The Only Footage of Mark Twain: The Original & Digitally Restored Films Shot by Thomas Edison

in History, Literature | January 23rd, 2023

We know what Mark Twain looked like, and we think we know what he sounded like. Just above see what he looked like in motion, strolling around Stormfield, his house in Redding, Connecticut—signature white suit draped loosely around his frame, signature cigar puffing white smoke between his fingers. After Twain’s leisurely walk along the house’s façade, we see him with his daughters, Clara and Jean, seated indoors. Below you can see the original murky version, featured on our site way back in 2010. A digital restoration (top) does wonders for the watchability of this priceless silent artifact, so vividly capturing the writer/contrarian/raconteur’s essence that you’ll find yourself reaching to turn the volume up, expecting to hear that familiar curmudgeonly drawl.

Shot by Thomas Edison in 1909, the short film is most likely the only moving image of Twain in existence. We might assume that Edison also recorded Twain’s voice, since we seem to know it so well, from portrayals of the great American humorist in pop cultural touchstones like Star Trek: The Next Generation and parodies by Alec Baldwin and Val Kilmer.

Kilmer’s surprisingly funny in the role, but he doesn’t come near the pitch perfect impersonation Hal Holbrook had given us for the better part of sixty years in his masterful Mark Twain Tonight. Holbrook’s vocal mannerisms have become a definitive model for actors playing Twain on stage and screen.

Given the number of Twain vocal impersonations out there, and Edison’s interest in documenting the author, we might be surprised to learn that no original recordings of his voice exist. Twain, we find out in the short film below, experimented with audio recording technology, but abandoned his efforts. It seems that none of the wax cylinders he worked with have survived—perhaps he destroyed them himself.

As narrator Rod Rawlings—himself a Twain impersonator and aficionado—informs us, what we do have is a recording made in 1934 by actor and playwright William Gillette, an able mimic of Twain, his patron and longtime neighbor. Like Holbrook, Gillette spent a good part of his career traveling from town to town playing Mark Twain. Below, you’ll hear Gillette address a class of students at Harvard, first in his own voice, then in the voice of the author, reading from “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Gillette’s performance is likely the closest we’ll ever come to hearing the voice of the real Twain, whose major works appear in our collection of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

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

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Watch Classic Performances by Yellow Magic Orchestra, the Japanese Band That Became One of the Most Innovative Electronic Music Acts of All Time

in Music | January 23rd, 2023

Music changes when technology changes. Few musicians have demonstrated as keen an awareness of that fact as Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, who together as Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) burst onto the scene making sounds that most listeners of the late nineteen-seventies had never heard before — never heard in a musical context, at least. They’d never seen a band employ a computer programmer, nor bring onstage a device like Roland’s MC‑8 Microcomposer, an early musical sequencer designed strictly for studio use. That YMO didn’t hesitate to make these unconventional choices, and many others besides, won them years as the most popular band in their native Japan.

It would be unimaginable for YMO to have emerged in any other place or time. “Japan had long since remade itself as a postwar economic engine, but by the late 1970s it was becoming something else: a global emblem of techno-utopianism and futuristic cool,” writes the New York Times’ Clay Risen. “Sony released the Walkman in 1979, just as Kenzo Takada and Issey Miyake were taking over Paris fashion runways with their playful, visionary designs.”

Japan had become economically, technologically, and culturally formidable on a global scale, and YMO were placed to become its ideal representatives: they had the askew hipness and the cutting-edge sounds, but it was their sense of humor, evident in the playfulness of their music, that took the rest of the world by surprise.

You’ll find no better introduction to YMO’s work than the hour-long YMO concert at the Nippon Budokan at the top of the post. It took place in 1983, not long before Hosono, Takahashi, and Sakamoto packed the band up and returned to their already well-established solo careers. As a unit they’d achieved global stardom, playing foreign venues like Los Angeles’ Greek Theatre in 1979 and, unbelievably, going on Soul Train in 1980. Their early hit “Behind the Mask” even caught the attention of Michael Jackson, who recorded his own version of the song for Thriller but left it unreleased until 2010 — by which time YMO had reunited to perform in Japan, Europe, and America, playing for new generations of listeners who had grown up immersed in their music, directly or indirectly.

Influences on YMO included the work of Brian Wilson and Giorgio Moroder, as well as music from India, China, the Caribbean, the late-fifties-early-sixties “exotica” fad, and even arcade games. But their own influence has spread out farther still, shaping not just various subgenres of electronic music but also certain formative works of hip hop. If you listen to YMO’s albums today — nearly 45 years after their commercial debut, and just a few weeks after the death of co-founder Takahashi — their music still, somehow, sounds thoroughly Japanese. Like Isao Tomita (whose assistant became their computer programmer), YMO understood not just that music changes with technology, but also that it emerges from a specific culture, and in their discography we hear those principles pushed to their thrilling limits.

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Pink Lady and Jeff: Japan’s Biggest Pop Musicians Star in One of America’s Worst-Reviewed TV Shows (1980)

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Kraftwerk’s First Concert: The Beginning of the Endlessly Influential Band (1970)

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Mystery Finally Solved: Why Has Roman Concrete Been So Durable?

in Architecture, History | January 20th, 2023

Image by Benjaminec, via Wikimedia Commons

Rome may not have been built in a day, but it was built to last — or at least its concrete was, given that the pieces of the Roman Empire that have stood to our time, in one form or another, tend to have been built with it. That material has proven not just durable but enduringly fascinating, holding a great deal of not just historical interest but technical interest as well. For ancient Roman concrete appears to outlast its much more technically advanced modern descendants, and the complex question of why is one we’ve featured more than once here on Open Culture. Just this year, researchers at MIT, Harvard, and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland have found what seems to be the final piece of the puzzle.

“For many years, researchers have assumed that the key to the ancient concrete’s durability was based on one ingredient: pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash from the area of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples,” writes MIT News’ David L. Chandler. “Under closer examination, these ancient samples also contain small, distinctive, millimeter-scale bright white mineral features.”

Previously assumed to be nothing but imperfections in the process or the materials, these “lime clasts,” in light of this most recent research, constitute evidence of “hot mixing,” which involves heating to a high temperature ingredients including quicklime (or calcium oxide), a purer and more reactive form of lime.

Undergoing hot mixing, “the lime clasts develop a characteristically brittle nanoparticulate architecture, creating an easily fractured and reactive calcium source” that “could provide a critical self-healing functionality.” In practice, this means that “as soon as tiny cracks start to form within the concrete, they can preferentially travel through the high-surface-area lime clasts. This material can then react with water, creating a calcium-saturated solution, which can recrystallize as calcium carbonate and quickly fill the crack, or react with pozzolanic materials to further strengthen the composite material.” Here we have a convincing explanation of the reactions that, in ancient Roman concrete, “automatically heal the cracks before they spread.”

No such self-healing happens in modern concrete, the production of which has not involved quicklime for a very long time indeed — but perhaps it could once more. During their research process, writes Dezeen’s Rima Sabina Aouf, the team “produced samples of hot-mixed concrete using both ancient and modern formulations, cracked them, and ran water through the cracks. Within two weeks, the cracks had healed and water could no longer flow through, while identical concrete blocks made without quicklime never healed.” Such findings “could help increase the lifespan of modern concrete and therefore mitigate the notorious environmental impact of the material,” and the researchers “are now working to commercialize their more durable concrete formula.” Even in the twenty-first century, the building industry could well benefit by doing as the Romans did.

via MIT News

How to Make Roman Concrete, One of Human Civilization’s Longest-Lasting Building Materials

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The Beauty & Ingenuity of the Pantheon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Preserved Monument: An Introduction

Roman Architecture: A Free Course from Yale

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Contribute a Song to WNYC’s Public Song Project & Use Your Creativity to Explore the Public Domain

in Books, Film, Literature, Music | January 20th, 2023

We recognize that Open Culture readers are a creative bunch.

As proof, we point to your Getty Museum Challenge entries and the fact that one of your number won Yale University Press’s Kafka Caption Contest.

We’ve identified another opportunity to show off your creative streak, compliments of All Of It with Alison Stewart, a daily live culture program on WNYC, New York City’s public radio station.

You have until February 13 to write and record an original song inspired by a work in the public domain, and submit it to The All Of It Public Song Project.

Amateurs are welcome to take a crack at it and any genre is cricket, including rap, spoken word, and instrumentals.

Even if you limit yourself to the works that entered the public domain on January 1 of this year, the possibilities are almost endless.

Should you be inclined toward a faithful cover, we encourage you to consider one of 1927’s deep cuts, like Fats Waller’s “Soothin’ Syrup Stomp” or Jelly Roll Morton’s “Hyena Stomp,” though we understand the attraction of Irving Berlin’s enduringly popular “Puttin’ on the Ritz”.

Apologies to Emily Joy, the accomplished young classical pianist, above — participation is limited to entrants aged 18 or older.

The rest of us are free to invent new lyrics for an existing composition, or a brand new tune for existing lyrics.

You might musicalize a poem or speech, some dialogue from a film, or a page from a book.

A bluegrass spin on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, perhaps?

A death metal re-envisioning of Buttercup Days from A.A. Milne’s Now We Are Six?

How about a sissy bounce take on these lines from “The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone,” the first short story in Arthur Conan Doyle’s collection, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes:

“Billy, you will see a large and ugly gentleman outside the front door. Ask him to come up.”

“If he won’t come, sir?”

“No violence, Billy. Don’t be rough with him. If you tell him that Count Sylvius wants him he will certainly come.”

“What are you going to do now?” asked the Count as Billy disappeared.

“My friend Watson was with me just now. I told him that I had a shark and a gudgeon in my net; now I am drawing the net and up they come together.”

The Count had risen from his chair, and his hand was behind his back. Holmes held something half protruding from the pocket of his dressing-gown.

“You won’t die in your bed, Holmes.”

Okay, we’re being silly, but only because we don’t want to put ideas in your head!

You could even concoct something entirely new — perhaps a ballad from the POV of To the Lighthouse’s young James Ramsay, or a ditty apologizing to Virginia Woolf for reading the Cliffs Notes instead of the actual novel when it was assigned in your college Women’s Literature class.

…we’re doing it again, aren’t we?

All right, we’ll leave you to it, with a reminder that anything outside of your public domain source material must be wholly original — no borrowing a catchy tune from Lennon and McCartney, capisci?

Winners will get a chance to discuss their works on WNYC and all qualifying entries will be posted at contest’s end for the public’s listening pleasure.

Contest rules and information on how to submit to The All Of It Public Song Project can be found here.

Good luck! We can’t wait to hear what you come up with.

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- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Virtual Tour of Ancient Athens: Fly Over Classical Greek Civilization in All Its Glory

in Architecture, History | January 19th, 2023

If we seek to understand Western civilization, we must look back not just to Rome, but also to Athens. And today, thanks to computer-generated imagery informed by historical research, we can look not just to those cities, but at them — or at least at convincing digital reconstructions, but from angles their actual inhabitants could scarcely have imagined. A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture the Youtube channel Ancient Athens 3D for its reconstructions of individual structures like the Temples of Ilissos and Hephaestus. Its more recent video above offers a twelve-minute virtual tour of all classical Athens in the fifth century BC, the height of ancient Greek civilization.

In that period, according to the video, Athens “was the center of the arts, theater, philosophy, and democracy.” In the city “great monuments of architecture were built and were largely associated with the Athenian general Pericles.”

It was Pericles who led the city-state during the first two years of the Peloponnesian War, the conflict in which Athens would eventually fall to Sparta in 404 BC — a defeat that had almost, but not quite come to the city at the moment Ancient Athens 3D creator Dimitris Tsalkanis brings it back to life. He includes everything from the Acropolis and the Agora to the Olympieion and the Sacred Gate, all looking as if they’ll stand forever.

Nor does Tsalkanis ignore even better-known classical Greek buildings like the Parthenon, whose detailed reconstruction, inside and out, also appears in its own video just above. Commissioned by Pericles, built on the Acropolis, and dedicated to the goddess Athena, “patroness of the city of Athens,” the building remains “a symbol of ancient Greece, democracy, and Western civilization” nearly two and half millennia after its construction, and more than two centuries after the Earl of Elgin had its mythology-depicting marbles sent off to England. You can still see them at the British Museum (at least for now), and for that matter you can still visit the Parthenon itself in Athens — or at least the ruins thereof, wholly untouched by digital magic.

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How Ancient Greek Statues Really Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Colors and Patterns

Watch Art on Ancient Greek Vases Come to Life with 21st Century Animation

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An 8‑Minute Animated Flight Over Ancient Rome

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Stephen King’s 20 Rules for Writers

in Writing | January 19th, 2023

Image by the USO, via Flickr Commons

In one of my favorite Stephen King interviews, for The Atlantic, he talks at length about the vital importance of a good opening line. “There are all sorts of theories,” he says, “it’s a tricky thing.” “But there’s one thing” he’s sure about: “An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.” King’s discussion of opening lines is compelling because of his dual focus as an avid reader and a prodigious writer of fiction—he doesn’t lose sight of either perspective:

We’ve talked so much about the reader, but you can’t forget that the opening line is important to the writer, too. To the person who’s actually boots-on-the-ground. Because it’s not just the reader’s way in, it’s the writer’s way in also, and you’ve got to find a doorway that fits us both.

This is excellent advice. As you orient your reader, so you orient yourself, pointing your work in the direction it needs to go. Now King admits that he doesn’t think much about the opening line as he writes, in a first draft, at least. That perfectly crafted and inviting opening sentence is something that emerges in revision, which can be where the bulk of a writer’s work happens.

Revision in the second draft, “one of them, anyway,” may “necessitate some big changes” says King in his 2000 memoir slash writing guide On Writing. And yet, it is an essential process, and one that “hardly ever fails.” Below, we bring you King’s top twenty rules from On Writing. About half of these relate directly to revision. The other half cover the intangibles—attitude, discipline, work habits. A number of these suggestions reliably pop up in every writer’s guide. But quite a few of them were born of Stephen King’s many decades of trial and error and—writes the Barnes & Noble book blog—“over 350 million copies” sold, “like them or loathe them.”

1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

2. Don’t use passive voice. “Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe.”

3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend.”

4. Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said.”

5. But don’t obsess over perfect grammar. “The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.”

6. The magic is in you. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.”

7. Read, read, read. ”If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

8. Don’t worry about making other people happy. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

9. Turn off the TV. “TV—while working out or anywhere else—really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs.”

10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”

11. There are two secrets to success. “I stayed physically healthy, and I stayed married.”

12. Write one word at a time. “Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”

13. Eliminate distraction. “There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with.”

14. Stick to your own style. “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what that writer is doing may seem.”

15. Dig. “Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.”

16. Take a break. “You’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience.”

17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. “(kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.)”

18. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. “Remember that word back. That’s where the research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it.”

19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. “You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”

20. Writing is about getting happy. “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid or making friends. Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.”

See a fuller exposition of King’s writing wisdom at Barnes & Noble’s blog.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

ChatGPT Writes a Song in the Style of Nick Cave–and Nick Cave Calls it “a Grotesque Mockery of What It Is to Be Human”

in Music, Technology | January 18th, 2023

Photo by Bleddyn Butcher via Wikimedia Commons

Last year, not long before Christmas, everyone on the internet received a shiny new toy in the form of ChatGPT, which by the power of artificial intelligence can near-instantaneously generate most any text one asks it to. And after a bit of experimentation, one is inclined, naturally, to turn such an impressive technological achievement to the most ridiculous possible uses. Over the past few months, pastiche has proven an especially popular use of ChatGPT: my own interest was first piqued, as I recall, by its generation of instructions for “how to remove a peanut-butter sandwich from a VCR” in the style of the King James Bible.

It’s unknowable what the author or authors of the Bible (depending on how you happen to conceive of its authorship) would think of the results. But we do know just what Nick Cave thinks of ChatGPT’s attempt to write a song in his style. You can read its lyrics at The Red Hand Files, the site of Cave’s question-and-answer newsletter (in which he has opined on these matters before). Consisting of two verses, a chorus, and an outro filled with lines about “a siren’s song,” “the blood of angels,” and “the fire of hell,” the song was sent in by a fan named Mark in New Zealand, to whom Cave writes a characteristically thoughtful reply — or at least he does after delivering his verdict: “This song sucks.”

“What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty,” Cave writes. “It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.” Genuine songs, he explains, “arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation.” But “ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.”

“What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work,” he continues. “Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past.” This is the act that Cave himself has committed to over and over again throughout his half-century-long musical career. But even if that act will lie forever beyond the grasp of an artificial-intelligence system, no matter how robust, it also lies beyond the grasp of the many human musicians content to crank out the same old songs for decades on end. Perhaps it is they, not the Nick Caves of the world, who should worry about the likes of ChatGPT putting them out of work.

Listen to Nick Cave’s Lecture on the Art of Writing Sublime Love Songs (1999)

Demystifying Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ “Red Right Hand,” and How It Was Inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Nick Cave’s Beautiful Letter About Grief

Nick Cave Narrates an Animated Film about the Cat Piano, the Twisted 18th Century Musical Instrument Designed to Treat Mental Illness

Hayao Miyazaki Tells Video Game Makers What He Thinks of Their Characters Made with Artificial Intelligence: “I’m Utterly Disgusted. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Behold Colorful Geologic Maps of Mars Released by The United States Geological Survey

in Astronomy, Maps | January 18th, 2023

The USGS Astrogeology Science Center has recently released a series of colorful and intricately-detailed maps of Mars. These colorful maps, notes USGS, “provide highly detailed views of the [plantet’s] surface and allow scientists to investigate complex geologic relationships both on and beneath the surface. These types of maps are useful for both planning for and then conducting landed missions.”

The map above lets you see Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system, which stands more than twice the height of Mount Everest. The USGS goes on to add: “Map readers can visualize the caldera complex more easily due to the detail that is available at the 1:200,000 scale and the addition of contour lines to the map. The map covers a region that is roughly the size of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metropolitan area and is a detailed look at the volcano’s summit that we have not seen before. This new view of the Olympus Mons caldera complex allows scientists to more easily compare it to similar features on Earth (known as terrestrial analogs) such as Hawaii’s Mauna Loa.”

You can find more Martian maps here.

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

View and Download Nearly 60,000 Maps from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)

Vintage Geological Maps Get Turned Into 3D Topographical Wonders

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Only Footage of Mark Twain: The Original & Digitally Restored Films Shot by Thomas Edison

Watch Classic Performances by Yellow Magic Orchestra, the Japanese Band That Became One of the Most Innovative Electronic Music Acts of All Time

The Mystery Finally Solved: Why Has Roman Concrete Been So Durable?

Contribute a Song to WNYC’s Public Song Project & Use Your Creativity to Explore the Public Domain

A Virtual Tour of Ancient Athens: Fly Over Classical Greek Civilization in All Its Glory

Stephen King’s 20 Rules for Writers

ChatGPT Writes a Song in the Style of Nick Cave–and Nick Cave Calls it “a Grotesque Mockery of What It Is to Be Human”

Behold Colorful Geologic Maps of Mars Released by The United States Geological Survey

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