Watch a Korean Master Craftsman Make a Kimchi Pot by Hand, All According to Ancient Tradition

The South Kore­an cap­i­tal of Seoul, where I live, has in the 21st cen­tu­ry aston­ished vis­it­ing West­ern­ers with its tech­nol­o­gy, its infra­struc­ture, and its sheer urban vital­i­ty. It strikes many of those West­ern­ers (and I include myself among them) as con­sid­er­ably more devel­oped than any­where in the coun­tries they came from. But how­ev­er much Seoul may feel like the future, nowhere in Korea has the past whol­ly van­ished. Take the bul­bous earth­en­ware jars still vis­i­ble on more than a few of the coun­try’s ter­races and rooftops, meant to hold condi­ments like soy­bean and red pep­per paste as well as that world-famous sym­bol of not just Kore­an cui­sine but Kore­an cul­ture itself, the fer­ment­ed cab­bage known as kim­chi.

Com­mon­ly called hangari, or more tra­di­tion­al­ly ong­gi, these jars essen­tial to the fer­men­ta­tion of kim­chi and oth­er Kore­an foods are today pro­duced in large num­bers with indus­tri­al meth­ods. But there are also Kore­an pot­ters who’ve stuck to the old ways — and in a select few cas­es, the very old ways indeed. Take Jin-Gyu, the sub­ject of the video above, a short doc­u­men­tary from Eater’s “Hand­made” series.

“I’m the youngest of the intan­gi­ble cul­tur­al assets in Korea,” he says, refer­ring to the offi­cial list of Impor­tant Intan­gi­ble Cul­tur­al Prop­er­ties intro­duced to pro­tect long-stand­ing tra­di­tions in music, dance, and craft just as the coun­try began its unprece­dent­ed surge into moder­ni­ty. The mak­ing of ong­gi itself, a process Jin-Gyu demon­strates from start to fin­ish in the video, is Impor­tant Intan­gi­ble Cul­tur­al Prop­er­ty No. 96.

After pound­ing his clay into shape while describ­ing how its soil first flows down from the moun­tains, Jin-gyu places it onto his wheel and gives it the dis­tinc­tive shape rec­og­niz­able from all those ter­races and rooftops. This requires con­stant use of his hands, occa­sion­al use of his feet, and even the appli­ca­tion of tra­di­tion­al tools that he also made him­self. The con­trast with tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese pot­tery, its empha­sis on small-scale ele­gance and near-exis­ten­tial­ist atti­tude toward the final prod­uct, is instruc­tive: the Kore­an vari­ety, as Jin-gyu prac­tices it, has a dif­fer­ent ener­gy, more of an emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal rus­tic­i­ty. “This makes me so hap­py,” he says after remov­ing fin­ished jar from the kiln orig­i­nal­ly built by his ong­gi-pot­ter father. “After 300 years, it’ll return to the soil.” But there are plen­ty of hearty meals to be had in the mean­time, none of them with­out kim­chi.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Kore­an Pot­ter Found a “Beau­ti­ful Life” Through His Art: A Short, Life-Affirm­ing Doc­u­men­tary

The Art of the Japan­ese Teapot: Watch a Mas­ter Crafts­man at Work, from the Begin­ning Until the Star­tling End

How Soy Sauce Has Been Made in Japan for Over 220 Years: An Inside View

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

“Prim­i­tive Pot­ter” Trav­els into the Back­coun­try for 10 Days with Only a Knife & Buck­skin and Makes Anasazi Pot­tery

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.

The History of American Newspapers Has Been Digitized: Explore 114 Years of Editor & Publisher, “the Bible of the Newspaper Industry”

If you look into the his­to­ry of the Amer­i­can news­pa­per, you can’t get too deep before your inevitable encounter with Edi­tor & Pub­lish­er. Brand­ed as “the bible of the news­pa­per indus­try,” the trade mag­a­zine has for 120 years cov­ered its sub­ject from every pos­si­ble angle. Though news­pa­pers had already been pub­lished in the Unit­ed States for near­ly 200 years before the mag­a­zine’s found­ing, its run has been coeval with an espe­cial­ly fas­ci­nat­ing, even dra­mat­ic peri­od in their his­to­ry. It was in the 20th cen­tu­ry that Amer­i­can news­pa­pers con­sol­i­dat­ed into the pil­lars of what looked, for a time, like a mighty “fourth estate”; in this cen­tu­ry, they’ve plunged into what Edi­tor & Pub­lish­er’s own­er Mike Blind­er terms “such a cri­sis.”

Still, since pur­chas­ing the mag­a­zine last year, writes Inter­net Archive Col­lec­tions Man­ag­er Mari­na Lewis, “Blind­er and his wife, Robin, have been able to turn the oper­a­tion around, dou­bling its rev­enues and tripling its audi­ence.” He also gave the Inter­net Archive per­mis­sion to upload and make avail­able 114 years of Edi­tor & Pub­lish­er issues online for free.

“Going beyond the Inter­net Archive’s tra­di­tion­al lend­ing sys­tem ensures it can be indexed by search engines and made max­i­mal­ly use­ful to read­ers and researchers,” writes Lewis. “The abil­i­ty to research these archived issues has been tru­ly excit­ing, espe­cial­ly for those look­ing up his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments, many with a per­son­al or fam­i­ly con­nec­tion.”

As the Nie­man Jour­nal­ism Lab’s Joshua Ben­don remem­bers itEdi­tor & Pub­lish­er was once “the best (and often only) place to find out about job open­ings at news­pa­pers.”  With more than a cen­tu­ry of its back issues freely avail­able at the Inter­net Archive, “if you’re at all inter­est­ed in the 20th-cen­tu­ry his­to­ry of the Amer­i­can news­pa­per busi­ness, you now have access to a robust new resource.” In the archive he finds doc­u­men­ta­tion of “some of the century’s most inter­est­ing moments,” at least as far as that busi­ness is con­cerned: The New York­er’s 1946 pub­li­ca­tion of John Hersey’s “Hiroshi­ma,” which it sub­se­quent­ly offered to con­ven­tion­al news­pa­pers (“The piece runs about 30,000 words and no cut­ting or con­dens­ing is to be per­mit­ted”); the 1965 hir­ing of Ben Bradlee by The Wash­ing­ton Post; the 1971 debut of Doones­bury in nation­al news­pa­pers.

Not all of these reflect well on the U.S. news­pa­per indus­try. Ben­ton high­lights the 1981 expo­sure of “Jim­my’s World,” a Pulitzer-win­ning Post sto­ry about an eight-year-old hero­in addict, as a fab­ri­ca­tion — or a piece of “fake news,” as we might say today. That arti­cle also quotes a Boston Globe edi­tor as say­ing “the pub­lic faith in the press is min­i­mal at the moment,” a sen­ti­ment not unheard these 40 years lat­er. The mag­a­zine was also quick to observe the emer­gence of oth­er forms of media (such as a 1925 test of French inven­tor Édouard Belin’s exper­i­men­tal “tele­vi­sion”) that would lat­er force change upon the news­pa­per indus­try’s very nature. And if the cur­rent cri­sis is, as some argue, not destroy­ing the fourth estate but return­ing it to its roots, there could be few bet­ter paths back to an under­stand­ing of those roots than through the Edi­tor & Pub­lish­er archive.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Techie Work­ing at Home Cre­ates Big­ger Archive of His­tor­i­cal News­pa­pers (37 Mil­lion Pages) Than the Library of Con­gress

Enter “The Mag­a­zine Rack,” the Inter­net Archive’s Col­lec­tion of 34,000 Dig­i­tized Mag­a­zines

The End of an Era: A Short Film About The Last Day of Hot Met­al Type­set­ting at The New York Times (1978)

A Big Dig­i­tal Archive of Inde­pen­dent & Alter­na­tive Pub­li­ca­tions: Browse/Download Rad­i­cal Peri­od­i­cals Print­ed from 1951 to 2016

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

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.

The Bauhaus Chess Set Where the Form of the Pieces Artfully Show Their Function (1922)

Learn­ing to play chess first neces­si­tates learn­ing how each piece moves. This is hard­ly the labor of Her­cules, to be sure, though it does come down to pure mem­o­riza­tion, unaid­ed by any ver­bal or visu­al cues. Does the name “pawn,” after all, sound par­tic­u­lar­ly like some­thing that can only step for­ward? And what about the shape of the knight sug­gests the shape of the knight’s move? The form of a chess piece, in oth­er words, does­n’t fol­low its func­tion — and under cer­tain sets of aes­thet­ic prin­ci­ples, there could be few greater crimes. Leave it to a mem­ber of the Bauhaus, the art school and move­ment that aimed to uni­fy not just form and func­tion but art, craft, and design — to bring them all into line.

Brought into the Bauhaus in 1921 by its founder Wal­ter Gropius, the sculp­tor Josef Hartwig began work on his redesigned chess set the fol­low­ing year. In all its iter­a­tions, the pieces takes on forms made of sim­ple shapes: “The sphere, dou­ble cube, and three sizes of block, singly or com­bined, yield pieces that, despite their high­ly geo­met­ric styl­iza­tion, are strong­ly sug­ges­tive of their rank or pow­er,” says the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, own­er of one of one of Hartwig’s orig­i­nal sets.

“The bish­ops are clear­ly implied by the cross out­line, and the rooks by the sim­ple sta­bil­i­ty of a cube. Most inge­nious of all are the knights, formed of three dou­ble cubes joined in such a fash­ion that each face of the result­ing form shows two cubes one above the oth­er and a third on the side, an embod­i­ment of the knight’s move.”

Like many Bauhaus works, Hartwig’s chess set found a dual exis­tence as both a piece of art and a con­sumer good. The artist him­self also “made a poster to talk about his prod­uct” and “a box to pack­age it,” says cua­tor Anne Monier in the video above, “so we real­ly are in a total cre­ation around a game of chess.” In addi­tion to mak­ing the game’s move­ments eas­i­er to learn, it also con­sti­tutes a visu­al demon­stra­tion of what it means for form to fol­low func­tion. The idea, says Monier, is “to spread the ideas of the Bauhaus in peo­ple’s every­day life, to be able in fact to change the liv­ing envi­ron­ment, to take part in cre­at­ing a new soci­ety.” The video comes from Bauhaus Move­ment, an online shop where you can invite the spread into your home by order­ing a repli­ca Hartwig chess set. It’ll set you back €495, but ideals, now as in the hey­day of the Bauhaus, don’t come cheap.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Har­vard Puts Online a Huge Col­lec­tion of Bauhaus Art Objects

Man Ray Cre­ates a “Sur­re­al­ist Chess­board,” Fea­tur­ing Por­traits of Sur­re­al­ist Icons: Dalí, Bre­ton, Picas­so, Magritte, Miró & Oth­ers (1934)

The Pol­i­tics & Phi­los­o­phy of the Bauhaus Design Move­ment: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Mar­cel Duchamp, Chess Enthu­si­ast, Cre­at­ed an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Avail­able via 3D Print­er

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

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.

The Internet Archive Now Digitizing 1,000,000+ Objects from a Massive Cinema History Library


Major motion pic­tures need the work of writ­ers, direc­tors, actors, cin­e­matog­ra­phers, and a slew of oth­er pro­fes­sion­als besides. That group also includes researchers, whose role has until recent­ly gone prac­ti­cal­ly uncel­e­brat­ed out­side the indus­try. In 2015, film­mak­er Daniel Raim brought the work of the film researcher to light with Harold and Lil­lian: A Hol­ly­wood Love Sto­ry, about pro­duc­tion design­er Harold Michel­son and his researcher wife Lil­lian. “In Raim’s doc­u­men­tary, she talks about work­ing on Fid­dler on the Roof and the film­mak­ers need­ed to know what a Jew­ish wom­an’s under­gar­ments looked like in the 1890s,” writes The Hol­ly­wood Reporter’s Emi­ly Hilton. How could she find such obscure infor­ma­tion?

“Michel­son sat on a bench at Fair­fax and Bev­er­ly near a Jew­ish deli and spoke to women who were about the right age to have been alive in that era.” One of these women “ran home and grabbed a sewing pat­tern for her to ref­er­ence. This research inspired the out­fits that Τevye’s daugh­ters wear in the num­ber: knee length bloomers with scal­loped edges.”

As yet, this pat­tern has­n’t appeared in the Michel­son Cin­e­ma Research Library, now host­ed online at the Inter­net Archive. But it may yet, as the project of dig­i­ti­za­tion and upload­ing has hard­ly begun: it was just last year that the nona­ge­nar­i­an Lil­lian Michel­son donat­ed to the Archive her for­mi­da­ble col­lec­tion of research mate­ri­als, amassed over her long career.

“After near­ly six decades serv­ing film­mak­ers first at Samuel Gold­wyn, then the Amer­i­can Film Insti­tute, Zoetrope Stu­dio, Para­mount and Dream­Works,” writes the Los Ange­les Times’ Mary McNa­ma­ra, “the library filled 1,594 box­es: tens of thou­sands of books, pho­tographs, mag­a­zines and a panoply of oth­er visu­al resources. All of this had been sit­ting for five years in a stor­age facil­i­ty, paid for by friends who could not bear to see it all destroyed.” Now that the dig­i­tal archival process is under­way, you can browse the first 1,300 or so entries at the Inter­net Archive, which allows users to vir­tu­al­ly check out the Michel­son Cin­e­ma Research Library’s books on sub­jects rang­ing from the­atri­cal cos­tumes and vin­tage cin­e­ma lob­by cards to places like Japan and Paris to less expect­ed top­ics like the Amaz­ing Kre­skin and the exter­nals of the Catholic Church.

But then, a Hol­ly­wood researcher must be pre­pared to learn about any­thing, and by all accounts Lil­lian Michel­son was per­haps the great­est of them all. In addi­tion to its com­pre­hen­sive­ness, her library became a hang­out of choice for a vari­ety of stu­dio pro­fes­sion­als and celebri­ties includ­ing Tom Waits. (“I wouldn’t be sur­prised if that’s how he found some time to unwind,” says Raim, “just drink­ing tea there.”) The Inter­net Archive describes her col­lec­tion as con­sist­ing of “5,000 books, 30,000 pho­tographs, and more than 1,000,000 clip­pings, scrap­books and ephemera,” more of which will come online as time goes by. Even­tu­al­ly the site will con­tain all the mate­ri­als from which Michel­son drew vital knowl­edge for film­mak­ers like Roman Polan­s­ki, Alfred Hitch­cock, and Stan­ley Kubrick. And if her research mate­ri­als sat­is­fied those three, they’re more than good enough for us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10,000 Clas­sic Movie Posters Get­ting Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter at UT-Austin: Free to Browse & Down­load

40,000 Film Posters in a Won­der­ful­ly Eclec­tic Archive: Ital­ian Tarkovsky Posters, Japan­ese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

Good Movies as Old Books: 100 Films Reimag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

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.

The First American Cookbook: Sample Recipes from American Cookery (1796)

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

On the off chance Lin-Manuel Miran­da is cast­ing around for source mate­r­i­al for his next Amer­i­can his­to­ry-based block­buster musi­cal, may we sug­gest Amer­i­can Cook­ery by “poor soli­tary orphan” Amelia Sim­mons?

First pub­lished in 1796, at 47 pages (near­ly three of them are ded­i­cat­ed to dress­ing a tur­tle), it’s a far quick­er read than the fate­ful Ron Cher­now Hamil­ton biog­ra­phy Miran­da impul­sive­ly select­ed for a vaca­tion beach read.

Slen­der as it is, there’s no short­age of meaty mate­r­i­al:

Calves Head dressed Tur­tle Fash­ion

Soup of Lamb’s Head and Pluck

Fowl Smoth­ered in Oys­ters

Tongue Pie

Foot Pie

Mod­ern chefs may find some of the first Amer­i­can cook­book’s meth­ods and mea­sure­ments take some get­ting used to.

We like to cook, but we’re not sure we pos­sess the where­with­al to tack­le a Crook­neck or Win­ter Squash Pud­ding.

We’ve nev­er been called upon to “per­fume” our “whipt cream” with “musk or amber gum tied in a rag.”

And we wouldn’t know a whortle­ber­ry if it bit us in the whit­pot.

The book’s full title is an indi­ca­tion of its mys­te­ri­ous author’s ambi­tions for the new country’s culi­nary future:

Amer­i­can Cook­ery, or the art of dress­ing viands, fish, poul­try, and veg­eta­bles, and the best modes of mak­ing pastes, puffs, pies, tarts, pud­dings, cus­tards, and pre­serves, and all kinds of cakes, from the impe­r­i­al plum to plain cake: Adapt­ed to this coun­try, and all grades of life.

As Kei­th Stave­ly and Kath­leen Fitzger­ald write in an essay for What It Means to Be an Amer­i­can, a “nation­al con­ver­sa­tion host­ed by the Smith­son­ian and Ari­zona State Uni­ver­si­ty,” Amer­i­can Cook­ery man­aged to strad­dle the refined tastes of Fed­er­al­ist elites and the Jef­fer­so­ni­ans who believed “rus­tic sim­plic­i­ty would inoc­u­late their fledg­ling coun­try against the cor­rupt­ing influ­ence of the lux­u­ry to which Britain had suc­cumbed”:

The recipe for “Queen’s Cake” was pure social aspi­ra­tion, in the British mode, with its but­ter whipped to a cream, pound of sug­ar, pound and a quar­ter of flour, 10 eggs, glass of wine, half-teacup of del­i­cate-fla­vored rose­wa­ter, and spices. And “Plumb Cake” offered the striv­ing house­wife a huge 21-egg show­stop­per, full of expen­sive dried and can­died fruit, nuts, spices, wine, and cream.

Then—mere pages away—sat john­ny­cake, fed­er­al pan cake, buck­wheat cake, and Indi­an slap­jack, made of famil­iar ingre­di­ents like corn­meal, flour, milk, water, and a bit of fat, and pre­pared “before the fire” or on a hot grid­dle. They sym­bol­ized the plain, but well-run and boun­ti­ful, Amer­i­can home. A dia­logue on how to bal­ance the sump­tu­ous with the sim­ple in Amer­i­can life had begun.

(Hamil­ton fans will please note that the cake for the 1780 Schuyler-Hamil­ton wed­ding leaned more toward the for­mer than any­thing in the john­ny­cake / slap­jack vein…)

Amer­i­can Cook­ery is one of nine 18th-cen­tu­ry titles to make the Library of Con­gress’ list of 100 Books That Shaped Amer­i­ca:

This cor­ner­stone in Amer­i­can cook­ery is the first cook­book of Amer­i­can author­ship to be print­ed in the Unit­ed States. Numer­ous recipes adapt­ing tra­di­tion­al dish­es by sub­sti­tut­ing native Amer­i­can ingre­di­ents, such as corn, squash and pump­kin, are print­ed here for the first time. Sim­mons’ “Pomp­kin Pud­ding,” baked in a crust, is the basis for the clas­sic Amer­i­can pump­kin pie. Recipes for cake-like gin­ger­bread are the first known to rec­om­mend the use of pearl ash, the fore­run­ner of bak­ing pow­der.

Stu­dents of Women’s His­to­ry will find much to chew on in the sec­ond edi­tion of Amer­i­can Cook­ery as well, though they may find a few spoon­fuls of pearl ash dis­solved in water nec­es­sary to set­tle upset stom­achs after read­ing Sim­mons’ intro­duc­tion.

Stave­ly and Fitzger­ald observe how “she thanks the fash­ion­able ladies,” or “respectable char­ac­ters,” as she calls them, who have patron­ized her work, before return­ing to her main theme: the “egre­gious blun­ders” of the first edi­tion, “which were occa­sioned either by the igno­rance, or evil inten­tion of the tran­scriber for the press.”

Ulti­mate­ly, all of her prob­lems stem from her unfor­tu­nate con­di­tion; she is with­out “an edu­ca­tion suf­fi­cient to pre­pare the work for the press.” In an attempt to side­step any crit­i­cism that the sec­ond edi­tion might come in for, she writes: “remem­ber, that it is the per­for­mance of, and effect­ed under all those dis­ad­van­tages, which usu­al­ly attend, an Orphan.”

Read the sec­ond edi­tion of Amer­i­can Cook­ery here. (If the archa­ic font trou­bles your eyes, a plain­er ver­sion is here.) A fac­sim­i­le edi­tion of Amer­i­can Cook­ery can be pur­chased online.

Lis­ten to a Lib­riVox audio record­ing of Amer­i­can Cook­ery here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Archive of 3,000 Vin­tage Cook­books Lets You Trav­el Back Through Culi­nary Time

His­toric Mex­i­can Recipes Are Now Avail­able as Free Dig­i­tal Cook­books: Get Start­ed With Dessert

Recipes from the Kitchen of Geor­gia O’Keeffe

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

PBS American Masters Archive Releases 1,000+ Hours of Uncut, Never-Before-Seen Interviews: Patti Smith, David Bowie, Neil Young & More

When we think of Amer­i­can mas­ters, we don’t think of David Bowie, who despite being a mas­ter was also the most Eng­lish rock star ever to live. But an inter­view with Bowie, nev­er before seen in full, nonethe­less appears in the new­ly opened Amer­i­can Mas­ters archive, hav­ing been shot for the long-run­ning PBS series’ 1997 doc­u­men­tary on Lou Reed — if not the most Amer­i­can rock star ever to live, then sure­ly the most New York one. “For me, New York was always James Dean walk­ing out in the mid­dle of the road, and it was always the Fugs, the Vil­lage Fugs. It was the Beats and it was SoHo. It was that kind of bohemi­an intel­lec­tu­al extrav­a­gance that made it so vibrant for some­one like me, grow­ing up in quite a gray, sub­ur­ban, ten­e­ment-filled South Lon­don envi­ron­ment.”

As with any soci­ety or cul­ture, it takes an out­sider to see things most clear­ly, or at any rate most vivid­ly. But then, cer­tain Amer­i­can-born Amer­i­cans also have pret­ty vivid impres­sions of their own. No less a New York icon than Pat­ti Smith, for instance, also sat for an inter­view about Lou Reed — as well as Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, the Chelsea Hotel, poet­ry, labels, impro­vi­sa­tion, John Coltrane, Jack­son Pol­lock, CBGB, and much else besides.

Smith’s full inter­view runs 44 min­utes, much longer than the brief clip above, but even it con­sti­tutes just a small frac­tion of the over 1,000 hours of sim­i­lar­ly uncut inter­view footage now made avail­able, com­plete with search­able tran­scripts, in the Amer­i­can Mas­ters archive.

Since its debut in 1986 Amer­i­can Mas­ters has pro­filed cul­tur­al fig­ures from Maya Angelou to Aretha Franklin, Ernest Hem­ing­way to Edgar Allan Poe, Mae West to Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, Car­ol Bur­nett to Mel Brooks. Those last episodes include inter­views with the late Carl Rein­er, a tow­er­ing Amer­i­can come­di­an in his own right. In addi­tion to Rein­er’s half-hour on Bur­nett and hour on Brooks, you’ll also find in the archive four dif­fer­ent inter­views of Brooks him­self, as well as a sol­id three and a half hours with Bur­nett her­self. Neil Young on David Gef­fenWilliam F. Buck­ley on Wal­ter Cronkite, Cybill Shep­herd on Jeff Bridges, and Quin­cy Jones on Sid­ney Poiti­er — as well as, in two inter­views total­ing near­ly four hours, on Quin­cy Jones. Like all the best Amer­i­can lives, his con­tains many more sto­ries than one can tell at a sit­ting. Enter the the Amer­i­can Mas­ters archive here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A New Online Archive Lets You Lis­ten to 40 Years Worth of Ter­ry Gross’ Fresh Air Inter­views: Stream 22,000 Seg­ments Online

How Dick Cavett Brought Sophis­ti­ca­tion to Late Night Talk Shows: Watch 270 Clas­sic Inter­views Online

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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.

Algerian Cave Paintings Suggest Humans Did Magic Mushrooms 9,000 Years Ago

We mod­erns might won­der what ancient peo­ples did when not hunt­ing, gath­er­ing, and repro­duc­ing. The answer is that they did mush­rooms, at least accord­ing to one inter­pre­ta­tion of cave paint­ings at Tas­sili n’A­j­jer in Alge­ria, some of which go back 9,000 years. “Here are the ear­li­est known depic­tions of shamans with large num­bers of graz­ing cat­tle,” writes ethnobotanist/mystic Ter­ence McKen­na in his book Food of the Gods: The Search for the Orig­i­nal Tree of Knowl­edge. “The shamans are danc­ing with fists full of mush­rooms and also have mush­rooms sprout­ing out of their bod­ies. In one instance they are shown run­ning joy­ful­ly, sur­round­ed by the geo­met­ric struc­tures of their hal­lu­ci­na­tions. The pic­to­r­i­al evi­dence seems incon­tro­vert­ible.”

McKen­na was­n’t the only schol­ar of the psy­che­del­ic expe­ri­ence to take an inter­est in Tas­sili. Gior­gio Samor­i­ni had writ­ten about its ancient paint­ings a few years before, focus­ing on one that depicts “a series of masked fig­ures in line and hier­at­i­cal­ly dressed or dressed as dancers sur­round­ed by long and live­ly fes­toons of geo­met­ri­cal designs of dif­fer­ent kinds.” Each dancer “holds a mush­room-like object in the right hand,” but the key visu­al ele­ment is the par­al­lel lines that “come out of this object to reach the cen­tral part of the head of the dancer.” These “could sig­ni­fy an indi­rect asso­ci­a­tion or non-mate­r­i­al flu­id pass­ing from the object held in the right hand and the mind,” an inter­pre­ta­tion in line with the idea of “the uni­ver­sal men­tal val­ue induced by hal­lu­cino­genic mush­rooms and veg­e­tals, which is often of a mys­ti­cal and spir­i­tu­al nature.”

The U.S. For­est Ser­vice acknowl­edges Tas­sili as “the old­est known pet­ro­glyph depict­ing the use of psy­choac­tive mush­rooms,” adding the pos­tu­late that “the mush­rooms depict­ed on the ‘mush­room shaman’ are Psilo­cybe mush­rooms.” That name will sound famil­iar to 21st-cen­tu­ry con­scious­ness-alter­ation enthu­si­asts, some of whom advo­cate for the use of psilo­cy­bin, the psy­che­del­ic com­pound that occurs in such mush­rooms, as not just a recre­ation­al drug but a treat­ment for con­di­tions like depres­sion. Cave art like Tas­sil­i’s sug­gests that such instru­men­tal uses of hal­lu­cino­genic plants — as vital parts of rit­u­als, for exam­ple — may stretch all the way back to the Neolith­ic era, when last the Sahara desert was a rel­a­tive­ly ver­dant savan­na rather than the vast expanse of sand we know today.

A sense of con­ti­nu­ity with the prac­tices of these long-ago pre­de­ces­sors — ancient Egyp­tians to the ancient Egyp­tians, as one Red­di­tor frames it — must enrich mush­room use for many psy­cho­nauts today. And indeed, the “bee-head­ed shaman” and his com­pa­tri­ots have had a robust cul­tur­al after­life: “A pop­u­lar­ly pub­lished draw­ing based on one of the Tas­sili fig­ures has become an icon of post-1990’s psy­che­delia,” says Bri­an Akers of Mush­room: The Jour­nal of Wild Mush­room­ing. The “abstract-bizarre” style of its images have also put it “among the sites favored by ancient ET the­o­riz­ing.” How­ev­er rich the visions expe­ri­enced by the cave-painters who once lived there, sure­ly none could have been as mind-blow­ing as the idea that their work would still fire up imag­i­na­tions nine mil­len­nia lat­er.

via Red­dit

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Gold­en Guide to Hal­lu­cino­genic Plants: Dis­cov­er the 1977 Illus­trat­ed Guide Cre­at­ed by Harvard’s Ground­break­ing Eth­nob­otanist Richard Evan Schultes

Psilo­cy­bin Could Soon Be a Legal Treat­ment for Depres­sion: Johns Hop­kins Pro­fes­sor, Roland Grif­fiths, Explains How Psilo­cy­bin Can Relieve Suf­fer­ing

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

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.

“The Most Intelligent Photo Ever Taken”: The 1927 Solvay Council Conference, Featuring Einstein, Bohr, Curie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger & More

A curi­ous thing hap­pened at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry and the dawn­ing of the 20th. As Euro­pean and Amer­i­can indus­tries became increas­ing­ly con­fi­dent in their meth­ods of inven­tion and pro­duc­tion, sci­en­tists made dis­cov­ery after dis­cov­ery that shook their under­stand­ing of the phys­i­cal world to the core. “Researchers in the 19th cen­tu­ry had thought they would soon describe all known phys­i­cal process­es using the equa­tions of Isaac New­ton and James Clerk Maxwell,” Adam Mann writes at Wired. But “the new and unex­pect­ed obser­va­tions were destroy­ing this rosy out­look.”

These obser­va­tions includ­ed X‑rays, the pho­to­elec­tric effect, nuclear radi­a­tion and elec­trons; “lead­ing physi­cists, such as Max Planck and Wal­ter Nernst believed cir­cum­stances were dire enough to war­rant an inter­na­tion­al sym­po­sium that could attempt to resolve the sit­u­a­tion.” Those sci­en­tists could not have known that over a cen­tu­ry lat­er, we would still be star­ing at what physi­cist Dominic Wal­li­man calls the “Chasm of Igno­rance” at the edge of quan­tum the­o­ry. But they did ini­ti­ate “the quan­tum rev­o­lu­tion” in the first Solvay Coun­cil, in Brus­sels, named for wealthy chemist and orga­niz­er Ernest Solvay.

“Rever­ber­a­tions from this meet­ing are still felt to this day… though physics may still some­times seem to be in cri­sis” writes Mann (in a 2011 arti­cle just months before the dis­cov­ery of the Hig­gs boson). The inau­gur­al meet­ing kicked off a series of con­fer­ences on physics and chem­istry that have con­tin­ued into the 21st cen­tu­ry. Includ­ed in the pro­ceed­ings were Planck, “often called the father of quan­tum mechan­ics,” Ernest Ruther­ford, who dis­cov­ered the pro­ton, and Heike Kamer­lingh-Onnes, who dis­cov­ered super­con­duc­tiv­i­ty.

Also present were math­e­mati­cian Hen­ri Poin­caré, chemist Marie Curie, and a 32-year-old Albert Ein­stein, the sec­ond youngest mem­ber of the group. Ein­stein described the first Solvay con­fer­ence (1911) in a let­ter to a friend as “the lamen­ta­tions on the ruins of Jerusalem. Noth­ing pos­i­tive came out of it.” The ruined “tem­ple,” in this case, were the the­o­ries of clas­si­cal physics, “which had dom­i­nat­ed sci­en­tif­ic think­ing in the pre­vi­ous cen­tu­ry.” Ein­stein under­stood the dis­may, but found his col­leagues to be irra­tional­ly stub­born and con­ser­v­a­tive.

Nonethe­less, he wrote, the sci­en­tists gath­ered at the Solvay Coun­cil “prob­a­bly all agree that the so-called quan­tum the­o­ry is, indeed, a help­ful tool but that it is not a the­o­ry in the usu­al sense of the word, at any rate not a the­o­ry that could be devel­oped in a coher­ent form at the present time.” Dur­ing the Fifth Solvay Coun­cil, in 1927, Ein­stein tried to prove that the “Heisen­berg Uncer­tain­ty Prin­ci­ple (and hence quan­tum mechan­ics itself) was just plain wrong,” writes Jonathan Dowl­ing, co-direc­tor of the Horace Hearne Insti­tute for The­o­ret­i­cal Physics.

Physi­cist Niels Bohr respond­ed vig­or­ous­ly. “This debate went on for days,” Dowl­ing writes, “and con­tin­ued on 3 years lat­er at the next con­fer­ence.” At one point, Ein­stein uttered his famous quote, “God does not play dice,” in a “room full of the world’s most notable sci­en­tif­ic minds,” Aman­da Macias writes at Busi­ness Insid­er. Bohr respond­ed, “stop telling God what to do.” That room full of lumi­nar­ies also sat for a por­trait, as they had dur­ing the first Solvay Coun­cil meet­ing. See the assem­bled group at the top and fur­ther up in a col­orized ver­sion in what may be, as one Red­di­tor calls it, “the most intel­li­gent pic­ture ever tak­en.”

The full list of par­tic­i­pants is below:

Front row: Irv­ing Lang­muir, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hen­drik Lorentz, Albert Ein­stein, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugène Guye, C.T.R Wil­son, Owen Richard­son.

Mid­dle row: Peter Debye, Mar­tin Knud­sen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hen­drik Antho­ny Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Comp­ton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr.

Back row: Auguste Pic­card, Émile Hen­ri­ot, Paul Ehren­fest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Don­der, Erwin Schrödinger, JE Ver­schaf­felt, Wolf­gang Pauli, Wern­er Heisen­berg, Ralph Fowler, Léon Bril­louin.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Quan­tum Physics Made Rel­a­tive­ly Sim­ple: A Mini Course from Nobel Prize-Win­ning Physi­cist Hans Bethe

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er

Hear Albert Ein­stein Read “The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence” (1941)

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

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