Amazing Miniature Sculptures of New York City Landmarks: CBGB, Katz’s Deli, Vesuvio Bakery & More
If you’re near Pasadena, California, stop by the Flower Pepper Gallery and see Facade, the new exhibition featuring the work of visual artist Randy Hage. For decades now, Hage has been fascinated by the beauty of aging structures in New York City. This led him, beginning in the late 1990s, to start photographing aging storefronts in the city, “with their hand painted signs, layers of architecture, wonderful patinas and intriguing history.” Later, he decided to preserve their memory in miniaturized, hyper-realistic sculptures (like the ones now on display in Pasadena through November 18th). In the video above, see just how perfectly Hage manages to recreate New York storefronts in miniature. Here’s another famous-but-now-defunct facade you might recognize:
To take a closer look at his work, visit Hage’s Instagram page where you will see mini sculptures of fading New York institutions like Katz’s Deli, CBGB, McSorley’s Old Ale House, Vesuvio Bakery, and more.
via SuperSonic Art/BoingBoing
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Read More...Innovative Film Visualizes the Destruction of World War II: Now Available in 7 Languages
Back in June we highlighted Neil Halloran’s 15 minute film, The Fallen of World War II, which used “innovative data visualization techniques to put the human cost of WW II into perspective, showing how some 70 million lives were lost within civilian and military populations across Europe and Asia, from 1939 to 1945.” It’s a pretty staggering illustration of the deadliest war. As the film went viral, Halloran raised money that would enable him to develop new films exploring “other trends of war and peace — from drones and terrorism to democracy and peacekeeping.” He has also translated the film into six different languages. They all went online in the last few weeks. Here they are: Russian, Japanese, Polish, French, German, and Serbian.
Above, you can watch the original in English (certainly worth doing if you were vacationing in June), and you might also explore the accompanying interactive web site here.
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Read More...How a Virus Invades Your Body: An Eye-Popping, Animated Look
It’s getting close to that time of the year again, when the flu starts to wreak havoc. And so, with the help of NPR’s Robert Krulwich and medical animator David Bolinsky, we’re taking an animated look at what actually happens when a virus invades your body and tricks a single cell into making a million more viruses, and how your immune system eventually deals with the whole mess. It’s a nice demystification of phenomena that affects our everyday lives. If you feel inclined to get a flu shot after watching this clip, I can’t say that I blame you.
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Read More...Fantastic Mr. Fox Meets The Shining in an Animated, Cautionary Tale About Consumerism
In this short stop-motion film, Alexandra Lemay draws some creative inspiration from Wes Anderson and Stanley Kubrick and leaves us with a “cautionary tale of what happens when we don’t think enough about what we buy.” Produced as part of the National Film Board of Canada’s Hothouse apprenticeship program, All the Rage follows a mink’s experience shopping in a luxury fur store. It’s perhaps not too much of a spoiler to say, it doesn’t end well. Lemay tells you more about the making of the film here. And don’t miss the many great films in the Animation section of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Read More...The Syrian Conflict & The European Refugee Crisis Explained in an Animated Primer
In a quick six minutes, the animation above explains the origins of two very related problems — the Syrian Conflict & the European Refugee Crisis. How did the crisis first erupt? How did it lead to a refugee crisis? And why should we why put xenophobic fears aside and provide refugees with a safe haven in the West? All of these questions get addressed by “Kurzgesagt” (“in a nutshell” in German), whose timely animations you can find on Youtube (including a separate video on the rise of ISIS in Iraq).
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Read More...The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps Podcast, Now at 370 Episodes, Expands into Eastern Philosophy
Perhaps you’ve heard of a phenomenon called “podfade,” wherein a podcast — particularly an ambitious podcast — begins by putting out episodes regularly, then misses one or two, then lets more and more time elapse between each episode, one day ceasing to update entirely. It pleases us to report that The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, the podcast offering just that, on whose progress we’ve kept you posted over the past three years, not only shows no signs of podfade, but has even broadened its mandate to include a greater variety of philosophical traditions than before.
For those who haven’t heard the show, The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps comes from Peter Adamson, philosophy professor at Ludwig Maximilians University Munich and King’s College London, and “looks at the ideas, lives and historical context of the major philosophers as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition.”
The main show has put out 379 episodes so far, beginning with the pre-Socratics (specifically Thales) and most recently examining Franciscan poverty, and now a new branch has grown, starting from Adamson and collaborator Jonardon Ganeri’s introduction to Indian Philosophy. (Hear the first episode of the Indian Philosophy series below.)
Episodes of this new series on the Indian tradition, Adamson writes, “will appear in alternating weeks with episodes on European philosophy.” He also mentions a “further ambition to cover the other philosophical traditions of Asia (especially Chinese) and also African philosophy and the philosophy of the African diaspora, but of course India will take a while so you’ll have to be patient if you are waiting for me to get to that!”
You can subscribe to The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps’ Indian philosophy series on its very own podcast RSS feed, or on iTunes here. Philosophically-minded binge-listeners beware; you could lose a lot of time to these two shows. “I’ve been doing my laundry to it for months and I’m only up to Maimonides,” says one commenter on a Metafilter thread about the new series. “I am totally not ready for this Patañjali.”
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Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch Online The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodor Dreyer (1928)
Sit back and enjoy The Passion of Joan of Arc, a 1928 silent film based on the historical record of the trial of Joan of Arc. Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer and starring Renée Jeanne Falconetti, the film is considered a landmark of cinema. In fact, in the BFI’s poll of 846 critics, it was voted the 8th best film of all time.
Find more classic films in our meta collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Read More...The Solar System Drawn Amazingly to Scale Across 7 Miles of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert
Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh set out to create something you’ve never seen before — our solar system drawn to actual scale. Forget what you’ve seen in books, or on web sites. To depict things accurately, you need a bigger surface. A really large canvas. Like a seven-mile expanse in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert (which otherwise hosts The Burning Man Festival). It’s on this dry lakebed that Overstreet and Gorosh built “the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits” and it’s a sight to behold. Creative, industrious, and humbling. Enjoy.
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Read More...Mark Twain Skewers Great Works of Art: The Mona Lisa (“a Smoked Haddock!”), The Last Supper (“a Mournful Wreck”) & More
Some of the U.S.‘s greatest secular sages also happen to be some of its greatest cranks, contrarians, and critics. I refer to a category that includes Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, and Hunter S. Thompson. The many differences between these characters don’t eclipse a fundamental similarity: not a one embraced any of the usual pieties about the inherent, infallible greatness of Western Civilization, though each one in his own way made a significant contribution to the Western canon. We would be greatly remiss if we did not include among them perhaps the greatest American satirist of all, Mark Twain.
Twain skewered all comers, usually with such wit and invention that we smile and nod even when we feel the sting ourselves. Such was his talent, to deflate puffery in Western literature, politics, religion, and… as we will see, in art. “Throughout his career”—writes UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library—“Twain expressed his strong reactions to Western painting and sculpture, particularly the Old Masters, both in his published works and in private.” He offered up some hilariously irreverent takes on some of the most revered works of art in history: “his opinions are often passionate, sometimes eccentric, and always lively.” Take for example Twain’s tepid assessment of that most recognizable of Renaissance masterpieces, the Mona Lisa. In an unpublished draft called “The Innocents Adrift,” an account of an 1891 boat trip down the Rhone River, Twain “admitted to being puzzled by the adulation accorded” the painting.
To Twain, the Mona Lisa seemed “merely a good representation of a serene & subdued face… The complexion was bad; in fact it was not even human; there are no people of that color.” The painting’s greenish hue prompted one of Twain’s companions, possibly an invention of the author’s, to exclaim in response, “that smoked haddock!” “After some discussion,” write the UC Berkeley librarians, “the travelers concede that it requires a ‘trained eye’ to appreciate certain aspects of art.” Such training in art appreciation seemed to Twain as much genuine education as instruction in studied, insincere poses.
The author took his first “grand tour” in 1867—travelling through Europe and the Levant on the cruise ship Quaker City in the company of many “prosperous—and very proper—passengers.” Unlike these bourgeois travelling companions’ “conventional appreciation for all that they saw,” Twain—writing as a correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California—confessed himself underwhelmed. In particular, he described another Da Vinci, The Last Supper—“the most celebrated painting in the world”—as a “mournful wreck.” (The work was then unrestored; see it above as it looked 100 years later in the 1970s.) Twain later revised his observations for his first full-length book, 1869’s Innocents Abroad, a caricature of ugly American tourists filled with what William Dean Howells called “delicious impudence.” While the others marveled at Da Vinci’s crumbling fresco, Twain, in the current parlance, expressed a great big “meh.”
The world seems to have become settled in the belief, long ago, that it is not possible for human genius to outdo this creation of Da Vinci’s.… The colors are dimmed with age; the countenances are scaled and marred, and nearly all expression is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon the wall, and there is no life in the eyes.… I am satisfied that the Last Supper was a very miracle of art once. But it was three hundred years ago.
Twain and the professional critics did not always disagree. Take J.M.W. Turner’s famously riotous canvas Slave Ship (or Slavers Overthrowing the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Coming On), above. John Ruskin may have praised the work as the “noblest sea… ever painted by man” and it has come down to us as a violent representation of the horrors of the slave trade, occasioned in part, writes Stephen J. May, by Turner’s sense of “shared guilt about his own role and England’s role in condoning and perpetuating slavery’s malevolent legacy.” The anti-slavery, anti-imperialist Twain would surely have appreciated the sentiment; the painting, however, not so much. Other critics felt similarly, one calling Slave Ship a “gross outrage on nature.” Twain’s summation in an 1878 notebook is much more colorful, a piece of vintage Samuel Clemens undercutting: “Slave Ship—Cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes.”
For all his snide portraits of conventional middle-class attitudes toward art, Twain could also be a bit of a prig, as we see in his response to Titian’s Venus of Urbino. In this, he was not so far removed from our own cultural attitudes (or Facebook and Google’s attitudes) about nudity. The censored version of the painting above (see the original here) comes to us via Buzzfeed, who write “Remember kids, blood and gore are fine but boobs will make you blind.” Twain seemed to have unironically agreed, railing in his 1880 travel book A Tramp Abroad against the “indecent license” afforded artists and calling Titian’s suggestive reclining nude “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses.” (Ah, if only he had lived to see the internet’s foulest depths.)
Twain’s own meager contributions to the visual arts—consisting of a dozen sketches, like that above, made for A Tramp Abroad—fall somewhat short of the standards he set for other artists. Nevertheless, he recalled in The Innocents Abroad his dismay at the “acres of very bad drawing, very bad perspective, and very incorrect proportions” in the museums and churches across Europe. What, we might wonder, could possibly move such a harsh, unsparing critic? In art, it seems, Twain valued “strict realism, grandeur of theme and scale, and propriety”—all on display in abundance in American artist Frederic Edwin Church’s The Heart of the Andes, below.
After viewing this idealized South American landscape in St. Louis, Twain called the enormous (over five feet high by ten feet wide) canvas a “most wonderfully beautiful painting.” “We took the opera glasses,” he wrote to his brother, “and examined its beauties minutely…. There is no slurring of perspective about it.” He recommended multiple viewings: “Your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in… and understand how such a miracle could have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands.”
Twain, won over by this sublime spectacle, seems to have temporarily surrendered his critical faculties. In reading his response, I found myself wanting to egg him on: C’mon, what about this soft, gauzy lighting, those lumpy mountains, and the kitschy, overly-sentimental look of the whole thing? But there was room enough in Twain’s critical arsenal for genuine awe as for amused contempt at what he saw as phony expressions of the same. And that breadth of character is what made Mark Twain, well, Mark Twain.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Thomas Dolby Potty Trains His Cat, and There’s Video Proof
One of our favorite curiosities is the The Charles Mingus CAT-alogue for Toilet Training Your Cat–a pamphlet written by the mercurial jazz musician that offers step-by-step advice on how to get your cat to use the loo. The one thing Mingus didn’t provide is video proof that it could actually be done.
That’s where another musician steps in. Above, we have video of Thomas Dolby’s cat, “Mozart,” in action. Dolby, best known for his 1982 hit “She Blinded Me with Science,” is a teacher at heart. The son of an Oxford and Cambridge don, he’s now the Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University. And, on his Youtube channel, he explains how he pulled off the seemingly impossible:
This is my cat Mozart, a Cornish Rex, peeing on the toilet. Many believed this was not possible, but it’s 100% real. When he was a kitten we tried to teach him to use the toilet, using a DVD. We thought it was a no go. But then aged about 3 he suddenly started to do it. Now sometimes when I get up in the night to pee Mo nips in ahead of me and I have to wait till he’s done. Next we need to teach him to flush! ~TD
If anyone is familiar with the DVD he’s referencing, please identify it in the comments below.
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