A Glass Floor in a Dublin Grocery Store Lets Shoppers Look Down & Explore Medieval Ruins
In South Korea, where I live, many recent buildings — the new Seoul City Hall, Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza — have incorporated the century-upon-century old ruins discovered on their sites. This makes literally visible, often through clear glass floors, the “5,000 years of unbroken history” about which one often hears boasts in Korea. But nor is Europe historically impoverished, and there the window-onto-the-past architectural technique has been applied in even less likely places: a new Dublin location, for instance, of German chain discount supermarket Lidl.
“Architects discovered the remains of an 11th-century house during the development of the site on Aungier Street,” says the video from Irish broadcaster RTÉ above. “The sunken-floored structure has been preserved and is displayed beneath the glass.” Archaeological site director Paul Duffy described the discovery as potentially having “functioned as many things, as a house or an extra space for the family. It’s a domestic structure, so you have to imagine that there would have been a suburb here of Hiberno-Norse Dubliners, who were effectively the ancestors of the Vikings.”
We’re a long way indeed from James Joyce’s Dubliners of 900 years later. But the new Lidl has put more than one formerly buried era of the city’s past on display: “A second glass panel near the checkout tills allows shoppers to glimpse an 18th-century ‘pit trap’ from the stage of the old Aungier Street Theatre,” writes Irish Central’s Shane O’Brien, pit traps being devices “used to bring an actor on stage as if by magic. Another working area under the building preserves “the foundations of the medieval parish church of St. Peter, which served parishioners for more than 600 years between 1050 AD and 1650 AD.”
In the RTÉ video, Dublin City Archaeologist Ruth Johnson frames this as a challenge to the speed-oriented construction model — “put up a hoarding, excavate a site, and then put up a development” — prevalent during Ireland’s recent “Celtic Tiger” period of economic growth. That and other factors have made the built environment of Dublin, a city of many charms, less interesting than it could be. In his recent book Trans-Europe Express’ chapter on Dublin, critic Owen Hatherley writes that “contemporary Irish architecture is marked by a striking parsimony, a cheapness and carelessness in construction.” Looking to the past isn’t always the answer, of course, but in this case Lidl has done well to take it literally.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Jazz-Zither-Piano-Man Laraaji Discusses His Decades of Meditative Improvisations: A Nakedly Examined Music Podcast Conversation (#134)
Jazz multi-instrumentalist Edward Larry Gordon Jr. became Laraaji around the same time he started releasing meditative zither music in the late 70s and was then discovered by Brian Eno, who produced “The Dance No. 1” from Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980). Laraaji has since had around 40 releases of largely improvised music, and this interview (below) explores his approach toward improvisation on numerous instruments, playing “functional” music intended to aid meditation and reflection, and the evolution of Laraaji’s unique musical vision.
Each episode of Nakedly Examined Music features full-length presentations of four recordings discussed by the artist with your host Mark Linsenmayer. Here we present “Hold on to the Vision” and “Shenandoah” from Laraaji’s latest release, Sun Piano (2020), the single edit of “Introspection” from Bring On the Sun (2017), and “All of a Sudden,” a 1986 vocal tune released on Vision Songs, Vol. 1 (2017). Get more information at laraaji.blogspot.com.
Want more? Hear all of “The Dance No. 1.” Watch the live TV version of “All of a Sudden” we discuss, as well another episode of Celestrana featuring Dr. Love the puppet. Watch a similar, recent isolation stream also featuring Dr. Love and much more. Listen to the full glory of “Introspection” and the trip that is “Sun Gong.” Check out some live gong playing. Here’s a remix of “Introspection” by Dntel.
Find the archive of songwriter interviews at nakedlyexaminedmusic.com or get the ad-free feed at patreon.com/nakedlyexaminedmusic. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.
Nakedly Examined Music is a podcast. Mark Linsenmayer also hosts The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast and Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast, and releases music under the name Mark Lint.
Read More...The 100 Most Influential Photographs: Watch TIME’s Video Essays on Photos That Changed the World
We live in a culture oversaturated with images. Videos of violence and death circulate with disturbing regularity, only rarely rising to the level of mass public outrage. Social media and news feeds bombard us not only with distressing headlines but with photograph after photograph–doctored, memed, repeated, then discarded and forgotten. It’s impossible to do otherwise than to forget: the sheer volume of visual information most of us take in daily overwhelms the brain’s ability to sort and process.
As if insisting that we look and really see, the judges of the Pulitzer Prize have given the award for feature photography almost exclusively to images of tragedy in recent years. In most cases, the conflicts and disasters they depict have not gone away, they have only disappeared from headline news. Whether we can say that photography is losing its power to move and shock us in the overwhelming sea of visual noise is a subject for a much longer meditation. But I can think of few recent images comparable to those in the TIME 100 Photographs series.
Of course the saying “time will tell” isn’t just a pun here: we can only know if a photo will have historic impact in hindsight, but in nearly all of the 100 photos featured—which have been given their own mini-documentaries—the impact was immediate and galvanizing, inspiring action, activism, widespread, sorrow, anger, appreciation, or awe. The emotional resonance, in many cases, has only deepened over the decades.
The image of Emmett Till’s face, battered into unrecognizability, has not lost its power to shock and appall one bit. Although the specific context may now elude us, its details still mysterious, we can still be moved by Jeff Widener’s photograph of a defiant Chinese citizen facing down the tanks in Tiananmen Square. Alberto Korda’s 1960 portrait of Che Guevarra became not only iconic but a literal icon.
What will we see fifty, or 100, years from now, on the other hand, in “Oscars Selfie” (2014), by Bradley Cooper? The photo seems to me an eerily cheerful portent from the point-of-view of 2020, just a handful of years later, with its well-groomed, smiling, mask-less faces and lack of social distancing. It is an image of a genuinely simpler, or at least a profoundly more oblivious, time. And it was also just yesterday in the scale of TIME’s list, whose earliest photo dates to almost 200 years ago and happens to be the “first known permanent photograph.”
TIME itself, once a standard bearer for photojournalism, shows us how much our interaction with photography has changed. The so-called “turn to video” may have been mostly hype—we continue to read, listen to podcasts, and yes, pour over striking photographs obsessively. But hardly anything these days, it seems, can pass by without a mini-YouTube documentary. We may not need them to be emotionally moved by these photographs, yet taken altogether, these short videos offer “an unprecedented exploration,” writes TIME, of how “each spectacular image… changed the course of history.”
Watch all of the 21 short documentary videos currently available at TIME’s YouTube channel, with more, it seems, likely to come.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...What Caused the Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe?: A Brief Investigation into the Poet’s Demise 171 Years Ago Today
Edgar Allan Poe died 171 years ago today, but we still don’t know why. Of course, we all must meet our end sooner or later, as the literary master of the macabre would well have understood. His inclination toward the mysterious would have prepared him to believe as well in the power of questions that can never be answered. And so, perhaps, Poe would have expected that a death like his own — early, unexpected, and of finally undeterminable cause — would draw public fascination. But could even he have imagined it continuing to compel generation after generation of urban-legend and American-lore enthusiasts, whether or not they’ve read “The Raven” or “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
Poe’s end thus makes ideal material for Buzzfeed Unsolved, a video series whose other popular episodes include the death of Vincent van Gogh, the disappearance of D.B. Cooper, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In 25 minutes, “The Macabre Death Of Edgar Allan Poe” summarizes the writer’s remarkably unlucky life and gets into the detail of his equally unlucky death, beginning on September 27th, 1849, when “Poe left Richmond by steamer, stopping the next day in Baltimore. For the next five days, Poe’s whereabouts are unknown.” Then, on October 3rd, he was found “delirious, immobile, and dressed in shabby clothing” in “a gutter outside of a public house that was being used as a polling place.”
“Rapping at death’s chamber’s door, Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital that afternoon.” (The narration works in several such references to his writing.) “Assumed to be drunk, the weak and weary Poe was brought to a special room reserved for patients ill from intoxication.” Alas, “Poe never fully regained consciousness to be able to detail what had happened to him,” and expired on October 7th at the age of 40. The hosts examine several of the theories that attempt to explain what happened (nineteen of which we previously featured here on Open Culture): did a binge trigger his known physical intolerance of alcohol? Did he have a brain tumor? Did he get beaten up by his fiancée’s angry brothers? Was he a victim of “cooping”?
Cooping, a “violent form of voter fraud that was extremely common in Baltimore at that time,” involved roving gangs who “would kidnap a victim and force him to vote multiple times in a variety of disguises.” This jibes with the location and state in which Poe was found — and because “voters were often given some alcohol after voting as a celebration,” it also explains his apparent stupor. But none of the major theories actually contradict each other, and thus more than one could be true: “Edgar Allan Poe may very well have been beaten and kidnapped in a cooping scheme, sent into a stupor with alcohol after voting, and unable to recover due to a brain tumor.” However it happened, his death became a final story as enduring as — and even grimmer than — many of his tales of the grotesque.
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Download The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Stories as Free eBooks & Audio Books
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Dear Facebook, This is How You’re Breaking Democracy: A Former Facebook Insider Explains How the Platform’s Algorithms Polarize Our Society
Is this what we want? A post-truth world where toxicity and tribalism trump bridge building and consensus seeking? —Yaël Eisenstat
It’s an increasingly familiar occurrence.
A friend you’ve enjoyed reconnecting with in the digital realm makes a dramatic announcement on their social media page. They’re deleting their Facebook account within the next 24 hours, so shoot them a PM with your email if you’d like to stay in touch.
Such decisions used to be spurred by the desire to get more done or return to neglected pastimes such as reading, painting, and going for long unconnected nature walks.
These announcements could induce equal parts guilt and anxiety in those of us who depend on social media to get the word out about our low-budget creative projects, though being prone to Internet addiction, we were nearly as likely to be the one making the announcement.
For many, the break was temporary. More of a social media fast, a chance to reevaluate, rest, recharge, and ultimately return.
Legitimate concerns were also raised with regard to privacy. Who’s on the receiving end of all the sensitive information we’re offering up? What are they doing with it? Is someone listening in?
But in this election year, the decision to quit Facebook is apt to be driven by the very real fear that democracy as we know it is at stake.
Former CIA analyst, foreign service officer, and—for six months—Facebook’s Global Head of Elections Integrity Ops for political advertising, Yaël Eisenstat, addresses these preoccupations in her TED Talk, “Dear Facebook, This is How You’re Breaking Democracy,” above.
Eisenstat contrasts the civility of her past face-to-face ”hearts and minds”-based engagements with suspected terrorists and anti-Western clerics to the polarization and culture of hatred that Facebook’s algorithms foment.
As many users have come to suspect, Facebook rewards inflammatory content with amplification. Truth does not factor into the equation, nor does sincerity of message or messenger.
Lies are more engaging online than truth. As long as [social media] algorithms’ goals are to keep us engaged, they will feed us the poison that plays to our worst instincts and human weaknesses.
Eisenstat, who has valued the ease with which Facebook allows her to maintain relationships with far-flung friends, found herself effectively demoted on her second day at the social media giant, her title revised, and her access to high level meetings revoked. Her hiring appears to have been purely ornamental, a palliative ruse in response to mounting public concern.
As she remarked in an interview with The Guardian’s Ian Tucker earlier this summer:
They are making all sorts of reactive changes around the margins of the issues, [to suggest] that they are taking things seriously – such as building an ad library or verifying that political advertisers reside in the country in which they advertising – things they should have been doing already. But they were never going to make the fundamental changes that address the key systemic issues that make Facebook ripe for manipulation, viral misinformation and other ways that the platform can be used to affect democracy.
In the same interview she asserted that Facebook’s recently implemented oversight board is little more than an interesting theory that will never result in the total overhaul of its business model:
First of all, it’s another example of Facebook putting responsibility on someone else. The oversight board does not have any authority to actually address any of the policies that Facebook writes and enforces, or the underlying systemic issues that make the platform absolutely rife for disinformation and all sorts of bad behaviour and manipulation.
The second issue is: it’s basically an appeal process for content that was already taken down. The bigger question is the content that remains up. Third, they are not even going to be operational until late fall and, for a company that claims to move fast and break things, that’s absurd.
Nine minutes into her TED Talk, she offers concrete suggestions for things the Facebook brass could do if it was truly serious about implementing reform:
- Stop amplifying and recommending disinformation and bias-based hatred, no matter who is behind it—from conspiracy theorists to our current president.
- Discontinue personalization techniques that don’t differentiate between targeted political content and targeted ads for athletic footwear.
- Retrain algorithms to focus on a metrics beyond what users click or linger on.
- Implement safety features that would ensure that sensitive content is reviewed before it is allowed to go viral.
Hopefully viewers are not feeling maxed out on contacting their representatives, as government enforcement is Eisenstat’s only prescription for getting Facebook to alter its product and profit model. And that will require sustained civic engagement.
She supplements her TED Talk with recommendations for artificial intelligence engineer Guillaume Chaslot’s insider perspective op-ed “The Toxic Potential of YouTube’s Feedback Loop” and The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think by MoveOn.org’s former Executive Director, Eli Pariser.
Your clued-in Facebook friends have no doubt already pointed you to the documentary The Social Dilemma, which is now available on Netflix. Or perhaps to Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
Read the transcript of Yaël Eisenstat’s TED Talk here.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...A Long, Guided Tour of New York City Captured in Original Color Film (1937)
So much classic black and white footage has been digitally colorized recently, it’s hard to remember that the Eastman Kodak Company’s Kodachrome film debuted way back in 1935.
The above footage of New York City was shot by an unknown enthusiast in and around 1937.
Dick Hoefsloot, the Netherlands-based videographer who posted it to YouTube after tweaking it a bit for motion stabilization and speed-correction, is not averse to artificially coloring historic footage using modern software, but in this case, there was no need.
It was shot in color.
If things have a greenish cast, that’s owing to the film on which it was shot. Three-color film, which added blue to the red-green mix, was more expensive and more commonly used later on.
Hoefsloot’s best guess is that this film was shot by a member of a wealthy family. It’s confidently made, but also seems to be a home movie of sorts, given the presence of an older woman who appears a half dozen times on this self-guided tour of New York sites.
There’s plenty here that remains familiar: the Woolworth Building and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, trussed up Christmas trees propped against makeshift sidewalk stands, the New York Public Library’s lions, Patience and Fortitude.
Other aspects are more a matter of nostalgia.
Over in Times Square, Bulldog Drummond Comes Back starring John Barrymore was playing at the Criterion (now the site of a Gap store), while the Paramount Theater, now a Hard Rock Cafe, played host to True Confession with Barrymore and Carol Lombard.
Oysters were still food for the masses, though records show that locally harvested ones had been deemed too polluted for human consumption for at least a decade.
A bag of peanuts cost 15¢. A new Oldsmobile went for about $914 plus city tax.
Laundry could be seen strung between buildings (still can be on occasion), but people dressed up carefully for shopping trips and other excursions around town. Heaven forbid they step outside without a hat.
Though the Statue of Liberty makes an appearance, the film doesn’t depict the neighborhoods where new and established immigrants were known to congregate. Had the camera traveled uptown to the Apollo—by 1937, the largest employer of black theatrical workers in the country and the sole venue in the city in which they were hired for backstage positions—the overall composition would have proved less white.
The film, which was uploaded a little over a year ago, has recently attracted a fresh volley of attention, leading Hoefsloot to reissue his request for viewers to “refrain from (posting) political, religious or racist-related comments.”
In this fraught election year, we hope you will pardon a New Yorker for pointing out the legion of commenters flouting this polite request, so eager are they to fan the fires of intolerance by expressing a preference for the “way things used to be.”
With all due respect, there aren’t many people left who were present at the time, who can accurately recall and describe New York City in 1937. Our hunch is that those who can are not spending such time as remains rabble-rousing on YouTube.
So enjoy this historic window on the past, then take a deep breath and confront the present that’s revealing itself in the YouTube comments.
A chronological list of New York City sites and citizens appearing in this film circa 1937:
00:00 Lower Manhattan skyline seen from Brooklyn Heights Promenade
00:45 Staten Island steam ferry
01:05 RMS Carinthia
01:10 Old three-stack pass.ship, maybe USS Leviathan
01:28 One-stack pass.ship, name?
01:50 HAL SS Volendam or SS Veendam II
02:18 Westfield II steam ferry to Staten Island, built 1862?
02:30 Floyd Bennett Airfield, North Beach Air Service inc. hangar
02:43 Hoey Air Services hangar at F.B. Airfield
02:55 Ladies board monoplane, Stinson S Junior, NC10883, built 1931
03:15 Flying over New York: Central Park & Rockefeller Center
03:19 Empire State Building (ESB)
03:22 Chrysler building in the distance
03:26 Statue of Liberty island
03:30 Aircraft, Waco ZQC‑6, built 1936
03:47 Reg.no. NC16234 becomes readable
04:00 Arrival of the “Fly Eddie Lyons” aircraft
04:18 Dutch made Fokker 1, packed
04:23 Douglas DC3 “Dakota”, also packed, new
04:28 Green mono- or tri-engine aircraft, type?
04:40 DC3 again. DC3’s flew first on 17 Dec.1935
04:44 Back side of Woolworth Building
05:42 Broadway at Bowling Green
05:12 Brooklyn across East River, view from Pier 11
05:13 Water plane, Grumman G‑21A Goose
05:38 Street with bus, Standard Oil Building ®
05:40 Truck, model?
05:42 Broadway at Bowling Green
05:46 Old truck, “Engels”, model?
05:48 Flag USA with 48 stars!
05:50 Broadway at Bowling Green, DeStoto Sunshine cab 1936
05:52 Truck, “Bier Mard Bros”, model?
05:56 Ford Model AA truck 1930
05:58 Open truck, model?
06:05 Standard Oil Building
06:25 Bus 366 & Ford Model A 1930
06:33 South Street & Coenties Slip
06:45 Cities Service Building at 70 Pine St. right. Left: see 07:12
06:48 Small vessels in the East River
06:50 Owned by Harry F. Reardon
07:05 Shack on Coenties Slip, Pier 5
07:12 City Bank-Farmers Trust Building, 20 Exchange Place
07:15 Oyster bar, near Coenties Slip
07:19 South Street, looking North towards the old Seaman’s Church Institute
07:31 Holland America Line, Volendam‑I, built 1922
07:32 Chrysler Plymouth P2 De Luxe
07:34 Oyster vendor
08:05 Vendor shows oyster in pot
08:16 Wall st.; Many cars, models?
08:30 Looking down Wall st.
08:52 More cars, models?
09:00 Near the Erie Ferry, 1934/35 Ford s.48 De Luxe
09:02 Rows of Christmas tree sales, location?
09:15 Erie Railroad building, location? Quay 21? Taxi, model?
09:23 1934 Dodge DS
09:27 Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad
09:29 Clyde Mallory Lines
09:48 South end of West Side Highway
09:49, 10:08, 10:11, 10:45 Location?
10:25 Henry Hudson Parkway
11:30 George Washington Bridge without the Lower Level
12:07 Presbyterian Hospital, Washington Heights
12:15 Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research
12:49 New York Hospital at 68th St. & East River
13:14 ditto
13:35 ditto
13:42 Metropolitan Museum of Art
14:51 Rockefella Plaza & RCA building
16:33 Saint Patrick’s Cathedral
16:50 Public Library
17:24 Panoramic view, from ESB
17:45 RCA Building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza
18:16 Original Penn Station
19:27 Movie True Confession, rel. 24 Dec.1937
19:30 Sloppy Joes
20:12 Neon lights & Xmas
26:34 Herald Square
29:48 Police Emergency Service (B&W)
31:00 SS Normandie, French Line, Pier 88
32:06 RMS Queen Mary, White Star Line, Pier 92
32:43 Departure Queen Mary
33:45 Italian Line, Pier 84, Terminal, dd.1935
34:00 SS Conte Di Savoia, Italian Line, Pier 84
34:25 Peanut seller, near the piers
34:35 Feeding the pidgeons
34:52 SS Normandie, exterior & on deck
35:30 View from Pier 88
35:59 Interior
37:06 From Pier 88
37:23 Northern, Eastern, Southern or Western Prince, built 1929
37:32 Tug, William C. Gaynor
38:20 Departure
38:38 Blue Riband!
39:15 Tugs push Normandie into fairway
39:50 Under own steam.
40:00 Statue of Liberty
40:15 SS Normandie leaves NYC
View more of Dick Hoefsloot’s historic uploads on his YouTube channel.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...The Curious Death of Vincent van Gogh
The story of Vincent van Gogh’s suicide, like the removal of his ear, has been integral to his mythos for a long time, immortalized by Kirk Douglas in the final scene of Vincente Minnelli’s film Lust for Life and in the 1934 biographical novel of the same name by Irving Stone. We’ve all accepted this as brute historical fact, but, apparently, “it’s all bunk,” Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh wrote in a 2014 Vanity Fair article based on a decade of research for a new biography (Van Gogh: The Life).
“Though eagerly embraced by a public in love with a handful of memorable images and spellbound by the thought of an artist who would cut off his own ear,” the authors argue, “Stone’s suicide yarn was based on bad history, bad psychology, and, as a definitive new expert analysis makes clear, bad forensics.” An expert analysis, you say? Yes. the world’s biggest posthumous art star has become an unsolved mystery, the subject of a Buzzfeed video above, part a series that also includes Edgar Allan Poe, JFK, Jimmy Hoffa, and Natalie Wood.
Van Gogh’s suicide seems accepted as a fact by the Van Gogh Museum, at least according to their website, evidenced by the morbid gloom of his late letters to his brother. But Van Gogh wrote “not a word about his final days,” Smith and Naifeh point out, and he left behind no suicide note, “odd for a man who churned out letters so profligately.” A piece of writing found on him turned out to be an early draft of his last letter to Theo, which was “upbeat—even ebullient—about the future.” He had every reason to be, given the glowing success of his first show. “He had placed a large order for more paints only a few days before a bullet put a hole in his abdomen.”
The story of how the hole got there involves a then-16-year-old Paris pharmacist named René Secrétan, who cruelly bullied Van Gogh during his 1890 summer in Auvers. (He also sat for some paintings and a drawing.) His involvement explains the “studied silence” the community maintained after Van Gogh’s death. No one mentioned suicide, but no one would say much of anything else either. Secrétan became a wealthy banker and lived to see Kirk Douglas portray the eccentric artist he mocked as “Toto.” He later admitted to owning the gun that killed Van Gogh, but denied firing the shot.
The new evidence surrounding Van Gogh’s possible murder has been in the public eye for several years now, but it hasn’t made much of a dent in the Van Gogh suicide legend. Still, we must admit, that story has always made little sense. Even scholars at the Van Gogh museum privately admitted to the artist’s biographers that they had serious doubts about it. These were dismissed, they claimed, as being “too controversial.” Now that Van Gogh has become a YouTube true crime unsolved mystery, there’s no shutting the door on speculation about his untimely and tragic demise.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Discover the Longest Song in the World: A 639-Year Performance of the John Cage Composition Called “Organ/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible)”
In 2016, Laurie Anderson recreated the experience of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music in Saint Mark’s chapel in Brighton. The five-day-long performance piece involved “some eight unmanned guitars leaning on a similar number of vintage amps,” Mark Sheerin writes, all of them cranked up, feeding back, and echoing around the Anglican church’s vaulted ceiling. It was a fitting tribute to Reed, a sustained, dissonant drone that also invokes “the mysteries of faith and the incarnation of rebel angels.”
If five days seems like a long time to hold a single note, however, consider the performance of John Cage’s composition “ORGAN/ASLSP” or “A Slow as Possible” that began in the St. Burchardi church, in the German town of Halberstadt, on September 5th, 2001, what would have been Cage’s 89th birthday. The artists staging this piece intend it to last for 639 years. If the organ doesn’t fall apart and if a new generation of curators continues to take the place of the old, it will play until the year 2640.
Those are some big Ifs, but as long as it lasts, the piece should draw crowds every few years when a chord changes, as just happened recently, despite the pandemic, after the organ had played the same chord for almost 7 years. The change occurred on September 5th, 2020, Cage’s birthday, 19 years after the performance began. Lest we think its length insanely perverse, we should bear in mind that Cage himself never specified a tempo for “As Slow as Possible.” The score itself only “consists of eight pages of music, to be played,” writes Kyle Macdonald at Classic FM, “well, very, very slowly.”
Typically, organists and pianists have interpreted this direction within the space of an hour. Some have stretched single performances “up to, and beyond, 12 hours.” Obviously, no single person, or even team of people, could sustain playing the piece for 233,235 days. Nor, however, has the extreme slowness of the John Cage Organ Project version been made possible by digital means. Instead, a group of artists built a special pipe organ for the task. Each time a chord changes, new pipes are added manually. On Saturday, a masked crowd gathered “to see the G sharp and E notes meticulously installed.”
The organ is automated, by mechanical means. No one needs to sit and hold keys for several years. But can the long-term coordination needed to maintain this solemnly quixotic installation extend over six hundred years for a grand finale in 2640 (IF the organ, the church, and the planet, survive)? The question seems almost irrelevant since no one living can answer it with any degree of certainty. It depends on whether future generations see the St. Buruchardi “As Slow as Possible” as a phenomenon that should continue to exist. But why, we might ask, should it?
Maybe one way of thinking of the John Cage Organ Project is through the lens of the Long Now Project’s 10,000 Year Clock, a device being constructed (“no completion date scheduled”) to radically change humans’ relationship to time, to push us to think beyond—hundreds and thousands of years beyond—our meager lifetimes. Cage, I think, would appreciate the effort to turn his eight page composition into a musical manifestation of the future’s longue durée.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Fall of Civilizations Podcast Engagingly Explores the Collapse of Civilizations & Empires Throughout History
Now the country does not even boast a tree.
—Robert Browning, “Love Among the Ruins”
Every empire seems to think (as much as empires seem to think) that it will be the one to outlast them all. And all of them have ended up more or less the same way in the end. This isn’t just a gloomy fact of human history, it’s a fact of entropy, mortality, and the linear experience of time. If imperial rulers forget—begin to think themselves immortal—there have always been poets to remind them, though maybe not so directly. Epic poetry often legitimizes the founding of empires. Another form, the poetry of ruin, interprets their inevitable demise.
All the Romantics were doing it, and so too was an unknown 8th century British poet who encountered Roman ruins during the so-called “Dark Ages.” The poem they left behind “gives us a glimpse of a world of mystery,” says Paul Cooper above in episode one of his Fall of Civilizations podcast, which begins with Roman Britain and continues, in each subsequent (but not chronological) episode, to explore the collapse of empires around the world through literature and culture. “Every ruin,” says Cooper in an interview with the North Star Podcast, “is a place where a physical object was torn apart, and that happened because of some historical force.”
We are enthralled with ruins, though this can seem like the product of a distinctly modern sensibility—that of the poets who inhabited what novelist Rose Macaulay called in her 1953 study Pleasure of Ruins “a ruined and ruinous world.”
But as our Old English poet above demonstrates, the fascination predates Shakespeare and Marlowe. Cooper would know. He has dedicated his life to studying and writing about ruins, earning a PhD in their cultural and literary significance. Along the way, he has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Discover Magazine, and the BBC.
Cooper also began publishing one of the most intriguing Twitter feeds in 2017, detailing in “several nested threads” various “ruin-related thoughts and feelings,” as Shruti Ravindran writes at Timber Media. His tweets became so popular that he turned them into a podcast, and it is not your standard informally chatty podcast fare. Fall of Civilizations engages deeply with its subjects on their own terms, and avoids the sensationalist cliches of so much popular history. Cooper “knew, for certain, what he wanted to avoid,” when he began: the “focus on gruesome torture techniques, executions, and the sexcapades of nobles.”
“History writers often don’t trust their audience will be interested in the past if they don’t Hollywoodize it,” says Cooper. Instead, in the latest episode on the Byzantine Empire he recruits the choir from the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London, “and a number of musicians playing traditional Byzantine instruments such as the Byzantine lyra, the Qanun and the Greek Santur,” he explains. In his episode on the Han dynasty, Cooper looks back through “ancient Chinese poetry, songs and folk music” to the empire’s rise, “its remarkable technological advances, and its first, tentative attempts to make contact with the empires of the west.”
This is a rich journey through ancient history, guided by a master storyteller dedicated to taking ruins seriously. (Cooper has published a novel about ruins, River of Ink, “inspired by time spent in UNESCO sites in Sri Lanka,” Ravindran reports.) There is “love among the ruins,” wrote Robert Browning, and there is poetry and music and story and song—all of it brought to bear in Fall of Civilizations to “make sense about what must have happened,” says Cooper. Find more episodes, on fallen civilizations all around the world, on YouTube or head to Fall of Civilizations to subscribe through the podcast service of your choice.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch an Epic Drum Battle, Pitting a 9‑Year-Old Girl Against Foo Fighter Dave Grohl
Foo Fighter Dave Grohl, formerly of Nirvana, and Nandi Bushell, an Ipswich elementary schooler, have something in common besides their incredible command of the drums.
By all appearances, both seem to have benefited from being reared by grounded, encouraging parents.
Nandi, at 10, likely has a few more years under her folks’ roof despite her growing renown—she’s jammed with Lenny Kravitz, gone viral in last year’s Argos Christmas advert, and most recently, matched Grohl beat for beat in an epic drum battle, above.
Nandi demonstrated a natural rhythmic ear at an early age, bobbing along to the Teletubbies while still in diapers.
Of course, everything she’s achieved thus far can be considered to have occurred at an early age.
On the other hand, it was half a lifetime ago when her father, a software engineer and self-described “massive music fan” introduced the then-5-year-old to “Hey, Jude,” as part of a weekly tradition wherein he makes pancakes with his children while sharing YouTube links to favorite songs.
She was immediately taken with Ringo Starr, and the joy he exuded behind his kit.
Shortly thereafter, she passed a math exam, earning a trip to Toys “R” Us to pick out a promised treat. Her eye went immediately to a £25 kiddie drum set.
The plastic toy was a far cry from the professional kit she uses today, but she’s shown herself to be adaptable in a recent series of video tutorials for Daniel Bedingfield’s “Gonna Get Through This,” encouraging viewers who lack equipment to bang on whatever’s handy—colanders, pot lids, biscuit tins… She recommends kebab skewers tipped with cellophane tape for the stickless.
Her YouTube channel definitely reveals a preference for hard rock.
Her father, John, dislikes playing publicly, but occasionally accompanies her on guitar, hoping she’ll grow accustomed to playing with other people.
Documenting his daughter’s performances lies more within his comfort zone as he told Drum Talk TV in a very glitchy, early-pandemic virtual interview. Asked by host Dan Shinder to share tips for other parents of young drummers, particularly girls, he counsels exposing them to as many musical genres as possible, nurturing their desire to play, and resolving to have as much fun as possible.
It’s clear that Nandi is having a ball twirling her sticks and whaling on the drum part of Foo Fighters’ hit “Everlong,” in a video uploaded last month.
Grohl got wind of the video and the challenge contained therein.
He took the bait, responding with an “epic” video of his own, playing a set of drums borrowed from his 11-year-old daughter:
I haven’t played that song since the day I recorded it in 1997, but Nandi, in the last week I’ve gotten at least 100 texts from people all over the world saying ‘This girl is challenging you to a drum-off, what are you going to do?’
Look, I’ve seen all your videos. I’ve seen you on TV. You’re an incredible drummer. I’m really flattered that you picked some of my songs… and you’ve done them all perfectly. So today, I’m gonna give you something you may not have heard before. This is a song called “Dead End Friends” from a band called Them Crooked Vultures… now the ball is in your court.
(Fast forward to the final thirty seconds if you want to see the ultimate in happy dances.)
The young challenger calls upon the rock Gods of old—Bonzo, Baker, Peart, Moon—to back her side for “THE GREATEST ROCK BATTLE IN THE HISTORY OF ROCK!!!”
(In addition to drum lessons, and participation in the Ipswich Rock Project and junior jam sessions, it looks like her acting classes at Stagecoach Performing Arts Ipswich are so paying off.)
Five days after Grohl threw down his gauntlet, she’s back on her drum throne, clad in a preteen version of Grohl’s buffalo check shirt and black pants, her snare bearing the legend “Grohl rocks.”
That sentiment would surely please Grohl’s mother, Virginia, author of From Cradle to Stage: Stories from the Mothers Who Rocked and Raised Rock Stars.
A born entertainer in his mother’s opinion, Grohl didn’t take up music until he was around the age Nandi is now, after which it monopolized his focus and energy, leading to a disastrous 6th grade report card.
Rather than freaking out about general education dips, Virginia, a public school teacher, was supportive when the opportunity arose for him to tour Europe at 17 with the Washington, DC band Scream after the departure of drummer Kent Stax.
Wise move. Her son may be a high school drop-out, but he’s using his fame to shine a spotlight on the concerns of teachers, who are essential workers in his view. Check out his essay in The Atlantic, in which he writes that he wouldn’t trust the U.S. Secretary of Percussion to tell him how to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” if they had never sat behind a drum set:
It takes a certain kind of person to devote their life to this difficult and often-thankless job. I know because I was raised in a community of them. I have mowed their lawns, painted their apartments, even babysat their children, and I’m convinced that they are as essential as any other essential workers. Some even raise rock stars! Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Adam Levine, Josh Groban, and Haim are all children of school workers (with hopefully more academically rewarding results than mine).
He’s also leaving time in his schedule for another drum battle:
Ok, @Nandi_Bushell .…..you win round one.…but it ain’t over yet! Buckle up, cuz I have something special in mind…
Stay tuned, Dave https://t.co/THyApmHHep — Foo Fighters (@foofighters) September 4, 2020
Watch more of Nandi Bushell’s drum and guitar covers on her parent-monitored YouTube channel.
Related Content:
The Fundamentals of Jazz & Rock Drumming Explained in Five Creative Minutes
The Case for Why Ringo Starr Is One of Rock’s Greatest Drummers
The Neuroscience of Drumming: Researchers Discover the Secrets of Drumming & The Human Brain
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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