Jon Kabat-Zinn Presents an Introduction to Mindfulness (and Explains Why Our Lives Just Might Depend on It)

in Health, Life | April 28th, 2022

The prac­tice of cul­ti­vat­ing mind­ful­ness through med­i­ta­tion first took root in Europe and the U.S. in the 1960s, when Bud­dhist teach­ers from Japan, Tibet, Viet­nam, and else­where left home, often under great duress, and taught West­ern stu­dents hun­gry for alter­na­tive forms of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. Though pop­u­lar­ized by coun­ter­cul­tur­al fig­ures like Alan Watts and Allen Gins­berg, the prac­tice did­n’t seem at first like it might reach those who seemed to need it most — stressed out denizens of the cor­po­rate world and mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex who had­n’t changed their con­scious­ness with mind-alter­ing drugs, or left the cul­ture to become monas­tics.

Then pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine Jon Kabat-Zinn came along, stripped away reli­gious and new age con­texts, and began redesign­ing mind­ful­ness for the mass­es in 1979 with his mind­ful­ness-based stress reduc­tion (MBSR) pro­gram. Now every­one knows, or thinks they know, what mind­ful­ness is. As med­i­ta­tion teacher Lokad­hi Lloyd tells The Guardian, Kabat-Zinn is “Mr Mind­ful­ness in rela­tion to our sec­u­lar strand. With­out him, I don’t think mind­ful­ness would have risen to the promi­nence it has.”

His sec­u­lar­iza­tion of mind­ful­ness, how­ev­er, has not, in prac­ti­cal terms, tak­en it very far from its roots, which explains why Kabat-Zin­n’s ground­break­ing 1990 book Full Cat­a­stro­phe Liv­ing receives high praise from Bud­dhist teach­ers like Joseph Gold­stein, Sharon Salzburg, and Kabat-Zin­n’s own for­mer Zen teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh.

While Kabat-Zinn says he him­self is not (or is no longer) a Bud­dhist, his def­i­n­i­tions of mind­ful­ness might sound just close enough to those who study and prac­tice the reli­gion. As he says in the short seg­ment at the top: “It’s pay­ing atten­tion, on pur­pose, in the present moment, non-judg­men­tal­ly.” And then, “some­times,” he says, “I like to add, as if your life depend­ed on it.” The qual­i­ty of our lives, the clar­i­ty of our lives, and the depth and rich­ness of our lives depend on our abil­i­ty to be aware of what’s hap­pen­ing around and inside us. This abil­i­ty, Kabat-Zinn insists, is the inher­i­tance of all human beings. It can be found in spir­i­tu­al prac­tices around the world. No one owns a patent on aware­ness.

Nev­er­the­less, Kabat-Zinn is par­tic­u­lar­ly leery of what he calls McMind­ful­ness, the com­mod­i­ty-dri­ven indus­try sell­ing col­or­ing books, apps, puz­zles, t‑shirts, and nov­el­ties tout­ing mind­ful ben­e­fits. Mind­ful­ness based stress reduc­tion is “not a trick,” he says. It isn’t some­thing we buy and try out here and there. “MBSR is exceed­ing­ly chal­leng­ing,” Kabat-Zinn writes in Full Cat­a­stro­phe Liv­ing. “In many ways, being in the present moment with a spa­cious ori­en­ta­tion toward what is hap­pen­ing may real­ly be the hard­est work in the world for us humans. At the same time, it is also infi­nite­ly doable.” It can also be high­ly unpleas­ant, forc­ing us to sit with the things we’d rather ignore about our­selves. Why should we do it? We might con­sid­er the alter­na­tives.

MBSR began (“in the base­ment of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts Med­ical Cen­ter,” notes NPR) help­ing patients with chron­ic pain recov­er. It proved so effec­tive, Kabat-Zinn applied the insight more glob­al­ly — “using the wis­dom of your body and mind to face stress, pain, and ill­ness.” This is not a cure-all, but a way of liv­ing that reduces unnec­es­sary suf­fer­ing caused by over­ac­tive dis­cur­sive think­ing, which traps us in pat­terns of blame, shame, fear, regret, judg­ment, and self-crit­i­cism (illus­trat­ed in Scot­tish psy­chol­o­gist R.D. Laing’s book of neu­rot­ic nar­ra­tives, Knots) — traps us, that is, in sto­ries about the past and future, which affect our phys­i­cal and men­tal health, our work, and our rela­tion­ships.

The med­ical evi­dence for mind­ful­ness has only begun to catch up with Kabat-Zin­n’s work, yet it weighs heav­i­ly on the side of the out­comes he has seen for over 40 years. MBSR also comes high­ly rec­om­mend­ed by Har­vard neu­ro­sci­en­tist Sara Lazar and trau­ma expert Bessel Van Der Kok, among so many oth­ers who have done the research. The evi­dence is why, as you can see in the longer pre­sen­ta­tions above at Dart­mouth and Google, Kabat-Zinn has become some­thing of an evan­ge­list for mind­ful­ness. “If this is anoth­er fad, I don’t want to have any part of it,” he says. “If in the past 50 years I had found some­thing more mean­ing­ful, more heal­ing, more trans­for­ma­tive and with more poten­tial social impact, I would be doing that.”

As Kabat-Zin­n’s 2005 book, Wher­ev­er You Go, There You Are, shows, we can bring what hap­pens in med­i­ta­tion into our every­day life, let­ting assump­tions go, and “let­ting life become both the med­i­ta­tion teacher and the prac­tice, moment by moment, no mat­ter what aris­es,” he tells Mind­ful mag­a­zine. This isn’t about escap­ing into blissed out moments of Zen. It’s fos­ter­ing “deep con­nec­tions,” over and over again, with our­selves, fam­i­lies, friends, com­mu­ni­ties, the plan­et we live on, and, in turn, “the future that we’re bequeath­ing to our future gen­er­a­tions.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

How Mind­ful­ness Makes Us Hap­pi­er & Bet­ter Able to Meet Life’s Chal­lenges: Two Ani­mat­ed Primers Explain

De-Mys­ti­fy­ing Mind­ful­ness: A Free Online Course by Lei­den Uni­ver­si­ty 

Stream 18 Hours of Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions

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

An Online Archive of Beautiful, Early 20th Century Japanese Postcards

in Archives, Art, History, Museums | April 28th, 2022

The world thinks of Japan as hav­ing trans­formed itself utter­ly after its defeat in the Sec­ond World War. And indeed it did, into what by the nine­teen-eight­ies looked like a gleam­ing, tech­nol­o­gy-sat­u­rat­ed con­di­tion of ultra-moder­ni­ty. But the stan­dard ver­sion of moder­ni­ty, as con­ceived of in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry with its trains, tele­phones, and elec­tric­i­ty, came to Japan long before the war did. “Between 1900 and 1940, Japan was trans­formed into an inter­na­tion­al, indus­tri­al, and urban soci­ety,” writes Muse­um of Fine Arts Boston cura­tor Anne Nishimu­ra Morse. “Post­cards — both a fresh form of visu­al expres­sion and an impor­tant means of adver­tis­ing — reveal much about the dra­mat­i­cal­ly chang­ing val­ues of Japan­ese soci­ety at the time.”

These words come from the intro­duc­to­ry text to the MFA’s 2004 exhi­bi­tion “Art of the Japan­ese Post­card,” curat­ed from an archive you can vis­it online today. (The MFA has also pub­lished it in book form.) You can browse the vin­tage Japan­ese post­cards in the MFA’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tions in themed sec­tions like archi­tec­ture, women, adver­tis­ing, New Year’s, Art Deco, and Art Nou­veau.

These rep­re­sent only a tiny frac­tion of the post­cards pro­duced in Japan in the first decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, when that new medi­um “quick­ly replaced the tra­di­tion­al wood­block print as the favored tableau for con­tem­po­rary Japan­ese images. Hun­dreds of mil­lions of post­cards were pro­duced to meet the demands of a pub­lic eager to acquire pic­tures of their rapid­ly mod­ern­iz­ing nation.”

The ear­li­est Japan­ese post­cards “were dis­trib­uted by the gov­ern­ment in con­nec­tion with the Rus­so-Japan­ese War (1904–5), to pro­mote the war effort. Almost imme­di­ate­ly, how­ev­er, many of Japan’s lead­ing artists — attract­ed by the infor­mal­i­ty and inti­ma­cy of the post­card medi­um — began to cre­ate stun­ning designs.” The work of these artists is col­lect­ed in a ded­i­cat­ed sec­tion of the online archive, where you’ll find post­cards by the com­mer­cial graph­ic-design pio­neer Sug­uira Hisui; the French-edu­cat­ed, high­ly West­ern-influ­enced Asai Chi; the mul­ti­tal­ent­ed Ota Saburo, known as the illus­tra­tor of Kawa­ba­ta Yasunar­i’s The Scar­let Gang of Asakusa; and Nakaza­wa Hiromit­su, cre­ator of the “div­er girl” long well-known among Japan­ese-art col­lec­tors.

Sur­pris­ing­ly, Nakaza­wa’s div­er girl (also known as the “mer­maid,” but most cor­rect­ly as “Hero­ine Mat­suza­ke” of a pop­u­lar play at the time) seems not to have been among the pos­ses­sions of cos­met­ics bil­lion­aire and art col­lec­tor Leonard A. Laud­er, who donat­ed more than 20,000 Japan­ese selec­tions from his vast post­card col­lec­tion to the MFA. “In 1938 or ’39, a boy of five or six, or maybe sev­en, was so enthralled by the beau­ty of a post­card of the Empire State Build­ing that he took his entire five-cent allowance and bought five of them,” writes the New York­er’s Judith H. Dobrzyn­s­ki. The young­ster thrilling to the paper image of a sky­scraper was, of course, Laud­er — who could­n’t have known how much, in that moment, he had in com­mon with the equal­ly moder­ni­ty-intox­i­cat­ed peo­ple on the oth­er side of the world.

via Flash­bak

Relat­ed con­tent:

Adver­tise­ments from Japan’s Gold­en Age of Art Deco

Vin­tage 1930s Japan­ese Posters Artis­ti­cal­ly Mar­ket the Won­ders of Trav­el

Glo­ri­ous Ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

An Eye-Pop­ping Col­lec­tion of 400+ Japan­ese Match­box Cov­ers: From 1920 through the 1940s

View 103 Dis­cov­ered Draw­ings by Famed Japan­ese Wood­cut Artist Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

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.

A Whirlwind Architectural Tour of the New York Public Library–“Hidden Details” and All

in Architecture, History | April 27th, 2022

The New York Pub­lic Library opened in 1911, an age of mag­nif­i­cence in Amer­i­can city-build­ing. Eigh­teen years before that, writes archi­tect-his­to­ri­an Witold Rybczyn­s­ki, “Chicago’s Columbian Expo­si­tion pro­vid­ed a real and well-pub­li­cized demon­stra­tion of how the unruly Amer­i­can down­town could be tamed though a part­ner­ship of clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture, urban land­scap­ing, and hero­ic pub­lic art.” Mod­eled after Europe’s urban civ­i­liza­tion, the “White City” built on the ground of the Columbian Expo­si­tion inspired a gen­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can archi­tects and plan­ners includ­ing John Nolen, Fred­er­ick Law Olm­st­ed, Jr., and John Car­rère, co-design­er of the New York Pub­lic Library.

Car­rère appears in the Archi­tec­tur­al Digest tour video of the NYPL build­ing above — or at least his bust does, promi­nent­ly placed as it is on the land­ing of one of the grand stair­cas­es lead­ing up from the main entrance. The stair­cas­es are mar­ble, as is much of else; when the NYPL opened after nine years of con­struc­tion, so the tour’s nar­ra­tion informs us, it did so as the largest mar­ble-clad struc­ture in the coun­try.

On the sound­track we have not just one guide, but three: NYPL vis­i­tor vol­un­teer pro­gram man­ag­er Kei­th Glut­ting, design his­to­ri­an Judith Gura, and archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Paul Ranoga­jec. Togeth­er they tell the sto­ry of this ven­er­a­ble Amer­i­can build­ing, and also point out the “hid­den details” that a vis­i­tor might not oth­er­wise notice.

Take the ter­race on which the whole build­ing stands, a fea­ture of the Euro­pean vil­la and palace tra­di­tion. Or the murals depict­ing the his­to­ry of the writ­ten word from Moses’ stone tablets on down. Or the pneu­mat­ic tubes, arti­facts of the ana­log infor­ma­tion-tech­nol­o­gy sys­tem in use before the NYPL com­put­er­ized in the nine­teen-sev­en­ties. Or the ren­der­ing of the world in the library’s for­mi­da­ble map room that mis­tak­en­ly depicts Cal­i­for­nia as an island (not that every New York­er would dis­agree). The video also includes oth­er, even less­er-seen won­ders both old and new, from a 1455 Guten­berg Bible — the first in the New World — to the auto­mat­ed trol­ley sys­tem that brings books out of the stacks. But it is the build­ing itself that inspires won­der, its extrav­a­gant solid­i­ty and detail that hark back to a time of con­sen­sus, how­ev­er brief, that noth­ing was too good for ordi­nary peo­ple.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Announces the Top 10 Checked-Out Books of All Time

Watch 52,000 Books Get­ting Reshelved at The New York Pub­lic Library in a Short, Time­lapse Film

The New York Pub­lic Library Pro­vides Free Online Access to Banned Books: Catch­er in the Rye, Stamped & More

The New York Pub­lic Library Unveils a Cut­ting-Edge Train That Deliv­ers Books

The “Weird Objects” in the New York Pub­lic Library’s Col­lec­tions: Vir­ginia Woolf’s Cane, Charles Dick­ens’ Let­ter Open­er, Walt Whitman’s Hair & More

The New York Pub­lic Library Cre­ates a List of 125 Books That They Love

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.

The History of Birth Control: From Alligator Dung to The Pill

in Gender, Health, History, Politics, Religion | April 25th, 2022

The his­to­ry of birth con­trol is almost as old as the his­to­ry of the wheel.

Pes­saries dat­ing to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt pro­vide the launch­ing pad for doc­u­men­tar­i­an Lind­say Hol­i­day’s overview of birth con­trol through­out the ages and around the world.

Holiday’s His­to­ry Tea Time series fre­quent­ly delves into women’s his­to­ry, and her pledge to donate a por­tion of the above video’s ad rev­enue to Pathfind­er Inter­na­tional serves as reminder that there are parts of the world where women still lack access to afford­able, effec­tive, and safe means of con­tra­cep­tion.

One goal of the World Health Organization’s End­ing Pre­ventable Mater­nal Mor­tal­i­ty ini­tia­tive is for 65% of women to be able to make informed and empow­ered deci­sions regard­ing sex­u­al rela­tions, con­tra­cep­tive use, and their repro­duc­tive health by 2025.

As Hol­i­day points out, expense, social stig­ma, and reli­gious edicts have impact­ed ease of access to birth con­trol for cen­turies.

The fur­ther back you go, you can be cer­tain that some meth­ods advo­cat­ed by mid­wives and med­i­cine women have been lost to his­to­ry, owing to unrecord­ed oral tra­di­tion and the sen­si­tive nature of the infor­ma­tion.

Hol­i­day still man­ages to truf­fle up a fas­ci­nat­ing array of prac­tices and prod­ucts that were thought — often erro­neous­ly — to ward off unwant­ed preg­nan­cy.

Some that worked and con­tin­ue to work to vary­ing degrees, include bar­ri­er meth­ods, con­doms, and more recent­ly the IUD and The Pill.

Def­i­nite­ly NOT rec­om­mend­ed: with­draw­al, hold­ing your breath dur­ing inter­course, a post-coital sneez­ing reg­i­men, douch­ing with Lysol or Coca-Cola, tox­ic cock­tails of lead, mer­cury or cop­per salt, any­thing involv­ing alli­ga­tor dung, and slug­ging back water that’s been used to wash a corpse.

As for sil­phi­um, an herb that like­ly did have some sort of sper­mi­ci­dal prop­er­ties, we’ll nev­er know for sure. By 1 CE, demand out­stripped sup­ply of this rem­e­dy, even­tu­al­ly wip­ing it off the face of the earth despite increas­ing­ly astro­nom­i­cal prices. Fun fact: sil­phi­um was also used to treat sore throat, snakebite, scor­pi­on stings, mange, gout, quin­sy, epilep­sy, and anal warts

The his­to­ry of birth con­trol can be con­sid­ered a semi-secret part of the his­to­ry of pros­ti­tu­tion, fem­i­nism, the mil­i­tary, obscen­i­ty laws, sex edu­ca­tion and atti­tudes toward pub­lic health.

From Mar­garet Sanger and the 60,000 women exe­cut­ed as witch­es in the 16th and 17th cen­turies, to econ­o­mist Thomas Malthus’ 1798 Essay on the Prin­ci­ple of Pop­u­la­tion and leg­endary adven­tur­er Gia­co­mo Casano­va’s satin rib­bon-trimmed jim­my hat, this episode of His­to­ry Tea Time with Lind­say Hol­i­day touch­es on it all.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Birth Con­trol Hand­book: The Under­ground Stu­dent Pub­li­ca­tion That Let Women Take Con­trol of Their Bod­ies (1968)

I’m Just a Pill: A School­house Rock Clas­sic Gets Reimag­ined to Defend Repro­duc­tive Rights in 2017

The Sto­ry Of Men­stru­a­tion: Watch Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

A Master List of 1,700 Free Courses From Top Universities: A Lifetime of Learning on One Page

in Online Courses | April 24th, 2022

For the past 15 years, we’ve been busy rum­mag­ing around the inter­net and adding cours­es to an ever-grow­ing list of Free Online Cours­es, which now fea­tures 1,700 cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties. Let’s give you the quick overview: The list lets you down­load audio & video lec­tures from schools like Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Har­vard and many oth­er insti­tu­tions. Gen­er­al­ly, the cours­es can be accessed via YouTube, iTunes or uni­ver­si­ty web sites, and you can lis­ten to the lec­tures any­time, any­where, on your com­put­er or smart phone. We haven’t done a pre­cise cal­cu­la­tion, but there’s about 50,000 hours of free audio & video lec­tures here. Enough to keep you busy for a very long time–something that’s use­ful dur­ing these social­ly dis­tant times.

Right now you’ll find 200 free phi­los­o­phy cours­es, 105 free his­to­ry cours­es, 170 free com­put­er sci­ence cours­es, 85 free physics cours­es and 55 Free Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es in the col­lec­tion, and that’s just begin­ning to scratch the sur­face. You can peruse sec­tions cov­er­ing Astron­o­my, Biol­o­gy, Busi­ness, Chem­istry, Eco­nom­ics, Engi­neer­ing, Math, Polit­i­cal Sci­ence, Psy­chol­o­gy and Reli­gion.

Here are some high­lights from the com­plete list of Free Online Cours­es. We’ve added a few unconventional/vintage cours­es in the mix just to keep things inter­est­ing.

• A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times — Free Online Video — Arthur Holmes, Wheaton Col­lege
• A Romp Through Ethics for Com­plete Begin­ners - Var­i­ous For­mats – Mar­i­anne Tal­bot, Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty
• Ancient Greek His­to­ry — Var­i­ous For­mats — Don­ald Kagan, Yale
• Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing by William S. Bur­roughs — Free Online Audio — Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty
• Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing for Begin­ners — Var­i­ous For­mats – Mar­i­anne Tal­bot, Oxford
• Deep Learn­ing — Free Online Video — Vin­cent Van­houcke, Google
• Edi­ble Edu­ca­tion 101 – Free Online Video – Michael Pol­lan, UC Berke­ley
• Finan­cial Mar­kets — Var­i­ous For­mats — Robert Shiller, Yale
• Grow­ing Up in the Uni­verse – Free Online Video – Richard Dawkins, Oxford
• Har­vard’s Intro­duc­to­ry Com­put­er Sci­ence Course - Free Online Course — David Malan, Har­vard
• Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er – Var­i­ous For­mats – Wai Chee Dimock, Yale
• How to Lis­ten to Music — Var­i­ous For­mats — Craig Wright, Yale
• Human Behav­ioral Biol­o­gy – Var­i­ous For­mats – Robert Sapol­sky, Stan­ford
• Intro­duc­tion to the Old Tes­ta­ment (Hebrew Bible) – Free Online Video — Chris­tine Hayes, Yale.
• Lec­tures on Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy — Free Online Video — Marc Lev­oy, Stanford/Google
• Physics for Future Pres­i­dents – Free Online Video – Richard Muller, UC Berke­ley
• Sci­ence and Cook­ing: From Haute Cui­sine to the Sci­ence of Soft Mat­ter — Var­i­ous For­mats — Team taught, Har­vard
• Speak Ital­ian with Your Mouth Full - Var­i­ous For­mats — MIT, Dr. Pao­la Rebus­co
• The Amer­i­can Nov­el Since 1945 – Var­i­ous For­mats – Amy Hunger­ford, Yale
• The Cen­tral Phi­los­o­phy of Tibet — Free Online Audio – Robert Thur­man, Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty
• The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law (1964) - Free Online Video — Richard Feyn­man, Cor­nell
• The Tem­pest - Free Online Audio — Allen Gins­berg, Naropa
• Wal­ter Kauf­mann Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre — Free Online Audio

The com­plete list of cours­es can be accessed here: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties. For more enrich­ing mate­r­i­al, see our oth­er col­lec­tions below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Learn 45+ Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More.

200 Online Cer­tifi­cate & Micro­cre­den­tial Pro­grams from Lead­ing Uni­ver­si­ties & Com­pa­nies.

Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Mas­ters, Mini Mas­ters, Bach­e­lors & Mini Bach­e­lors from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Explore a Big Archive of Vintage Early Comics: 1700–1929

in Archives, Art, Comics/Cartoons, History | April 22nd, 2022

The pop­u­lar­i­ty of graph­ic nov­els (and more than a few extreme­ly lucra­tive super­hero movie fran­chis­es) have con­ferred respectabil­i­ty on comics.

Hand­some reis­sues of such stun­ning ear­ly works as Win­sor McKay’s Lit­tle Nemo in Slum­ber­land, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, and Frank King’s Walt and Skeez­ix sug­gest that read­ers’ appetite for vin­tage comics extends deep­er and fur­ther back than mere nos­tal­gia for the Sun­day fun­nies of their youth.

Artist Andy Bleck’s Andy’s Ear­ly Comics Archive is an excel­lent resource for those seek­ing to dis­cov­er ear­ly exam­ples of the form that have yet to be reis­sued in a col­lect­ed edi­tion. (Fair warn­ing: reflect­ing the atti­tudes of the time, the col­lec­tion does inevitably con­tains some racist imagery. Such imagery won’t be on dis­play in this post.)

Bleck, the cre­ator of Konky Kru, a beau­ti­ful­ly sim­ple, word­less series, as well as sev­er­al self-pub­lished mini comics, takes a historian’s inter­est in his sub­ject, begin­ning with the William Hog­a­rth engrav­ings A Harlot’s Progress from 1730:

The famous ‘pro­gres­sions’ by Hog­a­rth were not actu­al­ly comics. The images don’t lead into and don’t inter­act with each oth­er. Each shows a dis­tinct, sep­a­rate stage of a longer sto­ry. How­ev­er, because of their great pop­u­lar­i­ty, they estab­lished the very notion of telling enter­tain­ing sto­ries with a series of pic­tures and so became a high­ly influ­en­tial step­ping stone for future devel­op­ments.

He also cites the influ­ence of British polit­i­cal car­toons, Chi­nese wood­cuts, illus­trat­ed fairy tales and nurs­ery rhymes, and Hein­rich Hoff­man­n’s Struwwelpeter, a book that ter­ri­fied chil­dren into behav­ing by depict­ing the mon­strous con­se­quences befalling those who failed to do so.

Iron­i­cal­ly, Franz Joseph Goez’s Lenar­do und Blan­dine, an actu­al graph­ic nov­el­ette from 1783, “prob­a­bly had lit­tle influ­ence:”

 It was too ahead of its time as far as the com­ic struc­ture is con­cerned. In con­tent, it was delight­ful­ly very much of its time, full of out­ra­geous melo­dra­ma.

Things con­tin­ued to evolve in the sec­ond half of the 19th-cen­tu­ry, with pic­ture broad­sheets for chil­dren, such as the ones star­ring Wil­helm Busch’s wild­ly pop­u­lar Max and Moritz. (See an Eng­lish trans­la­tion here.)

Bleck traces the birth of mod­ern comics, whose sto­ry­telling vocab­u­lary con­tin­ues today, to the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tu­ry, with Amer­i­can news­pa­per strips and par­tic­u­lar­ly, the Sun­day fun­nies:

The news­pa­per for­mat was much larg­er and cheap­er, pro­vid­ing a lot more emp­ty space to fill. The audi­ence was less sophis­ti­cat­ed, but (pos­si­bly because of this) more open to a par­tic­u­lar type of exper­i­men­ta­tion, despite the dumb and low­brow humor… these Amer­i­can Sun­day pages became the breed­ing ground for some­thing new. Weird­er, rougher, slap­dashier. Also eas­i­er, for chil­dren, but not child­ish. More pop­u­lar. More … some­thingi­er.

Maybe it was that new type of human being, the urban immi­grant, who was most pre­pared and eager to pay for all this new visu­al goings on.

Andy’s Ear­ly Comics Archive can be searched chrono­log­i­cal­ly, or alpha­bet­i­cal­ly by artist’s name. Enter here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Read The Very First Com­ic Book: The Adven­tures of Oba­di­ah Old­buck (1837)

Down­load Over 22,000 Gold­en & Sil­ver Age Com­ic Books from the Com­ic Book Plus Archive

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

100-Year-Old Music Recordings Can Now Be Heard for the First Time, Thanks to New Digital Technology

in History, Music, Technology | April 21st, 2022

If you were lis­ten­ing to record­ed music around the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, you lis­tened to it on cylin­ders. Not that any­one alive today was lis­ten­ing to record­ed music back then, and much of it has since been lost. Invent­ed by Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell (bet­ter known for his work on an even more pop­u­lar device known as the tele­phone), the record­ing cylin­der marked a con­sid­er­able improve­ment on Thomas Edis­on’s ear­li­er tin­foil phono­graph. Nev­er hes­i­tant to cap­i­tal­ize on an inno­va­tion — no mat­ter who did the inno­vat­ing — Edi­son then began mar­ket­ing cylin­ders of his own, soon turn­ing his own name into the for­mat’s most pop­u­lar and rec­og­niz­able brand.

“Edi­son set up coin-oper­at­ed phono­graph machines that would play pre-record­ed wax cylin­ders in train sta­tions, hotel lob­bies, and oth­er pub­lic places through­out the Unit­ed States,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Sarah Durn. They also became the medi­um choice for hob­by­ists. “One of the most famous is Lionel Maple­son,” says Jen­nifer Vanasco in an NPR sto­ry from ear­li­er this month.

“He record­ed his fam­i­ly,” but “he was also the librar­i­an for the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera. And in the ear­ly 1900s, he record­ed dozens of rehearsals and per­for­mances. Lis­ten­ing to his work is the only way you can hear pre-World War I opera singers with a full orches­tra”: Ger­man sopra­no Frie­da Hempel, singing “Evvi­va la Fran­cia!” above.

The “Maple­son Cylin­ders” con­sti­tute just part of the New York Pub­lic Library’s col­lec­tion of about 2,700 record­ings in that for­mat. “Only a small por­tion of those cylin­ders, around 175, have ever been dig­i­tized,” writes Durn. “The vast major­i­ty of the cylin­ders have nev­er even been played in the gen­er­a­tions since the library acquired them.” Most have become too frag­ile to with­stand the nee­dles of tra­di­tion­al play­ers. Enter End­point Audio Labs’ $50,000 Cylin­der and Dictabelt Machine, which uses a com­bi­na­tion of nee­dle and laser to read and dig­i­tize even already-dam­aged cylin­ders with­out harm. Only sev­en of End­point’s machines exist in the world, one of them a recent acqui­si­tion of the NYPL’s, which will now be able to play many of its cylin­ders for the first time in more than a cen­tu­ry.

Some of these cylin­ders are unla­beled, their con­tents unknown. Cura­tor Jes­si­ca Wood, as Velas­co says, is hop­ing to “hear a birth­day par­ty or some­thing that tells us more about the social his­to­ry at the time, even some­one shout­ing their name and explain­ing they’re test­ing the machine, which is a pret­ty com­mon thing to hear on these record­ings.” She knows that the NYPL’s col­lec­tion has “about eight cylin­ders from Por­tu­gal, which may be some of the old­est record­ings ever made in the coun­try,” as well as “five Argen­tin­ian cylin­ders that have pre­served the sound of cen­tu­ry-old tan­go music.” In the event, from the first cylin­der she puts on for NPR’s micro­phone issue famil­iar words: “Hel­lo, my baby. Hel­lo, my hon­ey. Hel­lo, my rag­time gal.” This lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence per­haps felt like some­thing less than time trav­el. But then, were you real­ly to go back to 1899, what song would you be more like­ly to hear?

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load 10,000 of the First Record­ings of Music Ever Made, Cour­tesy of the UCSB Cylin­der Audio Archive

Opti­cal Scan­ning Tech­nol­o­gy Lets Researchers Recov­er Lost Indige­nous Lan­guages from Old Wax Cylin­der Record­ings

Hear Singers from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera Record Their Voic­es on Tra­di­tion­al Wax Cylin­ders

A Beer Bot­tle Gets Turned Into a 19th Cen­tu­ry Edi­son Cylin­der and Plays Fine Music

400,000+ Sound Record­ings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Pub­lic Domain

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 or on Face­book.

The Birth of the Blues Brothers: How Dan Aykroyd & John Belushi Started Introducing a New Generation to the Blues

in Comedy, Music, Television | April 20th, 2022

What were the Blues Broth­ers? A com­e­dy sketch? A par­o­dy act? A real band? A celebri­ty soul artist trib­ute? All of the above, yes. The musi­cal-comedic duo of Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi turned a ludi­crous begin­ning in bum­ble bee cos­tumes — not dark suits, fedo­ras, and Ray-Bans — into a musi­cal act that “exposed a gen­er­a­tion to the bril­liance of blues and soul leg­ends like John Lee Hook­er and Aretha Franklin,” as Dar­ren Weale writes at Loud­er­sound.

That’s quite an accom­plish­ment for a cou­ple of improv come­di­ans on a fledg­ling late-night com­e­dy show that did not seem, in its first year, like it would stick around long. It was dur­ing that anar­chic peri­od when the Killer Bees became recur­ring char­ac­ters on the show, appear­ing 11 times (despite the stu­dio note, “Cut the bees,” which Lorne Michaels point­ed­ly ignored).

The bees were the first incar­na­tion of the Blues Broth­ers, two years before their actu­al debut in Sea­son 4. (See a lat­er appear­ance from that sea­son, intro­duced by Gar­rett Mor­ris, just above).

A Jan­u­ary 17, 1976 appear­ance of the bees fea­tured “Howard Shore and his All Bee Band,” con­sist­ing of “Aykroyd on the har­mon­i­ca and Belushi on vocals belt­ing out a blues clas­sic very much in the style of the future Elwood and ‘Joli­et’ Jake Blues,” notes History.com. They had the begin­nings of an act, but the look and the per­sonas would come lat­er, “dur­ing the hia­tus between SNL sea­sons two and three” in 1977, while Belushi filmed Ani­mal House in Eugene, Ore­gon and fell under the spell of local blues­man Cur­tis Sal­ga­do, future har­mon­i­ca play­er for Robert Cray.

Sal­ga­do “sure turned John on to blues music,” says Aykroyd. “He steeped him in blues cul­ture.” Sal­ga­do him­self describes how Belushi won him over on their first meet­ing: “I’m pack­ing up my harps, try­ing to break free, when he says, ‘I’m going to have Ray Charles on the show.’ ” Sal­ga­do also gave Belushi a les­son in play­ing it straight, even when he played the blues for laughs. When the com­ic per­formed the song “Hey Bar­tender” to a packed house one night, in char­ac­ter as Joe Cock­er, his men­tor gave him a post-show dress­ing down.

“He asks me, ‘What did you think?’”
“I say, ‘John, it’s Joe Cock­er.’”
‘Yes, I do Joe on Sat­ur­day Night Live.’
“I punch his chest and say, ‘You need to do this from here [point­ing at his heart] and be your­self.’ After that he didn’t mim­ic any more. He was him­self.”

Tak­ing the look of Jake and Elwood from Sal­ga­do, but devel­op­ing the char­ac­ter as his swag­ger­ing self, Belushi “came back from Ore­gon with a lust for the blues,” his wid­ow, Judith, recalls. “He had tapes in his pock­ets and went to clubs.” (See the duo play “Hey Bar­tender” at the Uni­ver­sal Amphithe­ater in 1978, below.)

The name was the brain­child of SNL musi­cal direc­tor Howard Shore (who would go on to write the Lord of the Rings film scores), who hap­pened to be present when the two con­ceived the char­ac­ters at a bar. Their 1978 debut — made over the protests of Lorne Michaels (who did­n’t get it) — made them instant stars.

Paul Shaf­fer spun their ori­gin sto­ry in his intro­duc­tion, “claim­ing that they had been dis­cov­ered in 1969 by the fic­tion­al ‘Mar­shall Check­er,” writes Men­tal Floss. He went on:

Today they are no longer an authen­tic blues act, but have man­aged to become a viable com­mer­cial prod­uct. So now, let’s join “Joli­et” Jake and his silent broth­er Elwood — the Blues Broth­ers.

With that, the nev­er-authen­tic blues act did, indeed, become a viable com­mer­cial prod­uct. “Things start­ed to move quick­ly,” Weale writes. “Record exec­u­tive Michael Klenfn­er took John and Dan to see Ahmet Ertegün at Atlantic Records. He signed the Blues Broth­ers up.” They were a real act, and two years lat­er, real movie stars with the release of John Lan­dis’ The Blues Broth­ers, a film that ful­ly deliv­ered on the duo’s com­ic promis­es, while glee­ful­ly giv­ing the spot­light away to its huge cast of soul and blues leg­ends

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aretha Franklin’s Pitch-Per­fect Per­for­mance in The Blues Broth­ers, the Film That Rein­vig­o­rat­ed Her Career (1980)

Sat­ur­day Night Live’s Very First Sketch: Watch John Belushi Launch SNL in Octo­ber, 1975

The Night John Belushi Cart­wheeled Onstage Dur­ing a Grate­ful Dead Show & Sang “U.S. Blues” with the Band (1980)

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

Make Your Own Medieval Memes with a New Tool from the Dutch National Library

in Art, History, Web/Tech | April 14th, 2022

As much joy as inter­net memes have giv­en you over the years, you may have strug­gled to explain them to those unfa­mil­iar with the con­cept. But if you’ve found it a tall order to artic­u­late the pow­er of found images crude­ly over­laid with text to, say, your par­ents, imag­ine attempt­ing to do the same to an ances­tor from the four­teenth cen­tu­ry. Intro­duc­ing memes to a medieval per­son, the best strat­e­gy would pre­sum­ably be to begin not with sar­don­ic Willy Won­ka, the guy dis­tract­ed by anoth­er girl, or The Most Inter­est­ing Man in the World, but memes with famil­iar medieval imagery. Thanks to KB, the nation­al library of the Nether­lands, you can now make some of you own with ease.

“On www.medievalmemes.org vis­i­tors can use images tak­en from the Dutch nation­al library’s medieval col­lec­tion and turn them into memes,” says Medievalists.net. “When using the meme gen­er­a­tor, peo­ple active­ly cre­ate new con­texts for these his­toric images by adding cur­rent cap­tions. The avail­able images are accom­pa­nied by explana­to­ry videos, pro­vid­ing view­ers with back­ground infor­ma­tion and show­ing them that, much like today, peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages used images to com­ment on their sur­round­ings and cur­rent affairs.” You might repur­pose these live­ly pieces of medieval art for such twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry top­ics as club­bing, online shop­ping, or the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

At the top of this post appears an image from 1327, orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed for a book of mir­a­cles King Charles IV ordered for his queen. As KB explains, it offers “a warn­ing of what can hap­pen if you don’t learn your prayers prop­er­ly.” Below that is “a sort of Medi­ae­val car­toon” from 1183 about the tech­niques involved in prop­er­ly slaugh­ter­ing a pig. And just above, we see what hap­pened when “the Ken­ite Jael lured the leader of the army, Sis­era, into her tent. Sis­era had been vio­lent­ly oppress­ing the Ken­ites for 20 years. While he slept, she whacked a tent peg straight through his head.” Though cre­at­ed for a pic­ture Bible 592 years ago, this pic­ture sure­ly has poten­tial for trans­po­si­tion into com­men­tary on the very dif­fer­ent per­ils of life in the twen­ty-twen­ties. But when you deploy it as a meme, you can do so in the knowl­edge that even your medieval fore­bears would have known that feel.

via Medievalist.net

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Butt Trum­pets & Oth­er Bizarre Images Appeared in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Killer Rab­bits in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Why So Many Draw­ings in the Mar­gins Depict Bun­nies Going Bad

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

160,000 Pages of Glo­ri­ous Medieval Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized: Vis­it the Bib­lio­the­ca Philadel­phien­sis

The Aberdeen Bes­tiary, One of the Great Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts, Now Dig­i­tized in High Res­o­lu­tion & Made Avail­able Online

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 or on Face­book.

Watch Stevie Wonder’s Amazing Drum Solo, and See Why He May Be the “Greatest Drummer of Our Time”

in Music | April 14th, 2022

When Prince passed away, many a non-Prince fan sud­den­ly found out that the man was not only a bril­liant song­writer, singer, dancer, gui­tarist, pianist, styl­ist, and super­star, but that he was also a vir­tu­al one-man band in the stu­dio, able to play almost any instru­ment, in exact­ly the way he want­ed it played. Prince fans knew this, as do fans of the musi­cian who made Songs in the Key of Life — or what Prince called the great­est album ever record­ed. And if Prince were here, he would agree:  Ste­vie Won­der deserves more appre­ci­a­tion for his mul­ti-musi­cian­ship while he’s still with us.

Yes, of course, we know him for his “stag­ger­ing song­writ­ing and vocal skills,” writes PC Muñoz at Drum! mag­a­zine, for his “prowess as a for­mi­da­ble, inven­tive key­boardist (and pop music syn­the­siz­er pio­neer)” and “his vir­tu­oso-lev­el skills on har­mon­i­ca.”

But do we know Ste­vie Won­der as a drum­mer? Well, “news­flash for those who did­n’t know,” Muñoz announces: “Ste­vie Won­der also hap­pens to be one badass drum­mer.” (In fact, his very first gig, at 8 years old, was on the drums.) Not that he hasn’t received his just due from fel­low musi­cians, far from it.

Eric Clap­ton called Won­der “the great­est drum­mer of our time” in 1974 — “hefty praise” (and maybe a bit of a swipe), wrote music jour­nal­ist Eric San­dler, “com­ing from a man who played with Gin­ger Bak­er.” See a demon­stra­tion of Won­der’s for­mi­da­ble feel and groove behind the kit in the drum solo at the top of the post. But, of course, you’ve already heard his drum­ming — all, or most, of your life per­haps — on his albums, includ­ing most every track on Talk­ing Book, Songs in the Key of Life, and Innervi­sions — songs like “Super­sti­tion,” “High­er Ground,” “Liv­ing for the City” … all Ste­vie.

“I grew up prac­tic­ing to Ste­vie Wonder’s music,” drum­mer Eric Carnes tells Muñoz, “but I actu­al­ly didn’t know he was often the drum­mer on his own stuff. Until I was in my twen­ties.” Carnes goes on to describe the hall­marks of Won­der’s style: “very relaxed – not so crisp and not so metro­nom­ic. He’s using dif­fer­ent parts of the stick at dif­fer­ent times, and his hi-hat parts change through­out the song. A lot of times, each cho­rus in a giv­en song is played slight­ly dif­fer­ent­ly, too. He esca­lates a song over a long peri­od of time, real­ly grow­ing the whole piece, instead of top­ping out ear­ly; it gives the music some­where to go.”

Bill Janovitz of the band Buf­fa­lo Tom — in a very thor­ough paean to Songs in the Key of Life – points to the “innate sense of groove in his drum­ming.… There is a musi­cal inven­tive­ness that might stem from being a well-round­ed mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist, as opposed to some­one who strict­ly defines them­selves as a drum­mer.”

In his appre­ci­a­tion of Won­der’s drum­ming at Slate, Seth Steven­son also high­lights Won­der’s “expres­sive­ness.… No two mea­sures sound the same.” He offers a mini best-of roundup of Won­der’s record­ed drum­ming moments:

My favorite Won­der drum track comes on ‘Too High,’ the first song on Innervi­sions. Sub­tle snare rolls, sud­den tom-tom tum­bles, jazzy ride-cym­bal swings – they’re all scrump­tious and all in the greater ser­vice of the song. This is not the approach of a hired drum­mer attempt­ing to carve out his own ter­rain. It’s the work of a mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ist com­pos­er who fits his vision for each part into an inter­lock­ing whole.

Steven­son and Janovitz speak to a thread in so many dis­cus­sions of “vir­tu­oso” musi­cians: com­posers who are also musi­cal prodi­gies have ways of play­ing instru­ments in an idiom only they can under­stand. One imag­ines that if we had record­ings of Mozart or Bach – both prodi­gious mul­ti-instru­men­tal­ists from very young ages – we would hear clas­si­cal instru­ments played in ways we’ve nev­er heard them played before. The mag­ic of record­ing — and Ste­vie Won­der’s record­ings espe­cial­ly — means we can hear the drums on his songs exact­ly as he heard, and played, them, and exact­ly as he want­ed them played.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Catch Ste­vie Won­der, Ages 12–16, in His Ear­li­est TV Per­for­mances

Decon­struct­ing Ste­vie Wonder’s Ode to Jazz and His Hero Duke Elling­ton: A Great Break­down of “Sir Duke”

See Ste­vie Won­der Play “Super­sti­tion” and Ban­ter with Grover on Sesame Street in 1973

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