William Blake’s Paintings Come to Life in Two Animations

in Animation, Art, Museums, Poetry | September 4th, 2020

The poet and painter William Blake toiled in obscu­ri­ty, for the most part, and died in pover­ty.

Twen­ty some years after his death, his rebel­lious spir­it gained trac­tion with the Pre-Raphaelites.

By the dawn­ing of the Age of Aquar­ius, Blake was ripe to be ven­er­at­ed as a counter-cul­tur­al hero, for hav­ing flown in the face of con­ven­tion, while cham­pi­oning gen­der and racial equal­i­ty, nature, and free love.

Reclin­ing half-naked on a “a fab­u­lous couch in Harlem,” poet Allen Gins­burg had a hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry encounter where­in Blake recit­ed to him “in earth­en mea­sure.”

Dit­to poet Michael McClure, though in his case, Bob Dylan’s “Gates of Eden” served as some­thing of a medi­um:

I had the idea that I was hal­lu­ci­nat­ing, that it was William Blake’s voice com­ing out of the walls and I stood up and put my hands on the walls and they were vibrat­ing.

Blake’s work (and world view) con­tin­ues to exert enor­mous influ­ence on graph­ic nov­el­ists, the­ater­mak­ers, and cre­atives of every stripe.

He’s also a dab hand at ani­ma­tion, col­lab­o­rat­ing from beyond the grave.

The short above, a com­mis­sion for a late ‘70s Blake exhi­bi­tion at The Tate, envi­sions a roundtrip jour­ney from Heav­en to Hell. Ani­ma­tor Sheila Graber parked her­self in the Sculp­ture Hall to cre­ate it in pub­lic view, pair­ing Blake’s line “Ener­gy is Eter­nal delight” with a per­son­al obser­va­tion:

Whether we use it to cre­ate or destroy—it’s the same ener­gy. The prac­tice of art can turn a per­son from a van­dal to a builder!

More recent­ly, the Tate gave direc­tor Sam Gains­bor­ough access to super high-res imagery of Blake’s orig­i­nal paint­ings, in order to cre­ate a pro­mo for last year’s block­buster exhi­bi­tion.

Gains­bor­ough and ani­ma­tor Renald­ho Pelle worked togeth­er to bring the cho­sen works to life, frame by frame, against a series of Lon­don build­ings and streets that were well known to Blake him­self.

The film opens with Blake’s Ghost of a Flea emerg­ing from the walls of Broad­wick Street, where its cre­ator was born, then stalk­ing off, bowl in hand, ced­ing the screen to God, The Ancient of Days, whose reach spreads like ink across the grit­ty facade of a white brick edi­fice.

Sey­mour Mil­ton’s orig­i­nal music and Jas­mine Black­borow’s nar­ra­tion of excerpts from Blake’s poem “Auguries of Inno­cence” seem to antic­i­pate the fraught cur­rent moment, as does the entire poem:

Auguries of Inno­cence

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heav­en in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infin­i­ty in the palm of your hand 

And Eter­ni­ty in an hour

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heav­en in a Rage 

A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons

Shud­ders Hell thr’ all its regions 

A dog starvd at his Mas­ters Gate

Pre­dicts the ruin of the State 

A Horse mis­usd upon the Road

Calls to Heav­en for Human blood 

Each out­cry of the hunt­ed Hare

A fibre from the Brain does tear 

A Sky­lark wound­ed in the wing 

A Cheru­bim does cease to sing 

The Game Cock clipd & armd for fight

Does the Ris­ing Sun affright 

Every Wolfs & Lions howl

Rais­es from Hell a Human Soul 

The wild deer, wan­dring here & there 

Keeps the Human Soul from Care 

The Lamb mis­usd breeds Pub­lic Strife

And yet for­gives the Butch­ers knife 

The Bat that flits at close of Eve

Has left the Brain that wont Believe

The Owl that calls upon the Night

Speaks the Unbe­liev­ers fright

He who shall hurt the lit­tle Wren

Shall nev­er be belovd by Men 

He who the Ox to wrath has movd

Shall nev­er be by Woman lovd

The wan­ton Boy that kills the Fly

Shall feel the Spi­ders enmi­ty 

He who tor­ments the Chafers Sprite

Weaves a Bow­er in end­less Night 

The Cat­ter­piller on the Leaf

Repeats to thee thy Moth­ers grief 

Kill not the Moth nor But­ter­fly 

For the Last Judg­ment draweth nigh 

He who shall train the Horse to War

Shall nev­er pass the Polar Bar 

The Beg­gars Dog & Wid­ows Cat 

Feed them & thou wilt grow fat 

The Gnat that sings his Sum­mers Song

Poi­son gets from Slan­ders tongue 

The poi­son of the Snake & Newt

Is the sweat of Envys Foot 

The poi­son of the Hon­ey Bee

Is the Artists Jeal­ousy

The Princes Robes & Beg­gars Rags

Are Toad­stools on the Misers Bags 

A Truth thats told with bad intent

Beats all the Lies you can invent 

It is right it should be so 

Man was made for Joy & Woe 

And when this we right­ly know 

Thro the World we safe­ly go 

Joy & Woe are woven fine 

A Cloth­ing for the soul divine 

Under every grief & pine

Runs a joy with silken twine 

The Babe is more than swadling Bands

Through­out all these Human Lands

Tools were made & Born were hands 

Every Farmer Under­stands

Every Tear from Every Eye

Becomes a Babe in Eter­ni­ty 

This is caught by Females bright

And returnd to its own delight 

The Bleat the Bark Bel­low & Roar 

Are Waves that Beat on Heav­ens Shore 

The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath

Writes Revenge in realms of Death 

The Beg­gars Rags flut­ter­ing in Air

Does to Rags the Heav­ens tear 

The Sol­dier armd with Sword & Gun 

Palsied strikes the Sum­mers Sun

The poor Mans Far­thing is worth more

Than all the Gold on Africs Shore

One Mite wrung from the Labr­ers hands

Shall buy & sell the Misers Lands 

Or if pro­tect­ed from on high 

Does that whole Nation sell & buy 

He who mocks the Infants Faith

Shall be mockd in Age & Death 

He who shall teach the Child to Doubt

The rot­ting Grave shall neer get out 

He who respects the Infants faith

Tri­umphs over Hell & Death 

The Childs Toys & the Old Mans Rea­sons

Are the Fruits of the Two sea­sons 

The Ques­tion­er who sits so sly 

Shall nev­er know how to Reply 

He who replies to words of Doubt

Doth put the Light of Knowl­edge out 

The Strongest Poi­son ever known

Came from Cae­sars Lau­rel Crown 

Nought can Deform the Human Race

Like to the Armours iron brace 

When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow

To peace­ful Arts shall Envy Bow 

A Rid­dle or the Crick­ets Cry

Is to Doubt a fit Reply 

The Emmets Inch & Eagles Mile

Make Lame Phi­los­o­phy to smile 

He who Doubts from what he sees

Will neer Believe do what you Please 

If the Sun & Moon should Doubt 

Theyd imme­di­ate­ly Go out 

To be in a Pas­sion you Good may Do 

But no Good if a Pas­sion is in you 

The Whore & Gam­bler by the State

Licencd build that Nations Fate 

The Har­lots cry from Street to Street 

Shall weave Old Eng­lands wind­ing Sheet 

The Win­ners Shout the Losers Curse 

Dance before dead Eng­lands Hearse 

Every Night & every Morn

Some to Mis­ery are Born 

Every Morn and every Night

Some are Born to sweet delight 

Some are Born to sweet delight 

Some are Born to End­less Night 

We are led to Believe a Lie

When we see not Thro the Eye

Which was Born in a Night to per­ish in a Night 

When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light 

God Appears & God is Light

To those poor Souls who dwell in Night 

But does a Human Form Dis­play

To those who Dwell in Realms of day

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter an Archive of William Blake’s Fan­tas­ti­cal “Illu­mi­nat­ed Books”: The Images Are Sub­lime, and in High Res­o­lu­tion

William Blake Illus­trates Mary Wollstonecraft’s Work of Children’s Lit­er­a­ture, Orig­i­nal Sto­ries from Real Life (1791)

William Blake’s Mas­ter­piece Illus­tra­tions of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

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

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J. Robert Oppenheimer Explains How He Recited a Line from Bhagavad Gita–“Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”–Upon Witnessing the First Nuclear Explosion

in History, Physics, Religion | September 4th, 2020

No mat­ter how lit­tle we know of the Hin­du reli­gion, a line from one of its holy scrip­tures lives with­in us all: “Now I am become Death, the destroy­er of worlds.” This is one facet of the lega­cy of J. Robert Oppen­heimer, an Amer­i­can the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist who left an out­sized mark on his­to­ry. For his cru­cial role in the Man­hat­tan Project that dur­ing World War II pro­duced the first nuclear weapons, he’s now remem­bered as the“father of the atom­ic bomb.” He secured that title on July 16, 1945, the day of the test in the New Mex­i­can desert that proved these exper­i­men­tal weapons actu­al­ly work — that is, they could wreak a kind of destruc­tion pre­vi­ous­ly only seen in visions of the end of the world.

“We knew the world would not be the same,” Oppen­heimer remem­bered in 1965. “A few peo­ple laughed, a few peo­ple cried. Most peo­ple were silent. I remem­bered the line from the Hin­du scrip­ture, the Bha­gavad Gita; Vish­nu is try­ing to per­suade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his mul­ti-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroy­er of worlds.’ ” The trans­la­tion’s gram­mat­i­cal archaism made it even more pow­er­ful, res­onat­ing with lines in Ten­nyson (“I am become a name, for always roam­ing with a hun­gry heart”), Shake­speare (“I am come to know your plea­sure”), and the Bible (“I am come a light into the world, that whoso­ev­er believeth on me should not abide in dark­ness”).

But what is death, as the Gita sees it? In an inter­view with Wired, San­skrit schol­ar Stephen Thomp­son explains that, in the orig­i­nal, the word that Oppen­heimer speaks as “death” refers to “lit­er­al­ly the world-destroy­ing time.” This means that “irre­spec­tive of what Arju­na does” — Arju­na being the afore­men­tioned prince, the nar­ra­tive’s pro­tag­o­nist — every­thing is in the hands of the divine.” Oppen­heimer would have learned all this while teach­ing in the 1930s at Berke­ley, where he learned San­skrit and read the Gita in the orig­i­nal. This cre­at­ed in him, said his col­league Isidor Rabi, “a feel­ing of mys­tery of the uni­verse that sur­round­ed him like a fog.”

The neces­si­ty of the Unit­ed States’ sub­se­quent drop­ping of not one but two atom­ic bombs on Japan, exam­ined in the 1965 doc­u­men­tary The Deci­sion to Drop the Bomb, remains a mat­ter of debate. Oppen­heimer went on to oppose nuclear weapons, describ­ing him­self to an appalled Pres­i­dent Har­ry Tru­man as hav­ing “blood on my hands.” But in devel­op­ing them, could he have sim­ply seen him­self as a mod­ern Prince Arju­na? “It has been argued by schol­ars,” writes the Eco­nom­ic Times’ Mayank Chhaya, “that Oppen­heimer’s approach to the atom­ic bomb was that of doing his duty as part of his dhar­ma as pre­scribed in the Gita.” He knew, to quote anoth­er line from that scrip­ture brought to mind by the nuclear explo­sion, that “if the radi­ance of a thou­sand suns were to burst into the sky that would be like the splen­dor of the Mighty One” — and per­haps also that splen­dor and wrath may be one.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­tion to Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course

Oppen­heimer: The Man Behind the Bomb

Haunt­ing Unedit­ed Footage of the Bomb­ing of Nagasa­ki (1945)

The “Shad­ow” of a Hiroshi­ma Vic­tim, Etched into Stone Steps, Is All That Remains After 1945 Atom­ic Blast

63 Haunt­ing Videos of U.S. Nuclear Tests Now Declas­si­fied and Put Online

53 Years of Nuclear Test­ing in 14 Min­utes: A Time Lapse Film by Japan­ese Artist Isao Hashimo­to

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

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John Waters Designs a Witty Poster for the New York Film Festival

in Film | September 3rd, 2020

Yes­ter­day, Film at Lin­coln Cen­ter unveiled the poster for the 58th New York Film Fes­ti­val (Sep­tem­ber 17-Octo­ber 11, 2020). And it’s cre­at­ed by none oth­er than film­mak­er, artist, and “Pope of Trash,” John Waters.

The New York Film Fes­ti­val writes: The “poster is both a fond trib­ute and wit­ty par­o­dy of the his­toric fes­ti­val, pok­ing fun at the long-held stereo­types, valid cri­tiques, and pre­sumed pomp and cir­cum­stance of the annu­al Lin­coln Cen­ter event. The con­cept was devel­oped before the cur­rent health cri­sis, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with and inspired by Globe Poster, the leg­endary press of Waters’s home­town. Found­ed in 1929 in Bal­ti­more, Mary­land, Globe Poster deliv­ered eye-catch­ing posters to pro­mote con­certs, drag races, cir­cus­es, car­ni­vals, and more. Flu­o­res­cent col­ors, bold wood type, and let­ter­ing that shook and shim­mied defined Globe’s icon­ic style, attract­ing clients from James Brown and Mar­vin Gaye to Tina Turn­er and the Beach Boys.”

For a lit­tle laugh, study the poster close­ly above. And then head to the Relat­eds below for more.

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:

John Waters’ RISD Grad­u­a­tion Speech: Real Wealth is Nev­er Hav­ing to Spend Time with A‑Holes

John Waters Nar­rates Off­beat Doc­u­men­tary on an Envi­ron­men­tal Cat­a­stro­phe, the Salton Sea

John Waters Makes Hand­made Christ­mas Cards, Says the “Whole Pur­pose of Life is Christ­mas”

An Anti, Anti-Smok­ing Announce­ment from John Waters

When John Waters Appeared on The Simp­sons and Changed America’s LGBTQ Views (1997)

Hear Moby Dick Read in Its Entire­ty by Til­da Swin­ton, Stephen Fry, John Waters & Oth­ers

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David Lynch Being a Madman for a Relentless 8 Minutes and 30 Seconds

in Film | September 3rd, 2020

Mad­man or vision­ary? A lit­tle of both? A genius? A brand? A men­sch? David Lynch is all these things and more, and this fan-made video above is a quick reminder of the career and the con­sis­ten­cy of the film director/artist/transcendental med­i­ta­tor who turned 74 this year.

Ear­ly in the video we see one of the director’s pub­lic­i­ty stunts, when he sat in a chair on the cor­ner of La Brea and Hol­ly­wood, next to a cow and large poster of Lau­ra Dern. No, the cow had noth­ing to do with the film he was promoting—2006’s Inland Empire—but it did stop traf­fic and draw atten­tion. Lynch didn’t have an adver­tis­ing bud­get to pro­mote Lau­ra Dern’s lead role in the film, so the cow had to do.

Lau­ra Dern has been in a major­i­ty of Lynch’s films since 1986’s Blue Vel­vet, and the video hon­ors their friend­ship (he calls her “Tid­bit”) as well as with Kyle MacLach­lan (who Lynch calls “Kale”) and Nao­mi Watts. All three obvi­ous­ly adore this man.

There’s also a com­pi­la­tion of Lynch swear­ing like a champ. Prod­uct place­ment in film is “bull­shit,” prob­lems on set are “fuck­ing nuts,” and for those who sat through the “peanut sweep­ing” scene in Twin Peaks The Return, you’ll under­stand his out­burst on set: “Who gives a fuc&ing $hit how long a scene is?”

We’ve linked pre­vi­ous­ly to Lynch’s video where he makes quinoa, and this short edit sums up that video nice­ly. It’s also nice to see atten­tion giv­en to The Straight Sto­ry, which usu­al­ly gets passed over in his fil­mog­ra­phy, despite (or maybe because of) being his sweet­est movie.

There’s also a reminder that Lynch is cur­rent­ly releas­ing videos from quar­an­tine in his Los Ange­les home. Not only is he deliv­er­ing the dai­ly weath­er reports like he used to, but is also cur­rent­ly announc­ing Today’s Num­ber, which is caus­ing quite a lot of anx­i­ety in the YouTube com­ments. (Why no sev­en? WHY NO NUMBER 7?)

The video ends with Lynch’s the­o­ry about catch­ing ideas like fish—we’ve also high­light­ed this before—and then a love­ly mon­tage of title cards, remind­ing us all that “Direct­ed by David Lynch” is a guar­an­teed sign of qual­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Boosts Our Cre­ativ­i­ty (Plus Free Resources to Help You Start Med­i­tat­ing)

David Lynch Made a Dis­turb­ing Web Sit­com Called “Rab­bits”: It’s Now Used by Psy­chol­o­gists to Induce a Sense of Exis­ten­tial Cri­sis in Research Sub­jects

Pat­ti Smith and David Lynch Talk About the Source of Their Ideas & Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

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.

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A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks–Covering 1,000 Years of Food History–Is Now Online

in Food & Drink | September 3rd, 2020

As you know if you’re a read­er of this site, there are vast, inter­ac­tive (and free!) schol­ar­ly data­bas­es online col­lect­ing just about every kind of arti­fact, from Bibles to bird calls, and yes, there are a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of cook­books online, too. But prop­er search­able, his­tor­i­cal data­bas­es of cook­books seem to have appeared only late­ly. To my mind these might have been some of the first things to become avail­able. How impor­tant is eat­ing, after all, to vir­tu­al­ly every part of our lives? The fact is, how­ev­er, that schol­ars of food have had to invent the dis­ci­pline large­ly from scratch.

“West­ern schol­ars had a bias against study­ing sen­su­al expe­ri­ence,” writes Reina Gat­tuso at Atlas Obscu­ra, “the rel­ic of an Enlight­en­ment-era hier­ar­chy that con­sid­ered taste, touch, and fla­vor taboo top­ics for sober aca­d­e­m­ic inquiry. ‘It’s the baser sense,’ says Cathy Kauf­man, a pro­fes­sor of food stud­ies at the New School.” Kauf­man sits on the board of The Sifter, a new mas­sive, mul­ti-lin­gual online data­base of his­tor­i­cal recipe books. Anoth­er board mem­ber, sculp­tor Joe Wheaton, puts things more direct­ly: “Food his­to­ry has been a bit of an embar­rass­ment to a lot of aca­d­e­mics, because it involves women in the kitchen.”

Luck­i­ly for food schol­ars, the sit­u­a­tion has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly. There are now over 2,000 his­tor­i­cal Mex­i­can cook­books of all kinds online at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas San Anto­nio, for exam­ple. (The UTSA is busy curat­ing and trans­lat­ing hun­dreds of those recipes into Eng­lish for what they call a “series of mini-cook­books.”)  And schol­ars of food his­to­ry may have to be pulled away by force from The Sifter, a vast, ever-expand­ing Wikipedia-like archive of food research.

The data­base col­lects “over 5,000 authors and 5,000 works with details about the authors and about the con­tents of the works,” the site explains. “The cen­tral doc­u­ments are cook­books and oth­er writ­ings relat­ed to get­ting, prepar­ing, and con­sum­ing food, and the activ­i­ties asso­ci­at­ed with them, as well as writ­ings about cul­tur­al and moral atti­tudes.” Like Wikipedia, users are invit­ed to sub­mit their own data, which can be edit­ed by oth­er users. Unlike the pub­lic ency­clo­pe­dia, which we know has seri­ous flaws, The Sifter is over­seen by experts, and inspired by none oth­er than the expert Julia Child her­self, or at least by her library.

Although the Sifter does not con­tain actu­al texts or recipes, it does col­lect the bib­li­o­graph­ic data of thou­sands of such books, a trea­sury for schol­ars, researchers, and his­to­ri­ans. The pri­ma­ry force behind the project, Bar­bara Wheaton, was a neigh­bor of Julia Childs’ in the ear­ly 1960s and used Childs’ library and Har­vard University’s Schlesinger Library Culi­nary Col­lec­tion (where she is now an hon­orary cura­tor) to become “one of the best-known schol­ars of culi­nary his­to­ry.” Her sto­ry illus­trates how a recent wealth of culi­nary schol­ar­ship did not just sud­den­ly appear but has been ger­mi­nat­ing for decades. The Sifter is the result of “Wheaton’s 50 years of labor.”

Wheaton launched the site in July with the help of a team of schol­ars and her chil­dren, Joe and Cather­ine. The Sifter con­tains “more than a thou­sand years of Euro­pean and U.S. cook­books, from the medieval Latin De Re Culi­nar­ia, pub­lished in 800, to The Romance of Can­dy, a 1938 trea­tise on British sweets.” It also col­lects bib­li­o­graph­ic data on cook­books, in their orig­i­nal lan­guages, from around the world. Wheaton hopes The Sifter will gen­er­ate new areas of research into the his­to­ry of what may be at once the most uni­ver­sal of all human activ­i­ties and the most cul­tur­al­ly, region­al­ly, and his­tor­i­cal­ly par­tic­u­lar. Per­haps a sil­ver lin­ing of so many years of schol­ar­ly neglect is that there is now so much work for food his­to­ri­ans to do. Get start­ed at The Sifter here.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Archive of Hand­writ­ten Tra­di­tion­al Mex­i­can Cook­books Is Now Online

His­toric Mex­i­can Recipes Are Now Avail­able as Free Dig­i­tal Cook­books: Get Start­ed With Dessert

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

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

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A Short Introduction to Caravaggio, the Master Of Light

in Art | September 3rd, 2020

Like many a great artist, the for­tunes of Michelan­ge­lo Merisi da Car­avag­gio rose and fell dra­mat­i­cal­ly. After his death, pos­si­bly from syphilis or mur­der, his influ­ence spread across the con­ti­nent as fol­low­ers called Car­avaggisti took his extreme use of chiaroscuro abroad. He influ­enced Rubens, Rem­brandt, and Velázquez—indeed, the entire Baroque peri­od in Euro­pean art his­to­ry prob­a­bly would nev­er have hap­pened with­out him. “With the excep­tion of Michelan­ge­lo,” art his­to­ri­an Bernard Beren­son wrote, “no oth­er Ital­ian painter exer­cised so great an influ­ence.”

But lat­er crit­ics sav­aged his hyper-dra­mat­ic, high-con­trast real­ism. His style, called “tene­brism” for its use of deep dark­ness in paint­ings like The Call­ing of St. Matthew, is shock­ing by com­par­i­son with the fan­ci­ful Man­ner­ism that came before. In the video above, Evan Puschak, the Nerd­writer, explains what makes Caravaggio’s work so strange­ly hyper­re­al. He “pre­ferred to paint his sub­jects as the eye sees them,” the Car­avag­gio Foun­da­tion writes, “with all their nat­ur­al flaws and defects instead of as ide­al­ized cre­ations…. This shift from stan­dard prac­tice and the clas­si­cal ide­al­ism of Michelan­ge­lo was very con­tro­ver­sial at the time…. His real­ism was seen by some as unac­cept­ably vul­gar.”

Also con­tro­ver­sial was Car­avag­gio him­self. His wild life made an ide­al sub­ject for Derek Jarman’s 1986 art­house biopic star­ring Til­da Swin­ton. Famous for brawl­ing, “the tran­scripts of his police records and tri­al pro­ceed­ings fill sev­er­al pages.” He nev­er mar­ried or set­tled down and the male eroti­cism in his paint­ings has led many to sug­ges­tions he was gay .(Jarman’s film makes this an explic­it part of his biog­ra­phy.) It’s like­ly, art his­to­ri­ans think, that the painter had many tumul­tuous rela­tion­ships, sex­u­al and oth­er­wise, with both men and women before his ear­ly death at the age of 38.

Despite his pro­fane life, Caravaggio’s paint­ings evince a “remark­able spir­i­tu­al­i­ty” and illus­trate, as Puschak notes, exact­ly the kind of pas­sion­ate inten­si­ty the counter-Ref­or­ma­tion Catholic Church want­ed to use to stir the faith­ful. Caravaggio’s pop­u­lar­i­ty meant com­mis­sions from wealthy patrons, and for a time, he was the most famous painter in Rome, as well as one of the city’s most infa­mous char­ac­ters. Car­avag­gio paint­ed from life, stag­ing his intri­cate arrange­ments with real mod­els who held the pos­es as he worked.

His fig­ures were ordi­nary peo­ple one might meet on the 17th cen­tu­ry streets of the city. And Car­avag­gio him­self, despite his enor­mous tal­ent, was an ordi­nary per­son as well, stereo­types of trag­ic, tor­tured genius­es aside. He was deeply flawed, it’s true, yet dri­ven by an incred­i­ble long­ing to become some­thing greater.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Liv­ing Paint­ings: 13 Car­avag­gio Works of Art Per­formed by Real-Life Actors

Paint­ings by Car­avag­gio, Ver­meer, & Oth­er Great Mas­ters Come to Life in a New Ani­mat­ed Video

Why Babies in Medieval Paint­ings Look Like Mid­dle-Aged Men: An Inves­tiga­tive Video

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

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Behold a Beautiful 400-Year-Old ‘Friendship Book’ Featuring the Signatures of Historic Figures

in Art, Books, History | September 2nd, 2020

Main­tain­ing the bal­ance of pow­er among Euro­pean states has always been a fraught affair, but it was espe­cial­ly so in the years when mer­can­til­ism made frag­ile alliances dur­ing the reli­gious wars of the 17th cen­tu­ry. This was a time when mer­chants made excel­lent diplo­mats, not only because they trav­eled exten­sive­ly and learned for­eign tongues and cus­toms, but because they spoke the uni­ver­sal lan­guage of trade.

Ger­man mer­chant and diplo­mat Philipp Hain­hofer from Augs­burg was such a fig­ure, trav­el­ing from court to court to meet with Europe’s renowned dig­ni­taries. As he did so, he would ask them to sign his album ami­co­rum, or “friend­ship book,” also called a stamm­buch. Each sign­er would then “com­mis­sion an artist to cre­ate a paint­ing accom­pa­ny­ing their sig­na­tures,” Ali­son Flood writes at The Guardian.

“There are around 100 draw­ings” in his auto­graph book, known as the Große Stamm­buch, “which took more than 50 years to com­pile.” After Hainhofer’s death in 1647, his friend August the Younger—who helped col­lect the hun­dreds of thou­sand of books in the Her­zog August Bibliothek—tried to acquire the book but failed. Now it has final­ly land­ed in the huge library, one of the world’s old­est, almost 400 years lat­er, after a pur­chase at a pri­vate auc­tion this week.

Friend­ship books were com­mon­ly used at the time to record the names of fam­i­ly and friends. Stu­dents used them as year­books, and Hain­hofer began his col­lec­tion of sig­na­tures as a col­lege stu­dent. He grad­u­al­ly gained a select clien­tele as his career advanced. Sig­na­to­ries, the His­to­ry Blog points out, “include Holy Roman Emper­or Rudolf II, anoth­er HRE Matthias, Chris­t­ian IV of Den­mark and Nor­way, Cosi­mo II de’Medici, Grand Duke of Tus­cany…” and many oth­ers.

Hainhofer’s Große Stamm­buch is, as you can see, a beau­ti­ful work of art—or almost 100 col­lect­ed works of art—in its own right. “The elab­o­rate­ness of the illus­tra­tions direct­ly cor­re­sponds to the signatory’s sta­tus and rank in soci­ety,” as Grace Ebert notes at Colos­sal. It is also a fas­ci­nat­ing record of Ear­ly Mod­ern Euro­pean pol­i­tics, trade, and diplo­ma­cy, a fine art all its own.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

160,000 Pages of Glo­ri­ous Medieval Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized: Vis­it the Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

The Vat­i­can Library Goes Online and Dig­i­tizes Tens of Thou­sands of Man­u­scripts, Books, Coins, and More

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

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Take Immersive Virtual Tours of the World’s Great Museums: The Louvre, Hermitage, Van Gogh Museum & Much More

in Art, Museums | September 2nd, 2020

Can you remem­ber when you last vis­it­ed a muse­um? Even if you did­n’t much care for them before the time of the coro­n­avirus, you’re prob­a­bly begin­ning to miss them right about now. At least the inter­net tech­nol­o­gy that has kept our com­mu­ni­ca­tion open and our enter­tain­ment flow­ing — and, regret­tably for some, kept our work meet­ings reg­u­lar — has also made it pos­si­ble to expe­ri­ence art insti­tu­tions through our screens. Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured many such online art spaces, dig­i­tal gallery expe­ri­ences, and vir­tu­al muse­um tours, and today we’ve round­ed up some of the best for you.

Most every­one who had a trip to France sched­uled for this spring or sum­mer will have can­celed it. But thanks to these three high-def­i­n­i­tion, first-per­son videos, you can still tour the Lou­vre, Lib­er­ty Lead­ing the Peo­ple, the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, and even I.M. Pei’s rooftop pyra­mid and all. Per­haps you’d planned to spend part of 2020 trav­el­ing Europe more wide­ly, in which case you’d almost cer­tain­ly have gone to Italy and seen Forence’s Uffizi Gallery as well. Luck­i­ly, that most famous col­lec­tion of Renais­sance art has gone dig­i­tal with a com­plete “street view” tour as well as an archive of 3D sculp­ture scans.

Of course, no art-ori­ent­ed trip to Italy would be well spent only in gal­leries and muse­ums: it would also have to include St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca, the Sis­tine Chapel, and oth­er sacred spaces of the Vat­i­can, in whose vir­tu­al ver­sions you can now spend as long as you like. And while some tourists in Europe face time or mon­ey con­straints too tight to allow vis­its to small­er coun­tries like the Nether­lands, inter­net trav­el is sub­ject to no such lim­i­ta­tions. So go ahead and take a sev­en-part tour of the Van Gogh Muse­um in 4K, or have a look at Rem­brandt’s The Night Watch down to every last brush­stroke.

You won’t find every Dutch mas­ter­piece in the Nether­lands. Take Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Ear­ly Delights, for instance, cur­rent­ly held by Spain’s Pra­do Muse­um, which has also made a vir­tu­al tour of the grotesque and spec­tac­u­lar paint­ing avail­able online. As for the work of Spain’s own artists, you can go even deep­er into the work of Sal­vador Dalí with this 360-degree vir­tu­al-real­i­ty video of his paint­ing Archae­o­log­i­cal Rem­i­nis­cence of Millet’s ‘Angelus.’  Those who’d like to spend some time off the con­ti­nent and back down on Earth can view an alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent 360-degree video, this one of Shake­peare’s Globe The­atre in Lon­don — and have a look at the trea­sures of the British Muse­um while they’re at it.

The ongo­ing pan­dem­ic hav­ing put a tem­po­rary stop to not just most trav­el to Europe but most inter­na­tion­al trav­el of any kind, hope­ful trav­el­ers to and with­in North Amer­i­ca have also been forced to change their plans. If this describes you, con­sid­er tak­ing a vir­tu­al tour of the Smith­son­ian Nation­al Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry, Frank Lloyd Wright’s stu­dio Tal­iesin, or the Fri­da Kahlo Muse­um in Mex­i­co City. But while you’re online, why not mount an even more ambi­tious world­wide art jour­ney: to the Her­mitage in Rus­sia, the Ghi­b­li Muse­um in Japan, and street art (as well as stolen art) from all over? It’s a big world of art out there — some­thing we can’t let our­selves for­get before we can see it in per­son again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of 30 World-Class Muse­ums & Safe­ly Vis­it 2 Mil­lion Works of Fine Art

The Stay At Home Muse­um: Your Pri­vate, Guid­ed Tours of Rubens, Bruegel & Oth­er Flem­ish Mas­ters

14 Paris Muse­ums Put 300,000 Works of Art Online: Down­load Clas­sics by Mon­et, Cézanne & More

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Free: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art and the Guggen­heim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online

Chi­nese Muse­ums, Closed by the Coro­n­avirus, Put Their Exhi­bi­tions Online

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

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Bronze Age Britons Turned Bones of Dead Relatives into Musical Instruments & Ornaments

in History, Life | September 2nd, 2020

Image via the Wilt­shire Muse­um

The bur­ial rites of ancient and exot­ic peo­ples can seem out­landish to us, but there’s noth­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly nor­mal about the funer­al tra­di­tions in the Unit­ed States and the UK, where corpses are sent off to pro­fes­sion­al under­tak­ers and made to look alive before they’re sealed in box­es and buried or turned into piles of ash.

Andrea Den­Hoed at The New York­er refers to the prac­tice of Tibetan Bud­dhist sky buri­als, in which “bod­ies are rit­u­al­ly dis­sect­ed and left in the open to be con­sumed by vul­tures” and of the Tora­jans of Indone­sia, who “have a rit­u­al called Ma’Nene, in which bod­ies are dis­in­terred, dressed in new clothes, and car­ried in a parade around the vil­lage.” These rites seem almost to mock our west­ern fears of death.

Inno­va­tions on the funer­al dis­place us fur­ther from the body. Den­Hoed writes, in 2016, of the then-rel­a­tive­ly rare expe­ri­ence of attend­ing a funer­al over Skype, now com­mon­place by virtue of bleak neces­si­ty. It’s hard to say if high-tech mourn­ing rit­u­als like turn­ing human remains into playable vinyl records brings us clos­er to accept­ing dead bod­ies, but they cer­tain­ly bring us clos­er to an ances­tral pre­his­toric past when at least some Bronze Age Britons turned the bones of their dead into musi­cal instru­ments.

Is it any more macabre than turn­ing rel­a­tives into dia­monds? Who’s to say. The researchers who made this dis­cov­ery, Dr. Thomas Booth and Joan­na Brück, pub­lished their find­ings in the jour­nal Antiq­ui­ty under the tongue-in-cheek title “Death is not the end: radio­car­bon and his­to-tapho­nom­ic evi­dence for the cura­tion and excar­na­tion of human remains in Bronze Age Briton.”

What’s that now? Through radio­car­bon-dat­ing, the researchers, in oth­er words, were able to deter­mine that ancient peo­ple who lived between 2500–600 BC “were keep­ing and curat­ing body parts, bones and cre­mat­ed remains” of peo­ple they knew well, some­times exhum­ing and rit­u­al­ly re-bury­ing the remains in their homes, or just keep­ing them around for a cou­ple gen­er­a­tions.

“It’s indica­tive of a broad­er mind­set where the line between the liv­ing and the dead was more blurred than it is today,” Booth tells The Guardian. “There wasn’t a mind­set that human remains go in the ground and you for­get about them. They were always present among the liv­ing.” This is hard­ly strange. The incred­i­ble amount of loss peo­ple will feel after COVID-19 will like­ly bring a pro­lif­er­a­tion of such rit­u­als.

The find mak­ing head­lines is a human thigh bone “that had been carved into a whis­tle” Josh Davis writes at the British Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Muse­um, and buried with anoth­er adult male. “When dat­ed, it revealed that the thigh bone came from a per­son who prob­a­bly lived around the same date as the man that it was buried with, mean­ing it is like­ly that it was some­one that they knew in life, or were fair­ly close to.”

There doesn’t seem to be any sug­ges­tion that this was a com­mon or wide­spread prac­tice, but it’s not that dis­sim­i­lar to wear­ing the remains of the dead as jew­el­ry. “The Romans did it,” notes Glenn McDon­ald at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, “The Per­sians did it. The Maya did it.” And the Vic­to­ri­ans, also, wore the remains of their dead, 4,000 years after their ancient ances­tors. “The tech­nolo­gies change,” says McDon­ald, “but the basic human expe­ri­ence” of death, loss, and mourn­ing remains the same.

The thigh bone whis­tle is on dis­play at the Wilt­shire Muse­um in the UK.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear the World’s Old­est Instru­ment, the “Nean­derthal Flute,” Dat­ing Back Over 43,000 Years

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Old­est Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

Lis­ten to the Old­est Song in the World: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years Ago

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

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Hear Patti Smith’s First Poetry Reading, Accompanied by Her Longtime Guitarist Lenny Kaye (St. Mark’s Church, 1971)

in Music, Poetry | September 1st, 2020

There are so many ori­gin sto­ries of punk that no sin­gle his­to­ry can count as defin­i­tive. But there’s also no dis­put­ing its roots in the New York poet­ry scene from which Pat­ti Smith emerged in the 1960s and 70s. She learned from Allen Gins­berg and William S. Bur­roughs, and Gre­go­ry Cor­so and Sam Shep­herd inspired the poetry/rock hybrid that would become the music of Hors­es.

Cor­so, who called him­self a “punk debauche” in his 1960 poem “1959,” lived up to the label. He would heck­le poets “dur­ing their list­less per­for­mances,” writes Kem­brew McLeod in Down­town Pop Under­ground, “yelling, ‘Shit! Shit! No blood! Get a trans­fu­sion!’ Sit­ting at Corso’s side,” dur­ing poet­ry read­ings host­ed by the Poet­ry Project at St. Mark’s Church, “Smith made a men­tal note not to be bor­ing.”

She fol­lowed her friend Sam Shepard’s advice to add music to her first pub­lic read­ing and called gui­tar play­er Lenny Kaye to accom­pa­ny her. “It was pri­mar­i­ly a solo poet­ry read­ing,” McLeod writes, “with occa­sion­al gui­tar accom­pa­ni­ment.” The 1971 appear­ance, which you can hear in the record­ing above, set the tone for almost all of her sub­se­quent per­for­mances for the next sev­er­al decades.

“We did ‘Mack the Knife,” Kaye recalls, “because it was Bertolt Brecht’s birth­day, and then I came back for the last three musi­cal pieces. I hes­i­tate to call them ‘songs,’ but in a sense they were the essence of what we would pur­sue.” Odd­ly, that year also marked the first usage of “punk” to describe a style of music, though it was applied to the garage rock of ? and the Mys­te­ri­ans, not to Smith and Kaye’s music. She her­self has said she didn’t con­sid­er what they were doing to be “punk” at all.

This does­n’t much mat­ter. It was atti­tude and the ener­gy Smith trans­lat­ed from St. Marks to the CBG­Bs scene that secures her “God­moth­er” sta­tus. She was impressed, as she says above, by Jim Mor­ri­son and Jimi Hen­drix. She was also impressed by a 1971 essay writ­ten by Andrew Wylie, who pub­lished her first book after her St. Mark’s read­ing. “Liv­ing as we were in an extreme­ly vio­lent, frag­ile time,” Smith’s Unau­tho­rized Biog­ra­phy recounts, “[Wylie] was drawn to short, almost ampu­tat­ed works.” He con­clud­ed that “just to be alive in such times was an act of vio­lence.”

Punk poet­ry, or what­ev­er we want to call it, was born in a church on St. Mark’s Place in New York City in 1971. From then on, what­ev­er oth­er strains came togeth­er to make punk rock, Smith’s chan­nel­ing of Cor­so, Shep­ard, Bur­roughs, Mor­ri­son, etc., backed by Kaye’s steady gui­tar work, has res­onat­ed through the music into the present.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Pat­ti Smith “Saved” Rock and Roll: A New Video Makes the Case

Pat­ti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rim­baud to Susan Son­tag

Pat­ti Smith Sings “Peo­ple Have the Pow­er” with a Choir of 250 Fel­low Singers

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

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How to Manage Your Time More Effectively: The Science of Applying Computer Algorithms to Our Everyday Lives

in Computer Science, Productivity, TED Talks | September 1st, 2020

Who among us has­n’t wished to be as effi­cient as a com­put­er? While com­put­ers seem to do every­thing at once, we either flit or plod from task to task, often get­ting side­tracked or even lost. At this point most have relin­quished the dream of true “mul­ti­task­ing,” which turns out to lie not only beyond the reach of humans but, tech­ni­cal­ly speak­ing, beyond the reach of com­put­ers as well. “Done right, com­put­ers move so flu­id­ly between their var­i­ous respon­si­bil­i­ties, they give the illu­sion of doing every­thing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly,” says the nar­ra­tor of the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above. But in real­i­ty, even they do one thing at a time; what, then, can we humans learn from how they’re pro­grammed to pri­or­i­tize and switch between their many tasks?

A com­put­er oper­at­ing sys­tem has an ele­ment called a “sched­uler,” which “tells the CPU how long to work on each task before switch­ing.” Sched­ulers work quite well these days, but “even com­put­ers get over­whelmed some­times.” This used to hap­pen to the open-source oper­at­ing sys­tem Lin­ux, which “would rank every sin­gle one of its tasks in order of impor­tance, and some­times spent more time rank­ing tasks than doing them. The pro­gram­mers’ coun­ter­in­tu­itive solu­tion was to replace this full rank­ing with a lim­it­ed num­ber of pri­or­i­ty ‘buck­ets,’ ” replac­ing a pre­cise pri­or­i­ty order­ing with a broad­er low-medi­um-high kind of group­ing. This turned out to be a great improve­ment: “The sys­tem was less pre­cise about what to do next, but more than made up for it by spend­ing more time mak­ing progress.”

The les­son for those of us who habit­u­al­ly list and pri­or­i­tize our tasks is obvi­ous: “All the time you spend pri­or­i­tiz­ing your work is time you aren’t spend­ing doing it,” and “giv­ing up on doing things in the per­fect order may be the key to get­ting them done.” In the case of e‑mail, bane of many a 21st-cen­tu­ry exis­tence, “Insist­ing on always doing the very most impor­tant thing first could lead to a melt­down. Wak­ing up to an inbox three times fuller than nor­mal could take nine times longer to clear.

You’d be bet­ter off reply­ing in chrono­log­i­cal order, or even at ran­dom.” Robert Pir­sig mem­o­rably artic­u­lat­ed this in Zen and the Art of Motor­cy­cle Main­te­nance, whose main char­ac­ter offers advice to his son frus­trat­ed by the task of writ­ing a let­ter home from their road trip:

I tell him get­ting stuck is the com­mon­est trou­ble of all. Usu­al­ly, I say, your mind gets stuck when you’re try­ing to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try not to force words to come. That just gets you more stuck. What you have to do now is sep­a­rate out the things and do them one at a time. You’re try­ing to think of what to say and what to say first at the same time and that’s too hard. So sep­a­rate them out. Just make a list of all the things you want to say in any old order. Then lat­er we’ll fig­ure out the right order.

We don’t write many let­ters home these days, of course, and even e‑mail may no longer pose the direst threat to our time man­age­ment. More of us blame our lack of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty on the inter­rup­tions of instant mes­sag­ing in all its forms, from tex­ting to social media, anoth­er prob­lem with an equiv­a­lent in com­put­ing. That a com­put­er can be inter­rupt­ed by any num­ber of the process­es it runs neces­si­tat­ed the devel­op­ment of a pro­ce­dure called “inter­rupt coa­lesc­ing,” accord­ing to which, “rather than deal­ing with things as they come up,” the sys­tem “groups these inter­rup­tions togeth­er based on how long they can afford to wait.” Even if we can’t elim­i­nate inter­rup­tions in our lives, we can group them: “If no noti­fi­ca­tion or e‑mail requires a response more urgent­ly than once an hour, say, then that’s exact­ly how often you should check them — no more.”

This TED-Ed les­son comes adapt­ed from Bri­an Chris­t­ian and Tom Grif­fiths’ book Algo­rithms to Live By: The Com­put­er Sci­ence of Human Deci­sions. If you’d like to hear about more of the ways in which they apply com­put­ers’ meth­ods of deci­sion mak­ing to areas of human life — home-buy­ing, gam­bling, dat­ing — you can also watch their talk at Google. We also have plen­ty of sup­ple­men­tary time man­age­ment-relat­ed mate­r­i­al here in the Open Cul­ture archives, on every­thing from the neu­ro­science of pro­cras­ti­na­tion to the dai­ly rou­tines of philoso­phers, writ­ers and oth­er cre­ative peo­ple to tips for read­ing more books per year to the pres­i­den­tial­ly-approved “Eisen­how­er Matrix.” By all means, click on all these links; just don’t over­think the order in which to do it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Use the “Eisen­how­er Matrix” to Man­age Your Time & Increase Your Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty: The Sys­tem Designed by the 34th Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States

The Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy of Pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and How to Over­come It

The Dai­ly Rou­tines of Famous Cre­ative Peo­ple, Pre­sent­ed in an Inter­ac­tive Info­graph­ic

The Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

The Dai­ly Habits of Famous Writ­ers: Franz Kaf­ka, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Stephen King & More

7 Tips for Read­ing More Books in a Year

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

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