Now, if this leaves you wanting to hear Dave Grohl sing “Never Gonna Give You Up,” all you have to do is click here. Enjoy…
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A wise woman once quoth that one man’s adult coloring book is another’s Medieval Tapestry Edit.
If taking crayons to empty outlines of mandalas, floral patterns, and forest and ocean scenes has failed to calm your mind, the Historic Tale Construction Kit may cure what ails you.
Programmers Leonard Allain-Launay and Mathieu Thoretton and software engineer Maria Cosmina Etegan created the online kit as a tribute to a late, great, early 21st-century application designed by Academy of Media Arts Cologne students Björn Karnebogen and Gerd Jungbluth.
They separated out various elements of the Bayeux Tapestry, allowing you to freely mess around with 1000-year-old images of warriors, commoners, beasts, and buildings:
Craft thy own Bayeux Tapestry
Slay mischievous beasts
Rule the kingdom
Choose a background, add some text in your choice of Bayeux or Augusta font and you’ll have done your bit to revive the fading art of the Medieval Macro (or meme.)
The original tapestry used some 224 feet of wool-embroidered linen to recount the Battle of Hastings and the events leading up to it.
You need not have such lofty aims.
Perhaps test the waters with a Father’s Day greeting, resizing and rotating until you feel ready to export as a PNG.
The interface is extremely user friendly, kind of like a tech-savvy 11th-century cousin of the online drag-and-drop graphic design tool, Canva.
The Historic Tale Construction Kit’s most impressive bells and whistles reside in the paintbrush tool in the lower left corner, which allows you to lay down great swaths of folks, birds, or corpses in a single sweep.
Your palette will be limited to the shades deployed by the Bayeux embroiderers, who obtained their colors from plants—dyer’s woad, madder, and dyer’s rocket (or weld).
The text, of course, is entirely up to you.
It pleased us to go with the eminently quotable David Bowie, and only after we groped our way into the three fledgling efforts you see above did we discover that we’re not the only ones.
Presenting Early Pre-Bowie References to “Space Oddity”
Throw on some Bardcore and begin reworking the Bayeux Tapestry with the Historic Tale Construction Kit here.
If you are interested in something a bit more technical, the designers have put the opensource code on GitHub for your customizing pleasure.
The Bayeux Tapestry has also been recently digitized. Explore it here: The Bayeux Tapestry Gets Digitized: View the Medieval Tapestry in High Resolution, Down to the Individual Thread
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
From Ted-Ed comes a video that answers a timely question: How fast can a vaccine be made?
They write: “When a new pathogen emerges, our bodies and healthcare systems are left vulnerable. And when this pathogen causes the outbreak of a pandemic, there’s an urgent need for a vaccine to create widespread immunity with minimal loss of life. So how quickly can we develop vaccines when we need them most? Dan Kwartler describes the three phases of vaccine development.” Exploratory research, clinical testing, and manufacturing.
When you’re done, you can watch their related video: When is a pandemic over?
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You know Times New Roman, you know Helvetica, you know Comic Sans — and though you may not realize it, you know Cooper Black as well. Just think of the “VOTE FOR PEDRO” shirt worn in Napoleon Dynamite (and in real life for years thereafter), or a few decades earlier, the cover of Pet Sounds. In fact, the history of Cooper Black extends well before the Beach Boys’ mid-1960s masterpiece; to see and hear the full story, watch the Vox video above. It begins, as narrator Estelle Caswell explains, in Chicago, at the turn of the 1920s when type designer Oswald Bruce Cooper created the series of fonts that bear his name. Nearly a century after the 1922 introduction of the variant Cooper Black, we see it everywhere, not just on album covers and T‑shirts but storefronts, movie posters, and candy wrappers all over the world.
The evolution of printing, specifically the evolution from carved wood type to cast metal, made Cooper Black possible. Its distinctive look — and the curved edges that made it forgiving to imperfect printing processes — made it a hit. And when film strips replaced metal type, allowing the kind of closely-spaced printing that Cooper thought best presented his font, the already-popular Cooper Black underwent a renaissance.
“It thrived, as always, in advertising,” says Caswell. “Its friendly curves fit the tongue-in-cheek aesthetic of the 1960s and 70s, but it also showed up in magazines, movies, and hundreds of album covers.” To typography enthusiasts, Pet Sounds seemingly remains Cooper Black’s finest hour: “Just look at the way the D works with the E and the Y, and ‘Boys’ fits so nicely over the O,” as art director Stephen Heller says in the video.
In the 1920s Cooper Black not only showcased cutting-edge printing technology, its aesthetic looked exhilaratingly modern as well. Now, of course, it looks comfortingly retro, evocative of the era of handmade graphic design slipping out of living memory in our digital 21st century. But the 21st century so far has also been a time of “retromania”: with all previous media increasingly at our fingertips, we draw inspiration (and even material) for our art and design more directly and instinctively than ever from the trends of the past. No wonder we continue to feel a resonance in Cooper Black, whose letters, as Caswell puts it, bring with them the weight of “a century’s worth of changes in technology and pop culture.” Nor is Cooper Black’s next century, whatever uses it sees the font put to, likely to diminish its appeal.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
As every American knows, February is Black History Month. And as every American also knows — if the events of 2020 haven’t warped their sense of time too badly — is isn’t February right now. But thanks to online learning technology, we all have the freedom to study any subject we want, as much as we want, whenever we want, irrespective of the time of year. Sources of internet-based education have proliferated in the 21st century, but long-respected institutions of higher learning have also got in on the action. Yale University, for example, has produced the online course African American History: Emancipation to the Present, whose 25 lectures by history professor Jonathan Holloway you can watch on YouTube, or at Yale’s web site. The first lecture appears above.
Originally recorded in the spring of 2010, Holloway’s course examines “the African American experience in the United States from 1863 to the present,” involving such chapters of history as “the end of the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction” and “African Americans’ urbanization experiences.”
It also includes lectures on the “thought and leadership of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X” — all writers and thinkers Open Culture readers will have encountered before, but a course like African American History: Emancipation to the Present offers the opportunity to consider their lives and work in clearer context and greater detail.
Black history has deeper roots in some parts of the United States than others. But that doesn’t mean the universities of the west have nothing to offer in this department: take, for example, Stanford University’s African-American History: Modern Freedom Struggle, taught by the historian (and editor of MLK’s papers) Clayborne Carson. Available to watch on YouTube and iTunes (or right above), its 18 lectures deliver an introduction to “African-American history, with particular emphasis on the political thought and protest movements of the period after 1930, focusing on selected individuals who have shaped and been shaped by modern African-American struggles for freedom and justice.” Taken together, these online courses offer you more than enough material to hold your own Black History Month right now.
Note: Clay Carson’s course can also be taken as a MOOC on edX. Enroll now in American Prophet: The Inner Life and Global Vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. And find the courses listed above in our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
“What is Bresson’s genre? He doesn’t have one. Bresson is Bresson,” wrote master filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky in his seminal book Sculpting in Time. “The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb.”
Nonetheless, Tarkovsky made two of the most praised, best-regarded science fiction films in cinema. Stalker is a metaphysical riddle wrapped in the trappings of a sci-fi thriller. In the verdant area called the Zone, ringed off by miles of barbed wire and armed soldiers, pilgrims come to behold an uncanny landscape ruled by a powerful, otherworldly intelligence. The film seemed to prefigure the Chernobyl disaster that happened years later and proved to be the unlikely inspiration for a video game.
Adapted from a novel by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris is about a space station that orbits a sentient planet that causes hallucinations in the cosmonauts. The hyper-rational protagonist, Kris Kelvin, is thrown for a loop when he is confronted by a doppelganger of his dead wife who killed herself years earlier. The logical side of him knows that this is a hallucination but he falls in love anyway, only to lose her again. Kelvin is caught in a hell of repeating the mistakes of his past.
Solaris was seen as a Cold War-era response to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both movies are mind-altering deep-space epics that raise more questions than they answer. Yet Tarkovsky hated 2001’s ostentatious use of cutting-edge special effects. “For some reason, in all the science-fiction films I’ve seen, the filmmakers force the viewer to examine the details of the material structure of the future,” he told Russian film journalist Naum Abramov in 1970. “More than that, sometimes, like Kubrick, they call their own films premonitions. It’s unbelievable! Let alone that 2001: A Space Odyssey is phony on many points, even for specialists. For a true work of art, the fake must be eliminated.”
Indeed, Tarkovsky seemed to deliberately half-ass the generic elements of film. He used leisurely shots of tunnels and highways of 1971 Tokyo to depict the city of the future. He devoted only a couple minutes of the film’s nearly three hour running time to things like spaceships. And you have to love the fact that the space station in Solaris has such distinctly unfuturistic design elements as a chandelier and a wood-paneled library.
Tarkovsky, of course, isn’t interested in science. He’s interested in art and its way to evoke the divine. And his primary way of doing this is with long takes; epic shots that resonate profoundly even if the meaning of those images remains elusive. Solaris opens with a shot of water flowing in a brook and then, later in the scene, there is a sudden downpour. The camera presses into a shot of a teacup filling with rain. It’s a beautiful, memorable, evocative shot. Maybe the image means something. Maybe its beauty is, in and of itself, its meaning. Either way, Tarkovsky forces you to surrender to his deliberate cinematic rhythm and his pantheistic view of the world.
In a piece called Tarkovsky Shot by Shot, video essayist Antonios Papantoniou dissects a few scenes from Solaris, breaking down each according to camera angle, shot type and duration while pointing out recurring visual motifs. “Diametrically different from Hollywood’s extravagant moviemaking Tarkovsky’s Solaris is in a cinematic universe of its own,” writes Papantoniou in one of the video’s copious intertitles. “Symbolic images and metaphysical manifestations are created and expressed in a poetic way where every visual detail matters.” Watching Shot by Shot, you get a real sense of just how beautifully his films unfold with those gorgeously choreographed long takes. You can watch the full video above.
Note: This post originally appeared on our site in June, 2015.
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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Poet and Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter penned some of the band’s best-known songs. Even if you’re only casually familiar with the Dead’s vast catalogue and even vaster labyrinth of live recordings, you can probably sing along to classics like “Casey Jones” or “Box of Rain.” Both came about during the most prolific phase of Hunter and Jerry Garcia’s collaboration on the country-folk masterpieces Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, released one after the other in 1970.
Among these collections of timeless tunes, one stands above the rest: “Ripple” is “perhaps the quintessence of both the band’s delicate studio magic and the Garcia/Hunter partnership,” writes Jim Beviglia at American Songwriter. Hunter himself, when asked about his favorite lyric, answered, “’Let it be known there is a fountain / That was not made by the hands of men.’ That’s pretty much my favorite line I ever wrote, that’s ever popped into my head. And I believe it, you know?”
The line popped into his head in London in 1970. Jerry Garcia’s melody arrived shortly thereafter. “We were in Canada,” says Hunter, “on that train trip [the Festival Express, 1970] and one morning the train stopped and Jerry was sitting out on the tracks not too far off, in the sunrise, setting ‘Ripple’ to music. That’s a good memory.” They debuted it right away, “in an acoustic set at the Fillmore West on August 19, 1970,” notes David Dodd at the official Dead site, “along with first performances of ‘Brokedown Palace,’ ‘Operator,’ and ‘Truckin’.’”
What’s so great about “Ripple”? Where to start. “The Dead had damn near perfected the harmonies they used heavily on Workingman’s Dead,” Beviglia writes. “The ensemble voices on ‘Ripple’ provide comfort when the words evoke hardship.” Such is the balance struck by the most beautifully bittersweet of American folk songs, from “You Are My Sunshine” to “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” The lyrics themselves “evoke cosmic wisdom and serenity without ignoring the darkness on the fringes of even the most blessed lives.”
C’mon, the chorus is a freakin’ haiku…
“Each of us has our own individual path, for our steps alone,” Dodd writes of the song. “That might seem like a frightening thought, but I find the universality of it a comfort: we’re all in the same boat.” This truth is inescapable, whether we approach it philosophically, contemplatively, or Biblically, as the song’s verses seem to do (with allusions to William Butler Yeats). What better illustration of this theme than a collection of musicians from around the world—some famous some obscure—playing the song alone together in Playing for Change’s excellent collaboration video above?
Among the famous names we have Jimmy Buffett, David Crosby, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, and Bill Kreutzmann himself. The joy this song evokes is unmistakable on the faces of the musicians: no matter who sings it, “Ripple” is a song that brings people together by reminding us that existence is much vaster than our individual lives. Playing for Change has previously brought together international musicians for other classic sing-along songs from the American (and Jamaican and Canadian) popular songbook. See more in the links below.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Denis Shiryaev is an AI wizard who has liberally applied his magic to old film—upscaling, colorizing, and otherwise modernizing scenes from Victorian England, late Tsarist Russia, and Belle Époque Paris. He trained machines to restore the earliest known motion picture, 1888’s Roundhay Garden Scene and one of the most mythologized works of early cinema, the Lumière Brothers 50-second Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station.
Shiryaev’s casual distribution of these efforts on YouTube can make us take for granted just how extraordinary they are. Such recreations would have been impossible just a decade or so ago. But we should not see these as historic restorations. The software Shiryaev uses fills in gaps between the frames, allowing him to upscale the frame rate and make more naturistic-looking images. This often comes at a cost. As Ted Mills wrote in an earlier Open Culture post on Shiryaev’s methods, “there are a lot of artifacts, squooshy, morphing moments where the neural network can’t figure things out.”
But it’s an evolving technology. Unlike wizards of old, Shiryaev happily reveals his trade secrets so enterprising coders can give it a try themselves, if they’ve got the budget. In his latest video, above, he plugs the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000, a $4,000 graphics card (and does some griping about rights issues), before getting to the fun stuff. Rather than make old film look new, he’s “applied a bunch of different neural networks in an attempt to generate realistic faces of people from famous paintings.”
These are, Shiryaev emphasizes, “estimations,” not historical recreations of the faces behind Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Lady with an Ermine, Botticelli’s model for The Birth of Venus, Vermeer’s for Girl with a Pearl Earring, or Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. In the case of American Gothic, we have a photo of the model, artist Grant Wood’s sister, to compare to the AI’s version. Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird gets the treatment. She left perhaps a few hundred photographs and some films that probably look more like her than the AI version.
The GIF-like “transformations,” as they might be called, may remind us of a less fun use of such technology: AI’s ability to create realistic faces of people who don’t exist for devious purposes and to make “deep fake” videos of those who do. But that needn’t take away from the fact that it’s pretty cool to see Botticelli’s Venus, or a simulation of her anyway, smile and blink at us from a distance of over 500 years.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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