Orson Welles Narrates the Russian Revolution in Ten Days That Shook the World (1967)

in Film, History | February 24th, 2016

“St. Peters­burg, cap­i­tal of Rus­sia. Octo­ber the 25th, 1917. The time: twen­ty-one min­utes to ten in the evening. At anchor in the riv­er Neva, the cruis­er Auro­ra waits to take her place in his­to­ry. In pre­cise­ly one min­ute’s time, the crew, led by Bol­she­viks, will fire a shot to sig­nal the attack on the win­ter palace.” So begins Ten Days That Shook the World — not John Reed’s 1919 book of reportage on the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion, nor Sergei Eisen­stein’s 1928 film based on it, but a 1967 doc­u­men­tary by Grana­da Tele­vi­sion. And who speaks those words? You won’t have to hear any­thing more than “St. Peters­burg” to rec­og­nize the voice of the one and only Orson Welles.

Welles could tell the sto­ry of any­thing, of course, and he does the expect­ed good job recount­ing that of the fall of Nico­las II, the Keren­sky regime, the Bol­she­vik takeover, and the Rus­sia that rose there­after, work­ing from a script by the Sovi­et film­mak­er Grig­ori Alexsan­drov, who co-direct­ed Eisen­stein’s film. As we lis­ten to Welles speak, we see imagery drawn from a vari­ety of sources: pho­tographs and news­pa­per clip­pings, inter­view footage, con­tem­po­rary news­reels, and even scenes from his­tor­i­cal fea­ture films about the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, espe­cial­ly Eisen­stein and Alexan­drov’s pic­ture.

I like to think that Welles appre­ci­at­ed this method of doc­u­men­tary con­struc­tion, which com­bines an over­all adher­ence to fact with occa­sion­al visu­al depar­tures from it — though the pro­duc­tion tight­ly inte­grates the “fic­tion­al” footage with the “fac­tu­al” footage, and the for­mer has in many cas­es shaped our col­lec­tive men­tal image of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion more than the lat­ter has. He would step deep into this are­na him­self less than a decade lat­er with F for Fake, his final, sui gener­is piece of film­mak­ing osten­si­bly about art forgery but real­ly, in both its form and sub­stance, about the line between the true and the false.

Watch­ing Ten Days That Shook the World here almost a half-cen­tu­ry into 1967’s future — itself a half-cen­tu­ry into 1917’s future — makes it impos­si­ble not to think about the con­tin­u­um of his­to­ry, and the shift­ing ways in which we’ve told and retold the sto­ries of those who came before us all along it. “Who dare say where the road they began to trav­el in 1917 will final­ly lead them,” asks Orson Welles of the Rus­sians at the doc­u­men­tary’s end, “and us?” The ques­tion holds up today just as it did fifty years ago — or indeed a hun­dred.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Red Men­ace: A Strik­ing Gallery of Anti-Com­mu­nist Posters, Ads, Com­ic Books, Mag­a­zines & Films

War & Peace: An Epic of Sovi­et Cin­e­ma

F for Fake: Orson Welles’ Short Film & Trail­er That Was Nev­er Released in Amer­i­ca

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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New Digital Archive, “Richard Pryor’s Peoria,” Takes You Inside the Dark, Lively World That Shaped the Pioneering Comedian

in Comedy, History | February 18th, 2016

By Scott Saul:

Richard Pry­or is a leg­endary com­ic, and for good rea­son. He had extra­or­di­nary gifts as a mim­ic, sto­ry­teller, phys­i­cal come­di­an, satirist, and impro­vis­ing actor — gifts he brought togeth­er in an act that had the dan­ger­ous elec­tric­i­ty of an unin­su­lat­ed wire. Mean­while he estab­lished a feed­back loop between his act and his per­son­al life, mak­ing use of all those stage chops to draw com­e­dy out of a life that was painful­ly full of self-sab­o­tage, may­hem, and var­i­ous forms of abuse.

It was my task, as Pryor’s biog­ra­ph­er, to probe the leg­ends of his life, start­ing with the vivid sto­ries he told of his for­ma­tive years in the red-light dis­trict of Peo­ria, Illi­nois. In his stage act and rem­i­nis­cences, Pry­or relat­ed how he’d been raised in a broth­el by a grand­moth­er and father who worked, respec­tive­ly, as madam and pimp, and how he had both suf­fered at their hands and learned from them. He told, too, how he’d made his way in a larg­er world that, while bru­tal, was also touched with grace — that grace he felt when he ven­tured onstage, at school or in a club, and start­ed to find him­self as a per­former. 

 young pryor

Ear­li­er biog­ra­phers had won­dered how much Pry­or had embell­ished his past in build­ing his act around his life sto­ry. In my research I dis­cov­ered a moth­er­lode of mate­r­i­al — fam­i­ly pho­tos, court records, news­pa­per arti­cles, and more — that not only cor­rob­o­rat­ed the out­lines of Pryor’s sto­ry but also filled in the pic­ture and gave it a his­tor­i­cal depth. I could see, for instance, how Pryor’s taboo-bust­ing com­e­dy was root­ed in his child­hood envi­ron­ment, a black work­ing-class under­ground where taboos were bust­ed on a reg­u­lar basis, and hypocrisies called to account. You can watch a short, four-minute film above that sets the sto­ry of the young Richard and his fam­i­ly against the back­drop of “Roarin’ Peo­ria.”

RP-highschool-recordslores-clip1

Ulti­mate­ly, I dis­cov­ered so much in my research into Pryor’s for­ma­tive years that I felt it couldn’t be con­tained in the book I was writ­ing (in which Pryor’s first two decades in Peo­ria make up only one of five sec­tions). So I built a dig­i­tal com­pan­ion where you can explore over 200 doc­u­ments from “Richard Pryor’s Peo­ria”. Here you can see, through the young Richard’s report card, how he strug­gled in the con­fines of Peo­ria schools. You can see, through the divorce case of his par­ents, how his moth­er (con­trary to reports that she aban­doned him) tried, unsuc­cess­ful­ly, to steal Richard away from his grand­moth­er and father, and from the red-light dis­trict itself. You can see, through the paper trail of Richard’s for­mi­da­ble grand­moth­er Marie, how she fought — with wil­i­ness and blunt force — against her abu­sive hus­band and against the sys­tem of Jim Crow. And you can vis­it the var­i­ous scenes of Richard’s youth, from his family’s tav­ern and the com­mu­ni­ty cen­ter where he first took the stage to the some­times rau­cous, some­times styl­ish clubs where he got his start as an enter­tain­er. 

Richard Pry­or was an excep­tion­al human being — a genius who changed the rules of com­e­dy in Amer­i­ca — and the web­site aims to show how the seeds of that genius were plant­ed. At the same time, it sug­gests how Pryor’s life sto­ry makes rich­er sense when set against larg­er his­tor­i­cal back­drops: the sto­ry of how the Midwest’s pre­mier “Sin City” became, dur­ing the Cold War, a lead­ing “All-Amer­i­can City”; the sto­ry of how black neigh­bor­hoods were demol­ished in “urban renew­al” efforts (Pryor’s child­hood home was itself tar­get­ed by a wreck­ing ball so that Peo­ria might be linked to an inter­state high­way); and, most of all, the sto­ry of how black Amer­i­cans, while locked into seg­re­ga­tion in the Mid­west, defied that sys­tem in inven­tive and force­ful ways.

This post is by Scott Saul, the author of Becom­ing Richard Pry­or (Harper­Collins), now out in paper­back.  He teach­es Amer­i­can his­to­ry and lit­er­a­ture at UC-Berke­ley, and also is the host of the Chap­ter & Verse pod­cast. Fol­low him on Twit­ter @scottsaul4.

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An Animated Introduction to Goethe, Germany’s “Renaissance Man”

in History, Literature | January 28th, 2016

We all know the name Goethe — some of us even know the full name, Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe. I’ve nev­er lived in the renowned 18th- and 19th-cen­tu­ry writer, politi­cian, and cul­tur­al poly­math­’s home­land of Ger­many, but even when I lived in Los Ange­les, I reg­u­lar­ly went to my local branch of the Goethe-Insti­tute for Ger­man cul­tur­al events. Even in Korea, where I live now, Goethe has left a wide if shal­low mark: you can see The Sor­rows of Young Werther in the form of an elab­o­rate stage musi­cal, for instance, and buy almost all the goods you need in life from the enor­mous con­glom­er­ate named after the young lady on whom Werther con­cen­trates his doomed affec­tions, Lotte.

But why, more than 180 years after Goethe’s death, does his name still come up in so many dif­fer­ent con­texts? And giv­en that, why do so many of us know so lit­tle about his long, var­ied, col­or­ful, and high­ly pro­duc­tive life and career? This sounds like a job for the video wing of Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life, whose short primers con­tin­ue to bring us up to speed on why the lega­cies of so many cul­tur­al fig­ures (with one sec­tion giv­en over to the lit­er­ary) have endured, or should endure. “Goethe is one of the great minds of Euro­pean civil­i­sa­tion, though his work is large­ly unknown out­side of the Ger­man speak­ing coun­tries,” says de Bot­ton in their video on Goethe: “He deserves our renewed atten­tion.”

To fill out the details pro­vid­ed in the School of Life’s video, you can read an overview of Goethe’s career (includ­ing details on the prop­er pro­nun­ci­a­tion of his name) in the accom­pa­ny­ing Book of Life entry online. It tells the sto­ry of not just Young Werther’s cre­ator, but “one of Europe’s big cul­tur­al heroes – com­pa­ra­ble to the likes of Shake­speare, Dante and Homer,” skilled in let­ters, of course, but also in “phys­i­ol­o­gy, geol­o­gy, botany and optics,” who also spent stretch­es of his career as “a diplo­mat, fash­ion guru, a senior civ­il ser­vant, a pornog­ra­ph­er, the head of a uni­ver­si­ty, a fine artist, an adven­tur­ous trav­eller, the direc­tor of a the­atre com­pa­ny and the head of a min­ing com­pa­ny.”

We might call Goethe, inso­far as he devel­oped his own mas­tery, span­ning so much of the human expe­ri­ence, a Renais­sance man out of time — but one who, in his way, out­did even the actu­al men of the Renais­sance. “We have so much to learn from him,” adds the Book of Life. “We don’t often hear peo­ple declar­ing a wish to be a lit­tle more like ‘Goethe.’ But if we did, the world would be a more vibrant and humane place.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Goethe’s The­o­ry of Col­ors: The 1810 Trea­tise That Inspired Kandin­sky & Ear­ly Abstract Paint­ing

The Tale of the Fox: Watch Ladis­las Starevich’s Ani­ma­tion of Goethe’s Great Ger­man Folk­tale (1937)

The Death Masks of Great Authors: Dante, Goethe, Tol­stoy, Joyce & More

Har­ry Clarke’s 1926 Illus­tra­tions of Goethe’s Faust: Art That Inspired the Psy­che­del­ic 60s

Eugène Delacroix Illus­trates Goethe’s Faust, “One of the Very Great­est of All Illus­trat­ed Books”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civil Rights Guide to Traveling Safely in the U.S. (1936–66)

in Books, History, Life, Travel | January 18th, 2016

Green Book Cover

Pop­u­lar enter­tain­ment has roman­ti­cized the idea of the road trip as a whol­ly spon­ta­neous adven­ture, but for mid-cen­tu­ry African Amer­i­can motorists, plan­ning was essen­tial. The lodg­ings, restau­rants, and tourist attrac­tions where they could be assured of a warm wel­come were often few and far between in the era of seg­re­ga­tion.

The Negro Trav­el­ers’ Green Book, first print­ed in 1936, was an invalu­able resource for trav­el­ers of col­or, par­tic­u­lar­ly when their route took them out­side of urban areas. In the pre-Inter­net age, pub­lish­er Vic­tor Green, a Harlem-dwelling mail­man, relied on read­ers to sup­ply feed­back and new loca­tions for sub­se­quent edi­tions:

There are thou­sands of first class busi­ness places that we don’t know about and can’t list, which would be glad to serve the trav­el­er, but it is hard to secure list­ings of these places since we can’t secure enough agents to send us the infor­ma­tion. Each year before we go to press the new infor­ma­tion is includ­ed in the new edi­tion. When you are trav­el­ing please men­tion the Green Book, in order that they might know how you found their place of busi­ness, as they can see that you are strangers. If they haven’t heard about this guide, ask them to get in touch with us so that we might list their place. If this guide has proved use­ful to you on your trips, let us know. If not, tell us also as we appre­ci­ate your crit­i­cisms and ideas in the improve­ment of this guide from which you ben­e­fit. There will be a day some­time in the near future when this guide will not have to be pub­lished. That is when we as a race will have equal oppor­tu­ni­ties and priv­i­leges in the Unit­ed States. It will be a great day for us to sus­pend this pub­li­ca­tion for then we can go wher­ev­er we please, and with­out embar­rass­ment. But until that time comes we shall con­tin­ue to pub­lish this infor­ma­tion for your con­ve­nience each year.

- from the intro­duc­tion to the 1949 edi­tion

The New York Pub­lic Library’s Schom­burg Cen­ter for Research in Black Cul­ture has dig­i­tized 21 vol­umes of its Green Book col­lec­tion for your brows­ing plea­sure. It’s a trip back in time.

Green Book Points of Interest NYC

1936’s pre­mier edi­tion is geared toward vis­i­tors spend­ing time in and around New York City. In appear­ance, it resem­bles a church bul­letin or com­mu­ni­ty the­ater pro­gram, with busi­ness card ads for beau­ty salons spe­cial­iz­ing in mar­cel wav­ing and restau­rants serv­ing South­ern home cook­ing. Pub­lish­er Green extols the won­ders of Coney Island, Chi­na­town, and the The­atri­cal Dis­trict, even as he notes that “the col­ored show hous­es are in Harlem.” He also seeks to give read­ers a laugh with “How to Keep From Grow­ing Old,” a dri­ver-spe­cif­ic list that could be read aloud from the pas­sen­ger seat for the mer­ri­ment of every­one in the car. (“In slop­py weath­er, dri­ve close to pedes­tri­ans. Dry clean­ers appre­ci­ate this.”)

Green Book Westchester

The Green Book soon swelled to include nation­al list­ings, as tourists and busi­ness trav­el­ers heed­ed Green’s call to beef up the info.

1961’s 25th anniver­sary edi­tion includes a his­to­ry of the enter­prise, a fair amount of typos, newsy updates on the staff, and a renewed promise to list the best places on the moon, should lunar trav­el become an option.

Green Book Pg 5

Green Book 25th Anniversary

Arm­chair trav­el­ers can take the NYPL’s dig­i­tized col­lec­tion out for a spin by enter­ing coor­di­nates into a map­ping fea­ture for 1947 or 1956.

Start­ing in my Indi­ana home­town with sights set on Man­hat­tan took me to the Cot­tage Restau­rant in Colum­bus, Ohio, the Jones Restau­rant in Grafton, West Vir­ginia, and the beau­ti­ful­ly named Trott Inn in Philadel­phia, before I final­ly lay my vir­tu­al head at the Amer­i­ca Hotel. (These days, it would be the Mil­len­ni­um Broad­way.)

Green Book 1956

Enjoy your trip. In the words of Vic­tor Green, “let’s all get togeth­er and make motor­ing bet­ter.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

Robert Penn War­ren Archive Brings Ear­ly Civ­il Rights to Life

Vin­tage 1930s Japan­ese Posters Artis­ti­cal­ly Mar­ket the Won­ders of Trav­el

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She doc­u­ment­ed her mis­ad­ven­tures on the road in No Touch Mon­key! And Oth­er Trav­el Lessons Learned Too Late Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Attention K‑Mart Shoppers: Hear 90 Hours of Background Music & Ads from the Retail Giant’s 1980s and 90s Heyday

in History, Music | January 18th, 2016

Back in high school, I worked part-time at the Gap, a job that, for all its dis­com­forts — the late-night restock­ing, the Sisyphean fold­ing and re-fold­ing, those head­sets — real­ly only left a bit­ter mem­o­ry because of the music. Each month, the store received a new disc of back­ground shop­ping sound­track, but only an hour-long sound­track, to be played on loop over over and over again, and so to be heard by me six or sev­en times per shift. Need­less to say, the start of a new month, and, with this, the arrival of a new mix of bland pop hits, felt like a sal­va­tion.

This sort of pro­gram­mat­ic musi­cal engi­neer­ing already had plen­ty of prece­dent by that point, as thor­ough­ly doc­u­ment­ed by Mark Davis, who spent the late 1980s and ear­ly 1990s work­ing at K‑Mart’s cus­tomer ser­vice desk and — per­haps fore­see­ing both the future ease of shar­ing audio­vi­su­al mate­ri­als over the inter­net and the waves of nos­tal­gia for the recent past that ease would enable — pock­et­ed all the shopp­ping-sound­track cas­sette tapes that passed through his hands, build­ing the impres­sive col­lec­tion you can see in the video above.

“Until around 1992, the cas­settes were rotat­ed month­ly,” writes Davis. “Then, they were replaced week­ly. Final­ly some­time around 1993, satel­lite pro­gram­ming was intro­duced which elim­i­nat­ed the need for these tapes alto­geth­er. The old­er tapes con­tain canned ele­va­tor music with instru­men­tal ren­di­tions of songs. Then, the songs became com­plete­ly main­stream around 1991. All of them have adver­tise­ments every few songs. The month­ly tapes are very, very, worn and rip­pled. That’s because they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse.”

The high­ly delib­er­ate, near-fric­tion­less mild­ness; the inter­spersed spo­ken-word adver­tise­ments and their hyp­not­i­cal­ly repet­i­tive empha­sis on low, low prices; the wob­ble and hiss of the bat­tered record­ing media; all of it adds up to a lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence his­tor­i­cal­ly and aes­thet­i­cal­ly like no oth­er. (If you enjoy this sort of thing and haven’t yet heard of the move­ment called “vapor­wave,” hie thee to Google, look it up, and pre­pare for aston­ish­ment.) You can hear over 90 hours of it at Atten­tion K‑Mart Shop­pers, Davis’ dig­i­tized repos­i­to­ry of his cas­settes at the Inter­net Archive.

If you have any mem­o­ries of shop­ping at K‑Mart twen­ty to thir­ty years ago, these tapes may bring on a rush of Prous­t­ian rec­ol­lec­tion. But not all of them scored the aver­age shop­ping day. One, for exam­ple, came just for play on March 1st, 1992, K‑Mart’s 30th anniver­sary. “This was a spe­cial day at the store where employ­ees spent all night set­ting up for spe­cial pro­mo­tions and extra excite­ment. It was a real fun day, the store was packed wall to wall, and I recall that the stores were asked to play the music at a much high­er vol­ume,” a pro­gram which includ­ed “oldies and all sorts of fun facts from 1962.” Final­ly, a way to feel nos­tal­gia for one era’s nos­tal­gia of anoth­er era. How’s that for a 21st-cen­tu­ry expe­ri­ence?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

As Benev­o­lent Dic­ta­tor, Vladimir Nabokov Would Abol­ish Muzak & Bidets: What Would Make Your List?

Why We Love Rep­e­ti­tion in Music: Explained in a New TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

Woody Allen Lives the “Deli­cious Life” in Ear­ly-80s Japan­ese Com­mer­cials

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Artist Julie Green Paints the Last Suppers of 600+ Death Row Inmates on Ceramic Plates

in Art, Food & Drink, History, Law, Life, Politics | January 15th, 2016

What would you choose for your last meal?

The com­fort food of your child­hood?

Or some lav­ish dish you nev­er had a chance to taste?

What might your choice reveal about your race, region­al ori­gins, or eco­nom­ic cir­cum­stances?

Artist Julie Green devel­oped a fas­ci­na­tion with death row inmates’ final meals while teach­ing in Okla­homa, where the per capi­ta exe­cu­tion rate exceeds Texas’ and con­demned pris­on­ers’ spe­cial menu requests are a mat­ter of pub­lic record:

Fried fish fil­lets with red cock­tail sauce from Long John Silver’s

Large pep­per­oni piz­za with sausage and extra mush­rooms and a large grape soda.

Chateaubriand steak, medi­um rare with A‑1 steak sauce, fried shrimp entree with cock­tail sauce, large baked pota­to with but­ter, sour cream, chopped scal­lions, bacon bits, salt and pep­per, six pieces of gar­lic but­ter toast, whole Ken­tucky Bour­bon pecan pie, one liter of Coca Cola Clas­sic, and bag of ice. 

Last Meal Plate

The lat­ter order, from April 29, 2014, was denied on the grounds that it would have exceed­ed the $15-per-cus­tomer max. The pris­on­er who’d made the request skipped his last meal in protest.

Green recre­ates these, and hun­dreds of oth­er death row pris­on­ers’ last sup­pers in cobalt blue min­er­al paint on care­ful­ly select­ed sec­ond-hand plates. The influ­ence of Dutch Delft­ware and Span­ish still life paint­ing are evi­dent in her depic­tion of burg­ers, Ken­tucky Fried Chick­en, and pie.

Many of the requests betray a child­like poignan­cy:

A sin­gle hon­ey bun (North Car­oli­na, Jan­u­ary 30, 1998) 

Shrimp and ice cream  (New Mex­i­co, Novem­ber 6, 2001)

 A peanut but­ter and jel­ly sand­wich (Flori­da, Feb­ru­ary 26, 2014)

One man got per­mis­sion for his moth­er to pre­pare his last meal in the prison kitchen. Anoth­er was sur­prised with a birth­day cake after prison staff learned he had nev­er had one before.

Some refrain from exer­cis­ing their right to a spe­cial request, a choice Green doc­u­ments in text. She resorts to sim­i­lar tac­tics when a pris­on­er requests that his final meal be kept con­fi­den­tial.

Final Meal Not Made Public

Each meal Green paints is accom­pa­nied by a menu, the date, and the state in which it was served, but the pris­on­ers and their crimes go unnamed. She has com­mit­ted to pro­duc­ing fifty plates a year until cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is abol­ished.

Green nar­rates a Last Sup­per slideshow above, or you can browse all the plates in the project, orga­nized by state here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Pris­on­ers Ate at Alca­traz in 1946: A Vin­tage Prison Menu

The Odd Col­lec­tion of Books in the Guan­tanamo Prison Library

Mod­ern Art Was Used As a Tor­ture Tech­nique in Prison Cells Dur­ing the Span­ish Civ­il War

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

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The New York Public Library Lets You Download 180,000 Images in High Resolution: Historic Photographs, Maps, Letters & More

in Archives, History, Letters, Literature, Photography | January 7th, 2016

NYPL 1

Most of us Open Cul­ture writ­ers and read­ers sure­ly grew up think­ing of the local pub­lic library as an end­less source of fas­ci­nat­ing things. But the New York Pub­lic Library’s col­lec­tions take that to a whole oth­er lev­el, and, so far, they’ve spent the age of the inter­net tak­ing it to a lev­el beyond that, dig­i­tiz­ing ever more of their fas­ci­nat­ing things and mak­ing them freely avail­able for all of our perusal (and even for use in our own work). Just in the past cou­ple of years, we’ve fea­tured their release of 20,000 high-res­o­lu­tion maps, 17,000 restau­rant menus, and lots of the­ater ephemera.

This week, The New York Pub­lic Library (NYPL) announced not only that their dig­i­tal col­lec­tion now con­tains over 180,000 items, but that they’ve made it pos­si­ble, “no per­mis­sion required, no hoops to jump through,” to down­load and use high-res­o­lu­tion images of all of them.

NYPL 2

You’ll find on their site “more promi­nent down­load links and fil­ters high­light­ing restric­tion-free con­tent,” and, if you have techi­er inter­ests, “updates to the Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions API enabling bulk use and analy­sis, as well as data exports and util­i­ties post­ed to NYPL’s GitHub account.” You might also con­sid­er apply­ing for the NYPL’s Remix Res­i­den­cy pro­gram, designed to fos­ter “trans­for­ma­tive and cre­ative uses of dig­i­tal col­lec­tions and data, and the pub­lic domain assets in par­tic­u­lar.”

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And what do those assets include? Endur­ing pieces of Amer­i­can doc­u­men­tary art like the Farm Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion pho­tographs tak­en dur­ing the Great Depres­sion by Dorothea Lange, Walk­er Evans, and Gor­don Parks. Lange’s shot of the Mid­way Dairy Coop­er­a­tive near San­ta Ana, Cal­i­for­nia appears at the top of the post. Arti­facts from the cre­ative process­es of such icons of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture as Hen­ry David Thore­au, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whit­man, whose hand­writ­ten pref­ace to Spec­i­men Days you’ll find sec­ond from the top. The let­ters and oth­er papers of the Found­ing Fathers, includ­ing Thomas Jef­fer­son­’s list of books for a pri­vate library just above. And, of course, all those maps, like the 1868 Plan of New York and Brook­lyn just below.

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These selec­tions make the NYPL’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion seem strong­ly Amer­i­ca-focused, and to an extent it is, but apart from host­ing a rich repos­i­to­ry of the his­to­ry, art, and let­ters of the Unit­ed States, it also con­tains such fas­ci­nat­ing inter­na­tion­al mate­ri­als as medieval Euro­pean illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts; 16th-cen­tu­ry hand­scrolls illus­trat­ing The Tale of Gen­ji, the first nov­el; and 19th-cen­tu­ry cyan­otypes of British algae by botanist and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Anna Atkins, the first per­son to pub­lish a book illus­trat­ed with pho­tos. You can start your own brows­ing on the NYPL Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions front page, and if you do, you’ll soon find that some­thing else we knew about the library grow­ing up — what good places they make in which to get lost — holds even truer on the inter­net.

nypl.digitalcollections.510d47da-ec3d-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.001.w

Relat­ed Con­tent:

100,000+ Won­der­ful Pieces of The­ater Ephemera Dig­i­tized by The New York Pub­lic Library

Food­ie Alert: New York Pub­lic Library Presents an Archive of 17,000 Restau­rant Menus (1851–2008)

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Michio Kaku & Noam Chomsky School Moon Landing and 9/11 Conspiracy Theorists

in Current Affairs, History, Psychology | January 5th, 2016

Who real­ly killed John F. Kennedy? Did Amer­i­ca real­ly land on the moon? What real­ly brought down the Twin Tow­ers? Few mod­ern phe­nom­e­na pos­sess the sheer fas­ci­na­tion quo­tient of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries. If you believe in them, you’ll of course dig into them obses­sive­ly, and if you don’t believe in them, you sure­ly feel a great curios­i­ty about why oth­er peo­ple do. Sci­ence writer and Skep­tic mag­a­zine Edi­tor in Chief Michael Sher­mer falls, need­less to say, into the sec­ond group; so far into it that exam­in­ing con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and those who sub­scribe to them has become one of his best-known pro­fes­sion­al pur­suits since at least 1997, the year of his straight­for­ward­ly titled book Why Peo­ple Believe Weird Things.

On the 50th anniver­sary of JFK’s assas­si­na­tion, Sher­mer wrote an arti­cle in the Los Ange­les Times about the rea­sons that event has drawn so many avid con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists over the past half-decade. First: their cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance result­ing from the two seem­ing­ly incom­pat­i­ble ideas, that of JFK “as one of the most pow­er­ful peo­ple on Earth” and JFK “killed by Lee Har­vey Oswald, a lone los­er, a nobody.” Sec­ond: their par­tic­i­pa­tion in a mono­log­i­cal belief sys­tem, “a uni­tary, closed-off world­view in which beliefs come togeth­er in a mutu­al­ly sup­port­ive net­work.” Third: their con­fir­ma­tion bias, or “the ten­den­cy to look for and find con­firm­ing evi­dence for what you already believe” — the umbrel­la man, the grassy knoll — “and to ignore dis­con­firm­ing evi­dence.”

These fac­tors all come into play with the oth­er major Amer­i­can con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries as well. In the pod­cast clip at the top of the post, you can hear physi­cist Michio Kaku try­ing to set straight a moon land­ing con­spir­a­cy the­o­rist. They argue that man has nev­er set foot on the moon, but that the gov­ern­ment instead hood­winked us into believ­ing it with an elab­o­rate audio­vi­su­al pro­duc­tion (direct­ed, some the­o­rists insist, by none oth­er than Stan­ley Kubrick, who sup­pos­ed­ly “con­fessed” in fake inter­view footage that recent­ly made the inter­net rounds). Should you require fur­ther argu­ment to the con­trary, have a look at S.G. Collins’ Moon Hoax Not just above.

No high­er-pro­file set of con­spir­a­cy-the­o­ry move­ment has come out of recent his­to­ry than the 9/11 Truthers, who may dif­fer on the details, but who all gath­er under the umbrel­la of believ­ing that the events of that day hap­pened not because of the actions of a con­spir­a­cy of for­eign ter­ror­ists, but because of a con­spir­a­cy with­in the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment itself. In the Q&A footage above (orig­i­nal­ly uploaded, in fact, by a believ­er), one such the­o­rist stands up and asks lin­guist and activist Noam Chom­sky to join in on the move­ment, point­ing to a cov­er-up of the man­ner in which 7 World Trade Cen­ter col­lapsed — a big “smok­ing gun” of the larg­er con­spir­a­cy, in their eyes.

This prompts Chom­sky to offer an expla­na­tion of how sci­en­tists and engi­neers actu­al­ly go look­ing for the truth. Have they elim­i­nat­ed entire­ly their cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance, mono­log­i­cal belief sys­tems, and con­fir­ma­tion bias­es? No human could ever do that per­fect­ly — indeed, to be human is to be sub­ject to all these dis­tort­ing con­di­tions and more — but the larg­er enter­prise of sci­ence, at its best, frees us lit­tle by lit­tle from those very shack­les. What a shame to vol­un­tar­i­ly clap one­self back into them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michio Kaku Schools a Moon Land­ing-Con­spir­a­cy Believ­er on His Sci­ence Fan­tas­tic Pod­cast

Stan­ley Kubrick Faked the Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing in 1969, Or So the Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry Goes

Noam Chom­sky Schools 9/11 Truther; Explains the Sci­ence of Mak­ing Cred­i­ble Claims

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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