Some of the Oldest Photos You Will Ever See: Discover Photographs of Greece, Egypt, Turkey & Other Mediterranean Lands (1840s)

in History, Photography, Travel | June 14th, 2023

Begin­ning in the late sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry, aris­to­crat­ic Eng­lish­men or con­ti­nen­tal Euro­peans came of age and went on a Grand Tour. Last­ing any­thing from few a months to a few years, such trips were meant direct­ly to expose their young tak­ers to the lega­cy of the Renais­sance and antiq­ui­ty. Nat­u­ral­ly, most Grand Tour itin­er­aries placed the utmost impor­tance on Italy and Greece; some even went to the Holy Land, as sat­i­rized by Mark Twain in The Inno­cents Abroad. By the time that book was pub­lished in 1869, the Grand Tour was out of high fash­ion — but a cou­ple of decades ear­li­er, Joseph-Philib­ert Girault de Prangey had pre­served many of its des­ti­na­tions with a piece of cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy known as the cam­era.

Girault de Prangey went on his first pho­to­graph­ic “Grand Tour” in 1841, when he was in his late thir­ties. Hav­ing already trav­eled exten­sive­ly and received an edu­ca­tion in both art and law, he was hard­ly a cal­low youth in need of refine­ment. But he was an aris­to­crat, the sole inher­i­tor of his fam­i­ly for­tune, and thus able to “devote his life to his pas­sions: trav­el, arts, and pub­lish­ing.”

So says the nar­ra­tor of the Kings and Things video above, which tells the sto­ry of how Girault de Prange man­aged to leave us the ear­li­est known pho­tographs of a large swath of the world. This project “took him from Italy to Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and the Lev­ant, he cap­tured over 1,000 pho­tographs, with sub­jects rang­ing from streetscapes and archi­tec­tur­al details to nature and land­scapes and por­traits of local peo­ple.”

Not that pho­tog­ra­phy per se was Girault de Prangey’s goal; for him, tak­ing a pic­ture con­sti­tut­ed mere­ly an ear­ly step in the cre­ation of a draw­ing or paint­ing. “Although he only intend­ed to use them as a sort of sketch to refer to back home in his stu­dio,” he “arranged his pic­tures so as to pro­duce a sense of dra­ma or mys­tery, and this artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty sets him apart from many oth­er pio­neers of pho­tog­ra­phy, who were pri­mar­i­ly tech­ni­cians or inven­tors.” The age of the Grand Tour was end­ing even in Girault de Prangey’s day, but 180 years lat­er (and about a cen­tu­ry after their redis­cov­ery in one of his estate’s store­rooms), his pho­tographs send us on a very dif­fer­ent kind of trip: not just across the world, but — much more thrilling­ly — deep back in time as well.

via Aeon

Relat­ed con­tent:

The First Pho­to­graph Ever Tak­en (1826)

See the First Pho­to­graph of a Human Being: A Pho­to Tak­en by Louis Daguerre (1838)

Take a Visu­al Jour­ney Through 181 Years of Street Pho­tog­ra­phy (1838–2019)

Behold the Pho­tographs of John Thom­son, the First West­ern Pho­tog­ra­ph­er to Trav­el Wide­ly Through Chi­na (1870s)

Rome Comes to Life in Pho­tochrom Col­or Pho­tos Tak­en in 1890: The Colos­se­um, Tre­vi Foun­tain & More

The First Sur­viv­ing Pho­to­graph of the Moon (1840)

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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The Three Punctuation Rules of Cormac McCarthy (RIP), and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

in Literature, Writing | June 13th, 2023

Note: Today nov­el­ist Cor­mac McCarthy (All the Pret­ty Hors­es, The Road and No Coun­try for Old Men) passed away at the age of 89. Below, we’re revis­it­ing a favorite post from our archive that focus­es on punc­tu­a­tion, a dis­tinc­tive ele­ment of McCarthy’s writ­ing.

Cor­mac McCarthy has been—as one 1965 review­er of his first nov­el, The Orchard Keep­er, dubbed him—a “dis­ci­ple of William Faulkn­er.” He makes admirable use of Faulkner­ian traits in his prose, and I’d always assumed he inher­it­ed his punc­tu­a­tion style from Faulkn­er as well. But in his very rare 2008 tele­vised inter­view with Oprah Win­frey, McCarthy cites two oth­er antecedents: James Joyce and for­got­ten nov­el­ist MacKin­lay Kan­tor, whose Ander­son­ville won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Joyce’s influ­ence dom­i­nates, and in dis­cus­sion of punc­tu­a­tion, McCarthy stress­es that his min­i­mal­ist approach works in the inter­est of max­i­mum clar­i­ty. Speak­ing of Joyce, he says,

James Joyce is a good mod­el for punc­tu­a­tion. He keeps it to an absolute min­i­mum. There’s no rea­son to blot the page up with weird lit­tle marks. I mean, if you write prop­er­ly you shouldn’t have to punc­tu­ate.

So what “weird lit­tle marks” does McCarthy allow, or not, and why? Below is a brief sum­ma­ry of his stat­ed rules for punc­tu­a­tion:

1. Quo­ta­tion Marks:

McCarthy does­n’t use ’em. In his Oprah inter­view, he says MacKin­lay Kan­tor was the first writer he read who left them out. McCarthy stress­es that this way of writ­ing dia­logue requires par­tic­u­lar delib­er­a­tion. Speak­ing of writ­ers who have imi­tat­ed him, he says, “You real­ly have to be aware that there are no quo­ta­tion marks, and write in such a way as to guide peo­ple as to who’s speak­ing.” Oth­er­wise, con­fu­sion reigns.

2. Colons and semi­colons:

Care­ful McCarthy read­er Oprah says she “saw a colon once” in McCarthy’s prose, but she nev­er encoun­tered a semi­colon. McCarthy con­firms: “No semi­colons.”

Of the colon, he says: “You can use a colon, if you’re get­ting ready to give a list of some­thing that fol­lows from what you just said. Like, these are the rea­sons.” This is a spe­cif­ic occa­sion that does not present itself often. The colon, one might say, gen­u­flects to a very spe­cif­ic log­i­cal devel­op­ment, enu­mer­a­tion. McCarthy deems most oth­er punc­tu­a­tion uses need­less.

3. All oth­er punc­tu­a­tion:

Aside from his restric­tive rationing of the colon, McCarthy declares his styl­is­tic con­vic­tions with sim­plic­i­ty: “I believe in peri­ods, in cap­i­tals, in the occa­sion­al com­ma, and that’s it.” It’s a dis­ci­pline he learned first in a col­lege Eng­lish class, where he worked to sim­pli­fy 18th cen­tu­ry essays for a text­book the pro­fes­sor was edit­ing. Ear­ly mod­ern Eng­lish is noto­ri­ous­ly clut­tered with con­found­ing punc­tu­a­tion, which did not become stan­dard­ized until com­par­a­tive­ly recent­ly.

McCarthy, enam­ored of the prose style of the Neo­clas­si­cal Eng­lish writ­ers but annoyed by their over-reliance on semi­colons, remem­bers par­ing down an essay “by Swift or some­thing” and hear­ing his pro­fes­sor say, “this is very good, this is exact­ly what’s need­ed.” Encour­aged, he con­tin­ued to sim­pli­fy, work­ing, he says to Oprah, “to make it eas­i­er, not to make it hard­er” to deci­pher his prose. For those who find McCarthy some­times mad­den­ing­ly opaque, this state­ment of intent may not help clar­i­fy things much. But lovers of his work may find renewed appre­ci­a­tion for his stream­lined syn­tax.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Wern­er Her­zog Reads From Cor­mac McCarthy’s All the Pret­ty Hors­es

Cor­mac McCarthy Explains Why He Worked Hard at Not Work­ing: How 9‑to‑5 Jobs Lim­it Your Cre­ative Poten­tial

Wern­er Her­zog and Cor­mac McCarthy Talk Sci­ence and Cul­ture

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

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Charlie Chaplin’s Final Speech in The Great Dictator: A Statement Against Greed, Hate, Intolerance & Fascism (1940)

in Film, History, Politics | June 13th, 2023

The nar­row “tooth­brush mus­tache” caught on in the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, first in the Unit­ed States and soon there­after across the Atlantic. When Char­lie Chap­lin put one on for a film in 1914, he became its most famous wear­er — at least until Adolf Hitler rose to promi­nence a cou­ple of decades lat­er. By that point Chap­lin had become the most famous com­e­dy star in the world, which may have inspired the Nazi Par­ty leader, a known fan of Chap­lin’s work, to adopt the same mus­tache as a kind of tool of self-advance­ment. Chap­lin him­self could hard­ly have approved of his new dop­pel­gänger, and it trou­bled him to dis­cov­er their oth­er shared qual­i­ties: their births in April of 1889, their poor child­hoods, their love of Wag­n­er.

Still, as an invet­er­ate enter­tain­er, Chap­lin grasped the comedic poten­tial of his and Hitler’s par­al­lel icon­ic sta­tus. The result, released in 1940, was The Great Dic­ta­tor, his first gen­uine sound film. Chap­lin had con­tin­ued mak­ing silent pic­tures, and refin­ing his sig­na­ture visu­al humor, well into the era of “talkies.”

But he could only have done so much to ridicule Hitler, who had come to pow­er in large part through speech­es broad­cast over the radio, with­out being able to use his voice as well. Yet he deliv­ers his most mem­o­rable lines not in the role of Hitler sur­ro­gate Ade­noid Hynkel, but that of the unnamed Jew­ish bar­ber who — through, of course, sev­er­al absurd turns of events — ends up mis­tak­en for Hynkel and made to address the nation.

“I’m sor­ry, but I don’t want to be an emper­or,” says Chap­lin-as-the-Bar­ber-as-Hynkel. “That’s not my busi­ness. I don’t want to rule or con­quer any­one. I should like to help every­one — if pos­si­ble — Jew, Gen­tile, black man, white. We all want to help one anoth­er. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s hap­pi­ness, not by each other’s mis­ery.” Through­out the three-and-a-half-minute mono­logue, he speaks against “greed,” “clev­er­ness,” “nation­al bar­ri­ers,” and “the hate of men”; he advo­cates for “kind­ness and gen­tle­ness,” “uni­ver­sal broth­er­hood,” “a world of rea­son,” and “the love of human­i­ty.” These may not be espe­cial­ly pre­cise terms, but, know­ing his pub­lic well — much bet­ter, indeed, than Hitler ever knew his — Chap­lin also knew just when to go broad.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Did Hitler Rise to Pow­er? : New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Pro­vides a Case Study in How Fas­cists Get Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly Elect­ed

When Mahat­ma Gand­hi Met Char­lie Chap­lin (1931)

Carl Jung Psy­cho­an­a­lyzes Hitler: “He’s the Uncon­scious of 78 Mil­lion Ger­mans.” “With­out the Ger­man Peo­ple He’d Be Noth­ing” (1938)

When Char­lie Chap­lin Entered a Chap­lin Look-Alike Con­test & Came in 20th Place

The Famous Down­fall Scene Explained: What Real­ly Hap­pened in Hitler’s Bunker at the End?

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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The Destruction of Penn Station: How New York City Lost Its Majestic Beaux-Arts Rail Terminal

in Architecture, History | June 13th, 2023

In the New York of old, “one entered the city like a god. One scut­tles in now like a rat.” When he wrote those words, archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Vin­cent Scul­ly issued what has end­ed up as the defin­i­tive judg­ment of Penn­syl­va­nia Sta­tion. Or rather, of the Penn­syl­va­nia Sta­tions: the majes­tic orig­i­nal build­ing from 1910, as well as its util­i­tar­i­an replace­ment that has stood in Mid­town Man­hat­tan since 1968. But then, the word “stood” does­n’t quite apply to the lat­ter, since it resides entire­ly under­ground, below Madi­son Square Gar­den. Over the years, New York­ers have come more and more open­ly to resent the Penn Sta­tion they have and lament the Penn Sta­tion they lost, which archi­tect Michael Wyet­zn­er intro­duces to us in the Archi­tec­tur­al Digest video above.

“A con­jec­tur­al recon­struc­tion of Impe­r­i­al Rome’s Baths of Cara­calla of 212–216 AD,” writes New York Review of Books archi­tec­ture crit­ic Mar­tin Filler, the orig­i­nal Penn Sta­tion con­sti­tut­ed “a har­mo­nious syn­the­sis of two diver­gent and sup­pos­ed­ly irrec­on­cil­able archi­tec­tur­al approach­es, the Clas­si­cal and the indus­tri­al.”

It was com­mis­sioned by the Penn­syl­va­nia Rail­road, which in the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry was “the country’s largest busi­ness enter­prise, with a bud­get sec­ond only to that of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment,” writes the New York­er’s William Finnegan, and which at that time had a for­mi­da­ble engi­neer­ing prob­lem to solve: “Its tracks end­ed, like those of every rail­road approach­ing New York from the west, in New Jer­sey, on the banks of the Hud­son Riv­er. In 1900, nine­ty mil­lion pas­sen­gers were oblig­ed to trans­fer to fer­ries to reach Man­hat­tan.”

To run the Penn­syl­va­nia Rail­road­’s tracks into the cen­ter of New York City required dig­ging a set of tun­nels under the Hud­son, where, says one his­to­ri­an on PBS’ Amer­i­can Expe­ri­ence doc­u­men­tary on the rise and fall of Penn Sta­tion, “nobody thought tun­nels could be built. It’s almost as though they were going to go to the moon.” The tech­no­log­i­cal achieve­ment was matched by the aes­thet­ic: “Its main wait­ing room, pan­eled in Ital­ian traver­tine, with flut­ed columns and cof­fered ceil­ings a hun­dred and fifty feet high, was the world’s largest room,” Finnegan writes. “The train shed was equal­ly grand, with arch­ing steel gird­ers, stag­gered mez­za­nines, and glass-block floors that let sun­light through to the tracks. ” Like oth­er major urban rail ter­mi­nals of its era, writes Tony Judt, Penn Sta­tion “spoke direct­ly and delib­er­ate­ly to the com­mer­cial ambi­tions and civic self-image of the mod­ern metrop­o­lis.”

By the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry, how­ev­er, trains were fac­ing aggres­sive com­pe­ti­tion from both the pri­vate car and the air­plane, which dis­placed their sta­tions from the cen­ter of mod­ern life. “Between 1955 and 1975,” Judt writes, “a mix of anti­his­tori­cist fash­ion and cor­po­rate self-inter­est saw the destruc­tion of a remark­able num­ber of ter­mi­nal sta­tions.” But prospects for rail of one kind or anoth­er in Amer­i­ca have looked up in recent years, and “we are no longer embar­rassed by the roco­co or neo-Goth­ic or Beaux-Arts excess­es of the great rail­way sta­tions of the indus­tri­al age and can see such edi­fices instead as their design­ers and con­tem­po­raries saw them: as the cathe­drals of their age.” Hence, in New York, the preser­va­tion of Grand Cen­tral Sta­tion — as well as the bit­ter and pro­tract­ed strug­gle (cov­ered exten­sive­ly in Finnegan’s New York­er piece) over whether and how to turn the unloved Penn Sta­tion into a cathe­dral of our age.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Immer­sive Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of New York City’s Icon­ic Grand Cen­tral Ter­mi­nal

An Archi­tect Breaks Down the Design of New York City Sub­way Sta­tions, from the Old­est to Newest

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

A Sub­way Ride Through New York City: Watch Vin­tage Footage from 1905

Famous Archi­tects Dress as Their Famous New York City Build­ings (1931)

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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Hear Demos of Madonna Performing Punk Songs with Her Pre-Fame Band, Breakfast Club (1979)

in Music | June 12th, 2023

Isn’t it won­der­ful when long-for­got­ten record­ings get dust­ed off and exposed to a much wider audi­ence, thrust­ing lit­tle-remem­bered artists into the spot­light, per­haps for the first time in their lives?

Think Con­nie Con­verse…

The Shag­gs…

Madon­na…

Wait, who?

Short­ly after the aspi­rant dancer ditched Michi­gan for New York City in 1976, mak­ing ends by wait­ress­ing, mod­el­ing nude and work­ing the counter at Dunkin’ Donuts, she formed the band, Break­fast Club with her boyfriend Dan Gilroy and his broth­er, Ed.

“I was sick of being an out-of-work dancer, so he taught me how to play gui­tar,” she recalled in her 2008 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induc­tion speech.

“It was a sur­prise that she men­tioned me, like right away, like that was great,” Dan mused in the 2019 docu­d­ra­ma Madon­na and the Break­fast Club:

It was won­der­ful, in fact and it changed my whole … in town, the musi­cians in town were like, “Did you see that?” Sud­den­ly, again, it’s like we were with Madon­na. It’s like she threw the spot­light.

Boys far out­num­bered girls in the scrap­py late-70’s New York City scene, but Madon­na held her own, work­ing hard and look­ing the part in full-skirt­ed thrift store dress­es from an ear­li­er era.

(If you’ve resist­ed the Queen of Pop’s charms, thus far, this ear­li­est incar­na­tion may be the one that final­ly hooks you.)

Before gui­tar, the broth­ers turned her onto drums in the base­ment of the for­mer Queens syn­a­gogue the three called home. (She habit­u­al­ly stuck her gum on one of the kit’s met­al stands.)

Dan Gilroy observed that her dance train­ing served her well as a musi­cian:

..she was always into count­ing, you know, every­thing, eight counts, and it fit right into drum­ming, so it was a very smooth tran­si­tion from danc­ing to drumming…She already could keep the beat, so nat­u­ral­ly, she want­ed to get more into music than just drum­ming, not that drum­ming isn’t music.

Break­fast Club fea­tured Madon­na on drums, the broth­ers out front with gui­tars, and, briefly Madonna’s friend Ang­ie Smit on bass, though their roles weren’t set in stone.

Accord­ing to Nor­ris Bur­roughs, author of MY MADONNA: My Inti­mate Friend­ship With The Blue Eyed Girl On Her Arrival In New York:

It kind of felt like it was gonna be the sort of band where, like a Fleet­wood Mac thing where you’d have Lind­sey Buck­ing­ham and Steve Nicks and Chris­tine McVie tak­ing turns on vocals or they would har­mo­nize.

Even a frac­tion of a Fleet­wood Mac-like lev­el of recog­ni­tion would have been heady stuff, but as Ang­ie Smit’s replace­ment, bassist Gary Burke unequiv­o­cal­ly states, “Madon­na want­ed to be famous:”

That was her thing, man. And she didn’t care if she got it…through dance, through rock and roll, what­ev­er. She want­ed to be famous. She would be so squir­rel­ly, like, “I wan­na be famous!” She want­ed to be famous now, man. And she was like, you could just see it in her body lan­guage, it’s like, “Ooh, when’s it gonna hap­pen!?

SPOILER: It hap­pened.

Just a cou­ple of years after leav­ing both the band and Dan Gilroy, she had a record con­tract and a debut sin­gle that she pro­mot­ed tire­less­ly with live club appear­ances. 1983 saw the release of a first album so packed with hits, it was only a mat­ter of months til she became a house­hold name.

But the street cred of her Break­fast Club demo is a hard one to beat:

0:01 Shit On The Ground-Safe Neigh­bor­hood 

1:35 Shine A Ligh

3:13 Lit­tle Boy

4:47 l Love Express

Lis­ten to Break­fast Club’s post-Madon­na work on Spo­ti­fy.

via Flash­bak

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Mys­ti­cal Poet­ry of Rumi Read By Til­da Swin­ton, Madon­na, Robert Bly & Cole­man Barks

Sex Pis­tols Front­man John­ny Rot­ten Weighs In On Lady Gaga, Paul McCart­ney, Madon­na & Katy Per­ry

David Fincher’s Five Finest Music Videos: From Madon­na to Aero­smith

Kurt Cobain’s Home Demos: Ear­ly Ver­sions of Nir­vana Hits, and Nev­er-Released Songs

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Dire Straits’ “Sultans Of Swing” Performed on the Gayageum, a Korean Instrument Dating Back to the 6th Century

in Music | June 12th, 2023

Every now and then, we check in on the fas­ci­nat­ing musi­cal world of Luna Lee–a musi­cian who per­forms West­ern music on the Gayageum, a tra­di­tion­al Kore­an stringed instru­ment which dates back to the 6th cen­tu­ry. Over the years, we’ve shown you her adap­ta­tions of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile;’ David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World;” Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah;” blues clas­sics by John Lee Hook­er, B.B. King & Mud­dy Waters; and Pink Floy­d’s “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall” & “Great Gig in the Sky.” To keep the tra­di­tion going, today we bring you Luna’s vir­tu­oso take on Dire Straits’ “Sul­tans Of Swing.”

Accord­ing to Gui­tar Play­er, Mark Knopfler orig­i­nal­ly wrote the song on a Nation­al Steel gui­tar in an open tun­ing. “I thought it was dull, but as soon as I bought my first Strat[ocaster] in 1977, the whole thing changed.” “It just came alive as soon as I played it on that ’61 Strat.” Above, you can hear Luna play the song on a very vin­tage Gayageum. Be sure to catch that solo at the 1:28 mark. 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:

Mark Knopfler Gives a Short Mas­ter­class on His Favorite Gui­tars & Gui­tar Sounds

Gui­tar Sto­ries: Mark Knopfler on the Six Gui­tars That Shaped His Career

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

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When There Were Three Popes at Once: An Animated Video Drawn in the Style of Medieval Illuminated Manuscript

in History, Religion | June 9th, 2023

Pope Fran­cis, who’s been head of the Catholic Church for a decade now, is offi­cial­ly Pon­tiff num­ber 266. But if you scroll through Wikipedi­a’s list of popes, you’ll see quite a few entries with­out num­bers, their rows cast in a dis­rep­utable-look­ing dark­er shade of gray. The pres­ence of sev­er­al such unof­fi­cial Popes usu­al­ly indi­cates par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing times in the his­to­ry of the Church, and thus the his­to­ry of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion itself. The new TED-Ed video above, writ­ten by medieval his­to­ry pro­fes­sor Joëlle Rol­lo-Koster, tells of the only peri­od in which three popes vied simul­ta­ne­ous­ly for legit­i­ma­cy. This was The West­ern Schism — or the Papal Schism, or the Great Occi­den­tal Schism, or the Schism of 1378.

How­ev­er one labels it, “the ori­gins of this papal predica­ment began in 1296, when France’s King Philip IV decid­ed to raise tax­es on the church.” So begins the nar­ra­tor of the video, which ani­mates the his­tor­i­cal scenes he describes in the style of a medieval illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script. (It includes many amus­ing details, though I haven’t man­aged to spot any aggres­sive rab­bits or snails, to say noth­ing of butt trum­pets.) Pope Boni­face VIII, the Church’s leader at the time, respond­ed with the Unam Sanc­tam, “a rad­i­cal decree assert­ing the pope’s total suprema­cy over earth­ly rulers.” The clash between the two result­ed in the death of Boni­face, who was even­tu­al­ly replaced in 1305 by Clement V.

As “a French diplo­mat seek­ing peace in the war between Eng­land and his home­land,” Clement strate­gi­cal­ly moved the seat of the papa­cy to Avi­gnon. Sev­en popes lat­er, the papa­cy moved back to Italy — not long before the death of Gre­go­ry XI, the Pon­tiff who moved it. Out of the chaot­ic process of select­ing his suc­ces­sor came Pope Urban VI, who turned out to be “a reformer who sought to lim­it the car­di­nals’ finances.” Those car­di­nals then “denounced Urban as a usurp­er” and elect­ed Pope Clement VII to replace him. But Urban refused to relin­quish his posi­tion, and in fact “entrenched him­self in Rome while Clement and his sup­port­ers returned to Avi­gnon.”

This began the schism, split­ting West­ern Chris­ten­dom between the cap­i­tals of Avi­gnon and Rome. Each cap­i­tal kept its line going, replac­ing popes who die and per­pet­u­at­ing the sit­u­a­tion in which “Euro­pean rulers were forced to choose sides as both popes vied for spir­i­tu­al and polit­i­cal suprema­cy.” Only in 1409 did a group of car­di­nals attempt to put an end to it, elect­ing a new pope them­selves — who went unrec­og­nized, of course, by the exist­ing popes in Rome and Avi­gnon. The schism went on for near­ly 40 years, under­scor­ing the allit­er­a­tive truth that “even those who are sup­posed to be pious are prone to pet­ty pow­er strug­gles.” Most popes, like any fig­ures of pow­er, must feel lone­ly at the top — but that’s sure­ly bet­ter than when it’s too crowd­ed there.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Lis­ten to a Brief His­to­ry of Papal Abdi­ca­tion

A Brief Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Mar­tin Luther’s 95 The­ses & the Ref­or­ma­tion — Which Changed Europe and Lat­er the World

The Vat­i­can Library Goes Online and Dig­i­tizes Tens of Thou­sands of Man­u­scripts, Books, Coins, and More

Watch the Bayeux Tapes­try Come to Life in a Short Ani­mat­ed Film

Ani­mat­ed: Stephen Fry & Ann Wid­de­combe Debate the Catholic Church

Pope John Paul II Takes Bat­ting Prac­tice in Cal­i­for­nia, 1987

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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A Kubrick Scholar Discovers an Eerie Detail in The Shining That’s Gone Unnoticed for More Than 40 Years

in Film | June 8th, 2023

Stan­ley Kubrick­’s The Shin­ing pulls off the uncom­mon feat of inhab­it­ing a genre with­out falling vic­tim to its vices. But exact­ly which genre does it inhab­it? Hor­ror? Meta-hor­ror? Super­nat­ur­al thriller? Psy­cho­log­i­cal dra­ma? Most of the pic­tures made for these broad fields of cin­e­ma share a dispir­it­ing lack of re-watch­a­bil­i­ty, espe­cial­ly those reliant on the device of the twist end­ing: M. Night Shya­malan’s The Sixth Sense, for exam­ple, which now, 24 years after its release, is enjoyed pri­mar­i­ly as an arti­fact of its cul­tur­al era. But over the past four decades The Shin­ing has only become a rich­er view­ing expe­ri­ence, and one that con­tin­ues to yield hereto­fore unseen details.

In the new video above (and an asso­ci­at­ed Twit­ter thread), Kubrick schol­ar Fil­ip­po Ulivieri expos­es one such detail — or rather, a whole series of them. Through­out his per­for­mance as the Over­look Hotel’s increas­ing­ly trou­bled care­tak­er Jack Tor­rance, Jack Nichol­son keeps look­ing direct­ly at the cam­era. “I’m not talk­ing about when he looks at the cam­era because he’s talk­ing to some­one else,” says Uliv­eri. “I’m talk­ing about all the times in which Jack Tor­rance looks at the cam­era, but there’s no one to look at.”

All are “very brief moments, cap­tured by a few frames of film,” or even just one. But giv­en how many times it hap­pens (much more often than the one fourth-wall-break­ing glance already acknowl­edged by Shin­ing exegetes), as well as Kubrick­’s well-known per­fec­tion­ist atten­tion to detail, all this can hard­ly be an acci­dent.

Despite the exis­tence of doc­u­men­tary footage that shows Kubrick explic­it­ly telling Nichol­son to look down at the cam­era in one shot, this choice has remained, as it were, over­looked. But what to make of it? It could mean that “we are not safe from Jack­’s fury. He knows where we are; he may come for us next.” Yet he also looks at the cam­era well before descend­ing into insan­i­ty. “Who is look­ing at Jack? Ghosts. The ghosts of the Over­look Hotel.” Per­haps “Jack felt their pres­ence from the very begin­ning. So the cam­era in The Shin­ing must be… well, a ghost itself.” But if the sub­jec­tive cam­era rep­re­sents the ghost­ly point of view, “does that mean that I am a ghost, too?” And more impor­tant­ly for fans, does that mean Kubrick out­did Shya­malan near­ly twen­ty years before The Sixth Sense came out?

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Jack Nichol­son Get Mani­a­cal­ly Into Char­ac­ter for The Shin­ing’s Icon­ic Axe Scene

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Anno­tat­ed Copy of Stephen King’s The Shin­ing

Room 237: New Doc­u­men­tary Explores Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing and Those It Obsess­es

Decod­ing the Screen­plays of The Shin­ing, Moon­rise King­dom & The Dark Knight: Watch Lessons from the Screen­play

Go Inside the First 30 Min­utes of Kubrick’s The Shin­ing with This 360º Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Video

Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing Reimag­ined as Wes Ander­son and David Lynch Movies

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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The Absurd Logistics of Concert Tours: The Behind-the-Scenes Preparation You Don’t Get to See

in Music | June 8th, 2023

If you’re lucky, you get to spend three hours at a con­cert, com­muning with your favorite band. That’s just a frac­tion of the time it takes to pre­pare the logis­tics for the show–to sign the orig­i­nal agree­ments with the venue, rent suit­able hotels, hire crews, fill trucks with equip­ment and haul it from venue to venue, hang speak­ers and erect the stage, the list goes on.

The absurd logis­tics of con­cert tours gets cov­ered in the Wen­dover Pro­duc­tions video above. It takes you through all the behind-the-scenes logis­tics you nev­er get to see. Mean­while, the video below lets you see, in time­lapse motion, a crew prepar­ing a Ramm­stein show at a large Ger­man sta­di­um, com­press­ing sev­en days of bee­hive activ­i­ty into 2 min­utes. It’s a sight to behold…

Relat­ed Con­tent

Why Music Fes­ti­vals Sound Bet­ter Than Ever: A Coachel­la Sound Engi­neer Demys­ti­fies Mod­ern Sound Sys­tems

How the Grate­ful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Mon­ster, 600-Speak­er Sound System–Changed Rock Con­certs & Live Music For­ev­er

James Brown’s His­toric Con­cert, Staged 24 Hours After Mar­tin Luther King’s Assas­si­na­tion, Is Now Restored and Free to Watch Online

 

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Behold the Microscopically Tiny Handwriting of Novelist Robert Walser, Which Took Four Decades to Decipher

in History, Literature, Writing | June 7th, 2023

Robert Walser’s last nov­el, Der Räu­ber or The Rob­ber, came out in 1972. Walser him­self had died fif­teen years ear­li­er, hav­ing spent near­ly three sol­id decades in a sana­to­ri­um. He’d been a fair­ly suc­cess­ful fig­ure in the Berlin lit­er­ary scene of the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, but dur­ing his long  insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion in his home­land of Switzer­land — from which he refused to return to nor­mal life, despite his out­ward appear­ance of men­tal health — he claimed to have put let­ters behind him. As J. M. Coet­zee writes in the New York Review of Books, “Walser’s so-called mad­ness, his lone­ly death, and the posthu­mous­ly dis­cov­ered cache of his secret writ­ings were the pil­lars on which a leg­end of Walser as a scan­dalous­ly neglect­ed genius was erect­ed.”

This cache con­sist­ed of “some five hun­dred sheets of paper cov­ered in a micro­scop­ic pen­cil script so dif­fi­cult to read that his execu­tor at first took them to be a diary in secret code. In fact Walser had kept no diary. Nor is the script a code: it is sim­ply hand­writ­ing with so many idio­syn­crat­ic abbre­vi­a­tions that, even for edi­tors famil­iar with it, unam­bigu­ous deci­pher­ment is not always pos­si­ble.”

He devised this extreme short­hand as a kind of cure for writer’s block: “In a 1927 let­ter to a Swiss edi­tor, Walser claimed that his writ­ing was over­come with ‘a swoon, a cramp, a stu­por’ that was both ‘phys­i­cal and men­tal’ and brought on by the use of a pen,” writes the New York­er’s Deirdre Foley Mendelssohn. “Adopt­ing his strange ‘pen­cil method’ enabled him to ‘play,’ to ‘scrib­ble, fid­dle about.’ ”


“Like an artist with a stick of char­coal between his fin­gers,” Coet­zee writes, “Walser need­ed to get a steady, rhyth­mic hand move­ment going before he could slip into a frame of mind in which rever­ie, com­po­si­tion, and the flow of the writ­ing tool became much the same thing.” This process facil­i­tat­ed the trans­fer of Walser’s thoughts straight to the page, with the result that his late works read — and have been belat­ed­ly rec­og­nized as read­ing — like no oth­er lit­er­a­ture pro­duced in his time. As Brett Bak­er at Painter’s table sees it,” Walser’s com­pressed prose (rarely more than a page or two) con­structs full nar­ra­tives than can be con­sumed rapid­ly – near­ly ‘at a glance,’ as it were. Their short length allows the read­er to revis­it the work in detail, focus­ing on sen­tences, phras­es, or words as one might exam­ine the paint­ed pas­sages or marks on a can­vas.”

These ultra-com­pressed works from the Bleis­tift­ge­bi­et, or “pen­cil zone,” writes Foley Mendelssohn, “estab­lish Walser as a mod­ernist of sorts: the recy­cling of mate­ri­als can make the texts look like col­lages, mod­ernist mashups toe­ing the line between mechan­i­cal and per­son­al pro­duc­tion.” But they also make him look like the fore­run­ner of anoth­er, lat­er vari­ety of exper­i­men­tal lit­er­a­ture: in a longer New York­er piece on Walser, Ben­jamin Kunkel pro­pos­es 1972 as a cul­tur­al­ly appro­pri­ate year to pub­lish The Rob­ber, “a fit­ting date for a beau­ti­ful, unsum­ma­riz­able work every bit as self-reflex­ive as any­thing pro­duced by the metafic­tion­ists of the six­ties and sev­en­ties.” The pub­li­ca­tion of his “micro­scripts,” in Ger­man as well as in trans­la­tion, has ensured him an influ­ence on writ­ers of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry — and not just their choice of font size.

For any­one inter­est­ed in see­ing a pub­lished ver­sion of Walser’s writ­ing, see the book Micro­scripts, which fea­tures full-col­or illus­tra­tions by artist Maira Kalman.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Code of Charles Dick­ens’ Short­hand Has Been Cracked by Com­put­er Pro­gram­mers, Solv­ing a 160-Year-Old Mys­tery

Font Based on Sig­mund Freud’s Hand­writ­ing Com­ing Cour­tesy of Suc­cess­ful Kick­starter Cam­paign

Why Did Leonar­do da Vin­ci Write Back­wards? A Look Into the Ulti­mate Renais­sance Man’s “Mir­ror Writ­ing”

Dis­cov­er Nüshu, a 19th-Cen­tu­ry Chi­nese Writ­ing Sys­tem That Only Women Knew How to Write

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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Why Music Festivals Sound Better Than Ever: A Coachella Sound Engineer Demystifies Modern Sound Systems

in Music | June 7th, 2023

Back in 1965, the Bea­t­les played Shea Sta­di­um. And to com­pete with the noise gen­er­at­ed by 55,000 scream­ing youth, they pumped their music through a series of Elec­tro-Voice LR4 col­umn speak­ers. But to no avail. As Ringo put it, “From the count-in on the first num­ber, the vol­ume of screams drowned every­thing else.”

It did­n’t take long for rock bands to play catch up. By the 1970s, the Grate­ful Dead had invent­ed the “Wall of Sound,” then the largest con­cert sound sys­tem ever built. Designed by Owsley “Bear” Stan­ley, the Dead­’s sound sys­tem brought togeth­er 604 speak­ers, gen­er­at­ing 26,400 watts of pow­er in total. Expen­sive and unwieldy, the Wall of Sound was short-lived, soon giv­ing way to more logis­ti­cal­ly-fea­si­ble and cost-effec­tive tour­ing rigs.

From there, the quest for the per­fect sound system–especially ones suit­able to sus­tain large, out­door concerts–continued. Bring­ing us to today. Above, sound engi­neer Dave Rat breaks down exact­ly how mod­ern sound sys­tems work, “and why mod­ern music fes­ti­vals sound so much bet­ter than they used to.” Mr. Rat has pro­vid­ed audio for the Coachel­la music fes­ti­val since 2001. Ergo he knows of what he speaks.

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 

How the Grate­ful Dead’s “Wall of Sound”–a Mon­ster, 600-Speak­er Sound System–Changed Rock Con­certs & Live Music For­ev­er

One Man’s Quest to Build the Best Stereo Sys­tem in the World

An 82-Year-Old Japan­ese Audio­phile Search­es for the Best Sound by Installing His Own Elec­tric Util­i­ty Pole in His Yard

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