This fall, historian Timothy Snyder is teaching a course at Yale University called The Making of Modern Ukraine. And he’s generously making the lectures available on YouTube–so that you can follow along too. All of the currently-available lectures appear above (or on this playlist), and we will keep adding new ones as they come online. A syllabus for the course can be found here. Key questions covered by the course include:
What brought about the Ukrainian nation? Ukraine must have existed as a society and polity on 23 February 2022, else Ukrainians would not have collectively resisted Russian invasion the next day. Why has the existence of Ukraine occasioned such controversy? In what ways are Polish, Russian, and Jewish self-understanding dependent upon experiences in Ukraine? Just how and when did a modern Ukrainian nation emerge? Just how for that matter does any modern nation emerge? And why some nations and not others? What is the balance between structure and agency in history? Can nations be chosen, and does it matter? Can the choices of individuals influence the rise of much larger social organizations? If so, how? Ukraine was the country most touched by Soviet and Nazi terror: what can we learn about those systems, then, from Ukraine? Is the post-colonial, multilingual Ukrainian nation a holdover from the past, or does it hold some promise for the future?
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Mud everywhere…and where there wasn’t mud, there was fog, and in between was us, enjoying ourselves. — Berta Ruck
Berta Ruck and Frances ‘Effy’ Jones were teenagers in the 1890s, and while their recollections of their formative years in muddy old London are hardly a portrait of Jazz Age wildness, neither are they in keeping with modern notions of stuffy Victorian mores.
Interviewed for the BBC documentary series Yesterday’s Witness in 1970, these nonagenarians are formidable personages, sharper than proverbial tacks, and unlikely to elicit the sort of agist pity embodied in the lyrics of a popular ditty Ruck remembers the Cockneys singing in the gutter after the pubs had closed for the night.
“Do you think I might dare to sing [it] now?” Ruck, then 91, asks (rhetorically):
She may have known better days
When she was in her prime
She may have known better days
Once upon a time…
(Raise your hand if you suspect those lyrics are describing a washed up spinster in her late 20s or early 30s.)
The 94-year-old Jones reaches back more than 7 decades to tell about her first job, when she was paid 8 shillings a week to sit in a storefront window, demonstrating a new machine known as a typewriter.
Some of her earnings went toward the purchase a bicycle, which she rode back and forth to work and overnight holidays in Brighton, scandalously clad in bloomers, or as Jones and her friends referred to them, “rational dress”.
We do hope at least one of these features a heroine resentfully brushing a skirt muddied up to the knees by passing hansom cabs, an imposition Ruck refuses to sweeten with the nostalgia.
As the British Film Institute’s Patrick Russell writes in 100 British Documentaries, the Yesterday’s Witness series, and Jones and Ruck’s episode, in particular, popularized the oral history approach to documentary, in which the director-interviewer is an invisible presence, creating the impression that the subject is speaking directly to the audience, unprompted:
The series’ makers successfully resisted any temptations to patronize or editorialize, and aimed at sympathetic curiosity rather than nostalgia. The two women tell their stories fluently, humorously, intelligently — offering considered retrospective comment on their generation’s assumptions, neither simply accepting nor rejecting them…Unlike textbooks, and other types of documentary, films like Two Victorian Girls gave the youth access to the modern past as privately experienced.
Even if you don’t speak a word of Chinese, you surely know that the language uses not an alphabet, but ideographic characters: about 50,000 of them, all told, 3,000 to 5,000 of which must be memorized in order to achieve reasonable literacy. The potential for conflict between the Chinese writing system and twenty-first-century technology hardly needs explanation. How, in short, do Chinese people type? Youtuber Johnny Harris offers an explanation in the video above, beginning with the perhaps counterintuitive answer that Chinese people type with more or less the same keyboard everyone else does — when they’re using a computer, at any rate.
Our smartphone age has given rise to a number of different input systems, all designed to perform the same basic task of adapting the ancient and elaborate written Chinese language to digital modernity. In Harris’ telling, these technologies turn on two major developments: the creation of pinyin, a version of the Latin alphabet that phonetically represents Chinese characters, and the development of algorithms that predict which character the user wants to type next.
His explanation is breezy and not without its errors (the diagram about thirteen minutes in, for example, actually shows the Korean alphabet), and you might consider supplementing it with videos like expatriate Matthew Tye’s more detailed “How Do Chinese People Type?” above.
But if you truly want to understand the evolution of Chinese typing, you must begin with the Chinese typewriter — and so must read Tom Mullaney. A Professor of East Asian Language and Cultures at Stanford University, Mullaney published The Chinese Typewriter: A Historyfive years ago, and has more recently been at work on a follow-up on the Chinese computer. In the lecture above, he recounts the Chinese typewriter’s once-impossible-seeming development in an hour and a half, connecting it to a host of cultural, linguistic, orthographic, and technological phenomena along the way. It’s a story of ingenuity, but also of survival. Chinese made it through the twentieth century without being mangled or abolished to meet the limitations of Western engineering, but not every writing system was quite so lucky.
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
If you’re just starting out on acoustic guitar, buying your first instrument might seem simple enough…. Head to your local music shop (or ecommerce retailer), thrust out your hand, and say something like, “Give me a beginner guitar now!” Pay your money, take your lessons, Bob’s your uncle, right?
Ah, but say you encounter one of those things known as a guitar salesperson? And say that person has some questions… “Ok, we’ve got traditional-style dreadnoughts with cutaways or no cutaways. We’ve got concert sized guitars, parlor guitars, classical, all sorts!” And you, formerly confident shopper, now find yourself at sea. What’s the difference?
They’re already on to talking about different materials used in making guitars and you check out. You imagine a pursuit where you know what you’re doing: I could learn harmonica…. How many kinds of those are there?
Fear not, beginner, YouTube guitar educator Paul Davids is here to teach us the types of acoustic guitars we’re likely to encounter in the wild, as well as the different kinds of “tone woods” and why they make a difference.
Tone wood simply means the kinds of trees used to make the guitar – maple, mahogany, rosewood, spruce, etc. – and it’s called “tone wood” instead of just “wood” for a reason. Among makers and players of electric guitars, a never-ending argument persists about how much tone wood matters. There should be little debate when it comes to acoustic guitars.
The sound of an acoustic guitar comes from the pick, or the fingers, and from the neck, where the strings’ contact with the fretboard travels down to the resonating chamber of the body and gets sent out into the world. At each of these contact points, the properties of the wood in question naturally condition the shape of the sound waves.
Enlisting the help of Eastwood Guitars Pepijn ‘t Hart above, who donated the guitars in the first video for demonstration purposes, Davids demonstrates beyond question that different woods used to construct the back, sides, and top of an acoustic guitar have a tremendous effect on the tone.
From brighter to darker, treblier to bassier, or whatever you want to call the range of tones, you’ll hear them in these examples of different materials used to make the same sized guitars. Why is this important? As Hart explains, an acoustic guitar is basically its own amplifier. While you can adjust the tone somewhat with technique, the first thing you need to do as an acoustic guitar player is determine the best type of instrument you’ll need for the kind of music you’re playing.
Guitarists may also need to consider (eventually), the kinds of musicians they’re playing with. A heavy rock ensemble with rumbling bass and drums will require a much brighter guitar to cut through the mix, whereas accompanying a banjo player or violinist will call for more low end.
You can still grab the first beginner acoustic guitar you find online and call it a day. But if you’re serious about learning the instrument – and learning to play in a musical tradition, be it folk, blues, country, classical, rock, or whatever – you’ll need this essential information. Davids and Hart make it fun and easy to acquire in the two-part educational series above.
Those sweetly sentimental lyrics were penned not by A.A. Milne, creator of Winnie-The-Pooh but rather the Academy-Award winning songwriting team of brothers Robert and Richard Sherman, who also penned the scores of Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and The Jungle Book.
This means that Milne’s work can be freely reproduced or reworked, though Disney retains the copyright to their animated character designs.
Jennifer Jenkins, director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University, told the Washington Post that the bulk of the inquiries she fielded in the lead up to 2022’s public domain titles becoming available had to do with Winnie the Pooh:
I can’t get over how people are freaking out about Winnie-the-Pooh in a good way. Everyone has a very specific story of the first time they read it or their parents gave them a doll or they [have] stories about their kids…It’s the Ted Lassoeffect.We need a window into a world where people or animals behave with decency to one another.”
Ummm…
Judging by the trailer for their upcoming live action, low budget feature, Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, Jagged Edge, a London-based horror production company, is not much interested in Ted Lasso good vibes, though they do manage to stay within the limits of the law, equipping a black clad Piglet with threatening tusks, and dressing the titular “silly old bear” in a red shirt that doesn’t exactly scream Tummy Song.
When you see the cover for this and you see the trailers and the stills and all that, there’s no way anyone is going to think this is a child’s version of it.
Here’s hoping he’s right.
The trailer traffics freely in slasher flick tropes:
A bikini clad young woman relaxing, obliviously, in a hot tub.
A hand held camera tracking a desperate, and probably doomed, escape attempt through the woods.
Unnerving warnings written in blood (or possibly honey?)
The childish scrawl on the sign demarcating the 100 Acre Wood is both faithful to the original, and unmistakably sinister.
Equally disturbing is the lettering on Eeyore’s homemade grave marker. (SPOILER: as per Variety, a starving Pooh and Piglet ate him…and apparently discarded a human skull nearby.)
The “enchanted neighborhood of Christopher’s childhood days” has gone decidedly downhill.
Director Frake-Waterfield paints Pooh and Piglet as the primary villains, but surely the college-bound Christopher Robin deserves some of the blame for abandoning his old friends.
On the other hand, when a college-bound Andy tossed his beloved childhood playthings in a giveaway box at the beginning of Toy Story 3, Buzz and Woody did not go on a murderous rampage.
As Frake-Waterfield described Pooh and Piglet’s devolution to HuffPost:
Because they’ve had to fend for themselves so much, they’ve essentially become feral. So they’ve gone back to their animal roots. They’re no longer tame: they’re like a vicious bear and pig who want to go around and try and find prey.
An interview with Dread Centraloffers a graphic taste of the violent mayhem they inflict, even as Christopher Robin, as clueless as a bikini clad innocent in a hot tub, bleats, “We used to be friends, why are you doing this!?”
Unsurprisingly, the film’s tagline is “This Ain’t No Bedtime Story.”
Even cinephiles who know little of the business of film distribution will have developed associations, however unconscious, between certain pre-feature corporate logos and the exhilarating cinematic experiences that tend to follow. What sort of picture comes to mind, for example, when you read the name Kino Lorber? Perhaps documentaries on such compelling subjects as New York Times street-fashion photographer Bill Cunningham or gone-viral Winnebago pitchman Jack Rebney; perhaps international genre spectacles of recent years like Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night or Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Let the Corpses Tan.
Then again, your own taste in Kino Lorber-distributed movies may run to the likes of Goodbye to Language, Jean-Luc Godard’s 2014 meditation originally screened in 3D — or Derek Jarman’s autobiographical last testament Blue, which plays out entirely on a solid field of the eponymous color.
These are just a few of the more than 75 films now available free to watch on Kino Lorber’s Youtube channel. (Note that the actual number of viewable films may vary depending on your location.) Spanning various eras, genres, origins, and forms, together they offer a sense of the niche Kino Lorber has carved out for itself during its 45 years in business so far.
You may spot an old favorite on Kino Lorber’s Youtube channel, but the greater joy of exploring it lies in discovering films you missed the first time around. Gabe Klinger’s Porto, for instance, went practically unseen despite its evocative vision of the title city and posthumous showcase of acclaimed actor Anton Yelchin. Boasting a cast of Phoebe Cates, Bridget Fonda, Tim Roth, and Eric Stoltz, Michael Steinberg’s Bodies, Rest & Motion screened at Cannes as an Un Certain Regard selection back in 1993; surely the time has come for its reappraisal as a distillation of Generation‑X ennui. Even Taika Waititi once made lesser-known movies in and about his native New Zealand. Thanks to Kino Lorber, his fans can can watch Boy, which launched him on the journey that has made him one of the most globally popular directors alive. See the complete playlist of films here.
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
The Foo Fighters have teamed up with Taylor Hawkins’ family to stream worldwide their all-star celebration of the legendary drummer. Above you can stream the Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concert taking place in Wembley Stadium. Note: if you missed the beginning, you can scroll the video back to the very start.
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!
Lyricists must write concretely enough to be evocative, yet vaguely enough to allow each listener his personal interpretation. The nineteen-sixties and seventies saw an especially rich balance struck between resonant ambiguity and massive popularity — aided, as many involved parties have admitted, by the use of certain psychoactive substances. Half a century later, the visions induced by those same substances offer the closest comparison to the striking fruits of visual artificial-intelligence projects like Google’s Deep Dream a few years ago or DALL‑E today. Only natural, perhaps, that these advanced applications would sooner or later be fed psychedelic song lyrics.
The video at the top of the post presents the Electric Light Orchestra’s 1977 hit “Mr. Blue Sky” illustrated by images generated by artificial intelligence straight from its words. This came as a much-anticipated endeavor for Youtube channel SolarProphet, which has also put up similarly AI-accompanied presentations of such already goofy-image-filled comedy songs as Lemon Demon’s “The Ultimate Showdown” and Neil Cicierega’s “It’s Gonna Get Weird.”
Jut above appears a video for David Bowie’s “Starman” with AI-visualized lyrics, created by Youtuber Aidontknow. Created isn’t too strong a word, since DALL‑E and other applications currently available to the public provide a selection of images for each prompt, leaving it to human users to provide specifics about the aesthetic — and, in the case of these videos, to select the result that best suits each line. One delight of this particular production, apart from the boogieing children, is seeing how the AI imagines various starmen waiting in the sky, all of whom look suspiciously like early-seventies Bowie. Of all his songs of that period, surely “Life on Mars?” would be choice number one for an AI music video — but then, its imagery may well be too bizarre for current technology to handle.
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
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