The Meticulous, Elegant Illustrations of the Nature Observed in England’s Countryside

in Art, Books, Nature | November 5th, 2020

If you hap­pen to have grown up in the Eng­lish coun­try­side, you prob­a­bly retain a cer­tain sen­si­tiv­i­ty to and affin­i­ty for nature. This can express itself in any num­ber of ways, most often by a com­pul­sion to gar­den, no mat­ter how urban the set­ting in which you now live. But Jo Brown has shown how to base a career on it: an artist and illus­tra­tor — and “bird­er wildlif­er mush­roomer,” accord­ing to her Twit­ter bio — she has long kept a “nature jour­nal” doc­u­ment­ing the flo­ra and fau­na encoun­tered in the coun­try­side around her home in Devon.

“At the end of April 2019, Jo post­ed a video of her jour­nal so far on Twit­ter,” says her web site. “It went viral and her fol­low­ers jumped from 9K fol­low­ers to 20K fol­low­ers in two days.” A glance at any giv­en page reveals what so impressed them. “Each page of Brown’s note­book con­tains a pen and col­ored pen­cil draw­ing that begins at the pages’ edges, appear­ing to grow from the cor­ner or across the paper,” writes Colos­sal’s Grace Ebert.

“Some­times cap­tured through close-ups that mim­ic sci­en­tif­ic illus­tra­tions, the del­i­cate ren­der­ings depict the detail of a buff-tailed bumblebee’s fuzzy tor­so and the red ten­drils of a round-leaved sun­dew. Brown notes the com­mon and Latin names for each species and com­mon char­ac­ter­is­tics, in addi­tion to where and when she spot­ted it.”

In oth­er words, the nature jour­nal show­cas­es at once its cre­ator’s keen eye, well-trained hand, and for­mi­da­ble knowl­edge of the nat­ur­al world. It also stands as a prime exam­ple of the art of note­book­ing.

 

Using to its fullest advan­tage her ruled Mole­sk­ine note­book (the brand of choice for those invest­ed in doing their jot­ting and sketch­ing on the go for a cou­ple of decades now), Brown effec­tive­ly deliv­ers a mas­ter class in the vivid, leg­i­ble, and ele­gant — dare we say organ­ic? — orga­ni­za­tion of both visu­al and tex­tu­al infor­ma­tion in the space of a small page.

You can take a clos­er look at how she does it on her web site as well as her feeds on both Twit­ter and Insta­gram. More recent­ly, her jour­nal has been pub­lished in book form as Secrets of a Devon Wood. Few nature-lovers, per­haps, can equal Jo Brown as an artist, but every­one can enjoy the glo­ri­ous­ly var­ied realm of life that sur­rounds them just as much as she does. “All that’s required,” she says, “is a lit­tle patience and qui­et obser­va­tion.”

via Kot­tke/Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library Makes 150,000 High-Res Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al World Free to Down­load

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

New Study: Immers­ing Your­self in Art, Music & Nature Might Reduce Inflam­ma­tion & Increase Life Expectan­cy

Japan­ese Artist Has Drawn Every Meal He’s Eat­en for 32 Years: Behold the Deli­cious Illus­tra­tions of Itsuo Kobayashi

The Sketch­book Project Presents Online 24,000 Sketch­books, Cre­at­ed by Artists from 135 Coun­tries

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

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A Dictionary of Symbols: Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s Classic Study of Symbols Gets Republished in a Beautiful, Expanded Edition

in Art, History, Psychology | November 5th, 2020

How, exact­ly, does one go about mak­ing a glob­al dic­tio­nary of sym­bols? It is a Her­culean task, one few schol­ars would take on today, not only because of its scope but because the philo­log­i­cal approach that gath­ers and com­pares arti­facts from every cul­ture under­went a cor­rec­tion: No one per­son can have the exper­tise to cov­er every­thing. Yet the attempts to do so have had tremen­dous cre­ative val­ue. Such explo­rations bring us clos­er to what makes humans the same the world over: our pro­duc­tive imag­i­na­tions and the arche­typ­al well­spring of images that guide us through the unknown.

When Span­ish poet, crit­ic, trans­la­tor, and musi­col­o­gist Juan Eduar­do Cir­lot began his 1958 Dic­tio­nary of Sym­bols, he did so with Carl Jung in mind, writ­ing against a cur­rent of pos­i­tivism that deval­ued the sym­bol­ic.

Cir­lot quotes Jung in his intro­duc­tion: “For the mod­ern mind, analo­gies… are noth­ing but self-evi­dent absur­di­ties. This wor­thy judge­ment does not, how­ev­er, in any way alter the fact that such affini­ties of thought do exist and that they have been play­ing an impor­tant role for cen­turies.” Like it or not, we inter­act through the sym­bol­ic realm all the time. Those inter­ac­tions are freight­ed with his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al mean­ing we would do well to under­stand if we are to under­stand our­selves.

 

In his method, Cir­lot writes in a Pref­ace:

I want­ed to embrace the broad­est pos­si­ble range of objects and cul­tures, to com­pare the sym­bols of the post-Roman West with sym­bols from India, the Far East, Chaldea, Egypt, Israel and Greece. Images, essen­tial myths, alle­gories, for my pur­pos­es, all these need­ed to be con­sult­ed, not, self-evi­dent­ly, with the inten­tion of mak­ing an exhaus­tive reck­on­ing, but rather to comb out pat­terns in mean­ing, in what counts as essen­tial, in fields both near and far.

Cir­lot draws his inspi­ra­tion from Dada and Sur­re­al­ism and the com­par­a­tive method in reli­gious stud­ies pop­u­lar­ized by schol­ars like Mircea Eli­ade, who influ­enced promi­nent stu­dents of myth like Joseph Camp­bell (and through Camp­bell, the pop­u­lar cul­ture of film, tele­vi­sion, and the inter­net). “Thus I drew near the lumi­nous labyrinth of sym­bols,” Cir­lot writes, “con­cerned less with inter­pre­ta­tion than with com­pre­hen­sion and con­cerned most of all, real­ly, with the con­tem­pla­tion of how sym­bols dwell across time and cul­ture.” And “dwell” they do, as we know, in ele­men­tal fig­ures like drag­ons and ser­pents, destruc­tive gods and evil eyes. (In 1954, Cir­lot pub­lished The Eye in Mythol­o­gy, a pre­cur­sor to A Dic­tio­nary of Sym­bols.)

 

In times of trou­ble and uncer­tain­ty like ours, sym­bols become impor­tant ways of orga­niz­ing chaos in our col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion, and are inte­gral to what Sind­ing Bentzen, pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Copen­hagen, calls “reli­gious cop­ing” in the face of COVID-19. Ripped from their his­toric con­text, as hap­pened with the swasti­ka, sym­bols can be used to inten­tion­al­ly manip­u­late and mis­lead, to turn col­lec­tive anx­i­ety into acqui­es­cence to tyran­ny and total­i­tar­i­an­ism. Cir­lot was acute­ly aware of this as an artist work­ing under the rule of Fran­cis­co Fran­co. As a lead­ing mem­ber of a group of painters and poets who called them­selves Dau al Set (“the sev­en-spot­ted dice”), Cir­lot and his con­tem­po­raries “cham­pi­oned cre­ative lib­er­ty and resis­tance to the dom­i­nant Fas­cist regime.”

In the 21st cen­tu­ry, we can just as well read Cirlot’s dic­tio­nary with this same mis­sion. It is not an arti­fact of anoth­er time but as an ever-rel­e­vant, eru­dite, and fas­ci­nat­ing resource for our own. Through the study of sym­bols we learn to see, Cir­lot wrote, that “noth­ing is mean­ing­less or neu­tral: every­thing is sig­nif­i­cant,” every idea con­nect­ed to oth­ers across time and space. “It is only by read­ing through the vol­ume steadi­ly that one can become aware of the intri­cate inter­re­la­tions of sym­bol­ic mean­ings,” wrote Cather­ine Rau in a 1962 review of the book. We can “devel­op such aware­ness by start­ing off with any ran­dom entry,” Angel­i­ca Frey observes at Hyper­al­ler­gic.

Do so in the “orig­i­nal, sig­nif­i­cant­ly enlarged” new edi­tion of the Cirlot’s Dic­tio­nary of Sym­bols, just pub­lished by the New York Review of Books in an Eng­lish trans­la­tion by Valerie Miles. We can read the book for ref­er­ence or for plea­sure, Her­bert Read writes in an intro­duc­tion to the new edi­tion, “but in gen­er­al the great­est use of the vol­ume will be for the elu­ci­da­tion of those many sym­bols which we encounter in the arts and in the his­to­ry of ideas. Man, it has been said, is a sym­bol­iz­ing ani­mal; it is evi­dent that at no stage in the devel­op­ment of civ­i­liza­tion has man been able to dis­pense with sym­bols.”

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

18 Clas­sic Myths Explained with Ani­ma­tion: Pandora’s Box, Sisy­phus & More

48 Hours of Joseph Camp­bell Lec­tures Free Online: The Pow­er of Myth & Sto­ry­telling

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

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“Borat” on Politics and Embarrassment–Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast Discussion #67

in Comedy, Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | November 5th, 2020

Let’s stop obsess­ing about elec­tion mat­ters and con­sid­er instead a clown who brings out racism in rubes. Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, Bri­an Hirt, and our guest musician/actor Aaron David Glea­son con­sid­er the com­e­dy of Sacha Baron Cohen, in par­tic­u­lar the new Borat Sub­se­quent Moviefilm, which you should def­i­nite­ly go watch before lis­ten­ing, unless it’s the kind of thing that so repuls­es you that you’ll nev­er watch it, in which case this is the pod­cast to tell you what the fuss is about.

A few ques­tions we explore: Is it uneth­i­cal to use unwit­ting peo­ple who signed your release form as your sup­port­ing cast? Is it OK to use racism to expose racism? Are cam­eras now so ubiq­ui­tous that many peo­ple feel per­fect­ly com­fort­able let­ting their true col­ors show on film? How dehu­man­iz­ing is the nature of retail in Amer­i­ca that all these shop keep­ers would go along with Borat’s bizarre and/or racist requests? Cohen claims that this new film was about demon­strat­ing the human­i­ty of his sub­jects; how evi­dent was that pur­pose on screen? How does this film dif­fer from Cohen’s oth­er work? Was the film actu­al­ly fun­ny, or did it tran­scend (or fall short of) com­e­dy in its pol­i­tics and its king-size serv­ings of embar­rass­ment?

Watch Cohen and Maria Bakalo­va on Good Morn­ing Amer­i­ca explain­ing the film. Look at the Wikipedia arti­cle for info on how and when sequences were shot. You can browse through the crit­i­cal reac­tions your­self.

After we record­ed this, Cohen pro­vid­ed finan­cial help to his very sym­pa­thet­ic vic­tim, Jeanise Jones (the babysit­ter). And to set­tle one issue that came up in our con­ver­sa­tion, Judith Dim Evans (the nice old lady in the tem­ple who sub­se­quent­ly passed away) did­n’t know the gag dur­ing film­ing, but Cohen revealed it right after­wards.

Hear Aaron’s music on Naked­ly Exam­ined Music #71. Lis­ten to Aaron, Eri­ca, Mark, and oth­ers includ­ing Lucy Law­less and Emi­ly Perkins on the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Play­ers’ read­ing of Lysis­tra­ta. Learn more about Aaron at aarondavidgleason.com, and you can fol­low him on Insta­gram @aarondavidgleason.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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40,000 Early Modern Maps Are Now Freely Available Online (Courtesy of the British Library)

in History, Maps | November 4th, 2020

Most of us do not, today, live in des­per­ate need of maps. On the inter­net we can eas­i­ly find not only the cur­rent maps we need to nav­i­gate most any ter­ri­to­ry on Earth, but also an increas­ing pro­por­tion of all the maps made before as well. You can find the lat­ter in places like the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion, which, as we wrote last year here on Open Cul­ture, now boasts 91,000 his­toric maps free to down­load.  It will sure­ly add even more, as human­i­ty seems to have only just begun dig­i­tiz­ing its own many attempts to make the phys­i­cal world leg­i­ble, an art that goes back (as you know if you read the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chicago’s The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy online) to pre­his­toric Las­caux cave paint­ings of the night sky.

By that stan­dard, the maps cur­rent­ly being dig­i­tized and uploaded by the British Library are down­right mod­ern — or ear­ly mod­ern, to be more spe­cif­ic. Dat­ing between 1500 and 1824, says Medievalists.net, these maps “are part of the Topo­graph­i­cal Col­lec­tion of King George III (K. Top),” which also includes “maps, atlases, archi­tec­tur­al draw­ings, car­toons and water­col­ors.”

Part of “the larg­er King’s Library which was pre­sent­ed to the Nation by George IV in 1823,” the col­lec­tion was amassed “dur­ing the for­ma­tive peri­od of the British Empire” and thus shows “how Britain viewed and inter­act­ed with the wider world dur­ing this peri­od.”

The British Library plans to post 40,000 of these maps (broad­ly con­sid­ered), and you can now view the first set of rough­ly 18,000 at the insti­tu­tion’s Flickr Com­mons col­lec­tion. Medievalists.net names as high­lights of the full Topo­graph­i­cal Col­lec­tion of King George III such arti­facts as “a hand-drawn map of New York City, pre­sent­ed to the future James II in 1664,” “The vast Kangxi Map of Chi­na of 1719 made by the Ital­ian Jesuit Mat­teo Ripa,” “the ear­li­est com­pre­hen­sive land-use map of Lon­don from 1800,” and even “water­col­ors by not­ed 18th cen­tu­ry artists such as Paul Sand­by and Samuel Hierony­mus Grimm.”

Many of the pieces the British Library has thus far uploaded to Flickr look like maps to us still today, but just as many, per­haps most, strike us more as works of art. This goes for tra­di­tion­al bird’s-eye-views ren­dered more vivid­ly (and some­times imag­i­na­tive­ly) than we’re used to, as well for as rich­ly drawn or even paint­ed land­scapes, all of which exist to pro­vide a faith­ful rep­re­sen­ta­tion of land, sea, and sky. You can view more such images along that spec­trum, as well as read their sto­ries in con­text, at the British Library’s Pic­tur­ing Places site. The artis­tic and his­tor­i­cal rich­ness exud­ed by these maps today echoes the more tan­gi­ble val­ue they had when first cre­at­ed: back then, those who had the maps pos­sessed the world.

via Medievalist.net

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold an Incred­i­bly Detailed, Hand­made Map Of Medieval Trade Routes

Ancient Maps that Changed the World: See World Maps from Ancient Greece, Baby­lon, Rome, and the Islam­ic World

Down­load 91,000 His­toric Maps from the Mas­sive David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

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

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

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

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A Digital Library for Bartenders: Vintage Cocktail Books with Recipes Dating Back to 1753

in Food & Drink, Libraries | November 4th, 2020

So, um… you look like you could use a drink… or anoth­er drink, or five…. I’ve giv­en it up, but I can still mix a mean cock­tail. How about a Stom­ach Julep (Julepum Stom­achicum). No white suit or veran­da required. It’s a “saf­fron syrup made with sher­ry, spir­it rec­ti­fied with mint, and a non-alco­holic mint dis­til­late” among oth­er “fas­ci­nat­ing ingre­di­ents.” Yes, this is a recipe from a 1753 phar­ma­col­o­gy text­book, but in 1753, one’s bar­tender might just as well also be the local alchemist, phar­ma­cist, and cap­tive audi­ence. Fear­ing a resur­gence of plague and oth­er mal­adies, lack­ing prop­er health­care or clean water, the Ear­ly Mod­ern British for­ti­fied them­selves with booze.

The New Eng­lish Dis­pen­sato­ry might seem like an odd text, nonethe­less, to include in an online library for bar­tenders, but it is per­fect­ly in keep­ing with the spir­it of the EUVS Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion, an appre­cia­ble sam­pling of man­u­als, cock­tail menus, recipe books, and his­tor­i­cal ephemera relat­ed to “a pro­fes­sion that has redis­cov­ered a jus­ti­fi­able sense of pride and pur­pose.”

This sense does seem to vary great­ly between estab­lish­ments, but the col­lec­tion does not dis­crim­i­nate, though it does dis­play a par­tic­u­lar fond­ness for Cuba in its cur­rent state of digitization—now up to a few dozen titles span­ning the years 1753 to 1959. More books will be com­ing online soon out of a phys­i­cal col­lec­tion of “over 1,000 vol­umes.”

It may be hard to imag­ine earn­ing a bar­tend­ing Ph.D. but one could cer­tain­ly find a dis­ser­ta­tion top­ic in the impres­sive breadth and depth of the col­lec­tion, even in its lim­it­ed state. Or, more like­ly, one could put togeth­er a unique­ly imag­i­na­tive cock­tail menu that no one else in town can boast of. Bar­tend­ing is both art and sci­ence. In his 1892 book The Flow­ing Bowl, New York bar­tender William Schmidt, also known as “The Only William,” com­ments:

Mixed drinks might be com­pared to music: an orches­tra will pro­duce good music, pro­vid­ed all play­ers are artists; but have only one or two infe­ri­or musi­cians in your band and you may be con­vinced they will spoil the entire har­mo­ny.

To the bartender’s list of sup­ple­men­tary roles in the lives of their cus­tomers, we can add anoth­er: con­duc­tor. William first came to promi­nence in the pro­fes­sion in Ham­burg, Ger­many before emi­grat­ing to Chica­go, then Man­hat­tan. His tastes, in music and liquors, remained Euro­pean. “The finest mixed drinks and their ingre­di­ents are of for­eign ori­gin. Are not all of the supe­ri­or cor­dials of for­eign make?” he wrote. Clear­ly he knew noth­ing of bour­bon.

The Only William did know that fine art requires show­man­ship and style. He was “renowned for his acro­bat­ic bar­tend­ing feats: throw­ing flam­ing and non-flam­ing drinks in grace­ful arcs.” The EUVS Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion presents William as a kind of bar­tend­ing folk hero, a larg­er-than-life fig­ure who was said to have invent­ed a new drink dai­ly. If this is so, it may not be so sur­pris­ing. William was not only total­ly devot­ed to his art, but he was also a schol­ar, “cred­it­ed with an ency­clo­pe­dic knowl­edge of the clas­sics.”

The Flow­ing Bowl con­tains Schmidt’s “his­to­ry of var­i­ous bev­er­ages, descrip­tions of his­toric Gre­co-Roman ban­quets, sam­ple menus with bev­er­age pair­ings, plus a live­ly selec­tion of poet­ry read­ings whose focus is on drink.” One gets the sense he rep­re­sents the ide­al patron of The Bartender’s Library. What would such a mod­el bar­tender do dur­ing the pan­dem­ic? I think he’d hit the books, espe­cial­ly giv­en that so many, like his own, are free online. And giv­en the ever-present pos­si­bil­i­ty of plague and oth­er calami­ties, I guess he’d offer spir­it­ed reme­dies to the peo­ple locked down at home with him.

Note: One com­menter on the Cock­tail archive site left these com­ments, which might prove handy:

Here is a list of con­ver­sions, with Impe­r­i­al mea­sure­ments (from the U.K), as well as few British ones–as both are found in many clas­sic cock­tail books and can be mighty con­fus­ing.

1 quart (Impe­r­i­al) = 40 ounces

1 quart = 32 ounces

1 bot­tle = 24 ounces

1 pint (Impe­r­i­al) = 20 ounces

1 pint = 16 ounces

1/2 pint (Impe­r­i­al) = 10 ounces

1/2 pint = 8 ounces

1 gill (Impe­r­i­al) = 4.8 ounces

1 gill = 4 ounces

1 dram = 1/4 table­spoon (found in the British met­ric sys­tem or Eng­lish recipes before approx. 1972)

1 wine­glass = 2 ounces

1 jig­ger = 1 1/2 ounces – 1 1/4 ounces

1 pony = 1 (flu­id) ounce = 2 table­spoons

1 table­spoon = 1/2 (flu­id) ounces

1 tea­spoon = 1/16 flu­id ounces

A dash is a tricky one. When applied to bit­ters, a “dash” makes sense: it’s what comes out the top of the bot­tle. But if you find a recipe call­ing for “dash­es of syrup,” check out sim­i­lar drink recipes and use your judg­ment in how much you need.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Sci­ence of Beer: A New Free Online Course Promis­es to Enhance Your Appre­ci­a­tion of the Time­less Bev­er­age

A New Dig­i­tized Menu Col­lec­tion Lets You Revis­it the Cui­sine from the “Gold­en Age of Rail­road Din­ing”

The Recipes of Famous Artists: Din­ners & Cock­tails From Tol­stoy, Miles Davis, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, David Lynch & Many More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

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How the Iconic Colors of the New York City Subway System Were Invented: See the 1930 Color Chart Created by Architect Squire J. Vickers

in Design, History | November 4th, 2020

There may be no more wel­come sight to a New York­er than their own Pan­tone-col­ored cir­cle on an arriv­ing sub­way train. (Pro­vid­ed it’s also the right train num­ber or let­ter; is mak­ing local stops (or express stops); has not been rerout­ed due to track work, death or injury, etc.) The psy­cho­log­i­cal effect is not unlike a preschool­er spot­ting her bright­ly-col­ored cub­by at the end of a long day. There­in lies the com­fort­ing lovey—screen time, cli­mate con­trol, maybe a nap in a win­dow seat on the way home….

But as every New York­er also knows, the col­or-cod­ed sub­way sys­tem didn’t always have such a cheer­ful, Sesame Street-like look. Buried beneath the MTA’s mod­ern exte­ri­or, with those col­ored cir­cles adopt­ed piece­meal over the chaot­ic 1970s, is a much old­er system—three sys­tems, in fact—that had far less nav­i­ga­ble sig­nage. “The cur­rent New York sub­way sys­tem was formed in 1940,” writes Paul Shaw in a com­pre­hen­sive his­to­ry of sub­way sign fonts, “when the IRT (Inter­bor­ough Rapid Tran­sit), the BMT (Brook­lyn-Man­hat­tan Tran­sit) and the IND (Inde­pen­dent) lines were merged.”

The first two lines were built by the city and leased to pri­vate own­ers, with some ele­vat­ed sec­tions dat­ing all the way back to 1885. “The first ‘signs’ in the New York City sub­way sys­tem were cre­at­ed by Heins & LaFarge, archi­tects of the IRT,” who estab­lished the tra­di­tion of mosa­ic tiles on plat­form walls. The BMT “fol­lowed suit under Squire J. Vick­ers, who took over the archi­tec­tur­al duties in 1908.” The let­ter­ing and design of these tiled signs shift­ed, from 19th cen­tu­ry goth­ic styles to 20th cen­tu­ry art deco.

Image by Elvert Barnes, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When con­struc­tion on the IND sys­tem began, Vick­ers, now archi­tect of the entire sys­tem and its lead design­er, cre­at­ed a col­or-cod­ing sys­tem to iden­ti­fy each sta­tion. (See the chart above from 1930.) “The col­or vari­a­tions with­in this sys­tem are sub­tle,” notes 6sqft. “Though they’re grouped by col­or fam­i­ly, i.e. the five pri­ma­ry col­ors, dif­fer­ent shades are used with­in those fam­i­lies. Col­or names are based on paint chips and Berol Pris­ma­col­or pen­cils. Red sta­tions include ‘Scar­let Red’ ‘Carmine Red’ and ‘Tus­can Red,’ just to name a few.” This lev­el of speci­fici­ty con­tin­ues through each of the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary col­ors.

It’s not entire­ly clear why Vick­ers chose the col­or scheme he did. (See a sub­way map imag­ined with his col­or-cod­ing sys­tem, above, by design­er van­sh­nooken­raggen.) One the­o­ry is that the sys­tem was designed to help non-Eng­lish-speak­ing rid­ers nav­i­gate the trains, but “there isn’t any­thing that we were able to find that says defin­i­tive­ly ‘This is the rea­son why we are doing that,’” says New York Tran­sit Muse­um cura­tor Jodi Shapiro. The col­ors may have been cho­sen to stand out in arti­fi­cial light, she spec­u­lates, and “not look dingy and have some kind of cheer­ful effect…. Yel­low and blue are very nat­ur­al col­ors: yel­low like sun­light, green like grass, blue like water. I don’t think that’s an acci­dent.”

What­ev­er the rea­son­ing, the col­or-cod­ing did not sim­pli­fy sig­nage in the rapid­ly expand­ing sys­tem, which became incom­pre­hen­si­ble to rid­ers when all three sub­ways, and their dif­fer­ent, num­ber­ing, and let­ter­ing sys­tems, com­bined into an “unten­able mess of over­lap­ping sign sys­tems,” Shaw writes. Con­fu­sion reigned into the 1960s, when Bob Noor­da and Mas­si­mo Vignel­li, cre­ator of an icon­ic 1972 sub­way map, com­plet­ed “the Bible” of NYC tran­sit design, the New York City Tran­sit Author­i­ty Graph­ics Stan­dards Man­u­al. The new design­ers used “a rain­bow of 22 dif­fer­ent col­ors to assign to each sub­way line,” Untapped Cities writes, “and gave the routes new names.”

Col­ors were fur­ther sim­pli­fied in 1979 when John Tau­ranac and Michael Hertz designed the maps we know today. To solve the prob­lem of dif­fer­ent routes shar­ing the same col­ors, they assigned col­ors based on “trunk routes,” or the por­tion of the tracks that pass through Man­hat­tan. “All trains that share a trunk route are the same color”—a sys­tem that works beau­ti­ful­ly. And it only took eighty years to get there. The frus­tra­tion design­ers have felt over the decades can be neat­ly summed up in one word offered by Tau­ranac at a recent NYC sub­way map sym­po­sium: “Bas­ta!” Or in a New York Eng­lish, “Enough with all these col­ors already!”

via Untapped Cities/6sqft

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

A Sub­way Ride Through New York City: Watch Vin­tage Footage from 1905

Under­ci­ty: Explor­ing the Under­bel­ly of New York City

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

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10 Hours of Nick Offerman Quietly Drinking Single Malt Scotch by the Fire

in Random | November 3rd, 2020

Just a handy way to keep your mind off of the sturm and drang of the US elec­tion today.

If this does­n’t quite do the trick, find some alter­na­tives in the Relat­eds below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Moby Lets You Down­load 4 Hours of Ambi­ent Music to Help You Sleep, Med­i­tate, Do Yoga & Not Pan­ic

Med­i­ta­tion for Begin­ners: Bud­dhist Monks & Teach­ers Explain the Basics

Hear “Weight­less,” the Most Relax­ing Song Ever Made, Accord­ing to Researchers (You’ll Need It Today)

Stream 72 Hours of Ambi­ent Sounds from Blade Run­ner: Relax, Go to Sleep in a Dystopi­an Future

Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Paint­ing Free Online: 403 Episodes Span­ning 31 Sea­sons

10 Hours of Ambi­ent Arc­tic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Med­i­tate, Study & Sleep

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Three Days in Twin Peaks: An In-Depth Journey Through the Evocative Locations of David Lynch’s TV Series

in Film, Television, Travel | November 3rd, 2020

After a time of great per­son­al loss, a friend of mine set off on a road trip around the Unit­ed States. When I lat­er asked what part of the coun­try had made the deep­est impres­sion on him, he named a few towns about thir­ty miles east of Seat­tle: the shoot­ing loca­tions, he hard­ly need­ed tell a fel­low David Lynch fan, of Twin Peaks. Raised in Spokane, Wash­ing­ton, among a vari­ety of oth­er mod­est Amer­i­can cities, Lynch saw clear­ly the look and feel of the tit­u­lar set­ting by the time he co-cre­at­ed the show with writer Mark Frost. He even­tu­al­ly found it in the Wash­ing­ton­ian towns of Sno­qualmie, North Bend and Fall City, which even today offer a friend­ly recep­tion to the occa­sion­al Twin Peaks pil­grim — at least accord­ing to my friend.

This was more recent­ly cor­rob­o­rat­ed by Jere­mi­ah Beaver, cre­ator of Youtube “Twin Peaks the­o­ry and analy­sis show” Take the Ring. Thir­ty years after the pre­miere of the famous­ly cryp­tic yet trans­fix­ing orig­i­nal series, the Indi­anapo­lis-based Beaver made the trip to Wash­ing­ton to vis­it its every remain­ing loca­tion — as well as those used in the 1992 pre­quel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return, and even these pro­duc­tions’ delet­ed scenes.

Into the half-hour-long “Three Days in Twin Peaks” Beaver fits a great deal of infor­ma­tion relat­ed to Twin Peaks’ pro­duc­tion and mythos as well as the real-life his­to­ry of the rel­e­vant places. “It was at times hard to dis­tin­guish the Twin Peaks that lived in my imag­i­na­tion ver­sus the ground beneath my feet,” he admits.

Beaver makes his way to loca­tions both major and minor, from the Twin Peaks Sher­if­f’s Depart­ment (now the Dirt­Fish Ral­ly Rac­ing School) and the Dou­ble R din­er (Twede’s Cafe, “one of the few spots in Wash­ing­ton state that real­ly owns its Peakness”) to the shack of the Book House bik­er club and the bench in E.J. Roberts Park once sat upon by the late Har­ry Dean Stan­ton’s Carl Robb. Some real build­ings played dual roles: both Twin Peaks’ Blue Pine Lodge and Great North­ern Hotel are in real­i­ty dif­fer­ent parts of Pouls­bo’s Kiana Lodge, and the Mt. Si Motel appears as “two dif­fer­ent motels with ele­ments of the super­nat­ur­al,” first in Fire Walk with Me, then even more seed­i­ly in The Return. “That fresh moun­tain air and smell of trees is no joke,” says Beaver, words to heed if you plan on mak­ing your own Twin Peaks pil­grim­age — and if you do, you can sure­ly guess how he describes the cof­fee and cher­ry pie at Twede’s.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Twin Peaks Visu­al Sound­track Released Only in Japan: A New Way to Expe­ri­ence David Lynch’s Clas­sic Show

David Lynch Draws a Map of Twin Peaks (to Help Pitch the Show to ABC)

Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Mak­ing & Mythol­o­gy of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks Actu­al­ly Explained: A Four-Hour Video Essay Demys­ti­fies It All

Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans

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

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Martin Luther King: “You Know Who to Vote For. I’m Just Asking You to Vote!” (1964)

in History | November 3rd, 2020

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

At anoth­er turn­ing point in U.S. history–when LBJ ran against Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter in the 1964 pres­i­den­tial election–Martin Luther King, Jr. urged vot­ers to stand up and be count­ed. To set the scene, the UCLA Film & Tele­vi­sion Archive writes:

King, who had just been named the win­ner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his com­mit­ment to non­vi­o­lent resis­tance, embarked on a cross-coun­try get-out-the-vote cam­paign in sup­port of incum­bent Demo­c­rat Lyn­don B. John­son. Repub­li­can chal­lenger Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter opposed the Civ­il Rights Act of 1964 in favor of states’ rights and rep­re­sent­ed, for King, a set­back for the civ­il rights move­ment and “a great dark night of social destruc­tion” (Los Ange­les Times). King also advo­cat­ed for more African Amer­i­can rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Con­gress and spoke against bal­lot mea­sures that would per­pet­u­ate dis­crim­i­na­tion. To vote was not only a civic duty, it was a moral imper­a­tive.

His words speak to our moment today as much, if not more, than they did to the events of 56 years ago. Speak­ing to a crowd in LA, King said:

“Suf­fice it to say that we stand in one of the most momen­tous peri­ods of human his­to­ry. And in these days of emo­tion­al ten­sion, when the prob­lems of the world are gigan­tic in extent and chaot­ic in detail, all men of good will must make the right deci­sions.”

“We must decide whether … we will allow our nation to be rel­e­gat­ed to a sec­ond-rate pow­er in the world with no moral voice.”

“We must decide next Tues­day whether Amer­i­ca will take the high road of jus­tice and peace, com­pas­sion for the poor and under­priv­i­leged, or whether this nation will tread the low road of man’s inhu­man­i­ty to man, of injus­tice, of short-sight­ed­ness.”

“Each of us has a moral respon­si­bil­i­ty, if we are of vot­ing age and if we are reg­is­tered, to par­tic­i­pate in that deci­sion. I come here to urge every per­son under the sound of my voice to go to the polls on the 3rd of Novem­ber and vote your con­vic­tions.”

Amen.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Used Niet­zsche, Hegel & Kant to Over­turn Seg­re­ga­tion in Amer­i­ca

Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Explains the Impor­tance of Jazz: Hear the Speech He Gave at the First Berlin Jazz Fes­ti­val (1964)

Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.’s Hand­writ­ten Syl­labus & Final Exam for the Phi­los­o­phy Course He Taught at More­house Col­lege (1962)

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The Iconic Photography of Gordon Parks: An Introduction to the Renaissance American Artist

in Photography | November 3rd, 2020

I felt the need for me to some­how or anoth­er, use human­i­ty to get peo­ple to become aware of how peo­ple suf­fered. That was what drove me to it.

Poet, nov­el­ist, jazz pianist, clas­si­cal com­pos­er, co-founder of Essence mag­a­zine, and first Black direc­tor of a major Hol­ly­wood film, based on a book he him­self wrote.… Oh, and he also direct­ed Shaft, the high water­mark of Blax­ploita­tion film and a pro­duc­tion, says Evan Puschak, the Nerd­writer, above, “that helped to save MGM and the larg­er stu­dio sys­tem from bank­rupt­cy.” Gor­don Parks lived “enough for ten lives,” but the resume above miss­es out on Parks’ “great­est con­tri­bu­tion to Amer­i­can art in the 20th cen­tu­ry… his pho­tog­ra­phy.”

The self-taught Parks began tak­ing pic­tures at 25, inspired by news­reel footage of the bomb­ing of an Amer­i­can gun­ship. After see­ing the film, he pur­chased his first cam­era and soon moved to Chica­go, where he honed his craft in the ear­ly 40s and devel­oped the skills that would bring him to the New Deal’s Farm Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion. There he worked under the leg­endary Roy Stryk­er, the for­mer Colum­bia econ­o­mist who also hired Dorothea Lange, Walk­er Evans, Edwin Rosskam, and oth­er pho­tog­ra­phers who went on to have long careers in pho­to­jour­nal­ism.

None of these Depres­sion-era gov­ern­ment pho­tog­ra­phers neglect­ed the Black expe­ri­ence in Amer­i­ca; under Stryker’s direc­tion, the FSA did its best to faith­ful­ly doc­u­ment work­ing-class and poor Amer­i­cans of all back­grounds. Before being com­mis­sioned to do so, how­ev­er, Parks, the only Black pho­tog­ra­ph­er in the group, was already seek­ing out can­did, inti­mate images of life on the South Side of Chica­go. When he began work­ing for the FSA, he pro­duced one of the most icon­ic images of the peri­od, “Amer­i­can Goth­ic,” a solo restag­ing of the Grant Woods paint­ing fea­tur­ing a clean­ing woman named Ella Wat­son, broom in one hand, mop in the oth­er.

Stryk­er, one of the most dar­ing pho­to edi­tors of the time, helped estab­lish the bold doc­u­men­tary style that dom­i­nat­ed in the com­ing decades of Look and Life mag­a­zines. But even he saw Parks’ “Amer­i­can Goth­ic” as too incen­di­ary. As Parks remem­bers in a clip above, “he says, ‘Well, you’re get­ting the idea, but you’re going to get us all fired. (Laughs) He says, ‘This is a gov­ern­ment agency, and that pic­ture is an indict­ment against Amer­i­ca.’” Parks did not get fired. Instead, he went on to work for the FSA’s suc­ces­sor, the Office of War Infor­ma­tion, and pho­tographed the Tuskegee Air­men.

Parks’ skills as an artist were wide-rang­ing: his vision took in every­thing. He doc­u­ment­ed the Black expe­ri­ence in the 20th cen­tu­ry with more sen­si­tiv­i­ty and depth than any oth­er pho­tog­ra­ph­er. His pho­to essay of a Harlem gang leader earned him the first staff appoint­ment for a Black pho­tog­ra­ph­er at Life in 1948. He would go on to doc­u­ment the Civ­il Rights move­ment and both cel­e­brat­ed and ordi­nary peo­ple around the coun­try and the world for the next sev­er­al decades, return­ing often to the fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy in which he got his start. He was a renais­sance artist with an activist’s heart. Parks once called the cam­era a “weapon against pover­ty and racism,” but he tend­ed to wield it much more like a paint­brush.

You can view gal­leries of Parks’ pho­to­graph­ic work at The Gor­don Parks Foun­da­tion web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Art of the New Deal: Why the Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment Fund­ed the Arts Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion

Yale Presents an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Found: Lost Great Depres­sion Pho­tos Cap­tur­ing Hard Times on Farms, and in Town

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

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A Quay Brothers Animation Explains Anamorphosis, the Renaissance Illusion That Hides Pictures within Pictures

in Animation, Art, Religion, Science | November 2nd, 2020

First appear­ances can be deceiv­ing.

Take physi­cist Emmanuel Maig­nan’s 1642 fres­co in a cor­ri­dor of Rome’s Trinità dei Mon­ti monastery.

Viewed head on, it appears to be a some­what uncon­ven­tion­al land­scape in which one of the few remain­ing branch­es of a muti­lat­ed tree spreads over a city, far in the dis­tance. Streaky clouds sug­gest heavy weath­er is brew­ing.

Stroll to the end of the cor­ri­dor and take anoth­er look. You’ll find that the tree has con­tract­ed, and the clouds have recon­fig­ured them­selves into a por­trait of Saint Francesco of Pao­la, pray­ing beneath its boughs.

It’s a prime exam­ple of oblique anamor­pho­sis, an image that has been delib­er­ate­ly dis­tort­ed by an artist well versed in per­spec­tive, with the end result that the image’s true nature will only be revealed to those view­ing the work from an uncon­ven­tion­al point.

The Quay Broth­ers’ doc­u­men­tary short, above, a col­lab­o­ra­tion with art his­to­ri­an Roger Car­di­nal, uses a com­bi­na­tion of their delight­ful­ly creepy sig­na­ture pup­pet stop motion, as well as ani­mat­ed 3‑D cut outs, to lift the cur­tains on how the human eye can be manip­u­lat­ed, using prin­ci­ples of per­spec­tive.

Anamor­pho­sis may not seem like such a feat in an age when a num­ber of soft­ware pro­grams can pro­vide a major assist, but why would Renais­sance artists put them­selves to so much extra trou­ble?

The Quay Broth­ers delve into this too.

Per­haps the artist was inject­ing a bit of social crit­i­cism, like Hans Hol­bein the Younger, whose 1533 por­trait, The Ambas­sadors, includes a secret anamor­phic skull. This could be tak­en as a jab at the excess­es of the wealthy young diplo­mats who pro­vide the painting’s sub­ject, except that the one who com­mis­sioned the work, Jean de Din­teville, prized the mot­to “Memen­to mori.”

Maybe he know­ing­ly ordered up the naked death’s head to go along with his ermine and bling, an exam­ple of hav­ing one’s cake and eat­ing it too, and yet anoth­er dizzy­ing head trip for those view­ing the paint­ing from the intend­ed angle.

(Betcha didn’t have to work too hard to guess the skull’s loca­tion, though…)

Or an artist might choose to employ anamor­pho­sis as a brown paper wrap­per of sorts, as in the case of Erhard Schön’s erot­ic wood­block prints.

Else­where, the goal was to empha­size patience, reflec­tion, and cleav­ing to a pious path by reward­ing those who craned their necks toward a spir­i­tu­al peep­hole with an appro­pri­ate­ly reli­gious view.

(Pity the poor pil­grim who stepped up expect­ing Erhard Schön…)

For a 21st-cen­tu­ry take on anamor­phic art, have a look at the work of the graf­fi­ti col­lec­tive TRULY | Urban Artists here.

The Quay Broth­ers’ short film, “De Arti­fi­ciali Per­spec­ti­va, or Anamor­pho­sis,” has been made avail­able on The Met Muse­um’s YouTube chan­nel.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Opti­cal Poems by Oskar Fischinger, the Avant-Garde Ani­ma­tor Despised by Hitler, Dissed by Dis­ney

Watch Mar­cel Duchamp’s Hyp­not­ic Rotore­liefs: Spin­ning Discs Cre­at­ing Opti­cal Illu­sions on a Turntable (1935)

The Anatom­i­cal Draw­ings of Renais­sance Man, Leonar­do da Vin­ci

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

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