In the late 19th century, an enterprising photographer named George R. Lawrence developed a keen interest in aerial photography. He first began taking pictures with the help of high ladders, towers, and airborne balloons. Later he switched to using unmanned kites, which did the trick. Deploying 17 Conyne kites strung together by piano wire, Lawrence hoisted a hulking, 50 pound camera some 400 to 2,000 feet above the ground and then began capturing views of American cities. Most of these urban centers were growing at a steady clip. But, in his most famous photograph, Lawrence captured San Francisco reeling after the devastation of the 1906 earthquake. (Click the image above to see the leveled city in a larger format.)
A collection of Lawrence’s panoramic photographs can be viewed over at the Library of Congress web site. The collection includes bird’s-eye views of Manhattan (above) and a more sleepy Brooklyn, not to mention some great Midwestern cities and towns. Below you can see a vintage shot of The University of Chicago campus circa 1904. Or here Evanston’s Northwestern campus in 1907. And let’s not forget this 1908 photo of Madison, WI, where I spent my most formative years some eight decades later.…
Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, appeared in 1913. This year, exactly a century later, Proust enthusiasts, both individually and institutionally, have found all manner of ways to celebrate. The Morgan Library and Museum, for instance, put on an exhibition of “a fascinating selection of the author’s notebooks, preliminary drafts, galley-proofs, and other documents from the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France” — literarily serious stuff. For a Proust centennial experience equally literary but far less serious, why not watch the Monty Python sketch above depicting the “All-England Summarize Proust Competition”?
The situation presents the challenge you’d expect: contestants must relate, in fifteen seconds, the entirety of Proust’s seven-volume masterwork, “once in a swimsuit, and once in evening dress.” The attempt of one hapless participant, portrayed by Graham Chapman, runs as follows: “Proust’s novel ostensibly tells of the irrevocability of time lost, the forfeiture of innocence through experience, the reinstallment of extra-temporal values of time regained. Ultimately, the novel is both optimistic and set within the context of a humane religious experience, re-stating as it does the concept of atemporality. In the first volume, Swann, the family friend, visits…” But ah, too long. Watch the whole thing and find out if Michael Palin’s character fares any better at summarizing the unsummarizable, and, this happening in Monty Python’s reality, how quickly it will all cease to matter anyway.
Works by Proust can be found in our collection of Free eBooks.
At the height of Albert Einstein’s popularity, the public knew him not only as the world’s foremost theoretical physicist, but also as an enthusiastic sometime violinist. As a publication for the 2005 “World Year of Physics” puts it: “to the press of his time… Einstein was two parts renowned scientist, one jigger pacifist and Zionist fundraiser, and a dash amateur musician.” While this description may get at the public perception of his composition, Einstein himself seems to have favored the musician over all of his other “parts.” “Life without playing music is inconceivable for me,” he once said, “I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music… I get most joy in life out of music.”
The famous scientist never travelled without his beloved violin, “Lina.” His affair with music began with violin lessons in Munich at the age of 5. However, his early experiences with the instrument seem at best perfunctory and, at worst, antagonistic (one anecdote has him throwing a chair at his teacher, who left the house in tears).
He did not truly fall in love until discovering Mozart at age 13. A high school friend reported to biographer Carl Seeling that at this time, when the young Einstein’s “violin began to sing, the walls of the room seemed to recede—for the first time, Mozart in all his purity appeared before me, bathed in Hellenic beauty with its pure lines, roguishly playful, mightily sublime.”
This gushing recollection must inevitably prompt the question, raised in every account of Einstein and music—was he really any good? Since he played mostly for his own enjoyment, the answer seems irrelevant; yet, as particle physicist Brian Foster says in the video above, Einstein was “competent.” In his Berlin years, he played with renowned musicians like Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler and pianist Artur Schnabel (as well as with founder of quantum theory, Max Planck). His scientific notoriety garnered invitations to perform at benefit concerts. One critic remarked, “Einstein plays excellently. However… there are many violinists who are just as good.” Another concert-goer quipped, “I suppose now Fritz Kreisler is going to start giving physics lectures.” Accounts of his abilities do differ.
Brian Foster’s interest in Einstein the musician transcends the man’s virtuosity, or lack thereof. Since 2005—the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s “miracle year,” during which he published his most influential papers—Foster has teamed up with British violinist Jack Liebeck and other classical musicians to present lectures and concerts on the role of music in Einstein’s life and work. Einstein’s devotion to Mozart may be of particular interest to historians of science. Foster describes Einstein’s tastes as “conservative”; he found Beethoven too “creative,” but Mozart, on the other hand, revealed to him a universal harmony he believed existed in the universe. As another author puts it:
Einstein relished Mozart, noting to a friend that it was as if the great Wolfgang Amadeus did not “create” his beautifully clear music at all, but simply discovered it already made. This perspective parallels, remarkably, Einstein’s views on the ultimate simplicity of nature and its explanation and statement via essentially simple mathematical expressions.
While the interpretation of Einstein as a “realist” has its detractors, his insistence on the beauty and simplicity of scientific theories is not in dispute. Foster points out above that part of Einstein’s legacy is his push for beauty, unification, and harmony in our physical understanding of reality, a push that Foster credits to the scientist’s musical mind.
In 1967, two icons of French popular culture went out on a date. It didn’t go well. The usually cool Serge Gainsbourg was so intimidated by Brigitte Bardot’s beauty that his notorious charm failed him. Believing he had blown his chance, Gainsbourg was surprised when Bardot telephoned and said he could make amends by writing her “the most beautiful love song you can imagine.”
Gainsbourg responded by writing two songs. One was called “Bonnie and Clyde.” It was inspired by that year’s hit film of the same name by Arthur Penn, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty as the notorious 1930s outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.
You’ve read the story of Jesse James of how he lived and died. If you’re still in need; of something to read, here’s the story of Bonnie and Clyde.
Now Bonnie and Clyde are the Barrow gang I’m sure you all have read. how they rob and steal; and those who squeal, are usually found dying or dead.
There’s lots of untruths to these write-ups; they’re not as ruthless as that. their nature is raw; they hate all the law, the stool pigeons, spotters and rats.
They call them cold-blooded killers they say they are heartless and mean. But I say this with pride that I once knew Clyde, when he was honest and upright and clean.
But the law fooled around; kept taking him down, and locking him up in a cell. Till he said to me; “I’ll never be free, so I’ll meet a few of them in hell.”
The scene above, with Gainsbourg and Bardot performing the song, was broadcast on The Brigitte Bardot Show in early 1968. The song was released later that year on two albums: Initials B.B. and Bonnie and Clyde. The romance between Gainsbourg and Bardot was short. She returned to her second husband and he met actress Jane Birkin, with whom he recorded the second song he wrote for Bardot: “Je t’aime…mois non plus,” which means “I Love You…Me Neither.”
Rebecca Onion over at Slate’s history blog “The Vault” has brought to our attention two delightful finds from the Massachusetts Historical Society: childhood drawings by poet and painterE.E. Cummings, made when he was 6 and 7 years old. Dating from 1900–1902, the sketches, writes Onion, “reflect Cummings’ immersion in the popular culture of the time: circuses, Wild West shows, and adventure fiction.” These two drawings are fascinating portraits of the young Cummings’ mind at work. What a young mind he had.
Cummings began writing poetry at age 8, and wrote a poem a day until he was 22. His mature work, which he began publishing after his release from an internment camp in Normandy during WWI (where he was held for suspected treason), shows the same kind of childlike playfulness and discipline. And while the drawing at the top is the work of a young boy struggling with the conventions of the written word, its oddly-spaced and punctuated text—the lexical and syntactical ambiguities created by the layout—could certainly have come from the pen of the adult poet. Cummings’ ideas about his poetry were deliberately idiosyncratic and forcefully individual. As he would write, “may I be I is the only prayer—not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong.” Or, as he expressed in a similar sentiment in his 1926 collection, is 5, perhaps in response to some critical opprobrium:
mr youse needn’t be so spry
concernin questions arty
each has his tastes but as for i
i likes a certain party
In the drawing above, the young Edward Estlin Cummings imagines himself as a Buffalo Bill-like character. Onion points us toward the adult Cummings’ darkly ironic poem “[Buffalo Bill ‘s],” as a companion to the boy Cummings’ starry-eyed self-fashioning and “hero worship.” While on a superficial reading, Cummings’ work can sometimes seem maddeningly childish and silly, poems like “[Buffalo Bill ‘s]” show him plucking apart naïve illusions about heroism and spectacle as in so many of his other poems he skewers the pretensions of urban sophisticates and tastemakers, promoting a Romantic, uninhibited idea of the self unfettered by social, and typographical, conventions.
Cummings would be very appreciative of the work the Massachusetts Historical Society has done in cataloguing his family papers; he had a deep respect for history—above all for personal history. In the first of his so-called “nonlectures,” delivered at Harvard in 1952, he refers to his “autobiographical problem” in a passage that conjures the dystopian visions of Huxley and Orwell:
There’d be no problem, of course, if I subscribed to the hyperscientific doctrine that heredity is nothing because everything is environment; or if (having swallowed this supersleepingpill) I envisaged the future of socalled mankind as a permanent pastlessness, prenatally enveloping semiidentical supersubmorons in perpetual nonunhappiness. Rightly or wrongly, however, I prefer spiritual insomnia to psychic suicide.
Perhaps Cummings could thank “spiritual insomnia” for his serious wordplay and boundless curiosity—two childhood traits he never let go of.
If a Japanese cinephile likes American movies, they probably love David Lynch. I don’t mean to present this as an ironclad rule, but it certainly holds true among my friends. Just as many Americans find something interestingly askew in the fruits of modern Japanese culture, presumably Lynch’s Japanese fans experience his brand of off-kilter Americana — sometimes far off-kilter Americana — just as richly. Observers not particularly familiar with David Lynch have dismissed him as “weird,” just as those not particularly familiar with Japan have dismissed it as “weird.” But those of us familiar with both the filmmaker and the country know that they simply operate on different, and fascinating, sets of sensibilities.
You can see these worlds collide in Biblioklept’s post on Japanese posters advertising David Lynch films. At the top of the post, we have the ominously intriguing one-sheet for Mulholland Drive (or, rendered here in katakana script, “Maruhorando Doraibu”), Lynch’s critically acclaimed 2001 picture that, conceptually, began as a television series to follow up Twin Peaks. “Watashi no atama wa douka shiteiru,” reads the text between the faces of stars Laura Harring and Naomi Watts, which I translate to “Something is the matter with my head” — a viable tagline, come to think of it, for most of Lynch’s works. Just above you’ll find the poster for a personal Lynch favorite, Lost Highway (“Rosuto Haiuei”), clearly also pitched across the Pacific as the director’s mid-nineties comeback. And the chilling nearly abstract image below represents the chilling, abstract movie that started it all, 1977’s Eraserhead — or, Ireizaaheddo:
During World War II, Disney’s lovable characters made their own contribution to the war effort. In short propaganda films, Donald Duck, Goofy and the gang encouraged fellow Americans to support the draft and pay their taxes. And, through Disney characters, Americans learned about the evils of the Nazi regime. Here, we’ve gathered five of these animated propaganda films: Donald Gets Drafted (1942); Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943), The Spirit of 43′ (1943), The Old Army Game (1943), and Commando Duck (1944).
Fast forward 25 years and America found itself fighting a very different war, the Vietnam War. So far as I know, Disney never threw its cultural weight behind this divisive conflict. It wouldn’t have made good business sense. However, Disney’s most iconic character, Mickey Mouse, did appear in an animated underground film created by two critics of the war, Lee Savage and the celebrated graphic designer Milton Glaser.
Produced in 1968 for The Angry Arts Festival, the one minute animation shows Mickey getting lured into fighting in Nam, and then, rather immediately, getting shot in the head. The anti-war commentary gets made brutally and economically. Sometimes less is more. In a recent interview with Buzzfeed, Glaser recalls: “[O]bviously Mickey Mouse is a symbol of innocence, and of America, and of success, and of idealism — and to have him killed, as a solider is such a contradiction of your expectations. And when you’re dealing with communication, when you contradict expectations, you get a result.”
Mickey Mouse In Vietnam aired once at the aforementioned festival, then faded into oblivion, only to resurface later at the Sarajevo Film Festival and now on YouTube.
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Ever since I’ve written posts here on Open Culture, I’ve hosted and produced Notebook on Cities and Culture, a podcast dedicated to in-depth, long-form interviews with cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene. In its three seasons so far, I’ve roamed cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, Mexico City, Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka recording all of these conversations face to face with guests like writer of place Pico Iyer, Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt, MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey, film critic Karina Longworth, Los Angeles Review of Books editor Tom Lutz, graphic designer Clive Piercy, parking theorist Donald Shoup, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, Slate podcast producer Andy Bowers, Japan specialist Roland Kelts, novelist Timothy Taylor, and monologist Josh Kornbluth.
For the next season, the show’s fourth and most ambitious, I’ll record full-length conversations with sixty more luminaries not just in Los Angeles, but in the London, Toronto, and Copenhagen as well. As with previous seasons, I launched a Kickstarter drive last week to fund it. As of this writing, it’s raised $5,138 of its $8,000 budget, but it only has sixteen hours. If we don’t raise the full amount by Monday, June 24th at noon Pacific time, the season won’t happen at all. If Notebook on Cities and Culture’s fourth season strikes you as something you’d like to help make a reality, please do visit the show’s Kickstarter page. Thanks very much indeed!
When James Gandolfini first broke into film, he played Virgil, a brutal woman-beating mafioso (viewer beware), in the 1993 thriller, True Romance, written by Quentin Tarantino. In Terminal Velocity, he was back at it again, playing a Russian mobster. By the 1999, when The Sopranos first aired on HBO, Gandolfini had perfected the mobster role. The explosive anger, the raw violence, the colorful language — he had it all down. Of course, this contributed to a good gag when Gandolfini appeared on Sesame Street in 2002. Now the world had the chance to see the actor as it hadn’t seen him before. Meek, timid, and deathly afraid of giant talking vegetables. It’s an endearing little scene.
Those of us who spent hours sitting in front of the record player with our dads’ Radio Shack recorders, striving to duplicate the hilarity of Dickie Goodman’s novelty hit 1975 “Mr. Jaws,” will find much to appreciate in the staged spat above.
Musical pranksters Collective Cadenza raided the Beatles’ catalogue for seventeen songs to drive the narrative of a suspicious wife confronting her philandering husband. Which hussy sent him that passionate text? Lady Madonna? Julia? Michelle? Eleanor Rigby seems to have more comic potential than a tired ageist dig, and given their high production values, I’m mystified that the creators shied away from hiring a realistically hot plumber.
Perhaps I’m over-thinking things. It’s a lark, that’s all. Don’t expect Shakespeare, and you won’t lose sleep wondering why they failed to include“I Am the Walrus.”
I moved to New York City in 2000, and to the Lower East Side in 2002. To my dismay, the gritty downtown New York I’d loved from afar since childhood—represented by films like The Warriors, bands like Sonic Youth, and graffiti artists like Zephyr—was nearly at an end. CBGB’s was staggering toward its final years; local venue Brownies, right across the street, closed during my tenure, then re-opened as another bar, the live bands replaced by a jukebox; the few remaining artists from the old days holed up in their apartments, surly and forgotten; and rumors of Whole Foods and glass & steel condos proved true in the coming years. It was sad.
But oh, to be there in the 80s and early 90s, when flowers of dirty punk art grew from the needle-strewn Tompkins Square Park and the decaying squatters paradises along Avenue A. Of course I’m romanticizing a time of high crime, poverty, and low expectations, a time many native New Yorkers do not remember fondly (then again, it seems, just as many do). There are many, many documents of the old East Village mean streets—too many to properly list in this short post. But I can imagine no better tour guide to pre-millennial NYC than Iggy Pop.
In the short film above, watch him show Dutch filmmaker Bram van Splunteren around Alphabet City. Granted this is 1993. Things weren’t nearly as hairy as they were a few years prior (a fact Iggy points out right away), but it’s still a world away from the Lower East Side of today. Pop traipses through the neighborhood, pointing out favorite landmarks and pieces of graffiti. No stranger to urban decay, the Detroit native seems right at home. This being New York, Pop can stroll around without being molested (or mostly even recognized). All in all it’s a pretty leisurely tour of the 90s Lower East Side on a bright and sunny day with the guy who more-or-less invented punk. What more could you want?
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