The Rules of 100 Sports Clearly Explained in Short Videos: Baseball, Football, Jai Alai, Sumo Wrestling, Cricket, Pétanque & Much More

in Sports | April 5th, 2021

When you get down to it, every sport is its rules. This leaves aside great his­tor­i­cal weight and cul­tur­al asso­ci­a­tions, grant­ed, but if you don’t know a sport’s rules, not only can you not play it, you can’t appre­ci­ate it (the many child­hood after­noons I thrilled to tele­vised 49ers games with­out hav­ing any idea what was hap­pen­ing on the field notwith­stand­ing). What’s worse, you can’t dis­cuss it. “There is a shared knowl­edge of sports in Amer­i­ca that is unlike our shared knowl­edge of any­thing else,” as Chuck Kloster­man once put it. “When­ev­er I have to hang out with some­one I’ve nev­er met before, I always find myself secret­ly think­ing, ‘I hope this dude knows about sports. I hope this dude knows about sports. I hope this dude knows about sports.’ ”

Kloster­man is a cul­tur­al crit­ic, a posi­tion not at odds with his sports fanati­cism, and he sure­ly knows that his obser­va­tion holds well beyond the U.S.: just con­sid­er how deeply so much of the world is invest­ed in foot­ball. Despite its rel­a­tive sim­plic­i­ty, many Amer­i­cans nev­er quite grasped the work­ings of what we call soc­cer. But thanks to a Youtu­ber called Ninh Ly, we can learn in just over four min­utes.

Ly’s expla­na­tion of asso­ci­a­tion football/soccer is just one of near­ly 100 such videos on his chan­nel, each of which clear­ly and con­cise­ly lays out the rules of a dif­fer­ent sport. An Amer­i­can who watch­es it imme­di­ate­ly becomes not just able to under­stand a game, but pre­pared to engage with the cul­tures of foot­ball-enthu­si­ast coun­tries from Mex­i­co to Malaysia, Turkey to Thai­land.

Though British, Ly just as cogent­ly explains sports from the Unit­ed States, even the rel­a­tive­ly com­pli­cat­ed ones: bas­ket­ball, for instance, or what most of the world calls Amer­i­can foot­ball (as well as its are­na, Cana­di­an, and twice-failed XFL vari­ants), a game whose devot­ed fans include no less acclaimed-in-Europe an Amer­i­can nov­el­ist than than Paul Auster. Pre­vi­ous­ly on Open Cul­ture, we fea­tured Auster’s cor­re­spon­dence with J.M. Coet­zee on the sub­ject of sports, where­in the for­mer probes his own enthu­si­asm for foot­ball, and the lat­ter his own enthu­si­asm for crick­et. “If I look into my own heart and ask why, in the twi­light of my days, I am still — some­times — pre­pared to spend hours watch­ing crick­et on tele­vi­sion,” writes Coet­zee, “I must report that, how­ev­er absurd­ly, how­ev­er wist­ful­ly, I con­tin­ue to look out for moments of hero­ism, moments of nobil­i­ty.”

Any­one can enjoy such moments when and where they come, but only if they know the rules of crick­et in the first place. Ly has, of course, made a crick­et explain­er, which in four min­utes ful­ly elu­ci­dates a sport as obscure to some as it is beloved of oth­ers. He’s also cov­ered much more spe­cial­ized sports, includ­ing fenc­ing, curl­ing, pick­le­ball, jai alai, axe throw­ing, and sumo wrestling. (Unable to “ignore the over­whelm­ing demand,” he’s even explained the rules of quid­ditch, a game adapt­ed from the Har­ry Pot­ter books.) After a cou­ple of hours with his playlist (embed­ded below), you’ll come away ready to ascend to a new plane of appre­ci­a­tion for sports­man­ship in all its var­i­ous man­i­fes­ta­tions. If you’re any­thing like me, you’ll then revis­it your ear­li­est edu­ca­tion in these sub­jects: Sports Car­toons.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Ker­ouac Was a Secret, Obses­sive Fan of Fan­ta­sy Base­ball

Albert Camus’ Lessons Learned from Play­ing Goalie: “What I Know Most Sure­ly about Moral­i­ty and Oblig­a­tions, I Owe to Foot­ball”

Mon­ty Python’s Philosopher’s Foot­ball Match: The Epic Show­down Between the Greeks & Ger­mans (1972)

Read and Hear Famous Writ­ers (and Arm­chair Sports­men) J.M. Coet­zee and Paul Auster’s Cor­re­spon­dence

Jorge Luis Borges: “Soc­cer is Pop­u­lar Because Stu­pid­i­ty is Pop­u­lar”

The Weird World of Vin­tage Sports

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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5 Free Online Courses on Marx’s Capital from Prof. David Harvey

in Economics, Online Courses, Politics | April 2nd, 2021

Geo­g­ra­ph­er and Marx­ist schol­ar David Har­vey did not set out to become a Marx­ist. He didn’t even know what a Marx­ist was. He sim­ply start­ed to read Marx one day, at the age of 35, because all of the oth­er social sci­ence meth­ods he had applied in his study of the hous­ing mar­ket and social unrest in US cities “didn’t seem to be work­ing well,” he says in a Jacobin inter­view. “So, I start­ed to read Marx, and I found it more and more rel­e­vant…. After I cit­ed Marx a few times favor­ably, peo­ple pret­ty soon said I was a Marx­ist. I didn’t know what it meant… and I still don’t know what it means. It clear­ly does have a polit­i­cal mes­sage, though, as a cri­tique of cap­i­tal.”

The word “Marx­ist” has been as much a defam­a­to­ry term of moral and polit­i­cal abuse as it has a coher­ent descrip­tion of a posi­tion. But ask Har­vey to explain what Marx means in the Ger­man philosopher’s mas­sive analy­sis of polit­i­cal econ­o­my, Cap­i­tal, and he will glad­ly tell you at length. Har­vey has not only read all three vol­umes of the work many times over, a feat very few can claim, but he has expli­cat­ed them in detail in his cours­es at Johns Hop­kins and the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York since the 1970s. In the age of YouTube, Har­vey post­ed his lec­tures online, and they became so pop­u­lar they inspired a series of equal­ly pop­u­lar writ­ten com­pan­ion books.

Why study a dead 19th-cen­tu­ry social­ist? What could he pos­si­bly have to say about the world of AI, COVID, and cli­mate change? “I think Marx is more rel­e­vant today than ever before,” says Har­vey. “When Marx was writ­ing, cap­i­tal was not dom­i­nant in the world. It was dom­i­nant in Britain and West­ern Europe and the east­ern Unit­ed States, but it wasn’t dom­i­nant in Chi­na or India. Now it’s dom­i­nant every­where. So, I think Marx’s analy­sis of what cap­i­tal is and its con­tra­dic­tions is more rel­e­vant now than ever.”

To illus­trate, and exhaus­tive­ly explain, the point, Har­vey announced by tweet recent­ly that he’s made 5 cours­es freely avail­able online as videos and pod­casts. Find links to all 5 cours­es below. Or find them in our col­lec­tion: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Read­ing Marx’s Cap­i­tal Vol­ume 1 with David Har­vey – 2019 Edi­tion

Read­ing Marx’s Cap­i­tal Vol­ume I with David Har­vey – 2007 Edi­tion

Read­ing Marx’s Cap­i­tal Vol­ume 2 with David Har­vey

Read­ing Marx’s Grun­drisse with David Har­vey

Marx, Cap­i­tal, and the Mad­ness of Eco­nom­ic Rea­son

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Marx­ism by Ray­mond Geuss: A Free Course 

A Short Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Karl Marx

David Harvey’s Course on Marx’s Cap­i­tal: Vol­umes 1 & 2 Now Avail­able Free Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Discover the First Modern Kitchen–the Frankfurt Kitchen–Pioneered by the Architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1926)

in Architecture, Design, Gender, Life | April 2nd, 2021

Near­ly 100 years after it was intro­duced, archi­tect Mar­garete (Grete) Schütte-Lihotzky’s famous Frank­furt Kitchen con­tin­ues to exert enor­mous influ­ence on kitchen design.

Schütte-Lihotzky ana­lyzed designs for kitchens in train din­ing cars and made detailed time-motion stud­ies of house­wives’ din­ner prepa­ra­tions in her quest to come up with some­thing that would be space sav­ing, effi­cient, inex­pen­sive­ly pre-fab­ri­cat­ed, and eas­i­ly installed in the new hous­ing spring­ing up in post-WWI Ger­many.

Schütte-Lihotzky hoped that her design would have a lib­er­at­ing effect, by reduc­ing the time women spent in the kitchen. Noth­ing is left to chance in these 1.9 by 3.44 meters, with the main empha­sis placed on the well-trav­eled “gold­en tri­an­gle” between work­top, stove, and sink.

The design’s sci­en­tif­ic man­age­ment hon­ored ergonom­ics and effi­cien­cy, ini­ti­at­ing a sort of house­hold dance, but as film­mak­er Mari­beth Rom­s­lo, who direct­ed eight dancers on a painstak­ing fac­sim­i­le of a Frank­furt Kitchen, below, observes:

…as with any progress, there is fric­tion and pres­sure. As women gain more rights (then and now), are they real­ly just adding more to their to-do list of respon­si­bil­i­ties? Adding to the num­ber of plates they need to spin? They haven’t been excused from domes­tic duties in order to pur­sue careers or employ­ment, the new respon­si­bil­i­ties are addi­tive.

 

(Note: enter your infor­ma­tion to view the film.)

Chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Zoé Hen­rot, who also appears in the film, empha­sizes the Frank­furt Kitchen’s design effi­cien­cies and many of its famous fea­tures — the draw­ers for flour and oth­er bulk goods, the adjustable stool, the cut­ting board with a recep­ta­cle for par­ings and peels.

At the same time, she man­ages to tele­graph some pos­si­ble Catch-22s.

Its diminu­tive size dic­tates that this work­place will be a soli­tary one — no helpers, guests, or small chil­dren.

The built-in expec­ta­tions regard­ing uni­for­mi­ty of use leaves lit­tle room for culi­nary exper­i­men­ta­tion or a loosey goosey approach.

When crush­ing­ly repet­i­tive tasks begin to chafe, options for escape are lim­it­ed (if very well-suit­ed to the expres­sive pos­si­bil­i­ties of mod­ern dance).

Inter­est­ing­ly, many assume that a female archi­tect work­ing in 1926 would have brought some per­son­al insights to the task that her male col­leagues might have been lack­ing. Not so, as Schütte-Lihotzky read­i­ly admit­ted:

The truth of the mat­ter was, I’d nev­er run a house­hold before design­ing the Frank­furt Kitchen, I’d nev­er cooked, and had no idea about cook­ing.

Singer-song­writer Robert Rotifer is anoth­er artist who was moved to pay homage to Schütte-Lihotzky and the Frank­furt Kitchen, a “cal­cu­lat­ed move” that he describes as some­thing clos­er to design­ing a kitchen than “divine inspi­ra­tion”:

I sat on the train trav­el­ing from Can­ter­bury up to Lon­don… I was about to record a new album, and I need­ed one more uptem­po song, some­thing dri­ving and rhyth­mi­cal. While the noisy com­bi­na­tion of rick­ety train and worn-out tracks sug­gest­ed a beat, I began to think about syn­co­pa­tions and sub­jects.

I thought about the mun­dane things nobody usu­al­ly writes songs about, func­tion­al things that defy metaphor—tools, devices, house­hold goods. As I list­ed some items in my head, I soon real­ized that kitchen uten­sils were the way to go. I thought about the mechan­ics of a kitchen, and that’s when the name of the cre­ator of the famous Frank­furt Kitchen flashed up in my head.

There, in the nat­ur­al rhythm of her name, was the syn­co­pa­tion I had been look­ing for: “I sing this out to Grete Schütte-Lihotzky.” Writ­ing the rest of the lyrics was easy. The repet­i­tive ele­ment would illus­trate the way you keep return­ing to the same tasks and posi­tions when you are work­ing in a kitchen. In the mid­dle-eight I would also find space for some of the crit­i­cisms that have been lev­eled at Schütte-Lihotzky’s kitchen over the decades, such as the way her design iso­lat­ed the kitchen work­er, i.e. tra­di­tion­al­ly the woman, from the rest of the fam­i­ly.

Rotifer, who also cre­at­ed the paint­ings used in the ani­mat­ed music video, gives the archi­tect her due by includ­ing accom­plish­ments beyond the Frank­furt Kitchen: her micro-apart­ment with “a dis­guised roll-out bed,” her ter­raced hous­es at the Werk­bund­sied­lung, a hous­ing project’s kinder­garten, a print­ing shop, and the Vien­nese Com­mu­nist par­ty head­quar­ters.

It’s a love­ly trib­ute to a design pio­neer who, reflect­ing on her long career around the time of her 100th birth­day, remarked:

If I had known that every­one would keep talk­ing about noth­ing else, I would nev­er have built that damned kitchen!

Muse­ums that have acquired a Frank­furt Kitchen include Frankfurt’s Muse­um Ange­wandte Kun­st, New York City’s Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, London’s Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, and Oslo’s Nation­al Muse­um.

Learn more about the Kitchen Dance Project in this con­ver­sa­tion between film­mak­er Mari­beth Rom­s­lo, chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Zoé Emi­lie Hen­rot, and Min­neapo­lis Insti­tute of Art cura­tor Jen­nifer Komar Oli­varez.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Recipes from the Kitchen of Geor­gia O’Keeffe

The Pol­i­tics & Phi­los­o­phy of the Bauhaus Design Move­ment: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Vis­it the Homes That Great Archi­tects Designed for Them­selves: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Cor­busier, Wal­ter Gropius & Frank Gehry

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

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Why Do Wes Anderson Movies Look Like That?

in Film | April 2nd, 2021

The dom­i­nant form of Hol­ly­wood and/or main­stream film­mak­ing has been real­ism, the sense that even in our wildest fan­ta­sy, sci-fi, and super­hero films there’s still an attempt to hide the cam­era, the crew, and the light­ing, and that what we’re see­ing just *is*, that noth­ing has been con­struct­ed for us. Despite the tricks that edit­ing and non-diegetic sound (music, etc.) play on us, we are still will­ing to believe that we are see­ing a thing that hap­pened.

There’s very few film­mak­ers that explic­it­ly resist this and still make pop­u­lar and suc­cess­ful Hol­ly­wood films, and Wes Ander­son is one of them. Hence the above video essay from Thomas Flight, who recent­ly vis­it­ed Anderson’s films to pull out the more eso­teric of his ref­er­ences.

Flight’s the­sis runs thus­ly. Ander­son chose to use real fur on the stop-motion pup­pets in the Fan­tas­tic Mr. Fox not despite the hair mov­ing from the ani­ma­tors’ hands’ manip­u­la­tion, but *because* of it. Show­ing the fin­ger­prints as it were of the cre­ators with­in the film itself is a con­stant styl­is­tic choice in his cin­e­ma, and one that is also reflect­ed in his use of flat, dio­ra­ma-like frames. This is what crit­ic Matt Zoller Seitz, who has writ­ten sev­er­al beau­ti­ful cof­fee table books on Wes Ander­son, calls Plani­met­ric Com­po­si­tion. But it’s also there in the titles, use of the­ater cur­tains, of the numer­ous sto­ry­book and com­ic book ref­er­ences that shape Anderson’s work.

This is not new of course, if you fol­low any writ­ing on Ander­son. It’s a key to under­stand­ing his aes­thet­ic. But Flight goes fur­ther to ask why. Why con­struct some­thing so arti­fi­cial and risk alien­at­ing audi­ences?

Flight comes to the point: it’s a risk worth tak­ing. It’s a moment in childhood—he com­pares it to a par­ent read­ing a bed­time sto­ry. A par­ent is present, often the focus of the child’s atten­tion (there might not even be a book) but at the same time so is the sto­ry. Words unfold in speech and also unfold in a child’s mind. Both exist in the same space, the arti­fi­cial and the real.

So many Ander­son films unfold like storybooks—we often see a hard­back book with the same title in the film itself, or in the case of The Grand Budapest Hotel, a series of sto­ries and books, all nes­tled inside each oth­er. Flight doesn’t make the com­par­i­son, but it is worth doing so: Anderson’s films are like epis­to­lary nov­els of the 19th cen­tu­ry, such as Franken­stein or Wuther­ing Heights, sto­ries with­in let­ters with­in sto­ries.

But here’s the inter­est­ing part: when Ander­son has a moment of height­ened emo­tion in his films, where char­ac­ters let down their guard and speak from the heart, the direc­tor will give us the clas­sic real­ist shot/reverse shot. It’s fleet­ing but it’s there.

And that works exact­ly because Ander­son holds off on reveal­ing it to us until that one moment. The sto­ry­teller knows it’s spe­cial and knows we’re going to find it spe­cial. At a time when the auteur the­o­ry is under attack from crit­ics on one side and the cap­i­tal­ist machine, it’s good to know there’s a direc­tor like Ander­son who doesn’t give us what we want, but gives us what we so sore­ly need.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wes Anderson’s Shorts Films & Com­mer­cials: A Playlist of 8 Short Ander­son­ian Works

A Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Wes Ander­son Video Essays

Wes Ander­son Releas­es the Offi­cial Trail­er for His New Film, The French Dis­patch: Watch It Online

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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On “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” and the Female Buddy Comedy–Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #87

in Comedy, Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | April 2nd, 2021

The bud­dy com­e­dy is a sta­ple of Amer­i­can film, but using this to explore female friend­ship is still fresh ground. Eri­ca, Mark, Bri­an, and Eri­ca’s long-time friend Mic­ah Greene (actor and nurse) dis­cuss tropes and dynam­ics with­in this kind of film, focus­ing pri­mar­i­ly on Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, the 2021 release writ­ten and star­ring Kristin Wiig and Annie Mumo­lo as a cou­ple of mid­dle aged near-twin odd­balls expand­ing their hori­zons in a sur­re­al­is­tic, gag-filled trop­i­cal venue.

While male pair­ings of this sort (Cheech and Chong, Bob and Doug McKen­zie, Beav­is and Butthead et al) stick to sil­ly jokes, Barb and Star base their antics around their evolv­ing rela­tion­ship toward each oth­er. As with the 2019 film Books­mart and many TV shows includ­ing Dead to Me, PEN15, and Grace and Frankie, the trend is toward dram­e­dy as the dynam­ics of friend­ship are tak­en seri­ous­ly. We also touch on Brides­maids, Sis­ters, The Heat, BAPS, I Love You Man, and more.

A few rel­e­vant arti­cles:

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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When the Indiana Bell Building Was Rotated 90° While Everyone Worked Inside in 1930 (by Kurt Vonnegut’s Architect Dad)

in Architecture, History | April 1st, 2021

These days, when a com­pa­ny finds itself in need of more space than its cur­rent build­ing affords, it moves to a big­ger one, expands the one it has, or does a full tear­down-and-rebuild. But con­sid­er­ing only these options shows a cer­tain fail­ure of imag­i­na­tion, as under­scored by the video above: a brief sum­ma­ry of how the Indi­ana Bell Tele­phone Com­pa­ny added a sec­ond build­ing along­side its Indi­anapo­lis head­quar­ters — but only after hoist­ing up the lat­ter and piv­ot­ing it 90 degrees on its side. “This was no small task,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor, “as the eight-sto­ry, steel-frame-and-brick build­ing mea­sured about 100 by 135 feet, and weighed 11,000 tons.”

But between Octo­ber 20th and Novem­ber 14th, 1930, the com­pa­ny did indeed man­age to turn and shift the entire struc­ture as planned, “and the move caused no ser­vice out­ages, and all 600 work­ers with­in the build­ing still report­ed to work every day.”

This neces­si­tat­ed length­en­ing and mak­ing flex­i­ble all its util­i­ty cables and pipes, then lift­ing it a quar­ter-inch with jacks and plac­ing it on rollers. “Every six strokes of the jacks would shift the build­ing three-eighths of an inch, mov­ing it fif­teen inch­es per hour.” As for Indi­ana Bel­l’s employ­ees, they entered and left their slow­ly piv­ot­ing work­place “using a mov­able pas­sen­ger walk­way that moved with the build­ing.” To Kurt Von­negut Jr., then eight years old, all this must have been an impres­sive sight indeed.

The young nov­el­ist-to-be must have seen it not just because he was born and raised in Indi­anapo­lis, a fact he ref­er­enced through­out his life, but because his father was the pro­jec­t’s lead archi­tect. Kurt Von­negut, Sr. fol­lowed in the foot­steps of his own father Bernard Von­negut, design­er of Das Deutsche Haus, today known as the Athenaeum, which the Nation­al Reg­is­ter of His­toric Places des­ig­nates as “the best pre­served and most elab­o­rate build­ing asso­ci­at­ed with the Ger­man Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ty of Indi­anapo­lis.” This Ger­man lega­cy would prove rather more com­pli­cat­ed for the most famous Von­negut of them all, impris­oned in Dres­den as he was dur­ing World War II. The dark­ness of his expe­ri­ence man­i­fests in his work, not least his mas­ter­piece Slaugh­ter­house-Five; but so, one imag­ines, does the near-fan­tas­ti­cal prac­ti­cal­i­ty of 1930s Indi­anapo­lis.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A New Kurt Von­negut Muse­um Opens in Indi­anapo­lis … Right in Time for Banned Books Week

Watch the Com­plete­ly Unsafe, Ver­ti­go-Induc­ing Footage of Work­ers Build­ing New York’s Icon­ic Sky­scrap­ers

See New York City in the 1930s and Now: A Side-by-Side Com­par­i­son of the Same Streets & Land­marks

Free Online Engi­neer­ing Cours­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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Meet Les Rallizes Dénudés, the Mysterious Japanese Psych-Rock Band Whose Influence Is Everywhere

in Music | April 1st, 2021

For those young peo­ple – includ­ing you – who live this mod­ern ago­nis­ing ado­les­cence and who are want­i­ng the true rad­i­cal music, I sin­cere­ly wish the dia­logue accom­pa­nied by pierc­ing pain will be born and fill this recital hall.

– text from late 60s’ Les Ral­lizes Dénudés con­cert fly­ers

In Span­ish writer Car­los Ruiz Zafón’s best­selling nov­el The Shad­ow of the Wind, nar­ra­tor Daniel Sem­pere spends his ado­les­cence try­ing to solve the mys­tery of an obscure dead nov­el­ist. Fans of the book might see Daniel’s detec­tive sto­ry in Grayson Haver Currin’s quest to learn more about Japan­ese psych rock band Les Ral­lizes Dénudés and its elu­sive founder Takashi Mizu­tani. The band has inspired devo­tion and end­less fas­ci­na­tion among their small cult fol­low­ing. But Currin’s inves­ti­ga­tions met with one after anoth­er dead end. Les Ral­lizes Dénudés is, he writes, “a band that’s exist­ed behind a veil of secre­cy for so long that it’s almost impos­si­ble to tell where facts end and where fan­ta­sy begins.”

It does not help that many people’s first and last encounter with Les Ral­lizes Dénudés was Julian Cope’s 2007 Japrock­sam­pler, a gen­er­ous, even ency­clo­pe­dic intro­duc­tion to post-war Japan­ese rock and roll. The book played “a piv­otal role in expos­ing Amer­i­can and Eng­lish audi­ences to Les Ral­lizes Dénudés’ tantric gui­tar shrieks,” yet its mea­ger chap­ter on the band is appar­ent­ly rid­dled with inac­cu­ra­cies, includ­ing the claim that the band nev­er record­ed in the stu­dio in their entire 29-year exis­tence. They did, in 1991, 24 years after they began play­ing stages in Tokyo.

So how did any­one hear about them if they did­n’t make or pro­mote albums? “Through bootlegs, bootlegs and more bootlegs,” Cope wrote. Here he does not exag­ger­ate, but even where he does, “it’s in the ser­vice of truth,” Dan­ger­ous Minds argues, going on to sum­ma­rize the “skele­tal” biog­ra­phy Cope sketch­es out for the band:

Takashi Mizu­tani formed the group as a col­lege stu­dent in the ‘60s, when, Cope writes, French cul­ture still found devo­tees among post­war Japan­ese youth look­ing for a rev­o­lu­tion­ary alter­na­tive to Uncle Sam. That means: Cool for these guys was ice cold. Dead­pan as the Vel­vets or Space­men 3, Mizu­tani and his band­mates iden­ti­fied with the loud­est, dark­est and most destruc­tive aspects of psych-rock.

Les Ral­lizes Dénudés is leg­endary for good rea­son, as you can learn in the Band­splain­ing video at the top. One thing we do know about them is that a for­mer bassist appar­ent­ly hijacked an air­plane for the Japan­ese Red Army Fac­tion (then found asy­lum in North Korea), but “it’s actu­al­ly not the most inter­est­ing thing about them.” Those who already know a cer­tain kind of psy­che­del­ic rock may hear the dark, echoey drone of White Light/White Heat-era Vel­vet Under­ground and lat­er bands like Bri­an Jon­estown Mas­sacre or Moon Duo, as well as the No Wave noise rock of Son­ic Youth and hazy shoegaze of My Bloody Valen­tine.

The band’s echo­ing vocals and swirling, wail­ing peals of fuzzed-out gui­tar “fore­shad­owed the next five decades of under­ground rock,” the Band­splain­ing video notes. This seems to be the case whether the musi­cians inspired by Les Ral­lizes Dénudés had ever heard their music direct­ly. Japan­ese under­ground music “only began reach­ing West­ern ears in the ear­ly 90s,” writes Alan Cum­mings, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don pro­fes­sor of Japan­ese trans­la­tion, dra­ma, cul­ture, and his­to­ry, and a fore­most West­ern author­i­ty on Japan­ese psych rock. When the music first reached lis­ten­ers out­side Japan, how­ev­er, it wasn’t Les Ral­lizes Dénudés they first heard.

Cum­mings, who saw Les Ral­lizes Dénudés live in Japan, wrote “what might be the first Eng­lish piece to ever men­tion the band” ten years lat­er in 1999 in a Wire arti­cle on under­ground Japan­ese rock. “What is or was a ral­lize, and why it should be naked,” he remarked of their non­sen­si­cal French name, “remains unknown,” like most every­thing else about them. This was by design. As one musi­cian liv­ing in Tokyo put it, their ubiq­ui­tous obscu­ri­ty was “part of the Les Ral­lizes Dénudés strat­e­gy.”

You start hear­ing about this band, and once you know what their music sounds like, you hear their influ­ence every­where. Yet they’re not any­where. They’re ether. They’re smoke.

Les Ral­lizes Dénudés are so obscure in Japan, they don’t receive a men­tion in the fol­low-up arti­cle Cum­mings wrote for the Wire in 2013, in which he sur­veys the under­ground Japan­ese rock scene once again. He also admits to being part of a mys­ti­fi­ca­tion of Japan­ese sub­cul­tures and adopt­ing an atti­tude of “fan­ta­sy and pro­jec­tion” that he traces back to the 19th cen­tu­ry. In the case of Les Ral­lizes Dénudés, how­ev­er, fan­ta­sy and pro­jec­tion are often all we have to work with in the sto­ry of a band whose sound is every­where but whose for­mer asso­ciates and mem­bers, includ­ing Mizu­tani him­self, don’t wish to be found. As Cur­rin writes, “Peo­ple not only talk about Mizu­tani as a folk leg­end; they talk about peo­ple who sim­ply know him as such.”

Thanks to YouTube and the preva­lence of cam­corders at Les Ral­lizes Dénudés shows, hours of footage of the band per­form­ing live can be viewed online, avail­able to peo­ple out­side the small com­mu­ni­ty of cas­sette and VHS tapers and traders who kept their leg­end alive. See some of that footage above, includ­ing an hour and a half long “doc­u­men­tary” that con­sists of noth­ing but the band’s hyp­not­ic jams.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Ambi­ent Music of Hiroshi Yoshimu­ra, the Pio­neer­ing Japan­ese Com­pos­er

Zam­rock: An Intro­duc­tion to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psy­che­del­ic Rock Scene

Hear Enchant­i­ng Mix­es of Japan­ese Pop, Jazz, Funk, Dis­co, Soul, and R&B from the 70s and 80s

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Archive of Healing Is Now Online: UCLA’s Digital Database Provides Access to Thousands of Traditional & Alternative Healing Methods

in Archives, Health | April 1st, 2021

Pho­to by Kather­ine Han­lon on Unsplash

Folk med­i­cine is, or should be, anti­thet­i­cal to cap­i­tal­ism, mean­ing it should not be pos­si­ble to trade­mark, copy­right, or oth­er­wise own and sell plants and nat­ur­al reme­dies to which every­one has access. The entire rea­son such prac­tices devel­oped over the course of mil­len­nia was to help com­mu­ni­ties of close affil­i­a­tion sur­vive and thrive, not to fos­ter mar­ket com­pe­ti­tion between com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als. The impulse to prof­it from suf­fer­ing has dis­tort­ed what we think of as heal­ing, such that a strict­ly allo­path­ic, or “West­ern,” approach to med­i­cine relies on ethics of exclu­sion, exploita­tion, and out­right harm.

What we tend to think of as mod­ern med­i­cine, the Archive of Heal­ing writes, “is object-ori­ent­ed (phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly dri­ven) and struc­tured by his­tor­i­cal injus­tice against women and peo­ple of col­or.” The Archive, a new dig­i­tal project from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, offers “one of the most com­pre­hen­sive data­bas­es of med­i­c­i­nal folk­lore in the world,” Valenti­na Di Lis­cia writes at Hyper­al­ler­gic. “The inter­ac­tive, search­able web­site boasts hun­dreds of thou­sands of entries describ­ing cures, rit­u­als, and heal­ing meth­ods span­ning more than 200 years and sev­en con­ti­nents.”

In coun­tries like the Unit­ed States, where health­care is treat­ed as a scarce com­mod­i­ty mil­lions of peo­ple can­not afford, access to knowl­edge about effec­tive, age-old nat­ur­al wis­dom has become crit­i­cal. There may be no treat­ments for COVID-19 in the data­base, but there are like­ly tra­di­tion­al reme­dies, rit­u­als, prac­tices, treat­ments, oint­ments, etc. for just about every oth­er ill­ness one might encounter. The archive was curat­ed over a peri­od of more than thir­ty years by “a team of researchers at UCLA, work­ing under the direc­tion of Dr. Way­land Hand and then Dr. Michael Owen Jones,” the site notes in its brief his­to­ry.

The mate­r­i­al from the col­lec­tion, which was orig­i­nal­ly called the “archive of tra­di­tion­al med­i­cine,” came from “data on heal­ing from over 3,200 pub­li­ca­tions, six uni­ver­si­ty archives, as well as first-hand and sec­ond-hand infor­ma­tion from anthro­po­log­i­cal and folk­loric field­notes.” In 2016, when Dr. Del­ga­do Short­er took over as direc­tor of the pro­gram, he “reor­ga­nized it with an eye to social shar­ing and allow­ing for users to sub­mit new data and com­ment on exist­ing data,” notes UCLA’s School of the Arts and Archi­tec­ture in an inter­view with Short­er, who describes the project’s aims thus:

The whole goal here is to democ­ra­tize what we think of as heal­ing and knowl­edge about heal­ing and take it across cul­tures in a way that’s respect­ful and gives atten­tion to intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty rights.

This may seem like a del­i­cate bal­anc­ing act, between the schol­ar­ly, the folk­loric, and the realms of rights, remu­ner­a­tion, and social pow­er. The Archive strikes it with an ambi­tious set of tenets you can read here, includ­ing an empha­sis on offer­ing tra­di­tion­al and Indige­nous heal­ing prac­tices “out­side of often expen­sive allo­path­ic and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal approach­es, and not as alter­na­tives but as com­ple­men­tary modal­i­ties.”

The archive states as one of its the­o­ret­i­cal bases that health should be treat­ed “as a social goal with social meth­ods that affirm rela­tion­al­i­ty and kin­ship.” Those wish­ing to get involved with the Archive as part­ners or advi­so­ry board mem­bers can learn how at their About page, which also fea­tures the fol­low­ing dis­claimer: “State­ments made on this web­site have not been eval­u­at­ed by the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion. The infor­ma­tion con­tained here­in is not intend­ed to diag­nose, treat, cure or pre­vent any dis­ease.” Use the infor­ma­tion wise­ly, at your own risk, in oth­er words.

To use the Archive of Heal­ing, you will need to reg­is­ter with the site first.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

The Illus­trat­ed Med­i­c­i­nal Plant Map of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca (1932): Down­load It in High Res­o­lu­tion

Down­load 100,000+ Images From The His­to­ry of Med­i­cine, All Free Cour­tesy of The Well­come Library

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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What Andrei Tarkovsky’s Most Notorious Scene Tells Us About Time During the Pandemic: A Video Essay

in Current Affairs, Film | March 31st, 2021

In his films, Andrei Tarkovsky shows us things no oth­er auteur does: an unbro­ken eight-minute shot, for exam­ple, of a man slow­ly walk­ing a lit can­dle across an emp­ty pool, start­ing over again when­ev­er the flame goes out. One of the best-known (or at least most often men­tioned) sequences in the Russ­ian mas­ter’s oeu­vre, it comes from Nos­tal­ghia, a late pic­ture made dur­ing his final, exiled years in Italy. Some cite it as an exam­ple of all that’s wrong with Tarkovsky’s cin­e­ma; oth­ers as an exam­ple of all that’s right with it. But both the crit­i­cism and the praise are root­ed in the direc­tor’s height­ened sen­si­tiv­i­ty to and delib­er­ate use of time — a resource about which we’ve all come to feel dif­fer­ent­ly after a year of glob­al pan­dem­ic.

“Our sense of time dur­ing the pan­dem­ic was just as warped as our sense of space,” says Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, in his new video essay above, a fol­low-up to his pre­vi­ous explo­ration of how lock­downs turned cities around the world into de Chiri­co paint­ings.

At first, “time felt simul­ta­ne­ous­ly slow and fast: hours dragged on at a snail’s pace, but weeks flew by. 2020 seemed end­less while it was hap­pen­ing, but in ret­ro­spect it feels brief, short­er than a nor­mal year.” But even under “nor­mal” con­di­tions, it holds true that “the more atten­tion we give to time, the slow­er it feels.” And when we think back to our past expe­ri­ences, “the more we can remem­ber in a giv­en peri­od expands our sense of its length.”

Watch­ing Nos­tal­ghia’s can­dle-in-the-pool scene, “you become aware of the odd encounter you’re hav­ing with time itself. You can feel the tex­ture of it, its pres­ence, as if time were not only a con­cept, but a sub­stance, stretch­ing out in front of you, expand­ing and con­tract­ing with every breath. It’s beyond inter­est, beyond bore­dom.” Unlike most film­mak­ers, Tarkovsky does­n’t manip­u­late time to keep us on a pre-laid emo­tion­al track, but to make us aware of our own move­ment through it. “It’ll be the same for the pan­dem­ic,” says Puschak. “There are some rhythms we’ll be eager to get back to, and oth­ers, now that we’ve expe­ri­enced their absence, we’ll be eager to leave behind.” Right now, we’d do well to ques­tion the new forms of nos­tal­gia that have beset us. Or we could use the time still on our hands to hold Tarkovsky ret­ro­spec­tives of our own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online: Watch the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Arguably the Most Respect­ed Film­mak­er of All Time

The Poet­ic Har­mo­ny of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film­mak­ing: A Video Essay

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Tran­scends Sci­ence Fic­tion

Andrei Tarkovsky Answers the Essen­tial Ques­tions: What is Art & the Mean­ing of Life?

When Our World Became a de Chiri­co Paint­ing: How the Avant-Garde Painter Fore­saw the Emp­ty City Streets of 2020

Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Old­er: What the Research Says

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

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Don’t Die Curious: An Animated Lyric Video

in Music | March 31st, 2021

Chloe Jack­son was asked to cre­ate a lyric video for Tom Rosen­thal’s won­der­ful song, ‘Don’t Die Curi­ous’. And she deliv­ered. Enjoy…

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bob Marley’s Redemp­tion Song Final­ly Gets an Offi­cial Video: Watch the Ani­mat­ed Video Made Up of 2747 Draw­ings

Watch “The Stroke,” a Hand-Ani­mat­ed Music Video Where the Visu­als Came First & the Impro­vised Music Sec­ond

Watch Tom Waits For No One, the Pio­neer­ing Ani­mat­ed Music Video from 1979

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Behold the Elaborate Writing Desks of 18th Century Aristocrats

in Design, History | March 31st, 2021

Sit­ting or stand­ing before an esteemed writer’s desk can make us feel clos­er to their process. Vir­ginia Woolf’s desks — ply­wood boards she held on her lap and sloped stand­ing desks — show a kind of aus­tere rig­or in her pos­ture. “Through­out her life as a writer,” James Bar­rett points out, Woolf “paid atten­tion to the phys­i­cal act of writ­ing,” just as she paid atten­tion to the cre­ative act of walk­ing. The bare­ness of her imple­ments tells us a lot about her as an artist, but it tells us noth­ing about the state of writ­ing desk tech­nol­o­gy avail­able in her time.

20th cen­tu­ry mod­ernist Woolf pre­ferred the 16th-cen­tu­ry rus­tic sim­plic­i­ty of Monk’s house. Had she been an 18th cen­tu­ry aris­to­crat and a fol­low­er of fash­ion, she might have availed her­self of a desk designed by the Roent­gens, the “prin­ci­pal cab­i­net­mak­ers of the ancien régime,” notes the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art.

“From about 1742 to its clos­ing in the ear­ly 1800s, the Roent­gens’ inno­v­a­tive designs were com­bined with intrigu­ing mechan­i­cal devices to rev­o­lu­tion­ize tra­di­tion­al French and Eng­lish fur­ni­ture types.”

The Ger­man work­shop was found­ed by Abra­ham Roent­gen and con­tin­ued by his son David, whose cre­ations Goethe called “palaces in fairy­land” and who took first place in a fur­ni­ture mak­ing con­test with his entry: “a desk with cab­i­net, dec­o­rat­ed with chi­nois­erie fig­ures in superb mar­quetry and fea­tur­ing a clock with a car­il­lon (musi­cal mech­a­nism) and a hid­den clavi­chord.”

Roent­gen writ­ing desks were as func­tion­al as they were beau­ti­ful. But they were not made for just any­one. The Roent­gens made the Berlin Sec­re­tary Cab­i­net, for exam­ple — which you can see demon­strat­ed in the Met video at the top — for King Fred­er­ick William II of Prus­sia.

Oth­er Roent­gen desks may have been some­what less out­ward­ly osten­ta­tious, but their inner work­ings were just as inge­nious, as you can see in the roll­top desk fur­ther up and the mechan­i­cal desk above. Each of these mag­nif­i­cent cre­ations fea­tures hid­den draw­ers and com­part­ments, a main­stay of lux­u­ry desk design through­out the 1700s, as the Rijksmu­se­um video below demon­strates. Called “Neuwied fur­ni­ture,” this style was all the rage and any­one who was any­one, includ­ing, of course, Marie Antoinette, had the Roent­gens or their com­peti­tors make elab­o­rate cab­i­nets, desks, and bureaus that con­cealed com­plex inner work­ings like wood­en clocks.

“Roentgen’s per­fect­ly exe­cut­ed inven­tions became a sta­tus sym­bol for prince­ly inte­ri­ors all over Ger­many and Cen­tral Europe,” writes the Met. Whether their metic­u­lous­ly engi­neered writ­ing desks real­ly solved the prob­lem of office clut­ter or phys­i­cal­ly improved the expe­ri­ence of writ­ing in any way, how­ev­er, seems debat­able at best.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Who Wrote at Stand­ing Desks? Kierkegaard, Dick­ens and Ernest Hem­ing­way Too

How the Icon­ic Eames Lounge Chair Is Made, From Start to Fin­ish

How Women Got Dressed in the 14th & 18th Cen­turies: Watch the Very Painstak­ing Process Get Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Recre­at­ed

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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