On September 5, 1980, David Bowie performed for a delighted studio audience on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. First came “Life on Mars?”, and then his newly-released song, “Ashes to Ashes.” As his website (DavidBowie.com) describes it, the musician cobbled together a one-off band for the performance, ran through several rehearsals, and then taped the show at NBC Studios in LA. All of this came days before the release of his 14th studio album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), and Bowie’s triumphant debut in The Elephant Man on Broadway. Enjoy!
As children’s television has demonstrated since the beginning of the medium, sometimes the best way to make an unfamiliar concept understandable is to articulate it through the mouth — and the body — of a puppet. Most all of us alive today had some experience with that back when we were still getting our ABCs and 123s down. Yet even in adulthood, we continue to find ourselves confronted with ideas we may find difficult to grasp, especially in the domain of philosophy, with no explanation offering-puppets to be found — or at least there weren’t, not before the launch of Theoretical Puppets on Youtube.
Each month, Theoretical Puppets brings on a notable thinker or two, the current lineup of whom includes the likes of Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, all of them reconstructed out of cloth and wire.
These puppets are recognizable as the individuals who inspired them, and also recognizable as homages to the puppet aesthetic popularized by a certain long-running program on American television — a form of broadcasting, incidentally, that Benjamin never knew. He did, however, have serious thoughts about radio, the mass media of his day, some of which he — or rather, his puppet — articulates in the video just above.
Other episodes of Theoretical Puppets include Foucault on discourse, Deleuze on Power, Arendt on natality (and smoking), and even the late Bruno Latour on actor-network theory. Among the channel’s most-viewed videos are meetings of the minds both historical and fictional: between Deleuze and Foucault, (a re-creation of a 1963 radio interview), between Foucault and Benjamin, between Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dalí (which includes a discussion of the latter’s depiction of the former’s head as a “snail-like structure”). To varying extents, these dialogues are rooted in the words these figures wrote and spoke in their lifetimes; like most puppet-based productions, they also take place in the realm of fantasy. There’s humor in the incongruity, to be sure, but then, it must have demanded no small amount of imagination to produce such enduring bodies of theory in the first place.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
An Italian tourist went to Paris in search of the best croissant. A natural thing to do. Except he did it amidst a city-wide strike, one precipitated by Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to raise the minimum retirement age in France. It all makes for a unique kind of food/travel video.
And what bakery takes the proverbial cake? Turns out, it’s Du Pain et des Idées. When we visit Paris in June, we’ll be sure to stop by…
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Once lost, this 8‑minute, very damaged, but very delightful silent version of Alice in Wonderland was restored several years ago by the British Film Institute. It is the first film adaptation of the 1865 Lewis Carroll classic. And, at the time, the original length of 12 minutes (only 8 minutes survive today) made it the longest film coming out of the nascent British film industry.
After about a minute, the eye ignores the damage of the film, like the ear ignores a scratched 78 rpm record. Viewers can expect several vignettes from the novel, not a flowing narrative. It starts with Alice following the White Rabbit down the hole, the “eat me” and “drink me” sequence, the squealing baby that turns into a piglet, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Tea Party, and the Red Queen and her playing card minions. The coloring of the negative is a BFI reconstruction of the original colors, by the way.
The film was produced and directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow out of their Hepworth Studios in Walton-on-the-Thames, near London. They show knowledge of the camera trickery pioneered only a few years earlier by Georges Méliès, like the shrinking and growing Alice and the appearance of the Cheshire Cat. That cat, by the way, was the Hepworth’s family pet. Hepworth himself plays the frog-headed footman, and his wife played the Red Queen.
May Clark, who played Alice, was 18 at the time, and had already worked on several Hepworth productions, and not just acting. According to her bio at the Women Film Pioneers project, she did a bit of everything around the studio, “from special effects and set decoration to costume design and carpentry.” The early days of film have a real “student project” feel about them, no pigeonholed roles, just everybody chipping in.
As for Cecil Hepworth, he appeared destined for a career in film, as his father ran magic lantern shows. Cecil worked for several companies before setting up his own and wrote one of the first books on the subject, Animated Photography: The ABC of the Cinematograph. His company continued to make films in this early style through 1926, but eventually ran out of money. To pay off debts, the receivership company melted down his films to get the silver, which was the reason most scholars thought his films were lost. In 2008, one of his films was discovered, and then “Alice.” There may still be others out there.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Few outside New York know the Flatiron Building by name, but people everywhere associate it with the city. That owes in part to its tendency to appear in the vintage imagery of New York that adorns the walls of cafés, hotel rooms, and dentists’ offices across the world. And that, in turn, owes in part — in very large part — to the Flatiron’s unusual shape, the result of a design meant to maximize the profit of a triangular plot of land bounded by Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and East 22nd Street. You can hear the story of the building, “New York’s strangest tower,” in the new video from architecture-and-engineering Youtube channel The B1M just above.
We’ve previously featured The B1M here on Open Culture for videos on subjects like Europe’s lack of skyscrapers — a condition that certainly doesn’t afflict Manhattan, though at the time of the Flatiron Building’s construction in the first years of the twentieth century, the skyscraper itself was still a fairly novel concept.
Laws governing construction changed to keep up with developments in the technologies of construction: “Following a recent change in the city’s fire codes,” says the video’s narrator, “this became one of the earliest buildings in New York to shun load-bearing masonry and instead take advantage of steel for its structural frame.”
The Flatiron’s architects were Frederick P. Dinkelberg and Daniel Burnham, the latter of whom is now remembered as the original king of the American skyscraper. In fact, the very term “skyscraper” was coined in response to the Montauk Block, a high-rise he designed in Chicago. But while the Montauk Block stood only between 1883 and 1902, the Flatiron continues to stand proud — if, at 22 stories, no longer relatively tall — on the three-cornered plot where it first arose 120 years ago. Alas, it has also “sat empty since 2019, when its last tenants, Macmillan Publishers, moved out.” After that began a series of renovations, and after that began “multiple disagreements among the building’s current owners and future tenants,” which culminated in a court-ordered auction of the building won by a bidder who subsequently vanished. But however deep the Flatiron plunges into legal limbo, its status as a New York icon will surely remain intact.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Ask anyone who’s traveled to the Great Pyramids of Giza: no matter how many times you’ve seen them in photographs or on television, you’re never really prepared to come face-to-face with them in real life. But you can get fairly close to at least the appearance of real life by seeing the Pyramids in 4k resolution, as they’re presented in the video above from travel, architecture, and history Youtuber Manuel Bravo (previously featured here on Open Culture for his explanation of Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome atop the Florence Cathedral). This isn’t just vacation footage: Bravo tells the story of the Pyramids, puts them in context, and even incorporates virtual re-creations of what they would have looked like in their heyday.
We know the Pyramids as iconic ruins, undoubtedly mighty but also seriously dilapidated. When they were built in the 26th century BC, they were covered in white limestone exterior shells, giving them the strikingly smooth if chromatically reversed appearance of a 2001-style monolith — a characteristic that no doubt encourages certain theorists who imagine the construction process as having been executed by beings from outer space.
The technically inclined Bravo presumably has little time for such notions, filling the video as he does with details about the architecture and engineering of the Pyramids, many of them thoroughly human in nature, such as the deliberately confusing passageways meant to throw off plunderers.
Along with high-resolution footage and renderings of what the Pyramids looked like then and look like now, Bravo also includes his own on-foot explorations, showing us corners of the complex (and one especially claustrophobe-unfriendly tunnel) that we don’t normally see unless we take a tour ourselves. This close-up perspective gives him the opportunity to connect the modern human experience of these ancient monuments to their vast scale and historically distant conception. To be awed and even overwhelmed is perhaps the most natural response to the Pyramids, and for some, it’s worth the trip to experience that feeling alone. For others, answering the question of exactly how and why they awe and overwhelm becomes the work of a lifetime.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
We find ourselves in agreement with Nobel Prize-winning poet, and cat lover, Pablo Neruda:
Those of us who provide for felines choose to believe we are “the owner, proprietor, uncle of a cat, companion, colleague, disciple or friend of (our) cat”, when in fact they are mysterious beasts, far more self-contained than the companionable, inquisitive canine Neruda immortalized in Ode to the Dog.
Common knowledge once held that cats made their way to northern Europe from the Mediterranean aboard Roman — and eventually Viking — ships sometime between the 3rd to 7th century CE, but it turns out we were off by millennia.
In 2016, a team of researchers collaborating on the Five Thousand Years of History of Domestic Cats in Central Europe project confirmed the presence of domestic cats during the Roman period in the area that is now northern Poland, using a combination of zooarchaeology, genetics and absolute dating.
More recently, the team turned their attention to Felis bones found in southern Poland and Serbia, determining the ones found in the Jasna Strzegowska Cave to be Pre-Neolithic (5990–5760 BC), while the Serbian kitties hail from the Mesolithic-Neolitic era (6220–5730 BC).
In addition to clarifying our understanding of how our pet cats’ ancestors arrived in Central Europe from Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, the project seeks to “identify phenotypic features related to domestication, such as physical appearance, including body size and coat color; behavior, for example, reduced aggression; and possible physiological adaptations to digest anthropogenic food.”
Regarding non-anthropogenic food, a spike in the Late Neolithic Eastern European house mouse population exhibits some nifty overlap with these ancient cat bones’ newly attached dates, though Dr. Danijela Popović, who supervised the project’s paleogeneticians, reports that the cats’ arrival in Europe preceded that of the first farmers:
These cats probably were still wild animals that naturally colonized Central Europe.
We’re willing to believe they established a bulkhead, then hung around, waiting until the humans showed up before implementing the next phase of their plan — self-domestication.
Read the research team’s “history of the domestic cat in Central Europe” here.
We owe these pleasures in part to the First Folio, a fat collection of Shakespeare’s plays, compiled in 1623, seven years after his death.
As Elizabeth James, senior librarian at the National Art Library in London, and Harriet Reed, contemporary performance curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum point out in the show-and-tell above, 18 previously-unpublished plays would have sunk into oblivion had they not been truffled up and preserved here by John Heminge and Henry Condell, listed in the Folio as among the ‘Principall Actors’ of his work.
Hemings and Condell’s desire to create an accurate compendium of Shakespeare’s work for posterity led them to scour prompt books, authorial fair copy, and working drafts referred to as “foul papers” — a term rife for revival, in our opinion — for the texts of the unpublished works.
Their labors yielded some 750 copies of a luxurious, high-priced volume, which positioned Shakespeare as someone of such consequence, his words were to be accorded the same reverence as that of classical authors’.
They categorized the plays as comedies, tragedies, or histories, forever cementing our conceptions of the individual works.
The now familiar portrait of the author also contributed to the perceived weightiness of the tome.
Some retain the handwritten annotations of their original owners, a meticulous record of plays seen or read. How many would you be able to check off as something read or seen?
It’s a rare young Star Trek fan indeed who doesn’t fantasize about sitting on the bridge of the starship Enterprise. That has gone for every generation of fan, every Star Trek series, and every Enterprise, whose bridges you can see in the new video above from the Roddenberry Archive. It begins, naturally, with the original Star Trek, the show with which creator Gene Roddenberry started it all — and for which art director Matt Jefferies designed a bridge that would become a model not just for all subsequent Enterprises, but real-life command centers as well. As the narrator says, “Jefferies’ bridge made such an impression that engineers from NASA, the U.S. Navy, and private industry have studied it as a model for an advanced, efficient control room.”
That narrator happens to be John de Lancie, whom viewers of Star Trek: The Next Generation and subsequent series will know as the all-powerful extra-dimensional being Q. He’s not the only familiar performer to participate in this retrospective project: in the video above appears a certain William Shatner, who as James Tiberius Kirk occupied the captain’s chair of the very first Enterprise.
“The site features 360-degree, 3D models of the various versions of the Enterprise, as well as a timeline of the ship’s evolution throughout the franchise’s history,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sarah Kuta. “Fans of the show can also read detailed information about each version of the ship’s design, its significance to the Star Trek storyline and its production backstory.” All this comes online to mark the end of Star Trek: Picard, the recent series built around Patrick Stewart’s Enterprise captain from The Next Generation, whose final episode went up last month on the streaming service Paramount+. For that grand finale, production designer Dave Blass “recreated the bridge of the Enterprise D,” and “Picard’s triumphant return to his beloved ship brought nostalgic tears to the eyes of more than a few fans,” no doubt regardless of generation. Take the virtual tours here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
The phrase “to throw down the gauntlet” means to issue a challenge, and this is understood all over the English-speaking world — even by those who have no idea what, exactly, a gauntlet is. “The word itself comes from the French word gantelet, and referred to the heavy, armored gloves worn by medieval knights,” writes History.com’s Elizabeth Harrison. “In an age when chivalry and personal honor were paramount, throwing a gauntlet at the feet of an enemy or opponent was considered a grave insult that could only be answered with personal combat, and the offended party was expected to ‘take up the gauntlet’ to acknowledge and accept the challenge.”
How many of us, here in the twenty-first century, have ever literally taken up a gauntlet? Adam Savage never has, which may come as a surprise to fans of the former MythBusters co-host and enthusiast of combat technologies past, present, and future.
Each of these gauntlets was made in a different style, with details like a fine-meshed chain mail underside (to make it easier to keep a grip on your sword) or even a locking spring catch (to make it impossible to let go of your sword at all). Savage marvels at these features, but also the visibly painstaking craftsmanship that went into every aspect of these gauntlets’ construction, which he has more than enough experience to understand. His enthusiasm and knowledge are evidenced by the wealth of armor-related videos on his Youtube channel, including a series about building his own full suit of armor, a challenge that it was inevitable he would set himself against — a gauntlet, in other words, he both threw down and took up.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
According to a new report published by PEN America, the “2022–23 school year has been marked to date by an escalation of book bans and censorship in classrooms and school libraries across the United States.” PEN America has tracked “1,477 instances of individual books banned, affecting 874 unique titles,” during the first half of this academic year. That marks an increase of 28 percent compared to the prior six months, January – June 2022.” The book bannings are taking place in conservative-leaning states (mainly, Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina), and overwhelmingly, they’re targeting “stories by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.”
Fortunately, American public libraries are pushing back. As mentioned last summer, the Brooklyn Public Library launched Books Unbanned. This initiative provides American students, no matter where they live in the U.S., free access to 500,000 digital books, including books banned by students’ local libraries. And now the Seattle Public Library has joined the effort, rolling out its own version of Books Unbanned. “We believe in your right to read what you want, discover yourself and form your own opinions,” writes the library. “Teens and young adults ages 13 to 26 living anywhere in the U.S. can access our entire collection of e‑books and audiobooks.” To get started, students can fill out the form at the bottom of this page (click here), and then explore these curated lists of banned non-fiction books and banned fiction books.
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