Bukowski Reads Bukowski: Watch a 1975 Documentary Featuring Charles Bukowski at the Height of His Powers

in Poetry | April 29th, 2024

In 1973, Richard Davies directed Bukowski, a documentary that TV Guide described as a “cinema-verite portrait of Los Angeles poet Charles Bukowski.” The film finds Bukowski, then 53 years old, “enjoying his first major success,” and “the camera captures his reminiscences … as he walks around his Los Angeles neighborhood. Blunt language and a sly appreciation of his life form the core of the program, which includes observations by and about the women in his life.”

The original film clocked in at 46 minutes. Then, two years later, PBS released a “heavily-edited 28-minute version of the film,” using alternate scenes and a rearranged structure. Renamed Bukowski Reads Bukowski, the film aired on Thursday, October 16, 1975. And, true to its name, the film features footage of Bukowski reading his poems, starting with “The Rat,” from the 1972 collection Mockingbird Wish Me Luck. You can watch Bukowski Reads Bukowski above, and find more Bukowski readings in the Relateds below.

Charles Bukowski Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski

Four Charles Bukowski Poems Animated

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The Origins of Anime: Watch Early Japanese Animations (1917 to 1931)

in Animation | April 26th, 2024

Japanese animation, AKA anime, might be filled with large-eyed maidens, way cool robots, and large-eyed, way cool maiden/robot hybrids, but it often shows a level of daring, complexity and creativity not typically found in American mainstream animation. And the form has spawned some clear masterpieces from Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira to Mamoru Oishii’s Ghost in the Shell to pretty much everything that Hayao Miyazaki has ever done.

Anime has a far longer history than you might think; in fact, it was at the vanguard of Japan’s furious attempts to modernize in the early 20th century. The oldest surviving example of Japanese animation, Namakura Gatana (Blunt Sword), dates back to 1917, though much of the earliest animated movies were lost following a massive earthquake in Tokyo in 1923. As with much of Japan’s cultural output in the first decades of the 20th Century, animation from this time shows artists trying to incorporate traditional stories and motifs in a new modern form.

Above is Oira no Yaku (Our Baseball Game) from 1931, which shows rabbits squaring off against tanukis (raccoon dogs) in a game of baseball. The short is a basic slapstick comedy elegantly told with clean, simple lines. Rabbits and tanukis are mainstays of Japanese folklore, though they are seen here playing a sport that was introduced to the country in the 1870s. Like most silent Japanese movies, this film made use of a benshi – a performer who would stand by the movie screen and narrate the movie. In the old days, audiences were drawn to the benshi, not the movie. Akira Kurosawa’s elder brother was a popular benshi who, like a number of despondent benshis, committed suicide when the popularity of sound cinema rendered his job obsolete.

Then there’s this version of the Japanese folktale Kobu-tori from 1929, about a woodsman with a massive growth on his jaw who finds himself surrounded by magical creatures. When they remove the lump, he finds that not everyone is pleased. Notice how detailed and uncartoony the characters are.

Another early example of early anime is Ugokie Kori no Tatehiki (1931), which roughly translates into “The Moving Picture Fight of the Fox and the Possum.” The 11-minute short by Ikuo Oishi is about a fox who disguises himself as a samurai and spends the night in an abandoned temple inhabited by a bunch of tanukis (those guys again). The movie brings all the wonderful grotesqueries of Japanese folklore to the screen, drawn in a style reminiscent of Max Fleischer and Otto Messmer.

And finally, there is this curious piece of early anti-American propaganda from 1936 that features a phalanx of flying Mickey Mouses (Mickey Mice?) attacking an island filled with Felix the Cat and a host of other poorly-rendered cartoon characters. Think Toontown drawn by Henry Darger. All seems lost until they are rescued by figures from Japanese history and legend. During its slide into militarism and its invasion of Asia, Japan argued that it was freeing the continent from the grip of Western colonialism. In its queasy, weird sort of way, the short argues precisely this. Of course, many in Korea and China, which received the brunt of Japanese imperialism, would violently disagree with that version of events.

The Aesthetic of Anime: A New Video Essay Explores a Rich Tradition of Japanese Animation

How Master Japanese Animator Satoshi Kon Puhed the Boundaries of Making Anime: A Video Essay

“Evil Mickey Mouse” Invades Japan in a 1934 Japanese Anime Propaganda Film

Watch the Oldest Japanese Anime Film, Jun’ichi Kōuchi’s The Dull Sword (1917)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

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What Would Happen If a Nuclear Bomb Hit a Major City Today: A Visualization of the Destruction

in Politics, Technology | April 26th, 2024

One of the many memorable details in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, placed prominently in a shot of George C. Scott in the war room, is a binder with a spine labeled “WORLD TARGETS IN MEGADEATHS.” A megadeath, writes Eric Schlosser in a New Yorker piece on the movie, “was a unit of measurement used in nuclear-war planning at the time. One megadeath equals a million fatalities.” The destructive capability of nuclear weapons having only increased since 1964, we might well wonder how many megadeaths would result from a nuclear strike on a major city today.

In collaboration with the Nobel Peace Prize, filmmaker Neil Halloran addresses that question in the video above, which visualizes a simulated nuclear explosion in a city of four million. “We’ll assume the bomb is detonated in the air to maximize the radius of impact, as was done in Japan in 1945. But here, we’ll use an 800-kiloton warhead, a relatively large bomb in today’s arsenals, and 100 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.” The immediate result would be a “fireball as hot as the sun” with a radius of 800 meters; all buildings within a two-kilometer radius would be destroyed, “and we’ll assume that virtually no one survives inside this area.”

Already in these calculations, the death toll has reached 120,000. “From as far as away as eleven kilometers, the radiant heat from the blast would be strong enough to cause third-degree burns on exposed skin.” Though most people would be indoors and thus sheltered from that at the time of the explosion, “the very structures that offered this protection would then become a cause of injury, as debris would rip through buildings and rain down on city streets.” This would, over the weeks after the attack, ultimately cause another 500,000 casualties — another half a megadeath — with another 100,000 at longer range still to occur.

These are sobering figures, to be sure, but as Halloran reminds us, the Cold War is over; unlike in Dr. Strangelove’s day, families no longer build fallout shelters, and schoolchildren no longer do nuclear-bomb drills. Nevertheless, even though nations aren’t as on edge about total annihilation as they were in the mid-twentieth-century, the technologies that potentially cause such annihilation are more advanced than ever, and indeed, “nuclear weapons remain one of the great threats to humanity.” Here in the twenty-twenties, “countries big and small face the prospect of new arms races,” a much more complicated geopolitical situation than the long standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union — and, perhaps, one beyond the reach of even Kubrickianly grim satire.

Why Hiroshima, Despite Being Hit with the Atomic Bomb, Isn’t a Nuclear Wasteland Today

When the Wind Blows: An Animated Tale of Nuclear Apocalypse With Music by Roger Waters & David Bowie (1986)

Innovative Film Visualizes the Destruction of World War II: Now Available in 7 Languages

The Map of Doom: A Data-Driven Visualization of the Biggest Threats to Humanity, Ranked from Likely to Unlikely

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.

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Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Massive Floating Stage in 1989; Forces the Mayor & City Council to Resign

in Music | April 25th, 2024

When Roger Waters left Pink Floyd after 1983’s The Final Cut, the remaining members had good reason to assume the band was truly, as Waters proclaimed, “a spent force.” After releasing solo projects in the next few years, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright soon discovered they would never achieve as individuals what they did as a band, both musically and commercially. Gilmour got to work in 1986 on developing new solo material into the 13th Pink Floyd studio album, the first without Waters, A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

Whether the record is “misunderstood, or just bad” is a matter for fans and critics to hash out. At the time, as Ultimate Classic Rock writes, it “would make or break their future ability to tour and record without” Waters. Richard Wright, who could only contribute unofficially for legal reasons, later admitted that “it’s not a band album at all,” and mostly served as a showcase for Gilmour’s songs, supported in recording by several session players.

Still A Momentary Lapse of Reason “surpassed quadruple platinum status in the U.S.,” driven by the single “Learning to Fly.” The Russian crew of the Soyuz TM‑7 took the disc with them on their 1988 expedition, “making Pink Floyd the first rock band to be played in outer space,” and the album “spawned the year’s biggest tour and a companion live album.”

Uncertain whether the album would sell, the band only planned a small series of shows initially in 1987, but arena after arena filled up, and the tour extended into the following two years, with massive shows all over the world and the usual extravaganza of lights and props, including “a large disco ball which opens like a flower. Lasers and light effects. Flying hospital beds that crash in the stage, Telescan Pods and of course the 32-foot round screen.” As in the past, the over-stimulating stage shows seemed warranted by the huge, quadrophonic sound of the live band. When they arrived in Venice in 1989, they were met by over 200,000 Italian fans. And by a significant contingent of Venetians who had no desire to see the show happen at all.

This is because the free concert had been arranged to take place in St. Mark’s square, coinciding with the widely celebrated Feast of the Redeemer, and threatening the fragile historic art and architecture of the city. “A number of the city’s municipal administrators,” writes Lea-Catherine Szacka at The Architects’ Newspaper, “viewed the concert as an assault against Venice, something akin to a barbarian invasion of urban space.” The city’s superintendent for cultural heritage “vetoed the concert” three days before its July 15 date, “on the grounds that the amplified sound would damage the mosaics of St. Mark’s Basilica, while the whole piazza could very well sink under the weight of so many people.”

An accord was finally reached when the band offered to lower the decibel levels from 100 to 60 and perform on a floating stage 200 yards from the square, which would join “a long history… of floating ephemeral architectures” on the canals and lagoons of Venice. Filmed by state-run television RAI, the spectacle was broadcast “in over 20 countries with an estimated audience of almost 100 million.”

The show ended up becoming a major scandal, splitting traditionalists in the city government and progressives on the council—who believed Venice “must be open to new trends, including rock music” (deemed “new” in 1989). It drew over 150 thousand more people than even lived within the city limits, and while “it was reported that most of the fans were on their best behavior,” notes Dave Lifton, and only one group of statues sustained minor damage, officials claimed they “left behind 300 tons of garbage and 500 cubic meters of empty cans and bottles. And because the city didn’t provide portable bathrooms, concertgoers relieved themselves on the monuments and walls.”

Enraged afterward, residents shouted down the Mayor Antonio Casellati, who attempted a public rapprochement two days later, with cries of “resign, resign, you’ve turned Venice into a toilet.” Casellati did so, along with the entire city council who had brought him to power. Was the event—which you can see reported on in several Italian news broadcasts, above—worth such unsanitary inconvenience and political turbulence? The band may have taken down the city’s government, but they put on a hell of a show–one the Italian fans, and the millions of who watched from home, will never forget. See the front rows of the crowd queued up and restless on barges and boats in footage above. And, at the top of the post, see the band play their 14-song set, with bassist Guy Pratt subbing in for the departed Roger Waters. It’s apparently the original Italian broadcast of the event.

Pink Floyd Films a Concert in an Empty Auditorium, Still Trying to Break Into the U.S. Charts (1970)

How Pink Floyd Built The Wall: The Album, Tour & Film

Pink Floyd’s Debut on American TV, Restored in Color (1967)

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

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Inside the Beautiful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)

in Architecture | April 25th, 2024

Being Frank Lloyd Wright’s son surely came with its downsides. But one of the upsides — assuming you could stay in the mercurial master’s good graces — was the possibility of his designing a house for you. Such was the fortune of his fourth child David Samuel Wright, a Phoenix building-products representative well into middle age himself when he got his own Wright house. It must have been worth the wait, given that he and his wife lived there until their deaths at age 102 and 104, respectively. Not long thereafter, the sold-off David and Gladys Wright House faced the prospect of imminent demolition, but it ultimately survived long enough to be added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2022.

Given that its current owners include restoration-minded former architectural apprentices Taliesin West, the David and Gladys Wright House would now seem to have a secure future. To get a sense of what makes it worth preserving, have a look at this new tour video from Architectural Digest led — like the AD video on Wright’s Tirranna previously featured here on Open Culture — by Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation president and CEO Stuart Graff. He first emphasizes the house’s most conspicuous feature, its spiral shape that brings to mind (and actually predated) Wright’s design for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Here, Graff explains, “the spiral really takes on a unique sense of longevity as it moves from one generation, father, to the next generation, son — and even today, as it moves between father and daughter working on this restoration.” That father and daughter are Bing and Amanda Hu, who have taken on the job of correcting the years and years of less-than-optimal maintenance inflicted on this house on which Wright, characteristically, spared little expense or attention to detail. Everything in it is custom made, from the Philippine mahogany ceilings to the doors and trash cans to the concrete blocks that make up the exterior walls.

“David Wright worked for the Besser Manufacturing Company, and they made concrete block molds,” says Graff. “David insisted that his company’s molds and concrete block be used for the construction and design of this house.” That wasn’t the only aspect on which the younger Wright had input; at one point, he even dared to ask, “Dad, can the house be only 90 percent Frank Lloyd Wright, and ten percent David and Gladys Wright?” Wright’s response: “You’re making your poor old father tired.” Yet he did, ultimately, incorporate his son’s requests into the design — understanding, as Bing Hu also must, that filial piety is a two-way street.

A Beautiful Visual Tour of Tirranna, One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Remarkable, Final Creations

130+ Photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece Fallingwater

What Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unusual Windows Tell Us About His Architectural Genius

A Virtual Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Lost Japanese Masterpiece, the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo

When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Doghouse, His Smallest Architectural Creation (1956)

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.

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Steven Spielberg Calls Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange “the First Punk Rock Movie Ever Made”

in Film | April 24th, 2024

Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick are two of the first directors whose names young cinephiles get to know. They’re also names between which quite a few of those young cinephiles draw a battle line: you may have enjoyed films by both of these auteurs, but ultimately, you’re going to have to side with one cinematic ethos or the other. Yet Spielberg clearly admires Kubrick himself: his 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence originated as an unfinished Kubrick project, and he’s gone on record many times praising Kubrick’s work.

This is true even of such an un-Spielbergian picture as A Clockwork Orange, a collection of Spielberg’s comments on which you can hear collected in the video above. He calls it “the first punk-rock movie ever made. It was a very bleak vision of a dangerous future where young people, teenagers, are free to roam the streets without any kind of parental exception. They break into homes, and they assault and rape people. The subject matter was dangerous.” On one level, you can see how this would appeal to Spielberg, who in his own oeuvre has returned over and over again to the subject of youth.

Yet Kubrick makes moves that seem practically inconceivable to Spielberg, “especially the scene where you hear Gene Kelly singing ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ ” when Malcolm McDowell’s Alex DeLarge is “kicking a man practically to death. That was one of the most horrifying things I think I’ve ever witnessed.” And indeed, such a savage counterpoint between music and action is nowhere to be found in the filmography of Steven Spielberg, which has received criticism from the Kubrick-enjoyers of the world for the emotional one-dimensionality of its scores (even those composed by his acclaimed longtime collaborator John Williams).

Less fairly, Spielberg has also been charged with an inability to resist happy endings, or at least a discomfort with ambiguous ones. He would never, in any case, end a picture the way he sees Kubrick as having ended A Clockwork Orange: despite the intensive “deprogramming” Alex undergoes, “he comes out the other end more charming, more witty, and with such a devilish wink and blink at the audience, that I am completely certain that when he gets out of that hospital, he’s going to kill his mother and his father and his partners and his friends, and he’s going to be worse than he was when he went in.” To Spielberg’s mind, Kubrick made a “defeatist” film; yet he, like every Kubrick fan, must also recognize it as an artistic victory.

When Stanley Kubrick Banned His Own Film, A Clockwork Orange: It Was the “Most Effective Censorship of a Film in British History”

Peter Sellers Calls Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange “Violent,” “The Biggest Load of Crap I’ve Seen” (1972)

A Clockwork Orange Author Anthony Burgess Lists His Five Favorite Dystopian Novels: Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Island & More

Terry Gilliam on the Difference Between Kubrick & Spielberg: Kubrick Makes You Think, Spielberg Wraps Everything Up with Neat Little Bows

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.

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Hear Flannery O’Connor Read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1959)

in Audio Books, Literature | April 24th, 2024

Flannery O’Connor was a Southern writer who, as Joyce Carol Oates once said, had less in common with Faulkner than with Kafka and Kierkegaard. Isolated by poor health and consumed by her fervent Catholic faith, O’Connor created works of moral fiction that, according to Oates, “were not refined New Yorker stories of the era in which nothing happens except inside the characters’ minds, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent means.”

In imagining those events of irreversible magnitude, O’Connor could sometimes seem outlandish–even cartoonish–but she strongly rejected the notion that her perceptions of 20th century life were distorted. “Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable,” O’Connor said. “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

In April of 1959–five years before her death at the age of 39 from lupus–O’Connor ventured away from her secluded family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to give a reading at Vanderbilt University. She read one of her most famous and unsettling stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The audio, accessible above, is one of two known recordings of the author reading that story. In her distinctive Georgian drawl, O’Connor tells the story of a fateful family trip:

The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. “Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.”

After you listen to this rare track, you can follow this link to a recording of O’Connor reading her 1960 essay, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in which she writes: “I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

Hear Flannery O’Connor’s Short Story, “Revelation,” Read by Legendary Historian & Radio Host, Studs Terkel

Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” Read by Estelle Parsons

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A Guided Tour of the Largest Handmade Model of Imperial Rome: Discover the 20x20 Meter Model Created During the 1930s

in Architecture, History | April 23rd, 2024

At the moment, you can’t see the largest, most detailed handmade model of Imperial Rome for yourself. That’s because the Museo della Civiltà Romana, the institution that houses it, has been closed for renovations since 2014. But you can get a guided tour of “Il Plastico,” as this grand Rome-in-miniature is known, through the new Ancient Rome Live video above. “The archaeologist and architect Italo Gismondi created this amazing model,” explains host Darius Arya, previously featured here on Open Culture for his tour of Pompeii. Working at a 1:250 scale, Gismondi built most of Il Plastico between 1933 and 1937, with later expansions after its installation in the Museo della Civiltà Romana.

Archaeologists and other scholars have, of course, learned more about the Eternal City over the past nine decades, knowledge reflected in regularly updated digital models like Rome Reborn. But none have showed Gismondi’s dedication to painstaking manual labor, which allowed him to craft practically every then-known architectural and infrastructural feature within the walls of Rome in the Constantinian age, from 306 to 337 AD.

Arya points out recognizable landmarks like the Colosseum, the Forum, and the Pyramid of Cestius as well as bridges, river fortifications, aqueducts, and even landscaping details down to the level of individual trees.

Even when the camera zooms way in, Gismondi’s Rome looks practically habitable (and indeed, it may appeal to some viewers more than do the modern European cities that are its descendants). It’s no wonder that Ridley Scott, a director famously sensitive to visual impact, would use the model in Gladiator. And while a video tour like Arya’s provides a closer-up view of many sections of Il Plastico than one can get in person, the only way to fully appreciate the sheer scale of the achievement is to behold its physical reality. Luckily, you should be able to do just that next year, when the Museo della Civiltà Romana is scheduled to reopen at long last. But then, no more could Rome be built in a day than its museum could be renovated in a mere decade.

Rome Reborn: A New 3D Virtual Model Lets You Fly Over the Great Monuments of Ancient Rome

Interactive Map Lets You Take a Literary Journey Through the Historic Monuments of Rome

New Digital Archive Puts Online 4,000 Historic Images of Rome: The Eternal City from the 16th to 20th Centuries

Ancient Rome’s System of Roads Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps

Do You Think About Ancient Rome Every Day? Then Browse a Wealth of Videos, Maps & Photos That Explore the Roman Empire

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.

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Watch Iconic Artists at Work: Rare Videos of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Renoir, Monet, Pollock & More

in Art | April 23rd, 2024

Claude Monet, 1915:

We’ve all seen their works in fixed form, enshrined in museums and printed in books. But there’s something special about watching a great artist at work. Over the years, we’ve posted film clips of some of the greatest artists of the 20th century caught in the act of creation. Today we’ve gathered together eight of our all-time favorites.

Above is the only known film footage of the French Impressionist Claude Monet, made when he was 74 years old, painting alongside a lily pond in his garden at Giverny. The footage was shot in the summer of 1915 by the French actor and dramatist Sacha Guitry for his patriotic World War I‑era film, Ceux de Chez Nous, or “Those of Our Land.” For more information, see our previous post, “Rare Film: Claude Monet at Work in His Famous Garden at Giverny, 1915.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1915:

You may never look at a painting by the French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir in quite the same way after seeing the footage above, which is also from Sacha Guitry’s Ceux de Chez Nous. Renoir suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis during the last decades of his life. By the time this film was made in June of 1915, the 74-year-old Renoir was physically deformed and in constant pain. The painter’s 14-year-old son Claude is shown placing the brush in his father’s permanently clenched hand. To learn more about the footage and about Renoir’s terrible struggle with arthritis, be sure to read our post, “Astonishing Film of Arthritic Impressionist Painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1915).”

Auguste Rodin, 1915:

The footage above, again by Sacha Guitry, shows the French sculptor Auguste Rodin in several locations, including his studio at the dilapidated Hôtel Biron in Paris, which later became the Musée Rodin. The film was made in late 1915, when Rodin was 74 years old. For more on Rodin and the Hôtel Biron, please see: “Rare Film of Sculptor Auguste Rodin working at his Studio in Paris (1915).”

Wassily Kandinsky, 1926:

In 1926, filmmaker Hans Cürlis took the rare footage above of the Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky applying paint to a blank canvas at the Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf in Berlin. Kandinsky was about 49 years old at the time, and teaching at the Bauhaus. To learn more about Kandinsky and to watch a video of actress Helen Mirren discussing his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, see our post, “The Inner Object: Seeing Kandinsky.”

Henri Matisse, 1946:

The French artist Henri Matisse is shown above when he was 76 years old, making a charcoal sketch of his grandson, Gerard, at his home and studio in Nice. The clip is from a 26-minute film made by François Campaux for the French Department of Cultural Relations. To read a translation of Matisse’s spoken words and to watch a clip of the artist working on one of his distinctive paper cut-outs, go to “Vintage Film: Watch Henri Matisse Sketch and Make His Famous Cut-Outs (1946).”

Pablo Picasso, 1950:

In the famous footage above, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso paints on glass at his studio in the village of Vallauris, on the French Riviera. It’s from the 1950 film Visite à Picasso (A Visit with Picasso) by Belgian filmmaker Paul Haesaerts. Picasso was about 68 years old at the time. You can find the full 19-minute film here.

Jackson Pollock, 1951:

In the short film above, called Jackson Pollock 51, the American abstract painter talks about his work and creates one of his distinctive drip paintings before our eyes. The film was made by Hans Namuth when Pollock was 39 years old. To learn about Pollock and his fateful collaboration with Namuth, see “Jackson Pollock: Lights, Camera, Paint! (1951).”

Alberto Giacometti, 1965:

The Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti is most famous for his thin, elongated sculptures of the human form. But in the clip above from the 1966 film Alberto Giacometti by the Swiss photographer Ernst Scheidegger, Giacometti is shown working in another medium as he paints the foundational lines of a portrait at his studio in Paris. The footage was apparently shot in 1965, when Giacometti was about 64 years old and had less than a year to live. To learn about Giacometti’s approach to drawing and to read a translation of the German narration in this clip, be sure to see our post, “Watch as Alberto Giacometti Paints and Pursues the Elusive ‘Apparition,’ (1965).”

Helen Mirren Tells Us Why Wassily Kandinsky Is Her Favorite Artist (And What Acting & Modern Art Have in Common)

When Henri Matisse Was 83 Years Old, He Couldn’t Go to His Favorite Swimming Pool, So He Created a Swimming Pool as a Work of Art

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Humans First Started Enjoying Cannabis in China Circa 2800 BC

in Biology, History | April 22nd, 2024

Judging by how certain American cities smell these days, you’d think cannabis was invented last week. But that spike in enthusiasm, as well as in public indulgence, comes as only a recent chapter in that substance’s very long history. In fact, says the presenter of the PBS Eons video above, humanity began cultivating it “in what’s now China around 12,000 years ago. This makes cannabis one of the single oldest known plants we domesticate,” even earlier than “staples like wheat, corn, and potatoes.” By that time scale, it wasn’t so long ago — four millennia or so — that the lineages used for hemp and for drugs genetically separated from each other.

The oldest evidence of cannabis smoking as we know it, also explored in the Science magazine video below, dates back 2,500 years. “The first known smokers were possibly Zoroastrian mourners along the ancient Silk Road who burned pot during funeral rituals,” a proposition supported by the analysis of the remains of ancient braziers found at the Jirzankal cemetery, at the foot of the Pamir mountains in western China. “Tests revealed chemical compounds from cannabis, including the non-psychoactive cannabidiol, also known as CBD” — itself reinvented in our time as a thoroughly modern product — and traces of a THC byproduct called cannabinol “more intense than in other ancient samples.”

What made the Jirzankal cemetery’s stash pack such a punch? “The region’s high altitude could have stressed the cannabis, creating plants naturally high in THC,” writes Science’s Andrew Lawler. “But humans may also have intervened to breed a more wicked weed.” As cannabis-users of the sixties and seventies who return to the fold today find out, the weed has grown wicked indeed over the past few decades. But even millennia ago and half a world away, civilizations that had incorporated it for ritualistic use — or as a medical treatment — may already have been agriculturally guiding it toward greater potency. Your neighborhood dispensary may not be the most sublime place on Earth, but at least, when next you pay it a visit, you’ll have a sound historical reason to cast your mind to the Central Asian steppe.

Algerian Cave Paintings Suggest Humans Did Magic Mushrooms 9,000 Years Ago

Pipes with Cannabis Traces Found in Shakespeare’s Garden, Suggesting the Bard Enjoyed a “Noted Weed”

Reefer Madness, 1936’s Most Unintentionally Hilarious “Anti-Drug” Exploitation Film, Free Online

Carl Sagan on the Virtues of Marijuana (1969)

Watch High Maintenance: A Critically-Acclaimed Web Series About Life & Cannabis

The New Normal: Spike Jonze Creates a Very Short Film About America’s Complex History with Cannabis

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 Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Daniel Dennett Presents the 4 Biggest Ideas in Philosophy in One of His Final Videos (RIP)

in Philosophy | April 19th, 2024

A week ago, Big Think released this video featuring philosopher Daniel Dennett talking about the four biggest ideas in philosophy. Today, we learned that he passed away at age 82. The New York Times obituary for Dennett reads: “Espousing his ideas in best sellers, he insisted that religion was an illusion, free will was a fantasy and evolution could only be explained by natural selection.” “Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful writing style to reach a lay public, avoiding the impenetrable concepts and turgid prose of many other contemporary philosophers. Beyond his more than 20 books and scores of essays, his writings even made their way into the theater and onto the concert stage.”

Above, Dennett, a long-time philosophy professor at Tufts University, outlines the “four eras he evolved through on his own journey as a philosopher: classical philosophy, evolutionary theory, memetic theory, and the intentional stance. Each stage added depth to his perspective and understanding… Dennett’s key takeaway is a request for philosophers to reevaluate their methodologies, urging modern-day thinkers to embrace the insights offered by new scientific discoveries. By combining the existential and theoretical viewpoints of philosophers with the analytical and evidential perspective of scientists, we can begin to fully and accurately interpret the world around us.”

To help you delve a little deeper into Daniel Dennett’s world, we’ve also posted below a vintage TED video where the philosopher discusses the illusion of consciousness. We would also encourage you to explore the Dennett items in the Relateds below.

How to Argue With Kindness and Care: 4 Rules from Philosopher Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett and Cornel West Decode the Philosophy of The Matrix

Hear What It Sounds Like When Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Brain Activity Gets Turned into Music

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Bukowski Reads Bukowski: Watch a 1975 Documentary Featuring Charles Bukowski at the Height of His Powers

The Origins of Anime: Watch Early Japanese Animations (1917 to 1931)

What Would Happen If a Nuclear Bomb Hit a Major City Today: A Visualization of the Destruction

Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Massive Floating Stage in 1989; Forces the Mayor & City Council to Resign

Inside the Beautiful Home Frank Lloyd Wright Designed for His Son (1952)

Steven Spielberg Calls Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange “the First Punk Rock Movie Ever Made”

Hear Flannery O’Connor Read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1959)

A Guided Tour of the Largest Handmade Model of Imperial Rome: Discover the 20x20 Meter Model Created During the 1930s

Watch Iconic Artists at Work: Rare Videos of Picasso, Matisse, Kandinsky, Renoir, Monet, Pollock & More

Humans First Started Enjoying Cannabis in China Circa 2800 BC

Daniel Dennett Presents the 4 Biggest Ideas in Philosophy in One of His Final Videos (RIP)

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