Gustav Klimt’s Masterpieces Destroyed During World War II Get Recreated with Artificial Intelligence

in Art, Technology | October 11th, 2021

A cen­tu­ry after the death of Gus­tav Klimt, his art con­tin­ues to enrap­ture its view­ers. Maybe it has enrap­tured you, but no mat­ter how deep you’ve gone into Klimt’s oeu­vre, there are three paint­ings you’ve only ever seen in black and white. That’s not because he paint­ed them in that way; rich and bril­liant col­ors orig­i­nal­ly fig­ured into all his work, the most notable usage being the real gold lay­ered onto his best-known paint­ing, 1908’s The Kiss. In the year before The Kiss, he com­plet­ed an even more ambi­tious work: a series of paint­ings com­mis­sioned for the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vien­na’s Great Hall, meant to rep­re­sent the fields after which they were titled: Phi­los­o­phy, Med­i­cine, and Jurispru­dence.

Klimt’s “Fac­ul­ty Paint­ings,” as they’re now known, struck crit­ics at the time as pieces of “per­vert­ed excess.” Such charges must have been noth­ing new to Klimt, for whom unabashed eroti­cism and sub­jec­tive views of real­i­ty — nei­ther par­tic­u­lar­ly in fash­ion in the insti­tu­tions of ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Vien­na — con­sti­tut­ed basic artis­tic prin­ci­ples.

Ulti­mate­ly, Klimt him­self bought Phi­los­o­phy, Med­i­cine, and Jurispru­dence back, and by the end of the Sec­ond World War all three had found their way into the hands of the Nazis. With defeat loom­ing, they chose to burn down rather than sur­ren­der the Aus­tri­an cas­tle in which they’d been stor­ing the Fac­ul­ty Paint­ings and oth­er works of art.

With the Fac­ul­ty Paint­ings sur­viv­ing only in black-and-white pho­tographs and scanty descrip­tions, gen­er­a­tions of Klimt enthu­si­asts have had to imag­ine how they real­ly looked. Now, Google Arts & Cul­ture and Vien­na’s Belvedere Muse­um have joined forces to fig­ure out to a greater degree of cer­tain­ty than ever, using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to deter­mine what col­ors Klimt would have applied to Phi­los­o­phy, Med­i­cine, and Jurispru­dence based on in-depth analy­ses of the rest of his work. You can get an overview of the process from the short video at the top of the post, and you can read about it in more detail at Google Arts & Cul­ture.

“Klimt’s three Fac­ul­ty Paint­ings were among the largest art­works Klimt ever cre­at­ed and in the field of Sym­bol­ist paint­ing they rep­re­sent Klimt’s mas­ter­pieces,” says Belvedere cura­tor Dr. Franz Smo­la in a Google Arts & Cul­ture blog post. “The col­ors were essen­tial for the over­whelm­ing effect of these paint­ings, and they caused quite a stir among Klimt’s con­tem­po­raries. There­fore the recon­struc­tion of the col­ors is syn­ony­mous with rec­og­niz­ing the true val­ue and sig­nif­i­cance of these out­stand­ing art­works.” The project comes as just one part of Klimt vs. Klimt: The Man of Con­tra­dic­tions, an online ret­ro­spec­tive fea­tur­ing more than 120 of the artist’s works avail­able to view in aug­ment­ed real­i­ty, as well as an ultra-high-res­o­lu­tion scan of The Kiss. Klimt’s paint­ings may no longer shock us, but they still have much to show us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Long-Lost Pieces of Rembrandt’s Night Watch Get Recon­struct­ed with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Brings to Life Fig­ures from 7 Famous Paint­ings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

AI & X‑Rays Recov­er Lost Art­works Under­neath Paint­ings by Picas­so & Modigliani

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

Gus­tav Klimt’s Icon­ic Paint­ing The Kiss: An Intro­duc­tion to Aus­tri­an Painter’s Gold­en, Erot­ic Mas­ter­piece (1908)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

When J.R.R. Tolkien Worked for the Oxford English Dictionary and “Learned More … Than Any Other Equal Period of My Life” (1919–1920)

in Books, Literature | October 11th, 2021

When J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings appeared in the mid-1950s, its first crit­i­cal read­ers held some diverg­ing views on the books’ qual­i­ty. On the one hand, there was praise for the revival of fan­ta­sy for grown-ups, and com­par­isons to great epics of the past. On the oth­er hand, Tolkien’s prose was exco­ri­at­ed for its wordi­ness, length, and seem­ing­ly inex­haustible obses­sion with obscu­ri­ties. Both per­spec­tives seemed to miss some­thing impor­tant. Yes, Tolkien drew lib­er­al­ly from epics of the past such as the Norse Sagas and cre­at­ed a world as ful­ly-real­ized as any in ancient mythol­o­gy, build­ing in decades what took cen­turies to devel­op.

It’s also true that Tolkien wrote in a thor­ough­ly unusu­al way — unfa­mil­iar as he was with the con­ven­tions of con­tem­po­rary lit­er­ary prose. But his style did not only derive from his work as a schol­ar of Anglo-Sax­on lit­er­a­ture. For all of the dis­cus­sion of Tolkien’s ency­clo­pe­dic tech­nique, no one seemed to note at the time that the author had, in fact, invent­ed for him­self (with apolo­gies to James Joyce) a new genre and way of writ­ing, a kind of ety­mo­log­i­cal fan­ta­sy, a kind of writ­ing he learned while work­ing on the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary, that august cat­a­logue of the Eng­lish lan­guage which first appeared in full in 1928 — in ten vol­umes after fifty years of work.

The Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary (OED) remains an indis­pens­able ref­er­ence for schol­ars of lan­guage and lit­er­a­ture, but it is not itself a typ­i­cal aca­d­e­m­ic text. It is a com­pendi­um, a mis­cel­lany, a descrip­tive map and time­line track­ing how Eng­lish evolves; it is the ulti­mate ref­er­ence work, a work of philol­o­gy, a dis­ci­pline that had fall­en out of fash­ion by the time of The Lord of the Rings. The first edi­tion of the OED, begun in 1878 (five years into the pro­posed time­line, the edi­tors had only reached the word “ant”), con­tained around 400,000 words. Between the years 1919 and 1920, Tolkien was respon­si­ble for the words between wag­gle and war­lock. He would lat­er say he “learned more in those two years than in any oth­er equal peri­od of my life.”

The OED estab­lish­es lin­guis­tic his­to­ries by cit­ing a word’s appear­ances in lit­er­a­ture and pop­u­lar press over time, trac­ing deriva­tions from oth­er lan­guages, and trac­ing the evo­lu­tion, and extinc­tion, of words and mean­ings. After his return from World War I, the future nov­el­ist found him­self work­ing under found­ing co-edi­tor Hen­ry Bradley, labor­ing away on words like wal­nut, wal­rus, and wampum, which “seem to have been assigned to Tolkien because of their par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult ety­molo­gies,” notes the OED blog. These entries would lat­er be sin­gled out by Bradley as “con­tain­ing ‘ety­mo­log­i­cal facts or sug­ges­tion not giv­en in oth­er dic­tio­nar­ies.’ ”

The expe­ri­ence as an OED lex­i­cog­ra­ph­er pre­pared Tolkien for his life­long career as a philol­o­gist. It also informed his lit­er­ary tech­nique, argue Peter Gilliv­er, Jere­my Mar­shall, and Edmund Wein­er, the authors of Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary and for­mer OED edi­tors, all. The authors show how Tolkien drew the lan­guage of his books direct­ly from his ety­mo­log­i­cal research. For exam­ple, “for decades it was assumed that he was being char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly mod­est” when he declined to claim cred­it for the inven­tion of the word “hob­bit.” As it turned out, “an obscure list of myth­i­cal beings, pub­lished in 1895” came to light in 1977, includ­ing the word “ ‘hob­bits’, along with such oth­er irre­sistible crea­tures as ‘bog­gle­boes’ and gal­lytrots,” writes Kel­ly Grovi­er at The Guardian.

Tolkien’s rela­tion­ship to ety­mol­o­gy in The Hob­bit, The Lord of the Rings, and every oth­er lengthy piece of writ­ing Mid­dle Earth-relat­ed goes far beyond dig­ging up obscure words or coin­ing new ones. He learned to think like a lex­i­cog­ra­ph­er. As the authors write, “in describ­ing his own cre­ative process­es, Tolkien often com­ments on how the con­tem­pla­tion of an indi­vid­ual word can be the start­ing point for an adven­ture in imag­i­na­tion — and con­tem­plat­ing indi­vid­ual words is pre­cise­ly what lex­i­cog­ra­phers do.” Tolkien’s bound­less curios­i­ty about the roots of lan­guage led him to “invent every­thing,” writes Tolkien crit­ic John Garth, “from star mariners to cal­en­dars, flow­ers, cities, food­stuffs, writ­ing sys­tems and birth­day cus­toms, to men­tion just a few of the eclec­tic fea­tures of Mid­dle-earth.”

Decades after Tolkien’s first asso­ci­a­tion with the OED, he would become involved again with the pub­li­ca­tion in 1969 when the edi­tor of the dic­tio­nary’s Sup­ple­ment, his for­mer stu­dent Robert Burch­field, asked for com­ments on the entry for “Hob­bit.” Tolkien offered his own def­i­n­i­tion for just one of the many Tolkien­ian words that would even­tu­al­ly make into the OED (along with math­om, orc, mithril, and bal­rog). Burch­field pub­lished Tolkien’s def­i­n­i­tion almost exact­ly as writ­ten:

In the tales of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973): one of an imag­i­nary peo­ple, a small vari­ety of the human race, that gave them­selves this name (mean­ing ‘hole-dweller’) but were called by oth­ers halflings, since they were half the height of nor­mal men.

Learn more about Tolkien’s work on the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary’s first edi­tion in this arti­cle by Peter Gilliv­er and pick up a copy of Ring of Words here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

When the Nobel Prize Com­mit­tee Reject­ed The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien “Has Not Mea­sured Up to Sto­ry­telling of the High­est Qual­i­ty” (1961)

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Per­son­al Book Cov­er Designs for The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lit­tle-Known and Hand-Illus­trat­ed Children’s Book, Mr. Bliss

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Witness Maya Angelou & James Baldwin’s Close Friendship in a TV Interview from 1975

in Books, History, Literature, Poetry, Television | October 11th, 2021

In the mid-50s, Maya Angelou accept­ed a role as a cho­rus mem­ber in an inter­na­tion­al tour­ing pro­duc­tion of the opera, Por­gy and Bess:

I want­ed to trav­el, to try to speak oth­er lan­guages, to see the cities I had read about all my life, but most impor­tant, I want­ed to be with a large, friend­ly group of Black peo­ple who sang so glo­ri­ous­ly and lived with such pas­sion.

On a stopover in Paris, she met James Bald­win, who she remem­bered as “small and hot (with) the move­ments of a dancer.”

The two shared a love of poet­ry and the arts, a deep curios­i­ty about life, and a pas­sion­ate com­mit­ment to Black rights and cul­ture. They forged a con­nec­tion that would last the rest of their lives.

In 1968, when Angelou despaired over the assas­si­na­tion of Mar­tin Luther King Jr., Bald­win did what he could to lift her spir­its, includ­ing escort­ing her to a din­ner par­ty where she cap­ti­vat­ed the oth­er guests with her anec­do­tal sto­ry­telling, paving a path to her cel­e­brat­ed first mem­oir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

The book wouldn’t have been writ­ten, how­ev­er, with­out some dis­creet behind-the-scenes med­dling by Bald­win.

Angelou con­sid­ered her­self a poet and a play­wright, and resist­ed repeat­ed attempts by fel­low din­ner par­ty guest, Ran­dom House edi­tor Robert Loomis, to secure her auto­bi­og­ra­phy.

As Angelou lat­er dis­cov­ered, Bald­win coun­seled Loomis that a dif­fer­ent strat­e­gy would pro­duce the desired result. His dear friend might not con­ceive of her­self as a mem­oirist, but would almost assured­ly respond to reverse psy­chol­o­gy, for instance, a state­ment that no auto­bi­og­ra­phy could com­pete as lit­er­a­ture.

As Angelou recalled:

I said, ‘Well, hmmm, maybe I’ll try it.’ The truth is that (Loomis) had talked to James Bald­win, my broth­er friend, and Jim­my told him that ‘if you want Maya Angelou to do some­thing, tell her she can’t do it.’

“This tes­ti­mo­ny from a Black sis­ter marks the begin­ning of a new era in the minds and hearts and lives of all Black men and women,” Bald­win enthused upon its pub­li­ca­tion.

They became sib­lings of affin­i­ty. Wit­ness their easy rap­port on the 1975 episode of Assign­ment Amer­i­ca, above.

Every episode cen­tered on some­one who had made an impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion to the ideas and issues of Amer­i­ca, and Angelou, who alter­nat­ed host­ing duties with psy­cho-his­to­ri­an Doris Kearns Good­win, colum­nist George Will, and oral his­to­ri­an Studs Terkel, land­ed an extreme­ly wor­thy sub­ject in Bald­win.

Their friend­ship made good on the promise of her hopes for that Euro­pean tour of Por­gy and Bess.

Their can­did dis­cus­sion cov­ers a lot of over­lap­ping ground: love, death, race, aging, sex­u­al iden­ti­ty, suc­cess, writ­ing, and the close­ness of Baldwin’s fam­i­ly — whom Angelou adored.

Those of us in the gen­er­a­tions who came after, who became acquaint­ed with Angelou, the com­mand­ing, supreme­ly dig­ni­fied elder stateswoman, com­mand­ing more author­i­ty and respect than any offi­cial Poet Lau­re­ate, may be sur­prised to see her MO as inter­view­er, gig­gling and teas­ing, func­tion­ing as the cho­rus in a room where code switch­ing is most def­i­nite­ly not a thing:

Bald­win: I think…the only way to live is know­ing you’re going to die. If you’re afraid to die, you’ll nev­er be able to live. 

Angelou: Hey, hey!

Bald­win: You know. 

Angelou: Hey, hey.

Bald­win: And nobody knows any­thing about that. 

Angelou: Yes, yes, yes.

She pos­es great ques­tions, and lis­tens with­out inter­rupt­ing to her friend’s thought­ful­ly com­posed answers, for instance, his descrip­tion of his family’s response to his deci­sion to base him­self in France, far from their Harlem home:

Sweet­heart, you have to under­stand, um, you have to under­stand what hap­pens to my moth­er’s tele­phone when I’m in town. Peo­ple will call up and say what they will do to me. It does­n’t make me shut up. You, you also got­ta remem­ber that I’ve been writ­ing, after all, between assas­si­na­tions. If you were my moth­er or my broth­er, you would think, who’s next?

There’s a lot of food for thought in that reply. The famil­iar con­nec­tion between inter­view­er and sub­ject, both tow­er­ing fig­ures of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, brings a tru­ly rare dimen­sion, as when Angelou shares how Baldwin’s old­er broth­ers would reserve a part of the pro­ceeds from sell­ing coal in the win­ter and ice in the sum­mer to send to Bald­win:

In France! I mean to think of a Black Amer­i­can fam­i­ly in Harlem, who had no pre­ten­sions to great lit­er­a­ture… and to have the old­est boy leave home and go to Paris, France, and then for them to save up enough pen­nies and nick­els and dimes to send a check of $150 to him, in Paris, France!

Bald­win: That’s what peo­ple, that’s what peo­ple don’t real­ly know about us. 

Angelou: One of the things I think, I mean I believe that we are Amer­i­ca. It is true. 

Bald­win: You believe it? 

Angelou: Well. 

Bald­win: I know it. 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Maya Angelou Reads “Still I Rise” and “On the Pulse of the Morn­ing”

Watch a Nev­er-Aired TV Pro­file of James Bald­win (1979)

James Bald­win Talks About Racism in Amer­i­ca & Civ­il Rights Activism on The Dick Cavett Show (1969)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Ohio State Marching Band Plays Tribute to Rush: “2112,” “YYZ,” “Tom Sawyer” & “Limelight”

in Music | October 10th, 2021

It all took place at this week­end’s Ohio State-Mary­land game. Enjoy.…

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

The Anti-Con­formist, Lib­er­tar­i­an Phi­los­o­phy That Shaped Rush’s Clas­sic Albums

Wit­ness Rush Drum­mer Neil Peart’s (RIP) Finest Moments On Stage and Screen

Notre Dame March­ing Band Per­forms “This Too Shall Pass”

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch “The Impossible Map,” a Short Animated Film That Uses a Grapefruit to Show Why Maps of the Earth Are Misleading (1947)

in Maps | October 8th, 2021

There are any num­ber of ways one might try to turn a globe into a two-dimen­sion­al sur­face. You could start by cut­ting it down the mid­dle, as in this Vox video on world maps. You could choose vol­un­teers and have them come up to the head of the class and peel oranges in one piece, flat­ten­ing out the strips onto an over­head pro­jec­tor, as in this Nation­al Geo­graph­ic les­son on world maps. Or, you might attack an already halved grape­fruit peel with a rolling pin, as in the Nation­al Film Board of Canada’s ani­mat­ed short, “The Impos­si­ble Map,” above.

Each method (except, maybe, the rolling pin) has its mer­its, but none of them will make a 2‑dimensional sur­face with­out warp­ing, stretch­ing, and dis­tort­ing. That’s the point, in all these exer­cis­es, a point that has been made over and over through­out the years as car­tog­ra­phers search for bet­ter, more accu­rate ways to turn the Earth’s sphere (or oblate spher­oid) into a rep­re­sen­ta­tive rec­tan­gle that rough­ly pre­serves the scale of the con­ti­nents. As the hands-on demon­stra­tions show, you don’t need to remem­ber your geom­e­try to see that it’s impos­si­ble to do so with much pre­ci­sion.

A car­tog­ra­ph­er must choose a focal point, as Ger­ar­dus Mer­ca­tor did in the 16th cen­tu­ry in his famous cylin­dri­cal pro­jec­tion. Since the map was designed by a Euro­pean for use by Euro­pean nav­i­ga­tors, it nat­u­ral­ly puts Europe in the cen­ter, result­ing in extreme dis­tor­tions of the land mass­es around it. These have been reme­died by alter­nate pro­jec­tions like the Moll­wei­de, Goode Homolo­sine (the “orange-peel map”), and the 1963 Robin­son pro­jec­tion, which was “adopt­ed for Nation­al Geographic’s world maps in 1988,” The Guardian notes, and “appears in [a] grow­ing num­ber of oth­er pub­li­ca­tions, [and] may replace Mer­ca­tor in many class­rooms.”

Pio­neer­ing Cana­di­an ani­ma­tor Eve­lyn Lam­bart made “The Impos­si­ble Map” in 1947, sev­er­al years before pro­fes­sor Arthur Robin­son cre­at­ed his “Pseudo­cylin­dri­cal Pro­jec­tion with Pole Line” — for which he used “a huge num­ber of tri­al-and-error com­put­er sim­u­la­tions,” as the Arthur H. Robin­son Map Library writes. “To this day, no oth­er pro­jec­tion uses this approach to build a map,” not even most GPS map­ping soft­ware, which still, in many cas­es, uses a “Web Mer­ca­tor” pro­jec­tion to rep­re­sent the whole Earth. But while Lam­bart’s film may not be tech­no­log­i­cal­ly up-to-date, it is visu­al­ly and ped­a­gog­i­cal­ly bril­liant, explain­ing, with some basic nar­ra­tion and sliced pro­duce, why globes still beat flat maps of the Earth every time.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

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

Why Mak­ing Accu­rate World Maps Is Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Impos­si­ble

Why Every World Map Is Wrong

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Quentin Tarantino Gives a Tour of Video Archives, the Store Where He Worked Before Becoming a Filmmaker

in Film | October 8th, 2021

When Quentin Taran­ti­no hit it big in the 1990s with Reser­voir Dogs, and then much big­ger with Pulp Fic­tion, he became known as the auteur who’d received his film edu­ca­tion by work­ing as a video-store clerk. But like much Hol­ly­wood hype, that sto­ry was­n’t quite true. “No, I was already a movie expert,” says the man him­self in a clip from the 1994 BBC doc­u­men­tary Quentin Taran­ti­no: Hol­ly­wood’s Boy Won­der. “That’s how I got hired at Video Archives.” Locat­ed in the South Bay — a com­par­a­tive­ly lit­tle-seen region of Los Ange­les Coun­ty lat­er paid lov­ing trib­ute with Jack­ie Brown — the store was, in the words of one of its own­ers, “one of the few places that Quentin could come as a reg­u­lar guy and get a job and become like a star.”

“Me and the oth­er guys would walk into the local movie the­ater and we’d be head­ing toward our seats and we’d hear, ‘There go the guys from Video Archives,’ ” says Taran­ti­no in Tom Ros­ton’s I Lost It at the Video Store. On one lev­el, the expe­ri­ence con­sti­tut­ed “a primer to what it would be like to be famous.” Hav­ing begun as a Video Archives cus­tomer, Taran­ti­no wound up work­ing there for five years, offer­ing volu­mi­nous and force­ful rec­om­men­da­tions by day and, after clos­ing, putting on staff-only film fes­ti­vals by night. “That time is cap­tured per­fect­ly in True Romance,” which Tony Scott direct­ed but Taran­ti­no wrote, and one of those co-work­ers, Roger Avary, would col­lab­o­rate with him on the screen­play for Pulp Fic­tion.

Video Archives was a bea­con to all the South Bay’s “film geeks.” Then as now, most such peo­ple “devote a lot of mon­ey and they devote a lot of their life to the fol­low­ing of film, but they don’t real­ly have that much to show for all this devo­tion,” oth­er than their strong­ly held cin­e­mat­ic opin­ions. “What you find out fair­ly quick­ly in Hol­ly­wood is, this is a com­mu­ni­ty where hard­ly any­body trusts their own opin­ion. Peo­ple want peo­ple to tell them what is good, what to like, what not to like.” Hence the abil­i­ty of the young Taran­ti­no,  brim­ming with opin­ions and unafraid to state them and pos­sessed of an unwa­ver­ing resolve to make movies of his own, to go from video-store clerk­ing prac­ti­cal­ly straight to the top of the indus­try. Though he did­n’t need film school — nor col­lege, or indeed high school — he could hard­ly have found a more suit­able alma mater.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Last Video Store: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on How the World’s Old­est Video Store Still Sur­vives Today

Quentin Taran­ti­no Picks the 12 Best Films of All Time; Watch Two of His Favorites Free Online

Quentin Tarantino’s Hand­writ­ten List of the 11 “Great­est Movies”

Quentin Tarantino’s Copy­cat Cin­e­ma: How the Post­mod­ern Film­mak­er Per­fect­ed the Art of the Steal

Quentin Taran­ti­no Reviews Movies: From Dunkirk and King of New York, to Soul Broth­ers of Kung Fu & 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 or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Walking Tour Around the Pyramids of Giza: 2 Hours in Hi Def

in History | October 8th, 2021

One of the first things tourists learn about the great Pyra­mids of Giza is how they are not far away in some remote loca­tion. Turns out they’re just pho­tographed that way with the West­ern Desert as back­drop. Turn around and you’ll see not just the bustling city of Cairo, but a freakin’ golf course. The next thing tourists learn is that there’s a lot of walk­ing if you want to take in both pyra­mids and the Sphinx. Hope you packed some good shoes!

Or you could sit back and watch this one-hour-and-50-minute walk­ing tour, shot in 4K, on a chilly Jan­u­ary morn­ing in 2019. There’s not many tourists around for most of it, bet­ter to instill a sense of won­der and oth­er­ness as you encounter these 4,500 year old struc­tures.

With its relax­ing bob­bing-head cam­era and its immer­sive field record­ing soundtrack—headphones are recommended—the video tours the entire ancient area, start­ing with the Mor­tu­ary Tem­ple of Khafre, then mov­ing to the two main pyra­mids, the ceme­tery, the small­er pyra­mid of Menkau­re, and end­ing on the Sphinx. There’s even room for a horse ride, although as it’s sped up, it turns out to be rather com­i­cal. It’s also a delight to hear the occa­sion­al camel make them­selves known.

Open Cul­ture has writ­ten about the Pyra­mids of Giza sev­er­al times. We’ve linked to the mas­sive Dig­i­tal Giza Project; shown a 3‑D recon­struc­tion of what the pyra­mids looked like when they were orig­i­nal­ly built (they were gleam­ing white, for one thing); fol­lowed a 3‑D tour *inside* the pyra­mid that is quite spine-tin­gling; and high­light­ed an intro­duc­to­ry course of Giza and Egyp­tol­ogy. The only remain­ing of the Sev­en Won­ders of the Ancient World con­tin­ues to inspire a new gen­er­a­tion of archae­ol­o­gists, and this walk­ing tour is as close as your brows­er can get to being there. ProWalk Tours’ YouTube site also offers many oth­er pleas­ant walks, from the ancient to the mod­ern. They’re worth check­ing out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 4,000-Year-Old Stu­dent ‘Writ­ing Board’ from Ancient Egypt (with Teacher’s Cor­rec­tions in Red)

Won­ders of Ancient Egypt: A Free Online Course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Orig­i­nal Col­ors Still In It

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Animated History of the Ottoman Empire (1299 — 1922)

in History | October 7th, 2021

His­to­ry is selec­tive. Or, rather, it’s select­ed by those in pow­er for their own uses. Nowhere do we see this more than in nation­al­ist re-imag­in­ings of an impe­r­i­al past, whether it be British, Roman, or, in the case of mod­ern Turkey, Ottoman. “Much has been writ­ten,” notes Time magazine’s Alan Mikhail, “about [Turk­ish pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s attempts to ‘res­ur­rect’ the Ottoman Empire or to style him­self a sul­tan.” Erdogan’s turn to hard­line Islam has been inspired by one par­tic­u­lar sul­tan, Selim I, under whose rule, “the Ottoman Empire grew from a strong region­al pow­er to a gar­gan­tu­an glob­al empire.” Mikhail com­pares Selim to anoth­er his­tor­i­cal fig­ure famed for sin­gle-mind­ed intol­er­ance: Andrew Jack­son, a hero of the for­mer Unit­ed States pres­i­dent.

Erdogan’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the Ottoman Empire some­times seems to have more in com­mon with ear­ly Euro­pean ideas about the empire than its ideas about itself. Euro­pean writ­ers in the 16th and 17th cen­tu­ry linked the Ottomans with Islamist repres­sion, an Ori­en­tal­ist take on Turk­ish pow­er as a dan­ger­ous yet seduc­tive new ene­my. “The glo­ri­ous Empire of the Turkes, the present ter­rour of the world,” wrote Richard Knolles in his 1603 Gen­er­all His­to­rie of the Turkes, “hath amongst oth­er things noth­ing in it more won­der­ful or strange, than the poore begin­ning of itselfe….” These same sen­ti­ments were echoed in 1631 by Eng­lish writer John Speed, who described the “sud­den advance­ment” of the Empire as “a ter­rour to the whole world.” Like­wise, Andrew Moore in 1659 wrote of “this bar­barous Nation, the worlds present ter­rour,” a nation with a “small & obscure begin­ning.”

All empires have small begin­nings. In the case of the Ottomans, the sto­ry begins with Osman I, a trib­al leader of obscure ori­gins who found­ed the Empire in Ana­to­lia some 300 years before the authors above put pen to paper. (The word “Ottoman” derives from his name.) A series of con­quests fol­lowed, the most dra­mat­ic occur­ring in 1453 when Mehmed the Con­quer­er entered Con­stan­tino­ple, effec­tive­ly end­ing the Byzan­tine Empire, an event you can see high­light­ed in the video above, an “entire his­to­ry of the Ottoman Empire” — all 600 years of it — from 1299 to 1922. Such an extend­ed peri­od of con­quest and influ­ence led, of course, to a vari­ety of views about the nature of the Ottomans, not least among the Ottomans them­selves, who saw them­selves not as Mus­lim invaders of Europe but as the right­ful heirs of Rome. Indeed, edu­cat­ed Ottomans referred to them­selves not as “Turks,” a word for the peas­antry, but as Rūmī, “Roman.”

In many ways, the Ottomans — bloody con­quests, slav­ery, geno­cides and all — took after the Romans. “Obvi­ous­ly they saw val­ue in spread­ing reli­gion,” says David Lesch, pro­fes­sor of Mid­dle East his­to­ry at Trin­i­ty Uni­ver­si­ty in San Anto­nio. But they did not share the nar­ra­tive of a “clash of civ­i­liza­tions” favored by Euro­pean writ­ers of the time, and cer­tain revi­sion­ists today. “The Ottoman Empire saw itself as very much, even more so a Euro­pean empire than a Mid­dle East­ern empire. And they took a very tol­er­ant view toward non-Mus­lims since for most of the Ottoman Empire — espe­cial­ly when it was at its largest — most of its pop­u­la­tion was non-Mus­lim. It was in fact Chris­t­ian.” The obser­va­tion brings to mind the cen­tral claim of Turk­ish schol­ar Namık Kemal’s influ­en­tial essay “Europe Knows Noth­ing about the Ori­ent,” in which he writes that Euro­pean schol­ars have failed to under­stand the “true char­ac­ter such as ours, which is so close to them that … it might as well be touch­ing their eye­lash­es.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Down­load Thou­sands of Ottoman-Era Pho­tographs That Have Been Dig­i­tized and Put Online

The Rise and Fall of West­ern Empires Visu­al­ized Through the Art­ful Metaphor of Cell Divi­sion

Watch the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in an Ani­mat­ed Time-Lapse Map ( 519 A.D. to 2014 A.D.)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A Brilliant Demonstration of Magnets & the Promise of Levitating Trains (1975)

in Science, Technology | October 7th, 2021

For a brief time in the 1980s, it seemed like trains pow­ered by maglev — mag­net­ic lev­i­ta­tion — might just solve trans­porta­tion prob­lems every­where, maybe even replac­ing air trav­el, there­by elim­i­nat­ing one of the most vex­ing sources of car­bon emis­sions. Maglev trains don’t use fuel; they don’t require very much pow­er by com­par­i­son with oth­er sources of high speed trav­el; they don’t pro­duce emis­sions; they’re qui­et, require less main­te­nance than oth­er trains, and can trav­el at speeds of 300 mph and more. In fact, the fastest maglev train to date, unveiled this past sum­mer in Qing­dao, Chi­na, can reach speeds of up to 373 miles per hour (600 kph).

So, why isn’t the plan­et criss-crossed by maglev trains? asks Dave Hall at The Guardian, cit­ing the fact that the first maglev train was launched in the UK in 1984, after which Ger­many, Japan, and Chi­na fol­lowed suit. It seems to come down, as such things do, to “polit­i­cal will.” With­out sig­nif­i­cant com­mit­ment from gov­ern­ments to reshape the trans­porta­tion infra­struc­ture of their coun­tries, maglev trains remain a dream, the mono­rails of the future that nev­er mate­ri­al­ize. Even in Chi­na, where gov­ern­ment man­date can insti­tute mass changes at will, the devel­op­ment of maglev trains has not meant their deploy­ment. The new train could, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly, fer­ry trav­el­ers between Shang­hai to Bei­jing in 2.5 hours… if it had the track.

Per­haps some­day the world will catch up with maglev trains, an idea over a cen­tu­ry old. (The first patents for maglev tech­nol­o­gy were filed by a French-born Amer­i­can engi­neer named Emile Bachelet in the 1910s.) Until then, the rest of us can edu­cate our­selves on the tech­nol­o­gy of trains that use mag­net­ic lev­i­ta­tion with the 1975 video les­son above from British engi­neer and pro­fes­sor Eric Laith­waite (Impe­r­i­al Col­lege Lon­don), who “decon­structs the fas­ci­nat­ing physics at work behind his plans for a maglev trains, which he first mod­elled in the 1940s and per­fect­ed in the 1970s,” notes Aeon. “Well-regard­ed in his time as both a lec­tur­er and an engi­neer, Laith­waite presents a series of demon­stra­tions that build, step by step, until he final­ly unveils a small maglev train mod­el.”

Laithwaite’s small-scale demon­stra­tion would even­tu­al­ly cul­mi­nate in the first com­mer­cial maglev train almost a decade lat­er at Birm­ing­ham Air­port. Here, he begins where sci­ence begins, with an admis­sion of igno­rance. “Per­ma­nent mag­nets are dif­fi­cult things to under­stand,” he says. “In fact, if we’re absolute­ly hon­est with our­selves, we don’t under­stand them.” The good pro­fes­sor then briskly moves on to demon­strate what he does know — enough to build a lev­i­tat­ing train. Learn much more about the his­to­ry and tech­nol­o­gy of maglev trains at How Stuff Works, and keep your eyes on the North­east Maglev project, a devel­op­ing Super­con­duct­ing Maglev train that promis­es trav­el between New York and Wash­ing­ton, DC in one hour flat.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Fly­ing Train: A 1902 Film Cap­tures a Futur­is­tic Ride on a Sus­pend­ed Rail­way in Ger­many

In 1900, a Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Had to Cre­ate an Enor­mous 1,400-Pound Cam­era to Take a Pic­ture of an Entire Train

Free Online Physics Cours­es 

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How to Make Comics: A Four-Part Series from the Museum of Modern Art

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Education, Museums | October 7th, 2021


A paint­ing? “Mov­ing. Spir­i­tu­al­ly enrich­ing. Sub­lime. ‘High’ art.” The com­ic strip? “Vapid. Juve­nile. Com­mer­cial hack work. ‘Low’ art.” A paint­ing of a com­ic strip pan­el? “Sophis­ti­cat­ed irony. Philo­soph­i­cal­ly chal­leng­ing. ‘High’ art.” So says Calvin of Bill Wat­ter­son­’s Calvin and Hobbes, whose ten-year run con­sti­tutes one of the great­est artis­tic achieve­ments in the his­to­ry of the news­pa­per com­ic strip. The larg­er medi­um of comics goes well beyond the fun­ny pages, as any num­ber of trend pieces have told us, but as an art form it remains less than per­fect­ly under­stood.  Per­haps, as else­where, one must learn by doing: hence “How to Make Comics,” a “four-part jour­ney through the art of comics” from the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art.

Cre­at­ed by comics schol­ar and writer Chris Gavaler, this edu­ca­tion­al series begins with the broad­est pos­si­ble ques­tion: “What Are Comics?” That sec­tion offers two answers, the first being that comics are “car­toons in the fun­nies sec­tions of news­pa­pers and the pages of com­ic books” telling sto­ries “about super­heroes or talk­ing ani­mals” — or they’re longer-for­mat “graph­ic nov­els,” which “can be more seri­ous and include per­son­al mem­oirs.”

The sec­ond, broad­er answer con­ceives of comics as noth­ing more spe­cif­ic than “jux­ta­posed images. Any work of art that divides into two or more side-by-side parts is for­mal­ly a com­ic. So if an artist cre­ates two images and places them next to each oth­er, they’re work­ing in the comics form.”

That sec­ond def­i­n­i­tion of comics includes, say, Andy Warhol’s Jacque­line Kennedy III — a work of art that con­ve­nient­ly hap­pens to be owned by MoMA. The muse­um’s visu­al resources fig­ure heav­i­ly into the whole “How to Make Comics,” in which Gavaler explains not just the process of cre­at­ing comics but the rela­tion­ship between comics and oth­er (often longer insti­tu­tion­al­ly approved) forms of art. And to what­ev­er degree they jux­ta­pose images, the works of art in MoMA’s online col­lec­tion — rich as so many of them are with action, char­ac­ter, nar­ra­tive, humor, and even words — offer inspi­ra­tion to com­ic artists bud­ding and expe­ri­enced alike. The bet­ter part of two cen­turies into its devel­op­ment, this thor­ough­ly mod­ern medi­um has the pow­er to incor­po­rate ideas from any oth­er art form; the high-and-low dis­tinc­tions can take care of them­selves. Enter “How to Make Comics” here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Free Online Course on Mak­ing Com­ic Books, Com­pli­ments of the Cal­i­for­nia Col­lege of the Arts

Fol­low Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Barry’s 2017 “Mak­ing Comics” Class Online, Pre­sent­ed at UW-Wis­con­sin

Watch Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Barry’s Two-Hour Draw­ing Work­shop

Down­load Over 22,000 Gold­en & Sil­ver Age Com­ic Books from the Com­ic Book Plus Archive

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

MoMA’s Online Cours­es Let You Study Mod­ern & Con­tem­po­rary Art and Earn a Cer­tifi­cate

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Guitarist Rocks Out on Guitars Made from Shovels, Cigar Boxes, Oil Cans & Whisky Barrels

in Creativity, Design, Music | October 6th, 2021

When Kei­th Richards felt he’d gone as far as he could go with the six-string gui­tar, he took one string off and played five, a trick he learned from Ry Cood­er. These days, the trend is to go in the oppo­site direc­tion, up to sev­en or eight strings for high­ly tech­ni­cal pro­gres­sive met­al com­po­si­tions and down­tuned “djent.” Tra­di­tion­al­ists may balk at this. A five-string, after all, is a mod­i­fi­ca­tion eas­i­ly accom­plished with a pair of wire-cut­ters. But odd­ly shaped eight-string gui­tars seem like weird­ly roco­co extrav­a­gances next to your aver­age Stra­to­cast­er, Tele, or Les Paul.

Ideas we have about what a gui­tar should be, how­ev­er, come most­ly from the mar­ket­ing and pub­lic rela­tions machin­ery around big brand gui­tars and big name gui­tarists. The truth is, there is no Pla­ton­ic ide­al of the gui­tar, since no one is quite sure where the gui­tar came from.

It’s most eas­i­ly rec­og­nized ances­tors are the oud and the lute, which them­selves have ancient her­itages that stretch into pre­his­to­ry. The six-string arrived rather late on the scene. In the renais­sance, gui­tars had eight strings, tuned in four “cours­es,” or pairs, like the mod­ern 12-string, and baroque gui­tars had 10 strings in five cours­es.

Clos­er in time to us, “the jazz gui­tarist George Van Eps had a sev­en-string gui­tar built for him by Epi­phone Gui­tars in the late 1930s,” notes one brief his­to­ry, “and a sig­na­ture Gretsch sev­en-string in the late 60s and ear­ly 70s…. Sev­er­al oth­ers began using sev­en-string gui­tars after Van Eps.” Russ­ian folk gui­tars had sev­en strings before the arrival of six-string Span­ish clas­si­cal instru­ments (two hun­dred years before the arrival of Korn).

Mean­while, in the hills, hol­lars, and deltas of the U.S. south, folk and blues musi­cians built gui­tars out of what­ev­er was at hand, and fit as many, or as few, strings as need­ed. From these instru­ments came the pow­er­ful­ly sim­ple, time­less licks Keef spent his career emu­lat­ing. Gui­tarist Justin John­son has cul­ti­vat­ed an online pres­ence not only with his slick elec­tric slide play­ing, but also with his trib­utes to odd, old-time, home­made gui­tars. At the top, he plays a three-string shov­el gui­tar, doing Kei­th two bet­ter.

Fur­ther up, some “Porch Swing Slidin’” with a six-string cig­ar box-style gui­tar engraved with a por­trait of Robert John­son. Above, hear a stir­ring ren­di­tion of George Harrison’s “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” on an oil can and a slide solo on a whiskey bar­rel gui­tar. Final­ly, John­son rocks out Ray Charles on a three string cig­ar box gui­tar, made most­ly out of ordi­nary items you might find around the shed.

You might not be able to pluck out Renais­sance airs or com­pli­cat­ed, sweep-picked arpeg­gios on some of these instru­ments, but where would even the most com­plex pro­gres­sive rock and met­al be with­out the raw pow­er of the blues dri­ving the evo­lu­tion of the gui­tar? Final­ly, below, see John­son play a hand­made one-string Did­dley Bow (and see the mak­ing of the instru­ment as well). Orig­i­nal­ly a West African instru­ment, it may have been the very first gui­tar.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Kei­th Richards Demon­strates His Famous 5‑String Tech­nique (Used on Clas­sic Stones Songs Like “Start Me Up,” “Honky Tonk Women” & More)

Meet Brushy One String, the One String Gui­tar Play­er Who Will Blow Your Mind

The His­to­ry of the Gui­tar: See the Evo­lu­tion of the Gui­tar in 7 Instru­ments

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |


« Newer Entries | Older Entries »

  • Great Lectures

  • Sign up for Newsletter

  • About Us

    Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.


    Advertise With Us

  • Great Recordings

  • Book Lists By

  • Syllabi

  • Favorite Movies

  • Archives

  • Search

    • Quantcast
    Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.