New Digital Archive Will Feature the Complete Works of Egon Schiele: Start with 419 Paintings, Drawings & Sculptures

in Archives, Art | December 24th, 2018

If you’ve ever mis­tak­en an Egon Schiele for a Gus­tav Klimt, you can sure­ly be forgiven—the Aus­tri­an mod­ernist don served as a North Star for Schiele, who sought out Klimt, appren­ticed him­self, and received a great deal of encour­age­ment from his elder. But he would soon strike out on his own, devel­op­ing a grotesque, exag­ger­at­ed, yet ele­gant­ly sen­su­al style that shocked his con­tem­po­raries and made him a lead­ing fig­ure of Aus­tri­an Expres­sion­ism.

Now, a cen­tu­ry after his death in 1918 at age 28, a num­ber of exhi­bi­tions have high­light­ed the com­plex­i­ty of his brief career, dur­ing which he “cre­at­ed a for­mi­da­ble out­put that turned him into a real icon for new gen­er­a­tions,” writes Ele­na Mar­tinique.

Schiele achieved “a remark­able impact and per­ma­nen­cy” and it’s easy to see why. Best known for his erot­ic, elon­gat­ed por­traits and self-por­traits, “sear­ing explo­rations of their sitter’s psy­ches,” as The Art Sto­ry describes them, his depic­tions of the human form are con­sid­ered some of the “most remark­able of the 20th cen­tu­ry.”

The details of Schiele’s short life paint the pic­ture of a mod­ernist rock star. He is as famous for his work as for his “licen­tious lifestyle… marked by scan­dal, noto­ri­ety, and a trag­i­cal­ly ear­ly death… at a time when he was on the verge of the com­mer­cial suc­cess that had elud­ed him for much of his career.” In his short life, Mar­tinique notes, Schiele pro­duced “over 400 paint­ings; close to 3,000 water­col­ors and draw­ings; 21 sketch­books; 17 graph­ics; and 4 sculp­tures.”

This incred­i­ble body of work will be made avail­able in full online in a project spear­head­ed by Jane Kallir, co-direc­tor of New York’s Galerie St. Eti­enne, which mount­ed Schiele’s first Amer­i­can solo exhi­bi­tion in 1941 and recent­ly staged a “com­pre­hen­sive sur­vey of the artist’s artis­tic devel­op­ment.” Kallir authored the most recent cat­a­logue raison­né of Schiele’s work, and rather than pub­lish anoth­er print edi­tion, she has decid­ed to put the full cat­a­logue online, under the aus­pices of her research insti­tute.

The project cur­rent­ly “details 419 works and count­ing, with a par­tic­u­lar empha­sis on Schiele’s paint­ings,” reports Meilan Sol­ly at Smith­son­ian. His draw­ings and water­col­ors will be added in 2019. Though it is a pub­lic resource, the online cat­a­logue is designed for schol­ars, who can use it to “trace spe­cif­ic pieces’ prove­nance or debunk the exis­tence of forg­eries.” Kallir con­tin­ues the work of her grand­fa­ther, Otto Kallir, who wrote the first com­plete cat­a­logue of the artist’s work in 1930.

That ear­ly ref­er­ence has proven invalu­able “in the tan­gle court­room dra­ma sur­round­ing the resti­tu­tion of Nazi-loot­ed art.” The cen­te­nary of Schiele’s death on Octo­ber 31, 2018 has brought even more inter­est to his work, and a rise in fakes cir­cu­lat­ing in the art mar­ket. “It is very impor­tant to have a reli­able and read­i­ly acces­si­ble means of iden­ti­fy­ing authen­tic works of art,” Kallir writes in a state­ment. There is no one bet­ter placed than her to cre­ate it.

But while the Kallir Research Institute’s Com­plete Works of Egon Schiele Online offers nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion for cura­tors, art deal­ers, and schol­ars, it is very acces­si­ble to the gen­er­al pub­lic. If you’re new to Schiele, start with a short biog­ra­phy at the site. (Also read The Art Story’s overview and see sev­er­al high-res­o­lu­tion scans of his most famous works at the Art His­to­ry Project). Then click on “Works” to view pho­tos and infor­ma­tion about sketch­books, graph­ics, sculp­tures, and paint­ings.

These lat­ter works show a rad­i­cal devel­op­ment: from the con­ser­v­a­tive, tra­di­tion­al style of his ear­li­est paint­ing, to the heav­i­ly Klimt-influ­enced work of 1908–9, to 1910–18, when he dis­cov­ered and per­fect­ed his own pecu­liar vision.

via Art Net

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gus­tav Klimt’s Haunt­ing Paint­ings Get Re-Cre­at­ed in Pho­tographs, Fea­tur­ing Live Mod­els, Ornate Props & Real Gold

Explore 7,600 Works of Art by Edvard Munch: They’re Now Dig­i­tized and Free Online

3,900 Pages of Paul Klee’s Per­son­al Note­books Are Now Online, Pre­sent­ing His Bauhaus Teach­ings (1921–1931)

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

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An Archive of 800+ Imaginative Propaganda Maps Designed to Shape Opinions & Beliefs: Enter Cornell’s Persuasive Maps Collection

in Archives, Maps, Politics | November 17th, 2018

We tend to take a very spe­cial inter­est in archives and maps on this site—and espe­cial­ly in archives of maps. Yet it is rare, if not unheard of, to dis­cov­er a map archive in which every sin­gle entry repays atten­tion. The PJ Mode Per­sua­sive Car­tog­ra­phy Col­lec­tion at Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty Library is such an archive. Each map in the col­lec­tion, from the most sim­pli­fied to the most elab­o­rate, tells not only one sto­ry, but sev­er­al, over­lap­ping ones about its cre­ators, their intend­ed audi­ence, their antag­o­nists, the con­scious and uncon­scious process­es at work in their polit­i­cal psy­ches, the geo-polit­i­cal view from where they stood.

Maps drawn as pro­pa­gan­da must be broad and bold, cast­ing aside pre­ci­sion for the press­ing mat­ter at hand. Even when fine­ly detailed or laden with sta­tis­tics, such maps press their mean­ing upon us with unsub­tle force.

One espe­cial­ly res­o­nant exam­ple of per­sua­sive car­tog­ra­phy, for exam­ple, at the top shows us an ear­ly ver­sion of a wide­ly-used motif—the “Car­to­graph­ic Land Octo­pus,” or CLO, as Frank Jacobs dubs it at Big Think. The CLO has nev­er gone out of style since its like­ly ori­gin in J.J. van Brederode’s “Humor­ous War Map” of 1870, which depicts Rus­sia as a mon­strous mol­lusk. Lat­er, Car­i­ca­tur­ist Fred W. Rose print­ed a reprise, the “Serio-Com­ic War Map for the Year 1877.”

A full twen­ty-sev­en years lat­er, a Japan­ese stu­dent used the very same design for his satir­i­cal map of Rus­sia-as-Octo­pus, the occa­sion this time the Rus­so-Japan­ese War. Titled “A Humor­ous Diplo­mat­ic Atlas of Europe and Asia,” the Japan­ese map cites Rose, or “a cer­tain promi­nent Eng­lish­man,” as its inspi­ra­tion. Its text reads, in part:

The black octo­pus is so avari­cious, that he stretch­es out his eight arms in all direc­tions, and seizes up every thing that comes with­in his reach. But as it some­times hap­pens he gets wound­ed seri­ous­ly even by a small fish, owing to his too much cov­etous­ness.

No doubt Russ­ian per­sua­sive car­tog­ra­phers had a dif­fer­ent view of who was or wasn’t an octo­pus. Many years after his octo­pus map, Fred Rose dropped sea crea­tures for fish­ing in anoth­er of his serio-com­ic maps, “Angling in Trou­bled Waters,” above, this one from 1899, and show­ing Rus­sia as a mas­sive incar­na­tion of the tsar, his boots posed to walk all over Europe. After the rev­o­lu­tion, the Russ­ian octo­pus returned, bear­ing dif­fer­ent names but no less men­ac­ing a beast.

Many maps in the col­lec­tion show con­tra­dic­to­ry views of Rus­sia, or Great Britain, or what­ev­er world pow­er at the time threat­ened to over­run every­one else. It’s inter­est­ing to see the con­ti­nu­ity of such depic­tions over decades, and cen­turies (Jacobs shows exam­ples of Russ­ian octopi from 1938 and 2008). The map above from 1938 reflects “Nazi expan­sion­ist goals,” notes Cornell’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tions, by show­ing the sup­posed “Ger­man” pop­u­la­tions scat­tered all over Europe and the need, as Hitler argued in the quot­ed speech, to pro­tect and lib­er­ate “nation­al com­rades” by means of annex­a­tion, bomb­ing, and inva­sion.

Where the blood red of the Ger­man map rep­re­sents the “blood” of the volk, in the map above, from 1917, it stands in for the blood of every­one else if the “lead­ers of Ger­man thought” get what they want. Where the Reich map took aim at Europe, the quot­ed “for­mer gen­er­als,” notes Cor­nell, “and well-known Panger­man­ists” in the WWI-era map above want­ed to col­o­nize most of the world, a par­tic­u­lar affront to the British, who were well on their way to doing so, and to a less­er degree, the French, who want­ed to. These two world pow­ers had been at it far longer, how­ev­er, and not with­out fierce oppo­si­tion at home as well as in the colonies.

The famous eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry British car­i­ca­tur­ist James Gillray’s most famous print, from 1805, shows William Pitt and Napoleon seat­ed at table, carv­ing up the world between them to con­sume it.

A steam­ing ‘plum-pud­ding’ globe, both intent on carv­ing them­selves a sub­stan­tial por­tion…. Pitt appears calm, metic­u­lous and con­fi­dent, spear­ing the pud­ding with a tri­dent indica­tive of British naval suprema­cy. He lays claim to the oceans and the West Indies. In con­trast Napoleon Bona­parte reach­es from this chair with cov­etous, twitch­ing eyes fixed on the prize of Europe and cuts away France, Hol­land, Spain, Switzer­land, Italy and the Mediter­ranean.

Gillray’s car­toon hard­ly counts as a “map” but it deserves inclu­sion in this fine col­lec­tion. Oth­er notable maps fea­tured include the 1904 “Dis­tri­b­u­tion of Crime & Drunk­en­ness in Eng­land and Wales,”a study in the per­sua­sive use of cor­re­la­tion; the 1856 “Reynold’s Polit­i­cal Map of the Unit­ed States,” illus­trat­ing the “stakes involved in the poten­tial spread of slav­ery to the West­ern States” in sup­port of the Repub­li­can Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date John Fre­mont; and the French Com­mu­nist Party’s 1951 “Who is the Aggres­sor?” which shows Amer­i­can mil­i­tary bases around the world, their guns—or big black arrows—pointed at Chi­na and the U.S.S.R.

There are hun­dreds more per­sua­sive maps, illus­trat­ing views the­o­log­i­cal, polit­i­cal, social, mechan­i­cal, and oth­er­wise, dat­ing from the 15th cen­tu­ry to the 2000s. You can browse the whole col­lec­tion or by date, cre­ator, sub­ject, repos­i­to­ry, and for­mat. All of the maps are anno­tat­ed with cat­a­log infor­ma­tion and collector’s notes explain­ing their con­text. And all of them, from the friv­o­lous to the world-his­tor­i­cal, tell us far more than they intend­ed with their pecu­liar ways of spa­tial­iz­ing prej­u­dices, fears, desires, beliefs, obses­sions, and overt bias­es.

“Every map has a Who, What, Where and When about it,” as col­lec­tor PJ Mode writes on the Cor­nell site. “But these maps had anoth­er ele­ment: Why? Since they were pri­mar­i­ly ‘about’ some­thing oth­er than geog­ra­phy, under­stand­ing the map required find­ing the rea­son­ing behind it.” The most recent entry in the archive, Christo­pher Neiman’s 2011 “World Map of Use­less Stereo­types” from The New York Times Mag­a­zine turns the per­sua­sive map in on itself, using its satir­i­cal devices to poke fun at propaganda’s reduc­tive effects.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

An Atlas of Lit­er­ary Maps Cre­at­ed by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Trea­sure Island & More

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

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NASA Digitizes 20,000 Hours of Audio from the Historic Apollo 11 Mission: Stream Them Free Online

in Archives, History | November 15th, 2018

When we think of the Apol­lo mis­sions, we tend to think of images, espe­cial­ly those broad­cast on tele­vi­sion dur­ing the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing in 1969. And if we think of the sounds of Apol­lo, what comes more quick­ly to mind — indeed, what sound in human his­to­ry could come more quick­ly to mind — than Neil Arm­strong’s “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” line spo­ken on that same mis­sion? But that’s just one small piece of the total amount of audio record­ings made dur­ing the Apol­lo pro­gram, which ran from the mid-1960s to the ear­ly 1970s. Now, with near­ly 20,000 hours of them dig­i­tized, they’ve begun to be made avail­able for lis­ten­ing and down­load­ing at the Inter­net Archive.

“After the Apol­lo mis­sions end­ed, most of the audio tapes even­tu­al­ly made their way to the Nation­al Archives and Records Admin­is­tra­tion build­ing in Col­lege Park, Mary­land,” writes Astron­o­my’s Cather­ine Mey­ers. But even after get­ting all the record­ings in one place (eas­i­er said than done giv­en the vast size of the archives in which they resided), a much larg­er chal­lenge loomed.

“The exist­ing tapes could be played only on a machine called a Sound­Scriber, a big beige and green con­trap­tion com­plete with vac­u­um tubes. NASA had two machines, but the first was can­ni­bal­ized for parts to make the sec­ond one run.”

Refur­bish­ing the very last Sound­Scriber to play these 30-track tapes required the help of a retired tech­ni­cian, and then the research team need­ed to “play all 30 tracks at once to min­i­mize the time required to dig­i­tize them, as well as to avoid dam­ag­ing the almost 50-year-old tapes by play­ing them over and over.” What with the 50th anniver­sary of the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing approach­ing next sum­mer — and with First Man, Damien Chazelle’s biopic of Neil Arm­strong cur­rent­ly in the­aters — NASA has cleared that mis­sion’s audio record­ings for pub­lic release.

You can lis­ten to the Apol­lo 11 tapes direct­ly at the Inter­net Archive, or you can make your way through them at Explore Apol­lo, a site designed by stu­dents at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Dal­las that high­lights the most his­tor­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant of the thou­sands of hours of audio record­ed dur­ing Apol­lo 11: not just Arm­strong’s first step, but the launch from Kennedy Space Cen­ter, the lunar land­ing itself, and the astro­nauts’ walk on the moon’s sur­face. But space explo­ration is about much more than astro­nauts, as you’ll soon find out if you spend much time at the Inter­net Archive’s col­lec­tion of Apol­lo 11 record­ings, on which appear not just Neil Arm­strong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, but the hun­dreds and hun­dreds of oth­er NASA per­son­nel who made the moon land­ing pos­si­ble. We may nev­er have heard their names before, but now we can final­ly hear their voic­es.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Orig­i­nal TV Cov­er­age of the His­toric Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing: Record­ed on July 20, 1969

Hear the Declas­si­fied, Eerie “Space Music” Heard Dur­ing the Apol­lo 10 Mis­sion (1969)

8,400 Stun­ning High-Res Pho­tos From the Apol­lo Moon Mis­sions Are Now Online

NASA Puts 400+ His­toric Exper­i­men­tal Flight Videos on YouTube

The Best of NASA Space Shut­tle Videos (1981–2010)

NASA Puts Online a Big Col­lec­tion of Space Sounds, and They’re Free to Down­load and Use

NASA Releas­es a Mas­sive Online Archive: 140,000 Pho­tos, Videos & Audio Files Free to Search and Down­load

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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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The Library of Congress Makes Thousands of Fabulous Photos, Posters & Images Free to Use & Reuse

in Archives, Art, Education, Libraries, Photography | November 2nd, 2018

The his­to­ry of the ven­er­a­ble Library of Con­gress demon­strates the vast impor­tance that the founders of the U.S. accord­ed to read­ing and study­ing. It may be one of the country’s most durable insti­tu­tions, “the old­est fed­er­al cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion in the nation,” it pro­claims. While par­ti­san ran­cor, war, and vio­lence recur, the LoC has stolid­ly held an ever-increas­ing­ly diverse col­lec­tion of arti­facts sit­ting peace­ful­ly along­side each oth­er on sev­er­al hun­dred miles of shelves, a mon­u­ment to the life of the mind that ought to get more atten­tion.

Tout­ing itself as “the largest library in the world,” its col­lec­tions “are uni­ver­sal, not lim­it­ed by sub­ject, for­mat, or nation­al bound­ary, and include research mate­ri­als from all parts of the world and in more than 450 lan­guages.”

Its first mate­ri­als were, of course, books—including over six-thou­sand books pur­chased from Thomas Jefferson’s pri­vate col­lec­tion after the British burned the orig­i­nal library down in 1814. Now, it “adds approx­i­mate­ly 12,000 items to the col­lec­tion dai­ly,” in every pos­si­ble for­mat one can imag­ine.

And since its dig­i­tal col­lec­tions came online, any­one, any­where in the world can call up these vast resources with an inter­net con­nec­tion and a few clicks. Though we tend to take such things for grant­ed in our fer­vid­ly dis­tract­ed times, a lit­tle reflec­tion should remind us of how incred­i­ble that is. But before we wax too rhap­sod­ic, let’s remem­ber there’s a busi­ness end to the LoC and it’s called the U.S. Copy­right Office, that guardian of intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty that both ensures cre­ators can prof­it from their labors and pre­vents the free and open use of so many enrich­ing mate­ri­als long after those cre­ators have need of them.

But the Library has done its dig­i­tal users a ser­vice in this regard as well, with its “Free to Use and Reuse Sets,” a siz­able col­lec­tion of images that the Library “believes… is either in the pub­lic domain, has no known copy­right, or has been cleared by the copy­right own­er for pub­lic use.” (The use of the word “believes” seems to leave room for doubt, but if you got it with per­mis­sion from the LoC, you’re prob­a­bly safe.) Need pho­tographs of Abra­ham Lincoln—and scans of his speech­es, let­ters, and “duel­ing instruc­tions”—for that book you’re writ­ing? You’re cov­ered with this gallery. Need a col­lec­tion of clas­sic chil­dren’s books for your web­site (or your read­ing plea­sure)? Here you go.

From the graph­ic genius of vin­tage WPA and trav­el posters to icon­ic jazz por­traits by William Got­tlieb to base­ball cards to end­less­ly quaint and quirky Amer­i­can road­side attrac­tions to pic­tures of dogs and their peo­ple… you nev­er know when you might need such images, but when you do you now know where to find them. Want to know what’s in the set called “Not an Ostrich”? A valkyrie cat named Brunnhilde, for one thing, and much more here.

The Library cur­rent­ly high­lights its “Poster Parade”—a set of posters from the 1890s to the 1960s fea­tur­ing “trav­el, com­mer­cial prod­ucts, war pro­pa­gan­da, enter­tain­ment, and more”—in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Poster House, a muse­um open­ing in New York next year. These range from delec­table art nou­veau ads to shouty broad­sides telling you to drink your milk, brush your teeth, or have “More Cour­tesy.” Sen­si­ble pre­scrip­tions, but we also need more knowl­edge, study, and thought. Start at the LoC’s Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions here and har­vest your free to use and reuse images here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Library of Con­gress Makes 25 Mil­lion Records From Its Cat­a­log Free to Down­load

Large Archive of Han­nah Arendt’s Papers Dig­i­tized by the Library of Con­gress: Read Her Lec­tures, Drafts of Arti­cles, Notes & Cor­re­spon­dence

Get­ty Images Makes 35 Mil­lion Pho­tos Free to Use Online

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

 

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The World’s Largest Collection of Tibetan Buddhist Literature Now Online

in Archives, Religion | October 30th, 2018

FYI: The Bud­dhist Dig­i­tal Resource Cen­ter (BDRC) and Inter­net Archive (IA) announced ear­li­er this month “that they are mak­ing a large cor­pus of Bud­dhist lit­er­a­ture avail­able via the Inter­net Archive. This col­lec­tion rep­re­sents the most com­plete record of the words of the Bud­dha avail­able in any lan­guage, plus many mil­lions of pages of relat­ed com­men­taries, teach­ings and works such as med­i­cine, his­to­ry, and phi­los­o­phy.” In a press release from the Inter­net Archive, Chokyi Nyi­ma Rin­poche, a respect­ed teacher of Tibetan Bud­dhism, expressed grat­i­tude that the teach­ings of the Bud­dha have been made avail­able online. “We can share the entire body of lit­er­a­ture with every Tibetan who can use it. These texts are sacred, and should be free.” It should be not­ed that the texts aren’t writ­ten in Eng­lish, but rather the authors’ native tongue.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take Harvard’s Intro­duc­to­ry Course on Bud­dhism, One of Five World Reli­gions Class­es Offered Free Online

Free Online Course: Robert Thurman’s Intro­duc­tion to Tibetan Bud­dhism (Record­ed at Colum­bia U)

The Dalai Lama’s Intro­duc­tion to Bud­dhism

Bud­dhism 101: A Short Intro­duc­to­ry Lec­ture by Jorge Luis Borges

Free Online Reli­gion Cours­es 

How Bud­dhism & Neu­ro­science Can Help You Change How Your Mind Works: A New Course by Best­selling Author Robert Wright

 

 

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The Lenny Bruce Archive: Brandeis Digitally Preserves the Legacy of the Pathbreaking Comedian

in Archives, Comedy | October 24th, 2018

Edgy, smart, aggres­sive, unapolo­get­i­cal­ly Jew­ish, Lenny Bruce mixed Yid­dishisms, hip­ster slang, col­or­ful terms for var­i­ous sex acts, and social, polit­i­cal, and reli­gious satire in a high-wire impro­visato­ry act he thought of as “ver­bal jazz.” Mar­ket­ed as a “sick come­di­an,” Bruce got his start play­ing strip clubs, and end­ed up—bitter, defeat­ed, black­list­ed, and addicted—ranting and read­ing court tran­scripts from his var­i­ous obscen­i­ty tri­als. It was a sad end to a bril­liant and too-short career.

When Bruce died of an over­dose at 40, “his wid­ow and their daugh­ter,” Kit­ty, “start­ed archiv­ing all that he had left behind,” notes NPR. Now that archive resides at Bran­deis Uni­ver­si­ty, acquired in 2014 by librar­i­an for archives and spe­cial col­lec­tions Sarah Schoe­mak­er. An episode of The Kitchen Sis­ters Present pod­cast called “The Keep­ers” tells the sto­ry of that col­lec­tion, kept for decades in Kitty’s attic, with back­up copies in Michi­gan and L.A. in case of fire. “10 lin­ear feet” of mate­r­i­al, as Kit­ty Bruce remem­bers it.

The sto­ry of that archive involves not only Bruce’s daugh­ter and Shoe­mak­er but also one of Bruce’s biggest cham­pi­ons, Hugh Hefn­er, his daugh­ter Christie, and his lawyer Mar­tin Gar­bus. It also fea­tures Steve Krief, who wrote the first Ph.D. the­sis on Bruce. When Krief vis­it­ed Kit­ty in Penn­syl­va­nia, she told him “you know what I don’t know what I’m going to do with my father’s things. They’re going to get destroyed.” Krief advised her to call Hefn­er, who even­tu­al­ly made a dona­tion to Bran­deis to fund the archive.

Some of the mate­r­i­al, the col­lec­tion notes, “has been pre­vi­ous­ly released in edit­ed form. Most of these record­ings are of Lenny Bruce’s stand-up com­e­dy per­for­mances…. Some of the record­ings are of a per­son­al nature, such as the ‘phone let­ters’ and pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions between Bruce and his friends and fam­i­ly.” At the collection’s site, you can hear frus­trat­ing­ly short, 10-sec­ond clips of sev­er­al rou­tines, but to hear the tapes in full, you need to con­tact the uni­ver­si­ty and set up an in-per­son appoint­ment. But the archive is ful­ly open to the pub­lic, and Bruce’s con­sid­er­able lega­cy is secure. Note: you can hear some longer record­ings on this page: Click here and then scroll down.

It’s a lega­cy that real­ly should be bet­ter known. Bruce con­sid­ered him­self “a sol­dier fight­ing for the Con­sti­tu­tion” and against gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship. With­out him, it’s hard to imag­ine the careers of George Car­lin or Richard Pry­or ever hap­pen­ing, and he even left his imprint on Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, as Gar­bus tells it. At his obscen­i­ty tri­al in New York, for which he was giv­en two years pro­ba­tion, a sen­tence only over­turned after his death, Philip Roth sat in the court­room. Roth lat­er said that with­out Bruce, he couldn’t have writ­ten Portnoy’s Com­plaint.

“Lenny broke down so many bar­ri­ers,” says Gar­bus, and though his humor may seem tame today—though his com­e­dy still holds up—in the ear­ly 1960s few peo­ple dared to say the things he did, the way he did. Bruce railed against the hyp­o­crit­i­cal puri­tanism of Amer­i­can cul­ture and paid a heavy price for telling truths we might take for grant­ed now—and many we still don’t want to hear. (See Dustin Hoff­man doing one of Bruce’s more seri­ous bits above in a clip from the 1974 Bob Fos­se biopic Lenny.) Browse the con­tents of the Lenny Bruce Audio Files here and learn more about Bruce’s life and influ­ence at his offi­cial web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thank You, Mask Man: Lenny Bruce’s Lone Ranger Com­e­dy Rou­tine Becomes a NSFW Ani­mat­ed Film (1968)

George Car­lin Per­forms His “Sev­en Dirty Words” Rou­tine: His­toric and Com­plete­ly NSFW

Bill Hicks’ 12 Prin­ci­ples of Com­e­dy

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

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Conserve the Sound, an Online Museum Preserves the Sounds of Past Technologies–from Typewriters, Electric Shavers and Cassette Recorders, to Cameras & Classic Nintendo

in Archives, History, Libraries, Technology | August 28th, 2018

The unmis­tak­able zip and whirr of a rotary phone, the ungod­ly squeal of dial-up modems, the sat­is­fy­ing thunk of a car­tridge in a clas­sic Nin­ten­do con­sole, a VCR rewind­ing, the click-clack sound of a Walk­man’s but­tons…. I date myself in say­ing that these sounds imme­di­ate­ly send me back to var­i­ous moments in my child­hood with Prous­t­ian immer­sion. The sense of smell is most close­ly linked to mem­o­ry, but hear­ing can­not be far behind giv­en how sound embeds itself in time, and most espe­cial­ly the sounds of tech­nolo­gies, which are by nature fat­ed for obso­les­cence. A muse­um-qual­i­ty aura sur­rounds the Walk­man and the first iPods. These are tri­umphs of con­sumer design, but only one of them makes dis­tinc­tive mechan­i­cal nois­es.

As ana­log recedes, it can seem that noisy tech in gen­er­al becomes more and more dat­ed. It is hard to hear the rub­bing of thumbs and fin­gers across screens and touch­pads. Voice com­mands make but­tons and switch­es redun­dant. How much tech from now will one day fea­ture in Con­serve the Sound, the “online muse­um for van­ish­ing and endan­gered sounds”?

Its col­lec­tion gives the impres­sion of a bygone age, quaint in its dozens of exam­ples of mechan­i­cal inge­nu­ity. The visu­al jux­ta­po­si­tion of hand­held film cam­eras, type­writ­ers, car win­dow han­dles, elec­tric shavers, boom box­es, stop­watch­es, and so on has the effect of mak­ing these things seem all of a piece, assort­ed arti­facts in a great hall of won­ders called “the Sound the 20th Cen­tu­ry.”

At the top of the site’s “Sound” page, time­line nav­i­ga­tion allows users to vis­it every decade from the 1910s to the 2000s, a cat­e­go­ry that con­tains only two objects. Oth­er dis­plays are more plen­ti­ful, and col­or­ful. The 1960s, for exam­ple show­cas­es the incred­i­bly sexy red Schreib­mas­chine Olivet­ti Dora fur­ther up. It sounds as sleek and sophis­ti­cat­ed as it looks. The vir­tu­al dis­play case of the 30s holds the sounds of a twin-engine pro­peller plane and a hand­ful of beau­ti­ful mov­ing and still cam­eras, like the Fotokam­era Pur­ma Spe­cial above. It also fea­tures the hum­ble and endur­ing library stamp, a sound I pine for as I slide books under the self-check­out laser scan­ner at my local branch.

Giv­en just the few images here, you can already see that Con­serve the Sound is as much a feast for the eyes as for the ears, each object lov­ing­ly pho­tographed against an aus­tere white back­ground. In order for the full nos­tal­gic effect to work, how­ev­er, you need to vis­it these pages and hit “play.” It even mag­i­cal­ly works with objects from before our times, giv­en how promi­nent­ly their sounds fea­ture in film and audio record­ings that define the peri­ods. You’ve like­ly also noticed how many of these prod­ucts are of Euro­pean ori­gin, and many of them, like the robot­ic head of the Kas­set­ten­reko­rder Wel­tron Mod­el 2004, are per­haps unfa­mil­iar to many con­sumers from else­where in the world.

Con­serve the Sound is a Euro­pean project, fund­ed by the Film & Medi­en­s­tiftung NRW in Ger­many, thus its selec­tion skews toward Euro­pean-made prod­ucts. But the sound of a fan or an adding machine in Ger­many is the sound of a fan or adding machine in Chile, Chi­na, Kenya, or Nebras­ka. See a trail­er for the project at the top of the post, and below, one of the many inter­views in which Ger­man pub­lic fig­ures, schol­ars, librar­i­ans, tech­ni­cians, and stu­dents answer ques­tions about their mnemon­ic asso­ci­a­tions with tech­no­log­i­cal sound. In this inter­view, radio pre­sen­ter Bian­ca Hau­da describes one of her favorite old sounds from a favorite old machine, a 1970s portable cas­sette recorder.

via WFMU

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

Bri­an Eno Once Com­posed Music for Win­dows 95; Now He Lets You Cre­ate Music with an iPad App

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

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

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New Web Site Showcases 700,000 Artifacts Dug Up from the Canals of Amsterdam, Some Dating Back to 4300 BC

in Archives, History | July 12th, 2018

Ams­ter­dam has many plea­sures to offer, not least boat­ing through its hun­dred-kilo­me­ter net­work of canals. First laid out in the ear­ly 17th cen­tu­ry, they con­sti­tute a rich his­to­ry les­son in and of them­selves. But Ams­ter­dam is also, of course, a mod­ern city with mod­ern infra­struc­ture, such as a metro sys­tem with a new line set to open this month. Ams­ter­dammers have been wait­ing for that line for fif­teen years now, and the rea­sons for the pro­longed con­struc­tion have to do with the old canals, or rather part of the Riv­er Ams­tel that feeds them.

Bor­ing the tun­nels entailed drain­ing the riv­er, and drain­ing the riv­er turned out to offer anoth­er his­to­ry les­son, and a much deep­er one than expect­ed. “It is not often that a riverbed, let alone one in the mid­dle of a city, is pumped dry and can be sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly exam­ined,” says the web site Below the Sur­face. “The exca­va­tions in the Ams­tel yield­ed a del­uge of finds, some 700,000 in all: a vast array of objects, some bro­ken, some whole, all jum­bled togeth­er.”

The unin­tend­ed archae­o­log­i­cal ben­e­fit of drain­ing the riv­er amounts to “a mul­ti-faceted pic­ture of dai­ly life in the city of Ams­ter­dam. Every find is a frozen moment in time, con­nect­ing the past and the present. The pic­ture they paint of their era is extreme­ly detailed and yet entire­ly ran­dom due to the chance of objects or remains sink­ing down into the riverbed and being retrieved from there.” At Below the Sur­face you can browse the exten­sive cat­a­log of all these arti­facts, the old­est of which date to around 4300 BC, more than five and a half mil­len­nia before the found­ing of Ams­ter­dam itself.

Below the Sur­face’s col­lec­tion is orga­nized into ten dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories includ­ing “inte­ri­ors and acces­sories,” “crafts and indus­try,” “arms and armor,” “com­mu­ni­ca­tion and exchange,” and “games and recre­ation.” On your dig­i­tized object-based his­tor­i­cal jour­ney there, you’ll encounter objects from all of those realms of human life across time, from 13th-cen­tu­ry coins, 15th-cen­tu­ry keys, 18th-cen­tu­ry tiles, and 20th-cen­tu­ry med­i­cine tins. To we humans of the 21st cen­tu­ry, in the Nether­lands or else­where, some of these might look sur­pris­ing­ly con­tem­po­rary — or at least not near­ly as ancient as a mobile phone from the 1990s. Enter Below the Sur­face here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Rijksmu­se­um Puts 125,000 Dutch Mas­ter­pieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art

16th-Cen­tu­ry Ams­ter­dam Stun­ning­ly Visu­al­ized with 3D Ani­ma­tion

Flash­mob Recre­ates Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” in a Dutch Shop­ping Mall

20,000 Endan­gered Archae­o­log­i­cal Sites Now Cat­a­logued in a New Online Data­base

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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