Mystical Photographs Taken Inside a Cello, Double Bass & Other Instruments

in Music, Photography | February 7th, 2022

All images by Adri­an Bor­da

“If God had designed the orches­tra,” remarks a char­ac­ter in Rick Moody’s Hotels of North Amer­i­ca, “then the cel­lo was His great­est accom­plish­ment.” I couldn’t agree more. The cel­lo sounds sub­lime, looks state­ly… even the word cel­lo evokes regal poise and grace. If orches­tral instru­ments were chess pieces, the cel­lo would be queen: shape­ly and dig­ni­fied, prime mover on the board, majes­tic in sym­phonies, quar­tets, cham­ber pop ensem­bles, post rock bands….

With all its many son­ic and aes­thet­ic charms, I didn’t imag­ine it was pos­si­ble to love the cel­lo more. Then I saw Roman­ian artist Adri­an Bor­da’s mag­nif­i­cent pho­tos tak­en from inside one. The pho­to above, Bor­da tells us at his Deviant Art page, was tak­en from inside “a very old French cel­lo made in Napoleon’s times.” It looks like the bel­ly of the HMS Vic­to­ry mat­ed with the nave of Chartres Cathe­dral. The light descend­ing through the f‑holes seems of some divine ori­gin.

Bor­da has also tak­en pho­tos from inside an old dou­ble bass (above), as well as a gui­tar, sax, and piano. The stringed orches­tral instru­ments, he says, yield­ed the best results. He was first inspired by a 2009 ad cam­paign for the Berlin­er Phil­har­moniker that “cap­tured the insides of instru­ments,” writes Twist­ed Sifter, “reveal­ing the hid­den land­scapes with­in.” With­out any sense of how the art direc­tor cre­at­ed the images, Bor­da set about exper­i­ment­ing with meth­ods of his own.

He was lucky enough to have a luthi­er friend who had a con­tra­bass open for repairs. Lat­er he trav­eled to Amiens, where he found the French cel­lo, also open. “To achieve these shots,” Twist­ed Sifter notes, “Bor­da fit a Sony NEX‑6 cam­era equipped with a Samyang 8mm fish­eye lens inside the instru­ment and then used a smart remote so he could pre­view the work­flow on his phone.” Depend­ing on the angle and the play of light with­in the instru­ment, the pho­tos can look eerie, somber, omi­nous, or angelic—mirroring the cello’s expres­sive range.

Bor­da gives the cel­lo inte­ri­or shot above the per­fect title “A Long, Lone­ly Time….” Its play of smoke and light is ghost­ly noir. His pho­to below, of the inside of a sax­o­phone, pulls us into a haunt­ed, alien tun­nel. If you want to know what’s on the oth­er side, con­sid­er the strange sur­re­al­ist worlds of Borda’s main gig as a sur­re­al­ist painter of warped fan­tasies and night­mares. Unlike these pho­tos, his paint­ings are full of lurid, vio­lent col­or, but they are also filled with mys­te­ri­ous musi­cal motifs. See more of Bor­da’s inte­ri­or instru­ment pho­tos at Deviant Art and Twister Sifter.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a Luthi­er Birth a Cel­lo in This Hyp­not­ic Doc­u­men­tary

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Hear the Amati “King” Cel­lo, the Old­est Known Cel­lo in Exis­tence (c. 1560)

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

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Space Sex is Serious Business: A Hilarious Short Animation Addresses Serious Questions About Human Reproduction in Space

in Biology, Physics, Science | February 7th, 2022

Back in the late 80s, there was a rumor float­ing around that Earth Girls Are Easy.

40 some years of sci­en­tif­ic and social advance­ment have shift­ed the con­ver­sa­tion­al focus.

We’re just now begin­ning to under­stand that Space Sex is Seri­ous Busi­ness.

Par­tic­u­lar­ly if SpaceX CEO Elon Musk achieves his goal of estab­lish­ing a per­ma­nent human pres­ence on Mars.

Sure­ly at some point in their long trav­els to and res­i­dence on Mars, those pio­neers would get down to busi­ness in much the same way that rats, fruit flies, par­a­sitic wasps, and Japan­ese rice fish have while under obser­va­tion on pri­or space expe­di­tions.

Mean­while, we’re seri­ous­ly lack­ing in human data.

A pair of human astro­nauts, Jan Davis and Mark Lee, made his­to­ry in 1992 as the first mar­ried cou­ple to enter space togeth­er, but NASA insist­ed their rela­tions remained strict­ly pro­fes­sion­al for the dura­tion, and that a shut­tle’s crew com­part­ment is too small for the sort of antics a nasty-mind­ed pub­lic kept ask­ing about.

In an inter­view with Mens Health, Colonel Mike Mul­lane, a vet­er­an of three space mis­sions, con­firmed that a space­craft’s lay­out does­n’t favor romance:

The only pri­va­cy would have been in the air lock, but every­body would know what you were doing. You’re not out there doing a space­walk. There’s no rea­son to be in there.

Short­ly after Davis and Lee returned to earth, NASA for­mal­ized an unspo­ken rule pro­hibit­ing hus­bands and wives from ven­tur­ing into space togeth­er. It did lit­tle to squelch pub­lic inter­est in space sex.

One won­ders if NASA’s rule has been rewrit­ten in accor­dance with the times. Air lock aside, might same sex cou­ples remain free to swing what het­ero-nor­ma­tive mar­rieds (arguably) can­not?

This is but one of hun­dreds of space sex ques­tions beg­ging fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion.

Some of the most seri­ous are raised in Tom McCarten’s wit­ty col­lage ani­ma­tion for FiveThir­tyEight, above.

Name­ly how dam­ag­ing will cos­mic radi­a­tion and micro­grav­i­ty prove to human repro­duc­tion? As more humans toy with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of leav­ing Earth, this ques­tion feels less and less hypo­thet­i­cal.

Mag­gie Koerth-Bak­er, who researched and nar­rates the ani­mat­ed short, notes that Musk por­trayed the risks of radi­a­tion as minor dur­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion at the 67th Inter­na­tion­al Astro­nau­ti­cal Con­gress in Guadala­jara, Mex­i­co, and breathed not a peep as to the effects of micro­grav­i­ty.

Yet sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies of non-human space trav­el­ers doc­u­ment a host of repro­duc­tive issues includ­ing low­ered libido, atyp­i­cal hor­mone lev­els, ovu­la­to­ry dys­func­tion, mis­car­riages, and fetal muta­tions.

On its web­page, NASA pro­vides some infor­ma­tion about the Repro­duc­tion, Devel­op­ment, and Sex Dif­fer­ences Lab­o­ra­to­ry of its Space Bio­sciences Research Branch, but remains mum on top­ics of press­ing con­cern to, say, stu­dents in a typ­i­cal mid­dle school sex ed class.

Like achiev­ing and main­tain­ing erec­tions in micro­grav­i­ty.

In Phys­i­ol­o­gy News Mag­a­zine, Dr. Adam Watkins, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of Repro­duc­tive and Devel­op­men­tal Phys­i­ol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham, sug­gests that inter­nal and exter­nal atmos­pher­ic changes would make such things, par­don the pun, hard:

First­ly, just stay­ing in close con­tact with each oth­er under zero grav­i­ty is hard. Sec­ond­ly, as astro­nauts expe­ri­ence low­er blood pres­sure while in space, main­tain­ing erec­tions and arousal are more prob­lem­at­ic than here on Earth. 

The excep­tion­al­ly forth­right Col Mul­lane has some con­tra­dic­to­ry first hand expe­ri­ence that should come as a relief to all humankind:

A cou­ple of times, I would wake up from sleep peri­ods and I had a bon­er that I could have drilled through kryp­tonite.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Free Online Astron­o­my Cours­es

Watch Fam­i­ly Plan­ning, Walt Disney’s 1967 Sex Ed Pro­duc­tion, Star­ring Don­ald Duck

The Sto­ry Of Men­stru­a­tion: Watch Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Bob Dylan Goes Punk on Late Night with David Letterman, Playing “Jokerman” with the Latino Punk Band, the Plugz (1984)

in Music, Television | February 7th, 2022

Lis­ten to Bob Dylan’s stu­dio albums all you like; you don’t know his music until you hear the live ver­sions. That, at least, is the con­clu­sion at which I’ve arrived after spend­ing the bet­ter part of the past year lis­ten­ing through Dylan’s stu­dio discog­ra­phy. This is not to put him into the mold of the Grate­ful Dead, whose stu­dio albums come a dis­tant sec­ond in impor­tance to their vast body of live record­ings. It was sure­ly the songs pre­served on the likes of High­way 61 Revis­it­ed, Blood on the Tracks, and Love and Theft, after all, that won Dylan the Nobel Prize. But in a sense he’s nev­er stopped writ­ing these same songs, often sub­ject­ing them to brazen styl­is­tic and lyri­cal changes when he launch­es into them onstage.

This self-rein­ter­pre­ta­tion occa­sion­al­ly pro­duces what Dylan’s fans con­sid­er a new defin­i­tive ver­sion. Per­haps the most agreed-upon exam­ple is “Jok­er­man,” the open­er to his 1983 album Infi­dels (and the basis for one of his ear­li­est MTV music videos), which he per­formed the fol­low­ing year on the still-new Late Night with David Let­ter­man.

As Vul­ture’s Matthew Giles puts it, Let­ter­man was fast becom­ing “a com­e­dy sen­sa­tion, bring­ing a new lev­el of sar­casm, irony, and Bud Mel­man-cen­tric humor to a late-night for­mat still reliant on the smooth unflap­pa­bil­i­ty of John­ny Car­son.” Dylan had been going in the oth­er direc­tion, “hav­ing frus­trat­ed his audi­ence with the musi­cal­ly slick, lyri­cal­ly hec­tor­ing series of evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian albums that he’d released in the late 70s and ear­ly 80s.”

By 1984, “Dave was far more of a coun­ter­cul­ture hero than Bob.” But Dylan had been sur­rep­ti­tious­ly prepar­ing for his next musi­cal trans­for­ma­tion: many were the nights he would “leave his Mal­ibu home and slip into shows by the likes of L.A. punk stal­warts X, or check out the San­ta Mon­i­ca Civic Cen­ter when the Clash came to town.” For accom­pa­ni­ment on the Let­ter­man gig he brought drum­mer J.J. Hol­i­day,  as well as Char­lie Quin­tana and bassist Tony Mar­si­co of the LA punk band the Plugz, with whom he’d been spent the pre­vi­ous few months jam­ming. It isn’t until they take Let­ter­man’s stage that Dylan tells the band what to open with: blues­man Son­ny Boy Williamson’s “Don’t Start Me Talk­ing.”

Just above, you can see Dylan’s rehearsal for the Let­ter­man show. It fea­tures five tracks–“I Once Knew a Man,” “License to Kill,” “Treat Her Right,” “My Guy,” and a ren­di­tion of “Jok­er­man” that turns the orig­i­nal’s reg­gae into stripped-down, hard-dri­ving rock. The styl­is­tic change seems to infuse the 42-year-old Dylan with a new sense of musi­cal vital­i­ty. As for the song itself, its lyrics — cryp­tic even by Dylan’s stan­dards — take on new mean­ings when charged by the young band’s ener­gy. But even in this high­ly con­tem­po­rary musi­cal con­text, Dylan keeps it “clas­sic” by bring­ing out the har­mon­i­ca for a final solo, though not with­out some con­fu­sion as to which key he need­ed. If any­thing, that mix-up makes the song even more punk — or maybe post-punk, pos­si­bly new wave, but in any case thor­ough­ly Dylan.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bob Dylan Plays Tom Petty’s “Learn­ing to Fly” Live in Con­cert (and How Pet­ty Wit­nessed Dylan’s Musi­cal Epiphany in 1987)

Bob Dylan & The Grate­ful Dead Rehearse Togeth­er in Sum­mer 1987: Hear 74 Tracks

Watch Bob Dylan Per­form “Only A Pawn In Their Game,” His Damn­ing Song About the Mur­der of Medgar Evers, at the 1963 March on Wash­ing­ton

Bob Dylan at the White House

How Bob Dylan Cre­at­ed a Musi­cal & Lit­er­ary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

75 Post-Punk and Hard­core Con­certs from the 1980s Have Been Dig­i­tized & Put Online: Fugazi, GWAR, Lemon­heads, Dain Bra­m­age (with Dave Grohl) & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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Google’s UX Design Professional Certificate: 7 Courses Helps Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months

in Design, Online Courses | February 7th, 2022

Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, Google launched a series of Career Cer­tifi­cates that will “pre­pare learn­ers for an entry-lev­el role in under six months.” One such cer­tifi­cate focus­es on User Expe­ri­ence Design, or what’s called UX Design, the process design teams use to cre­ate prod­ucts that pro­vide mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences to users.

Offered on the Cours­era plat­form, the User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate fea­tures sev­en cours­es, includ­ing the Foun­da­tions of User Expe­ri­ence, Start the UX Design Process, Build Wire­frames and Low-Fideli­ty Pro­to­types, and Con­duct UX Research and Test Ear­ly Con­cepts. In total, this pro­gram “includes over 200 hours of instruc­tion and hun­dreds of prac­tice-based activ­i­ties and assess­ments that sim­u­late real-world UX design sce­nar­ios and are crit­i­cal for suc­cess in the work­place. The con­tent is high­ly inter­ac­tive and devel­oped by Google employ­ees with decades of expe­ri­ence in UX design.” Upon com­ple­tion, stu­dents can direct­ly apply for jobs with Google and over 130 U.S. employ­ers, includ­ing Wal­mart, Best Buy, and Astreya. You can start a 7‑day free tri­al and explore the cours­es. If you con­tin­ue beyond that, Google/Coursera will charge $39 USD per month. That trans­lates to about $235 after 6 months.

Explore the User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate by watch­ing the video above. Learn more about the over­all Google career cer­tifi­cate ini­tia­tive here. And find oth­er Google pro­fes­sion­al cer­tifi­cates here.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Intro­duces 6‑Month Career Cer­tifi­cates, Threat­en­ing to Dis­rupt High­er Edu­ca­tion with “the Equiv­a­lent of a Four-Year Degree”

Cours­era and Google Launch an Online Cer­tifi­cate Pro­gram to Help Stu­dents Become IT Pro­fes­sion­als & Get Attrac­tive Jobs

Become a Project Man­ag­er With­out a Col­lege Degree with Google’s Project Man­age­ment Cer­tifi­cate

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Read the Original Serialized Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918)

in Literature | February 4th, 2022

In the sec­ond decade of the 20th cen­tu­ry, Amer­i­can edi­tor Mar­garet C. Ander­son pub­lished The Lit­tle Review, a month­ly lit­er­ary jour­nal of mod­ernist and exper­i­men­tal prose, poet­ry, and art. Four years into its exis­tence, at the begin­ning of 1918, Ander­son announced to her read­ers this:

“I have just received the first three instal­ments [sic] of James Joyce’s new nov­el which is to run seri­al­ly in The Lit­tle Review, begin­ning with the March num­ber.
It is called “Ulysses”.
It car­ries on the sto­ry of Stephen Dedalus, the cen­tral fig­ure in ‘A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man”.
It is, I believe, even bet­ter than the “Por­trait”.
So far it has been read by only one crit­ic of inter­na­tion­al rep­u­ta­tion. He says: “It is cer­tain­ly worth run­ning a mag­a­zine if one can get stuff like this to put in it. Com­pres­sion, inten­si­ty. It looks to me rather bet­ter than Flaubert”.
This announce­ment means that we are about to pub­lish a prose mas­ter­piece.”

Feb­ru­ary 2, 2022 marked the 100th anniver­sary of Ulysses, the day on which the full nov­el, first seri­al­ized in The Lit­tle Review, was pub­lished. Joyce, like many of The Lit­tle Review’s British and Euro­pean writ­ers, came to Ander­son through her fel­low edi­tor Ezra Pound. Ander­son might have sensed the great­ness that was to come and she knew the dan­ger in that great­ness. In the end, pub­lish­ing Ulysses would make her an ene­my of the state.

Over at the Mod­ernist Jour­nals Project, you can read every sin­gle issue of The Lit­tle Review (and oth­er such mag­a­zines) to place this rev­o­lu­tion­ary nov­el in con­text. The March 1918 issue which begins the jour­ney of Dedalus and Leopold Bloom also fea­tures works by Wyn­d­ham Lewis and Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Jes­si­ca Dis­morr, and Arthur Symons; let­ters (and some hate mail) from read­ers; adver­tise­ments for oth­er lit­er­ary mag­a­zines like The Quill, The Pagan, and The Ego­ist; ads for restau­rants in Green­wich Vil­lage, and one for the Berlitz School of Lan­guages; and a final appeal for more read­ers.

The most inter­est­ing of these sec­tions is Pound’s screed against Amer­i­can obscen­i­ty laws. The Lit­tle Review had already had an issue con­fis­cat­ed by the US Post Office. In 1917, a Wyn­d­ham Lewis sto­ry about a sol­dier who gets a girl preg­nant and aban­dons her was declared obscene, both for “lewd­ness” and its anti-war stance. Pound sus­pect­ed the gov­ern­ment was tar­get­ing Ander­son and her co-edi­tor (and lover) Jane Heap for their sup­port of anar­chists Emma Gold­man and Alexan­der Berk­man, along with their anti-war stances.

The Wyn­d­ham Lewis inci­dent had made it dif­fi­cult for Ander­son and Heap to find a pub­lish­er, so they knew some of the risks in begin­ning the ser­i­al. Soon enough they ran into trou­ble. Ulysses con­sists of 18 chap­ters or “Episodes”. The US gov­ern­ment seized the issues fea­tur­ing Episode 8 (“Lestry­go­ni­ans”), Episode 9 (“Scyl­la and Charyb­dis”), and Episode 12 (“Cyclops”) and burned them. But it was Episode 13, “Nau­si­caa,” that led to charges being filed against the pub­lish­ers. The chap­ter, which fea­tures a girl expos­ing her­self and Leopold Bloom mas­tur­bat­ing to orgasm (but writ­ten in such a, well, Joycean way that most would just miss it), was too much for some.

The tri­al that fol­lowed was a trav­es­ty, includ­ing a judge rul­ing that the offen­sive sec­tions of “Nau­si­caa” not be read out loud because a woman was present. When it was point­ed out that the woman was the pub­lish­er Ander­son her­self, he declared  “she did­n’t know the sig­nif­i­cance of what she was pub­lish­ing”. Ander­son and Heap were found guilty, forced to dis­con­tin­ue pub­lish­ing “Ulysses” and fined one hun­dred dol­lars.

The Lit­tle Review print­ed a sec­tion of Episode 14 (“Oxen of the Sun”) and then stopped. Ander­son thought of giv­ing up the mag­a­zine, but turned over con­trol to Heap. The mag­a­zine con­tin­ued pub­lish­ing until 1929, but removed their mot­to: “Mak­ing No Com­pro­mise with the Pub­lic Taste.”

James Joyce did not stop, how­ev­er, and Sylvia Beach—an ex-pat liv­ing in Paris and run­ning the book­store Shake­speare and Co.—pub­lished the full nov­el in 1922. Amer­i­cans would have to wait one more year, 1923, to read this “obscene” nov­el.

Ander­son was cor­rect however—-she had a major role in pro­mot­ing this “prose mas­ter­piece.” And one hun­dred years lat­er, Puri­tan­i­cal Amer­i­cans are still ban­ning and burn­ing books, which is only result­ing, like it did for Joyce’s nov­el, in send­ing the works into the Best Sell­er lists.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sylvia Beach Tells the Sto­ry of Found­ing Shake­speare and Com­pa­ny, Pub­lish­ing Joyce’s Ulysses, Sell­ing Copies of Hemingway’s First Book & More (1962)

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load as a Free Audio Book & Free eBook

Vir­ginia Woolf on James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Nev­er Did Any Book So Bore Me.” Shen Then Quit at Page 200

James Joyce’s Cray­on Cov­ered Man­u­script Pages for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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John Locke’s Personal Pancake Recipe: “This Is the Right Way” to Make the Classic Breakfast Treat

in Food & Drink, History, Philosophy | February 4th, 2022

No stu­dent of West­ern polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy can ignore John Locke, whose work defined the con­cepts of gov­er­nance we now know as lib­er­al­ism. By the same token, no stu­dent of West­ern cui­sine can ignore pan­cakes, a canon­i­cal ele­ment of what we now know as break­fast. The old­est pan­cake recipe we’ve fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture dates to 1585. Ernest Hem­ing­way had his own pre­ferred pan­cake-mak­ing method; so do Simon and Gar­funkel, though theirs are of the pota­to vari­ety.

Locke, as you might imag­ine, opt­ed for a more tra­di­tion­al­ly Eng­lish recipe. Three cen­turies on, how well his vision of lib­er­al­ism has held up remains a mat­ter of active debate. As for his pan­cakes, Maris­sa Nicosia at Cook­ing in the Archives put them to the test just last year. “When David Armitage post­ed this recipe for pan­cakes in the Bodleian col­lec­tion on Twit­ter, I knew that I want­ed to try it,” Nicosia writes. Her tran­scrip­tion is as fol­lows:

pan­cakes
Take sweet cream 3/4 + pint. Flower a
quar­ter of a pound. Eggs four 7 leave out two 4 of
the whites. Beat the Eggs very well. Then put in
the flower, beat it a quar­ter of an how­er. Then
put in six spoon­fulls of the Cream, beat it a litle
Take new sweet but­ter half a pound. Melt it to oyle, &
take off the skum, pow­er in all the clear by degrees
beat­ing it all the time. Then put in the rest of
your cream. beat it well. Half a grat­ed nut­meg
& litle orange­flower water. Frie it with­out but­ter.
This is the right way

“From the start, I was intrigued by the cross-outs and oth­er notes in the recipe. It appears that it was first draft­ed (or pre­pared) using sig­nif­i­cant­ly few­er eggs.” As metic­u­lous in his cook­ing as in his phi­los­o­phy, Locke clear­ly paid close atten­tion to “the details of sep­a­rat­ing and whisk­ing eggs as well as adding just the right amount of orange blos­som water (‘litle’) and nut­meg (‘Half a grat­ed nut­meg’) — an excep­tion­al, expen­sive amount.”

Draw­ing on her sig­nif­i­cant expe­ri­ence with ear­ly mod­ern pan­cakes, Nicosia describes Lock­e’s ver­sion as “a bit fluffi­er and fat­ti­er than a clas­sic French crêpe,” though with “far less rise than my favorite Amer­i­can break­fast ver­sion”; her hus­band places them “some­where between a clas­sic Eng­lish pan­cake and a Scotch pan­cake.” Per­haps that some­what norther­ly taste and tex­ture stands to rea­son, in light of the con­sid­er­able influ­ence Lock­e’s non-pan­cake-relat­ed work would lat­er have on the Scot­tish Enlight­en­ment.

The final line of Lock­e’s recipe, “This is the right way,” may sound a bit stern in con­text today. But whether you work straight from his orig­i­nal or from the updat­ed ver­sion Nicosia pro­vides in her post, you should end up with “pan­cakes made for a deca­dent break­fast.” Lock­e’s inclu­sion of an extrav­a­gant amount of nut­meg and splash of orange-blos­som water “ele­vates this spe­cif­ic pan­cake recipe to a spe­cial treat.” Nicosia includes a pic­ture of her own hon­ey-driz­zled Lock­ean break­fast with the a copy of Two Trea­tis­es of Gov­ern­ment and a cup of cof­fee — the lat­ter being an espe­cial­ly ide­al accom­pa­ni­ment to pan­cakes, and one that also comes thor­ough­ly philoso­pher-endorsed.

via Rare Cook­ing

Relat­ed con­tent:

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Hobbes, Locke & Rousseau: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Their Polit­i­cal The­o­ries

The Polit­i­cal Thought of Con­fu­cius, Pla­to, John Locke & Adam Smith Intro­duced in Ani­ma­tions Nar­rat­ed by Aidan Turn­er

What Makes Us Human?: Chom­sky, Locke & Marx Intro­duced by New Ani­mat­ed Videos from the BBC

A 1585 Recipe for Mak­ing Pan­cakes: Make It Your Sat­ur­day Morn­ing Break­fast

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Bialetti Moka Express: A Deep Dive Into Italy’s Most Popular Coffee Maker

in Food & Drink, History, Technology | February 3rd, 2022

Which cof­fee mak­er is most deeply embed­ded in Amer­i­can cul­ture? I would nom­i­nate the hum­ble Mr. Cof­fee, a device ref­er­enced on Cheers as well as Sein­feld, in the work of Ray­mond Carv­er as well as that of the Blood­hound Gang (to say noth­ing of the 1970s mass-media phe­nom­e­non that was its com­mer­cials star­ring Joe DiMag­gio). But I would also urge my fel­low Amer­i­cans to ask them­selves when last they actu­al­ly used one, or at least used one to sat­is­fy­ing results. Italy, by con­trast, knows what it is to take a cof­fee mak­er to heart. As one study found, nine out of ten Ital­ian house­holds pos­sess­es, in one form or anoth­er, the same basic mod­el: the Bialet­ti Moka Express.

As Ted Mills wrote here with con­fi­dence last month, “many an Open Cul­ture read­er has a Bialet­ti Moka Express in their kitchen. I know I do, but I must add that I knew lit­tle about its his­to­ry and appar­ent­ly even less about how to prop­er­ly use one.” Enter cof­fee Youtu­ber and The World Atlas of Cof­fee author James Hoff­mann, whose intro­duc­to­ry video proved pop­u­lar enough to launch a mini-series that takes a deep dive into the mechan­ics and vari­a­tions on the near­ly 90-year-old “moka pot.”

In the sec­ond episode, just above, Hoff­man per­forms a series of exper­i­ments vary­ing ele­ments of the sim­ple device — start­ing tem­per­a­ture, grind size, heat pow­er — in order to deter­mine how it makes the best cup of cof­fee.

In episode three, Hoff­man (who clear­ly knows a thing or two about not just cof­fee, but how to name a Youtube video to algo­rith­mic advan­tage) refines “the ulti­mate moka pot tech­nique.” Much depends, of course, on fac­tors like what sort of beans you buy, as well as sub­jec­tive con­sid­er­a­tions like how you want your cof­fee to taste — your pre­ferred “fla­vor pro­file,” as they now say. The long­time moka pot user will inevitably feel his/her way to his/her own idio­syn­crat­ic pro­ce­dure and set of acces­sories, and will more than like­ly also accrue a for­mi­da­ble col­lec­tion of moka pots them­selves. Here Hoff­man lines up ten of them, half of which are just dif­fer­ent sizes of the clas­sic Moka Express, its sil­hou­ette rec­og­niz­able at any scale.

Less famil­iar mod­els take cen­ter stage in the fourth episode, “The Moka Pot Vari­a­tions.” In it Hoff­man puts to the test the Bialet­ti’s dou­ble-cream espres­so-mak­ing Brik­ka; their cap­puc­ci­no-capa­ble Muk­ka; the tiny, dis­con­tin­ued Cuor di Moka, with its cor­re­spond­ing­ly avid fan base; and final­ly some­thing called the Kami­ra, which looks less like a cof­fee mak­er than a piece of recy­cled indus­tri­al art. Even apart from these, a vari­ety of com­pa­nies now make a vari­ety of moka pots, every sin­gle one of which has no doubt at least a few seri­ous cof­fee drinkers swear­ing by it. I myself have a weak­ness for Bialet­ti’s Moka Alpina; whether it makes a supe­ri­or brew I could­n’t say, but the jaun­ti­ness of that Tyrolean feath­er is hard­ly debat­able.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Bialet­ti Moka Express: The His­to­ry of Italy’s Icon­ic Cof­fee Mak­er, and How to Use It the Right Way

Life and Death of an Espres­so Shot in Super Slow Motion

How to Make the World’s Small­est Cup of Cof­fee, from Just One Cof­fee Bean

The Birth of Espres­so: How the Cof­fee Shots The Fuel Our Mod­ern Life Were Invent­ed

An Espres­so Mak­er Made in Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Style: Raw Con­crete on the Out­side, High-End Parts on the Inside

The Hertel­la Cof­fee Machine Mount­ed on a Volk­swa­gen Dash­board (1959): The Most Euro­pean Car Acces­so­ry Ever Made

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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In 1922, a Novelist Predicts What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wireless Telephones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

in History, Technology | February 2nd, 2022

A cen­tu­ry ago, the pop­u­lar Eng­lish nov­el­ist W.L. George sat down and put his mind to envi­sion­ing the world we live in today. That world has not, alas, turned out to be one in which his books are much read, but in his day a great many read­ers were moved by his social cause-dri­ven fic­tion and reportage. One might com­pare him to Upton Sin­clair, his con­tem­po­rary on the oth­er side of the Atlantic. In the Paris-born-and-raised George’s ances­tral home­land, George Orwell described him as an author of what G.K. Chester­ton called “good bad books,” sin­gling out for praise his 1920 nov­el Cal­iban amid the “shod­dy rub­bish” of his wider oeu­vre.

Still even authors of rub­bish — and per­haps espe­cial­ly authors of rub­bish — can sense the shape of things to come. For its edi­tion of May 7, 1922, the New York Her­ald com­mis­sioned George to share that sense with their read­ers. In response he described a world in which “com­mer­cial fly­ing will have become entire­ly com­mon­place,” reduc­ing the sep­a­ra­tion of Amer­i­ca and Europe to eight hours, and whose pas­sen­ger steam­ers and rail­roads will have con­se­quent­ly fall­en into obso­les­cence. “Wire­less teleg­ra­phy and wire­less tele­phones will have crushed the cable sys­tem,” result­ing in gen­er­a­tions who’ll nev­er have seen “a wire out­lined against the sky.”

That goes for the trans­mis­sion of elec­tric­i­ty as well, since George cred­its (a bit hasti­ly, it seems) the pos­si­bil­i­ty of wire­less pow­er sys­tems of the kind researched by Niko­la Tes­la. In 2022, coal will take a dis­tant back­seat to the tides, the sun, and radi­um, and “it may also be that atom­ic ener­gy will be har­nessed.” As for the cin­e­ma, “the fig­ures on the screen will not only move, but they will have their nat­ur­al col­ors and speak with ordi­nary voic­es. Thus, the stage as we know it to-day may entire­ly dis­ap­pear, which does not mean the doom of art, since the movie actress of 2022 will not only need to know how to smile but also how to talk.”

Oth­er women, how­ev­er, have proven just as capa­ble as George had imag­ined: “All posi­tions will be open to them and a great many women will have risen high. The year 2022 will prob­a­bly see a large num­ber of women in Con­gress, a great many on the judi­cial bench, many in civ­il ser­vice posts, and per­haps some in the Pres­i­den­t’s Cab­i­net.” Georges fore­sees the birth-con­trol pill, but also the “pill lunch.” Unlike some reform­ers, he hes­i­tates to declare the abo­li­tion of the fam­i­ly, but he does imag­ine the “major­i­ty of mankind” occu­py­ing mod­u­lar homes in high-rise com­mu­nal dwellings (“I have a vision of walls, fur­ni­ture, and hang­ings made of more or less com­pressed papi­er-mâché”), all gath­ered in cli­mate-con­trolled cities set under glass.

On the whole, in 2022, “the advance­ment of sci­ence will be amaz­ing, but it will be noth­ing like so amaz­ing as is the present day in rela­tion to a hun­dred years ago.” Indeed, he sus­pects that a glimpse of our real­i­ty would­n’t much sur­prise “the lit­tle girl who sells can­dies at Grand Cen­tral Sta­tion.” It could even be dull, what with com­plete set­tle­ment and devel­op­ment leav­ing “no more oppor­tu­ni­ty in Amer­i­ca than there is in Eng­land to-day.” In 1922, George could write that “in fic­tion, Amer­i­ca leads the world by sin­cer­i­ty, faith and fear­less­ness,” and believe that “in 2022 Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture will be a lit­er­a­ture of cul­ture. The bat­tle will be over and the muz­zle off. There will be no more things one can’t say, and things one can’t think.” What­ev­er the inspi­ra­tions of his prophe­cy, they must not have told him about social media.

You can find a copy of George’s orig­i­nal arti­cle over at the Library of Con­gress.

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via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1953, a Tele­phone-Com­pa­ny Exec­u­tive Pre­dicts the Rise of Mod­ern Smart­phones and Video Calls

Jules Verne Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts What the 20th Cen­tu­ry Will Look Like in His Lost Nov­el, Paris in the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry (1863)

In 1900, Ladies’ Home Jour­nal Pub­lish­es 28 Pre­dic­tions for the Year 2000

Futur­ist from 1901 Describes the World of 2001: Opera by Tele­phone, Free Col­lege & Pneu­mat­ic Tubes Aplen­ty

In 1911, Thomas Edi­son Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Pover­ty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

In 1926, Niko­la Tes­la Pre­dicts the World of 2026

9 Sci­ence-Fic­tion Authors Pre­dict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asi­mov, William Gib­son, Philip K. Dick & More Imag­ined the World Ahead

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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