Peruvian Scholar Writes & Defends the First Thesis Written in Quechua, the Main Language of the Incan Empire
We hear many tragic stories of disappearing indigenous languages, their last native speakers dying out, and the symbolic and social worlds embedded in those languages going with them, unless they’re recorded (or recovered) by historians and archived in museums. Such reporting, sad but necessary, can sometimes obscure the millions of living indigenous language speakers who suffer from systemic neglect around the world.
The situation is beginning to change. The UN has called 2019 the Year of Indigenous Languages, not only to raise awareness of the loss of language diversity, but also to highlight the world’s continued linguistic richness. A 2015 World Bank report estimated that 560 different languages are spoken in Latin America alone.
The South American language Quechua—once a primary language of the Incan empire—claims one of the highest number of speakers: 8 million in the Andean region, with 4 million of those speakers in Peru. Yet, despite continued widespread use, Quechua has been labeled endangered by UNESCO. “Until recently,” writes Frances Jenner at Latin American Reports, “the Peruvian government had few language preservation policies in place.”
“In 2016 however, TV Perú introduced a Quechua-language daily news program called Ñuqanchik meaning ‘All of us,’ and in Cusco, the language is starting to be taught in some schools.” Now, Peruvian scholar Roxana Quispe Collantes has made history by defending the first doctoral thesis written in Quechua, at Lima’s 468-year old San Marco University. Her project examines the Quechuan poetry of 20th century writer Alencastre Gutiérrez.
Collantes began her thesis presentation with a traditional thanksgiving ceremony,” writes Naveen Razik at NITV News, “and presented her study titled Yawar Para (Blood Rain),” the culmination of seven years spent “traveling to remote communities in the mountainous Canas region” to “verify the words and phrases used in Gutiérrez’s works.” The examiners asked her questions in Quechua during the nearly two hour examination, which you can see above.
The project represents a significant personal achievement for Collantes who “grew up speaking Quechua with her parents and grandparents in the Acomayo district of Cusco,” reports The Guardian. Collante’s work also represents a step forward for the support of indigenous language and culture, and the recognition of Quechua in particular. The language is foundational to South American culture, giving Spanish—and English—words like puma, condor, llama, and alpaca.
But it is “rarely—if ever—heard on national television or radio stations.” Quechua speakers, about 13% of Peruvians, “are disproportionately represented among the country’s poor without access to health services.” The stigma attached to the language has long been “synonymous with discrimination” and “social rejection” says Hugo Coya, director of Peru’s television and radio institute and the “driving force” behind the new Quechua news program.
Collantes’ work may be less accessible to the average Quechua speaker than TV news, but she hopes that it will make major cultural inroads towards greater acceptance. “I hope my example will help to revalue the language again and encourage young people, especially young women, to follow my path, “she says. “My greatest wish is for Quechua to become a necessity once again. Only by speaking it can we revive it.” Maybe in part due to her extensive efforts, UNESCO can take Quechua off its list of 2,860 endangered languages.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Explore 1400 Paintings & Drawings by Vincent van Gogh–and Much More–at the Van Gogh Museum’s Online Collection
Readers will receive no prizes for guessing what they’ll find, broadly speaking, at the Van Gogh Museum. But they may well be surprised by the full scope of the Van Gogh and Van Gogh-related work and information on offer for their free perusal at the Van Gogh Museum’s online collection. Naturally, you can view and learn about all of the paintings and drawings by Vincent van Gogh in the collection, including some of his best-known pieces like The Potato Eaters, a scene of “the harsh reality of country life” the artist deliberately chose for its difficulty; The Bedroom (or Bedroom in Arles), with its bright colors “meant to express absolute ‘repose’ or ‘sleep’”; and, painted between 1886 and 1889, no fewer than 21 self-portraits, including Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, the face we think of when we think of van Gogh himself.
For van Gogh’s most famous series of floral still-life paintings the Van Gogh Museum’s online collection goes much deeper, offering an entire section of its site dedicated to “everything about Sunflowers.”
Among its subsections you’ll find the story of how van Gogh “painted sunflowers as no one before him had ever done,” a look into the conservation of one of the most fragile of the artist’s masterpieces, and even a for-the-young-and-young-at-heart Sunflowers coloring-book page. If you get through all that and still feel your appetite for post-impressionist renderings of Helianthus not fully satiated, the collection’s curators also offer a link to van Gogh’s other depictions of sunflowers, from Shed with Sunflowers to Sunflowers Gone to Seed.
Online or off, collections dedicated to the work of a single artist sometimes suffer tunnel vision, providing a wealth of detail about the life and the masterpieces, but little in the way of context. The Van Gogh Museum doesn’t, having put on view not just van Gogh’s work, but also that of the Japanese woodblock makers from whom he drew inspiration (previously featured here on Open Culture) as well as that of more recent artists who have drawn their own inspiration from van Gogh: Britain’s Jason Brooks, China’s Zeng Fanzhi, and the Netherlands’ own Pieter Laurens Mol, to say nothing of the likes of Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon. Elsewhere you can even explore “the Parisian print world of the 19th century,” a “period of artistic innovation and decadence” that did more than its part to shape van Gogh’s sensibility. As the Van Gogh Museum clearly understands, to know an artist requires immersing yourself not just in their work, but in their world as well. Enter the van Gogh online collection here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The Provocative Art of Modern Sketch, the Magazine That Captured the Cultural Explosion of 1930s Shanghai
“With its newspapers in every language and scores of radio stations, Shanghai was a media city before its time, celebrated as the Paris of the Orient and ‘the wickedest city in the world.’ ” So British writer J.G. Ballard remembers the Chinese metropolis in which he grew up in his autobiography Miracles of Life. “Shanghai struck me as a magical place, a self-generating fantasy that left my own little mind far behind.” Born in 1930, Ballard caught Shanghai at a particularly stimulating time: “Developed on the basis of ‘unequal treaties’ successively instituted after the First Opium War in 1842,” writes MIT’s John A. Crespi, Chinese port cities like Shanghai “experienced a welter of technological and demographic changes,” including automobiles, skyscrapers, rolled cigarettes, movie theaters coffeehouses, and much else besides.
Such heady days also gave rise to media that reflected and critiqued them, and 1930s Shanghai produced no more compelling an example of such a publication than Modern Sketch (时代漫画, Shídài Mànhuà).
Among its points of interest, writes Crespi, “one can point to Modern Sketch’s longevity, the quality of its printing, the remarkable eclecticism of its content, and its inclusion of work by young artists who went on to become leaders in China’s 20th-century cultural establishment. But from today’s perspective, most intriguing is the sheer imagistic force with which this magazine captures the crises and contradictions that have defined China’s 20th century as a quintessentially modern era.”
Published monthly from January 1934 through June 1937, the magazine first appeared on newsstands just over two decades after the collapse of China’s dynastic system. The modernization-minded May Fourth Movement, nationalist Northern Expedition, and purge of communists by “Generalissimo” Chiang Kai-shek were even more recent memories.
But the relative stability of the “Nanjing Decade” had begun in 1927, and its zeitgeist turned out to be rich soil for a wild cultural flowering in China’s coastal cities, none wilder than in Shanghai. To the reading public of this time Modern Sketch offered treatments of material like “eroticized women, foreign aggression — particularly the rise of fascism in Europe and militarized Japan — domestic politics and exploitation, and modernity-at-large,” writes Crespi.
The magazine’s attitude “could be incisive, bitter, shocking, and cynical. At the very same time it could be elegant, salacious, and preposterous. Its messages might be as simple as child’s play, or cryptically encoded for cultural sophisticates.”
Sometimes it didn’t encode its messages cryptically enough: as a result of one unflattering depiction of Xu Shiying, China’s ambassador to Japan, the authorities suspended publication and detained editor Lu Shaofei. Not that Lu didn’t know what he was getting into with Modern Sketch: “On all sides a tense era surrounds us,” he wrote in the magazine’s inaugural issue. “As it is for the individual, so it is for our country and the world.”
As for an answer to the question of whether the strange and tense but enormously fruitful cultural and political moment in which Lu and his collaborators found themselves wold last, “the more one fails to find it, the more that desire grows. Our stance, our single responsibility, then, is to strive!”
You can read more about what project entailed, and see in greater detail its textual and visual results, in Crespi’s history of this magazine that strove to capture the everyday reality of life on display in 1930s Shanghai — “though I sometimes wonder,” Ballard writes, “if everyday reality was the one element missing from the city.”
via 50 Watts
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The Night When John Coltrane Soloed in a Bathroom and David Crosby, High as a Kite, Nearly Lost His Mind
David Crosby is not only one of rock’s great songwriters; he is also one of rock’s great raconteurs—always ready with a story, told as only he can tell it, about life in not just one, but two of the most influential bands of the 1960s, the Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash and sometimes Young. Few people have lived a life as colorful as his and lived to tell about it. Even fewer possess Crosby’s wit and eye for detail.
He came by his wealth of anecdotes at a significant cost, however, to himself and the people around him, as he readily admits in the newly released (on Blu-ray) Cameron Crowe-produced documentary Remember My Name. Now a wizened 78-years-old and still prolific and raising hell (on Twitter, at least) Crosby reached far back in the memory vault to tell the tale of his life, from childhood to his 60s heyday to his stints in jail and rehab and through every sordid stage of full blown addiction.
Drugs will seriously mess up your life, says Crosby, in no uncertain terms, but it’s also clear his life would have been much less eventful, and less interesting, without them. Take the story he tells of running into John Coltrane in the men’s room of the South Side Chicago club called McKie’s in 1963. Incredibly high, Crosby finds himself blown out of his seat and against the wall by Elvin Jones’ drum solo. He retreats to the bathroom and promptly hits the floor. “I’ve got my head against this puke green tile,” he says in the clip above from Remember My Name (see the trailer below).
While Crosby tried to pull himself together, who should walk in but Coltrane, still playing:
He never stopped soloing. He’s still soloing. And he’s like burning in this bathroom. He doesn’t even know I’m there. He never even saw me. I’m thinking I’m gonna slide right down this tile. I’m thinking my nose is gonna open and my brain is gonna rush out onto the floor. It was so intense. I never heard anyone be more intense with music than that in my life.
Crosby gets into more detail in an interview with JazzTimes. Coltrane, he says, “played in the [restroom] for a couple of minutes because the sound was good—it was echoey—and he was… as good as you think he was.” He also talks at length about his long relationship with jazz, from his discovery of late-50s records by Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker, and Bill Evans, to Miles Davis recording a version of his song “Guinnevere.” (Davis was apparently instrumental in getting the Byrds signed to Columbia Records.)
The influence of Davis and Coltrane on Crosby’s songwriting is perhaps less evident than in, say, the work of Joni Mitchell, but Crosby admits that his “phrasing and melody choice” derived from “really good horn players.” It’s interesting to note just how much impact late-50s/early 60s jazz had on not only Crosby and Mitchell, but also 60s icons like Grace Slick. Listening to these classic rock survivors describe how Miles and Coltrane helped shape their sound shows just how much the mid-century jazz revolution fueled the rock revolution that followed.
Now that he’s sober, Crosby’s stories don’t involve nearly as much floor tile and brains sliding out of noses, but they’re still full of jazz encounters, including his recent collaborations with Wynton Marsalis and jazz collective Snarky Puppy. Read more about his recent projects and history with jazz over at JazzTimes.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Meet Viola Smith, the World’s Oldest Drummer: Her Career Started in the 1930s, and She Played Until She Was 107
Update: Viola Smith sadly passed away this past week. You can read her obituary at The Guardian.
She may be the most famous jazz drummer you’ve never heard of.
Viola Smith played with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, performed for Harry Truman’s inauguration in 1949, and played in the Kit-Kat Band (see them below on I’ve Got a Secret), in the first Broadway run of Cabaret from 1966–70. These mark only a handful of her career highlights. She’s still thriving—and still playing—at the age of 106. While a fall has forced her to rely on a walker, she “looks like a seventy-five-year-old in terrific shape!” writes Dan Barrett at The Syncopated Times.
Born Viola Schmitz in Mount Calvary, Wisconsin in 1912, Smith started playing in the 1920s with her family band, the Schmitz Sisters Family Orchestra (later the Smith Sisters Orchestra). Consisting of Viola, seven of her sisters, and one of her two brothers, they played the vaudeville and movie theater circuit on weekends. Their father managed, directed, and booked the band. An appearance on America’s Got Talent, “the 1930s radio version,” notes Barrett, gave Viola and her sisters the confidence to form the Coquettes, who garnered a considerable amount of fame after their debut in 1938.
In 1942, Viola wrote an article for Down Beat magazine titled “Give Girl Musicians a Break!,” suggesting that bands who lost musicians to WWII should hire women. Later that year, when Mildred, Viola’s last remaining sister in the Coquettes, got married, Viola moved to New York, “where I always wanted to be,” she tells Barrett. She earned a summer scholarship to Julliard, Benny Goodman asked her to join his band (she turned him down), and she played with Ella Fitzgerald and many other greats. She recorded film music and played with the National Symphony Orchestra. She appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show five times.
Though often compared to Gene Krupa, whom she considers a “lovely person” and an influence, Smith had a very distinctive style all her own, characterized by a twelve-drum kit with two 16-inch toms mounted on either side of her head, as you can see in the clip at the top of the post, in a 1939 performance with the Coquettes. This was no mere gimmick. Smith had studied tympani at Julliard and imported classical training into her big band sound. (She claims drummer Louis Bellson’s use of two bass drums was due to her influence.)
Why isn’t Viola Smith better known? It may have something to do with patronizing coverage in the press, where she was described as “the girl Gene Krupa,” the “fastest girl drummer,” “the famous girl drummer” etc. Other female instrumentalists were similarly belittled as “girl” novelty acts, or ignored, even when they played with bandleaders like Benny Goodman, whose orchestra featured trumpet players Billie Rogers and Laurie Frink. (Smith herself frowns on women playing brass instruments, for some odd reason.) In her Down Beat article, Viola named a number of other top female players of the day who deserved more work and recognition.
She may forget things here and here, but Smith still has a steel-trap memory for a 106-year old who has lived such a rich life. Her interview with Barrett is full of detailed reminisces (she briefly dated Frank Sinatra, for example). She gives us a picture of a musician at the top of her game and in full command of her career during the golden age of big band swing. We can credit Smith’s lifetime as a professional musician with much of this confidence. Like all of her siblings she learned to play piano and read music from a young age, and she honed her skills as part of a hard-working family “pit band,” as she says. But she was also driven to succeed above all else, leaving behind the conventional life each of her sibling bandmates eventually chose.
Smith did it her way—reportedly turning down offers to play in Sinatra’s band and refusing bandleader Woody Herman in order keep playing with the Coquettes. She played for the radio show Hour of Charm until she was 63, and has played concerts recently in Costa Mesa, California, where she now lives, tended to by the staff of a quilting supply shop called Piecemakers. Smith talks easily about the sources of her musical longevity—her family band, education, and the tight-knit community of musicians who embraced her.
As for her physical vigor and stamina, this she chalks up to the rigor of playing the drums, and to relaxing with a drink or two on occasion—a lifetime of activity and moderation that has helped keep her sharp and healthy after all of her contemporaries have passed away. See Smith in interviews at 100, further up, and 102, just above, and read her recent interview at 106 at The Syncopated Times here.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Internet Archive Makes 2,500 More Classic MS-DOS Video Games Free to Play Online: Alone in the Dark, Doom, Microsoft Adventure, and Others
Back in 2015 we let you know that the Internet Archive made 2,400 computer games from the era of MS-DOS free to play online: titles like Commander Keen, Scorched Earth, and Prince of Persia may have brought back fond 1990s gaming memories, as well as promised hours of more such enjoyment here in the 21st century. That set of games included Id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D, which created the genre of the first-person shooter as we know it, but the Internet Archive’s latest DOS-game upload — an addition of more than 2,500 titles — includes its follow-up Doom, which took computer gaming itself to, as it were, a new level.
The Internet Archive’s Jason Scott calls this “our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decades ago.” After detailing some of the technical challenges he and his team faced in getting many of the games to work properly in web browsers on modern computers — “a lot has changed under the hood and programs were sometimes only written to work on very specific hardware and a very specific setup” — he makes a few recommendations from this newest crop of games.
Scott’s picks include Microsoft Adventure, the DOS version of the very first computer adventure game; the 1960s-themed racer Street Rod; and Super Munchers, one in a line of educational titles all of us of a certain generation will remember from our classroom computers. Oddities highlighted by classic game enthusiasts around the internet include Mr. Blobby, based on the eponymous character from the BBC comedy show Noel’s House Party; the undoubtedly thrilling simulator President Elect — 1988 Edition; and Zool, the only ninja-space-alien platformer sponsored by lollipop brand Chupa Chups.
This addition of 2,500 computer games to the Internet Archive also brings in no few undisputed classics whose influence on the art and design of games is still felt today: Alone in the Dark, for example, progenitor of the entire survival-horror genre; Microsoft Flight Simulator, inspiration for a generation of pilots; and SimCity 2000, inspiration for a generation of urban planners. Among the adventure games, one of the strongest genres of the MS-DOS era, we have Discworld, based on Terry Pratchett’s comedic fantasy novels, and from the mind of Harlan Ellison the somewhat less comedic I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. One glance at the Internet Archive’s updated computer game collection reveals that, no matter how many games you played in the 90s, you’ll never be able to play them all.
Get more information on the new batch of games at the Internet Archive.
via Boing Boing
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Stream Dozens of Classic & Contemporary Horror Movies Free Online in October
There is a paradox in the genre we call horror. Its main engine has remained constant for millennia—primal fears of death (and afterlife), and relatedly inescapable phenomena like birth, aging, and sickness. At the same time, horror is always contemporary, reflecting “society’s collective anxieties throughout the decades,” writes Lauren McGrail at the Lights Film School blog.
We can see this in horror movies, dividing them by decade according to their most pressing concerns. 1920s German expressionism recoiled from the growing threat of fascism. The 1930s and 40s created a cult of personality around deathless horror icons.
“In the 1950s,” McGrail writes, “the fear of invasion and atomic war fueled films in which the effects of radiation created larger-than-life monsters.” The 60s saw deviancy everywhere, especially among the supposedly normal.
“In the 1970s, Hollywood looked inward, inventing threats that sprung from within,” sometimes quite literally. The ‘80s dealt in panic over satanism, teenage promiscuity, and childhood abuse. The ‘90s gave us charming sociopathic killers, horror parodies, (and bees). “More recently, an uptick in prestigious ‘elevated horror’ films is tackling modern social issues head-on.” Get Out uses disorienting shocks and scares for a heady examination of racism. Midsommer represents the fear of isolationist, homogeneous communities (ethnostate horror, if you will).
Kanopy, the free film streaming service, has made its horror film catalogue available online, allowing us to test this theory by watching classic movies from nearly every decade of cinema history. They’ve included a generous portion of recent highly acclaimed horror films, like Ari Aster’s Hereditary, Robert Eggers’ The Witch, and Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. There are classic subgenre-defining films like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Even the oldest of horror movie tropes get updated every few years to illustrate contemporary social conflicts. Frankenstein and his monster, Dracula: such 19th century literary characters came to life on celluloid again and again in the first half of the 20th century, when Hollywood horror was still figuring itself out. These oft-campy characters aren’t well-represented in the Kanopy collection. But there are offbeat psychological thrillers like Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, crime thrillers about real monsters like David Fincher’s Zodiac, and horror comedies like Kevin Smith’s Tusk.
The horror film arrived before the 19th century ended, with Georges Méliès’ 1896 The Haunted Castle, a visual effects feast for 1890s filmgoers’ eyes. Its imagery now calls to mind a seasonal candy aisle—bats, witches, devils, skeletons, and a bubbling cauldron. Fall is a commercial bonanza for fun-sized candy bars and scary movies. Like pharmacies stocking giant bags of candy come summer’s end, no major studio should find itself without a horror release—or re-release—this time of year.
Halloween—the harvest-festival-turned-quasi-Christian/occult-ceremony-turned-major-shopping-season—may do as much to keep horror alive in popular culture as Christmas does for films about family dysfunction. Whether they’re digging up the corpses of ancient evils or inventing new metaphors for old-fashioned fears, horror films give Halloween its best costume ideas, and the best reason to gather up friends and family and get scared out of your wits together (ideally).
Should you be hosting such a gathering, or looking to freak yourself out, you’ll find contemporary horror aplenty free to stream at Kanopy. All you’ll need is your local library card. (To check and see whether your library–or university–is among Kanopy’s partners, just type it into the search window on this page.) “We stream thoughtful entertainment to your preferred device with no fees and no commercials by partnering with public libraries and universities,” says Kanopy’s about page, explaining that you need only “log in with your library membership and enjoy our diverse catalog with new titles added every month.” A very small price to pay indeed for such high-quality content. Enter Kanopy’s horror collection here.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...MIT Researchers 3D Print a Bridge Imagined by Leonardo da Vinci in 1502— and Prove That It Actually Works
Photo by Gretchen Ertl, via MIT News
Unfortunate though it may be for the dreamers of the world, we’re all judged not by what we imagine, but what we actually do. This goes double for those specifically tasked with creating things in the physical environment, from engineers and architects to inventors and artists. Leonardo da Vinci, the original “Renaissance man,” was an engineer, architect, inventor, artist, and more besides, and five centuries after his death we continue to admire him for not just the works of art and technology he realized during his lifetime, but also the ones that never made it off his drawing board (or out of his notebooks). And as we continue to discover, many of the latter weren’t just flights of fancy, but genuine innovations grounded in reality.
Take the bridge Leonardo proposed to Sultan Bayezid II, who in 1502 had “sent out the Renaissance equivalent of a government RFP (request for proposals), seeking a design for a bridge to connect Istanbul with its neighbor city Galata,” writes MIT News’ David L. Chandler. Writing to the sultan, Leonardo describes his design as “a masonry bridge as high as a building, and even tall ships will be able to sail under it.”
At the time, such bridges required the support of piers all along their spans, which prevented large ships from passing underneath. But Leonardo’s design would do the job with only “a single enormous arch.” About ten times longer than the typical bridge of the early 16th century, it took a page from the bridges of ancient Rome, designed as it was to “stand on its own under the force of gravity, without any fasteners or mortar to hold the stone together.”
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Alas, Leonardo, who had better luck with Italian patrons, didn’t win this particular commission. His bridge design must at least have impressed the sultan with its sheer ambition, but would it have held up? A team at MIT consisting of graduate Karly Bast, professor John Ochsendorf, and undergraduate Michelle Xie recently put it to the test, scrutinizing the material Leonardo left behind, replicating the geological conditions of the proposed site, and building a 1:500 scale model out of 126 3D-printed blocks. Not only could the model bear weight using only the strength of its own geometry, the design also came with other features, such as stabilizing abutments (which Chandler compares to the legs of “a standing subway rider widening her stance to balance in a swaying car”) to keep the bridge upright in that earthquake-prone area of modern-day Turkey.
That particular location didn’t get a bridge until 1845, when Valide Sultan ordered the construction of the first, wooden, Galata Bridge. It stood for 18 years until its replacement by another wooden bridge, part of an infrastructure-building push before Napoleon III’s visit to Istanbul. The third Galata Bridge, completed in 1875 from a design by a British engineering firm, floated on pontoons. The fourth was a German-designed floating bridge in use from 1912 until a fire damaged it in 1992. Only the fifth and current Galata Bridge, with its tram tracks above, its pedestrianized deck full of shops and market spaces below, and it drawbridge section in the middle, was built by a Turkish company. In all its iterations, the Galata Bridge has become one of Istanbul’s cultural reference points and major attractions as well — not that having been designed by Leonardo would have hurt its image any.
via MIT News/Popular Mechanics
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The Women of Rock: Discover an Oral History Project That Features Pioneering Women in Rock Music
If you’ve wondered why projects celebrating women in the history of rock are needed, maybe all you need to do is listen to women in rock. Stories of boys’ clubs in the industry, from record labels to journalists to fandoms, are ubiquitous, which is why so many voices are pushed to the margins, say rock historians like Tanya Pearson, director of the Women of Rock oral history project.
Marginalization happens not only on stages and studios but at the level of memory and preservation. “Canons influence how we remember the past,” Pearson writes. “Rock journalism, media, and scholarship perpetuates a one sided, androcentric rock narrative…. Women do not easily fit and so they continue to be underrepresented. If they are represented at all, they are not given the same level of attention or granted the same access to audience as their male counterparts.”
Women of Rock, a “collection of digital interviews and written transcripts housed at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith college,” focuses “primarily on artists who have been left out of the popular rock narratives.”
Pearson and her volunteer collaborators hope that “by creating space for women, trans, and gender nonconforming artists to share their personal and professional histories” the project can “contribute to their personal and professional histories and accurate popular rock narratives.”
Pearson created the project while an undergraduate at Smith, finding herself “frustrated by the scant details available about her favorite musicians,” writes Sharon Hannon at Please Kill Me. “The main reason I started this project,” she tells Hannon, “was that it’s something I wish I had access to when I was 13 or 14,” a time in her life when she was “desperately searching for representation.” The problem wasn’t that women like her did not exist in rock, but that she couldn’t find out much about them.
The site’s current roster of interviewees is an interesting and impressive mix. It includes women who have been integral to punk, indie, and alternative rock—like Lydia Lunch (further up), Nina Gordon and Louise Post of Veruca Salt, Alice Bag, Shirley Manson, Julie Cafritz, Melissa Auf der Mauer, Kristin Hersh, Mary Timony, Kira Rosseler, JD Samson, Amanda Palmer, and Exene Cervanka. (Sadly, Kim Shattuck of the Muffs, who passed away recently, isn’t featured.) And there are lesser-known artists who deserve a much wider audience, like Brie (Howard) Darling, a member of the criminally underrated Fanny, and whose full interview you can see below.
All of these women have stories to tell about surviving in a “male dominated business” as Tracy Bonham says in the trailer at the top of the post. Stories about “the patriarchal system,” as Shirley Manson says in her interview further up, “that allows men to thrive” and pushes women out. All of these musicians also tell us stories about themselves—their childhoods, influences, struggles, and passions, leaving behind a record in which future women rockers and rock historians among the current generation of 13- and 14-year-old kids can see themselves.
See the project’s YouTube channel for more full interviews and interview clips and visit the Women of Rock site for more.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...Watch 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki Free Online: A Four Part-Part Documentary on the Unstoppable Japanese Animator
When Conan O’Brien found himself temporarily out of a late-night television hosting job a few years ago, he went on tour with a stage show instead. If the documentary chronicling that period of his career wasn’t called Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, a similar title could equally fit the recent films that have captured Hayao Miyazaki’s oscillation between work and “retirement.” In 2013’s Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, previously featured here on Open Culture, we thought we witnessed Miyazaki animating the final frame of his final feature. But his subsequent withdrawal from filmmaking proved short-lived, and his preparation for re-emergence (including his gone-viral critique of experimental computer animation) provides the subject for 2016’s Never-Ending Man.
This year, Never-Ending Man director Kaku Arakawa returns with 10 Years With Hayao Miyazaki, a four-part documentary available to watch free at NHK’s web site, and whose trailer appears at the top of the post. “Whereas Never-Ending Man tracked the director’s career from his short-lived retirement in 2013 to the germination of his forthcoming feature How Do You Live?, this series covers the decade running up to 2013,” writes Cartoon Brew’s Alex Dudok de Wit. Those were busy years for Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, involving as they did the production of Ponyo and The Wind Rises, as well as two films directed by Miyazaki’s son Goro: the Ursula K. LeGuin adaptation Tales from Earthsea and the 1960s boarding school-set From Up on Poppy Hill.
Tales from Earthsea came out in 2006, and at the time Miyazaki felt that Goro was unready to make his debut. As awkward as the period of estrangement between Miyazaki père et fils during that movie’s production may feel — especially given how often they’re in the same office — it reflects the near-impossibly high standard to which the man who directed My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away holds not just his successor and his collaborators, but himself. Above all himself, as revealed by the candid footage Arakawa’s decade of access to Miyazaki’s life allowed him to gather.
“We see him at work in his private studio and at Studio Ghibli, and relaxing at home,” writes Dudok de Wit, “insofar as he’s capable of relaxation.” What Miyazaki says to Arakawa about his craft, his worldview, and his life suggests a mind perpetually at work, even during the rare times his hands aren’t. 10 Years With Hayao Miyazaki ends with the making of The Wind Rises, but Arakawa must surely have known not to take the animator’s pronouncements of it being his final feature seriously: Hayao Miyazaki can’t stop, nor do we want him to.
Watch 10 Years With Hayao Miyazaki online here, and find it listed in our collection of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
Related Content:
Watch Hayao Miyazaki Animate the Final Shot of His Final Feature Film, The Wind Rises
Watch Moebius and Miyazaki, Two of the Most Imaginative Artists, in Conversation (2004)
Hayao Miyazaki Meets Akira Kurosawa: Watch the Titans of Japanese Film in Conversation (1993)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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