…he went away, and passing through what was called the house of Tiberius, went down into the forum, to where a gilded column stood, at which all the roads that intersect Italy terminate.”
No one can give you exact directions to Milliarium Aureum (aka the Golden Milestone). Just a few carved marble fragments of the gilded column’s base remain in the Roman Forum, where its original location is somewhat difficult to pinpoint.
But as the image above, from interactive map Roads to Rome, shows (view it here), the motto Emperor Caesar Augustus’ mighty mile marker inspired still holds true.
All roads lead to Rome.
To illustrate, designers Benedikt Groß and Philipp Schmitt worked with digital geographer Raphael Reimann to select 486,713 starting points on a 26,503,452 km² grid of Europe.
From there, they created an algorithm to calculate the best route from each point to Rome.
(It beats typing a street address into Google Maps 486,713 times.)
From afar, the resulting map looks like a delicate piece of sea lettuce or an early exploration in neuroanatomy.
Zoom in as tight as you can and things become more traditionally cartographic in appearance, names and spatial relations of cities asserting themselves. A bold line indicates a busy route.
Now you do, from 312,719 distinct starting points.
To help them in their labor, the creative team made good use of the GraphHopper route optimization tool and the Open Street Map wiki. In their own estimation, the project’s outcome is “somewhere between information visualization and data art, unveiling mobility on a very large scale.”
“Dada thrives on contradictions. It is creative and destructive. Dada denounces the world and wishes to save it.” So says one narrator of journalist-filmmaker Mick Gold’s Europe After the Rain, a 1978 Arts Council of Great Britain documentary on not just the international avant-garde movement called Dada but the associated currents of surrealism churning around that continent during the first half of the twentieth century. “Dada wanted to replace the nonsense of man with the illogically senseless. Dada is senseless, like nature. Dada is for nature, and against art. Philosophers have less value for Dada than an old toothbrush, and Dada abandons them to the great leaders of the world.”
Of the many bold and often contradictory claims made about Dada, none describe it as easily understood. But Dada has less to do with intellectual, aesthetic, or political coherence than with a certain energy. That energy could fire up the likes of André Breton, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Giorgio de Chirico, and many other artists besides, channeling frustrations with the state of post-World War I Europe into a sensibility that demanded ripping everything up and building it all again, beginning with the very foundations of sense.
Gold and his collaborators on Europe After the Rain understand this, audiovisually interpreting the legacy of Dada, which despite its short lifespan left behind a host of still-striking works in text, image, and sculpture, in a variety of ways.
“The movie is full of treasures,” writes Dangerous Minds’ Oliver Hall, including “BBC interviews with Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp from the Sixties, a reading of Artaud’s ‘Address to the Dalai Lama,’ an account of Freud’s meeting with Dalí.” He adds that its “re-enactment of Breton’s dialogue with an official of the Parti communiste français is illuminating, and complements the other valuable material on the ‘Pope of Surrealism’: his work with shell-shocked soldiers in World War I, trials and expulsions of other Surrealists, collaboration with Leon Trotsky in Mexico, less-than-heroic contributions to the French Resistance, and study of the occult.” But then, the kind of mind that could launch a movement like Dada — which fifty years after its end remained fascinating enough to inspire a documentary that itself holds its fascination forty years on — is capable, one suspects, of anything.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
“When do governments deserve our allegiance, and when should they be denied it?” It’s a question that has perhaps crossed your mind lately. And it’s precisely the question that’s at the heart of The Moral Foundations of Political Philosophy, a free course taught by Yale political science professor Ian Shapiro.
In 25 lectures (all available above, on YouTube and iTunes), the course “starts with a survey of major political theories of the Enlightenment—Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract tradition—through classical formulations, historical context, and contemporary debates relating to politics today. It then turns to the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking. Lastly, it deals with the nature of, and justifications for, democratic politics, and their relations to Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment political thinking.”
The study of musical instruments opens up vast histories of sound reverberating through the centuries. Should we embark on a journey through halls of Europe’s musical instrument museums, for example, we should soon discover how limited our appreciation for music history has been, how narrowed by the relative handful of instruments allowed into orchestras, ensembles, and bands of all kinds. The typical diet of classical, romantic, modern, jazz, pop, rock, R&B, or whatever, the music most of us in the West grow up hearing and studying, has resulted from a careful sorting process that over time chose certain instruments over others.
Some of those historic instruments—the violin, cello, many wind and brass—remain in wide circulation and produce music that can still sound relevant and contemporary. Others, like the Mellotron (above) or barrel organs (like the 1883 Cylinderpositiv at the top), remain wedded to their historical periods, making sounds that might as well have dates stamped on them.
You could—and many an historian has, no doubt—travel the world and pay a personal visit to the museums housing thousands of musical instruments humans have used—or at least invented—to carry melodies and harmonies and keep time. Such a tour might constitute a life’s work.
You can search instruments by maker, country, city, or continent, time period, museum, and type. (Wind, Percussion, Stringed, Zithers, Rattles, Bells, Lamellaphones, etc….) Researchers may encounter a few language hurdles—MIMO’s about page mentions “searching in six different languages,” and the site actually lists 11 language categories in tabs at the top. But users may still need to plug pages into Google translate unless they read French or German or some of the other languages in which descriptions have been written. Refreshingly consistent, the photographs of each instrument conform to a standard set by the consortium that provides “detailed guidelines on how to set up a repository to enable the harvesting of digital content.”
But enough about the site functions, what about the sounds? Well, in a physical museum, you wouldn’t expect to take a three-hundred-year-old flute out of its case and hear it played. Just so, most of the instruments here can be seen and not heard, but the site does have over 400 sound files, including the enchanting recording of Symphonion Eroica 38a (above), as played on a mechanical clock from 1900.
As you discover instruments you never knew existed—such as the theramin-like Croix Sonore (Sonorus Cross), created by Russian composer Nicolas Obukhov between 1926 and 1934—you can undertake your own research to find sample recordings online, such as “The Third and Last Testament,” below, Obukhov’s composition for 5 voices, organ, 2 pianos, orchestra, and croix sonore. Obukhov’s experiments with instruments of his own invention prompted his experiments in 12-tone composition, in which, he declared, “I forbid myself any repetition.” Just one example among many thousands demonstrating how instrument design forms the basis of a wildly proliferating variety of musical expressions that can start to seem endless after a while.
Among the many other 50ths commemorated this year, one will largely go unnoticed by the U.S. press, given that it happened in France, a country we like to ignore as much as possible, and concerned the politics of anarchists and communists, people we like to pretend don’t exist except as caricatures in scare-mongering cartoons. But the French remember May 1968, and not only on its fiftieth. The wildcat strikes, student marches, and barricades in the Latin Quarter haunt French politics. “We’re slightly prisoners of a myth,” laments historian Danielle Tartakowsky.
The international historical events surrounding the strikes and marches are well-known or should be. The founding ethos of the movement, Situationism, perhaps less so. Reading Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacleand the 1968 movement’s other essential texts can feel like looking into a funhouse mirror.
The 1966 pamphlet manifesto that began the student agitation—“On the Poverty of Student Life”—might sound mighty familiar: it has no kind words for consumerist student radicals who “convert their unconscious contempt into a blind enthusiasm.” Yet they have been attacked, it clarifies, “from the wrong point of view.”
Since we seem to be, in some denatured way, reliving events of fifty years ago, the thinking of that not-so-distant moment illuminates our circumstances. “If there’s one thing in common between 1968 and today,” remarks Antoine Guégan, whose father Gérard staged Paris campus sit-ins, “it’s young people’s despair. But it’s a different kind of despair…. Today’s youth is facing a moment of stagnation, with little to lean on.” Despite the riotous, bloody nature of the times, a global movement then found reason for hope.
We see it reflected in the defiant art and cinema of the time, from revolutionary work by a 75-year-old Joan Miró to vérité film by 20-year-old wunderkind Philippe Garrel. And we see it, especially, in the huge number of posters printed to advertise the movement, radical graphic designs that illustrate the exhilaration and defiance of the loose collective of Marxists-Leninists, Trotskyites, Maoists, Anarchists, Situationists, and so on who propelled the movement forward.
Last year, we featured a gallery of these arresting images from the Atelier Populaire, a group of artists and students, notes Dangerous Minds, which “occupied the École des Beaux-Arts and dedicated its efforts to producing thousands of silk-screened posters using bold, iconic imagery and slogans as well as explicitly collective/anonymous authorship.” Today, we bring you a huge gallery of more than 300 such images, housed online at Victoria University in the University of Toronto.
Some of the images are downloadable. You can request downloads of others from the university library for private use or publication. These posters represent a movement confronting an oppressive society with its own logic, a society of which Debord wrote just the previous year, “the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.” There is no understanding of the events of May 1968 without an understanding of its visual culture as, Debord wrote, “a means of unification.” Enter the gallery of posters and prints here.
To casual viewers, most Japanese animation (at least apart from the elegant work of Hayao Miyazaki and his collaborators at Studio Ghibli) can look like a pretty unsophisticated and even disreputable affair, characterized by crude flashiness, convoluted storylines, and bizarre, sophomoric humor. All those things do, of course, exist in the realm of anime, but only because everything does: if Japan’s version of animation often rises above those of other cultures, it does so as a result of that culture regarding animation as simply cinema by other means. And any cinematic form will inevitably produce diverse virtuosity: to see how a master Japanese animator can have a sensibility completely different from that of Miyazaki, look no further than Satoshi Kon.
“Even if you don’t know his work, you have certainly seen some of these images,” says Every Frame a Painting’s Tony Zhou in the series’ video essay on Kon’s work, which includes the internationally acclaimed films Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, andPaprika.
“He is an acknowledged influence on both Darren Aronofsky and Christopher Nolan, and he has a fan base that includes just about everyone who loves animation.” The essay shows us how those two Western live-action auteurs, among Kon’s other fans, have borrowed his images for their own stories, just as Kon, in turn, drew a great deal of inspiration from a similarly unlikely source: George Roy Hill’s 1972 cinematic adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
More specifically, Kon drew inspiration from the film’s inventive and surprising cuts from one scene to another, a formal reflection of its chronology-and-geography-jumping protagonist’s state of being “unstuck in time.” Throughout his decade-long feature filmmaking career, Kon “was constantly showing one image and then revealing that it wasn’t what you thought it was.” Kon died in 2010, having “pushed animation in ways that aren’t really possible in live action, not just elastic images but elastic editing, a unique way of moving from image to image, scene to scene.” His accomplishments live on not just in his own work, but in all the ways the creators who admire it continue to adapt his innovations for their own, even in the traditionally “respectable” forms of cinema.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
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New York Times critic Clive Barnes—a fan—caved to pressure from anxious preview audience members, who wanted him to warn prospective ticket buyers what they were in for. Tongue firmly in cheek, he complied within the body of a rave review:
A great many four letter words such as “love”
A number of men and women (I should have counted)… totally nude
Frequent approving references… to the expanding benefits of drugs
Homosexuality
Miscegenation
Flowers
Then, as now, a growing youth movement occupied the American public’s imagination.
If 2018’s Broadway producers are willing to take a risk on a musical that’s not adapted from a popular movie, we may well be entering ticket lotteries for Gonzalez! sometime in the very near future.
Back then, young people were in revolt against the Vietnam War and the values their parents held dear.
The original versions, both on and off Broadway, featured two of the show’s three authors, Gerome Ragni and James Rado, as antiheroes Berger and Claude. (Galt MacDermot wrote the music.)
While other cast members emerged from New York’s hippie scene, Ragni and Rado’s backgrounds were somewhat lacking in patchouli. Rado was an aspirant composer of traditional Broadway musicals. Ragni, as a member of The Open Theater, was a bit more tuned in, theatrically speaking.
There was so much excitement in the streets and the parks and the hippie areas, and we thought if we could transmit this excitement to the stage it would be wonderful. … We hung out with them and went to their Be-Ins (and) let our hair grow.
Barnes wryly noted in his review that “these hard-working and talented actors are in reality about as hippie as Mayor Lindsay.”
To learn more about Hair’s role in theater history—including understudy Diane Keaton’s refusal to get naked and a page from the Times’ theater listings showing what else was playing at the time—read The Bowery Boys photo-packed 50th anniversary salute.
Sing along with the original Off-Broadway cast below.
A while ago we brought you a hilarious series of recordings of the British comedic actor Peter Sellers reading The Beatles’ “She Loves You” in four different accents. Today we have a brief clip from a telephone call by Sellers on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (in which Sellers played three different roles). Here he demonstrates the nuances of a few of the many accents around Great Britain. From cockney to upper class and from London to Edinburgh, it’s classic Sellers all the way.
If this whets your appetite, don’t miss the items in the Relateds below.
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But we aren’t talking Disney here, but hard-boiled pulp fiction, a genre I think Chesterton would have liked. Chesterton’s work “was entirely popular in nature,” notes Graydanus. He was “a great defender of popular and even ‘vulgar’ culture.” Take his essay “A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls,” which begins:
One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically–it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.
Sentiments like these inspired admirers of Chesterton like Marshall McLuhan and Jorge Luis Borges to take seriously the mass entertainments of their respective cultures.
We might apply a Chestertonian appreciation to the book covers here, illustrating detective fiction by such notables as Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Raymond Chandler.
Despite the cultural cachet these names bear, they are also writers whose work thrived in the “pulps,” a term denoting, Rebecca Romney writes at Crime Reads, “a wide category that bounds across genres.” Famed detective writers were as likely to be printed in “pulp fiction” magazines and cheap paperback editions as were acclaimed authors like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe. In addition to a number of genre conventions, the “common traits” of pulp fiction “are cheapness, portability, and popularity.”
Detective fiction, whether “literary” or wildly sensational, has always been a popular entertainment, close kin to the “Penny Dreadful,” those cheaply-produced 19th century British novels of adventure and sensation. “Twentieth-century detective novels are intimately tied to the history of the pulps,” writes Romney, which “rely on the erotic for their appeal.” Pulp publications sensationalize in images what may be far more chaste in the text. These “ridiculously sexified” book covers do not bother with coy symbolism or minimalist allusion. They take aim directly at the libido, or, to take Chesterton’s phrase, “the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.”
The cover of The Maltese Falcon at the top goes out of its way to illustrate “the only sexually scandalous scene of the book, as if it were the single most crucial moment of the entire story.” The cover is pure objectification, and on such grounds we might reasonably object. To do so is to critique an entire mid-twentieth century aesthetic of “exploitation,” a campy style that gleefully titillated audiences who gleefully desired titillation.
The covers date from the mid-thirties to early fifties. All of the typical visual pulp themes are here, which are also typical of detective fiction and noir: the femme fatale (called “a luscious mantrap” on the cover of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep below), in various seductive states of undress; the unsubtle hints of violence and sadomasochism. Such themes in the novels can be overt, implicit, or fully submerged. The focus of these covers turns the tropes into cheap come-ons. In this, perhaps, they do their authors an injustice, but their naked intention is solely to make the sale. What readers do with the books afterward is their own affair.
“These absurd covers,” Romney writes, “speak to the detective novel’s unavoidably shared heritage with other sensational pulp genres, much like the ever-present creepy uncle at Thanksgiving.” As much as quality detective fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror might receive critical praise as high art, they will always be inextricably related to the “vulgar” pleasures of the pulps. To speak of such entertainments as the domain of the lowbrow, the magnanimous Chesterton might say, is only to “mean humanity minus ourselves.” Still, I wonder what Chesterton would have said had his collected Father Brown stories appeared in a pulp version with a nonsensically sexy cover?
Visit Crime Reads to see these covers compared with those of more subtle, and arguably more tasteful, editions.
Through the magic of black and white video, this rare gig of Bon Scott-led AC/DC has been unearthed. The sound is poor, the lighting sometimes non-existent, but who cares? Just look at the faces of the 16-year-old girls in the front row as one of the hardest rocking bands plays (checks notes) the St. Albans High School gymnasium in 1976! It’s absolute madness. Who knew at that time that AC/DC were going to hit big, like stadium big, like essential hard rock band of all time big? To some it was probably a fun night out and isn’t it funny that the lead singer likes to rock a set of bagpipes?
In this key bit of investigation by Dangerous Minds, writer Cherrybomb wonders whether Bon Scott–a transplant from Scotland to Australia when he was six–actually could play the pipes at all. I mean, yes, one might *assume* that being Scottish means you’re half-way there, but in fact, according to a piper called Kevin Conlon, Scott only got an interest in the instrument during the recording of 1975’s T.N.T. :
I got a call from Bon, and he didn’t know who I was and I didn’t know who he was. He wanted to buy a set of bagpipes and have a few lessons. I told him they would cost over $1000 and it would take 12 months or more of lessons to learn how to play a tune. He said that was fine and came down for a few lessons, but as we were only going to be miming, he just had to look like he was playing.
Cherrybomb concludes that maybe, just maybe, Scott is playing the pipes during this number, instead of miming to a pre-recorded track over the P.A. But later the pipes got smashed up, and the number got dumped from the act. And reportedly the rest of the band was furious over their limited funds being spent on an instrument Scott couldn’t really play. The whole story has a tinge of Spinal Tap excess to it, but hey, you wouldn’t want it any other way, right?
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
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