Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600: A Free Online Course from Yale University

in History, Yale | July 25th, 2021

From Yale Uni­ver­si­ty comes an unfor­tu­nate­ly time­ly course, Epi­demics in West­ern Soci­ety Since 1600. Record­ed before the out­break of COVID-19, the 25 lec­ture course, pre­sent­ed by his­to­ri­an Frank Snow­den, cov­ers the fol­low­ing ground:

This course con­sists of an inter­na­tion­al analy­sis of the impact of epi­dem­ic dis­eases on west­ern soci­ety and cul­ture from the bubon­ic plague to HIV/AIDS and the recent expe­ri­ence of SARS and swine flu. Lead­ing themes include: infec­tious dis­ease and its impact on soci­ety; the devel­op­ment of pub­lic health mea­sures; the role of med­ical ethics; the genre of plague lit­er­a­ture; the social reac­tions of mass hys­te­ria and vio­lence; the rise of the germ the­o­ry of dis­ease; the devel­op­ment of trop­i­cal med­i­cine; a com­par­i­son of the social, cul­tur­al, and his­tor­i­cal impact of major infec­tious dis­eases; and the issue of emerg­ing and re-emerg­ing dis­eases.

You can watch the lec­tures on YouTube above, or on iTunes (Video — Audio). You can also read Snow­den’s relat­ed book: Epi­demics and Soci­ety: From the Black Death to the Present.

If you want to hear what Snow­den has to say about COVID-19, we have two inter­views below.

Coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) Update: Epi­demics in His­to­ry

How Will COVID-19 Change the World? His­to­ri­an Frank Snow­den on Epi­demics From the Black Death to Now

Epi­demics in West­ern Soci­ety Since 1600 will be added to our list of Free Online His­to­ry cours­es, a sub­set of our meta­col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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:

The His­to­ry of the Plague: Every Major Epi­dem­ic in an Ani­mat­ed Map

The His­to­ry of the 1918 Flu Pan­dem­ic, “The Dead­liest Epi­dem­ic of All Time”: Three Free Lec­tures from The Great Cours­es

Why You Should Read The Plague, the Albert Camus Nov­el the Coro­n­avirus Has Made a Best­seller Again

The Meaning of Hieronymus Bosch’s Spellbinding Triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights

in Art, History, Television | July 20th, 2021

Hierony­mus Bosch was born Jheron­imus van Aken. We know pre­cious lit­tle else about him, not even the year of his birth, which schol­ar Nicholas Baum guess­es must have been right in the mid­dle of the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry. But we do know that the artist was born in the Dutch town of ‘s‑Hertogenbosch, bet­ter known as Den Bosch, to which his assumed name pays trib­ute. It is thus to Den Bosch that Baum trav­els in the The Mys­ter­ies of Hierony­mus Bosch, the 1983 BBC TV movie above, in search of clues to an inter­pre­ta­tion of Bosch’s mys­te­ri­ous, grotesque, and some­times hilar­i­ous paint­ings. What man­ner of place could pro­duce an artis­tic mind capa­ble of The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights?

“My first reac­tion was dis­ap­point­ment,” Baum says of Den Bosch. “I was­n’t expect­ing such a very ordi­nary, very com­mer­cial, very provin­cial lit­tle town. I could­n’t for the life of me fit any­body as extra­or­di­nary as Bosch into a sleepy lit­tle place like this.” A hard­work­ing every­day Dutch­man might laugh at Baum’s Eng­lish imag­i­na­tion hav­ing got away with him; per­haps he’d even quote his coun­try’s well-worn proverb about nor­mal human behav­ior being crazy enough.

Nev­er­the­less, fueled by a near-life­long fas­ci­na­tion with Bosch’s fan­tas­ti­cal and for­bid­ding art, Baum goes deep­er: quite lit­er­al­ly deep­er, in one case, descend­ing to the dank cel­lar beneath the house where the artist grew up in order to take in “the authen­tic smell and feel of Bosch’s own day.”

Fur­ther insights come when Baum inves­ti­gates Bosch’s mem­ber­ship in the Catholic fra­ter­ni­ty of the Com­mon Life. A few decades lat­er, that same order would also edu­cate north­ern Renais­sance philoso­pher Eras­mus, whose reli­gios­i­ty is well known. Bosch must have been no less pious, but for cen­turies that did­n’t fig­ure as thor­ough­ly into the inter­pre­ta­tion of his paint­ings as it might have. Focused on the vivid images of bac­cha­na­lia Bosch incor­po­rat­ed into his work, some spec­u­lat­ed on his involve­ment in orgy-ori­ent­ed secret soci­eties. But Baum’s jour­ney con­vinces him that Bosch was “a fierce and pious Chris­t­ian” who paint­ed with the goal of turn­ing a glut­to­nous, wealth- and plea­sure-obsessed human­i­ty back toward the teach­ings of the Bible. And half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er, it is his wild­ly imag­i­na­tive ren­der­ings of sin that con­tin­ue to com­pel us — as well as hold out the promise of fur­ther secrets yet unex­plained.

For any­one inter­est­ed, Taschen now pub­lish­es an Bosch: The Com­plete Works, a beau­ti­ful and exhaus­tive explo­ration of the painter’s work. It includes a spe­cial chap­ter on The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Explained

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

Hierony­mus Bosch’s Medieval Paint­ing The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Comes to Life in a Gigan­tic, Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion

Take a Mul­ti­me­dia Tour of the But­tock Song in Hierony­mus Bosch’s Paint­ing The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

New App Lets You Explore Hierony­mus Bosch’s “The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights” in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

When Rage Against the Machine Interviewed Noam Chomsky (1999)

in Music, Politics | July 20th, 2021

“The first great [eco­nom­ic] exper­i­ment was a ‘bad idea’ for the sub­jects, but not for the design­ers and local elites asso­ci­at­ed with them. This pat­tern con­tin­ues until the present: plac­ing prof­it over peo­ple.” — Noam Chom­sky, Prof­it Over Peo­ple

“A glob­al decom­po­si­tion is tak­ing place. We call it the Fourth World War: neoliberalism’s glob­al­iza­tion attempt to elim­i­nate that mul­ti­tude of peo­ple who are not use­ful to the pow­er­ful — the groups called ‘minori­ties’ in the math­e­mat­ics of pow­er, but who hap­pen to be the major­i­ty pop­u­la­tion in the world.” — Sub­co­man­dante Mar­cos

Whether we think of glob­al neolib­er­al­ism — to the extent that we think about it — as the iner­tia of cen­turies-old eco­nom­ic the­o­ry or as delib­er­ate geno­cide, the effects are the same. The major­i­ty of the world’s pop­u­la­tion suf­fers under mas­sive inequal­i­ty, includ­ing, now, vac­cine inequal­i­ty, lead­ing to rag­ing COVID epi­demics in some parts of the world as oth­er places emerge from lock­downs and resume “nor­mal” oper­a­tions. The “Cap­i­tal­ist Hydra,” as Zap­atista leader Sub­co­man­dante Mar­cos once called it, always seems to grow more heads.

Indeed, most plans to alle­vi­ate glob­al pover­ty and dis­ease seem to fur­ther enrich the archi­tects and immis­er­ate the tar­gets of their pur­port­ed care. Noam Chom­sky has point­ed out repeat­ed­ly that neolib­er­al eco­nom­ic rules are only applied to sub­ject pop­u­la­tions, since the wealthy ignore the strict con­di­tions they impose by force and coer­cion on oth­ers, call­ing the out­comes a nat­ur­al sort­ing of “win­ners and losers.” Ongo­ing glob­al eco­nom­ic prac­tices have accel­er­at­ed a cli­mate cri­sis that impacts the major­i­ty of the world’s (poor) pop­u­la­tion, send­ing mil­lions on a col­li­sion course with bru­tal­i­ty at the bor­ders as they flee to oth­er parts of the world for bare sur­vival.

The mul­ti­ple crises we now face were clear­ly evi­dent at the turn of the mil­len­ni­um, when Rage Against the Machine played Mex­i­co City for the first time in 1999. They released the con­cert footage in a video titled The Bat­tle of Mex­i­co City in 2001, the same year the indige­nous guer­ril­la force EZLN — pop­u­lar­ly known as the Zap­atis­tas — marched on Mex­i­co City. (Con­cert audio was released on vinyl this past June.) The video release includ­ed inter­views with Chom­sky and then-EZLN mil­i­tary leader Mar­cos, and you can see them both here.

At the top, Chom­sky responds to a ques­tion about NAFTA, a “free-trade” agree­ment that proved his point about how such poli­cies do the oppo­site of what they pro­pose, ben­e­fit­ting the very few instead of the many. Chom­sky, who ana­lyzed the ways that the gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate media man­u­fac­tured con­sent for their poli­cies dur­ing the Viet­nam War, wasn’t tak­en in by the hype. The agree­ment nev­er had any­thing to do with free trade, he says, but with lock­ing Mex­i­co into pro­grams of “struc­tur­al adjust­ment” that kept peo­ple in pover­ty and the coun­try depen­dent on eco­nom­ic terms dic­tat­ed from out­side its bor­ders.

From the per­spec­tive of the indige­nous peo­ple in Mex­i­co fight­ing for an autonomous region in Chi­a­pas, the strug­gle is not only against the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment, but also an inter­na­tion­al eco­nom­ic order that impos­es its will on the coun­try and its cit­i­zens, who then turn on the poor­est and most dis­pos­sessed among them in con­di­tions of man­u­fac­tured scarci­ty. Indige­nous Mex­i­cans, like oth­er inter­nal­ly sub­ject­ed peo­ple around the world, are deemed expend­able, fig­ured as a “prob­lem” to be solved or elim­i­nat­ed. What is so strik­ing about these per­spec­tives, twen­ty years after the release of The Bat­tle of Mex­i­co City, is just how pre­scient, even prophet­ic, they sound today.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Noam Chomsky’s Man­u­fac­tur­ing Con­sent and How the Media Cre­ates the Illu­sion of Democ­ra­cy

Requiem for the Amer­i­can Dream: Noam Chom­sky on the 10 Prin­ci­ples That Have Led to Unprece­dent­ed Inequal­i­ty in the US 

Noam Chom­sky Explains the Best Way for Ordi­nary Peo­ple to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunt­ing

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Noam Chomsky’s Ground­break­ing Lin­guis­tic The­o­ries

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

The Life & Art of Hilma Af Klint: A Short Art History Lesson on the Pioneering Abstract Artist

in Art, Religion, Sci Fi | July 12th, 2021

Like many artists whose abstrac­tions cement­ed their lega­cy, Hilma af Klint was trained to paint por­traits, botan­i­cals, and land­scapes.

The nat­u­ral­ist works of her ear­ly adult­hood depict bour­geois, late-19th cen­tu­ry Swedish life, and, by asso­ci­a­tion, the sort of sub­ject mat­ter and approach that were deemed most fit­ting for a female artist, even in a soci­ety where women were allowed to work along­side men.

But some­thing else was afoot with Hilma, as artist and edu­ca­tor Paul Priest­ley points out in the above episode from his Art His­to­ry School series.

Her 10-year-old sister’s death from the flu may have caused her to lean into an exist­ing inter­est in spir­i­tu­al­ism, but as Iris Müller-West­er­mann, direc­tor of Mod­er­na Museet Malmö told The Guardian’s Kate Kell­away, the “math­e­mat­i­cal, sci­en­tif­ic, musi­cal, curi­ous” teen was like­ly moti­vat­ed by her own thirst for knowl­edge as by this fam­i­ly tragedy:

 You have to under­stand this was the age when nat­ur­al sci­ences went beyond the vis­i­ble: Hein­rich Hertz dis­cov­ered elec­tro­mag­net­ic waves [1886], Wil­helm Rönt­gen invent­ed the x‑ray [1895]…Hilma is like Leonar­do – she want­ed to under­stand who we are as human beings in the cos­mos.

Her inter­est in the occult did not make her an out­sider. Spir­i­tu­al­ism was con­sid­ered a respectable intel­lec­tu­al pre­oc­cu­pa­tion. Abstract painters Vasi­ly Kandin­sky, Piet Mon­dri­an, Kasimir Male­vich and Fran­tisek Kup­ka were also using their art to try and get at that which the eye could not see.

All but Hilma were hailed as pio­neers.

The New York Times review of Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art’s 1986 exhib­it The Spir­i­tu­al in Art: Abstract Paint­ing 1890–1985, men­tions some of their spir­i­tu­al bona fides:

They were gen­er­at­ed by such ven­tures into mys­ti­cism as Theos­o­phy, Anthro­pos­o­phy, Rosi­cru­cian­ism, East­ern phi­los­o­phy, and var­i­ous East­ern and West­ern reli­gions. Spir­i­tu­al ideas were not periph­er­al to these artists’ lives, not some­thing that hap­pened to pop into their minds as they stood by their can­vas. Kup­ka par­tic­i­pat­ed in seances and was a prac­tic­ing medi­um. Kandin­sky attend­ed pri­vate fetes involved with mag­ic, black mass­es and pagan rit­u­als. Mon­dri­an was a mem­ber of the Dutch Theo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety and lived briefly in the quar­ters of the French Theo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety in Paris. He said once that he ”got every­thing from the Secret Doc­trine” of Theos­o­phy, which was an attempt by its founder Hele­na Petro­v­na Blavatsky to do noth­ing less than read, digest and syn­the­size all reli­gions. It has been known for some time how much of Mon­dri­an’s sym­bol­ism — includ­ing the ubiq­ui­tous ver­ti­cal and hor­i­zon­tal lines — and how much of his utopi­anism, was shaped by Theo­soph­i­cal doc­trine.

Review­er Michael Bren­son devotes one sen­tence to Hilma, “a pre­vi­ous­ly unknown Swedish artist whose some­what mechan­i­cal abstract paint­ings and draw­ings of organ­ic, geo­met­ri­cal forms were marked by Theos­o­phy and Anthro­pos­o­phy.”

Thir­ty-five years lat­er, she’s receiv­ing much more cred­it. As Priest­ley says in his video biog­ra­phy, Hilma, and not Kandin­sky, is now hailed as the first painter to exper­i­ment with abstrac­tion.

Would Hilma have wel­comed such a dis­tinc­tion?

She main­tained that she was but a receiv­ing instru­ment for Amaliel, a “high mas­ter” from anoth­er dimen­sion, who made con­tact dur­ing the séances she par­tic­i­pat­ed in reg­u­lar­ly with four friends who met week­ly to prac­tice auto­mat­ic draw­ing and writ­ing.

Amaliel charged her with cre­at­ing the art­work for the inte­ri­or of a tem­ple that was part of the high mas­ters’ vision. The Guggenheim’s class­room mate­ri­als for The Paint­ings for the Tem­ple note that her friends warned Hilma against accept­ing this oth­er­world­ly com­mis­sion, “that the inten­si­ty of this kind of spir­i­tu­al engage­ment could dri­ve her into mad­ness.”

But Hilma threw her­self into the assign­ment, pro­duc­ing 111 paint­ings dur­ing a one-and-a-half year peri­od, claim­ing:

The pic­tures were paint­ed direct­ly through me, with­out any pre­lim­i­nary draw­ings and with great force. I had no idea what the paint­ings were sup­posed to depict; nev­er­the­less, I worked swift­ly and sure­ly, with­out chang­ing a sin­gle brush­stroke.

For what­ev­er rea­son, the paint­ings proved too much for Rudolph Stein­er, the founder of the Anthro­po­soph­i­cal Soci­ety, whom she had invit­ed to view them, pay­ing his trav­el expens­es in hope that he would pro­vide a detailed analy­sis and inter­pre­ta­tion of the images. Instead, he coun­seled her that no one would under­stand them, and that the only course of action would be to keep the paint­ings out of sight and out of mind for fifty years. To do oth­er­wise might endan­ger her health.

A dis­ap­point­ing response that ulti­mate­ly led to the paint­ings being socked away for an even longer peri­od.

Good news for Kandin­sky… and pos­si­bly for Stein­er.

At any rate, the com­pe­ti­tion was coerced into elim­i­nat­ing her­self, inad­ver­tent­ly plant­i­ng the seeds for some major, if delayed art world excite­ment. Hilma, who died more than forty years before the L.A. Coun­ty Muse­um show, was not able to bask in the atten­tion on any earth­ly plane.

For those curi­ous in a take that is not entire­ly root­ed in the art world, Light­forms Art Cen­ter in Hud­son, New York host­ed a recent Hilma Af Klint exhib­it. Their strong ties to the Anthro­po­soph­i­cal com­mu­ni­ty make for some inter­est­ing exhib­it com­men­tary.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Com­plete Works of Hilma af Klint Are Get­ting Pub­lished for the First Time in a Beau­ti­ful, Sev­en-Vol­ume Col­lec­tion

New Hilma af Klint Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Life & Art of the Trail­blaz­ing Abstract Artist

Dis­cov­er Hilma af Klint: Pio­neer­ing Mys­ti­cal Painter and Per­haps the First Abstract Artist

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Watch Artisans Make Hand-Carved Championship Chess Sets: Each Knight Takes Two Hours

in Games, History | July 7th, 2021

Whether because of the pop­u­lar­i­ty of Net­flix’s The Queen’s Gam­bit or because of how much time indoors the past year and a half has entailed, chess has boomed late­ly. Luck­i­ly for those would-be chess­mas­ters who’ve had their inter­est piqued, every­thing they need to learn the game is avail­able free online. But the deep­er one gets into any giv­en pur­suit, the greater one’s desire for con­crete rep­re­sen­ta­tions of that inter­est. In the case of chess play­ers, how many, at any lev­el, have tran­scend­ed the desire for a nice board and pieces? And how many have nev­er dreamed of own­ing one of the finest chess sets mon­ey can buy?

Such a set appears in the Busi­ness Insid­er video above. “You can pick up a plas­tic set for $20 dol­lars, but a wood­en set cer­ti­fied for the World Chess Cham­pi­onship costs $500,” says its nar­ra­tor. “Much of the val­ue of a high-qual­i­ty of the set comes down to how well just one piece is made: the knight.”

Prop­er­ly carved by a mas­ter arti­san, each knight — with its horse’s head, the only real­is­tic piece in chess — takes about two hours. Very few are qual­i­fied for the job, and one knight carv­er appears in an inter­view to explain that it took him five or six years to learn it, as against the four or five months required to mas­ter carv­ing the oth­er pieces.

The work­shop intro­duced in this video is locat­ed in Amrit­sar (also home to the Gold­en Tem­ple and its enor­mous free kitchen, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here in Open Cul­ture). To those just start­ing to learn about chess, India may seem an unlike­ly place, but in fact no coun­try has a longer his­to­ry with the game. “Chess has been played for over 1,000 years, with some form of the game first appear­ing in India around the sixth cen­tu­ry,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor. “Over the past two cen­turies, high-lev­el com­pe­ti­tions have drawn inter­na­tion­al inter­est.” For most of that peri­od, fluc­tu­a­tions in pub­lic enthu­si­asm for chess have result­ed in pro­por­tion­ate fluc­tu­a­tions in the demand for chess sets, much of which is sat­is­fied by large-scale indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion. But the most expe­ri­enced play­ers pre­sum­ably feel sat­is­fac­tion only when han­dling a knight carved to arti­sanal per­fec­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn How to Play Chess Online: Free Chess Lessons for Begin­ners, Inter­me­di­ate Play­ers & Beyond

A Brief His­to­ry of Chess: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the 1,500-Year-Old Game

Man Ray Designs a Supreme­ly Ele­gant, Geo­met­ric Chess Set in 1920–and It Now Gets Re-Issued

Mar­cel Duchamp, Chess Enthu­si­ast, Cre­at­ed an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Avail­able via 3D Print­er

The Bauhaus Chess Set Where the Form of the Pieces Art­ful­ly Show Their Func­tion (1922)

A Beau­ti­ful Short Doc­u­men­tary Takes You Inside New York City’s Last Great Chess Store

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Storytelling and Race in Captain America — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #98

in Comics/Cartoons, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | July 6th, 2021

What is it for a super-hero to rep­re­sent Amer­i­ca? Though the char­ac­ter cre­at­ed by Joe Simon and Jack Kir­by in 1941 may have been a way to cap­i­tal­ize on WWII patri­o­tism, it has since been used to ask ques­tions about what it real­ly means to be patri­ot­ic and how Amer­i­ca’s ideals and its real­i­ty may con­flict. We’re of course talk­ing about race, a theme explored by Sam Wil­son, for­mer­ly Cap’s side-kick, pick­ing up the shield in the comics and now on TV (and in the forth­com­ing film).

Your Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca, and Bri­an are joined by com­ic super-fan Antho­ny LeBlanc (return­ing from our ep.  56 on black nerds) to dis­cuss the recent com­ic runs by Ta-Nehishi Coates and Nick Spencer and espe­cial­ly Truth: Red, White and Black, Mar­vel’s 2003 comics mini-series by Robert Morales and Kyle Bak­er that tells the sto­ry of Amer­i­can super-sol­dier exper­i­ments on unknow­ing black men (rem­i­nis­cent of the real-life Tuskegee Syphilis Study). This was the source of the “first black Cap­tain Amer­i­ca” char­ac­ter Isa­iah Bradley fea­tured in The Fal­con and the Win­ter Sol­dier Dis­ney+ show, which we also dis­cuss.

Here are a few arti­cles that fed into our dis­cus­sion:

• “The Pow­er of a Skep­ti­cal Cap­tain Amer­i­ca” by Sophie Gilbert
• “‘The Fal­con and the Win­ter Sol­dier’ Nev­er Took Its Pro­tag­o­nist Seri­ous­ly” by Justin Char­i­ty
• “‘The Fal­con and the Win­ter Sol­dier’ Was Rid­dled With Con­tra­dic­tions” by Ali­son Her­man
• “When Sam Wil­son Became Cap­tain Amer­i­ca” by Brit­tany Mat­ter
• “Why I’m Writ­ing Cap­tain Amer­i­ca, and Why It Scares the Hell out of Me” by Ta-Nehishi Coates
• “My Secret His­to­ry With Secret Empire: Look­ing Back At Nick Spencer’s Cap­tain Amer­i­ca” by Vishal Gul­la­pal­li
• “Secret Empire Cre­ators Pre­view Cap­tain Amer­i­ca’s Assault on the Mar­vel Uni­verse” by Chris­t­ian Hol­ub
• “Cap­tain Amer­i­ca Goes to War With Jor­dan Peter­son” by Matthew Gault
• “Black Pan­ther Writer Crit­i­cizes Mar­vel’s Treat­ment of Com­ic Cre­ators” by Robert Wood

The final issue of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Cap­tain Amer­i­ca is com­ing July 7.

We rec­om­mend the Cap­tain Amer­i­ca Com­ic Book Fans pod­cast for more infor­ma­tion. Their recent inter­view with long­time edi­tor Tom Brevoort was illu­mi­nat­ing, and they spent eps.  33 and 34 walk­ing through Truth: Red, White & Black.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

Quentin Tarantino Releases His First Novel: A Pulpy Novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

in Film | July 5th, 2021

There’s no busi­ness like show busi­ness. Or maybe — as Bart Simp­son once wrote on the black­board — “there are plen­ty of busi­ness­es like show busi­ness.”

Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film, 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood, fol­lows aging TV star, Rick Dal­ton, being pushed into play­ing vil­lain­ous char­ac­ter roles. Drunk and depressed, Dal­ton and his side­kick­/hang­er-on/s­tunt dou­ble Cliff Booth watch reruns of his show and get into a series of increas­ing­ly seri­ous scrapes as the actor search­es for a role that will redeem him. The film’s outline–shorn of his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences that made crit­ics lion­ize it as “a love let­ter to old Hollywood”–sounds sus­pi­cious­ly like anoth­er media prop­er­ty in the mid­dle of its final sea­son that sum­mer.

Called a Mad Men replace­ment, Netflix’s satir­i­cal adult car­toon series Bojack Horse­man also fol­lows an aging for­mer TV star and his sidekicks/hanger(s)-on through their mis­ad­ven­tures in Hol­ly­wood (“Hol­ly­woo”). Along the way they con­front issues that fall under the rubric of “tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty,” such as work­place harass­ment, emo­tion­al imma­tu­ri­ty, and the abuse of pow­er in an indus­try with wild­ly unequal pow­er dynam­ics. The show makes clear that nei­ther old, nor new, Hol­ly­wood deserves a love let­ter — no more than oth­er indus­tries that allow such behav­ior. (It also fea­tures a car­i­ca­ture of Taran­ti­no.)

Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood, by con­trast, cel­e­brates the old star sys­tem and its priv­i­leges — or so Richard Brody argues at The New York­er — in an “obscene­ly regres­sive vision of the 60s” that scrubs the decade of its protests and bru­tal crack­downs. The premise under­ly­ing Tarantino’s alter­nate-his­to­ry dram­e­dy seems to be: “If only the old-line Hol­ly­wood peo­ple of the fifties and six­ties had main­tained their pride of place—if only the times hadn’t changed, if only the keys to the king­dom hadn’t been hand­ed over to the free­thinkers and deca­dents of the sixties—then both Hol­ly­wood and the world would be a bet­ter, safer, hap­pi­er place.”

Taran­ti­no sets up “hip­pies,” a favorite pejo­ra­tive of his char­ac­ters, as fall guys for the Man­son Fam­i­ly mur­ders, rather than Manson’s own white suprema­cist beliefs. As many crit­ics not­ed at the time, “the only sub­stan­tial char­ac­ter of col­or, Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), is played… as a haughty par­o­dy” who gets “dra­mat­i­cal­ly humil­i­at­ed” by Pitt’s swash­buck­ling stunt­man — who is rumored to have mur­dered his wife and who dis­patch­es the film’s female Man­son cult vil­lains with the sadis­tic glee of a true psy­chopath, a scene, Brody writes, “that only ham­mers [Tarantino’s] doc­trine home.”

Cel­e­bra­tion there may be in the film, but there is also mourn­ing. Christo­pher Hooten at Lit­tle White Lies scoffs at the “love let­ter” idea and sees the film instead as a lament for the end of cinema’s “free­thinkers”:

This is Tarantino’s pas­sion project – poten­tial­ly his last film – and it comes across as him try­ing to sneak out a movie with a ’70s sen­si­bil­i­ty and tone before it’s no longer pos­si­ble. Once the likes of Taran­ti­no and Mar­tin Scors­ese have bowed out, that might well be it for auteur-dri­ven film­mak­ing on a block­buster scale. We’ve reached a polar­i­sa­tion in the indus­try where a direc­tor either works as a hired (and fre­quent­ly fired) gun for a Dis­ney or a Warn­er Bros, or else goes cap in hand in the hope of scrap­ing togeth­er a few mil­lion dol­lars to make some­thing more per­son­al and unique.

The Taran­ti­nos of the world might be a dying breed, but Taran­ti­no isn’t leav­ing his art behind so much as turn­ing his hand to “more per­son­al and unique” projects – in this case a nov­el, and more specif­i­cal­ly, “the pulpi­est of pulp fic­tion — the nov­el­iza­tion,” writes Peter Brad­shaw at The Guardian. Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood: A Nov­el finds him “crank­ing up the back­sto­ries, mulching up real­i­ty and alt.reality pas­tiche, ladling in new episodes,” and flex­ing his for­mi­da­ble strengths as a writer of crack­ling dia­logue and action. The book also promis­es an end­ing view­ers of the film won’t see com­ing.

The nov­el explores the inner lives of its female char­ac­ters, includ­ing, of course, Sharon Tate “and the fic­tion­al child actor Tru­di Fras­er,” and adds an even dark­er edge to Cliff Booth, who is said to admire a cer­tain char­ac­ter despite or because he is “uncon­scious­ly racist, con­scious­ly misog­y­nis­tic.” This is Taran­ti­no, after all, none of whose char­ac­ters are ever shin­ing exam­ples of virtue. But in the post-auteur, post-Wein­stein future, he seems to sug­gest, maybe old-Hol­ly­wood anti-heroes like Cliff Booth and Leonar­do DiCaprio’s washed-up star Rick Dal­ton will only shine on stream­ing TV shows and in the pages of throw­back pulp nov­els, “pack­aged like those New Eng­lish Library paper­backs that used to be on carousel dis­plays in super­mar­kets and drug­stores.” You can pick up a copy of Once Upon a Time in Hol­ly­wood: A Nov­el here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Quentin Taran­ti­no Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

Quentin Tarantino’s Copy­cat Cin­e­ma: How the Post­mod­ern Film­mak­er Per­fect­ed the Art of the Steal

An Analy­sis of Quentin Tarantino’s Films Nar­rat­ed (Most­ly) by Quentin Taran­ti­no

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

The Conspiracy Behind the Iconic Statue, the Venus de Milo

in Art, History, Travel | July 2nd, 2021

The Venus de Milo is one of art’s most wide­ly rec­og­nized female forms.

The Mona Lisa may be the first stop on many Lou­vre vis­i­tors’ agen­das, but Venus, by virtue of being unclothed, sculp­tur­al, and promi­nent­ly dis­played, lends her­self beau­ti­ful­ly to all man­ner of sou­venirs, both respect­ful and pro­fane.

Delacroix, Magritte, Dali, and The Simp­sons have all paid trib­ute, ensur­ing her con­tin­ued renown.

Renoir is that rare bird who was imper­vi­ous to her 6’7” charms, describ­ing her as the “big gen­darme.” His own Venus, sculpt­ed with the help of an assis­tant near­ly 100 years after the Venus de Milo joined the Louvre’s col­lec­tion, appears much meati­er through­out the hip and thigh region. Her celebri­ty can­not hold a can­dle to that of her arm­less sis­ter.

In the Vox Almanac episode above, host Phil Edwards delves into the Venus de Milo’s appeal, tak­ing a less deliri­ous approach than sculp­tor Auguste Rodin, who rhap­sodized:

…thou, thou art alive, and thy thoughts are the thoughts of a woman, not of some strange, supe­ri­or being, arti­fi­cial and imag­i­nary. Thou art made of truth alone, out­side of which there is nei­ther strength nor beau­ty. It is thy sin­cer­i­ty to nature which makes thee all pow­er­ful, because nature appeals to all men. Thou art the famil­iar com­pan­ion, the woman that each believes he knows, but that no man has ever under­stood, the wis­est not more than the sim­ple. Who under­stands the trees? Who can com­pre­hend the light?

Edwards opts instead for a Sharpie and a tiny 3‑D print­ed mod­el, which he marks up like a plas­tic sur­geon, draw­ing view­ers’ atten­tion to the miss­ing bits.

The arms, we know.

Also her ear­lobes, most like­ly removed by loot­ers eager to make off with her jew­el­ry.

One of her mas­sive mar­ble feet (a man’s size 15) is miss­ing.

And so is a por­tion of the plinth on which she once stood.

Inter­est­ing­ly, the plinth was among the items dis­cov­ered by acci­dent on the Greek island of Milos in 1820, along with two pil­lars topped with busts of Her­cules and Her­mes, the bisect­ed Venus, and assort­ed mar­ble frag­ments, includ­ing — maybe — an upper arm and hand hold­ing a round object (a gold­en apple, may­haps?)

Edwards doesn’t delve into the con­flict­ing accounts sur­round­ing the wheres and whys of this dis­cov­ery. Nor does he go into the com­pli­ca­tions of the sculp­ture’s acqui­si­tion, and how it very near­ly wound up on a ship bound for Con­stan­tino­ple.

What he’s most inter­est­ed in is that plinth, which would have giv­en the lie to the long-stand­ing asser­tion that the Venus de Milo was cre­at­ed in the Clas­si­cal era.

This incor­rect des­ig­na­tion made the Lou­vre’s newest res­i­dent a most wel­come replace­ment for the loot France had been com­pelled to return to the Vat­i­can in the wake of Napoleon’s first abdi­ca­tion.

The plinth may have been “lost” under mys­te­ri­ous cir­cum­stances, but its inscrip­tion was pre­served in a sketch by A. Debay, whose father had been a stu­dent of Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon’s now-ban­ished First Painter, a Neo-Clas­si­cist.

(David’s final paint­ing, Mars Dis­armed by Venus and the Three Graces, com­plet­ed a cou­ple of years after Venus de Milo was installed in the Lou­vre, was con­sid­ered a bust.)

Debay’s faith­ful recre­ation of the plinth’s inscrip­tion as part of his study of the Venus de Milo offers clues as to her cre­ator — “ …andros son of …enides cit­i­zen of …ioch at Mean­der made.”

It also dates her cre­ation to 150–50 BCE, cor­rob­o­rat­ing notes French naval offi­cer Jules d’Urville had made in Greece weeks after the dis­cov­ery.

The birth of this Venus should have been attrib­uted to the Hel­lenis­tic, not Clas­si­cal peri­od.

This would have been prob­lem­at­ic for both France and the Lou­vre, as art his­to­ri­an Jane Ursu­la Har­ris writes in The Believ­er:

Had her true author been known, she like­ly would’ve been locked away in the museum’s archive, if not sold off. Hel­lenis­tic art had by then been den­i­grat­ed by Renais­sance schol­ars who re-con­ceived it in anti-clas­si­cal terms, find­ing in its expres­sive, exper­i­men­tal form and emo­tion­al con­tent a provoca­tive real­ism that defied every­thing their era stood for: mod­esty, intel­lect, and equanimity…It helped that the Venus de Milo pos­sessed sev­er­al clas­si­cal attrib­ut­es. Her strong pro­file, short upper lip, and smooth fea­tures, for exam­ple, were in keep­ing with Clas­si­cal  fig­ur­al con­ven­tions, as was the con­tin­u­ous line con­nect­ing her nose and fore­head. The par­tial­ly-draped fig­ure with its atten­u­at­ed sil­hou­ette – which the Regency fash­ion of the day imi­tat­ed with its empire bust-line – also recalled clas­si­cal sculp­tures of Aphrodite, and her Roman coun­ter­part, Venus. Yet despite all these clas­si­cal iden­ti­fiers, the Venus de Milo flaunt­ed a defin­i­tive Hel­lenis­tic influ­ence in her provoca­tive­ly low-slung drap­ery, high waist line, and curve-enhanc­ing contrapposto—far more sen­su­al and exag­ger­at­ed than clas­si­cal ideals allowed.

It took the Lou­vre over a hun­dred years to come clean as to its star sculpture’s true prove­nance.

What hap­pened to the plinth remains any­one’s guess.

The only mys­tery the museum’s web­site seems con­cerned with is one of iden­ti­ty — is she Aphrodite, god­dess of beau­ty, or Poseidon’s wife, Amphitrite, the sea god­dess wor­shipped on the island on which she was dis­cov­ered?

For a deep­er dive into the Venus de Milo’s com­pli­cat­ed jour­ney to the Lou­vre, we rec­om­mend Rachel Kousser’s arti­cle, “Cre­at­ing the Past: The Venus de Milo and the Hel­lenis­tic Recep­tion of Clas­si­cal Greece,” which can be down­loaded free here. Or do as Vox’s Edwards sug­gests and 3‑D print a tiny Venus de Milo in a decid­ed­ly non-Clas­si­cal col­or using MyMiniFactory’s free pat­tern.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hun­dreds of Clas­si­cal Sculp­tures from the Uffizi Gallery Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online: Explore a Col­lec­tion of 3D Inter­ac­tive Scans

The Mak­ing of a Mar­ble Sculp­ture: See Every Stage of the Process, from the Quar­ry to the Stu­dio

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Down­load & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Considering Mare of Easttown — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #97

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | July 1st, 2021

Inso­far as some­thing is a TV hit at all these days, the small-town Penn­syl­va­nia mur­der mys­tery star­ring Kate Winslet seems to qual­i­fy, but what dis­tin­guish­es it from the many many oth­er crime dra­mas on TV? Your Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt dis­cuss the plot struc­ture, cast­ing, and oth­er cre­ative choic­es and try to fig­ure out how the show relates to Broad­church, The Undo­ing, etc. Should there be a sea­son two?

Here are a few of the arti­cles that fed the dis­cus­sion:

• “‘Mare of East­town’ Was Not a Show About Mur­der” by Ali­son Her­man
• “Does It Take a Mur­der to Make an HBO Show About Women a Hit?” by Anna Nord­berg
• “‘Mare of East­town’ End­ed with a Shock­ing Twist. But That’s Not the Only Rea­son the Show Was a Hit.” by Emi­ly Yahr
• “Kate Winslet Shows There’s More to Mid­dle Age Than a Sag­gy Bel­ly” by Gaby Hinsliff
• “Why Most Actors Won’t Even Attempt a Philadel­phia Accent” by Sam Adams
• “Mare of East­town Sea­son 2 Could Hap­pen — but It Should­n’t” by Marc McLaren
• “ ‘Mur­dur Dur­dur’: Inside SNL’s Killer Mare of East­town Par­o­dy” by Hillary Busis

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

This Is “The End”: A Video Exploration of The Doors’ Existential Epic

in Music | June 28th, 2021

If you had bro­ken up with your col­lege boyfriend and he told you that he writ­ten an 11-minute song about you while on enough LSD to kill a horse, would you want to hear it? Or would you block his num­ber on your phone?

Or maybe because said boyfriend is Jim Mor­ri­son and the band is the Doors and the song is “The End,” we’ll let it slide, because whether or not you think Jim’s lyrics are super deep or super­cil­ious, the groove is unde­ni­able, four small fur­ry musi­cians gath­ered togeth­er in a stu­dio and groov­ing on a raga, con­jur­ing up East­ern mys­ti­cism with West­ern instru­ments.

In Polyphonic’s explain­er video on “The End,” he pulls apart The Doors’ mag­num opus, the clos­er to its 1967 debut album, ana­lyz­ing the song in real time as it unspools. (There’s a few moments where Poly­phon­ic and Mor­ri­son are vocal­iz­ing at the same time—we rec­om­mend turn­ing on cap­tions).

The girl­friend in ques­tion was Mary Wer­be­low, Morrison’s steady in the ear­ly ‘60s before he chose the path of putting his poet­ry to music. The Werbelow/Morrison cou­ple had to die for the Doors to be born, in a sense, and Mor­ri­son start­ed the lyrics as a good­bye song, a stan­dard pop trope at the time. (There’s a very touch­ing, rare inter­view with Wer­be­low here). But Mor­ri­son took it in anoth­er direc­tion, we could say.

“The End” might be the first musi­cal exam­ple of the Psy­chotron­ic Breakup genre. Defined by Noah Segan and Adam Egypt Mor­timer when talk­ing about film, the Psy­chotron­ic Breakup genre “uses dream imagery, para­nor­mal ideas, or the hor­ror genre to express the emo­tion­al dra­ma of heart­break.” Segan and Mortimer’s def­i­n­i­tion deals only with film, but Mor­ri­son does the same thing with song, a lit­tle over ten years before the films they dis­cuss. “The End” is a breakup song that breaks down the psy­che like LSD, send­ing the injured par­ty back to basics, and into a uni­verse of arche­types. Things are dying. Things are being reborn. There’s a blue bus which is call­ing us, and that is either a ref­er­ence to the Solar Boat in Egypt­ian mythol­o­gy or a ref­er­ence to the San­ta Mon­i­ca bus sys­tem (accord­ing to one wag in the com­ments). Or hey, maybe it is both, because Mor­ri­son is tap­ping into some­thing here, much like James Joyce cre­at­ed lay­ers of myth with­in the quo­tid­i­an. (Mor­ri­son achieves this by walk­ing back­wards into it, how­ev­er.)

Poly­phon­ic gets into the song’s Oedi­pal Cliff Notes sec­tion, describ­ing how it all came flum­ing out of Mor­ri­son on stage, the band hav­ing dragged him to a gig at the Whiskey a Go-Go after he con­sumed “10,000 mikes” (i.e. 10,000 micro­grams, about ten full dos­es) of LSD. A few days lat­er the “kill your teach­ers, kill your par­ents” riff was com­mit­ted to tape, this time also on LSD.

For all its pre­tense the song still works. And though Mor­ri­son nev­er did rec­on­cile with his girl­friend, the song did find its soul mate when Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la used “The End” as the open­ing to Apoc­a­lypse Now, anoth­er work of art that drained the life force from its cre­ator. There are no real cov­er ver­sions of “The End,” and there are no films past Coppola’s that can use it with­out irony. It exists like a totem, to be found and puz­zled over.

(But because this is late cap­i­tal­ism and every­thing is ter­ri­ble, Polyphonic’s segue into a spon­sor ad at 11:46 is some­thing won­drous to behold in its per­verse beau­ty. Be warned, my only friend.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Doors’ Ray Man­zarek Walks You Through the Writ­ing of the Band’s Icon­ic Song, “Rid­ers on the Storm”

“The Lost Paris Tapes” Pre­serves Jim Morrison’s Final Poet­ry Record­ings from 1971

A Young, Clean Cut Jim Mor­ri­son Appears in a 1962 Flori­da State Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­mo Film

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.