Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioactive a Century Later

in Science | November 15th, 2023

When researching a famous historical figure, access to their work and materials usually proves to be one of the biggest obstacles. But things are much more difficult for those writing about the life of Marie Curie, the scientist who, along her with husband Pierre, discovered polonium and radium and birthed the idea of particle physics. Her notebooks, her clothing, her furniture (not to mention her lab), pretty much everything surviving from her Parisian suburban house, is radioactive, and will be for 1,500 years or more.

If you want to look at her manuscripts, you have to sign a liability waiver at France’s Bibliotheque Nationale, and then you can access the notes sealed in a lead-lined box. The Curies didn’t know about the dangers of radioactive materials, though they did know about radioactivity. Their research attempted to find out which substances were radioactive and why, and so many dangerous elements–thorium, uranium, plutonium–were just sitting there in their home laboratory, glowing at night, which Curie thought beautiful, “like faint, fairy lights,” she wrote in her autobiography. Marie Curie carried these glowing objects around in her pockets. She and her husband wore standard lab clothing, nothing more.

Marie Curie died at age 66 in 1934, from aplastic anemia, attributed to her radioactive research. The house, however, continued to be used up until 1978 by the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Paris Faculty of Science and the Curie Foundation. After that it was kept under surveillance, authorities finally now aware of the dangers inside. When many people in the neighborhood noticed high cancer rates among them, as reported in Le Parisien, they blamed the Curie’s home.

The laboratory and the building were decontaminated in 1991, a year after the Curie estate began allowing access to Curie’s notes and materials, which had been removed from the house. A flood of biographies appeared soon after: Marie Curie: A Life by Susan Quinn in 1995, Pierre Curie by Anna Hurwic in 1998, Curie: Le rêve scientifique by Loïc Barbo in 1999, Marie Curie et son laboratoire by Soraya Boudia in 2001, Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie by Barbara Goldsmith in 2005, and Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, a Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss in 2011.

Still, passing away at 66 is not too shabby when one has changed the world in the name of science. Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (1903), the only woman to win it again (1911), the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and the first woman to be entombed (on her own merits) at the Panthéon in Paris. And she managed many of her breakthroughs after the passing of her husband Pierre in 1906–who slipped and fell in the rain on a busy Paris street and was run over by the wheels of a horse-drawn cart.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Marie Curie’s Ph.D. Thesis on Radioactivity–Which Made Her the First Woman in France to Receive a Doctoral Degree in Physics

An Animated Introduction to the Life & Work of Marie Curie, the First Female Nobel Laureate

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Bertrand Russell: The Everyday Benefit of Philosophy Is That It Helps You Live with Uncertainty

in Life, Philosophy | November 15th, 2023

On the strength of a few quotations and the popular lecture Why I am Not a Christian, philosopher Bertrand Russell has been characterized as a so-called “positive atheist,” a phrase that implies a high degree of certainty. While it is true that Russell saw “no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology” — he saw them, in fact, as positively harmful — it would be misleading to suggest that he rejected all forms of metaphysics, mysticism, and imaginative, even poetic, speculation.

Russell saw a way to greatness in the search for ultimate truth, by means of both hard science and pure speculation. In an essay entitled “Mysticism and Logic,” for example, Russell contrasts two “great men,” Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, whose “scientific impulse reigns quite unchecked,” and poet William Blake, in whom “a strong hostility to science co-exists with profound mystic insight.”

It’s interesting that Russell chooses Blake for an example. One of his oft-quoted aphorisms cribs a line from another mystical poet, William Butler Yeats, who wrote in “The Second Coming” (1920), “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Russell’s version of this, from his 1933 essay “The Triumph of Stupidity,” is a bit clunkier rhetorically speaking:

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

The quote has been significantly altered and streamlined over time, it seems, yet it still serves as a kind of motto for the skeptical philosophy Russell advocated, one he would partially define in the 1960 interview above as a way to “keep us modestly aware of how much that seems like knowledge isn’t knowledge.” On the other hand, philosophy pushes reticent intellectuals to “enlarge” their “imaginative purview of the world into the hypothetical realm,” allowing “speculations about matters where exact knowledge is not possible.”

Where the quotation above seems to pose an insoluble problem—similar to the cognitive bias known as the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”—it seems in Russell’s estimation a false dilemma. At the 9:15 mark, in answer to a direct question posed by interviewer Woodrow Wyatt about the “practical use of your sort of philosophy to a man who wants to know how to conduct himself,” Russell replies:

I think nobody should be certain of anything. If you’re certain, you’re certainly wrong because nothing deserves certainty. So one ought to hold all one’s beliefs with a certain element of doubt, and one ought to be able to act vigorously in spite of the doubt…. One has in practical life to act upon probabilities, and what I should look to philosophy to do is to encourage people to act with vigor without complete certainty.

Russell’s discussion of the uses of philosophy puts me in mind of another concept devised by a poet: John Keats’ “negative capability,” or what Maria Popova calls “the art of remaining in doubt…. The willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity.” Perhaps Russell would not characterize it this way. He was, as you’ll see above, not much given to poetic examples. And indeed, Russell’s method relies a great deal more on logic and probability theory than Keats’. And yet the principle is strikingly similar.

For Russell, certainty stifles progress, and an inability to take imaginative risks consigns us to inaction. A middle way is required to live “vigorously,” that of philosophy, which requires both the mathematic and the poetic. In “Mysticism and Logic,” Russell sums up his position succinctly: “The greatest men who have been philosophers have felt the need of science and of mysticism: the attempt to harmonise the two was what made their life, and what always must, for all its arduous uncertainty, make philosophy, to some minds, a greater thing than either science or religion.”

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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Bertrand Russell’s Message to People Living in the Year 2959: “Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish”

Noam Chomsky Defines The Real Responsibility of Intellectuals: “To Speak the Truth and to Expose Lies” (1967)

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

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Advice for Time Traveling to Medieval Europe: How to Staying Healthy & Safe, and Avoiding Charges of Witchcraft

in History | November 14th, 2023

Generations of foreign tourists in Europe have heard advice about traveling in groups, haggling prices, avoiding pickpockets, and being able to communicate in, if not the local language, then at least the lingua franca. It turns out that very similar guidance applies to time travel in Europe, or at least specifically to the region of England, France, Germany, and northern Italy in the central Middle Ages, roughly between the years 1000 and 1400. In the new video above, history Youtuber Premodernist provides an hour’s worth of advice to the modern preparing to travel back in time to medieval Europe — beginning with the declaration that “you will very likely get sick.”

The gastrointestinal distress posed by the “native biome” of medieval European food and drink is one thing; the threat of robbery or worse by its roving packs of outlaws is quite another. “Crime is rampant” where you’re going, so “carry a dagger” and “learn how to use it.” In societies of the Middle Ages, people could only protect themselves by being “enmeshed in social webs with each other. No one was an individual.” And so, as a traveler, you must — to put it in Dungeons-and-Dragons terms — belong to some legible class. Though you’ll have no choice but to present yourself as having come from a distant land, you can feel free to pick one of two guises that will suit your obvious foreignness: “you’re either a merchant or a pilgrim.”

Unlike modern-day Europe, through which you travel for weeks barely speaking to anyone, the Europe of the Middle Ages offers numerous opportunities for conversation, whether you want them or not. Without any media as we know it today, medievals had to “make their own entertainment by talking to each other,” and if they could talk to a stranger from an exotic land, so much the more entertaining. But having none of our relatively novel ideas that “everybody’s on an equal footing, that everybody’s equal to each other, nobody’s better or worse than anybody else, nobody gets any special treatment,” they’ll guess your social rank and treat you accordingly; you, in turn, would do well to act the part.

Imagining themselves in medieval Europe, many of our contemporaries say things like, “If I go there, they’ll hang me as a witch, or they’ll burn me at the stake as a witch, because I’m wearing modern clothes and because I talk funny.” But that fear (not untainted, perhaps, by a certain self-regard) is unfounded, since medievals “were not scared of people just because they were different. They were scared of people who were different in a way that challenged the social order or threatened social chaos.” Their worldview put religious affiliation above all, without consideration for even the most hotly debated twenty-first-century political or racial battle lines. But then, as we never needed time travel to understand, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

People in the Middle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Practice Was Rediscovered

How to Make a Medieval Manuscript: An Introduction in 7 Videos

What Sex Was Like in Medieval Times?: Historians Look at How People Got It On in the Dark Ages

Behold a 21st-Century Medieval Castle Being Built with Only Tools & Materials from the Middle Ages

A Concise Breakdown of How Time Travel Works in Popular Movies, Books & TV Shows

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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Explore the Florentine Codex: A Brilliant 16th Century Manuscript Documenting Aztec Culture Is Now Digitized & Available Online

in Books, History | November 14th, 2023

The Spanish conquista of the Americas happened long enough ago — and left behind a spotty enough body of historical records — that we tend to perceive it as much through simplifications, exaggerations, and distortions as we do through facts. What we now call Mexico underwent “essentially an internal conflict between different indigenous groups who saw the arrival of strangers as an opportunity to resist having to pay tribute to the Aztec Empire,” says Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico history professor Berenice Alcántara Rojas. “When the Spaniards initially attacked the Mexica capital, they were swiftly driven out.”

“Only when aided by various groups of Indigenous allies, as well as by the spread of a terrible smallpox epidemic, did they manage to force the ruler Cuauhtemoc and other Mexica leaders to capitulate,” Rojas continues, drawing upon details provided in the version of the events laid out in the Florentine Codex.

That encyclopedic series of twelve 16th-century illustrated manuscripts lavishly documents the known society and nature of that land at the time — and has now, nearly 450 years later, been acknowledged as “the most reliable source of information about Mexica culture, the Aztec Empire, and the conquest of Mexico.”

“In 1547, Bernardino de Sahagún, a Spanish Franciscan friar who committed most of his life to working closely with the Indigenous peoples of Mexico, began collecting information about central Mexican Nahua culture, life, people, history, astronomy, flora, fauna, and the Nahuatl language, among other topics,” says the Getty Research Institute. “Nahua elders, grammarians, scribes, and artists worked with Sahagún to compile a three-volume, 12-book, 2500-page illustrated manuscript, modeling its content on European encyclopedias, especially Pliny the Elder’s Natural History,” all of which has been digitized, translated, and made available at the Getty’s web site.

A thoroughly multicultural project avant la lettre, the Florentine Codex (named for the Medici family library in Florence, where it was sent upon its completion) has only just become accessible to a wide online readership. Though it’s “been digitally available via the World Digital Library since 2012, for most users it remained impenetrable because reading it requires knowledge of sixteenth-century Nahuatl and Spanish, and of pre-Hispanic and early modern European art traditions.” By offering searchable text in modern versions of both those languages as well as English — to say nothing of its browsable sections organized by people, animals, deities, and even by Nahuatl terms like coyote and tortilla — the Digital Florentine Codex re-illuminates an entire civilization.

via Hyperallergic

Native Lands: An Interactive Map Reveals the Indigenous Lands on Which Modern Nations Were Built

Explore the Codex Zouche-Nuttall: A Rare, Accordion-Folded Pre-Columbian Manuscript

How the Ancient Mayans Used Chocolate as Money

Peruvian Scholar Writes & Defends the First Thesis Written in Quechua, the Main Language of the Incan Empire

How the Inca Used Intricately-Knotted Cords, Called Khipu, to Write Their Histories, Send Messages & Keep Records

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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The History of Disco Visualized on a Circuit Diagram of a Klipschorn Speaker: Features 600 Musicians, DJs, Producers, Clubs & Record Labels

in Dance, Design, History, Music | November 13th, 2023

Half a century after it was birthed in New York’s black, Latino and gay underground club scene–and nearly 45 years after the infamous Disco Demolition in Chicago’s Comiskey Park–disco is finally being accorded some respect in the annals of music history.

Even those who remain impervious to disco fever seem willing to acknowledge its cultural significance as evidenced by a recent exchange on the Trouser Press forum:

It was everywhere and could indeed get tiresome. But today I can appreciate how well put-together those records by an artist like the Bee Gees were…

Hearing techno for the first time in the early 90s, and realizing it was just disco in a new, all-electronic package, made me realize how good a lot of it was…

I remember seeing (A Taste of Honey) on The Midnight Special. It was the first time I’d seen a band with female members playing instruments…

Having previously celebrated the history of hip-hop, UK-based design studio Dorothy gives disco its due with a blueprint paying tribute to the many artists who made the form what it was, from foundation layers like Teddy Pendergrass, Marvin Gaye, and James Brown to such trailblazing superstars as Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Sylvester, Chic and the Bee Gees.

The Disco Love Blueprint also name checks some of disco’s influential producers, DJs, and labels, along with watershed moments like 1969’s Stonewall Uprising and 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, reportedly film critic Gene Siskel’s favorite movie.

And while the disco explosion eventually saw young straight singles doing the Bump in Indianapolis, Phoenix, and Spokane, Dorothy sticks close to the epicenter by including such legendary New York City clubs as Studio 54, The Gallery, Paradise Garage, The Saint, and The Loft, a private discotheque in DJ David Mancuso’s Lower Manhattan apartment.

In Bill Brewster’s Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, Mancuso’s audio engineer, Alex Rosner, recalled the Loft’s clientele as being “probably about sixty percent black and seventy percent gay:”

There was a mix of sexual orientation, there was a mix of races, mix of economic groups. A real mix, where the common denominator was music.

One can’t mention the music at The Loft without giving props to the innovative and efficient sound system Rosner devised for Mancuso’s 1,850-square-foot space, using a McIntosh amplifier, an AR amplifier, Vega bass bottom speakers, and two Klipschorn Cornwall loudspeakers, whose circuit diagram inspired the Disco Love Blueprint’s layout.

As composer and producer Matt Sommers told The Vinyl Factory, those speakers surrounded dancers with the sort of high volume, undistorted sound they could lose themselves in:

…the Mancuso parties were unique because what he did was take it to a whole other level and created that envelopment experience where you could really get lost and I think that’s what people love about that, because you can just let your troubles go and enjoy it.

Get Dorothy’s Disco Love Blueprint, featuring 600 musicians, DJs, producers, clubs and record labels here.

The History of Rock Mapped Out on the Circuit Board of a Guitar Amplifier: 1400 Musicians, Songwriters & Producers

Diagram of a 1950s Theremin: 200 Inventors, Composers & Musicians

A History of Alternative Music Brilliantly Mapped Out on a Transistor Radio Circuit Diagram: 300 Punk, Alt & Indie Artists

The History of Hip Hop Music Visualized on a Turntable Circuit Diagram: Features 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

How Giorgio Moroder & Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” Created the “Blueprint for All Electronic Dance Music Today” (1977)

The Untold Story of Disco and Its Black, Latino & LGBTQ Roots

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Open Planet Lets You Download & Use 4,500 Free Videos That Document Nature & Climate Change

in Environment, Film, Nature | November 13th, 2023

Plastic pollution in the Red Sea…

A melting glacier in Iceland…

Trees scorched by a wildfire in Australia…

As the effects of climate change become increasingly dire, we’ve grown accustomed to such grimly sobering visions.

Some look away.

Others work to heighten awareness of these clear and present environmental dangers.

And some strive to implement innovative solutions before it’s too late:

Solar panels in Costa Rica

Bubble barriers filtering plastic refuse from Amsterdam’s canals…

Sustainable agroforestry in the Amazon.

A classroom full of desks constructed from recycled one-time use plastics in India…

The creators of Open Planet, a soon-to-launch free footage library, hope to support change-making organizations and individuals by supplying video that can be edited together into narratives to “inspire optimism and action in this decisive decade for our planet.”

Caroline Petit, who prioritizes education and awareness in her position as Deputy Director for the United Nations Regional Information Centre for Europe, hails Open Planet for supplying worldwide free access to high-quality, accurate footage:

At this halfway point of the Sustainable Development Goals, it is crucial to provide all possible tools to supercharge the breakthroughs needed to achieve them. Capturing hearts and minds to motivate action is one powerful way to do so.

Enlisting some non-humans players to help achieve that end is a sound idea.

Behold a Nepal Gray Langur mother and baby hanging out in the treetops…

Cheetah cubs playfully sparring with each other in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve…

A group of Pashmina goats peacefully grazing on wild sea buckthorn berries on the high plateaus of Ladakh.

Open Planet’s 4,500 clip strong collection also teems with photogenic birds, insects, and marine life, with more being added all the time.

Studio Silverback, which is collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab on this project, created some of the footage specifically for the platform.

The remainder has been donated by outside filmmakers, broadcasters, and production companies who are credited in their clips’ content details.

In advance of its 2024 global launch, Open Planet has released a mostly uplifting 74-clip spotlight collection drawn from over 2000 pieces of footage filmed in India

A look at the platform’s searchable filter themes reminds us that the picture is not so overwhelmingly rosy, but also makes a strong case that change is possible:

Biodiversity

Climate

Consumption

Deforestation

Energy

Extreme Weather

Food

Human Health

Land Management

Natural Disasters

Nature-only

Pollution

Waste

Water

Sustainable Future

Technology

Explore Open Planet’s footage library and create a free account to download the clips of your choice here. The videos are free to use for educational, environmental and impact storytelling.

via Colossal

Carl Sagan Warns Congress about Climate Change (1985)

Frank Capra’s Science Film The Unchained Goddess Warns of Climate Change in 1958

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Researcher Identifies the Old Man on the Iconic Cover of Led Zeppelin IV, 52 Years After the Album’s Release

in Art, Music | November 10th, 2023

Who’s that bearded man on the cover of Led Zeppelin IV, the one hunched over, carrying a large bundle of sticks? Brian Edwards, a researcher from the University of the West of England, has solved the 52-year-old mystery. Looking through a photo album while conducting research, Edwards spotted a photograph and, being a Led Zeppelin fan, “instantly recognised the man with the sticks.” “It was quite a revelation, he told the BBC.” From there, he figured out who took the photograph in 1892 (Ernest Howard Farmer), and eventually identified the figure in the photo itself: Lot Long, a thatcher from Mere, a town in Wiltshire, England. You can see him above.

Decades later, Robert Plant apparently found a colorized version of the photograph in an antique shop. On the 1971 album cover, we see the photo turned into a framed painting and layered onto the wall of a drab home. The rest, as they say, is rock ’n’ roll history…

William S. Burroughs Reviews a Led Zeppelin Concert for Crawdaddy! Magazine (1975)

Hear Led Zeppelin’s First Recorded Concert Ever (1968)

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Watch Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa Get Entirely Recreated with 50,000 LEGO Bricks

in Art | November 10th, 2023

A few years ago here on Open Culture, we featured a re-creation of The Great Wave off Kanazawa made entirely out of LEGO by a serious enthusiast named Jumpei Mitsui. Though the work’s depth does come across to some extent in still photos, it bears repeating that Mitsui assembled not just a two-dimensional image, but a complete three-dimensional scene that, when viewed straight on, looks just like Hokusai’s famous woodblock print. All told, the project required 50,000 LEGO bricks, all of which you can now watch Mitsui lay down in the ten-minute time-lapse video above.

By presenting the whole construction process from a variety of angles, the video allows us to better appreciate not just the painstaking manual labor involved, but the amount of creative and technical work necessary to conceptualize the Great Wave — perhaps the foremost example of the vividly flat ukiyo‑e woodblock print style — in physical reality.

Viewers who’ve never tried their hand at large-scale LEGO building will also be surprised by the way in which Mitsui goes about building the grid-like sub-structure that undergirds what looks, in the finished product, like a sold sea of bricks.

It’s natural that Mitsui (now a “LEGO Certified Professional”) has shared the details of how he built his best-known LEGO creation on Youtube, given that it was on the same platform that he gained some of the knowledge necessary to execute it in the first place. “The brick artist observed waves on Youtube for hours, and read academic papers on waves to better understand their forms and energy,” notes The Kid Should See This, underscoring the intensity of preparation required even for what may, at first, look like a novelty project. And if the still-young Mitsui is anything like his nineteenth-century countryman, he’ll be tempted to build the Great Wave again, and even better, a few more times in the decades to come.

via The Kid Should See This

Ai Weiwei Recreates Monet’s Water Lilies Triptych Using 650,000 Lego Bricks

The Frank Lloyd Wright LEGO Set

With 9,036 Pieces, the Roman Colosseum Is the Largest LEGO Set Ever

Why Did LEGO Become a Media Empire? Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #37

The Evolution of The Great Wave off Kanagawa: See Four Versions That Hokusai Painted Over Nearly 40 Years

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 ( None ) |

Political Scientist Ian Bremmer Breaks Down the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

in Current Affairs | November 9th, 2023

Ian Bremmer, a political scientist and president of Eurasia Group, has an intelligent, fair, and humane way of explaining crises around the world. That includes the current crisis in the Middle East. Above, he spends an hour discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its geo-political and historical context. Speaking with BigThink’s editor-in-chief, Robert Chapman-Smith, Bremmer delves “into internal politics in Israel — including growing dissent against the government, how the conflict in Gaza is being handled, the influence of hard-right political parties, and the impact of these factors on the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians.” Below you can find timestamps for the different subjects covered.

0:00 Palestinians forgotten
6:30 Israel’s domestic instability
13:17 Israel and Gulf states
19:28 Hamas’ strategy
27:06 Social media disinformation
37:20 Israel’s strategy and peace
44:40 U.S. support for Israel
49:32 World War 3?
54:07 Two-state solution

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( Comments Off on Political Scientist Ian Bremmer Breaks Down the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict ) |

One Hour of David Lynch Listening to Rain, Smoking & Reflecting on Art

in Art, Film, Life | November 9th, 2023

At this point, there’s no need to point out the dangers posed by smoking. Those who do it these days do it in full knowledge of the health risks involved, for reasons of their own. Sometimes those reasons are artistic ones: “I had this idea that you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it,” says David Lynch in Jon Nguyen’s documentary David Lynch: The Art Life, describing his youthful conception of what it was to be an artist. “Maybe girls come into it a little bit, but basically, it’s the incredible happiness of working and living that life.” Though much better known as a filmmaker than a painter, Lynch has never stopped living that life, cigarette-smoking and all.

The “you drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint” line surfaces in the audio mix of the video above, which mashes up that and other of Lynch’s observations from various places and times with looped footage of him silently smoking and listening to the rain falling outside. Most of his words here have to do with “the art life”: how he conceives of it, how he lives it, and how he made his way into it in the first place.

Some of them will be well familiar to longtime Lynch fans, not least his notion that, when it comes to getting the ideas with which he builds his work, the “little fish” swim on the surface of consciousness, but the “big fish” — the stranger, more powerful ideas that lead, presumably, to a Blue Velvet or a Mulholland Dr. — inhabit the kind of depths accessible only through meditation.

Along with such pieces of Lynchian advice come expressions of enthusiasm, memories from his younger days, and reflections on history, society, and nature, all of them similarly decontextualized and backed by an ominous-sounding piece of music. The resulting ambience isn’t entirely unlike that of Lynch’s deliberately disturbing sitcom Rabbits, but it also fits in with the burgeoning genre of long-form Youtube videos optimized for relaxation value. Thirty years ago, when each movie or television show he made seemed to surpass the last in sheer weirdness, we entered Lynch’s world in order to be unsettled, to see and hear things at once inexplicably compelling and obscurely horrifying; in the twenty-twenties, we go there to unwind.

Bertrand Russell Explains How Smoking Paradoxically Saved His Life

David Lynch Explains How Meditation Enhances Our Creativity

Cigarette Commercials from David Lynch, the Coen Brothers and Jean Luc Godard

An Anti, Anti-Smoking Announcement from John Waters

Two Short Films on Coffee and Cigarettes from Jim Jarmusch & Paul Thomas Anderson

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 ) |

Renaissance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades & Now You Can Hear the Songs Performed by Modern Singers

in History, Music | November 9th, 2023

Image courtesy of The Victoria and Albert Museum

On any given weekend, in any part of the state where I live, you can find yourself standing in a hall full of knives, if that’s the kind of thing you like to do. It is a very niche kind of experience. Not so in some other weapons expos—like the Arms and Armor galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where everyone, from the most warlike to the staunchest of pacifists, stands in awe at the intricate ornamentation and incredibly deft craftsmanship on display in the suits of armor, lances, shields, and lots and lots of knives.

We must acknowledge in such a space that the worlds of art and of killing for fame and profit were never very far apart during Europe’s late Medieval and Renaissance periods. Yet we encounter many similar artisanal instruments from the time, just as finely tuned, but made for far less belligerent purposes.

As Maya Corry of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge—an institution with its own impressive arms and armor collection—comments in the video above (at 2:30), one unusual kind of 16th century knife meant for the table, not the battlefield, offers “insight into that harmonious, audible aspect of family devotions,” prayer and song.

From the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge. (Johan Oosterman )

These knives, which have musical scores engraved in their blades, brought a table together in singing their prayers, and may have been used to carve the lamb or beef in their “striking balance of decorative and utilitarian function.” At least historians think such “notation knives,” which date from the early 1500s, were used at banquets. “The sharp, wide steel would have been ideal for cutting and serving meat,” writes Eliza Grace Martin at the WQXR blog, “and the accentuated tip would have made for a perfect skewer.” But as Kristen Kalber, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses the knives at the top of the post, tells us “diners in very grand feasts didn’t cut their own meat.” It’s unlikely they would have sung from the bloody knives held by their servants.

The knives’ true purpose “remains a mystery,” Martin remarks, like many “rituals of the Renaissance table.” Victoria and Albert Museum curator Kirstin Kennedy admits in the video above that “we are not entirely sure” what the “splendid knife” she holds was used for. But we do know that each knife had a different piece of music on each side, and that a set of them together contained different harmony parts in order to turn a roomful of diners into a chorus. One set of blades had the grace on one side, with the inscription, “the blessing of the table. May the three-in-one bless that which we are about to eat.” The other side holds the benediction, to be sung after the dinner: “The saying of grace. We give thanks to you God for your generosity.”

Common enough verbiage for any household in Renaissance Europe, but when sung, at least by a chorus from the Royal College of Music, who recreated the music and made the recordings here, the prayers are superbly graceful. Above, hear one version of the Grace and Benediction from the Victoria and Albert Museum knives; below, hear a second version. You can hear a captivating set of choral prayers from the Fitzwilliam Museum knives at WQXR’s site, recorded for the Fitzwilliam’s “Madonnas & Miracles” exhibit. We are as unlikely now to encounter singing kitchen knives as we are to run into a horse and rider bearing 100 pounds of finely-wrought wearable steel sculpture. Such strange artifacts seem to speak of a strange people who valued beauty whether carving up the main course or cutting down their enemies.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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

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