A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Original Colors Still In It
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
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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.
Read More...David Chase Talks Sopranos for 90 Minutes on the Talking Sopranos Podcast
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 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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Read More...Hokusai’s Iconic Print, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” Recreated with 50,000 LEGO Bricks
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
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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.
Read More...David Byrne Turns His Acclaimed Musical American Utopia into a Picture Book for Grown-Ups, with Vivid Illustrations by Maira Kalman
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.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Sistine Chapel of the Ancients: Archaeologists Discover 8 Miles of Art Painted on Rock Walls in the Amazon
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
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...
The Internet Archive is Saving Classic Flash Animations & Games from Extinction: Explore Them Online
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.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...88 Philosophy Podcasts to Help You Answer the Big Questions in Life
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.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Nikon Offers Free Online Photography Courses During the Holidays
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 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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1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities Read More...Kevin Allison (The State, RISK!) Discusses Confessional Comedy on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #70
Kevin was in the infamous, NYU-based sketch comedy group The State which had a show for a season on MTV and seemed like it was going to get picked up by CBS, but no. After several years getting over this disappointment, Kevin discovered a new outlet for his energies: He delivers, curates, and coaches personal stories (bordering on too personal, thus the “risk”) for his stage show and podcast RISK!
Kevin joins your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to discuss this idiosyncratic form: Do the stories have to be funny? Can you change things? What’s the relation to autobiographical, humorous essays a la David Sedaris? What might be too personal or actually indicating trauma to actually share on RISK? This seems like something anyone can do, so what’s the role of craft and story-telling history?
Listen to RISK at risk-show.com, and watch many stories on the RISK! YouTube channel. Also: kevinallison.net, thestorystudio.org, and @thekevinallison. Kevin’s story about prostituting himself is about 14 minutes into this episode. Hear Kevin on Marc Maron’s WTF! Listen to that audio guide Kevin mentions, “What Every RISK! Storyteller Should Know.” Read about the four lies of storytelling.
Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This time, the hosts tell (or at least outline) their own RISK!-like stories, and the result is predictably too personal for our public feed.
This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.
Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.
Read More...Watch How to Be at Home, a Beautiful Short Animation on the Realities of Social Isolation in 2020
I think, as social primates, we want to feel a strong sense of belonging either in a relationship or to a community—or both. But also intrinsic to our humanity is a feeling that we are truly alone.
—Filmmaker Andrea Dorfman, 2010
When they first became friends, poet Tanya Davis and filmmaker Andrea Dorfman talked a lot about the pleasures and hardships of being alone. Davis had just gone through a break up, and Dorfman was just embarking on a relationship after four years of flying solo.
These conversations led to a collaboration, 2010’s How to Be At Alone (see below), a whimsical videopoem that combines live action and animation to consider some of solitude’s sweeter aspects, like sitting on a bench as signal to the universe that one is available for impromptu conversation with a stranger.
That bench reappears in their 2020 follow up, How to Be At Home, above. Now it is cordoned off with black and yellow caution tape, a familiar public health measure in 2020.
As with the earlier project, a large part of Davis’ purpose was to reflect and reassure, both herself, and by extension, others.
Although she has become a poster child for the joys of solitude, she also relishes human contact, and found herself missing it terribly while sheltering alone in the early days of the pandemic. Writing the new poem gave her “an anchor” and a place to put her anxiety.
Dorfman notes that the project, which was commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada as part of a short film collection about Canadians navigating life during the pandemic, was “essentially catalyzed by COVID.”
As she embarked on the project, she wondered if the pandemic would be over by the time it was complete. As she told the CBC’s Tom Power:
There was this feeling that this could go away in a month, so this better be finished soon, so it’s still relevant. So as an artist, as a filmmaker, I thought, “I have to crank this out” but there’s no fast and easy way to do animation. It just takes so long and as I got into it and realized that this was going to be a marathon, not a sprint, the images just kept coming to me and I really just made it up as I went along. I’d go into my studio every day not knowing what lay ahead and I’d think, “Okay, so, what do we have up next? What’s the next line? And I’d spend maybe a week on a line of the poem, animating it.
It appears to have been an effective approach.
Dorfman’s painted images ripple across the fast turning pages of an old book. The titles change from time to time, and the choices seem deliberate—The Lone Star Ranger, Le Secret du Manoir Hanté, a chapter in The Broken Halo—“Rosemary for Remembrance.”
“It’s almost as though the way the poem is written there are many chapters in the book. (Davis) moves from one subject to another so completely,” Dorfman told the University of King’s College student paper, The Signal.
In the new work, the absence of other people proves a much heavier burden than it does in How To Be Alone.
Davis flirts with many of the first poem’s settings, places where a lone individual might have gone to put themselves in proximity to other humans as recently as February 2020:
Public transportation
The gym
A dance club
A description from 2010:
The lunch counter, where you will be surrounded by chow-downers, employees who only have an hour and their spouses work across town, and they, like you, will be alone.
Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.
In 2020, she struggles to recreate that experience at home, her phone serving as her most vital link to the outside world, as she scrolls past images of a Black Lives Matter protests and a masked essential worker:
I miss lunch counters so much I’ve been eating [pickles and] toasted sandwiches while hanging unabashedly with my phone.
See How to Be at Home and the 29 other films that comprise The Curve, the National Film Board of Canada series about life in the era of COVID-19 here.
How to be at Home
By Tanya Davis
If you are, at first, really fucking anxious, just wait. It’ll get worse, and then you’ll get the hang of it. Maybe.
Start with the reasonable feelings – discomfort, lack of focus, the sadness of alone
you can try to do yoga
you can shut off the radio when it gets to you
you can message your family or your friends or your colleagues, you’re not supposed to leave your home anyway, so it’s safe for you
There’s also the gym
you can’t go there but you could pretend to
you could bendy by yourself in your bedroom
And there’s public transportation
probably best to avoid it
but there’s prayer and meditation, yes always
employ it
if you have pains in your chest ‘cause your anxiety won’t rest
take a moment, take a breath
Start simple
things you can handle based on your interests
your issues and your triggers
and your inner logistics
I miss lunch counters so much I’ve been eating [pickles and] toasted sandwiches while hanging unabashedly with my phone
When you are tired, again of still being alone
make yourself a dinner
but don’t invite anybody over
put something green in it, or maybe orange
chips are fine sometimes but they won’t keep you charged
feed your heart
if people are your nourishment, I get you
feel the feelings that undo you while you have to keep apart
Watch a movie, in the dark
and pretend someone is with you
watch all of the credits
because you have time, and not much else to do
or watch all of the credits to remember
how many people come together
just to tell a story
just to make a picture move
And then, set yourself up dancing
like it’s a club where everyone knows you
and they’re all gonna hold you
all night long
they’re gonna dance around you and with you and on their own
it’s your favourite song
with the hardest bass and the cathartic drums
your heart pumps along/hard, you belong
you put your hands up to feel it
With the come down comes the weeping
those downcast eyes and feelings
the truth is you can’t go dancing, not right now
not at any club or party in any town
The heartbreak of this astounds you
it joins old aches way down in you
you can visit them, but please don’t stay there
Go outside if you’re able, breathe the air
there are trees for hugging
don’t be embarrassed
it’s your friend, it’s your mother, it’s your new crush
lay your cheek against the bark, it’s a living thing to touch
Sadly, leave all benches empty
appreciate the kindness in the distance of strangers
as you pine for company and wave at your neighbours
savour the depths of your conversations
the layers uncovered
in this strange space and time
Society is afraid of change
and no one wants to die
not now, from a tiny virus
not later from the world on fire
But death is a truth we all hate to know
we all get to live, and then we all have to go
In the meantime, we’re surrounded, we’re alone
each a thread woven in the fabric, unravelling in moments though
each a solo entity spinning on its axis, forgetting that the galaxy includes us all
Herein our fall
from grace from each other from god whatever, doesn’t matter
the disaster is that we believe we’re separate
we’re not
As evidenced by viruses taking down societies
as proven by the loneliness inherent in no gatherings
as palpable as the vacancy in the space of one person hugging
If this disruption undoes you
if the absence of people unravels you
if touch was the tether that held you together
and now that it’s severed you’re fragile too
lean into loneliness and know you’re not alone in it
lean into loneliness like it is holding you
like it is a generous representative of a glaring truth
oh, we are connected
we forget this, yet we always knew.
How to Be at Home will be added to the Animation section of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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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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