Edvard Munch’s Famous Painting “The Scream” Animated to Pink Floyd’s Primal Music

in Art, Music | December 9th, 2021

In this short video, Roman­ian ani­ma­tor Sebas­t­ian Cosor brings togeth­er two haunt­ing works from dif­fer­ent times and dif­fer­ent media: The Scream, by Nor­we­gian Expres­sion­ist painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944), and “The Great Gig in the Sky,” by the British rock band Pink Floyd.

Munch paint­ed the first of four ver­sions of The Scream in 1893. He lat­er wrote a poem describ­ing the apoc­a­lyp­tic vision behind it:

I was walk­ing along the road with two Friends
the Sun was set­ting — the Sky turned a bloody red
And I felt a whiff of Melan­choly — I stood
Still, death­ly tired — over the blue-black
Fjord and City hung Blood and Tongues of Fire
My Friends walked on — I remained behind
– shiv­er­ing with anx­i­ety — I felt the Great Scream in Nature

Munch’s hor­rif­ic Great Scream in Nature is com­bined in the video with Floy­d’s oth­er­world­ly “The Great Gig in the Sky,” one of the sig­na­ture pieces from the band’s 1973 mas­ter­piece, Dark Side of the Moon. The vocals on “The Great Gig” were per­formed by an unknown young song­writer and ses­sion singer named Clare Tor­ry.

Tor­ry had been invit­ed by pro­duc­er Alan Par­sons to come to Abbey Road Stu­dios and impro­vise over a haunt­ing piano chord pro­gres­sion by Richard Wright, on a track that was ten­ta­tive­ly called “The Mor­tal­i­ty Sequence.”  The 25-year-old singer was giv­en very lit­tle direc­tion from the band. “Clare came into the stu­dio one day,” said bassist Roger Waters in a 2003 Rolling Stone inter­view, “and we said, ‘There’s no lyrics. It’s about dying — have a bit of a sing on that, girl.’ ”

Forty-two years lat­er, that “bit of a sing” can still send a shiv­er down any­one’s spine. For more on the mak­ing of “The Great Gig in the Sky,” and Tor­ry’s amaz­ing con­tri­bu­tion, see the clip below to hear Tor­ry’s sto­ry in her own words.

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 and BlueSky.

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:

30,000 Works of Art by Edvard Munch & Oth­er Artists Put Online by Norway’s Nation­al Muse­um of Art

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

Hear How Clare Torry’s Vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Made the Song Go from Pret­ty Good to Stun­ning

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

The Night Frank Zap­pa Jammed With Pink Floyd … and Cap­tain Beef­heart Too (Bel­gium, 1969) 

Three Pink Floyd Songs Played on the Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Gayageum: “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall” & “Great Gig in the Sky”

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‘The Character of Physical Law’: Richard Feynman’s Legendary Course Presented at Cornell, 1964

in Online Courses, Physics | December 8th, 2021

Lec­ture One, The Law of Grav­i­ta­tion:

“Nature,” said physi­cist Richard Feyn­man, “uses only the longest threads to weave her pat­terns, so that each small piece of her fab­ric reveals the orga­ni­za­tion of the entire tapes­try.”

With those words Feyn­man end­ed the first of his famous 1964 Mes­sen­ger Lec­tures at Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, a talk enti­tled “The Law of Grav­i­ta­tion, an Exam­ple of Phys­i­cal Law.” (See above.) The lec­tures were intend­ed by Feyn­man as an intro­duc­tion, not to the fun­da­men­tal laws of nature, but to the very nature of such laws. The lec­tures were lat­er tran­scribed and col­lect­ed in The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law, one of Feyn­man’s most wide­ly read books. In the intro­duc­tion to the Mod­ern Library edi­tion, writer James Gle­ick gives a brief assess­ment of the charis­mat­ic man at the lectern:

Feyn­man, then forty-six years old, did the­o­ret­i­cal physics as spec­tac­u­lar­ly as any­one alive. He was due to win the Nobel Prize the next year for his ground­break­ing work in the 1940s in quan­tum elec­tro­dy­nam­ics, a the­o­ry that tied togeth­er in an exper­i­men­tal­ly per­fect pack­age all the var­ied phe­nom­e­na at work in light, radio, mag­net­ism, and elec­tric­i­ty. He had tak­en the cen­tu­ry’s ear­ly, half-made con­cep­tions of waves and par­ti­cles and shaped them into tools that ordi­nary physi­cists could use and under­stand. This was eso­teric science–more so in the decades that followed–and Feyn­man was not a house­hold name out­side physics, but with­in his field he had devel­oped an astound­ing stature. He had a mys­tique that came in part from sheer prag­mat­ic brilliance–in any group of sci­en­tists he could cre­ate a dra­mat­ic impres­sion by slash­ing his way through a dif­fi­cult problem–and in part, too, from his per­son­al style–rough-hewn, Amer­i­can, seem­ing­ly uncul­ti­vat­ed.

All sev­en of Feyn­man’s lec­tures were record­ed by the British Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion and pre­sent­ed as part of BBC Two’s “Fur­ther Edu­ca­tion Scheme.” In 2009 Bill Gates bought the rights to the videos and made them avail­able to the pub­lic on Microsoft­’s Project Tuva Web site.

Since then the series has become avail­able on YouTube for eas­i­er view­ing. As you scroll down the page you can access the videos which, “more than any oth­er record­ed image or doc­u­ment,” writes physi­cist Lawrence Krauss in Quan­tum Man: Richard Feyn­man’s Life in Sci­ence, “cap­ture the real Feyn­man, play­ful, bril­liant, excit­ed, charis­mat­ic, ener­getic, and no non­sense.”

You can find the remain­ing video lec­tures below:

Lec­ture Two, The Rela­tion of Math­e­mat­ics to Physics:

Lec­ture Three, The Great Con­ser­va­tion Prin­ci­ples:

Lec­ture Four, Sym­me­try in Phys­i­cal Law:

Lec­ture Five, The Dis­tinc­tion of Past and Future:

Lec­ture Six, Prob­a­bil­i­ty and Uncertainty–The Quan­tum Mechan­i­cal View of Nature:

Lec­ture Sev­en, Seek­ing New Laws:

You can find this course indexed in our list of Free Online Physics Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The “Feyn­man Tech­nique” for Study­ing Effec­tive­ly: An Ani­mat­ed Primer

How Richard Feynman’s Dia­grams Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Physics

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Is Now Com­plete­ly Online

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Download 215,000 Japanese Woodblock Prints by Masters Spanning the Tradition’s 350-Year History

in Archives, Art, Museums | December 8th, 2021

If you enjoy Japan­ese wood­block prints, that appre­ci­a­tion puts you in good com­pa­ny: with Vin­cent van Gogh, for exam­ple, and per­haps even more flat­ter­ing­ly, with many of your fel­low read­ers of Open Cul­ture. So avid is the inter­est in ukiyo‑e, the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese “pic­tures of the float­ing world,” that you might even have missed one of the large, free online col­lec­tions we’ve fea­tured over the years. Take, for instance, the one made avail­able by the Van Gogh Muse­um itself, which fea­tures the work of such well-known mas­ters as Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai, artist of The Great Wave off Kanaza­wa, and Uta­gawa Hiroshige, he of the One Hun­dred Views of Edo.

Edo was the name of Tokyo until 1868, a decade after Hiroshige’s death — an event that itself marked the end of an aes­thet­i­cal­ly fruit­ful era for ukiyo‑e. But the his­to­ry of the form itself stretch­es back to the 17th cen­tu­ry, as reflect­ed by the Unit­ed States Library of Con­gress’ online col­lec­tion “Fine Prints: Japan­ese, pre-1915.”

There you’ll find plen­ty of Hoku­sai and Hiroshige, but also oth­ers who took the art form in their own direc­tions like Uta­gawa Yoshi­fu­ji, whose prints include depic­tions of not just his coun­try­men but vis­it­ing West­ern­ers as well. (The results are some­what more real­is­tic than the ukiyo‑e Lon­don imag­ined in 1866 by Uta­gawa Yoshi­to­ra, anoth­er mem­ber of the same artis­tic lin­eage.)

As if all this was­n’t enough, you can also find more than 220,000 Japan­ese wood­block prints at Ukiyo‑e.org. Quite pos­si­bly the most expan­sive such archive yet cre­at­ed, it includes works from Hiroshige and Hoku­sai’s 19th-cen­tu­ry “gold­en age of print­mak­ing” as well as from the devel­op­ment of the art form ear­ly in the cen­tu­ry before. Even after its best-known prac­ti­tion­ers were gone, ukiyo‑e con­tin­ued to evolve: through Japan’s mod­ern­iz­ing Mei­ji peri­od in the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, through var­i­ous aes­thet­ic move­ments in the years up to the Sec­ond World War, and even on to our own time, which has seen the emer­gence even of pro­lif­ic non-Japan­ese print­mak­ers.

Of course, these ukiyo‑e prints weren’t orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed to be viewed on the inter­net; the works of Hoku­sai and Hiroshige may look good on a tablet, but not by their design. Still, they did often have the indi­vid­ual con­sumer in mind: these are artists “known today for their wood­block prints, but who also excelled at illus­tra­tions for deluxe poet­ry antholo­gies and pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture,” writes the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art cura­tor John Car­pen­ter. His words greet the vis­i­tor to the Met’s online col­lec­tion of more than 650 illus­trat­ed Japan­ese books, which presents ukiyo‑e as it would actu­al­ly have been seen by most peo­ple when the form first explod­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty — not that, even then, its enthu­si­asts could imag­ine how many appre­ci­a­tors it would one day have around the world.

Below you can find a list of pri­or posts fea­tur­ing archives of Japan­ese wood­block prints. Please feel free to explore them at your leisure.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load Hun­dreds of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters of the Tra­di­tion

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

The Met Puts 650+ Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Online: Mar­vel at Hokusai’s One Hun­dred Views of Mount Fuji and More

Watch the Mak­ing of Japan­ese Wood­block Prints, from Start to Fin­ish, by a Long­time Tokyo Print­mak­er

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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Punks, Goths, and Mods on TV (1983)

in Fashion, Music, Television | December 8th, 2021

The Riv­et­head pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with fash­ion is inescapably relat­ed to their anx­i­ety over being con­fused for sub­cul­tures they pro­fess to hate: Goths, Punks, Met­al­heads, Death Rock­ers… The fact that so many sub­cul­tures claim black as their col­or of choice con­tributes to the con­fu­sion.

There are two points upon which the­o­rists of post-indus­tri­al British sub­cul­tures gen­er­al­ly agree: 1) No mat­ter the music or the fash­ion, the bound­aries between one sub­cul­ture and anoth­er were rig­or­ous­ly, even vio­lent­ly, enforced (hence the wars between the mods and rock­ers), and; 2) The music and fash­ions of every sub­cul­ture were sub­ject to coop­ta­tion by the machin­ery of cap­i­tal­ism, to be mass pro­duced, pack­aged, and sold as off-the-rack com­mod­i­ty, a phe­nom­e­non that occurred almost as soon as punks, mods, rock­ers, goths, ted­dy boys, skin­heads, New Roman­tics, etc. began appear­ing on tele­vi­sion — as in the post-Grundy Irish TV appear­ance of four young indi­vid­u­als above from 1983.

The inter­view­er intro­duces these punks, goths, and mods by refer­ring first to their employ­ment — or lack of employ­ment — sta­tus, and then to the num­ber of chil­dren in their fam­i­ly. Com­ments drip­ping with class dis­dain sit along­side a char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of var­i­ous sub­cul­tures as “gangs” — the Hell’s Angels thrown in among them just to dri­ve the point home. Of course, there’s more to say about the denizens of ear­ly-80s UK sub­cul­tur­al street cor­ners — more than these four rep­re­sen­ta­tives have to say them­selves. It is com­mu­ni­cat­ed through per­for­mance rather than ver­bal expo­si­tion, through the affil­i­a­tions of cloth­ing, music, and pose — as in the mini-his­tor­i­cal slideshow of late-20th cen­tu­ry British sub­cul­tures below, from the 50s to the 80s.

In 1979, British the­o­rist Dick Heb­di­ge pub­lished what many con­sid­ered the defin­i­tive analy­sis of these work­ing-class scenes, which fre­quent­ly cen­tered around forms of racial and cul­tur­al exchange — as with mods who loved jazz or punks who loved ska and dub reg­gae; or racial and cul­tur­al exclu­sion — as with fas­cist skin­heads and chau­vin­ist ted­dy boys who glo­ri­fied the past, while oth­er sub­cul­tur­al ide­olo­gies looked to the future (or, as the case may be, no future).

Hebdige’s Sub­cul­ture: the Mean­ing of Style begins with a sto­ry about French writer Jean Genet, humil­i­at­ed in prison by homo­pho­bic guards over his pos­ses­sion of a tube of Vase­line:

Like Genet, we are inter­est­ed in sub­cul­ture – in the expres­sive forms and rit­u­als of those sub­or­di­nate groups – the ted­dy boys and mods and rock­ers, the skin­heads and the punks – who are alter­nate­ly dis­missed, denounced and can­on­ized; treat­ed at dif­fer­ent times as threats to pub­lic order and as harm­less buf­foons.

The irony of sub­cul­tures is that they iden­ti­fy with social out­siders, while re-enforc­ing bound­aries that cre­ate exclu­siv­i­ty (cf. the quote at the top, from Heb­di­ge-inspired Sub­cul­tures List). When the nov­el­ty and shock recedes, they become ripe fod­der for com­mer­cial coop­ta­tion, even lux­u­ry brand­ing.

What we usu­al­ly don’t get from tame ret­ro­spec­tives, or from patron­iz­ing mass media of the time, are deviant out­siders like Genet who can­not be reab­sorbed into the sys­tem because their very exis­tence pos­es a threat to the social order as so con­strued. So much of the fash­ion and music of post-war Britain was direct­ly cre­at­ed or inspired by West Indi­an migrants of the Win­drush gen­er­a­tion, for exam­ple. In too many pop­u­lar rep­re­sen­ta­tions of post­war British sub­cul­tures, that essen­tial part of the work­ing class UK sub­cul­ture sto­ry has been entire­ly left out.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A His­to­ry of Punk from 1976–78: A Free Online Course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Read­ing

The Sex Pis­tols Make a Scan­dalous Appear­ance on the Bill Grundy Show & Intro­duce Punk Rock to the Star­tled Mass­es (1976)

The His­to­ry of Punk Rock in 300 Tracks: A 13-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to Present

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

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How Well Can You Move in Medieval Armor?: Medievalist Daniel Jaquet Gives It a Try in Real Life

in Design, History, Life, Sports | December 7th, 2021

If you’ve ever run a marathon in cos­tume, or for that mat­ter, board­ed pub­lic trans­porta­tion with a large musi­cal instru­ment or a bulky bag of ath­let­ic equip­ment, you know that gear can be a bur­den best shed.

But what if that gear is your first, nay, best line of defense against a fel­low knight fix­ing to smite you in the name of their liege?

Such gear is non-option­al.

Curi­ous about the degree to which 15th-cen­tu­ry knights were encum­bered by their pro­tec­tive plat­ing, medieval­ist Daniel Jaquet com­mis­sioned a top armor spe­cial­ist from the Czech Repub­lic to make a suit spe­cif­ic to his own per­son­al mea­sure­ments. The result is based on a 15th cen­tu­ry spec­i­men in Vien­na that has been stud­ied by the Wal­lace Col­lec­tion’s archaeomet­al­lur­gist Alan Williams. As Jaquet recalled in Sci­ences et Avenir:

We had to make com­pro­mis­es in the copy­ing process, of course, because what inter­est­ed me above all was to be able to do a behav­ioral study, to see how one moved with this equip­ment on the back rather than attach­ing myself to the num­ber of exact rivets…we knew the com­po­si­tion and the hard­ness of the parts that we could com­pare to our repli­ca.

The accom­plished mar­tial artist test­ed his mobil­i­ty in the suit with a vari­ety of high­ly pub­lic, mod­ern activ­i­ties: reach­ing for items on the high­est super­mar­ket shelves, jog­ging in the park, scal­ing a wall at a climb­ing gym, tak­ing the Metro …

It may look like show­boat­ing, but these move­ments helped him assess how he’d per­form in com­bat, as well as low­er stress activ­i­ties involv­ing sit­ting down or stand­ing up.

Out of his met­al suit, Jaquet has been known to amuse him­self by ana­lyz­ing the verisimil­i­tude of Game of Thrones’ com­bat scenes. (Con­clu­sion: some lib­er­ties were tak­en, armor-wise, in that grue­some face off between the Moun­tain and the Viper.)

An invi­ta­tion to trav­el to New York City to present at the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art offered an unex­pect­ed test­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty, com­pli­ments of the airline’s bag­gage restric­tions:

For rea­sons of weight, space and cost, the solu­tion to wear the armor over me was con­sid­ered the best.

(The TSA offi­cers at Newark were not amused...)

His armored expe­ri­ence sheds light on those of ear­ly 15th-cen­tu­ry knight Jean le Main­gre, aka Bouci­caut, whose impres­sive career was cut short in 1415, when he was cap­tured by the Eng­lish at the Bat­tle of Agin­court.

Bouci­caut kept him­self in tip top phys­i­cal con­di­tion with a reg­u­lar armored fit­ness reg­i­men. His chival­ric biog­ra­phy details gear­ing up for exer­cis­es that include run­ning, chop­ping wood, vault­ing onto a horse, and work­ing his way up a lad­der from the under­side, with­out using his feet.

Jaquet dupli­cates them all in the above video.

(Reminder to those who would try this at home, make sure you’re capa­ble of per­form­ing these exer­cis­es in light­weight shorts and t‑shirt before attempt­ing to do them in armor.)

Like Boucicault’s, Jaquet’s armor is bespoke. Those who’ve strug­gled to lift their arms in an off-the-rack jack­et will appre­ci­ate the trade off. It’s worth spend­ing more to ensure suf­fi­cient range of move­ment.

In Boucicault’s day, ready-made pieces of less­er qual­i­ty could be pro­cured at mar­kets, trad­ing fairs, and shops in pop­u­lous areas. You could also try your luck after bat­tle, by strip­ping the cap­tive and the dead of theirs. Size was always an issue. Too small and your move­ment would be restrict­ed. Too big, and you’d be haul­ing around unnec­es­sary weight.

Jaquet describes his load as being on par with the weight 21st-cen­tu­ry sol­diers are required to car­ry. Body armor is a life­saver, accord­ing to a 2018 study by the Cen­ter for a New Amer­i­can Secu­ri­ty, but it also reduces mobil­i­ty, increas­es fatigue, and reduces mis­sion per­for­mance.

Giz­mo­do’s Jen­nifer Ouel­lette finds that medieval knights faced sim­i­lar chal­lenges:

The legs alone were car­ry­ing an extra 15 to 18 pounds, so the mus­cles had to work that much hard­er to over­come iner­tia to set the legs in motion. There is also evi­dence that the thin slits in the face mask, and tight chest plate, restrict­ed oxy­gen flow even fur­ther.

Read a detailed, schol­ar­ly account of Jaquet’s armor exper­i­ment in His­tor­i­cal Meth­ods: A Jour­nal of Quan­ti­ta­tive and Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary His­to­ry.

For those look­ing for a lighter read, here is Jaque­t’s account of tak­ing a com­mer­cial flight in armor (and some best prac­tice tips for those attempt­ing the same.)

- 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.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

What It’s Like to Actu­al­ly Fight in Medieval Armor

Watch Accu­rate Recre­ations of Medieval Ital­ian Longsword Fight­ing Tech­niques, All Based on a Man­u­script from 1404

How to Make and Wear Medieval Armor: An In-Depth Primer

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Stephen Fry Explains How to Deal with Bullying

in Life | December 7th, 2021

Stephen Fry got sent off to a far­away board­ing school at the age of sev­en. His sub­se­quent years of stu­dent life far from home taught him, among oth­er things, a set of effec­tive strate­gies to deflect bul­ly­ing. (“I sup­pose it all began when I came out of the womb,” he once said when asked at what point he acknowl­edged his sex­u­al­i­ty, and that must have giv­en him plen­ty of time to con­sid­er what it was to stand out­side the main­stream.) The par­tic­u­lar line he rec­om­mends deliv­er­ing in the Q&A clip above (record­ed at The Oxford Union) may not be for every­one, but he also has a larg­er point to make, and he makes it with char­ac­ter­is­tic elo­quence. The eter­nal threat of bul­ly­ing, he says, is “why nature gave us, or enough of a per­cent­age of us, wit — or at least what might pass for it.”

Wit, which Fry pos­sess­es in a famous abun­dance, must sure­ly have car­ried him through a great many sit­u­a­tions both pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al. A mod­ern-day intel­lec­tu­al and aes­thet­ic heir to Oscar Wilde, Fry has the advan­tage of hav­ing lived in a time and place with­out being sub­ject to the kind of pun­ish­ment vis­it­ed on the author of “The Bal­lad of Read­ing Gaol.” But that does­n’t mean he’s had an easy time of it. He cites an “ancient metaphor” he’s kept in mind: “No mat­ter how dark it is, the small­est light is vis­i­ble; no mat­ter how light it is, a bit of dark is noth­ing.” The chal­lenges he’s faced in life — none of them a mil­lion miles, pre­sum­ably, from the kind endured by those seen to be dif­fer­ent in oth­er ways — have sent him to the wells of his­to­ry, phi­los­o­phy, and even mythol­o­gy. 

“We have to return to Niet­zsche,” Fry says, and specif­i­cal­ly The Birth of Tragedy. “He argued that tragedy was born out of ancient Greece, out of a spir­it that the Athe­ni­ans had as they grew up as a spe­cial tribe that some­how man­aged to com­bine two qual­i­ties of their twelve Olympic deities.” Some of these qual­i­ties were embod­ied in Athena, god­dess of wis­dom, and Apol­lo, god of har­mo­ny, music, math­e­mat­ics, and rhetoric. But then we have Diony­sius, “god of wine and fes­ti­val and riot. Absolute riot.” Tragedies, accord­ing to Niet­zsche, “look at the fact that all of us are torn in two,” with part of us inclined toward Athen­ian and Apol­lon­ian pur­suits, where anoth­er part of us “wants to wrench our clothes off, dive into the grapes, and make slurp­ing, hor­ri­ble nois­es of love and dis­cord.”

This all comes down to the thor­ough­ly mod­ern myth that is Star Trek. On the Enter­prise we have Mr. Spock, who embod­ies “rea­son, log­ic, cal­cu­la­tion, sci­ence, and an absolute inabil­i­ty to feel”; we have Bones, “all gut reac­tion”; and “in the mid­dle, try­ing to be a per­fect mix of the two of them,” we have Cap­tain Kirk, “who want­ed the human­i­ty of Bones, but some of the rea­son­ing judg­ment of Spock.” The Enter­prise, in a word, is us: “Each one of us, if we exam­ine our­selves, knows there is an inner beast who is capa­ble of almost any­thing — in mind, at least — and there is an inner monk, an inner har­mo­nious fig­ure.” Each side keeps get­ting the bet­ter of the oth­er, turn­ing even the bul­lied into bul­lies on occa­sion. The best you can do, in Fry’s view, is to “go forth, be mad, be utter­ly proud of who you are — what­ev­er you are — and for God’s sake, try every­thing.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry: What I Wish I Knew When I Was 18

Stephen Fry on Cop­ing with Depres­sion: It’s Rain­ing, But the Sun Will Come Out Again

Stephen Fry on the Pow­er of Words in Nazi Ger­many: How Dehu­man­iz­ing Lan­guage Laid the Foun­da­tion for Geno­cide

How Blondie’s Deb­bie Har­ry Learned to Deal With Super­fi­cial, Demean­ing Inter­view­ers

PBS Short Video “Bad Behav­ior Online” Takes on the Phe­nom­e­non of Cyber­bul­ly­ing

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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When the Colosseum in Rome Became the Home of Hundreds of Exotic Plant Species

in Architecture, Biology, History | December 7th, 2021

The Colos­se­um is one of the most pop­u­lar tourist attrac­tions in Italy, and thus one of the most pop­u­lar tourist attrac­tions in all of Europe. But the nature of its appeal to its many vis­i­tors has changed over the cen­turies. In the Atlantic, nov­el­ist and pod­cast­er Paul Coop­er notes that, “the belief that Chris­t­ian mar­tyrs had once been fed to the lions in the are­na,” for exam­ple, once made it a renowned site of reli­gious pil­grim­age. (This “despite lit­tle evi­dence that Chris­tians were ever actu­al­ly killed in the are­na.”) But in that same era, the Colos­se­um was also a site of botan­ic pil­grim­age: amid its ruins grew “420 species of plant,” includ­ing some rare exam­ples “found nowhere else in Europe.”

Notable tourists who took note of the Colos­se­um’s rich plant life include Charles Dick­ens, who beheld its “walls and arch­es over­grown with green,” and Per­cy Bysshe Shel­ley, who wrote of how “the copse­wood over­shad­ows you as you wan­der through its labyrinths, and the wild weeds of this cli­mate of flow­ers bloom under your feet.”

Coop­er quotes from these writ­ings in his Atlantic piece, and in an asso­ci­at­ed Twit­ter thread also includes plen­ty of ren­der­ings of the Colos­se­um as it then looked dur­ing the 18th and 19th cen­turies. He even select­ed images from Flo­ra of the Colos­se­um of Rome, or, Illus­tra­tions and descrip­tions of four hun­dred and twen­ty plants grow­ing spon­ta­neous­ly upon the ruins of the Colos­se­um of Rome (read­able free online at the Inter­net Archive), the 1855 work of a less well-known Eng­lish­man named Richard Deakin.

A botanist, Deakin did the hard work of cat­a­loging those hun­dreds of plant species grow­ing in the Colos­se­um back in the 1850s. The inter­ven­ing 170 or so years have tak­en their toll on this bio­di­ver­si­ty: as Nature report­ed it, only 242 of these species were still present in the ear­ly 2000s, due in part to “a shift towards species that pre­fer a warmer, dri­er cli­mate” and the growth of the sur­round­ing city. In its hey­day in the first cen­turies of the last mil­len­ni­um, the are­na lay on the out­skirts of Rome, where­as it feels cen­tral today. Pay it a vis­it, and you both will and will not see the Colos­se­um that Dick­ens and Shel­ley did; but then, they nev­er knew it as, say, Titus or Domit­ian did. In recent years there have been moves to restore and even improve ancient fea­tures like the retractable floor; why not dou­ble down on the exot­ic flo­ra while we’re at it?

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed con­tent:

Rome’s Colos­se­um Will Get a New Retractable Floor by 2023 — Just as It Had in Ancient Times

The Roman Colos­se­um Has a Twin in Tunisia: Dis­cov­er the Amphithe­ater of El Jem, One of the Best-Pre­served Roman Ruins in the World

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 CE: Explore Stun­ning Recre­ations of The Forum, Colos­se­um and Oth­er Mon­u­ments

High-Res­o­lu­tion Walk­ing Tours of Italy’s Most His­toric Places: The Colos­se­um, Pom­peii, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca & More

Build­ing The Colos­se­um: The Icon of Rome

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

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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Pink Floyd’s Entire Studio Discography is Now on YouTube: Stream the Studio & Live Albums

in Music | December 6th, 2021

Approached with lit­tle pri­or knowl­edge, Pink Floyd is an enig­ma. A sta­di­um rock band renowned for mas­sive laser light shows and a pio­neer­ing use of quadra­phon­ic and holo­phon­ic sound, they are also best appre­ci­at­ed at home — alone or with a few true fans — on a pair of high fideli­ty stereo speak­ers or head­phones, under the hazy pur­plish-green­ish glow of a black­light poster. The expe­ri­ence of their clas­sic albums is para­dox­i­cal­ly one of “shared soli­tary con­tem­pla­tion”; their live shows are an expan­sion of the home lis­ten­ing envi­ron­ment, where fans first received an “edu­ca­tion from cousins and old­er broth­ers of friends as to the seri­ous­ness (and ston­er sacra­ment) of The Dark Side of the Moon,” as Mar­tin Popoff writes in Pink Floyd: Album by Album. Both enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar and dar­ing­ly exper­i­men­tal, it’s hard to place them com­fort­ably in one camp or anoth­er.

Lis­ten­ers who came to the band dur­ing their 1970s hey­day, “in the years between The Dark Side of the Moon and The Final Cut,” Bill Kopp writes, “were large­ly unaware of what the band had done before the peri­od….. The fact high­lights a remark­able fea­ture of Pink Floyd’s pop­u­lar­i­ty: casu­al fans knew of the band’s work from The Dark Side of the Moon onward; more seri­ous stu­dents of the group were famil­iar with the band’s 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, made when Pink Floyd was led by its founder, Roger Kei­th ‘Syd’ Bar­rett.”

The split is curi­ous because the 70s space rock ver­sion of the band who made the third best-sell­ing album of all time owed so much to its psy­che­del­ic founder, who slipped com­plete­ly from view as he slipped away from the music indus­try.

As Andy Mab­bett writes in his book Pink Floyd: The Music and the Mys­tery:

Barrett’s with­draw­al from music had long ago become a source of intrigue, one of the most mys­ti­fy­ing sagas in rock, but his con­tri­bu­tion to the group as their first singer, gui­tarist and song­writer was cru­cial to there ever being a Pink Floyd in the first place. Syd might not have played much of a role in the clas­sic record­ings Pink Floyd pro­duced in the Sev­en­ties, but every­one — not least the group them­selves — long ago real­ized that all this might nev­er have hap­pened were it not for Syd’s ini­tial inspi­ra­tion.

At their best, dur­ing the gold­en years of Dark Side and Wish You Were Here, the band remem­bered their his­to­ry while expand­ing their ear­ly avant-blues rock into the out­er reach­es of space. Dark Side con­tained their first hit sin­gles since their 1967 debut and intro­duced new fans to Bar­rett indi­rect­ly via the lyrics of “Brain Dam­age” (orig­i­nal­ly called “Lunatic”) and the “Shine on You Crazy Dia­mond” suite. The cyn­i­cism and sense of doom that seemed to take over as Roger Waters became the band’s pri­ma­ry song­writer found its foil in Bar­ret­t’s con­tin­ued influ­ence — in his absence — on the band dur­ing the ear­ly 70s.

But in the 70s one had to work par­tic­u­lar­ly hard to get caught up on the ear­ly mythos of Pink Floyd, track­ing down LPs of albums like Med­dle, Atom Heart Moth­er, and Ummagum­ma. As ear­ly albums were reis­sued on tape and CD, it became a lit­tle eas­i­er to famil­iar­ize one­self with Pink Floy­d’s many his­tor­i­cal phas­es — from exper­i­men­tal psych-rock pio­neers to sta­di­um-fill­ing prog-rock super­stars. These days, that expe­ri­ence can be had in an after­noon on YouTube. The band has put their stu­dio discog­ra­phy and three live per­for­mances online and you can find links below (with a few choice cuts above).

Stu­dio

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

A Saucer­ful of Secrets

More

Ummagum­ma

Atom Heart Moth­er

Med­dle

Obscured by Clouds

The Dark Side of the Moon

Wish You Were Here

Ani­mals

The Wall

The Final Cut

A Momen­tary Lapse of Rea­son

The Divi­sion Bell

The End­less Riv­er

Live

Del­i­cate Sound of Thun­der

Pulse

Is There Any­body Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81 

Does the ridicu­lous ease of find­ing this music now clear up the enig­ma of Pink Floyd? Maybe. Or maybe no amount of stream­ing con­ve­nience will dis­pel “the mys­tery,” Mab­bett writes, “that grew around their reluc­tance to be pho­tographed or inter­viewed for much of the Sev­en­ties, the lack of sin­gles dur­ing the same cru­cial peri­od, the imag­i­na­tive album pack­ag­ing, the crisp live sound, the spec­tac­u­lar the­atri­cal shows — and, of course, a spe­cial mag­ic that can­not be copied no mat­ter how much mon­ey or equip­ment is avail­able.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

“The Dark Side of the Moon” and Oth­er Pink Floyd Songs Glo­ri­ous­ly Per­formed by Irish & Ger­man Orches­tras

Pink Floyd’s First Mas­ter­piece: An Audio/Video Explo­ration of the 23-Minute Track, “Echoes” (1971)

A Live Stu­dio Cov­er of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Played from Start to Fin­ish

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

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The Quirky Self-Portraits of 18th Century Painter Joseph Ducreux

in Art | December 6th, 2021

We all know him, the dap­per cross between a smarmy office bro and smug, pull-my-fin­ger uncle; lean­ing on his walk­ing stick, hat pushed back at a rak­ish angle, point­ing at the view­er with a leer.… The 18th-cen­tu­ry paint­ing, titled Self-Por­trait in the Guise of a Mock­er, enjoyed a brief but rich sec­ond life for a cou­ple years as a 21st cen­tu­ry meme, first appear­ing online in a 2009 image macro with the cap­tion “Dis­re­gard Females, Acquire Cur­ren­cy,” an over­ly stuffy, thus hilar­i­ous, rephras­ing of Noto­ri­ous B.I.G.’s “Get Mon­ey” lyrics. Thou­sands of imi­ta­tions fol­lowed. With­in a cou­ple years, Steve Buscemi’s face got pho­to­shopped in place of the grin­ning bon vivant, and the meme began its decline.

But whose face was it, pre-Busce­mi, giv­ing us that toothy grin and point, “like a man catch­ing sight of an old friend across a crowd­ed room,” the Pub­lic Domain Review writes, “or a politi­cian try­ing to charm a vot­er.” The gen­tle­man in ques­tion, in fact, hap­pened to be the artist, Joseph Ducreux, a high­ly skilled oil painter whose minia­ture of Marie Antoinette in 1769 won him a baronet­cy and the title of primer pein­tre de la reine (First Painter to the Queen).

This was an hon­or not giv­en to any old slouch. Ducreux worked along­side such mas­ters as Élis­a­beth Vigée Le Brun and Jacques-Louis David, despite the fact that he was not a mem­ber of the Roy­al Acad­e­my of Paint­ing and Sculp­ture, unheard of at the time for a court painter.

Dur­ing the French Rev­o­lu­tion, Ducreux hid out in Lon­don, where he made the last por­trait of Louis XVI before the king’s behead­ing. After­ward, he returned and, through his friend­ship with David, resumed his career as a por­trait painter, as well as an eccen­tric self-por­traitist, an avo­ca­tion he’d tak­en up in the 1780s and 90s to sat­is­fy his curios­i­ty about the the­o­ry of phys­iog­no­my, a pseu­do­science that attempt­ed to divine a per­son­’s char­ac­ter and per­son­al­i­ty from their facial expres­sions and bod­i­ly pos­tures.

These were remark­able paint­ings for their time, but they were not made with Tum­blr or Twit­ter in mind. Giv­en that they were made before the age of pho­tog­ra­phy and paint­ed on large can­vas­es in oils, the process of cre­at­ing these goofy self­ies would have been painstak­ing and time-con­sum­ing — hard­ly the kind of effort a work­ing artist applies to a joke.

Humor­ous as they are, and no doubt Ducreux had a healthy sense of humor, the por­traits were also meant to serve a sci­en­tif­ic pur­pose of a sort, and they show an artist push­ing past the con­ser­v­a­tive tra­di­tions of por­trai­ture in his day, chaf­ing at the sedate roy­al pos­tures and placid expres­sions that were sup­posed to tele­graph the aris­toc­ra­cy’s inner nobil­i­ty. We might sus­pect that through­out his career as a court painter, Ducreux him­self had rea­sons to sus­pect oth­er­wise about his sub­jects. But he only had per­mis­sion to prac­tice his the­o­ries on him­self.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Inti­ma­cy of Fri­da Kahlo’s Self-Por­traits: A Video Essay

14 Self-Por­traits by Pablo Picas­so Show the Evo­lu­tion of His Style: See Self-Por­traits Mov­ing from Ages 15 to 90

Vin­cent Van Gogh’s Self Por­traits: Explore & Down­load a Col­lec­tion of 17 Paint­ings Free Online

25 Mil­lion Images From 14 Art Insti­tu­tions to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online In One Huge Schol­ar­ly Archive

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

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How Peter Jackson Used Artificial Intelligence to Restore the Video & Audio Featured in The Beatles: Get Back

in Artificial Intelligence, Film, Music, Technology | December 6th, 2021

Much has been made in recent years of the “de-aging” process­es that allow actors to cred­i­bly play char­ac­ters far younger than them­selves. But it has also become pos­si­ble to de-age film itself, as demon­strat­ed by Peter Jack­son’s cel­e­brat­ed new docu-series The Bea­t­les: Get Back. The vast major­i­ty of the mate­r­i­al that com­pris­es its near­ly eight-hour run­time was orig­i­nal­ly shot in 1969, under the direc­tion of Michael Lind­say-Hogg for the doc­u­men­tary that became Let It Be.

Those who have seen both Lin­day-Hog­g’s and Jack­son’s doc­u­men­taries will notice how much sharp­er, smoother, and more vivid the very same footage looks in the lat­ter, despite the six­teen-mil­lime­ter film hav­ing lan­guished for half a cen­tu­ry. The kind of visu­al restora­tion and enhance­ment seen in Get Back was made pos­si­ble by tech­nolo­gies that have only emerged in the past few decades — and pre­vi­ous­ly seen in Jack­son’s They Shall Not Grow Old, a doc­u­men­tary acclaimed for its restora­tion of cen­tu­ry-old World War I footage to a time-trav­el-like degree of verisimil­i­tude.

“You can’t actu­al­ly just do it with off-the-shelf soft­ware,” Jack­son explained in an inter­view about the restora­tion process­es involved in They Shall Not Grow Old. This neces­si­tat­ed mar­shal­ing, at his New Zealand com­pa­ny Park Road Post Pro­duc­tion, “a depart­ment of code writ­ers who write com­put­er code in soft­ware.” In oth­er words, a suf­fi­cient­ly ambi­tious project of visu­al revi­tal­iza­tion — mak­ing media from bygone times even more life­like than it was to begin with — becomes as much a job of tra­di­tion­al film-restora­tion or visu­al-effects as of com­put­er pro­gram­ming.

This also goes for the less obvi­ous but no-less-impres­sive treat­ment giv­en by Jack­son and his team to the audio that came with the Let It Be footage. Record­ed in large part monau­ral­ly, these tapes pre­sent­ed a for­mi­da­ble pro­duc­tion chal­lenge. John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s instru­ments share a sin­gle track with their voic­es — and not just their singing voic­es, but their speak­ing ones as well. On first lis­ten, this ren­ders many of their con­ver­sa­tions inaudi­ble, and prob­a­bly by design: “If they were in a con­ver­sa­tion,” said Jack­son, they would turn their amps up loud and they’d strum the gui­tar.”

This means of keep­ing their words from Lind­say-Hogg and his crew worked well enough in the whol­ly ana­log late 1960s, but it has proven no match for the arti­fi­cial intelligence/machine learn­ing of the 2020s. “We devised a tech­nol­o­gy that is called demix­ing,” said Jack­son. “You teach the com­put­er what a gui­tar sounds like, you teach them what a human voice sounds like, you teach it what a drum sounds like, you teach it what a bass sounds like.” Sup­plied with enough son­ic data, the sys­tem even­tu­al­ly learned to dis­tin­guish from one anoth­er not just the sounds of the Bea­t­les’ instru­ments but of their voic­es as well.

Hence, in addi­tion to Get Back’s rev­e­la­to­ry musi­cal moments, its many once-pri­vate but now crisply audi­ble exchanges between the Fab Four. “Oh, you’re record­ing our con­ver­sa­tion?” George Har­ri­son at one point asks Lind­say-Hogg in a char­ac­ter­is­tic tone of faux sur­prise. But if he could hear the record­ings today, his sur­prise would sure­ly be real.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Paul McCart­ney Com­pose The Bea­t­les Clas­sic “Get Back” Out of Thin Air (1969)

Peter Jack­son Gives Us an Entic­ing Glimpse of His Upcom­ing Bea­t­les Doc­u­men­tary The Bea­t­les: Get Back

Lennon or McCart­ney? Sci­en­tists Use Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence to Fig­ure Out Who Wrote Icon­ic Bea­t­les Songs

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Pro­gram Tries to Write a Bea­t­les Song: Lis­ten to “Daddy’s Car”

Watch The Bea­t­les Per­form Their Famous Rooftop Con­cert: It Hap­pened 50 Years Ago Today (Jan­u­ary 30, 1969)

How Peter Jack­son Made His State-of-the-Art World War I Doc­u­men­tary They Shall Not Grow Old: An Inside Look

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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Dave Grohl & Greg Kurstin Cover The Ramones “Blitzkrieg Bop” to Celebrate Hannukah: Hey! Oy! Let’s Goy!

in Music | December 4th, 2021

As men­tioned ear­li­er this week, Foo Fight­ers front­man Dave Grohl and pro­duc­er Greg Kurstin have launched The Hanukkah Ses­sions, a fes­tive music series where they cov­er a song–one for each night of Hanukkah–originally cre­at­ed by a Jew­ish musi­cian. Above, watch them pay trib­ute to two nice Jew­ish boys from Queens named Jef­fery Hyman and Thomas Erde­lyi, aka the great Joey and Tom­my Ramone. Hey! Oy! Let’s Goy!

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 and BlueSky.

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

Dave Grohl & Greg Kurstin Cov­er Van Halen’s “Jump,” Cel­e­brat­ing David Lee Roth, One of the Hard­est Rock­ing Jews, on the Fourth Night of Han­nukah

Talk­ing Heads Per­form The Ramones’ “I Wan­na Be Your Boyfriend” Live in 1977 (and How the Bands Got Their Start Togeth­er)

The Ramones, a New Punk Band, Play One of Their Very First Shows at CBGB (1974)

The Ramones Play New Year’s Eve Con­cert in Lon­don, 1977

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