A Web Site That Lets You Find Your Home Address on Pangea
A cool tool. Software engineer Ian Webster has created a website that lets you see how the land masses on planet Earth have changed over the course of 750 million years. And it has the added bonus of letting you plot modern addresses on these ancient land formations. Ergo, you can see where your home was located on the Big Blue Marble some 20, 100, 500, or 750 million years ago. Webster’s project (access it here) is open source. Have fun.
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Read More...The Red Hot Chili Peppers “Californication” Played on the Gayageum, a Korean Instrument That Emerged 1,400 Years Ago
We just had the chance to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers kick off a new tour, and so had to bring you this–Luna Lee performing RHCP’s “Californication” on the Gayageum, a traditional Korean stringed instrument dating back to the 6th century. Over the years, we’ve shown you her adaptations of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile;’ David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World;” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah; and Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” “Another Brick in the Wall” & “Great Gig in the Sky.” Today, we’re keeping the tradition going. You can follow along with the original recording down below. Enjoy!
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Read More...Architect Breaks Down the Design Of Four Iconic New York City Museums: the Met, MoMA, Guggenheim & Frick
Context may not count for everything in art. But as underscored by everyone from Marcel Duchamp (or Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven) to the journalists who occasionally convince virtuoso musicians to busk in dingy public spaces, it certainly counts for something. Whether or not you believe that works of art retain the same essential value no matter where they’re beheld, some environments are surely more conducive to appreciation than others. The question of just which design elements make the difference has occupied museum architects for centuries, and in New York City alone, you can directly experience more than 200 years of bold exercises and experiments in the form.
In the Architectural Digest video above, architect Michael Wyetzner (previously featured here on Open Culture for his exegeses of New York’s apartments, bridges, and subway stations, as well as Central Park and the Chrysler Building) uses his expert knowledge to reveal the design choices that have gone into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Frick Collection. No two of these famous art institutions were conceived in quite the same period, none look or feel quite the same as the others, and we can be reasonably sure that no single piece of art would look quite the same if it were moved between any of them.
Occupying five blocks of Central Park, MoMA is less a building than a collection of buildings — each added at a different time, in a style of that time — and indeed, less a collection of buildings than “a city unto itself,” as Wyetzner puts it. (No wonder Claudia and Jamie Kincaid could run away from home and go unnoticed living in it.) The comparatively modest MoMA has also grown addition-by-addition, beginning with a “stripped-down form of modernism” that stood well out on the West 53rd street of the late thirties. It opened as the first of the many “clean white boxes” that would appear across the country — and later the world — to show the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The original MoMA building remains striking today, but it’s now flanked by expansions from the hands of Philip Johnson, Cesar Pelli, Yoshio Taniguchi, and Jean Nouvel. Much less likely to have anything attached to it is the Guggenheim, with its instantly recognizable spiral design by Frank Lloyd Wright. Based on an idea by Le Corbusier, its narrow atrium-wrapping galleries do present certain difficulties for the proper display of large-scale artworks. Wyetzner also mentions the oft-heard criticism of Wright’s having “created a monument to himself — but it’s one hell of a monument.”
Last comes “the original building for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which later became the Met Breuer, which now has become the Frick. Who knows what it’ll become next.” The second of its names refers to its architect, the Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer (he of the Wassily chair), whose muscular design “slices off” the museum from the brownstone neighborhood that surrounds it. With its “open, loft-like spaces,” it provides a context meant for the art of its time, much as the Met, MoMA, and the Guggenheim do for the art of theirs. But all these institutions have succeeded just as much by carving out contexts of their own in the open-air museum of architecture and urbanism that is New York City.
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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 or on Facebook.
Read More...Brian Eno’s Beautiful New Turntable Glows & Constantly Changes Colors as It Plays
When we think of Brian Eno’s work, we first think of his records. These include not just his own classics of “ambient music” — a term he popularized — like Discreet Music and Music for Airports, but also the albums he’s produced: Devo’s Q. Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, U2’s The Joshua Tree, David Bowie’s Outside. Yet even before he got into music, Eno was painting, and in some sense, he’s never stopped. He was describing his work with sound as the creation of “imaginary landscapes” even in the nineteen-eighties; in this century, he’s continued to put out records while creating ever-more-high-profile works of a more visual nature, from installations to apps.
A few years ago, Eno even got into the business of functional sculpture, designing a turntable that emanates LED light of various, gradually shifting colors while it plays records. “The light from it was tangible as if caught in a cloud of vapor,” said Eno about his early experience with the finished product, quoted at designboom upon the announcement of its limited production run in 2021.
“We sat watching for ages, transfixed by this totally new experience of light as a physical presence.” Now comes the sequel, Eno’s Turntable II, which will be produced in equally restricted numbers. “Those who can afford one of the 150 limited units also receive the musician’s signature and edition number engraved on the side of the neon turntable’s base,” says designboom.
Eno’s turntable design recently drew attention as the inspiration for U2’s stage set during their residency at Las Vegas’ brazen new venue The Sphere. In the home, it serves multiple functions: “When it doesn’t have to do anything in particular, like play a record, it is a sculpture,” Eno says, “and when it’s in action, it’s a generative artwork. Several overlapping light cycles will keep producing different color balances and blends — and different shadow formations that slowly evolve and never exactly repeat.” Die-hard fans who know how long Eno has been following this artistic and intellectual thread may consider Turntable II’s £20,000 (or more than $25,000 USD) price tag almost reasonable. And next to the $60,000 Linn Sondek LP12 Jony Ive redesigned last year, it’s practically a bargain.
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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 or on Facebook.
Read More...Punk Dulcimer: Hear The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated” Played on the Dulcimer
Sam Edelston can rock the duclimer. On his YouTube channel, he writes: “Dulcimers are natural rock instruments. In fact, I even say that dulcimers are among the world’s coolest musical instruments, and they deserve to be known by the general public — the way that everybody knows guitars and ukuleles. Though usually associated with old folk songs and tunes, dulcimers are great for a shocking variety of modern music, too. I do these videos to inspire more people to play and listen to dulcimer music, in diverse, non-traditional styles.” Above, watch him cover the Ramones’ 1978 classic “I Wanna Be Sedated.” Find more covers of Zeppelin, the Stones & Beatles here. And yet more covers–including Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Sabbath’s “War Pigs”–on the Contemporary Dulcimer YouTube Channel. Enjoy.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
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Read More...A 3D Animation Shows the Evolution of New York City (1524 — 2023)
Nearly two and a half centuries after its founding, the United States of America is still both celebrated and derided as a young country. Examined on the whole, the US may or may not seem less mature than other lands in any obvious way, but the difference manifests much more clearly on the level of cities. For even among those founded before the independence of the country itself, no American city has yet attained 500 official years of age. But in the case of New York City, we can trace its formation through half a millennium of history, as rendered in the 3D animated video from InfoGeek above.
The long version of New York’s story begins in 1524, the year Giovanni da Verrazzano commanded the French ship La Dauphine into what we now know as New York Harbor. While he and his crew did not, of course, get the dramatic forest-of-skyscrapers view for which that approach would later be celebrated, they would, perhaps, have seen an actual forest, as well as other elements of a natural landscape that would have appeared sublimely untouched. A century later, the Dutch there founded the trading outpost of New Amsterdam, which commenced the written history of New York — as well as the aggressive development that would eventually come to characterize the city and its culture.
New Amsterdam became New York in 1664, one of the many historical events that scroll past in the window at the video’s lower-left corner. At that point in time, the population had grown to about 3,600, a figure counted at the bottom of the frame. Yet even as we see streets roll out, buildings rise, and trees sprout rapidly around us over the next 150 or so years of our stroll, and even after New York becomes America’s largest city in 1790, we must bear in mind that its century hasn’t even begun. It’s something of an irony that the hugely destructive Great Fire of 1835 precedes a developmental push that makes the city, even to our twenty-first-century eyes, look almost modern.
Later in the nineteenth century, we witness the appearance of Central Park and the introduction of motorcars; by the turn of the twentieth, New York’s population approaches three and a half million. Walking down Wall Street (and into the Great Depression), we pass just-materializing landmarks that remain iconic today, like the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building and — after a somewhat dramatic fast-forward in time — Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Minoru Yamasaki’s ill-fated World Trade Center. We’re now well into the New York of living memory, and even when the animation has passed the creative decrepitude of the seventies and eighties and arrives at the city as it was last year (population: 7,888,120), we sense that its evolution has only just begun.
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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 or on Facebook.
Read More...Black History in Two Minutes: Watch 93 Videos Written & Narrated by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
We’re nearly halfway through February, which the United States of America also knows as Black History Month. Perhaps there are relevant subjects on which you’ve been meaning to catch up, but you haven’t quite got around to it yet. If so, never fear: in the next couple of weeks, you’ll have plenty of time to binge-watch the Youtube series Black History in Two Minutes. Written and narrated by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., it has so far covered everything from Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth to the Civil War and emancipation to the civil rights movement and school integration.
Those of us who went to school in the US — and especially those of us who did so after the institution of Black History Month, in 1970 — will remember those subjects having been discussed in the classroom. But even within the brief confines of two minutes (sometimes sprawling out to three minutes and change), Gates introduces facts most of us will never have heard.
For instance, the very first underground railroad in the eighteenth century ran not from the south of the country to the north, but the other way around, Spanish Florida having then been “a sanctuary for slaves who fled south from English rule” — though the freedom it offered did require conversion to Catholicism.
Also among the nearly 100 videos Black History in Two Minutes has so far produced are a wealth of bite-sized treatments of movements and figures important to not just black culture but the whole of American culture. These include Billie Holiday and Maya Angelou, the 1893 World’s Fair, the births of jazz and hip hop, and Negro league baseball. The show also encompasses episodes of history well within living memory, such as the Los Angeles riots and the election of Barack Obama — as well as the earlier, pioneering presidential run of Jesse Jackson. And in light of Jackson’s campaign T‑shirts’ having made a fashion comeback in Korea, where I live, it now seems to say that the culture that has arisen out of black history isn’t just vital to the culture of America, but of the world.
You can watch the complete playlist of videos at the top, or visit the Black History in Two Minutes website here.
via Kottke
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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 or on Facebook.
Read More...Why Incompetent People Think They’re Competent: The Dunning-Kruger Effect, Explained
When surveyed, eighty to ninety percent of Americans consider themselves possessed of above-average driving skills. Most of them are, of course, wrong by statistical definition, but the result itself reveals something important about human nature. So does another, lesser-known study that had two groups, one composed of professional comedians and the other composed of average Cornell undergraduates, rank the funniness of a set of jokes. It also asked those students to rank their own ability to identify funny jokes. Naturally, the majority of them credited themselves with an above-average sense of humor.
Not only that, explains the host of the After Skool video above, “those who did the worst placed themselves in the 58th percentile on average. They believed that they were better than 57 other people out of 100. Their real score? Twelfth percentile.” Here we have an example of the cognitive bias whereby “people with a little bit of knowledge or skill in an area believe that they are better than they are,” now commonly known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s named for social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who conducted the aforementioned joke-ranking study as well as others in various domains that all support the same basic finding: the incompetent don’t know how incompetent they are.
“When you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is,” Dunning told Errol Morris in a 2010 interview (the first of a five-part series on anosognosia, or the inability to recognize one’s own lack of ability). “In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer.” What’s more, “even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.”
This brings to mind Donald Rumsfeld’s much-mocked remark about “unknown unknowns,” which Dunning actually considered “the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.” (Morris, for his part, would go on to make a documentary about Rumsfeld titled The Unknown Known.) But whether you’re the Secretary of Defense, a celebrated filmmaker, a Youtuber, an essayist, or anything else, you’ve almost certainly been afflicted with the Dunning-Kruger effect. But if we can make a habit of subjecting ourselves to bracing objective assessment, we can — at least, at certain times and certain domains — break free of what T. S. Eliot called the endless struggle to think well of ourselves.
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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 or on Facebook.
Read More...Ten of the Most Expensive Arts & Art Supplies in the Worlds: Japanese Bonsai Scissors & Calligraphy Brushes, Tunisian Dye Made from Snails and More
A few years ago, we featured a $32,000 pair of bonsai scissors here on Open Culture. More recently, their maker Yasuhiro Hiraka appeared in the Business Insider video above, a detailed 80-minute introduction to ten of the most expensive arts and art supplies around the world. It will come as no surprise that things Japanese figure in it prominently and more than once. In fact, the video begins in Nara Prefecture, “where for over 450 years, the company Kobaien, has been making some of the world’s most sought-after calligraphy ink” — the sumi you may know from the classical Japanese art form sumi‑e.
But even the most painstakingly produced and expensively acquired ink in the world is no use without brushes. In search of the finest examples of those, the video’s next segment takes us to another part of Japan, Hiroshima Prefecture, where an artisan named Yoshiyuki Hata runs a workshop dedicated to the “no-compromise craftsmanship” of calligraphy brushes. One of his top-of-the-line models, made with rigorously hand-selected goat hair, could cost the equivalent of $27,000 — but for an equally uncompromising master calligrapher, money seems to be no object.
However dedicated its craftsmen and practitioners, by no means does the Land of the Rising Sun have a monopoly on expensive art supplies. This video also includes Tyrian purple dye made in Tunisia the old-fashioned way — indeed, the ancient way — by extracting the glands of murex snails; the sơn mài lacquer painting unique to Vietnam that requires toxic tree resin; long-lasting ultra-high-quality oil paints rich with rare pigments like cobalt blue; and Kolinsky’s Series 7 sable watercolor brush, which is made from hairs from the tails of Siberian weasels, and whose process of production has remained the same since it was first created for Queen Victoria in 1866.
This world tour also comes around to non-traditional art forms and tools. One operation in Ohio turns the muck of industrial pollution — “acid mine drainage,” to get technical — into pigments that can make vivid paints. The stratospheric prices commanded by certain works of “modern art,” broadly considered, have long inspired satire, but here we get a closer examination of the connection between the nature of the work and the cost of purchasing it. “What looks simple can be the culmination of a lifetime’s work,” one example of which is Kazmir Malevich’s Black Square, “the result of twenty years of simplification and development.” If you don’t know anything about that painting, it will seem to have no value; by the same token, if you don’t know anything about those $32,000 bonsai scissors, you’ll probably use them to open Amazon boxes.
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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 or on Facebook.
Read More...How an Unscheduled, Last Minute Performance of “Fast Car” Shot Tracy Chapman to Stardom in 1988
And the award for the first Black songwriter to win Song of the Year at the Country Music Awards goes to Tracy Chapman …for a tune that transfixed millions of rowdy concertgoers when she sang it at Wembley Stadium 35 years earlier (see above.)
At the time of that performance, Chapman was just 24, nearly a decade younger than 33-year-old Luke Combs, the country superstar whose recent cover was a massive hit.
“Fast Car” was not just a star-making turn at Wembley. It was a last minute, unscheduled one.
Chapman had already performed her 3‑song set at that day’s celebrity-studded Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert, sandwiched between Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie’s comedy act and prototypically 80s Scottish soft rockers Wet Wet Wet.
Her 3‑song set list was in keeping with the nature of the event, which helped speed the anti-apartheid activist and future South African president’s release from prison, and was described by music journalist Robin Denselow, as “a more political version of Live Aid, with the aim of raising consciousness rather than just money:”
The audience got to hear “Fast Car” thanks to the unwitting involvement of surprise guest Stevie Wonder.
The R&B great went to Wembley Stadium straight from the airport, unaware that his synclavier’s hard disc, containing all the synthesized music for his act, had not made the trip.
This colossal oversight was only discovered when he was heading toward the stage. Unwilling, or possibly too overwhelmed to come up with a workaround, he declined to go on, leaving organizers scrambling for an artist who could hustle to the mic to fill time.
Chapman and her solo guitar must have struck them as a technically uncomplicated solution.
No one can fault her for seeming a bit breathless at first. How often is an emerging singer-songwriter called upon to save the day by stepping into a legend’s shoes?
Within a year, Chapman was named Best New Artist at the Grammy Awards, and “Fast Car,” which she performed at the ceremony, earned her “Best Pop Vocal Performance Female”. (Song of the Year went to Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” a cultural juggernaut of a different stripe.)
A few days ago, Chapman reprised “Fast Car” at the 2024 Grammys as a duet with Combs, an interpretation that impressed the New York Times’ pop music critic Lindsay Zoladz as “welcoming and expansive enough to hold every single person (the song) had ever touched, regardless of the markers of identity that so often divide us:”
It was a rare reminder of music’s unique ability to obliterate external differences. “Fast Car” is about something more internal and universal. It is a song about the wants and needs that make us human: the desire to be happy, to be loved, to be free.
That’s certainly one interpretation, but perhaps the artist who wrote it should have the final word:
I never had a Fast Car, it’s just a story about a couple, how they are trying to make a life together and they face challenges…At the time that I wrote the song, I actually didn’t really know who I was writing about. Looking back at it, and this happens with other songs as well, that I feel like I understand it only later… I think that it was a song about my parents… And about how when they met each other they were very young and they wanted to start a new life together and my mother was anxious to leave home. My parents got married and went out into the world to try to make a place for themselves and it was very difficult going.
My mother didn’t have a high school diploma and my father was a few years older. It was hard for him to create the kind of life that he dreamed of… With the education that he had…. With the opportunities that were available to him… In a sense I think they came together thinking that together they would have a better chance at making it.
– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Over and out.
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