates the old star system and its privileges — or so Richard Brody argues at The New Yorker — in an “obscenely regressive vision of the 60s” that scrubs the decade of its protests and brutal crackdowns. The premise underlying Tarantino’s alternate-history dramedy seems to be: “If only the old-line Hollywood people of the fifties and sixties had maintained their pride of place—if only the times hadn’t changed, if only the keys to the kingdom hadn’t been handed over to the freethinkers and decadents of the sixties—then both Hollywood and the world would be a better, safer, happier place.”
Tarantino sets up “hippies,” a favorite pejorative of his characters, as fall guys for the Manson Family murders, rather than Manson’s own white supremacist beliefs. As many critics noted at the time, “the only substantial character of color, Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), is played… as a haughty parody” who gets “dramatically humiliated” by Pitt’s swashbuckling stuntman — who is rumored to have murdered his wife and who dispatches the film’s female Manson cult villains with the sadistic glee of a true psychopath, a scene, Brody writes, “that only hammers [Tarantino’s] doctrine home.”
Celebration there may be in the film, but there is also mourning. Christopher Hooten at Little White Lies scoffs at the “love letter” idea and sees the film instead as a lament for the end of cinema’s “freethinkers”:
This is Tarantino’s passion project – potentially his last film – and it comes across as him trying to sneak out a movie with a ’70s sensibility and tone before it’s no longer possible. Once the likes of Tarantino and Martin Scorsese have bowed out, that might well be it for auteur-driven filmmaking on a blockbuster scale. We’ve reached a polarisation in the industry where a director either works as a hired (and frequently fired) gun for a Disney or a Warner Bros, or else goes cap in hand in the hope of scraping together a few million dollars to make something more personal and unique.
The Tarantinos of the world might be a dying breed, but Tarantino isn’t leaving his art behind so much as turning his hand to “more personal and unique” projects – in this case a novel, and more specifically, “the pulpiest of pulp fiction — the novelization,” writes Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian.Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novelfinds him “cranking up the backstories, mulching up reality and alt.reality pastiche, ladling in new episodes,” and flexing his formidable strengths as a writer of crackling dialogue and action. The book also promises an ending viewers of the film won’t see coming.
The novel explores the inner lives of its female characters, including, of course, Sharon Tate “and the fictional child actor Trudi Fraser,” and adds an even darker edge to Cliff Booth, who is said to admire a certain character despite or because he is “unconsciously racist, consciously misogynistic.” This is Tarantino, after all, none of whose characters are ever shining examples of virtue. But in the post-auteur, post-Weinstein future, he seems to suggest, maybe old-Hollywood anti-heroes like Cliff Booth and Leonardo DiCaprio’s washed-up star Rick Dalton will only shine on streaming TV shows and in the pages of throwback pulp novels, “packaged like those New English Library paperbacks that used to be on carousel displays in supermarkets and drugstores.” You can pick up a copy of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novelhere.
On first encountering Antoni Jażwiński’s “Polish System,” I couldn’t help but think of Incan Quipu, the system that used knotted cords to keep official records. Like Quipu, Jażwiński’s system of colored squares relies on an extreme shorthand to tell complex stories with mnemonic devices. But maybe that’s where the similarities end. Jażwiński’s invention (circa (1820) does not so much resemble other forms of communication as it does the abstract art of the following century.
“Jażwiński’s Méthode polonaise promises that the complexities of centuries can be refined into colors, lines, squares, and just a few marks,” writes Philippa Pitts at Sequitur. “Neatly arranged into a diagram that can be diligently committed to memory, the twists and turns of battles and revolutions are rendered as panes of pure gentle color, quietly plotted as coordinates in a matrix, subsumed back into the orderly progress of history.”
His attempts to impose order on life may have come to little in the end, but as an artifact of visual culture, the “Polish System” is sublime. Pitts goes on to write:
There is a wonderful resonance between Jażwiński’s chronographs and a wide range of artistic production, despite the anachronism of such comparisons. They recall Piet Mondrian’s early checkerboards and Robert Delaunay’s simultaneity. There is something reminiscent of process art here: They evoke the repetitive, cataloguing handwork of Hanne Darboven or Agnes Martin. There appears to be a common calm, comfort, catharsis, or salvation promised by the embrace of rule, order, and logic.
Jażwiński, a Polish educator, invented the system in the 1820s. It was “later brought to public attention in the 1830s and 1840s by General Józef Bem, a military engineer with a penchant for mnemonics,” notes the Public Domain Review. Such systems cropped up everywhere in 19th-century education, such as those pioneered by Emma Willard, the first woman mapmaker in the U.S. “Jażwiński’s contribution (and its later adaptations) proved one of the most popular.”
He explained his system with long paragraphs of text (which you can read here, in French), little of which students were likely to remember. What mattered was whether they could make sense of the color-coding and symbols placed inside the grid system, with each grid standing for an entire century — 100 years of human history reduced, for example, in the figure above, to one name, Constantine the Great, and two symbols, a sword and cross. This was an example of a “chronological constellation,” in which historical events take particular shapes, “sometimes it’s a chair,” Jażwiński wrote, “a sickle, a boat, a letter of the alphabet, etc.”
Even the names neatly printed above the grids are redundant, Pitts suggests. In such systems, called chronographs, “denotative text is of limited use. It is connotative visuality which further condenses the information: Flags, shields, and insignia can serve as shorthand for nations and dynasties, while looming storm clouds, bright sunbursts, and invocations of classical architecture add layers of associated meaning.” The view of history represented by such systems is quaint, at best; their oversimplifications erase more than they could ever communicate. But their visual appeal is undeniable as objects from a pre-Google past, when memorization was the only way to reliably store and access knowledge outside of books.
How can we explain kindness and cruelty? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Why do people so often disagree about moral issues? This course from Yale University, Moralities of Everyday Life, explores the psychological foundations of our moral lives. Taught by psychology & cognitive science professor Paul Bloom, the course focuses on the origins of morality, compassion, how culture/religion influence moral thought and moral action, and beyond. If you select the “Audit” option, you can take the course for free.
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The Venus de Milo is one of art’s most widely recognized female forms.
The Mona Lisa may be the first stop on many Louvre visitors’ agendas, but Venus, by virtue of being unclothed, sculptural, and prominently displayed, lends herself beautifully to all manner of souvenirs, both respectful and profane.
Renoir is that rare bird who was impervious to her 6’7” charms, describing her as the “big gendarme.” His own Venus, sculpted with the help of an assistant nearly 100 years after the Venus de Milo joined the Louvre’s collection, appears much meatier throughout the hip and thigh region. Her celebrity cannot hold a candle to that of her armless sister.
In the Vox Almanac episode above, host Phil Edwards delves into the Venus de Milo’s appeal, taking a less delirious approach than sculptor Auguste Rodin, who rhapsodized:
…thou, thou art alive, and thy thoughts are the thoughts of a woman, not of some strange, superior being, artificial and imaginary. Thou art made of truth alone, outside of which there is neither strength nor beauty. It is thy sincerity to nature which makes thee all powerful, because nature appeals to all men. Thou art the familiar companion, the woman that each believes he knows, but that no man has ever understood, the wisest not more than the simple. Who understands the trees? Who can comprehend the light?
Edwards opts instead for a Sharpie and a tiny 3‑D printed model, which he marks up like a plastic surgeon, drawing viewers’ attention to the missing bits.
The arms, we know.
Also her earlobes, most likely removed by looters eager to make off with her jewelry.
One of her massive marble feet (a man’s size 15) is missing.
Interestingly, the plinth was among the items discovered by accident on the Greek island of Milos in 1820, along with two pillars topped with busts of Hercules and Hermes, the bisected Venus, and assorted marble fragments, including — maybe — an upper arm and hand holding a round object (a golden apple, mayhaps?)
What he’s most interested in is that plinth, which would have given the lie to the long-standing assertion that the Venus de Milo was created in the Classical era.
This incorrect designation made the Louvre’s newest resident a most welcome replacement for the loot France had been compelled to return to the Vatican in the wake of Napoleon’s first abdication.
The plinth may have been “lost” under mysterious circumstances, but its inscription was preserved in a sketch by A. Debay, whose father had been a student of Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon’s now-banished First Painter, a Neo-Classicist.
(David’s final painting, Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces, completed a couple of years after Venus de Milo was installed in the Louvre, was considered a bust.)
Debay’s faithful recreation of the plinth’s inscription as part of his study of the Venus de Milo offers clues as to her creator — “ …andros son of …enides citizen of …ioch at Meander made.”
It also dates her creation to 150–50 BCE, corroborating notes French naval officer Jules d’Urville had made in Greece weeks after the discovery.
The birth of this Venus should have been attributed to the Hellenistic, not Classical period.
Had her true author been known, she likely would’ve been locked away in the museum’s archive, if not sold off. Hellenistic art had by then been denigrated by Renaissance scholars who re-conceived it in anti-classical terms, finding in its expressive, experimental form and emotional content a provocative realism that defied everything their era stood for: modesty, intellect, and equanimity…It helped that the Venus de Milo possessed several classical attributes. Her strong profile, short upper lip, and smooth features, for example, were in keeping with Classical figural conventions, as was the continuous line connecting her nose and forehead. The partially-draped figure with its attenuated silhouette – which the Regency fashion of the day imitated with its empire bust-line – also recalled classical sculptures of Aphrodite, and her Roman counterpart, Venus. Yet despite all these classical identifiers, the Venus de Milo flaunted a definitive Hellenistic influence in her provocatively low-slung drapery, high waist line, and curve-enhancing contrapposto—far more sensual and exaggerated than classical ideals allowed.
It took the Louvre over a hundred years to come clean as to its star sculpture’s true provenance.
What happened to the plinth remains anyone’s guess.
The only mystery the museum’s website seems concerned with is one of identity — is she Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, or Poseidon’s wife, Amphitrite, the sea goddess worshipped on the island on which she was discovered?
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