Given the dominance YouTube has achieved over large swaths of world culture, we’d all expect to remember the first video we watched there. Yet many or most of us don’t: rather, we simply realized, one day in the mid-to-late two-thousands, that we’d developed a daily YouTube habit. Like as not, your own introduction to the platform came through a video too trivial to make much of an impression, assuming you could get it to load at all. (We forget, in this age of instantaneous streaming, how slow YouTube could be at first.) But perhaps the triviality was the point, a precedent set by the first YouTube video ever uploaded, “Me at the Zoo.”
“Alright, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants,” says YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, standing before those animals’ enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. “The cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks, and that’s, that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”
The runtime is 19 seconds. The upload date is April 24, 2005, two years before “Charlie Bit My Finger” and “Chocolate Rain,” four years before The Joe Rogan Experience, and seven years before “Gangnam Style.” The pop-cultural force that is MrBeast, then a child known only as Jimmy Donaldson, would have been anticipating his seventh birthday.
“After the zoo, the deluge,” wrote Virginia Heffernan in a 2009 NewYorkTimes piece on YouTube’s first four and a half years, when the site contained barely any of the content with which we associate it today. If you have a favorite YouTube channel, it probably didn’t exist then. Heffernan approached the “fail,” “haul,” and “unboxing” videos going viral at the time as new cultural forms, as indeed they were, but the conventions of the YouTube video as we now know them had yet to crystallize. Not everyone who saw the likes of “Me at the Zoo” would have understood the promise of YouTube. Perhaps it didn’t feel particularly revelatory to be informed that elephants have trunks — but then, that’s still more informative than many of the countless explainer videos being uploaded as we speak.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The epistemological nightmare we seem to be in, bombarded over our screens and speakers with so many moving-image messages per day, false and true, is at least in part due to the paralysis that we – scholars, journalists, and regulators, but also producers and consumers – are still exhibiting over how to anchor facts and truths and commonly accepted narratives in this seemingly most ephemeral of media. When you write a scientific paper, you cite the evidence to support your claims using notes and bibliographies visible to your readers. When you publish an article in a magazine or a journal or a book, you present your sources – and now when these are online often enough live links will take you there. But there is, as yet, no fully formed apparatus for how to cite sources within the online videos and television programs that have taken over our lives – no Chicago Manual of Style, no Associated Press Stylebook, no video Elements of Style. There is also no agreement on how to cite the moving image itself as a source in these other, older types of media.
The Moving Image: A User’s Manual, published by the MIT Press on February 25, 2025, looks to make some better sense of this new medium as it starts to inherit the mantle that print has been wearing for almost six hundred years. The book presents 34 QR codes that resolve to examples of iconic moving-image media, among them Abraham Zapruder’s film of the Kennedy assassination (1963); America’s poet laureate Ada Límon reading her work on Zoom; the first-ever YouTube video shot by some of the company founders at the San Francisco Zoo in 2005; Darnella Frazier’s video of George Floyd’s murder; Richard Feynman’s physics lectures at Cornell; courseware videos from MIT, Columbia, and Yale; PBS documentaries on race and music; Wikileaks footage of America at war; January 6 footage of the 2021 insurrection; interviews with Holocaust survivors; films and clips from films by and interviews with Sergei Eisenstein, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, François Truffaut and others; footage of deep fake videos; and the video billboards on the screens now all over New York’s Times Square. The electronic edition takes you to their source platforms — YouTube, Vimeo, Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, others — at the click of a link. The videos that you can play facilitate deep-dive discussions about how to interrogate and authenticate the facts (and untruths!) in and around them.
At a time when Trump dismisses the director of our National Archives and the Orwellian putsch against memory by the most powerful men in the world begins in full force, is it not essential to equip ourselves with proper methods for being able to cite truths and prove lies more easily in what is now the medium of record? How essential will it become, in the face of systematic efforts of erasure, to protect the evidence of criminal human depravity – the record of Nazi concentration camps shot by U.S. and U.K. and Russian filmmakers; footage of war crimes, including our own from Wikileaks; video of the January 6th insurrection and attacks at the American Capitol – even as political leaders try to scrub it all and pretend it never happened? We have to learn not only how to watch and process these audiovisual materials, and how to keep this canon of media available to generations, but how to footnote dialogue recorded, say, in a combat gunship over Baghdad in our histories of American foreign policy, police bodycam footage from Minneapolis in our journalism about civil rights, and security camera footage of insurrectionists planning an attack on our Capitol in our books about the United States. And how should we cite within a documentary a music source or a local news clip in ways that the viewer can click on or visit?
Just like footnotes and embedded sources and bibliographies do for readable print, we have to develop an entire systematic apparatus for citation and verification for the moving image, to future-proof these truths.
* * *
At the very start of the 20th century, the early filmmaker D. W. Griffith had not yet prophesied his own vision of the film library:
Imagine a public library of the near future, for instance, there will be long rows of boxes or pillars, properly classified and indexed, of course. At each box a push button and before each box a seat. Suppose you wish to “read up” on a certain episode in Napoleon’s life. Instead of consulting all the authorities, wading laboriously through a host of books, and ending bewildered, without a clear idea of exactly what did happen and confused at every point by conflicting opinions about what did happen, you will merely seat yourself at a properly adjusted window, in a scientifically prepared room, press the button, and actually see what happened.
No one yet had said, as people would a century later, that video will become the new vernacular. But as radio and film quickly began to show their influence, some of our smartest critics began to sense their influence. In 1934, the art historian Erwin Panofsky, yet to write his major works on Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, could deliver a talk at Princeton and say:
Whether we like it or not, it is the movies that mold, more than any other single force, the opinions, the taste, the language, the dress, the behavior, and even the physical appearance of a public comprising more than 60 per cent of the population of the earth. If all the serious lyrical poets, composers, painters and sculptors were forced by law to stop their activities, a rather small fraction of the general public would become aware of the fact and a still smaller fraction would seriously regret it. If the same thing were to happen with the movies, the social consequences would be catastrophic.
And in 1935, media scholars like Rudolf Arnheim and Walter Benjamin, alert to the darkening forces of politics in Europe, would begin to notice the strange and sometimes nefarious power of the moving image to shape political power itself. Benjamin would write in exile from Hitler’s Germany:
The crisis of democracies can be understood as a crisis in the conditions governing the public presentation of politicians. Democracies [used to] exhibit the politician directly, in person, before elected representatives. The parliament is his public. But innovations in recording equipment now enable the speaker to be heard by an unlimited number of people while he is speaking, and to be seen by an unlimited number shortly afterward. This means that priority is given to presenting the politician before the recording equipment. […] This results in a new form of selection—selection before an apparatus—from which the champion, the star, and the dictator emerge as victors.
At this current moment of champions and stars – and dictators again – it’s time for us to understand the power of video better and more deeply. Indeed, part of the reason that we sense such epistemic chaos, mayhem, disorder in our world today may be that we haven’t come to terms with the fact of video’s primacy. We are still relying on print as if it were, in a word, the last word, and suffering through life in the absence of citation and bibliographic mechanisms and sorting indices for the one medium that is governing more and more of our information ecosystem every day. Look at the home page of any news source and of our leading publishers. Not just MIT from its pole position producing video knowledge through MIT OpenCourseWare, but all knowledge institutions, and many if not most journals and radio stations feature video front and center now. We are living at a moment when authors, publishers, journalists, scholars, students, corporations, knowledge institutions, and the public are involving more video in their self-expression. Yet like 1906, before the Chicago Manual, or 1919 before Strunk’s little guidebook, we have had no published guidelines for conversing about the bigger picture, no statement about the importance of the moving-image world we are building, and no collective approach to understanding the medium more systematically and from all sides. We are transforming at the modern pace that print exploded in the sixteenth century, but still without the apparatus to grapple with it that we developed, again for print, in the early twentieth.
* * *
Public access to knowledge always faces barriers that are easy for us to see, but also many that are invisible. Video is maturing now as a field. Could we say that it’s still young? That it still needs to be saved – constantly saved – from commercial forces encroaching upon it that, if left unregulated, could soon strip it of any remaining mandate to serve society? Could we say that we need to save ourselves, in fact, from “surrendering,” as Marshall McLuhan wrote some 60 years ago now, “our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, [such that] we don’t really have any rights left”? Before we have irrevocably and permanently “leased our central nervous systems to various corporations”?
You bet we can say it, and we should. For most of the 130 years of the moving image, its producers and controllers have been elites—and way too often they’ve attempted with their control of the medium to make us think what they want us to think. We’ve been scared over most of these years into believing that the moving image rightfully belongs under the purview of large private or state interests, that the screen is something that others should control. That’s just nonsense. Unlike the early pioneers of print, their successors who formulated copyright law, and their successors who’ve gotten us into a world where so much print knowledge is under the control of so few, we – in the age of video – can study centuries of squandered opportunities for freeing knowledge, centuries of mistakes, scores of hotfooted missteps and wrong turns, and learn from them. Once we understand that there are other options, other roads not taken, we can begin to imagine that a very different media system is – was and is – eminently possible. As one of our great media historians has written, “[T]he American media system’s development was the direct result of political struggle that involved suppressing those who agitated for creating less market-dominated media institutions. . . . [That this] current commercial media system is contingent on past repression calls into question its very legitimacy.”
The moving image is likely to facilitate the most extraordinary advances ever in education, scholarly communication, and knowledge dissemination. Imagine what will happen once we realize the promise of artificial intelligence to generate mass quantities of scholarly video about knowledge – video summaries by experts and machines of every book and article ever written and of every movie and TV program ever produced.
We just have to make sure we get there. We had better think as a collective how to climb out of what journalist Hanna Rosin calls this “epistemic chasm of cuckoo.” And it doesn’t help – although it might help our sense of urgency – that the American president has turned the White House Oval Office into a television studio. Recall that Trump ended his February meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy by saying to all the cameras there, “This’ll make great television.”
The Moving Image: A User’s Manual exists for all these reasons, and it addresses these challenges. And these challenges have everything to do with the general epistemic chaos we find ourselves in, with so many people believing anything and so much out there that is untrue. We have to solve for it.
As the poets like to say, the only way out is through.
–Peter B. Kaufman works at MIT Open Learning. He is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge and founder of Intelligent Television, a video production company that works with cultural and educational institutions around the world. His new book, The Moving Image: A User’s Manual, is just out from the MIT Press.
All good things must come to an end, but it hurt when CBGB’s, New York City’s celebrated — and famously filthy — music club shuttered for good on October 15th, 2006, a victim of skyrocketing Lower East Side rents.
While plenty of punk and New Wave luminaries cut their teeth on the legendary venue’s stage — Talking Heads, The Ramones, Blondie — final honors went to Patti Smith, a CBGB’s habitué, whose seven-week residency in 1975 earned her a major record deal.
In her National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids, Smith described her first impressions of the place, when she and her guitarist Lenny Kaye headed downtown to catch their friend Richard Hell’s band, Television, following the premiere of the concert film, Ladies & Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones at the Ziegfeld:
CBGB was a deep and narrow room along the right side, lit by overhanging neon signs advertising various brands of beer. The stage was low, on the left-hand side, flanked by photographic murals of turn-of-the-century bathing belles. Past the stage was a pool table, and in back was a greasy kitchen and a room where the owner, Hilly Krystal, worked and slept with his saluki, Jonathan…
It was a world away from the Ziegfeld. The absence of glamour made it seem all the more familiar, a place that we could call our own. As the band played on, you could hear the whack of the pool cue hitting the balls, the saluki barking, bottles clinking, the sounds of a scene emerging. Though no one knew it, the stars were aligning, the angels were calling.
You couldn’t replicate the décor in a million years, and dismantling all those layers of archaeology of music in the club is a daunting task.
The Village Voice observed that it was “a crazy, emotional night for everyone in the crowd and for everyone on the stage,” and the New York Times reported how Smith documented the club’s awning with a Polaroid, explaining, “I’m sentimental…”
But Smith, who actively encouraged young fans to resist worshiping at the altar of the club’s reputation when they could be starting scenes of their own, also pushed back against sentimentality, telling the crowd, “It’s not a fucking temple — it is what it is.”
That may be, but her three-and-a-half-hour performance, above, was still one for the history books, from the opening reading of Piss Factory(I’m gonna be somebody, I’m gonna get on that train, go to New York City /I’m gonna be so bad I’m gonna be a big star and I will never return) tothe closing in memoriam recitation (Joe Strummer…Johnny Thunders…Stiv Bators…Johnny, Joey, and Dee Dee Ramone…)
Smith took care that other artists who helped make the scene were represented in her below set lists, from Blondie and Lou Reed to Television and the Dead Boys:
Lou (Reed) had a gift of taking very simple lines, ‘Linger on, your pale blue eyes,’ and make it so they magnify on their own. That song has always haunted me. (The Associated Press)
Television will help wipe out media. They are not theatre. Neither were the early Stones or the Yardbirds. They are strong images procduce from pain and speed and the fanatic desire to make it. They are also inspired enough below the belt to prove that SEX is not dead in rock ’n’ roll. (Rock Scene)
I was thinking about the words to that: “War, children, it’s just a shot away.” To me, a song like that is more meaningful than ever. (Rolling Stone)
Even though I wrote the poem at the beginning of “Gloria” in 1970, it took all those years to evolve, to merge into “Gloria.” And that was pretty much done at CBGB. We recorded Horses in 1975, and did all the groundwork at CBGB. (Rolling Stone)
As I was reading that little list, those people seemed in that moment — because of the intense emotional energy in that room — to be alive. Everyone in the room knew or heard of or loved one of those people. That collective love and sorrow and recognition made those people seem as alive as any of us. (Rolling Stone)
The Austrian symbolist painter, Gustav Klimt, a driving force of the Vienna Secession, has joined the ranks of famous, dead artists being served up as pricey, super-sized, Instagram-friendly immersive experiences.
Having visited the Gold in Motion immersive Klimt exhibit at New York City’s recently inaugurated Hall des Lumières with Artnet’s Ben Davis, she definitely has some notes:
They take liberties with the originals. If you know the originals well, which I do, it’s sometimes hard to figure out what they were working from. The color is sometimes way off. And some of the images are not by Klimt at all. They seem like pastiches of Klimt or pieces of Klimts that they’ve pasted together in different ways…these images are blown up to a height of, what, 20 feet? It really doesn’t work, aesthetically. Klimt’s drawings are especially difficult because they’re so delicate, at times almost invisible.
But mustn’t some young visitors, after posting the plethora of selfies that motivate many a pilgrimage to this “multi-sensory celebration,” be moved to learn more about the artist it’s cashing in on?
That’d be a good thing, right?
Of course it would, and Paul Priestley provides a great introduction to Klimt’s life and work in the above episode of his Art History Schoolweb series.
We grant that spending 13 minutes with a middle-aged arts educator in a festive vest is a less sexy-seeing prospect than “step(ping) into a wonderland of moving paintings” to be “amazed by the golden era of modernism.”
But Priestley offers something you can’t really focus on while gawking at enormous 360º projections of The Kiss during a $35 timed entry — historical context and a generous portion of art world dish on a “lifelong bachelor who had countless liaisons during his lifetime, usually with his models, and is rumored to have fathered more than a dozen children.”
Priestley makes clear how the young Klimt’s career took a fateful turn with Philosophy (below), part of a massive commission for the ceiling of Vienna University’s Great Hall, that was ultimately destroyed by the Nazis, but has since been resurrected after a fashion using AI, black and white photos, and eyewitness descriptions.
When Klimt’s first go at it was displayed, it was savaged by critics as “chaotic, nonsensical and out of keeping with the intended setting.”
Philosophy’s drubbing put an end to Klimt’s official commissions, but private ones flourished due to the bohemian painter’s “beautiful women in elegantly languid and flattering poses.”
Imagine how those status conscious society matrons would have reacted to seeing their likenesses tapped as immersive art, which Vice’s Alex Fleming-Brown pegs as “the latest lazy lovechild of TikTok and enterprising warehouse landlords.”
It’s an astonishing painting, but there’s so much more to discover about Klimt and his four decades worth of work.
But first, with apologies to any readers who genuinely enjoy immersive art exhibits — many do — here are Jane Kallir’s not entirely conciliatory thoughts on Beethoven Frieze, Klimt’s voluptuous vision of lust, love and disease, which was deliberately enhanced by accompanying sculpture and live music when it made its public debut in 1902, and is currently being parceled out and writ large in digital form in the building formerly known as New York’s Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank:
I asked myself whether Klimt would have approved of the Beethoven Frieze projections. I believe most artists embrace cutting-edge technology, whatever it may be in their day and age. The Beethoven Frieze segment is a Gesamtkunstwerk on a scale that Klimt might have dreamed of—might have. This is the one part of the presentation that could be faithful to his intentions.
Hacks are golden in this forum — whether or not they actually work — and running time is of the essence.
There’s an unmistakable visual vocabulary, too — from the god shots of manicured hands dumping pre-measured ingredients into mixing bowls to the reveal of the completed dish just seconds later.
One has to be conversant in these tropes to subvert them as gleefully as the anonymous creator of the seven year old online seriesYou Suck at Cooking.
Unlike such TikTok heavy hitters as cloud bread or whipped coffee, most of You Suck at Cooking’s dishes are things you might consider preparing on a regular basis, however trendy they may be at the moment.
The responsible party’s cooking and editing skills are solid, but his writing is the real star here. We also appreciate the massive amount of planning and care that goes into every five minute episode.
He’s an unabashed coiner of vocabulary and elaborate ways to refer to straightforward appliances and ingredients. His delivery is mild mannered, but he doesn’t mince words when it comes to culinary biases — e.g., condimenting only one side of the bun is a certifiable burger crime and if you don’t like pickles, one thing you can do is seek help.
Simple dishes such as overnight oats require so little instruction, he’s freed up to skewer the questionable claims of food-focused wellness “experts” by leaning all the way in.
The spirit of the project carries over into his written step-by-steps on the rare occasions when mere video demonstration will not suffice.
To get the most from your experience, we recommend you first watch his deep fried Korean-style corndog How To, then follow the written recipe:
1. Go to the store
2. Buy corn dogs
3. Enjoy
If you insist on making corn dogs yourself, first read these frying safety tips
The reason home fryers are safer than doing it on the stovetop is because they limit the heat of your oil so it won’t catch fire. It’s easy to let it get too hot which is very bad news.
Batter
1 ¼ cups flour
2 tablespoon sugar
½ teaspoon salt
1.3 teaspoon yeast
1 egg
100 ml warm water
Wangjangle until your wrist is furious (I did it for a few minutes tops)
Let it sit for half an hour
Dry off anything you’re rolling in it
Peg your dogs
Roll ‘em
Roll them in artisan Italian bread crumbs (okay seriously this is a flavor game changer and I can’t recommend them enough. Kortalian food just has such depth.
Fry for 3 minutes
Cool for a few minutes
I think anything else is pretty straight forward
When it comes to cooking hacks, our hero is a champion fabulist.
It’s safe to assume that the first tip is legit, after which… well, let’s just say that some of his orange peeling methods remind us in the best possible way of our old pal Shel Silverstein’s Uncle Shelby’s ABZ Book.
There’s a passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions that crosses our desk a lot at this time of year. It’s the one in which he declares Armistice Day, which coincidentally falls on his birthday, sacred:
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.
Here, here!
Hopefully Shakespeare won’t take umbrage if we skip over his doomed teenaged lovers to celebrate Kurt Vonnegut’s 11/11 Centennial with songs inspired by his work.
The driving force behind the KTE Tim Langsford, a drummer who mentors Autistic students at the University of Plymouth, was looking for ways to help his “foggy mind remember the key concepts, characters, and memorable lines that occur in each” of Vonnegut’s 14 books.
The solution? Community and accountability to an ongoing assignment. Langsford launched the Plymouth Vonnegut Collective in 2019 with a typewritten manifesto, inviting interested parties to read (or re-read) the novels in publication order, then gather for monthly discussions.
His loftier goal was for book club members to work collaboratively on a 14-track concept album informed by their reading.
They stuck to it, with efforts spanning a variety of genres.
The psychedelic God Bless You, Mister Rosewatermixes quotes from the book with edited clips of the collective’s discussion of the novel.
The project pushed Langsford out from behind the drum kit, as well as his comfort zone:
It has taken an awful lot to be comfortable with the songs on which I sing. However, I have tried to invoke KV’s sense of creation as if no one is watching. It doesn’t matter so do it for yourself…. Although do I contradict that by sharing these things to the internet rather than trashing them unseen or unheard?!
Ah, but isn’t one of the most beautiful uses of the Internet as a tool for finding out what we have in common with our fellow humans?
Congratulations to our fellow Vonnegut fans in Plymouth, who will be celebrating their achievement and the legendary author’s 100th birthday with an event featuring poetry, art, music and film inspired by the birthday boy’s novels.
Folk rocker Al Stewart is another who “was drawn by the Sirens of Titan.” The lyrics make perfect sense if the novel is fresh in your mind:
The band gave the author a writing credit. He repaid the compliment with a fan letter:
I was at my daughter’s house last night, and the radio was on. By God if the DJ didn’t play our song, and say it was number ten in New York, and say how good you guys are in general. You can imagine the pleasure that gave me. Luck has played an enormous part in my life. Those who know pop music keep telling me how lucky I am to be tied in with you. And I myself am crazy about our song, of course, but what do I know and why wouldn’t I be? This much I have always known, anyway: Music is the only art that’s really worth a damn. I envy you guys.
If that isn’t nice, we don’t know what is.
Vonnegut’s best known work, the time-traveling, perennially banned anti-war novel,Slaughterhouse-Five, presents an irresistible songwriting challenge, judging from the number of tunes that have sprouted from its fertile soil.
She titled her recent EP of five Vonnegut-inspired songs, Everything is Sateen, a nod to the Sateen Dura-Luxe house paint Vonnegut’s abstract expressionist, Rabo Karabekian, favors in Bluebeard.
We’re fairly confident that Hwang’s No Answer, offered above as a thank you to crowdfunders of a recent tour, will be the bounciest adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five you’ll hear all day.
Keep listening.
Sweet Soubrette, aka Ellia Bisker, another Bushwick Book Club fixture and one half of the goth-folk duo Charming Disaster, leaned into the horrors of Dresden for her Slaughterhouse-Five contribution, namechecking rubble, barbed wire, and the “mustard gas and roses” breath born of a night’s heavy drinking.
Songwriting musicologist Gail Sparlin’s My Blue Heaven: The Love Song of Montana Wildhack — seen here in a library performance — is as girlish and sweet as Valerie Perrine’s take on the character in George Roy Hill’s 1972 film of Slaughterhouse-Five.
Back in 1988, Hawkwind’s The War I Survived suffused Slaughterhouse-Five with some very New Wave synths…
The chorus of Sam Ford’s wistful So It Goes taps into the novel’s time traveling aspect, and touches on the challenges many soldiers experience when attempting to reintegrate into their pre-combat lives :
That ain’t the way home
Who says I wanna go home? I’m always home I’m always home.
Having invoked Vonnegut’s evergreen phrase, there’s no getting away without mentioning Nick Lowe’s 1976 power pop hit, though it may make for a tenuous connection.
Hi ho!
Still, tenuous connections can count as connections, especially when you tally up all the references to Cat’s Cradle’s secret government weapon, Ice Nine, in lyrics and band names.
Then there are the submerged references. We may not pick up on them, but we’re willing to believe they’re there.
Pearl Jam’s front man Eddie Vedder wrote that “books like Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Player Piano…they’ve had as much influence on me as any record I’ve ever owned.”
A memorable Breakfast of Champions illustration is said to have lit a flame with New Order, propelling Vonnegut out onto the dance floor.
And Ringo Starr edged his way to favorite Beatle status when he tipped his hat to Breakfast of Champions, dedicating his 1973 solo album to “Kilgore Trout and all the beavers.”
There are dozens more we could mention — you’ll find some of them in the playlist below — but without further ado, let’s welcome to the stage Special K and His Crew!
Yes, that’s Phish drummer (and major Vonnegut fan) Jon Fishman on vacuum.
But who’s that mystery front man, spitting Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales?
Happy 100th, Kurt Vonnegut! We’re glad you were born.
Construction sites are hives of specialized activity, but there’s no particular training needed to ferry 500 lbs of stone several stories to the masons waiting above. All you need is the stamina for a few steep flights and a medieval treadwheel crane or “squirrel cage.”
The technology, which uses simple geometry and human exertion to hoist heavy loads, dates to ancient Roman times.
Retired in the Victorian era, it has been resurrected and is being put to good use on the site of a former sandstone quarry two hours south of Paris, where the castle of an imaginary, low ranking 13th-century nobleman began taking shape in 1997.
There’s no typo in that timeline.
Château de Guédelon is an immersive educational project, an open air experimental archeology lab, and a highly unusual working construction site.
With a project timeline of 35 years, some 40 quarrypeople, stonemasons, woodcutters, carpenters, tilers, blacksmiths, rope makers and carters can expect another ten years on the job.
That’s longer than a medieval construction crew would have taken, but unlike their 21st-century counterparts, they didn’t have to take frequent breaks to explain their labors to the visiting public.
A team of archeologists, art historians and castellologists strive for authenticity, eschewing electricity and any vehicle that doesn’t have hooves.
Research materials include illuminated manuscripts, stained glass windows, financial records, and existing castles.
The 1425-year-old Canterbury Cathedral has a non-reproduction treadmill crane stored in its rafters, as well as a levers and pulleys activity sheet for young visitors that notes that operating a “human treadmill” was both grueling and dangerous:
Philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that they were “unequalled in the modern annals of legalized torture.”
Good call, then, on the part of Guédelon’s leadership to allow a few anachronisms in the name of safety.
Guédelon’s treadmill cranes, including a double drum model that pivots 360º to deposit loads of up to 1000 lbs wherever the stonemasons have need of them, have been outfitted with brakes. The walkers inside the wooden wheels wear hard hats, as are the overseer and those monitoring the brakes and the cradle holding the stones.
The onsite worker-educators may be garbed in period-appropriate loose-fitting natural fibers, but rest assured that their toes are steel-reinforced.
Château de Guédelon guide Sarah Preston explains the reasoning:
Obviously, we’re not trying to discover how many people were killed or injured in the 13th-century.
Learn more about Château de Guédelon, including how you can arrange a visit, here.
As a child, Jeff De Boer, the son of a sheet metal fabricator, was fascinated by the European plate armor collection in Calgary’s Glenbow Museum:
There was something magical or mystical about that empty form, that contained something. So what would it contain? A hero? Do we all contain that in ourselves?
After graduating from high school wearing a partial suit of armor he constructed for the occasion, De Boer completed seven full suits, while majoring in jewelry design at the Alberta College of Art and Design.
A sculpture class assignment provided him with an excuse to make a suit of armor for a cat. The artist had found his niche.
Using steel, silver, brass, bronze, nickel, copper, leather, fiber, wood, and his delicate jewelry making tools, DeBoer became the cats’ armorer, spending anywhere from 50 to 200 hours producing each increasingly intricate suit of feline armor. A noble pursuit, but one that inadvertently created an “imbalance in the universe”:
The only way to fix it was to do the same for the mouse.
“The suit of armor is a transformation vehicle. It’s something that only the hero would wear,” De Boer notes.
Fans of David Petersen’s Mouse Guard series will need no convincing, though no real mouse has had the misfortune to find its way inside one of his astonishing, custom-made creations.
It’s not an altogether bad idea. The only reason I don’t do it is that hollow suit of armor like you might see in a museum, your imagination will make it do a million things more than if you stick a mouse in it will ever do. I have put armor on cats. I can tell you, it’s nothing like what you think it’s going to be. It’s not a very good experience for the cat. It does not fulfill any fantasies about a cat wearing a suit of armor.
Though cats were his entry point, De Boer’s sympathies seem aligned with the underdog — er, mice. Equipping humble, hypothetical creatures with exquisitely wrought, historical protective gear is a way of pushing back against being perceived differently than one wishes to be.
Accepting an Honorary MFA from his alma mater earlier this year, he described an armored mouse as a metaphor for his “ongoing cat and mouse relationship with the world of fine art…a mischievous, rebellious being who dares to compete on his own terms in a world ruled by the cool cats.”
Each tiny piece is preceded by painstaking research and many reference drawings, and may incorporate special materials like the Japanese silk haori-himo cord lacing the shoulder plates to the body armor of a Samurai mouse family.
Additional creations have referenced Mongolian, gladiator, crusader, and Saracen styles — this last perfect for a Persian cat.
“I mean, “Why not?” he asks in his TED‑x Talk,Village Idiots & Innovation, below.
His latest work combines elements of Maratha and Hussar armor in a veritable puzzle of minuscule pieces.
See more of Jeff De Boer’s cat and mouse armor on his Instagram.
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