Hear the First Japanese Visitor to the United States & Europe Describe Life in the West (1860–1862)

in History | May 4th, 2021

“Oh, would some Pow­er give us the gift / To see our­selves as oth­ers see us!” wrote poet Robert Burns. “It would from many a blun­der free us, And fool­ish notion.” I can­not vouch for a being blun­der-free, but read­ing his­tor­i­cal accounts of our nation from for­eign vis­i­tors does help to increase our world­ly per­spec­tive, and hope­ful­ly ques­tion what often we take for grant­ed. The 19th cen­tu­ry was a par­tic­u­lar­ly ripe time for the nar­ra­tives, as ocean­ic com­merce (and on its tail tourism) was mak­ing the world small­er than ever before.

The YouTube chan­nel Voic­es of the Past has been bring­ing a lot of these sto­ries to life over the last few years, with new trans­la­tions of for­eign texts, dra­mat­ic read­ings, and thought­ful image pre­sen­ta­tions to reveal the world to us as new and won­drous as it was to the orig­i­nal writ­ers. The video above and the one below take us on trips to the Unit­ed States and Great Britain by some of the first ever Japan­ese trav­el­ers to step onto West­ern soil.

For over 200 years, 1600 — 1868, Japan had remained iso­lat­ed from much of the world, a time known as the Edo Peri­od (named after the capi­tol) or the Toku­gawa Peri­od (named after the shogu­nate). With­in this hot­house, it devel­oped much of the tra­di­tion­al cul­ture that we know today—the tea cer­e­mo­ny, haiku, wood­block prints—and the cap­i­tal Edo (now Tokyo) grew from a fish­ing vil­lage to a major city. When Com­modore Matthew C. Per­ry land­ed in 1853 to get Japan to open up to trad­ing, the coun­try knew its time in iso­la­tion was at an end. The tech­nol­o­gy they saw on the Amer­i­can ships was advanced enough they knew they’d have to catch up or be dom­i­nat­ed.

Both videos con­cern Fukuza­wa Yukichi, one of the founders of mod­ern Japan. An author, jour­nal­ist, founder of Keio Uni­ver­si­ty, and cre­ator of the first Eng­lish-Japan­ese dic­tio­nary, he was also a main pro­po­nent of mod­ern reform. (He’s also the face on Japan’s 10,000 yen note).

In Fukuzawa’s retelling, you can hear how his encoun­ters with Dutch and Eng­lish trades­men made him insa­tiably curi­ous to learn the lan­guage he could not under­stand. After the Japan­ese gov­ern­ment bought a ship from the Dutch, nam­ing it the Kan­rin Maru, Fukuza­wa and a crew of 96 men (a minor­i­ty being Amer­i­can), land­ed in San Fran­cis­co in 1860, the first Japan­ese diplo­mat­ic mis­sion to Amer­i­ca. Tech­ni­cal­ly they did not stay in San Fran­cis­co, but in a naval hotel on Mare Island, 23 miles north east of the city. Fukuza­wa takes note of the abun­dance of car­pet and rugs in many of the offi­cial buildings—such fab­ric was so expen­sive in Japan that he had only seen it used as hand­bags and such—and the Amer­i­can desire to walk on it with their street shoes. Even more amaz­ing: ice cubes. He also notes some­thing that hasn’t changed since his time: the amount of waste in the streets, and the high cost of goods in Cal­i­for­nia.

Fukuza­wa likens his experience—warm hos­pi­tal­i­ty mixed with his own embar­rass­ment of an unfa­mil­iar­i­ty with for­eign mores—with the “shy, self-con­scious blush­ing bride.”

The most impor­tant pur­chase Fukuza­wa made on his trip was a Webster’s Dic­tio­nary, which would help him write his own Eng­lish-Japan­ese ver­sion when he returned. Two years after his Amer­i­can trip, he once again set out on a diplo­mat­ic mis­sion, this time to Europe. He and his co-patri­ots would be away from Japan for a whole year, tak­ing in France, the Unit­ed King­dom, the Nether­lands, Prus­sia, Rus­sia, and Por­tu­gal. This trip is dif­fer­ent in its aware­ness of pol­i­tics. Men­tion is made of Napoleon III (well admired) and the rise of Prus­sia. He is suit­ably baf­fled by Britain’s Par­lia­ment (as are most Amer­i­cans these days watch­ing it on CSPAN), but comes away with a strong con­vic­tion in inde­pen­dent thought and democ­ra­cy that would begin to change Japan through his influ­ence.

We have men­tioned Voic­es of the Past pre­vi­ous­ly, and you can find all sort of accounts of ear­ly inter­na­tion­al trav­el­ers. Fukuzawa’s accounts are some of the best, as his down-to-earth voice feels less for­eign than the Eng­lish speak­ers he meets.

Relat­ed Posts:

A Beau­ti­ful New Book of Japan­ese Wood­block Prints: A Visu­al His­to­ry of 200 Japan­ese Mas­ter­pieces Cre­at­ed Between 1680 and 1938

A Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed His­to­ry of Amer­i­ca (1861): Fea­tures George Wash­ing­ton Punch­ing Tigers, John

Adams Slay­ing Snakes & Oth­er Fan­tas­tic Scenes

The Entire His­to­ry of Japan in 9 Quirky Min­utes

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.

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The Isolator: A 1925 Helmet Designed to Eliminate Distractions & Increase Productivity (Created by SciFi Pioneer Hugo Gernsback)

in History, Technology | May 3rd, 2021

The anti-dis­trac­tion device is the mod­ern mouse­trap: build a bet­ter one, and the world will beat a path to your door. Or so, at least, will the part of the world engaged in the pur­suits we’ve broad­ly labeled “knowl­edge work.” Even among the knowl­edge work­ers who’ve spent most of the past year in pan­dem­ic-prompt­ed iso­la­tion, many still feel besieged by unend­ing claims on their atten­tion. Laments at hav­ing been ren­dered unpro­duc­tive by con­stant dis­trac­tion go back at least to medieval times, but the pro­posed solu­tions to this long-stand­ing prob­lem change with — and reflect — the times. Take the “Iso­la­tor,” the for­mi­da­ble-look­ing wear­able machine above that debuted on the cov­er of July 1925’s Sci­ence and Inven­tion mag­a­zine.

“Per­haps the most dif­fi­cult thing that a human being is called upon to face is long, con­cen­trat­ed think­ing,” writes inven­tor Hugo Gerns­back in the accom­pa­ny­ing arti­cle. “Most peo­ple who desire thus to con­cen­trate find it nec­es­sary to shut them­selves up in an almost sound­proof room in order to go ahead with their work, but even here there are many things that dis­tract their atten­tion.”

Even absent such nui­sances as “street nois­es” and the “tele­phone bell,” the mind seeks out its own dis­trac­tions as if nat­u­ral­ly com­pelled: “You will lean back in your chair and begin to study the pat­tern of the wall­pa­per, or you will see a fly crawl along the wall, or a win­dow cur­tain will be mov­ing back and forth, all of which is often suf­fi­cient to turn your mind away from the imme­di­ate task to be per­formed.”

Gerns­back­’s solu­tion involves a large hel­met, lined with cork and cov­ered in felt, with a baf­fle for breath­ing and glass eye­holes to see through. Paint­ed black but for two thin bands, the eye­holes make it “almost impos­si­ble to see any­thing except a sheet of paper in front of the wear­er. There is, there­fore, no opti­cal dis­trac­tion here.” To pre­vent drowsi­ness, “the writer intro­duced a small oxy­gen tank, attached to the hel­met. This increas­es the res­pi­ra­tion and livens the sub­ject con­sid­er­ably.” And so we arrive at the set­up pic­tured below, orig­i­nal­ly cap­tioned, “The author at work in his pri­vate study aid­ed by the Iso­la­tor. Out­side nois­es being elim­i­nat­ed, the work­er can con­cen­trate with ease upon the sub­ject at hand.” The Iso­la­tor’s patent appears just above, one of 80 for var­i­ous inven­tions that Gerns­back held in his life­time.

What­ev­er the device con­tributed to Gerns­back­’s pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, there can be no ques­tion that the man got a lot done. Not just a con­trib­u­tor to Sci­ence and Inven­tion but also its pub­lish­er, he over­saw a small media empire whose oth­er peri­od­i­cals includ­ed Every­day Sci­ence and Mechan­ics, Sci­en­tif­ic Detec­tive Month­ly, the sin­is­ter-sound­ing Tech­noc­ra­cy Review, and Amaz­ing Sto­ries, which launched in 1926 as the first mag­a­zine devot­ed entire­ly to sci­ence fic­tion (or “sci­en­tific­tion,” as Gerns­back called it). For his advance­ment of the genre he was hon­ored by the World Sci­ence Fic­tion Society’s Annu­al Achieve­ment Awards, bet­ter known as the “Hugos.” Pulp-fic­tion­al though the Iso­la­tor may have looked in 1925 (as indeed it looks now), it rep­re­sents a gen­uine effort to alle­vi­ate with tech­nol­o­gy a both­er­some aspect of the human con­di­tion — and a prece­dent for the new-and-improved iso­la­tion hel­mets engi­neered for the even more dis­tract­ing world in which we live a cen­tu­ry on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Con­cen­tra­tion

The Ben­e­fits of Bore­dom: How to Stop Dis­tract­ing Your­self and Get Cre­ative Ideas Again

The Case for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valu­able “Deep Work” Instead, Accord­ing to Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Cal New­port

Pico Iyer on “the Art of Still­ness”: How to Enrich Your Busy, Dis­tract­ed Life by Unplug­ging and Stay­ing Put

Medieval Monks Com­plained About Con­stant Dis­trac­tions: Learn How They Worked to Over­come Them

What Hap­pens When You Spend Weeks, Months, or Years in Soli­tary Con­fine­ment

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 Story of the Rolling Stones: A Selection of Documentaries on the Quintessential Rock-and-Roll Band

in History, Music | May 3rd, 2021

The Rolling Stones define the rock-and-roll band, as they have for near­ly six decades now. Exact­ly how they’ve done so is thor­ough­ly doc­u­ment­ed, not least by the band’s own expan­sive and still-grow­ing cat­a­log of songs and albums (all of which I hap­pen to have spent the last few months lis­ten­ing through). But the sto­ry of the Stones con­tin­ues to com­pel, told and re-told as it is in every form of media pro­duced by each era through which the band has passed: books, arti­cles, pod­casts, and also the sort of doc­u­men­taries we’ve col­lect­ed here today. Some were orig­i­nal­ly pro­duced for tele­vi­sion; oth­ers, like Watch­Mo­jo’s “The Rolling Stones: The Sto­ry & the Songs” above, for the inter­net. Each of them address­es the same ques­tion: how did a cou­ple of blues-obsessed lads from Kent come to run the biggest rock group in the world?

Even when straight­for­ward­ly pre­sent­ed, as in the Biog­ra­phy broad­cast above, the his­to­ry of the Rolling Stones con­sti­tutes a pop-cul­tur­al thrill ride. It begins, by most accounts, with for­mer class­mates Mick Jag­ger and Kei­th Richards bump­ing into each oth­er at a train sta­tion in 1961. Their shared inter­est in music, and espe­cial­ly Amer­i­can blues, inspired them to put a band togeth­er.

Before long, Jag­ger and Richards’ Blues Boys made the acquain­tance of anoth­er band, Blues Incor­po­rat­ed, whose mem­bers includ­ed Bri­an Jones, Ian Stew­art and Char­lie Watts. Though Watts would­n’t join up until lat­er, the oth­er four con­sti­tut­ed most of the first line­up of the Rolling Stones, who made their debut at Lon­don’s Mar­quee Club in July 1962.

You can see a great deal of archive footage depict­ing the Stones in their ear­ly years in the doc­u­men­tary above, Rolling Stones: Rock of Ages. The title implies an obvi­ous and much-repeat­ed joke about the once-rebel­lious young­sters’ insis­tence on rock­ing into rel­a­tive­ly advanced age. But onstage — and the live per­for­mance has always been essen­tial to their appeal, more so even than their albums — they remain very much the same band once pro­mot­ed with the ques­tion “Would you let your sis­ter go with a Rolling Stone?” That line was only one of the strate­gies used by its author, the Stones’ first man­ag­er Andrew Loog Old­ham, to launch his boys into world­wide pop­u­lar­i­ty by fram­ing them as the brash oppo­site of the Bea­t­les — to whom, despite their con­sid­er­able musi­cal dif­fer­ences, one can hard­ly avoid mak­ing ref­er­ence in the sto­ry of the Stones.

Though the bands became fast friends in real life, the press of the 1960s could­n’t resist craft­ing a rival­ry, as recount­ed in The Bea­t­les vs. The Rolling Stones, the Canal+ doc­u­men­tary above. What­ev­er com­pe­ti­tion exist­ed between them (or with Amer­i­can bands like the Beach Boys) only encour­aged them to make their music more pow­er­ful and dis­tinc­tive. This they did in the face of count­less per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al set­backs, which for the Stones includ­ed the loss of found­ing mem­ber Bri­an Jones and the vio­lent Alta­mont Free Con­cert, wide­ly inter­pret­ed as the end of the utopi­an 1960s. As prod­ucts and sur­vivors of that era, the Stones also remain embod­i­ments of its insou­ciant ambi­tion. “For my gen­er­a­tion, what was hap­pen­ing and the feel­ing in the air was: it’s time to push lim­its, says no less a sur­vivor than the sub­ject of Kei­th Richards: The Ori­gin Of The Species. “The world is ours now, and you can rise or fall on it.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Visu­al His­to­ry of The Rolling Stones Doc­u­ment­ed in a Beau­ti­ful, 450-Page Pho­to Book by Taschen

Watch the Rolling Stones Write “Sym­pa­thy for the Dev­il”: Scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One

Revis­it the Infa­mous Rolling Stones Free Fes­ti­val at Alta­mont: The Ill-Fat­ed Con­cert Took Place 50 Years Ago

The Rolling Stones at 50: Mick, Kei­th, Char­lie & Ron­nie Revis­it Their Favorite Songs

Watch the Rolling Stones Play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” While Social Dis­tanc­ing in Quar­an­tine

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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Magnus Carlsen’s Mind-Blowing Memory of Historic Chess Matches

in Games | May 3rd, 2021

How many his­toric chess games can Mag­nus Carlsen rec­og­nize just by look­ing at the place­ment of chess pieces on the board? It turns out a lot. And that’s part­ly what makes him the reign­ing World Chess Cham­pi­on.

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!

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent

Learn How to Play Chess Online: Free Chess Lessons for Begin­ners, Inter­me­di­ate Play­ers & Beyond

A Free 700-Page Chess Man­u­al Explains 1,000 Chess Tac­tics in Straight­for­ward Eng­lish

A Beau­ti­ful Short Doc­u­men­tary Takes You Inside New York City’s Last Great Chess Store

A Brief His­to­ry of Chess: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the 1,500-Year-Old Game

Vladimir Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Mind-Bend­ing Chess Prob­lems

The Mag­ic of Chess: Kids Share Their Unin­hib­it­ed, Philo­soph­i­cal Insights about the Ben­e­fits of Chess

Gar­ry Kas­parov Now Teach­ing an Online Course on Chess

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Get 30-Day Free Access to a Udacity Nanodegree Program & Start Learning for Free (Until May 23)

in Deals | May 3rd, 2021

FYI: Until May 23, you can have 30-day free access to a Udac­i­ty Nan­ode­gree pro­gram and start learn­ing for free. Pop­u­lar Udac­i­ty Nan­ode­gree sub­jects include: Intro to Pro­gram­ming, Become a Prod­uct Man­ag­er, Become a Data Sci­en­tist, Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing, and Become a Data Ana­lyst. But there are many more sub­jects to choose from.

The deal is open to res­i­dents of the Unit­ed States and most oth­er coun­tries around the globe, with the excep­tion of India, Brazil, Bahrain, Egypt, Jor­dan, Kuwait, Moroc­co, Oman, Qatar and Sau­di Ara­bia. Res­i­dents of those coun­tries can get 60% off the entire Udac­i­ty site through May 31 by using the SCHOOLOFCYBER60 code at check­out.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Udac­i­ty. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Udac­i­ty cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

200 Online Cer­tifi­cate & Micro­cre­den­tial Pro­grams from Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties & Com­pa­nies.

Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Mas­ters, Mini Mas­ters, Bach­e­lors & Mini Bach­e­lors from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Introductions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picasso & More

in Art | April 30th, 2021

Can great art be explained? Isn’t it a lit­tle like explain­ing a joke? Yet this can be worth­while when the joke is in a for­eign lan­guage or an unfa­mil­iar idiom, a long-for­got­ten dialect or an alien idi­olect. Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the most com­mon response to Mark Rothko’s mono­chro­mat­ic rec­tan­gles: “I don’t get it.”

Will per­plexed view­ers bet­ter under­stand Rothko’s Sea­gram murals when they learn that “he was found in a pool of blood six by eight feet wide, rough­ly the size of one of his paint­ings,” as James Payne writes, hours after he sent the nine can­vass­es to the Tate Mod­ern gallery in Lon­don in 1970? “His sui­cide would change every­thing and shape the way we respond to his work,” adding a dark­er edge to com­ments of his like “I’m inter­est­ed only in express­ing basic human emo­tions, tragedy, ecsta­sy, doom and so on.”

Last sum­mer, Payne launched his series Great Art Explained in Fif­teen Min­utes, “a bril­liant new addi­tion to YouTube art his­to­ry chan­nels,” Forbes enthused — “enter­tain­ing and infor­ma­tive short films [that] present a fresh look at famil­iar art­works.” There’s much more to Rothko than his trag­ic death at 66. We learn of his love for Mozart, a com­pos­er who was “always smil­ing through his tears,” the painter said.

An artist who seems to embody the oppo­site of Rothko’s trou­bled pas­sion, Andy Warhol gets an explain­er, above, in which Payne takes on the artist’s Mar­i­lyn Dip­tych. He opens with 30 sec­onds of audio from an inter­view with Warhol, who gives char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly dis­in­ter­est­ed yes or no respons­es: “Andy, do you think that Pop Art has reached the point where it’s becom­ing rep­e­ti­tious now?” “Uh, yes.”

Pop Art’s rep­e­ti­tions were the point. Warhol ele­vat­ed the unre­mark­able mass prod­uct to the lev­el of high art, becom­ing the biggest-sell­ing artist in the world. Payne draws a par­al­lel between Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s trans­for­ma­tion from “abused fos­ter child from the rur­al mid­west” to Hol­ly­wood roy­al­ty, and Warhol’s move from a shy, sick­ly child of immi­grants to an inter­na­tion­al art star.

Even if Payne is explain­ing things you already knew about famous art­works like Monet’s Water Lilies, you’ll still enjoy his pre­sen­ta­tion, with its clever edit­ing and com­pelling nar­ra­tion. “I want to present art in a jar­gon free, enter­tain­ing, clear and con­cise way,” he writes. Each video cov­ers one famous art­work, not all of them mod­ern. (We recent­ly fea­tured Payne’s take on Hierony­mus Bosch’s Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights.)

Payne’s work as an art con­sul­tant, guide, “and art and film writer,” Forbes writes, “make him the ide­al pre­sen­ter of this excel­lent new art his­to­ry series.” Crav­ing some con­text on your lunch break? Head over the Great Art Explained in Fif­teen Min­utes and catch a few excel­lent mini-art his­to­ry lec­tures, each one 15 min­utes or less, for free.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

60-Sec­ond Intro­duc­tions to 12 Ground­break­ing Artists: Matisse, Dalí, Duchamp, Hop­per, Pol­lock, Rothko & More

An Intro­duc­tion to 100 Impor­tant Paint­ings with Videos Cre­at­ed by Smarthis­to­ry

Free Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the Art of the Ital­ian Renais­sance

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

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Harrison Ford Gets Delightfully Dumbfounded by David Blaine’s Card Trick

in Random | April 30th, 2021

Orig­i­nal­ly record­ed back in 2014, this clip of David Blaine per­form­ing a card trick for Har­ri­son Ford went viral this week. (Can we still use this expres­sion in the age of COVID?) Hang with it until the end. It’s worth the 1:50 of your time.

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!

via Clarisse Loughrey

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Willie Nel­son Shows You a Delight­ful Card Trick

Mon­key Sees A Mag­ic Trick

Orson Welles Per­forms a Mag­ic Trick

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Invisible People: Watch Poignant Mini-Documentaries Where Homeless People Tell Their Stories

in Current Affairs, Life, Politics | April 30th, 2021

Over the past year, the sto­ry of evic­tions dur­ing COVID has often risen above the muck. It’s made head­lines in major news­pa­pers and TIME mag­a­zine, and received seri­ous atten­tion from the gov­ern­ment, with stop-gap evic­tion mora­to­ri­ums put in effect and renewed sev­er­al times, and like­ly due to be renewed again. Stop­ping evic­tions is not enough. “For many land­lords,” notes the Unit­ed Way, “the order cre­at­ed a finan­cial bur­den of hous­ing renters with no pay­ments,” and with­out income, they have no way to pay. But these mea­sures have kept many thou­sands of vul­ner­a­ble adults and chil­dren from expe­ri­enc­ing home­less­ness.

And yet mora­to­ri­ums aside, the num­ber of peo­ple los­ing their homes is on the rise dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, with a dis­pro­por­tion­ate impact on Black, Lat­inx, and Indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties, and shel­ters have been forced to close or low­er capac­i­ty. Fram­ing increas­ing home­lessnes sole­ly as a cri­sis dri­ven by the virus miss­es the fact that it has been grow­ing since 2016, though it is down from pre-2007 lev­els. “Even before the cur­rent health/economic cri­sis,” notes a Home­less­ness Research Insti­tute report, “the old­er adult home­less pop­u­la­tion was pro­ject­ed to trend upwards until 2030.”

Indeed, home­less­ness has seemed like a sad, inevitable fact of Amer­i­can life for decades. Rather than accept the sit­u­a­tion, orga­ni­za­tions like Invis­i­ble Peo­ple have worked to end it. “The first step to solv­ing home­less­ness,” they write, “is acknowl­edg­ing that its vic­tims are peo­ple. Reg­u­lar peo­ple. Fathers. Moth­ers. Vet­er­ans. Whole fam­i­lies. Folks who fell on hard times and lost their core foun­da­tion of being human — their homes.” No one asks to be in the sit­u­a­tion, and the longer a per­son goes unhoused, the hard­er it is for them to rebuild their lives.

Invis­i­ble Peo­ple offers action steps and pub­lish­es well-researched jour­nal­ism on the prob­lems, and solu­tions, for the mil­lions of peo­ple expe­ri­enc­ing home­less­ness at any giv­en time. But as their name sug­gests, their pri­ma­ry aim is to make the lives of unhoused peo­ple vis­i­ble to those of us who tend to walk right by them in our haste. We can feel over­whelmed by the intractable scale of the prob­lem, which tends to turn indi­vid­u­als into sta­tis­tics. Invis­i­ble Peo­ple asks us to “change the sto­ry,” and to start by approach­ing home­less­ness one per­son, or one fam­i­ly, at a time.

Invis­i­ble Peo­ple was found­ed in Los Ange­les by Mark Hor­vath, a for­mer TV exec­u­tive who became home­less after drug and alco­hol addic­tion in 1995. After recov­er­ing, he lost his home again dur­ing the 2008 Reces­sion. Hor­vath began inter­view­ing peo­ple he met on the streets of L.A. and post­ing the videos to YouTube and Twit­ter. Soon, the project became a glob­al one, incor­po­rat­ed as a non-prof­it, and Hor­vath has trav­eled across the U.S. and to Cana­da, Peru, and the UK to inter­view peo­ple liv­ing with­out homes.

The project, says Hor­vath is designed to fos­ter  “a con­ver­sa­tion about solu­tions to end home­less­ness [that] gives home­less peo­ple a chance to tell their own sto­ry.” Those sto­ries are mov­ing, human, unfor­get­table, and usu­al­ly not at all what you might expect. You can see some of them here, and many more at the Invis­i­ble Peo­ple YouTube chan­nel. Con­nect with the orga­ni­za­tion and find out what you can do here.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Design­er Cre­ates Origa­mi Card­board Tents to Shel­ter the Home­less from the Win­ter Cold

How Josephine Bak­er Went From Home­less Street Per­former to Inter­na­tion­al Super­star, French Resis­tance Fight­er & Civ­il Rights Hero

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets Patrons Check Out Ties, Brief­cas­es & Hand­bags for Job Inter­views

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

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Nerves of Steel!: Watch People Climb Tall Buildings During the 1920s.

in Architecture, Gender, Life | April 30th, 2021

Thrillseek­ers! Are you gird­ing your loins to rejoin the amuse­ment park crowds this sum­mer?

No wor­ries if you don’t feel quite ready to brave the social­ly dis­tanced roller­coast­er lines. Indulge in some low-risk ver­ti­go, thanks to British Pathé’s vin­tage news­reels of steeple­jacks, steel­work­ers, and win­dow clean­ers doing their thing.

While these trades­peo­ple were called in when­ev­er an indus­tri­al chim­ney required repair or a steel beam was in need of weld­ing, many of the news­reels fea­ture icon­ic loca­tions, such as New York City’s Wool­worth Build­ing, above, get­ting a good stonework clean­ing in 1931.

In 1929, some “work­men acro­bats” were engaged to adorn St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca and the Vat­i­can with thou­sands of lamps when Pope Pius XI, in his first offi­cial act as pope, revived the pub­lic tra­di­tion of Urbi et Orbi, a papal address and apos­tolic bless­ing for the first time in fifty-two years.

Some gen­der bound­aries got smashed in the after­math of WWII, but “steeple­jills” were nov­el­ty enough in 1948 that the scriptwriter pre­dictably milks it by hav­ing the announc­er crack wise to and about the uniden­ti­fied woman ready to climb all the way to the rim of a very tall smoke­stack.

“There it is! That long thing point­ing up there, it’s all yours!”

These days such a jib might con­sti­tute work­place harass­ment.

Did she get the job?

We don’t know. We hope so, who­ev­er she is — pre­sum­ably one of twen­ty female Lon­don­ers respond­ing to the help want­ed ad described in the Leth­bridge Her­ald, below:

Watch more scenes of vin­tage steeple­jacks — and jills — at work in a British Pathé “Nerves of Steel” playlist here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Sto­ry Behind the Icon­ic Pho­to­graph of 11 Con­struc­tion Work­ers Lunch­ing 840 Feet Above New York City (1932)

Watch the Com­plete­ly Unsafe, Ver­ti­go-Induc­ing Footage of Work­ers Build­ing New York’s Icon­ic Sky­scrap­ers

Watch 85,000 His­toric News­reel Films from British Pathé Free Online (1910–2008)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  She’s had a ter­ri­ble fear of heights since a near miss in the Tro­gir Bell Tow­er some 14 years ago. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A Short Animation Explores the Nature of Creativity & Invention, with Characters That Look Like Andrei Tarkovsky & Sergei Eisenstein

in Film, Language, Philosophy, Writing | April 30th, 2021

A gen­tle­man goes to the movies, only to find a mar­quee full of retreads, reboots, sequels, and pre­quels. He demands to know why no one makes orig­i­nal films any­more, a rea­son­able ques­tion peo­ple often ask. But it seems he has run direct­ly into a grad­u­ate stu­dent in crit­i­cal the­o­ry behind the glass. The tick­et-sell­er rat­tles off a the­o­ry of uno­rig­i­nal­i­ty that is dif­fi­cult to refute but also, it turns out, only a word-for-word recita­tion of the Wikipedia page on “Pla­gia­rism.”

This is one of the ironies in “Aller­gy to Orig­i­nal­i­ty” every Eng­lish teacher will appre­ci­ate. In the short, ani­mat­ed New York Times Op-Doc by Drew Christie, an offi­cial Sun­dance selec­tion in 2014, “two men dis­cuss whether any­thing is tru­ly orig­i­nal — espe­cial­ly in movies and books,” notes the Times. The ques­tion leads us to con­sid­er what we might mean by orig­i­nal­i­ty when every work is built from pieces of oth­ers. “In cre­at­ing this Op-Doc ani­ma­tion,” Christie writes, “I copied well-known images and pho­tographs, retraced innu­mer­able draw­ings, then pho­to­copied them as a way to under­score the un-orig­i­nal­i­ty of the entire process.”

From William Bur­roughs’ cut-ups to Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author,” mod­erns have only been re-dis­cov­er­ing what ancients accept­ed with a shrug — no one can take cred­it for a sto­ry, not even the author. Barthes argued that “lit­er­a­ture is pre­cise­ly the inven­tion of this voice, to which we can­not assign a spe­cif­ic ori­gin: lit­er­a­ture is that neuter, that com­pos­ite, that oblique into which every sub­ject escapes, the trap where all iden­ti­ty is lost, begin­ning with the very iden­ti­ty of the body that writes.”

In Christie’s short, the smar­tass the­ater employ­ee con­tin­ues quot­ing sources, now from the “Orig­i­nal­i­ty” Wikipedia, now from Mark Twain, who had many things to say about orig­i­nal­i­ty. Twain once wrote to Helen Keller, for exam­ple, out­raged that she had been accused of pla­gia­rism. He came to her defense with an earnest con­vic­tion: “The ker­nel, the soul—let us go fur­ther and say the sub­stance, the bulk, the actu­al and valu­able mate­r­i­al of all human utter­ance — is pla­gia­rism.”

Post­mod­ern sophistry from Mark Twain? Maybe. We haven’t had much oppor­tu­ni­ty to ver­bal­ly spar in pub­lic like this late­ly, unmasked and in search of enter­tain­ment in a pub­lic square. If you find your­self exas­per­at­ed with the stream­ing choic­es on offer, if the books you’re read­ing all start to feel too famil­iar, con­sid­er the infi­nite num­ber of cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties inher­ent in the art of quo­ta­tion — and remem­ber that we’re always repeat­ing, replay­ing, and remix­ing what came before, whether or not we cite our sources.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Every­thing is a Remix: A Video Series Explor­ing the Sources of Cre­ativ­i­ty

Mal­colm McLaren: The Quest for Authen­tic Cre­ativ­i­ty

Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains

Quentin Tarantino’s Copy­cat Cin­e­ma: How the Post­mod­ern Film­mak­er Per­fect­ed the Art of the Steal

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

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What Makes Citizen Kane a Great Film: 4 Video Essays Revisit Orson Welles’ Masterpiece on the 80th Anniversary of Its Premiere

in Film, History | April 29th, 2021

To under­stand why Cit­i­zen Kane has for so long been referred to as the “great­est film of all time,” sim­ply watch any film made before it. Glib though that often-made pre­scrip­tion may sound, it gets at a truth about Orson Welles’ tale of the rise and fall of an Amer­i­can media mag­nate, his first and by far his most high­ly regard­ed pic­ture, now just days from the eight­i­eth anniver­sary of its pre­miere. “Its impact on cin­e­ma was so pro­found, and its tech­niques became so ubiq­ui­tous, that its once-rad­i­cal ideas now seem com­mon­place,” says the nar­ra­tor of the Youtube series One Hun­dred Years of Cin­e­ma, whose episode on the year 1941 could hard­ly have focused on any oth­er movie.

Among Cit­i­zen Kane’s most vis­i­ble inno­va­tions is cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Gregg Toland’s use of deep focus, which allows Welles and his col­lab­o­ra­tors to make con­stant nar­ra­tive use of every visu­al detail. This encour­ages the audi­ence to “read the whole frame at once, much in the same way that one would read a paint­ing, each lay­er adding an ele­ment to the sto­ry.”

More sub­tly, “what sep­a­rat­ed Citi­zen Kane from the kind of films that pre­ced­ed it was the over­all ambiva­lence of its tone. It’s a film about one of the wealth­i­est, most suc­cess­ful men in the world, and yet per­me­at­ing the entire film is the gloom of fail­ure.” The lega­cy of these and oth­er dar­ing artis­tic choic­es man­i­fest in the work of sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of direc­tors, includ­ing such names cit­ed in the brief Fan­dor video essay above as Quentin Taran­ti­no, Mar­tin Scors­ese, Wes Ander­son, and Steven Spiel­berg.

“The cre­ators of Cit­i­zen Kane had the free­dom to play and inno­vate,” says Michael Aran­da in the episode of Crash Course Film Crit­i­cism above. “Many of their tech­ni­cal exper­i­ments changed the way film was being used as a sto­ry­telling medi­um — which, arguably, could be anoth­er way to define ‘great­ness.’ ” Welles him­self put it dif­fer­ent­ly: “There is a great gift that igno­rance has to bring to any­thing. That was the gift I brought to Kane, igno­rance.” Of course, he had the good excuse of being 25 years old, although already more than estab­lished on the stage and the radio. When Hol­ly­wood came call­ing, he brought his cre­ative­ly spir­it­ed Mer­cury The­atre Play­ers with­in to make use of the rel­a­tive­ly vast pro­duc­tion resources avail­able at RKO Pic­tures. One of Welles’ col­lab­o­ra­tors in par­tic­u­lar has recent­ly been back in the pub­lic eye: Her­man J. Mankiewicz, who’d pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten scripts for Welles’ Camp­bell Play­house series on CBS Radio.

David Fincher’s bio­graph­i­cal dra­ma Mank, which won a cou­ple of Acad­e­my Awards last week­end, tells the sto­ry of the trou­bled screen­writer’s involve­ment with Cit­i­zen Kane. Orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten by Fincher’s father, Mank drew its first inspi­ra­tion from “Rais­ing Kane,” a 1971 essay by New York­er film crit­ic Pauline Kael that famous­ly depict­ed Mankiewicz, not Welles, as Cit­i­zen Kane’s pri­ma­ry author. Sub­se­quent schol­ar­ship, as explained in the Roy­al Ocean Film Soci­ety video above, has revealed that Kael was labor­ing under a mis­ap­pre­hen­sion (if not a grudge). But the fact remains that all the par­tic­i­pants in Cit­i­zen Kane did their bit to great­ly advance the medi­um of cin­e­ma, and for the young Welles the pic­ture became proof of his artis­tic matu­ri­ty: a mas­ter­piece, in the orig­i­nal sense.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

Jorge Luis Borges Reviews Cit­i­zen Kane — and Gets a Response from Orson Welles

Jean-Paul Sartre Reviews Orson Welles’ Mas­ter­work (1945): “Cit­i­zen Kane Is Not Cin­e­ma”

When Ted Turn­er Tried to Col­orize Cit­i­zen Kane: See the Only Sur­viv­ing Scene from the Great Act of Cin­e­mat­ic Sac­ri­lege

How Orson Welles’ F for Fake Teach­es Us How to Make the Per­fect Video Essay

What Makes Ver­ti­go the Best Film of All Time? Four Video Essays (and Mar­tin Scors­ese) Explain

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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