Americans today can acquire every element of their Thanksgiving dinner practically ready to eat, in need of little more than some heat before being set on the table. This very Thursday, in fact, many Americans will no doubt do just that. But it wasn’t an option two centuries ago, especially for those who lived on the wild frontier. To see how they’d have put their Thanksgiving dinner together, you’ll want to consult one Youtube channel in particular: Early American, previously featured here on Open Culture for its videos re-creating various meals as they would have been prepared circa 1820.
The creators of Early American, Justine Dorn and Ron Rayfield, also happen to be a married couple in real life. In their videos they appear to play historical versions of themselves, adhering to the domestic division of labor custom would have dictated in rural America of the early nineteenth century.
All this happens at the hearth, which demands a set of skills (and a set of tools, including an hourglass) not normally possessed by home-cooking enthusiasts of the twenty-twenties. But the meal that results will surely look appetizing even to modern viewers. Though Abraham Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, George Washington first issued a proclamation for “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer” in 1789. And by that time, many of Thanksgiving’s dishes had already become established tradition. (Turkey and cranberry were linked together in the first American cookbook in 1796, NPR notes.) As always, Justine provides the original recipes (scant in detail though they often are) at the end. Use them well, it seems, and you can have a grand Thanksgiving feast even if you don’t bring home a turkey.
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.
The Youtube channel GlamourDaze invites you to time travel back to a sunny beach in roaring 20s Biarritz France. And, to help you along, they’ve enhanced the original 1928 video with AI technology. Setting the stage, they write:
By the 1920’s, the coastal resort of Biarritz on the Côte Basque in France attracted the fashionable and wealthy during the summer and early autumn. Those who could afford it, stayed at the Hôtel du Palais which was originally a summer villa built for Empress Eugénie. Her visits turned Biarritz into a popular summer resort.
The film starts with clips from a hotel overlooking the beach, then a street fashion show. We then move down to the beach for a walk among the sunbathers and swimmers.
In just a few years over the 1920’s, women’s swimsuits had evolved considerably when compared to those seen in our recent video “A Day at the Beach c. 1921″.
The roaring twenties saw seismic changes in clothing, style and social attitudes.
You can find more historical footage restored with AI in the Relateds below.
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Every moving image we watch today descends, in a sense, from the work of Eadweard Muybridge. In the 1870s he devised a method of photographing the movements of animals, a study he expanded to humans in the 1880s. This constituted a leap toward the development of cinema, though you wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking at the best-known images he produced, such as the set of cards known as The Horse in Motion. You may get a more vivid sense of his photography’s import by seeing it in animated GIF form, as previously featured here on Open Culture, including the very first kiss on film.
Though he often worked with nude models, “Muybridge was not into smut and eroticism,” says Flashbak. “His rapid-fire sequential photographs of two naked women kissing served to aid his studies of human and animal movement. It was in the interests of art and science Muybridge secured the services of two women, invited them to undress and photographed them kissing.” This turns out to be somewhat more plausible than it sounds: the Muybridge online archive notes that “because of Victorian sexual taboos Muybridge was not able to photograph men and women naked together,” and in any case it was commonly believed that “women had little or no sex drive.”
Whatever its relationship to public morality at the time, Muybridge’s kiss suggested the shape of things to come. For a long time after the invention of cinema, writes the New York Times’ A. O. Scott, “a kiss was all the sex you could show on-screen.” Today, “we sometimes look back on old movies as artifacts of an innocent, more repressive time,” but the rich history of “the cinematic kiss” reveals “yearning and hostility, defiance and pleading, male domination and female assertion. There are unlikely physical contortions and suggestive compositions, sometimes imposed by the anti-lust provisions of the code” — the censorious “Hays Code” that restricted the content of American movies between 1934 and 1968 — “sometimes by the desire to breathe new formal life into a weary convention.” Muybridge may have been the first to figure out how to capture a kiss, but generations of filmmakers have had to reinvent the practice over and over ever since.
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.
The nineteen-seventies had its own distinctive aesthetics, questionable though that period’s styles have often looked to subsequent generations. So, in stark, jagged, neon contrast, did the eighties. Those of us who came of age in the nineties have, in recent years, come to appreciate that look and feel of what then surrounded us, which seemed both bland and exaggerated at the time. But around the turn of the millennium, something fundamental seems to have changed. The brief “Y2K” era may now officially be retro, but how different was the style of the two-thousands from that of the subsequent decade, or indeed one after that — the one in which we find ourselves right now?
To put the question more bluntly, why don’t decades feel culturally distinct anymore? “The dimension of the future has disappeared,” British theorist Mark Fisher once said in a lecture. “We’re marooned, we’re trapped in the twentieth century, still.”
To be in the twenty-first century is nothing more than “to have twentieth-century culture on high-definition screens.” Though Fisher died five years ago, his observations have only become more relevant to our cultural condition. We’re still experiencing what he called “the slow cancellation of the future,” a phenomenon explained in the Epoch Philosophy video at the top of the post.
“The way we experience artistic time periods is dying as we speak,” explains the video’s narrator. “In our current state of this new postmodern social existence that we see in the West, historicity is gone. The way we interact and experience time is starting to fade away into a confused jumbled mess of aesthetic chaos.” The culprit, in Fisher’s view? The triumph of capitalism, and more so the “capitalist realism” that closes off the possibility of even imagining alternative social and economic orders. “During the age of social democracy, Britain funded art programs and film centers,” resulting in “experimental classics” and “extremely artistic British TV.” These and other mechanisms maintained a “sublime value around art” that protected it from “the whims of the market.”
Today we have only “a hyper-commodified sphere of art, where the primary goal is now making a profit — not necessarily out of pure love of profit, but the realization that your ability to be an artist will die without tangible sales.” Hence the “recycling of old art” in forms as various as “music, TV, film, and even video games.” This absence of the truly new, to Fisher’s mind, implied the death of the very idea of the future, of improvement on or at least a break from the present. No matter our political views — or our ability to digest Fisher’s use of Derridean terms like “hauntology” — we’ve all felt the truth of this in our cultural lives. As technology marches on, we indulge ever more deeply in nostalgia, pastiche, and retro-futurism. Perhaps we can break out of this cycle, but Fisher, safe to say, was not optimistic.
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.
We may not know for sure the identity of Banksy, the English street artist famous for his social-commentary graffiti murals inspired and integrated with their surroundings. But given his apparent interests, we might have suspected him to turn up in Ukraine sooner or later. Recently posted by Banksy himself, the video above shows him at work in the region of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, each of which makes a visual comment on this year’s Russian invasion and the fortitude Ukraine’s people have shown against it. “As is typical of Banksy’s work,” writes The Art Newspaper’s Torey Akers, “the artist’s edits combine a satirist’s edge for winking commentary with a sincere investment in political solidarity.”
In another, “a young boy flips an older man onto his back in a judo match. Some speculate that the older man is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is known to be a judo enthusiast.” (Banksy has developed a distinctive sensibility in his decades of public art, but subtlety isn’t its foremost element.) His images put up elsewhere “juxtapose wartime imagery with snapshots of civilian life: in one, children ride a metal tank trap as a seesaw,” and in another “a woman in her dressing gown wears a gas mask.”
The conflict in Ukraine now approaches its tenth month, with no clear signs of an end to the violence. Civilian life can’t go on, yet must go on, and it comes as no surprise that Banksy would find something to draw upon in that harrowing and contradictory state of affairs. Nor could it have been lost on him what contextual power the shambolic urban environments of Borodyanka, Hostomel, and Horenka — towns literally torn apart by war — could grant even murals humorously spray-painted upon its surfaces.
At the end of the video, Akers notes, “a heated local man points to an image the artist painted on a graffitied wall so that a pre-existing tag of a penis became a warhead atop an armored truck and declares, ‘For this, I would kick out all his teeth and break his legs.’ ” Even in a war zone, everybody’s a critic.
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.
André Hörmann and Anna Samo’s short animation, Obon, opens on a serene scene — a quiet forest, anda red torii gate framing moonlight on the water.
But then we notice that the water is choked with bodies, victims of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Akiko Takakura, whose reminiscences inspired the film, arrived for work at the Hiroshima Bank just minutes before the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb “Little Boy” over the city, killing some 80,000 instantly.
Takakura-san, who had been cleaning desks and mooning over a cute co-worker with her fellow junior bank employee Satomi Usami when the bomb hit, was one of the 10 people within a radius of 500 meters from ground zero to have survived .
(Usami-san, who fought her way out of the wreckage with her friend’s assistance, later succumbed to her injuries.)
Animator Samo, whose style harkens to traditional woodcuts, based her depiction of the horrors confronting the two young women when they emerge from the bank on the drawings of survivors:
Without craft or artistry to hide behind, the drawings told stories unfiltered, made me hear shaking voices saying: this is what happened to us.
Takakura-san attempted to capture one such image in a 1974 drawing:
I saw one corpse with burning fingers. Her hand was raised and her fingers were on fire, blue flames burning them down to stumps. A light charcoal-colored liquid was oozing onto the ground. When I think of those hands cradling beloved children and turning the pages of books, even now my heart fills with a deep sadness.
Takakura-san was 84 when writer/director Hörmann traveled to Japan to meet with historians, nuclear scientists, peace researchers and elderly survivors of the atomic bomb. Over the course of three 90 minute sessions, he noticed a quality that set her apart from the other survivors he interviewed :
…the stories that she told me there was always a glimmering light of hope in the midst of all of the horror. For me, it was a sigh of relief to have this moment of hope and peace, it was beautiful. It is impossible to just tell a story that is all pain. Ms. Takakura’s story was a way for me to look at this dark piece of history and not be emotionally crushed.
Her perspective informs the film, which travels backward and forward throughout time.
We meet her as a tiny, kimono-clad old woman in modern day Japan, whose face now bears a strong resemblance to her father’s. Her back is crisscrossed with scars of the 102 lacerations she sustained on the morning of August 6, 1945.
We then see her as a little girl, whose father, “a typical man from Meiji times, tough and strict,” is unable to express affection toward his daughter.
This changed when the 19-year-old was reunited with her family after the bombing, and her father asked for forgiveness while tenderly bathing her burned hands.
To Hörmann this “tiny moment of happiness” and connection is at the heart of Obon.
Animator Samo wonders if Takakura-san would have achieved “peace with the world that was so cruel to her” if her father hadn’t tended to her wounded hands so gently:
What does an act of love in a moment of despair mean? Can it allow you to you go on with a normal life, drink tea and cook rice? If you have seen so much death, can you still look people in the eyes, get married and give birth to children?
The film takes its title from the annual Buddhist holiday to commemorate ancestors and pay respect to the dead.
As an old woman, Takakura-san tends to the family altar, then travels with younger celebrants to the river for the release of the paper lanterns that are believed to guide the spirits back to their world at the festival’s end.
The face that appears in her glowing lantern is both her father’s and a reflection of her own.
8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945,
a very clear morning.
The mother preparing her baby’s milk,
the old man watering his potted plants,
the old woman offering flowers at her Buddhist altar,
the young boy eating breakfast,
the father starting work at his company,
the thousands walking to work on the street,
all died.
Not knowing an atomic bomb would be dropped,
they lived as usual.
Suddenly, a flash.
“Ah ~
Just as they saw it,
people in houses were shoved over and smashed.
People walking on streets were blown away.
People were burned-faces, arms, legs-all over.
People were killed, all over
the city of Hiroshima
by a single bomb.
Those who died.
A hundred? No. A thousand? No. Ten thousand?
No, many, many more than that.
More people than we can count
died, speechless,
knowing nothing.
Others suffered terrible burns,
horrific injuries.
Some were thrown so hard
their stomachs ripped open,
their spines broke.
Whole bodies filled with glass shards.
Clothes disappeared,
burned and tattered.
Fires came right after the explosion.
Hiroshima engulfed in flames.
Everyone fleeing, not knowing where
they were or where to go.
Everyone barefoot,
crying tears of anger and grief,
hair sticking up, looking like Ashura*,
they ran on broken glass, smashed roofs
along a long, wide road of fire.
Blood flowed.
Burned skin peeled and dangled.
Whirlwinds of fire raged here and there.
Hundreds, thousands of fire balls
30-centimeters across
whirled right at us.
It was hard to breathe in the flames,
hard to see in the smoke.
What will become of us?
Those who survived, injured and burned,
shouted, “Help! Help!” at the top of their lungs.
One woman walking on the road
died and then
her fingers burned,
a blue flame shortening them like candles,
a gray liquid trickling down her palms
and dripping to the ground.
Whose fingers were those?
More than 50 years later,
I remember that blue flame,
and my heart nearly bursts
with sorrow.
The B‑52s’ debut single “Rock Lobster” brought the party and a playful sense of the absurd
to New Wave.
The New York Times nailed the band’s appeal as “70s punks molded not from the syringes and leather of New York City, but from the campy detritus you might have found in the thrift stores and garage sales of their home of Athens, Ga.: bright clothes, toy pianos, old issues of Vogue, tall wigs and discarded vinyl:”
They channeled spy soundtracks, exotica, surf music, long-abandoned dance crazes and garage rock …The B‑52s were a sui generis clash of sounds that help bring punk to the suburban kids more likely to watch Saturday Night Live than visit CBGB:Fred Schneider’s sing-shout poetry, Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson’s alien girl-group harmonies, Ricky Wilson’s tricky guitar riffs and Keith Strickland’s art-funky drums. Even demographically they were nothing like the new world of new wave being built by Talking Heads and Devo: 40 percent female, 60 percent Southern, 80 percent queer, 100 percent fun.
Their quirky sense of humor found favor with a wider audience thanks to 1989’s Cosmic Thing, with its irresistible “Love Shack.”
“It’s a fictitious place, but the whole idea is that everyone’s welcome to the party,” Kate Pierson told The Guardian.
“Roam,” Cosmic Thing’s other chart topper offers a similarly bouncy groove, well suited to road trips and other adventures. “We were on the bus,” Pierson explains:
We partied with each other – we had some epic bus parties, and the bus driver created a dance called the Bore Hog. We would do our concert then get on the bus and keep rolling. It was a wild ride though. We were tired of being this underground band – this was a confirmation of something.
Pierson and Cindy Wilson’s isolated “Roam” harmonies, above, strike us as aural confirmation of something else.
Not just Classic Pop’s apt description of the pair’s tight harmonies as a combination of “Appalachian folk music” and “teenage Motown fantasies of hairbrushes for microphones…”
With the instruments removed (and Schneider temporarily benched), “Roam” evinces a haunting quality that supports Cindy Wilson’s assertion that “it’s a beautiful song about death:”
It’s about when your spirit leaves your body and you can just roam.
Wilson, whose brother and bandmate, Ricky, died from AIDS in 1985 at the age of 32, recalled the recording process:
When we started jamming, it felt like Ricky was in the room with us. I was having a really hard time with the grieving and sorrow, but creating this music was such a wonderful thing. Ricky’s spirit was there and it was amazing. We did that music for ourselves, and it really helped me.
Imagine the afterlife as a great after party, where auto-tune hasn’t been invented yet, and the harmonies are truly angelic.
Historical research reveals psychoactive substances to have been in use longer than most of us would assume. But did Adam and Eve do mushrooms in the Garden of Eden? Unsurprisingly, that question is fraught on more than one level. But if you wish to believe that they did, spend some time with the thirteenth-century artwork above, known as the Plaincourault fresco. In it, writes Atlas Obscura’s Emma Betuel, “Adam and Eve stand in the Garden of Eden, both of them faceless.” Between them “stands a large red tree, crowned with a dotted, umbrella-like cap. The tree’s branches end in smaller caps, each with their own pattern of tiny white spots” — just like you’d see on certain species of fungus. “Tourists, scholars, and influencers come to see the tree that, according to some enthusiasts, depicts the hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria.”
This image, more than any other piece of evidence, supports the theory that “early Christians used hallucinogenic mushrooms.” Supports is probably the wrong word, though there have been true believers since at least since 1911, “when a member of the French Mycological Society suggested the thing sprouting between Adam and Eve was a ‘bizarre’ and ‘arborescent’ mushroom.” The video essay just below, “Psychedelics in Christian Art,” presents the cases for and against the Tree of Life being a bunch of magic mushrooms. It comes from Youtuber Hochelaga, whose videos previously featured here on Open Culture have covered subjects like the Voynich Manuscript and the Biblical apocalypse. This particular episode comes as part of a miniseries on “strange Christian art” whose previous installments have focused on hellmouths and the three-headed Jesus.
Nevertheless, Hochelaga can’t come down on the side of the mushrooms-seers. Similar vegetation appears in other pieces of medieval art, but “in reality, these are drawings of trees, rendered with strange forms and bright colors,” as dictated by the relatively loose and exaggerated aesthetic of the era. But that doesn’t mean the Plaincourault fresco has nothing to teach us, and the same holds for other “psychedelic” Christian creations, like the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or the art-inspiring music of Hildegard von Bingen. Judging by the investigations this sort of thing has inspired — Tom Hatsis’ “The Psychedelic Gospels, The Plaincourault fresco, and the Death of Psychedelic History,” Jerry B. Brown and Julie M. Brown’s Journal of Psychedelic Studies article “Entheogens in Christian Art: Wasson, Allegro, and the Psychedelic Gospels” — the relevant history constitutes quite a trip by itself.
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.
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