Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova Tells Protestors What to Do–and Not Do–If Arrested by Authoritarian Police

in Current Affairs, Politics | January 26th, 2021

Note: If the sub­ti­tles don’t play auto­mat­i­cal­ly, please click the “cc” at the bot­tom of the video.

Oli­garchic regimes built on cor­rup­tion and naked self-inter­est don’t typ­i­cal­ly exhib­it much in the way of cre­ativ­i­ty when respond­ing to crises of legit­i­ma­cy. The most recent chal­lenge to the oli­garchic rule of Vladimir Putin, for exam­ple, after the attempt­ed assas­si­na­tion and jail­ing of his rival, anti-cor­rup­tion activist Alex­ey Naval­ny, revealed “the regime’s utter lack of imag­i­na­tion and inabil­i­ty to plan ahead,” writes Masha Gessen at The New York­er, and seems to promise an open­ing for a rev­o­lu­tion­ary move­ment.

Per­haps it’s safer to say, Joshua Yaf­fa writes, “that Russ­ian pol­i­tics are mere­ly enter­ing the begin­ning of a pro­tract­ed new phase,” that will involve more large, coor­di­nat­ed mass protests against the “per­ceived impuni­ty and law­less­ness of Putin’s sys­tem,” such as hap­pened all over the coun­try in recent days: “In St. Peters­burg, a siz­able crowd blocked Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main thor­ough­fare. Sev­er­al thou­sand gath­ered in Novosi­birsk, the largest city in Siberia. Even in Yakut­sk, a far­away region­al cap­i­tal, where the day’s tem­per­a­tures reached minus fifty-eight degrees Fahren­heit, a num­ber of peo­ple came out to the cen­tral square.”

Footage from the protests “shows activists pelt­ing Russ­ian riot police and vehi­cles with snow­balls,” Dazed reports. Mas­sive, in-real-life protests have been orga­nized and sup­port­ed by online activists on Tik Tok, YouTube, and oth­er social media sites, where young peo­ple like viral teenag­er Neu­rol­era share tips—such as pre­tend­ing to be an indig­nant Amer­i­can—that might help pro­tes­tors avoid arrest. In one video call­ing on young stu­dents to attend Saturday’s protests, a young woman holds a book, and cap­tions “explain how she is read­ing about how cit­i­zens’ rights are guar­an­teed,” writes Bren­dan Cole at Newsweek. “But wait!” she says in one cap­tion, “In Rus­sia things hap­pen dif­fer­ent­ly.”

Russ­ian cit­i­zens, and espe­cial­ly young activists, do not walk into protest sit­u­a­tions unpre­pared for arrest and detention—particularly those who fol­low long­time trou­ble-mak­ers Pussy Riot, famous for stag­ing flam­boy­ant anti-Putin protests and get­ting arrest­ed. In the video at the top, the band/activist collective’s Nadya Tolokon­niko­va explains “how to behave when you’re arrest­ed.” Deten­tion “is an unpleas­ant expe­ri­ence,” she says, but it need not “end up being such a trau­mat­ic expe­ri­ence.” One must con­quer fear with knowl­edge. Dur­ing her first arrest, “I was scared because I felt that the police offi­cers held an enor­mous pow­er over me. That’s not true.”

The Eng­lish trans­la­tion seems inex­act and many of the intri­ca­cies of Russ­ian law will not trans­late to oth­er nation­al con­texts. Woven through­out the video, how­ev­er, are gen­er­al­ly pru­dent tips—like not adding crim­i­nal charges by attack­ing police dur­ing arrest. Last year, the group dis­trib­uted anti-sur­veil­lance make-up tips also use­ful to activists every­where. The viral spread of videos like Pussy Riot’s and Neurolera’s tuto­r­i­al show us a world­wide desire for youth­ful hope and deter­mi­na­tion in the face of bru­tal real­i­ties. Yaf­fa describes the “scenes of police employ­ing brute force” that filled his Russ­ian-lan­guage social media dur­ing the protests:

In one such video, from St. Peters­burg, a woman con­fronts a col­umn of riot police­men drag­ging a pro­test­er by his arms and asks, “Why are you arrest­ing him?” One of the police offi­cers kicks her in the chest, knock­ing her to the ground. Watch­ing these scenes, I couldn’t help but think of Belarus, where months of street protests against the rule of Alexan­der Lukashen­ka have been marked by bru­tal­i­ty and tor­ture by the secu­ri­ty forces, and a remark­able will­ing­ness from pro­test­ers to fight back against riot police, at times forc­ing them to retreat or aban­don mak­ing an arrest.

These images do not spread so read­i­ly in Eng­lish-lan­guage media, per­haps giv­ing a super­fi­cial impres­sion that the cur­rent anti-Putin, pro-Naval­ny move­ment is a new, young online phe­nom­e­non, rather than the con­tin­u­a­tion of a bat­tle-hard­ened resis­tance to twen­ty years of mis­rule. “Throw­ing the book at Naval­ny could spark protests of unde­ter­mined strength and longevi­ty,” Yaf­fa argues, from which mass move­ments around the world draw inspi­ra­tion for years to come.

via Dazed

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A His­to­ry of Pussy Riot: Watch the Band’s Ear­ly Performances/Protests Against the Putin Regime

Slavoj Žižek & Pussy Riot’s Nadezh­da Tolokon­niko­va Exchange An Extra­or­di­nary Series of Let­ters

Pussy Riot Releas­es First Video in a Year, Tak­ing on Russ­ian Oil Prof­its and Oth­er High-Pro­file Tar­gets

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

Rarely-Seen Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy Are Now Free Online, Courtesy of the Uffizi Gallery

in Art, Literature | January 20th, 2021

We know Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy—espe­cial­ly its famous first third, Infer­no—as an extend­ed the­o­log­i­cal trea­tise, epic love poem, and vicious satire of church hypocrisy and the Flo­ren­tine polit­i­cal fac­tion that exiled Dante from the city of his birth in 1302. Most of us don’t know it the way its first read­ers did (and as Dante schol­ars do): a com­pendi­um in which “a num­ber of medieval lit­er­ary gen­res are digest­ed and com­bined,” as Robert M. Durl­ing writes in his trans­la­tion of the Infer­no.

These lit­er­ary gen­res include ver­nac­u­lar tra­di­tions of romance poet­ry from Provence, pop­u­lar long before Dante turned his Tus­can dialect into a lit­er­ary lan­guage to rival Latin. They include “the dream-vision (exem­pli­fied by the Old French Romance of the Rose)”; “accounts of jour­neys to the Oth­er­world (such as the Visio Pauli, Saint Patrick’s Pur­ga­to­ry, the Nav­i­ga­tio Sanc­ti Bren­dani)”; and Scholas­tic philo­soph­i­cal alle­go­ry, among oth­er well-known forms of writ­ing at the time.

By the time the Divine Com­e­dy cap­tured imag­i­na­tions in the peri­od of incunab­u­la, or the infan­cy of the print­ed book, many of these asso­ci­a­tions and influ­ences had reced­ed. And by the time of the Counter-Ref­or­ma­tion, the poem most impressed read­ers and illus­tra­tors of the text as a divine plan for a tor­ture cham­ber and an ency­clo­pe­dia of the tor­tures there­in. What­ev­er oth­er asso­ci­a­tions we have with Dante’s poem, we all know the nine cir­cles of hell and have an omi­nous sense of what goes on there.

No doubt we also have in our mind’s eye some of the hun­dreds of illus­tra­tions made of the text’s grue­some depic­tions of hell, from San­dro Bot­ti­cel­li to Robert Rauschen­berg. Illus­trat­ed edi­tions of Dante’s poem began appear­ing in 1472, and the first ful­ly illus­trat­ed edi­tion in 1491. By the late 16th cen­tu­ry, the poem had become a lit­er­ary clas­sic (the word Divine joined Com­e­dy in the title in 1555). By this time, the tra­di­tion of depict­ing a lit­er­al, rather than a lit­er­ary, hell was firm­ly estab­lished.

It was in this peri­od that Fred­eri­co Zuc­cari made the beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions you see here, com­plet­ed, Angela Giuf­fri­da writes at The Guardian, “dur­ing a stay in Spain between 1586 and 1588. Of the 88 illus­tra­tions, 28 are depic­tions of hell, 49 of pur­ga­to­ry and 11 of heav­en. After Zuccari’s death in 1609, the draw­ings were held by the noble Orsi­ni fam­i­ly, for whom the artist had worked, and lat­er by the Medici fam­i­ly before becom­ing part of the Uffizi col­lec­tion in 1738.”

The pen­cil-and-ink draw­ings have rarely been seen before because of their frag­ile con­di­tion. They were only exhib­it­ed pub­licly for the first time in 1865 for the 600th anniver­sary of Dante’s birth and of Ital­ian uni­fi­ca­tion. Now, they are on dis­play, vir­tu­al­ly, for free, as part of a “year-long cal­en­dar of events to mark the 700th anniver­sary of the poet’s death.” This is an extra­or­di­nary oppor­tu­ni­ty to see these illus­tra­tions, which have until now “only been seen by a few schol­ars and dis­played to the pub­lic only twice, and only in part,” says Uffizi direc­tor Eike Schmidt.

Much of the promised “didac­tic-sci­en­tif­ic com­ment” to accom­pa­ny each draw­ing is marked as “upcom­ing” on the Eng­lish ver­sion of the Uffizi site, but you can see high res­o­lu­tion scans of each draw­ing and zoom in to exam­ine the many tor­tures of the damned and the grotesque demons who tor­ment them. Learn much more at Khan Acad­e­my about how Dante’s lit­er­ary epic in terza rima left “a last­ing impres­sion on the West­ern imag­i­na­tion for more than half a mil­len­ni­um,” solid­i­fy­ing and reshap­ing images of hell “into new guis­es that would become famil­iar to count­less gen­er­a­tions that fol­lowed.” If you like, you can also take a free course on Dan­te’s Divine Com­e­dy from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty.

via MyMod­ern­Met/The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Why Should We Read Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy? An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

A Dig­i­tal Archive of the Ear­li­est Illus­trat­ed Edi­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1487–1568)

Artists Illus­trate Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Through the Ages: Doré, Blake, Bot­ti­cel­li, Mœbius & More

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

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Original Colors Still In It

in Art, History, Museums | January 18th, 2021

It’s a good bet your first box of crayons or water­col­ors was a sim­ple affair of six or so col­ors… just like the palette belong­ing to Amen­emopet, vizier to Pharaoh Amen­hotep III (c.1391 — c.1354 BC), a plea­sure-lov­ing patron of the arts whose rule coin­cid­ed with a peri­od of great pros­per­i­ty.

Amenemopet’s well-used artist’s palette, above, now resides in the Egypt­ian wing of New York City’s Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art.

Over 3000 years old and carved from a sin­gle piece of ivory, the palette is marked “beloved of Re,” a roy­al ref­er­ence to the sun god dear to both Amen­hotep III and Akhen­aton, his son and suc­ces­sor, whose wor­ship of Re resem­bled monothe­ism.

As cura­tor Catharine H. Roehrig notes in the Met­ro­pol­i­tan’s pub­li­ca­tion, Life along the Nile: Three Egyp­tians of Ancient Thebes, the palette “con­tains the six basic col­ors of the Egypt­ian palette, plus two extras: red­dish brown, a mix­ture of red ocher and car­bon; and orange, a mix­ture of orpi­ment (yel­low) and red ocher. The painter could also vary his col­ors by apply­ing a thick­er or thin­ner lay­er of paint or by adding white or black to achieve a lighter or dark­er shade.”

(Care­ful when mix­ing that orpi­ment into your red ocher, kids. It’s a form of arsenic.)

Oth­er min­er­als that would have been ground and com­bined with a nat­ur­al bind­ing agent include gyp­sum, car­bon, iron oxides, blue and green azu­rite and mala­chite.

The col­ors them­selves would have had strong sym­bol­ism for Amen­hotep and his peo­ple, and the artist would have made very delib­er­ate—reg­u­lat­ed, even—choic­es as to which pig­ment to load onto his palm fiber brush when dec­o­rat­ing tombs, tem­ples, pub­lic build­ings, and pot­tery.

As Jen­ny Hill writes in Ancient Egypt Online, iwn—col­or—can also be trans­lat­ed as “dis­po­si­tion,” “char­ac­ter,” “com­plex­ion” or “nature.” She delves into the specifics of each of the six basic col­ors:

Wadj (green) also means “to flour­ish” or “to be healthy.” The hiero­glyph rep­re­sent­ed the papyrus plant as well as the green stone mala­chite (wadj). The col­or green rep­re­sent­ed veg­e­ta­tion, new life and fer­til­i­ty. In an inter­est­ing par­al­lel with mod­ern ter­mi­nol­o­gy, actions which pre­served the fer­til­i­ty of the land or pro­mot­ed life were described as “green.”

Dshr (red) was a pow­er­ful col­or because of its asso­ci­a­tion with blood, in par­tic­u­lar the pro­tec­tive pow­er of the blood of Isis…red could also rep­re­sent anger, chaos and fire and was close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with Set, the unpre­dictable god of storms. Set had red hair, and peo­ple with red hair were thought to be con­nect­ed to him. As a result, the Egyp­tians described a per­son in a fit of rage as hav­ing a “red heart” or as being “red upon” the thing that made them angry. A per­son was described as hav­ing “red eyes” if they were angry or vio­lent. “To red­den” was to die and “mak­ing red” was a euphemism for killing.

Irtyu (blue) was the col­or of the heav­ens and hence rep­re­sent­ed the uni­verse. Many tem­ples, sar­copha­gi and bur­ial vaults have a deep blue roof speck­led with tiny yel­low stars. Blue is also the col­or of the Nile and the primeval waters of chaos (known as Nun).

Khenet (yel­low) rep­re­sent­ed that which was eter­nal and inde­struc­tible, and was close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with gold (nebu or nebw) and the sun. Gold was thought to be the sub­stance which formed the skin of the gods.

Hdj (white) rep­re­sent­ed puri­ty and omnipo­tence. Many sacred ani­mals (hip­po, oxen and cows) were white. White cloth­ing was worn dur­ing reli­gious rit­u­als and to “wear white san­dals” was to be a priest…White was also seen as the oppo­site of red, because of the latter’s asso­ci­a­tion with rage and chaos, and so the two were often paired to rep­re­sent com­plete­ness.

Kem (black) rep­re­sent­ed death and the after­life to the ancient Egyp­tians. Osiris was giv­en the epi­thet “the black one” because he was the king of the nether­world, and both he and Anu­bis (the god of embalm­ing) were por­trayed with black faces. The Egyp­tians also asso­ci­at­ed black with fer­til­i­ty and res­ur­rec­tion because much of their agri­cul­ture was depen­dent on the rich dark silt deposit­ed on the riv­er banks by the Nile dur­ing the inun­da­tion. When used to rep­re­sent res­ur­rec­tion, black and green were inter­change­able.

via My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Won­ders of Ancient Egypt: A Free Online Course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia

Harvard’s Dig­i­tal Giza Project Lets You Access the Largest Online Archive on the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids (Includ­ing a 3D Giza Tour)

Pyra­mids of Giza: Ancient Egypt­ian Art and Archaeology–a Free Online Course from Har­vard

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

Take a 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Includ­ing the Great Pyra­mids, the Sphinx & More

What Ancient Egypt­ian Sound­ed Like & How We Know It

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

David Chase Talks Sopranos for 90 Minutes on the Talking Sopranos Podcast

in Television | December 23rd, 2020

Dur­ing the ear­ly days of the pan­dem­ic, the Talk­ing Sopra­nos pod­cast (pre­vi­ous­ly dis­cussed on OC here) got under­way. Host­ed by Michael Impe­ri­oli (Christo­pher Molti­san­ti) and Steve Schirri­pa (Bob­by Bacala), the pod­cast revis­its every episode of HBO’s ground­break­ing TV series. It starts nat­u­ral­ly with the 1999 pilot and then moves for­ward sequen­tial­ly. And each install­ment fea­tures a guest (usu­al­ly an actor, writer, or direc­tor who con­tributed to the show), fol­lowed by a scene-by-scene break­down of a com­plete Sopra­nos episode. (They cov­ered the cel­e­brat­ed “Pine Bar­rens” episode a few weeks back.) Past guests have includ­ed Edie Fal­co, Aida Tur­tur­ro, Steve Busce­mi, Lor­raine Brac­co and more.

Now almost halfway through the entire series, Impe­ri­oli and Schirri­pa spent 90 min­utes this week with Sopra­nos’ cre­ator David Chase. In a rare inter­view (watch above), Chase talks about his cre­ative ambi­tions for the show, the real peo­ple (friends and acquain­tances) he mod­eled char­ac­ters on, his some­times fric­tion-filled rela­tion­ship with James Gan­dolfi­ni, and the upcom­ing Sopra­nos film.

You can lis­ten to Talk­ing Sopra­nos on Apple, Spo­ti­fy and Google, or watch all episodes on YouTube. And if you’d like to sup­ple­ment all of this with more detail, get a copy of Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepin­wal­l’s book The Sopra­nos Ses­sions. It’s high­ly rec­om­mend­ed.

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

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent

Why James Gandolfini’s Tony Sopra­no Is “the Great­est Act­ing Achieve­ment Ever Com­mit­ted to the Screen”: A Video Essay

How David Chase Breathed Life into the The Sopra­nos

David Chase Reveals the Philo­soph­i­cal Mean­ing of The Sopra­nos’ Final Scene

Rewatch Every Episode of The Sopra­nos with the Talk­ing Sopra­nos Pod­cast, Host­ed by Michael Impe­ri­oli & Steve Schirri­pa

Hokusai’s Iconic Print, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” Recreated with 50,000 LEGO Bricks

in Architecture, Art, Creativity, Design | December 18th, 2020

For those with the time, skill, and dri­ve, LEGO is the per­fect medi­um for wild­ly impres­sive recre­ations of icon­ic struc­tures, like the Taj Mahal, Eif­fel Tow­er, the Titan­ic and now the Roman Colos­se­um.

But water? A wave?

And not just any wave, but Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai’s cel­e­brat­ed 19th-cen­tu­ry wood­block print, The Great Wave off Kana­gawa.

As Open Culture’s Col­in Mar­shall point­ed out ear­li­er, you might not know the title, but the image is instant­ly rec­og­niz­able.

Artist Jumpei Mit­sui, the world’s youngest LEGO Cer­ti­fied Pro­fes­sion­al, was unde­terred by the thought of tack­ling such a dynam­ic and well known sub­ject.

While oth­er LEGO enthu­si­asts have cre­at­ed excel­lent fac­sim­i­les of famous art­works, doing jus­tice to the curves and implied motion of The Great Wave seems a near­ly impos­si­ble feat.

Hav­ing spent his child­hood in a house by the sea, waves are a famil­iar pres­ence to Mit­sui. To get a bet­ter sense of how they work, he read sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic papers and spent four hours study­ing wave videos on YouTube.

He made only one prepara­to­ry sketch before begin­ning the build, an effort that required 50,000 some LEGO pieces.

His biggest hur­dle was choos­ing which col­or bricks to use in the area indi­cat­ed by the red arrow in the pho­to below. Hoku­sai had tak­en advan­tage of the new­ly afford­able Berlin blue pig­ment in the orig­i­nal.

Mit­sui tweet­ed:

I tried a total of 7 col­ors includ­ing trans­par­ent parts, but in the end, I adopt­ed the same blue col­or as the waves. If you use oth­er col­ors, the lines will be overem­pha­sized and unnat­ur­al, but if you use blue, the shade will be cre­at­ed just by adjust­ing the light, and the nat­ur­al lines will appear nice­ly. It can be said that it was pos­si­ble because it was made three-dimen­sion­al.

Jumpei Mitsui’s wave is now on per­ma­nent view at Osaka’s Han­kyu Brick Muse­um.

via Spoon and Tam­a­go and Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Lego Set

With 9,036 Pieces, the Roman Colos­se­um Is the Largest Lego Set Ever

Why Did LEGO Become a Media Empire? Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #37

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

David Byrne Turns His Acclaimed Musical American Utopia into a Picture Book for Grown-Ups, with Vivid Illustrations by Maira Kalman

in Art, Books, Current Affairs, Life | December 15th, 2020

What­ev­er your feel­ings about the sen­ti­men­tal, light­heart­ed 1960 Dis­ney film Pollyan­na, or the 1913 nov­el on which it’s based, it’s fair to say that his­to­ry has pro­nounced its own judg­ment, turn­ing the name Pollyan­na into a slur against exces­sive opti­mism, an epi­thet reserved for adults who dis­play the guile­less, out-of-touch naïveté of chil­dren. Pit­ted against Pollyanna’s effer­ves­cence is Aunt Pol­ly, too caught up in her grown-up con­cerns to rec­og­nize, until it’s almost too late, that maybe it’s okay to be hap­py.

Maybe we all have to be a lit­tle like prac­ti­cal Aunt Pol­ly, but do we also have a place for Pollyan­nas? Can that not also be the role of the mod­ern artist? David Byrne hasn’t been wait­ing for per­mis­sion to spread joy in his late career. Con­tra the com­mon wis­dom of most adults, a cou­ple years back Byrne began to gath­er pos­i­tive news sto­ries under the head­ing Rea­sons to Be Cheer­ful, now an online mag­a­zine.

Then, Byrne had the audac­i­ty to call a 2018 album, tour, and Broad­way show Amer­i­can Utopia, and the gall to have Spike Lee direct a con­cert film with the same title, and release it smack in the mid­dle of 2020, a year all of us will be glad to see in hind­sight. Byrne’s two-year endeav­or can be seen as his answer to “Amer­i­can Car­nage,” the grim phrase that began the Trump era.

As if all that weren’t enough, Amer­i­can Utopia is now an “impres­sion­is­tic, sweet­ly illus­trat­ed adult pic­ture book,” as Lily Mey­er writes at NPR, “a sooth­ing and uplift­ing, if some­what neb­u­lous, expe­ri­ence of art.” Work­ing with artist Maira Kalman, Byrne has turned his con­cep­tu­al musi­cal into some­thing like a “book-length poem… filled with charm­ing illus­tra­tions of trees, dancers, and par­ty-hat­ted dogs.”

Byrne’s project is not naive, Maria Popo­va argues at Brain Pick­ings, it’s Whit­manesque, a sal­vo of irre­press­ible opti­mism against “a kind of pes­simistic ahis­tor­i­cal amne­sia” in which we “judge the defi­cien­cies of the present with­out the long vic­to­ry ledger of past and fall into despair.” Amer­i­can Utopia doesn’t artic­u­late this so much as per­form it, either with bare feet and gray suits onstage or the vivid col­ors of Kalman’s draw­ings, “light­ly at odds,” Mey­er notes, “with Byrne’s words, trans­form­ing their plain opti­mism into a more nuanced appeal.”

Amer­i­can Utopia the book, like the musi­cal before it, was writ­ten and drawn before the pan­dem­ic. Do Byrne and Kalman still have rea­sons to be cheer­ful post-COVID? Just last week, they sat down with Isaac Fitzger­ald for Live Talks LA to dis­cuss it. You can see the whole, hour-long con­ver­sa­tion just above. Kalman con­fess­es she’s still in “qui­et shock,” but finds hope in his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive and “incred­i­ble peo­ple out there doing fan­tas­tic things.”

Byrne takes us on one of his fas­ci­nat­ing inves­ti­ga­tions into the his­to­ry of thought, ref­er­enc­ing a the­o­rist named Aby War­burg who saw in the sum total of art a kind “ani­mat­ed life” that con­nects us, past, present, and future, and who remind­ed him, “Yes, there are oth­er ways of think­ing about things!” Per­haps the vision­ary and the Pollyan­naish need not be so far apart. See sev­er­al more of Kalman and Byrne’s beau­ti­ful­ly opti­mistic pages from Amer­i­can Utopia, the book, at Brain Pick­ings.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

David Byrne’s Amer­i­can Utopia: A Sneak Pre­view of Spike Lee’s New Con­cert Film

David Byrne Launch­es Rea­sons to Be Cheer­ful, an Online Mag­a­zine Fea­tur­ing Arti­cles by Byrne, Bri­an Eno & More

David Byrne Curates a Playlist of Great Protest Songs Writ­ten Over the Past 60 Years: Stream Them Online

Watch Life-Affirm­ing Per­for­mances from David Byrne’s New Broad­way Musi­cal Amer­i­can Utopia

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

The Sistine Chapel of the Ancients: Archaeologists Discover 8 Miles of Art Painted on Rock Walls in the Amazon

in Art, History | December 8th, 2020

All images by José Iri­arte

Over twelve thou­sand years ago, some of the first humans in the Ama­zon hunt­ed, paint­ed, and danced with the mas­sive extinct mam­mals of the ice age: giant sloths and armadil­los, ice-age hors­es, and mastodons…. How do we know? We have pic­tures, or rock paint­ings, rather–many thou­sands of them made around 12,500 years ago and only recent­ly “found on an eight-mile rock sur­face along the Guayabero Riv­er the Colom­bian Ama­zon,” Hakim Bishara reports at Hyper­al­ler­gic. The pre­his­toric won­der has been dubbed the “Sis­tine Chapel of the ancients.”

The dis­cov­ery, made last year, was kept secret until the release of a new doc­u­men­tary air­ing this month called Jun­gle Mys­tery: Lost King­doms of the Ama­zon. Palaeo-anthro­pol­o­gist Ella Al-Shamahi, pre­sen­ter of the Chan­nel 4 series and a mem­ber of the team that found the site, explains why it may be hard to imag­ine such great pre­his­toric beasts lum­ber­ing through the rain­for­est.

Their exis­tence in this rock art offers a clue to major cli­ma­to­log­i­cal shifts that have occurred in the region over mil­len­nia. As Al-Shamahi tells The Observ­er:

One of the most fas­ci­nat­ing things was see­ing ice age megafau­na because that’s a mark­er of time. I don’t think peo­ple realise that the Ama­zon has shift­ed in the way it looks. It hasn’t always been this rain­for­est. When you look at a horse or mastodon in these paint­ings, of course they weren’t going to live in a for­est. They’re too big. Not only are they giv­ing clues about when they were paint­ed by some of the ear­li­est peo­ple – that in itself is just mind-bog­gling – but they are also giv­ing clues about what this very spot might have looked like: more savan­nah-like.

“We’re talk­ing about sev­er­al tens of thou­sands of paint­ings,” says the team’s leader, José Iri­arte, pro­fes­sor of archae­ol­o­gy at Exeter Uni­ver­si­ty. “It’s going to take gen­er­a­tions to record them.” The rock wall art illus­trates many extinct species, includ­ing pre­his­toric lama and three-toed hoofed mam­mals with trunks, as well as real­is­tic depic­tions of mon­keys, bats, snakes, tur­tles, tapirs, birds, lizards, fish, and deer. Remains found near the site offer clues to the ancient peo­ples’ diets, which includ­ed piran­ha, alli­ga­tors, snakes, frogs, and “rodents such as paca, capy­bara, and armadil­los,” Bishara notes.

Many of the images are paint­ed to the scale of hand­prints left in many places along the wall, and some are much larg­er. Researchers were par­tic­u­lar­ly sur­prised by the method of com­po­si­tion. Some of the art is so high up it can only be seen by drone. “I’m 5ft 10in,” says Shamahi, “and I would be break­ing my neck look­ing up. How were they scal­ing those walls?” It appears the artists used some form of rap­pelling. There are “depic­tions of wood­en tow­ers among the paint­ings,” reports The Guardian, “includ­ing fig­ures appear­ing to bungee jump from them.”

Fur­ther study in the com­ing decades, and cen­turies, will reveal much more about how the paint­ings were made. The why, how­ev­er, will prove more elu­sive. Iri­arte spec­u­lates they served a sacred pur­pose. “It’s inter­est­ing to see that many of these large ani­mals appear sur­round­ed by small men with their arms raised, almost wor­ship­ping these ani­mals.” The pres­ence of hal­lu­cino­genic plants among the paint­ings leads him to com­pare the paint­ings with con­tem­po­rary Ama­zon­ian peo­ple, for whom “non-humans like ani­mals and plants have souls, and they com­mu­ni­cate and engage with peo­ple in coop­er­a­tive or hos­tile ways through the rit­u­als and shaman­ic prac­tices that we see depict­ed in the rock art.”

What­ev­er their pur­pose, the over 100,000 paint­ings on the eight-mile wall con­tain an immea­sur­able store of infor­ma­tion about ancient Ama­zo­ni­ans’ cre­ativ­i­ty and inge­nu­ity. They also add, per­haps, to the moun­tain of rock art evi­dence sug­gest­ing, Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich argued recent­ly, that before orga­nized war became the dom­i­nant prac­tice of civ­i­liza­tions, “humans once had bet­ter ways to spend their time.” The pub­li­ca­tion of the research team’s find­ings is avail­able here. See more images of the site at Hyper­al­ler­gic and Design­boom and watch the first two episodes of Jun­gle Mys­tery: Lost King­doms of the Ama­zon here.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered 44,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing Tells the Old­est Known Sto­ry

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er the World’s First “Art Stu­dio” Cre­at­ed in an Ethiopi­an Cave 43,000 Years Ago

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

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

The Internet Archive is Saving Classic Flash Animations & Games from Extinction: Explore Them Online

in Animation, Archives, Internet Archive, Software, Technology | December 2nd, 2020

Flash is final­ly dead, and the world… does not mourn. Because the announce­ment of its end actu­al­ly came three years ago, “like a guil­lo­tine in a crowd­ed town square,” writes Rhett Jones at Giz­mo­do. It was a slow exe­cu­tion, but it was just. So use­ful in Web 1.0 days for mak­ing ani­ma­tions, games, and seri­ous pre­sen­ta­tions, Flash had become a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, a viral car­ri­er that couldn’t be patched fast enough to keep the hack­ers out. “Adobe’s Flash died many deaths, but we can tru­ly throw some dirt on its grave and say our final good­byes because it’s get­ting the preser­va­tion treat­ment.” Like the ani­mat­ed GIF, Flash ani­ma­tions have their own online library.

All those love­ly Flash memes—the danc­ing bad­gers and the snake, peanut but­ter and jel­ly time—will be saved for per­plexed future gen­er­a­tions, who will use them to deci­pher the runes of ear­ly 2000’s inter­net-speak. How­ev­er sil­ly they may seem now, there’s no deny­ing that these arti­facts were once cen­tral con­stituents of pop cul­ture.

Flash was much more than a dis­trac­tion or frus­trat­ing brows­er crash­er. It pro­vid­ed a “gate­way,” Jason Scott writes at the Inter­net Archive blog, “for many young cre­ators to fash­ion near-pro­fes­sion­al-lev­el games and ani­ma­tion, giv­ing them the first steps to a lat­er career.” (Even if it was a career mak­ing “advergames.”)

A sin­gle per­son work­ing in their home could hack togeth­er a con­vinc­ing pro­gram, upload it to a huge clear­ing­house like New­grounds, and get feed­back on their work. Some cre­ators even made entire series of games, each improv­ing on the last, until they became full pro­fes­sion­al releas­es on con­soles and PCs.

Always true to its pur­pose, the Inter­net Archive has devised a way to store and play Flash ani­ma­tions using emu­la­tors cre­at­ed by Ruf­fle and the Blue­Max­i­ma Flash­point Project, who have already archived tens of thou­sands of Flash games. All those adorable Home­s­tar Run­ner car­toons? Saved from extinc­tion, which would have been their fate, since “with­out a Flash play­er, flash ani­ma­tions don’t work.” This may seem obvi­ous, but it bears some expla­na­tion. Where image, sound, and video files can be con­vert­ed to oth­er for­mats to make them acces­si­ble to mod­ern play­ers, Flash ani­ma­tions can only exist in a world with Flash. They are like Edison’s wax cylin­ders, with­out the charm­ing three-dimen­sions.

Scott goes into more depth on the rise and fall of Flash, a his­to­ry that begins in 1993 with Flash’s pre­de­ces­sor, SmartS­ketch, which became Future­Wave, which became Flash when it was pur­chased by Macro­me­dia, then by Adobe. By 2005, it start­ed to become unsta­ble, and could­n’t evolve along with new pro­to­cols. HTML5 arrived in 2014 to issue the “final death-blow,” kind of.… Will Flash be missed? It’s doubt­ful. But “like any con­tain­er, Flash itself is not as much of a loss as all the art and cre­ativ­i­ty it held.” The Archive cur­rent­ly hosts over 1,500 Flash ani­ma­tions from those turn-of-the-mil­len­ni­um inter­net days, and there are many more to come. Enter the Archive’s Flash col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The U.S. Nation­al Archives Launch­es an Ani­mat­ed GIF Archive: See Whit­man, Twain, Hem­ing­way & Oth­ers in Motion

36,000 Flash Games Have Been Archived and Saved Before Flash Goes Extinct: Play Them Offline

What the Entire Inter­net Looked Like in 1973: An Old Map Gets Found in a Pile of Research Papers

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

88 Philosophy Podcasts to Help You Answer the Big Questions in Life

in Philosophy, Podcasts | December 1st, 2020

The big ques­tions of phi­los­o­phy, sim­mer­ing since antiq­ui­ty, still press upon us as they did the Athe­ni­ans of old (and all ancient peo­ple who have phi­los­o­phized): what oblig­a­tions do we real­ly owe to fam­i­ly, friends, or strangers? Do we live as free agents or beings con­trolled by fate or the gods (or genes or a com­put­er sim­u­la­tion)? What is a good life? How do we cre­ate soci­eties that max­i­mize free­dom and hap­pi­ness (or what­ev­er ulti­mate val­ues we hold dear)? What is lan­guage, what is art, and where did they come from?

These ques­tions may not be answered with a brute appeal to facts, though with­out sci­ence we are grop­ing in the dark. Reli­gion takes big ques­tions seri­ous­ly but tells con­verts to take its super­nat­ur­al answers on faith. “Between the­ol­o­gy and sci­ence there is a No Man’s Land,” writes Bertrand Rus­sell, “exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man’s Land is phi­los­o­phy.” Phi­los­o­phy reach­es beyond cer­tain­ty, to “spec­u­la­tions on mat­ters as to which def­i­nite knowl­edge has, so far, been unascer­tain­able.” And yet, like sci­ence, “it appeals to human rea­son rather than author­i­ty.”

The con­cerns of phi­los­o­phy have nar­rowed since Russell’s time, not to men­tion the time of Socrates, put to death for lead­ing the youth astray. But pro­fes­sors of phi­los­o­phy still raise the ire of the pub­lic, accused of seduc­ing stu­dents from the safe spaces of sacred dog­ma and sec­u­lar util­i­ty. “To study phi­los­o­phy,” wrote Cicero, “is noth­ing but to pre­pare one­self to die.” It is a poet­ic turn of phrase, and yes, we must con­front mor­tal­i­ty, but phi­los­o­phy also asks us to con­front the lim­its of human knowl­edge and pow­er in the face of the unknown. Dan­ger­ous indeed.

Should you decide to embark on this jour­ney your­self, you will meet with no small num­ber of fel­low trav­el­ers along the way. Bring some ear­phones, you can hear them in the trove of 88 phi­los­o­phy pod­casts com­piled on the phi­los­o­phy web­site Dai­ly Nous. “How many phi­los­o­phy pod­casts are there?” asks Dai­ly Nous, who brings us this list. “Over 80, and they take a vari­ety of forms.” See 15 below, with descrip­tions, see the rest at Dai­ly Nous, and enjoy your sojourn into “no man’s land.”

• 5 Ques­tions (inter­views about philoso­phers them­selves w/ Kier­an Setiya)
• Embrace the Void (con­ver­sa­tions w/ Aaron Rabi­nowitz)
• Get­ting Ethics to Work (inter­views and dis­cus­sion w/ Andy Culli­son and Kate Berry
• Hi-Phi Nation (edit­ed nar­ra­tives w/ Bar­ry Lam)
• The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy with­out any Gaps (mix of mono­logues and inter­views w/ Peter Adam­son)
• New Books in Phi­los­o­phy (inter­views w/ Car­rie Fig­dor, Alexus McLeod, Mar­shall Poe, & Robert Talisse)
• Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life (“read­ing group” dis­cus­sions w/ Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Seth Paskin, Wes Alwan, & Dylan Casey)
• Phi­los­o­phy Bites (short inter­views w/ David Edmonds & Nigel War­bur­ton)
• Phi­los­o­phy Talk (con­ver­sa­tions w/ Stan­ford Fac­ul­ty incl. John Per­ry, for­mer­ly Ken Tay­lor, Ray Brig­gs, Debra Satz, Josh Landy, et al.)
• Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast (inter­views w/ Tobias Buck­le)
• Philoso­phers On Med­i­cine (inter­views w/ Jonathan Fuller)
• Reduc­tio (edit­ed nar­ra­tives w/ Andrew Lavin)
• SCI PHI (inter­views w/ Nick Zau­tra)
• Unmute (inter­views w/ Myisha Cher­ry)
• Very Bad Wiz­ards (con­ver­sa­tions w/ Tam­ler Som­mers & David Pizarro)

See the full list here. And explore our col­lec­tion of 200 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Learn Phi­los­o­phy with a Wealth of Free Cours­es, Pod­casts and YouTube Videos

Oxford’s Free Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy: Stream 41 Lec­tures

Dis­cov­er the Cre­ative, New Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast Hi-Phi Nation: The First Sto­ry-Dri­ven Show About Phi­los­o­phy

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

Nikon Offers Free Online Photography Courses During the Holidays

in Online Courses, Photography | November 25th, 2020

A quick heads up. From Novem­ber 23rd through Decem­ber 31st, you can stream for free all class­es offered by Nikon School Online. Nor­mal­ly priced at $15-$50 per course, this 10-course offer­ing cov­ers Fun­da­men­tals of Pho­tog­ra­phy, Dynam­ic Land­scape Pho­tog­ra­phy, Macro Pho­tog­ra­phy, Pho­tograph­ing Chil­dren and Pets, and more.

Find­ing the cours­es on the Nikon site is not very intu­itive. To access the cours­es, click here and then scroll down the page until you see a yel­low but­ton that says “Watch Full Ver­sion.” From there you will get a prompt that allows you to sign up for the cours­es…

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

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via PetaPix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Annie Lei­bovitz Teach­es Pho­tog­ra­phy in Her First Online Course

Take a Free Course on Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy from Stan­ford Prof Marc Lev­oy

Learn Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy with Har­vard University’s Free Course