The Stay At Home Museum: Your Private, Guided Tours of Rubens, Bruegel & Other Flemish Masters

in Art, Museums, Travel | May 1st, 2020

Of the many world class muse­ums treat­ing a stuck-at-home pub­lic to vir­tu­al tours of their col­lec­tions, none inspire the resolve for future trav­el as the Stay At Home Muse­um, an ini­tia­tive of the Flan­ders tourism board.

Before the COVID-19 epi­dem­ic response demand­ed the tem­po­rary shut­ter­ing of all such attrac­tions, the region was enter­ing the final year of a 3‑year fes­ti­val cel­e­brat­ing such Flem­ish mas­ters as Jan Van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel, and Peter Paul Rubens.

Its web­site appeals to young, hip vis­i­tors by match­ing inter­ests with celebri­ty tour guides: Bac­chus (as ren­dered by Rubens) for eat­ing and drink­ing in an arty atmos­phere and Rubens’ Venus for cul­tur­al­ly respon­si­ble shop­ping and dia­mond admir­ing.

Oth­er entic­ing prospects we can’t take advan­tage of at present:

A down­load­able Bruegel walk­ing tour map

Rubens-inspired beer tourism

A Flem­ish Mas­ters itin­er­ary for chil­dren

An open air aug­ment­ed real­i­ty expe­ri­ence based on Bruegel’s The Fight Between Car­ni­val and Lent

Our sad­ness at miss­ing these can­not be chalked up to FOMO. Right now, the whole world is miss­ing out.

So, con­sid­er the Stay At Home Muse­um a pre­view, some­thing to help us enjoy our trips to the region all the more at some point in the future, by edu­cat­ing our­selves on the painters who made Flan­ders famous.

The series is also a treat for the Zoom weary. The expert guides aren’t fac­ing their web­cams at home, but rather using their high lev­el access to lead us through the emp­ty muse­ums in which the exhibits are still installed.

No jostling…

No crowd­ing in front of the most cel­e­brat­ed pieces…

No inane lunch-relat­ed chat­ter from tourists who aren’t into art as deeply as you are…

Above, Van Eyck expert Till-Hol­ger Borchert, Direc­tor of Musea Bruges, ori­ents us to the artist and his work, most notably the Ghent altar­piece, aka Ado­ra­tion of the Mys­tic Lamb, a 12-pan­el polyp­tych that Van Eyck worked on with Hugo, the old­er broth­er who died 6 years before its com­ple­tion.

Pay close atten­tion to Adam and Eve’s body hair. Borchert cer­tain­ly does.

He also sheds a lot of inter­est­ing light on the sig­nif­i­cance of mate­ri­als, fram­ing choic­es, and com­po­si­tion.

The restored altar­piece was slat­ed to be rein­stalled in its orig­i­nal home of Ghent’s Saint Bavo’s Cathe­dral, fol­low­ing the sched­uled clos­ing of Jan van Eyck: An Opti­cal Rev­o­lu­tion—April 30, 2020.

The Roy­al Muse­um of Fine Art’s direc­tor Michel Draguet takes us on a French-speak­ing jour­ney inside Bruegel’s paint­ing, The Fall of the Rebel Angels.

Ben Van Bene­den, the direc­tor of the Rubens House, invites us into Ruben’s “art gallery room”—something no self-respect­ing wealthy poly­glot diplomat/aesthete who’s also a Baroque painter would do with­out, appar­ent­ly.

The peek at Rubens’ gar­den is nice too, espe­cial­ly for those of us with no pri­vate out­door space of our own.

Jump­ing ahead to the Bel­gian avant-garde of the late nine­teenth and ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­turies, cura­tor Mieke Mels of Ostennd’s the Mu.ZEE spills the beans on why native son, James Ensor, shield­ed his 1888 mas­ter­piece Christ’s Entry into Brus­sels from the pub­lic view for 3 decades.

This episode has been trans­lat­ed into Inter­na­tion­al Sign Lan­guage for deaf and hear­ing impaired view­ers.

A fifth and alleged­ly final episode is forth­com­ing. View a playlist of all Stay At Home Muse­um episodes here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of 30 World-Class Muse­ums & Safe­ly Vis­it 2 Mil­lion Works of Fine Art

14 Paris Muse­ums Put 300,000 Works of Art Online: Down­load Clas­sics by Mon­et, Cézanne & More

The British Muse­um Puts 1.9 Mil­lion Works of Art Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. It’s been so long since she vis­it­ed Bel­gium, she can’t remem­ber if her indis­cre­tion in the Bruges youth hos­tel made it into her trav­el mem­oir, No Touch Mon­key! And Oth­er Trav­el Lessons Learned Too Late. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Experience New York City’s Fabled Mid-Century Nightclubs in an Interactive, COVID-19-Era, Student-Designed Exhibit

in Design, Education, History, Museums, Technology, Travel | April 24th, 2020

It’s been over a month since pub­lic health pre­cau­tions led almost every school in the Unit­ed States to switch to online instruc­tion.

While there are obvi­ous­ly much greater tragedies unfold­ing dai­ly, it’s hard not to empathize with stu­dents who have watched count­less spe­cial events—proms, com­mence­ments, spring sports, per­for­mances, hot­ly antic­i­pat­ed rites of passage—go poof.

In New York City, stu­dents in Par­sons School of Design’s Nar­ra­tive Spaces: Design Tools for Spa­tial Sto­ry­telling course were crest­fall­en to learn that their upcom­ing open-to-the-pub­lic exhi­bi­tion of group and solo projects in the West Village—the cen­ter­piece of the class and a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­nect with an audi­ence out­side of the classroom—was sud­den­ly off the menu.

Mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary artist Jeff Stark, who co-teach­es the class with Pamela Park­er, was dis­ap­point­ed on their behalves.

Stark’s own work, from Empire Dri­ve In to Miss Rock­away Arma­da, is root­ed in live expe­ri­ence, and New York City holds a spe­cial place in his heart. (He also edits the week­ly email list Non­sense NYC, an invalu­able resource for inde­pen­dent art and Do-It-Your­self events in the city.)

This year’s class projects stemmed from vis­its to the City Reli­quary, a small muse­um and civic orga­ni­za­tion cel­e­brat­ing every­day New York City arti­facts. Stu­dents were able to get up close and per­son­al with Chris Engel’s col­lec­tion of pho­tographs, menus, pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als, and sou­venirs doc­u­ment­ing the hey­day of New York’s sup­per club nightlife, from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Stu­dent Rylie Cooke, an Aus­tralian who aspires to launch a design com­pa­ny, found that her research deep­ened her con­nec­tion to arti­facts she encoun­tered at the Reli­quary, as she came to appre­ci­ate the fabled Copaca­bana’s influ­ence on the pop­u­lar cul­ture, food, and music of the peri­od:

… with COVID-19 it became impor­tant to have this con­nec­tion to the arti­facts as I was­n’t able to phys­i­cal­ly touch or look at them when Par­sons moved to online for the semes­ter. I am a very hands-on cre­ative and I love curat­ing things, espe­cial­ly in an exhib­it for­mat.

Rather than scrap their goal of pub­lic exhi­bi­tion, the class decid­ed to take things into the vir­tu­al realm, hus­tling to adapt their orig­i­nal con­cepts to a pure­ly screen-based expe­ri­ence, The New York Sup­per Club: From Nightlife to Social Dis­tanc­ing.

The plan to wow vis­i­tors with a peri­od-appro­pri­ate table in the cen­ter of their West Vil­lage exhi­bi­tion space became a grid of dig­i­tal place­mats that serve as por­tals to each project.

Cooke’s con­tri­bu­tion, A Seat at the Copaca­bana, begins with an inter­view in which base­ball great Mick­ey Man­tle recounts get­ting into a cloak­room brawl as he and fel­low New York Yan­kees cel­e­brat­ed a birth­day with a Sam­my Davis Jr. set. Recipes for steak and pota­toes, Chick­en a la King, rarebit, and arroz con pol­lo pro­vide fla­vor for a floor­show rep­re­sent­ed by archival footage of “Let’s Do the Copaca­bana” star­ring Car­men Miran­da, a Mar­tin and Lewis appear­ance, and a dance rehearsal from 1945. The tour ends at the Copa’s cur­rent incar­na­tion in Times Square, with a vision of pre-social­ly dis­tanced con­tem­po­rary mer­ry­mak­ers sal­sa-ing the night away.

(Nav­i­gate this exhib­it using tool­bar arrows at the bot­tom of the screen.)

Stu­dent Hongxi Chen’s inves­ti­ga­tions into The Chi­na Doll night­club result­ed in an elab­o­rate inter­ac­tive immer­sive expe­ri­ence on the top­ic of cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion:

The Chi­na Doll… was found­ed in 1946 by Cau­casian stage pro­duc­er Tom Ball, who deemed it the only “all-ori­en­tal” night club in New York. While the club some­times played off “Ori­en­tal” stereo­types, and titled one of its shows “Slant-Eyed Scan­dals,” they fea­tured Asian dancers and Asian singers pre­sent­ing pop­u­lar songs in a way New York­ers had nev­er seen before. The Dim inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence unfolds with the sto­ry of Thomas, a wait­er at the Chi­na Doll.

As a junior in Par­sons’ Design and Tech­nol­o­gy pro­gram, Chen had plen­ty of pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ence forg­ing vir­tu­al envi­ron­ments, but work­ing with a muse­um col­lec­tion was new to him, as was col­lab­o­rat­ing on a vir­tu­al plat­form.

He sought Stark’s advice on cre­at­ing vivid dia­logue for his fic­tion­al wait­er.

Jiaqi Liuan, a Design and Tech­nol­o­gy MFA stu­dent and vet­er­an of the Shang­hai pro­duc­tion of Sleep No More, Punchdrunk’s immer­sive retelling of Mac­Beth, helped chore­o­graph Chen’s Chi­na Doll dancers in an homage to The Flower Drum Song’s Fan Tan Fan­nie num­ber.

Chen stayed up until 7 am for two weeks, devour­ing open source tuto­ri­als in an attempt to wran­gle and debug the many ele­ments of his ambi­tious project—audio, video, char­ac­ter mod­els and ani­ma­tion, soft­ware, game engines, and game serv­er plat­form.

As Chen not­ed at the exhibition’s recent Zoom open­ing (an event that was fol­lowed by a dig­i­tal dance par­ty), the mas­sive game can be a bit slow to load. Don’t wor­ry, it’s worth the wait, espe­cial­ly as you will have a hand in the sto­ry, steer­ing it to one of five dif­fer­ent end­ings.

Chen, an inter­na­tion­al stu­dent, could not safe­ly return to Chi­na and has not left his stu­dent apart­ment since mid-March, but game­ly states that remain­ing in the same time zone as his school allowed him to com­mu­ni­cate effi­cient­ly with his pro­fes­sors and the major­i­ty of his class­mates. (Cooke is back home in Aus­tralia.)

Adds Chen:

Even though we are fac­ing a dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stance under the pan­dem­ic and had to piv­ot our orig­i­nal ideas into a vir­tu­al pre­sen­ta­tion, I’m glad that our class was able to quick­ly change plans and adapt to the sit­u­a­tion. This… actu­al­ly inspired me a lot and opened up ways to invite and con­nect peo­ple with vir­tu­al art­work.

Oth­er high­lights of The New York Sup­per Club: From Nightlife to Social Dis­tanc­ing include Ming Hong Xian’s explo­ration of the famous West Vil­lage coun­try music club, The Vil­lage Barn (com­plete with tur­tle races) and What Are You? a per­son­al­i­ty test devised by Mi Ri Kim and Eleanor Mel­by, to help vis­i­tors deter­mine which clas­sic NYC sup­per club best suits their per­son­al­i­ty.

(Appar­ent­ly, I’m head­ed to Cafe Zanz­ibar, below, where the drinks are cheap, the aspirin is free, and Cab Cal­loway is a fre­quent head­lin­er.)

Stark admits that ini­tial­ly, his stu­dents may not have shared his swoon­ing response to the source mate­r­i­al, but they share his love of New York City and the desire to “get in the thick of it.” By bring­ing a Gen­er­a­tion Z per­spec­tive to this his­tor­i­cal ephemera, they stake a claim, mak­ing work that could help the City Reli­quary con­nect to a new audi­ence.

Enter The New York Sup­per Club: From Nightlife to Social Dis­tanc­ing here.

Explore the City Reli­quary online here, and join in the civic pride by par­tic­i­pat­ing in its week­ly Insta­gram Live events, includ­ing Thurs­day Col­lec­tors’ Nights.

(All images used with per­mis­sion of the artists and The City Reli­quary)

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

See New York City in the 1930s and Now: A Side-by-Side Com­par­i­son of the Same Streets & Land­marks

New York City: A Social His­to­ry (A Free Online Course from N.Y.U.) 

The Lost Neigh­bor­hood Buried Under New York City’s Cen­tral Park

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Her con­tri­bu­tion to art in iso­la­tion is a hasti­ly assem­bled trib­ute to the clas­sic 60s social line dance, The Madi­son. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How to Paint Water Lilies Like Monet in 14 Minutes

in Art, Travel | April 17th, 2020

Some of us are using this peri­od of self-iso­la­tion to make sour­dough.

Oth­ers are learn­ing to play an instru­ment or ini­ti­at­ing a dai­ly yoga prac­tice.

For those con­sid­er­ing tak­ing up paint­ing, David Dun­lop’s Emmy-Award win­ning PBS series Land­scapes Through Time offers an excel­lent alter­na­tive (or sup­ple­ment) to the well-estab­lished joys of cult fig­ure Bob Ross, the eter­nal king of tele­vi­sion art instruc­tion.

Like Ross, Dun­lop has a mel­low onscreen tem­pera­ment that pairs beau­ti­ful­ly with the enchant­i­ng set­ting of Claude Monet’s famous water gar­den, above.

(Those who’ve vis­it­ed Monet’s house and gar­den at Giverny will envy him his tourist-free access to the site. Even those with no inten­tion of pick­ing up a brush should find it restora­tive to spend time gaz­ing at the same love­ly view that Dun­lop, like Mon­et before him, looks at through a delib­er­ate­ly Impres­sion­is­tic squint.)

He packs a lot of art appre­ci­a­tion into 14 eas­i­ly digest­ed min­utes, touch­ing on art his­to­ry, brush tech­nique, com­po­si­tion, use of light, and, in par­tic­u­lar, col­or the­o­ry.

When the muse­ums reopen, you may find this crash course has enhanced your enjoy­ment, espe­cial­ly as per­tains to can­vas­es by Mon­et and his fel­low Impres­sion­ists.

For those pur­su­ing the hands-on oil paint­ing expe­ri­ence, Dun­lop pro­vides a sup­ply list of col­ors, all read­i­ly avail­able:

Cobalt Blue

Cad­mi­um Yel­low

Alizarin Crim­son

Ultra­ma­rine

Bril­liant Rose

Emer­ald Green

Hooker’s Green

Tita­ni­um White

His brush­es and paper appear to be gar­den vari­ety, and his approach, like Ross’, is fast and loose.

Those who favor a less brazen approach may feel more at home with his water­col­or paint­ing demon­stra­tion in Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Vic­toire in Provence, France, below.

There are more excerpts and instruc­tion on Dunlop’s YouTube chan­nel. For those wish­ing to take it to the next lev­el, Dun­lop is teach­ing a series of inter­ac­tive stu­dio demon­stra­tion class­es via Zoom. Reg­is­ter here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Rare 1915 Film Shows Claude Mon­et at Work in His Famous Gar­den at Giverny

Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Paint­ing Free Online: 403 Episodes Span­ning 31 Sea­sons

Bob Ross’ Christ­mas Spe­cial: Cel­e­brate, Relax, Nod Off

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her art in iso­la­tion has tak­en the form of a hasti­ly assem­bled trib­ute to the clas­sic 60s social line dance, The Madi­son. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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See Web Cams of Surreally Empty City Streets in Venice, New York, London & Beyond

in Current Affairs, Travel | April 16th, 2020

The lack of human pres­ence in major­ly pol­lut­ed cities these past cou­ple months has had some peo­ple see­ing utopias as the skies begin to clear. But emp­ty cities seem a lit­tle more dystopi­an to me. Dystopias are “a kind of sur­re­al­ism,” writes Kim Stan­ley Robin­son. They unearth the dream­like dread beneath the veneer of the nor­mal. No mat­ter when they’re set, dystopias don’t depict the future so much as “the feel­ing of the present… height­ened by exag­ger­a­tion to a kind of dream or night­mare.” The events in dystopi­an fic­tion approach the truth of someone’s sit­u­a­tion some­where in the world and make vis­i­ble what has been hid­den.

We know ghost cities exist as ancient dis­as­ters like Pom­peii and Her­cu­la­neum and mod­ern ones like Pripy­at, Ukraine, out­side Cher­nobyl. But there are more of them than many of us know. Gleam­ing cities like Ash­ga­bat, Turk­menistan, which broke ground in 1991 and con­tains the largest num­ber of mar­ble build­ings in the world.

The 4.5 mil­lion square meter metrop­o­lis has almost no inhab­i­tants, an enor­mous gov­ern­ment fol­ly. Towns and cities around the world have been aban­doned for for all sorts of rea­sons, and they con­tin­ue to as sea lev­els rise. Which is what makes view­ing live cam­era footage of some of the world’s most icon­ic streets—almost com­plete­ly emp­tied by the pan­dem­ic at the height of tourist season—so… sur­re­al.

It’s true that peo­ple haven’t fled these cities, but made cozy bunkers of their apart­ments. Yet see­ing the vacant streets live on cam­era, in Venice, Lon­don, New York, and else­where in the world,  I get the uncan­ny feel­ing of look­ing at pro­to-sur­re­al­ist painter Gior­gio de Chirico’s The Enig­ma of a Day, a depic­tion of a shad­owy, unin­hab­it­ed street through which we expect the Ital­ian ver­sion of a tum­ble­weed to roll. Sur­veil­lance tech­nol­o­gy has inad­ver­tent­ly become a medi­um of mod­ernist art.

There is so much beau­ty in the live view at the top of the Ponte delle Guglie in Venice from the Hotel Filù Venezia, and there is also such lone­ly melan­choly, depend­ing on the time of day and where the shad­ows fall. See a live view of Times Square, above, and anoth­er Times Square view at Earth­Cam, where you can also catch a feed of a most­ly emp­ty Abbey Road (some times of day emp­ti­er than oth­ers, as in the ear­ly-morn­ing screen­shot below). Sky­line Web­cams hosts even more live cam­era views of Venice, includ­ing feeds from the Rial­to Bridge and the Piaz­za San Mar­co, as well as live feeds from sev­er­al sites in Pad­ua and oth­er places in Italy.

These real-time visions are trans­port­ing in their strange­ness. Are we liv­ing in the present or the future? In a dystopi­an world, there isn’t any dif­fer­ence. All futures are fore­closed by cat­a­stro­phe, “all dis­tances in time and space are shrink­ing,” wrote Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, a thinker who under­stood dis­as­ter, and who fell in line behind it. In that same essay, “The Thing” (as trans­lat­ed by Albert Hof­s­tad­er), the Ger­man philoso­pher made his famous com­ment, “the ter­ri­ble has already hap­pened.”

The ter­ri­ble that has hap­pened to us is not only a dead­ly pan­dem­ic. The virus is not like­ly to dis­ap­pear on its own; who knows how long this will go on? But not far behind the cur­rent cri­sis are more cli­mate events that threat­en to emp­ty streets. If we emp­ty cities not only as indica­tive of tem­porar­i­ly social dis­tanc­ing, but as images of the pos­si­ble near-future, maybe we’ll be far less inclined to come out of this sur­re­al expe­ri­ence and get right back to busi­ness-as-usu­al.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Venice (Its Streets, Plazas & Canals) with Google Street View

Google Lets You Take a 360-Degree Panoram­ic Tour of Street Art in Cities Across the World

Spring Break vs. COVID-19: Map­ping the Real Impact of Ignor­ing Social Dis­tanc­ing

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

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Take a Virtual Tour of the Paris Catacombs

in History, Life, Travel | March 25th, 2020

The Paris Cat­a­combs is “one of those places,” wrote pho­tog­ra­ph­er Félix Nadar, “that every­one wants to see and no one wants to see again.” If any­one would know, Nadar would. He spent three months in and out of the under­ground city of death, with its macabre piles of skulls and cross­bones, tak­ing pho­tographs (see here) that would help turn it into an inter­na­tion­al­ly famous tourist attrac­tion. In these days of quar­an­tine, no one can see it; the site is closed until fur­ther notice. But if you’re the type of per­son who enjoys tour­ing necrop­olis­es, you can still get your fix with a vir­tu­al vis­it.

Why would any­one want to do this, espe­cial­ly dur­ing a glob­al out­break? The Cat­a­combs have attract­ed seek­ers after mor­bid curiosi­ties and spir­i­tu­al and philo­soph­i­cal truths for over two hun­dred years, through rev­o­lu­tions, mas­sacres, and plagues.

A stark, haunt­ing reminder of what Nadar called “the egal­i­tar­i­an con­fu­sion of death,” they wit­ness mute­ly, with­out euphemism, to the future we are all assured, no mat­ter our rank or posi­tion. They began as a dis­or­dered pile of bones in the late 18th cen­tu­ry, trans­ferred from over­crowd­ed ceme­ter­ies and became a place where “a Merovin­gian king remains in eter­nal silence next to those mas­sa­cred in Sep­tem­ber ‘92” dur­ing the French Rev­o­lu­tion.

Con­tem­pla­tions of death, espe­cial­ly in times of war, plague, famine, and oth­er shocks and crises, have been an inte­gral part of many cul­tur­al cop­ing mech­a­nisms, and often involve med­i­ta­tions on corpses and grave­yards. The Cat­a­combs are no dif­fer­ent, a sprawl­ing memen­to mori named after the Roman cat­a­combs, “which had fas­ci­nat­ed the pub­lic since their dis­cov­ery,” as the offi­cial site notes. Expand­ed, ren­o­vat­ed, and rebuilt dur­ing the time of Napoleon and lat­er dur­ing the exten­sive ren­o­va­tions of Paris in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry, the site was first “con­se­crat­ed as the ‘Paris Munic­i­pal Ossuary’ on April 7, 1786” and opened to the pub­lic in 1809.

It is a place that reminds us how all con­flicts end. To the “litany of roy­al and impov­er­ished dead from French his­to­ry,” writes Alli­son Meier at the Pub­lic Domain Review, Nadar added in his essay on the Cat­a­combs “the names of rev­o­lu­tion­ary vic­tims and per­pe­tra­tors like Max­im­i­lien Robe­spierre and Jean-Paul Marat.” Rumi­na­tions on the uni­ver­sal nature of death may be an odd diver­sion for some, and for oth­ers an urgent reminder to find out what mat­ters to them in life. Learn more about the fas­ci­nat­ing his­to­ry of the Paris Cat­a­combs here and begin your vir­tu­al vis­it here.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Félix Nadar’s Pio­neer­ing Pho­tographs of the Paris Cat­a­combs (1861)

Notre Dame Cap­tured in an Ear­ly Pho­to­graph, 1838

19th-Cen­tu­ry Skele­ton Alarm Clock Remind­ed Peo­ple Dai­ly of the Short­ness of Life: An Intro­duc­tion to the Memen­to Mori

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

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Italians’ Nightly Singalongs Prove That Music Soothes the Savage Beast of Coronavirus Quarantine & Self-Isolation

in Health, Life, Music, Opera, Travel | March 16th, 2020

It’s not like we’re maestros…it’s a moment of joy in this moment of anx­i­ety. —Emma San­tachiara, Rome

As report­ed by The New York Times, Ms. Sanachiara, age 73, has joined the vast choir of ordi­nary Ital­ians tak­ing to their bal­conies and win­dows to par­tic­i­pate in social­ly dis­tant neigh­bor­hood sin­ga­longs as coro­n­avirus rages through their coun­try.

The Inter­net has been explod­ing with mes­sages of sup­port and admi­ra­tion for the quar­an­tined cit­i­zens’ musi­cal dis­plays, which have a fes­tive New Year’s Eve feel, espe­cial­ly when they accom­pa­ny them­selves on pot lids.

Three days ago, Rome’s first female may­or, Vir­ginia Rag­gi, called upon res­i­dents to fling open their win­dows or appear on their bal­conies for night­ly 6pm com­mu­ni­ty sings.

A woman in Turin report­ed that the pop up musi­cales have forged friend­ly bonds between neigh­bors who in pre-quar­an­tine days, nev­er acknowl­edged each other’s exis­tence.

Nat­u­ral­ly, there are some soloists.

Tenor Mau­r­izio Mar­chi­ni ser­e­nad­ed Flo­ren­tines to “Nes­sun Dor­ma,” the famous aria from Puc­cini’s opera Turan­dot, repeat­ing the high B along with a final Vin­cerò!, which earns him a clap from his young son.

In Rome, Giu­liano San­gior­gi, front­man for Negra­maro, hit his bal­cony, gui­tar in hand, to enter­tain neigh­bors with Pino Daniele’s 1980 hit “Quan­no Chiove” and his own band’s “Mer­av­iglioso.”

Ear­li­er in the year, the 11 mil­lion res­i­dents of Wuhan, Chi­na, the dead­ly epi­cen­ter of the coro­n­avirus out­break, also used music to boost morale, singing the nation­al anthem and oth­er patri­ot­ic songs from their indi­vid­ual res­i­dences. Jiāyóu, or “add oil,” was a fre­quent exhor­ta­tion, remind­ing those in iso­la­tion to stay strong and keep going.

Read­ers, are you singing with your neigh­bors from a safe dis­tance? Are they ser­e­nad­ing you? Let us know in the com­ments.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tom Waits Releas­es a Time­ly Cov­er of the Ital­ian Anti-Fas­cist Anthem “Bel­la Ciao,” His First New Song in Two Years

Bruce Spring­steen Sin­gin’ in the Rain in Italy, and How He Cre­ates Pow­er­ful Imag­i­nary Worlds

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Like most of us in this crazy, his­toric peri­od, all of her events have been can­celled. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Take a Drive Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Angeles with Vintage Through-the-Car-Window Films

in History, Travel | March 11th, 2020

Many claim Los Ange­les was “built for the car,” a half-truth at best. When the city — or rather, the city and the vast region of south­ern Cal­i­for­nia sur­round­ing it — first boomed in the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, it grew accord­ing to the spread of its elec­tric rail­way net­works. But for ear­ly adopters of the auto­mo­bile (as well as the many aspi­rants close behind), its sheer size, eas­i­ly nav­i­ga­ble ter­rain, and still-low pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty made greater Los Ange­les an ide­al place to dri­ve.

After the Sec­ond World War, the days of the Pacif­ic Elec­tric and Los Ange­les Rail­road, once among the finest urban rail sys­tems in the world, were clear­ly num­bered. Both went out of ser­vice by the ear­ly 1960s, and for the next few decades the car was indeed king. One the­o­ry holds, though with imper­fect evi­dence, that Los Ange­les lost its trains because of an automak­ers’ con­spir­a­cy.

What­ev­er the cause, the long hey­day of the auto­mo­bile and its atten­dant “car cul­ture” changed mid-20th-cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. It left its bold­est mark in the city’s archi­tec­ture, a cat­e­go­ry that must sure­ly include the swoop­ing con­crete of the free­ways, but more obvi­ous­ly includes the build­ings designed to catch the eye of a human being behind the wheel cruis­ing at speed. We notice at a dif­fer­ent scale in a car than we do on foot, and so the struc­tures along Los Ange­les’ main roads — espe­cial­ly boule­vards like Wilshire, Hol­ly­wood, and Sun­set — grew more leg­i­ble to the motorist in the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.

That means Los Ange­les’ archi­tec­ture grew ever big­ger, bold­er, more eye-catch­ing — or, depend­ing on your per­spec­tive, ever more gar­ish, ungain­ly, and imper­son­al. You can see this trans­for­ma­tion cap­tured in action from the car win­dow in the three videos fea­tured here. At the top of the post is a six-minute dri­ve through the down­town Los Ange­les of the 1940s, which begins on Bunker Hill, an area orig­i­nal­ly built up with state­ly Vic­to­ri­an hous­es in the late 19th cen­tu­ry. 

By the time of this film those hous­es had been sub­di­vid­ed into cheap apart­ments, and films noirs (such as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Dead­ly) were using it as a typ­i­cal “bad neigh­bor­hood.” That atmos­phere also made it a tar­get for a 50-year “urban renew­al” project that, start­ing in the late 50s onward, scraped the hous­es off Bunker Hill and rebuilt it with cor­po­rate tow­ers and pres­tige cul­tur­al venues.

A through-the-wind­shield view of Los Ange­les in the 50s appears in the video sec­ond from the top, a 1957 dri­ve down Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard. That street and that year stand at the inter­sec­tion of pre-war and post-war Los Ange­les, and the built envi­ron­ment reflects as much the sen­si­bil­i­ty of the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry as it does what we know think of as “mid-cen­tu­ry mod­ern.”

Below that we have a dri­ve through the city so many think of when they think of Los Ange­les: the Los Ange­les of the 1960s, a seem­ing­ly lim­it­less realm of palm trees, bright­ly col­ored bill­boards, and Space Age-influ­enced tow­ers that pop out even more from their low-slung sur­round­ings when seen from the free­way — in oth­er words, the Los Ange­les Quentin Taran­ti­no recre­ates in Once Upon a Time… in Hol­ly­wood.

To get a sense of the greater sweep of change in Los Ange­les, have a look at the New York­er video above (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) that puts the down­town dri­ve from the 1940s along­side the same dri­ve repli­cat­ed in the 2010s. Pop­u­lar cul­ture may asso­ciate Los Ange­les with the will­ful era­sure of his­to­ry as much as it asso­ciates Los Ange­les with the auto­mo­bile, but traces are there for those — in a car, on foot, on a bike, or going by any form of trans­porta­tion besides — who know how to see them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Amer­i­can Cities Then & Now: See How New York, Los Ange­les & Detroit Look Today, Com­pared to the 1930s and 1940s

Enjoy Daz­zling & Dizzy­ing 360° Vir­tu­al Tours of Los Ange­les Land­marks

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

Watch Randy Newman’s Tour of Los Ange­les’ Sun­set Boule­vard, and You’ll Love L.A. Too

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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 Face­book.

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An Artist Tricks Google Maps Into Creating a Virtual Traffic Jam, Using a Little Red Wagon & 99 Smartphones

in Google, Life, Maps, Technology, Travel | February 7th, 2020

Some­times the mirac­u­lous time-sav­ing con­ve­niences we’ve come to depend on can have the oppo­site effect, as artist Simon Wick­ert recent­ly demon­strat­ed, ambling about the streets of Berlin at a Huck Finn-ish pace, tow­ing a squeaky-wheeled red wag­on loaded with 99 sec­ond­hand smart­phones.

Each phone had a SIM card, and all were run­ning the Google Maps app.

The result?

A near-instan­ta­neous “vir­tu­al traf­fic jam” on Google Maps, even though bicy­clists seem to vast­ly out­num­ber motorists along Wick­ert’s route.

As a Google spokesper­son told 9to5 Google’s Ben Schoon short­ly after news of Wickert’s stunt began to spread:

Traf­fic data in Google Maps is refreshed con­tin­u­ous­ly thanks to infor­ma­tion from a vari­ety of sources, includ­ing aggre­gat­ed anonymized data from peo­ple who have loca­tion ser­vices turned on and con­tri­bu­tions from the Google Maps com­mu­ni­ty.

In oth­er words, had you checked your phone before head­ing out to the Baumhaus an der Mauer (Tree­house on the Wall), the Urban Art Clash Gallery, OMA’s Café, or some oth­er spot close to Wickert’s lit­tle red wagon’s trail of terror—like Google’s Berlin office—you might have thought twice about your intend­ed path, or even going at all, see­ing bridges and streets change from a free and easy green to an osten­si­bly grid­locked red.

As long as Wick­ert kept mov­ing, he was able to con­tin­ue fool­ing the algo­rithm into think­ing 99 humans were all using their phone’s Maps app for nav­i­ga­tion­al pur­pos­es in a small, con­gest­ed area.

Obvi­ous­ly, a cou­ple of bus­es could eas­i­ly be respon­si­ble for car­ry­ing 99 smart­phones in active use, but it’s unlike­ly those phones own­ers would be con­sult­ing the map app in the pas­sen­ger seats, when they could be scrolling through Insta­gram or play­ing Can­dy Crush.

Wick­ert also dis­cov­ered that his vir­tu­al traf­fic jam dis­ap­peared when­ev­er a car passed his wag­onload.

The spokesper­son who engaged with Schoon put a good-natured face on Google’s response to Wickert’s hack, say­ing, “We’ve launched the abil­i­ty to dis­tin­guish between cars and motor­cy­cles in sev­er­al coun­tries includ­ing India, Indone­sia and Egypt, though we haven’t quite cracked trav­el­ing by wag­on. We appre­ci­ate see­ing cre­ative uses of Google Maps like this as it helps us make maps work bet­ter over time.”

Mean­while, the artist’s puck­ish stunt, which he describes as a “per­for­mance and instal­la­tion,” seems anchored by sin­cere philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions, as evi­denced by the inclu­sion on his web­site of the below excerpt from “The Pow­er of Vir­tu­al Maps,” urban researcher Moritz Ahlert’s recent essay in the Ham­burg­er Jour­nal für Kul­tur­an­thro­polo­gie, :

The advent of Google’s Geo Tools began in 2005 with Maps and Earth, fol­lowed by Street View in 2007. They have since become enor­mous­ly more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced. Google’s vir­tu­al maps have lit­tle in com­mon with clas­si­cal ana­log maps. The most sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence is that Google’s maps are inter­ac­tive  – scrol­lable, search­able and zoomable. Google’s map ser­vice has fun­da­men­tal­ly changed our under­stand­ing of what a map is, how we inter­act with maps, their tech­no­log­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions, and how they look aes­thet­i­cal­ly.

In this fash­ion, Google Maps makes vir­tu­al changes to the real city. Appli­ca­tions such as Airbnb and Car­shar­ing have an immense impact on cities: on their hous­ing mar­ket and mobil­i­ty cul­ture, for instance. There is also a major impact on how we find a roman­tic part­ner, thanks to dat­ing plat­forms such as Tin­der, and on our self-quan­ti­fy­ing behav­ior, thanks to the nike jog­ging app. Or map-based food deliv­ery apps like deliv­eroo or foodo­ra. All of these apps func­tion via inter­faces with Google Maps and cre­ate new forms of dig­i­tal cap­i­tal­ism and com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion. With­out these maps, car shar­ing sys­tems, new taxi apps, bike rental sys­tems and online trans­port agency ser­vices such as Uber would be unthink­able. An addi­tion­al map­ping mar­ket is pro­vid­ed by self-dri­ving cars; again, Google has already estab­lished a posi­tion for itself.

With its Geo Tools, Google has cre­at­ed a plat­form that allows users and busi­ness­es to inter­act with maps in a nov­el way. This means that ques­tions relat­ing to pow­er in the dis­course of car­tog­ra­phy have to be refor­mu­lat­ed. But what is the rela­tion­ship between the art of enabling and tech­niques of super­vi­sion, con­trol and reg­u­la­tion in Google’s maps? Do these maps func­tion as dis­pos­i­tive nets that deter­mine the behav­ior, opin­ions and images of liv­ing beings, exer­cis­ing pow­er and con­trol­ling knowl­edge? Maps, which them­selves are the prod­uct of a com­bi­na­tion of states of knowl­edge and states of pow­er, have an inscribed pow­er dis­pos­i­tive. Google’s sim­u­la­tion-based map and world mod­els deter­mine the actu­al­i­ty and per­cep­tion of phys­i­cal spaces and the devel­op­ment of action mod­els.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Plan­e­tary Per­spec­tive: Tril­lions of Pic­tures of the Earth Avail­able Through Google Earth Engine

View and Down­load Near­ly 60,000 Maps from the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS)

Ancient Rome in 3D on Google Earth

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join Ayun’s com­pa­ny The­ater of the Apes in New York City this March for her book-based vari­ety series, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, and the world pre­miere of Greg Kotis’ new musi­cal, I AM NOBODY. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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