A Beautiful Short Documentary Takes You Inside New York City’s Last Great Chess Store

in Games, Life, Philosophy, Travel | December 14th, 2018

Chess Forum in Green­wich Vil­lage is, like Gramer­cy Type­writer and the Upper East Side’s Ten­der But­tons, the sort of shop New York­ers feel pro­tec­tive of, even if they’ve nev­er actu­al­ly crossed the thresh­old.

“How can it still exist?” is a ques­tion left unan­swered by “King of the Night,” Lone­ly Leap’s love­ly short pro­file of Chess Forum’s own­er, Imad Khachan, above, but no mat­ter. We’re just glad it does.

The store, locat­ed a block and a half south of Wash­ing­ton Square, looks old­er than it is. Khachan, hung out his shin­gle in 1995, after five years as an employ­ee of the now-defunct Vil­lage Chess Shop, a rift that riled the New York chess com­mu­ni­ty.

Now, things are much more placid, though the film incor­rect­ly sug­gests that Chess Forum is the only refuge where chess lov­ing New York­ers can avail them­selves of an impromp­tu game, take lessons, and buy sets. (There are also shops in Brook­lyn, Harlem, and the Upper East Side.) That said, Chess Forum might not be wrong to call itself “New York’s last great chess store.” It may well be the best of the last.

The nar­row shop’s inte­ri­or trig­gers nos­tal­gia with­out seem­ing cal­cu­la­tion, an organ­ic reminder of the Village’s Bohemi­an past, when beret-clad folkies, artists, and stu­dents wiled away hours at bat­tered wood­en tables in its many cheap cafes and bars. (Two blocks away, sole sur­vivor Caf­fé Reggio’s ambi­ence is intact, but the prices have kept pace with the neigh­bor­hood, and the major­i­ty of its clien­tele are clutch­ing guide­books or the dig­i­tal equiv­a­lent there­of.)

Khachan, born in Lebanon to Pales­tin­ian refugees, gives a warm wel­come to tourists and locals alike, espe­cial­ly those who might make for an uneasy fit at tonier neigh­bor­hood estab­lish­ments.

In an inter­view with the Green­wich Vil­lage Soci­ety for His­toric Preser­va­tion, he recalled a “well-dressed and high­ly edu­cat­ed doc­tor who would come in wear­ing his Har­vard logo sweater, and lose repeat­ed­ly to a home­less man who was a reg­u­lar at Chess Forum and a chess mas­ter.”

The game also pro­vides com­mon ground for strangers who share no com­mon tongue. In Jonathan Lord’s rougher New York City chess-themed doc, Pass­port Play, Khachan points out how dia­grams in chess books speak vol­umes to expe­ri­enced play­ers, regard­less of the lan­guage in which the book is writ­ten.

The store’s mot­tos also bear wit­ness to the val­ue its own­er places on face-to-face human inter­ac­tion:

Cool in the sum­mer, warm in the win­ter and fuzzy all year long.

Chess Forum: An expe­ri­ence not a trans­ac­tion

Smart peo­ple not smart phones.  (You can play a game of chess on your phone, Khachan admits, but don’t fool your­self into think­ing that it’s giv­ing you a full chess expe­ri­ence.)

An hour of play costs about the same as a small lat­te in a cof­fee­house chain (whose preva­lence Khachan refers to as the Bostoniza­tion of NYC.) Senior cit­i­zens and chil­dren, both revered groups at Chess Forum, get an even bet­ter deal—from $1/hour to free.

Although the store’s offi­cial clos­ing time is mid­night, Khachan, sin­gle and child­less, is always will­ing to oblige play­ers who would stay lat­er. His soli­tary mus­ings on the neighborhood’s wee hours trans­for­ma­tion sup­ply the film’s title and med­i­ta­tive vibe, while remind­ing us that this gen­tle New York char­ac­ter was orig­i­nal­ly drawn to the city by the specter of a PhD in lit­er­a­ture at near­by NYU.

Read­ers who would like to con­tribute to the health of this inde­pen­dent­ly owned New York City estab­lish­ment from afar can do so by pur­chas­ing a chess or backgam­mon set online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When John Cage & Mar­cel Duchamp Played Chess on a Chess­board That Turned Chess Moves Into Elec­tron­ic Music (1968)

Chess Grand­mas­ter Gar­ry Kas­parov Relives His Four Most Mem­o­rable Games

Man Ray Designs a Supreme­ly Ele­gant, Geo­met­ric Chess Set in 1920–and It Now Gets Re-Issued

A Human Chess Match Gets Played in Leningrad, 1924

A Free 700-Page Chess Man­u­al Explains 1,000 Chess Tac­tics in Plain Eng­lish

Clay­ma­tion Film Recre­ates His­toric Chess Match Immor­tal­ized in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Play Chess Against the Ghost of Mar­cel Duchamp: A Free Online Chess Game

Chess Grand­mas­ter Mau­rice Ash­ley Plays Unsus­pect­ing Trash Talk­er in Wash­ing­ton Square Park

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City through Decem­ber 20th in the 10th anniver­sary pro­duc­tion of Greg Kotis’ apoc­a­lyp­tic hol­i­day tale, The Truth About San­ta. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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

in Books, History, Travel | November 9th, 2018

As an Amer­i­can liv­ing out­side Amer­i­ca, I’m often asked how best to see my home­land by peo­ple want­i­ng to vis­it it. I always sug­gest the same method: road-trip­ping, prefer­ably across the entire con­ti­nent — a way of expe­ri­enc­ing the U.S. of A guar­an­teed to at once to con­firm and shat­ter the vis­i­tor’s pre-exist­ing per­cep­tions of the coun­try. But even under the best pos­si­ble con­di­tions, such road trips have their ardu­ous stretch­es and even their dan­gers, a fact under­stood by nobody bet­ter than by the black trav­el­ers of the Green Book era. Pub­lished between 1936 and 1967, the guide offi­cial­ly known as The Negro Motorist Green Book informed such trav­el­ers of where in Amer­i­ca (and lat­er oth­er coun­tries as well) they could have a meal, stay the night, and get their car repaired with­out prej­u­dice.

You can learn more about the Green Book (which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) from the Vox explain­er video above. Then, to get a fuller idea of the books’ con­tent, head over to the New York Pub­lic Library’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tions, where you’ll find 23 issues from the Green Book’s more than 30-year run.

Dig­i­tized by the NYPL’s Schom­burg Cen­ter for Research in Black Cul­ture, they’re free to read online and down­load. Data drawn from this archive and released into the pub­lic domain has also giv­en rise to projects like “Nav­i­gat­ing the Green Book,” where you can explore its rec­om­mend­ed places laid out on a map and even plot a trip between any two cities in Amer­i­ca accord­ing to the Green Book’s 1947 or 1956 edi­tions.

Though the Green Book ceased pub­li­ca­tion not long after the pas­sage of the Civ­il Rights Act, inter­est in the Amer­i­ca they reflect has­n’t van­ished, and has in fact grown in recent years. Acad­e­mia has pro­duced more stud­ies of Jim Crow-era trav­el over the past decade or two, and this Thanks­giv­ing will see the wide release of Green Book, Peter Far­rel­ly’s fea­ture film about the friend­ship between black pianist Don Shirley and the chauf­feur who drove him through the Deep South in the 1960s. “To flip through a Green Book is to open a win­dow into his­to­ry and per­haps to see, the tini­est amount, through the eyes of some­one who lived it,” writes K Menick on the NYPL’s blog. “Read these books; map them in your mind. Think about the trips you could take, can take, will take. See how the size of the world can change depend­ing on the col­or of your skin.” 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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

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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Pianist Plays Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Ravel & Debussy for Blind Elephants in Thailand

in Biology, Music, Nature, Travel | July 27th, 2018

Rom­sai the ele­phant wore a red rope around his neck to warn approach­ing humans that he was a dan­ger to both them and ele­phants. A dark patch on his head from a tem­po­rin secre­tion indi­cat­ed that he was in the musth cycle, which only height­ened his aggres­sion. His mahouts at the Ele­phantsWorld sanc­tu­ary in Kan­chanaburi, Thai­land observed that the old, blind ele­phant was grow­ing more dan­ger­ous with age.

And yet, he is the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of sweet­ness, as pianist Paul Bar­ton ser­e­nades him with a per­for­mance of Beethoven’s Sonata Pathé­tique, repeat­ing the melody sec­tion sev­er­al times “as he seems to like it.”

In lieu of applause, Rom­sai places his trunk over the top of Barton’s upright piano again and again, in no way aggres­sive, more the ges­ture of a grate­ful audi­ence mem­ber.

As Bar­ton, a York­shire­man who went to Thai­land over twen­ty years ago for what he thought would be a short piano teach­ing stint only to wind up mar­ry­ing a local artist and ani­mal rights activist, said in an inter­view with YourSto­ry:

All ani­mals like music. Dogs, cats, etc. But ele­phants are the clos­est to human beings in the sense that they have the same neu­rons in the brains as us. Also they have a very good mem­o­ry. If you are treat­ed bad­ly as a child, you are going to remem­ber that all your life. It’s the same with ele­phants. The ele­phant shares that part of the brain with us which has flash­backs. They can nev­er for­get the ter­ri­ble things they have seen and suf­fered… If you play clas­si­cal music to an ele­phant, some­thing soft and beau­ti­ful, some­thing that human beings have been lis­ten­ing to for hun­dreds for hun­dreds of years, some­thing that is timeless—and you play that to an ele­phant that is blind and they’ve nev­er heard music before—the reac­tion is price­less. There is a spe­cial bond between you and the ele­phant. You are com­mu­ni­cat­ing with them in a dif­fer­ent lan­guage. That lan­guage is nei­ther ours nor theirs. There is some­thing infin­i­tes­i­mal­ly won­der­ful in a piece of Beethoven that con­nects me to that ele­phant and that feel­ing is oth­er­world­ly.

The impulse to play live con­certs for Rom­sai and oth­er blind sanc­tu­ary dwellers was part­ly born from see­ing the pos­i­tive effect music had on some blind chil­dren with whom Bar­ton worked.

He also want­ed to make amends for the defor­esta­tion of the elephant’s home­land, and the way the teak indus­try exploit­ed their labor. It was while thus employed that many of them suf­fered scratched corneas and oth­er eye injuries that blind­ed them, ren­der­ing them dou­bly vul­ner­a­ble when the Thai gov­ern­ment enact­ed a ban on com­mer­cial tim­ber log­ging in 1989:

The ele­phant has worked for humans for too long. It was used in wars, it was used to defor­est its own home. What is the lit­tle thing I can do as a human to say sor­ry, for my species for what we have done to them? I’ll car­ry this heavy thing myself and play some music for the ele­phant while it is hav­ing some break­fast.

Removed from the plush seats of a con­cert hall, Rav­el feels right at home. A roost­er crows, a near­by child pipes up, and Rom­sai wan­ders in and out of the frame, at times appear­ing to keep time with his trunk.

Cicadas under­score Schubert’s Ser­e­nade.

Anoth­er Ele­phantsWorld res­i­dent, Lam Duan’s (aka “Tree with Yel­low Flow­ers”) still­ness as she lis­tens to Bach is rem­i­nis­cent of Barton’s first musi­cal out­ing with the ele­phants:

Ele­phants eat a lot of food. A lot. It is exhaust­ing try­ing to pro­cure that much food for so many ele­phants. When an ele­phant gets to eat, it’s a bit like a dog. A dog will eat its food so quick­ly because it’s not sure if it will ever eat again. And ele­phants are the same. Once they get their hands on some juicy leaves, they will eat and eat and noth­ing can tear them away from their food. That morn­ing I brought the piano in ear­ly to the sanc­tu­ary. Pla-Ra was tak­en to a field full of juicy bam­boo shoots and she began eat­ing with a sin­gle mind­ed ded­i­ca­tion. I start­ed to play Beethoven and she stopped eat­ing. There was this half eat­en bam­boo shoot stick­ing out of her trunk while she stared at me. That was a reac­tion nev­er seen before. An ele­phant stopped eat­ing because of music.

Barton’s lat­est record­ing fea­tures 80-year-old Ampan, blind in one eye and near blind in the oth­er, enjoy­ing Debussy’s Clair de Lune.

Sup­port Paul Barton’s Patre­on here. Learn about vol­un­teer oppor­tu­ni­ties or make a dona­tion to Ele­phantsWorld here

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream 58 Hours of Free Clas­si­cal Music Select­ed to Help You Study, Work, or Sim­ply Relax

Watch Clas­si­cal Music Get Per­fect­ly Visu­al­ized as an Emo­tion­al Roller Coast­er Ride

Down­load 400,000 Free Clas­si­cal Musi­cal Scores & 46,000 Free Clas­si­cal Record­ings from the Inter­na­tion­al Music Score Library Project

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

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French Bookstore Blends Real People’s Faces with Book Cover Art

in Art, Books, Literature, Photography, Travel | July 13th, 2018

You can lead the I‑generation to a book­store, but can you make them read?

Per­haps, espe­cial­ly if the vol­ume has an eye-catch­ing cov­er image that bleeds off the edge.

If noth­ing else, they can be enlist­ed to pro­vide some stun­ning free pub­lic­i­ty for the titles that appeal to their high­ly visu­al sense of cre­ative play. (An author’s dream!)

France’s first indie book­store, Bordeaux’s Librairie Mol­lat, is reel­ing ‘em in with Book Face, an irre­sistible self­ie chal­lenge that harkens back to DJ Carl Mor­ris’ Sleeve­face project, in which one or more peo­ple are pho­tographed “obscur­ing or aug­ment­ing any part of their body or bod­ies with record sleeve(s), caus­ing an illu­sion.”

The results are pro­lif­er­at­ing on the store’s Insta­gram, as fetch­ing young things (and oth­ers) apply them­selves to find­ing the best angles and cos­tumes for their lit-based Trompe‑l’œil mas­ter­strokes.

…even the ones that don’t quite pass the forced per­spec­tive test have the capac­i­ty to charm.

…and not every shot requires intense pre-pro­duc­tion and pre­ci­sion place­ment.

Hope­ful­ly, we’ll see more kids get­ting into the act soon. In fact, if some young­sters of your acquain­tance are express­ing a bit of bore­dom with their vacances d’été, try turn­ing them loose in your local book­store to iden­ti­fy a like­ly can­di­date for a Book Face of their own.

(Remem­ber to sup­port the book­seller with a pur­chase!)

Back state­side, some librar­i­ans shared their pro tips for achiev­ing Book Face suc­cess in this 2015 New York Times arti­cle. The New York Pub­lic Library’s Mor­gan Holz­er also cites Sleeve­face as the inspi­ra­tion behind #Book­face­Fri­day, the hash­tag she coined in hopes that oth­er libraries would fol­low suit.

With over 50,000 tagged posts on Insta­gram, looks like it’s caught on!

See Librairie Mol­lat’s patrons’ gallery of Book Faces here.

Read­ers, if you’ve Book Faced any­where in the world, please share the link to your efforts in the com­ments sec­tion.

via This is Colos­sal/Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

36 Abstract Cov­ers of Vin­tage Psy­chol­o­gy, Phi­los­o­phy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Mes­mer­iz­ing Ani­ma­tion

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers: From the Fan­tas­ti­cal 1920s to the Psy­che­del­ic 1960s & Beyond

Enter the Cov­er Art Archive: A Mas­sive Col­lec­tion of 800,000 Album Cov­ers from the 1950s through 2018

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. In hon­or of her son’s 18th birth­day, she invites you to Book Face your baby using The Big Rum­pus, her first book, for which he served as cov­er mod­el. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Anthony Bourdain’s Free Show, Raw Craft Where He Visits Craftsmen Making Guitars, Tattoos, Motorcycles & More (RIP)

in Food & Drink, Travel | June 11th, 2018

Why has food become such an object of inter­est in recent years? One pos­si­ble expla­na­tion is that it rep­re­sents one of the last pur­suits still essen­tial­ly untouch­able by dig­i­tal cul­ture: for all you can write about and pho­to­graph food for the inter­net, you can’t actu­al­ly expe­ri­ence it there. Food, in oth­er words, means phys­i­cal­i­ty, dex­ter­i­ty, sen­si­bil­i­ty, and hand-crafts­man­ship in a con­crete, vis­cer­al way that, in the 21st, cen­tu­ry, has come to seem increas­ing­ly scarce. But anoth­er, short­er expla­na­tion sums the phe­nom­e­non up, just as plau­si­bly, in two words: Antho­ny Bour­dain.

Ever since he first entered the pub­lic eye at the end of the 1990s, late chef-writer-trav­el­er-tele­vi­sion host taught a read­ing, and lat­er view­ing pub­lic to appre­ci­ate not just food but all that goes into food: the ingre­di­ents, sure, the intense train­ing and labor, of course, but most of all the many and var­ied cul­tur­al fac­tors that con­verge on a meal. Bour­dain found robust cul­tures every­where, those that devel­oped cart-filled streets of cities across the world to the kitchens of the most unas­sum­ing-look­ing restau­rants and every­where in between. He deeply respect­ed not just those ded­i­cat­ed to the mak­ing and serv­ing of food, but those ded­i­cat­ed to crafts of all kinds.

Bour­dain’s nat­ur­al kin­ship with all crafts­men and craftswomen made him a nat­ur­al choice to car­ry Raw Craft, a web series spon­sored by the Bal­ve­nie, a pop­u­lar-pre­mi­um brand of Scotch whisky. In its four­teen episodes (each of which finds a way to fea­ture a bot­tle of the Bal­ve­nie), Bour­dain goes char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly far and wide to vis­it the stu­dios and work­shops of real peo­ple mak­ing real suits, shoes, sax­o­phones, drums, gui­tars, hand­print­ed books, fur­ni­ture, motor­cy­cles, and “tra­di­tion­al­ly fem­i­nine objects.” That last may break some­what from Bour­dain’s swag­ger­ing, mas­cu­line-if-not-macho image, but as the series’ host he dis­plays a good deal of enthu­si­asm for the sub­ject of each episode, includ­ing the trip to the spon­sor’s own dis­tillery in Dufftown, Scot­land.

Nat­u­ral­ly, Bour­dain can engage on a whole oth­er lev­el in the episodes about food and food-relat­ed objects, such as pas­tries and hot choco­late, kitchen knives, and, in the video at the top of the post, cast-iron skil­lets. Ever the par­tic­i­pa­to­ry observ­er, he fin­ish­es that last by prepar­ing steak au poivre with one of the work­shop’s own skil­lets on the flame of its own skil­let-forg­ing fur­nace. He takes it a step fur­ther, or sev­er­al, in the episode with Japan­ese tat­too artist Takashi where, despite “run­ning out of room” on his own much-tat­tooed skin, he com­mis­sions one more: a mag­nif­i­cent blue chrysan­the­mum on his shoul­der, drawn and inked with only the most time-hon­ored tools and tech­niques.

We even, dur­ing one of Bour­dain’s ink-receiv­ing ses­sions with Takashi, glimpse a true crafts­man-to-crafts­man con­ver­sa­tion­al exchange. Bour­dain asks Takashi about some­thing he’s seen all of the many times he’s been on the tat­too­ing table: a junior artist will approach to watch and learn from the way a senior one works. Takashi, who had to go through a minor ordeal just to con­vince his own mas­ter to take him on as an appren­tice, con­firms both the uni­ver­sal­i­ty and the impor­tance of the prac­tice: “If you stop learn­ing, you are pret­ty much done, you know?” Bour­dain, who could only have agreed with the sen­ti­ment, lived it to the very end. “I’d like it to last as long as I do,” he says of his Takashi tat­too — “Which ain’t that long,” he adds, “but long enough, I hope.” But sure­ly no amount of time could ever sat­is­fy a culi­nary, cul­tur­al, and intel­lec­tu­al appetite as prodi­gious as his.

You can watch the com­plete series of Raw Craft videos here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20 Mes­mer­iz­ing Videos of Japan­ese Arti­sans Cre­at­ing Tra­di­tion­al Hand­i­crafts

Japan­ese Crafts­man Spends His Life Try­ing to Recre­ate a Thou­sand-Year-Old Sword

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Brooklyn–Based Mak­ers of Arti­sanal Water Let You Sip From America’s Great Cul­tur­al Waters

David Rees Presents a Primer on the Arti­sanal Craft of Pen­cil Sharp­en­ing

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 Face­book.

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You Can Now Airbnb the Home of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Where the Author Wrote Tender Is the Night

in History, Literature, Travel | May 29th, 2018

Pho­to by George F. Lan­deg­ger, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

F. Scott Fitzger­ald start­ed writ­ing in earnest at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, sev­er­al of whose lit­er­ary and cul­tur­al soci­eties he joined after enrolling in 1913. So much of his time did he devote to what would become his voca­tion that he even­tu­al­ly found him­self on aca­d­e­m­ic pro­ba­tion. Still, he kept on writ­ing nov­els even after drop­ping out and join­ing the Army in 1917. He wrote hur­ried­ly, with the prospect of being shipped out to the trench­es hang­ing over his head, but that grim fate nev­er arrived. Instead the Army trans­ferred him to Camp Sheri­dan out­side Mont­gomery, Alaba­ma, at one of whose coun­try clubs young Scott met a cer­tain Zel­da Sayre, the “gold­en girl” of Mont­gomery soci­ety.

With his sights set on mar­riage, Scott spent sev­er­al years after the war try­ing to earn enough mon­ey to make a cred­i­ble pro­pos­al. Only the pub­li­ca­tion of This Side of Par­adise, his debut nov­el about a lit­er­ar­i­ly mind­ed stu­dent at Prince­ton in wartime, con­vinced Zel­da that he could main­tain the lifestyle to which she had become accus­tomed. Between 1921, when they mar­ried, and 1948, by which time both had died, F. Scott and Zel­da Fitzger­ald lived an occa­sion­al­ly pro­duc­tive, often mis­er­able, and always intense­ly com­pelling life togeth­er. The sto­ry of this ear­ly cul­tur­al “pow­er cou­ple” has an impor­tant place in Amer­i­can lit­er­ary his­to­ry, and Fitzger­ald enthu­si­asts can now use Airbnb to spend the night in the home where one of its chap­ters played out.

The rentable apart­ment occu­pies part of the F. Scott Fitzger­ald Muse­um in Mont­gomery, an oper­a­tion run out of the house in which the Fitzger­alds lived in 1931 and 1932. For the increas­ing­ly trou­bled Zel­da, those years con­sti­tut­ed time in between hos­pi­tal­iza­tions. She had come from the Swiss sana­to­ri­um that diag­nosed her with schiz­o­phre­nia. She would after­ward go to Johns Hop­kins Hos­pi­tal in Bal­ti­more, where she would write an ear­ly ver­sion of her only nov­el Save Me the Waltz, a roman à clef about the Fitzger­ald mar­riage. For Scot­t’s part, the Mont­gomery years came in the mid­dle of his work on Ten­der is the Night, the fol­low-up to The Great Gats­by for which crit­ics had been wait­ing since that book’s pub­li­ca­tion in 1925.

“The house dates to 1910,” writes the Chica­go Tri­bune’s Beth J. Harpaz. “The apart­ment is fur­nished in casu­al 20th cen­tu­ry style: sofa, arm­chairs, dec­o­ra­tive lamps, Ori­en­tal rug, and pil­lows embroi­dered with quotes from Zel­da like this one: ‘Those men think I’m pure­ly dec­o­ra­tive and they’re fools for not know­ing bet­ter.’ ” Evoca­tive fea­tures include “a record play­er and jazz albums, a bal­cony, and flow­er­ing mag­no­lia trees in the yard.” It may not offer the kind of space need­ed to throw a Gats­by-style bac­cha­nal — to the end­less relief, no doubt, of the muse­um staff — but at $150 per night as of this writ­ing, trav­el­ers look­ing to get a lit­tle clos­er to these defin­ing lit­er­ary icons of the Jazz Age might still con­sid­er it a bar­gain. It also comes with cer­tain mod­ern touch­es that the Fitzger­alds could hard­ly have imag­ined, like wi-fi. But then, giv­en the well-doc­u­ment­ed ten­den­cy toward dis­trac­tion they already suf­fered, sure­ly they were bet­ter off with­out it.

You can book your room at Airbnb here.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: The Great Gats­by & Oth­er Major Works by F. Scott Fitzger­ald

Rare Footage of Scott and Zel­da Fitzger­ald From the 1920s

Win­ter Dreams: F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s Life Remem­bered in a Fine Film

The Evo­lu­tion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Sig­na­ture: From 5 Years Old to 21

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Hand­writ­ten Man­u­scripts for The Great Gats­by, This Side of Par­adise & More

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 Face­book.

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Explore Meticulous 3D Models of Endangered Historical Sites in Google’s “Open Heritage” Project

in Architecture, Data, Travel | May 25th, 2018

One brisk thump­ing by a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter, total­i­tar­i­an regime, or ter­ror­ist group is more than enough to reduce an awe-inspir­ing her­itage site to rub­ble.

With that sad fact in mind, Google Arts & Cul­ture has paired with CyArk, a non prof­it whose mis­sion is using the lat­est tech­nolo­gies to dig­i­tal­ly doc­u­ment and pre­serve the world’s sig­nif­i­cant cul­tur­al her­itage in an eas­i­ly share­able for­mat.

The result­ing project, Open Her­itage, is a mas­sive brows­able col­lec­tion of 3D her­itage data, already the largest of its kind, and cer­tain to increase as its cre­ators race against the clock.

As of this writ­ing, vis­i­tors can explore 3D mod­els of 27 her­itage sites from 18 coun­tries.

Even those of us who’ve had the good for­tune to vis­it these sites in per­son have much to gain from the drone’s eye view of the Cara­col obser­va­to­ry that’s part of Mexico’s ancient Mayan metrop­o­lis Chichén Itzá or Berlin’s icon­ic Bran­den­burg Gate.

Each mod­el is accom­pa­nied by an expe­di­tion overview that details the site’s his­to­ry and sig­nif­i­cance, as well as its loca­tion on a map. Time lapse pho­tos help give a sense of the site’s human traf­fic dur­ing the time it was being doc­u­ment­ed, as well as the nature of the work CyArk does on loca­tion. Sig­nif­i­cant details are high­light­ed, and their sym­bol­ism dis­cussed.

CyArk will share project data with view­ers who request it, using a Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion-Non­Com­mer­cial 4.0 Inter­na­tion­al License.

Equal­ly impor­tant is the role these com­pre­hen­sive 3D scans can play in cur­rent and future restora­tion efforts, by iden­ti­fy­ing areas of dam­age and doc­u­ment­ing exist­ing col­or and tex­ture with down-to-the-mil­lime­ter pre­ci­sion.

Begin your vir­tu­al explo­rations of such Open Her­itage sites as Greece’s Ancient Corinth, Lebanon’s Tem­ple of Echoun, and Ayut­thaya, Thailand’s Wat Si San­phet, here.

Learn more about aer­i­al pho­togram­me­try, 3D laser scan­ning, stereo­scop­ic 360 imagery, and oth­er tools of the dig­i­tal preser­va­tion trade here.

And stay abreast of CyArk’s work by sub­scrib­ing to their free month­ly newslet­ter here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it 890 UNESCO World Her­itage Sites with Free iPhone/iPad App

Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

Google Dig­i­tizes and Puts Online a Vast Archive of Lati­no Art­works and Arti­facts

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her solo show Nurse!, in which one of Shakespeare’s best loved female char­ac­ters hits the lec­ture cir­cuit to set the record straight pre­mieres in June at The Tank in New York City. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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An Interactive Map Shows Just How Many Roads Actually Lead to Rome

in History, Maps, Travel | May 7th, 2018

…he went away, and pass­ing through what was called the house of Tiberius, went down into the forum, to where a gild­ed col­umn stood, at which all the roads that inter­sect Italy ter­mi­nate.”

- Plutarch, Life of Gal­ba (XXIV.4)

No one can give you exact direc­tions to Mil­liar­i­um Aureum (aka the Gold­en Mile­stone). Just a few carved mar­ble frag­ments of the gild­ed column’s base remain in the Roman Forum, where its orig­i­nal loca­tion is some­what dif­fi­cult to pin­point.

But as the image above, from inter­ac­tive map Roads to Rome, shows (view it here), the mot­to Emper­or Cae­sar Augus­tus’ mighty mile mark­er inspired still holds true.

All roads lead to Rome.

To illus­trate, design­ers Benedikt Groß and Philipp Schmitt worked with dig­i­tal geo­g­ra­ph­er Raphael Reimann to select 486,713 start­ing points on a 26,503,452 km² grid of Europe.

From there, they cre­at­ed an algo­rithm to cal­cu­late the best route from each point to Rome.

(It beats typ­ing a street address into Google Maps 486,713 times.)

From afar, the result­ing map looks like a del­i­cate piece of sea let­tuce or an ear­ly explo­ration in neu­roanato­my.

Zoom in as tight as you can and things become more tra­di­tion­al­ly car­to­graph­ic in appear­ance, names and spa­tial rela­tions of cities assert­ing them­selves. A bold line indi­cates a busy route.

In a nod to map lovers out­side of Europe, the mobil­i­ty-obsessed team came up with anoth­er map, this one geared to state­side users.

Do you know which of the Unit­ed States’ nine Romes you are clos­est to?

Now you do, from 312,719 dis­tinct start­ing points.

To help them in their labor, the cre­ative team made good use of the Graph­Hop­per route opti­miza­tion tool and the Open Street Map wiki. In their own esti­ma­tion, the project’s out­come is “some­where between infor­ma­tion visu­al­iza­tion and data art, unveil­ing mobil­i­ty on a very large scale.”

Buy a poster of the All Roads Lead to Rome map here. Or view the inter­ac­tive map here.

via Arch Dai­ly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Lon­don Time Machine: Inter­ac­tive Map Lets You Com­pare Mod­ern Lon­don, to the Lon­don Short­ly After the Great Fire of 1666

Watch the His­to­ry of the World Unfold on an Ani­mat­ed Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today

An Inter­ac­tive Map of Every Record Shop in the World

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Wednes­day, May 16 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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