Leonardo da Vinci Created the Design for the Miter Lock, Which Is Still Used in the Panama and Suez Canals

in History, Technology | November 1st, 2023

“A Man, a Plan, a Canal — Panama”: we all know the piece of infrastructure to which this famous palindrome refers. But who, exactly, is the man? Some might imagine President Theodore Roosevelt in the role, given his oversight of the project’s acquisition by the United States of America. But it’s more commonly thought to be George W. Goethals, the Roosevelt-appointed chief engineer who brought it to completion two years early. Then again, one could also make the case for French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, who originally conceived of not only the Panama Canal but also the Suez Canal. And as long as we’re reaching back in history, how does Leonardo da Vinci strike you?

True, Leonardo died roughly four centuries before the Panama Canal broke ground. But that its mechanism works at all owes to one of his many inventions: the miter lock, documented in one of his notebooks from 1497. The design, as explained in the Lesics video above, involves “two V‑shaped wooden gates” attached with hinges to the sides of a river.

Given their shape, the water flowing through the river naturally forces the gates to close, one side forming a neat joint with the other. Inside, “as the water level rises, the pressure on the gate increases,” which seals it even more tightly. To facilitate re-opening the “perfect watertight lock” thus formed, Leonardo also specified a set of sluice valves in the gates that can be opened to even out the water levels again.

The twentieth-century builders of the Panama Canal benefited from technologies unavailable in Leonardo’s time: powerful motors, for instance, that could open and close the gates more efficiently than human muscle. And though it has undergone improvements over the past century (such as the replacement of the geared system attached to those motors with even more effective hydraulic cylinders), its structure and operation remain visibly derived from Leonardo’s elegant miter lock, as do those of the Suez Canal. About 80 ships pass through those two famous waterways each and every day, and ships of a size scarcely imaginable in the fifteenth century at that: not bad for a couple pieces of 500-year-old engineering.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Inventions Come to Life as Museum-Quality, Workable Models: A Swing Bridge, Scythed Chariot, Perpetual Motion Machine & More

Watch Leonardo da Vinci’s Musical Invention, the Viola Organista, Being Played for the Very First Time

The Ingenious Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci Recreated with 3D Animation

How to Build Leonardo da Vinci’s Ingenious Self-Supporting Bridge: Renaissance Innovations You Can Still Enjoy Today

Leonardo da Vinci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & 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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Animated: The Rise & Fall of the Largest Cities in the World, from 3,000 BC to the 2020s

in History | November 1st, 2023

This is the first era of human history when more of us live in cities than not. That’s what we’ve often been told in recent years, at least, though the specifics do depend on what kinds of urbanized areas you count as proper cities. Still, this would seem to mark an important inflection point in human history, the past five millennia of which has also been the history of great cities rising and falling, in absolute terms but also relative to one another in size, power, and influence. You can see this animated in the video above from cartographical-historical Youtuber Ollie Bye, previously featured here on Open Culture for his visualizations of the history of London, of the British Empire, and of the entire world.

Here, Bye charts the largest cities in the world between the year 3000 BC and today, indicating their size on the map while also ranking them on an ever-changing leaderboard below. Out front in the very beginning was Uruk, capital of the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization (and a prominent location in the Epic of Gilgamesh).

A thousand years later, it was the Egyptian capital of Thebes; a thousand years after that, it was the later Egyptian capital of Alexandria. From that point on, the shuffle at the bottom of the screen grows more and more rapid: the title of largest city in the world is lost by Constantinople to Ctesiphon; by Lin’an, briefly, to Cairo, and then to Hangzhou; by London to New York.

It was in the nineteen-fifties that Tokyo — a city left in shambles by the Second World War a decade earlier — overtook New York for the top spot. There it has remained ever since, seeing off such different challengers in different eras as Osaka, Mexico City, and New Delhi. When Bye’s animation leaves off, in 2021, that last has a population of 31.1 million against Tokyo’s 37.3 million. Whether the Japanese capital has proportionately more power or influence in the world today than Beijing, São Paulo, or Los Angeles is, of course, a separate and less objective question. But no visitor to Tokyo can deny that it must have achieved something like the pinnacle of urban civilization per se — and has somehow kept the rents reasonable to boot.

The Growth of London, from the Romans to the 21st Century, Visualized in a Time-Lapse Animated Map

Watch the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in an Animated Time-Lapse Map ( 519 A.D. to 2014 A.D.)

The Entire History of the British Isles Animated: 42,000 BCE to Today

The History of the World in One Video: Every Year from 200,000 BCE to Today

A Wonderful Archive of Historic Transit Maps: Expressive Art Meets Precise Graphic Design

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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Hear Classic Readings of Poe’s “The Raven” by Vincent Price, James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, Neil Gaiman & More

in Audio Books, Literature | October 31st, 2023

It can seem that the writing of literature and the theory of literature occupy separate great houses, Game of Thrones-style, or even separate countries held apart by a great sea. Perhaps they war with each other, perhaps they studiously ignore each other or obliquely interact at tournaments with acronymic names like MLA and AWP. Like Thomas Pynchon’s characterization of the political right and left, scholars and writers represent opposing poles, the hothouse and the street. That rare beast, the academic poet, can seem like something of a unicorn, or dragon.

…Or like the ominous talking raven in Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous of poems.

The divide between theory and practice is a recent development, a product of state budgeting, political brinksmanship, the relentless publishing mills of academia that force scholars to find a pigeonhole and stay there.… In days past, poets and scholar/theorists frequently occupied the same place at the same time—Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and, of course, Poe, whose perennially popular “The Raven” serves as a point-by-point illustration for his theory of composition just as thoroughly as Eliot’s great works bear out his notion of the “objective correlative.”

Poe’s object, the titular creature, is an “archetypal symbol,” writes Dana Gioia, in a poem that aims for what its author calls a “unity of effect.” In his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe the poet/theorist tells us in great detail how “The Raven” satisfies all of his other criteria for literature as well, such as achieving its intent in a single sitting, using a repeated refrain, and so on.

Should we have any doubt about how much Poe wanted us to see the poem as the deliberate outcome of a conceptual scheme, we find him three years later, in 1849, the year of his death, delivering a lecture on the “Poetic Principle,” and concluding with a reading of “The Raven.”

John Moncure Daniel of the Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner remarked after attending one of these talks that “the attention of many in this city is now directed to this singular performance.” At that point, Poe, who hardly made a dime from “The Raven,” had to suffer the indignity of having all of his work go out of print during his brief, unhappy lifetime. Moncure and the Examiner thereby furnished readers “with the only correct copy ever published,” previous appearances, it seems, having contained punctuation errors.

Nonetheless, for all of Poe’s pedantry and penury, “The Raven“ ‘s first appearances made him semi-famous. His readings were a sensation, and it’s a sure bet that his audiences came to hear him read the poem, not deliver a lecture on its principles. Oh, for some proto-Edison in the room with an early recording device. What would it be like to hear the mournful, grief-stricken, alcoholic genius—master of the macabre and inventor of the detective story—intone the raven’s enigmatic “Nevermore”?

While Poe’s speaking voice has receded irretrievably into history, his poetic voice may live close to forever. So mesmerizing are his meter and diction that many great actors known especially for their voices have become possessed by “The Raven.”

Likely when we think of the poem, what first comes to the mind’s ear is the voice of Vincent Price, or James Earl Jones, Christopher Lee, or Christopher Walken, all of whom have given “The Raven” its due.

And so have many other notables, such as the great Stan Lee, Poe successor Neil Gaiman, original Gomez Addams actor John Astin, and venerable Beat poet/scholar Anne Waldman (listen here). You will find those recitations here at this round-up of notable “Raven” readings, and if this somehow doesn’t satiate you, then check out Lou Reed’s take on the poem, the Grateful Dead’s musical tribute, “Raven Space,” or a reading in 100 different celebrity impressions.

Finally, we would be remiss not to mention The Simpsons’ James Earl Jones-narrated parody, a worthy teaching tool for distracted young visual learners. Is it a shame that we now think of “The Raven” as a Halloween yarn fit for the Treehouse of Horror or any number of enjoyable exercises in spooky oratory—rather than the theoretical thought experiment its author seemed to intend? Does Poe rotisserie in his grave as Homer snores in a wingback chair? Probably. But as the author told us himself at length, the poem works! It still never fails to excite our morbid curiosity, enchant our gothic sensibility, and maybe send a chill or two down the spine. Maybe we never really needed Poe to explain it to us.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017. We’re bringing it back for Halloween.

The Raven: a Pop-up Book Brings Edgar Allan Poe’s Classic Supernatural Poem to 3D Paper Life

A Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in 100 Celebrity Voices

Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven: Watch an Award-Winning Short Film That Modernizes Poe’s Classic Tale

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

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Meet the Man Who Created the Iconic Emblem of the Day of the Dead: José Guadalupe Posada

in Art, History, Politics | October 31st, 2023

Odds are you’re acquainted with the lady pictured above.

She’s called La Catrina, and her likeness adorns countless t‑shirts and tote bags.

She is a popular Halloween costume and a mainstay of Day of the Dead celebrations.

She pops up in the animated family feature, Coco, to guide its young hero to the Land of the Dead.

She’s spent the better part of a century making cameos in numerous artists works, most famously Diego Rivera’s surreal 1947 mural, Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central, a fever dream that places her front and center, arm in arm with a distinguished-looking, mustachioed gent in a bowler hat.

That gent is her original creator, José Guadalupe Posada, a hardworking printmaker and political cartoonist who produced over 20,000 images during his lifetime, on subjects ranging from the Mexican Revolution and other events, both current and historical, to popular entertainment and the daily lives of average men and women.

The artist frequently hammered his point home by depicting the parties in his works as calaveras - exuberant skeletons seemingly unaware they had lost all flesh and blood.

Posada was still a teenager in 1871 when a hometown paper picked up his first cartoons. One reportedly enraged a local politician to such a degree that the paper was forced to cease publication.

La Catrina was published posthumously in 1913, as a broadsheet illustration accompanying a satirical poem about chickpea vendors. It’s believed that Posada intended his image to be a jab at upper class Mexican women obsessed with European fashions.

(Rivera was the one who changed her name from La Cucaracha — the cockroach — to the much more lyrical La Catrina. He also planted the seed that Posada, who died penniless and largely forgotten, had been a revolutionary. The Mexican progressive printmaking collective El Taller Grafica Popular took graphic inspiration from his calaveras, while embracing and disseminating this myth.

What’s that they say about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery?

After Posada’s death, his colleagues at the publishing firm of Antonio Vanegas Arroyor, saved time and money by continuing to produce work from his blocks and plates.

As Jim Nikas, founding director of the Posada Art Foundation told Atlas Obscura “If the image was neutral enough, you could change the text and use it as an illustration for any story.”

Whether increasing public awareness of harmful agricultural pesticides, protesting American immigration policies, or, uh, selling tequila, 21^st century artists, activists, and entrepreneurs continue to harness Posada’s vision for their own purposes.

Nikas, who sampled Posada’s La Calavera de Don Quixote for an Occupy Wall Street collaboration with Art Hazelwood and Marsha Shaw writes that “the calavera is something we all have biologically in common and, accordingly, may be used to convey messages:

Posada and his publishers used depictions of calaveras not only to remind us of our collective mortality but also to shed light. His illustrations were often satirical caricatures uprooted from the current political climate and used to poke fun at our human condition. This use was evolutionary, occurring over time, and as applicable today as it was over a century ago.

See more of José Guadalupe Posada’s calaveras in the Library of Congress’ Prints and Photographs Division collection.

– 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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Jerry Garcia Explains How Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein Changed His Life (1995)

in Film, Music | October 31st, 2023

If you’re looking for a classic monster movie to watch this Halloween, and one that will also give you a few non-ironic laughs along the way, you’d do well to put on Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. But don’t take this recommendation from me: take it from the Grateful Dead’s own Jerry Garcia, who recalls his own formative viewing experience in the clip above from a 1995 broadcast of AMC’s The Movie that Changed My Life. When Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein came out, in 1948, he was just six years old: too tender an age, it seems, to appreciate the monstrous spectacle to which his mother had taken him. “I mostly hid behind the seats,” he remembers. “It was just pure panic.”

Unaware even of who Abbott and Costello were, the young Garcia could hardly have perceived the outwardly horrific picture’s lighthearted comic intentions. Yet it compelled him nevertheless, and even resonated with him on other emotional levels not having to do with fear.

“My father had died the previous year, in ’47, so that also made it kind of a heavy time in my life, emotionally,” he says, and one that perhaps gave him a certain receptiveness to the notion of “a dead thing brought to life.” Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein features not just the titular doctor’s monster, played by Glenn Strange, but also Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man and Bela Lugosi as Dracula. “This was a juicy cast, and it was the last time these characters had dignity.”

For Garcia, these Hollywood monsters “became figures of tremendous fascination,” which led him to discover cultural movements like German expressionist theater and film. While they cast a spell of primal fear — “I think there was some desire on my part to embrace that, to not let that control me” — Abbott and Costello, for their part, suggested to him the great promise of comedy: “It’s a smart strategy to get by in life. If you’re not powerful, if you’re not huge, if you’re not muscular, if intimidation is too much work for you, it works good at disarming powerful adversaries.” Garcia’s “general fascination with the bizarre” also originated with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which showed him that “there are things in this world that are really weird” — a fact of which we could all stand to remind ourselves each and every Halloween.

New Jerry Garcia Web Site Features 5,000 Hours of Free Music, Plus Some Fantastic Archival Material

Reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on Its 200th Anniversary: An Animated Primer to the Great Monster Story & Technology Cautionary Tale

Jerry Garcia Talks About the Birth of the Grateful Dead & Playing Kesey’s Acid Tests in New Animated Video

Bela Lugosi Discusses His Drug Habit as He Leaves the Hospital in 1955

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

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 Writing Systems of the World Explained, from the Latin Alphabet to the Abugidas of India

in Language, Writing | October 30th, 2023

The Korean alphabet, hangul, is “the most scientific writing system.” One often hears that in South Korea, a society that has taken to heart Asia scholar Edwin O. Reischauer’s description of hangul as “perhaps the most scientific system of writing in general use in any country.” But whatever their scientific credentials, all the other writing systems in use (and indeed out of use) have fascinating qualities of their own, a range of which are explained in the UsefulCharts video above on the writing systems of the world — not just the alphabets of the world, mind you, but also the abjads, the syllabaries, the logo-syllabaries, and the abugidas.

The symbols used in an abjad, like that of Hebrew or Arabic (or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs), represent only consonants; as for vowels, “the readers are expected to add them in on their own, based on context.” In a syllabary, like the hiragana and katakana used in Japanese, each character represents a syllable: に for “ni,” ほ for “ho,” ん for “n” (though linguists no doubt argue about whether that last should really count as a syllable).

But most of the Japanese writing is adapted from the Chinese one, a logo-syllabary in which “a single character can stand for a unique syllable or an entire word or idea,” which results in “thousands of characters that need to be learned for basic literacy.”

Abugidas, primarily used in Indian and southeast Asian languages (but also to write Amharic, the language of Ethiopia), “have unique characters both for vowels and for consonants. However, these vowel letters are generally only used in situations where a word begins with a vowel.” Otherwise, a “small change” made to a consonant character indicates which vowel follows. However mechanically or aesthetically diverse they may appear, none of these writing systems (all pictured on a poster from UsefulCharts, available for $19.95 USD) are so fundamentally different that they can’t be mastered by a non-native with time and effort. Not that they’re all as easy as hangul, which — as its commissioner King Sejong the Great put it, in another quotable quote — a wise man can learn before the morning is over, and a stupid man can learn in ten days.

The Evolution of the Alphabet: A Colorful Flowchart, Covering 3,800 Years, Takes You From Ancient Egypt to Today

How to Read Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A British Museum Curator Explains

The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets: A Free Online Atlas That Helps Preserve Writing Systems That May Soon Disappear

Discover Nüshu, a 19th-Century Chinese Writing System That Only Women Knew How to Write

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Writing System in the World: A Short, Charming Introduction

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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Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies, Packed with Horror & Suspense

in Film | October 29th, 2023

In 1999, Stephen King found himself confined to a hospital room “after a careless driver in a minivan smashed the shit out of me on a country road.” There, “roaring with pain from top to bottom, high on painkillers,” and surely more than a little bored, he popped a movie into the room’s VCR. But it didn’t take long before its cinematic power got the better of him: “I asked my son, who was watching with me, to turn the damn thing off. It may be the only time in my life when I quit a horror movie in the middle because I was too scared to go on.”

The movie on King’s bootleg tape (“How did I get the bootleg? Never mind how I got it”) was The Blair Witch Project, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s ultra-low-budget horror picture that sent shockwaves through the independent film world at the end of the millennium.

Though nobody seems to talk much about it anymore, let alone watch it, King’s appreciation has endured: he wrote the essay about it quoted here in 2010, and you can read it in full at Bloody Disgusting. That same site has also published a list of fifteen horror movies King has personally recommended, Blair Witch and beyond.

The list below combines King’s picks at Bloody Disgusting, which lean toward recent films, with a different selection of favorites, with a stronger focus on classics, published at the British Film Institute. “I am especially partial – this will not surprise you – to suspense films,” the author of Carrie, Cujo, and It writes by way of introduction,” but “my favorite film of all time – this may surprise you — is Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s remake of the great Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear. Some may argue that the Clouzot film is better; I beg to disagree.”

The Autopsy of Jane Doe (André Øvredal, 2016) “Visceral horror to rival Alien and early Cronenberg”
The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
The Changeling (Peter Medak, 1980)
Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015)
Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004) “Snyder’s zombies are, it seems to me: fast-moving terrorists who never quit.”
Deep Blue Sea (Renny Harlin, 1999)
The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005)
Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971) “His most inventive film, and stripped to the very core.”
Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) “He out-Hitchcocked Hitchcock.”
Final Destination (James Wong, 2000)
Event Horizon (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1997) “Basically a Lovecraftian terror tale in outer space with a The Quatermass Experiment vibe, done by the Brits.”
The Hitcher (Robert Harmon, 1986 and Dave Meyers, 2007) “Rutger Hauer in the original will never be topped, but this is that rarity, a reimagining that actually works.”
The Last House on the Left (Dennis Iliadis, 2009)
The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2007)
Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957) “The horror here is pretty understated, until the very end.”
The Ruins (Carter Smith, 2008)
Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977)
Stepfather (Joseph Ruben, 1986)
Stir of Echoes (David Koepp 1999) “An unsettling exploration of what happens when an ordinary blue-collar guy (Kevin Bacon) starts to see ghosts.”
The Strangers (Bryan Bertino, 2008)
Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960) As far as “British horror (wrapped in an SF bow), you can’t do much better.”
The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015)

Though clearly a movie fan, King also shows a willingness to advocate where many a cineaste fears to tread, for instance in his selection of not just Sorcerer but several other remakes besides (and in the case of The Hitcher, both the remake and the original). He even chooses the 2004 Dawn of the Dead — directed by no less an object of critical scorn than Zack Snyder — over the 1978 George A. Romero original.

But then, King has always seemed to pride himself in his understanding of and rootedness in unpretentious, working-class America, which you can see in his novels, the various film adaptations of his novels that have come out over the years, and the sole movie he wrote and directed himself: 1986’s Maximum Overdrive, about machines turning against their human masters at a North Carolina truck stop. King now describes that project as a “moron movie,” but as he clearly understands, even a moron movie can make a powerful impact.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

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

Stephen King’s 20 Rules for Writers

Martin Scorsese Names the 11 Scariest Horror Films

Time Out London Presents The 100 Best Horror Films: Start by Watching Four Horror Classics Free Online

How The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Invented Psychological Horror Film & Brought Expressionism to the Screen (1920)

Watch the Cult Classic Horror Film Carnival of Souls (1962)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How the CIA Secretly Used Jackson Pollock & Other Abstract Expressionists to Fight the Cold War

in Art, History | October 27th, 2023

What’s the difference between the United States of America and a cup of yogurt? If you leave the cup of yogurt alone for 200 years, it develops a culture. So goes one of many jokes long in circulation about the supposed American tendency toward low-minded, expedient philistinism. I grant, as an American myself, that such humor surrounds at least a grain of truth. But there was a time when the federal government of the U.S., an organization not often accused of excessive high-mindedness, took an active role in promoting the country’s home-grown avant-garde — an appropriate term, notes Lucie Levine at JSTOR Daily, since it “began as a French military term to describe vanguard troops advancing into battle,” and American modern art had become a continuation of politics by other means.

“Up until World War II, America had never produced large, influential art movements like in Europe,” says the narrator of the Conspiracy of Art video above. After the war, “something unexpected happened: a brood of radical American painters helped make New York City the center of the art world.”

Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock: they and other artists “captured the world’s attention with large-scale works of pure color and form.” This movement came to be known as abstract expressionism, and in the eyes of the newly established Central Intelligence Agency, it came to show promise as propaganda. If shown abroad, it could function as propaganda, highlighting “the differences between American and Soviet politics” — and more specifically, “the appeal of American culture over Soviet Culture.”

“Was Jackson Pollock a weapon in the Cold War?” asks the New Yorker’s Louis Menand. While Pollock was indeed promoted abroad with CIA money (usually provided through layers of organizational misdirection), you don’t look at a painting like Lavender Mist and “think about ‘artistic free enterprise’ or the CIA, or the cultural politics of Partisan Review. You think about how a painter could have taken all he had experienced across a creative threshold that no one had crossed before, and produced this particular thing.” But its “importance for a certain strand of Cold War cultural politics is part of the story of how it got to us, a generation or more later, and that history is worth knowing.” It’s also worth asking, should the United States once again find itself face-to-face with a formidable political and cultural adversary, whether it will be prepared to draft a few Pollocks back into service.

How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

Watch Portrait of an Artist: Jackson Pollock, the 1987 Documentary Narrated by Melvyn Bragg

How the CIA Funded & Supported Literary Magazines Worldwide While Waging Cultural War Against Communism

Was Jackson Pollock Overrated? Behind Every Artist There’s an Art Critic, and Behind Pollock There Was Clement Greenberg

How the CIA Helped Shape the Creative Writing Scene in America

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 ( 3 ) |

The Talking Heads Reunite on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and Revisit Their Early Days as a Band

in Music | October 27th, 2023

Late this summer, the Talking Heads released a remastered version of their concert film, Stop Making Sense. Although the film has already left some theaters, the band hasn’t stopped promoting it. Above, David Byrne, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth join Stephen Colbert and reminisce about their adventures at RISD, CBGBs, and touring with The Ramones. It’s great seeing the band sharing a stage (and a laugh) again, even if there are no instruments in sight. Find Part 1 above, and parts 2 and 3 below…

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

Watch David Byrne Practice His Dance Moves for Stop Making Sense in Newly Released Behind-the-Scenes Footage

The Talking Heads’ First TV Appearance Was on American Bandstand, and It Was a Little Awkward (1979)

Talking Heads Perform The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” Live in 1977 (and How the Bands Got Their Start Together)

A Brief History of Talking Heads: How the Band Went from Scrappy CBGB’s Punks to New Wave Superstars

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Behold Gustave Doré’s Illustrations for Rabelais’ Grotesque Satirical Masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel

in Art, Books, Literature | October 26th, 2023

When François Rabelais came up with a couple of giants to put at the center of a series of inventive and ribald works of satirical fiction, he named one of them Gargantua. That may not sound particularly clever today, gargantuan being a fairly common adjective to describe anything quite large. But we actually owe the word itself to Rabelais, or more specifically, to the nearly half-millennium-long legacy of the character into whom he breathed life. But there’s so much more to Les Cinq livres des faits et dits de Gargantua et Pantagruel, or The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel, whose enduring status as a masterpiece of the grotesque owes much to its author’s wit, linguistic virtuosity, and sheer brazenness.

Nor has it hurt that the books have inspired vivid illustrations from a host of artists, one of whom in particular stands out: Gustave Doré, whom Richard Smyth calls “one of the most prolific — and most successful — book illustrators of the nineteenth century.”

Here at Open Culture, we’ve previously featured the art he created to accompany the work of Dante, Cervantes, and Poe, each a writer possessed of a highly distinctive set of literary powers, and each of whom thus received a different but equally lavish and evocative treatment from Doré.

For Rabelais, says the site of book dealer Heribert Tenschert, the 22-year-old artist produced (in 1854) “100 images that oscillate between the whimsical and the uncanny, between realism and fantasy,” a count he would expand to 700 in another edition two decades later.

You can see a great many of Doré’s illustrations for Gargantua and Pantagruel at Wikimedia Commons. The simultaneous extravagance and repugnance of the series’ medieval France may seem impossibly distant to us, but it can hardly have felt like yesterday to Doré either, given that he was working three centuries after Rabelais.

As suggested by Heribert Tenschert, perhaps these imaginative visions of the Middle Ages — like Balzac’s Rabelaisian Les contes drolatiques, which he also illustrated — “resonated with Doré because they reminded him of the mysterious atmosphere of his childhood, which he had spent in the middle of the medieval city of Strasbourg.” Whatever his connection, Doré created images that still bring to mind a whole range of descriptors: somberly jocular, rigorously voluptuous, compellingly repellent, and above all pantagruelist. (Look it up.)

The Adventures of Famed Illustrator Gustave Doré Presented in a Fantasic(al) Cutout Animation

Gustave Doré’s Dramatic Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy

The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel: 120 Woodcuts Envision the Grotesque Inhabitants of Rabelais’ World (1565)

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Choir with 1,000 Singers Pays Tribute to Sinéad O’Connor & Performs “Nothing Compares 2 U”

in Music | October 26th, 2023

The building that houses Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre began life as Dan Lowrey’s Star of Erin Music Hall.

It has undergone several name changes over the course of its 145 years, and played host to drama, opera, ballet, films, oratorio, pantomime, variety shows, and world-famous popular musicians like David Bowie, REM, Foo Fighters… and Dublin native Sinéad O’Connor, who arrived at the venue in 2011, unceremoniously toting her aluminum foil-wrapped lunch.

Her fifteen-year-old daughter, Róisín Waters, sang back up.

Reviewer Nicola Byrne wrote in Golden Plec that “a single spotlight illuminated O’Connor on the middle of the stage, as she launched into “I Am Stretched On Your Grave,” a song she ‘Usually dedicates to any dead people that may be present:’”

With no instrumental, all attention was on that spotlight. If a pin had’ve been dropped in the Olympia, I would’ve known about it.

O’Connor dedicated that evening’s performance of “Nothing Compares To You” to her 7‑year-old son, Shane Lunny, who died by suicide in January 2022, a year and a half before his mother also took her leave.

A few weeks ago, Nobu Adilman and Daveed Goldman, founders of Choir! Choir! Choir!, swung by 3Olympia Theatre, to lead a 1000-member strong spontaneous choir of ticket holders in a moving cover of “Nothing Compares 2 You,” at the top of the page.

It was a meaningful way for fans to connect to an artist who spoke to them.

Choir! Choir! Choir! previously paid tribute to David Bowie with “Space Oddity,” and Prince (composer of “Nothing Compares 2 You)” with “When Doves Cry” not long after their deaths.

Prior to Dublin, Choir! Choir! Choir! honored O’Connor with a singalong of “Nothing Compares 2 You” at the Toronto Opera House, in the town where their movement got its start.

Ticket purchases benefited CAMH: The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Adilman and Goldman were joined onstage by the producer of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Chris Birkett, and Toronto-based singer-songwriter Feist, whose first album purchase was O’Connor’s debut, The Lion and the Cobra.

“I remember so clearly the first time I heard her at a friend’s house after school,” she told Index Magazine in 2005:

She blew my mind. Her voice sounded like it was from another universe. She redefined everything for me.

Turning the clock back to 2016, we find Choir! Choir! Choir! participants tackling “Nothing Compares 2” as a way of getting the jump on February’s most fraught holiday:

Valentine’s Day kinda sucks so last night, in anticipation, we celebrated EPIC HEARTBREAKS with the one and only Sinéad O’Connor. Props to Prince (yes, we know he wrote this amazing tune!) for not taking this video down in 7 hours and 15 days.

Sinéad O’Connor’s Raw Isolated Vocals for “Nothing Compares 2 U”

Sinéad O’Connor Makes Her First US Television Appearance: Watch Her Sing “Mandinka” on Late Night with David Letterman (1988)

– 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 ( 4 ) |

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A Choir with 1,000 Singers Pays Tribute to Sinéad O’Connor & Performs “Nothing Compares 2 U”

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