Listen to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” Played on a 1914 Fairground Organ

in History, Music, Technology | April 16th, 2021

To tru­ly appre­ci­ate the spec­ta­cle of ABBA’s “Danc­ing Queen” played on a 1914 Hooghuys fair­ground organ, we rec­om­mend you read Angus Harrison’s 2016 VICE essay, “Why Abba’s ‘Danc­ing Queen’ Is the Sad­dest Record Ever Made”:

Make no mis­take. This song is about the danc­ing queen, but it is most def­i­nite­ly not sung by her. Here­in lies the tragedy. Our nar­ra­tor has real­ized that she is no longer the Danc­ing Queen. She is no longer young, no longer sweet, no longer 17. Now, instead, she watch­es from the bar; the dance­floor a mael­strom of lost faith, mem­o­ries, and missed oppor­tu­ni­ties. She was once 17, and as such was total­ly obliv­i­ous that the moment would ever end.

Could such sen­ti­ments apply to the above instru­ment, whose carved fig­urines, ornate scroll­work, and dis­tinc­tive sound def­i­nite­ly sug­gest that how­ev­er lov­ing­ly it’s been main­tained, its prime is long past.

This 105-year-old organ was already 62 when “Danc­ing Queen” was released at the height of the dis­co craze in 1976.

The tune quick­ly soared to the top of the charts world­wide, as fans raced to the record store to pick up a 45, or the full album, Arrival, on vinyl, cas­sette, or 8‑track.

But pro­duc­tion of punched, card­board scrolls such as the ones these metic­u­lous­ly hand built instru­ments — no two alike! — use had long since ceased.

A site ded­i­cat­ed to Hooghuys organs ties their decline to the end of WWI, cit­ing the neces­si­ty of cheap­er post-war pro­duc­tion. When the founder of the fam­i­ly busi­ness died, short­ly there­after, the firm ceased to exist.

Flash for­ward to this mil­len­ni­um, when a mechan­i­cal music afi­ciona­do named Alex­ey Rom used MIDI — Musi­cal Instru­ment Dig­i­tal Inter­face — to give the aged organ new life, pro­gram­ming his own arrange­ment, then using an auto­mat­ic punch to cre­ate card­board cards the instru­ment was capa­ble of read­ing.

His first such tri­umph came when he equipped a sim­i­lar organ to cov­er Queen’s “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody.” “Danc­ing Queen,” and many oth­er pop­u­lar favorites that didn’t exist in the organs’ hey­day fol­lowed. (We’re pret­ty par­tial to “Mack the Knife” played on an 81-key Marenghi organ from 1905…)

Below Rom shares a tiny peek into his process.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1910 Fair­ground Organ Plays Queen’s “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody,” and It Works Like a Charm

When ABBA Wrote Music for the Cold War-Themed Musi­cal, Chess: “One of the Best Rock Scores Ever Pro­duced for the The­atre” (1984)

Bach’s Most Famous Organ Piece Played on Wine Glass­es

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Experience Footage of Roaring 1920s Berlin, Restored & Colorized with Artificial Intelligence

in Film, History | April 15th, 2021

Offered the chance to trav­el back in time to any city in any peri­od, sure­ly more than a few would choose Berlin in the 1920s. Ide­al­ly it would be Berlin in the mid-1920s: after much of the social and eco­nom­ic dam­age of the Great War had been repaired, but before the Great Depres­sion reached Ger­many at the end of the decade, doing its part to enable the rise of Hitler. The clos­est expe­ri­ence to step­ping in that time machine yet devel­oped is the video above, a series of clips from Walther Ruttman­n’s 1927 doc­u­men­tary Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Metrop­o­lis, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here in Open Cul­ture — but smoothed out, scaled up, and col­orized with the aid of appli­ca­tions pow­ered by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.

Describ­ing it as “the real Baby­lon Berlin of the 1920s” por­trayed “from dawn until dusk in three min­utes,” the video’s poster empha­sizes that the Berlin of the Weimar Repub­lic (the Ger­man state from 1918 to 1933) “was a mul­ti-cul­tur­al city” — which it is again today, though a lit­tle less than a cen­tu­ry ago it was one “teem­ing with flap­pers, bobbed hair, cloche hats, and the danc­ing girls of Berlin’s infa­mous cabaret scene.”

Dur­ing these Weimar “Gold­en Years,” Berlin expe­ri­enced a “cul­tur­al explo­sion,” the vivid­ness of which is under­scored by the myr­i­ad enhance­ments per­formed on Ruttman­n’s already strik­ing orig­i­nal footage. These include the use of DeNoise, the inter­po­la­tion of motion “using a deep learn­ing open source pro­gram Dain-App,” and the addi­tion of col­or with Deold­ify.

You may rec­og­nize the name of that last appli­ca­tion, which was used a cou­ple of years ago to cre­ate a “remixed” ver­sion of Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, now nowhere to be found on the inter­net. Oth­er, more benign uses of DeOld­ify include the col­oriza­tion of dance sequences from black-and-white films like Stormy Weath­er and Hel­lza­pop­pin’, as well as of an 1896 snow­ball fight orig­i­nal­ly cap­tured by the Lumière Broth­ers. Ruttman­n’s work, and that of oth­er cre­ators of “city sym­phonies” in the 1920s, builds on that of those cin­e­ma pio­neers for whom real life was the nat­ur­al sub­ject, cap­tur­ing live­li­er urban envi­ron­ments with dynam­ic and inno­v­a­tive shoot­ing and edit­ing tech­niques to match. If you enjoy your three min­utes in the DeOld­ified ver­sion of his Berlin, why not spent a lit­tle more of your day in sim­i­lar­ly deep-learn­ing-enhanced Paris, New York, and Havana of the past as well?

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Gold­en Age of Berlin Comes to Life in the Clas­sic, Avant-Garde Film, Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Dra­mat­ic Col­or Footage Shows a Bombed-Out Berlin a Month After Germany’s WWII Defeat (1945)

See Berlin Before and After World War II in Star­tling Col­or Video

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Watch 1920s “City Sym­phonies” Star­ring the Great Cities of the World: From New York to Berlin to São Paulo

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

in Music | April 15th, 2021

Image by Herb Greene, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“Once we’re done with it, the audi­ence can have it.” — Jer­ry Gar­cia

It so hap­pens that one of the great­est things about the Inter­net is also one of the not-so-great­est things: you hard­ly ever have to leave the house any­more. Of course, for traders and col­lec­tors of bootlegs, this has been a major boon. Obscure tapes a fan might spend years track­ing down in pre­vi­ous times can now be searched, found, and down­loaded with ease. And — as a spe­cial added bonus — their qual­i­ty won’t degrade with every copy.

For Dead­heads, espe­cial­ly, such easy online access has been crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant in main­tain­ing a com­mu­ni­ty of peo­ple who love the Grate­ful Dead, when there hasn’t been a Grate­ful Dead show in years. That’s enough time for new gen­er­a­tions of Dead­heads to emerge, and to dis­cov­er and grow up with a resource their elders could only dream about: the Inter­net Archive’s Grate­ful Dead col­lec­tion, which cur­rent­ly fea­tures over 15,000 record­ings (most­ly com­plete con­certs) and con­tin­ues to expand as more are added.

Sure, it’s not quite com­pen­sa­tion for nev­er get­ting to see, and tape, the band in per­son, but these days, such a thing would prob­a­bly be impos­si­ble in any case, even if Jer­ry Gar­cia hadn’t died in 1995. (Last year, to keep fans’ spir­its up, band mem­bers Mick­ey Hart, Bob Weir, and Don­na Jean God­chaux wel­comed famous spe­cial guests on YouTube and broad­cast unre­leased filmed con­certs in the week­ly “Shake­down Stream.”) For those raised on Dead tapes, the archive must feel like com­ing home. For oth­ers, it can be a bewil­der­ing col­lec­tion of dates, venues, and loca­tions.

How to nav­i­gate the thou­sands of record­ings of the esti­mat­ed 2,200 con­certs cap­tured on tape by the band and their fans over the course of decades? A few years back, one fan made a list of the “10 Essential/Best Grate­ful Dead Shows,” all of which you can down­load and/or stream and pore over to your heart’s con­tent.

“I am not an old Dead Head, or a mem­ber of the 4‑decade club,” he admits. “In fact, I nev­er saw a show, see­ing as I was born in 2001.” It’s not his fault, but he’s entered an are­na where fun­da­men­tal dis­agree­ment about such things is a mat­ter of course.

1. 09–21-72, The Spec­trum, Philadel­phia, PA
2. 05–08-77, Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, Itha­ca, NY
3. 02–27-69, Fill­more West, San Fran­cis­co, CA
4. 05–02-70, Harpur Col­lege, Bing­ham­ton, NY
5. 08–27-72, Vene­ta, OR
6. 07–07-89, JFK Sta­di­um, Philadel­phia, PA
7. 05–26-72, The Strand Lyceum, Lon­don, Eng­land
8. 12–31-78, Win­ter­land Are­na, San Fran­cis­co, CA
9. 11–08-69, Fill­more The­ater, San Fran­cis­co, CA
10. 12–06-73, Cleve­land Pub­lic Hall, Cleve­land, OH
11. 06–26-74, Prov­i­dence Civic Cen­ter, Prov­i­dence, RI

See the top ten list above (includ­ing links to shows), find hon­or­able men­tions here, a short­er list by Mike Mineo here, and add your own picks in the com­ments. And con­sid­er the fact that a band who devot­ed more time to tour­ing than any­thing else “had just one Top Forty hit in thir­ty years,” Nick Paum­garten writes at The New York­er (though “not for lack of try­ing”). They more than their share of ter­ri­ble nights onstage (by their own admis­sion) but still inspire peo­ple who will nev­er see them play.

“Each tape seemed to have its own par­tic­u­lar note of decay, like the taste of the barn­yard in a wine or a cheese,” writes Paum­garten of learn­ing to savor these con­certs: “You came to love each one, as you might a three-legged dog.” For Dead­heads, it can be hard to pick favorites, espe­cial­ly if you haven’t heard them all yet. Immerse your­self in live Dead now at the Inter­net Archive’s Grate­ful Dead Col­lec­tion here. Browse by the year of the record­ings here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Grate­ful Dead Movie: Watch It Free Online

How the Grate­ful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Mon­ster, 600-Speak­er Sound System–Changed Rock Con­certs & Live Music For­ev­er

The Grate­ful Dead’s “Rip­ple” Played By Musi­cians Around the World (with Cameos by David Cros­by, Jim­my Buf­fett & Bill Kreutz­mann)

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

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Is “Rain” the Perfect Beatles Song?: A New Video Explores the Radical Innovations of the 1966 B‑Side

in Music | April 15th, 2021

“That one was the gift of God… of Ja actually—the god of mar­i­jua­na, right? So Ja gave me that one.”

The Bea­t­les 1966 Revolver, a mini-mas­ter­piece, con­tains all the ele­ments that would inform the band’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary late-60s sound on Sgt. Pepper’s, Abbey Road, The White Album, and Let it Be. The album’s first track, “Tax­man,” announced “a sweep­ing shift in the essen­tial nature of the Bea­t­les’ sound,” writes music his­to­ri­an Ken­neth Wom­ack. Its ulti­mate track, “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows,” was “the great­est leap into the future” up to that point in their career, argues pop cul­ture writer Robert Rodriguez, who lit­er­al­ly wrote the book, or a book, on the sea change that was Revolver.

Crit­i­cal to dis­cus­sion of this peri­od, how­ev­er, is a sin­gle that appeared at the same time, and proved just as impor­tant to the Bea­t­les’, and thus pop music’s, evo­lu­tion. Though not espe­cial­ly inno­v­a­tive musi­cal­ly or lyri­cal­ly, “Paper­back Writer” was the first Bea­t­les’ record­ing to bring Paul McCartney’s bass for­ward in the mix, show­cas­ing the utter­ly dis­tinc­tive play­ing that would lat­er form the back­bone of songs like “Come Togeth­er.” The record’s B‑side, “Rain,” more­over, is the first Bea­t­les song to use back­wards tape, a sta­ple of psy­che­del­ic music there­after.

In fact,  “Rain” was “the first back­wards tape on any record any­where. Before Hen­drix, before The Who, before any f*cker,” John Lennon bragged. (He con­ced­ed that the nov­el­ty hit “They’re Com­ing to Take Me Away, Ha Haaa!” got there a lit­tle ear­li­er, “but it’s not the same thing.”). Lennon claimed the song as his, although McCart­ney lat­er claimed co-author­ship. But Lennon gave cred­it for the back­wards voic­es and gui­tars to “Ja,” telling Play­boy in 1980:

I got home from the stu­dio and I was stoned out of my mind on mar­i­jua­na… and, as I usu­al­ly do, I lis­tened to what I’d record­ed that day. Some­how it got on back­wards and I sat there, trans­fixed, with the ear­phones on, with a big hash joint.

There’s much more to the sto­ry of “Rain,” as you’ll hear in the You Can’t Unhear This video above. The track came out of “what would arguably be the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary week of their record­ing career… work­ing close­ly with their beloved pro­duc­er George Mar­tin and an eager young EMI engi­neer named Geoff Emer­ick.” In “Rain,” specif­i­cal­ly, they took full advan­tage of a dis­cov­ery made on “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows” — the impact of slow­ing down record­ings.

The band “played the rhythm track real­ly fast,” dur­ing record­ing, “so that when the tape was played back at nor­mal speed every­thing would be so much slow­er, chang­ing the tex­ture,” remem­bered Emer­ick. This led to what McCart­ney would call a “big omi­nous noise”:

The drums became a giant drum kit. If you slow down a foot­step it becomes a giant’s foot­step, it adds a few tones to the weight of the per­son. So we got a big, pon­der­ous, thun­der­ous back­ing and then we worked on top of that as nor­mal. 

Ringo called it the great­est per­for­mance of his musi­cal career: “I think I just played amaz­ing… I think it was the first time I used this trick of start­ing a break by hit­ting the hi-hat first instead of going direct­ly to a drum off the hi-hat.”

Con­trar­i­ans love takes about icon­ic artists like the Bea­t­les that over­state the impor­tance of deep cuts and minor record­ings. But in the case of “Rain” — the B‑side of a 1966 sin­gle that didn’t appear on the album that changed rock and roll and the coun­ter­cul­ture that same year– believe the hype. The Bea­t­les them­selves sin­gle out the song as sem­i­nal­ly impor­tant to their musi­cal devel­op­ment for good rea­son. Or as Sir Paul recalls, “It was nice, I real­ly enjoyed that one.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” Con­tains “the Cra­zi­est Edit” in Bea­t­les His­to­ry

Hear the Beau­ti­ful Iso­lat­ed Vocal Har­monies from the Bea­t­les’ “Some­thing”

Lennon or McCart­ney? Sci­en­tists Use Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence to Fig­ure Out Who Wrote Icon­ic Bea­t­les Songs

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

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The Trial of the Chicago 7 and the Oeuvre of Aaron Sorkin: An Assessment by Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast (#89)

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | April 15th, 2021

In lieu of an Oscars episode, the Pret­ty Much Pop pod­cast this week con­sid­ers one of the nom­i­nat­ed films, The Tri­al of the Chica­go 7, and the career of its writer/director, Aaron Sorkin, which start­ed with A Few Good Men through four TV series (most notably The West Wing), and films like The Social Net­work, Steve Jobs, and Mol­ly’s Game.

Your hosts Bri­an Hirt, Eri­ca Spyres, and Mark Lin­sen­may­er con­sid­er Sork­in’s stock recur­ring char­ac­ters and their polit­i­cal dia­tribes, plots often based on true events, and how his writ­ing cre­ates dra­ma. Do we feel uplift­ed or vague­ly dirty after a Sorkin bath? It’s great to have char­ac­ters that aren’t stu­pid, but are they actu­al­ly smart or just designed to seem that way? Are the devi­a­tions from fact just good use of dra­mat­ic license or pos­i­tive­ly harm­ful? We touch on vir­tu­al­ly all of Sork­in’s pro­duc­tions (well, except for the plays; he actu­al­ly con­sid­ers him­self native­ly a play­wright) and still have ener­gy for a few Oscars mus­ings and reflec­tions about includ­ing real loca­tions or news events in fic­tion.

Here are some arti­cles we used to pre­pare our­selves:

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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The Strangest Books in the World: Discover The Madman’s Library, a Captivating Compendium of Peculiar Books​ & Manuscripts

in Books | April 14th, 2021

If you are a fre­quent read­er of Open Cul­ture, or the many blogs we tend to read — espe­cial­ly those con­cerned with the rare, unusu­al, and obscure — it’s like­ly you’ve encoun­tered some of the books in The Madman’s Library, Edward Brooke-Hitching’s fan­tas­tic new vol­ume of lit­er­ary odd­i­ties. If not, you’re prob­a­bly famil­iar with a few of the cat­e­gories he iden­ti­fies under his sub­ti­tle, “The Strangest Books, Man­u­scripts and Oth­er Lit­er­ary Curiosi­ties from His­to­ry.” These include “Books Made of Flesh and Blood,” such as a Qur’an writ­ten in 50 pints of Sad­dam Hussein’s blood. If such arti­facts don’t qual­i­fy as “lit­er­ary curiosi­ties,” it’s hard to know what does.

Brooke-Hitch­ing grants the des­ig­na­tion “curios­i­ty” is sub­jec­tive, and cul­tur­al­ly deter­mined, “but after near­ly a decade of search­ing through cat­a­logues of libraries, auc­tion hous­es and anti­quar­i­an book deal­ers around the world,” he writes in his intro­duc­tion,” works of unde­ni­able pecu­liar­i­ty leapt out.”

Or as he tells Smith­son­ian in an inter­view, “the more books you see, the more your radar is sen­si­tive to some­thing that pings with its strange­ness.” He pulls out the first book in his bag as an exam­ple: a self-pub­lished col­lec­tion of poet­ry by Char­lie Sheen.

Per­haps few oth­er peo­ple have laid eyes on such an enor­mous col­lec­tion of odd­ball bib­li­o­graph­ic trea­sures. These are not only books made of strange — and even dead­ly — mate­ri­als; they are also books whose con­tents or his­to­ries are just plain weird.

The chap­ter ‘Curi­ous Col­lec­tions’… fea­tures sim­i­lar projects of obses­sive ded­i­ca­tion, from medieval man­u­scripts of fan­tas­tic beasts, and guides to crim­i­nal slang of Geor­gian Lon­don (with plen­ty of las­civ­i­ous high­lights pro­vid­ed), to Cap­tain Cook’s secret ‘atlas of cloth’ and the unex­pect­ed­ly homi­ci­dal sto­ry of the ori­gin of the Oxford Eng­lish dic­tio­nary. Else­where, ‘Lit­er­ary Hoax­es’ presents the best of the ancient tra­di­tion of decep­tive writing–lies in book form–whether it be for satire, self pro­mo­tion or as an instru­ment of revenge.

Of the lat­ter, Brooke-Hitch­ing cites Jonathan Swift’s series of pam­phlets writ­ten under a pseu­do­nym, “a suc­cess­ful cam­paign to con­vince all of Lon­don of the pre­ma­ture death of a char­la­tan prophet he despised.” In a chap­ter titled ‘Works of the Super­nat­ur­al,’ Brooke-Hitch­ing gives us the exam­ple of W.B. Yeats’ wife George, who tran­scribed “4000 pages of spir­i­tu­al dic­ta­tion in the first three years of their mar­riage.” Her auto­mat­ic writ­ing was pub­lished in a com­pi­la­tion called A Vision in 1925, but “through sev­en edi­tions it was only Yeats’ name” on the title page.

There are ‘Books that aren’t Books,’ such as a skull inscribed with a prayer and a col­lec­tion of auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal frag­ments embroi­dered on the linen jack­et of an incar­cer­at­ed seam­stress; there are ‘Cryp­tic Books” like the Voyn­ich Man­u­script and poet­ry writ­ten in code. Part lit­er­ary detec­tive sto­ry, part bib­li­o­graph­ic odyssey through time, part lit­er­ary curios­i­ty all its own (though more of the cof­fee-table vari­ety), The Madman’s Library is a feast for bib­lio­philes and odd­balls of all kinds. Pick up a copy here and see sev­er­al more of excep­tion­al­ly curi­ous books over at Smith­son­ian.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Explore Online the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Dif­fer­ent Ways, Reveal­ing Six Dif­fer­ent Books in One

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

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

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Free Software Lets You Create Traditional Japanese Wood Joints & Furniture: Download Tsugite

in Architecture, Art | April 14th, 2021

The Japan­ese art of tsug­ite, or wood join­ery, goes back more than a mil­len­ni­um. As still prac­ticed today, it involves no nails, screws, or adhe­sives at all, yet it can be used to put up whole build­ings — as well as to dis­as­sem­ble them with rel­a­tive ease. The key is its canon of elab­o­rate­ly carved joints engi­neered to slide togeth­er with­out acci­den­tal­ly com­ing apart, the designs of which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture in ani­mat­ed GIF form. Though it would be nat­ur­al to assume that 21st-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy has no pur­chase on this domain of ded­i­cat­ed tra­di­tion­al crafts­men, it does great­ly assist the efforts of the rest of us to under­stand just how tsug­ite works.

Now, thanks to researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo, a new piece of soft­ware makes it pos­si­ble for us to do our own Japan­ese join­ery as well. Called, sim­ply, Tsug­ite, it’s described in the video intro­duc­tion above as  “an inter­ac­tive com­pu­ta­tion­al sys­tem to design wood­en join­ery that can be fab­ri­cat­ed using a three-axis CNC milling machine.” (CNC stands for “com­put­er numer­i­cal con­trol,” the term for a stan­dard auto­mat­ed-machin­ing process.)

In real time, Tsug­ite’s inter­face gives graph­i­cal feed­back on the joint being designed, eval­u­at­ing its over­all “slid­abilty” and high­light­ing prob­lem areas, such as ele­ments “per­pen­dic­u­lar to the grain ori­en­ta­tion” and thus more like­ly to break under pres­sure.

This is the sort of thing that a Japan­ese car­pen­ter, hav­ing under­gone years if not decades of train­ing and appren­tice­ship, will know by instinct. And though the work of a three-axis CNC machine can’t yet match the aes­thet­ic ele­gance of join­ery hand-carved by a such a mas­ter, Tsug­ite could well, in the hands of users from dif­fer­ent cul­tures as well as domains of art and craft, lead to the cre­ation of new and uncon­ven­tion­al kinds of joints as yet unimag­ined. You can down­load the soft­ware on Github, and you’ll also find sup­ple­men­tary doc­u­men­ta­tion here. Even if you don’t have a milling sys­tem handy, work­ing through vir­tu­al tri­al and error con­sti­tutes an edu­ca­tion in tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese wood join­ery by itself.  The cur­rent ver­sion of Tsug­ite only accom­mo­dates sin­gle joints, but its poten­tial for future expan­sion is clear: with prac­tice, who among us would­n’t want to try our hand at, say, build­ing a shrine?

via Spoon & Tam­a­go

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery: A Kyoto Wood­work­er Shows How Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Cre­at­ed Wood Struc­tures With­out Nails or Glue

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

See How Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Can Build a Whole Build­ing Using No Nails or Screws

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Nick Offer­man Explains the Psy­cho­log­i­cal Ben­e­fits of Woodworking–and How It Can Help You Achieve Zen in Oth­er Parts of Your Life

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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Mick Jagger Takes Shots at Conspiracy Theorists & Anti-Vaxxers in a New Song, “Eazy Sleazy” (with Dave Grohl on Drums, Bass & Guitar)

in Current Affairs, Music | April 13th, 2021

Fol­low along with the lyrics below, or in the video above.

W’e took it on the chin
The num­bers were so grim
Bossed around by pricks
Stiff­en upper lips
Pac­ing in the yard
You’re try­ing to take the mick
You must think i’m real­ly thick

Look­ing at the graphs with a mag­ni­fy­ing glass
Can­cel all the tours foot­balls fake applause
No more trav­el brochures
Vir­tu­al pre­mieres
Ive got noth­ing left to wear

Look­ing out from these prison walls
You got to rob peter if you’re pay­ing paul
But its easy easy everything’s gonna get real­ly freaky
Alright on the night
Soon it ll be be a mem­o­ry you’re try­ing to remem­ber to for­get

That’s a pret­ty mask
But nev­er take a chance tik tok stu­pid dance
Took a sam­ba class i land­ed on my ass
Try­ing to write a tune you bet­ter hook me up to zoom
See my pon­cey books teach myself to cook
Way too much tv its lobot­o­mis­ing me
Think ive put on weight
Ill have anoth­er drink then ill clean the kitchen sink

We escaped from the prison walls
Open the win­dows and open the doors
But its easy easy
Every­thing s gonna get real­ly freaky
Alright on the night
Its gonna be a gar­den of earth­ly delights
Easy sleazy its gonna be smooth and greasy
Yeah easy believe me
Itll only be a mem­o­ry you’re try­ing to remem­ber
To for­get

Shoot­ing the vac­cine bill gates is in my blood­stream
Its mind con­trol
The earth is flat and cold its nev­er warm­ing up
The arc­tics turned to slush
The sec­ond com­ings late
There’s aliens in the deep state

We’ll escape from these prison walls
Now were out of these prison walls
You got­ta pay peter if you’re rob­bing paul
But its easy easy every­thing s gonna be real­ly freaky
Alright on the night
Were all head­ed back to par­adise
Yeah easy believe me
It’ll be a mem­o­ry you’re try­ing to remem­ber to for­get
Easy cheesy every­one sing please please me
It’ll be a mem­o­ry you’re try­ing to remem­ber to for­get

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Harvard’s Digital Giza Project Lets You Access the Largest Online Archive on the Egyptian Pyramids (Including a 3D Giza Tour)

in Harvard, History, K-12, Libraries | April 13th, 2021

Noth­ing excites the imag­i­na­tion of young his­to­ry-and-sci­ence-mind­ed kids like the Egypt­ian pyra­mids, which is maybe why so many peo­ple grow up into ama­teur Egyp­tol­o­gists with very strong opin­ions about the pyra­mids. For such peo­ple, access to the high­est qual­i­ty infor­ma­tion seems crit­i­cal for their online debates. For pro­fes­sion­al aca­d­e­mics and seri­ous stu­dents of ancient Egypt such access is crit­i­cal to doing their work prop­er­ly. All lovers and stu­dents of ancient Egypt will find what they need, freely avail­able, at Har­vard University’s Dig­i­tal Giza Project.

“Chil­dren and spe­cial­ized schol­ars alike may study the mate­r­i­al cul­ture of this ancient civ­i­liza­tion from afar,” Harvard’s Meta­l­ab writes, “often with greater access than could be achieved in per­son.” The project opened at Har­vard in 2011 after spend­ing its first eleven years at the Muse­um of Fine Arts, Boston with the goal of “dig­i­tiz­ing and post­ing for free online all of the archae­o­log­i­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion from the Har­vard University—Boston Muse­um of Fine Arts Expe­di­tion to Giza, Egypt (about 1904–1947),” notes the about page.

The Dig­i­tal Giza Project was born from a need to cen­tral­ize research and arti­facts that have been scat­tered all over the globe. “Doc­u­ments and images are held in far­away archives,” the Har­vard Gazette points out, “arti­facts and oth­er relics of ancient Egypt have been dis­persed, stolen, or destroyed, and tombs and mon­u­ments have been dis­man­tled, weath­er-worn, or locked away behind pas­sages filled in when an exca­va­tion clos­es.” Oth­er obsta­cles to research include the expense of trav­el and, more recent­ly, the impos­si­bil­i­ty of vis­it­ing far-off sites.

Expand­ing far beyond the scope of the orig­i­nal expe­di­tions, the project has part­nered with “many oth­er insti­tu­tions around the world with Giza-relat­ed col­lec­tions” to com­pile its search­able library of down­load­able PDF books and jour­nal arti­cles. Kids, adult enthu­si­asts, and spe­cial­ists will all appre­ci­ate Giza 3D, a recon­struc­tion with guid­ed tours of all the major arche­o­log­i­cal sites at the pyra­mids, from tombs to tem­ples to the Great Sphinx, as well as links to images and arche­o­log­i­cal details about each of the var­i­ous finds with­in.

For a pre­view of the mul­ti­me­dia expe­ri­ence on offer at the Dig­i­tal Giza Project, see the videos here from project’s YouTube chan­nel. Each short video pro­vides a wealth of infor­ma­tion; young learn­ers and those just get­ting start­ed in their Egyp­tol­ogy stud­ies can find lessons, glos­saries, an overview of the peo­ple and places of Giza, and more at the Giza @ School page. What­ev­er your age, occu­pa­tion, or lev­el of com­mit­ment, if you’re inter­est­ed in learn­ing more about the pyra­mids at Giza, you need to book­mark Dig­i­tal Giza. Start here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Who Built the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids & How Did They Do It?: New Arche­o­log­i­cal Evi­dence Busts Ancient Myths

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Orig­i­nal Col­ors Still In It

What Ancient Egypt­ian Sound­ed Like & How We Know It

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

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The Decay of Cinema: Susan Sontag, Martin Scorsese & Their Lamentations on the Decline of Cinema Explored in a New Video Essay

in Film | April 13th, 2021

This deep into the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, how many cinephiles haven’t yet got word of the bank­rupt­cy or shut­ter­ing of a favorite movie the­ater? Though the coro­n­avirus has­n’t quite killed film­go­ing dead — at least not every­where in the world — the cul­ture of cin­e­ma itself had been show­ing signs of ill health long before any of us had heard the words “social dis­tanc­ing.” The pre­vi­ous plague, in the view of Mar­tin Scors­ese, was the Hol­ly­wood super­hero-fran­chise block­buster. “That’s not cin­e­ma,” the auteur-cinephile told Empire mag­a­zine in 2019. “Hon­est­ly, the clos­est I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the cir­cum­stances, is theme parks.”

This past March, Scors­ese pub­lished an essay in Harp­er’s called “Il Mae­stro.” Osten­si­bly a reflec­tion on the work of Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, it also pays trib­ute to Fellini’s hey­day, when on any giv­en night in New York a young movie fan could find him­self torn between screen­ings of the likes of La Dolce Vita, François Truf­faut’s Shoot the Piano Play­er, Andrzej Waj­da’s Ash­es and Dia­monds, John Cas­savetes’ Shad­ows, and the work of oth­er mas­ters besides. This was ear­ly in the time when, as New York­er crit­ic Antho­ny Lane puts it, “adven­tur­ous moviego­ing was part of the agreed cul­tur­al duty, when the duty itself was more of a trip than a drag, and when a review­er could, in the inter­ests of cross-ref­er­ence, men­tion the names ‘Drey­er’ or ‘Vigo’ with­out being accused of sim­ply drop­ping them for show.”

Alas, writes Scors­ese, today the art of cin­e­ma today is “sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly deval­ued, side­lined, demeaned, and reduced to its low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor, ‘con­tent.’ ” Video essay­ist Daniel Simp­son of Eye­brow Cin­e­ma calls this lament “more than an artist rail­ing against a busi­ness­man­’s ter­mi­nol­o­gy, but a yearn­ing for a time when movies used to be spe­cial in and of them­selves, not just as an exten­sion of a stream­ing ser­vice.” In “The Decay of Cin­e­ma,” Simp­son con­nects this cri de cinephilic coeur by the man who direct­ed Taxi Dri­ver and Good­Fel­las to a 25-year-old New York Times opin­ion piece by Susan Son­tag. A mid­cen­tu­ry-style film devo­tee if ever there was one, Son­tag mourns “the con­vic­tion that cin­e­ma was an art unlike any oth­er: quin­tes­sen­tial­ly mod­ern; dis­tinc­tive­ly acces­si­ble; poet­ic and mys­te­ri­ous and erot­ic and moral — all at the same time.”

Some may object to Son­tag’s claim that tru­ly great films had become “vio­la­tions of the norms and prac­tices that now gov­ern movie mak­ing every­where.” Just two weeks after her piece ran, Simp­son points out, the Coen broth­ers’ Far­go opened; soon to come were acclaimed pic­tures by Mike Leigh and Lars von Tri­er, and the next few years would see the emer­gence of Wes Ander­son and Paul Thomas Ander­son both. But what of today’s mas­ter­pieces, like Chung Mong-hong’s A Sun? Though released before the hav­oc of COVID-19, it has nev­er­the­less — “with­out a fran­chise, rock-star celebri­ties, or an ele­va­tor-pitch high con­cept” — lan­guished on Net­flix. And as for an event of such seem­ing­ly enor­mous cin­e­mat­ic import as the com­ple­tion of Orson Welles’ The Oth­er Side of the Wind three decades after his death, the result wound up “sim­ply dumped on the plat­form with every­thing else.”

In a time like this, when the many stuck at home have few options besides stream­ing ser­vices, one hes­i­tates to accuse Net­flix of killing either cin­e­ma or cinephil­ia. And yet Simp­son sees a con­sid­er­able dif­fer­ence between being a cinephile and being a “user,” a label that sug­gests “a cus­tomer to be sati­at­ed” (if not an addict to be grant­ed a fix of his habit-form­ing com­mod­i­ty). “There’s only one prob­lem with home cin­e­ma,” writes Lane. “It doesn’t exist.” Choice “pret­ty much defines our sta­tus as con­sumers, and has long been an unques­tioned tenet of the cap­i­tal­ist feast, but in fact carte blanche is no way to run a cul­tur­al life (or any kind of life, for that mat­ter).” If we con­tin­ue to do our view­ing in algo­rithm-padded iso­la­tion, we sur­ren­der what Simp­son describes as “the human con­nec­tion to the film expe­ri­ence” — one of the things that, when all the social dis­tanc­ing ends, even for­mer­ly casu­al movie­go­ers may find them­selves des­per­ate­ly crav­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Susan Sontag’s 50 Favorite Films (and Her Own Cin­e­mat­ic Cre­ations)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Explains the Dif­fer­ence Between Cin­e­ma and Movies

Mar­tin Scors­ese on How “Diver­si­ty Guar­an­tees Our Cul­tur­al Sur­vival,” in Film and Every­thing Else

Watch the New Trail­er for Orson Welles’ Lost Film, The Oth­er Side of the Wind: A Glimpse of Footage from the Final­ly Com­plet­ed Film

This Is Your Kids’ Brains on Inter­net Algo­rithms: A Chill­ing Case Study Shows What’s Wrong with the Inter­net Today

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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Buckminster Fuller, Isaac Asimov & Other Futurists Make Predictions About the 21st Century in 1967: What They Got Right & Wrong

in Science, Television | April 13th, 2021

Why both­er with rea­son and evi­dence to make pre­dic­tions when you can put your faith in a chance roll of the dice? These two meth­ods could be said to rep­re­sent the vast­ly diver­gent ways of sci­ence and super­sti­tion, two realms that rarely inter­sect except, per­haps, when it comes to for­tune-telling — or, in the argot of the 20th century’s sooth­say­ers, “Futur­ism,” where pre­dic­tions seem to rely as much on wish­ful think­ing as they do on intu­ition and intel­lect.

In the 1967 short doc­u­men­tary film, The Futur­ists, above, sci­en­tists and vision­ar­ies quite lit­er­al­ly com­bine the sci­en­tif­ic method with ran­dom chance oper­a­tion to make pre­dic­tions about the 21st cen­tu­ry. Host Wal­ter Cronkite explains:

A pan­el of experts has stud­ied a list of pos­si­ble 21st cen­tu­ry devel­op­ments, from per­son­al­i­ty con­trolled drugs to house­hold robots. They have esti­mat­ed the numer­i­cal prob­a­bil­i­ty of each, from zero to 100 per­cent. The twen­ty sided dice are then rolled to sim­u­late these prob­a­bil­i­ties. A use of ran­dom num­bers known as the Monte Car­lo tech­nique, often used in think­tank games. All of this is high­ly spec­u­la­tive.

Indeed. The glimpse we get of the future — of our present, as it were — is very opti­mistic, “and so very, very wrong,” writes Bil­ly Ingram at TV Par­ty — at least in some respects. “Sad­ly, those past futur­ists for­got to fac­tor in human greed and the refash­ion­ing of Amer­i­cans’ way to be less com­mu­nal and more self-cen­tered.” The very medi­um on which the doc­u­men­tary appeared helped to cen­ter self­ish­ness as a car­di­nal Amer­i­can virtue.

Yet in 1967, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment still required major net­works to run edu­ca­tion­al con­tent, even if “net­work exec­u­tives under­stood these pro­grams would end up at the bot­tom of the Nielsen rat­ings.” Hence, The Futur­ists, which aired on prime­time on CBS “when the 3 net­works would occa­sion­al­ly pre­empt pop­u­lar pro­grams with a news feature/documentary.” Despite low expec­ta­tions at the time, the short film now proves to be a fas­ci­nat­ing doc­u­ment.

The rolls of the dice with which it opens are not, it turns out, a “crap game,” but a “seri­ous game at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh,” Cronkite tells us before intro­duc­ing the august pan­el of experts. We see a num­ber of sce­nar­ios pre­dict­ed for the com­ing cen­tu­ry. These include the vague “increased impor­tance of human con­cerns,” sci-fi “teach­ing by direct record­ing on the brain,” and omi­nous “tac­ti­cal behav­ior con­trol devices.”

Buck­min­ster Fuller even pre­dicts bod­i­ly tele­por­ta­tion by radio waves, some­thing like the tech­nol­o­gy then fea­tured in a brand-new TV show, Star Trek, but not sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly prob­a­ble in any sense, either then or now. Nonethe­less, there is sur­pris­ing pre­science in The Futur­ists, as its open­ing pan­el of futur­is­tic experts announces their con­clu­sions:

We wind up with a world which has the fol­low­ing fea­tures: fer­til­i­ty con­trol, 100-year lifes­pan, con­trolled ther­mal nuclear pow­er, con­tin­ued automa­tion, genet­ic con­trol, man-machine sym­bio­sis, house­hold robots, wide­band com­mu­ni­ca­tions, opin­ion con­trol, and con­tin­ued orga­ni­za­tion.

Appar­ent­ly, in 1967, all the Futur­ists worth talk­ing to — or so it seemed to the film’s pro­duc­er McGraw Hill — were men. Theirs was the only per­spec­tive offered to home view­ers and to the stu­dents who saw this film in schools across the coun­try. Those men include not only Fuller, who gives his full inter­view at 14:30, but also fre­quent mak­er of accu­rate futur­is­tic pre­dic­tions Isaac Asi­mov, who appears at the 20:50 mark. Aside from the exclu­sion of 50% of the pop­u­la­tion’s per­spec­tive, and an over­ly rosy view of human nature, how­ev­er, The Futur­ists is often an uncan­ni­ly accu­rate vision of life as we now know it — or at least one far more accu­rate than most 21st cen­tu­ry futurisms of the past.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

In 1964, Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like Today: Self-Dri­ving Cars, Video Calls, Fake Meats & More

9 Sci­ence-Fic­tion Authors Pre­dict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asi­mov, William Gib­son, Philip K. Dick & More Imag­ined the World Ahead

Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Pre­dict­ing the Future

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

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