If you’ve seen a David Byrne concert in recent years, you know that he performs with a large ensemble of musicians, each carrying their own instruments across the stage, all while moving in intricately choreographed patterns. On his current tour, Byrne and his band stopped by NPR’s studio and played a very different kind of show—a show tightly squeezed behind NPR’s Tiny Desk. As you will see above, they performed two songs (“Everybody Laughs” and “Don’t Be Like That”) from Byrne’s new album, along with two Talking Heads favorites, “(Nothing But) Flowers” and “Life During Wartime.” Enjoy!
For young children today, just as it was for generations of their predecessors, nothing is quite so thrilling about their first visit to a Disney theme park as catching a glimpse of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, or another beloved character greeting them in real life. Creating this memorable experience requires nothing more advanced than a well-trained employee (or “cast member,” as the company puts it) in an oversized costume. Nevertheless, effective though it may be, it wasn’t part of Walt Disney’s long-term vision. A true man of the Space Age, he looked ahead to the time — surely not all too far in the future — when he could instead fill Disneyland with reliable, untiring, perfectly lifelike robots in the shape of animals, human beings, or anything else besides.
In the event, Disney only lived long enough to see his people create a mechanical version of Abraham Lincoln, whose abilities were limited to standing up from his chair and delivering a short speech. By the time that “audio-animatronic” resurrection of the United States’ sixteenth president was first publicly shown at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, its rumored development had already set off a number of ethical and aesthetic controversies. Yet it worked so well — at least after its early, embarrassing technical difficulties were ironed out — that some attendees assumed that they were looking at an actor dressed up as Lincoln, and even wondered if the poor fellow got tired doing the same routine all day long.
This story is included in the video above from Defunctland, a YouTube channel that focuses on amusement-park-related failures, especially those connected with the Disney empire. The Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln show was a success, as was the all-robotic Hall of Presidents that opened at Disneyland in 1971, a few years after Disney’s death. But try as it might — and spend as much as it will — the company has yet to realize the vision that came to obsess its founder: in effect, that of creating technological life. Of course, Disney was hardly the first to entertain such Promethean ambitions: mankind had already been trying to pull that trick off for quite some time, as evidenced by the efforts, previously featured here on Open Culture, of minds like Leonardo da Vinci and the medieval polymath Al-Jazari.
To explain Disney’s long, frustrated quest to create artificial human beings — or mice, as the case may be — requires a good deal of historical, economic, technological, and even philosophical context. That’s just what Defunctland creator Kevin Perjurer does, and then some, in the documentary that comprises the earlier video from last year and its just-released second part above. Over its collective runtime of six hours, he goes deep into a question of great interest to Disney enthusiasts: what, exactly, has prevented the most ambitious entertainment company in the world from perfecting its automatons, even here in the twenty-first century? But then, as those of us of a certain age who have fond memories of the relatively crude likes of the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean (to say nothing of non-Disney operations like Chuck. E Cheese) understand, perfection isn’t always the way to a child’s heart.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
While not every Open Culture reader dreams of moving to Japan and becoming a woodblock printmaker, it’s a safe bet that at least a few of you entertain just such a fantasy from time to time. David Bull, a British-Born Canadian who got his first exposure to the art of ukiyo‑e in his late twenties, actually did it. Though he’s been living in Japan and steadily pursuing his art there since 1986, only in recent years has he become known around the world. That’s thanks to his YouTube channel, which we’ve featured here several times before. In the video above, one of his most popular, he lets his viewers experience printmaking from his point of view, seeing what he sees and even hearing what he hears.
Though Bull normally focuses on the early stage carving images into the blocks, here he spends about an hour on the final printing phase, going through a batch of eight sheets. As even a few minutes’ viewing reveals, this is a labor-intensive and thoroughly analog process.
That impression will be heightened if you wear headphones, since, as Bull explains, he shot the video while wearing in-ear microphones that record the sounds of the job just as he hears them. This particular aspect of the production required him to rise considerably earlier than usual, in order to avoid the considerable daytime noise on the streets of Tokyo right outside his workshop — and thus to more fully satisfy the large ASMR crowd.
The term ASMR, or “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” refers to a set of pleasing sensations triggered by certain kinds of sound, often those produced by soft-spoken individuals like Bull or the kind of repetitive, methodical tool work he does. Chances are, many if not most of the almost 950,000 views this video has racked up so far have come from ASMR enthusiasts less interested in Japanese woodblock printing per se than in the general aesthetic experience of watching and listening to Japanese woodblock printing — at least at first. We all know how life can go: one day you’re checking out YouTube, just looking to relax, and the next you’re ensconced in Asakusa, having wholly devoted yourself to a three-and-a-half-millennium-year-old traditional art form.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
As hard as it may be to believe, some of us have never seen a movie belonging to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If you’re one of those uninitiated, none of the countless clips incorporated into the Like Stories of Old video essay above will tempt you to get initiated. Nor will the laments aired by host Tom van der Linden, who, despite once enjoying the MCU himself, eventually came to wonder why keeping up with its releases had begun to feel less like a thrill than a chore. As if their CGI-laden sound and fury weren’t trying enough, there’s also “the constant quipping, the annoying self-awareness, the fact that everything has to be a franchise now.”
Van der Linden labels a central factor in the decline of the MCU “storytelling entropy.” Classic films, you may have noticed, concentrate practically all the energy in every facet of their production toward the expression of specific themes, stories, and characters; at their best, their every line, gesture, cut, and invention represents the tip of an artistic iceberg. Take, to use a popular example, the lightsaber introduced in Star Wars, which Van der Linden calls “not just a weapon, but a metaphor” that “symbolically communicates a lot about the philosophy of its wielder, and about the larger world that it exists in,” condensing “a multitude of meanings and ideas into a simple, singular object.”
It does so in the first two or three movies, at any rate. In the decades since, as the Star Wars universe has grown ever vaster, more complex, and conceptually unwieldy, so the proliferation and modification of the once-marvelous lightsaber has turned it into something mundane, even banal. So it goes with storytelling entropy, a phenomenon that afflicts every narrative franchise commercially compelled to grow without end. That process of expansion eventually turns even the most captivating original materials diffuse and uninvolving to all but the hardest-core fans — by which point it has usually become obvious that creators themselves have long since lost their own passion for the stories.
Most MCU viewers will admit that it has produced misses as well as hits. But Marvelization, as Van der Linden calls it, has also inspired other, imitative corporate franchises to pump out globally marketable content fiercely protected by intellectual property lawyers — and has even drained the interest out of realms of film and television that have nothing to do with superheroes, swords, or sci-fi. Hollywood has always been about the bottom line, of course, but only in recent decades have market saturation, cross-platform strategy, and maximum crossover potential come to dominate its priorities so completely. From the MCU or otherwise, a Marvelized movie is one that, at bottom, has no pressing need to be made — and that we, ultimately, feel no pressing need to see.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-bating police officer, by the name of William “Obie” Obanhein, arrested Arlo for littering. (Cultural footnote: Obie previously posed for several Norman Rockwell paintings, including the well-known painting, “The Runaway,” that graced a 1958 cover of The Saturday Evening Post.) In fairly short order, Arlo pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pays a $25 fine, and cleans up the thrash. But the story isn’t over. Not by a long shot.
Later, when Arlo (son of Woody Guthrie) gets called up for the draft, the petty crime ironically becomes a basis for disqualifying him from military service in the Vietnam War. Guthrie recounts this with some bitterness as the song builds into a satirical protest against the war: “I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” And then we’re back to the cheery chorus again: “You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.”
We have featured Guthrie’s classic during past years. But, for this Thanksgiving, we give you the illustrated version.
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With Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Galenson writes, “the greatest artist of the century initiated the century’s most important artistic movement. Art scholars debate whether the Demoiselles should be considered a Cubist painting, but there is no question that it differed profoundly from all of the art that preceded it, and that it began the development of Cubism.”
Painted in ambitious response to Henri Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre, its rejection of traditional formality and beauty shocked even Picasso’s forward-thinking colleagues: “Not only did Matisse denounce the painting as an attempt to discredit modern art, but even Georges Braque, who would later join forces with Picasso in developing Cubism, was initially so shocked by the painting that he compared Picasso to the fairground fire-eaters who drank kerosene to spit flames.”
Of course, there was also the matter of the painting’s subject, five nude prostitutes in a Barcelona brothel. But as explained by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker in the Smarthistory video above, the Demoiselles wasn’t always about the demoiselles alone. “In the original sketches, the women were focusing on a male that was included, a sailor,” says Zucker. “There was also a medical student.” At some stages, Harris emphasizes, the latter carried a human skull, a piece of professional equipment but also “a reminder of death, a memento mori. And so there seems to be some tension here between the sensuality that the sailor is indulging in and a moralizing reminder that the pleasures of life are short”: an unusual perspective to be expressed by a 26-year-old, but then, Picasso wasn’t the usual artist.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Above, we have the menu for an 1899 Thanksgiving dinner at the Plaza Hotel in New York. If you were a turkey, you had it relatively easy. But the ducks? Not so much. On the menu, you’ll find Mallard duck and Ruddy duck. But also Red-head duck, Long Island duckling, Teal duck and Canvas-back duck, too. A duck in NYC was not a good place to be.
And, oh, those prices! Not one item above a few dollars. But let’s account for inflation, shall we? In 2021, one Redditor noted: “I found a calculator and it turns out that $.30 in 1899 equals $10.00 now. The Fried oyster crabs would be $24.99 now and a Philadelphia chicken would be $66.65. So, the cheapest thing on the menu is Sweet buttermilk for $.10, but today would be $3.33.”
For our U.S. readers, enjoy your holiday tomorrow…
In his new video above, the writer Daniel Pink proposes the following exercise: “Grab a book and time yourself. How long can you read without getting up or checking your phone? Really try to push yourself, but don’t judge yourself if it’s only a few minutes. Write down your time; that’s your baseline.” From there, you “train your attention like a muscle: build it by starting small and gradually stretching it.” This is just one of five strategies he recommends to “fix your attention span,” a repair of which more and more of us feel in need the deeper we get into the twenty-first century. If even opening up a book sounds like a bit much, first take up Pink’s challenge of watching this four-and-a-half minute video “on full screen, 1x speed, with no distractions.”
As with any endeavor, it’s important to start small. Once you have your baseline, however you’ve measured it, you can set about improving it. In order to place yourself well to do so, Pink recommends eliminating distractions from your immediate environment, which has already been “rigged against you,” not least by social media companies: hence the importance of creating a “no phone zone,” or at least permanently turning off notifications.
Drawing on the work of Cal Newport (previously featured here on Open Culture), he also suggests creating cues — using certain physical movements, certain music, certain scents — that signal your brain to go into work mode. But even in work mode, you should make sure to take breaks, deliberately, every 90 minutes, or at whatever interval your brain starts performing like a toddler in a meltdown.
On the highest level of all, we must “reconnect attention to meaning.” In other words, we have to understand the reasons we’re doing a task, if any, before we can hope to concentrate on it. “I learned this myself on my last book,” Pink says. “I was struggling. I was distracted. I was on my phone and watching sports highlights rather than my work, and I realized the problem was that I didn’t know why I was writing this book. I didn’t have a purpose.” Only when he finally articulated the benefit of doing that work, and then posted that articulation above his desk, did it start to flow. When next you find yourself unable to stick to a task on the job, a personal project, or a book — whether you’re reading or writing one — ask yourself: Why am I doing this? Maybe the answer will empower you to attend to it. Or maybe you’ll be better off doing something else entirely.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
You might know Winsor McCay (1867? ‑1934) for the gorgeously surreal Little Nemo comic strip or for his early animated short Gertie the Dinosaur(1914). But did you know that he also created some of the earliest examples of animated propaganda ever?
On May 7, 1915, the RMS Lusitania was just off the coast of Ireland, heading towards its destination of Liverpool, when a German U‑boat attacked the ship without warning. Eighteen minutes after two torpedoes slammed into the ship, it was under water. 1,198 died. The furor over the incident eventually led to the United States entering WWI.
At the time of the sinking, McCay was employed by William Randolph Hearst as an editorial cartoonist. Though McCay was incensed by the attack, Hearst was an isolationist and demanded that he draw anti-war cartoons. This grated on the artist more and more until finally he decided to follow up on his hugely successful Gertie the Dinosaur by making The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), which you can see above.
The movie took two years of painstaking effort to make and consisted of over 25,000 drawings—all done by hand and most done by McCay himself during his free time after work.
Compared to other animation done around this time, the film is both stark and serious, lending it the air of a documentary. The piece, which isn’t much shorter than the actual time it took for the Lusitania to sink, gives a blow-by-blow account of the attack. Though the incident is depicted largely from afar, as if from a camera on another ship, McCay doesn’t shy away from showing some really gut-wrenching moments of the tragedy up close. At one point, there is a shot of a desperate mother trying to keep her baby above the waves. At another point, dozens of people are seen bobbing in the choppy seas like driftwood.
And, just in case you haven’t quite grasped the thrust of the film, McCay includes some intertitles, which are, even by the standards of war propaganda, pretty heavy-handed.
The babe that clung to his mother’s breast cried out to the world – TO AVENGE the most violent cruelty that was ever perpetrated upon an unsuspecting and innocent people.
And
The man who fired the shot was decorated for it by the Kaiser! – AND YET THEY TELL US NOT TO HATE THE HUN.
The curious thing about the movie, considering its subject matter, is how beautiful it is. Just look at the stylized lines of the ocean, the baroque arabesques of the smoke coming off the ship’s smokestacks, the elegant use of negative space. Each and every cel of the movie is worthy of getting framed. How many war propaganda movies can you say that about?
Actor George Takei was once best known as Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu. He still is, of course, but over the last couple decades his friendly, intelligent, and wickedly funny presence on social media has landed him a new popular role as a civil liberties advocate. Takei’s activist passion is informed not only by his status as a gay man, but also by his childhood experiences. At the age of 5, Takei was rounded up with his American-born parents and taken to a Japanese internment camp in Arkansas, where he would live for the next three years. In an interview with Democracy Now, Takei spoke frankly about this history:
We’re Americans…. We had nothing to do with the war. We simply happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor. But without charges, without trial, without due process—the fundamental pillar of our justice system—we were summarily rounded up, all Japanese Americans on the West Coast, where we were primarily resident, and sent off to 10 barb wire internment camps—prison camps, really, with sentry towers, machine guns pointed at us—in some of the most desolate places in this country.
Takei and his family were among over 100,000 Japanese-Americans—over half of whom were U.S. citizens—interned in such camps.
Into one of these camps, Manzanar, located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, celebrated photographer Ansel Adams managed to gain entrance through his friendship with the warden. Adams took over 200 photographs of life inside the camp.
In 1965, he donated his collection to the Library of Congress, writing in a letter, “The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, business and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment.”
Adams had another purpose as well—as scholar of the period Frank H. Wu describes it—“to document some aspects of the internment camp that the government didn’t want to have shown.” These include “the barbed wire, and the guard towers, and the armed soldiers.” Prohibited from documenting these control mechanisms directly, the photographer “captured them in the background, in shadows,” says Wu: “In some of the photos when you look you can see just faintly that he’s taking a photo of something, but in front of the photo you can see barbed wire, or on the ground you can see the shadow of barbed wire. Some of the photos even show the blurry outline of a soldier’s shadow.”
The photographs document the daily activities of the internees—their work and leisure routines, and their struggles to maintain some semblance of normalcy while living in hastily constructed barracks in the harshest of conditions.
Though the landscape, and its climate, could be desolate and unforgiving, it was also, as Adams couldn’t help but notice, “magnificent.” The collection includes several wide shots of stretches of mountain range and sky, often with prisoners staring off longingly into the distance. But the majority of the photos are of the internees—men, women, and children, often in close-up portraits that show them looking variously hopeful, happy, saddened, and resigned.
You can view the entire collection at the Library of Congress’ online catalog. Adams also published about 65 of the photographs in a book titled Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese Americans in 1944. The collection represents an important part of Adams’ work during the period. But more importantly, it represents events in U.S. history that should never be forgotten or denied.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
New York isn’t the oldest city in the United States of America, and it certainly isn’t the newest. But it is, quite possibly, the American city where more layers of history coexist than any other, a quality that manifests most vividly in its built environment. Even the most casual tourist can sense the sheer variety of time periods embodied in the buildings around them on, say, a stroll down Broadway — one of the streets featured in the ten-part walking tour compiled in the new Architectural Digest video above. As a whole, it offers a two-hour journey through the city beginning in Central Park and ending on Wall Street.
In between come on-foot examinations of everything from the fin-de-siècle “apartment hotels” of the Upper West Side to the recently built “super-tall” residential towers of West 57th Street to the developments atop the buried Grand Central Station to the disused industrial railway now known — and imitated around the world — as a linear park called the High Line.
Tend though longtime New Yorkers may to regard each part of the city as more or less a nation unto itself, a perspective with a bit more distance reveals signs of the never-ending social, economic, and aesthetic exchange between them: an important factor in how the use of and role played by even the city’s most august structures has been subject to change after unanticipated change.
Helping us to understand all this are architects Michael Wyetzner and Nick Potts, both professionally well placed to explain both the big picture of New York’s evolution and the significance of the various oddities and eccentricities on its streets. Even an architectural layman would take impressed notice while passing, say, the mansions once inhabited by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr; the jagged bunker that has housed the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Met Breuer, and Frick Madison; the impossibly skinny-looking skyscrapers of the so-called “Billionaire’s Row”; or the Dakota, John Lennon’s final residence. But to learn what such buildings have to tell us about the history and nature of New York, we must look at them, as another famous rock star once sang, thru’ these architects’ eyes.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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