The Art of the Marbler: An Enchanting Film on the Centuries-Old Craft of Making Handmade Marbled Paper

in Art, Books | June 14th, 2017

The cur­rent mode of scan­dal in busi­ness and pol­i­tics involves email and tweets rather than mem­o­ran­da. But we do not yet live a paper­less world, even if you haven’t dust­ed your print­er in months. Book pro­duc­tion and sales con­tin­ue to rise, for exam­ple, defy­ing pre­dic­tions of a few years back that eBooks would over­take print. Even if we have to some­day make paper in lab­o­ra­to­ries rather than forests and mills, it’s hard to imag­ine read­ers ever let­ting go of the plea­sures of its tex­tures and smells, or of sim­ple, yet sat­is­fy­ing acts like plac­ing a favorite paper book­mark in the creas­es.

We do, how­ev­er, seem to live in a large­ly sta­tion­ary-less world, and we have for some time. As the fine art of mak­ing arti­sanal papers recedes into his­to­ry, so too does the print­ing of books with mar­bled cov­ers and pages.

Yet, if you have on your shelf hard­back books any­where from 30 to 130 years old, you no doubt have a few with mar­bled pat­terns on them or in them. And if you’ve ever won­dered about this strange art form, won­der no more. The 1970 British edu­ca­tion­al film, “The Art of the Mar­bler,” above, offers a broad overview of this fas­ci­nat­ing “mate­r­i­al which has cov­ered books for many cen­turies.”

Pro­duced by Bed­ford­shire Record Office of Cock­erell Mar­bling and direct­ed by K.V. Whit­bread, the short film is a mar­vel of quaint­ness. It effort­less­ly achieves the kind of quirk Wes Anderson’s films strive for sim­ply by being itself. We learn that every mar­bled paper, unlike Christ­mas wrap­ping paper, is a “sep­a­rate and unique orig­i­nal.” And that the process is pre­cious and spe­cial­ized, and near­ly all done by hand. Lest we become too enam­ored of the idea that mar­bling is strict­ly a his­tor­i­cal curios­i­ty these days, the mes­mer­iz­ing video above from 2011 by Sey­it Uygur shows us up close how his par­ents per­form the art of Ebru, Turk­ish for paper mar­bling.

Mar­bling, the “print­mak­ing tech­nique that basi­cal­ly looks like cap­tur­ing a galaxy on a page,” as Emma Dajs­ka writes at Rook­ie, became quite pop­u­lar in the Islam­ic world, where intri­cate pat­terns stood in lieu of por­traits. But the process orig­i­nat­ed nei­ther in Eng­land nor Turkey, but in Chi­na and, lat­er, Japan, where it is known as Sum­i­na­gashi, or “float­ing ink.” The Japan­ese tech­nique, as you can see in the video tuto­r­i­al above from Chrys­tal Shaulis, is very dif­fer­ent from British Mar­bling or Turk­ish Ebru, seem­ing to com­bine the meth­ods of Jack­son Pol­lack with those of the Zen gar­den­er. How­ev­er it’s done, the results, as “The Art of the Mar­bler” tells and shows us, are each one a “unique orig­i­nal.”

“The Art of the Mar­bler” will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

How Ink is Made: The Process Revealed in a Mouth-Water­ing Video

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

Google Creates a Digital Archive of World Fashion: Features 30,000 Images, Covering 3,000 Years of Fashion History

in Archives, Art, Fashion, Google, History | June 13th, 2017

Both the fash­ion and art worlds fos­ter the cre­ation of rar­i­fied arti­facts inac­ces­si­ble to the major­i­ty of peo­ple, often one-of-a-kind pieces that exist in spe­cial­ly-designed spaces and flour­ish in cos­mopoli­tan cities. Does this mean that fash­ion is an art form like, say, paint­ing or pho­tog­ra­phy? Doesn’t fashion’s ephemer­al nature mark it as a very dif­fer­ent activ­i­ty? We might con­sid­er that we can ask many of the same ques­tions of haute cou­ture as we can of fine art. What are the social con­se­quences of tak­ing folk art forms, for exam­ple, out of their cul­tur­al con­text and plac­ing them in gallery spaces? What is the effect of tap­ping street fash­ion as inspi­ra­tion for the run­way, turn­ing it into objects of con­sump­tion for the wealthy?

Such ques­tions should remind us that fash­ion and the arts are embed­ded in human cul­tur­al and eco­nom­ic his­to­ry in some very sim­i­lar ways. But they are also very dif­fer­ent social prac­tices. Much like trends in food (both fine din­ing and cheap con­sum­ables) fash­ion has long been impli­cat­ed in the spread of mar­kets and indus­tries, labor exploita­tion, envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, and even microbes. As Jason Daley points out at Smith­son­ian, “The craze for silk in ancient Rome helped spawn the Silk Road, a fash­ion for feath­ered hats con­tributed to the first Nation­al Wildlife Refuges. Fash­ion has even been wrapped up in pan­demics and infec­tious dis­eases.”

So how to tell the sto­ry of a human activ­i­ty so deeply embed­ded in every facet of world his­to­ry? Expan­sive­ly. Google Arts & Cul­ture has attempt­ed to do so with its “We wear cul­ture” project. Promis­ing to tell “the sto­ries behind what we wear,” the project, as you can see in the teas­er video at the top, “trav­elled to over 40 coun­tries, col­lab­o­rat­ing with more than 180 cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions and their world-renowned his­to­ri­ans and cura­tors to bring their tex­tile and fash­ion col­lec­tions to life.” Cov­er­ing 3,000 years of his­to­ry, “We wear cul­ture” uses video, his­tor­i­cal images, short quotes and blurbs, and fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy to cre­ate a series of online gallery exhibits of, for exam­ple, “The Icons,” pro­files of design­ers like Oscar de la Renta, Coco Chanel, and Issey Miyake.

Anoth­er exhib­it “Fash­ion as Art” includes a fea­ture on Florence’s Museo Sal­va­tore Fer­rag­amo, a gallery ded­i­cat­ed to the famous design­er and con­tain­ing 10,000 mod­els of shoes he cre­at­ed or owned. Ask­ing the ques­tion “is fash­ion art?”, the exhib­it “analy­ses the forms of dia­logue between these two worlds: rec­i­p­ro­cal inspi­ra­tions, over­laps and col­lab­o­ra­tions, from the expe­ri­ences of the Pre-Raphaelites to those of Futur­ism, and from Sur­re­al­ism to Rad­i­cal Fash­ion.” It’s a won­der they don’t men­tion the Bauhaus school, many of whose res­i­dent artists rad­i­cal­ized fash­ion design, though their geo­met­ric odd­i­ties seem to have had lit­tle effect on Fer­rag­amo.

As you might expect, the empha­sis here is on high fash­ion, pri­mar­i­ly. When it comes to telling the sto­ries of how most peo­ple in the world have expe­ri­enced fash­ion, Google adopts a very Euro­pean, sup­ply side, per­spec­tive, one in which “The impact of fash­ion,” as one exhib­it is called, spans cat­e­gories “from the econ­o­my and job cre­ation, to help­ing empow­er com­mu­ni­ties.” Non-Euro­pean cloth­ing mak­ers gen­er­al­ly appear as anony­mous folk arti­sans and crafts­peo­ple who serve the larg­er goal of pro­vid­ing mate­ri­als and inspi­ra­tion for the big names.

Cul­tur­al his­to­ri­ans may lament the lack of crit­i­cal or schol­ar­ly per­spec­tives on pop­u­lar cul­ture, the dis­tinct lack of oth­er cul­tur­al points of view, and the intense focus on trends and per­son­al­i­ties. But per­haps to do so is to miss the point of a project like this one—or of the fash­ion world as a whole. As with fine art, the sto­ries of fash­ion are often all about trends and per­son­al­i­ties, and about mate­ri­als and mar­ket forces.

To cap­i­tal­ize on that fact, “We wear cul­ture” has a num­ber of inter­ac­tive, 360 degree videos on its YouTube page, as well as short, adver­tis­ing-like videos, like that above on ripped jeans, part of a series called “Trends Decod­ed.” Kate Lauter­bach, the pro­gram man­ag­er at Google Arts & Cul­ture, high­lights the videos below on the Google blog (be aware, the inter­ac­tive fea­ture will not work in Safari).

• Find out how Chanel’s black dress made it accept­able for women to wear black on any occa­sion (Musée des Arts Déco­rat­ifs, Paris, France — 1925)
• Step on up—way up—to learn how Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s sparkling red high heels became an expres­sion of empow­er­ment, suc­cess and sex­i­ness for women (Museo Sal­va­tore Fer­rag­amo from Flo­rence, Italy — 1959)
• See design­er Vivi­enne West­wood’s unique take on the corset, one of the most con­tro­ver­sial gar­ments in his­to­ry (Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, Lon­don, UK — 1990)
• Dis­cov­er the Comme des Garçons sweater and skirt with which Rei Kawakubo brought the aes­thet­ics and crafts­man­ship of Japan­ese design onto the glob­al fash­ion stage (Kyoto Cos­tume Insti­tute, Kyoto, Japan — 1983)

Does the project yet deliv­er on its promise, to “tell the sto­ries behind what we wear”? That all depends, I sup­pose, on who “we” are. It is a very valu­able resource for stu­dents of high fash­ion, as well as “a pleas­ant way to lose an after­noon,” writes Marc Bain at Quartz, one that “may give you a new under­stand­ing of what’s hang­ing in your own clos­et.”

“We wear cul­ture” fea­tures 30,000 fash­ion pieces and more than 450 exhibits. Start brows­ing here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kandin­sky, Klee & Oth­er Bauhaus Artists Designed Inge­nious Cos­tumes Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Before

1930s Fash­ion Design­ers Pre­dict How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

Punk Meets High Fash­ion in Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Exhi­bi­tion PUNK: Chaos to Cou­ture

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

A Short, Animated Introduction to Emil Cioran, the “Philosopher of Despair”

in Philosophy | June 13th, 2017

It is admit­ted­ly a gross over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, but if asked to sum­ma­rize a crit­i­cal dif­fer­ence between ana­lyt­i­cal Anglo-Amer­i­can philoso­phers and so-called “Con­ti­nen­tals,” one might broad­ly say that the for­mer approach phi­los­o­phy as think­ing, the lat­ter as writ­ing. Con­trast, for exam­ple, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Bertrand Russell—none of whom are espe­cial­ly known as prose stylists—with Michel de Mon­taigne, Kierkegaard, Niet­zsche, or Albert Camus. While the Eng­lish­men struck out into heady intel­lec­tu­al waters indeed, the Euro­peans brought the full weight of their per­son­al­i­ties to bear on their inves­ti­ga­tions. They invent­ed per­son­ae, wrote lit­er­ary apho­risms, and often wrote fic­tion, dra­ma, and dia­logue in addi­tion to phi­los­o­phy.

Sure­ly there are many excep­tions to this scheme, but on the whole, Con­ti­nen­tal thinkers have been loos­er with the laws of log­ic and more inti­mate with the rules of rhetoric, as well as with their own emo­tion­al lives. But per­haps one of the great­est exam­ples of such a philo­soph­i­cal writer is some­one most of us have nev­er heard of. After watch­ing this short School of Life video intro­duc­tion on Roman­ian-French philoso­pher Emil Cio­ran, we may be per­suad­ed to get to know his work. Cio­ran, says Alain de Bot­ton above, “is very much wor­thy of inclu­sion in the line of the great­est French and Euro­pean moral philoso­phers and writ­ers of max­ims stretch­ing back to Mon­taigne, Cham­fort, Pas­cal, and La Rochefou­cauld.”

Cos­ti­ca Bra­datan describes Cio­ran as a “20th-cen­tu­ry Niet­zsche, only dark­er and with a bet­ter sense of humor.” Called a “philoso­pher of despair” by the New York Times upon his death in 1995, Cioran’s “hair-shirt­ed world view res­onat­ed in the titles” of books like On the Heights of Despair, Syl­lo­gisms of Bit­ter­ness, and The Trou­ble with Being Born. Though his deeply pes­simistic out­look was con­sis­tent through­out his career, he was not a sys­tem­at­ic thinker. “Cio­ran often con­tra­dicts him­self,” writes Bra­datan, “but that’s the least of his wor­ries. With him, self-con­tra­dic­tion is not even a weak­ness, but the sign a mind is alive.”

Like Niet­zsche, Cio­ran pos­sessed a “brood­ing, roman­tic, fatal­is­tic tem­pera­ment” com­bined with an obses­sion with reli­gious themes, inher­it­ed from his father, a Greek Ortho­dox priest. The two also share a pen­chant for pithy apho­risms both shock­ing and dark­ly fun­ny in their bru­tal can­dor. De Bot­ton quotes one exam­ple: “It is not worth the both­er of killing your­self, since you always kill your­self too late.” For Cio­ran, Bra­datan remarks, writ­ing phi­los­o­phy was “not about being con­sis­tent, nor about per­sua­sion or keep­ing a read­er­ship enter­tained.” It was a per­son­al act of sur­vival. “You write not to pro­duce some body of text, but to act upon your­self; to bring your­self togeth­er after a per­son­al dis­as­ter or to pull your­self out of a bad depres­sion.”

Cio­ran put it this way: “Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would nev­er dare con­fide to any­one.” In his the­mat­ic obses­sions, lit­er­ary ele­gance, and per­son­al invest­ment in his work, Cio­ran resem­bles a num­ber of writ­ers we admire because phi­los­o­phy for them was not a mat­ter of ratio­nal abstrac­tion; it was an active engage­ment with the most per­son­al, yet uni­ver­sal, ques­tions of life and death.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Arthur Schopen­hauer and How We Can Achieve Hap­pi­ness Through Art & Phi­los­o­phy

An Ani­mat­ed, Mon­ty Python-Style Intro­duc­tion to the Søren Kierkegaard, the First Exis­ten­tial­ist

Niet­zsche, Wittgen­stein & Sartre Explained with Mon­ty Python-Style Ani­ma­tions by The School of Life

How Did Niet­zsche Become the Most Mis­un­der­stood & Bas­tardized Philoso­pher?: A Video from Slate Explains

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

A New Theme Park Based on Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro Set to Open in 2020

in Animation, Film, Travel | June 5th, 2017

Is a frame of ref­er­ence nec­es­sary to appre­ci­ate Dis­ney World? Can you enjoy a ride in a spin­ning teacup if you have no work­ing knowl­edge of Alice in Won­der­land? What sort of mag­ic might the Mag­ic King­dom hold for those who’ve nev­er heard of Cin­derel­la or Peter Pan?

Now imag­ine if the theme park’s scope was nar­rowed to a sin­gle film.

You’ve got until 2020 to sneak in a view­ing of the Hayao Miyaza­ki film, My Neigh­bor Totoro, before Ghi­b­li Park, a 500-acre amuse­ment park on the grounds of Japan’s 2005 World’s Fair site, opens.

To date, Miyaza­k­i’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li has pro­duced more than a dozen fea­ture-length ani­mat­ed films. That’s a lot of raw mate­r­i­al for attrac­tions.

Por­co Rosso’s 1930s sea­planes have ride writ­ten all over them, and think of the Haunt­ed Man­sion-esque thrills that could be wrung from Spir­it­ed Away’s bath­house.

How about a Jun­gle Cruise-style ram­ble through the coun­try­side in Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle?

An under­wa­ter adven­ture with gold­fish princess Ponyo?

Pre­pare for a very long wait if you’re join­ing the queue for those. It’s being report­ed that Ghi­b­li Park will focus exclu­sive­ly on a sin­gle film, 1988’s My Neigh­bor Totoro.

(Care to take a guess what its Mouse Ears will look like?)

The film’s theme of respect for the nat­ur­al world is good news for the area’s exist­ing flo­ra. The gov­er­nor of Japan’s Aichi Pre­fec­ture, where Ghi­b­li Park is to be sit­u­at­ed, has announced that it will be laid out in such a way as to pre­serve the trees.

Pre­sum­ably the film’s icon­ic cat bus and fast grow­ing cam­phor tree, above, will be pow­ered by the green­est of ener­gies.

Pre­view the sort of won­ders in store by tour­ing the life­size house of My Neigh­bor Totoro’s human char­ac­ters, Sat­su­ki and Mei, below.

via NPR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Essence of Hayao Miyaza­ki Films: A Short Doc­u­men­tary About the Human­i­ty at the Heart of His Ani­ma­tion

Hayao Miyazaki’s Mas­ter­pieces Spir­it­ed Away and Princess Mononoke Imag­ined as 8‑Bit Video Games

Soft­ware Used by Hayao Miyazaki’s Ani­ma­tion Stu­dio Becomes Open Source & Free to Down­load

Hayao Miyaza­ki Picks His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  She’ll be appear­ing onstage in New York City in Paul David Young’s Faust 3, open­ing lat­er this week. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Artists May Have Different Brains (More Grey Matter) Than the Rest of Us, According to a Recent Scientific Study

in Neuroscience, Science | June 2nd, 2017

Image Pho­to cour­tesy of the Lab­o­ra­to­ry of Neu­ro Imag­ing at UCLA.

Sometimes—as in the case of neuroscience—scientists and researchers seem to be say­ing sev­er­al con­tra­dic­to­ry things at once. Yes, oppos­ing claims can both be true, giv­en dif­fer­ent con­text and lev­els of descrip­tion. But which is it, Neu­ro­sci­en­tists? Do we have “neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty”—the abil­i­ty to change our brains, and there­fore our behav­ior? Or are we “hard-wired” to be a cer­tain way by innate struc­tures.

The debate long pre­dates the field of neu­ro­science. It fig­ured promi­nent­ly in the work, for exam­ple, of John Locke and oth­er ear­ly mod­ern the­o­rists of cognition—which is why Locke is best known as the the­o­rist of tab­u­la rasa. In “Some Thoughts Con­cern­ing Edu­ca­tion,” Locke most­ly denies that we are able to change much at all in adult­hood.

Per­son­al­i­ty, he rea­soned, is deter­mined not by biol­o­gy, but in the “cra­dle” by “lit­tle, almost insen­si­ble impres­sions on our ten­der infan­cies.” Such imprints “have very impor­tant and last­ing con­se­quences.” Sor­ry, par­ents. Not only did your kid get wait-list­ed for that elite preschool, but their future will also be deter­mined by mil­lions of sights and sounds that hap­pened around them before they could walk.

It’s an extreme, and unsci­en­tif­ic, con­tention, fas­ci­nat­ing as it may be from a cul­tur­al stand­point. Now we have psy­che­del­ic-look­ing brain scans pop­ping up in our news feeds all the time, promis­ing to reveal the true ori­gins of con­scious­ness and per­son­al­i­ty. But the con­clu­sions drawn from such research are ten­ta­tive and often high­ly con­test­ed.

So what does sci­ence say about the eter­nal­ly mys­te­ri­ous act of artis­tic cre­ation? The abil­i­ties of artists have long seemed to us god­like, drawn from super­nat­ur­al sources, or chan­neled from oth­er dimen­sions. Many neu­ro­sci­en­tists, you may not be sur­prised to hear, believe that such abil­i­ties reside in the brain. More­over, some think that artists’ brains are supe­ri­or to those of mediocre abil­i­ty.

Or at least that artists’ brains have more gray and white mat­ter than “right-brained” thinkers in the areas of “visu­al per­cep­tion, spa­tial nav­i­ga­tion and fine motor skills.” So writes Kather­ine Brooks in a Huff­in­g­ton Post sum­ma­ry of “Draw­ing on the right side of the brain: A vox­el-based mor­phom­e­try analy­sis of obser­va­tion­al draw­ing.” The 2014 study, pub­lished at Neu­roIm­age, involved a very small sam­pling of grad­u­ate stu­dents, 21 of whom were artists, 23 of whom were not. All 44 stu­dents were asked to com­plete draw­ing tasks, which were then scored and com­pared to images of their brain tak­en by a method called “vox­el-based mor­phom­e­try.”

“The peo­ple who are bet­ter at draw­ing real­ly seem to have more devel­oped struc­tures in regions of the brain that con­trol for fine motor per­for­mance and what we call pro­ce­dur­al mem­o­ry,” the study’s lead author, Rebec­ca Cham­ber­lain of Belgium’s KU Leu­ven Uni­ver­si­ty, told the BBC. (Hear her seg­ment on BBC Radio 4’s Inside Sci­ence here.) Does this mean, as Art­net News claims in their quick take, that “artists’ brains are more ful­ly devel­oped?”

It’s a juicy head­line, but the find­ings of this lim­it­ed study, while “intrigu­ing,” are “far from con­clu­sive.” Nonethe­less, it marks an impor­tant first step. “No stud­ies” thus far, Cham­ber­lain says, “have assessed the struc­tur­al dif­fer­ences asso­ci­at­ed with rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al skills in visu­al arts.” Would a dozen such stud­ies resolve ques­tions about causality–nature or nur­ture? As usu­al, the truth prob­a­bly lies some­where in-between.

At Smith­son­ian, Randy Rieland quotes sev­er­al crit­ics of the neu­ro­science of art, which has pre­vi­ous­ly focused on what hap­pens in the brain when we look at a Van Gogh or read Jane Austen. The prob­lem with such stud­ies, writes Philip Ball at Nature, is that they can lead to “cre­at­ing cri­te­ria of right or wrong, either in the art itself or in indi­vid­ual reac­tions to it.” But such cri­te­ria may already be pre­de­ter­mined by cul­tur­al­ly-con­di­tioned respons­es to art.

The sci­ence is fas­ci­nat­ing and may lead to numer­ous dis­cov­er­ies. It does not, as the Cre­ators Project writes hyper­bol­i­cal­ly, sug­gest that “artists actu­al­ly are dif­fer­ent crea­tures from every­one else on the plan­et.” As Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia philoso­pher pro­fes­sor Alva Noe states suc­cinct­ly, one prob­lem with mak­ing sweep­ing gen­er­al­iza­tions about brains that view or cre­ate art is that “there can be noth­ing like a set­tled, once-and-for-all account of what art is.”

Emerg­ing fields of “neu­roaes­thet­ics” and “neu­ro­hu­man­i­ties” may mud­dy the waters between quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive dis­tinc­tions, and may not real­ly answer ques­tions about where art comes from and what it does to us. But then again, giv­en enough time, they just might.

via The Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neu­ro­science of Read­ing Great Lit­er­a­ture

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

The Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy of Pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and How to Over­come It

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

Why Catchy Songs Get Stuck in Our Brains: New Study Explains the Science of Earworms

in Music, Psychology | May 30th, 2017

What’s your cur­rent ear­worm?

For obvi­ous yet sad rea­sons, “Rasp­ber­ry Beret” and “Ash­es to Ash­es” have tun­neled into my brain in the past year. Can’t seem to shake ‘em loose, though it cer­tain­ly could be worse. Wan­der through a shop­ping mall (while they still exist), go to a chain restau­rant or gro­cery store. You may pick up an unwant­ed passenger—the tune of a song you loathe, yet can­not for the life of you for­get.

But can the Prince/Bowie sound­track in my mind prop­er­ly be called an “ear­worm”? Accord­ing to researchers at Durham Uni­ver­si­ty, Gold­smiths, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tub­in­gen, this is a sci­en­tif­ic ques­tion. Music psy­chol­o­gist Kel­ly Jakubows­ki of Durham Uni­ver­si­ty and her col­leagues pub­lished a study last year titled “Dis­sect­ing an Ear­worm: Melod­ic Fea­tures of Song Pop­u­lar­i­ty Pre­dict Invol­un­tary Musi­cal Imagery.” In it, they define the prop­er­ties of songs that pro­duce “invol­un­tary” recall.

You can read the study your­self here. It begins with a sum­ma­ry of the pre­vi­ous research on “the con­cepts of musi­cal ‘catch­i­ness’ and song ‘hooks,’” as well as the advice suc­cess­ful musi­cians often give for writ­ing “hooks” that will stick with lis­ten­ers for life. It’s not as easy as it looks, though one of the hall­marks of a suc­cess­ful ear­worm is sim­plic­i­ty. As Joan­na Klein writes at the New York Times, Jakubows­ki and her col­leagues “found that ear­worm songs tend­ed to be fast, with a com­mon, sim­ple melod­ic struc­ture that gen­er­al­ly went up and down and repeat­ed, like ‘Twin­kle Twin­kle Lit­tle Star.’”

How­ev­er, ear­worms also unset­tle our expec­ta­tions of sim­ple melodies, with “sur­pris­ing, unusu­al inter­vals,” as in the cho­rus of Lady Gaga’s insid­i­ous “Bad Romance” or, bane of every gui­tar store employ­ee, Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water.” Research on ear­worms began, notes Klein, in 2001, “when James Kel­laris, a mar­ket­ing researcher and com­pos­er at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cincin­nati trans­lat­ed the Ger­man word for ear­wig, Ohrwürmer, into that ‘cog­ni­tive itch’ he called an ‘ear­worm.’”

Kel­laris esti­mat­ed that around “98 per­cent of peo­ple expe­ri­ence this phe­nom­e­non at some point in time.” In order to ana­lyze the ear­worm, Jakubows­ki and her team col­lect­ed lists of songs from 3,000 study par­tic­i­pants. They attempt­ed to iso­late vari­ables such as “pop­u­lar­i­ty and recen­cy” that “could affect the like­li­hood of the song becom­ing stuck in the mind.” Before con­trol­ling for these fac­tors, “Bad Romance” appeared at the top of a list of “Songs Most Fre­quent­ly Named as Invol­un­tary Musi­cal Imagery (INMI).”

It’s a tune that might—under cer­tain cir­cum­stances, be used as a weapon—along with two oth­er Gaga songs at num­bers 8 and 9. See the full list below:

1. “Bad Romance,” Lady Gaga
2. “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” Kylie Minogue
3. “Don’t Stop Believ­ing,” Jour­ney
4. “Some­body That I Used to Know,” Gotye
5. “Moves Like Jag­ger,” Maroon 5
6. “Cal­i­for­nia Gurls,” Katy Per­ry
7. “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody,” Queen
8. “Ale­jan­dro,” Lady Gaga
9. “Pok­er Face,” Lady Gaga

The study goes on, in some tech­ni­cal detail, to account for chart posi­tion, length of time on the charts, etc. Unless you’re famil­iar with the meth­ods and jar­gon of this par­tic­u­lar kind of psy­cho­log­i­cal research, it’s a bit dif­fi­cult to fol­low. But Klein sum­ma­rizes some of the upshot: “While it may feel like ear­worms exist only to annoy you, researchers say they may actu­al­ly serve a pur­pose.… ear­worms could be rem­nants of how we learned before writ­ten lan­guage, when infor­ma­tion was more often passed through song.”

The sur­vival of this mech­a­nism can be used for good or ill—as was so humor­ous­ly illus­trat­ed in my favorite scene from Pixar’s psy­cho-dram­e­dy for kids, Inside Out. Adver­tis­ing jin­gles, annoy­ing pop songs that we mind­less­ly buy and stream because we can’t stop singing them, and—not least—perhaps the most effec­tive ear­worms of all time, TV sit­com theme songs.

The hey­day of unfor­get­table theme songs, the 80s, left us with some real gems: Klein names Grow­ing Pains (“show me that smile again!”). But I’m guess­ing we could get togeth­er in the thou­sands for an impromp­tu cho­rus of Cheers, Charles in Charge, Fam­i­ly Ties, Fam­i­ly Mat­ters, Step by Step, or my new ear­worm Sil­ver Spoons (thanks YouTube). As these examples—and so many hun­dreds more—prove, musi­cal ear­worms have been used by clever hacks to hack into our brains for quite some time now. When song­writ­ers we like do it, we can at least enjoy the invol­un­tary intru­sions.

Feel free to share your own unshake­able ear­worms in the com­ments sec­tion below.

via The New York Times

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear “Weight­less,” the Most Relax­ing Song Ever Made, Accord­ing to Researchers (You’ll Need It Today)

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

The Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy of Pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and How to Over­come It

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

Slavoj Žižek Names His 5 Favorite Films

in Film, Philosophy | May 25th, 2017

Any­one who has read the prose of philoso­pher-provo­ca­teur Slavoj Žižek, a potent mix­ture of the aca­d­e­m­ic and the psy­che­del­ic, has to won­der what mate­r­i­al has influ­enced his way of think­ing. Those who have seen his film-ana­lyz­ing doc­u­men­taries The Per­vert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma and The Per­vert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy might come to sus­pect that he’s watched even more than he’s read, and the inter­view clip above gives us a sense of which movies have done the most to shape his inter­nal uni­verse. Asked to name his five favorite films, he impro­vis­es the fol­low­ing list:

• Melan­cho­lia (Lars von Tri­er), “because it’s the end of the world, and I’m a pes­simist. I think it’s good if the world ends”
• The Foun­tain­head (King Vidor, 1949), “ultra­cap­i­tal­ist pro­pa­gan­da, but it’s so ridicu­lous that I can­not but love it”
• A Man with a Movie Cam­era (Dzi­ga Ver­tov, 1929), “stan­dard but I like it.” It’s free to watch online.
• Psy­cho (Alfred Hitch­cock, 1960), because “Ver­ti­go is still too roman­tic” and “after Psy­cho, every­thing goes down”
• To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942), “mad­ness, you can­not do a bet­ter com­e­dy”

You can watch a part of Žižek’s break­down of Psy­cho, which he describes as “the per­fect film for me,” in the Per­vert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma clip just above. He views the house of Nor­man Bates, the tit­u­lar psy­cho, as a repro­duc­tion of “the three lev­els of human sub­jec­tiv­i­ty. The ground floor is ego: Nor­man behaves there as a nor­mal son, what­ev­er remains of his nor­mal ego tak­ing over. Up there it’s the super­ego — mater­nal super­ego, because the dead moth­er is basi­cal­ly a fig­ure of super­ego. Down in the cel­lar, it’s the id, the reser­voir of these illic­it dri­ves.” Ulti­mate­ly, “it’s as if he is trans­pos­ing her in his own mind as a psy­chic agency from super­ego to id.” But giv­en that Žižek’s inter­pre­tive pow­ers extend to the her­menu­tics of toi­lets and well beyond, he could prob­a­bly see just about any­thing as a Freudi­an night­mare.

You can watch anoth­er of Žižek’s five favorite films, Dzi­ga Ver­tov’s A Man with a Movie Cam­era, which we fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture a few years ago, just above. Whether or not you can tune into the right intel­lec­tu­al wave­length to enjoy Žižek’s own work, the man can cer­tain­ly put togeth­er a stim­u­lat­ing view­ing list.

For more of his rec­om­men­da­tions — and his dis­tinc­tive jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for those rec­om­men­da­tions — have a look at his picks from the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion and his expla­na­tion of the great­ness of Andrei Tarkovsky. If uni­ver­si­ty super­star­dom one day stops work­ing out for him, he may well have a bright future as a revival-the­ater pro­gram­mer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Slavoj Žižek Names His Favorite Films from The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion

Slavoj Žižek Explains the Artistry of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Films: Solaris, Stalk­er & More

In His Lat­est Film, Slavoj Žižek Claims “The Only Way to Be an Athe­ist is Through Chris­tian­i­ty”

Free: Dzi­ga Vertov’s A Man with a Movie Cam­era, the 8th Best Film Ever Made

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rules for Watch­ing Psy­cho (1960)

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.

The Library of Congress Makes 25 Million Records From Its Catalog Free to Download

in Data | May 23rd, 2017

Image by Car­ol High­smith, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

A quick fyi: Accord­ing to For­tune, The Library of Con­gress announced that it “will make 25 mil­lion records from its cat­a­log avail­able for the pub­lic to down­load.” They add:

Pri­or to this, the records—which include books and seri­als, music and man­u­scripts, and maps and visu­al mate­ri­als span­ning from 1968 to 2014—have only been acces­si­ble through a paid sub­scrip­tion. These files will be avail­able for free down­load on [the Library of Con­gress site] and are also avail­able on data.gov.

This move helps free up the library’s dig­i­tal assets, allow­ing social sci­en­tists, data ana­lysts, devel­op­ers, sta­tis­ti­cians and every­one else to work with the data “to enhance learn­ing and the for­ma­tion of new knowl­edge.” The huge data sets will be avail­able here.

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!

via For­tune

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Huge Archive of Amer­i­can Films–From Casablan­ca to Gigli–Are Pro­tect­ed & Pre­served in a Nuclear Bunker

Library of Con­gress Releas­es Audio Archive of Inter­views with Rock ‘n’ Roll Icons

Library of Con­gress Launch­es New Online Poet­ry Archive, Fea­tur­ing 75 Years of Clas­sic Poet­ry Read­ings

Visit a New Digital Archive of 2.2 Million Images from the First Hundred Years of Photography

in Photography | May 23rd, 2017

Loya: Val­ley of the Yosemite (The Sen­tinel), c. 1867 – c. 1872. Ead­weard Muy­bridge. Rijksmu­se­um. Pub­lic Domain.

Inter­est­ed in pho­tog­ra­phy? You’re in the right place. Over the years, we’ve com­piled free class­es on dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, hun­dreds of pho­tog­ra­phy lec­tures, cours­es on pho­tog­ra­phy appre­ci­a­tion, and doc­u­men­taries on famous greats like Alfred Stieglitz, Diane Arbus, Edward West­on, and Hen­ri Carti­er-Bres­son. You can learn the his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy in “five ani­mat­ed min­utes,” see the ven­er­a­ble art of tin­type recre­at­ed, and vis­it archives from the Sovi­et Union, the col­lec­tion of George East­man, and the work of pio­neer­ing motion pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ead­weard Muy­bridge (ani­mat­ed in 93 GIFs).

Still not enough? How about a dig­i­tal library of 2.2 mil­lion images from the his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy? Euro­peana Col­lec­tions just launched its “lat­est the­mat­ic col­lec­tion,” Euro­peana Pho­tog­ra­phy, which, notes Dou­glas McCarthy at the site’s blog, “includes images and doc­u­ments from 50 Euro­pean insti­tu­tions in 34 dif­fer­ent coun­tries.”

Stun­ning land­scapes like that of Muybridge’s Loya: Val­ley of the Yosemite, above, and work from oth­er inno­va­tors like Julia Mar­garet Cameron, below, rep­re­sent high­lights of the archive’s dig­i­tal scans from the first 100 years of pho­tog­ra­phy.

Lilie, 1898–1903. Wil­helm Weimar. Muse­um für Kun­st und Gewerbe Ham­burg, CC0

The col­lec­tion promis­es, “future exhi­bi­tions on spe­cif­ic themes… telling com­pelling sto­ries with stun­ning images.” Cur­rent­ly, you’ll find there themed “expo­si­tions” like “Indus­tri­al Pho­tog­ra­phy in the Machine Age” and “Vin­tage Post­cards of South­east­ern Europe,” among oth­ers. A gallery on “The Mag­ic Lantern” offers a tour of a pre-cin­e­ma enter­tain­ment tech­nol­o­gy. One on pho­tog­ra­ph­er Johan Wil­helm Weimar intro­duces view­ers to incred­i­bly strik­ing work from his 1901 Herbar­i­um.

The col­lec­tion is search­able, down­load­able, share­able, and you can choose from 23 dif­fer­ent lan­guages, includ­ing Eng­lish. Its mis­sion is inter­na­tion­al, but also very much built on the idea—some might say polit­i­cal fiction—of a cul­tur­al­ly uni­fied Europe, allow­ing peo­ple to “con­nect with their past, with fel­low Euro­pean cit­i­zens, explore remote eras and loca­tions, and bet­ter appre­ci­ate the val­ue of their con­ti­nen­tal, nation­al and local cul­tur­al her­itage.”

Grand Canal, Venice, 1929. Nico­la Per­scheid. Muse­um für Kun­st und Gewerbe Ham­burg, CC0

Lofty goals, but one need no such larg­er pur­pose to sim­ply enjoy casu­al­ly brows­ing, and mak­ing the kind of odd dis­cov­er­ies one might on a con­ti­nen­tal walk­ing tour, with no par­tic­u­lar des­ti­na­tion in mind.

Vis­it the Euro­peana Pho­tog­ra­phy archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thou­sands of Pho­tos from the George East­man Muse­um, the World’s Old­est Pho­tog­ra­phy Col­lec­tion, Now Avail­able Online

Down­load 437 Issues of Sovi­et Pho­to Mag­a­zine, the Sovi­et Union’s His­toric Pho­tog­ra­phy Jour­nal (1926–1991)

School of Visu­al Arts Presents 99 Hours of Free Pho­tog­ra­phy Lec­tures

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

How Famous Paintings Inspired Cinematic Shots in the Films of Tarantino, Gilliam, Hitchcock & More: A Big Supercut

in Art, Film | May 23rd, 2017

It’s no acci­dent that one of the best-known series of cin­e­ma-ana­lyz­ing video essays bears the title Every Frame a Paint­ing. When describ­ing the height of film’s visu­al poten­tial, we often draw metaphors from art his­to­ry, but the rela­tion­ship also goes in anoth­er direc­tion: more often than we might think, the film­mak­ers and their col­lab­o­ra­tors looked to the can­vas­es of the mas­ters for inspi­ra­tion in the first place. In this tril­o­gy of short video essays, “Film Meets Art,” “Film Meets Art II,” and “Film Meets Art III,” Vugar Efen­di high­lights some of the most strik­ing paint­ings-turned-shots in the work of, among oth­er auteurs, Alfred Hitch­cock, Ter­ry Gilliam, Quentin Taran­ti­no, and Paul Thomas Ander­son.

Efen­di, writes Slate’s Made­line Raynor in a post on the sec­ond install­ment, “places shots from films side by side with the paint­ings that inspired them. And once you see the pair­ings, you won’t be able to unsee them. Some of these are unmis­tak­able ref­er­ences — like Jean-Luc Godard­’s ode to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres — while oth­ers are more sub­tle.

Film­mak­ers have been recre­at­ing paint­ings since the days of silent film: the video’s ear­li­est exam­ple is 1927’s Metrop­o­lis.” More recent instances include Alex Colville’s To Prince Edward Island in Wes Ander­son­’s Moon­rise King­dom, and Thomas Gains­bor­ough’s The Blue Boy in Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Djan­go Unchained. While per­haps too obvi­ous for inclu­sion into these essays, Wim Wen­ders once sat­i­rized this process with a movie-with­in-a-movie recre­ation of Edward Hop­per’s Nighthawks in The End of Vio­lence.

Which painters do film­mak­ers most often turn to for mate­r­i­al? Efendi’s visu­al essays show us a fair few mem­o­rable and var­ied uses of Hop­per, whose paint­ings pos­sess a cin­e­mat­ic atmos­phere of their own, and also Magritte, pos­si­bly because his dream­like sen­si­bil­i­ty aligns well with that of cin­e­ma itself: L’empire des lumières in William Fried­kin’s The Exor­cist, La Robe du soir in Bar­ry Jenk­ins’ Moon­light (win­ner of last year’s Best Pic­ture Oscar), and Archi­tec­ture au clair de Lune in Peter Weir’s The Tru­man Show. Weir’s work makes anoth­er appear­ance in the essays in the form of Pic­nic at Hang­ing Rock, a haunt­ing film based on a haunt­ing nov­el writ­ten in part out of fas­ci­na­tion with a haunt­ing paint­ing, William Ford’s At the Hang­ing Rock — whose imagery then made it back into the screen adap­ta­tion. It seems that art, be it on can­vas, film, or some medi­um yet unimag­ined, tells the sto­ry of civ­i­liza­tion in more ways than one.

via Slate and h/t Natal­ie

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Film­mak­ers Tell Their Sto­ries: Three Insight­ful Video Essays Demys­ti­fy the Craft of Edit­ing, Com­po­si­tion & Col­or

Watch the Trail­er for a “Ful­ly Paint­ed” Van Gogh Film: Fea­tures 12 Oil Paint­ings Per Sec­ond by 100+ Painters

Guer­ni­ca: Alain Resnais’ Haunt­ing Film on Picasso’s Paint­ing & the Crimes of the Span­ish Civ­il War

Watch Icon­ic Artists at Work: Rare Videos of Picas­so, Matisse, Kandin­sky, Renoir, Mon­et, Pol­lock & More

Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Film­mak­ing Tech­niques of Mar­tin Scors­ese, Jack­ie Chan, and Even Michael Bay

100,000 Free Art His­to­ry Texts Now Avail­able Online Thanks to the Get­ty Research Por­tal

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.