Technology Arbitrage: Amazon is Selling Airpods Pro Headphones for $50 Less Than Apple

in Deals, Technology | December 31st, 2020

Psst. Ama­zon cur­rent­ly has Air­Pods Pro head­phones for $199, while Apple has them list­ed for $249. It’s the deal of the day for any­one look­ing for wire­less Blue­tooth ear­buds, with noise-can­celling, immer­sive sound.

H/T Rolling Stone

How Jan van Eyck’s Masterpiece, the Ghent Altarpiece, Became the Most Stolen Work of Art in History

in Art | December 24th, 2020

It’s a lit­tle mirac­u­lous that so much Euro­pean art and archi­tec­ture sur­vives, giv­en how often the con­ti­nent has erupt­ed into wars that burned down near­ly every­thing else. The Ghent Altar­piece, or Ado­ra­tion of the Lamb, may be the most famous case in point. It is also, by far, the most stolen work of art in his­to­ry, the vic­tim of 13 dif­fer­ent crimes over the past 600 years. Com­plet­ed in 1432 by Flem­ish painter Jan van Eyck, and con­sid­ered one of the world’s great­est trea­sures, the huge, mul­ti-pan­eled paint­ing (a polyp­tych) has weath­ered it all.

The altar­piece has “almost been destroyed in a fire,” Noah Char­ney writes at The Guardian, “was near­ly burned by riot­ing Calvin­ists, it’s been forged, pil­laged, dis­mem­bered, cen­sored, stolen by Napoleon, hunt­ed in the first world war, sold by a rene­gade cler­ic, then stolen repeat­ed­ly dur­ing the sec­ond world war…. Göring want­ed it for his pri­vate col­lec­tion, Hitler as the cen­tre­piece of his city­wide super-muse­um.”

In the short TED-Ed les­son above, Char­ney, author of the book Steal­ing the Mys­tic Lamb: The True Sto­ry of the World’s Most Cov­et­ed Mas­ter­piece, sketch­es the his­to­ry of the final theft in 1934 by the Nazis of a low­er pan­el that has nev­er been recov­ered. “This may sound very sil­ly,” Char­ney tells NPR, “but in fact, the Nazis and Hitler in par­tic­u­lar were absolute­ly con­vinced that the occult and the super­nat­ur­al was real.” They thought of the Ghent altar­piece as a map to the relics of Christ’s cru­ci­fix­ion.

The case of the miss­ing pan­el remains open to this day “and new leads are fol­lowed all the time,” Char­ney writes. It is a sto­ry full of “many bizarre twists,” and just one of many in the altarpiece’s long his­to­ry. But why? What is it about the Ghent Altar­piece, besides occult fas­ci­na­tion, that has drawn so much unwant­ed atten­tion? Eleven feet high by 15 feet wide and made up of 24 pan­els (orig­i­nal­ly), the work “rede­fined art and became instant­ly famous,” notes New Statesman’s Michael Prodger. In his mas­ter­piece, Jan van Eyck, who took over for his old­er broth­er Hubert, “cre­at­ed a series of firsts in art.”

The Ghent altar­piece is “the first real­is­tic inte­ri­or, the first gen­uine land­scape, the first prop­er cityscape, the first tan­gi­ble nudes, the first life­like Renais­sance por­traits. [Van Eyck took oil paint to unprece­dent­ed lev­els of sophistication—with glazes and trans­par­ent lay­ers giv­ing depth and undreamed of effects of light—to match his preter­nat­ur­al pow­ers of obser­va­tion.” In the video series above and below by art his­to­ri­ans Beth Har­ris and Steven Zuck­er, you can learn much more about the qual­i­ties that have made the Ghent Altar­piece irre­sistible.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Lis­ten to Last Seen, a True-Crime Pod­cast That Takes You Inside an Unsolved, $500 Mil­lion Art Heist

Anato­my of a Fake: Forgery Experts Reveal 5 Ways To Spot a Fake Paint­ing by Jack­son Pol­lock (or Any Oth­er Artist)

Meet Noto­ri­ous Art Forg­er Han Van Meegeren, Who Fooled the Nazis with His Coun­ter­feit Ver­meers

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

Why Is Napoleon’s Hand Always in His Waistcoat?: The Origins of This Distinctive Pose Explained

in Art, History | December 21st, 2020

If the name of Napoleon Bona­parte should come up in a game of cha­rades, we all know what to do: stand up with one foot in front of the oth­er, stick a hand into our shirt, and con­sid­er the round won. Yet the recog­ni­tion of this pose as dis­tinc­tive­ly Napoleon­ic may not be as wide as we assume, or so Cole­man Lown­des dis­cov­ered in the research for the video above, “Napoleon’s Miss­ing Hand, Explained.” Asked to act out the image of Napoleon, not all of Lown­des col­leagues at Vox tried to evoke his hand in his waist­coat, opt­ing instead for grand pos­tur­ing and an approx­i­ma­tion of the (prob­a­bly apoc­ryphal) mod­est stature for which that pos­tur­ing sup­pos­ed­ly com­pen­sat­ed. Yet enough of us still pic­ture Napoleon hand-in-waist­coat that we might well won­der: how did that image take shape in the first place?

Rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the most famous states­man in all French his­to­ry, from paint­ings made in his life time to Bill and Ted’s Excel­lent Adven­ture, include count­less exam­ples of the pose. This has giv­en rise to bod­i­ly-ori­ent­ed spec­u­la­tions — a man­u­al defor­mi­ty, inter­nal organs pained by the can­cer that killed him — but the form came with his­tor­i­cal prece­dent.

“Con­ceal­ing a hand in one’s coat was a por­trai­ture cliche long before Napoleon was paint­ed that way in the ear­ly 1800s,” says Lown­des, in ref­er­ence to Jacques-Louis David’s The Emper­or Napoleon in His Study at the Tui­leries, a por­trait defin­i­tive enough to head up Napoleon’s Wikipedia entry. Nota­bles pre­vi­ous­ly depict­ed with one con­spic­u­ous­ly hid­den hand include George Wash­ing­ton, Mozart, and Fran­cis­co Pizarro.

Even ancient Greek ora­tor Aeschines “claimed that restrict­ing the move­ment of one hand was the prop­er way to speak in pub­lic.” Accord­ing to one 18th-cen­tu­ry British eti­quette guide, “keep­ing a hand in one’s coat was key to pos­tur­ing one­self with man­ly bold­ness, tem­pered with becom­ing mod­esty.” It even­tu­al­ly became com­mon enough to lose its high sta­tus, until David cap­tured Napoleon’s use of it in his mas­ter­ly pro­pa­gan­dis­tic por­trait. But the extent we think of Napoleon keep­ing a hand per­pet­u­al­ly in his waist­coat today sure­ly owes much to the many car­i­ca­tur­ists and par­o­dy artists who took up the trope, includ­ing Char­lie Chap­lin — who, after try­ing a mus­tache and bowler hat for a role, knew what it was to be turned icon­ic by a seem­ing­ly minor styl­is­tic choice.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Napoleon’s Eng­lish Lessons: How the Mil­i­tary Leader Stud­ied Eng­lish to Escape the Bore­dom of Life in Exile

Napoleon’s Dis­as­trous Inva­sion of Rus­sia Detailed in an 1869 Data Visu­al­iza­tion: It’s Been Called “the Best Sta­tis­ti­cal Graph­ic Ever Drawn”

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

The Face of Bill Mur­ray Adds Some Joy to Clas­sic Paint­ings

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.

How Joni Mitchell’s Song of Heartbreak, “River,” Became a Christmas Classic

in Music | December 21st, 2020

From Elvis’ “Blue Christ­mas” to Tom Waits’ “Christ­mas Card from a Hook­er in Min­neapo­lis” to the Pogues’ “Fairy­tale of New York,” the most hon­est Christ­mas songs freely acknowl­edge the holiday’s dark under­bel­ly. There are always those for whom the hol­i­days are times of heart­break, which, as we know, makes for bet­ter song­writ­ing than tin­sel, elves, and stock­ings. Near the top of any list of mis­er­able Christ­mas songs sits Joni Mitchell’s hol­i­day clas­sic “Riv­er,” in which she laments los­ing “the best baby I ever had” over the sea­son.

“Riv­er” is not real­ly a Christ­mas song; it just hap­pens to be set dur­ing the hol­i­days: “It’s com­ing on Christ­mas, they’re cut­ting down trees,” Joni sings, “They’re putting up rein­deer, singing songs of joy and peace.” This tran­quil scene pro­vides a trag­ic foil for the song’s true sub­ject. “Ulti­mate­ly,” writes J. Free­dom du Lac at The Wash­ing­ton Post, “‘Riv­er’ is a bereft song about a bro­ken romance and a woman who des­per­ate­ly wants to escape her heart­break, say­ing repeat­ed­ly: ‘I wish I had a riv­er I could skate away on.’”

Mitchell’s “despair­ing dra­ma” has “long been a pop­u­lar cov­er among musi­cians, hun­dreds of whom have record­ed it for com­mer­cial release.” (Accord­ing to her web­site, it has been record­ed 763 times, sec­ond only to “Both Sides Now” at almost twice that num­ber.) Last year Ellie Goulding’s cov­er rose to No. 1 in Europe. First released on Mitchel­l’s 1971 clas­sic Blue, the song delib­er­ate­ly evokes the hol­i­days with strains of “Jin­gle Bells” in its open­ing bars before descend­ing into its deeply melan­choly melody.

“Riv­er” did not enter mod­ern Christ­mas sin­ga­longs until the 1990s. In the Poly­phon­ic video at the top, “Joni Mitchell and the Melan­choly of Christ­mas,” we begin all the way back in the 1880s, with the first record­ings of “Jin­gle Bells.” The his­to­ry frames Mitchell’s use of the melody, almost a form of sam­pling, as rad­i­cal protest of a tune that has become “syn­ony­mous with Christ­mas joy.” It has been record­ed by vir­tu­al­ly every­one, and was even broad­cast from space in 1965 “when astro­nauts aboard NASA’s Gem­i­ni 6 played it as part of a Christ­mas prank.”

No, says Mitchell, there are real peo­ple with real prob­lems down here, and some­times Christ­mas sucks. There’ll be no dash­ing through the snow: “It don’t snow here / Stays pret­ty green.” The sto­ry behind the song is well-known: Mitchell end­ed her two-year rela­tion­ship with Gra­ham Nash in 1970, then “skat­ed away” to Europe to escape the “crazy scene.” While in Crete, “she sent Nash a telegram to tell him their rela­tion­ship was over,” notes Tom Eames. No one should try to force a hap­py hol­i­day in such times. If you’re crav­ing a lit­tle real­ness with your cheer, con­sid­er adding “Riv­er” to your playlist.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Joni Mitchell Wrote “Wood­stock,” the Song that Defined the Leg­endary Music Fes­ti­val, Even Though She Wasn’t There (1969)

Watch Joni Mitchell Sing an Immac­u­late Ver­sion of Her Song “Coy­ote,” with Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn & Gor­don Light­foot (1975)

The Expan­sive Vocal Range of Joni Mitchell: From the Ear­ly to Lat­er Years

The Sto­ry of The Pogues’ “Fairy­tale of New York,” the Boozy Bal­lad That Has Become One of the Most Beloved Christ­mas Songs of All Time

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

The Art of Movie Posters: View Online 40,000+ Movie Posters & Learn How They’re Made

in Art, Film | December 15th, 2020

If you can’t judge a movie by its poster, it’s not for the poster design­er’s lack of try­ing. Near­ly as ven­er­a­ble as cin­e­ma itself, the art of the movie poster has evolved to attract the atten­tion and inter­est of gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of film­go­ers — and, safe to say, devel­oped a few best prac­tices along the way. Some exam­ples go beyond effec­tive adver­tise­ment to become icons in and of them­selves: take for exam­ple, the poster for Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Pulp Fic­tion, designed by James Verdes­o­to. In the Van­i­ty Fair video above, Verdes­o­to draws on a vari­ety of “one-sheets” in order to explain a few of the tricks of the trade.

Like any cul­tur­al arti­fact, movie posters are sub­ject to trend and fash­ion. It just hap­pens that trends and fash­ions in movie poster design can last for decades, with each revival bring­ing an under­ly­ing aes­thet­ic con­cept back into the zeit­geist in a new way. Sure­ly you’ll recall a few years, not long ago, when every major com­e­dy seemed to stamp bold red text on a pure white back­ground: Amer­i­can Pie, the remakes of Cheap­er by the Dozen, and The Heart­break Kid, even the likes of Nor­bit.

This has been going on at least since the 1980s, as Verdes­o­to shows by pulling out the poster for John Hugh­es’ beloved Planes, Trains, and Auto­mo­biles, then com­par­ing it to the con­cep­tu­al­ly sim­i­lar one for Meet the Par­ents to note dif­fer­ences in the use of fonts, pho­tographs, and neg­a­tive space.

Since The Firm, thrillers have often been sig­naled with hunt­ed-look­ing men run­ning down blue-toned cor­ri­dors or streets, often in sil­hou­ette; a great many explo­sive action movies since Die Hard have gone in for black-and-white posters that empha­size slash­es of red or orange. Even the non-genre of “inde­pen­dent films,” often mod­est of mar­ket­ing bud­get, have their own col­or: canary yel­low “a cheap way to catch the eye.” Case in point: Vin­cent Gal­lo’s The Brown Bun­ny, a noto­ri­ous film that also hap­pened to come with one of the most mem­o­rable posters of the 2000s, due not just to its yel­low back­ground but because its con­scious ref­er­ence to Euro­pean designs of the 1950s and 60s, such as the one for Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nion­i’s Blow-Up.

You can behold (and in some cas­es even down­load) count­less many works of movie-poster art, from a vari­ety of decades and a vari­ety of nations, at the sites of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter and the New York movie poster gallery Pos­ter­i­tati. Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve also fea­tured Taschen’s book of dynam­ic movie posters of the Russ­ian avant-garde, online archives of the famous­ly artis­tic movie posters of Poland and Czecho­slo­va­kia, not to men­tion com­pelling­ly odd hand-paint­ed movie posters from Ghana. Spend enough time with all of them, and you may find your­self pos­sessed of enough of an intel­lec­tu­al invest­ment in this thor­ough­ly mod­ern art form to start invest­ing in a gen­uine col­lec­tion of your own. But no mat­ter your enthu­si­asm for movie posters, it’ll be a while before you catch up with Mar­tin Scors­ese.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10,000 Clas­sic Movie Posters Get­ting Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter at UT-Austin: Free to Browse & Down­load

40,000 Film Posters in a Won­der­ful­ly Eclec­tic Archive: Ital­ian Tarkovsky Posters, Japan­ese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

50 Film Posters From Poland: From The Empire Strikes Back to Raiders of the Lost Ark

An Archive of 20,000 Movie Posters from Czecho­slo­va­kia (1930–1989)

Graph­ic Design­er Redesigns a Movie Poster Every Day, for One Year: Scar­face, Mul­hol­land Dr., The Grad­u­ate, Ver­ti­go, The Life Aquat­ic and 360 More

The First Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed Exclu­sive­ly to Poster Art Opens Its Doors in the U.S.: Enter the Poster House

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.

Watch the Oscar-Winning “Gerald McBoing-Boing” (1950): It’s Ranked as the 9th Greatest Cartoon of All Time

in Animation | December 11th, 2020

To under­stand how rev­o­lu­tion­ary this short film from 1950 was to con­tem­po­rary view­ers, just con­sid­er the pre­vi­ous four decades (or so) of ani­mat­ed films. There were talk­ing ani­mals, singing ani­mals, bounc­ing ani­mals, and in Dis­ney films humans based on roto­scop­ing live action. From its hum­ble and humor­ous begin­nings, ani­ma­tion was strid­ing towards real­ism as fast as it could. But in the first minute of this adap­ta­tion of a Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel sto­ry, you can see that’s all been tossed out the win­dow, a win­dow shaped like a trape­zoid.

This ani­ma­tion from the rene­gade stu­dio Unit­ed Pro­duc­tions of Amer­i­ca (UPA) ush­ered in the space age look that suit­ed the dynam­ic post-war Amer­i­can econ­o­my. The pace of life was fran­tic, sleek, mod­ern, and the ani­mat­ed char­ac­ters and back­grounds fol­low suit: laws of per­spec­tive are gone. Back­grounds are sug­gest­ed with one or two objects, and col­or is impres­sion­is­tic, not real­is­tic. The char­ac­ters are cute, but drawn with an econ­o­my of line.

Which would all suit a sto­ry by Dr. Seuss that already exist­ed as a children’s record, told in his famil­iar rhyth­mic rhyming style.

The Ger­ald of the title is a young boy who doesn’t speak in words, but in sound effects. His par­ents freak out, a doc­tor can’t help, and his class­mates and school reject him. But like many a Dr. Seuss sto­ry, Gerald’s prob­lem is actu­al­ly a gift, and the film con­cludes in a pos­i­tive way, cel­e­brat­ing dif­fer­ence. The film went on to win the Oscar for Best Ani­mat­ed Short that year, beat­ing out the estab­lished stu­dios of Warn­er Bros., MGM, and Dis­ney. It paved the way for the more min­i­mal ani­ma­tion of Han­na-Bar­bera (Gerald’s dad has a pro­to-George Jet­son look) and opened the door for more abstract films from the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da, and influ­ence the Klasky Csupo stu­dio and oth­ers in the 1990s ani­ma­tion rebirth.

UPA was formed from the exo­dus of sev­er­al top Dis­ney ani­ma­tors after a cre­ators’ strike in 1941. Head among them was John Hub­ley, a lay­out artist who bris­tled against Disney’s real­ism and want­ed to branch out. At first known as Indus­tri­al Film and Poster Ser­vice, the stu­dio made films for the Unit­ed Auto Work­ers and for the Army, mak­ing edu­ca­tion­al films for young pri­vates with the Pri­vate Sna­fu series after Warn­er Bros stepped aside. Chuck Jones helped direct these shorts. Anti-Com­mu­nist sen­ti­ment put an end to gov­ern­ment work, and, so by the late 1940s, UPA decid­ed to take on the big stu­dios with the­atri­cal shorts and after “Ger­ald McBo­ing-Boing” was a hit, they con­tin­ued with the Mr. Magoo series, sev­er­al McBo­ing­Bo­ing sequels, and a TV ver­sion of Dick Tra­cy.

The stu­dio dried up in the 1960s and instead of ani­ma­tion teamed up with Toho Stu­dios in Japan and helped intro­duce a gen­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can audi­ences to kai­ju (giant mon­ster) films like Godzil­la by re-cut­ting and dis­trib­ut­ing many of their films.

Along with its Oscar, “Ger­ald McBo­ing-Boing” is now part of the Library of Con­gress’ Film Reg­istry as a sig­nif­i­cant Amer­i­can Film and often gets vot­ed as one of the great­est ani­mat­ed films of the 20th Cen­tu­ry. (It was vot­ed the 9th best ani­ma­tion of all time, by 1,000 ani­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als.)

Last­ly, Gerald’s last name lives on as the inspi­ra­tion for the “hap­py mutants” zine and web­site, boingboing.net.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 66 Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed-and-Award-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Shorts Online, Cour­tesy of the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Chuck Jones’ 9 Rules For Draw­ing Road Run­ner Car­toons, or How to Cre­ate a Min­i­mal­ist Mas­ter­piece

Leg­endary Ani­ma­tor Chuck Jones Cre­ates an Oscar-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion About the Virtues of Uni­ver­sal Health Care (1949)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

The Sistine Chapel of the Ancients: Archaeologists Discover 8 Miles of Art Painted on Rock Walls in the Amazon

in Art, History | December 8th, 2020

All images by José Iri­arte

Over twelve thou­sand years ago, some of the first humans in the Ama­zon hunt­ed, paint­ed, and danced with the mas­sive extinct mam­mals of the ice age: giant sloths and armadil­los, ice-age hors­es, and mastodons…. How do we know? We have pic­tures, or rock paint­ings, rather–many thou­sands of them made around 12,500 years ago and only recent­ly “found on an eight-mile rock sur­face along the Guayabero Riv­er the Colom­bian Ama­zon,” Hakim Bishara reports at Hyper­al­ler­gic. The pre­his­toric won­der has been dubbed the “Sis­tine Chapel of the ancients.”

The dis­cov­ery, made last year, was kept secret until the release of a new doc­u­men­tary air­ing this month called Jun­gle Mys­tery: Lost King­doms of the Ama­zon. Palaeo-anthro­pol­o­gist Ella Al-Shamahi, pre­sen­ter of the Chan­nel 4 series and a mem­ber of the team that found the site, explains why it may be hard to imag­ine such great pre­his­toric beasts lum­ber­ing through the rain­for­est.

Their exis­tence in this rock art offers a clue to major cli­ma­to­log­i­cal shifts that have occurred in the region over mil­len­nia. As Al-Shamahi tells The Observ­er:

One of the most fas­ci­nat­ing things was see­ing ice age megafau­na because that’s a mark­er of time. I don’t think peo­ple realise that the Ama­zon has shift­ed in the way it looks. It hasn’t always been this rain­for­est. When you look at a horse or mastodon in these paint­ings, of course they weren’t going to live in a for­est. They’re too big. Not only are they giv­ing clues about when they were paint­ed by some of the ear­li­est peo­ple – that in itself is just mind-bog­gling – but they are also giv­ing clues about what this very spot might have looked like: more savan­nah-like.

“We’re talk­ing about sev­er­al tens of thou­sands of paint­ings,” says the team’s leader, José Iri­arte, pro­fes­sor of archae­ol­o­gy at Exeter Uni­ver­si­ty. “It’s going to take gen­er­a­tions to record them.” The rock wall art illus­trates many extinct species, includ­ing pre­his­toric lama and three-toed hoofed mam­mals with trunks, as well as real­is­tic depic­tions of mon­keys, bats, snakes, tur­tles, tapirs, birds, lizards, fish, and deer. Remains found near the site offer clues to the ancient peo­ples’ diets, which includ­ed piran­ha, alli­ga­tors, snakes, frogs, and “rodents such as paca, capy­bara, and armadil­los,” Bishara notes.

Many of the images are paint­ed to the scale of hand­prints left in many places along the wall, and some are much larg­er. Researchers were par­tic­u­lar­ly sur­prised by the method of com­po­si­tion. Some of the art is so high up it can only be seen by drone. “I’m 5ft 10in,” says Shamahi, “and I would be break­ing my neck look­ing up. How were they scal­ing those walls?” It appears the artists used some form of rap­pelling. There are “depic­tions of wood­en tow­ers among the paint­ings,” reports The Guardian, “includ­ing fig­ures appear­ing to bungee jump from them.”

Fur­ther study in the com­ing decades, and cen­turies, will reveal much more about how the paint­ings were made. The why, how­ev­er, will prove more elu­sive. Iri­arte spec­u­lates they served a sacred pur­pose. “It’s inter­est­ing to see that many of these large ani­mals appear sur­round­ed by small men with their arms raised, almost wor­ship­ping these ani­mals.” The pres­ence of hal­lu­cino­genic plants among the paint­ings leads him to com­pare the paint­ings with con­tem­po­rary Ama­zon­ian peo­ple, for whom “non-humans like ani­mals and plants have souls, and they com­mu­ni­cate and engage with peo­ple in coop­er­a­tive or hos­tile ways through the rit­u­als and shaman­ic prac­tices that we see depict­ed in the rock art.”

What­ev­er their pur­pose, the over 100,000 paint­ings on the eight-mile wall con­tain an immea­sur­able store of infor­ma­tion about ancient Ama­zo­ni­ans’ cre­ativ­i­ty and inge­nu­ity. They also add, per­haps, to the moun­tain of rock art evi­dence sug­gest­ing, Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich argued recent­ly, that before orga­nized war became the dom­i­nant prac­tice of civ­i­liza­tions, “humans once had bet­ter ways to spend their time.” The pub­li­ca­tion of the research team’s find­ings is avail­able here. See more images of the site at Hyper­al­ler­gic and Design­boom and watch the first two episodes of Jun­gle Mys­tery: Lost King­doms of the Ama­zon here.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Recent­ly-Dis­cov­ered 44,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing Tells the Old­est Known Sto­ry

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er the World’s First “Art Stu­dio” Cre­at­ed in an Ethiopi­an Cave 43,000 Years Ago

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

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

The Internet Archive is Saving Classic Flash Animations & Games from Extinction: Explore Them Online

in Animation, Archives, Internet Archive, Software, Technology | December 2nd, 2020

Flash is final­ly dead, and the world… does not mourn. Because the announce­ment of its end actu­al­ly came three years ago, “like a guil­lo­tine in a crowd­ed town square,” writes Rhett Jones at Giz­mo­do. It was a slow exe­cu­tion, but it was just. So use­ful in Web 1.0 days for mak­ing ani­ma­tions, games, and seri­ous pre­sen­ta­tions, Flash had become a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, a viral car­ri­er that couldn’t be patched fast enough to keep the hack­ers out. “Adobe’s Flash died many deaths, but we can tru­ly throw some dirt on its grave and say our final good­byes because it’s get­ting the preser­va­tion treat­ment.” Like the ani­mat­ed GIF, Flash ani­ma­tions have their own online library.

All those love­ly Flash memes—the danc­ing bad­gers and the snake, peanut but­ter and jel­ly time—will be saved for per­plexed future gen­er­a­tions, who will use them to deci­pher the runes of ear­ly 2000’s inter­net-speak. How­ev­er sil­ly they may seem now, there’s no deny­ing that these arti­facts were once cen­tral con­stituents of pop cul­ture.

Flash was much more than a dis­trac­tion or frus­trat­ing brows­er crash­er. It pro­vid­ed a “gate­way,” Jason Scott writes at the Inter­net Archive blog, “for many young cre­ators to fash­ion near-pro­fes­sion­al-lev­el games and ani­ma­tion, giv­ing them the first steps to a lat­er career.” (Even if it was a career mak­ing “advergames.”)

A sin­gle per­son work­ing in their home could hack togeth­er a con­vinc­ing pro­gram, upload it to a huge clear­ing­house like New­grounds, and get feed­back on their work. Some cre­ators even made entire series of games, each improv­ing on the last, until they became full pro­fes­sion­al releas­es on con­soles and PCs.

Always true to its pur­pose, the Inter­net Archive has devised a way to store and play Flash ani­ma­tions using emu­la­tors cre­at­ed by Ruf­fle and the Blue­Max­i­ma Flash­point Project, who have already archived tens of thou­sands of Flash games. All those adorable Home­s­tar Run­ner car­toons? Saved from extinc­tion, which would have been their fate, since “with­out a Flash play­er, flash ani­ma­tions don’t work.” This may seem obvi­ous, but it bears some expla­na­tion. Where image, sound, and video files can be con­vert­ed to oth­er for­mats to make them acces­si­ble to mod­ern play­ers, Flash ani­ma­tions can only exist in a world with Flash. They are like Edison’s wax cylin­ders, with­out the charm­ing three-dimen­sions.

Scott goes into more depth on the rise and fall of Flash, a his­to­ry that begins in 1993 with Flash’s pre­de­ces­sor, SmartS­ketch, which became Future­Wave, which became Flash when it was pur­chased by Macro­me­dia, then by Adobe. By 2005, it start­ed to become unsta­ble, and could­n’t evolve along with new pro­to­cols. HTML5 arrived in 2014 to issue the “final death-blow,” kind of.… Will Flash be missed? It’s doubt­ful. But “like any con­tain­er, Flash itself is not as much of a loss as all the art and cre­ativ­i­ty it held.” The Archive cur­rent­ly hosts over 1,500 Flash ani­ma­tions from those turn-of-the-mil­len­ni­um inter­net days, and there are many more to come. Enter the Archive’s Flash col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The U.S. Nation­al Archives Launch­es an Ani­mat­ed GIF Archive: See Whit­man, Twain, Hem­ing­way & Oth­ers in Motion

36,000 Flash Games Have Been Archived and Saved Before Flash Goes Extinct: Play Them Offline

What the Entire Inter­net Looked Like in 1973: An Old Map Gets Found in a Pile of Research Papers

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

Japanese Art Installation Lets People Play Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” As They Walk on Socially-Distanced Notes on the Floor

in Art, Life, Music | December 2nd, 2020

The glob­al pan­dem­ic has revealed the depths of sys­tem­at­ic cru­el­ty in cer­tain places in the world that have refused to com­mit resources to pro­tect­ing peo­ple from the virus or refused to even acknowl­edge its exis­tence. Oth­er respons­es show a dif­fer­ent way for­ward, one in which every­one con­tributes mean­ing­ful­ly through the prin­ci­pled actions of wear­ing masks and social dis­tanc­ing or the prin­ci­pled non-action of stay­ing home to slow the spread.

Then there’s the crit­i­cal role of art, design, and music in our sur­vival. As we have seen—from spon­ta­neous bal­cony ser­e­nades in Italy to poignant ani­mat­ed video poet­ry—the arts are no less cru­cial to our sur­vival than pub­lic health. Human beings need delight, won­der, humor, mourn­ing, and cel­e­bra­tion, and we need to come togeth­er to expe­ri­ence these things, whether online or in real, if dis­tant, life. Ide­al­ly, pub­lic health and art can work togeth­er.

Japan­ese design­er Eisuke Tachikawa has put his skills to work doing exact­ly that. When cas­es began spik­ing in his coun­try in April, Tachikawa and his design firm Nosign­er made some beau­ti­ful­ly designed, and very fun­ny, posters to encour­age social dis­tanc­ing as part of an ini­tia­tive called Pandaid. Then they cre­at­ed Super Mario Broth­ers coin stick­ers to place six feet (or two meters, or one tuna) apart. In its Eng­lish trans­la­tion, at least, the text on Nosigner’s site is direct about their inten­tions: “As this con­tin­ues we want­ed to val­ue-trans­late the social con­straints of social dis­tanc­ing into some­thing pos­i­tive and enjoy­able.”

Tachikawa and Nosign­er have “devel­oped a brand,” they announced recent­ly, called SOCIAL HARMONY “in order to spread the cul­ture of social dis­tanc­ing in a humor­ous way.” Their lat­est instal­la­tion, how­ev­er, does not incor­po­rate jokes or Nin­ten­do ref­er­ences. Rather it draws on one of the most pop­u­lar and beloved pieces of min­i­mal­ist clas­si­cal music, Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” (pro­claimed by Clas­sic FM as “the most flat-out relax­ing piece of piano music ever writ­ten”). “Peo­ple stand on a large music sheet on the floor and notes are played the moment you step on them. By respect­ing social dis­tances and going one note at a time, the pub­lic is able to play” Satie’s piece.

Even for such a suc­cinct com­po­si­tion, this must require a rig­or­ous amount of coor­di­na­tion. But it is nec­es­sary to play the notes in order: “Since the melody changes with every stop, one can cre­ate one’s own Gymnopédie No. 1, since the played melody changes with every step.” The piece was installed at the entrance hall to the Yoko­hama Minatomi­rai Hall for DESIGNART TOKYO 2020, where it will remain until the end of the year. Sure­ly there will be oth­er forms of “social har­mo­ny” to come from the Japan­ese design­ers. Like the prac­tice of social dis­tanc­ing itself, we can only hope such projects catch on and go glob­al, until the wide­spread vac­ci­na­tion and an end to the pan­dem­ic can bring us clos­er again.

via Spoon & Tam­a­go 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A New Dig­i­tal Archive Pre­serves Black Lives Mat­ter & COVID-19 Street Art

Watch How to Be at Home, a Beau­ti­ful Short Ani­ma­tion on the Real­i­ties of Social Iso­la­tion in 2020

2020: An Iso­la­tion Odyssey–A Short Film Reen­acts the Finale of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a COVID-19 Twist

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

Learn How to Play Chess Online: Free Chess Lessons for Beginners, Intermediate Players & Beyond

in Games, How to Learn for Free | November 30th, 2020

The most desired Christ­mas gift of 2020? A chess set. It’s cer­tain­ly desired, at any rate, by the rapt view­ers of The Queen’s Gam­bit, the acclaimed Net­flix minis­eries that debuted in Octo­ber. Cre­at­ed by screen­writer-pro­duc­ers Scott Frank and Allan Scott, its sev­en episodes tell the sto­ry of Beth Har­mon, an orphan in 1950s Ken­tucky who turns out to be a chess prodi­gy, then goes on to become a world-class play­er. Dur­ing the Cold War, the intel­lec­tu­al and geopo­lit­i­cal prospect of Amer­i­can and Sovi­et mas­ters going head to head stoked pub­lic inter­est in chess; over the past month, the sur­prise suc­cess of The Queen’s Gam­bit has had a sim­i­lar effect.

Whether or not you feel a sense of kin­ship with the series’ unre­lent­ing­ly chess-obsessed young pro­tag­o­nist, you may well feel an urge to learn, or re-learn, to play the game. If so, all the resources you need are online, and today we’ve round­ed them up for you.

To get start­ed, Chess.com has pro­duced “Every­thing You Need to Know About Chess,” a series of Youtube videos “designed to give every aspir­ing chess play­er the ‘one chess les­son of their life’ if they were only to get one.” Watch them, or explore these web-based tuto­ri­als. And even if you don’t have a chess set of your own, you can get start­ed play­ing imme­di­ate­ly there­after: cre­ate an account at Chess.com and you can play against the com­put­er or real play­ers around the world matched to your skill lev­el, all for free.

To shore up your knowl­edge of the game’s fun­da­men­tals, watch this five-video series by instruc­tor John Bartholomew on top­ics like unde­fend­ed pieces, coor­di­na­tion, and typ­i­cal mis­takes. The Chess Web­site’s Youtube chan­nel cov­ers even more, and its basics playlist teach­es every­thing from open­ing prin­ci­ples to the nature of indi­vid­ual pieces, pawn, rook, knight, and beyond.

But nobody with a taste for chess can stop at the basics, and the sup­ply of instruc­tion has grown to meet the demand. The St. Louis Chess Club offers a series of lec­tures from nation­al mas­ters and grand­mas­ters geared toward begin­ning, inter­me­di­ate, and advanced play­ers.

At Chess School, you’ll find videos on“the great­est chess games ever played, the immor­tal chess games, the best games from the lat­est tour­na­ments, world cham­pi­on’s games, instruc­tive chess games, famous play­ers games and much more.” Among seri­ous play­ers you’ll find many fans of Agad­ma­tor, whose exten­sive playlists exam­ine cur­rent mas­ters like Mag­nus Carlsen, past mas­ters like Gar­ry Kas­parov, and exam­ples of tech­niques like the Eng­lish Open­ing and the Sicil­ian Defense, the lat­er of which enjoyed quite a moment in the era of The Queen’s Gam­bit.  The series has hard­ly gone unno­ticed in the chess world: on chan­nels like Chess Net­work, you’ll even find videos about the strate­gies employed by Beth Har­mon, whose style has been pro­grammed into chess-play­ing AI “bots.” They also have a “Begin­ner to Chess Mas­ter” playlist that will con­tin­u­al­ly build your under­stand­ing of the game in a step by step man­ner.

The char­ac­ter’s per­son­al­i­ty, how­ev­er, remains a cre­ation of Wal­ter Tevis, author of the epony­mous nov­el The Queen’s Gam­bit. Tevis’ oth­er works famous­ly brought to the screen include The Hus­tler and The Man Who Fell to Earth: works of lit­er­a­ture con­cerned, respec­tive­ly, with mas­tery of a decep­tive­ly com­plex game and the con­di­tion of the social out­sider. These themes come togeth­er in The Queen’s Gam­bit, whose author also described it as “a trib­ute to brainy women.” Per­haps you plan to give such a per­son in your life a chess set this year. If so, you know which book to wrap up with it — apart, of course, from  Ward Farnsworth’s 700-page Preda­tor at The Chess­board: A Field Guide To Chess Tac­tics. Or Bob­by Fis­ch­er Teach­es Chess. If you have oth­er favorite resources, please feel free to add them to the list below…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Free 700-Page Chess Man­u­al Explains 1,000 Chess Tac­tics in Straight­for­ward Eng­lish

A Beau­ti­ful Short Doc­u­men­tary Takes You Inside New York City’s Last Great Chess Store

A Brief His­to­ry of Chess: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the 1,500-Year-Old Game

Vladimir Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Mind-Bend­ing Chess Prob­lems

The Mag­ic of Chess: Kids Share Their Unin­hib­it­ed, Philo­soph­i­cal Insights about the Ben­e­fits of Chess

Gar­ry Kas­parov Now Teach­ing an Online Course on Chess

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.