The Band’s Classic Song, “The Weight,” Sung by Robbie Robertson (RIP) and Musicians Around the World

in Life, Music | August 10th, 2023

Yesterday Robbie Robertson, the Canadian songwriter and guitarist for The Band, passed away at age 80 after a long illness. As a tribute, we’re bringing back a video that pays homage to “The Weight,” a song Robertson wrote for The Band’s influential 1968 album, “Music from Big Pink.” The video features cameos of Robertson himself, and also Ringo Starr and other special guests. Enjoy…

Robbie Robertson’s “The Weight,” the Band’s most beloved song, has the quality of Dylan’s impressionistic narratives. Elliptical vignettes that seem to make very little sense at first listen, with a chorus that cuts right to the heart of the human predicament. “Robertson admits in his autobiography,” notes Patrick Doyle at Rolling Stone, “that he struggled to articulate to producer John Simon what the song was even about.” An artist needn’t understand a creation for it to resonate with listeners.

A read of “The Weight”’s lyrics make its poignant themes evident—each stanza introduces characters who illustrate some sorrow or small kindness. The chorus offers what so many people seem to crave these days: a promise of rest from ceaseless toil, freedom from constant transactions, a community that shoulders everyone’s burdens…. “It’s almost like it’s good medicine,” Robertson told Doyle, “and it’s so suitable right now.” He refers specifically to the song’s revival in a dominant musical form of our isolation days—the online sing-along.

Though its lyrics aren’t nearly as easy to remember as, say, “Lean on Me,” Robertson’s classic, especially the big harmonies of its chorus (which everyone knows by heart), is ideal for big ensembles like the globe-spanning collection assembled by Playing for Change, “a group dedicated to ‘opening up how people see the world through the lens of music and art.” The group’s producers, Doyle writes, “recently spent two years filming artists around the world, from Japan to Bahrain to Los Angeles, performing the song,” with Ringo Starr on drums and Robertson on rhythm guitar. They began on the 50th anniversary of the song’s release.

The performances they captured are flawless, and mixed together seamlessly. If you want to know how this was achieved, watch the short behind-the-scenes video above with producer Sebastian Robertson, who happens to be Robbie’s son. He starts by praising the stellar contributions of Larkin Poe, two sisters whose rootsy country rock updates the Allman Brothers for the 21st century. But there are no slouches in the bunch (don’t be intimated out of your own group sing-alongs by the talent on display here). The song resonates in a way that connects, as “The Weight”’s chorus connects its non-sequitur stanzas, many disparate stories and voices.

Robertson was thrilled with the final product. “There’s a guy on a sitar!” he enthuses. “There’s a guy playing an oud, one of my favorite instruments.” The song suggests there’s “something spiritual, magical, unsuspecting” that can come from times of darkness, and that we’d all feel a whole lot better if we learned to take care of each other. The Playing for Change version “screams of unity,” he says, “and I hope it spreads.”

Stream Marc Maron’s Excellent, Long Interview with The Band’s Robbie Robertson

Watch The Band Play “The Weight,” “Up On Cripple Creek” and More in Rare 1970 Concert Footage

Martin Scorsese Captures Levon Helm and The Band Performing “The Weight” in The Last Waltz

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

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The Live Music Archive Lets You Stream/Download More Than 250,000 Concert Recordings–for Free

in Internet Archive, Music | August 10th, 2023

The Internet Archive maintains an enormous Live Music Archive of concert recordings, not all of them by the Grateful Dead. There are more than 17,000 such recordings in its Grateful Dead collection — 2,000 more than when last we featured it here on Open Culture — but one must compare that figure to the 250,000 items now in the whole of the LMA. “It would be a great story to have the first item as part of the collection to be some rare Grateful Dead recording from 1968,” says a post at the Internet Archive blog reflecting on the twentieth anniversary of the LMA last year, “but it is actually an unassuming Rusted Root audience recording from August 24, 2001.”

In addition to Rusted Root and the Grateful Dead, you can stream or download a wealth of recorded live shows from bands like Little Feat, Blues Traveler, My Morning Jacket, Los Lobos, and the Smashing Pumpkins, as well as singer-songwriters like Warren Zevon, Elliott Smith, Jack Johnson, Robyn Hitchcock, and John Mayer.

How wide or narrow a variety of musical experiences these names conjure up will, of course, depend on your perspective. But if they do share a major characteristic in common, it’s the fact, to their true fans, their live performances count for as much as — or, often, more than — their studio recordings. The truest (or at least most technically adept) such fans have donated their time and skills to make these live performances freely accessible and endlessly relivable on the LMA.

“For years, concert-goers recorded and traded tapes, but in 2002, the Internet Archive offered a reliable infrastructure to preserve performances files,” writes the Internet Archive’s Caralee Adams in a blog post marking the uploading of 250,000 recordings. “Partnering with the etree music community, the Live Music Archive was established to provide ongoing, free access to lossless and MP3-encoded audio recordings.” Over the past 21 years, “more than 8,000 artists have given permission to have recordings of their shows archived on the Live Music Archive, and users from around the world have listened to files more than 600 million times.” Whether or not you’re into jam bands, if you’ve ever enjoyed live music, have a look through the LMA’s 250 terabytes of recordings made in venues from stadiums to neighborhood coffee shops. There’ll be a concert for you, no charge for admission.

Stream 385,000 Vintage 78 RPM Records at the Internet Archive: Louis Armstrong, Glenn Miller, Billie Holiday & More

Stream a Massive Archive of Grateful Dead Concerts from 1965–1995

Download 10,000 of the First Recordings of Music Ever Made, Courtesy of the University of California-Santa Barbara

BBC Launches World Music Archive

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 Oldest Known Photographs of Rome (1841–1871)

in History, Photography | August 9th, 2023

The ravages of COVID-19 have been followed by the ravages of the post-pandemic tourism boom. If you’ve been reading recent coverage of aggressive travel and its discontents, you may well assume that it’s too late to have a genuine experience of, say, the great cities of Europe. Paris, Vienna, Barcelona: none are as they used to be, we’re told, and the same may even be true of the Eternal City. Lovers of such places were complaining about tourists decades and decades ago, of course, but how far back in time would one have to travel in order to take in the glories of a Rome that hadn’t yet fallen to the invading T‑shirt-and-flip-flopped hordes?

One would have to travel back about 150 years, at least according to the pictorial evidence provided in the video above from Youtuber Jarid Boosters, who appears to have a strong interest in historical photography.

His most popular videos include gatherings-up of pictures of old Los Angeles, of the lost architecture of the German Empire, of nineteenth-century Iran. In this new episode, he presents the earliest known photographs taken in Rome, which date from the early eighteen-forties to the early eighteen-seventies. Most were taken by an early Italian adopter of photography named Gioacchino Altobelli.

Soon after picking up a camera in the eighteen-thirties, Altobelli dedicated his career to “photographing some of the most ancient and most infamous sites throughout Rome,” says Boosters. “From 1841 through 1871, Altobelli, along with a team of other photographers, including Richard Jones, took it upon themselves to document the most famous and ancient city of Rome as completely as possible.” Their subjects included the still-recognizable likes of the Colosseum and Hadrian’s tomb, naturally, as well as the Arch of Drusus, the Temple of Venus and Roma, and the Porto di Ripetta. Having been demolished by the early twentieth century, the Porto di Ripetta stands out as one of the features that sets the Rome of Altobelli’s day apart from the Rome of today — well, that and the absence of selfie-takers.

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

Some of the Oldest Photos You Will Ever See: Discover Photographs of Greece, Egypt, Turkey & Other Mediterranean Lands (1840s)

Behold the Photographs of John Thomson, the First Western Photographer to Travel Widely Through China (1870s)

A Virtual Tour of Ancient Rome, Circa 320 CE: Explore Stunning Recreations of The Forum, Colosseum and Other Monuments

High-Resolution Walking Tours of Italy’s Most Historic Places: The Colosseum, Pompeii, St. Peter’s Basilica & More

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

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Watch Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with a Modern, New Electronic Soundtrack (1927)

in Film, Music | August 9th, 2023

From sound artist Tomer Baruch and drummer Alex Brajković comes a new electronic soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s century-old classic film, Metropolis. The new score comes with this preface:

One of the most significant themes in the dystopian feature is the blurred-to-nonexistent line separating man and machine; Human-like machines, Mechanical-humans, real-life android deepfakes, and above all the city of Metropolis, an enormous machine and within it men, slaved to maintain its operation. The theme that was disturbing in the beginning of the 20th century is as relevant as ever with the latest developments in AI, forcing us to rethink again what makes us human.

In analogy to that the soundtrack is based on archive recordings of early 20th century machinery, on top of which Tomer Baruch and Alex Brajkovic play analog synthesizers and drums. They interface with the machines and embody a relentlessly repetitive mechanical motion, one which is usually sequenced or programmed. By creating music which is in itself blurring the line between man and machine, by subjecting themselves to machine-like patterns, the musicians become a part of Metropolis, creating a disillusioned, intensified and darker than ever soundtrack for the film.

Baruch and Alex Brajković created the soundtrack for the Sounds of Silence Film Festival, Den Haag in 2019. Stream it above.

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Read the Original 32-Page Program for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

See Metropolis‘ Scandalous Dance Scene Colorized, Enhanced, and Newly Soundtracked

Behold Beautiful Original Movie Posters for Metropolis from France, Sweden, Germany, Japan & Beyond

Watch Metropolis’ Cinematically Innovative Dance Scene, Restored as Fritz Lang Intended It to Be Seen (1927)

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The First Masterpieces to Depict Regular People: An Introduction to the Reformation Painting of Pieter Bruegel the Elder

in Art, History, Life | August 8th, 2023

The skating scene that opens A Charlie Brown Christmas is such an evocative, archetypical winter vision, it’s likely to stir nostalgia even in those whose childhoods didn’t involve gliding across frozen ponds.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder created a similar scene in the 16th-century. His changed the course of Western art.

Prior to his 1558 Ice Skating before the Gate of Saint George, Antwerp, Western artists mostly stuck to VIP portraits, and religious and mythological subjects.

As the Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak, explains above, the rare exceptions to these themes were intended to reinforce some moral instruction, often via buffoonish depictions of regular people behaving badly.

The couple in Quentin Matsys’ The Money Changer and His Wife are far less grotesque than the central figure of his satirical portrait, The Ugly Duchess, but the symbolism and the wife’s keen focus on the coins her husband is counting point to a sort of spiritual ugliness, namely a preoccupation with material wealth.

Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Loose Company and Pieter Aertsen’s The Egg Dance are both set in brothels, where debauchery is in ample evidence.

Bruegel painted some works in this vein too. The Fight Between Carnival and Lent pits pious churchgoers against a plump butcher riding a barrel, a guy with a pot on his head, and many more revelers acting the fool.

His skating scene, by contrast, passes no judgements. It’s just an observation of ordinary citizens amusing themselves outdoors during the ‘Little Ice Age’ that gripped Western Europe in the mid 16th century.

Adults bind runner-like blades to their feet with laces…

A small child uses poles to propel himself on a sled made from the mandible of a cow or horse…

A background figure plays with a hockey stick…

Less gifted skaters cut ungainly figures as they attempt to remain upright. (Pity the poor woman sprawled in the middle, whose skirts have flipped up to expose her bare heinie…)

Bruegel’s humanist portrayal of a crowd engaged in a recognizable, populist activity proved wildly popular with the growing merchant class. They might not have been able to afford an original painting, but prints of the engraving, published by the wonderfully named Hieronymus Cock, were well within their reach.

The everyday subject matter that so captivated them was made possible in part by the Protestant Reformation, which came to a head with the Iconoclastic Fury, eight years after “Peasant” Bruegel’s densely populated image appeared.

The image wins the approval of modern skating buffs too.

American field hockey pioneer Constance M.K. Applebee included it in her 20s era magazine, The Sportswoman. So did sportswriter Arthur R. Goodfellow in 1972’s Wonderful world of skates: Seventeen centuries of skating which prompted figure skating historian Ryan Stevens to quote a translated Old Flemish inscription on his blog:

Skating on ice outside the walls of Antwerp,

Some slide hither, others hence, all have onlookers everywhere;

One trips, another falls, some stand upright and chat.

This picture also tells one how we skate through our lives,

And glide along our paths; one like a fool, another like a wise;

On this perishable earth, brittler than ice.

Explore another of Pieter Bruegel’s teeming depictions of ordinary life with the Khan Academy/Smart History’s breakdown of 1567’s Peasant Wedding, below.

What Makes Vermeer’s The Milkmaid a Masterpiece?: A Video Introduction

A Short Introduction to Caravaggio, the Master Of Light

A Brief Animated History of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses & the Reformation–Which Changed Europe and Later the World

– 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 ) |

William Friedkin, RIP: Why the 80s Action Movie To Live and Die in L.A. Is His “Subversive Masterpiece”

in Film | August 8th, 2023

William Friedkin, who died yesterday, will be most widely remembered as the director of nineteen-seventies genre hits like The French Connection and The Exorcist. But it was in the subsequent decade that he made his most impressive picture, at least according to the Paper Starship video essay above. As its narrator Marcus Muscato puts it, Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. came out in 1985 as “a perfect blending of the crime and renegade cop genres, drenched brilliantly in eighties aesthetic and nihilistic existential glory.” Over nearly half an hour, he breaks down every major element of this “subversive masterpiece,” from its simultaneously slick and dingy look and feel to its technical and narrative brazenness to its soundtrack by none other than Wang Chung.

Like Friedkin’s earlier crime films, To Live and Die in L.A. traces “the thin line between cops and criminals, stating how some of the best cops have some criminal in them, or have been criminals themselves.” It does most of this through the character of Secret Service agent Richard Chance, played by William Petersen as a kind of “nihilistic Fonzie.” In pursuit of Willem Dafoe’s sinister artist-counterfeiter Rick Masters, Chance shows no caution, and his daring-to-the-point-of-reckless dedication. Friedkin matched it with his own “spontaneous, anti-authoritarian guerrilla filmmaking,” covertly shooting and using performances his actors (whom he wasn’t above encouraging to do some rule-breaking of their own) had been led to believe were rehearsals.

Friedkin and his collaborators meticulously planned and painstakingly executed other sequences, such as the central car chase. “The chase isn’t just on a freeway. It goes the wrong way down the freeway,” wrote Roger Ebert in his contemporary review. “I don’t know how Friedkin choreographed this scene, and I don’t want to know.” However astonishing (and anxiety-inducing) it remains today, it wouldn’t be as effective without the “hypnotizing yet energetic atmosphere” created throughout the film by the music of Wang Chung, a band both indelibly associated with the eighties and also possessed of a penchant for unconventional, even sinister sonic textures. That’s true even of their earlier singles: witness how well “Wait,” released in 1983, suits the vertiginous plunge of the film’s startling but chillingly inevitable ending.

Yet even this conclusion is just one memorable part among many. “Along with one of the greatest chase scenes, the film contains one of the most authentic and aesthetically pleasing depictions of the money counterfeiting process,” Muscato says. Those with an aversion to spoilers would do best to watch the movie itself before the video essay, but like the work of any respectable auteur, it draws its power from much more than plot twists. Its main theme, as Friedkin himself put it, was the “counterfeit world: counterfeit emotions, counterfeit money, the counterfeit superstructure of the Secret Service. Everyone in the film has a kind of counterfeit motive.” Given that the world has become no more real over the past four decades, perhaps it’s no wonder that To Live and Die in L.A. holds up so well today.

Watch Randy Newman’s Tour of Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard, and You’ll Love L.A. Too

Who Designed the 1980s Aesthetic?: Meet the Memphis Group, the Designers Who Created the 80s Iconic Look

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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When Mississippi Tried to Ban Sesame Street for Showing a “Highly Integrated Cast” (1970)

in K-12, Life, Television | August 7th, 2023

On November 10, 1969, Sesame Street made its broadcast debut.

The very first lines were spoken by Gordon (Matt Robinson), a Black schoolteacher who’s showing a new kid around the neighborhood, introducing her to a couple of other kids, along with Sesame Street adult mainstays Bob, Susan, and Mr. Hooper, and Big Bird, whose appearance had yet to find its final form:

Sally, you’ve never seen a street like Sesame Street. Everything happens here. You’re gonna love it.

The milieu would have felt familiar to children growing up on New York City’s Upper West Side, or Harlem or the Bronx. While not every block was as well integrated as Sesame Street’s cheerful, deliberately multicultural, brownstone setting, any subway ride was an opportunity to rub shoulders with New Yorkers of all races, classes and creeds.

Not six months later, the all-White Mississippi State Commission for Educational Television voted 3 to 2 to remove Sesame Street from their state’s airwaves.

A disgruntled pro-Sesame commission member leaked the reason to The New York Times:

Some of the members of the commission were very much opposed to showing the series because it uses a highly integrated cast of children.

The whistleblower also intimated that those same members objected to the fact that Robinson and Loretta Long, the actor portraying Susan, were Black.

They claimed Mississippi was “not yet ready” for such a show, even though Sesame Street was an immediate hit. Professionals in the fields of psychology, education, and medicine had consulted on its content, helping it secure a significant amount of federal and private grants prior to filming. The show had been lauded for its main mission — preparing American children from low-income backgrounds for kindergarten through lively educational programming with ample representation.

Kids growing up in sheltered, all-white enclaves stood to gain, too, by being welcomed into a television neighborhood where Black and white families were shown happily coexisting, treating each other with kindness, patience and respect. (Sonia Manzano and Emilio Delgado, who played Maria and Luis, joined the cast soon after.)

Even though Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee also moved to pre-empt the innovative hit show, the government appointees on the Mississippi State Commission for Educational Television who’d ousted Sesame Street found themselves outnumbered when Jackson residents of all ages staged a protest in front of Mississippi Public Broadcasting’s HQ.]

The Delta Democrat-Times published an editorial piece arguing that “there is no state which more desperately needs every educational tool it can find than Mississippi:”

There is no educational show on the market today better prepared than Sesame Street to teach preschool children what many cannot or do not learn in their homes….The needs are immense.

After 22 days, the ban was rolled back and Sesame Street was reinstated.

That fall, the cast made a pitstop in Jackson during a 14-city national tour. Susan, Gordon, Bob, Mr. Hooper and Big Bird sang and joked with audience members as part of an event co-sponsored by the very same commission that had tried to blackball them, and left without having received a formal apology.

Sesame Street has stayed true to its progressive agenda throughout its fifty+ year history, a commitment that seems more essential than ever in 2023.

Below, Elmo, a Muppet who rose through the ranks to become a Sesame Street star engages in an entry-level conversation about race with some newer characters in an episode from two years ago.

The Sesame Workshop recommends it for viewers aged 1 to 4, though it seems our country doesn’t lack for adult citizens who could do with a refresher on the subject…

Philip Glass Composes Music for a Sesame Street Animation (1979)

Watch Jazzy Spies: 1969 Psychedelic Sesame Street Animation, Featuring Grace Slick, Teaches Kids to Count

– 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.

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How to Enter Flow State, Increase Your Ability to Concentrate, and Let Your Ego Fall Away : An Animated Primer

in Psychology | August 7th, 2023

One needs hardly state that human beings desire things like wealth, power, and love. But it does bear repeating that, on a deeper level, we all desire flow. To say this is to repeat, in one form or another, the theories of the late psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. When we enter a flow state, Csikszentmihalyi once said in an interview, “the ego falls away,” and it is those words that open the animated TED-Ed lesson above. “A unique mental state of effortless engagement,” says its narrator, flow has been defined as “an altered state of consciousness,” and those who enter it “feel so effortlessly engaged in a task that time seems to fly by.”

If you’re a normal twenty-first-century person, this may not sound like an especially familiar experience. In fact, you may well think of your working life as more characterized by “cycles of procrastination, when it can feel impossible to start an activity.”

During flow, by contrast, “it can feel difficult to stop”; “feelings of worry or self-judgment” are diminished; a “sense of oneness” can arise between yourself and your activity. This state occurs when you do “intrinsically motivating” work, and even more so when the difficulty of that work matches or just slightly exceeds your skill level: “If a task is too easy, you may get distracted or feel bored. If it’s too challenging, you may become discouraged.”

To maximize your own chances of finding flow, engage in “activities that have clear goals and allow you to assess your progress along the way.” If possible, do it in “a quiet environment, free from distracting noises or devices.” Before you start, “break your tasks into small, specific segments that are easy to track and learn from,” and also “set clear end goals that are challenging, but not frustratingly so.” Above all, “don’t focus too much on reaching flow; that sort of distraction might just prevent you from finding it.” The talks by Flow Research Collective founder Steven Kotler and by Cskizentmihalyi himself previously featured here on Open Culture can supplement the TED-Ed lesson — and, perhaps, reassure you that the strange puckered expressions on the face of its characters are not, in fact, a requirement for entering the flow state.

How to Get into a Creative “Flow State”: A Short Masterclass

Albert Einstein Tells His Son The Key to Learning & Happiness is Losing Yourself in Creativity (or “Finding Flow”)

How to Enter a ‘Flow State’ on Command: Peak Performance Mind Hack Explained in 7 Minutes

The Philosophy of “Flow”: A Brief Introduction to Taoism

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 ) |

Novelist Michael Chabon Digitally Re-Creates the Science Fiction & Fantasy Section of His Favorite 1970s Bookstore

in Books, History, Sci Fi | August 4th, 2023

Michael Chabon was born in 1963, which placed him well to be influenced by the unpredictable, indiscriminate, and often lurid cultural cross-currents of the nineteen-seventies. He seemed to have received much of that influence at Page One, the local bookstore in his hometown of Columbia, Maryland — and it was to Page One that his imagination drifted during the long days of the COVID-19 pandemic spent in his personal library. “As I sat around communing with my tattered old friends,” he writes, “I discovered that I retained a sharp recollection — title, author, cover design — of what felt like every single book that had ever appeared on those tall shelves along the left wall of Page One, toward the back, between 1972 and 1980.”

That was the store’s “Science Fiction & Fantasy” section, which in that period was well-stocked with titles by such stars of those genres as Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. LeGuin, Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, C. J. Cherryh, Michael Moorcock, and Philip K. Dick.

Or at least it did if Chabon’s digital re-creation “The Shelves of Time” is anything to go by. Downloadable here in “small” (96 MB), “large” (283 MB) and “very large” (950 MB) formats, the lavish image functions as what Chabon calls a “time telescope,” offering “a look back at the visuals that embodied and accompanied my early aspirations as a writer, and at the mass-market splendor of paperback sf and fantasy in those days.”

“I’m the same age as Chabon, and I was also a bookstore rat, staring at these exact same covers and agonizing over which one I’d lay down my $1.25 for,” writes Ruben Bolling at Boing Boing. “Just look at those beautiful John Carter of Mars covers. I collected and cherished these, and the Tarzan series.” Bolling also highlights the adaptations Chabon includes on these re-imagined shelves: there’s “the James Blish Star Trek series, just as I remember it,” and also the novelization of Star Wars, which he read before the opening of the film itself. “So instead of experiencing the movie as it should have been — as campy movie fun — I experienced it as an adaptation of a literary work.”

Despite being a couple of decades younger, I, too, remember these covers vividly. My own sci-fi-and-fantasy period occurred in the late nineties, by which time these very same mass-market paperbacks from the seventies were turning up in quantity at used bookstores. For me, few images from these genres of that era could trigger reading memories as rich as those Ballantine covers of The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider, and Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, a British specialist in social and environmental catastrophe. Like many readers, I put this sort of thing aside after a few years, but Chabon has proven infinitely more dedicated: half a century after his days haunting Page One, his mission to “drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it,” as critic Ruth Franklin once described it, continues apace.

via Boing Boing

Novelist Michael Chabon Sang in a Punk Band During the ’80s: Newly Released Audio Gives Proof

600+ Covers of Philip K. Dick Novels from Around the World: Greece, Japan, Poland & Beyond

The Dune Encyclopedia: The Controversial, Definitive Guide to the World of Frank Herbert’s Sci-Fi Masterpiece (1984)

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: Animation Concepts

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

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 ( 4 ) |

Watch Oppenheimer: The Decision to Drop the Bomb, a 1965 Documentary Featuring J. Robert Oppenheimer

in Film, History | August 4th, 2023

If you’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s new Oppenheimer film, you may want to turn your attention to another film, the 1965 documentary called Oppenheimer: The Decision to Drop the Bomb. With it, you can hear directly from J. Robert Oppenheimer and other architects of the first atomic bomb. Released on NBC News’ official YouTube channel, the film captures their reflections two decades after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also features a coda by presidential historian Michael Beschloss. As one YouTube commenter put it, “This is something everyone should see. I was totally engrossed and captivated. History brought to life by the very people that were involved. Thank you NBC archives.” You can watch it above…

Oppenheimer: The Decision to Drop the Bomb will be added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection: 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 13 ) |

Behold a Digitization of “The Most Beautiful of All Printed Books,” The Kelmscott Chaucer

in Books | August 3rd, 2023

The history of the printed book stretches back well over a millennium, the title of the oldest known book currently being held by a Tang Dynasty work of the Diamond Sutra. But what about the most beautiful book? As a contender for that spot, Michael Goodman (previously featured here on Open Culture for his projects on the illustrations of Shakespeare and Dickens) has put forth the Kelmscott Chaucer, including the testimony of no less a literary figure than W.B. Yeats, who called it “the most beautiful of all printed books.” Goodman has also made the book freely available for our perusal on his new web site, The Kelmscott Chaucer Online.

“William Morris, the nineteenth-century designer, social reformer and writer, founded the Kelmscott Press towards the end of his life,” says the web site of the British Library. “He wanted to revive the skills of hand printing, which mechanization had destroyed, and restore the quality achieved by the pioneers of printing in the 15th century.”

Published in 1896, the Kelmscott Chaucer, fully titled The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer now newly imprinted, “is the triumph of the press. Its 87 wood-cut illustrations are by Edward Burne-Jones, the celebrated Victorian painter, who was a life-long friend of Morris. The illustrations were engraved by William Harcourt Hooper and printed in black, with shoulder and side titles.”

You can view all these elements and more, digitized in detail and entirely downloadable, on Goodman’s site, organized into separate sections dedicated to its illustrations, full pages, borders, frames, and even its decorated words — the likes of which we seldom, if ever, see in the printed books of our own, infinitely higher-tech century. “The edition I have used for this project is a facsimile from the 1950s that has sat on my shelf for many years,” Goodman notes. Given how few copies of the Kelmscott Chaucer were originally produced, thirteen copies on vellum, and another 58 on pig’s skin, “any special collection’s library who are lucky enough to own an original copy are likely to be very reluctant to embark upon any form of digitization due to the significant risk of damage that the process could inflict upon the book.”

If you’d like a closer look at the genuine article, which is much larger than the digitization may let on, you can get one in the video just above, hosted by London rare book dealer Adam Douglas. “It’s obvious as soon as we open to the beginning how much care and attention has been lavished on this book,” he says, highlighting the “beautiful designs in the pre-Raphaelite manner,” the woodcut initials throughout (no two of which are alike), and the “wonderful proportions” that match the Golden Ratio. It takes a certain sophistication, or at least knowledge of the history of printing and book design, to fully appreciate the Kelmscott Chaucer. But thanks to Goodman, younger readers — even much younger readers — can enjoy it in coloring-book form.

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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 ) |

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