Admittedly jewelry is not one of our areas of expertise, but when we hear that a bracelet costs €10,000, we kind of expect it to have a smattering of diamonds.
Designers Lyske Gais and Lia Duinker are getting that amount for a wristlet comprised chiefly of five large paper sheets printed with high res images downloaded free from the Rijksmuseum’s extensive digital archive of Rembrandt drawings and etchings.
Your average pawnbroker would probably consider its 18-karat gold clasp, or possibly the custom-made wooden box in which it can be stored when not in use the most precious thing about this ornament.
An ardent bibliophile or art lover is perhaps better equipped to see the book bracelet’s value.
Each gilt edged page — 1400 in all — features an image of a hand, sourced from 303 downloaded Rembrandt works.
An illustration on the designers’ Duinker and Dochters website details the painstaking process whereby the bookbracelet takes shape in 8‑page sections, or signatures, cross stitched tightly alongside each other on a paper band. Put it on, and you can flip through Rembrandt hands, Rolodex-style. When you want to do the dishes or take a shower, just pack it flat into that custom box.
The Rembrandt’s Hands and a Lion’s Paw bracelet, titled like a book and published in a limited edition of 10, nabbed first prize in the 2015 Rijksstudio Awards, a competition that challenges designers to create work inspired by the Rijksmuseum’s collection.
But what about that special art loving bibliophile who already has everything, including a Rembrandts Hands and a Lions Paw boekarmband?
Maybe you could get them Collier van hondjes, Gais and Duinker’s follow up to the book bracelet, a rubber choker with an attached 112-page book pendant showcasing Rembrandt dogs sourced from various museum’s digital collections.
Pity the United States of America: despite its economic, cultural, and military dominance of so much of the world, it struggles to build cities that measure up with the capitals of Europe and Asia. The likes of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago offer abundant urban life to enjoy, but also equally abundant problems. Apart from the crime rates for which American cities have become fairly or unfairly notorious, there’s also the matter of urban design. Simply put, they don’t feel as if they were built very well, which any American will feel after returning from a trip to Amsterdam or Tokyo — or after watching the videos on those cities by Danish Youtuber OBF.
In Amsterdam, OBF says, “commuters will use their bikes to get to and enter transit stations, where they simply park their bikes in these enormous bike-parking garages. Then they’ll travel on either a bus, tram, or train to their final destination, but most of the time, the fastest and most convenient option is simply taking the bike to the final destination.”
Near-impossible to imagine in the United States, this prevalence of cycling is a reality in not just the Dutch capital but also in other cities across the country, which boasts 32,000 kilometers of bike lanes in total. And those count as only one of the infrastructural glories covered in OBF’s video “Why the Netherlands Is Insanely Well Designed.”
Tokyo, too, has its fair share of cyclists. Whenever I’m over there, I take note of all the well-dressed moms biking their young children to school in the morning, who cut figures in the starkest possible contrast to their American equivalents. But what really underlies the Japanese capital’s distinctively intense urbanism, literally as well as figuratively, is its network of subway trains. OBF takes the precision-engineered efficiency and the impeccable maintenance of this system as his main subject in “Why Tokyo Is Insanely Well Designed.” But enough about good city design; what accounts for bad city design, especially in a rich country like the U.S.?
OMF has an answer in one word: parking. Philadelphia, for example, supplies its 1.6 million people with 2.2 million parking spaces. The consequent deformation of the city’s built environment, clearly visible in aerial footage, both symbolizes and perpetuates the hegemony of the automobile. That same condition once afflicted the European and Asian cities that have since designed their way out of it and then some. While “some people might think it’s nearly impossible to implement these methods into other countries,” says OBF, they “can be replicated any place in the world if the people and leadership are willing to collaborate and listen to one another, and invest in infrastructure that is people‑, environment‑, and future-centered.” As an American living in a non-American city, I hereby invite him to come have a ride on the Seoul Metro.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
You remember it — one of the most heartbreaking scenes on TV. A man longs for nothing more than time to read, to be free of all those people Sartre told us make our hells. Finally granted his wish by the H‑Bomb, he then accidentally break his glasses, rendering himself unable make out a word. Oh, cruel irony! Not an optometrist or optician in sight! Surely, there are “Time Enough at Last” jokes at eye care conventions worldwide.
Morality tales wrapped in science fiction might make us think about all sorts of things, but one of the most obvious questions when we witness the fate of Mr. Henry Bemis, “charter member in the fraternity of dreamers,” might be, but what did people do before corrective lenses? Were millions forced to accept his fate, living out their lives with farsightedness, nearsightedness, and other defects that impede vision? How did early humans survive in times much less hospitable to disabilities? At least there were others to read and describe things for them.…
In truth, the Twilight Zone is not far off the mark. Or at least nearsightedness and reading are closely linked. “As long as primates have been around, there’s probably been myopia,” says professor of ophthalmology Ivan Schwab. But Schwab argues in his book Evolution’s Witness: How Eyes Evolved that the rise of reading likely caused skyrocketing rates of myopia over the past three hundred years. “Though genes and nutrition may play a role in nearsightedness,” Natalie Jacewicz writes at NPR, “[Schwab] says education and myopia seem to be linked, suggesting that when people do a lot of close work, their eyes grow longer.”
As the History Dose video above explains, the oldest image of a pair of glasses dates from a 1351 painting of Cardinal Hugh of Saint-Cher. The painting is an anachronism — spectacles, the narrator tells us, were invented 23 years earlier in Pisa, after the cardinal’s death. They “gradually spread across Europe and travelled the Silk Road to China.” (The oldest surviving pair of glasses dates from around 1475). So what happened before 1286? As you’ll learn, glasses were not the only way to enlarge small items. In fact, humans have been using some form of magnifying lens to read small print (or manuscript or cuneiform or what-have-you) for thousands of years. Those lenses, however, corrected presbyopia, or far-sightedness.
Those with myopia were mostly out of luck until the invention of sophisticated lens-grinding techniques and improved vision tests. But for most of human history, unless you were a sailor or a soldier, you “likely spent your day as an artisan, smith, or farm worker,” occupations where distance vision didn’t matter as much. In fact, artisans like medieval scribes and illuminators, says Neil Handley — museum curator of the College of Optometrists, London — were “actually encouraged to remain in their myopic condition, because it was actually ideal for them doing this job.”
It wasn’t until well after the time of Gutenberg that wearing lenses on one’s face became a thing — and hardly a popular thing at first. Early glasses were held up to the eyes, not worn. They were heavy, thick, and fragile. In the 15th century, “because… they were unusual and rare,” says Handley, “they were seen as having magical powers” and their wearers viewed as “in league with the devil, immoral.” That stigma went away, even if glasses picked up other associations that sometimes made their users the subject of taunts. But by the nineteenth century, glasses were common around the world.
Given that we all spend most of our time interacting with small text and images on handheld screens, it seems maybe they haven’t spread widely enough. “More than a billion, and maybe as many as 2.5 billion, people in the world need but don’t have glasses to correct for various vision impairments,” notes Livescience, citing figures from The New York Times. For many people, especially in the developing world, the question of how to get by in the world without eyeglasses is still a very pressing, present-day issue.
Jim Morrison didn’t fare particularly well, health-wise, in the last years of his life. Alcoholism took a heavy toll, as we know. “Images of him with the shaggy beard, hair receding at the temples, and excess flesh gathering around the armpits,” writes Rob Fischer at Rolling Stone, “can resemble, in retrospect, T.J. Miller more than Father John Misty. This is the out-to-seed drunkard that Val Kilmer portrays in Oliver Stone’s iconic film The Doors.” It is also an unfortunate caricature that leaves out the creative and intellectual energy still left in the artist once called “the first major male sex symbol since James Dean died and Marlon Brando got a paunch.”
There was always more to Morrison than that, and in the 1969 interview above, filmed over a week in L.A. with Rolling Stone’s Jerry Hopkins, he is still “remarkably sharp,” Fischer writes.
Even though the conversations included many rounds of whiskey, scotch and beer, his responses give the impression of a thoughtful and engaged artist struggling to realize the full extent of his already colossal powers of expression. He was reading widely, writing poetry, gravitating more towards filmmaking, all while longing to reconnect with the explosive energy that comes with playing small venues and clubs like the Whiskey a Go Go.
Morrison and the Doors were experimental artists, taking musical risks and selling them with sex. The Doors were the first rock band, for example, to use the new Moog synthesizer on an album. Even before Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach introduced popular audiences to the technology of audio synthesis in 1968, the band brought jazz musician Paul Beaver into the 1967 recordings sessions for Strange Days to use Moog for effects on several tracks and to distort Morrison’s voice.
Beaver, an early adopter of the synthesizer, produced two seminal Moog records in the late sixties: The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds (1967) with Mort Garson and double album The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music (1968) with Bernie Krause.
Therefore, when Morrison, in his astute analysis of American music, “predicts” the future of electronic music in 1969 during the course of his interview with Hopkins, he knows of what he speaks. He’s already seen it, and being the hip guy that he was, he had likely heard the work of electronic pioneers Silver Apples and maybe even of the band White Noise, a side project of BBC Radiophonic Workshop composer Delia Derbyshire that produced music far ahead of its time that very year — music made almost exactly the way he describes:
I can kind of envision one person with a lot of machines, tapes and electronics set up, singing or speaking while using machines.…
At the end of the brief clip at the top, we hear Hopkins ignore this idea and move Morrison back to talking about rock. But Jim had already moved on — and so had the culture, he knew. The music he describes was happening all around him, and we might imagine he was a little frustrated that other people couldn’t hear it. What Morrison brought to it, however — or might have, had he lived — was the lyrical, the sensual, the performative, the melodramatic, and the truly frightening, all qualities it would take new wave and goth acts like Echo and Bunnymen, Depeche Mode, and a host of Doors-influenced dark wave bands to bring to fruition in the electronic music of future past.
It’s apparently a tradition–Flea performing “The Star Spangled Banner” before the start of an LA Lakers game, accompanied by the bass, and only the bass. The recording above took place over the past weekend. You can also watch other performances from 2016 and 2014. Somewhere, Jimi is smiling.
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When I lived in Los Angeles, I enjoyed no breakfast spot more than Pann’s. The place had it all: not just signature plates ranging from biscuits and gravy to chicken and waffles, but tropical landscaping, stone walls, a slanted roof, banquettes in burgundy and counter seats in cream, and as the pièce de résistance, a neon sign that lit up one letter at a time. Built in 1958, Pann’s stands today as quite possibly the most immaculate surviving example of Googie, a mid-twentieth-century aesthetic that takes its name from another Los Angeles coffee shop opened nearly a decade earlier. Though designed by no less serious a modern architect than Frank Lloyd Wright protégé John Lautner, Googie’s gave rise to perhaps the least serious of all architectural movements.
“It’s a style built on exaggeration; on dramatic angles; on plastic and steel and neon and wide-eyed technological optimism,” writes Matt Novak at Smithsonian magazine. “It draws inspiration from Space Age ideals and rocketship dreams. We find Googie at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the Space Needle in Seattle, the mid-century design of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, in Arthur Radebaugh‘s postwar illustrations, and in countless coffee shops and motels across the U.S.”
But the acknowledged cradle of Googie is Los Angeles, whose explosive development alongside that of mid-twentieth-century American “car culture” encouraged the ultra-commercial architectural experimentation whose first priority was to catch the eye of the motorist — and ideally, the hungry motorist.
You can hear the history of Googie told in the Cheddar Explain video “How Los Angeles Got Its Iconic Architecture Style,” which adapts Novak’s Smithsonian piece. In “Googie Architecture: From Diners to Donuts,” photographer Ahok Sinha goes into more detail about how the style turned “architecture into a form of advertising.” Like all the most effective advertising, Googie drew from the zeitgeist, incorporating the striking shapes and advanced materials connected in the public mind with notions of speed and technology embodied not just by automobiles but even more so by rockets. For Googie was the architecture of the Space Race: it’s no accident that the creators of The Jetsons, which aired in 1962 and 1963, rendered all the show’s settings in the same style.
It could fairly be said that no one architect invented Googie, that it emerged almost spontaneously as a product of American popular culture. But “for some reason, we got stuck with the name,” says architect Victor Newlove, of Armet Davis Newlove and Associates, in the interview clip above. For good reason, perhaps: to that firm’s credit are several locations of the diner chains Bob’s Big Boy (where for years David Lynch’s took his daily milkshake) and Norms, both of which are still in business in Los Angeles today. Its architects Eldon Davis and Helen Liu Fong also designed Pann’s, which for many Googie enthusiasts remains an unsurpassable achievement — and one whose competition, since the moon landing and the end it put to not just the Space Race but the sensibility it inspired, has been dwindling one demolition at a time.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Prince left us a vast body of work, with much rumored still to be awaiting release in his vault. But among his many albums already available, I still hold in especially high regard For You, the debut he recorded while still a teenager. Not only did he put out this first LP at an unusually young age, he produced it and played nearly all its instruments. Though Prince seemed to have emerged into the world as a fully formed pop-music genius, he had to come from somewhere. Indeed, he came from Minneapolis, a city with which he remained associated all his life. Now, nearly six years after his death, a Minneapolis television station has discovered a previously unknown artifact of the Purple One’s adolescence.
In April 1970 the teachers of Minneapolis’ public schools went on strike, and a reporter on the scene asked a crowd of nearby schoolchildren whether they were in favor of the picketing. “Yup,” replies a particularly small one who’d been jumping to catch the camera’s attention. “I think they should get a better education, too.”
Not only that, “they should get some more money ’cause they be workin’ extra hours for us and all that stuff.” None of this was audible to the producer at WCCO TV, a Minneapolis-native Prince fan, who’d brought the half-century-old footage out of the archive in order to contextualize another teachers strike just last month. But in the young interviewee’s face and mannerisms he saw not just a local boy, but one particular local boy made enormously good.
No one who’s seen Prince in action early in his career could fail to recognize him in this long-unseen footage. But it took more than fans to confirm his identity, as you can see in the WCCO news broadcast and behind-the-scenes segment here. A local Prince historian could provide highly similar photographs of the star-to-be in the same year, when he would have been eleven. Eventually the investigation turned up a childhood neighbor and former bandmate named Terry Jackson, who watches the clip and breaks at once into laughter and tears of recognition. “That’s Skipper!” Jackson cries, using the nickname by which his family and friends once knew him. “I never referred to him as Prince. He might even have got mad at me when he got famous.” Ascend to the pantheon of pop music, it seems, and you still can’t quite make it out of the old neighborhood.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
What separates the Cappuccino from the Latte, and the Macchiato from the Double Espresso? These are some important questions–questions that demand answers. And European Coffee Trip–a YouTube channel run by two Czech guys with a love for specialty coffee–has answers. Above, they break it all down for you. Find timestamps for the different variations below.
To delve deeper, you can also watch James Hoffman’s always informative video. It covers similar ground, but also touches on some other variations of espresso drinks.
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What does it take to wear an ancient Roman toga with dignity and grace?
Judging from the above demonstration by Dr Mary Harlow, Associate Professor of Ancient History at the University of Leicester, a couple of helpers, who, in the first century CE, would have invariably been enslaved, and thus ineligible for togas of their own.
The iconic outer garments, traditionally made of wool, begin as single, 12–16m lengths of fabric.
Extra hands were needed to keep the cloth from dragging on the dirty floor while the wearer was being wrapped, to secure the garment with additional pleats and tucks, and to create the pouch-like umbo at chest level, in a manner as aesthetically pleasing as every other fold and drape was expected to be.
As formal citizen’s garb, the toga was suitable for virtually every public occasion, as well as an audience with the emperor.
In addition to slaves, the toga was off-limits to foreigners, freedmen, and, with the notable exception of adulteresses and prostitutes, women.
Wealthier individuals flaunted their status by accenting their outfit with stripes of Tyrian Purple.
The BBC reports that dying even a single small swatch of fabric this shade “took tens of thousands of desiccated hypobranchial glands wrenched from the calcified coils of spiny murex sea snails” and that thus dyed, the fibers “retained the stench of the invertebrate’s marine excretions.”
Achieving that Tyrian Purple hue was “a very smelly process,” Dr. Harlow confirms, “but if you could retain a little bit of that fishy smell in your final garment, it would show your colleagues that you could afford the best.”
The students also share how toga-clad Romans dealt with stairs, and introduce viewers to 5 forms of toga:
Toga Virilis — the toga of manhood
Toga Praetexta — the pre-toga of manhood toga
Toga Pulla — a dark mourning toga
Toga Candida- a chalk whitened toga sported by those running for office
Toga Picta- to be worn by generals, praetors celebrating games and consuls. The emperor’s toga picta was dyed purple. Uh-oh.
Their youthful enthusiasm for antiquity is rousing, though Quintilian, the first century CE educator and expert in rhetoric might have had some thoughts on their clownish antics.
He certainly had a lot of thoughts about togas, which he shared in his instructive masterwork, Institutio Oratoria:
The toga itself should, in my opinion, be round, and cut to fit, otherwise there are a number of ways in which it may be unshapely. Its front edge should by preference reach to the middle of the shin, while the back should be higher in proportion as the girdle is higher
behind than in front. The fold is most becoming, if it fall to a point a little above the lower edge of the tunic, and should certainly never fall below it. The other fold which passes obliquely like a belt under the right shoulder and over the left, should neither be too tight nor too loose. The portion of the toga which is last to be arranged should fall rather low, since it will sit better thus and be kept in its place. A portion of the tunic also should be drawn back in order that it may not fall over the arm when we are pleading, and the fold should be thrown over the shoulder, while it will not be unbecoming if the edge be turned back. On the other hand, we should not cover the shoulder and the whole of the throat, otherwise our dress will be unduly narrowed and will lose the impressive effect produced by breadth at the chest. The left arm should only be raised so far as to form a right angle at the elbow, while the edge of the toga should fall in equal lengths on either side.
Quintillian was willing to let some of his high standards slide if the wearer’s toga had been untidied by the heat of rousing oration:
When, however, our speech draws near its close, more especially if fortune shows herself kind, practically everything is becoming; we may stream with sweat, show signs of fatigue, and let our dress fall in careless disorder and the toga slip loose from us on every side…On the other hand, if the toga falls down at the beginning of our speech, or when we have only proceeded but a little way, the failure to replace it is a sign of indifference, or sloth, or sheer ignorance of the way in which clothes should be worn.
We’re pretty sure he would have frowned on classical archaeologist Shelby Brown’s experiments using a twin-size poly-blend bed sheet in advance of an early 21st-century College Night at the Getty Villa.
Prospective guests were encouraged to attend in their “best togas.”
Could it be that the party planners , envisioning a civilized night of photo booths, classical art viewing, and light refreshments in the Herculaneum-inspired Getty Villa, were so ignorant of 1978’s notorious John Belushi vehicle Animal House?
What’s your stance on Wikipedia, the free, open content online encyclopedia?
Students are often discouraged or disallowed from citing Wikipedia as a source, a bias that a Wikipedia entry titled “Wikipedia should not be considered a definitive source in and of itself” supports:
As a user-generated source, it can be edited by anyone at any time, and any information it contains at a particular time could be vandalism, a work in progress, or simply incorrect. Biographies of living persons, subjects that happen to be in the news, and politically or culturally contentious topics are especially vulnerable to these issues…because Wikipedia is a volunteer-run project, it cannot constantly monitor every contribution. There are many errors that remain unnoticed for hours, days, weeks, months, or even years.
A list of Wikipedia controversies, published on — where else? — Wikipedia is a hair raising litany of political sabotage, character assassination, and “revenge edits”. (The list is currently substantiated by 338 reference links, and has been characterized as in need of update since October 2021, owing to a lack of edits regarding the “controversy about Mainland Chinese editors.”)
It can be a pretty scary place, but University of Michigan senior Annie Rauwerda, creator of the Instagram account Depths of Wikipedia is unfazed. As she wrote in an article for the tech publication Input:
Wikipedia is a splendidly extensive record of almost everything that matters; a modern-day Library of Alexandria that’s free, accessible, and dynamic. But Wikipedia is characterized not only by what it is but also by what it is not. It’s not a soapbox, a battleground, nor a blog.
It’s also becoming famous as Rauwerda’s playground, or more accurately, a packed swap shop in which millions of bizarre items are tucked away.
Turning a selection of Wikipedia excerpts into a collage for a friend’s quaran-zine inspired her to keep the party going with screenshots of oddball entries posted to a dedicated Instagram account.
Her followers don’t seem to care whether a post contains an image or not, though the neuroscience major finds that emotional, short or animal-related posts generate the most excitement. “I used to post more things that were conceptual,” she told Lithium Magazine, “like mind-blowing physics concepts, but those didn’t lend themselves to Instagram as well since they require a few minutes of thinking and reading.”
The bulk of what she posts come to her as reader submissions, though in a pinch, she can always turn to the “holy grail” — Wikipedia’s own list of unusual articles.
Along the way, she has found ways to give back, co-hosting a virtual edit-a-thon and bringing some genuine glamour to a livestreamed Wikipedia trivia contest.
And she recently authored a serious article for Slate about Russians scrambling to download a 29-gigabyte file containing Russian-language Wikipedia after the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) threatened to block it over content related to the invasion of Ukraine.
(You can read more about how that’s going on Wikipedia…)
The Book of Revelation is a strong competitor for weirdest text in all of ancient literature. Or, at least, it is “the strangest and most disturbing book in the whole Bible,” says the narrator of the video above from a channel called hochelaga, which features “obscure topics that deserve more attention.” Most of these are supernatural or religious in nature. But if you’re looking for a religious or theological interpretation of St. John of Patmos’ bizarre prophetic vision, look elsewhere. The examination above proceeds “from a secular, non-religious perspective.”
Instead, we’re promised a survival guide in the unlikely (but who knows, right) event that the prophecy comes true. But what, exactly, would that look like? Revelation is “highly symbolic” and very “non-literal.” The meanings of its symbols are rather inscrutable and have seemed to shift and change each century, depending on how its interpreters wanted to use it to forward agendas of their own.
This has, of course, been no less true in the 20th and 21st centuries. If you grew up in the 1970s and 80s, for example, you were bound to have come across the works of Hal Lindsay – author of The Late Great Planet Earth (turned into a 1977 film narrated by Orson Welles). And if you lived through the 1990s, you surely heard of his entertaining successors: the bloody-minded Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
The Apocalypse has been big business in publishing and other media for 50 plus years now. Revelation itself is an incredibly obscure book, but the use of its language and imagery for profit and proselyting “made the Apocalypse a popular concern,” as Erin A. Smith writes for Humanities. Lindsay’s book sold both as religious fact and science fiction, a genre later evangelical writers like LaHaye and Jenkins exploited on purpose. The influence has always gone both ways. “A kind of secular apocalyptic sensibility pervades much contemporary writing about our current world,” Paul Boyer, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, tells PBS.
Whether it’s a discussion of climate catastrophe, viral pandemic, economic collapse, the rise of artificial intelligence, or civil strife and international warfare, the apocalyptic metaphors stack up in our imaginations, often without us even noticing. Get to know one of their primary sources in the video introduction to Revelation just above.
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