A Researcher Identifies the Old Man on the Iconic Cover of Led Zeppelin IV, 52 Years After the Album’s Release

in Art, Music | November 10th, 2023

Who’s that bearded man on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV, the one hunched over, carrying a large bundle of sticks? Brian Edwards, a researcher from the University of the West of England, has solved the 52-year-old mystery. Looking through a photo album while conducting research, Edwards spotted a photograph and, being a Led Zeppelin fan, “instantly recognised the man with the sticks.” “It was quite a revelation, he told the BBC.” From there, he figured out who took the photograph in 1892 (Ernest Howard Farmer), and eventually identified the figure in the photo itself: Lot Long, a thatcher from Mere, a town in Wiltshire, England. You can see him above.

Decades later, Robert Plant apparently found a colorized version of the photograph in an antique shop. On the 1971 album cover, we see the photo turned into a framed painting and layered onto the wall of a drab home. The rest, as they say, is rock ’n’ roll history…

William S. Burroughs Reviews a Led Zeppelin Concert for Crawdaddy! Magazine (1975)

Hear Led Zeppelin’s First Recorded Concert Ever (1968)

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Watch Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa Get Entirely Recreated with 50,000 LEGO Bricks

in Art | November 10th, 2023

A few years ago here on Open Culture, we featured a re-creation of The Great Wave off Kanazawa made entirely out of LEGO by a serious enthusiast named Jumpei Mitsui. Though the work’s depth does come across to some extent in still photos, it bears repeating that Mitsui assembled not just a two-dimensional image, but a complete three-dimensional scene that, when viewed straight on, looks just like Hokusai’s famous woodblock print. All told, the project required 50,000 LEGO bricks, all of which you can now watch Mitsui lay down in the ten-minute time-lapse video above.

By presenting the whole construction process from a variety of angles, the video allows us to better appreciate not just the painstaking manual labor involved, but the amount of creative and technical work necessary to conceptualize the Great Wave — perhaps the foremost example of the vividly flat ukiyo‑e woodblock print style — in physical reality.

Viewers who’ve never tried their hand at large-scale LEGO building will also be surprised by the way in which Mitsui goes about building the grid-like sub-structure that undergirds what looks, in the finished product, like a sold sea of bricks.

It’s natural that Mitsui (now a “LEGO Certified Professional”) has shared the details of how he built his best-known LEGO creation on Youtube, given that it was on the same platform that he gained some of the knowledge necessary to execute it in the first place. “The brick artist observed waves on Youtube for hours, and read academic papers on waves to better understand their forms and energy,” notes The Kid Should See This, underscoring the intensity of preparation required even for what may, at first, look like a novelty project. And if the still-young Mitsui is anything like his nineteenth-century countryman, he’ll be tempted to build the Great Wave again, and even better, a few more times in the decades to come.

via The Kid Should See This

Ai Weiwei Recreates Monet’s Water Lilies Triptych Using 650,000 Lego Bricks

The Frank Lloyd Wright LEGO Set

With 9,036 Pieces, the Roman Colosseum Is the Largest LEGO Set Ever

Why Did LEGO Become a Media Empire? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #37

The Evolution of The Great Wave off Kanagawa: See Four Versions That Hokusai Painted Over Nearly 40 Years

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Political Scientist Ian Bremmer Breaks Down the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

in Current Affairs | November 9th, 2023

Ian Bremmer, a political scientist and president of Eurasia Group, has an intelligent, fair, and humane way of explaining crises around the world. That includes the current crisis in the Middle East. Above, he spends an hour discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its geo-political and historical context. Speaking with BigThink’s editor-in-chief, Robert Chapman-Smith, Bremmer delves “into internal politics in Israel — including growing dissent against the government, how the conflict in Gaza is being handled, the influence of hard-right political parties, and the impact of these factors on the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians.” Below you can find timestamps for the different subjects covered.

0:00 Palestinians forgotten
6:30 Israel’s domestic instability
13:17 Israel and Gulf states
19:28 Hamas’ strategy
27:06 Social media disinformation
37:20 Israel’s strategy and peace
44:40 U.S. support for Israel
49:32 World War 3?
54:07 Two-state solution

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One Hour of David Lynch Listening to Rain, Smoking & Reflecting on Art

in Art, Film, Life | November 9th, 2023

At this point, there’s no need to point out the dangers posed by smoking. Those who do it these days do it in full knowledge of the health risks involved, for reasons of their own. Sometimes those reasons are artistic ones: “I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it,” says David Lynch in Jon Nguyen’s documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, describing his youthful conception of what it was to be an artist. “Maybe girls come into it a little bit, but basically, it’s the incredible happiness of working and living that life.” Though much better known as a filmmaker than a painter, Lynch has never stopped living that life, cigarette-smoking and all.

The “you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint” line surfaces in the audio mix of the video above, which mashes up that and other of Lynch’s observations from various places and times with looped footage of him silently smoking and listening to the rain falling outside. Most of his words here have to do with “the art life”: how he conceives of it, how he lives it, and how he made his way into it in the first place.

Some of them will be well familiar to longtime Lynch fans, not least his notion that, when it comes to getting the ideas with which he builds his work, the “little fish” swim on the surface of consciousness, but the “big fish” — the stranger, more powerful ideas that lead, presumably, to a Blue Velvet or a Mulholland Dr. — inhabit the kind of depths accessible only through meditation.

Along with such pieces of Lynchian advice come expressions of enthusiasm, memories from his younger days, and reflections on history, society, and nature, all of them similarly decontextualized and backed by an ominous-sounding piece of music. The resulting ambience isn’t entirely unlike that of Lynch’s deliberately disturbing sitcom Rabbits, but it also fits in with the burgeoning genre of long-form Youtube videos optimized for relaxation value. Thirty years ago, when each movie or television show he made seemed to surpass the last in sheer weirdness, we entered Lynch’s world in order to be unsettled, to see and hear things at once inexplicably compelling and obscurely horrifying; in the twenty-twenties, we go there to unwind.

Bertrand Russell Explains How Smoking Paradoxically Saved His Life

David Lynch Explains How Meditation Enhances Our Creativity

Cigarette Commercials from David Lynch, the Coen Brothers and Jean Luc Godard

An Anti, Anti-Smoking Announcement from John Waters

Two Short Films on Coffee and Cigarettes from Jim Jarmusch & Paul Thomas Anderson

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Renaissance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades & Now You Can Hear the Songs Performed by Modern Singers

in History, Music | November 9th, 2023

Image courtesy of The Victoria and Albert Museum

On any given weekend, in any part of the state where I live, you can find yourself standing in a hall full of knives, if that’s the kind of thing you like to do. It is a very niche kind of experience. Not so in some other weapons expos—like the Arms and Armor galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where everyone, from the most warlike to the staunchest of pacifists, stands in awe at the intricate ornamentation and incredibly deft craftsmanship on display in the suits of armor, lances, shields, and lots and lots of knives.

We must acknowledge in such a space that the worlds of art and of killing for fame and profit were never very far apart during Europe’s late Medieval and Renaissance periods. Yet we encounter many similar artisanal instruments from the time, just as finely tuned, but made for far less belligerent purposes.

As Maya Corry of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge—an institution with its own impressive arms and armor collection—comments in the video above (at 2:30), one unusual kind of 16th century knife meant for the table, not the battlefield, offers “insight into that harmonious, audible aspect of family devotions,” prayer and song.

From the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge. (Johan Oosterman )

These knives, which have musical scores engraved in their blades, brought a table together in singing their prayers, and may have been used to carve the lamb or beef in their “striking balance of decorative and utilitarian function.” At least historians think such “notation knives,” which date from the early 1500s, were used at banquets. “The sharp, wide steel would have been ideal for cutting and serving meat,” writes Eliza Grace Martin at the WQXR blog, “and the accentuated tip would have made for a perfect skewer.” But as Kristen Kalber, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses the knives at the top of the post, tells us “diners in very grand feasts didn’t cut their own meat.” It’s unlikely they would have sung from the bloody knives held by their servants.

The knives’ true purpose “remains a mystery,” Martin remarks, like many “rituals of the Renaissance table.” Victoria and Albert Museum curator Kirstin Kennedy admits in the video above that “we are not entirely sure” what the “splendid knife” she holds was used for. But we do know that each knife had a different piece of music on each side, and that a set of them together contained different harmony parts in order to turn a roomful of diners into a chorus. One set of blades had the grace on one side, with the inscription, “the blessing of the table. May the three-in-one bless that which we are about to eat.” The other side holds the benediction, to be sung after the dinner: “The saying of grace. We give thanks to you God for your generosity.”

Common enough verbiage for any household in Renaissance Europe, but when sung, at least by a chorus from the Royal College of Music, who recreated the music and made the recordings here, the prayers are superbly graceful. Above, hear one version of the Grace and Benediction from the Victoria and Albert Museum knives; below, hear a second version. You can hear a captivating set of choral prayers from the Fitzwilliam Museum knives at WQXR’s site, recorded for the Fitzwilliam’s “Madonnas & Miracles” exhibit. We are as unlikely now to encounter singing kitchen knives as we are to run into a horse and rider bearing 100 pounds of finely-wrought wearable steel sculpture. Such strange artifacts seem to speak of a strange people who valued beauty whether carving up the main course or cutting down their enemies.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why People Hate Brutalist Buildings on American College Campuses

in Architecture, History | November 8th, 2023

Many Americans receive their introduction to the style known as Brutalism in college. This owes less to courses in twentieth-century architecture than to university campuses themselves, which tend to have been expanded or even wholly constructed in the decades immediately following the Second World War. As Vox’s Dean Peterson explains in the new video above, its veterans returned home eager to receive the tertiary education to which the G.I. Bill entitled them, which “necessitated that universities build new facilities to handle ballooning admissions. And with so many new buildings being needed, what did architects of the day turn to? Brutalism.”

“Not just a style of architecture but an entire aesthetic ethos,” Brutalism had developed through inspiration from the work of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. While other architects had employed concrete before him, he was the one to make the bold choice of leaving it exposed on the surface in its raw form: béton brut, to use the term that gave the movement its name.

To qualify under the rubric of this “new Brutalism,” as architectural historian Reyner Banham (later to become famous for his ultra-modern view of Los Angeles) referred to it, a structure should demonstrate “memorability as an image,” “clear exhibition of structure,” and “valuation of materials ‘as found’ ” — in contrast to the nineteen-fifties’ proliferation of seemingly featureless glass-sheathed skyscrapers designed by modernists like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his many imitators.

“Brutalist buildings strove for honesty in their materials and structure,” says Peterson. “They showed you how they were constructed.” Though acclaimed in their day as built statements of a break from the staid past into a wholly reimagined future, many campus Brutalist buildings in the United States subsequently fell into disrepair, owing to the economic downturn of the seventies and the resultant lapses into “deferred maintenance” — which, deferred long enough, shades into planned demolition. Such has been the case with Evans Hall, the statistics, economics, and mathematics building at University of California, Berkeley, which, since its construction in 1971, played an important part in the history of computer science, not least as the node through which the whole of the west coast connected to ARPANET, the military-built precursor to the internet.

Today, objections to Evans Hall’s Brutalist aesthetics, as well as to its location in front of the San Francisco Bay and its poor earthquake-safety rating (that last being fairly common among UC Berkeley’s structures), have led to its being emptied out with an eye toward replacement. Though it may be too late for Evans Hall, much of America’s Brutalist heritage can still be rehabilitated. “Be patient,” says architecture professor Timothy Rohan (author of a study of American Brutalist Paul Rudolph). “Just because you find something unfashionable at the moment doesn’t mean you should eradicate it.” This is not, perhaps, advice particularly well-suited to college students, but given the likelihood of their exposure to Brutalism not just on campus but also on Instagram, they may turn out to be its best hope yet.

Why Do People Hate Modern Architecture?: A Video Essay

How the Radical Buildings of the Bauhaus Revolutionized Architecture: A Short Introduction

The World According to Le Corbusier: An Animated Introduction to the Most Modern of All Architects

A is for Architecture: 1960 Documentary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Modern Times

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

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Rocky Horror Became a Cult Phenomenon

in Film, Gender, Theatre | November 8th, 2023

Call us old fashioned but invoking pumpkin spice and The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the same breath feels transgressive to the point of sacrilege.

The creator of the Polyphonic video, above, is on much firmer footing tying the film to queer liberation.

Prior to its now famous cinematic adaptation, The Rocky Horror Show was a low budget theatrical success, with nearly 3,000 performances and the 1973 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Musical to its name.

Reviewer Michael Billington lauded Tim Curry’s “garishly Bowiesque performance” as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the self-proclaimed Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania, but also acknowledged some drabber peacocks defying gender expectations in that production:

…for me the actor of the evening was Jonathan Adams as the Narrator: a bulky, heavy-jowled Kissinger-like figure who enters into the rock numbers with the stately aplomb of a dowager duchess doing a strip.

Playwright Richard O’Brien, who doubled as Frank-N-Furter’s sepulchral butler, Riff Raff, conceived of the show as a spoof on campy sci fi and gothic horror films in the Hammer Productions vein. He also owed a debt to glam rock, which “allowed me to be myself more.”

(Hats off, here, to Polyphonic for one of the best nutshell descriptions of glam rock we’ve ever encountered:

Glam rock was a queer led movement that was built on the back of gender non-conformity. Visually it was a hodgepodge of style from early Hollywood glamour to 50s pinups and cabaret theater augmented by touches of ancient civilizations sci-fi and and the occult.)

“The element of transvestism wasn’t intended as a major theme,” O’Brien told interviewer Patricia Morrisroe, “although it turned out to be one:”

I’ve always thought of Frank as a cross between Ivan the Terrible and Cruella de Ville of Walt Disney’s 101 Dalmations. It’s that sort of evil beauty that’s attractive. I found Brad and Janet very appealing too, especially the whole fifties image of boy-girl relationships. In the end, you see that Janet is not the weak little thing that society demands her to be and Brad is not the pillar of strength.

Audiences and critics may have loved the original show, but the film version did not find immediate favor. Reviewer Roger Ebert reflected that “it would be more fun, I suspect, if it weren’t a picture show:

It belongs on a stage, with the performers and audience joining in a collective send-up…The choreography, the compositions and even the attitudes of the cast imply a stage ambiance. And it invites the kind of laughter and audience participation that makes sense only if the performers are there on the stage, creating mutual karma.

A prophetic statement, as it turns out…

Once the producers began marketing the film as a midnight movie, repeat customers started coming up with the snarky callbacks that have become a de rigueur part of the experience.

“All the characters appear to be sophisticated, knowledgeable people but they’re really not,” O’Brien observed:

That allows people of a similar adolescent nature to feel they could be part of the whole thing. And now, in fact, they are.

Shadow casts positioned themselves in front of the screen, mimicking the action in cobbled together versions of designer Sue Blane’s costumes.

Audiences also afforded themselves the opportunity to dress outside the norm, creating a safe space where attendees could mess around with their gender expressions. The film may not end happily but that final scene is a great excuse for anyone who wants to take a lap in a corset and fishnets.

Rocky Horror’s flamboyance, humor, and defiance of the mainstream made it a natural fit with the queer community, with folks costumed as Frank-N-Furter, Riff Raff, Magenta and Columbia regularly turning up at fundraisers and pride events.

The film also deserves some activist street cred for saving a number of small indie movie theaters by fattening midnight box office receipts, a trend that continues nearly 50 years after the original release.

Admittedly, certain aspects of the script haven’t aged well.

“Virgins” attending their first live screening may be more shocked at the dearth of consent than the spectacle of Frank-n-Furter murdering Columbia’s rocker boyfriend Eddy with a pickaxe, then serving his remains for dinner.

Will they also recoil from Frank as an embodiment of toxic masculity in the queer space?

Quoth Columbia:

My God! I can’t stand any more of this! First you spurn me for Eddie, and then you throw him like an old overcoat for Rocky! You chew people up and then you spit them out again… I loved you… do you hear me? I loved you! And what did it get me? Yeah, I’ll tell you: a big nothing. You’re like a sponge. You take, take, take, and drain others of their love and emotion.

We’re hoping Frank, problematic though he may now seem, won’t ultimately be consigned to the dust bin of history.

For context, O’Brien recently told The Hollywood Reporter that the character was informed by his own experiences of cross-dressing as he tried to get a grip on his gender identity in the early 70s:

I used to beat myself up about the hand I was dealt. I don’t know how it works. I have no idea. I’ve read many tomes about the subject of the transvestic nature. It’s the cards you’re dealt. In a binary world it’s a bit of curse, really. Especially in those days when homosexuality was a crime. It’s just one of those things that western society wasn’t very keen on.

Real Content

1978 News Report on the Rocky Horror Craze Captures a Teenage Michael Stipe in Drag

Rare Interview: Tim Curry Discusses The Rocky Horror Picture Show, During the Week of Its Release (1975)

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A Secret Room with Drawings Attributed to Michelangelo Opens to Visitors in Florence

in Art, History, Museums | November 7th, 2023

Images on this page come courtesy of the Musei del Bargello

In the year 1530, Michelangelo was sentenced to death by Pope Clement VII — who, not coincidentally, was born Giulio de’ Medici. That famous dynasty, which once seemed to hold absolute economic and political power in Florence, had just seen off a violent challenge to its rule by republican-minded Florentines who, emboldened by the sack of Rome in 1527, took their city from the House of Medici that same year. Alas, that particular Republic of Florence proved short-lived, thanks to the pope and Emperor Charles V’s agreement agreed to use military power to return it to Medici hands.

During the struggles against the Medici, the Florence-born Michelangelo had come to the aid of his hometown by working on its fortifications. It seems to have been his participation in the revolt that drew the ire of the Medici, despite their court’s on-and-off patronage of his work for the preceding four decades.

Mercifully, they never actually executed Michelangelo, and indeed pardoned him before long–not least so he could finish his work on the Sistine Chapel and the Medici family tomb. But how did he occupy himself while still living under the death sentence?

As one theory has it, he simply hid out — and in a corner of what’s now the Medici Chapels Museum at that. In a “tiny chamber beneath the Medici Chapels in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in 1530,” writes the Guardian’s Angela Giuffrida, Michelangelo spent a couple months “making dozens of drawings that are reminiscent of his previous works, including a drawing of Leda and the Swan, a painting produced during the same year that was later lost.” All of these he drew directly on the walls, and their existence “remained unknown until 1975 when Paolo Dal Poggetto, then the director of the Medici Chapels, one of five museums that make up the Bargello Museums, was searching for a suitable space to create a new exit for the museum.”

“Others doubt that Michelangelo, already in his 50s and an acclaimed artist with powerful patrons, would have spent time in such a dingy hide out,” writes the New York Times’ Jason Horowitz. “But many scholars believe that the sketches show his hand”: the “imposing nude near the entrance” that evokes The Resurrection of Christ; the sketches that “resemble the central figure of his The Fall of Phaeton. Some even think a flexed and disembodied arm on the wall evokes his David statue.” And starting next week, visitors will be able to judge these very drawings for themselves.

Not that you can just waltz into this stanza segreta: “Visits will be kept to groups of four and limited to 15 minutes, with 45 minute lights-out periods in between to protect the drawings,” Horowitz writes. ‘Tickets, each connected to a specific person whose I.D. will be checked to prevent tour operators from gobbling them up, will cost 32 euros (about $34), and include access to the Medici tombs.” During your own fifteen minutes in this cramped, obscure room turned tastefully-lit gallery, you may or may not feel the presence of Michelangelo, but you’ll surely find yourself reminded that a true artist never stops creating, no matter the circumstances in which he finds himself.

Michelangelo’s David: The Fascinating Story Behind the Renaissance Marble Creation

Michelangelo Entered a Competition to Put a Missing Arm Back on Laocoön and His Sons — and Lost

New Video Shows What May Be Michelangelo’s Lost & Now Found Bronze Sculptures

Michelangelo’s Illustrated Grocery List

School Principal, Forced to Resign After Students Learn About Michelangelo’s David, Visits the Renaissance Statue in Florence

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Researcher Identifies the Old Man on the Iconic Cover of Led Zeppelin IV, 52 Years After the Album’s Release

Watch Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa Get Entirely Recreated with 50,000 LEGO Bricks

Political Scientist Ian Bremmer Breaks Down the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

One Hour of David Lynch Listening to Rain, Smoking & Reflecting on Art

Renaissance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades & Now You Can Hear the Songs Performed by Modern Singers

Why People Hate Brutalist Buildings on American College Campuses

How Rocky Horror Became a Cult Phenomenon

A Secret Room with Drawings Attributed to Michelangelo Opens to Visitors in Florence

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