Goodbye to the Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo’s Strangest and Most Utopian Apartment Building

in Architecture, History | September 22nd, 2022

On many of my trips to Japan I’ve stayed at the Cap­sule Inn Osa­ka, which is exact­ly where and what it sounds like. To any for­eign­er the place would be an intrigu­ing nov­el­ty, but to those inter­est­ed in Japan­ese archi­tec­ture it also has great his­tor­i­cal val­ue. Designed by archi­tect Kurokawa Kisho, the Cap­sule Inn Osa­ka opened in 1979 as the world’s first cap­sule hotel, a form of lodg­ing now wide­ly regard­ed as no less quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Japan­ese than the ryokan. At that point Kurokawa had already been advanc­ing cap­sule as an archi­tec­tur­al unit for years, con­tribut­ing a “cap­sule house” and cap­sule-based cor­po­rate pavil­ions to the Osa­ka World Expo 1970, and even build­ing a curi­ous mas­ter­work of the genre in Toky­o’s Nak­a­gin Cap­sule Tow­er.

The oth­er archi­tects involved in Expo ’70 includ­ed Tange Ken­zo, Kawa­zoe Noboru, Maki Fumi­hiko, Kiku­take Kiy­onori, and Isoza­ki Ara­ta — all asso­ci­at­ed to one degree or anoth­er with Metab­o­lism, an archi­tec­tur­al move­ment inspired by the rapid eco­nom­ic growth, enor­mous urban expan­sion, and unprece­dent­ed tech­no­log­i­cal change then trans­form­ing post­war Japan. The Metabolists “approached the city as a liv­ing organ­ism con­sist­ing of ele­ments with dif­fer­ent meta­bol­ic cycles,” writes Lin Zhongjie in Ken­zo Tange and the Metabolist Move­ment: Urban Utopias of Mod­ern Japan. “To accom­mo­date a city’s growth and regen­er­a­tion, Metabolists advanced trans­formable tech­nolo­gies based on pre­fab­ri­cat­ed com­po­nents and the replace­ment of obso­lete parts accord­ing to vary­ing life cycles.”

When it opened in 1972, the Nak­a­gin Cap­sule Tow­er did so as the first ful­ly real­ized Metabolist project. Abroad in Japan host Chris Broad intro­duces it as “not only my favorite build­ing in all of Tokyo, but in all of Japan.” He also con­tex­tu­al­izes it with­in a brief his­to­ry of Metab­o­lism, as well as of the post­war Japan­ese soci­ety that fired up its prac­ti­tion­ers’ aes­thet­i­cal­ly brazen, tech­no-Utopi­an ideals. Geared to the work-dom­i­nat­ed, peri­patet­ic lifestyle of what Kurokawa called “homo movens,” the Nak­a­gin Cap­sule Tow­er actu­al­ly con­sist­ed of two con­crete cores onto which were bolt­ed 140 cap­sules (archi­tec­tur­al the­o­rist Charles Jencks likened their aspect to “super­im­posed wash­ing machines”), each a self-con­tained liv­ing space replete with cut­ting-edge ameni­ties up to and includ­ing a bath­tub ash­tray Sony reel-to-reel tape play­er.

Kurokawa envi­sioned the cap­sules being replaced every 25 years over a life­time of cen­turies. Alas, the dif­fi­cul­ty of such an oper­a­tion meant that the orig­i­nals were sim­ply left in, and by the end of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry many had bad­ly dete­ri­o­rat­ed. “Iron­i­cal­ly,” writes Lin, “Tokyo is grow­ing and trans­form­ing itself so rapid­ly that it even out­paces the ‘metab­o­lism’ that the Metabolists envi­sioned, and requires renewals on the scale of entire build­ings instead of indi­vid­ual cap­sules.” First announced in 2007, the year of Kurokawa’s death, the build­ing’s demo­li­tion began this past April, and it has occa­sioned such trib­utes as Stu­dio Ito’s ele­giac ani­ma­tion just above. The Nak­a­gin Cap­sule Tow­er stood for half a cen­tu­ry, long out­liv­ing Metab­o­lism itself, but its cap­sules will now scat­ter across the world, sug­gest­ing that there was some­thing to the bio­log­i­cal metaphor all along.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Every­thing You Ever Want­ed to Know About the Beau­ty of Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­ture: An Intro­duc­tion in Six Videos

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

Why Do Peo­ple Hate Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture?: A Video Essay

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

Build­ing With­out Nails: The Genius of Japan­ese Car­pen­try

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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A Tour of All the Pizza Styles You Can Eat in the United States (and the History Behind Your Favorite Slices)

in Food & Drink, History, Travel | September 21st, 2022

When it comes to chili, Texas, Kansas City and Cincin­nati, will cede no quar­ter, each con­vinced that their par­tic­u­lar region­al approach is the only sane option.

Hot dogs? Put New York City and Chica­go in a pit and watch them tear each oth­er to rib­bons.

But piz­za?

There are so many geo­graph­ic vari­a­tions, even an impar­tial judge can’t see their way through to a clear vic­tor.

The play­ing field­’s thick as stuffed piz­za, a polar­iz­ing Chica­go local spe­cial­ty that’s deep­er than the deep­est dish.

Weird His­to­ry Food’s whirl­wind video tour of Every Piz­za Style We Could Find In the Unit­ed States, above, savors the ways in which var­i­ous piz­za styles evolved from the Neapoli­tan pie that Ital­ian immi­grant Gen­naro Lom­bar­di intro­duced to New York City in 1905.

Wait, though. We all have an acquain­tance who takes per­verse plea­sure in off­beat top­ping choic­es — look­ing at you, Cal­i­for­nia — but oth­er than that, isn’t piz­za just sauce, dough, and cheese?

How much room does that leave for vari­a­tion?

Plen­ty as it turns out.

Crusts, thick or thin, fluc­tu­ate wild­ly accord­ing to the type of flour used, how long the dough is proofed, the type of oven in which they’re baked, and phi­los­o­phy of sauce place­ment.

(In Buf­fa­lo, New York, piz­zas are sauced right up to their cir­cum­fer­ence, leav­ing very lit­tle crusty han­dle for eat­ing on the fly, though per­haps one could fold it down the mid­dle, as we do in the city 372 miles to the south.)

Sauce can also swing pret­ty wild­ly — sweet, spicy, pre­pared in advance, or left to the last minute — but cheese is a much hot­ter top­ic.

Detroit’s piz­za is dis­tin­guished by the inclu­sion of Wis­con­sin brick cheese.

St. Louis is loy­al to Prov­el cheese, a home­grown processed mix of ched­dar, Swiss, and pro­volone and liq­uid smoke.

Mia­mi piz­zas cater to the palates of its Cuban pop­u­la­tion by mix­ing moz­zarel­la with gou­da, a cheese that was both wide­ly avail­able and pop­u­lar before 1962’s rationing sys­tem was put in place.

Rhode Island’s apt­ly named Red Strips have no cheese at all…which might be prefer­able to the Altoona, Penn­syl­va­nia favorite that arrives topped with Amer­i­can cheese slices or — the hor­ror — Velvee­ta.

(This may be where we part ways with the old saw equat­ing piz­za with sex — even when it’s bad, it’s still pret­ty good.)

Cut and size also fac­tor in to piz­za pride.

Wash­ing­ton DC’s Jum­bo slices are pret­ty much the stan­dard issue New York-style thin crust slice, writ large.

Not only does size mat­ter here, it may be the only thing that matters…to the point where a local busi­ness improve­ment dis­trict had to inter­vene on behalf of side­walk rub­bish bins hard pressed to han­dle the vol­ume of greasy super-sized slice box­es Wash­ing­to­ni­ans were toss­ing away every evening.

In the land of oppor­tu­ni­ty, where small­er towns are under­stand­ably eager to claim their piece of pie, Weird His­to­ry Food gives the nod to Old Forge, Penn­syl­va­nia, opti­misti­cal­ly dubbed “the Piz­za Cap­i­tal of the World by Uncov­er­ing PA’s Jim Cheney, and Steubenville Ohio, home of the “over­sized Lunch­able” Atlas Obscu­ra refers to as America’s most mis­un­der­stood piz­za.

For good mea­sure, watch the PBS Idea Channel’s His­to­ry of Piz­za in 8 slices, below, then rep your favorite local pizze­ria in the com­ments.

We want to try them all!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The First Piz­za Ordered by Com­put­er, 1974

When Mikhail Gor­bachev, the Last Sovi­et Leader, Starred in a Piz­za Hut Com­mer­cial (1998)

Piz­za Box Becomes a Playable DJ Turntable Through the Mag­ic of Con­duc­tive Ink

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

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Getting Dressed Over the Centuries: 35 Videos Show How Women & Men Put on Clothes During Ancient, Medieval & Modern Times

in Fashion, History | September 20th, 2022

Across vast swathes of the world, many of us — arguably too many of us — have grown accus­tomed to putting on lit­tle more than a T‑shirt and jeans every morn­ing, regard­less of our sta­tus in soci­ety. We all know it was­n’t always this way, but we may not ful­ly under­stand just how much it was­n’t always this way. Through­out most of civ­i­lized human his­to­ry, dress­ing did­n’t just reflect one’s way of life, it prac­ti­cal­ly con­sti­tut­ed a way of life in itself. Thanks to Youtube chan­nel Crow’s Eye Pro­duc­tions, we here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry can enjoy detailed, even cin­e­mat­ic re-cre­ations of the dress­ing process in var­i­ous eras and places the West, from Roman Britain to Renais­sance Flo­rence to 1969 Lon­don.

You can watch all 35 of these dress­ing videos in chrono­log­i­cal order with this playlist. Many of the dressers, includ­ing such august per­son­ages as Prince Albert and Queen Vic­to­ria (on Christ­mas Day, no less), occu­py ele­vat­ed social posi­tions.

But the maids and gar­den­ers of the Vic­to­ri­an era had to get dressed too, and though their cloth­ing may be sim­pler than that worn by the roy­als — or even by the mid­dle class — it’s no less reveal­ing of his­to­ry. One could no doubt tell an even rich­er sto­ry of tech­no­log­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, and cul­tur­al change over the cen­turies through the cloth­ing of “the mass­es” than through the cloth­ing of the elites.

Even war, that most tra­di­tion­al his­tor­i­cal sub­ject of all, has its con­nec­tions with dress. This playlist fea­tures three videos on the dress­ing rou­tines of sol­diers, nurs­es, and young women dur­ing the First World War, as well as one on the mem­bers of the Wom­en’s Land Army dur­ing the Sec­ond World War. Estab­lished in 1917, the WLA orga­nized “Land Girls” to take over the agri­cul­tur­al work while the men who’d been doing it were out fight­ing on the front.

This was just the kind of effort neces­si­tat­ed by total war, as well as one that could only have been per­formed by women. It’s also, there­fore, engag­ing­ly approach­able by a series like this, with its pri­ma­ry focus on wom­en’s dress — which, at least since the Great Male Renun­ci­a­tion, has had a pret­ty spec­tac­u­lar his­to­ry of its own.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Wealthy Women (Like the Mona Lisa) Got Dressed in Renais­sance Flo­rence

How Fash­ion­able Dutch Women (Like the Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring) Got Dressed in 1665

Author Imag­ines in 1893 the Fash­ions That Would Appear Over the Next 100 Years

Fash­ion Design­ers in 1939 Pre­dict How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

Life Mag­a­zine Pre­dicts in 1914 How Peo­ple Would Dress in the 1950s

Google Cre­ates a Dig­i­tal Archive of World Fash­ion: Fea­tures 30,000 Images, Cov­er­ing 3,000 Years of Fash­ion His­to­ry

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Architect Breaks Down Five of the Most Iconic New York City Apartments

in Architecture, History, Travel | September 16th, 2022

Real estate is a peren­ni­al­ly hot top­ic in New York City, as is gen­tri­fi­ca­tion.

Above, archi­tect Michael Wyet­zn­er, breaks down the defin­ing fea­tures of sev­er­al typ­i­cal NYC apart­ments.

You’re on your own to truf­fle up the sort of rent a 340 square feet stu­dio com­mands in an East Vil­lage ten­e­ment these days.

The ances­tors would be shocked, for sure. My late moth­er-in-law nev­er tired of caus­ing young jaws to drop by reveal­ing how she once paid $27/month for a 1 bed­room on Sheri­dan Square…and her moth­er, who immi­grat­ed at the turn of the cen­tu­ry, couldn’t wait to put the Low­er East Side behind her.

He may not truck in final sales fig­ures, but Wyet­zn­er drops in a wealth of inter­est­ing fac­tu­al tid­bits as he sketch­es lay­outs with a black Pen­tel Sign Pen. His tone is more Low­er East Side Ten­e­ment Muse­um tour guide than the com­ments sec­tion of a real estate blog where salty New York­ers flaunt their street cred.

For instance, those enfilade ten­e­ment apartments–to employ the grand archi­tec­tur­al term Wyet­zn­er just taught us–were not only dark, but dan­ger­ous­ly under-ven­ti­lat­ed until 1901, when reforms stip­u­lat­ed that air shafts must be opened up between side by side build­ings.

This pub­lic health ini­tia­tive changed the shape of ten­e­ment build­ings, but did lit­tle to stop the pover­ty and over­crowd­ing that activist/photographer Jacob Riis famous­ly doc­u­ment­ed in How the Oth­er Half Lives.

(Anoth­er mea­sure decreed that build­ing own­ers must sup­ply one indoor toi­let …per 20 peo­ple!)

While we’re on the top­ic of toi­lets, did you know that there was a time when every brown­stone back­yard boast­ed its own privy?

Home­own­ers who’ve spent mil­lions on what many con­ceive of as the most roman­tic of New York City build­ings (then mil­lions more on gut ren­o­va­tions) proud­ly dis­play old bot­tles and oth­er refuse exca­vat­ed from the site where privys once stood. The for­mer res­i­dents turn their out­hous­es into garbage chutes upon achiev­ing indoor plumb­ing.

Lay­ing aside its dis­tinc­tive col­or, a brownstone’s most icon­ic fea­ture is sure­ly its stoop.

Stoops grabbed hold of the Amer­i­can public’s imag­i­na­tion thanks to Sesame Street, the Harlem pho­tographs of Gor­don Parks and the films of Spike Lee, who learned of Mar­tin Luther King’s assas­si­na­tion as an 11-year-old, sit­ting on his.

“Not porch!,” he empha­sized dur­ing a Tonight Show appear­ance. ”In Brook­lyn, it’s stoops. Stoops!”

(For­give me if I delve into NYC real estate prices for a sec: the Bed-Stuy brown­stone from Lee‘s semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Crook­lyn, above, just went on the mar­ket for $4.5 mil­lion.)

There’s no ques­tion that brown­stone stoops make excel­lent hang out spots, but that’s not the rea­son they rose to promi­nence.

As Esther Crain writes in Ephemer­al New York, the Com­mis­sion­ers’ Plan of 1811 which led to the city’s grid­like lay­out negat­ed the pos­si­bil­i­ty of alleys:

With­out a back door to a row­house accessed through an alley, ser­vants and work­ers would enter and exit a res­i­dence using the same front stoop the own­ers used—which wasn’t too pop­u­lar, at least with the own­ers. 

But a tall stoop set back from the side­walk allowed for a side door that led to the low­er lev­el of the house. While the own­ers con­tin­ued to go up and down the stoop to get to the par­lor floor (and see and be seen by their neigh­bors), every­one else was rel­e­gat­ed to the side…And of course, as New York entered the Gild­ed Age of busy streets filled with dust, ash, refuse, and enor­mous piles of horse manure, a very high stoop helped keep all the filth from get­ting into the house. 

Flash for­ward a hun­dred and fifty some years, and, as Wyet­zn­er notes, a stoop’s top step offers a high­ly scenic view of the Hefty bags the neigh­bors haul to the curb the night before New York’s Strongest roll through.

Wyet­zn­er also pro­vides the his­tor­i­cal con­text behind such archi­tec­tural­ly dis­tinc­tive digs as SoHo’s astro­nom­i­cal­ly priced light-filled lofts, the always desir­able Clas­sic Six res­i­dences on the Upper East and Upper West Sides, one-room stu­dios both mod­ern and orig­i­nal fla­vor, and our blight­ed pub­lic hous­ing projects.

If you’re itch­ing to play along from home, check out the New York Times’ reg­u­lar fea­ture The Hunt, which invites read­ers to trail a sin­gle, fam­i­ly, or cou­ple delib­er­at­ing between three prop­er­ties in New York City.

A sam­ple: “After a mouse infes­ta­tion at her West Vil­lage rental, a sin­gle moth­er need­ed a bet­ter spot for her fam­i­ly, includ­ing a son with autism.”

Review the lay­outs and click here to see whether she chose a brand-new 127-unit build­ing with a rooftop pool, a Harlem brown­stone duplex with a back­yard rights, or an updat­ed one bed­room in a down­town co-op from 1910.

Relat­ed Con­tent

A New Inter­ac­tive Map Shows All Four Mil­lion Build­ings That Exist­ed in New York City from 1939 to 1941

Behold the New York City Street Tree Map: An Inter­ac­tive Map That Cat­a­logues the 700,000 Trees Shad­ing the Streets of New York City

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo. She has lived in all man­ner of New York City apart­ments, but hopes to nev­er move again. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Evolution of the Electric Guitar: An Introduction to Every Major Variety of the Instrument That Made Rock-and-Roll

in History, Music, Technology | September 16th, 2022

The past cen­tu­ry has seen many styl­is­tic changes in pop­u­lar cul­ture, none more dra­mat­ic than in music. We need only hear a few mea­sures of a song to place it in the right decade. The sound of an era’s music reflects the state of its tech­nol­o­gy: when­ev­er engi­neer­ing can make pos­si­ble tools like mul­ti­track recorders, tape loops, sam­plers, and syn­the­siz­ers — to say noth­ing of lis­ten­ing media like cylin­ders, vinyl records, and online stream­ing — the sound­track of the zeit­geist has been trans­formed. But in liv­ing mem­o­ry, sure­ly no devel­op­ment has made quite so pow­er­ful an impact on pop­u­lar music as the elec­tric gui­tar.

“Almost all gui­tars cur­rent­ly on the mar­ket are either a direct descen­dant of, or very sim­i­lar to, a hand­ful of instru­ments that came to life dur­ing the span of one decade: the fifties.” With these words, Dutch Youtu­ber Paul Davids launch­es into a video jour­ney through the evo­lu­tion of the elec­tric gui­tar as we know it, begin­ning in 1950 with the Fend­er Tele­cast­er.

Davids does­n’t just explain the com­po­nents and con­struc­tion of that ven­er­a­ble instru­ment, he plays it — just as he does a vari­ety of oth­er elec­tric gui­tars, each with a sound rep­re­sen­ta­tive of its era. Even if you don’t know them by name, they’ll all sound famil­iar from a vari­ety of musi­cal con­texts.

The inven­tion of the elec­tric gui­tar made pos­si­ble the birth of rock and roll, which shows no few signs of frailty even here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. The ear­li­est mod­els pro­duced are ever more high­ly val­ued for their sound, their feel, and their appar­ent sim­plic­i­ty, a qual­i­ty many rock­ers hold in the utmost regard. But despite long adher­ing to the same basic form, the elec­tric gui­tar has incor­po­rat­ed a great vari­ety of inno­va­tions — in its pick­ups, its vibra­to sys­tems, and much else besides — whose com­bi­na­tions and per­mu­ta­tions have giv­en rise to entire sub­gen­res like surf, heavy met­al, rock­a­bil­ly, and grunge. Like rock itself, the elec­tric gui­tar arrived hav­ing already attained a kind of per­fec­tion, but pos­sessed too much vital­i­ty to stand still.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Behold the First Elec­tric Gui­tar: The 1931 “Fry­ing Pan”

The World’s First Bass Gui­tar (1936)

The Sto­ry of the Gui­tar: The Com­plete Three-Part Doc­u­men­tary

Oxford Sci­en­tist Explains the Physics of Play­ing Elec­tric Gui­tar Solos

All of the Dif­fer­ent Kinds of Acoustic Gui­tars, and the Dif­fer­ent Woods They’re Made Of: The Ulti­mate Acoustic Gui­tar Guide

Learn to Play Gui­tar for Free: Intro Cours­es Take You From The Very Basics to Play­ing Songs In No Time

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Clock That Changed the World: How John Harrison’s Portable Clock Revolutionized Sea Navigation in the 18th Century

in History, Technology | September 15th, 2022

In the ear­ly eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, a pock­et watch could keep rea­son­ably accu­rate time, give or take a minute per day. This may not sound too bad, giv­en how we now regard even the most advanced tech­nol­o­gy of that era. But it cer­tain­ly was­n’t good enough for marine nav­i­ga­tion: each day, a ship could tol­er­ate its clocks gain­ing or los­ing only a cou­ple of sec­onds. With­out prop­er reli­able infor­ma­tion about the time, sailors on the open sea had no way of know­ing quite where they were. More specif­i­cal­ly, the sun told them how far north or south they were, their lat­i­tude, but they did­n’t know how far east or west they were, their lon­gi­tude.

The­o­ret­i­cal­ly speak­ing, the “lon­gi­tude prob­lem” was eas­i­ly solv­able. You could cal­cu­late it, writes Gear Patrol’s Ed Est­low, “by sight­ing the sun at high noon where you were, and if you had a good enough clock for the time back home, you could com­pare the two and, with some sim­ple math­e­mat­ics, deter­mine your posi­tion.” But engi­neer­ing such a good-enough clock in real­i­ty took about half a cen­tu­ry. “In 1714, the British gov­ern­ment offered the huge prize of £20,000 (rough­ly £2 mil­lion today) to any­one who could solve the lon­gi­tude prob­lem once and for all.” But the mon­ey was­n’t ful­ly claimed until 1773, by a York­shire clock­mak­er John Har­ri­son.

Har­rison’s name looms large in the annals of chronom­e­try, and not with­out rea­son. His work of invent­ing an accu­rate ship clock involved the cre­ation of five dif­fer­ent mod­els, known by his­to­ri­ans as H1 through H5. H1 was a portable ver­sion of the kind of siz­able wood­en clock with which he’d already made his name. It was only in with H4, in 1765, that he real­ized small is beau­ti­ful, or rather accu­rate, at least if equipped with over­sized inter­nal bal­ance wheels to hold up more reli­ably against the con­stant move­ment of a ship at sea. This design worked with­out a hitch, but even so, the Board of Lon­gi­tude only saw fit to award him half the mon­ey offered.

Nei­ther Har­rison’s solv­ing of the lon­gi­tude prob­lem nor his receipt of a dis­ap­point­ing­ly halved prize seem to have stopped his obses­sion with build­ing ever-bet­ter time­keep­ing devices. This comes as no sur­prise giv­en the qual­i­ties of mind that emerge in “The Clock That Changed the World,” the episode of BBC’s A His­to­ry of the World at the top of the post. While work­ing on H5, Har­ri­son “sought the sup­port of King George III” (he of the famous mad­ness). “The King, a nat­ur­al philoso­pher in his own right, test­ed H5 him­self and promised Har­ri­son his sup­port.” That sup­port final­ly got the elder­ly Har­ri­son his promised amount and then some, but one sens­es that — like any pur­suit wor­thy of one’s life­long ded­i­ca­tion — it was nev­er real­ly about the mon­ey.

Relat­ed con­tent:

New Archive Reveals How Sci­en­tists Final­ly Solved the Vex­ing “Lon­gi­tude Prob­lem” Dur­ing the 1700s

How Clocks Changed Human­i­ty For­ev­er, Mak­ing Us Mas­ters and Slaves of Time

The Plan­e­tar­i­um Table Clock: Mag­nif­i­cent 1775 Time­piece Tracks the Pass­ing of Time & the Trav­el of the Plan­ets

How Did Car­tog­ra­phers Cre­ate World Maps before Air­planes and Satel­lites? An Intro­duc­tion

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Watch Opera Legend Marian Anderson’s Historic Performance on the Steps of the Lincoln Memorial (1939)

in History, Music | September 15th, 2022

Near­ly every Civ­il Rights icon becomes more of a sym­bol than a com­plex human being over time, a con­se­quence of iconog­ra­phy in gen­er­al. This has cer­tain­ly been the case with opera singer Mar­i­an Ander­son. “If Amer­i­cans know one fact about the leg­endary African-Amer­i­can con­tral­to Mar­i­an Ander­son,” Kira Thur­man writes at The New York­er, “it’s that she sang in defi­ance on the steps of the Lin­coln Memo­r­i­al, in 1939.”

We prob­a­bly also know that Ander­son took to the steps of the mon­u­ment again in 1963 to sing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” before Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.‘s “I Have a Dream Speech” at the March on Wash­ing­ton. In her offi­cial por­trait at the Nation­al Por­trait Gallery, she stands regal­ly before the Lin­coln Memo­ri­al’s columns in her fur coat, gaz­ing res­olute­ly into the mid­dle dis­tance, her hair gray with age and wis­dom. It’s the defin­ing image of an artist whose defi­ance has come to over­shad­ow her art.

The image is an undoubt­ed­ly pow­er­ful one, a key moment in the seem­ing­ly unend­ing strug­gle for jus­tice in the Unit­ed States, as well as “one of the most impor­tant musi­cal events of the 20th cen­tu­ry,” Anas­ta­sia Tsioul­cas writes at NPR. Ander­son “had nev­er faced such an enor­mous crowd” — 75,000 peo­ple of all races and back­grounds. “She was ter­ri­fied,” and lat­er wrote, “I could not run away from this sit­u­a­tion. If I had any­thing to offer, I would have to do so now.” She may have con­fessed to stage fright that day, but some char­ac­ter­i­za­tions do not do jus­tice to her pro­fes­sion­al­ism. Ander­son did not fear crowds or big­otry.

When she sang at the Lin­coln Memo­r­i­al, Ander­son was 42 years old and very much an inter­na­tion­al star. Four years ear­li­er, she had returned from Europe “as one of the most revered peo­ple on the plan­et” and per­formed at the White House for Eleanor Roo­sevelt. It was Roo­sevelt who arranged the 1939 Lin­coln Memo­r­i­al con­cert — after resign­ing from the Daugh­ters of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion when the all-white group refused to rent the 4,000-seat Con­sti­tu­tion Hall to Howard Uni­ver­si­ty for their annu­al con­cert event for Ander­son.

Roo­sevelt had and would con­tin­ue to inter­vene in many such instances of racism, using her pow­er for demo­c­ra­t­ic good. Ander­son, while not an activist, was not new to musi­cal protest. In 1935, her appli­ca­tion to sing at the Salzburg Fes­ti­val in Aus­tria had been sim­i­lar­ly reject­ed, on the heels of a Nazi riot over Black bari­tone Aubrey Pankey’s per­for­mance in the city ear­li­er that year. “What Ander­son did next illus­trates a pat­tern of behav­ior that she would deploy as a weapon through­out her career,” Thur­man writes. “She showed up any­way.”

Ander­son held a small con­cert for a few devot­ed lis­ten­ers at Mozar­teum con­cert hall, then a few days lat­er in a hotel ball­room for “hun­dreds of elite musi­cians, who applaud­ed her act of defi­ance,” and shared in it them­selves. After this con­cert, famed con­duc­tor Arturo Toscani­ni met her back­stage and said, “What I heard today one is priv­i­leged to hear only once in a hun­dred years.” Ander­son, “became an inter­na­tion­al super­star overnight.” She built a rep­u­ta­tion through bold acts of defi­ance, but her great­est con­tri­bu­tions were always to music.

The “dig­ni­fied, sto­ic, mid­dle-aged Black woman” who appeared at the Lin­coln Memo­r­i­al was young once, writes Thur­man, and as much a sen­sa­tion in Europe as Josephine Bak­er. She’s been char­ac­ter­ized as “mod­est” and self-effac­ing, but she was also ambi­tious, an incred­i­bly tal­ent­ed child prodi­gy who knew she would find too many doors closed in the U.S. Like many Black artists of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, she became a con­fi­dent, cel­e­brat­ed ex-pat: “Walk­ing down Salzburg’s hilly cob­ble­stone streets dur­ing her first day in the Alpine city, in the sum­mer of 1925, Ander­son was trailed by a cadre of jour­nal­ists every­where she went.”

Ten years lat­er, Ander­son would find things very much changed in Europe, and find her­self feel­ing as alien­at­ed in for­mer­ly wel­com­ing Aus­tria as she had in her home coun­try. (She was mourned by her Aus­tri­an fans. One crit­ic wrote of her last per­for­mance, “[her] music makes those peo­ple hap­py who have not yet giv­en up their belief that all men are equal.”) By 1939, Ander­son was a vet­er­an not only of opera and music hall stages around the world, but of fac­ing up to racism and dis­crim­i­na­tion.

“A qui­et, hum­ble per­son,” writes NPR’s Susan Stam­berg, “Ander­son often used ‘we’ when speak­ing about her­self,” refer­ring to the “many peo­ple whom we will nev­er know,” she once said, but who make our lives pos­si­ble. In the first song she sang at the Lin­coln Memo­r­i­al, “My Coun­try, ‘Tis of Thee,” she changed the words of the third line from “of thee I sing” to “to thee we sing,” a move that “can be heard as an embrace, imply­ing com­mu­ni­ty and group respon­si­bil­i­ty.” It could also imply Ander­son­’s con­scious­ness of her­self and her com­mu­ni­ty as mar­gin­al­ized out­siders in the coun­try of their birth, or her sense of her­self as address­ing an inte­grat­ed nation in that chilly, Novem­ber out­door crowd.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Brook­lyn Acad­e­my of Music Puts Online 70,000 Objects Doc­u­ment­ing the His­to­ry of the Per­form­ing Arts: Down­load Play­bills, Posters & More

Hear the High­est Note Sung in the 137-Year His­to­ry of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera

Hear Singers from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera Record Their Voic­es on Tra­di­tion­al Wax Cylin­ders

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

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How The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Invented Psychological Horror Film & Brought Expressionism to the Screen (1920)

in Film, History | September 14th, 2022

Even if you’ve nev­er actu­al­ly watched The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, you’ve seen it. You’ve seen it through­out the cen­tu­ry of cin­e­ma his­to­ry since the film first came out, dur­ing which its influ­ence has man­i­fest­ed again and again: in Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, Dario Argen­to’s Sus­piria, Ter­ry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, and Guiller­mo del Toro’s Night­mare Alley — not to men­tion much of the fil­mo­gra­phies of auteurs like David Lynch and Tim Bur­ton. These are just some of the films ref­er­enced by Tyler Knud­sen, bet­ter known as Cin­e­maTyler, in the video essay above, “Dr. Cali­gari Did More Than Just Invent Hor­ror Movies.”

“A case can be made that Cali­gari was the first true hor­ror film,” writes Roger Ebert. In ear­li­er cin­e­mat­ic scary sto­ries, “char­ac­ters were inhab­it­ing a rec­og­niz­able world. Cali­gari cre­ates a mind­scape, a sub­jec­tive psy­cho­log­i­cal fan­ta­sy. In this world, unspeak­able hor­ror becomes pos­si­ble.”

The tech­niques employed to that end have also con­vinced cer­tain his­to­ri­ans of the medi­um to call the pic­ture “the first exam­ple in cin­e­ma of Ger­man Expres­sion­ism, a visu­al style in which not only the char­ac­ters but the world itself is out of joint.” Knud­sen places this style in his­tor­i­cal con­text, specif­i­cal­ly that of Ger­many’s Weimar Repub­lic, which was estab­lished after World War I and last­ed until the rise of the Nazis.

Polit­i­cal­ly unsta­ble but artis­ti­cal­ly fruit­ful, the Weimar peri­od gave rise to a vari­ety of new artis­tic atti­tudes, at once enthu­si­as­tic and over­whelmed. “Where­as impres­sion­ism tries to depict the real world, but only from a first glance or impres­sion instead of focus­ing on details,” Knud­sen says, “expres­sion­ism tries to get at the artist’s inner feel­ings rather than the actu­al appear­ance of the sub­ject mat­ter.” Hence the bizarre sets of Cali­gari, whose every angle looks designed to be max­i­mal­ly uncon­vinc­ing. And yet the film is entire­ly faith­ful to its par­tic­u­lar real­i­ty: not the one occu­pied by Weimar-era Ger­mans or any­one else, but the one it con­jures up in a man­ner only motion pic­tures can. 102 years lat­er, The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari remains a haunt­ing view­ing expe­ri­ence — and one expres­sive of the sheer poten­tial of cin­e­ma. You can watch it above.

Relat­ed con­tent:

10 Great Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Nos­fer­atu to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

What Is Ger­man Expres­sion­ism? A Crash Course on the Cin­e­mat­ic Tra­di­tion That Gave Us Metrop­o­lis, Nos­fer­atu & More

Vir­ginia Woolf Watch­es The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari & Writes “The Cin­e­ma,” a Sem­i­nal Attempt to Under­stand the Pow­er of Movies (1926)

From Cali­gari to Hitler: A Look at How Cin­e­ma Laid the Foun­da­tion for Tyran­ny in Weimar Ger­many

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Influ­enced Tim Bur­ton: A Video Essay

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Gave Rise to the “Dutch” Angle, the Cam­era Shot That Defined Clas­sic Films by Welles, Hitch­cock, Taran­ti­no & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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