If you’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s new Oppenheimer film, you may want to turn your attention to another film, the 1965 documentary called Oppenheimer: The Decision to Drop the Bomb. With it, you can hear directly from J. Robert Oppenheimer and other architects of the first atomic bomb. Released on NBC News’ official YouTube channel, the film captures their reflections two decades after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also features a coda by presidential historian Michael Beschloss. As one YouTube commenter put it, “This is something everyone should see. I was totally engrossed and captivated. History brought to life by the very people that were involved. Thank you NBC archives.” You can watch it above…
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How’s this for fusion? Here we have The Sachal Studios Orchestra, based in Lahore, Pakistan, playing an innovative cover of “Take Five,” the jazz standard written by Paul Desmond and performed by The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959. (Watch them perform it here.) Before he died in 2012, Brubeck called it the “most interesting” version he had ever heard. Once you watch the performance above, you’ll know why.
According to The Guardian, The Sachal Studios Orchestra was created by Izzat Majeed, a philanthropist based in London. When Pakistan fell under the dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq during the 1980s, Pakistan’s classical music scene fell on hard times. Many musicians were forced into professions they had never imagined — selling clothes, electrical parts, vegetables, etc. Whatever was necessary to get by. Today, many of these musicians have come together in a 60-person orchestra that plays in a state-of-the-art studio, designed partly by Abbey Road sound engineers.
In 1880, architect Thomas W. Cutler endeavored to introduce his fellow Brits to Japanese art and design, a subject that remained novel for many Westerners of the time, given how recently the Tokugawa shogunate had “kept themselves aloof from all foreign intercourse, and their country jealously closed against strangers.”
Having written positively of China’s influence on Japanese artists, Cutler hoped that access to Western art would not prove a corrupting factor:
The fear that a bastard art of a very debased kind may arise in Japan, is not without foundation…The European artist, who will study the decorative art of Japan carefully and reverently, will not be in any haste to disturb, still less to uproot, the thought and feeling from which it has sprung; it is perhaps the ripest and richest fruit of a tree cultivated for many ages with the utmost solicitude and skill, under conditions of society peculiarly favorable to its growth.
Having never visited Japan himself, Cutler relied on previously published works, as well as numerous friends who were able to furnish him with “reliable information upon many subjects,” given their “long residence in the country.”
That said, Cutler emerges as a robust admirer of Japan’s painting, lacquerware, ceramics, calligraphy, textiles, metalwork, enamelwork and netsuke carvings, the latter of which are “are often marvelous in their humor, detail, and even dignity.”
Only Japan’s wooden architecture, which he confidently pooh poohed as little more than “artistic carpentry, decoration, and gardening”, cleverly designed to withstand earthquakes, get shown less respect.
Cutler’s renderings of Japanese design motifs, undertaken in his free time, are the lasting legacy of his book, particularly for those on the prowl for copyright-free graphics.
Cutler observed that the “most characteristic” element of Japanese decoration was its close ties to the natural world, adding that unlike Western designers, a Japanese artist “would throw his design a little out of the center, and cleverly balance the composition by a butterfly, a leaf, or even a spot of color.”
The below plant studies are drawn from the work of the great ukiyo‑e master Hokusai, a “man of the people” who ushered in a period of “vitality and freshness” in Japanese art.
A sampler of curved lines made with single brush strokes can be used to create clouds or the intricate scrollwork that inspired Western artists and designers of the Aesthetic Movement.
We think of the atomic bomb as a destroyer of cities, namely Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But its development also produced a city: Los Alamos, New Mexico, an officially non-existent community in which the necessary research could be conducted in secret. More recently, it became a major shooting location for Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s new movie about the titular theoretical physicist remembered as the father (or one of the fathers) of the atomic bomb based on his work as the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory. You can learn more about that laboratory, and the town of 6,000 constructed to support it, in the new Vox video above.
Los Alamos was necessary to the Manhattan Project, as the R&D of the world’s first nuclear weapon was code-named, but it wasn’t sufficient: other secret sites involved included “a nuclear reactor under a University of Chicago football field”; “the Alabama Ordinance Works, for producing heavy water”; “a large plant for the enrichment of uranium and production of some plutonium” in Oak Ridge, Tennessee”; and the Hanford Engineer Works in Washington State, which produced even more plutonium.
But the bomb itself was created in Los Alamos, into whose isolation Oppenheimer recruited the likes of Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Richard Feynman, and other powerful scientific minds — who brought their wives and children along.
As a 1944 Medical Corp memo warned, the “intellectuals” at Los Alamos would “seek more medical care than the average person”; at the same time, one-fifth of the married women there were pregnant, so up went maternity wards as well. The population of Los Alamos grew so rapidly that “hutments were a common form of accommodation,” though “apartment buildings were also available.” The housing sat alongside “facilities for graphite fabrication, and the cyclotron and Van de Graaff machines.” Less than 250 miles south lay what, in the summer of 1945, would become the site of the Trinity test. It was there, gazing upon the explosion of the unprecedented nuclear weapon whose development he’d overseen, that Oppenheimer saw not merely a destroyer of cities, but a destroyer of worlds.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
At the center of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a device quite like the real ancient Greek artifact known as the Antikythera mechanism, which has been called the world’s oldest computer. “Every Indiana Jones adventure needs an exotic MacGuffin,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Meilan Solly, and in this latest and presumably last installment in its series, “the hero chases after the Archimedes Dial, a fictionalized version of the Antikythera mechanism that predicts the location of naturally occurring fissures in time.” After undergoing Indiana Jonesification, in other words, the Antikythera mechanism becomes a time machine, a function presumably not included in even the least responsible archaeological speculations about its still-unclear set of functions.
But according to Jo Marchant, author of Decoding the Heavens: Solving the Mystery of the World’s First Computer, the Antikythera mechanism really is “a time machine in a sense. When you turn the handle on the side, you are moving backward in time, you’re controlling time. You’re seeing the universe either being fast-forwarded or reversed, and you’re choosing the speed and can set it to any moment in history that you want.”
She refers to the fact that a handle on the side of the mechanism controls gears within it, which engage to compute and display “the positions of celestial bodies, the date, the timing of athletic games. There’s a calendar, there’s an eclipse prediction dial, and there are inscriptions giving you information about what the stars are doing.”
It seems that the Antikythera mechanism could tell you “everything you need to know about the state and workings of the cosmos,” at least if you’re an ancient Greek. But it also tells us something important about the ancient Greeks themselves: specifically, that they’d developed much more sophisticated mechanical engineering than we’d known before the early twentieth century, when the device was discovered in a shipwreck. According to the BBC video above on the details of the Antikythera mechanism’s known capabilities, Arthur C. Clarke thought that “if the ancient Greeks had understood the capabilities of the technology, then they would have reached the moon within 300 years.” A grand old civilization that turns out to have been on a course for outer space: now there’s a viable premise for the next big architectural adventure film franchise.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
In the age of fast fashion, when planned obsolescence, cheap materials, and shoddy construction have become the norm, how startling to encounter a stylish women’s boot that’s truly built to last…
…like, for 2300 years.
It helps to have landed in a Scythian burial mound in Siberia’s Altai Mountains, where the above boot was discovered along with a number of nomadic afterlife essentials—jewelry, food, weapons, and clothing.
These artifacts (and their mummified owners) were well preserved thanks to permafrost and the painstaking attention the Scythians paid to their dead.
As curators at the British Museum wrote in advance of the 2017 exhibition Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia:
Nomads do not leave many traces, but when the Scythians buried their dead they took care to equip the corpse with the essentials they thought they needed for the perpetual rides of the afterlife. They usually dug a deep hole and built a wooden structure at the bottom. For important people these resembled log cabins that were lined and floored with dark felt – the roofs were covered with layers of larch, birch bark and moss. Within the tomb chamber, the body was placed in a log trunk coffin, accompanied by some of their prized possessions and other objects. Outside the tomb chamber but still inside the grave shaft, they placed slaughtered horses, facing east.
18th-century watercolor illustration of a Scythian burial mound. Archive of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg
The red cloth-wrapped leather bootie, now part of the State Hermitage Museum’s collection, is a stunner, trimmed in tin, pyrite crystals, gold foil and glass beads secured with sinew. Fanciful shapes—ducklings, maybe?—decorate the seams. But the true mindblower is the remarkable condition of its sole.
Become better acquainted with Scythian boots by making a pair, as ancient Persian empire reenactor Dan D’Silva did, documenting the process in a 3‑part series on his blog. How you bedazzle the soles is up to you.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
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“If you want to understand ancient Rome, its architecture, its history, the sprawl of the Roman Empire, you’ve got to go Rome.” So says archaeologist Darius Arya in the video above, making a fair, if obvious, point. “But you also have to go to the Vesuvian cities”: that is, the settlements located near the volcano Mount Vesuvius on the Gulf of Naples. “You have to go to Herculaneum. You must go to Pompeii. Not just because they’re famous, but because of the level of preservation.” This preservation was a side effect of the explosion of Vesuvius in 79 AD, which destroyed all life in Herculaneum and Pompeii, but also kept the basic structures of both cities intact; visiting either one today allows us to “get immersed in the world of the Romans.”
He does so with high-resolution travel footage, but also with his explanations of the city’s architecture and urban planning, breaking down the details of everything from its grand Forum (“anticipating modern practice by almost 2,000 years” as a “pedestrian-only precinct”) to its complexes of baths, to its thermopolia (“essentially ancient fast-food restaurants”). Even more revealing are its humbler features, such as the stepping-stones across streets that allowed citizens to avoid “the rainwater, sewage, and animal waste that would accumulate there.”
“Almost every building in Pompeii has interior wall paintings, from private residences to public spaces such as baths and markets,” says Bravo, and these omnipresent works of art “offer valuable insights into the everyday life and cultural values of ancient Roman society.” (And indeed, they’re still offering new ones: just last month, a rediscovered Pompeiian fresco showed the world an ancient precursor to pizza.) They also evidence the surprising popularity of trompe-l’œil, where artists create the illusion of walls constructed from solid marble, or even lush outdoor spaces. Even the already-grand Domus Romana, the form of housing of choice for affluent Pompeiians, incorporated paintings to look grander still. Even once you make it, as the ancients clearly knew, you’ve still got to fake it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
A lesser advertised joy of working in food service is achieving command of the slang:
Monkey dish…
Deuces and four tops…
Fire, flash, kill…
As you may have noticed, we here at Open Culture have an insatiable hunger for vintage lingo and it doesn’t get much more vintage than The Boke of Kervynge (The Book of Carving).
This 1508 manual was published for the benefit of young noblemen who’d been placed in affluent households, to learn the ropes of high society by serving the sovereigns.
Few families could afford to serve meat, let alone whole animals, so understandably, the presentation and carving of these precious entrees was not a thing to be undertaken lightly.
The influential London-based publisher Wynkyn de Worde compiled step-by-step instructions for getting different types of meat, game and fish from kitchen to plate, as well as what to serve on seasonal menus and special occasions like Easter and the Feast of St. John the Baptist.
The book opens with the list of “goodly termes” above, essential vocab for any young man eager to prove his skills around the carcass of a deer, goose, or lobster.
There’s nothing here for vegetarians, obviously. And some 21st-century carnivores may find themselves blanching a bit at the thought of tearing into a heron or porpoise.
If, however, you’re a medieval lad tasked with “disfiguring” a peacock, closely observed by an entire dining table of la crème de la crème, The Boke of Kervyngeis a lifesaver.
(It also contains some invaluable tips for meeting expectations should you find yourself in the position of chaumberlayne, Marshall or usher.)
In any event, let’s spice up our vocabulary while rescuing some aged culinary terms from obscurity.
Don’t be surprised if they work their way into an episode of The Bear next season, though you should also feel free to use them metaphorically.
And don’t lose heart if some of the terms are a bit befuddling to modern ears. Lists of Note’s Shaun Usher has taken a stab at truffling up some modern translations for a few of the less familiar sounding words, wisely refraining from hazarding a guess as to the meaning of “fruche that chekyn”.
(It’s not the “chekyn” part giving us pause…)
Termes of a keruer —Terms of a carver
Breke that dere — break that deer
lesche y brawne — leach the brawn
rere that goose — rear that goose
lyft that swanne — lift that swan
sauce that capon — sauce that capon
spoyle that henne — spoil that hen
fruche that chekyn — ? that chicken
vnbrace that malarde — unbrace that mallard
vnlace that cony — unlace that coney
dysmembre that heron — dismember that heron
dysplaye that crane — display that crane
dysfygure that pecocke —disfigure that peacock
vnioynt that bytture — unjoint that bittern
vntache that curlewe — untack that curlew
alaye that fesande — allay that pheasant
wynge that partryche — wing that partridge
wynge that quayle — wing that quail
mynce that plouer — mince that plover
thye that pegyon — thigh that pigeon
border that pasty — border that pasty
thye all maner of small byrdes — thigh all manner of small birds
tymbre that fyre — timber that fire
tyere that egge — tear that egg
chyne that samon — chinethat salmon
strynge that lampraye — string that lamprey
splatte that pyke — splat that pike
sauce that playce — sauce that plaice
sauce that tenche — sauce that tench
splaye that breme — splay that bream
syde that haddocke — side that haddock
tuske that barbell — tusk that barbel
culpon that troute — culponthat trout
fynne that cheuen — fin that cheven
trassene that ele — ? that eel
traunche that sturgyon — tranchethat sturgeon
vndertraunche yt purpos — undertranch that porpoise
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