Dick Cavett excelled at turning the late-night talk show format into a showcase for genuinely revealing conversations (and the occasional wrestling match). Of the many riveting guests he had on throughout the 60s and 70s, some appearing multiple times, few could match Orson Welles for sheer storytelling prowess. As if in a contest to outdo himself, Welles appeared on Cavett’s show three times in 1970, and once more in 1973, as an amiable, gruff raconteur who lived a life almost impossible to believe actually happened.
Welles met everyone. He even met Hitler, he says in the clip above from a July 1970 appearance on the show, his second that year. In those early days, he says, “the Nazis were just a very comical kind of minority party of nuts that nobody took seriously at all” except Welles’ Austrian hiking instructor, who brought the legendary actor and director to a Nazi dinner with the future mass-murdering dictator. Welles was seated next to Hitler, who “made so little an impression on me that I can’t remember a second of it. He had no personality. He was invisible…. I think there was nothing there.”
By 1938, everyone knew who he was: Hitler was named “man of the year” by Time magazine, who wrote, “lesser men of the year seemed small indeed beside the Führer”—and Welles was named “Radio’s Man of the Year.” His “famous The War of the Worlds broadcast, scared fewer people than Hitler,” the editors wrote, “but more than had ever been frightened by radio before, demonstrating that radio can be a tremendous force in whipping up mass emotion.” Welles’ never met Stalin, he tells Cavett, unprompted, but knew Roosevelt “very well.”
In a later appearance on the show, in September 1970, Welles claimed Roosevelt told him no one believed the Pearl Harbor announcement because of the War of the Worlds hoax. Here, in this twelve-minute clip from July, he has many more stories to tell and excellent questions from Cavett to answer (if he went back to school, he says, and “really wanted to get good at a subject,” he would study anthropology). Towards the end, at 9:00, he talks about another world leader who did make a distinct impression on him: Winston Churchill. “He was quite another thing,” says Welles. “He had great humor and great irony.”
Welles tells a story of Churchill coming to see him play Othello in London. “I heard a murmuring in the front row. I thought he was talking to himself.” Churchill later came to visit Welles in his dressing room and began to recite all of Othello’s lines from memory, “including the cuts which I had made.” Years later, after the war, when Churchill was out of office, Welles ran into him once more in Venice, and their prior association came very much in handy in the financing of his next picture. (He doesn’t name the film, but it might have been The Stranger.)
No one experienced the 20th century quite like Orson Welles, and no one left such a creative legacy. Always entertaining, his Cavett appearances are more than opportunities for name dropping—they’re televised memoirs, in extemporaneous vignettes, from one of history’s most engaging storytellers.
Since the first stirrings of the internet, artists and curators have puzzled over what the fluidity of online space would do to the experience of viewing works of art. At a conference on the subject in 2001, Susan Hazan of the Israel Museum wondered whether there is “space for enchantment in a technological world?” She referred to Walter Benjamin’s ruminations on the “potentially liberating phenomenon” of technologically reproduced art, yet also noted that “what was forfeited in this process were the ‘aura’ and the authority of the object containing within it the values of cultural heritage and tradition.” Evaluating a number of online galleries of the time, Hazan found that “the speed with which we are able to access remote museums and pull them up side by side on the screen is alarmingly immediate.” Perhaps the “accelerated mobility” of the internet, she worried, “causes objects to become disposable and to decline in significance.”
Fifteen years after her essay, the number of museums that have made their collections available online whole, or in part, has grown exponentially and shows no signs of slowing. We may not need to fear losing museums and libraries—important spaces that Michel Foucault called “heterotopias,” where linear, mundane time is interrupted. These spaces will likely always exist.
Yet increasingly we need never visit them in person to view most of their contents. Students and academics can conduct nearly all of their research through the internet, never having to travel to the Bodleian, the Beinecke, or the British Library. And lovers of art must no longer shell out for plane tickets and hotels to see the precious contents of the Getty, the Guggenheim, or the Rijksmuseum. And who would dare do that during our current pandemic?
For all that may be lost, online galleries have long been “making works of art widely available, introducing new forms of perception in film and photography and allowing art to move from private to public, from the elite to the masses.”
Even more so than when Hazan wrote those words, the online world offers possibilities for “the emergence of new cultural phenomena, the virtual aura.” Over the years we have featured dozens of databases, archives, and online galleries through which you might virtually experience art the world over, an experience once solely reserved for only the very wealthy. And as artists and curators adapt to a digital environment, they find new ways to make virtual galleries enchanting. The vast collections in the virtual galleries listed below await your visit, with 2,000,000+ paintings, sculptures, photographs, books, and more. See the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum (top), courtesy of the Google Cultural Institute. See Van Gogh’s many self-portraits and vivid, swirling landscapes at The Van Gogh Museum. Visit the Asian art collection at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries. Or see Vassily Kandinsky’s dazzling abstract compositions at the Guggenheim.
And below the list of galleries, find links to online collections of several hundred art books to read online or download. Continue to watch this space: We’ll add to both of these lists as more and more collections come online.
More free music/entertainment to carry you through these bleak, strange times. Dead & Company (the surviving members of the Grateful Dead plus John Mayer and Oteil Burbridge) are making concerts free to stream at home. And the first one gets underway tonight.
Stay at home this weekend and tune in to “One More Saturday Night”, a new #CouchTour series featuring your favorite Dead & Company shows, for FREE. We’re kicking things off with the 12/2/17 Austin show this Saturday at 8pm ET/ 5pm PT on http://nugs.tv and on Facebook!
Click the links above to watch the show. Until then, you can watch a set above, recorded live in Atlanta’s Lakewood Amphitheatre, back in June 2017.
Also find a trove of 11,000+ recorded Grateful Dead shows in the Relateds below.
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An embarrassment of riches for those whose experience of COVID-19 is somewhere between extended snow day and staycation…
But what about caregivers who suddenly find themselves providing 24–7 care for elders with dementia, or neuro-atypical adult children whose upended routine is wreaking havoc on their emotions?
“I know people are happy that the schools have closed but I just lost critical workday hours and if/when day hab closes I will have to take low-paid medical leave AND we will not have any breaks from caregiving someone with 24–7 needs and aggressive, loud behaviors. I feel completely defeated,” one friend writes.
24 hours later:
We just lost day hab, effective tomorrow. My messages for in-home services haven’t been returned yet. Full on panic mode.
What can we do to help lighten those loads when we’re barred from physical interaction, or entering each other’s homes?
We combed through our archive, with an eye toward the most soothing, uplifting content, appropriate for all ages, starting with pianist Paul Barton’s classical concerts for elephants in Kanchanaburi, Thailand, above.
We’ve also got a trove of free coloring books and pages, though caregivers should vet the content before sharing it with someone who’s likely to be disturbed by medical illustration and images of medieval demons…
Readers, if you know a resource that might buy caregivers and their agitated, housebound charges a bit of peace, please add it in the comments below.
When people say things like “the science is settled” or “the science has changed,” researchers tend to grind their teeth. Science can come to a broad consensus, as in the case of the coronavirus or climate change, but it isn’t ever perfectly settled as a bloc on any question. We proceed in scientific knowledge not by attaining perfect knowledge but, as Isaac Asimov once wrote, by being less wrong than those who came before.
And scientists advance in scientific publishing, as Aeon writes, not with certainty, but with “excitement, baby steps and reams of rejections.” As we see in the short film above, The Researcher’s Article, by French filmmaker Charlotte Arene, getting one’s research published can be “a patience-testing exercise in rejection, rewriting and waiting,” demonstrated here by the travails of physicists Frédéric Restagno and Julien Bobroff of the University of Paris-Saclay.
Even before submitting their findings, the scientists must carefully fit their work into the traditional form known as the “letter,” a document of four pages or fewer that condenses years of research into strictly succinct paragraphs, graphs, and references. The “letter” is “one of the most popular formats of articles in physics,” say the physicists, noting the major Nobel prize-winning discoveries to appear as letters in recent years, including the Higgs’ Boson publication that won in 2013, coming in at only two pages long.
Summing up “a massive amount of data,” short scientific articles then go on to prove themselves to their respective fields through a refereeing process in which three anonymous scientists read the work and recommend publication, revision, or rejection. This process can go several rounds and take several months. One must be persistent: Restagno and Bobroff were rejected from several journals before finally getting an acceptance.
After this significant investment of time and effort, the authors may have a readership of maybe twenty people. But crowd size is not the point, they say, “because research is made up of all these small discoveries,” contributing to a larger picture, informing and correcting each other, and going about the humble, painstaking business of trying to be less wrong than their predecessors, while still building on the best insights of hundreds of years of scientific publishing.
The past few weeks have reminded us just why viruses have been such a formidable enemy of humanity for so long. Though very few of the countless viruses in existence affect us in any way, let alone a lethal one, we can’t see them without microscopes. And so when a deadly virus breaks out, we live our daily lives with an invisible killer in our midst. Aggressive testing, as several coronavirus-afflicted countries have proven, does much to lower the rate of transmission. But how, exactly, does transmission happen? In the video above, Youtuber Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer and Apple product designer, demonstrates the process vividly by taking a blacklight into that most diseased of all environments: the elementary-school classroom.
You can’t see viruses under a blacklight, but you can see the special powder that Rober applies to the hands of the class’s teacher. At the beginning of the school day, the teacher shakes the hand of just three kids, touching none of the others, and by lunchtime — a couple of hours after Rober powders the hands of one more student during morning break — the blacklight reveals the “germs” everywhere.
This despite fairly diligent hand-washing, albeit hand-washing unaccompanied by the disinfection of surfaces, cellphones, and other objects in and parts of the classroom. “Even if a virus is spread through airborne transmission,” Rober says, “those tiny droplets don’t stay in the air for long. Then they land on surfaces, waiting to be touched by our hands.” This leads him to the declaration that “the ultimate defense against catching a virus is: just don’t touch your face.”
Rober calls your eyes, nose, and mouth “the single weak spot on the Death Star when it comes to viruses. That’s the only way they can get in to infect you.” Hence, here in the time of COVID-19, the frequent urgings not just to wash our hands but to refrain from touching our faces as well. Increasingly many of us have become hyper-aware of our own “germ hygiene,” as Rober calls it, but the other half of the battle against the pandemic must be institutional: school closures, for example, one of which was announced over the PA system during this very video’s shoot. “Because of this virus, we are going to be closing school for three weeks,” says the principal, not without a note of excitement in his voice — but an excitement hardly comparable to the subsequent explosion of joy among the third-graders listening. Challenging though this time may be, children like these remind us to take our fun wherever we find it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
In these times, we need to keep at some kind of routine. And so I’d like to doff my cloth worker’s cap to Denis Shiryaev, who once again has returned from the early days of cinema with another AI-restored clip of film from the early 20th century.
Ah, but there’s something amiss this time, a glitch in the matrix of expectations. Not all sources can be saved by technology. Fans of Shiryaev’s crystal clear journeys back in time (find them in the Relateds below) might find the footage rough. It doesn’t make this film any less fascinating.
Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon started their film business to try to copy the success of similar, earlier filmmakers like the Lumiere Brothers in Paris. Audiences would pay to see short films of how people lived, worked, walked about, and just existed. It was a window into another reality, and by pure chance a hundred of Mitchell & Kenyon’s films were found preserved in a Blackburn, UK basement nearly a century later. This is a compilation of three of them, scored by Guy Jones with mild atmospherics.
More than any of the other films that Shiryaev has “restored,” Mitchell & Kenyon don’t try to hide their camera or pretend it’s not there. Instead, these three films make a point of inviting their subjects to look directly at us, and because of Shiryaev’s work these dozens and dozens of eyes really seem to be watching us from across time. The young boys are cheeky, the young girls shy, the older adults bemused or slightly irritated. There is no particular focus here–we can choose who we want to follow, which indeed was one of the reasons for these films popularity. They were designed for repeat visits.
There are two particular points of interest that happen very quickly. One is at 1:09–the appearance of an Afro-Caribbean man as part of the workforce. People of African descent had lived in Britain since the 12th century, but this might be one of the earliest films of such a person. The other is later at 4:24, which might be the first film of a bloke giving the camera the rude two-fingered salute. This moment is why the British Film Institute dubbed Mitchell & Kenyon “the accidental anthropologists.”
(You might also watch for the fight that breaks out near the end of the film. Real or not? You be the judge.)
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.
A heads up to all parents, Audible has announced that they’re providing free stories for kids during this period of social distancing, which inevitably means widespread school closures. They write:
For as long as schools are closed, we’re open. Starting today, kids everywhere can instantly stream an incredible collection of stories, including titles across six different languages, that will help them continue dreaming, learning, and just being kids.
All stories are free to stream on your desktop, laptop, phone or tablet.
Explore the collection, select a title and start listening.
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Back in 2014, this image won a contest on a subreddit devoted to Blender, “the amazing open-source software program for 3D modeling, animation, rendering and more.” (You can download the free software here.) The image riffs, of course, on Edward Hopper’s classic 1942 painting, “Nighthawks,” taking its theme of loneliness to new extremes–extremes that we’re just starting to get accustomed to now.
Find lots of background information on the original “Nighthawks” painting in the Relateds below.
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With so many of us across the world stuck at home, humanity’s thoughts have turned to what we’ll do when we can resume our normal lives. This time of quarantine, lockdown, and other forms of isolation urges us to reflect, but also to read — and in many cases to read the important books we’d neglected in our pre-coronavirus lives. Quite a few such volumes appear in the Long Now Foundation’s “Manual for Civilization,” which longtime Open Culture readers will remember us featuring not long after it launched in 2014. Its name refers to a library, one that according to the Foundation’s executive director Alexander Rose “will include the roughly 3500 books most essential to sustain or rebuild civilization.”
“Using this as an curatorial principle,” Rose adds, “is helping us assemble a very interesting collection of books.” So too are their choices of people asked for recommendations of books to put on the Manual for Civilization’s shelves.
Take, for instance, the history-focused list of books provided by Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and The Baroque Cycle author Neal Stephenson, a prolific writer in his own right:
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volumes 1–6 by Edward Gibbon
The Odyssey by Homer translated by Robert Fagles
The Iliad by Homer translated by Robert Fagles
The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Volumes 1–3 by Fernand Braudel
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann
Newton’s Principia for the Common Reader by S. Chandrasekhar
Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil by Thomas Hobbes
The American Practical Navigator: An Epitome of Navigation by Nathaniel Bowditch
Pax Britannica: A Three Volume Set (Heaven’s Command, Pax Britannica, and Farewell the Trumpets) by James Morris
Son Of The Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn by Evan S. Connell
The Siege at Peking by Peter Fleming
Marlborough, His Life & Times, Volumes 1–6 by Winston Churchill
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes
The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose
The Long Now Foundation didn’t just approach Stephenson because they enjoy his novels: he was previously involved with the Foundation’s “Clock of the Long Now” project, a mechanical clock engineered to keep time for 10,000 years and thus serve as a physical reminder of the necessity of long-term thinking. The process of coming up with ideas for the Clock provided Stephenson with inspiration for his novel Anathem, which deals with monastic communities of intellectuals dedicated to safeguarding knowledge against the collapse of society.
Music producer and visual artist Brian Eno’s album January 07003 / Bell Studies for The Clock of The Long Now also came out of his own work on the Clock, and as a founding member of the Long Now Foundation he naturally also had a list of books (previously featured here on Open Culture) rich with historical, political, philosophical, sociological, architectural, literary, and aesthetic texts to contribute:
More recently, programmer and publisher Tim O’Reilly drew up an even more expansive list of books for addition to the Manual for Civilization. Owing to the wide and ever-growing array of technical books put out by the publisher that bears his name, you might guess that O’Reilly would mostly recommend volumes pertinent to rebuilding our digital world. In fact he offers a range of highly analog choices, thematically speaking, which he breaks down into four categories. First come the “religious/ philosophical works”:
The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu translated by Witter Bynner
The Bhagavad Gita translated by Christopher Isherwood
The Analects of Confucius translated by Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont
The Trial and Death of Socrates by Plato (translated by GMA Grube, revised by John Cooper)
Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugene Herrigel
The New Testament
An Introduction to Realistic Philosophy by John Wild
The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
The Masks of God (4 volumes) by Joseph Campbell
Then the literature:
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey translated by George Chapman
Samuel Johnson: Poems and Selected Prose
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens
The Four Quartets by T.S.Eliot
Then books about “science, technology, and society”:
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard Feynman
The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman
And finally, “stuff that would be useful if civilization declines”:
The Foxfire Books edited by Eliot Wigginton (more info)
The Tracker: The True Story of Tom Brown Jr. by Tom Brown
Putting Food By by Ruth Hertzberg
Luther Burbank: His Methods and Discoveries and Their Practical Application by Luther Burbank
Plant and mushroom identification manuals for every major geography: Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide and Edible Wild Mushrooms of North America
Guide to Identifying Trees and Shrubs by Mark Zampardo
O’Reilly adds that “you also need engineering, including (bicycles, flight, bridges, and factories), spinning and weaving and the manufacturing technology thereof, metallurgy, materials science, math (including slide rule design and logarithmic tables), chemistry, biology, fundamentals of computer chips (and alternate ways of doing computing without the ability to do a full fab).”
At the Long Now Foundation’s site you’ll find more recommendations by such luminaries as Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly, and Brain Pickings curator Maria Popova. Whether your interests incline toward the technical, the historical, the philosophical, or toward practically anything else besides, the Manual for Civilization has more than a few books for you to digest. (Nearly 900 of them are available for free at the Internet Archive.) What’s more, the coronavirus has granted an entirely plausible excuse to spend more of our days reading — and a fairly good reason to consider how we might run society differently in the future.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
This video of Tilda Swinton’s Springer Spaniels cavorting in pastoral Scotland to a Handel aria performed by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo won’t cure what ails you, but it is definitely good medicine.
Swinton and her partner, artist Sandro Kopp, filmed the beautiful beasts in such a way as to highlight their doggy exuberance, whether moving as a pack or taking a solo turn.
The title of the aria, “Rompo i Lacci,” from the second act of Flavio, translates to “I break the laces,” and there’s no mistaking the joy Rosy, Dora, Louis, Dot, and Snowbear take in being off the leash.
Flashbacks to their rolypoly puppy selves are cute, but it’s the feathery ears and tails of the adult dogs that steal the show as they bound around beach and field.
The filmmakers get a lot of mileage from their stars’ lolling pink tongues and willingness to vigorously launch themselves toward any out of frame treat.
We’ve never seen a tennis ball achieve such beauty.
There’s also some fun to be had in special effects wherein the dogs are doubled by a mirror effect and later, when one of them turns into a canine Rorschach blot.
The video was originally screened as part of Costanzo’s multi-media Glass Handel installation for Opera Philadelphia, an exploration into how opera can make the hairs on the back of our neck stand up.
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