Martin Scorsese Creates a List of 38 Essential Films About American Democracy

in Film, History, Politics | March 29th, 2018

So many of us, throughout so much of the 20th century, saw the nature of American-style democracy as more or less etched in stone. But the events of recent years, certainly on the national level but also on the global one, have thrown our assumptions about a political system that once looked destined for universality — indeed, the much-discussed “end” toward which history itself has been working — into question. Whatever our personal views, we’ve all had to remember that the United States, approaching a quarter-millennium of history, remains an experimental country, one more subject to re-evaluation and revision than we might have thought.

The same holds true for the art form that has done more than any other to spread visions of America: the movies. Martin Scorsese surely knows this, just as deeply as he knows that a full understanding of any society demands immersion into that society’s dreams of itself. The fact that so many of America’s dreams have taken cinematic form makes Scorsese well-placed to approach the subject, given that he’s dreamed a fair few of them himself. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, The Wolf of Wall Street: most of his best-known films tell thoroughly American stories, rooted in not just his country’s distinctive history but the equally distinctive politics, society, and culture that have resulted from it.

Now, along with his nonprofit The Film Foundation, Scorsese passes his understanding of America along to all of us with their curriculum, “Portraits of America: Democracy on Film.” It comes as part of their larger project “The Story of Film,” described by its official site as “an interdisciplinary curriculum introducing students to classic cinema and the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of film.” Scorsese and The Film Foundation offer its materials free to schools, but students of all ages and nationalities can learn a great deal about American democracy from the pictures it includes, the sequence of which runs as follows:

Module 1: The Immigrant Experience
Introductory Lesson: From Penny Claptrap to Movie Palaces—the First Three Decades
Chapter 1: “The Immigrant” (1917, d. Charlie Chaplin)
Chapter 2: “The Godfather, Part II” (1974, d. Francis Ford Coppola)
Chapter 3: “America, America” (1963, d. Elia Kazan)
Chapter 4: “El Norte” (1983, d. Gregory Nava)
Chapter 5: “The Namesake” (2006, d. Mira Nair)

Module 2: The American Laborer
Introductory Lesson: The Common Good
Chapter 1: “Black Fury” (1935, d. Michael Curtiz)
Chapter 2: “Harlan County U.S.A.” (1976, d. Barbara Kopple)
Chapter 3: “At the River I Stand” (1993, d. David Appleby, Allison Graham and Steven Ross)
Chapter 4: “Salt of the Earth” (1954, d. Herbert J. Biberman)
Chapter 5: “Norma Rae” (1979, d. Martin Ritt)

Module 3: Civil Rights
Introductory Lesson: The Camera as Witness
Chapter 1: King: A Filmed Record…Montgomery to Memphis (1970, conceived & created by
Ely Landau; guest appearances filmed by Sidney Lumet and Joseph L.
Mankiewicz)
Chapter 2: “Intruder in the Dust” (1949, d. Clarence Brown)
Chapter 3: “The Times of Harvey Milk” (1984, d. Robert Epstein)
Chapter 4: “Smoke Signals” (1998, d. Chris Eyre)

Module 4: The American Woman
Introductory Lesson: Ways of Seeing Women
Chapter 1: Through a Woman’s Lens: Directors Lois Weber (focusing on “Suspense,” 1913 and
“Where Are My Children,” 1916) and Dorothy Arzner (“Dance, Girl, Dance,” 1940)
Chapter 2: “Imitation of Life” (1934, d. John M. Stahl)
Chapter 3: “Woman of the Year” (1942, d. George Stevens)
Chapter 4: “Alien” (1979, d. Ridley Scott)
Chapter 5: “The Age of Innocence” (1993, d. Martin Scorsese)

Module 5: Politicians and Demagogues
Introductory Lesson: Checks and Balances
Chapter 1: “Gabriel Over the White House” (1933, d. Gregory La Cava)
Chapter 2: “A Lion is in the Streets” (1953, d. Raoul Walsh)
Chapter 3: “Advise and Consent” (1962, d. Otto Preminger)
Chapter 4: “A Face in the Crowd” (1957, d. Elia Kazan)

Module 6: Soldiers and Patriots
Introductory Lesson: Movies and Homefront Morale
Chapter 1: “Sergeant York (1941, d. Howard Hawks)
Chapter 2: Private Snafu’s Private War—three Snafu Shorts from WWII
Chapter 3: “Three Came Home” (1950, d. Jean Negulesco)
Chapter 4: “Glory” (1989, Edward Zwick)
Chapter 5: “Saving Private Ryan” (1998, d. Steven Spielberg)

Module 7: The Press
Introductory Lesson: Degrees of Truth
Chapter 1: “Meet John Doe” (1941, d. Frank Capra)
Chapter 2: “All the President’s Men” (1976, d. Alan J. Pakula)
Chapter 3: “Good Night, and Good Luck” (2005, d. George Clooney)
Chapter 4: “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006, d. Davis Guggenheim)
Chapter 5: “Ace in the Hole” (1951, d. Billy Wilder)

Module 8: The Auteurs
Introductory Lesson: Film as an Art Form
Chapter 1: “Modern Times” (1936, Charlie Chaplin)
Chapter 2: “The Grapes of Wrath”(1940, d. John Ford)
Chapter 3: “Citizen Kane” (1941, d. Orson Welles)
Chapter 4: “An American in Paris” (1951, d. Vincente Minnelli)
Chapter 5: “The Aviator” (2004, d. Martin Scorsese)

“Division, conflict and anger seem to be defining this moment in culture,” says Scorsese, quoted in a Film Journal International article about the curriculum. “I learned a lot about citizenship and American ideals from the movies I saw. Movies that look squarely at the struggles, violent disagreements and the tragedies in history, not to mention hypocrisies, false promises. But they also embody the best in America, our great hopes and ideals.” Few could watch all 38 of the films on his curriculum without feeling that the experiments of democracy and cinema are still on to something – and hold out the promise of more possibilities than we’d imagined before.

via Indiewire

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Read and Hear Tristan Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto,” the Avant-Garde Document Published 100 Years Ago (March 23, 1918)

in Art, History | March 28th, 2018

Dada demands explanation, yet it somehow also demands not to be explained. In the nearly 102 years since its inception, many attempts at summary and analysis of that early 20th-century European avant-garde movement have emerged; as you can see in the related links at the bottom of the post, we’ve featured a fair few of them here on Open Culture. But to truly understand Dada, you must, to the extent possible, get inside the heads of its founders, and one shortcut to that artistically rich destination takes the form of something any movement worth its salt — especially any early 20th-century European avant-garde movement — will have drawn up: its manifesto.

“The magic of a word – Dada – which has brought journalists to the gates of a world unforeseen, is of no importance to us,” wrote Romanian-French essayist, poet, and performance artist Tristan Tzara almost exactly a century ago.

To put out a manifesto you must want: ABC

to fulminate against 1, 2, 3

to fly into a rage and sharpen your wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big ABCs, to sign, shout, swear, to organize prose into a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, to prove your non plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life just as the latest-appearance of some whore proves the essence of God. His existence was previously proved by the accordion, the landscape, the wheedling word. To impose your ABC is a natural thing — hence deplorable.

In this Dada Manifesto of March 23, 1918 (read it online here), Tzara goes on to define “Dada” as “a word that throws up ideas so that they can be shot down; every bourgeois is a little playwright, who invents different subjects and who, instead of situating suitable characters on the level of his own intelligence, like chrysalises on chairs, tries to find causes or objects (according to whichever psychoanalytic method he practices) to give weight to his plot, a talking and self-defining story.” And further down, just in case you haven’t quite got the picture: “DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING.”

Different translations of Tzara’s words, of which you can hear readings in the videos at the top of the post and just above, put it somewhat differently: “Dada means nothing,” says another. But whatever it means, exactly — or doesn’t mean, exactly — Dada burned brightly enough during its brief heyday to produce not just one manifesto, but two. “As in every human endeavor when two strong personalities meet, opinions may clash and an argument often ensues,” writes Eli Anapur at Widewalls. The German writer Hugo Ball actually wrote his own Dada manifesto before Tzara did, in 1916. “Both Manifestos are explanations of the Dada movement and its goals, but the content differs as long as the modes of spreading the movement throughout Europe and ultimately world, were concerned.”

Ball begins by describing Dada as “a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it.” For the word itself he cites several dictionary definitions: “In French it means ‘hobby horse.’ In German it means ‘good-by,’ ‘Get off my back,’ ‘Be seeing you sometime.’ In Romanian: ‘Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of course, yes, definitely, right.’ ” Yet what a useful word it can be:

How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanized, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap. Dada Mr. Rubiner, dada Mr. Korrodi. Dada Mr. Anastasius Lilienstein.

One hundred years on, the tenets of Dada may not look like an obvious route to eternal bliss, fame, or the excision of bothersome elements of life. But something about the notion at the movement’s core — of moving radically beyond sense as a response to the state of the world — still resonates today. The Europe of 1918 found itself in a bad spot, to put it mildly, but most of us in the early 21st century also feel, at least occasionally, surrounded by a reality that has lost its own sense. How much could it hurt to heed Ball and Tzara’s words and just say dada?

You can read Tzara’s manifesto at this University of Pennsylvania website.

The ABCs of Dada Explains the Anarchic, Irrational “Anti-Art” Movement of Dadaism

Download 36 Dadaist Magazines from the The Digital Dada Archive (Plus Other Avant-Garde Books, Leaflets & Ephemera)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Faceboo k.

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The History of the U.S. Civil War Visualized Month by Month and State by State, in an Infographic from 1897

in Education, History, K-12, Maps | March 26th, 2018

There’s been a lot of handwringing over the i‑Generation’s lack of map reading skills.

While we’re at it, let’s take a cold, hard look at the Gilded Age infographic, above.…

… and conclude that people who live in glass houses should stop reaching for stones.

Published in 1897 by the Comparative Synoptical Chart Company, this now unfathomable document–History of the Civil War in the United States: 1860–1865–achieved its goal of squeezing the maximum amount of content onto a single sheet.

This is in direct opposition to today’s generally accepted rules for creating successful infographics, one of which is to simplify.

Another holds that text should be used sparingly, lest it clutter up strong visuals. Consumers have a limited attention span, and for content to be considered shareable, they should be able to take it in at a glance.

Modern eyes may be forgiven for mistaking this chart for the world’s most convoluted subway map. But those aren’t stops, friend. They’re minor engagements. Bloodier and better-known battles are delineated with larger circles—yellow centers for a Union victory, pale green for Confederate.

The fastest way to begin making heads or tails of the chart is to note that each column is assigned to a different state.

The vertical axis is divided into months. Notice all the negative space around Fort Sumter.

And the constant entries in Virginia’s column.

The publisher noted that the location of events was “entirely governed” by this time scale.

You’ll have to look hard for Lincoln’s assassination.

Consumers who purchased the History of the Civil War in the United States 1860–1865 presumably pored over it by candlelight, supplementing it with maps and books.

It would still make a superb addition to any history teacher’s classroom, both as decoration and the tinder that could ignite discussion as to how we receive information, and how much information is in fact received.

Explore a larger, zoomable version of the map here.

via Slate

Watch Veterans of The US Civil War Demonstrate the Dreaded Rebel Yell (1930)

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

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An Artist Visits Stonehenge in 1573 and Paints a Charming Watercolor Painting of the Ancient Ruins

in Art, History | March 21st, 2018

The purpose of the monumental druidical structure known as Stonehenge has been lost to us, but many theories abound, “from the rational to the irrational to the magical.” On the magical end of the scale, we have the giant stones associated with King Arthur and the wizard Merlin. On the more rational side, speculation that the structure functioned as a calendar for religious ceremonies or agricultural seasons.

While the search for answers may be irresistible, we may never know exactly what the builders of Stonehenge intended. But we learn much by studying how others have approached the ancient monument in the past. Existent studies of Stonehenge with illustrations date back to the 14th century. These Medieval representations tried to situate the stones in a “Christian view of world history,” as Art History professor Sam Smiles writes at the British Library.

A century later, drawings of the stones show more of an interest in its architectural features. One manuscript includes “a tiny illustration of four trilithons (two vertical stones supporting a lintel).” Remarkably, writes Smiles, “the artist has understood how the lintels were fixed to the uprights by a mortise and tenon joint.” The drawing may represent “the earliest surviving representation of Stonehenge based on direct observation.”

The practice of drawing Stonehenge from life continued, and in the watercolor above by Flemish painter Lucas de Heere, dating from circa 1573, we see “a more topographical approach.” Related to other similar images created around the same time, the painting shows us an early example of what came to be called “chorography,” which archaeologist Michael Shanks describes as referring to “antiquarian works that dealt in topography, place, community, history, memory.”

Rather than considering it only as a mystical or sacred site or an architectural marvel, de Heere’s depiction of Stonehenge folds both of these interests into a larger concern with English landscape and history, of the kind exemplified by William Camden’s 1586 Britannia, a chorographical survey of Britain and Ireland. Works like de Heere’s and Camden’s are part of the “Re-Discovery of England,” as historian R.C. Richardson argues, that took place under the reign of Elizabeth I, and which produced a new national history, “designed to extend the boundaries of knowledge and understanding.”

As chorography developed as a discipline, Stonehenge and other ancient monuments continued to exert a fascination for their historical, topographical, and archeological features. By the “last quarter of the 18th century,” Smiles tells us, “prehistoric monuments began to be regularly included in topographical surveys,” such as Thomas Hearne’s 1779 Antiquities of Great Britain, which included the engraving just above as its final plate. Learn more about the development of topography and its interest in ancient British monuments, and see many more of these historic images, at the British Library’s site.

1,000-Year-Old Manuscript of Beowulf Digitized and Now Online

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

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A Huge Scale Model Showing Ancient Rome at Its Architectural Peak (Built Between 1933 and 1937)

in History | March 19th, 2018

The narrator of Teju Cole’s Open City, one of the better novels of memory and urban space to come along in recent years, at one point flies into New York City and remembers going to see a “sprawling scale model” of the metropolis at the Queens Museum of Art. “The model had been built for the World’s Fair in 1964, at great cost, and afterward had been periodically updated to keep up with the changing topography and built environment of the city. It showed, in impressive detail, with almost a million tiny buildings, and with bridges, parks, rivers, and architectural landmarks, the true form of the city.” The model really exists; you can go see it yourself.

But if you get to Rome before you next get to New York, you can see another city model of equally impressive, almost implausible accomplishment there. At the Museum of Roman Culture resides a 1:250 recreation of imperial Rome, known as the Plastico di Roma Imperiale, which transports viewers not just through space but time as well.

“To commemorate the birth of Augustus (63 BC) two thousand years earlier, Mussolini commissioned a model of Rome as it appeared at the time of Constantine (AD 306–337), when the city had reached its greatest size,” says Encyclopedia Romana. Constructed by Italo Gismondi between 1933 and 1937, then extended and restored in the 1990s, it takes as its basis Rodolfo Lanciani’s 1901 atlas the Forma Urbis Romae.

You can see more detailed pictures of the Plastico di Roma Imperiale at the Museum of Roman Culture’s site as well as at Viral Spell, zooming in on such Roman landmarks as the Campus Martius, the Circus Maximus, the Tiber Island, and the Flavian Amphitheatre, better know as the Colosseum. “The attention to detail was so meticulous that one could not help but think of Borges’s cartographers,” says Open City’s narrator, “who, obsessed with accuracy, had made a map so large and so finely detailed that it matched the empire’s scale on a ratio of one to one, a map in which each thing coincided with its spot on the map.” This memory comes prompted by the sight of the Big Apple, of course, but it somehow sounds even more fitting for the Eternal City at the height of its ambition.

New Digital Archive Puts Online 4,000 Historic Images of Rome: The Eternal City from the 16th to 20th Centuries

Rome Reborn: Take a Virtual Tour of Ancient Rome, Circa 320 C.E.

Rome Reborn – An Amazing Digital Model of Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome’s System of Roads Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

How the Ornate Tapestries from the Age of Louis XIV Were Made (and Are Still Made Today)

in Art, History, Museums | March 16th, 2018

“Time is the warp and matter the weft of the woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurling shuttle.”

— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

For the uninitiated, the warp are the plain vertical threads of a weaving or tapestry, through which the colorful, horizontal weft threads are passed, over and under, on wooden needle-shaped bobbins (or shuttles).

As Beatrice Grisol, Head Weaver at Paris’ venerable Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins remarks, in The Art of Making a Tapestry, above, weavers must possess a love of drawing and an abundance of imagination in order to translate an artist’s vision using silken or woolen threads.

21st century designs are more contemporary, and dying equipment more precise, but Les Gobelins’s weavers’ process remains remarkably unchanged since the days of the Sun King, Louis XIV.

As in the 17th-century, giant looms are strung with white warp threads, in readiness for the threads expert dyers have colored according to the artist’s palette.

The colored weft threads are stored on spools, and eventually portioned out onto the bobbins, which dangle from the backside of the tapestry, as the weaver works her magic, constantly checking her progress in a mirror reflecting both the project’s front side and a print of the original design.

It’s worth noting that the pronouns here are exclusively feminine. The lavish tapestries decorating Louis XIV’s court hinted at years of unsung labor by highly skilled craftswomen. Tapestries were the ne plus ultra of princely status, a testament to their owner’s erudition and taste. Louis XIV amassed some 2,650 pieces.

That’s a lot of bobbins, and a lot of hard-working female weavers.

Witness the transformation from artist Charles Le Brun’s 1664 study for the figure who would become the seated youth in The Entry of Alexander into Babylon…

…to the fully realized oil on canvas rendering from 1690…

…to its incarnation as a tapestry in the Sun King’s court:

Speeding ahead to the 21st-century, Les Gobelins appears to rival Brooklyn’s Etsy flagship as a pleasantly appointed, well lit, and highly respected Temple of Craft.

View some of the highlights of the Getty Museum’s 2016 exhibition Woven Gold: Tapestries of Louis XIV here.

Or grab your heddles and plan an in-person visit to La Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins here.

Artistic Maps of Pakistan & India Show the Embroidery Techniques of Their Different Regions

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her in NYC on March 20 for the second installment of Necromancers of the Public Domain at The Tank. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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

How Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beautiful, Centuries-Old Craft

in Books, History | March 7th, 2018

What place does the paper book have in our increasingly all-digital present? While some utilitarian arguments once marshaled in its favor (“You can read them in the bathtub” and the like) have fallen into disuse, other, more aesthetically focused arguments have arisen: that a work in print, for example, can achieve a state of beauty as an object in and of itself, the way a file on a laptop, phone, or reader never can. In a sense, this case for the paper book in the 21st century comes back around to the case for the paper book from the 12th century and even earlier, the age of the illuminated manuscript.

Bookmakers back then had to concentrate on prestige products, given that they couldn’t make books in anything like the numbers even the humblest, most antiquated printing operation can run off today.

In the video above, the Getty Museum reveals the painstaking physical process behind the medieval illuminated manuscript: the sourcing, soaking, and stretching of animal skin for the parchment; the conversion of feathers into the quills and nuts into the ink with which scribes would write the text; the application of gold leaf and other colors by the illuminator as they drew in their designs; and the sewing of the binding before encasing the whole package tightly between clasped leather covers.

Some illuminated manuscripts also bear elaborate cover designs sculpted of precious metal, but even without those, these elaborate books — what with all the art and craft that went into them, not to mention all those pricey materials — came out even more valuable, at the time, than even the most coveted laptop, phone, reader, or other consumer electronic device today. Most of us in the developed world can now buy one of those, but the non-institutional patrons willing and able to commission the most splendid illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance included mostly “society’s rulers: emperors, kings, dukes, cardinals, and bishops.”

To fully understand the making of the devices we use to read electronically today would require years and years of study, and so there’s something satisfying in the fact that we can grasp so much about the making of illuminated manuscripts with relative ease: see, for example, the two-minute Getty video just above, “The Structure of a Medieval Manuscript.” A fuller understanding of the nature of illuminated manuscripts, both in the sense of their construction and their place in society, makes for a fuller understanding of how rare the chance was to own beautiful books of their kind in their own time — and how much rarer the exact combination of skills needed to create that beauty.

Behold the Beautiful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketchbook: A Window Into How Illuminated Manuscripts Were Made (1494)

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

1,600-Year-Old Illuminated Manuscript of the Aeneid Digitized & Put Online by The Vatican

Dante’s Divine Comedy Illustrated in a Remarkable Illuminated Medieval Manuscript (c. 1450)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Mozart’s Diary Where He Composed His Final Masterpieces Is Now Digitized and Available Online

in History, Music | March 5th, 2018

We have a tendency to regard Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music as having emerged fully formed into the world, not least because we hear it performed almost exclusively in a highly polished state of near-perfection. That makes any glimpse into the process of its creation all the more valuable, and the British Library has now provided us with much more than such a glimpse: at its site you can now read Mozart’s own thirty-page musical diary, a record of “his compositions in the last seven years of his life” and thus “a uniquely important document” in the history of classical music.

The British Library notes that, during the period from February 1784 until December 1791 that the diary covers, Mozart “composed many of his best-known works, including his five mature operas, several of his most beautiful piano sonatas, and his last three great symphonies, as well as several famous lesser works.”

The pages you see above and below this paragraph come from his comic opera The Marriage of Figaro. “It was a turbulent time of his life, with financial crises, family tragedy, and his ongoing unsuccessful search for a permanent court position.” Enthusiasts will have taken notice that those years also constituted the last seven of his life, before his early death at age 35.

But the flame that burns twice as bright, to coin a phrase, burns half as long, and we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture some of the formidable musical accomplishments Mozart attained before even reaching adolescence. But it somehow feels even more of a wonder to see writings in the actual hand of the mature Mozart, at the height of his compositional powers. You can read the musical diary he wrote in two different formats: as a standard web site with details about the viewed pages and historical context from Mozart’s life provided below each set of pages, and a zoomable, page-flippable browser with optional audio notes. If you’d like a soundtrack to go with the reading experience, a certain 127-hour playlist of Mozart’s music suggests itself.

Hear the Pieces Mozart Composed When He Was Only Five Years Old

Read an 18th-Century Eyewitness Account of 8‑Year-Old Mozart’s Extraordinary Musical Skills

See Mozart Played on Mozart’s Own Fortepiano, the Instrument That Most Authentically Captures the Sound of His Music

Leck Mich Im Arsch (“Kiss My Ass”): Listen to Mozart’s Scatological Canon in B Flat (1782)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Martin Scorsese Creates a List of 38 Essential Films About American Democracy

Read and Hear Tristan Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto,” the Avant-Garde Document Published 100 Years Ago (March 23, 1918)

The History of the U.S. Civil War Visualized Month by Month and State by State, in an Infographic from 1897

An Artist Visits Stonehenge in 1573 and Paints a Charming Watercolor Painting of the Ancient Ruins

A Huge Scale Model Showing Ancient Rome at Its Architectural Peak (Built Between 1933 and 1937)

How the Ornate Tapestries from the Age of Louis XIV Were Made (and Are Still Made Today)

How Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beautiful, Centuries-Old Craft

Mozart’s Diary Where He Composed His Final Masterpieces Is Now Digitized and Available Online

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