When asked once about his beliefs, This American Life creator Ira Glass replied that he believes “the car is the best place to listen to the radio.” That seems to be a culturally supported perception, or at least it has been in over the past half-century in America. But does it hold true in other countries? Does listening to the radio in the car feel as good in London, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, and Tokyo as it does in Chicago, New York, Miami, and Los Angeles?
You can see and hear for yourself with the wealth of virtual urban-driving-and-radio-listening experiences on offer at Drive & Listen, where you can take your pick from any of the aforementioned cities and 40 others besides. The site makes this possible by bringing together two forms of media that have come into their own on the internet of the 21st century: streaming radio and streaming video.
In most every major metropolitan area, radio stations now make their broadcasts available online. At the same time, Youtubers have by now shot and uploaded a great many through-the windshield views of all those places, creating the once-unlikely entertainment genre of the driving video.
Here we’ve included some prime examples from popular Youtube driver J Utah, whose scope includes American cities large and small as well as such world capitals as Tokyo, Paris, Singapore, Hong Hong, and São Paulo. All in 4K video.
Click on one of the cities on Drive & Listen’s menu, and chances are you’ll see one of J Utah’s videos. It will come with a streaming-radio soundtrack, sourced from one of the stations in the city or country on display. Your virtual Havana drive may be accompanied by announcements of the news of the day, your virtual Istanbul drive by Turkish rock, your virtual Chicago drive by an NPR affiliate (perhaps even WBEZ, home of This American Life), your virtual Guadalajara drive by soccer scores, your virtual Miami drive by straight-ahead jazz, your virtual Berlin drive by Patti Smith.
Each time you select a city, you’ll get a different combination of radio station and driving footage. As every driver knows, day driving and night driving — to say nothing of rush hour versus the wee hours — feels completely different, and so the drivers of Youtube have shot at all possible times. Some of their routes thread right between downtown skyscrapers, while others stick to freeways along the outskirts. As a resident of Seoul, I can tell you that Drive & Listen accurately conveys the experience of riding in a cab through that city — provided you first crank the video speed up to 2x.
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
When times are hard, it often helps to zoom out for a moment—in search of a wider perspective, historical context, the forest full of trees…
Astronaut.io, an algorithmic YouTube-based project by Andrew Wong and James Thompson, offers a big picture that’s as restorative as it is odd:
Today, you are an Astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100 miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this is what you see.
If the stars look very different today, it’s because they’re human, though not the kind who are prone to attracting the paparazzi. Rather, Astronaut is populated by ordinary citizens, with occasional appearances by pets, wildlife, video game characters, and houses, both interior and exterior.
Launch Astronaut, and you will be bearing passive witness to a parade of uneventful, untitled home video excerpts.
The experience is the opposite of earthshaking.
There’s this metaphor of being on a train …you see things out the window and think, ‘Oh what is that?’ but it’s too late, it’s already gone by. Not letting someone go too deep is pretty important.
After some trial and error on Twitter, where video content rarely favors the restful, Wong and Thompson realized that the sort of material they sought resided on YouTube. Perhaps it’s been reflexively dumped by users with no particular passion for what they’ve recorded. Or the account is a new one, its owner just beginning to figure out how to post content.
The videos on any given Astronaut journey earn their place by virtue of generic, camera-assigned file names (IMG 0034, MOV 0005, DSC 0165…), zero views, and an upload within the last week.
The overall effect is one of mesmerizing, unremarkable life going on whether it’s observed or not.
Children perform in their living room
A woman assembles a bride’s bouquet
A kitten bats a toy
A pre-fab home is moved into place
The vision is heartwarmingly global.
Astronaut is anti-star, but there are some frequent sightings, owing to the number of nameless inconsequential videos any one user uploads.
The effect is most soothing when you allow it to wash over you unimpeded, but there is a red button below the frame, if you feel compelled to linger within a certain scene.
(You can also click on whatever passes for the video’s title in the upper left corner to open it on YouTube, from whence you might be able to suss out a bit more information.)
A very young Super Mario fan has apparently colonized a parent’s account for his narrated gaming videos.
Halfway around the world, a formally dressed man sits behind a desk prior to his first-ever upload.
And everyone who comes through the door of a Chinese household adores the happy baby within.
It’s unclear if the algorithm will alight on any cell phone footage documenting the shocking scenes at recent protests sparked by the death of George Floyd. Perhaps not, given the urgency to share such videos, titling them to clue viewers in to the what, who, where, when, and why.
The internet is a place that often rewards the shocking, the sad, the rage-inducing — or the nakedly ambitious and attention-seeking. A morning of watching Astronaut.io is an antidote to all that.
Every sourdough starter is special to the ones who made or maintain it, but of the 1000s registered online with Quest for Sourdough, only 125 have earned a permanent place in the Puratos Sourdough Library in Saint-Vith, Belgium. It’s the world’s only library dedicated to Sourdough, and you can take a virtual tour here.
Housed in identical jars in a museum-quality refrigerated cabinets, these heritage starters have been carefully selected by librarian Karl De Smedt, above, who travels the world visiting bakeries, tasting bread, and learning the stories behind each sample that enters the collection.
As De Smedt recalls in an interview with the Sourdough Podcast, the idea for the museum began taking shape when a Lebanese baker reached out to Puratos, a hundred-year-old company that supplies commercial bakers and pastry makers with essentials of the trade. The man’s sons returned from a baking expo in Paris and informed their dad that when they took over, they planned to retire his time-honored practice of baking with fermented chickpeas in favor of instant yeast. Worried that his prized recipe would be lost to history, he appealed to Puratos to help preserve his protocols.
While fermented chickpeas do not count as sourdough—a combination of flour, water, and the resulting microorganisms this marriage gives rise to over time—the company had recently collected and analyzed 43 venerable starters. The bulk came from Italy, including one from Altamura, the “city of bread, producer of what Horace called in 37 B.C. ‘the best bread to be had, so good that the wise traveler takes a supply of it for his onward journey.’”
Thus was a non-circulating library born.
Each specimen is analyzed by food microbiologist Marco Gobbetti from the University of Bolzano and Bari.
More than 1100 strains of microorganisms have been recorded so far.
Every two months, the starters are taken out of the fridge and fed, i.e. reactivated, with a combination of water and some of their flour of origin, yearly quantities of which are contributed by their bakers. Without this regular care, the starters will die off.
(The pandemic has De Smedt working from home, but he intimated to The New York Times that he intended to make it back to feed his babies, or “mothers” as they are known in sourdough circles.)
Their consistency is documented along a line that ranges from hard to fluid, with Silly Putty in the middle.
Each year, De Smedt expands the collection with starters from a different area of the world. The latest additions come from Turkey, and are documented in the mouthwatering travelogue above.
For now, of course, he’s grounded in Belgium, and using his Instagram account to provide encouragement to other sourdough practitioners, answering rookie questions and showing off some of the loaves produced by his own personal starters, Barbara and Amanda.
Register your starter on Quest for Sourdough here.
If you haven’t yet taken the sourdough plunge, you can participate in North Carolina State University’s Wild Sourdough Project by following their instructions on making a starter from scratch and then submitting your data here.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her current starter, Miss Sourdough, was brought to life with an unholy splash of apple cider. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Of the many world class museums treating a stuck-at-home public to virtual tours of their collections, none inspire the resolve for future travel as the Stay At Home Museum, an initiative of the Flanders tourism board.
Before the COVID-19 epidemic response demanded the temporary shuttering of all such attractions, the region was entering the final year of a 3‑year festival celebrating such Flemish masters as Jan Van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel, and Peter Paul Rubens.
Our sadness at missing these cannot be chalked up to FOMO. Right now, the whole world is missing out.
So, consider the Stay At Home Museum a preview, something to help us enjoy our trips to the region all the more at some point in the future, by educating ourselves on the painters who made Flanders famous.
The series is also a treat for the Zoom weary. The expert guides aren’t facing their webcams at home, but rather using their high level access to lead us through the empty museums in which the exhibits are still installed.
No jostling…
No crowding in front of the most celebrated pieces…
No inane lunch-related chatter from tourists who aren’t into art as deeply as you are…
Above, Van Eyck expert Till-Holger Borchert, Director of Musea Bruges, orients us to the artist and his work, most notably the Ghent altarpiece, aka Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a 12-panel polyptych that Van Eyck worked on with Hugo, the older brother who died 6 years before its completion.
Pay close attention to Adam and Eve’s body hair. Borchert certainly does.
He also sheds a lot of interesting light on the significance of materials, framing choices, and composition.
The restored altarpiece was slated to be reinstalled in its original home of Ghent’s Saint Bavo’s Cathedral, following the scheduled closing of Jan van Eyck: An Optical Revolution—April 30, 2020.
The Royal Museum of Fine Art’s director Michel Draguet takes us on a French-speaking journey inside Bruegel’s painting, The Fall of the Rebel Angels.
Ben Van Beneden, the director of the Rubens House, invites us into Ruben’s “art gallery room”—something no self-respecting wealthy polyglot diplomat/aesthete who’s also a Baroque painter would do without, apparently.
The peek at Rubens’ garden is nice too, especially for those of us with no private outdoor space of our own.
Jumping ahead to the Belgian avant-garde of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, curator Mieke Mels of Ostennd’s the Mu.ZEE spills the beans on why native son, James Ensor, shielded his 1888 masterpiece Christ’s Entry into Brusselsfrom the public view for 3 decades.
While there are obviously much greater tragedies unfolding daily, it’s hard not to empathize with students who have watched countless special events—proms, commencements, spring sports, performances, hotly anticipated rites of passage—go poof.
In New York City, students in Parsons School of Design’s Narrative Spaces: Design Tools for Spatial Storytelling course were crestfallen to learn that their upcoming open-to-the-public exhibition of group and solo projects in the West Village—the centerpiece of the class and a huge opportunity to connect with an audience outside of the classroom—was suddenly off the menu.
Multidisciplinary artist Jeff Stark, who co-teaches the class with Pamela Parker, was disappointed on their behalves.
Stark’s own work, from Empire Drive In to Miss Rockaway Armada, is rooted in live experience, and New York City holds a special place in his heart. (He also edits the weekly email list Nonsense NYC, an invaluable resource for independent art and Do-It-Yourself events in the city.)
Student Rylie Cooke, an Australian who aspires to launch a design company, found that her research deepened her connection to artifacts she encountered at the Reliquary, as she came to appreciate the fabled Copacabana’s influence on the popular culture, food, and music of the period:
… with COVID-19 it became important to have this connection to the artifacts as I wasn’t able to physically touch or look at them when Parsons moved to online for the semester. I am a very hands-on creative and I love curating things, especially in an exhibit format.
Rather than scrap their goal of public exhibition, the class decided to take things into the virtual realm, hustling to adapt their original concepts to a purely screen-based experience, The New York Supper Club: From Nightlife to Social Distancing.
The plan to wow visitors with a period-appropriate table in the center of their West Village exhibition space became a grid of digital placemats that serve as portals to each project.
Cooke’s contribution, A Seat at the Copacabana, begins with an interview in which baseball great Mickey Mantle recounts getting into a cloakroom brawl as he and fellow New York Yankees celebrated a birthday with a Sammy Davis Jr. set. Recipes for steak and potatoes, Chicken a la King, rarebit, and arroz con pollo provide flavor for a floorshow represented by archival footage of “Let’s Do the Copacabana” starring Carmen Miranda, a Martin and Lewis appearance, and a dance rehearsal from 1945. The tour ends at the Copa’s current incarnation in Times Square, with a vision of pre-socially distanced contemporary merrymakers salsa-ing the night away.
(Navigate this exhibit using toolbar arrows at the bottom of the screen.)
Student Hongxi Chen’s investigations into The China Doll nightclub resulted in an elaborate interactive immersive experience on the topic of cultural appropriation:
The China Doll… was founded in 1946 by Caucasian stage producer Tom Ball, who deemed it the only “all-oriental” night club in New York. While the club sometimes played off “Oriental” stereotypes, and titled one of its shows “Slant-Eyed Scandals,” they featured Asian dancers and Asian singers presenting popular songs in a way New Yorkers had never seen before. The Dim interactive experience unfolds with the story of Thomas, a waiter at the China Doll.
As a junior in Parsons’ Design and Technology program, Chen had plenty of previous experience forging virtual environments, but working with a museum collection was new to him, as was collaborating on a virtual platform.
He sought Stark’s advice on creating vivid dialogue for his fictional waiter.
Chen stayed up until 7 am for two weeks, devouring open source tutorials in an attempt to wrangle and debug the many elements of his ambitious project—audio, video, character models and animation, software, game engines, and game server platform.
As Chen noted at the exhibition’s recent Zoom opening (an event that was followed by a digital dance party), the massive game can be a bit slow to load. Don’t worry, it’s worth the wait, especially as you will have a hand in the story, steering it to one of five different endings.
Chen, an international student, could not safely return to China and has not left his student apartment since mid-March, but gamely states that remaining in the same time zone as his school allowed him to communicate efficiently with his professors and the majority of his classmates. (Cooke is back home in Australia.)
Adds Chen:
Even though we are facing a difficult circumstance under the pandemic and had to pivot our original ideas into a virtual presentation, I’m glad that our class was able to quickly change plans and adapt to the situation. This… actually inspired me a lot and opened up ways to invite and connect people with virtual artwork.
(Apparently, I’m headed to Cafe Zanzibar, below, where the drinks are cheap, the aspirin is free, and Cab Calloway is a frequent headliner.)
Stark admits that initially, his students may not have shared his swooning response to the source material, but they share his love of New York City and the desire to “get in the thick of it.” By bringing a Generation Z perspective to this historical ephemera, they stake a claim, making work that could help the City Reliquary connect to a new audience.
Enter The New York Supper Club: From Nightlife to Social Distancing here.
Explore the City Reliquary online here, and join in the civic pride by participating in its weekly Instagram Live events, including Thursday Collectors’ Nights.
(All images used with permission of the artists and The City Reliquary)
Some of us are using this period of self-isolation to make sourdough.
Others are learning to play an instrument or initiating a daily yoga practice.
For those considering taking up painting, David Dunlop’s Emmy-Award winning PBS series Landscapes Through Time offers an excellent alternative (or supplement) to the well-established joys of cult figure Bob Ross, the eternal king of television art instruction.
Like Ross, Dunlop has a mellow onscreen temperament that pairs beautifully with the enchanting setting of Claude Monet’s famous water garden, above.
(Those who’ve visited Monet’s house and garden at Giverny will envy him his tourist-free access to the site. Even those with no intention of picking up a brush should find it restorative to spend time gazing at the same lovely view that Dunlop, like Monet before him, looks at through a deliberately Impressionistic squint.)
He packs a lot of art appreciation into 14 easily digested minutes, touching on art history, brush technique, composition, use of light, and, in particular, color theory.
When the museums reopen, you may find this crash course has enhanced your enjoyment, especially as pertains to canvases by Monet and his fellow Impressionists.
For those pursuing the hands-on oil painting experience, Dunlop provides a supply list of colors, all readily available:
Cobalt Blue
Cadmium Yellow
Alizarin Crimson
Ultramarine
Brilliant Rose
Emerald Green
Hooker’s Green
Titanium White
His brushes and paper appear to be garden variety, and his approach, like Ross’, is fast and loose.
Those who favor a less brazen approach may feel more at home with his watercolor painting demonstration in Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire in Provence, France, below.
There are more excerpts and instruction on Dunlop’s YouTube channel. For those wishing to take it to the next level, Dunlop is teaching a series of interactive studio demonstration classes via Zoom. Register here.
The lack of human presence in majorly polluted cities these past couple months has had some people seeing utopias as the skies begin to clear. But empty cities seem a little more dystopian to me. Dystopias are “a kind of surrealism,” writes Kim Stanley Robinson. They unearth the dreamlike dread beneath the veneer of the normal. No matter when they’re set, dystopias don’t depict the future so much as “the feeling of the present… heightened by exaggeration to a kind of dream or nightmare.” The events in dystopian fiction approach the truth of someone’s situation somewhere in the world and make visible what has been hidden.
We know ghost cities exist as ancient disasters like Pompeii and Herculaneum and modern ones like Pripyat, Ukraine, outside Chernobyl. But there are more of them than many of us know. Gleaming cities like Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, which broke ground in 1991 and contains the largest number of marble buildings in the world.
The 4.5 million square meter metropolis has almost no inhabitants, an enormous government folly. Towns and cities around the world have been abandoned for for all sorts of reasons, and they continue to as sea levels rise. Which is what makes viewing live camera footage of some of the world’s most iconic streets—almost completely emptied by the pandemic at the height of tourist season—so… surreal.
It’s true that people haven’t fled these cities, but made cozy bunkers of their apartments. Yet seeing the vacant streets live on camera, in Venice, London, New York, and elsewhere in the world, I get the uncanny feeling of looking at proto-surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico’s The Enigma of a Day, a depiction of a shadowy, uninhabited street through which we expect the Italian version of a tumbleweed to roll. Surveillance technology has inadvertently become a medium of modernist art.
There is so much beauty in the live view at the top of the Ponte delle Guglie in Venice from the Hotel Filù Venezia, and there is also such lonely melancholy, depending on the time of day and where the shadows fall. See a live view of Times Square, above, and another Times Square view at EarthCam, where you can also catch a feed of a mostly empty Abbey Road (some times of day emptier than others, as in the early-morning screenshot below). Skyline Webcams hosts even more live camera views of Venice, including feeds from the Rialto Bridge and the Piazza San Marco, as well as live feeds from several sites in Padua and other places in Italy.
These real-time visions are transporting in their strangeness. Are we living in the present or the future? In a dystopian world, there isn’t any difference. All futures are foreclosed by catastrophe, “all distances in time and space are shrinking,” wrote Martin Heidegger, a thinker who understood disaster, and who fell in line behind it. In that same essay, “The Thing” (as translated by Albert Hofstader), the German philosopher made his famous comment, “the terrible has already happened.”
The terrible that has happened to us is not only a deadly pandemic. The virus is not likely to disappear on its own; who knows how long this will go on? But not far behind the current crisis are more climate events that threaten to empty streets. If we empty cities not only as indicative of temporarily social distancing, but as images of the possible near-future, maybe we’ll be far less inclined to come out of this surreal experience and get right back to business-as-usual.
The Paris Catacombs is “one of those places,” wrote photographer Félix Nadar, “that everyone wants to see and no one wants to see again.” If anyone would know, Nadar would. He spent three months in and out of the underground city of death, with its macabre piles of skulls and crossbones, taking photographs (see here) that would help turn it into an internationally famous tourist attraction. In these days of quarantine, no one can see it; the site is closed until further notice. But if you’re the type of person who enjoys touring necropolises, you can still get your fix with a virtual visit.
Why would anyone want to do this, especially during a global outbreak? The Catacombs have attracted seekers after morbid curiosities and spiritual and philosophical truths for over two hundred years, through revolutions, massacres, and plagues.
A stark, haunting reminder of what Nadar called “the egalitarian confusion of death,” they witness mutely, without euphemism, to the future we are all assured, no matter our rank or position. They began as a disordered pile of bones in the late 18th century, transferred from overcrowded cemeteries and became a place where “a Merovingian king remains in eternal silence next to those massacred in September ‘92” during the French Revolution.
Contemplations of death, especially in times of war, plague, famine, and other shocks and crises, have been an integral part of many cultural coping mechanisms, and often involve meditations on corpses and graveyards. The Catacombs are no different, a sprawling memento mori named after the Roman catacombs, “which had fascinated the public since their discovery,” as the official site notes. Expanded, renovated, and rebuilt during the time of Napoleon and later during the extensive renovations of Paris in the mid-19th century, the site was first “consecrated as the ‘Paris Municipal Ossuary’ on April 7, 1786” and opened to the public in 1809.
It is a place that reminds us how all conflicts end. To the “litany of royal and impoverished dead from French history,” writes Allison Meier at the Public Domain Review, Nadar added in his essay on the Catacombs “the names of revolutionary victims and perpetrators like Maximilien Robespierre and Jean-Paul Marat.” Ruminations on the universal nature of death may be an odd diversion for some, and for others an urgent reminder to find out what matters to them in life. Learn more about the fascinating history of the Paris Catacombs here and begin your virtual visithere.
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