Modern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vases & Artisanal Glass

in Art, History | May 22nd, 2013

Some­times the old ways work best. That assump­tion, or at least the assump­tion that the most cen­turies-test­ed tech­niques can still pro­duce inter­est­ing results, under­pins many of the Art Insti­tute of Chicago’s Launch­pad videos. The series, designed to give vis­i­tors con­text for the arti­facts they see there, reveals the process behind the prod­uct, and some new prod­ucts may come out of some very old process­es indeed. In the case of the video at the top, we see the cre­ation of an ancient Greek vase — or, rather, a new vase, cre­at­ed as the ancient Greeks did — from the clay purifi­ca­tion to the knead­ing to the shap­ing to the illus­tra­tion to the fir­ing.

Just above, you can watch the ancient “free-blown tech­nique” of glass­mak­ing in action. Invent­ed around 40 B.C., glass-blow­ing gave the glass­mak­ers of the day a faster, cheap­er, more con­trol­lable way to work, which enabled them to pro­duce for a larg­er mar­ket than ever before. If you’d like to learn more about the method it dis­placed, the Art Insti­tute also has a video demon­strat­ing the old­er “core-formed” glass­mak­ing tech­nique. Pot­tery and glass­ware have an appeal­ing prac­ti­cal­i­ty, and first-rate arti­sans of those forms could no doubt make a good deal of mon­ey, but how did the mon­ey itself come into being? The Launch­pad video on coin pro­duc­tion in Ancient Greece, below, sheds light on mint­ing in antiq­ui­ty. Seri­ous artis­ti­cal­ly inclined numis­ma­tists will, of course, want to fol­low it up with its com­pan­ion piece on coin pro­duc­tion in the Roman world.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Bal­ti­more Hair­dress­er Became a World-Renowned “Hair Archae­ol­o­gist” of Ancient Rome

Rome Reborn – An Amaz­ing Dig­i­tal Mod­el of Ancient Rome

Learn­ing Ancient His­to­ry for Free

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Daniel Dennett Presents Seven Tools For Critical Thinking

in Philosophy | May 21st, 2013

Image via Flickr Com­mons

Love him or hate him, many of our read­ers may know enough about Daniel C. Den­nett to have formed some opin­ion of his work. While Den­nett can be a soft-spo­ken, jovial pres­ence, he doesn’t suf­fer fuzzy think­ing or banal plat­i­tudes— what he calls “deepities”—lightly. Whether he’s explain­ing (or explain­ing away) con­scious­ness, reli­gion, or free will, Dennett’s mate­ri­al­ist phi­los­o­phy leaves lit­tle-to-no room for mys­ti­cal spec­u­la­tion or sen­ti­men­tal­ism. So it should come as no sur­prise that his lat­est book, Intu­ition Pumps And Oth­er Tools for Think­ing, is a hard-head­ed how-to for cut­ting through com­mon cog­ni­tive bias­es and log­i­cal fal­lac­i­es.

In a recent Guardian arti­cle, Den­nett excerpts sev­en tools for think­ing from the new book. Hav­ing taught crit­i­cal think­ing and argu­men­ta­tion to under­grad­u­ates for years, I can say that his advice is pret­ty much stan­dard fare of crit­i­cal rea­son­ing. But Dennett’s for­mu­la­tions are uniquely—and bluntly—his own. Below is a brief sum­ma­ry of his sev­en tools.

1. Use Your Mis­takes

Dennett’s first tool rec­om­mends rig­or­ous intel­lec­tu­al hon­esty, self-scruti­ny, and tri­al and error. In typ­i­cal fash­ion, he puts it this way: “when you make a mis­take, you should learn to take a deep breath, grit your teeth and then exam­ine your own rec­ol­lec­tions of the mis­take as ruth­less­ly and as dis­pas­sion­ate­ly as you can man­age.” This tool is a close rel­a­tive of the sci­en­tif­ic method, in which every error offers an oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn, rather than a chance to mope and grum­ble.

2. Respect Your Oppo­nent 

Often known as read­ing in “good faith” or “being char­i­ta­ble,” this sec­ond point is as much a rhetor­i­cal as a log­i­cal tool, since the essence of per­sua­sion involves get­ting peo­ple to actu­al­ly lis­ten to you. And they won’t if you’re over­ly nit­picky, pedan­tic, mean-spir­it­ed, hasty, or unfair. As Den­nett puts it, “your tar­gets will be a recep­tive audi­ence for your crit­i­cism: you have already shown that you under­stand their posi­tions as well as they do, and have demon­strat­ed good judg­ment.”

3. The “Sure­ly” Klax­on

A “Klax­on” is a loud, elec­tric horn—such as a car horn—an urgent warn­ing. In this point, Den­nett asks us to treat the word “sure­ly” as a rhetor­i­cal warn­ing sign that an author of an argu­men­ta­tive essay has stat­ed an “ill-exam­ined ‘tru­ism’” with­out offer­ing suf­fi­cient rea­son or evi­dence, hop­ing the read­er will quick­ly agree and move on. While this is not always the case, writes Den­nett, such ver­biage often sig­nals a weak point in an argu­ment, since these words would not be nec­es­sary if the author, and read­er, real­ly could be “sure.”

4. Answer Rhetor­i­cal Ques­tions

Like the use of “sure­ly,” a rhetor­i­cal ques­tion can be a sub­sti­tute for think­ing. While rhetor­i­cal ques­tions depend on the sense that “the answer is so obvi­ous that you’d be embar­rassed to answer it,” Den­nett rec­om­mends doing so any­way. He illus­trates the point with a Peanuts car­toon: “Char­lie Brown had just asked, rhetor­i­cal­ly: ‘Who’s to say what is right and wrong here?’ and Lucy respond­ed, in the next pan­el: ‘I will.’” Lucy’s answer “sure­ly” caught Char­lie Brown off-guard. And if he were engaged in gen­uine philo­soph­i­cal debate, it would force him to re-exam­ine his assump­tions.

 5. Employ Occam’s Razor

 The 14^th-cen­tu­ry Eng­lish philoso­pher William of Occam lent his name to this prin­ci­ple, which pre­vi­ous­ly went by the name of lex par­si­mo­nious, or the law of par­si­mo­ny. Den­nett sum­ma­rizes it this way: “The idea is straight­for­ward: don’t con­coct a com­pli­cat­ed, extrav­a­gant the­o­ry if you’ve got a sim­pler one (con­tain­ing few­er ingre­di­ents, few­er enti­ties) that han­dles the phe­nom­e­non just as well.”

6. Don’t Waste Your Time on Rub­bish

Dis­play­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic gruff­ness in his sum­ma­ry, Dennett’s sixth point expounds “Sturgeon’s law,” which states that rough­ly “90% of every­thing is crap.” While he con­cedes this may be an exag­ger­a­tion, the point is that there’s no point in wast­ing your time on argu­ments that sim­ply aren’t any good, even, or espe­cial­ly, for the sake of ide­o­log­i­cal axe-grind­ing.

7. Beware of Deep­i­ties

Den­nett saves for last one of his favorite boogey­men, the “deep­i­ty,” a term he takes from com­put­er sci­en­tist Joseph Weizen­baum. A deep­i­ty is “a propo­si­tion that seems both impor­tant and true—and profound—but that achieves this effect by being ambigu­ous.” Here is where Dennett’s devo­tion to clar­i­ty at all costs tends to split his read­ers into two camps. Some think his dri­ve for pre­ci­sion is an admirable ana­lyt­ic eth­ic; some think he man­i­fests an unfair bias against the lan­guage of meta­physi­cians, mys­tics, the­olo­gians, con­ti­nen­tal and post-mod­ern philoso­phers, and maybe even poets. Who am I to decide? (Don’t answer that).

You’ll have to make up your own mind about whether Dennett’s last rule applies in all cas­es, but his first six can’t be beat when it comes to crit­i­cal­ly vet­ting the myr­i­ad claims rou­tine­ly vying for our atten­tion and agree­ment.

via Mefi

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix in 2004 Film

Daniel Den­nett (a la Jeff Fox­wor­thy) Does the Rou­tine, “You Might be an Athe­ist If…”

90 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

Doors Keyboardist Ray Manzarek Tells the Story of the Classic Song, ‘Riders on the Storm’

in Music | May 21st, 2013

Ray Man­zarek of the Doors died Mon­day of can­cer. He was 74. Man­zarek’s jazz-inflect­ed, clas­si­cal­ly influ­enced key­board play­ing, woven togeth­er with Jim Mor­rison’s bari­tone vocals, helped define the sound of the 1960s.

Man­zarek and Mor­ri­son were both recent grad­u­ates of the UCLA film school in 1965 when they had a chance encounter on Venice Beach. Mor­ri­son sang a few songs for Man­zarek, and the two decid­ed right then and there to start a band. Drum­mer John Dens­more and gui­tarist Rob­by Krieger soon joined, and the Doors were born.

From the begin­ning, the clas­si­cal­ly trained Man­zarek played musi­cal foil to Mor­rison’s poet­ic wild­man per­sona. “We just com­bined the Apol­lon­ian and the Dionysian,” Man­zarek said of the band in 1997. “The Dionysian side is the blues, and the Apol­lon­ian side is clas­si­cal music. The prop­er artist com­bines Apol­lon­ian rig­or and cor­rect­ness with Dionysian fren­zy, pas­sion and excite­ment. You blend those two togeth­er, and you have the com­plete, whole artist.”

For a fas­ci­nat­ing look at just how beau­ti­ful­ly things blend­ed togeth­er with the Doors, watch above as Man­zarek tells the sto­ry of the band’s clas­sic 1971 sin­gle, “Rid­ers on the Storm.” The scene is from the 2011 doc­u­men­tary Mr. Mojo Risin’: The Sto­ry of L.A. Woman, which chron­i­cles the mak­ing of the Doors’ sixth and final stu­dio album. The band record­ed “Rid­ers on the Storm” in Decem­ber of 1970. By the time L.A. Woman was released in April of 1971, Mor­ri­son had already moved to Paris, where he died a few months lat­er. “Rid­ers on the Storm” reached num­ber 14 on the Bill­board charts in Amer­i­ca. You can hear the fin­ished record­ing below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Young, Clean Cut Jim Mor­ri­son Appears in a 1962 Flori­da State Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­mo Film

Ani­ma­tions Revive Lost Inter­views with David Fos­ter Wal­lace, Jim Mor­ri­son & Dave Brubeck

Watch Picasso Create Entire Paintings in Magnificent Time-Lapse Film (1956)

in Art, Film | May 20th, 2013

How did Pablo Picas­so do it? Art his­to­ri­ans have spent much time and many words answer­ing that ques­tion, but in the video above, you can watch the painter in the act of cre­ation — or, rather, you can watch a series of his paint­ings as they come into being, evolv­ing from spare but evoca­tive col­lec­tions of mark­er strokes into com­plete images, alive with col­or. We see Picas­so’s visu­al ideas emerge, and then we see him refine and revise them, some­times toward a sur­pris­ing result. All of this hap­pens in under two min­utes, since film­mak­er Hen­ri-Georges Clouzot shot the artist work­ing with time-lapse pho­tog­ra­phy, com­press­ing each cre­ative process into mere sec­onds.

This par­tic­u­lar sequence became the trail­er of Clouzot’s 1956 doc­u­men­tary The Mys­tery of Picas­so. The paint­ings in it, we read at the end, “can­not be seen any­where else. They were destroyed upon com­ple­tion of the film.” Though word on the street has it that one or two of them may actu­al­ly sur­vive some­where today, the idea of Picas­so paint­ings exist­ing only on film does cap­ture the imag­i­na­tion, and it moved the French gov­ern­ment to offi­cial­ly declare The Mys­tery of Picas­so a nation­al trea­sure. Picas­so had, of course, paint­ed on film before, as you might recall from see­ing us fea­ture Paul Hae­saerts’ 1950 Vis­ite à Picas­so.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Icon­ic Artists at Work: Rare Videos of Picas­so, Matisse, Kandin­sky, Renoir, Mon­et, Pol­lock & More

Picas­so Paint­ing on Glass

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Keith Moon’s Last Interview, 1978

in Music, Television | May 20th, 2013

Here’s a sad lit­tle piece of rock and roll his­to­ry: the last tele­vi­sion inter­view of Kei­th Moon, mer­cu­r­ial drum­mer for The Who. It was broad­cast live on the morn­ing of August 7, 1978, exact­ly one month before Moon’s death from a drug over­dose at the age of 32.

Moon and gui­tarist Pete Town­shend had flown into New York the pre­vi­ous day to pro­mote The Who’s eighth stu­dio album, Who Are You. In addi­tion to a cou­ple of radio inter­views, Moon and Town­shend stopped by the stu­dios of Good Morn­ing Amer­i­ca for a TV inter­view with a stiff and humor­less David Hart­man. Moon appears bloat­ed and unhealthy. At one point he makes a joke about not being in con­trol of his life.

“Are you in con­trol of your life at all?” Hart­man asks.

“On cer­tain days,” says Moon.

“Cer­tain days.”

“Yeah.”

“What are you like the oth­er days?”

“Quite out of con­trol. Amazingly…ah…drunk.”

Moon’s var­i­ous addic­tions had caught up with him by 1978. “Musi­cal­ly,” writes Town­shend in Who I Am: A Mem­oir, “his drum­ming was get­ting so uneven that record­ing was almost impos­si­ble, so much so that work on the Who Are You album had ground to a halt.…[The Who] had just about enough tracks for a record, with very lit­tle addi­tion­al mate­r­i­al to spare. ‘Music Must Change’ was com­plet­ed with foot­steps replac­ing drums.”

On the night of Sep­tem­ber 6, 1978, Moon and his girl­friend Annette Wal­ter-Lax attend­ed a par­ty in Lon­don, host­ed by Paul McCart­ney. Dur­ing the par­ty, and at the mid­night pre­mier of The Bud­dy Hol­ly Sto­ry that fol­lowed, Moon took Clome­thi­a­zole, a seda­tive pre­scribed to help him cope with alco­hol with­draw­al. When he got home, he took more. Wal­ter-Lax found his life­less body when she checked on him on the after­noon of Sep­tem­ber 7. An autop­sy showed that Moon had tak­en 32 tablets of Clome­thi­a­zole. His doc­tor had told him not to exceed three per day.

In a pub­lic state­ment fol­low­ing Moon’s death, Town­shend wrote: “We have lost our great come­di­an, our supreme melo­drama­tist, the man, who apart from being the most unpre­dictable and spon­ta­neous drum­mer in rock, would have set him­self alight if he thought it would make the audi­ence laugh or jump out of its seats. We have lost our drum­mer but also our alter-ego. He drove us hard many times but his love of every one of us always ulti­mate­ly came through.… We loved him and he’s gone.”

For some­thing to help us remem­ber Moon’s con­tri­bu­tion to The Who–both his musi­cian­ship and his personality–here is a video fea­tur­ing his iso­lat­ed drum track from “Who Are You,” the title track on Moon’s final album:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kei­th Moon’s Final Per­for­mance with The Who (1978)

Kei­th Moon, Drum­mer of The Who, Pass­es Out at 1973 Con­cert; 19-Year-Old Fan Takes Over

Good­night Kei­th Moon: “The Most Inap­pro­pri­ate Bed­time Sto­ry Ever”

Allen Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework”: A Reading List for His Class “Literary History of the Beats”

in Education, Poetry | May 20th, 2013

Click for larg­er image

“Argh, you’re all ama­teurs in a pro­fes­sion­al uni­verse!” roared Allen Gins­berg to a young class of aspir­ing poets in 1977 at the Jack Ker­ouac School of Dis­em­bod­ied Poet­ics. Their offense? Most of the stu­dents had failed to reg­is­ter for med­i­ta­tion instruc­tion. The sto­ry comes to us from Steve Sil­ber­man, who was then a 19-year-old stu­dent in that class­room and a recip­i­ent of Ginsberg’s genius that sum­mer.

Only three years ear­li­er, in 1974, Gins­berg and poet Anne Wald­man launched the Jack Ker­ouac School at Naropa Insti­tute (now Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty), in Boul­der, Col­orado. The Institute—founded by Tibetan teacher Chö­gyam Trung­pa Rin­poche—was mod­eled on ancient Bud­dhist learn­ing cen­ters in India and described by Wald­man and poet Andrew Schelling as “part monastery, part col­lege, part con­ven­tion hall or alchemist’s lab.”

Gins­berg taught at Naropa until his death in 1997. The class in which he had his out­burst was called “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats,” at the start of which he hand­ed his stu­dents a list called “Celes­tial Home­work” (first page above, sec­ond and third pages here and here). Sil­ber­man describes the list thus (quot­ing from Gins­berg’s descrip­tion):

This “celes­tial home­work” is the read­ing list that Gins­berg hand­ed out on the first day of his course as “sug­ges­tions for a quick check-out & taste of antient scriven­ers whose works were reflect­ed in Beat lit­er­ary style as well as spe­cif­ic beat pages to dig into.”

It’s a par­tic­u­lar­ly Gins­berg-ian list, with a healthy mix of gen­res and peri­ods, most of it poetry—by Ginsberg’s fel­low beats, to be sure, but also by Melville, Dick­in­son, Yeats, Mil­ton, Shel­ley, and sev­er­al more. Sad­ly, it’s too late to sit at Gins­berg’s feet, but one can still find guid­ance from his “Celes­tial Home­work,” and you can even lis­ten to audio record­ings from the class online too.

Sil­ber­man has done us all the great ser­vice of com­pil­ing as many free online ver­sions of Ginsberg’s rec­om­mend­ed texts as he could. You’ll find them all here, with author bios linked to each pho­to. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, some of the links have gone dead, but with a lit­tle bit of search­ing, you can work your way through most of Ginsberg’s list. Sil­ber­man reports anoth­er Gins­berg epi­gram from his 1977 class: “Poet­ry is the real­iza­tion of the mag­nif­i­cence of the actu­al.” The works on the “Celes­tial Home­work,” Sil­ber­man com­ments, “are gates to that mag­nif­i­cence.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Allen Gins­berg Reads His Famous­ly Cen­sored Beat Poem, Howl

Allen Gins­berg Record­ings Brought to the Dig­i­tal Age. Lis­ten to Eight Full Tracks for Free

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Lit­er­a­ture Syl­labus Asks Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Works, Cov­er­ing 6000 Pages

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

Watch 5 Filmmakers Recall Their Most Cringeworthy Moments at the Movies with Mom & Dad

in Comedy, Film, Life | May 17th, 2013

In sixth grade, my friend Amy Osborn’s par­ents took us to a screen­ing of Annie Hall. The bed­room scenes with Car­ol Kane, Janet Mar­golin and Diane Keaton were chaste by today’s stan­dards. The repar­tee was so beyond my frame of ref­er­ence, it caused but lit­tle dis­com­fort. What did me in was the two-line exchange between a car­toon Woody Allen and Snow White’s Wicked Queen con­cern­ing her peri­od (or lack there­of). Are You There God? It’s Me, Mar­garet was our sacred text, but its most sen­sa­tion­al sub­ject matter—menstruation—was deeply taboo out­side of my 1970’s Indi­ana tribe. I could have died, know­ing Mr. Osborn was sit­ting right there. The one con­so­la­tion was that my own par­ents weren’t.

These awk­ward encoun­ters can be defin­ing, which explains why the Tribeca Film Fes­ti­val sought to fer­ret them out as part of its One Ques­tion series. It’s impres­sive that the four direc­tors and one pro­duc­er fea­tured above decid­ed to pur­sue careers in film after inad­ver­tent­ly shar­ing with their par­ents such ten­der moments as a mas­tur­bat­ing Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man in Todd Solondz’s sem­i­nal (par­don the pun) Hap­pi­ness or the relent­less deflo­ration scene at the top of Lar­ry Clark’s Kids.

Per­haps you can relate. If so, please spill the gory details below. Pro­vid­ed you’re strong enough to revis­it the trau­ma, what was your most cringe-induc­ing moment at the movies with your mom or dad, or—let’s not be ageist here—your kids?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Grow­ing Up John Waters: The Odd­ball Film­mak­er Cat­a­logues His Many For­ma­tive Rebel­lions (1993)

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

Dustin Hoff­man Talks Sex from the Com­fort of His Own Bed (1968)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day grows less ashamed with every pass­ing year. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Photographer Revisits Abandoned Movie Sets for Star Wars and Other Classic Films in North Africa

in Film, Photography | May 17th, 2013

Mak­ing a movie? Need to shoot some large-scale desert scenes? You might con­sid­er tak­ing your pro­duc­tion to North Africa, where you’ll find not only a great many acres of sand, but will fol­low in the foot­steps of some of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry’s high­est-pro­file film­mak­ers. Just above, you see a pic­ture of one of the many Star Wars sets still stand­ing in Tozeur, Tunisia, 36 years after the shoot. New York pho­tog­ra­ph­er Rä di Mar­ti­no has tak­en it upon her­self to deter­mine the loca­tions and col­lect images of these cin­e­mat­ic ruins in the projects “No More Stars” and “Every World’s a Stage.” Giv­en the sur­pris­ing­ly sound con­di­tion of some of these sets — that dry air must have some­thing to do with it — I fore­see an entre­pre­neur­ial oppor­tu­ni­ty in the vein of all those New Zealand Lord of the Rings fan tours.

Even if Star Wars does­n’t get you excit­ed enough to book a trip to Tunisia, a vis­it to Moroc­co may still inter­est you. Di Mar­ti­no’s short Petite his­toire des plateaux aban­don­nès (Short His­to­ry of Aban­doned Sets) seeks out more such long-silent fake towns, fortress­es, and gas sta­tions around Ouarza­zate, orig­i­nal­ly used for every­thing from cheap hor­ror movies to Lawrence of Ara­bia. There, a group of kids recites, dead­pan, scenes from the var­i­ous pro­duc­tions that swung through town well before they were born. These sur­viv­ing chunks of arti­fice, meant only for the cam­era, have found the cam­era again — or, rather, the cam­era has found them — with results that now look more inter­est­ing than many of the major films that com­mis­sioned them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mak­ing of The Empire Strikes Back Show­cased on Long-Lost Dutch TV Doc­u­men­tary

Hun­dreds of Fans Col­lec­tive­ly Remade Star Wars; Now They Remake The Empire Strikes Back

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

1927 London Shown in Moving Color

in History | May 16th, 2013

Back dur­ing the 1920s, Claude Friese-Greene, an ear­ly British pio­neer of film, shot The Open Road, “a series of ten-minute trav­el­ogues of Britain,” which were meant “to be shown before the main fea­ture in cin­e­ma pro­grammes,” accord­ing to the British Film Insti­tute. Clips from that series have appeared for years on the BFI’s YouTube Chan­nel. But, in recent days, the hive mind of the inter­net has focused on these five min­utes of footage show­ing 1920s Lon­don in rare mov­ing col­or. What draws us to this footage? Per­haps one Vimeo com­menter put it best, say­ing: “Pro­found­ly mov­ing some­how. All those ghosts on film, fore­shad­ow­ing our foot­steps through the same city. Parts of Lon­don remain star­tling­ly unchanged. The mega­lopo­lis was less cor­po­rate then, more impe­r­i­al, cer­tain­ly less sus­pi­cious of the cam­era. But, those pas­tel shades of peo­ple are shown dodg­ing the traf­fic in the same way as we do, per­haps show­ing us a way through the labyrinth.” It’s hard not to stop and take notice when the past seems dis­tant, yet so close and famil­iar.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the King’s Speech 1938

Ear­ly Exper­i­ments in Col­or Film (1895–1935)

The Nor­mandy Inva­sion Cap­tured on 16 mm Kodachrome Film (1944)

Rare Col­or Footage of the 1939 World Series: Yan­kees v. Reds

Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Kiss My Ass”

in Literature | May 14th, 2013

So every­one knows Hem­ing­way was a bruis­er. Some of the best sto­ries of his macho pos­tur­ing involve fel­low writ­ers. There was, of course, that time he and Wal­lace Stevens slugged it out in Key West. I’ve been told Stevens asked for it, drunk­en­ly telling Hemingway’s sis­ter Ursu­la that her broth­er wrote like a lit­tle boy. I don’t know whose ver­sion of the sto­ry this comes from, but by all accounts, Hem­ing­way knocked the bear of a poet down sev­er­al times. The two made up soon after. Then there’s the sto­ry of Hem­ing­way and James Joyce; the diminu­tive Irish writer appar­ent­ly hid behind his pugna­cious friend when trou­ble loomed.

There are many oth­er such yarns, I’m sure, but one I’ve just learned of shows us a much more pas­sive-aggres­sive side of Papa H. As the John F. Kennedy Pres­i­den­tial Library blog informs us, Hem­ing­way once sent F. Scott Fitzger­ald a type­script of A Farewell to Arms. Fitzger­ald sent back ten pages of edits and com­ments, sign­ing off with “A beau­ti­ful book it is!” You can see Hemingway’s first reac­tion above (signed EH). In lat­er drafts, it seems, he took some of Fitzgerald’s advice to heart.

via @matthiasrascher

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

F. Scott Fitzger­ald in Drag (1916)

James Joyce in Paris: “Deal With Him, Hem­ing­way!”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low  him @jdmagness