The Contributions of Women Philosophers Recovered by the New Project Vox Website

in Philosophy | April 14th, 2015

“If I am con­demned, I shall be anni­hi­lat­ed to noth­ing: but my ambi­tion is such, as I would either be a world, or noth­ing.” — Mar­garet Cavendish (1623–1673)

A phi­los­o­phy can­di­date or fem­i­nist schol­ar ven­tur­ing into Duke Uni­ver­si­ty’s new Project Vox web­site may expe­ri­ence a sen­sa­tion akin to dis­cov­er­ing King Tut’s tomb.

Such trea­sures! Not just a scrap here and a morsel there, but a seri­ous trove of infor­ma­tion about phi­los­o­phy writ by females!

Lady Damaris Masham (1658–1708), Mar­garet Cavendish (1623–1673), Vis­count­ess Anne Con­way (1631–1679), and Émi­lie Du Châtelet were high­ly thought of in their day, and praised by male con­tem­po­raries includ­ing John Locke.

Project Vox seeks to res­ur­rect their over­looked-to-the-point-of-undis­cov­ered con­tri­bu­tions by pub­lish­ing their long out of print texts, some trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish for the first time. Bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion and sec­ondary resources will pro­vide a sense of each philoso­pher as well as her phi­los­o­phy.

Even­tu­al­ly, the site will include a forum where teach­ers can share les­son plans and arti­cles. Male phi­los­o­phy doc­tor­ates cur­rent­ly out­num­ber their female coun­ter­parts by an over­whelm­ing num­ber, but that may change as young women begin to see them­selves reflect­ed in the cur­ricu­lum.

Edu­ca­tors! Edu­cate thy­selves! Project Vox is the Guer­ril­la Girl of ear­ly mod­ern phi­los­o­phy!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

Down­load 110 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks: From Aris­to­tle to Niet­zsche & Wittgen­stein

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

Han­nah Arendt Dis­cuss­es Phi­los­o­phy, Pol­i­tics & Eich­mann in Rare 1964 TV Inter­view

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

Watch La Linea, the Popular 1970s Italian Animations Drawn with a Single Line

in Animation, Art, Video - Arts & Culture | April 10th, 2015

Sim­plic­i­ty is not the goal. It is the by-prod­uct of a good idea and mod­est expec­ta­tions.

Thus spake design­er Paul Rand, a man who knew some­thing about mak­ing an impres­sion, hav­ing cre­at­ed icon­ic logos for such imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able brands as ABC, IBM, and UPS.

An exam­ple of Rand’s obser­va­tion, La Lin­ea, aka Mr. Line, a beloved and decep­tive­ly sim­ple car­toon char­ac­ter drawn with a sin­gle unbro­ken line, began as a shill for an Ital­ian cook­ware com­pa­ny. No mat­ter what he man­ages to get up to in two or three min­utes, it’s deter­mined that he’ll even­tu­al­ly butt up against the lim­i­ta­tions of his lin­eal real­i­ty.

His chat­ter­ing, apoplec­tic response proved such a hit with view­ers, that a few episodes in, the cook­ware con­nec­tion was sev­ered. Mr. Line went on to become a glob­al star in his own right, appear­ing in 90 short ani­ma­tions through­out his 15-year his­to­ry, start­ing in 1971. Find many of the episodes on Youtube here.

The for­mu­la does sound rather sim­ple. Ani­ma­tor Osval­do Cavan­doli starts each episode by draw­ing a hor­i­zon­tal line in white grease pen­cil. The line takes on human form. Mr. Line’s a zesty guy, the sort who throws him­self into what­ev­er it is he’s doing, whether ogling girls at the beach, play­ing clas­si­cal piano or ice skat­ing.

When­ev­er he bumps up against an obstacle—an uncross­able gap in his base­line, an inad­ver­tent­ly explod­ed penis—he calls upon the god­like hand of the ani­ma­tor to make things right.

(Bawdy humor is a sta­ple of La Lin­ea, though the visu­al for­mat keeps things fair­ly chaste. Innu­en­do aside, it’s about as graph­ic as a big rig’s sil­hou­et­ted mud­flap girl.)

Voiceover artist Car­lo Bono­mi con­tributes a large part of the charm. Mr. Line may speak with an Ital­ian accent, but his vocal track is 90% impro­vised gib­ber­ish, with a smat­ter­ing of Lom­bard dialect. Watch him chan­nel the char­ac­ter in the record­ing booth, below.

I love hear­ing him take the even-keeled Cavan­doli to task. I don’t speak Ital­ian, but I had the sen­sa­tion I under­stood where both play­ers are com­ing from in the scene below.

Watch a big two-hour marathon of La Lin­ea at the top, or the com­plete col­lec­tion here.

via E.D.W. Lynch on Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dis­ney Car­toon That Intro­duced Mick­ey Mouse & Ani­ma­tion with Sound (1928)

Con­fi­dence: The Car­toon That Helped Amer­i­ca Get Through the Great Depres­sion (1933)

Japan­ese Car­toons from the 1920s and 30s Reveal the Styl­is­tic Roots of Ani­me

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

Watch the Only Known Footage of Anne Frank

in History | April 10th, 2015

Almost all of us have read the sto­ry of Anne Frank, but we sure­ly all pic­ture it quite dif­fer­ent­ly. Most of us have seen the pho­tos used on the var­i­ous cov­ers of The Diary of a Young Girl, and some of us have even gone to Ams­ter­dam and walked through the home in which she wrote it. But now, thanks to the inter­net, we have access to his­tor­i­cal imagery that can help every­one envi­sion the life of Anne Frank a bit more clear­ly.

Many years ago, we fea­tured the only exist­ing film of Frank, a 20-sec­ond clip from July 22, 1941 in which she looks on as a bride and groom pass below her win­dow. Though short, the invalu­able footage breathes a sur­pris­ing amount of life into the cul­tur­al image of per­haps the 20th cen­tu­ry’s most impor­tant diarist.

Even more comes from the 3D tour of her house and hid­ing place more recent­ly made avail­able online. The tour’s inter­face, with which any­one who played 1990s graph­ic adven­ture games like Myst will feel imme­di­ate­ly famil­iar, gives you a first-per­son view behind the book­case which for two years kept the Frank fam­i­ly’s liv­ing quar­ters a secret from Ams­ter­dam’s Nazi occu­piers.

The tour’s cre­ators have loaded the dig­i­tal recre­ation of the house with dif­fer­ent spots that, when clicked, tell in audio of a cer­tain aspect of the Franks’ expe­ri­ence there. The far­ther we get from the Sec­ond World War, the more these events might seem, to stu­dents read­ing about them for the first time, like a piece of capital‑H His­to­ry dis­con­nect­ed from their own expe­ri­ence. But resources like these keep the sto­ry of Anne Frank and its lessons feel­ing as imme­di­ate as they should.

You can enter the tour here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mem­o­ry of the Camps (1985): The Holo­caust Doc­u­men­tary that Trau­ma­tized Alfred Hitch­cock, and Remained Unseen for 40 Years

Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945

Did Hol­ly­wood Movies Stu­dios “Col­lab­o­rate” with Hitler Dur­ing WW II? His­to­ri­an Makes the Case

Don­ald Duck’s Bad Nazi Dream and Four Oth­er Dis­ney Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons from World War II

How Alice Herz-Som­mer, the Old­est Holo­caust Sur­vivor, Sur­vived the Hor­rif­ic Ordeal with Music

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Paper Animation Tells Curious Story of How a Meteorologist Theorized Pangaea & Continental Drift (1910)

in Animation, Science | April 9th, 2015

Over a cen­tu­ry ago, the Ger­man mete­o­rol­o­gist Alfred Wegen­er (1880–1930) put forth a the­o­ry that changed how we look at an entire­ly dif­fer­ent sci­en­tif­ic dis­ci­pline — geol­o­gy. He argued that the con­ti­nents once formed a sin­gle land­mass called “Pan­gaea,” and that con­ti­nen­tal drift moved them apart slow­ly but ever so sure­ly. The sto­ry of how a mete­o­rol­o­gist changed the face of geol­o­gy gets told in a nice paper ani­ma­tion cre­at­ed by The New York Times. It comes nar­rat­ed by Mott Greene (author of the forth­com­ing book Alfred Wegen­er: Sci­ence, Explo­ration and the The­o­ry of Con­ti­nen­tal Drift) and Nao­mi Oreskes, Pro­fes­sor of the His­to­ry of Sci­ence at Har­vard. You can read the NYTimes arti­cle asso­ci­at­ed with the edu­ca­tion­al video here. Cours­es on geol­o­gy can be found in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Notebook on Cities and Culture’s Yearlong Podcast Exploration of Seattle Is Kickstarting Now

in Podcasts, Travel | April 8th, 2015

Just about as long as I’ve writ­ten here at Open Cul­ture, I’ve also host­ed and pro­duced Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture, a world-trav­el­ing pod­cast ded­i­cat­ed to in-depth con­ver­sa­tions with inter­est­ing peo­ple about the work they do and the world cities they do it in. Over five sea­sons so far, I’ve record­ed each and every inter­view “on loca­tion,” from Los Ange­les to Kyoto to Lon­don to Port­land to Mex­i­co City to Copen­hagen to Van­cou­ver to Seoul. Next comes the show’s sixth and most in-depth sea­son yet: A Year in Seat­tle.

Think of that name, and you think of the city of rain, of grunge, of Microsoft and Ama­zon, of the Space Nee­dle, of Frasi­er Crane, of Bud­dy Bradley, of Archie McPhee, of sleep­less­ness, of Star­bucks. But hav­ing spent my own ado­les­cence hang­ing out there, I know Seat­tle as even more than that, and it’s only grown more inter­est­ing since I’ve grown up. Now to explore the Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture way, through a year of in-depth con­ver­sa­tions with Seattle’s nov­el­ists, jour­nal­ists, com­ic artists, film­mak­ers, broad­cast­ers, explor­ers, gourmets, aca­d­e­mics, archi­tects, plan­ners, cul­tur­al cre­ators, inter­na­tion­al­ists, observers of the urban scene, and more.

As with every sea­son, I’m rais­ing the bud­get for Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture’s Year in Seat­tle on Kick­starter. If feel so inclined, you can have a look at its Kick­starter page and find out how you can help make it a hap­pen, receive post­cards from Seat­tle, or even get your project or mes­sage men­tioned at the top of every show.

And as a spe­cial pre­view, I’ve just post­ed an inter­view with com­ic artist Peter Bagge, cre­ator of the leg­endary alt-com­ic series Hate, author of the graph­ic nov­els Apoc­a­lypse Nerd, Oth­er Lives, Reset, Woman Rebel: The Mar­garet Sanger Sto­ry, and just about as Seat­tle a fig­ure as they come. There are 51 more where that came from — but only if we can suc­cess­ful­ly Kick­start the sea­son by this Sat­ur­day morn­ing at 10:00, Pacif­ic time.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Artists Illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy Through the Ages: Doré, Blake, Botticelli, Mœbius & More

in Art, Literature | April 8th, 2015

For a book about medieval the­ol­o­gy and tor­ture, filled with learned clas­si­cal allu­sions and obscure char­ac­ters from 13th cen­tu­ry Flo­ren­tine soci­ety, Dante Alighieri’s Infer­no, first book of three in his Divine Com­e­dy, has had con­sid­er­able stay­ing pow­er, work­ing its way into pop cul­ture with a video game, sev­er­al films, and a bale­ful appear­ance on Mad Men. While the Mad Men ref­er­ence may be the more lit­er­ary, the for­mer two may hint at the more promi­nent rea­son the Infer­no has cap­ti­vat­ed read­ers, play­ers, and view­ers for ages: the lengthy poem’s intense­ly visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of human extrem­i­ty makes for some unfor­get­table images. Like Achilles drag­ging Hec­tor behind his char­i­ot in Homer, who can for­get the lake of ice Dante encoun­ters in the ninth cir­cle of Hell, in which (in John Ciardi’s mod­ern trans­la­tion), he finds “souls of the last class,” which “shone below the ice like straws in glass,” and, frozen to his chest, “the Emper­or of the Uni­verse of Pain,” almost too enor­mous for descrip­tion and as hideous as he once was beau­ti­ful.

Like the rest of us, artists have been drawn to Dante’s extra­or­di­nary images and exten­sive fan­ta­sy geog­ra­phy since the Divine Com­e­dy first appeared (1308–1320). In pro­lif­ic French artist Gus­tave Doré’s ren­der­ing of the ninth cir­cle scene, above, Satan is a huge, beard­ed grump with wings and horns. Doré so des­per­ate­ly want­ed to illus­trate the Divine Com­e­dy (find in our col­lec­tion of 700 Free eBooks) that he financed the first book in 1861 with his own mon­ey.

After­wards, as Mike Springer wrote in a pre­vi­ous post on Dore’s illus­tra­tions, his pub­lish­er Louis Hachette agreed to put out the next two books with the telegram, “Suc­cess! Come quick­ly! I am an ass!” Doré’s eerie, beau­ti­ful draw­ings are just one such set of famous illus­tra­tions we’ve fea­tured on the site pre­vi­ous­ly.

Anoth­er artist per­fect­ly suit­ed to the task, William Blake, whose own poet­ry braved sim­i­lar heights and depths as Dante’s, took on the Infer­no at the end of his life. While he didn’t live to com­plete the engrav­ings, his unset­tling, yet high­ly clas­si­cal, ren­der­ings of the poet the Ital­ians call il Som­mo Poeta—“The Supreme Poet”—certainly do jus­tice to the vivid­ness and hor­ror of Dante’s descrip­tions. Above, see Blake’s 1827 inter­pre­ta­tion of the thief Agno­lo Brunelleschi attacked by a six-foot­ed ser­pent in Can­to twen­ty-five, a scene reprint­ed many times in col­or.

Cen­turies ear­li­er, Renais­sance mas­ter San­dro Bot­ti­cel­li made an attempt at all three books, though he fell short of fin­ish­ing them. See his “Pan­der­ers, Flat­ter­ers” above, the only draw­ing he made in col­or, and more black and white illus­tra­tions here.

Like the mak­ers of films and video games, artists have main­ly cho­sen to focus on the most bizarre and har­row­ing of the three books, the Infer­no. One mod­ern artist who undoubt­ed­ly would have had a fas­ci­nat­ing take on Dante’s hell instead illus­trat­ed his heav­en, being cho­sen to imag­ine Par­adiso by the Milan’s Nuages Gallery in 1999. I refer to graph­ic artist Jean Giraud, known in the world of fan­ta­sy, sci-fi, and comics as Mœbius. Despite some arguable artis­tic mis­cast­ing (Mœbius did after all make films like Alien and Tron “even weird­er”), the French artist took what may be the least visu­al­ly inter­est­ing of Dante’s three Divine Com­e­dy books and cre­at­ed some incred­i­bly strik­ing images. See one above, and more at our pre­vi­ous post.

Oth­er artists, like Alber­to Mar­ti­ni, who worked on his Divine Com­e­dy for over forty years, have pro­duced ter­ri­fy­ing images (above) and high­ly styl­ized ones—like these medieval illu­mi­na­tions from a 1450 man­u­script. The range of inter­pre­ta­tions all have one thing in common—their sub­ject mat­ter seems to allow artists almost unlim­it­ed free­dom to imag­ine Dante’s weird cos­mog­ra­phy. No vision of the Infer­no or the lofti­er realms above it can go too far, it seems, even in the absurd video game finale you real­ly have to see to believe. Some­how, I think Dante would approve… well… most­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gus­tave Doré’s Exquis­ite Engrav­ings of Cer­vantes’ Don Quixote

William Blake’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost

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

Listen to Nick Cave’s Lecture on the Art of Writing Sublime Love Songs (1999)

in Music | April 2nd, 2015

Let’s take a love song—let’s take Huey Lewis and the News’ “Pow­er of Love,” why not? Catchy, right? And that video? Back to the Future! That takes you back, doesn’t it? Yeah…. Now let’s ask some hard ques­tions. Is this song an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the human emo­tion we call “love”? All upbeat synths and blar­ing horns? Real­ly? But then, there’s Lewis, who, right out of the gate, acknowl­edges that love, “a curi­ous thing,” can “make one man weep” and “anoth­er man sing.” I imag­ine that love can make a woman feel the same. A curi­ous thing. Huey Lewis’ 80s anthem may not sound like love, nec­es­sar­i­ly, but he’s a smart enough song­writer to know that love often uses its pow­er for ill—“it’s strong and sud­den and it’s cru­el some­times.”

Let’s take anoth­er song­writer, one with a dark­er vision, a more lit­er­ary bent, Nick Cave. The Aus­tralian post-punk croon­er and for­mer leader of chaot­ic punk band The Birth­day Par­ty wrote a song called “Peo­ple Ain’t No Good,” the most uni­ver­sal of laments, after a breakup. See him, in the live ver­sion in Poland at the top, declare in a mourn­ful, soul­ful bari­tone accom­pa­nied only by a piano, the truth of no-good­ness. Unlike Huey Lewis, this song allows for no qual­i­ty, pow­er of love or oth­er­wise, to “change a hawk into a lit­tle white dove.” It’s Niet­zschean in its trag­ic dis­ap­point­ment. And yet, such is the pow­er of Nick Cave, to write a song of no good­ness that sounds like a hymn of praise. The dual­i­ty Cave embraces gets a part auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal, part gospel treat­ment in the lec­ture above (“The Secret Life of the Love Song”), which Cave deliv­ered at the Vien­na Poet­ry Fes­ti­val in 1999.

Cave, the son of a lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sor and him­self an accom­plished nov­el­ist and poet, knows his craft well. The bal­lads that dom­i­nate pop music have deep­er roots in a harsh­er world, one that pro­duced the “mur­der bal­lad,” not coin­ci­den­tal­ly the title of a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds record — one All­mu­sic writes Cave “was wait­ing to make his entire career.” Cave rec­og­nizes, as he says in his talk above “an uncar­ing world—a world that fucks every­body over.” And yet… and yet, he says again and again, there is love, or rather, love songs. Quot­ing W.H. Auden and Fed­eri­co Gar­cia Lor­ca, he goes on to describe the form as “a howl in the void, for Love and for com­fort.” The love song “lives on the lips of the child cry­ing for its moth­er. It is the song of the lover in need of her loved one, the rav­ing of the lunatic sup­pli­cant peti­tion­ing his God.”

The love song, then, must con­tain a qual­i­ty Gar­cia Lor­ca called Duende, an “eerie and inex­plic­a­ble sad­ness.” Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Van Mor­ri­son, Tom Waits, and Neil Young have it. “It haunts,” he says, his ex P.J. Har­vey. “All love songs must con­tain duende. For the love song is nev­er tru­ly hap­py. It must first embrace the poten­tial for pain.” Cave draws on Lou Reed’s “Per­fect Day,” the “bru­tal prose” of the Old Tes­ta­ment, and the most innocu­ous-sound­ing pop songs, which can dis­guise “mes­sages to God that cry out into the yawn­ing void, in anguish and self-loathing, for deliv­er­ance.”

He also ref­er­ences, and reads, his own song, “Far From Me,” from 1997’s The Boatman’s Call, the post-breakup record that con­tains “Peo­ple Ain’t No Good.” (Cave begins the lec­ture with a ren­di­tion of “West Coun­try Girl” from that same record.) It’s an album that brought Cave’s “mor­bid­i­ty to near-par­o­d­ic lev­els,” strip­ping the Bad Seeds stum­bling lounge punk down to most­ly piano and voice. This ref­er­ence is not a mat­ter of van­i­ty but of the most well cho­sen illus­tra­tion. Cave admits he is “hap­py to be sad,” to live in “divine dis­con­tent.” His reli­gious exis­ten­tial­ism is ulti­mate­ly relieved by the pow­er of love songs, by his “crooked brood of sad eyed chil­dren” which “ral­ly round and in their way, pro­tect me, com­fort me and keep me alive.” Maybe Huey Lewis had some­thing sim­i­lar to say, but there’s no way he could ever say it the way that Nick Cave does. Read a par­tial tran­script of Cave’s talk here.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Cohen and U2 Per­form ‘Tow­er of Song,’ a Med­i­ta­tion on Aging, Loss & Sur­vival

Tom Waits and Kei­th Richards Sing Sea Song “Shenan­doah” for New Pirate-Themed CD: Lis­ten Online

See Neil Young Per­form Clas­sic Songs in 1971 BBC Con­cert: “Old Man,” “Heart of Gold” & More

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

Download 100,000 Free Art Images in High-Resolution from The Getty

in Art | March 27th, 2015

When I want to get a good look at the city of Los Ange­les, I go up to the Get­ty Cen­ter in the San­ta Mon­i­ca Moun­tains. I can also, of course, get a pret­ty good look at some art at the muse­um there. But if I don’t feel like mak­ing that trek up the hill — and if you don’t feel like mak­ing the trek from wher­ev­er you live — The Get­ty can give you, in some ways, an even bet­ter way to look at art online. Just vis­it the Get­ty’s Open Con­tent Pro­gram.

See­ing as this sort of free cul­tur­al resource fits right into our wheel­house here at Open Cul­ture, we’ve tried to keep you post­ed on the archive’s devel­op­ment over the past few years. Last time we passed the word along, the Get­ty’s dig­i­tal pub­lic-domain archive of high-res­o­lu­tion images had grown to 87,000, and now it has near­ly hit the 100,000 mark (99,989, to be exact)— which sounds to us like just the time to keep you post­ed on what you can find there­in.

In its cur­rent state (which promis­es fur­ther expan­sion still), the Get­ty’s Open Con­tent Pro­gram offers images like Aban­doned Dust Bowl Home (top image), Dorothea Lange’s vivid­ly stark evo­ca­tion of Depres­sion-era Amer­i­can des­o­la­tion, as well as oth­er pho­to­graph­ic time (and place) cap­sules, such as Kusak­abe Kim­bei’s hand-col­ored prints of life in late 19th- and ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Japan (Japan­ese Ladies pic­tured here); impres­sion­ist can­vas­es like Édouard Manet’s 1878 The Rue Mosnier with Flags; and even views of Los Ange­les itself, like Car­leton Watkins’ shot of the city’s plaza cir­ca 1880.

To down­load an image for which you’ve searched, you first need to click on that image’s title. That link takes you to the image’s own page (like those we linked to in the para­graph just above), where you’ll find a down­load link. Look for the word “down­load” beneath the image, and then click that link. It’s just that sim­ple — far sim­pler, in any case, than visu­al access to such a range of art­work has ever been before. Though if you do make it to Los Ange­les, don’t hes­i­tate to make the effort to vis­it the Get­ty Cen­ter; the tram that takes you up to it makes for a pret­ty fas­ci­nat­ing cul­tur­al expe­ri­ence and view of the city in and of itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Get­ty Adds Anoth­er 77,000 Images to its Open Con­tent Archive

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

Down­load Over 250 Free Art Books From the Get­ty Muse­um

40,000 Art­works from 250 Muse­ums, Now View­able for Free at the Redesigned Google Art Project

LA Coun­ty Muse­um Makes 20,000 Artis­tic Images Avail­able for Free Down­load

The Rijksmu­se­um Puts 125,000 Dutch Mas­ter­pieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How Akira Kurosawa Used Movement to Tell His Stories: A Video Essay

in Film | March 24th, 2015

The his­to­ry books say that there were three Japan­ese film­mak­ers to emerge in the 1950s – Ken­ji Mizoguchi, Yasu­jiro Ozu and Aki­ra Kuro­sawa. Nev­er mind that Mizoguchi and Ozu made many of their best movies in the 1930s. Nev­er mind that mas­ter­ful, inno­v­a­tive direc­tors like Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshi­ta have been unfair­ly over­shad­owed by the bril­liance of these three greats.

Mizoguchi was an ear­ly mod­ernist who by the end of his career made med­i­ta­tive movies about how women suf­fer at the hands of men. His mas­ter­pieces like Uget­su and San­sho Dayu feel like Bud­dhist scroll paint­ings come to life. Ozu, “the most Japan­ese” of all film­mak­ers, made qui­et­ly mov­ing dra­mas about fam­i­lies, like Tokyo Sto­ry, but did so in a way that dis­card­ed such Hol­ly­wood prin­ci­ples as con­ti­nu­ity edit­ing and the 180 degree rule. Ozu was a qui­et rad­i­cal.

Com­pared to Ozu and Mizoguchi, Kurosawa’s movies are noisy, mas­cu­line and vital. Unlike Ozu, he didn’t chal­lenge Hol­ly­wood film form but improved on it. Born rough­ly a decade after the oth­er two film­mak­ers, Kuro­sawa spent his youth watch­ing West­ern movies, absorb­ing the lessons of his cin­e­mat­ic heroes like John Ford, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra. At his cre­ative height, in the 1950s and 60s, Kuro­sawa pro­duced mas­ter­piece after mas­ter­piece. Hol­ly­wood would remake or ref­er­ence Kuro­sawa con­stant­ly in the years that fol­lowed but few of those films had Kurosawa’s inven­tive­ness.

Tony Zhou, who has made a career of dis­sect­ing movies in his excel­lent video series Every Frame a Pic­ture, argues that the key to Kuro­sawa is move­ment. “A Kuro­sawa movie moves like no one else’s,” Zhou notes in his video. “Each one is a mas­ter class in dif­fer­ent types of motion and also ways to com­bine them.”

Kuro­sawa had an innate under­stand­ing that there is inher­ent dra­ma in the wind blow­ing in the trees. Like Andrei Tarkovsky and lat­er Ter­rence Mal­ick, he liked to place human dra­ma square­ly in the realm of nature. The rain falls, a fire rages and that move­ment makes an image com­pelling. He under­stood that graph­ic con­sid­er­a­tions out­weighed psy­cho­log­i­cal ones – he sim­pli­fied and exag­ger­at­ed a character’s move­ment with the frame to make char­ac­ter traits and emo­tions easy to reg­is­ter for the audi­ence. His cam­era move­ments were clear, moti­vat­ed and flu­id. Zhou com­pares Sev­en Samu­rai with The Avengers. You might have thought that The Avengers was unin­spired and soul­less but after watch­ing Zhou’s video, you’ll under­stand why – aside from the sil­ly plot and char­ac­ters – the movie was unin­spired and soul­less. The piece should be required view­ing for film­mak­ers every­where. You can watch it above.

And below you can see anoth­er video Zhou did on Kuro­sawa, focus­ing on his 1960 movie The Bad Sleep Well.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Kurosawa’s Rashomon Free Online, the Film That Intro­duced Japan­ese Cin­e­ma to the West

David Lynch Lists His Favorite Films & Direc­tors, Includ­ing Felli­ni, Wilder, Tati & Hitch­cock

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Lis­ten to François Truffaut’s Big, 12-Hour Inter­view with Alfred Hitch­cock (1962)

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la Star in Japan­ese Whisky Com­mer­cials (1980)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

The Story of Lorem Ipsum: How Scrambled Text by Cicero Became the Standard For Typesetters Everywhere

in Books, Design | March 18th, 2015

In high school, the lan­guage I most fell in love with hap­pened to be a dead one: Latin. Sure, it’s spo­ken at the Vat­i­can, and when I first began to study the tongue of Vir­gil and Cat­ul­lus, friends joked that I could only use it if I moved to Rome. Tempt­ing, but church Latin bare­ly resem­bles the clas­si­cal writ­ten lan­guage, a high­ly for­mal gram­mar full of sym­me­tries and puz­zles. You don’t speak clas­si­cal Latin; you solve it, labor over it, and gloat, to no one in par­tic­u­lar, when you’ve ren­dered it some­what intel­li­gi­ble. Giv­en that the study of an ancient lan­guage is rarely a con­ver­sa­tion­al art, it can some­times feel a lit­tle alien­at­ing.

And so you might imag­ine how pleased I was to dis­cov­er what looked like clas­si­cal Latin in the real world: the text known to design­ers around the globe as “Lorem Ipsum,” also called “filler text” and (erro­neous­ly) “Greek copy.”

The idea, Priceo­nom­ics informs us, is to force peo­ple to look at the lay­out and font, not read the words. Also, “nobody would mis­take it for their native lan­guage,” there­fore Lorem Ipsum is “less like­ly than oth­er filler text to be mis­tak­en for final copy and pub­lished by acci­dent.” If you’ve done any web design, you’ve prob­a­bly seen it, look­ing some­thing like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isc­ing elit, sed do eius­mod tem­por inci­didunt ut labore et dolore magna ali­qua. Ut enim ad min­im veni­am, quis nos­trud exerci­ta­tion ullam­co laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea com­mo­do con­se­quat. Duis aute irure dolor in rep­re­hen­der­it in volup­tate velit esse cil­lum dolore eu fugiat nul­la pariatur. Excep­teur sint occae­cat cup­i­datat non proident, sunt in cul­pa qui offi­cia deserunt mol­lit anim id est labo­rum.

When I first encoun­tered this text, I did what any Latin geek will—set about try­ing to trans­late it. But it wasn’t long before I real­ized that Lorem Ipsum is most­ly gib­ber­ish, a gar­bling of Latin that makes no real sense. The first word, “Lorem,” isn’t even a word; instead it’s a piece of the word “dolorem,” mean­ing pain, suf­fer­ing, or sor­row. So where did this mash-up of Latin-like syn­tax come from, and how did it get so scram­bled? First, the source of Lorem Ipsum—tracked down by Ham­p­den-Syd­ney Direc­tor of Pub­li­ca­tions Richard McClintock—is Roman lawyer, states­man, and philoso­pher Cicero, from an essay called “On the Extremes of Good and Evil,” or De Finibus Bono­rum et Mal­o­rum.

Why Cicero? Put most sim­ply, writes Priceo­nom­ics, “for a long time, Cicero was every­where.” His fame as the most skilled of Roman rhetori­cians meant that his writ­ing became the bench­mark for prose in Latin, the stan­dard Euro­pean lan­guage of the mid­dle ages. The pas­sage that gen­er­at­ed Lorem Ipsum trans­lates in part to a sen­ti­ment Latin­ists will well under­stand:

Nor is there any­one who loves or pur­sues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occa­sion­al­ly cir­cum­stances occur in which toil and pain can pro­cure him some great plea­sure.

Dolorem Ipsum, “pain in and of itself,” sums up the tor­tu­ous feel­ing of try­ing to ren­der some of Cicero’s com­plex, ver­bose sen­tences into Eng­lish. Doing so with tol­er­a­ble pro­fi­cien­cy is, for some of us, “great plea­sure” indeed.

But how did Cicero, that mas­ter styl­ist, come to be so bad­ly man­han­dled as to be near­ly unrec­og­niz­able? Lorem Ipsum has a his­to­ry that long pre­dates online con­tent man­age­ment. It has been used as filler text since the six­teenth cen­tu­ry when—as McClin­tock theorized—“some type­set­ter had to make a type spec­i­men book, to demo dif­fer­ent fonts” and decid­ed that “the text should be insen­si­ble, so as not to dis­tract from the page’s graph­i­cal fea­tures.” It appears that this enter­pris­ing crafts­man snatched up a page of Cicero he had lying around and turned it into non­sense. The text, says McClin­tock, “has sur­vived not only four cen­turies of let­ter-by-let­ter reset­ting but even the leap into elec­tron­ic type­set­ting, essen­tial­ly unchanged.”

The sto­ry of Lorem Ipsum is a fas­ci­nat­ing one—if you’re into that kind of thing—but its longevi­ty rais­es a fur­ther ques­tion: should we still be using it at all, this man­gling of a dead lan­guage, in a medi­um as vital and dynam­ic as web pub­lish­ing, where “con­tent” refers to hun­dreds of design ele­ments besides font. Is Lorem Ipsum a quaint piece of nos­tal­gia that’s out­lived its use­ful­ness? In answer, you may wish to read Karen McGrane’s spir­it­ed defense of the prac­tice. Or, if you feel it’s time to let the gar­bled Latin go the way of man­u­al type­set­ting machines, con­sid­er per­haps as an alter­na­tive “Niet­zsche Ipsum,” which gen­er­ates ran­dom para­graphs of most­ly verb-less, inco­her­ent Niet­zsche-like text, in Eng­lish. Hey, at least it looks like a real lan­guage.

via Priceo­nom­ics

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

The First Children’s Pic­ture Book, 1658’s Orbis Sen­su­al­i­um Pic­tus

On the Impor­tance of the Cre­ative Brief: Frank Gehry, Maira Kalman & Oth­ers Explain its Essen­tial Role

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