Yes, the big animation studios (Warner Bros., Disney, etc.) dominate the list. But a few “indies” manage to squeak in there. Take for example Winsor Mccay’s seminal 1914 creation “Gertie the Dinosaur.” Or Bambi Meets Godzilla. A student film created by Marv Newland in 1969, Bambi Meets Godzilla (above) runs only 90 seconds. Of which, 48 seconds are devoted to the opening credits, and 27 seconds to the closing credits, leaving only 12 seconds of “action,” which is mostly stillness. The timing is the funny.
The short film circulated in theaters across the U.S., shown before screenings of Philippe de Broca’s feature film King of Hearts. Over the years the publicly-available versions of Bambi Meets Godzilla became worn and faded. So, in 2013, Coda Gardner produced a frame-for-frame HD re-creation. You can watch it below.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
The National Film Board of Canada hosts more recent films by Newland, including 2005’s “Tête à Tête à Tête” and 2011’s “CMYK.”
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Which coffee maker is most deeply embedded in American culture? I would nominate the humble Mr. Coffee, a device referenced on Cheers as well as Seinfeld, in the work of Raymond Carver as well as that of the Bloodhound Gang (to say nothing of the 1970s mass-media phenomenon that was its commercials starring Joe DiMaggio). But I would also urge my fellow Americans to ask themselves when last they actually used one, or at least used one to satisfying results. Italy, by contrast, knows what it is to take a coffee maker to heart. As one study found, nine out of ten Italian households possesses, in one form or another, the same basic model: the Bialetti Moka Express.
As Ted Mills wrote here with confidence last month, “many an Open Culture reader has a Bialetti Moka Express in their kitchen. I know I do, but I must add that I knew little about its history and apparently even less about how to properly use one.” Enter coffee Youtuber and The World Atlas of Coffee author James Hoffmann, whose introductory video proved popular enough to launch a mini-series that takes a deep dive into the mechanics and variations on the nearly 90-year-old “moka pot.”
In the second episode, just above, Hoffman performs a series of experiments varying elements of the simple device — starting temperature, grind size, heat power — in order to determine how it makes the best cup of coffee.
In episode three, Hoffman (who clearly knows a thing or two about not just coffee, but how to name a Youtube video to algorithmic advantage) refines “the ultimate moka pot technique.” Much depends, of course, on factors like what sort of beans you buy, as well as subjective considerations like how you want your coffee to taste — your preferred “flavor profile,” as they now say. The longtime moka pot user will inevitably feel his/her way to his/her own idiosyncratic procedure and set of accessories, and will more than likely also accrue a formidable collection of moka pots themselves. Here Hoffman lines up ten of them, half of which are just different sizes of the classic Moka Express, its silhouette recognizable at any scale.
Less familiar models take center stage in the fourth episode, “The Moka Pot Variations.” In it Hoffman puts to the test the Bialetti’s double-cream espresso-making Brikka; their cappuccino-capable Mukka; the tiny, discontinued Cuor di Moka, with its correspondingly avid fan base; and finally something called the Kamira, which looks less like a coffee maker than a piece of recycled industrial art. Even apart from these, a variety of companies now make a variety of moka pots, every single one of which has no doubt at least a few serious coffee drinkers swearing by it. I myself have a weakness for Bialetti’s Moka Alpina; whether it makes a superior brew I couldn’t say, but the jauntiness of that Tyrolean feather is hardly debatable.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
A century ago, the popular English novelist W.L. George sat down and put his mind to envisioning the world we live in today. That world has not, alas, turned out to be one in which his books are much read, but in his day a great many readers were moved by his social cause-driven fiction and reportage. One might compare him to Upton Sinclair, his contemporary on the other side of the Atlantic. In the Paris-born-and-raised George’s ancestral homeland, George Orwell described him as an author of what G.K. Chesterton called “good bad books,” singling out for praise his 1920 novel Caliban amid the “shoddy rubbish” of his wider oeuvre.
Still even authors of rubbish — and perhaps especially authors of rubbish — can sense the shape of things to come. For its edition of May 7, 1922, the New York Herald commissioned George to share that sense with their readers. In response he described a world in which “commercial flying will have become entirely commonplace,” reducing the separation of America and Europe to eight hours, and whose passenger steamers and railroads will have consequently fallen into obsolescence. “Wireless telegraphy and wireless telephones will have crushed the cable system,” resulting in generations who’ll never have seen “a wire outlined against the sky.”
That goes for the transmission of electricity as well, since George credits (a bit hastily, it seems) the possibility of wireless power systems of the kind researched by Nikola Tesla. In 2022, coal will take a distant backseat to the tides, the sun, and radium, and “it may also be that atomic energy will be harnessed.” As for the cinema, “the figures on the screen will not only move, but they will have their natural colors and speak with ordinary voices. Thus, the stage as we know it to-day may entirely disappear, which does not mean the doom of art, since the movie actress of 2022 will not only need to know how to smile but also how to talk.”
Other women, however, have proven just as capable as George had imagined: “All positions will be open to them and a great many women will have risen high. The year 2022 will probably see a large number of women in Congress, a great many on the judicial bench, many in civil service posts, and perhaps some in the President’s Cabinet.” Georges foresees the birth-control pill, but also the “pill lunch.” Unlike some reformers, he hesitates to declare the abolition of the family, but he does imagine the “majority of mankind” occupying modular homes in high-rise communal dwellings (“I have a vision of walls, furniture, and hangings made of more or less compressed papier-mâché”), all gathered in climate-controlled cities set under glass.
On the whole, in 2022, “the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago.” Indeed, he suspects that a glimpse of our reality wouldn’t much surprise “the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station.” It could even be dull, what with complete settlement and development leaving “no more opportunity in America than there is in England to-day.” In 1922, George could write that “in fiction, America leads the world by sincerity, faith and fearlessness,” and believe that “in 2022 American literature will be a literature of culture. The battle will be over and the muzzle off. There will be no more things one can’t say, and things one can’t think.” Whatever the inspirations of his prophecy, they must not have told him about social media.
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!
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
Almost immediately after Scottish doctor Edward Jenner learned how to inoculate humans against smallpox in 1796, mass movements sprang up in England and the U.S. to oppose the measure. The rejection of inoculation and vaccination generally made its stand on “political grounds,” says Yale historian Frank Snowden. For over two hundred years, people have “widely considered [vaccines to be] another form of tyranny.” In the 19th century, fears of government control mutated into pseudoscientific conspiracy theories claiming the smallpox vaccine might cause, for example, the growth of hooves and horns or the birth of human/cow hybrid babies.
The pushback against the smallpox vaccine, writes Slate’s Nick Keppler, occurred during a time “when arguments about bodily integrity and religious objection carried as much weight as scientific evidence.” But vaccine science progressed nonetheless, and scientific institutions – very much in league with government by the mid-20th century – shared their largesse in the form of medical breakthroughs and consumer conveniences. “The postwar era was a very trust-in-science-era,” says researcher scientist Jonathan M. Berman, author of Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement. “The public not just accepted, but cheered, the headline-making work of guys in white lab coats,” Keppler remarks.
Not everyone was cheering for Jonas Salk, the March of Dimes, and the polio vaccine, however. While celebrities like Elvis Presley legitimized the vaccine in the eyes of a previously skeptical public, a few fervent anti-vaxxers rose to prominence, some using the same combination of fear mongering, pseudoscientific speculation, and conspiratorial thinking common to the smallpox era – and common, once again, in the time of COVID-19.
One of these figures, Florida businessman Duon Miller, founded a cosmetics company, then invested his own money and that of others into an organization called Polio Prevention Inc., a one-man operation that purported to fight polio with information about nutrition. Miller’s organization actually served to undermine the vaccine with a host of outrageous, logically fallacious claims about the causes of polio and the dangers of vaccination. As Keppler notes:
Like today’s COVID skeptics, Miller cherry-picked physicians who were skeptical of polio as a virus and misrepresented facts. One mailer was a rapid fire of out-of-context information: Salk “isn’t entirely satisfied with the vaccine.” Some children still got polio after being vaccinated. And just as the “real” number of COVID-19 deaths pales in comparison to vaccine deaths in some dark corners of the internet, so it was with polio in Miller’s world: “Polio ‘CRIPPLES’ and Polio ‘DEATHS’ are merely ‘Statistics’ to the ‘Charity-Brokers,’ whose record to date of ‘Cripples’ and ‘Deaths’ is TRULY DISGRACEFUL.”
Like many conspiracy theorists today, Miller’s claims contained several kernels of truth, misplaced in the service of a bizarre crusade. Research now ties excess consumption of soft drinks, white flour, and refined sugar to an increase in cancers and heart disease. In this, Miller was prescient, given that these are the some of the biggest killers in the country. But this had nothing to do with the polio virus. Miller’s uncritical thinking, mistaking large-scale correlations for causation, typifies conspiracy theories. His appeal to the welfare of children also strikes a familiar chord, but it’s unsurprising in this case, given that “polio was a disease of children,” says René F. Najera, editor of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s History of Vaccines project, “so people were already afraid for their children.” Comparatively, COVID-19 “has largely left children alone … so we don’t mobilize as much.”
Keppler draws many other parallels between Miller’s personal anti-polio vaccine project and the efforts today to resist the COVID-19 vaccine, all representative of American anti-intellectualism and the well-funded will to disbelieve what the science clearly demonstrates. Miller distributed mailers in schools around Florida, accepted hundreds in donations, and printed thousands of pamphlets for distribution. He even offered to get injected with the polio virus to show that it was harmless. However, “federal charges ended Miller’s crusade,” when he was charged with “sending ‘libellous, scurrilous and defamatory’ statements through the mail” in 1954, the year Salk readied nationwide trials of the vaccine. Five years later, “U.S. polio cases were about 14 percent of what they were in 1952, thanks to vaccination,” not, as Miller would have the public believe, a change in diet. “Give us proper diets,” he continued to write to newspapers, “and we’ll solve the physical imperfections of Americans young and old.” He might have been on to a good argument about nutrition just by chance, but the public had no reason to listen to his opinions about polio simply because he could afford to circulate them.
For example, Harvard’s Loeb Music Library has just released a selection from its 600-volume 78rpm collection of Arab and Arab-American music from the early 20th Century. The Library’s collection spans roughly 1903 to the 1950s and is not just a record of the aesthetics and the time of the Nahdah Era (the Arab Renaissance), but it also serves as a history of the still-young music industry. Among the RCA, Columbia, and Victor labels, you will also find many independent (and bootleg!) labels.
Arab record companies, such as Baidaphon and Cairophon, are only a few among many other American (Columbia, Victor), European (Odeon, Orfeon), and Arab-American companies (Al-Chark, Alamphon) that recorded and released these notable Arab voices. Songs and performers from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Al-Maghrib exhibit the rich tradition of Arabic musical forms, namely the art of al-mawwāl (vocal improvisation), qaṣīdah (sung poems), muwashshaḥ (Andalusian sung poetry), ṭaqṭūqah (pop songs) and taqsīm (instrumental improvisation. Religious chants are also an important piece of the Arabic musical tradition. The collection includes Qur’anic recitation of Al-shaykh Ṭāhā Al-Fashnī and a rare record of a woman reciter Wadūdah Al-Minyalawī alongside Christian hymns of Father Gigis ʻAzīz Al-Jizzīnī.
All this is happening due to the Music Modernization Act of 2018, which differs in its public-domain release dates by a few years compared to print and film. According to Citizen DJ, a website we told you about several years ago, “all sound recordings published before January 1, 1923 entered the public domain on January 1, 2022.”
The trick of course is getting access to all of these recordings. The Library of Congress runs a site called The National Jukebox, with access to thousands of 78rpm records from Victor and Columbia labels. That allows you to listen but not download.
The Association for Recorded Sound Collections also has a page noting “Ten Notable Pre-1923 Recordings”, which benefits from its curation. It features important early works like Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” one of the most popular “race records” (i.e. vocal blues sung by Black performers) of 1920; Enrico Caruso’s “Vesti La Giubba,” which features the tenor at the height of his career; and Vess L. Ossman’s recording of Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” which helped popularize the composer. Also see our recent post: 400,000+ Sound Recordings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Public Domain.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Even with 21st-century teaching aids, the written Japanese language isn’t the sort of thing one picks up in a few weeks’ study. A few hundred years ago it would’ve been much more difficult still, especially for those engaged in learning the sūtras or scriptures of Buddhism. “The stakes of correct recitation were high in the pre- and early modern era,” writes The Public Domain Review’s Hunter Dukes, “with strict rules for pronunciation existing since the 1100s, and sūtra recitation (dokyō) becoming an art form in the following century.” Imported from India and rewritten in classical Chinese with few clues as to how its words should actually be spoken, the Buddhist canon of east Asia set a mighty challenge even before the perfectly literate.
As for the illiterate — of whom, in complete contrast to modern-day Japan, there were many — what chance did they stand? Salvation, or at any rate a chance at salvation, arrived in the 17th century in the form of texts written just for them. “Japanese printers began creating a type of book for the illiterate, allowing them to recite sūtras and other devotional prayers, without knowledge of any written language,” writes Dukes. “The texts work by a rebus principle (known as hanjimono), where each drawn image, when named aloud, sounds out a Chinese syllable.” Geared toward an agricultural “readership,” this system drew its imagery from what they knew: farming tools, domestic animals, and even figures of myth.
“Because these pictures represent sounds, rather than objects or ideas, they don’t really act as pictograms the way emoji do,” admits the writer of the Library of Congress’ post. “But in their icon-like appearance, succinct and functional, they do bear a resemblance to our use of emoji today.” It was then reblogged on Language Log, one of whose commenters offered some explanation of the system as seen in the pictures: “The Sanskrit phrase ‘Prajñāpāramitā’ is rendered ‘Hannyaharamita’ in Japanese. ‘Hannya’ here is written with a drawing of the hannya demon mask from Noh. ‘Harami’ appears to be a picture of a body (mi) in an abdomen (hara), and then ‘ta’ is a picture of a ricefield (tanbo, the “ta” of many Japanese names, like Tanaka and Toyota).” Hands have been wringing about the potential of internet communication to deliver us into a “post-literate” society; perhaps these curious chapters in the history of the Japanese language show us where to go from there.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
“In many ways Scandinavian film and television is a global cultural brand, connected with and exporting some of the cultural and social values connected to a liberal and progressive welfare society.” From the University of Copenhagen, this free course deals with the social, institutional and cultural background of film and television in Scandinavia and in a broader European and global context. Spanning 5 weeks and taught by professor Eva Novrup Redvall, Scandinavian Film and Television covers the early cinematic work of Danish director Carl Dreyer, the films of Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier, Scandinavian new wave cinema, and finally more contemporary productions. You can enroll for free here.
On the surface of things, Anthony Roth Costanzo, the internationally-recognized countertenor and Justin Vivian Bond, the subversive performance artist best known for their creation Kiki DuRane, “an alcoholic battle-axe with a throat full of razor-blades,” would have little reason to share a mic, let alone inhabit the same stage.
Leave surfaces behind!
Their genre-defying, just released album, Only An Octave Apart, explores the depths that lurk beneath them, finding common cause between their chosen art forms and then some. The album’s title, a nod to the opening number of a Metropolitan Opera television special starring comedian Carol Burnett and operatic soprano Beverly Sills, is just the tip of the iceberg.
As they state in the program notes for a recent appearance with the New York Philharmonic at Jazz at Lincoln Center:
We each sound different from what you would expect when you look at us. The juxtaposition of our voices, personalities, and repertoire subverts notions of high and low, be it in terms of pitch, cultural echelon, or degrees of camp — not to mention the difference in height.
If you thought David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sent things into the stratosphere when they joined forces on “Under Pressure,” listen to Costanzo and Bond’s take, above.
Their Dido’s Lament / White Flag Medley smashes the musical binary with a delicacy that is given room to grow.
Introducing the number at Jazz at Lincoln Center, he recalled how Dido & Aeneas was one of his first professional opera gigs at 19. No, he wasn’t cast as the fatally distraught Queen of Carthage, a diva role he’s eyed for years, but rather the Second Woman and First Witch.
(“Second Woman / First Witch…sounds like the story of my life,” Bond marveled. “I own it! Can you imagine if you were First Woman and Second Witch?”)
Costanzo got his chance at Dido in the summer of 2020 when, with performance venues still closed due to the pandemic, he hatched an idea to cart Philharmonic musicians and guest singers around the city’s five Boroughs in a rented pickup dubbed the NY Phil Bandwagon. 80-some free performances later, he felt ready to record.
When Bond joins in, it’s with English singer-songwriter Dido’s 2003 chart topper, White Flag, which also speaks to the pains of love. The sincerity of the performers causes a gorgeous alchemical reaction to soften the positions of more than a few staunch opera-phobes and pop-deniers.
(“The wonderful thing about the opera,” Bond cracks, “is when you wake up, you’re at the opera!”)
Other treasures from this fruitful collaboration include skillful intertwinings of Tom Jobim’s Bossa nova favorite Águas de Março (Waters of March) with Gioachino Rossini’s Cinderella-themed confection La Cenerentola, and Gluck’s 18th-century masterpiece, Orfeo ed Euridice with Don’t Give Up, a “message of hope in the bleakest of moments” and a hit for Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush when Bond was a year out of college…and Costanzo was four.
Listen to Only an Octave Apart in its entirety on YouTube or Spotify.
Anthony Ross Costanzo will reprise his role as the revolutionary pharaoh, Akhnaten, at the Metropolitan Opera later this spring.
Above, you can watch Spiegelman respond to the ban and wonder whether it’s “a harbinger of things to come,” a step in a larger effort to efface the memory of the Holocaust.
Whatever our religious background, we all sooner or later have occasion to speak of nailing theses to a door. Most of us use the phrase as a metaphor, but seldom entirely without awareness of the historical events that inspired it. On October 31, 1517, a German priest and theologian named Martin Luther nailed to the door of Wittenberg’s All Saints’ Church his own theses, 95 of them, which collectively made an argument against the Roman Catholic Church’s practice of selling indulgences, or pardons for sins. Luther could not accept that the poor should “spend all their money buying their way out of punishment so they can go to heaven,” nor that it should be “easier for the rich to avoid a long time in purgatory.”
In other words, Luther believed that the Church in his time had become “way too much about money and too little about God,” according to the narration of the short film above. Created by Tumblehead Studios and showcased by National Geographic for the 500th anniversary of the original thesis-nailing, its five playfully animated minutes tell the story of the Reformation, which saw Protestantism split off from Catholicism as a result of Luther’s agitation. It also manages to include such events as Luther’s own translation of the New Testament, previously available only in Greek and Latin, into his native German, the publication of which created the basis of the modern German language as spoken and written today.
Luther’s translation gave ordinary people “the opportunity to read the Bible in their own language,” free from the interpretations of the priests and the Church. It also gave them, perhaps less intentionally, the ability to “use the words of the Bible as an argument for all sorts of things.” Luther’s thoughts were soon marshaled “in the power struggles of princes, in revolts, and in the struggle between kings, princes, and the Pope about who actually decides what.” Squabbles, battles, and full-scale wars ensued. The consequent institutional schisms changed the world in ways visible half a millennium later — but they first changed Europe, where traces of that transformation still reveal themselves most strikingly. Few travelers can be trusted to find and explain those traces more ably than public-television host Rick Steves.
In Luther and the Reformation, his 2017 special above, Steves visits all the important sites involved in the central figure’s life journey, a representation in microcosm of Europe’s grand shift from medievalism into modernity. In more than 40 years of professional travel, Steves has paid countless visits to the monuments of Catholic Europe. Appreciating them, he admitted in a recent New York Times Magazine profile, required him to “park my Protestant sword at the door.” His story-of-the-Reformation tour, however, lets him draw on his own Lutheran tradition with his characteristic enthusiasm. That enthusiasm, in part, that has made him a such a successful travel entrepreneur, though he presumably knows when to stop amassing wealth: after all, it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Or so the New Testament has it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
Watch above a classic movie made by David Rogers at Vanderbilt University in the 1950s. It shows “a neutrophil (a type of white blood cell) chasing a bacterium through a field of red blood cells in a blood smear. After pursuing the bacterium around several red blood cells, the neutrophil finally catches up to and engulfs its prey. In the human body, these cells are an important first line of defense against bacterial infection. The speed of rapid movements such as cell crawling can be most easily measured by the method of direct observation.” This comforting video comes courtesy of the estate of David Rogers, Vanderbilt University.
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