Patti Smith Creates a Detailed Packing List for Going on Tour: Haruki Murakami Books, Loquat Tea & More

in Life, Literature, Music, Poetry, Travel | January 1st, 2016

Packing lists are not inherently punk rock.

But the handwritten packing list Godmother of Punk Patti Smith scrawled upside down on a photocopied receipt from a children’s bookstore on the eve of a 40-date European tour comes close. One can kind of imagine her stuffing her adaptors, her Japanese pants, and her “9 underwears” into a shopping bag or a dirty day pack, using it as a pillow in the back of the van…

Behold the reality, below.

Smith’s hard shell case is kitted out with practiced precision, its contents pared to the leanest of luxury-brand necessities to keep her happy and healthy on the road.

It’s not often you find a devotee of Ann Demeulemeester black jackets and $8 toothpaste who’s willing to nightly wring their socks and undies over a hotel room sink, but according to her Banga tour diary, Smith is.

Other essentials in Smith’s tour bag include loquat tea for her throat and plenty of reading material. In addition to the Hunger Games, she elected to take along some old favorites from author Haruki Murakami:

I decide this will be essentially a Haruki Murakami tour. So I will take several of his books including the three volume IQ84 to reread. He is a good writer to reread as he sets your mind to daydreaming while you are reading him. thus i always miss stuff.

Readers, use the comments section to let us know what indispensable items you would pack when embarking on a 40-city tour with Patti Smith.

via That Eric Alper

Patti Smith Reviews Haruki Murakami’s New Novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Patti Smith Documentary Dream of Life Beautifully Captures the Author’s Life and Long Career (2008)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Human: The Movie Features Interviews with 2,020 People from 60 Countries on What It Means to Be Human

in Environment, Film, Life, Travel | September 29th, 2015

What is it that makes us human? And how best to ensure that we all get our fair say?

For director, photographer, and environmental activist Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the answers lay in framing all of his interview subjects using the same single image layout. The formal simplicity and unwavering gaze of his new documentary, Human, encourage viewers to perceive his 2,020 subjects as equals in the storytelling realm.

There’s a deep diversity of experiences on display here, arranged for maximum resonance.

The quietly content first wife of a polygamist marriage is followed by a polyamorous fellow, whose unconventional lifestyle is a source of both torment and joy.

There’s a death row inmate. A lady so confident she appears with her hair in curlers.

Where on earth did he find them?

His subjects hail from 60 countries. Arthus-Bertrand obviously went out of his way to be inclusive, resulting in a wide spectrum of gender and sexual orientations, and subjects with disabilities, one a Hiroshima survivor.

Tears, laughter, conflicting emotions… students of theater and psychiatry would do well to bookmark this page. There’s a lot one can glean from observing these subjects’ unguarded faces.

The project was inspired by an impromptu chat with a Malian farmer. The director was impressed by the frankness with which this stranger spoke of his life and dreams:

I dreamed of a film in which the power of words would resonate with the beauty of the world. Putting the ills of humanity at the heart of my work—poverty, war, immigration, homophobia—I made certain choices. Committed, political choices. But the men talked to me about everything: their difficulty in growing as well as their love and happiness. This richness of the human word lies at the heart of Human.

In Volume I, above, the interviewees consider love, women, work, and poverty. Volume II deals with war, forgiveness, homosexuality, family, and the afterlife. Happiness, education, disability, immigration, corruption, and the meaning of life are the concerns of the third volume .

The interview segments are broken up by aerial sequences, reminiscent of the images in Arthus-Bertrand’s book, The Earth from Above. It’s a good reminder of how small we all are in the grand scheme of things.

Appropriately, given the subject matter, and the director’s longtime interest in environmental issues, the filming and promotion were accomplished in the most sustainable way, with the support of the GoodPlanet Foundation and the United Carbon Action program. It would be lovely for all humanity if this is a feature of filmmaking going forward.

The Google Cultural Institute has a collection of related material, from the making of the soundtrack to behind-the-scenes reminiscences of the interview team.

Human will be added to our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Never a First Human Being

Biology That Makes Us Tick: Free Stanford Course by Robert Sapolsky

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her new play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Support “Where Is the City of the Future?”: A Journey Across the Pacific Rim Using a Brand New Model of Journalism

in Architecture, Current Affairs, Travel | September 15th, 2015

Apart from from writing here on Open Culture, I write about cities. Having mentioned my city-related projects here from time to time (the podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture, the City in Cinema video essays), I’d like to submit for your approval my newest and most ambitious one yet: Where Is the City of the Future?, an in-depth search across the Pacific Rim for the best city to lead us into the urban century ahead — using a brand new model of journalism.

Not long after the turn of the 21st century, the world’s urban population surpassed its non-urban population for the first time ever. And the deeper humanity gets into the this century, the more urbanized our world becomes: developing cities develop, neglected cities revitalize themselves, and the long-standing great cities of the world continue to find (or struggle to find) new ways of accommodating all those who’ve never stopped coming to live in them. How can the ever-growing urban world prepare itself for things to come?

This series of reports, combining both text and photographs, and informed by both extensive on-the-ground exploration and in-depth conversations with those who know these fascinating urban places best, aims to find out by taking as close as possible a look at cities all across the Pacific Rim. These include 20th-century metropolises looking toward the future like Los Angeles, Seattle and Vancouver, compact city-states like Singapore and Hong Kong, fast-developing capitals like Jakarta and Bangkok, lower-profile but nevertheless inventive “sleeper” cities like Wellington and Santiago, and east Asian megacities like Seoul, Tokyo, and Shanghai.

I’ve launched “Where Is the City of the Future?” as one of the flagship projects on Byline, a new platform for crowdfunded journalism. For every $2000 raised there, I’ll go report on one Pacific Rim city, seeking out the important lessons it has to teach every other, from the urbanistic to the architectural to the cultural and beyond. This will begin with reports on Los Angeles and Seoul, and will continue on indefinitely to potential cities of the future in an order voted on the backers. (Theoretically, you could keep me at this for quite a long time!) If you like, you can get involved at the project’s Byline page. Thanks very much indeed — and I look forward to finding the city of the future together.

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Wealth of Free Documentaries on All Things Japanese: From Bento Boxes to Tea Gardens, Ramen & Bullet Trains

in Television, Travel | September 11th, 2015

“I used to be OBSESSED with Japanese culture,” wrote an uncommonly thoughtful Youtube commenter. “I miss that part of me. Trying to search for it again. That’s when I was the happiest.” Many of us westerners — or really, many of us non-Japanese — go through similar periods of affinity and avidity for all things Japanese. Some of us put it away with our childish things; some of us make Japanese culture a lifelong interest, or even the stuff of our professions. I myself got into Japan early, at some point found myself put off by the just slightly too obsessive Japanese pop-culture fan community in the West (though I admittedly read that comment below a music video with four million views), and later returned with a much more serious intent to understand.

But to understand what? The Japanese language, certainly, and Japanese film, Japanese cities, Japanese aesthetics, Japanese technology — all the fruits of the culture that stoke in the rest of the world both deep envy and, sometimes, faint suspicion. Why do they persist in using writing systems that, despite their considerable beauty, come with such aggravating difficulty? The comprehensive subway networks in metropolises like Tokyo and Osaka function day in and day out with astonishing reach and reliability, but why do their riders tolerate crowdedness even to the point of getting uncomplainingly crammed inside the cars by white-gloved attendants? And why, despite the Japanese love for elegant design and advanced consumer technology, do their web sites look so jumbled and confusing?

NHK World can put you on the road to understanding these and other questions with Japanology, their series of English-language documentaries exploring the things large and small, all surprising to the foreigner, that make up the fabric of Japanese life. BEGIN Japanology, their series for the Japan-intrigued but not necessarily Japan-experienced, has come to six seasons so far.

At the top of the post, you can see its episode on bento, those painstakingly prepared lunch boxes, simplified versions of which even those who know nothing of Japan have seen at grocery stores the world over. To learn more about bento’s place in Japanese culture, proceed on to the relevant episode of Japanology Plus, NHK’s series for the even more insatiably curious Japanophile. And couple with an episode on Ramen above.

Japanology Plus also dedicates one of its half-hour programs to the Shinkansen, commonly known as the “bullet train,” that quintessentially Japanese mode of transportation that, with its impeccable half-century record of speed, safety, and punctuality, has become the pride of the land. (I, for one, hold out hope that Obama will make The Onion’s “Ambitious Plan to Fly Americans to Japan to Use Their Trains” a reality.) But if you don’t feel quite ready yet to board a Shinkansen, much less learn about its inner workings, try the Begin Japanology Special Mini series, which offers five-minute distilled documentaries on such icons of Japan as tea gardens, hot springs, and Mount Fuji. Watching all these, I feel glad indeed that I’ve already got the tickets booked for my next flight over there. Do you have yours?

You can find Japanology added to our list of 200+ Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More

“Tsundoku,” the Japanese Word for the New Books That Pile Up on Our Shelves, Should Enter the English Language

Watch a Japanese Craftsman Lovingly Bring a Tattered Old Book Back to Near Mint Condition

A Photographic Tour of Haruki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Memory, and Reality Meet

Early Japanese Animations: The Origins of Anime (1917–1931)

Cookpad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launches New Site in English

Let’s Learn Japanese: Two Classic Video Series to Get You Started in the Language

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Vintage 1930s Japanese Posters Artistically Market the Wonders of Travel

in Art, Travel | July 13th, 2015

Earlier this year, we featured vintage Japanese print advertisements from the golden age of Art Deco and for such products as beer, sake, and cigarettes. If you like that sort of thing, you might consider paying attention to the recently launched Branding in Asia, a site detected to covering “the art of branding” as expressed in “the exciting new ideas and concepts exploding from the mind of Asia” — or the exciting old ideas and concepts which, aesthetically speaking, remain pretty explosive still.

Take, for instance, their collection of classic Japanese steamship ads. “In the early part of the 20th century,” writes Steph Aromdee, “Japan’s increasingly prosperous middle class was taking to the high seas for travel. One company, the Japan Mail Steamship, advertised heavily, hoping to attract would-be tourists to their luxury ships. What were likely at the time regarded as simple advertisements and brochures that simply showed departures and destinations, have today become viewed as stunning works of art.”

Here we’ve excerpted a few such advertisements from their impressive selection which, as you can see, ranges artistically from the stylized to the realistic, and conceptually from the practical to the purely evocative. They might entice readers onto a steamship voyage with an Art Deco bathing beauty, a contrast of human traveler against mountain’s majesty, a detailed map enumerating a variety of possible destinations, or, as in the case of deer-filled Nara, a scattering of local icons.

The age of the steamship has, of course, long since dissolved into the romantic past, even in Japan. Or perhaps I should say especially in Japan, whose shinkansen bullet train not only put every other mode of transport straight into obsolescence, but — at least to my mind — also boasts a cutting-edge romance of its own.

And so these advertisements, more than 70 years after their printings, still get me planning my next trip to Japan, a country that knows a thing or two about desire and place. “Even in Kyoto,” wrote 17th-century poet Matsuo Bashō, “I long for Kyoto.”

via Branding in Asia

Glorious Early 20th-Century Japanese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

Hand-Colored Photographs of 19th Century Japan

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Pico Iyer on “the Art of Stillness”: How to Enrich Your Busy, Distracted Life by Unplugging and Staying Put

in Life, TED Talks, Travel | July 8th, 2015

Having known Pico Iyer for quite some time, on paper and in person, as a perpetual example and occasional mentor in the writing of place, it delights me to watch him attract more listeners than ever with the talks he’s given in recent years, the most popular of which advocate something called “stillness.” But at first I wondered: did this shift in subject mean that Iyer—a California-grown Brit from an Indian family who mostly lives in Japan (“a global village on two legs,” as he once called himself), known for books like Video Night in Kathmandu, Falling off the Map, and The Global Soul—had put his signature hard-traveling ways behind him?

Hardly. But he did start telling the world more about his long-standing habit of routinely seeking out the most quiet, least “connected” places he can—the seaside no-speech-allowed Catholic hermitage, the rural village outside Kyoto—in order to reflect upon the time he has spent circling the globe, transposing himself from culture to alien culture. “24 years ago, I took the most mind-bending trip across North Korea,” he tells us, “but the trip lasted a few days. What I’ve done with it sitting still—going back to it in my head, trying to understand it, finding a place for it in my thinking—that’s lasted 24 years already, and will probably last a lifetime.”

If we want to follow Pico’s example, we must strike a balance: we must process the time we spend doing something intensely—traveling, writing, programming, lifting weights, what have you—with time spent not doing that something, a pursuit in its own way as intense. He connects all this with the 21st-century technology culture in which we find ourselves, citing the example of folks like Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly and even certain enlightenment-minded Googlers who regularly and rigorously detach themselves from certain kinds of modern devices, going “completely offline in order to gather the sense of direction and proportion they’ll need when they go online again.”

Achieving such a proper intellectual, psychological, social, and technological compartmentalization in life may seem like a rare trick to pull off. But if you ever doubt its possibility, just revisit the last talk from Pico we featured, in which he describes his encounter with Leonard Cohen, the only man alive who has successfully combined the lifestyles of rock star and Zen monk.

Pico Iyer on “The Joy of Less”

How Leonard Cohen’s Stint As a Buddhist Monk Can Help You Live an Enlightened Life

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Climb Virtually Up “El Capitan,” Yosemite’s Iconic Rock Wall, With Google Street View

in Google, Travel | June 25th, 2015

Google has used its Street View technology to let you take virtual tours of some far-flung places — places like Shackleton’s Antarctic, Mt. Everest and other high mountain peaks, The Amazon River, and The Grand Canyon. Now you can add to the list, El Capitan, the iconic rock wall in the middle of Yosemite National Park.

Yesterday, Google’s official blog declared, “Today we’re launching our first-ever vertical Street View collection, giving you the opportunity to climb 3,000 feet up the world’s most famous rock wall: Yosemite’s El Capitan. To bring you this new imagery, we partnered with legendary climbers Lynn Hill, Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell.” Above, you can see this trio in action, talking about what makes El Cap a mecca for rock climbers everywhere.

To create this Street View of El Capitan, Hill, Honnold and Caldwell worked with Google engineers to figure out how to haul a camera up this sheer rock face. And what you ultimately get are some amazing 360-degree panoramic images. According to Caldwell, these “are the closest thing I’ve ever witnessed to actually being thousands of feet up a vertical rock face—better than any video or photo.” Which, hating heights, is good enough for me.

via Google Blog

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Take a Visual Walking Tour of Franz Kafka’s Prague with Will Self (Then Read His Digital Essay, “Kafka’s Wound”)

in Literature, Travel | June 24th, 2015

“There is nothing intrinsically imaginative about the idea of ‘gold,’ nor the idea of ‘mountain,’” writes Will Self, citing an idea of the philosopher David Hume, “but join them together and you have a fantastically gleaming ‘gold mountain.’ And might not that gold mountain be the Laurenziberg in Prague? After all, it looms over contemporary Prague just as it loomed in the consciousness of Franz Kafka, whose earliest surviving narrative fragment, ‘Description of a Struggle,’ is in part an account of a phantasmagorical ascent of its slopes.”

This association comes from “Kafka’s Wound,” Will Self’s new essay in the London Review of Books — or rather, a new “digital essay” from the LRB on the BBC and Arts Council England’s new site The Space, one which takes full advantage of the multimedia future, much enthused over back in the 1990s, in which we now find ourselves. For some readers, myself included, the association of the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial with Hume, the author of so many volumes fictional, nonfictional, and psychogeographical (find some in our collection of Free Philosophy eBooks), constitutes reason enough to minimize all other windows and get reading.

But Self has taken on an even more ambitious project than that: the mind-mappish interface of “Kafka’s Wound” offers a wealth of audio, video, and other textual material to supplement the experience of the main text, all of which connects in some way to the essay’s subject: Will Self’s “personal relationship to Kafka’s work through the lens of the short story ‘A Country Doctor’ (1919), and in particular through the aperture of the wound described in that story.” Self’s own site describes the essay as “ ‘through composed’ with Will’s own thoughts, as he works, being responded to by digital-content providers,” with more of that content to come through July.

The environment internet, which facilitates our natural tendency to drift from subject to at least semi-related subject with an addictive vengeance, encourages associational thinking. But so do cities, as a psychogeographer like Will Self knows full well. And so part of this rich literary investigation takes the form of an hourlong documentary (click here or the image above to view), in which Self takes a walking tour of Kafka’s Prague, seeking out the writer’s “genius loci,” the sites that gave settings to the milestones of his life and shape to his artistic and intellectual sensibilities. He also takes the opportunity to do a Kafka reading right there in Kafka’s hometown. It’s one thing to read Kafka with the Laurenziberg in mind, but still quite another to do it with the Laurenziberg in sight.

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters

Vladimir Nabokov Makes Editorial Tweaks to Franz Kafka’s Novella The Metamorphosis

The Art of Franz Kafka: Drawings from 1907–1917

Four Franz Kafka Animations: Enjoy Creative Animated Shorts from Poland, Japan, Russia & Canada

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Patti Smith Creates a Detailed Packing List for Going on Tour: Haruki Murakami Books, Loquat Tea & More

Human: The Movie Features Interviews with 2,020 People from 60 Countries on What It Means to Be Human

Support “Where Is the City of the Future?”: A Journey Across the Pacific Rim Using a Brand New Model of Journalism

A Wealth of Free Documentaries on All Things Japanese: From Bento Boxes to Tea Gardens, Ramen & Bullet Trains

Vintage 1930s Japanese Posters Artistically Market the Wonders of Travel

Pico Iyer on “the Art of Stillness”: How to Enrich Your Busy, Distracted Life by Unplugging and Staying Put

Climb Virtually Up “El Capitan,” Yosemite’s Iconic Rock Wall, With Google Street View

Take a Visual Walking Tour of Franz Kafka’s Prague with Will Self (Then Read His Digital Essay, “Kafka’s Wound”)

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