The Interim Executive Producer of The Second City joins your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to discuss the scope of black nerd-dom: what nerdy properties provide to those who feel “othered,” using sci-fi to talk about race, Black Panther and other heroes, afrofuturism, black anime fans, Star Trek, Key & Peele, Get Out vs. Us, and more.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, what we know of as The Age of Enlightenment or early modernity, Europeans traversed the globe and returned to publish travel accounts that cast the natives they encountered as childlike beings, destitute savages, or literal monsters. Unable to make sense of alien languages and cultures, they mistook everything they saw.
Meanwhile, the bubonic plague swept Europe, and plague doctors wandered towns and countryside in a “fanciful-looking costume [that] typically consisted of a head-to-toe leather or wax-canvas garment,” writes the Public Domain Review, “large crystal glasses; and a long snout or bird beak, containing aromatic spices (such as camphor, mint, cloves, and myrrh), dried flowers (such as roses or carnations), or a vinegar sponge.”
Moreover, the plague doctor—as you can see from illustrations of this bizarre character—also carried with him a wand, “with which to issue instructions,” one scholar writes, “such as ordering disease-stricken houses filled with spiders or toads ‘to absorb the air’ and commanding the infected to inhale ‘bottled wind’ or take urine baths, purgatives, or stimulants.” The wand was also used to forcefully fend off patients.
Visiting travelers from elsewhere might be justified in thinking the plague doctor represented some strange, primitive religious custom: perhaps a monstrous—and mostly ineffective—exorcism ritual. The “early-modern hazmat suit” is perfectly reasonable, of course, if you understand the reigning theory of “miasmas,” which posited that disease is spread through “bad air.” Not entirely wrong, as our current masked existences show, but in the case of the plague, miasma theory was only very partially explanatory.
Which is to say the costume wasn’t entirely useless. “The ankle-length gown and herb-filled beak… would also have offered some protection against germs,” especially since its herbs were sometimes lit on fire and allowed to smolder, sending billowing smoke from the plague doctor’s face. (The satirical engraving above from 1700 mocks this practice.) “The appearance of one of these human-sized birds on a doorstep could only mean that death was near.”
This particular design has been credited to a French doctor, Charles de Lorme, said to have invented it in 1619. “De Lorme thought the beak shape of the mask would give the air sufficient time to be suffused by the protective herbs before it hit the plague doctors’ nostrils and lungs.” Often mistaken for Medieval or Renaissance garb, the plague doctor costume is, in fact, a modern piece of kit.
No matter how widespread the beak was historically, its iconic status as part of the plague doctor costume remains inscribed in art and culture. “The look was so iconic in Italy that the ‘plague doctor’ became a staple of Italian commedia dell’arte and carnival celebrations,” Erin Blakemore writes at National Geographic. Given the associations a more authentic costume would evoke, no one seems to be clamoring to replace beaked masks with pointed hoods in representations of plague doctors. The beak also symbolically conveys an important fact about plague doctors: they were not healers—they were mostly witnesses of death.
Few of their remedies had any effect. Rather, on the government’s payroll, plague doctors—often second or third-rate practitioners attempting to build a career—recorded demographic data, witnessed wills, and performed autopsies. They were like weird avian aliens come to observe the customs of a continent’s dying population, appearing in what came to be widely understood as the “costume of death,” as the illustration above puts it. See more representations of the plague doctor costume at the Public Domain Review.
The world does not lack action movies, but well-made ones have for most of cinema history been few and far between. Despite long understanding that action sells, Hollywood seldom manages to get the most out of the genre’s master craftsmen. Hence the excitement in the early 1990s when fans of Hong Kong gangster pictures learned that John Woo, that country’s preeminent action auteur, was coming stateside. His streak of Hong Kong hits at that point included A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Bullet in the Head, and Hard Boiled, most of which starred no less an action icon than Chow Yun-fat. For Woo’s American debut Hard Target, starring a Belgian muscleman called Jean-Claude Van Damme, it would prove a hard act to follow.
Hard Target, Evan Puschak (better known as the Nerdwriter) drily puts it in the video essay above, is “not quite a masterpiece.” Woo “battled a mediocre script, studio pressure, and a star who couldn’t really act,” and then “the studio re-edited a lot of the movie to get an R rating, and to make it more palatable for American moviegoers, diluting Woo’s signature style in the process.”
But despite being a weak spot in Woo’s filmography, it makes for an illuminating case study in his cinematic style. Puschak calls its action scenes “absurdly creative” in a way that has “grown more impressive over time”: in them Woo employs slow motion — a signature technique “he weaves it into his highly kinetic sequences like an expert composer” — and other forms of time dilation to “heighten the experience of impact.”
Like most action movies, Hard Target offers a great many impacts: punches, kicks, improbable leaps, gunshots, and explosions aplenty. Under Woo’s direction they feel even more plentiful than they are, given that he “often repeats things two or three times so that the impact has an echoing effect.” Yet unlike in run-of-the mill examples of the genre, we feel each and every one of those impacts, owing to such relatively subtle editing strategies as presenting the firing of a gun and the bullet hitting its target as “two distinct moments.” (Several such gunshots, as Puschak shows us using deleted footage, were among the studio-mangled sequences.) “This is unlike any traditional films in the States,” Woo later said of Hard Target’s disappointing performance, “so the audience didn’t understand what’s going on with these techniques.” More than a quarter-century later, Western audiences have more of a grasp of Woo’s cinematic language, but few other filmmakers have come close to mastering it.
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.
Of all the desserts to attain cultural relevance over the past century, can any hope to touch Alice B. Toklas’ famous hashish fudge? Calling for such ingredients as black peppercorns, shelled almonds, dried figs, and most vital of all Cannabis sativa, the recipe first appeared in 1954’s The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book. (Toklas would read the recipe aloud on the radio in the early 1960s, a time when the fudge’s key ingredient had become an object of much more intense public interest.) More than a how-to on Toklas’ favorite dishes, the book is also a kind of memoir, including recollections of her life with Gertrude Stein — herself the author of the ostensible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
This puts us in the realm of serious literature where sweets, you might assume, are scarcely to be found. But baking constituted a part of the creative process of no less a literary mind than Emily Dickinson, whose handwritten recipe for coconut cake appears above.
It may seem obvious that women like Toklas and Dickinson, born and raised in the 19th century, would have been expected to learn this sort of thing. But a fair few of the literary men of generations past knew something of their way around the kitchen as well. George Orwell, for instance, wrote an essay on “British cookery,” early in which he states that “in general, British people prefer sweet things to spicy things.” While describing “sweet dishes and confectionery – cakes, puddings, jams, biscuits and sweet sauces” as the “glory of British cookery,” he admits that “the national addiction to sugar has not done the British palate any good.” And so he includes the recipe for a Christmas pudding which, subtle by that standard, calls for only half a pound of the stuff.
Born a generation after Orwell, Roald Dahl made no secret of his own sugar-addicted British palate. In his book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Dahl had “dazzled young readers with visions of Cavity-Filling Caramels, Everlasting Gobstoppers, and snozzberry-flavored wallpaper,” writes Open Culture’s own Ayun Halliday. But his own candy of choice was “the more pedestrian Kit-Kat bar. In addition to savoring one daily (a luxury little Charlie Bucket could but dream of, prior to winning that most golden of tickets) he invented a frozen confection called ‘Kit-Kat Pudding,’ ” whose simple recipe is as follows: “Stack as many Kit-Kats as you like into a tower, using whipped cream for mortar, then shove the entire thing into the freezer, and leave it there until solid.”
If you’re looking for a slightly more challenging dessert that still comes with a cultural figure’s imprimatur, you might give Normal Rockwell’s favorite oatmeal cookies a try. Going deeper into American history, we’ve also got Thomas Jefferson’s recipe for ice cream, the taste for which he picked up while living in France in the 1780s. That same country’s cuisine also inspired Ernest Hemingway’s fruit pie, meant for summer-camping with one’s pals: “If your pals are Frenchmen,” Hemingway adds, “they will kiss you.” Alas, if anyone has determined the exact recipe for the most famous dessert in all of French literature, Marcel Proust’s memory-triggering madeleines, they haven’t released it to the hungry public.
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.
Everything old is new again and Tuscany’s buchette del vino—wine windows—are definitely rolling with the times.
As Lisa Harvey earlier reported in Atlas Obscura, buchette del vino became a thing in 1559, shortly after Cosimo I de’ Medici decreed that Florence-dwelling vineyard owners could bypass taverns and wine merchants to sell their product directly to the public. Wealthy wine families eager to pay less in taxes quickly figured out a workaround that would allow them to take advantage of the edict without requiring them to actually open their palace doors to the rabble:
Anyone on the street could use the wooden or metal knocker … and rap on a wine window during its open hours. A well-respected, well-paid servant, called a cantiniere and trained in properly preserving wine, stood on the other side. The cantiniere would open the little door, take the customer’s empty straw-bottomed flask and their payment, refill the bottle down in the cantina (wine cellar), and hand it back out to the customer on the street.
Seventy years further on, these literal holes-in-the-walls served as a means of contactless delivery for post-Renaissance Italians in need of a drink as the second plague pandemic raged.
Scholar Francesco Rondinelli (1589–1665) detailed some of the extra sanitation measures put in place in the early 1630s:
A metal payment collection scoop replaced hand-to-hand exchange
Immediate vinegar disinfection of all collected coins
No exchange of empty flasks brought from home
Customers who insisted on bringing their own reusable bottles could do self-serve refills via a metal tube, to protect the essential worker on the other side of the window.
Sound familiar?
After centuries of use, the windows died out, falling victim to flood, WWII bombings, family relocations, and architectural renovation.
The novel coronavirus pandemic has definitely played a major role in putting wine windows back on the public’s radar, but Babae, a casual year-old restaurant gets credit for being the first to reactivate a disused buchetta del vino for its intended purpose, selling glasses of red for a single hour each day starting in August 2019.
Now several other authentic buchette have returned to service, with menus expanded to accommodate servings of ice cream and coffee.
They may even take a page from the past, and send some of the money they take in back out, along with food and yes—wine—to sustain needy members of the community.
Comedian Fred Armisen is best known for his years on Saturday Night Live, his eight seasons of surreal sketch comedy (with Carrie Brownstein) on Portlandia, and his unnerving command of regional accents and impressions. True fans also know that for much of his career he’s also been a musician, primarily a drummer, since college. Starting in high school, he’s been in various bands, including Trenchmouth, the Blue Man Group, and sometimes sitting in with Seth Meyers’ house band.
So the above skit from SNL is fun because Armisen gets to indulge his love of punk music. It’s a basic set-up, a 40-something groom and his best buds “getting the band back together” to play one more song at a wedding. But here the band used to be a political punk band along the lines of Fear, The Dead Kennedys, and Suicidal Tendencies, and the anti-Reagan lyrics (you too, Alexander Haig, you fascist!) have been preserved in amber.
Like most SNL sketches it unfolds kind of how you expect (and just kinda…ends), but man, this must have been fun to shoot. And yes, that’s the Foo Fighters/Nirvana’s Dave Grohl on drums.
If that skit was a tribute to American punk, then this other one is a nod to the Sex Pistols and the steady rightward drift of John Lydon. Armisen plays lead singer Ian Rubbish (you know, of Ian Rubbish and the Bizarros) whose lyrics decry and attack everything…except for Margaret Thatcher. The Queen? She’s useless (and other words we can’t write on Open Culture), but Maggie? Ian has a soft spot.
This 2013 skit came shortly after Thatcher died and Americans were treated to videos of some Britons (not all, but *a lot*) celebrating her death much as you would the death of Hitler or Mussolini. Goodbye, good riddance, and let me know where she’s located so we can pee on her grave. That sorta thing. And if that’s where you’re at, you might find the turn this sketch takes a bit too nice. But kudos to ex-Pistol Steve Jones for turning up and doing the Rutles-like thing. There’s even a nice parody of the infamous Bill Grundy interview.
Armisen had another crack, by the way, at the reunion joke. In Season 8 of Portlandia, the “Band Reunion” skit brought together Henry Rollins (Black Flag), Krist Novoselic (Nirvana), and Brendan Canty (Fugazi) to bring back Armisen’s character’s band “Riot Spray” and record one more time. (Brownstein only figures a bit in the skit, but her reaction is priceless). The humor is just a little bit more mellow, a bit more empathetic, and hurts just that little bit more.
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.
The rediscovery of Berlin began thirty years ago this November, with the demolition of the wall that had long divided the city’s western and eastern halves. Specifically, the Berlin Wall had stood since 1961, meaning the younger generation of West and East Berliners had no memory of their city’s being whole. In another sense, the same could be said of their parents’ generation, who saw nearly a third of Berlin destroyed in the Second World War. Only the most venerable Berliners would have remembered the social and industrial golden age the undivided city enjoyed back in the 1920s — an age exhilaratingly presented in the film Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis.
An early example of the silent-era “city symphonies” that showed off the capitals of the world on film (several of which you can watch here on Open Culture),Berlin takes the viewer along streets and waterways, through parks, onto trains and elevators, on roller coasters, and into factories, building sites, cabarets, and skies. Shot over a year and compressed into less than an hour, this avant-garde documentary captures the experience of Berlin in the 1920s — or rather it captures, in that mightily industrial age, experience at the intersection of human and machine. Director Walther Ruttmann “charts the movements of crowds of children, workers, swimmers, rowers, and so on,” writes Popmatters’ Chadwick Jenkins, “but only occasionally focuses on a person as an individual. Moreover, many of the most striking scenes in the film avoid the intrusion of people altogether, concentrating instead on the operation of mechanical devices.”
Absent explanatory narration or title cards, the film invites a variety of readings. Chadwick sees it as “the defamatory dehumanization of the human, the derogation of human autonomy and dominion over a world of indifferent matter, a reduction of the divine spark in humankind to the status of another mere thing.” This same quality drove away one of Ruttmann’s key collaborators on Berlin, the writer Carl Mayer. Ruttmann, for his part, described his own motivation as “the idea of making something out of life, of creating a symphonic film out of the millions of energies that comprise the life of a big city.”
A primary interest in movement itself is perhaps to be expected from a filmmaker who had previously distinguished himself as an abstract animator. (What his later work as an assistant to Leni Riefenstahl on Triumph of the Will indicates is another matter.) But if Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis “dehumanizes,” writes Jenkins, it does so as a deliberate artistic strategy to show that “the city is more than its various components, including its human components,” and to “provide an insight into the emergent qualities that make a city what it is, beyond being a mere composite of the elements within its geographical boundaries,” however those boundaries get drawn and redrawn over time.
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.
George Orwell and Winston Churchill didn’t agree on much. For example, while Orwell wrote with deep sympathy about coal miners in The Road to Wigan Pier, Churchill, as home secretary, brutally crushed a miner’s strike in Wales. Orwell’s early years as “an apparatchik in the last days of the empire… left him with a hatred of authority and imperialism,” writes Richard Eilers. Churchill was a committed imperialist all his life, instrumental in prolonging a famine in British India that killed “at least three million people.”
Importantly for history’s sake, they agreed on the need to confront, rather than appease, the Nazis, against both the British left and right of the 1930s. “At a time not unlike today,” says journalist Tom Ricks, “when people were wondering whether democracy was sustainable, when a lot of people thought you needed authoritarian rule, either from the right or the left, Orwell and Churchill, from their very different perspectives, come together on a key point. We don’t have to have authoritarian government.”
Maybe somewhat less important—but strenuously agreed upon nonetheless by these two figures—was the need for clear, concise prose that avoids obfuscation. In Politics and the English Language—an essay routinely taught in college composition classes—Orwell describes politically misleading writing as overstuffed with “pretentious diction” and “meaningless words.” These are, he writes, signs of a “decadent… civilization.” Churchill has had at least as much influence as Orwell on a certain kind of political writing, though not the kind most of us read often.
In 1940, Churchill issued a memo to his staff titled “Brevity.” He did not express concerns about creeping fascism in bureaucratic communiques, but decried the problem of wasted time, “while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.” He ends up, however, saying some of the same things as Orwell, in fewer words.
I ask my colleagues and their staffs to see to it that their Reports are shorter.
The aim should be Reports which set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.
If a Report relies on detailed analysis of some complicated factors, or on statistics, these should be set out in an Appendix.
Often the occasion is best met by submitting not a full-dress Report, but an Aide-memoire consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed.
Let us have an end of such phrases as these: “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…,” or “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect….” Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.
Reports drawn up on the lines I propose may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving in time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking.
The message “cascaded through the civil service,” writes Laura Cowdry at the UK National Archives. A 1940 article in the Times picked up the story. But the problem persisted, as it does today and maybe will till the end of time (or until machines start to do all our writing for us). Frustrated, Churchill issued another admonition, shorter even than the first, in 1951.
Official papers are too long and too diffuse. In 1940 I called for brevity. Evidently I must do so again. I ask my colleagues to read what I wrote then… and to make my wishes known to their staffs.
These memos, Cowdry notes, “may shed some light onto government communications work of the past,” and on the Churchillian style that may have taken hold for decades in government documents, as well as—of course—far beyond them. His emphatic statements also articulate “key elements of good communication that would resonate with the thinking of any modern communicator,” whether Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, or Cormac McCarthy, who has become a sought-after scientific editor for his strict minimalism.
Churchill did not seem overly concerned with wordiness as a political problem. Orwell did not approach the problem philosophically. That task fell to the Logical Positivists of the early 20th century. In his attempt to explain the wordiness of both undergraduates and world-renowned thinkers, “neo-Positivist” philosopher David Stove goes so far as to ascribe overwriting to “defects of character… such things as an inability to shut up; determination to be thought deep; hunger for power; fear, especially the fear of an indifferent universe….”
Something to consider, maybe, when you’re looking at your next draft email, Facebook comment, or Slack message, and wondering whether it actually needs to be an essay….
The cards of the tarot, first created for play around 600 years ago and used in recent centuries for occult divination of truths about life, the universe, and everything, should by all rights be nothing more than a historical curiosity today. Yet something about the tarot still compels, even to many of us in the ever more digital, ever more data-driven 21st century. Taschen, publisher of lavish art and photo books, know this: hence, as we featured last year here on Open Culture, products like their box-set reissue of the tarot deck designed by Salvador Dalí. (There must be a meaningful overlap between Taschen’s demographic and Dalí’s fans, given that the publisher more recently put out the most complete collection of his paintings between two covers.)
Dalí isn’t the only artist whose interpretations of the Fool, the Hierophant, the Lovers, the Hanged One, and the other arcana have graced a tarot deck. H.R. Giger, the artist responsible for the biomechanical creepiness of Alien, designed one in the 1990s; more recently, we’ve featured decks illustrated with visions inspired by the novels of Philip K. Dick and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
But all these together — even including the “Thoth deck” designed by occultist Aleister Crowley and the Sola-Busca deck, the earliest known complete set of tarot cards — represent only a small fraction of the story of tarot’s place in the past six centuries of civilization. That story is told, and more importantly shown, in Taschen’s new book Divine Decks: A Visual History of Tarot.
The first volume in Taschen’s “Library of Esoterica,” the book “gathers more than 500 cards and works of original art from around the world in the ultimate exploration of a centuries-old art form.” An image gallery on Taschen’s web site gives a small sampling of the range of tarot decks found within, including ones created in 1930s England, 1970s Italy, and 2010s Brooklyn. One was intended as a promotional item for an American paper company in the 1960s; another, with different purposes, announces itself as the “Black Power Tarot.” This in addition to such well-known examples as Crowley’s Thoth deck and the venerable Sola-Busca, both lushly reproduced in its pages. And the tarot lives on, as I’m reminded whenever I pass one of the many storefronts here in Seoul offering tarot readings. In any case, it’s certainly come a long way from 15th-century Europe. You can get a copy of Divine Decks: A Visual History of Tarot on Taschen’s website.
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.
A little over four years ago, discriminatory and arbitrarily confusing travel bans descended on the U.S., tearing refugee families apart and leaving thousands in diplomatic limbo. This seemed nightmarish enough at the time. But it took a viral pandemic to bring travel bans and restrictions down on the entire world, more or less, with countries appearing on bulletins that vaguely look like lists of enemies on governing bodies’ websites, including the CDC’s.
Likewise, almost all 27 countries that comprise the European Union are currently disallowing U.S. travelers, with the exception of Croatia,” Mary Claire Patton reports. The UK has also kept its ban on U.S. citizens in place. All this is to say, to fellow citizens and residents of any gender, that the days of traipsing around the world for Instagram impressions, or saving and scraping for that vacation honeymoon, or making even more important journeys, may be on hold indefinitely.
Fortunately, art galleries worldwide have been preparing their collections for independent lives online, with ultra-high-resolution photography; materials that rarely appear on view in any form; and more context than visitors typically get on a guided tour.
Would-be visitors keen on public art collections will find their niche online at Art UK, a charity project that is digitizing “more than 150,000 publicly owned sculptures in Great Britain by the end of 2020,” writes Mental Floss, including many sculptures living their lives out in public spaces.
Art UK seem to be lagging a bit behind on the sculpture posts, and they are light on the context, but a few big things have happened since they made the announcement in February 2019. In any case, you will not have to travel to a Nando’s eatery in Harlow to see Rodin’s Eve, originally created for his Gates of Hell in Paris. (Not that one wouldn’t want to go to Harlow, which “also displays works by acclaimed artists such as Henry Moore, Elisabeth Frink, Barbara Hepworth and Lynn Chadwick,” Mark Brown points out at The Guardian.)
These include the requisite doting and revealing portraits of lords, ladies, merchants, worthies, and bureaucrats. They also include brilliant oil paintings like David Hepher’s Night Flats, whose title and faraway lonesomeness evoke Edward Hopper. Furthermore, not all portraits of British worthies fit the stereotype, as Colin Colahan’s 1933 arresting likeness of English actress Marie Ney demonstrates.
You can read more about the process of bringing this work online in Goodwin’s essay, which also lists the national organizations and museums from which the collection draws. These are “located throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the crown dependencies of the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.” Visit Art UK themselves here to see their photographic archive of publicly-owned painting, sculpture, and other visual media in the UK—now publicly available online around the world to people indefinitely banned from visiting the art in person.
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