Around the World in 1896: 40 Minutes of Real Footage Lets You Visit Paris, New York, Venice, Rome, Budapest & More

in Film, History | November 8th, 2022

No cul­tur­al tour of Glas­gow could be com­plete with­out a vis­it to the Bri­tan­nia Panop­ti­con, the world’s old­est sur­viv­ing music hall. “Con­vert­ed from ware­house to music hall in 1857 and licensed in 1859, the Bri­tan­nia Music Hall enter­tained Glasgow’s work­ing class­es for near­ly 80 years,” says its about page. “By the time it closed in 1938 it had also accom­mo­dat­ed cin­e­ma, car­ni­val, freak show, wax works, zoo, art gallery and hall of mir­rors,” and it had also changed its name to reflect the fact that every con­ceiv­able form of enter­tain­ment could be seen there. Thanks to an ongo­ing con­ser­va­tion effort, the build­ing still stands today, and its details have grad­u­al­ly been returned to the look and feel of its glo­ry days.

In 2016, the Bri­tan­nia Panop­ti­con marked 120 years of show­ing film in that build­ing. Part of the cel­e­bra­tion involved upload­ing, to its very own Youtube chan­nel, this 40-minute com­pi­la­tion of real footage from 1896, the year its cin­e­mat­ic pro­gram­ming began. (Ambi­ent sound has been added to enhance the sen­sa­tion of time trav­el.)

In it you’ll catch glimpses of life as it was real­ly lived 126 years ago in places like Man­hat­tan’s Union Square, Lon­don’s Pic­cadil­ly Cir­cus, Budapest’s Széchenyi Chain Bridge, Rome’s Por­to di Ripet­ta, and Paris’ Bassin des Tui­leries — as well as the Pont Neuf and Arc de Tri­om­phe. The pre­pon­der­ance of Parisian loca­tions is unsur­pris­ing, giv­en that most of the footage was shot by the French broth­ers Auguste and Louis Lumière, pio­neers of both the tech­nol­o­gy and art of cin­e­ma.

The sons of a fam­i­ly involved in the nascent pho­tog­ra­phy indus­try, the Lumière broth­ers patent­ed their own motion-pic­ture sys­tem in 1895, the same year they gave their first screen­ing: the film was La Sor­tie de l’u­sine Lumière à Lyon, whose 46 sec­onds show exact­ly that. A few months lat­er, they put on a pub­lic pro­gram includ­ing nine more films of sim­i­lar length, each also con­sist­ing of a sin­gle shot in what we would now call doc­u­men­tary style. This proved enter­tain­ment enough to launch a world tour, and the broth­ers took their ciné­matographe to Lon­don, New York City, Bom­bay, Buenos Aires and else­where. This pre­sum­ably gave them their chance to shoot in such cities, sug­gest­ing that a wide vari­ety of loca­tions and cul­tures could become cap­ti­vat­ing mate­r­i­al for motion pic­tures: a propo­si­tion more than val­i­dat­ed by the sub­se­quent cen­tu­ry, but not one in which the Lumière broth­ers, who quit cin­e­ma less than a decade lat­er, seem to have put much stock them­selves.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the Films of the Lumière Broth­ers & the Birth of Cin­e­ma (1895)

Footage of Cities Around the World in the 1890s: Lon­don, Tokyo, New York, Venice, Moscow & More

Watch Scenes from Czarist Moscow Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (May 1896)

Real Inter­views with Peo­ple Who Lived in the 1800s

What the First Movies Real­ly Looked Like: Dis­cov­er the IMAX Films of the 1890s

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.

A Stunning, Hand-Illustrated Book of Mushrooms Drawn by an Overlooked 19th Century Female Scientist

in Biology, Gender, History | November 7th, 2022

Mush­rooms have qui­et­ly become super­stars of the glob­al stage.

Sure, not every­one likes them on piz­za, but who cares?

In the 21st-cen­tu­ry, they are hailed as role mod­els and poten­tial plan­et savers (not to men­tion a wild­ly pop­u­lar design motif…)

Time-lapse cin­e­matog­ra­phy pio­neer Louie Schwartzberg’s crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed doc­u­men­tary, Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi, has made experts of us all.

Go back a cen­tu­ry, and such knowl­edge was much hard­er won, requir­ing time, patience, and prox­im­i­ty to field or for­est.

Wit­ness Fun­gi col­lect­ed in Shrop­shire and oth­er neigh­bor­hoods, a hand­bound, hand-illus­trat­ed 3‑volume col­lec­tion by one Miss M. F. Lewis, of Lud­low, Eng­land.

Miss Lewis, a tal­ent­ed artist with an obvi­ous pas­sion for mycol­o­gy spent over 40 years painstak­ing­ly doc­u­ment­ing the spec­i­mens she ran across in England’s West Mid­lands region.

Each draw­ing or water­col­or is iden­ti­fied in Miss Lewis’ hand by its sub­jec­t’s sci­en­tif­ic name. The loca­tion in which it was found is duti­ful­ly not­ed, as is the date.

The hun­dreds of species she cap­tured with pen and brush between 1860 and 1902 def­i­nite­ly con­sti­tute a life’s work, and also an unpub­lished one.

Cor­nell University’s Mann Library, where the only copy of this pre­cious record is housed, has man­aged to truf­fle up but a sin­gle ref­er­ence to Miss Lewis’ sci­en­tif­ic myco­log­i­cal con­tri­bu­tion.

Eng­lish botanist William Phillips, writ­ing in an 1880 issue of the Trans­ac­tions of the Shrop­shire Archae­o­log­i­cal and Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Soci­ety, not­ed that he been “per­mit­ted to look over [a work] of very much excel­lence exe­cut­ed by Miss M. F. Lewis, of Lud­low”, adding that “sev­er­al rare species [of fun­gi] are very artis­ti­cal­ly rep­re­sent­ed.“

The his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of Miss Lewis’ work extends beyond the fun­gal realm.

As Sage writes in Miss­ing Miss­es in Mycol­o­gy, a post on the Mann Library’s Tum­blr cel­e­brat­ing Miss Lewis and her con­tem­po­rary, Eng­lish mycol­o­gist and illus­tra­tor, Sarah Price, women’s work was often omit­ted from the offi­cial sci­en­tif­ic record:

While we’re now see­ing con­sid­er­able effort to rec­ti­fy the record, the dis­cov­ery of untold sto­ries to fill in the blanks can be tricky busi­ness. It’s not that the sto­ries nev­er hap­pened — the field of botany, for one, is replete with some pret­ty spec­tac­u­lar evi­dence of women’s (often unac­knowl­edged) engage­ment with sci­en­tif­ic inquiry, embod­ied in the detailed illus­tra­tions that cap­tured the insights of obser­va­tions from the nat­ur­al world. But the pub­lished his­tor­i­cal record is often woe­ful­ly scant when it comes to clos­er detail on the lives and careers of the women who have helped car­ry mod­ern sci­ence for­ward.

We may nev­er learn any­thing more about the par­tic­u­lars of Miss Lewis’ train­ing or per­son­al cir­cum­stances, but the care she took to pre­serve her own work turned out to be a great gift for future gen­er­a­tions.

Leaf through all three vol­umes of Miss M.F. Lewis’ Fun­gi col­lect­ed in Shrop­shire and oth­er neigh­bor­hoods on the Inter­net Archive:

Vol­ume I

Vol­ume II

Vol­ume III

Via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent 

John Cage Had a Sur­pris­ing Mush­room Obses­sion (Which Began with His Pover­ty in the Depres­sion)

How Mush­room Time-Laps­es Are Filmed: A Glimpse Into the Pio­neer­ing Time-Lapse Cin­e­matog­ra­phy Behind the Net­flix Doc­u­men­tary Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi

The Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Atlas of Mush­rooms: Edi­ble, Sus­pect and Poi­so­nous (1827)

Alger­ian Cave Paint­ings Sug­gest Humans Did Mag­ic Mush­rooms 9,000 Years Ago

- 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.

The History of Jazz Visualized on a Circuit Diagram of a 1950s Phonograph: Features 1,000+ Musicians, Artists, Songwriters and Producers

in Design, Music | November 7th, 2022

The dan­ger of enjoy­ing jazz is the pos­si­bil­i­ty of let­ting our­selves slide into the assump­tion that we under­stand it. To do so would make no more sense than believ­ing that, say, an enjoy­ment of lis­ten­ing to records auto­mat­i­cal­ly trans­mits an under­stand­ing of record play­ers. One look at such a machine’s inner work­ings would dis­abuse most of us of that notion, just as one look at a map of the uni­verse of jazz would dis­abuse us of the notion that we under­stand that music in all the vari­eties into which it has evolved. But a jazz map that exten­sive has­n’t been easy to come by until this month, when design stu­dio Dorothy put on sale their Jazz Love Blue­print.

Mea­sur­ing 80 cen­time­ters by 60 cen­time­ters (rough­ly two and half by two feet), the Jazz Love Blue­print visu­al­ly cel­e­brates “over 1,000 musi­cians, artists, song­writ­ers and pro­duc­ers who have been piv­otal to the evo­lu­tion of this ever chang­ing and con­stant­ly cre­ative genre of music,” dia­gram­ming the con­nec­tions between the defin­ing artists of major eras and move­ments in jazz.

These include the “inno­va­tors that laid the foun­da­tions for jazz music” like Scott Joplin and Jel­ly Roll Mor­ton, “orig­i­nal jazz giants” like Louis Arm­strong and Ella Fitzger­ald, “inspired musi­cians of bebop” like Char­lie Park­er, Dizzy Gille­spie, and such lead­ing lights of “spir­i­tu­al jazz” as John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, and the late Pharoah Sanders.

You prob­a­bly know all those names, even if you only casu­al­ly lis­ten to jazz. But you may not have heard of such play­ers on “the cur­rent vibrant UK scene” as Ezra Col­lec­tive, Shaba­ka Hutch­ings, Nubya Gar­cia, Koko­roko, and Moses Boyd, or those on “the explod­ing US scene” like Kamasi Wash­ing­ton, Robert Glasper, and Makaya McCraven. The map includes not only the indi­vid­u­als but also the insti­tu­tions that have shaped jazz in all its forms: clubs like Bird­land and Ron­nie Scot­t’s, record labels like Blue Note, Verve, and ECM. Even the most expe­ri­enced jazz fans will sure­ly spot new lis­ten­ing paths on the Jazz Love Blue­print. Those with an elec­tron­ic or mechan­i­cal bent will also notice that the whole design has been based on the cir­cuit dia­gram of a phono­graph: the very machine that set so many of us on the path to our love of jazz in the first place.

You can find oth­er dia­grams map­ping the his­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, Rock, Hip Hop and Alter­na­tive Music here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Linked Jazz: A Huge Data Visu­al­iza­tion Maps the Rela­tion­ships Between Count­less Jazz Musi­cians & Restores For­got­ten Women to Jazz His­to­ry

Hear 2,000 Record­ings of the Most Essen­tial Jazz Songs: A Huge Playlist for Your Jazz Edu­ca­tion

1959: The Year That Changed Jazz

Langston Hugh­es Presents the His­to­ry of Jazz in an Illus­trat­ed Children’s Book (1955)

Hear the First Jazz Record, Which Launched the Jazz Age: “Liv­ery Sta­ble Blues” (1917)

Behold the MusicMap: The Ulti­mate Inter­ac­tive Geneal­o­gy of Music Cre­at­ed Between 1870 and 2016

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.

When Medieval Manuscripts Were Recycled & Used to Make the First Printed Books

in Books, History, Technology | November 4th, 2022

“Old paint on a can­vas, as it ages, some­times becomes trans­par­ent,” play­wright Lil­lian Hell­man observed in Pen­ti­men­to, the sec­ond vol­ume of her mem­oirs. “When that hap­pens it is pos­si­ble, in some pic­tures, to see the orig­i­nal lines: a tree will show through a wom­an’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea.”

Sev­en years ago, some­thing sim­i­lar start­ed hap­pen­ing with thou­sands of old books, dat­ing from the 15th to 19th cen­tu­ry.

Age, how­ev­er, did­n’t force these vol­umes to spill their secrets…at least not direct­ly.

That hon­or goes to macro X‑ray flu­o­res­cence spec­trom­e­try (MA-XRF) and Erik Kwakkel, a book his­to­ri­an who the­o­rized that this tech­nol­o­gy might reveal medieval man­u­script frag­ments hid­den in the bind­ings of new­er texts, much as it had ear­li­er revealed hid­den lay­ers of paint on Old Mas­ter can­vas­es.

How did this strange “hid­den library” come to be?

Books were high­ly prized objects when man­u­scripts were copied by hand, but as Kwakkel notes on his medieval­books blog, “thou­sands and thou­sands of medieval man­u­scripts were torn apart, ripped to pieces, boiled, burned, and stripped for parts” upon the advent of the print­ing press.

Their pages were pressed into ser­vice as toi­let paper, bukram-like cloth­ing stiff­en­ers, book­marks, and, most tan­ta­liz­ing to a medieval book spe­cial­ist, bind­ing sup­port for print­ed books.

This prac­tice was so com­mon that the bind­ings of near­ly 150 ear­ly print­ed books in the Yale Law Library are known to con­tain pieces of medieval man­u­scripts.

These mate­ri­als may have been down­grad­ed in the lit­er­ary sense, but to Kwakkel they are “trav­el­ers in time, stow­aways in leather cas­es with great and impor­tant sto­ries to tell:”

Indeed, sto­ries that may oth­er­wise not have sur­vived, giv­en that clas­si­cal and medieval texts fre­quent­ly only come down to us in frag­men­tary form. The ear­ly his­to­ry of the Bible as a book could not be writ­ten if we were to throw out frag­ment evi­dence. More­over, while ancient and medieval texts sur­vive in many hand­some books from before the age of print, quite often the old­est wit­ness­es are frag­ments. At the very least a frag­ment tells you that a cer­tain text was avail­able at a cer­tain loca­tion at a cer­tain time. Step­ping out of their leather time cap­sules after cen­turies of dark­ness, frag­ments are “blips” on the map of Europe, express­ing “I exist­ed, I was used by a read­er in tenth-cen­tu­ry Italy!”

A few lines of a muti­lat­ed text can often be suf­fi­cient to iden­ti­fy it, as well as the loca­tion and gen­er­al tim­ing of its cre­ation:

That said, it is not easy to make sense of the remains. Binders seem to have par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed slic­ing text columns in half, as if they knew how to frus­trate future researchers best. Iden­ti­fy­ing what works these unful­fill­ing quotes come from can be a night­mare. Dat­ing and local­iz­ing the remains can cause insom­nia.

Pri­or to Kwakkel’s high tech exper­i­ments at Lei­den Uni­ver­si­ty, mod­ern researchers had to con­fine them­selves to acci­dents, as when, say, an old book’s spine cracks, reveal­ing the con­tents with­in.

Macro X‑ray flu­o­res­cence spec­trom­e­try turns out to be well equipped to detect the iron, cop­per and zinc of medieval inks beneath a lay­er of paper or parch­ment.

But it does so at a pace that might not knock a medieval scribe’s socks off.

Pro­duc­ing a leg­i­ble scan of what lurks beneath a sin­gle vol­ume’s spine can require as much as 24 hours, and expen­sive and time con­sum­ing propo­si­tion.

With thou­sands of these bind­ings hid­ing so close to the sur­face in col­lec­tions as mas­sive as the British Library and Oxford’s Bodleian, be pre­pared to remain on your ten­ter­hooks for the fore­see­able future.

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!

via Messy Nessy 

Relat­ed Con­tent 

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Dif­fer­ent Ways, Reveal­ing Six Dif­fer­ent Books in One

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

Cats in Medieval Man­u­scripts & Paint­ings

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Join her in New York City on Novem­ber 11 to cre­ate a col­lab­o­ra­tive Kurt Von­negut Cen­ten­ni­al fanzine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Comiclopedia: An Online Archive of 14,000 Comic Artists, From Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, to Mœbius and Hergé

in Comics/Cartoons | November 4th, 2022

Nobody inter­est­ed in comics can pass through Ams­ter­dam with­out vis­it­ing Lam­biek. Hav­ing opened in 1968 as the third com­ic-book shop in human his­to­ry, it now sur­vives as the old­est one still in exis­tence. But even those with­out a trip to the Nether­lands lined up can eas­i­ly mar­vel at one of Lam­biek’s major claims to fame: the Comi­clo­pe­dia, “an illus­trat­ed com­pendi­um of over 14,000 com­ic artists from around the world.” Dis­play­ing the same kind of pre­science that inspired him to open his store ahead of the com­ic-indus­try boom, Lam­biek’s founder Kees Kouse­mak­er launched this online ency­clo­pe­dia in 1999, more than a year before Wikipedia first went live.

The video above offers a brief illus­trat­ed his­to­ry of the Comi­clo­pe­dia, but the pro­jec­t’s ambi­tion comes across just as clear­ly in alpha­bet­i­cal­ly orga­nized index pages. Amer­i­can com­ic-book icons like Stan Lee and Jack Kir­by get exten­sive entries, of course, but so do news­pa­per com­ic-strip cre­ators from George Her­ri­man and Win­sor McCay (fea­tured on this page) to Charles Schulz and Bill Wat­ter­son (whose entry fea­tures not just Calvin and Hobbes but such ear­ly work as a pan­el pub­lished in his col­lege news­pa­per). There are even fig­ures not known pri­mar­i­ly as com­ic artists: the late Char­lie Watts, for instance, whose art­work includ­ed the back cov­er of Between the But­tons, or David Lynch, who for nine years “drew” The Angri­est Dog in the World.

For 23 years now, the Comi­clo­pe­dia has main­tained its com­mit­ment to both includ­ing deep cuts of that kind as well as con­stant­ly widen­ing its inter­na­tion­al per­spec­tive. You’d expect its robust entries on Jean Giraud, bet­ter known as Mœbius, and Georges Remi, bet­ter known as Hergé, but you’ll also find intro­duc­tions to the likes of Ser­afín Rojo Caa­maño, cre­ator of a host of char­ac­ters beloved in twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Spain (includ­ing the per­pet­u­al­ly drunk­en mar­chioness­es), and Kim Seong-hwan, whose unflap­pable old man Gob­au bore wit­ness to half a cen­tu­ry of tumul­tuous South Kore­an his­to­ry.

Nor have Lam­biek or the Comi­clo­pe­dia ignored the comics of its home­land. “Kouse­mak­er and his entourage wrote var­i­ous essays, arti­cles and books about comics,” says the page on the store’s own sto­ry, and with­out their work “much of the Nether­lands’ comics his­to­ry might oth­er­wise have remained unex­plored.” Batavo­phones can enjoy a thor­ough overview of the his­to­ry of Dutch comics here; oth­ers can read a more con­densed Eng­lish ver­sion here, or set the Comi­clo­pe­di­a’s coun­try fil­ter to the Nether­lands and sam­ple the work of the 1,045-and-counting artists cur­rent­ly in the data­base. If you do make it out to Ams­ter­dam, after all, you’re going to want to know Tom Poes from Eric de Noor­man from Kapitein Rob before­hand.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

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

How to Make Comics: A Four-Part Series from the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art

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

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free 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.

The Mastermind of Devo, Mark Mothersbaugh, Presents His Personal Synthesizer Collection

in Music | November 3rd, 2022

Mark Moth­ers­baugh’s stu­dio is locat­ed in a cylin­dri­cal struc­ture paint­ed bright green — it looks more like a fes­tive auto part than an office build­ing. It’s a fit­ting place for the icon­o­clast musi­cian. For those of you who didn’t spend your child­hoods obses­sive­ly watch­ing the ear­ly years of MTV, Mark Moth­ers­baugh was the mas­ter­mind behind the band Devo. They skew­ered Amer­i­can con­for­mi­ty by dress­ing alike in shiny uni­forms and their music was nervy, twitchy and weird. They taught a nation that if you must whip it, you should whip it good.

In the years since, Moth­ers­baugh has segued into a suc­cess­ful career as a Hol­ly­wood com­pos­er, spin­ning scores for 21 Jump Street and The Roy­al Tenen­baums among oth­ers.

In the video above, you can see Moth­ers­baugh hang out in his stu­dio filled with syn­the­siz­ers of var­i­ous makes and vin­tages, includ­ing Bob Moog’s own per­son­al Mem­o­ry­moog. Watch­ing Moth­ers­baugh pull out and play with each one is a bit like watch­ing a pre­co­cious child talk about his toys. He just has an infec­tious ener­gy that is a lot of fun to watch.

Prob­a­bly the best part in the video is when he shows off a device that can play sounds back­ward. It turns out that if you say, “We smell sausage” back­wards it sounds an awful lot like “Jesus loves you.” Who knew?

Below you can see Moth­ers­baugh in action with Devo, per­form­ing live in Japan dur­ing the band’s hey­day in 1979.

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!

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Feb­ru­ary 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Phi­los­o­phy & Music of Devo, the Avant-Garde Art Project Ded­i­cat­ed to Reveal­ing the Truth About De-Evo­lu­tion

Neil Young Plays “Hey, Hey, My, My” with Devo: Watch a Clas­sic Scene from the Impro­vised Movie Human High­way (1980)

See Devo Per­form Live for the Very First Time (Kent State Uni­ver­si­ty, 1973)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

An AI Generated, Never-Ending Discussion Between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek

in Philosophy | November 3rd, 2022

From the site Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion comes an AI gen­er­at­ed, nev­er-end­ing dis­cus­sion between Wern­er Her­zog and Slavoj Žižek. What’s the point of this AI gen­er­at­ed con­ver­sa­tion? The cre­ator explains:

As of late 2022, it’s cheap and easy to pro­duce AI-gen­er­at­ed con­tent that is super­fi­cial­ly good and sur­pris­ing­ly sim­i­lar to “the real thing”. This applies to videos resem­bling celebri­ties (com­mon­ly known as Deep­fakes) or, as in the case of the Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion, speech.

This project aims to raise aware­ness about the ease of using tools for syn­the­siz­ing a real voice. Right now, any moti­vat­ed fool can do this with a lap­top in their bed­room. This changes our rela­tion­ship with the media we con­sume online and rais­es ques­tions about the impor­tance of author­i­ta­tive sources, breach of trust and gulli­bil­i­ty.

Will this tech­nol­o­gy lead to a mas­sive pro­lif­er­a­tion of sub-opti­mal-qual­i­ty con­tent? Should we sim­ply dis­trust any­thing we see online? As new tools are devel­oped to help iden­ti­fy gen­er­at­ed con­tent, I rec­om­mend main­tain­ing a skep­ti­cal stance, par­tic­u­lar­ly when the source/channel of infor­ma­tion does­n’t seem reli­able and when the claims seem pre­pos­ter­ous or out­ra­geous.

Ulti­mate­ly, I don’t see this as a tech­ni­cal prob­lem, but as a human one. We all share a duty to edu­cate the com­ing gen­er­a­tions about the new par­a­digm while focus­ing on form­ing com­pas­sion­ate indi­vid­u­als who would not mis­use these awe­some pow­ers.

As an AI opti­mist, I remain hope­ful that we will be able to reg­u­late our­selves, and that we will take exper­i­ments such as the Infi­nite Con­ver­sa­tion for what they are: a play­ful way to help us imag­ine what our favorite peo­ple would do, if we had unlim­it­ed access to their minds. Art and Phi­los­o­phy, here exem­pli­fied by Bavar­i­an direc­tor Wern­er Her­zog and Sloven­ian philoso­pher Slavoj Žižek, can guide us while nav­i­gat­ing these treach­er­ous waters.

Lis­ten to the end­less Her­zog-Žižek con­ver­sa­tion here.

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

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing and Life Advice

Slavoj Žižek: What Ful­fils You Cre­ative­ly Isn’t What Makes You Hap­py

Wern­er Her­zog Nar­rates the Touch­ing, Exis­ten­tial Jour­ney of a Plas­tic Bag

Bruce Springsteen Performs Moving Acoustic Versions of “Thunder Road,” “The Rising” & “Land of Hope & Dreams” on the Howard Stern Show

in Music | November 2nd, 2022

After try­ing for 35 years, the Howard Stern Show final­ly land­ed an inter­view with Bruce Springsteen–an inter­view that last­ed 2 hours and 15 min­utes and cov­ered a tremen­dous amount of ground. Along the way, Spring­steen talked about his song-writ­ing process and the ori­gins of his clas­sic songs, and then per­formed some acoustic ver­sions, alter­nat­ing between gui­tar and piano. Above and below, you can watch stir­ring per­for­mances of  “Thun­der Road,” “The Ris­ing,” “Land of Hope and Dreams,” “Born to Run, and “Tougher Than the Rest.”

Those who have the Sir­ius XM app can watch the entire per­for­mance online. For those who don’t, you can always sign up for a free tri­al to the ser­vice.

Land of Hope and Dreams

The Ris­ing

Tougher Than the Rest

Born to Run

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

Bruce Spring­steen and the E Street Band Impro­vis­es and Plays, Com­plete­ly Unre­hearsed, Chuck Berry’s “You Nev­er Can Tell,” Live Onstage (2013)

Bruce Spring­steen Lists 20 of His Favorite Books: The Books That Have Inspired the Song­writer & Now Mem­oirist

Bruce Spring­steen Plays East Berlin in 1988: I’m Not Here For Any Gov­ern­ment. I’ve Come to Play Rock

Michael Pollan, Sam Harris & Others Explain How Psychedelics Can Change Your Mind

in Psychology | November 2nd, 2022

You may nev­er have tried psy­che­del­ic sub­stances. You may nev­er have had an inter­est in try­ing psy­che­del­ic sub­stances. But if you’re read­ing this, you do have a mind, and you’ve almost cer­tain­ly felt some curios­i­ty about how that mind works. As any engi­neer knows, one of the short­est routes to under­stand­ing how a machine works is to dis­rupt its nor­mal oper­a­tions. Psy­che­delics do just that for your brain, shift­ing your con­scious­ness into a new per­spec­tive that can offer insights into your very per­cep­tions of real­i­ty. Or at least they do it in the view of Michael Pol­lan, Sam Har­ris, Jacob Sil­va, Ben Goertzel, and Matthew John­son.

The more famil­iar you are with cur­rent psy­che­delics research, the more of those names you’ll know. Pol­lan, who made his name writ­ing about food, stars in the Big Think video above about the sci­en­tif­ic renais­sance of mind-alter­ing drugs. “The brain is a hier­ar­chi­cal sys­tem, and the default mode net­work appears to be at the top,” he explains. That net­work is “the orches­tra con­duc­tor or cor­po­rate exec­u­tive. You take that out of the pic­ture, and sud­den­ly you have this upris­ing from oth­er parts of the brain and you have net­works that don’t ordi­nar­i­ly com­mu­ni­cate with one anoth­er sud­den­ly strik­ing up con­ver­sa­tions.”

Psy­che­del­ic sub­stances do this, mean­ing that when they’re in use, “you might have the visu­al cor­tex talk­ing to the audi­to­ry sys­tem, and sud­den­ly you’re see­ing music.” Any music-lover would feel at least some desire for the same expe­ri­ence. And even those with­out any inter­est in music would sure­ly like to enjoy for them­selves what Sam Har­ris describes feel­ing dur­ing one of his own psy­che­del­ic expe­ri­ences: “There was a whole veneer of fear, frankly, that I did­n’t know was there that got stripped away,” leav­ing a “naked aware­ness of the present moment.”

This may sound sim­i­lar to the kind of state com­mon­ly ascribed to inten­sive med­i­ta­tion, and indeed, Har­ris — him­self a prac­ti­tion­er and advo­cate of med­i­ta­tive prac­tice — acknowl­edges it as anoth­er path to the same des­ti­na­tion. But for some peo­ple, Har­ris says, “tak­ing a drug is the only way they’re going to notice that it’s pos­si­ble to have a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence of the world.” Even if we’re not so “lumpen and un-inquis­i­tive,” we still may not have seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered the range of ben­e­fits psy­che­delics could offer human­i­ty. “Many of the dis­or­ders that psy­che­delics appear to treat well are man­i­fes­ta­tions of a stuck brain,” Pol­lan says, “a mind that’s telling itself destruc­tive sto­ries like, ‘I can’t get through the day with­out a cig­a­rette,’ ‘I’m unwor­thy of love,’ ‘My work is shit.’ ”

The Unit­ed States was actu­al­ly con­duct­ing research into psy­che­del­ic drugs up until the ear­ly 1970s, when Richard Nixon’s admin­is­tra­tion made them ille­gal due to their poten­tial to sap the will of the men who were sup­posed to fight the Viet­nam War. (“He may well have been right,” Pol­lan acknowl­edges.) But now our soci­ety has found itself in a “men­tal health cri­sis,” as John­son, a psy­che­del­ic-sub­stance researcher at Johns Hop­kins, puts it in the brief explain­er just above, we’ll have to explore all pos­si­ble avenues — even pre­vi­ous­ly closed ones — in order to change our minds.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Use Psy­che­del­ic Drugs to Improve Men­tal Health: Michael Pollan’s New Book, How to Change Your Mind, Makes the Case

Psilo­cy­bin Could Soon Be a Legal Treat­ment for Depres­sion: Johns Hop­kins Pro­fes­sor, Roland Grif­fiths, Explains How Psilo­cy­bin Can Relieve Suf­fer­ing

Artist Draws 9 Por­traits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Exper­i­ments to Turn LSD into a “Cre­ativ­i­ty Pill”

New LSD Research Pro­vides the First Images of the Brain on Acid, and Hints at Its Poten­tial to Pro­mote Cre­ativ­i­ty

Inside MK-Ultra, the CIA’s Secret Pro­gram That Used LSD to Achieve Mind Con­trol (1953–1973)

Aldous Hux­ley, Psy­che­delics Enthu­si­ast, Lec­tures About “the Vision­ary Expe­ri­ence” at MIT (1962)

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.

How Pink Floyd Built The Wall: The Album, Tour & Film

in Music | November 2nd, 2022

The mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera The Wall is rife with the kind of rock star ironies exploit­ed a few years lat­er by This Is Spinal Tap. Their fall into frac­tious­ness and bloat began when Roger Waters firm­ly estab­lished him­self as cap­tain on 1977’s Ani­mals, his trib­ute album for George Orwell. Stage shows became even more grandiose, lead­ing key­boardist Richard Wright to wor­ry they were “in dan­ger of becom­ing slaves to our equip­ment.” Cer­tain moments dur­ing the 1977 In the Flesh tour in sup­port of the album seem right out of a Christo­pher Guest brain­storm.

One night in Frank­furt, “the stage filled with so much dry ice that the band were almost com­plete­ly obscured,” Mark Blake writes in Com­fort­ably Numb. Fans threw bot­tles. Crowds felt fur­ther alien­at­ed when Waters start­ed wear­ing head­phones onstage, try­ing to sync the music and visu­als. Dur­ing a five-night run at London’s Wem­b­ley Empire Pool, “offi­cials from the Greater Lon­don Coun­cil descend­ed on the venue to check that the band’s inflat­able pig had been equipped with a safe­ty line” (due to a minor pan­ic caused by an ear­li­er escaped pig). “Roger Waters over­saw the inspec­tion, bark­ing orders to the pig’s oper­a­tors… “ ‘Halt pig! Revolve pig!’ ”

Moments like these could have added lev­i­ty to Alan Parker’s 1982 film of The Wall, star­ring Bob Geld­of as the main char­ac­ter, dis­af­fect­ed rock star Pink. Waters hat­ed the movie at the time, though lat­er said, “I’ve actu­al­ly grown quite fond of it, though I very much regret there’s no humour in it, but that’s my fault. I don’t think I was in a par­tic­u­lar­ly jol­ly state.” A pris­on­er of his own suc­cess, Waters resent­ed ine­bri­at­ed fans who were (under­stand­ably) dis­tract­ed by stage shows that threat­ened to over­whelm the music. See­ing fans singing along in the front row instead of lis­ten­ing intent­ly sent him into a rage, lead­ing to the infa­mous spit­ting inci­dent, as recalled by tour­ing gui­tarist Snowy White: “It was a fun­ny gig. It was a real­ly weird vibe… to look across the stage and see Roger spit­ting at this guy at the front… It was a very strange gig. Not very good vibes.”

This is still only back­sto­ry for the album and tour to come — the mak­ing of which you can learn all about in the three-part Vinyl Rewind video series here. Waters based the jad­ed Pink on him­self and for­mer Pink Floyd front­man Syd Bar­rett, who did not return from his own onstage melt­down. Waters found him­self wish­ing he could build a wall between him­self and the fans. The band liked his demo ideas and vot­ed to move for­ward with the project. Then things real­ly went sour. Pink Floyd began to fall apart dur­ing the record­ing ses­sions. As engi­neer James Guthrie remem­bers, at the start, “they were still play­ing togeth­er, rather than one guy at a time, which is the way we end­ed up record­ing in France.” Frac­tures between Waters and Richard Wright would even­tu­al­ly lead to Wright’s fir­ing from the band.

Most of the per­son­al dis­putes were already estab­lished before The Wall. Cer­tain­ly Roger’s rela­tion­ship with Rick, but things did dete­ri­o­rate fur­ther on that lev­el dur­ing the mak­ing of the album. There were some very dif­fi­cult moments, but I don’t think there was ever a ques­tion of Roger not fin­ish­ing the album. He’s a very strong per­son. Not eas­i­ly deterred from his path. If every­one else had walked out, he would still have fin­ished it.

Waters would have toured the album by him­self as well — as he did after he left the band fol­low­ing 1983’s The Final Cut, a Pink Floyd album in name only. As it was, The Wall tour end­ed up send­ing the band into debt. Only Richard Wright made a prof­it, play­ing with the band as a salaried musi­cian. For all the stage mishaps and inter­per­son­al feuds — despite it all — Pink Floyd did what they set out to do. “We knew when we were mak­ing it,” says David Gilmour, in rec­ol­lec­tions mel­lowed by time and age, “that it was a good record.” It still stands, some forty-three years lat­er, as one of the greats. Learn how it earned the dis­tinc­tion, and what that great­ness cost the band that made it.

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: 

Pink Floyd Adapts George Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm into Their 1977 Con­cept Album, Ani­mals (a Cri­tique of Late Cap­i­tal­ism, Not Stal­in)

Pink Floyd’s First Mas­ter­piece: An Audio/Video Explo­ration of the 23-Minute Track, “Echoes” (1971)

Pink Floyd’s Entire Stu­dio Discog­ra­phy is Now on YouTube: Stream the Stu­dio & Live Albums

Pink Floyd Releas­es Its First New Song in 28 Years to Help Sup­port Ukraine

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