Why You Shouldn’t Drive Slowly in the Left Traffic Lane

If you tend to dri­ve slow­ly in the left lane, then take note. At best, you’re cre­at­ing more traf­fic. At worst, you’re increas­ing the chances of an acci­dent. That’s what research indi­cates. And that’s why the author­i­ties are now try­ing to dis­cour­age the prac­tice. Above, you can watch a quick pub­lic ser­vice announce­ment from Vox. Read more on the cons of left-lane dri­ving here.

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!

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Download 100,000 Photos of 20 Great U.S. National Parks, Courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service

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The sto­ry of the U.S.’s nation­al parks isn’t one sto­ry, but many. These have been told and retold since the found­ing of the Nation­al Park Ser­vice, a cen­tu­ry ago this past Thurs­day. And they stretch back even fur­ther, to the Civ­il War, the con­quer­ing and set­tling of the west, and the begin­nings of the Amer­i­can con­ser­va­tion move­ment. Near­ly every one of us who grew up with­in a cramped, con­tentious fam­i­ly car ride from one (or more) of those parks has our own sto­ry to tell. But our nos­tal­gic mem­o­ries can con­flict with the his­to­ry. Vir­ginia and North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Park­way, for example—the park clos­est to my child­hood home—offers vis­i­tors an idyl­lic vision of Appalachi­an life and land­scape. But the found­ing and con­struc­tion of the park in the 1930s and 40s was any­thing but.

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On the one hand, the build­ing of the gor­geous­ly scenic, 469-mile high­way pro­vid­ed jobs for out-of-work civil­ians and, lat­er, con­sci­en­tious objec­tors under FDR’s Works Progress Admin­is­tra­tion, Emer­gency Relief Admin­is­tra­tion, and Civil­ian Con­ser­va­tion Corps. On the oth­er hand, the fed­er­al government’s seizure of the land cre­at­ed hard­ships for exist­ing farm­ers and landown­ers, forced some­times to sell their prop­er­ty or to obtain per­mis­sion for build­ing and devel­op­ment. The Park Ser­vice project also engen­dered resent­ment among the East­ern Chero­kee, who fought the Park­way, and won some con­ces­sions. (In one sto­ry that rep­re­sents both of these hard­ships, a Chero­kee man Jer­ry Wolfe tells WRAL what it was like to work on the road, one that ran direct­ly through the cab­in he once shared with his par­ents.)

Planting Plan Blue Ridge

To cel­e­brate their 100 years of exis­tence, the Nation­al Park Ser­vice has launched what it calls its Open Parks Net­work, a por­tal to thou­sands of pho­tographs and doc­u­ments dat­ing from the very begin­nings of many of its parks—some of which, like Yosemite and Yel­low­stone, came under fed­er­al pro­tec­tion before the NPS exist­ed, and some, like New York’s Stonewall Inn, only giv­en pro­tect­ed mon­u­men­tal sta­tus this year. The Open Parks Net­work includes over 20 dif­fer­ent parks and sev­er­al dozen col­lec­tions that doc­u­ment spe­cif­ic peri­ods.

Great Smoky Mountains Shelton

In the case of Blue Ridge Park­way, we have only one—a col­lec­tion of the park’s engi­neer­ing plans. One might hope for images of those toil­ing Depres­sion-era crews, or of the anx­ious faces of the region’s res­i­dents. But instead we can piece togeth­er the sto­ry of the park through fas­ci­nat­ing doc­u­ments like the “Plant­i­ng Plan” fur­ther up, from 1965, which reminds us how much the nat­ur­al beau­ty of the Park­way is achieved through human inter­ven­tion. And we can imag­ine what many of those ear­ly-20th cen­tu­ry Appalachi­an folks looked like in his­toric pho­tos like that above, from a col­lec­tion of Great Smokey Moun­tains pho­tographs tak­en in the teens and 20s by Jim Shel­ton.

Lincoln's Birthplace Nearby House

Regard­less of how much med­dling we have done to cre­ate the scenic over­looks and moun­tain and Red­wood under­pass­es that con­sti­tute the nation’s pro­tect­ed parks, there’s no deny­ing their appeal to us all, nature lovers and oth­er­wise, as sym­bols of the country’s rough grandeur. We can skip the hikes and long car rides, or plan for them in the future, sur­vey­ing the parks’ beau­ty through over 100,000 high-res­o­lu­tion dig­i­tal scans of pho­tographs and 200,000 images in all, includ­ing more gal­leries of build­ing plans, maps, and illus­tra­tions. Some of the gal­leries are quite unusual—like this col­lec­tion of aer­i­al infrared pho­tographs of the Great Smoky Moun­tains, or this one of “his­toric goats” of the Carl Sand­burg Home Nation­al His­toric Site. And many of the photos—like the fad­ed 1968 pho­to of Yellowstone’s Old Faith­ful geyser, fur­ther up, look just like your fam­i­ly vaca­tion pho­tos.

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There are beau­ti­ful his­tor­i­cal images like that of a house near Hod­genville, Ken­tucky, site of the Abra­ham Lin­coln Birth­place Nation­al His­tor­i­cal Park, fur­ther up; images of park rangers and staff, like the charm­ing group pho­to above from Ander­son­ville Nation­al His­toric Site in Geor­gia; and sub­lime vis­tas like the pho­to at the top of the post from the Kings Moun­tain Nation­al Mil­i­tary Park in Yosemite Val­ley. The Open Parks Net­work, writes Joe Toneli at Digg, “is con­stant­ly being added to, and is an impor­tant tool in pre­serv­ing the his­to­ry of the NPS and the nation­al mon­u­ments it pro­tects.” Devel­oped in part­ner­ship with Clem­son Uni­ver­si­ty since 2010, Open Parks hosts all pub­lic domain images, free to explore and down­load. See this guide for a detailed expla­na­tion on how to best nav­i­gate the col­lec­tions, all of which are ful­ly search­able.

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Each image, like that of Yosemite Falls, above, has options for view­ing full-screen and zoom­ing in and out. So absorb­ing are these archives, you may find your­self get­ting lost in them, and any one of these beau­ti­ful­ly-pre­served parks and their incred­i­ble his­to­ries offer wel­come places to get lost for sev­er­al hours, or sev­er­al days. For even more his­toric pho­tog­ra­phy from the nation’s many parks, see selec­tions online from the East­man Muse­um’s cur­rent exhib­it, Pho­tog­ra­phy and Amer­i­ca’s Nation­al Parks, “designed,” writes John­ny Simon at Quartz, “to inspire peo­ple to look at nation­al land­scape just as Ted­dy Roo­sevelt once did, a cen­tu­ry ago.”

Enter Open Parks here.

via Digg

Relat­ed Con­tent:

226 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs of Great Amer­i­can Nation­al Parks Are Now Online

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

The Beau­ty of Space Pho­tog­ra­phy

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

The Spellbinding Art of Human Anatomy: From the Renaissance to Our Modern Times

Many of us have a fraught rela­tion­ship with what med­ical illus­tra­tor Vanes­sa Ruiz, above, refers to as our anatom­i­cal selves.

You may have received the Vis­i­ble Man for your 8th birth­day, only to for­get, some thir­ty years lat­er, what your spleen looks like, where it’s locat­ed and what it does.

We know more about the inner work­ings of our appli­ances than we do our own bod­ies. Why? Large­ly because we saved the man­u­al that came with our dish­wash­er, and refer to it when our glass­ware is cov­ered in spots.

As Ruiz not­ed in her TED-Med talk last Novem­ber, there’s a wealth of eas­i­ly acces­si­ble detailed anatom­i­cal illus­tra­tions, but we tend to keep them out of sight, and thus out of mind. Once a stu­dent is fin­ished with his or her med­ical text­book or app, he or she rarely seeks those pic­tures out again. Those of us out­side the med­ical pro­fes­sion have spent very lit­tle time con­sid­er­ing the way our bod­i­ly sys­tems are put togeth­er.

This lack of engage­ment prompt­ed Ruiz to found the aggre­gate blog Street Anato­my, devot­ed to fer­ret­ing out the inter­sec­tion between anatom­i­cal illus­tra­tion and pub­lic art. Expo­sure is key. In cre­at­ing star­tling, body-based images—and what is more star­tling than a flayed human or piece thereof?—the artist reminds view­ers of what lurks beneath their own skin.

Ruiz is deeply inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of her craft, a prac­tice which can be dat­ed to Renais­sance man Leonar­do da Vin­ci. She sees beau­ty in bizarre ear­ly exam­ples which insert­ed sev­ered limbs into still lives and posed semi-dis­sect­ed cadav­ers next to pop­u­lar attrac­tions, such as Clara, the tour­ing rhi­no.

These days, the sub­jects of those pur­pose­ful illus­tra­tions are more like­ly to be ren­dered as 3‑D com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed ani­ma­tions.

The more old school approach is vis­i­ble in the work of the artists Ruiz cham­pi­ons, such as Fer­nan­do Vicente, who couch­es 19th-cen­tu­ry male anatom­i­cal plates inside more con­tem­po­rary female pin-ups and fash­ion illus­tra­tions.

Artist Jason Free­ny gives Bar­bie, Legos, and Mario the Vis­i­ble Man treat­ment.

Noah Scalin, who spent 2007 cre­at­ing a skull a day, made a gut-filled gun and titled it “Anato­my of War.”

But let us not pre­sume all view­ers are in total igno­rance of their bod­ies’ work­ings. A woman whose ankle had been smashed in a roller skat­ing acci­dent com­mis­sioned archi­tect Fed­eri­co Car­ba­jal to doc­u­ment its recon­struc­tion with one of his anatom­i­cal­ly accu­rate wire sculp­tures. Car­ba­jal incor­po­rat­ed his bene­fac­tor’s sur­gi­cal screws.

Check out Ruiz’s rec­om­mend­ed read­ing list to delve into the sub­ject more deeply.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load the Sub­lime Anato­my Draw­ings of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Avail­able Online, or in a Great iPad App

The Anatom­i­cal Draw­ings of Renais­sance Man, Leonar­do da Vin­ci

Micro­scop­ic Bat­tle­field: Watch as a Killer T Cell Attacks a Can­cer Cell

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her lat­est script, Fawn­book, is avail­able in a dig­i­tal edi­tion from Indie The­ater Now.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

1850s Japan Comes to Life in 3D, Color Photos: See the Stereoscopic Photography of T. Enami

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For about a quar­ter of a mil­len­ni­um, Japan had a pol­i­cy called sakoku, lit­er­al­ly mean­ing “closed coun­try,” which put to death for­eign­ers who dared enter to Japan, or Japan­ese who dared to leave it. It came to an end with the Mei­ji Restora­tion, the peri­od between 1868 to 1912, dur­ing which Japan put the Emper­or back in charge and, as his­to­ri­ans often say, began to “open up” to the out­side world, light­ing out on the path to its own kind of moder­ni­ty. For­eign­ers would still have had only a vague idea of Japan­ese life at the time — at least those with­out access to a stere­o­scope, and who thus could­n’t lay eyes on the vivid 3D pho­tog­ra­phy of Yoko­hama’s T. Ena­mi.

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“To many whose lives revolved around pho­tog­ra­phy — includ­ing both Japan­ese and for­eign pro­fes­sion­als, as well as seri­ous ama­teurs — Ena­mi was not just a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, but a ‘pho­tog­ra­pher’s pho­tog­ra­ph­er,’ ” writes Ena­mi enthu­si­ast Rob Oech­sle on his site t‑enami.org. He also dubs his pho­to­graph­ic hero (who was born Nobuku­ni Ena­mi in 1859 and lived until 1929, see­ing the end of the Mei­ji era but not the begin­ning of the sec­ond world war) “King of the Stere­oview, Mas­ter of the Lantern-Slide, Pro­lif­ic, Anony­mous Con­trib­u­tor To the World of Mei­ji-era Yoko­hama Album Views, Ded­i­cat­ed Street Pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and Hon­ored Alum­nus of Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Mag­a­zine.”

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That first title has grant­ed a por­tion of Enam­i’s large body of work a sur­pris­ing recent after­life. Fol­low­ing in his teacher’s foot­steps, Ena­mi refined the Japan­ese use of the stere­o­graph­ic cam­era, a device that pro­duced, writes the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um’s Zoe Clay­ton, a stere­o­graph: “two pic­tures mount­ed next to each oth­er, viewed with a set of lens­es known as a stere­o­scope.  Tak­en around 7cm apart, rough­ly cor­re­spond­ing to the spac­ing of the eyes, the left pic­ture rep­re­sents what the left eye would see, and like­wise for the right, so when observ­ing the pic­tures through a stereo­scop­ic view­er, the pair of pho­tographs con­verge into a sin­gle three-dimen­sion­al image.”

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Adver­tised with slo­gans like “See the world from your par­lor!,” this “opti­cal mar­vel took the world by storm in the mid 19th cen­tu­ry, becom­ing the first ever mass-pro­duced pho­to­graph­ic images sold,” their pop­u­lar­i­ty such that “every Vic­to­ri­an home — regard­less of class — had a stere­o­scope and a col­lec­tion of views.” And though the years have made stere­o­scopes a lit­tle hard to come by, the inter­net has dis­cov­ered that you can enjoy some­thing like the same 3D effect Vic­to­ri­an view­ers did by look­ing at an ani­mat­ed GIF that oscil­lates quick­ly between the left pic­ture and the right one. Ena­mi hand-tint­ed many of his stere­o­graphs, result­ing in col­ored his­tor­i­cal images that look, even in two dimen­sions, star­tling­ly real­is­tic today.

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Here we present only a few of Enam­i’s stere­o­graphs, but you can see a much fuller col­lec­tion at Oeschle’s “Old Japan in 3D” Flickr page. He sur­vived 1923’s Great Kan­tō earth­quake, but his stu­dio did­n’t; he rebuilt it and lat­er passed it on to his son, who ran the place until it under­went a sec­ond destruc­tion in 1945 by Allied bombs. Though Enam­i’s name remains known pri­mar­i­ly to fans of Mei­ji-era pho­tog­ra­phy, his posthu­mous rep­u­ta­tion has slow­ly but steadi­ly grown: one of his pho­tos even appeared on the cov­er of the first edi­tion of Odyssey: the Art of Pho­tog­ra­phy at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic. These GIFs have already sparked an inter­est in Enam­i’s work among a new gen­er­a­tion. When 3D mon­i­tors catch on, per­haps he’ll rise to his true place in the pho­to­graph­ic pan­theon.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hand-Col­ored 1860s Pho­tographs Reveal the Last Days of Samu­rai Japan

Hand-Col­ored Pho­tographs of 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan

Adver­tise­ments from Japan’s Gold­en Age of Art Deco

Glo­ri­ous Ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hear the Beatles Play Their Final Concert 50 Years Ago Today (August 29, 1966)

50 years ago today, the Bea­t­les played their final offi­cial con­cert and put an end to their tour­ing career. It all hap­pened at the now defunct Can­dle­stick Park in San Fran­cis­co.

As Josh Jones told us in 2014, “know­ing it would be their final show, the band brought a cam­era onstage to take pho­tos of the crowd and them­selves.” And “Paul McCart­ney asked the band’s press offi­cer Tony Bar­row to record the con­cert on a hand-held tape recorder.” Bar­rows even­tu­al­ly talked more about how this record­ing came to see the light of day. He said:

Back in Lon­don I kept the con­cert cas­sette under lock and key in a draw­er of my office desk, mak­ing a sin­gle copy for my per­son­al col­lec­tion and pass­ing the orig­i­nal to Paul for him to keep. Years lat­er my Can­dle­stick Park record­ing re-appeared in pub­lic as a boot­leg album. If you hear a boot­leg ver­sion of the final con­cert that fin­ish­es dur­ing Long Tall Sal­ly it must have come either from Paul’s copy or mine, but we nev­er did iden­ti­fy the music thief!

Above, you can hear the Bea­t­les’ last 28 min­utes as a live act—save, of course, their impromp­tu gig played on a Lon­don rooftop in 1969. For all its rough­ness, there’s a good chance that the sound qual­i­ty rivals what fans heard that cold August night in Can­dle­stick. Like oth­er sta­di­ums from that era, Can­dle­stick had a god-awful sound sys­tem, ill-equipped to com­pete with an end­less bar­rage of teenage screams and gusts of wind. But that did­n’t stop fans from enjoy­ing the show all the same.

Find a setlist for the 11-song con­cert below:

01. “Rock and Roll Music”
02. “She’s a Woman”
03. “If I Need­ed Some­one”
04. “Day Trip­per”
05. “Baby’s In Black”
06. “I Feel Fine”
07. “Yes­ter­day”
08. “I Wan­na Be Your Man”
09. “Nowhere Man”
10. “Paper­back Writer”
11. “Long Tall Sal­ly” (Incom­plete)

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Sell­ers Reads The Bea­t­les’ “She Loves You” in 4 Dif­fer­ent Accents: Dr. Strangelove, Cock­ney, Irish & Upper Crust

Watch HD Ver­sions of The Bea­t­les’ Pio­neer­ing Music Videos: “Hey Jude,” “Pen­ny Lane,” “Rev­o­lu­tion” & More

The Bea­t­les’ Rooftop Con­cert: The Last Gig Filmed in Jan­u­ary 1969

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Nakedly Examined Music Podcast Explores Songwriting with Cracker, King Crimson, Cutting Crew, Jill Sobule & More

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I’m Mark Lin­sen­may­er, the host of The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast, and I’d like to intro­duce you to a new-in-2016 inter­view series called Naked­ly Exam­ined Music (iTunes — Face­book — RSS) that fea­tures great song­writ­ers talk­ing about their moti­va­tions and tech­niques regard­ing spe­cif­ic songs.

In episode one, for instance, indie rock icon and activist for artist rights David Low­ery decon­struct­ed the lyrics for his sto­ry songs “All Her Favorite Fruit” (Camper Van Beethoven, 1989) and “I Sold the Arabs the Moon” (from his 2011 solo album), con­trast­ing these with the non­sense song that launched his career, “Take the Skin­heads Bowl­ing.”

The songs dis­cussed are played in full, and the idea is to get a sense of the artist’s approach in very spe­cif­ic terms, and how this has changed over time. In episode 15, Craig Wedren shows us his devel­op­ment from writ­ing heavy (“post-hard­core”), dis­so­nant music in the 90s with Shud­der to Think, to cre­at­ing dis­co synth­scapes with his ear­ly 00’s band Baby, to now com­pos­ing music for sound­tracks like Net­flix’s “Wet Hot Amer­i­can Sum­mer: First Day of Camp.”

The empha­sis in a giv­en inter­view depends on the artist: Gui­tar vir­tu­oso Gary Lucas (Cap­tain Beef­heart, Jeff Buck­ley) eschews music the­o­ry, so the focus is more on the ide­ol­o­gy of cre­ation, where­as tap-gui­tar wiz­ard Trey Gunn (King Crim­son, David Syl­vian) instructs us in com­bin­ing time sig­na­tures and solo­ing in modes. The inter­views both teach us how to lis­ten to and appre­ci­ate music by show­ing us what to focus on, and also serve to instruct song­writ­ers real and vic­ar­i­ous about deci­sions that go into a choice of chord or lyric or instru­men­ta­tion.

What kind of music can you expect to hear? Offi­cial­ly, any­thing that has thought behind it, but I’m start­ing with my expe­ri­ence as musi­cian (see www.marklint.com) and music lover grow­ing up in the 80s and 90s lis­ten­ing to pop­u­lar, indie, folk, punk, and pro­gres­sive rock. There hare been some move­ment into soul (Episode 16 fea­tures the great Nara­da Michael Walden, who pro­duced Whit­ney Hous­ton among many oth­ers), elec­tron­i­ca (Gareth Mitchell), coun­try (Beth Kille), and future episodes will ven­ture into clas­si­cal, hip-hop, and world music. More typ­i­cal, how­ev­er (i.e. more akin to my own writ­ing), are fig­ures like 90s sweet­heart and polit­i­cal activist Jill Sob­ule, cow-punk pio­neer Jon Lang­ford (Mekons), grunge-ped­dler turned sym­phon­ist Jonathan Don­ahue (Mer­cury Rev), NPR dar­ling Chad Clark (Beau­ty Pill), and 80s Cut­ting Crew front-man Nick Eede. One of the episodes next to be released will fea­ture Bill Bru­ford (Yes, King Crim­son, Earth­works).

Lis­ten to Jill Sob­ule in episode 18:

In one of the most inter­est­ing inter­views (episode 3), major league music video director–and mem­ber of 70s super­group 10cc and 80s duo God­ley & Creme–Kevin God­ley takes us from 70s prog excess (and get­ting to record jazz leg­end Sarah Vaugh­an) into the New Wave and out of music alto­geth­er, only to redis­cov­er it post-retire­ment.

This is not about get­ting behind the scenes with your favorite stars or any oth­er hype of that sort, but about talk­ing with smart peo­ple to fig­ure out the lan­guage of music, the moti­va­tions behind cre­ation, and the tech­niques avail­able for self-expres­sion. In the course of these dis­cus­sions, we get into chang­ing trends in mak­ing a liv­ing in music (or not!), new music tech­nolo­gies, and, of course, philo­soph­i­cal issues.

Mark Lin­sen­may­er is a writer and musi­cian in Madi­son, WI. His Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast has been down­loaded more than 15 mil­lion times. Learn more about Naked­ly Exam­ined Music at www.nakedlyexaminedmusic.com, sub­scribe via iTunes, or fol­low on Face­book.

Angelo Badalamenti Reveals How He and David Lynch Composed the Twin Peaks’ “Love Theme”


On my last trip to New York, some friends took me to a favorite new-wave Chi­nese place of theirs. When I asked where to find the bath­room, they said to go down­stairs. The stair­case deposit­ed me into one of the most sur­re­al bath­room approach­es I’ve ever expe­ri­enced: a long, nar­row, ful­ly mir­rored hall­way with a haunt­ing­ly famil­iar com­po­si­tion piped in from speak­ers installed along its length. Not until I resur­faced and asked what the deal was could I iden­ti­fy the music: the “Love Theme” from David Lynch’s ear­ly-1990s tele­vi­sion series Twin Peaks.

Many TV themes have lodged them­selves into our col­lec­tive mem­o­ry, most­ly through sheer rep­e­ti­tion, but few have retained as much evoca­tive pow­er as the one Lynch’s com­pos­er, Ange­lo Badala­men­ti, record­ed for his short-lived post­mod­ern detec­tive show.

It had that pow­er from the moment Badala­men­ti put his fin­gers to the key­board, a sto­ry told in the clip above. “What do you see, David?” he remem­bers ask­ing the direc­tor as he sits down before the very same Fend­er Rhodes on which he com­posed Twin Peaks’ major themes all those years ago. “Just talk to me.”

“We’re in a dark woods,” Badala­men­ti recalls Lynch first say­ing. “There’s a soft wind blow­ing through sycamore trees. There’s a moon out, some ani­mal sounds in the back­ground. You can hear the hoot of an owl. Just get me into that beau­ti­ful dark­ness.” Badala­men­ti plays as he played then, which drew an imme­di­ate response from Lynch: “Ange­lo, that’s great. I love that. That’s a good mood. But can you play it slow­er?” With the feed­back loop between the scene in Lynch’s mind and the mood of Badala­men­ti’s music engaged, Lynch added a detail: “From behind a tree, in the back of the woods, is this very lone­ly girl. Her name is Lau­ra Palmer.”

Badala­men­ti light­ens his impro­vi­sa­tion in a way that makes it some­how eerier. “That’s it!” The com­pos­er and the direc­tor play off one anoth­er’s ideas, almost like two long-col­lab­o­rat­ing musi­cians in a jam ses­sion. “She’s walk­ing toward the cam­era, she’s com­ing clos­er… just keep build­ing it! Just keep build­ing it!” Even­tu­al­ly, they’ve cre­at­ed an entire ris­ing and falling dra­mat­ic arc in this sin­gle piece of music (arguably more dra­mat­ic than the one cre­at­ed by the series itself, which Lynch left after two sea­sons). “David got up, gave me a big hug, and said, ‘Ange­lo, that’s Twin Peaks’ ” — and to this day, a part of the cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Dan­ish Nation­al Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra

Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Title Sequence, Recre­at­ed in an Adorable Paper Ani­ma­tion

David Lynch Draws a Map of Twin Peaks (to Help Pitch the Show to ABC)

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Exper­i­men­tal Band, Xiu Xiu: A Free Stream of Their New Album

Ele­men­tary School Stu­dents Per­form in a Play Inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

David Lynch Directs a Mini-Sea­son of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japan­ese Cof­fee Com­mer­cials

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Rome Comes to Life in Photochrom Color Photos Taken in 1890: The Colosseum, Trevi Fountain & More

1890 Colosseum

For almost two hun­dred years, Eng­lish gen­tle­men could not con­sid­er their edu­ca­tion com­plete until they had tak­en the “Grand Tour” of Europe, usu­al­ly cul­mi­nat­ing in Naples, “raga­muf­fin cap­i­tal of the Ital­ian south,” writes Ian Thom­son at The Spec­ta­tor. Italy was usu­al­ly the pri­ma­ry focus, such that Samuel John­son remarked in 1776, per­haps with some irony, “a man who has not been to Italy is always con­scious of an infe­ri­or­i­ty.” The Roman­tic poets famous­ly wrote of their Euro­pean sojourns: Shel­ley, Byron, Wordsworth… each has his own “Grand Tour” sto­ry.

1890 Trevi Fountain

Shel­ley, who trav­eled with his wife Mary God­win and her step­sis­ter Claire Clair­mont, did not go to Italy, how­ev­er. And Byron sailed the Mediter­ranean on his Grand Tour, forced away from most of Europe by the Napoleon­ic wars. But in 1817, he jour­neyed to Rome, where he wrote the Fourth Can­to of Childe Harold’s Pil­grim­age:

Oh Rome! my coun­try! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone moth­er of dead empires! And con­trol
In their shut breasts their pet­ty mis­ery.

For the trav­el­ing artist and philoso­pher, “Italy,” Thom­son writes, “pre­sent­ed a civ­i­liza­tion in ruins,” and we can see in all Roman­tic writ­ing the tremen­dous influ­ence visions of Rome and Pom­peii had on gen­tle­men poets like Byron. The Grand Tour, and jour­neys like it, per­sist­ed until the 1840s, when rail­roads “spelled the end of soli­tary aris­to­crat­ic trav­el.” But even decades after­ward, we can see Rome (and Venice) the way Byron might have seen it—and almost, even, in full col­or. As we step into the vis­tas of these post­cards from 1890, we are far clos­er to Byron than we are to the Rome of our day, before Mussolini’s mon­u­ments, noto­ri­ous snarls of Roman traf­fic, and throngs of tourists.

1890 Trumphal Arch

“These post­cards of the ancient land­marks of Rome,” writes Mash­able, “were pro­duced… using the Pho­tochrom process, which adds pre­cise gra­da­tions of arti­fi­cial col­or to black and white pho­tos.” Invent­ed by Swiss print­er Orell Gess­ner Fus­sli, the process involved cre­at­ing lith­o­graph­ic stone from the negatives—“Up to 15 dif­fer­ent tint­ed stones could be involved in the pro­duc­tion of a sin­gle pic­ture, but the result was remark­ably life­like col­or at a time when true col­or pho­tog­ra­phy was still in its infan­cy.”

temple rome

The Library of Con­gress hosts forty two of these images in their online cat­a­log, all down­load­able as high qual­i­ty jpegs or tiffs, and many, like the stun­ning image of the Colos­se­um at the top (see the inte­ri­or here), fea­tur­ing a pre-Pho­tocrom black and white print as well.

1890 San Lorenzo

Aside from a rare street scene, with an urban milieu look­ing very much from the 1890s, the pho­tographs are void of crowds. In the fore­ground of the Tri­umphal Arch fur­ther up we see a soli­tary woman with a bas­ket of pro­duce on her head. In the image of San Loren­zo, above, a tiny fig­ure walks away from the cam­era.

forum rome 1890

In most of these images—with their dream­like coloration—we can imag­ine Rome the way it looked not only in 1890, but also how it might have looked to bored aris­to­crats in the 17th and 18th centuries—and to pas­sion­ate Roman­tic poets in the ear­ly 19th, a place of raw nat­ur­al grandeur and sub­lime man-made decay. See the Library of Con­gress online cat­a­log to view and down­load all forty-two of these post­cards. Also find a gallery at Mash­able.

1890 Great Cascade

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Venice in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images 125 Years Ago: The Rial­to Bridge, St. Mark’s Basil­i­ca, Doge’s Palace & More

Beau­ti­ful, Col­or Pho­tographs of Paris Tak­en 100 Years Ago—at the Begin­ning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

Behold the Very First Col­or Pho­to­graph (1861): Tak­en by Scot­tish Physi­cist (and Poet!) James Clerk Maxwell

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

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