Enchanting Video Shows How Globes Were Made by Hand in 1955: The End of a 500-Year Tradition

in Maps | March 7th, 2017

The first globe–a spher­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of our plan­et Earth–dates back to the Age of Dis­cov­ery. Or 1492, to be more pre­cise, when Mar­tin Behaim and painter Georg Glock­endon cre­at­ed the “Nürn­berg Ter­res­tri­al Globe,” oth­er­wise known as the “Erdapfel.” It was made by hand. And that tra­di­tion con­tin­ued straight through the 20th cen­tu­ry, until machines even­tu­al­ly took over.

Above, you can watch the tail end of a 500-year tra­di­tion. Some­where in North Lon­don, in 1955, “a woman takes one of the moulds from a shelf and takes it over to a work­bench. She fix­es it to a device which holds it steady whilst still allow­ing it to spin.” “Anoth­er girl,” notes British Pathe, “is stick­ing red strips onto a larg­er sphere.” After that, “coloured print­ed sec­tions show­ing the map of the world are cut to shape then past­ed onto the sur­face of the globes.” Through that “skilled oper­a­tion,” the Lon­don-based firm pro­duced some 60,000 globes each year.

Here, you can also watch anoth­er globe-mak­ing mini-doc­u­men­tary, this one in black & white, from 1949. It gives you a glimpse of a process that takes 15 hours, from start to fin­ish.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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:

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

How Ani­mat­ed Car­toons Are Made: A Vin­tage Primer Filmed Way Back in 1919

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

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How Mindfulness Makes Us Happier & Better Able to Meet Life’s Challenges: Two Animated Primers Explain

in Life, Psychology, Religion | March 6th, 2017

The West has very rich con­tem­pla­tive tra­di­tion. Monas­tics of the ear­ly Chris­t­ian church prac­ticed forms of med­i­ta­tion that have been adopt­ed by many peo­ple seek­ing a deep­er, more serene expe­ri­ence of life. Giv­en the wealth of con­tem­pla­tive lit­er­a­ture and prac­tice in Euro­pean his­to­ry, why have so many West­ern peo­ple turned to the East, and toward Bud­dhist con­tem­pla­tive forms in par­tic­u­lar?

The answer is com­pli­cat­ed and involves many strains of philo­soph­i­cal and coun­ter­cul­tur­al his­to­ry. Some of the great­est influ­ence in the U.S. has come from Tibetan monks like the Dalai Lama and Chö­gyam Trung­pa Rin­poche, one­time teacher of Allen Gins­berg, and founder of Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty and the ecu­meni­cal Shamb­ha­la school of Bud­dhism. Trung­pa Rin­poche con­trast­ed the­is­tic forms of med­i­ta­tion, both Hin­du and Chris­t­ian, with the mind­ful­ness and con­cen­tra­tion prac­tices of Bud­dhism, writ­ing that the first one, focused on a “high­er being” or beings, is “inward or intro­vert­ed” and dual­is­tic.

Bud­dhist mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion, on the oth­er hand, is “what one might call ‘work­ing med­i­ta­tion’ or extro­vert­ed med­i­ta­tion. This is not a ques­tion of try­ing to retreat from the world.” Mind­ful­ness  “is con­cerned with try­ing to see what is,” he writes, and to do so with­out prej­u­dice: “there is no belief in high­er and low­er; the idea of dif­fer­ent lev­els, or of being in an under­de­vel­oped state, does not arise.” In oth­er words, all of the import­ed con­cepts that push us one way or anoth­er, dri­ve our rigid opin­ions about our­selves and oth­ers, and make us feel supe­ri­or or infe­ri­or, become irrel­e­vant. We take own­er­ship of the con­tents of our own minds.

How is this rel­e­vant for the mod­ern per­son? Con­sid­er the videos here. These explain­ers,  like many oth­er con­tem­po­rary uses of the word “mind­ful­ness,” peel the con­cept away from its Bud­dhist ori­gins. But sec­u­lar and Bud­dhist ideas of mind­ful­ness are not as dif­fer­ent as some might think. “Mind­ful­ness,” says Dan Har­ris in the video at the top, “is the abil­i­ty to know what’s hap­pen­ing in your head at any giv­en moment with­out get­ting car­ried away by it.” (Some might pre­fer the more suc­cinct Vipas­sana def­i­n­i­tion “non­judg­men­tal aware­ness.”) With­out mind­ful­ness, “there’s no buffer between the stim­u­lus and your reac­tion.” With it, how­ev­er, we “learn to respond wise­ly” to what hap­pens to us instead of being pushed and pulled around by habit­u­al reac­tiv­i­ty.

As the video above has it—using the Chero­kee para­ble of the two wolves—mind­ful­ness pro­vides us with the space we need to observe our sen­sa­tions, emo­tions, and ideas. From a crit­i­cal dis­tance, we can see caus­es and effects, and cre­ate dif­fer­ent con­di­tions. We can learn, in short, to be hap­py, even in dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances, with­out deny­ing or fight­ing with real­i­ty. The Dalai Lama refers to this as observ­ing “the prin­ci­ple of causal­i­ty… a nat­ur­al law.” “In deal­ing with real­i­ty,” he says, “you have to take that law into account…. If you desire hap­pi­ness, you should seek the caus­es that give rise to it.” Like­wise, we must under­stand the men­tal caus­es of our suf­fer­ing if we want to pre­vent it.

How do we do that? Is there an app for it? Well, yes, and no. One app is Hap­pi­fy—who pro­duced these videos with ani­ma­tor Katy Davis, med­i­ta­tion instruc­tor Sharon Salzberg, and Har­ris, cre­ator of the mind­ful­ness course (and app) 10% Hap­pi­er. Hap­pi­fy offers “Sci­ence-based Activ­i­ties and Games, and “a high­ly sec­u­lar­ized, some might say decon­tex­tu­al­ized, form of mind­ful­ness training—including the “Med­i­ta­tion 101” primer video above. For those who reject every­thing that smacks of reli­gion, sec­u­lar mind­ful­ness prac­tices have been rig­or­ous­ly put to many a peer-reviewed test. They are wide­ly accept­ed as evi­dence-based ways to reduce anx­i­ety and depres­sion, improve focus and con­cen­tra­tion, and man­age pain. These prac­tices have been used in hos­pi­tals, med­ical schools, and even pub­lic ele­men­tary schools for many years.

But whether we are Bud­dhists or oth­er reli­gious peo­ple prac­tic­ing mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion, or sec­u­lar human­ists and athe­ists using mod­i­fied, “science-based”—or app-based—techniques, the fact remains that we have to build the dis­ci­pline into our dai­ly life in order for it to work. No app will do that for us, any more than a fit­ness app will make us toned and healthy. Nor will read­ing books or arti­cles about med­i­ta­tion make us med­i­ta­tors. (To para­phrase Augus­tine, we might say that end­less read­ing or star­ing at screens amounts to an atti­tude of “give me mind­ful­ness, but not yet.”)

Har­ris, in char­ac­ter as a mouse in a V‑neck sweater, says in the video above that med­i­ta­tion is “exer­cise for your brain.” And like exer­cise, Trung­pa Rin­poche writes, med­i­ta­tion can be “painful in the begin­ning.” We may not always like what we find knock­ing around in our heads. And yet with­out acknowl­edg­ing, and even befriend­ing, the feel­ings and thoughts that make us feel ter­ri­ble, we can’t learn to nur­ture and “feed” those that make us feel good. If you’re inspired to get start­ed, you’ll find sev­er­al free online guid­ed med­i­ta­tions at the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Philoso­pher Sam Har­ris Leads You Through a 26-Minute Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion

Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions From UCLA: Boost Your Aware­ness & Ease Your Stress

Stream 18 Hours of Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

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

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Talking Heads Featured on The South Bank Show in 1979: How the Groundbreaking New Wave Band Made Normality Strange Again

in Music, Television | March 6th, 2017

“I think sub­ur­ban life is some­thing that almost any Amer­i­can can under­stand,” says Talk­ing Heads drum­mer Chris Frantz near the begin­ning of The South Bank Show’s 1979 episode on the band. “They might dis­like or like it, but they can relate to it. It’s a nice metaphor, or what­ev­er, for mod­ern life.” That obser­va­tion func­tions as well as any as an intro­duc­tion to the band who, after hav­ing debuted as open­ers for the Ramones just four years ear­li­er at CBGB, went on to build a world­wide fan base enthralled with the way their music, their per­for­mances, and even their self-pre­sen­ta­tion ren­dered Amer­i­can nor­mal­i­ty and banal­i­ty new and strange.

Orig­i­nal­ly called “The Artis­tics,” the band found its true name through a dis­so­lu­tion, ref­or­ma­tion, and glance at the pages of TV Guide. “All of us could imme­di­ate­ly relate to that name,” says bassist Tina Wey­mouth. “We also thought it could have many con­no­ta­tions, the most impor­tant of which was that it had no con­no­ta­tion with any exist­ing music form. It’s TV, video — sup­pos­ed­ly the most bor­ing for­mat.” This ethos extend­ed to the song­writ­ing pro­ce­dure of lead vocal­ist and gui­tarist David Byrne, who delib­er­ate­ly used lan­guage and ref­er­ences “that were no more inter­est­ing than nor­mal speech and no more dra­mat­ic and yet some­how, in the song con­text, might become more inter­est­ing.”

The result: albums like 1978’s More Songs About Build­ings and Food. From a dis­tance of near­ly forty years, the Talk­ing Heads of those days look a bit like pio­neers of “norm­core,” the fash­ion, much dis­cussed in recent years, of delib­er­ate­ly look­ing as aes­thet­i­cal­ly aver­age as pos­si­ble. “I’m glad we don’t have to dress up in uni­forms every day,” says Frantz of their refusal of the duel­ing “punk” and “glam” modes of dress sport­ed by so many rock­ers at the time. Byrne speaks of orig­i­nal­ly want­i­ng to wear the most nor­mal out­fits pos­si­ble, as deter­mined by observ­ing peo­ple out on the street, but it turned out that “a lot of aver­age clothes require more upkeep than I’m will­ing to do. Like, they need iron­ing and things like that.”

The idea of norm­core draws its pow­er from the con­tra­dic­tion at its core, and Talk­ing Heads nev­er feared con­tra­dic­tion. “We write songs that have a par­tic­u­lar point of view, and we’re not wor­ried if the next song has the oppo­site point of view,” says key­board and gui­tar play­er Jer­ry Har­ri­son. “We feel that peo­ple have dif­fer­ent ideas, feel dif­fer­ent at dif­fer­ent times of the day as well as at dif­fer­ent times of their life, and we don’t real­ly want to have a man­i­festo or, you know, an ide­ol­o­gy.” (“We’ve gone through so many ide­olo­gies late­ly,” he adds.)

Despite that, Talk­ing Heads always seemed to adhere to cer­tain prin­ci­ples: “I believe a lot of those moral clich­es,” admits Byrne, “like ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right’ or ‘There’s no free lunch’ or ‘If you do bad things it’ll come back to you,’ and all those sort of stu­pid things.” But they nev­er real­ly inhab­it­ed main­stream Amer­i­ca; cul­tur­al­ly hyper-aware urban­ites made up much of their audi­ence, and the band mem­bers them­selves — play­ers, one says, of quin­tes­sen­tial­ly “city music” — were very much denizens of pre-gen­tri­fi­ca­tion Man­hat­tan. “It’s stim­u­lat­ing to go out and see dirt every­where and peo­ple falling over,” says Byrne. “I lived out in the sub­urbs and had a nice place with a big lawn or what­ev­er — although I can’t afford that — if I did live some­where like that, I would be afraid that I would get too com­fort­able and would­n’t work.”

But work they did, so dili­gent­ly and whol­ly with­out the extrav­a­gances of the rock star lifestyle that Frantz, after describ­ing his ear­ly-to-rise lifestyle, says he some­times con­sid­ers him­self “just a glo­ri­fied man­u­al labor­er, and that if any­body it’s the oth­er mem­bers of the band that are that artists. Anoth­er day I’ll think, wow, these peo­ple, the Talk­ing Heads, work­ing togeth­er — some day it’s going to be remem­bered in music his­to­ry, and I think it’s a very artis­tic thing we’re doing. I’m not try­ing to sound high­fa­lutin’, but this is the way I real­ly feel some­times.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Talk­ing Heads’ First TV Appear­ance Was on Amer­i­can Band­stand, and It Was Pret­ty Awk­ward (1979)

Watch Talk­ing Heads Play Live in Dort­mund, Ger­many Dur­ing Their Hey­day (1980)

Watch Talk­ing Heads Play a Vin­tage Con­cert in Syra­cuse (1978)

Hear the Ear­li­est Known Talk­ing Heads Record­ings (1975)

Talk­ing Heads Live in Rome, 1980: The Con­cert Film You Haven’t Seen

Talk­ing Heads Play CBGB, the New York Club that Shaped Their Sound (1975)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Banksy Opens a Hotel with the Worst View in the World: Visit the Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem

in Art, Life, Politics, Travel | March 6th, 2017

Quirky, artist-cus­tomized guest rooms equipped with wifi, fridge, and safes…

Leather couch­es and “an air of unde­served author­i­ty” in the com­mu­nal areas…

VIPs who spring for the Pres­i­den­tial suite will enjoy access to a tiki bar, library, and Dead Sea min­er­als for use in a plunge bath spa­cious enough for four…

Sounds like the sort of hotel cater­ing to well-heeled hip­sters in San Fran­cis­co, Brook­lyn, or Shored­itch…

…but Beth­le­hem?

The artist Banksy’s lat­est mas­sive-scale project may nev­er find its way onto Palestine’s offi­cial tourism site, but it’s no joke. The ful­ly func­tion­ing hotel is set to open for online book­ings on March 11.

Vis­i­tors should be pre­pared to put a $1000 deposit on their cred­it cards at check in, a secu­ri­ty mea­sure aimed at those who might be tempt­ed to walk off with art­work by Sami Musa, Dominique Petrin, or the hotel’s famous founder.

Guests are also cau­tioned to con­tain their excite­ment about their upcom­ing stay when pass­ing through cus­toms at Tel Aviv air­port, where trav­el­ers who blab about their inten­tions to vis­it the West Bank are often sub­ject­ed to extra scruti­ny. One won­ders how many Tel Aviv TSA offi­cers would get the appeal of stay­ing in a hotel that boasts of its ter­ri­ble views of the wall divid­ing Pales­tine from Israel.

The hotel’s prox­im­i­ty to the wall pro­vides both its name and its raison‑d’etre. Banksy is mark­ing the cen­te­nary of British con­trol of Pales­tine by entic­ing vis­i­tors to edu­cate them­selves, using his cus­tom­ary humor and lack of polemic as the launch­ing pad.

To that end, a muse­um and gallery on the premis­es will be open to the pub­lic, offer­ing “a warm wel­come to peo­ple from all sides of the con­flict and across the world.” (The hotel’s FAQ coun­ters the notion that the project is an anti-Semit­ic state­ment, issu­ing a zero-tol­er­ance pol­i­cy where fanati­cism is con­cerned.)

One of the hotel’s most orig­i­nal ameni­ties is its in-house graf­fi­ti sup­plies store, staffed by experts ready to dis­pense “local advice and guid­ance” to vis­i­tors eager to con­tribute to the Wall’s pro­lif­er­at­ing street art. (For inspi­ra­tion, refer to Banky’s work from a 2015 trip to Gaza, below.)

Arm­chair trav­el­ers can check out Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel here.

The online reser­va­tions desk will open for busi­ness on March 11, the same day the gallery and muse­um open to the pub­lic.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Always Bank­able Banksy

Watch Dis­ma­land — The Offi­cial Unof­fi­cial Film, A Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney Through Banksy’s Apoc­a­lyp­tic Theme Park

Banksy Cre­ates a Tiny Repli­ca of The Great Sphinx Of Giza In Queens

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is now play­ing in New York City. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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42 Hours of Ambient Sounds from Blade Runner, Alien, Star Trek and Doctor Who Will Help You Relax & Sleep

in Film, Random | March 3rd, 2017

Back in 2009, the musi­cian who goes by the name “Cheesy Nir­vosa” began exper­i­ment­ing with ambi­ent music, before even­tu­al­ly launch­ing a YouTube chan­nel where he “com­pos­es long­form space and sci­fi ambi­ence.” Or what he oth­er­wise calls “ambi­ent geek sleep aids.” Click on the video above, and you can get lulled to sleep lis­ten­ing to the ambi­ent dron­ing sound–get ready Blade Run­ner fans!– heard in Rich Deckard’s apart­ment. It runs a good con­tin­u­ous 12 hours.

You’re more a Star Trek fan? Ok, try nod­ding off to the idling engine noise of a ship fea­tured in Star Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion. Mr. Nir­vosa cleaned up a sam­ple from the show and then looped it for 24 hours. That makes for one long sleep.

Or how about 12 hours of ambi­ent engine noise gen­er­at­ed by the USCSS Nos­tro­mo in Alien?

Final­ly, and per­haps my favorite, Cheesy cre­at­ed a 12 hour clip of the ambi­ent sounds made by the Tardis, the time machine made famous by the British sci-fi TV show, Doc­tor Who. But watch out. You might wake up liv­ing in a dif­fer­ent time and place.

For lots more ambi­ent sci-fi sounds (Star Wars, The Matrix, Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca, etc. ) check out this super long playlist here.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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!

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­­sion­al­­ly-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10 Hours of Ambi­ent Arc­tic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Med­i­tate, Study & Sleep

Moby Lets You Down­load 4 Hours of Ambi­ent Music to Help You Sleep, Med­i­tate, Do Yoga & Not Pan­ic

Music That Helps You Sleep: Min­i­mal­ist Com­pos­er Max Richter, Pop Phe­nom Ed Sheer­an & Your Favorites

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Download Influential Avant-Garde Magazines from the Early 20th Century: Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism & More

in Art, Literature, Magazines | March 3rd, 2017

“I’m tired of pol­i­tics, I just want to talk about my art,” I some­times hear artists—and musi­cians, actors, writ­ers, etc.—say. And I some­times see their fans say, “you should shut up about pol­i­tics and just talk about your art.” Giv­en the cur­rent onslaught of polit­i­cal news, com­men­tary, scan­dal, and alarm, these are both under­stand­able sen­ti­ments. But any­one who thinks that art and pol­i­tics once occu­pied sep­a­rate spheres har­bors a his­tor­i­cal­ly naïve belief. The arts have always been polit­i­cal, and all the more so dur­ing times of high dra­ma and ten­sion like the one we live in now. We can look, for exam­ple, to John Milton’s Par­adise Lost, Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, or Pablo Picasso’s Guer­ni­ca, just to men­tion three par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing his­tor­i­cal exam­ples.

The polit­i­cal acts of avant-garde artists like Picas­so in the 20th cen­tu­ry were as much rev­o­lu­tions in form as in con­tent, and we begin to see the most rad­i­cal state­ments emerge in the teens and twen­ties with Dada, Sur­re­al­ism, and oth­er mod­ernisms: some­times explic­it­ly polit­i­cal in their orientation—spanning the gamut from anar­chism to fascism—sometimes more sub­tly par­ti­san.

This peri­od was also, per­haps not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, the Gold­en Age of the arts jour­nal, when every move­ment, cir­cle, and splin­ter group in Europe and the U.S. had its own pub­li­ca­tion. For many years now, Prince­ton University’s Blue Moun­tain Project, a joint effort from “schol­ars, librar­i­ans, cura­tors, and dig­i­tal human­i­ties researchers,” has archived com­plete issues of sev­er­al such jour­nals, and we’ve fea­tured a cou­ple notable exam­ples in pre­vi­ous posts.

Now we direct your atten­tion to the full online library, where you’ll find issues of Poe­sia (top), pub­lished by F.T. Marinet­ti between 1905 and 1920. This mag­a­zine rep­re­sents “the tran­si­tion from Italy’s engage­ment with an inter­na­tion­al Sym­bol­ist move­ment to an increas­ing­ly nation­al­ist Futur­ism” and fea­tures the work of Marinet­ti, Alfred Jar­ry, W.B. Yeats, Pao­lo Buzzi, Emilio Notte, and James Joyce. Below Poe­sia, from the oth­er side of the spec­trum, we see the cov­er of a 1920 issue of Action, a “lit­er­ary and artis­tic mag­a­zine asso­ci­at­ed with Indi­vid­u­al­ist Anar­chism,” and fea­tur­ing work from writ­ers like André Mal­raux, Antonin Artaud, and Paul Élu­ard, and art­work from Demetrios Gala­nis and Robert Morti­er, to name just a few.

Not every avant-garde arts jour­nal had a clear ide­o­log­i­cal mis­sion, but they all rep­re­sent­ed aes­thet­ic pro­grams that strong­ly react­ed against the sta­tus quo. The artists of the so-called Vien­na Seces­sion broke away from Asso­ci­a­tion of Aus­tri­an Artists to protest its con­ser­vatism. Their jour­nal, Ver Sacrum, fur­ther up, joined the flow­ing, intri­cate, and pas­sion­ate designs of Art Nou­veau and Ger­man Jugend­stil artists, who cre­at­ed the look of the Weimar Repub­lic and the Jazz Age. Con­trib­u­tors includ­ed Gus­tav Klimt, Kolo­man Moser, and Josef Hoff­mann.

Some­times avant-garde jour­nals reflect­ed polit­i­cal con­flicts between war­ring fac­tions of artists, as in the exam­ple of Le coeur à barbe: jour­nal trans­par­ent, “pro­duced by Tris­tan Tzara as a response to the attacks on him by Fran­cis Picabia and André Bre­ton about the future of the Dada move­ment.” Oth­er pub­li­ca­tions aimed to expand the bound­aries of nation­al cul­ture, as with Broom, above, a “self-pro­claimed inter­na­tion­al mag­a­zine of arts and lit­er­a­ture… a sump­tu­ous jour­nal that intro­duced Amer­i­can audi­ences to the Euro­pean avant-garde.” What­ev­er their stat­ed mis­sion and implic­it or explic­it slant, it’s fair to say that the rad­i­cal art pub­lished in avant-garde jour­nals between the turn of the cen­tu­ry and the end of the 1920s did every­thing but stand on the side­lines.

You can view … and down­load … more avant-garde mag­a­zines at Prince­ton’s Blue Moun­tain Project.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load All 8 Issues of Dada, the Arts Jour­nal That Pub­li­cized the Avant-Garde Move­ment a Cen­tu­ry Ago (1917–21)

Down­load Alfred Stieglitz’s Pro­to-Dada Art Jour­nal, 291, The First Art Mag­a­zine That Was Itself a Work of Art (1916)

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

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

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Stream 8,000 Vintage Afropop Recordings Digitized & Made Available by The British Library

in Music | March 3rd, 2017

Sta­bil­i­ty or cul­tur­al vital­i­ty: many nations seem as if they can only have one or the oth­er. The Repub­lic of Guinea, for instance, has endured quite a tur­bu­lent his­to­ry, yet its musi­cians have also enjoyed roles as “pio­neers in the cre­ation of African pop­u­lar music styles and as the voice of a new Africa.” That’s the view of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mel­bourne’s Graeme Coun­sel, who over the past decade has made a series of trips to the Guinean cap­i­tal of Conakry on a mis­sion to pre­serve the great vari­ety of music, part of the tra­di­tion now broad­ly labeled “Afropop,” record­ed dur­ing the decades of state-spon­sored cul­tur­al abun­dance after the coun­try gained inde­pen­dence from France in 1958.

“Under the lead­er­ship of music lover Pres­i­dent Ahmed Sék­ou Touré,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Alli­son Meier, “the gov­ern­ment was soon send­ing out gui­tars, sax­o­phones, and brass instru­ments to 35 state-fund­ed pre­fec­ture orches­tras as part of a new authen­tic­ité pol­i­cy.

This direc­tive encour­aged a cul­tur­al revival that mixed tra­di­tion­al sounds with con­tem­po­rary music, par­tic­u­lar­ly Cuban and Latin rhythms.” The effort had its own record label called Syli­phone, which record­ed and dis­trib­uted this new Guinean music until the mid-1980s, and the pow­er­ful radio sig­nal of Radiod­if­fu­sion Télévi­sion Guinée (RTG) turned lis­ten­ers on to it well beyond the new coun­try’s bor­ders.

Coun­sel, already a col­lec­tor of Syli­phone records, dis­cov­ered dur­ing his PhD research in 2001 that the Guinean gov­ern­ment still held a col­lec­tion of that era’s music (though “a large part of the archive had been destroyed in 1985 when the RTG was bombed by Guinean artillery dur­ing an unsuc­cess­ful coup”). Apply­ing for and receiv­ing, ulti­mate­ly, three rounds of fund­ing from the British Library’s Endan­gered Archives Pro­gramme, he set about dig­i­tiz­ing and cat­a­loging the unex­pect­ed­ly numer­ous and per­haps expect­ed­ly dis­or­ga­nized and poor­ly main­tained reels of mag­net­ic tape he found, work­ing through bureau­crat­ic has­sles, coups d’é­tat, and even a mas­sacre.

“Noth­ing would deter me,” writes Coun­sel in a series of essays (part one, part two, part three) on the project, “not the author­i­ties’ indif­fer­ence towards the sound archive, not the recal­ci­trance of their atti­tudes, nor the tragedies of every­day life in Guinea. Noth­ing.” The fruits of his labors have now become avail­able at the British Library’s online Syli­phone archive, which boasts over 8,000 Guinean Afropop tracks record­ed over 26 years. Meier names among the “leg­endary” music it makes avail­able “the loose rhythms of the Bem­beya Jazz Nation­al, the horn-heavy melodies of the Super Boiro Band, the Latin-influ­enced beats of Orchestre de la Pail­lote, and the all-women Cuban-infused les Ama­zones de Guinée.” Those musi­cians’ names may not ring a bell for you now, but a lit­tle time with the archive will guar­an­tee a long-term inabil­i­ty to get their songs out of your head.

Find the 8,000 record­ings here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic/Elec­tron­ic Beats

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing Is Rhythm

New Doc­u­men­tary Brings You Inside Africa’s Lit­tle-Known Punk Rock Scene

The Alan Lomax Sound Archive Now Online: Fea­tures 17,000 Blues & Folk Record­ings

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will Wasn’t a Cinematic Masterpiece; It Was a Staggeringly Effective Piece of Propaganda

in Film, History | March 3rd, 2017

“Tri­umph of the Will,” says Dan Olson of the ana­lyt­i­cal video series Fold­ing Ideas, “is not a tri­umph of cin­e­ma.” Already the propo­si­tion runs counter to what many of us learned in film stud­ies class­es, whose pro­fes­sors assured us that Leni Riefen­stahl’s 1935 glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of Nazi Ger­many, despite its thor­ough­ly pro­pa­gan­dis­tic nature, still counts as a seri­ous achieve­ment in film art. “None of the ideas or tech­niques were new,” Olson explains. “It is sim­ply that no one had pre­vi­ous­ly thrown enough mon­ey and resources at pro­pa­gan­da on this scale before.”

If it has val­ue as noth­ing but sheer spec­ta­cle, does Tri­umph of the Will (watch it below) amount to the Trans­form­ers of its day — and with motives that make Michael Bay block­busters look like noble, altru­is­tic endeav­ors at that? Despite doing noth­ing new with its medi­um, the film does still show­case cer­tain qual­i­ties of pro­pa­gan­da that, more than 70 years after the fall of the Third Reich, we’d all do well to keep in mind and keep an eye on.

Olson quotes “Ur-Fas­cism,” an essay by Umber­to Eco (who spent a cou­ple for­ma­tive years “among the SS, Fas­cists, Repub­li­cans, and par­ti­sans shoot­ing at one anoth­er”) explain­ing that, for fas­cist lead­ers to con­vince peo­ple to fol­low them,

the fol­low­ers must feel humil­i­at­ed by the osten­ta­tious wealth and force of their ene­mies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Eng­lish­men as the five-meal peo­ple. They ate more fre­quent­ly than the poor but sober Ital­ians. Jews are rich and help each oth­er through a secret web of mutu­al assis­tance. How­ev­er, the fol­low­ers must be con­vinced that they can over­whelm the ene­mies. Thus, by a con­tin­u­ous shift­ing of rhetor­i­cal focus, the ene­mies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fas­cist gov­ern­ments are con­demned to lose wars because they are con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly inca­pable of objec­tive­ly eval­u­at­ing the force of the ene­my.

Here we have sum­ma­rized both a mes­sage that Tri­umph of the Will wants to con­vey and the intel­lec­tu­al Achilles’ heel of fas­cist pro­pa­gan­da. It must imply the strength of the ene­mies even as it makes the strength of the regime crush­ing­ly explic­it. “To the mod­ern view­er it may seem aim­less and shod­di­ly paced,” says Olson, “with mon­tages that just go on and on and on long after the point has been made, but that’s the point: it is not mere­ly a demon­stra­tion of pres­ence, but of vol­ume. The indul­gence of it, the con­spic­u­ous cost, is as much a mes­sage of the film as any oth­er.”

The words of Han­nah Arendt, who once called sci­ence “only a sur­ro­gate for pow­er,” also enter into the analy­sis. Olson uses the quote to get into the idea that “one of the main mech­a­nisms of pro­pa­gan­da is to plant the idea of prece­dent, to alter the audi­ence’s own sense of his­to­ry and the world and appeal to the seem­ing­ly objec­tive author­i­ties of god, his­to­ry and sci­ence” in order to, through what Eco called the “cult of tra­di­tion,” make “new insti­tu­tions seem old­er than they real­ly are.”

We might find all this a bit fun­ny, giv­en the high­ly pre­ma­ture ter­mi­na­tion of a reign the Nazis insist­ed could endure for a thou­sand years, but in some sense their pro­pa­gan­dists had the last laugh. What­ev­er its cin­e­mat­ic mer­its or lack there­of, Riefen­stahl’s film remains essen­tial­ly effec­tive. “To this day we con­tin­ue to use Tri­umph of the Will as a ref­er­ence point for our men­tal con­struct of the Nazi regime,” says Olson. “Our idea of the Nazis is deeply informed by a pro­pa­gan­da film pro­duced by the Nazis for the explic­it pur­pose of cre­at­ing that men­tal con­struct.” When we think of the Nazis, in oth­er words, we still think of the images man­u­fac­tured more than eighty years ago by Tri­umph of the Will — “exact­ly the image they want­ed you to think of when you thought of them.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Lam­beth Walk—Nazi Style: The Ear­ly Pro­pa­gan­da Mash Up That Enraged Joseph Goebbels

Edu­ca­tion for Death: The Mak­ing of the Nazi–Walt Disney’s 1943 Pro­pa­gan­da Film Shows How Fas­cists Are Made

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Noam Chom­sky on Whether the Rise of Trump Resem­bles the Rise of Fas­cism in 1930s Ger­many

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch Umberto Eco Walk Through His Immense Private Library: It Goes On, and On, and On!

in Books | March 2nd, 2017

When Umber­to Eco died last year at the age of 84, he left behind a siz­able body of work and a vast col­lec­tion of books. He wrote such hefty and much-read nov­els as The Name of the Rose and Fou­cault’s Pen­du­lum as well as sto­ries for chil­dren, pieces of lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, aca­d­e­m­ic texts on semi­otics, stud­ies of every­thing from medieval aes­thet­ics to mod­ern media, and much else besides, but as we recent­ly not­ed, he also advised against becom­ing too pro­lif­ic. Not for him the life of “those nov­el­ists who pub­lish a book every year,” thus miss­ing out on the “plea­sure of spend­ing six, sev­en, eight years to tell a sto­ry.”

Still, the man wrote a lot. He also read a lot, as a glance at a chap­ter or two from any one of his own nov­els will attest. An avowed fan of James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges, Eco wove into his work count­less threads pulled from the lit­er­ary and intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ry of a host of dif­fer­ent places, cul­tures, and lan­guages — evi­dence of a well-stocked mind indeed, but a well-stocked mind requires a well-stocked library, or libraries.

We can only imag­ine how many such citadels of knowl­edge Eco vis­it­ed in his trav­els all over the world, but we don’t have to imag­ine the one he built him­self, since we can see it in the video above. Though not infi­nite like the library of all pos­si­ble books imag­ined by Borges, Eco’s pri­vate home library looks, from cer­tain angles, near­ly as big. The cam­era fol­lows Eco as he pass­es shelf after packed shelf, some lin­ing the walls and oth­ers stand­ing free, even­tu­al­ly find­ing his way to one vol­ume in par­tic­u­lar — despite the fact that he appar­ent­ly shelved very few of his books with their spines fac­ing out­ward.

Accord­ing to Nas­sim Nicholas Taleb, quot­ed by Maria Popo­va at Brain Pick­ings, Eco’s library con­tained 30,000 books and tend­ed to sep­a­rate vis­i­tors into two cat­e­gories: ‘those who react with ‘Wow! Sig­nore pro­fes­sore dot­tore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?’ and the oth­ers — a very small minor­i­ty — who get the point that a pri­vate library is not an ego-boost­ing appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valu­able than unread ones.” By that mea­sure, Eco might have amassed an even more valu­able library than his fans would assume.

via 9gag.com

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Umber­to Eco Dies at 84; Leaves Behind Advice to Aspir­ing Writ­ers

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Umber­to Eco Explains the Poet­ic Pow­er of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts

21 Artists Give “Advice to the Young:” Vital Lessons from Lau­rie Ander­son, David Byrne, Umber­to Eco, Pat­ti Smith & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear Carl Sagan Artfully Refute a Creationist on a Talk Radio Show: “The Darwinian Concept of Evolution is Profoundly Verified”

in Religion, Science | March 2nd, 2017

It takes a spe­cial kind of per­son to calm­ly debate those who pre­fer dog­ma to rea­son and who insist on ignor­ing or dis­tort­ing evi­dence to suit their pre­con­cep­tions. Carl Sagan was such a per­son. Among his many oth­er sci­en­tif­ic accom­plish­ments, he became leg­endary for his skill as an edu­ca­tor and sci­ence advo­cate. Sagan com­mu­ni­cat­ed not only his knowl­edge, but also his awe and won­der at the beau­ty and intri­ca­cy of the uni­verse, bring­ing to his expla­na­tions an unri­valed enthu­si­asm, clar­i­ty, and tal­ent for poet­ic expres­sion. And when faced with inter­locu­tors who were less than intel­lec­tu­al­ly hon­est, Sagan kept his cool and car­ried on.

This could be dif­fi­cult. In the audio from a radio call-in show above, we hear Sagan answer ques­tions from a caller with a clear, and rather fool­hardy agen­da: to best the astronomer, astro­physi­cist, and astro­bi­ol­o­gist in a debate over Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion. He begins right away with some ad hominem, call­ing Sagan and his wife Ann Druyan “true believ­ers, who are no more will­ing to ques­tion the the­o­ry that you base your beliefs on than were the min­is­ters of the 19th cen­tu­ry who you reg­u­lar­ly crit­i­cize as being close-mind­ed.” The irony of accu­sa­tions like these should be obvi­ous. Though the caller doesn’t announce him­self as a cre­ation­ist, it’s abun­dant­ly clear to Sagan from his talk­ing points that he’s defend­ing a cre­ation­ist par­ty line.

Sagan attempts to answer his first ques­tion, but before he can fin­ish, the caller leaps to anoth­er bul­let point, the “gaps in the the­o­ry” or “gap­ing hole” of “fos­sils in tran­si­tion.” Sagan press­es his claim, with evi­dence, that “the Dar­win­ian con­cept of evo­lu­tion and nat­ur­al selec­tion is pro­found­ly ver­i­fied.” The insis­tent caller again inter­rupts and Sagan almost gives up on him, say­ing he “rather reminds me of Pon­tius Pilate. He asks, ‘what is truth?’ but does not stay for the answer.’” Then Sagan, with­out hes­i­ta­tion, patient­ly makes a case in brief:

Con­sid­er arti­fi­cial selec­tion. There is some­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly implau­si­ble about nat­ur­al selec­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly if you think that the world is only a few thou­sand years old, as the Bib­li­cal chronol­o­gy would have it. Then the idea of one species flow­ing into anoth­er is absurd, we nev­er see that in our every­day life, we are told. But con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the vari­ety of dogs on the plan­et… We humans made them… by con­trol­ling which dogs shall mate with which…. In the short peri­od of 8 or 10,000 years, we pro­duce this immense vari­ety of dogs. Now com­pare that with four bil­lion years of bio­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion, not arti­fi­cial selec­tion, but nat­ur­al selec­tion, which goes into not just the over­all per­son­al­i­ty and char­ac­ter­is­tics of the dog, but the bio­chem­istry and inter­nal organs… and then it is clear that the beau­ty and diver­si­ty of life on earth can emerge. But if you don’t buy four bil­lion years, you don’t buy evo­lu­tion.

Sagan fre­quent­ly cit­ed this fig­ure of 4 bil­lion years for the ori­gin of life on Earth. Dur­ing his huge­ly pop­u­lar pro­gram Cos­mos, for exam­ple, he used the num­ber in an accel­er­at­ed evo­lu­tion­ary his­to­ry, which you can hear him nar­rate accom­pa­nied by a nifty ani­ma­tion in the video below. Most sci­en­tists have used that fig­ure or a few mil­lion years ear­li­er. For some time, the actu­al num­ber was thought to be between 3.6 and 3.8 bil­lion years. Recent­ly, as Tim Marcin reports at the Inter­na­tion­al Busi­ness Times, some sci­en­tists have con­clud­ed that “liv­ing organ­isms may have exist­ed on Earth as long as 4.1 bil­lion years ago.”

Marcin quotes UCLA pro­fes­sor of geo­chem­istry Mark Har­ri­son, who spec­u­lates, “life on Earth may have start­ed almost instan­ta­neous­ly” (rel­a­tive­ly speak­ing) after the planet’s for­ma­tion some 4.6 bil­lion years ago. These esti­mates come from car­bon dat­ing, not fos­sils, but just yes­ter­day, Sarah Kaplan writes at The Wash­ing­ton Post, dis­cov­er­ies of “tiny, tubu­lar struc­tures uncov­ered in ancient Cana­di­an rocks” may be evi­dence of ancient microbes thought to be 3.77 bil­lion years old, “mak­ing them the old­est fos­sils ever found.”

Like all new sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies, these recent find­ings have been con­test­ed by oth­er sci­en­tists in these fields. And like some dis­cov­er­ies, their ques­tions may nev­er be resolved in our life­times. Sci­ence depends on meth­ods of data col­lec­tion, eval­u­a­tion and inter­pre­ta­tion of evi­dence, peer review, and many oth­er process­es sub­ject to human error. Sci­en­tists must often revise their con­clu­sions and recon­sid­er the­o­ries. No sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tion is con­clu­sive­ly defin­i­tive in all its par­tic­u­lars. Nonethe­less, Sagan believed that only through the sci­en­tif­ic method could we obtain knowl­edge about the cos­mos and the ori­gin of life on earth that was in any way reli­able. He admired reli­gious ethics and the space reli­gions held for the big ques­tions. Sagan even declared in his 1985 Gif­ford Lec­tures (pub­lished posthu­mous­ly as The Vari­eties of Sci­en­tif­ic Expe­ri­ence) that “the objec­tives of reli­gion and sci­ence… are iden­ti­cal or very near­ly so.” But he did not think reli­gions could answer the ques­tions they asked.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Presents a Mini-Course on Earth, Mars & What’s Beyond Our Solar Sys­tem: For Kids and Adults (1977)

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

Watch Episode #2 of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cos­mos: Explains the Real­i­ty of Evo­lu­tion (US View­ers)

Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawk­ing & Arthur C. Clarke Dis­cuss God, the Uni­verse, and Every­thing Else

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

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Icelandic Folk Singers Break Into an Impromptu Performance of a 13th Century Hymn in a Train Station, and It’s Delightful

in Music | March 2nd, 2017

Ice­landic folk group Árstíðir know a good acoustic cathe­dral when they see one, even when it’s in a train sta­tion. In the above video, the sex­tet was return­ing from a con­cert in Wup­per­tal, Ger­many, when they were struck by the acoustic prop­er­ties of this one sec­tion of the train ter­mi­nal.

Indeed, this was a fine place to stop and offer a spe­cial encore to their show, a per­for­mance of the ear­ly 13th cen­tu­ry Ice­landic hymn “Heyr him­na smiður” (“Hear, Smith of Heav­ens”) by Kol­beinn Tuma­son.

Hear­ing this music strips away the con­crete and the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion and we are sud­den­ly back in the mists of time…even when the tan­noy speak­ers in the back­ground announce a train depar­ture. In fact, it just adds anoth­er lay­er of atmos­phere to this beau­ti­ful work. The sparse crowd stops and just lis­tens. It’s a beau­ti­ful video that has earned over six mil­lion views in the near­ly four years it has been online.

Com­pos­er Kol­beinn Tuma­son is best known for this hymn–you can see a trans­la­tion of the lyrics here–and was both a deeply reli­gious man and one of the most pow­er­ful chief­tains in Ice­land. He met his mak­er at age 34 in a bat­tle between reli­gious and sec­u­lar clans, where his head was bashed in by a rock. Still, the his­to­ry goes, he held on long enough to write this hymn on his deathbed, and it remains an oft-per­formed work.

Hope­ful­ly no such bat­tle­field fate awaits the group Árstíðir, who formed in Reyk­javik in 2008 and con­tin­ue to per­form, though their style is clos­er to Fleet Fox­es than this 13th cen­tu­ry times­lip might indi­cate.

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­­sion­al­­ly-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn What Old Norse Sound­ed Like, with UC Berkeley’s “Cow­boy Pro­fes­sor, Dr. Jack­son Craw­ford

Wear­able Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Man­u­scripts & Turned Them into Clothes

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

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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