Customize Your Zoom Virtual Background with Free Works of Art
Limitations stimulate creativity. While that phrasing is credited to business-management scholar Henry Mintzberg, the idea itself has a long history. We know we work more fruitfully when we work within boundaries, and we’ve known ever since our capabilities were limited in ways barely imaginable today. With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic having temporarily redrawn the boundaries of our lives, many of us have already begun to rediscover our own creativity. Some have even done it on Zoom, the teleconferencing software used by businesses and institutions to keep their meetings and classes going even in a time of social distancing.
Instead of their bedrooms or offices, students and office workers have started appearing in settings like a 1970s disco, the Taj Mahal, and the starship Enterprise. The technology making this possible is the “virtual background,” explained in the official Zoom instructional video down below.
Word of the virtual background’s possibilities has spread through institutions everywhere. It certainly has at the Getty, whose digital editor Caitlin Shamberg notes that “the Getty’s Open Content program includes over 100,000 images that are free and downloadable. This means they’re also fair game to use as your own custom background.”
From the Getty’s digital collection Shamberg offers such works suitable for Zoom as Van Gogh’s Irises, Turner’s Van Tromp, going about to please his Masters, Ships a Sea, getting a Good Wetting, and other canvasses of such reliably pleasing settings as 18th-century Venice and a 16th-century forest with a rabbit. The Verge’s Natt Garun recently rounded up a few resources where you can find more promising virtual-background material, from bingo cards to beaches to “pop culture homes” including “Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment from Sex and the City, your favorite Friends lofts, Seinfeld living rooms, and more.”
Here at Open Culture, we’ll point you to the thirty world-class museums that have put two million works of art online, many of which institutions have made them available for download. In this post appears, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa (whose evolution to the status of an iconic ukiyo‑e print we’ve previously covered); from the Getty, an 18th-century room “originally used as a bedroom or large cabinet in a private Parisian home at number 18 place Vendôme”; and from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, George Bellows’ The Coming Storm.
That last work, pictured above, has a certain metaphorical resonance with the situation the world now finds itself in, hoping though we are that the storm of COVID-19 is now passing rather than still coming. But while we’re sheltering from it — and continuing to carry on business as usual as best we can — we might as well get take every opportunity to get artistic. Find many more artistic images to download here.
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Take a Virtual Tour of 30 World-Class Museums & Safely Visit 2 Million Works of Fine Art
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew Turns 50: Celebrate the Funk-Jazz-Psych-Rock Masterpiece
I shouldn’t have to tell you that Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, released fifty years ago this month, is a groundbreaking record. The funk-jazz-psych-rock masterpiece has been handed that award in “best of” lists for half a century. “Bitches Brew is NOT LIKE OTHER records of its time, or any other time,” Rick Frystak announced emphatically on the Amoeba Records blog last year, on the 50th anniversary of the album’s 1969 “hatching” onstage and in the studio. How could it be otherwise?
Davis “gave his band very little instruction” about what to do, bassist and Jazz Night in America host Christian McBride tells NPR’s Audie Cornish. “Miles might come in with sheet music with, like, four bars. And then you just, do what you do.”
Or as guitarist John McLaughlin remembers it, in the clip above from The Miles Davis Story, “I don’t think even Miles had a clear idea of what he wanted to do. But he was a man of such impeccable intuition that the moment that thing happened, he knew it. He said, ‘that’s it.’”
“What got recorded was the process,” says bassist Dave Holland, of figuring out, for example, how to make three keyboards at once work. Author and Miles Davis scholar Paul Tingen tones down the idea that the band made it all up on the spot. “Three of the pieces had already been broken in during live concerts,” he writes, such as the live clip of “Bitches Brew” in Copenhagen, 1969, above. And many of the musicians did get to rehearse before the studio sessions.
But during much of the album’s making, Miles “brought in these musical sketches that nobody had seen,” Davis himself says, and the band, featuring 13 musicians in total, found their way. Tingen writes:
On the third day the rhythm section consisted of as many as 11 players: three keyboardists, electric guitar, two basses, four drummers/percussionists and a bass clarinet. Miles had pulled out the stops in his search for a heavier bottom end.
The album’s heaviness, Davis’ tape echo, and McLaughlin’s squealing, distorted guitar turned off many jazzheads. “A lot of people felt that he was an artistic traitor,” McBride explains. “But I think that there were a number of college kids who were listening to progressive rock [and] soul music who absolutely loved this record.” Davis was booked to open for the Grateful Dead, Neil Young, and the Steve Miller Band. A new generation was turned on to jazz almost overnight.
After Bitches Brew, jazz kept fusing with rock instrumentation and overdrive, “from Chick Corea with Return to Forever and Wayne Shorter with Weather Report to Herbie Hancock with The Headhunters”—and, of course, McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. As Coltrane’s experimental 60s records had done, Davis’ bedrock fusion album freed rock from its formulas, giving it space to spread out and explore. Even Radiohead cited it as an influence on their groundbreaking 1997 Ok Computer. “It was building something up and watching it fall apart,” says Thom Yorke, “that’s the beauty of it.”
The album’s initial rejection in jazz circles didn’t last, as anyone familiar with the music’s direction knows. Davis determined its course in the 70s (as cover artist Mati Karwein determined its look). “I’m not sure if jazz ever got unplugged,” says McBride, and influential contemporary jazz fusionists like Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, and The Comet is Coming prove his point. Fifty years ago, the ground was broken for experimental electric jazz, and musicians are still building on Miles’ Bitches Brew intuitions.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Bob Dylan Releases a Cryptic 17-Minute Song about the JFK Assassination: Hear a “Murder Most Foul”
Like an Old Testament prophet with smartphone, Bob Dylan has appeared the midst of catastrophe to drop a new previously unreleased track, “Murder Most Foul,” on Twitter. Ostensibly a 17-minute song about JFK’s assassination, it’s “the first evidence of original songwriting that we’ve had in eight years from one of the most original songwriters of our era,” writes Kevin Dettmar, Professor of English at Pomona College, for The New Yorker.
The move seems like a weird one—“’weird’ with its full Shakespearean force, as in the ‘weird sisters’ of ‘Macbeth.’” Its title, however, comes from Hamlet. Uttered by the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the phrase shows us the murdered king pronouncing judgment on his own death. It is also the title of the third Miss Marple film, released in the U.S. in 1964, the same year (to the month) that the Warren commission submitted its report to Lyndon Johnson.
Is Dylan pulling us into what may be the most bottomless of modern conspiracy theories, with a Shakespearean allusion suggesting we might hear the song as emanating from Kennedy himself? He’s more than aware of what he’s doing with the many specific references to the murder, drawing out the most committed of conspiracy theorists in YouTube comments. As Andy Greene writes at Rolling Stone, “Murder Most Foul” is:
Packed with references only JFK buffs will likely recognize, like the ‘triple underpass’ near Dealey Plaza, the removal of his brain during the autopsy, and the ‘three bums comin’ all dressed in rags’ captured on the Zapruder film that conspiracy theorists have been obsessing over for decades. Clearly, Dylan has spent a lot of time reading books and watching documentaries about this.
There is so much more besides. Dylan weaves densely allusive texts, just as another poet to whom he bears some comparison, John Milton, whose work has been background for Dylan’s songwriting for decades, including a sly allusion to Paradise Lost in 1965’s “Desolation Row,” another prophetic work that stretches over the ten-minute mark (and ends with passengers on the Titanic shouting “Which side are you on?”)
In 2006, Dylan opened an episode of his Theme Time Radio Hour broadcast with lines from the first book of Paradise Lost: describing Satan “hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky.” Dylan has long been obsessed with the Devil, as literary scholar Aidan Day argues in a comparison of Dylan and Milton. Likewise, he is obsessed with apocalyptic falls from grace. Songs abound with images of the powerful brought low, the lowly brought lower, and the whole world sinking like an ocean liner. He returned to the theme in 2012’s “The Tempest,” a 14-minute epic about the Titanic.
Why JFK, and why now? As he vaguely notes, the song was “recorded a while back.” Dettmar estimates sometime in the last decade. Does it live up to Dylan’s earlier epics? Hear it above and judge for yourself. (And see many of its lyrical references at its Genius page.) Dettmar calls its first half “doggerel” and the opening lines do sound like a fifth-grade history presentation: “’Twas a dark day in Dallas, November, ‘63/The day that would live on in infamy.”
Is this cliché or a satire of cliché? (Dylan was fond of “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.”) Things soon take a darker turn, with lines full of Miltonian portent: assassination becomes regicide: The day they blew out the brains of the king/Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing.
Allusions tumble out, line after line. Once Dylan gets to Wolfman Jack, verse two begins, and “something amazing happens,” writes Dettmar. “We’re presented with another version of the Great American Songbook.”—JFK’s death now prelude for all the cultural shifts to come. “Wolfman, oh Wolfman, oh Wolfman, howl/Rub-a-dub-dub, it’s a murder most foul.” NPR’s Bob Boilen and Ann Powers have compiled a playlist of the dozens of songs referenced in the second half of “Murder Most Foul,” a compilation of the music Dylan admires most.
What is he up to in this track? Is “Murder Most Foul” a summation of Dylan’s career? Dylanologists will be puzzling it out for years. But the last line of his Twitter announcement sure sounds like a cryptic farewell wrapped in a warning: “Stay safe,” Dylan writes, “stay observant, and may God be with you.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Coursera Providing Free Access to Its Course Catalog to Universities Impacted by COVID-19
FYI: If you work in a university impacted by COVID-19, Coursera invites you to leverage their course catalogue. The company’s CEO writes:
The spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) is the most serious global health security threat in decades. In many countries, restrictions imposed by government agencies have disrupted daily routines for millions, including students. Many universities in the impacted regions have suspended face-to-face seminars, closed campuses, and are scrambling to find a solution to minimize disruption for their students.
We are fortunate to have university and industry partners, who have been at the forefront of responding to the challenges humanity has faced from time to time. Inspired by their support and consistent with our mission of serving learners everywhere, we are launching a global effort to assist universities and colleges seeking to offer online courseware in response to the coronavirus.
Starting today, we’ll provide every impacted university in the world with free access to our course catalogue through Coursera for Campus. Universities can sign up to provide their enrolled students with access to more than 3,800 courses and 400 Specializations from Coursera’s top university and industry partners. These institutions will have access until July 31, 2020, after which we plan to provide month-to-month extensions depending on prevailing risk assessments. Students who enroll on or before July 31 will continue to have access until Sept. 30, 2020.
Over the past few weeks, Duke University has been using Coursera for Campus to serve impacted students at their Duke Kunshan campus in China. This effort has been swiftly adopted by students and widely recognized by the broader community. We believe that Coursera for Campus can be an effective resource to help all higher education institutions respond to the impact of coronavirus.
As a global community of educators, we are honored to be serving fellow institutions and student communities during this crisis. Over the next few days, we will also hold webinars and share more resources, including experiences from our partner community, to help institutions looking to transition online during this crisis. Stay tuned.
Sign up for Coursera’s Coronavirus program here.
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Read More...The Summerhill School, the Radical Educational Experiment That Let Students Learn What, When, and How They Want (1966)
Among the political and social revolutions of the 1960s, the movement to democratize education is of central historical importance. Parents and politicians were entrenched in battles over integrating local schools years after 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education. Sit-ins and protests on college campuses made similar student unrest today seem mild by comparison. Meanwhile, quieter, though no less radical, educational movements proliferated in communes, homeschools, and communities that could pay for private schools.
Most of these experimental methods drew from older sources, such as the theories of Rudolf Steiner and Maria Montessori, both of whom died before the Age of Aquarius. One movement that got its start decades earlier was popularized in the 60s when its founder A.S. Neill published the influential Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, a classic work of alternative pedagogy in which the Scottish writer and educator described the radical ideas developed in his Summerhill School in England, first founded in 1921.
Neill’s school “helped to pioneer the ‘free school’ philosophy,” writes Aeon, “in which lessons are never mandatory and nearly every aspect of student life can be put to a vote.” His methods “and a rising countercultural movement inspired similar institutions to open around the world.” When Neill first published his book, however, he was very much on the defensive, against “an increasing reaction against progressive education,” psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in the book’s foreword.
At the extreme end of this backlash Fromm situates “the remarkable success in teaching achieved in the Soviet Union,” where “the old-fashioned methods of authoritarianism are applied in full strength.” Fromm defended experiments like Neill’s, despite their “often disappointing” results, as a natural outgrowth of the Enlightenment.
During the eighteenth century, the ideas of freedom, democracy, and self-determination were proclaimed by progressive thinkers; and by the first half of the 1900’s these ideas came to fruition in the field of education. The basic principle of such self-determination was the replacement of authority by freedom, to teach the child without the use of force by appealing to his curiosity and spontaneous needs, and thus to get him interested in the world around him. This attitude marked the beginning of progressive education and was an important step in human development.
What seemed anarchic to its detractors had its roots in the tradition of individual liberty against feudal traditions of unquestioned authority. But Neill was less like John Locke, who included children in his category of irrational beings (along with “idiots” and “Indians”) than he was like Jean Jacques Rousseau. Fromm suggests this too: “A.S. Neill’s system is a radical approach to child rearing because it represents the true principle of education without fear. In Summerhill School authority does not mask a system of manipulation.”
Students decide what they want to learn, and what they don’t, with no curriculum, requirements, or testing to speak of and no structured time or mandatory attendance. Is such a thing even possible in practice? How could educators manage and measure student progress, or ensure their students learn anything at all? What might this look like? Find out in the 1966 National Film Board of Canada documentary Summerhill, above, full of “candid moments and scenes,” Aeon writes, “that evoke the rhythms of daily life at the school and give a sense of the children’s lived experience.”
Disorganized, but not chaotic, classroom bustle contrasts with idyllic, sunlit moments on Summerhill’s verdant grounds and honest criticism, some from the students themselves. One girl admits that the free play wears thin after a while and that “there probably aren’t such good facilities for learning here, after a certain level. But you can always go somewhere else afterwards” (though many would have difficulty with entrance exams). Another student talks about the struggle to study without structure to help minimize distractions. Despite Neill’s philosophical aversion to fear, she says “you’re always afraid of missing something.”
We also meet the man himself, A.S. Neill, a rumpled, avuncular figure at 83 years old, who proclaims freedom as the answer for students who struggle in school, and for students who don’t. If we’re honest, we might all admit we felt this strongly as children ourselves. It may never be an impulse that’s compatible with contemporary goals for education, which is often geared toward workplace training at the expense of creative thinking. But for many students, the opportunity to pursue their own course on their own terms can become the impetus for a lifetime of independent thought and action. I can’t think of a loftier educational goal.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Jeremy Bentham’s Mummified Body Is Still on Display–Much Like Other Aging British Rock Stars
Plato’s ideal of philosopher-kings seems more unlikely by the day, but most modern readers of The Republic don’t see his state as an improvement, with its rigid caste system and state control over childbearing and rearing. Plato’s Socrates did not love democracy, though he did argue that men and women (those of the guardian class, at least) should receive an equal education. So too did many prominent European political philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who had at least as much influence on world affairs as Plato did on Athens, for better and worse.
One such thinker, Jeremy Bentham, is often remembered as the inventor of the panopticon, a dystopian prison design that makes inmates internalize their own surveillance, believing they could be watched at any time by unseen eyes. Made infamous by Michel Foucault in the mid-20th century, the proposal was first intended as humane reform, consistent with the tenets of Bentham’s philosophical innovation, Utilitarianism, often associated with his most famous disciple, John Stuart Mill.
Bentham may also have been one of the most progressive secular philosophers of any age—espousing full political rights for everyone—by which he actually meant everyone, not only European landowning men. “In his own time,” writes Faramerz Dabhoiwala at The Guardian, Bentham “was celebrated around the globe. Countless practical efforts at social and political reform drew inspiration from him. […] He was made an honorary citizen of revolutionary France, while the Guatemalan leader José del Valle acclaimed him as ‘the legislator of the world.’ Never before or since has the English-speaking world produced a more politically engaged and internationally influential thinker across such a broad range of subjects.”
Bentham took the role seriously, though there may be the seeds of a morbid practical joke in his last philosophical act.
As he lay dying in the spring of 1832, the great philosopher Jeremy Bentham left detailed directions for the preservation of his corpse. First, it was to be publicly dissected in front of an invited audience. Then, the preserved head and skeleton were to be reassembled, clothed, and displayed ‘in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought and writing.’ His desire to be preserved forever was a political statement. As the foremost secular thinker of his time, he wanted to use his body, as he had his mind, to defy religious superstitions and advance real, scientific knowledge. Almost 200 years later, Bentham’s ‘auto-icon’ still sits, staring off into space, in the cloisters of University College London.
His full-body parody of saints’ relics doesn’t just sit in London, in the “appropriate box or case” he specified in his instructions. It has also sat in its box in cities across England, Germany, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Not unlike an aging British rock star,” writes Isaac Schultz at Atlas Obscura, “the older he gets, the more tours he seems to go on. Sometimes Bentham’s severed, mummified head,” with its terrifying, unblinking glass eyes, “accompanies the rest of him.” Sometimes it doesn’t.
The head, which was supposed to have been kept atop the fully dressed skeleton, was mishandled and damaged in the creation of the “auto-icon” and replaced by a wax replica (surely an accident and not a way to mitigate the creepiness). What did Bentham mean by all of this? And what is an “auto-icon”? Though it sounds like the sort of inscrutable prank Salvador Dali might have played at the end, Bentham described the idea straightforwardly in his pamphlet Auto-Icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living. The philosopher, says Hannah Cornish, science curator at the University College London, genuinely “thought it’d catch on.”
Photo via Wikimedia Commons
In his short, final work of moral philosophy, Bentham shows that, like Plato, he didn’t quite get the point of making art, advancing a theory that becoming one’s own icon would eliminate the need for paintings, statues, and the like, since “identity is preferable to similitude” (to the extent that a mummified corpse is identical to a living person). Other utilitarian reasons include benefits to science, reduced public health risks, and creating “agreeable associations with death.”
Also, in what must have been intended with at least some undercurrent of humor, he asked that his remains “occasionally be brought into meetings involving his still-living friends,” writes Schultz, “so that what’s left of Bentham might enjoy their company.”
Learn more about Bentham’s “auto-icon” in the Atlas Obscura videos here, including the video further up showing how a team of professionals packed up and moved the whole macabre assemblage to its new home across the University of London campus. And read an even more detailed description, with several photographs, of how the oldest partially mummified British rock star philosopher travels, here.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...Americans Visited Libraries Almost Twice as Often as They Went to the Movies Last Year, a New Survey Shows
Image via Wikimedia Commons
One recurring story over the past year, covered by every major news outlet, asks whether streaming services are “killing” movie theaters (or if they are killing themselves). Another looks into the trend of binge-watching, and the effect of an entertainment ecosystem built on shows that seem to stream themselves. Given the ubiquity of this kind of coverage, we might be forgiven for suspecting that the U.S. is turning into a mass of passive home viewers transfixed by supernatural thrillers, dark comedies, reality TV, teen dramas, etc.….
This isn’t entirely the case.… While others tally up the number of eyeballs on variously-sized screens, veteran polling outfit Gallup spent part of December 2019 asking Americans around the country what they did when they went out. Among the nine activities they listed—including movies, concerts, sporting events, museums, zoos, and casinos—“visiting the library remains the most common cultural activity Americans engage in, by far,” averaging 10.5 visits per year, notes Justin McCarthy at Gallup News.
To put that “by far” into perspective, those polled reported, on average, going to the library almost twice as often as going to the movies, the second-place activity, over the past year. But as with all such polling data, we should not draw hasty conclusions without looking at specifics. Gallup breaks down the demographics by gender, age, income, region, and by households with and without children. Surprisingly, they found very little difference between the latter two groups’ reported library trips.
Among the other categories, we find that women reported going to libraries almost twice as often as men; that people between 18–29 report going over twice as often as those between 50–64—perhaps due to college assignments; and that low income households report going at much higher rates than those in higher brackets. “Cost seems to be a factor driving these trends,” writes Brigit Katz at Smithsonian. “Visiting the library is free, as are the variety of services libraries offer, including Wi-Fi.”
Indeed, “29 percent of library-going Americans over the age of 16 went to use computers, the internet or a public Wi-Fi network.” Libraries are places to gain access to cultural experiences that can be cost-prohibitive elsewhere: to take free classes and enjoy free movies, music, and, yes, books. The number of average visits has remained unchanged since a similar poll in 2001, “suggesting libraries are as popular now as they were at the turn of the millennium.” Trips to the movies, on the other hand, are down an average of 1.3 visits.
Make of the data what you will in the full breakdown at Gallup News. The telephone survey has a very small sample size—1,024 adults in all 50 states—which may not be at all representative of the whole. Nonetheless, McCarthy concludes that “despite the proliferation of digital-based activities over the past two decades… libraries have endured.” May they continue to do so, and to serve the needs of all Americans, especially those who might otherwise have little access to the kinds of knowledge, information, and culture that libraries steward.
via Smithsonian
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...Free Courses on the Coronavirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerging Pandemic
The coronavirus has spread out of China, into South Korea, Japan and now Italy. We’re settling into the reality that we’re likely facing a pandemic. It’s time to educate ourselves–to take some free courses on COVID-19.
In response to the outbreak, Imperial College London has put together a free course (offered through Coursera) called “Science Matters: Let’s Talk About COVID-19.” The course will teach you the “science underpinning the novel Coronavirus outbreak,” so that you can understand “how the spread of the epidemic is modeled, how transmissibility of infections is estimated, what the challenges are in estimating the case fatality ratio, and also … the importance of community involvement in responding to the epidemic.” You can get started with this course right now.
Alternatively you can sign up for COVID-19: Tackling the Novel Coronavirus. Created by FutureLearn and The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, this course looks at “how COVID-19 emerged, was identified and spreads, the public health measures for the virus worldwide, and what is needed to address COVID-19 and prevent it [from] spreading.” Although the course is now open for enrollment, it won’t officially start until March 22.
Both courses will be added to our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
Note: The University of Hong Kong also offer a course on Epidemics.
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!
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New Digital Archive Will Bring Medieval Chants Back to Life: Project Amra Will Feature 300 Digitized Manuscripts and Many Audio Recordings
Among historians of European Christianity, it long seemed a settled question that Irish Catholicism, the so-called “Celtic Rite,” differed significantly in the middle ages from its Roman counterpart. This despite the fact that the phrase Celtic Rite “must not be taken to imply any necessary homogeneity,” notes the Catholic Encyclopedia, “for the evidence such as it is, is in favour of considerable diversity.” Far from an insular religion, Irish Catholicism spread to France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Northern Spain through the missions of St. Columbanus and others, and both influenced and absorbed the Continent’s practices throughout the medieval period.
Historians have recently set out to “restore [the Irish Church] to its rightful place on the European historical map,” writes Trinity College Dublin’s Ann Buckley in her introduction to a book of scholarly essays called Music, Liturgy, and the Veneration of Saints of the Medieval Irish Church in a European Context.
To varying degrees, all of the scholars represented in this collection write to counter the essentializing “quest for what might be unique or ‘other’ about Ireland and Irish culture” among all other European national and religious histories.
Buckley’s writing on the veneration of Irish saints has made a significant contribution to this effort, and her decade and a half of archival work has helped create the Amra project, which aims “to digitize and make freely available online over 300 manuscripts containing liturgical material associated with some 40 Irish saints which are located in research libraries across Europe.” So write Medievalists.net, who also point out some of the most exciting aspects of this accessible resource:
The digital archive, when completed, will also incorporate recordings and performing editions of all the chants and prayers from the original manuscripts, as well as translations of the Latin texts into a number of European languages. In this way, contemporary audiences can enjoy first-hand the devotional songs associated with Irish saints, bringing them out of their slumber after more than half a millennium.
You can hear one antiphonal chant, “Magni patris/Mente mundi,” from the Office St. Patrick, just above. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “no other Irish saint is represented so extensively or with such variety in medieval liturgical sources,” writes Buckley. Manuscript hymns, prayers, and offices for Patrick have been found in Dublin, Oxford, Cambridge, the British Library, and “in the Vienna Schottenkloster dating from the time of its foundation by Irish Benedictine monks in the twelfth century.” (See the opening of the Office of St. Patrick, “Venerenda imminentis,” from a late-15th century manuscript, at the top.)
Other saints represented in the archival material include Brigit, Colmcille, Columbanus, Canice, Declan, Ciaran, Finian, and Laurence O’Toole. The missionary monks all received their own “offices,” liturgical ceremonies performed on their feast days. Many of the manuscripts, such as the opening of the Office of St. Brigit, above, contain musical notation, allowing musicologists like Buckley to recreate the sound of Irish Catholicism as it existed in Ireland, Britain, and Continental Europe several hundred years ago.
The project is developing a digital archive of such recordings, as well as “a fully searchable database,” Medievalists.net notes, with “interactive maps showing the geographical distribution of the cults of Irish saints across Europe, and of the libraries where the manuscripts are now housed. A series of documentary films is also envisaged.” You don’t have to be a specialist in the history of the Irish Church, or an Irish Catholic, for that matter, to get excited about the many ways such a rich resource will bring this medieval history to new life.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch More Than 400 Classic Korean Films Free Online Thanks to the Korean Film Archive
Even if you don’t know much about Korea, or indeed about film, it’s safe to say that you know at least one Korean film: Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which has circled the world gathering acclaim and awards since its release last spring. First it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first Korean production to do so; more recently, it made film history even more dramatically at the Academy Awards. There it won Oscars not just for Best International Feature Film, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Director, but also Best Picture, becoming the first non-English-language film to do so. For many viewers, Parasite and its director seem to have come out of nowhere, but lovers of Korean cinema know full well that they come out of a rich tradition — and a robust industry.
Maybe you thrilled to Bong’s suspenseful, funny, and violent tale of class warfare as much as the Academy did. Maybe you’ve even seen the work of Bong’s contemporaries: Park Chan-wook, he of the controversial hit Oldboy; the even more transgressive Kim Ki-duk; the prolific Hong Sangsoo, with his Woody Allen-meets-Éric Rohmer sensibility.
But do you know their sonsaengnim, the generations of Korean filmmakers who went before them? Now you can, no matter where in the world you are, on the Korean Film Archive’s Youtube channel. There, at no charge, you can experience decades of Korean cinema and hundreds of works of Korean cinematic art, including but not limited to those of mid-20th-century masters like Kim Ki-young, Im Kwon-taek, and my personal favorite Kim Soo-yong, director of haunting, even brazen pictures of the 1960s and 70s like Mist and Night Journey.
I actually met the then-octogenarian Kim Soo-yong a few years ago, when he called me over to his table out of curiosity about what a foreigner was doing at a screening of Mist. It happened at the Korean Film Archive’s cinematheque (known as Cinematheque KOFA) here in Seoul, where I’ve lived for the past few years. During that time I’ve also been writing a Korea Blog for the Los Angeles Review of Books, which occasionally features essays on the classic Korean films made available online by the Korean Film Archive. I began the series with Night Journey, and more recently have written up pictures like the 1960s neorealist cry of agony Aimless Bullet, the 1970s college-under-dictatorship comedy The March of Fools, the 1980s Westernization comedy Chil-su and Man-su, the 1990s food-sex-horror satirical mixture 301, 302, and others.
If you need more suggestions as to where to start with the KOFA’s more than 400 free films online, pay a visit to the Korean Movie Database (KMDb), where KOFA regularly post selections from their catalog. This month’s picks are “spy thriller films from the 1950s to 1970s infused with the anti-communist ideology during the time.” Previous months have rounded up “melodramas that are filled with women’s desire and craving for love,” films about “individual or family tragedies leading to historical tragedies,” and “heart-warming classical movies all the family members can enjoy together.” You can watch all these films either on the KMDb (which requires free registration) or on KOFA’s ever-growing Youtube channel. Either way, as we say here in Korea, 재미있게 보세요.
Related Content:
Martin Scorsese Introduces Filmmaker Hong Sangsoo, “The Woody Allen of Korea”
The Five Best North Korean Movies: Watch Them Free Online
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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