Russian Invasion of Ukraine Teach-Out: A Free Course from the University of Michigan

in Current Affairs, History, Online Courses | March 6th, 2022

From the University of Michigan comes a free short course on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Here’s how they set the context for the course, which you can find on the Coursera platform:

“The armed conflict in Ukraine first started in the beginning of 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea. Over the past eight years, there has been ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia, with regular shelling and skirmishes occurring along Russian and Ukrainian borders in the eastern part of the country. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, plunging the entire country into war and sending shockwaves across the world. With casualties mounting and over one million Ukrainians fleeing the country, the need for dialogue and de-escalation have never been higher. In this Teach-Out, you will learn from a diverse group of guest experts about the history and origins of war in Ukraine, its immediate and long-term impacts, and what you can do to support people in this growing humanitarian crisis. Specifically this Teach-Out will address the following questions:

- How did we get here? Why did Russia invade Ukraine?
— What historical and cultural contexts do we need to know about in order to understand this conflict?
— How is cyber and information warfare impacting the conflict in Ukraine?
— What can be done to stop this war?
— How can we support Ukrainian refugees and displaced peoples?”

Sign up for the course here.

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Putin’s War on Ukraine Explained in 8 Minutes

Why Russia Invaded Ukraine: A Useful Primer

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

Free Coloring Books from The Public Domain Review: Download & Color Works by Hokusai, Albrecht Dürer, Harry Clarke, Aubrey Beardsley & More

in Art, Books, Creativity, History | March 4th, 2022

Did you somehow miss that the Public Domain Review has gotten in on the adult coloring book craze?

If so, don’t feel bad. There were probably a lot of other news items vying for your attention back in March of 2020, when the first volume was released “for diversion, entertainment and relaxation in times of self-isolation.”

By the time the second volume made its debut less than two months later, the first had been downloaded some 30,000 times.

Tell your scarcity mentality to stand down. You may be late to the party, but all 40 images can still be downloaded for free, “to ease and aid pleasurable focus in these oddest of times.”

It’s our belief that odd times call for odd images so we’re reproducing some of our favorites below, though be advised there are also plenty of calming botanical prints and graceful maidens for those craving a less challenging coloring experience.

Behold Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons by Martin Schongauer (c. 1470–75), above!

And below, the 13-year-old Michelangelo’s reproduction in tempera on a wood panel. Biographers Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi both told how the young artist visited the fish market, seeking inspiration for the demons’ scales. Perhaps you will be inspired by the barely teenaged High Renaissance master’s palette, though it’s YOUR coloring page, so you do you.

In “Filling in the Blanks: A Prehistory of the Adult Coloring Craze”, historians Melissa N. Morris and Zach Carmichael recount how publisher Robert Sayer’s illustrated book, The Florist, “for the use & amusement of Gentlemen and Ladies” was published with the explicit understanding that readers were meant to color in its botanically semi-inaccurate images:

Comprised of pictures of various flowers, the author gives his (presumably) adult readers detailed instructions for paint mixing and color choice (including the delightful sounding “gall-stone brown”).

Perhaps you will bring some of Sayer’s suggested colors to bear on the above image from Parisian bookseller Richard Breton’s Les songes drolatiques de Pantagruel (1565), a collection of 120 grotesque woodcut figures intended as a tribute to the bawdy writer (and priest!) François Rabelais, or a possibly just a canny marketing ploy.

Next, let’s color this perky fellow from Giovanni Battista Nazari’s famous alchemical treatise on metallic transmutation, Della tramutatione metallica sogni tre from 1599.

The “winged pig in the world” by Dutch engraver and mapmaker Cornelis Anthonisz doesn’t look very cheerful, does he? He’s on top of the imperial orb, but he’s also an allegory of the corrupt world. Hopefully, this will get sorted by the time pigs fly.

As to Ambroise Paré’s 1598 rendering of a “camphur” … well, let’s just say THIS is what a proper unicorn should look like.

According to an annotated checklist that accompanied the Metropolitan Museum’s Cloisters’ 75th Anniversary exhibition Search for the Unicorn, Paré, a pioneering French barber surgeon, claimed that it live(d) in the Arabian Desert, and that its horn can cure various maladies, especially poisoning.”

There’s a lot to unpack there. Think about it as you color.

Hokusai, Albrecht Dürer, and Aubrey Beardsley, are among the artists whose work you’ll encounter, “arranged in vague order of difficulty — from a simple 17th-century kimono pattern to an intricate thousand-flowered illustration.”

Download Volume 1 of the Public Domain Review Coloring book in US Letter or A4 format.

And here is Volume 2 in US Letter or A4 format.

A Free Shakespeare Coloring Book: While Away the Hours Coloring in Illustrations of 35 Classic Plays

Download 150 Free Coloring Books from Great Libraries, Museums & Cultural Institutions: The British Library, Smithsonian, Carnegie Hall & More

The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel: 120 Woodcuts Envision the Grotesque Inhabitants of Rabelais’ World (1565)

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

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

The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel: 120 Woodcuts Envision the Grotesque Inhabitants of Rabelais’ World (1565)

in Art, Books, History | March 3rd, 2022

George Orwell lives on, to varying degrees of aptness, in the form of the word Orwellian. David Lynch has, within his lifetime, made necessary the term Lynchian. Though few of us will leave such adjectival legacies of our own, we should at least aspire to do so, and that task requires looking back to the original master: François Rabelais. Merriam-Webster defines Rabelaisian as “marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism.” Rabelais expressed this sensibility at great length in La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel, a pentalogy of elaborate satirical novels published from the 1530s to the 1560s — and more recently endorsed by Harold Bloom, Joseph Brodsky, Henry Miller, and Marilyn Monroe.

Rabelais died in the 1550s, hence the still-unresolved questions about the authorship of the fifth and final Gargantua and Pantagruel book: was it completed from his notes? Was it, in fact, a fabrication by another writer?

Such was the public’s hunger for the Rabelaisian that multiple different “fifth books” were published. The satisfaction of that same insatiable demand seems also to have motivated the publication of Les Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel ou sont contenues plusieurs figures de l’invention de maitre François Rabelais. This slim volume, writes the Public Domain Review’s Adam Green, “is made up entirely of images — 120 woodcuts depicting a series of fantastically bizarre and grotesque figures, reminiscent of some of the more inventive and twisted creations of Brueghel or Bosch.”

There is no main text, just a preface wherein publisher Richard Breton writes that “the great familiarity I had with the late François Rabelais has moved and even compelled me to bring to light the last of his work, the drolatic dreams of the very excellent and wonderful Pantagruel.” Yet, as Green explains, “the book’s wonderful images are very unlikely to be the work of Rabelais himself — the attribution probably a clever marketing ploy.” You can view these amusing and grotesque images at the Public Domain Review, and in the context of the book as preserved at the Internet Archive. “Be warned,” says Intriguing History, the artist “seems to enjoy the use of a lot of phallic imagery, along with frogs, fish and elephants.” But who is the artist?

“The creator of the prints is now widely thought to be François Desprez,” writes Green, “a French engraver and illustrator” who published a couple of similarly imaginative sets of images with Breton in 1567. Whoever made them, these Rabelaisian woodcuts remained surreal enough through the centuries to catch the eye of none other than Salvador Dalí, who in 1973 paid tribute to them with a set of lithographs of his own. (You can see more examples at the Lockport St. Gallery.) As far as the title, an exegesis at Poemas del río Wang offers a clarification: “Drolatic is an adjective of dream,” and so “we must ask what kind of dream is this. It is certainly the dream of reason, as it gives birth to monsters” — monsters, as a satirist like Rabelais well understood, not altogether unlike ourselves.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Monster Drawings: Cthulhu & Other Creatures from the “Boundless and Hideous Unknown”

Visualizing Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Drawings of Dante’s Inferno from the Renaissance Through Today

Take a Virtual Tour of Hieronymus Bosch’s Bewildering Masterpiece The Garden of Earthly Delights

The Aberdeen Bestiary, One of the Great Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, Now Digitized in High Resolution & Made Available Online

Behold Fantastical Illustrations from the 13th Century Arabic Manuscript Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing

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 ) |

Putin’s War on Ukraine Explained in 8 Minutes

in History | March 3rd, 2022

A new explainer from Vox:

On February 24th, Russia launched a military invasion of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin called it a “special military operation,” but the scale of the attack shows this is a full-scale war that has already caused more than 100 casualties and forced more than half a million Ukrainians to flee their homes.

Ukraine and Russia’s conflict goes back to 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and Russian-backed separatist forces took over parts of southeastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. But to understand the full context behind the invasion, it’s important to go even farther back, to the time when Europe’s current-day divisions began, and see how that shaped Europe’s power balance today.

To understand the current conflict’s history in less than 10 minutes, watch the video above.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Russia’s War on Ukraine: A Conversation Hosted by The Atlantic, Featuring Anne Applebaum, Tom Nichols & Jeffrey Goldberg

in Current Affairs, History | March 2nd, 2022

“After years of threats, Vladimir Putin’s Russian forces invaded Ukraine—culminating in the largest attack against one European state by another since the Second World War. What happens now?”

Above, you can watch a wide-ranging conversation hosted by The Atlantic, featuring Anne Applebaum (Pulitzer-prize winning historian), Tom Nichols (U.S. Naval War College professor), and Jeffrey Goldberg (editor-in-chief of The Atlantic) as they examine “the global reaction, the effectiveness of sanctions, and how to address the rise of authoritarianism and ongoing threats to democracy.” It’s also worth reading Applebaum’s latest piece, “The Impossible Suddenly Became Possible.”

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Aladdin Sane Became the Most Expensive Album Cover Ever — and David Bowie’s Defining Image

in Art, History, Music, Photography | March 1st, 2022

If you search for David Bowie on Spotify, a familiar icon pops up: the man himself, eyes closed, made up with a deathly-looking pallor and a red-and-blue lighting bolt across his face. This is the photo on the front of Bowie’s sixth album, 1973’s Aladdin Sane. “Perhaps more iconic than the music inside,” says the narrator of the Trash Theory video essay above, “it stands as the Mona Lisa of album covers.” It was also, at the time of production, the most costly album cover of all time: this was at the behest of Bowie’s manager Tony Defries, who suspected that sparing no expense on the image would motivate RCA, his label, to spare no expense promoting the album itself.

One might call this a bold move for an artist like Bowie, who had only just made it big. In the early years of his career he’d racked up failure after failure: with 1971’s Hunky Dory, a kind of declaration of commitment to musical and artistic “changes,” he had a succès d’estime, but not until the following year did he become a bona fide star.

The vehicle for that transformation was the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which introduced the listening public to its title character, an androgynous rocker from outer space. Throughout his subsequent year and a half of touring Bowie took the stage in full Ziggy glam regalia, inhabiting the character so fully that he eventually began to question his own sanity.

Though young British audiences couldn’t get enough of Ziggy and the Spiders, reactions across the United States were rather less enthusiastic. There, says the Trash Theory narrator, “they were not the type of British rock that rock radio played: hard-hitting, riff-heavy behemoths like Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones. But this indifference was shaping what Bowie wanted to do next.” His experience of America inspired a new, harder-edged persona, Aladdin Sane. Ziggy Stardust “was a vision of the best a rock star could be, an inspirational figure, while Aladdin was more about fame’s darker underbelly, filtered through imagined Americana and futuristic nostalgia” — and the character needed a look to match.

Shot by Brian Duffy, described in the San Francisco Art Exchange vide0 above as “a very eccentric and incredible photographer,” the Aladdin Sane cover was printed with a seven-color system unprecedented in the medium. (Up to that point, four-color had been the standard.) According to Trash Theory, Bowie described makeup artist Pierre Laroche’s lightning bolt “as representative of schizophrenia, and more specifically, his split feelings about his 1972 American tour.” (The shape came from the logo on a National Panasonic rice cooker in Duffy’s studio.) Though the result has become, in the words of curator Victoria Broackes, “probably the most recognizable symbol in rock and roll,” Bowie never actually assumed this look onstage; ahead of him, there still lay four more decades of changes to go through.

David Bowie Songs Reimagined as Pulp Fiction Book Covers: “Space Oddity,” “Heroes,” “Life on Mars” & More

David Bowie Paper Dolls Recreate Some of the Style Icon’s Most Famous Looks

50 Years of Changing David Bowie Hair Styles in One Animated GIF

Lego Video Shows How David Bowie Almost Became “Cobbler Bob,” Not “Aladdin Sane”

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 ) |

Hear the Uncensored Original Version of “Hurricane,” Bob Dylan’s Protest Song About Jailed Boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (1976)

in History, Music | February 28th, 2022

Throughout his six-decade-long career, Bob Dylan has taken up quite a few causes in his songs. In the 1960s he was especially given to musical accusations of miscarriages of justice like “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” which he recorded less than two months after the assassination of Medgar Evers. But he kept it up even in the 70s, as demonstrated by his 1976 album Desire. “Here comes the story of the Hurricane,” he sings on its opening track, “the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done: put in a prison cell, but one time he could have been the champion of the world.”

This “Hurricane” is, of course, former star boxer Rubin Carter, who’d been convicted for a triple murder at a Paterson, New Jersey bar a decade earlier. Today, many know the story of the Hurricane from the eponymous Denzel Washington-starring Hollywood biopic. By the time that film came out in 1999, Carter had long since been exonerated and made a free man, but when Dylan sang of his having been “falsely tried,” and “obviously framed,” the man was still serving a double life sentence. It was Carter’s autobiography The Sixteenth Round, written in prison, that inspired the literarily-minded Dylan to champion his release.

Written with songwriter-psychologist Jacques Levy, Dylan’s collaborator throughout Desire, “Hurricane” still today sounds as if it pulls no punches, delivering a host of can-he-say-that moments in its seven minutes. But in truth, says Far Our Magazine, “Dylan’s initial vision for the track had been a little different before the lawyers at Columbia Records began pawing over the lyrics. While many of Dylan’s claims of racial injustice are there in plain sight, the men in suits were more concerned with the lyrics implying that Alfred Bello and Arthur Dexter Bradley (the two lead witnesses of the original case) as having ‘robbed the bodies’ ” of Carter and acquaintance John Artis’ alleged victims. Given that they hadn’t been accused of stealing from any corpses, Columbia feared that the implication would draw a lawsuit.

Dylan had previously exhibited a devil-may-care attitude about such matters in his protest songs: “I should have sued him and put him in jail,” grumbled an aged William Zantzinger, the real-life attacker in Dylan’s “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” But this time Dylan acquiesced to the lawyers. Returning to the studio with members of his Rolling Thunder Revue, he laid down a new version of “Hurricane,” censored but musically even harder-hitting (below), that did make it onto Desire. In the video at the top of the post, you can hear the original, which is longer, slower, and more raw in every sense. In the event, the expurgated “Hurricane” still got Dylan sued, but by a different witness: Patricia Valentine, who lived above the bar where the killings occurred and insisted that she did not, in fact, see “the bartender in a pool of blood.” Even a future Nobel Prize winner, it seems, isn’t safe to take a bit of poetic license.

“Tangled Up in Blue”: Deciphering a Bob Dylan Masterpiece

Bob Dylan Releases a Cryptic 17-Minute Song about the JFK Assassination: Hear a “Murder Most Foul”

Bob Dylan Goes Punk on Late Night with David Letterman, Playing “Jokerman” with the Latino Punk Band, the Plugz (1984)

How Bob Dylan Created a Musical & Literary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

Pop Songs with Narrative: Pretty Much Pop (#69) Discusses Tunes Ranging from Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” to “The Pina Colada Song” with Songwriter/Author Rod Picott

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 ( 15 ) |

Why Russia Invaded Ukraine: A Useful Primer

in Current Affairs, History | February 27th, 2022

Why did Russia launch an unprovoked war in Ukraine and risk creating a wider global conflict? If you haven’t closely tracked the ambitions of Vladimir Putin, this primer offers some helpful context. In 30 minutes, the video covers the geopolitical, economic and environmental backstory. As you watch the explainer, it’s worth keeping one thing in mind: For years, European nations have long resisted bringing Ukraine into the NATO fold, precisely because they knew it would trigger a conflict with Putin. And there had been no recent plan to revisit the issue. All of this suggests that Putin has highlighted the NATO threat (amply discussed in the video) because it would provide him a useful pretext for an invasion. There was hardly an imminent threat.

If you’re looking for other rationales not covered by this video, you could focus on two reasons provided by Hein Goemans, a professor of political science at the University of Rochester: Putin “wants to reestablish directly or indirectly, by annexation or by puppet-regimes, a Russian empire—be it the former USSR or Tsarist Russia. A second possible answer has to do with the role of domestic Russian politics, which the standard literature on conflict takes very seriously: Putin has seen what happened in some former Soviet successor republics and the former Yugoslavia, several of which experienced ‘Color Revolutions’ and democratized. Indeed, it was a Color Revolution in Ukraine in 2014, which Putin mischaracterizes as a military coup. He wants to prevent more of these revolutions and prevent a democratic encirclement of countries around him, which could provide a safe haven for Russian dissidents who’d be dangerous to Putin’s political survival. Both of these goals overlap in the sense that he is seeking regime change, which is a dangerous game.”

For a deeper dive into the imperial ambitions of Putin–his attempt to reconstitute the Russian Empire–read this eye-opening interview with Fiona Hill.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.

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!

Why is Ukraine in Crisis?: A Quick Primer For Those Too Embarrassed to Ask (2014)

Why Putin Wants Alexei Navalny Dead

Free Online History Courses

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

Russian Invasion of Ukraine Teach-Out: A Free Course from the University of Michigan

Free Coloring Books from The Public Domain Review: Download & Color Works by Hokusai, Albrecht Dürer, Harry Clarke, Aubrey Beardsley & More

The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel: 120 Woodcuts Envision the Grotesque Inhabitants of Rabelais’ World (1565)

Putin’s War on Ukraine Explained in 8 Minutes

Russia’s War on Ukraine: A Conversation Hosted by The Atlantic, Featuring Anne Applebaum, Tom Nichols & Jeffrey Goldberg

How Aladdin Sane Became the Most Expensive Album Cover Ever — and David Bowie’s Defining Image

Hear the Uncensored Original Version of “Hurricane,” Bob Dylan’s Protest Song About Jailed Boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (1976)

Why Russia Invaded Ukraine: A Useful Primer

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