Yes’ Rick Wakeman Explores Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and Why It Was the First Concept Album
In this 2015 production, Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman revisits Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, and makes the case for why “it was so far ahead of its time that it was actually the first ever concept album, making Vivaldi the world’s first rock superstar.”
“Uncovering the dark rumours surrounding the churches, orphanages and canals of Venice, Rick Wakeman sets out to investigate the extraordinary life of Antonio Vivaldi. From 18th century scandals to interviews with fellow musician Mike Rutherford, uncover the mystery behind one of the world’s favourite composers.” Rick Wakeman: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons appears on the “Rick Wakeman’s World” YouTube channel.
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Read More...
Tasting History: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Other Places & Periods
The food of our ancestors has come back into fashion, no matter from where your own ancestors in particular happened to hail. Whether motivated by a desire to avoid the supposedly unhealthy ingredients and processes introduced in modernity, a curiosity about the practices of a culture, or simply a spirit of culinary adventure, the consumption of traditional foods has attained a relatively high profile of late. So, indeed, has their preparation: few of us could think of a more traditional food than bread, the home-baking of which became a sweeping fad in the United States and elsewhere shortly after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Max Miller, for example, has baked more than his own share of bread at home. Like no few media-savvy culinary hobbyists, he’s put the results on Youtube; like those hobbyists who develop an unquenchable thirst for ever-greater depth and breadth (no pun intended) of knowledge about the field, he’s gone well beyond the rudiments.
18th-century Saly Lunn buns, medieval trencher, Pompeiian panis quadratus, even the bread of ancient Egypt: he’s gone a long way indeed beyond simple sourdough. But in so doing, he’s learned — and taught — a great deal about the variety of civilizations, all of them heartily food-eating, that led up to ours.
“His show, Tasting History with Max Miller, started in late February,” writes Devan Sauer in a profile last year for the Phoenix New Times. “Since then, Tasting History has drawn more than 470,000 subscribers and 14 million views.” Each of its episodes “has a special segment where Miller explains the history of either the ingredients or the dish’s time period.” These periods come organized into playlists like “Ancient Greek, Roman, & Mesopotamian Recipes,” “The Best of Medieval & Renaissance Recipes,” and “18th/19th Century Recipes.” In his clearly extensive research, “Miller looks to primary accounts, or anecdotal records from the people themselves, rather than historians. He does this so he can get a better glimpse into what life was like during a certain time.”
If past, as L.P. Hartley put it, is a foreign country, then Miller’s historical cookery is a form of not just time travel, but regular travel — exactly what so few of us have been able to do over the past year and a half. And though most of the recipes featured on Tasting History have come from Western, and specifically European cultures, its channel also has a playlist dedicated to non-European foods such as Aztec chocolate; the kingly Indian dessert of payasam; and hwajeon, the Korean “flower pancakes” served in 17th-century snack bars, or eumshik dabang. He’s also prepared the snails served at the thermopolium, the equivalent establishment of the first-century Roman Empire recently featured here on Open Culture. But however impressive Miller’s knowledge, enthusiasm, and skill in the kitchen, he commands just as much respect for having mastered Youtube, the true Forum of early 21st-century civilization.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...What Happened During the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, One of the Worst Episodes of Racial Violence in U.S. History
In February 1915, Thomas Dixon, author of popular novel The Clansman, and D.W. Griffith, the director who adapted the book into the film Birth of a Nation, lobbied then-president Woodrow Wilson for a screening at the White House. The two were sure their story would get a warm reception from the “well documented racist” and onetime scholar who produced a five-volume History of the American People, in which he portrayed the South as “overrun by ex-slaves who were undeserving of freedom,” as Boston University journalism professor Dick Lehr remarks.
Whether or not Wilson actually uttered the words attributed to him afterward (“It’s like writing history with lightning”), he approved the film’s message and rebuffed Black leaders who were “appalled and outraged,” says Lehr. The moment was pivotal for the birth of the Civil Rights movement, he argues in a recent book. Following the country’s entry into World War I, it also lit the fires of what novelist, composer and executive director of the NAACP James Weldon Johnson called “Red Summer”… a summer of lynchings, lootings, burnings, shootings and other violence.
Mass lynchings — ignored or misconstrued as “race riots” for decades, though now properly referred to as massacres — took place all over the country between 1917 and 1923 under various pretexts, “in at least 26 cities,” Deneen Brown writes at National Geographic, “including Washington, D.C.; Chicago, Illinois; Omaha, Nebraska; Elaine, Arkansas; Charleston, South Carolina; Columbia, Tennessee; Houston, Texas,” and — the bloodiest and most destructive of them all — Tulsa, Oklahoma, an event many learned about for the first time when the current president proclaimed its 100th anniversary, May 31st, a “Day of Remembrance.”
On May 31 and June 1, 1921, the mob who rampaged through the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood, a prosperous black community just a generation removed from slavery, killed over 300 Black residents, “dumping their bodies into the Arkansas River or burying them in mass graves. More than a hundred businesses were destroyed, as well as a school, a hospital, a library, and dozens of churches. More than 1,200 Black-owned houses burned.” The attackers rained death from above: a report by a state-appointed commission found “Tulsa was likely the first city” in the country “to be bombed from the air.”
“The economic losses in the Black community amounted to more than $1 million,” Brown notes, a figure that cannot account for personal losses that resonated through generations, like those described by the massacre’s oldest living survivor, who testified recently before a House subcommittee. Sonali Kolhatkar writes:
107-year-old Viola Fletcher… testified to Congress a few weeks ahead of the 100th anniversary and recalled growing up as a child in Greenwood in “a beautiful home” with “great neighbors and… friends to play with.” “I had everything a child could need. I had a bright future ahead of me,” she said. A few weeks after Fletcher turned seven, the armed men struck on May 31, 1921. After recounting the “violence of the white mob,” and her memories of seeing “Black bodies lying in the street” and “Black businesses being burned,” she went on to describe the grinding poverty she was thrown into as a result of the massacre.
Fletcher never made it past the fourth grade in school. The promising future that her family had worked hard to give her was obliterated in the ashes of the Tulsa Race Massacre. “Most of my life I was a domestic worker serving white families. I never made much money. To this day I can barely afford my everyday needs,” she told lawmakers during her testimony.
That the anniversary now falls on Memorial Day (then celebrated on May 30th) seems a bitter irony given that much of the backlash toward Black communities came from fear of those returning Black soldiers who stood up against the everyday violence of Jim Crow when they returned from overseas. Birth of a Nation inspired a reborn Ku Klux Klan and its supporters to turn that fear into a crusade, a kind of pre-emptive collective retaliation.
“During the massacres, they murdered and maimed people indiscriminately, unprovoked,” says Alice M. Thomas, a Carnegie scholar and a professor in the School of Law at Howard University. “They went into homes, stole personal belongings, and burned down homes. They used the massacres as a cover to murder without sanction, maim without sanction, and steal without sanction. No one, to this day, has been held accountable.”
Red Summer was primarily driven by what now gets coded as “economic anxiety.” Karlos K. Hill, professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma, explains that “the Greenwood District [of Tulsa] was perhaps the wealthiest Black community in the country… a symbol of what was possible even in Jim Crow America.” Referred to as “Black Wall Street” — the moniker given to many other such communities — Greenwood posed a threat: “The fear was, if Black people could have economic and political equality, then social equality would follow right behind.”
Rather than face the frightening prospect of an actual democracy, thousands of white Americans lashed out in Red Summer, burning Black Wall Streets to the ground nationwide. After a century of denial, the U.S. is only beginning to reckon with the massacres, and specifically, with Tulsa. The president’s proclamation marks a historic step in the right direction. In the Vox video above, learn more about a story “you won’t find in most history books.”
As NPR notes, you can also watch another documentary on the Tulsa massacre on PBS.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Art of Creating a Bonsai: One Year Condensed Condensed Into 22 Mesmerizing Minutes
To be a good writer, one must be a good reader. This is made true by the need to absorb and assess the work of other writers, but even more so by the need to evaluate one’s own. Writing is re-writing, to coin a phrase, and effective re-writing can only follow astute re-reading. This condition applies to other arts and crafts as well: take bonsai, the regarding of which constitutes a skill in and of itself. To craft an aesthetically pleasing miniature tree, one must first be able to see an aesthetically pleasing miniature tree — or perhaps to feel one. “Bonsai trees (and inspiring art in general) give me a ‘feeling’ that is hard to describe,” as practitioner Bucky Barnes puts it in the video above. “I’m not getting it from this tree yet, so I know I need to continue tweaking.”
That tree is a Japanese larch bonsai, Barnes’ year of work on which the video compresses into a mere 22 minutes. The work is more than a matter of water and sunlight: aspects that must be considered and aggressively modified, include the plant’s viewing and potting angle, the number and direction of its branches, and even the structure of roots spreading through the soil below.
Barnes breaks out a range of clippers, knives, pastes, brushes, and wires — part of a suite of tools that, at least for the masters back in bonsai’s homeland of Japan, can get expensive indeed. To us laymen, the tree that results from this year of work looks pretty respectable, but by bonsai standards its existence has only just begun. Over the coming decades — or even the coming centuries — it could take on other qualities altogether. When well maintained, bonsai only improve with age.
As demonstrated in the video just above, however, not every bonsai receives such maintenance. A product of the same Youtube channel, Bonsai Releaf, “Restoring a Neglected Chinese Juniper Bonsai” begins with a tree that, to many of its nearly four million viewers so far, probably doesn’t look too bad. Barnes sees things differently: beginning by sketching the tree, apparently a standard stage of his professional bonsai-viewing process, he sets about correcting a host of deficiencies like “lower branches competing for light,” excessive upward or downward growth (as well as something called “weak crotch growth”), and dead tissue not delineated from living. This laborious operation requires an even wider tool set, encompassing Dremels and even flames. But by the video’s end, anyone can see the difference in the tree itself — and more importantly, feel it.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The Mistake Waltz: Watch the Hilarious Ballet by Legendary Choreographer Jerome Robbins
So often mistakes are the most memorable part of live performance.
In Jerome Robbins’ The Concert (or The Perils of Everybody), they’re built in.
The portion set to Chopin’s Waltz in E Minor, above, has earned the nickname The Mistake Waltz. It’s an anthology of screw ups that will be familiar to anyone who’s attended a few amateur ballet productions and school recitals.
When the entire ensemble is meant to be traveling in the same direction or synchronizing swanlike gestures, the one who’s egregiously out of step is a guaranteed standout… if not the audience’s flat out favorite.
Robbins generously spreads the clowning between all six members of the corps, getting extra mileage from the telegraphed irritation in every indiscreetly attempted correction.
Performed well, the silliness seems almost improvisational, but as with all of this legendary choreographer’s work, the spontaneous beats are very, very specific.
It only works if the dancers have the technical prowess and the comic chops to pull it off. Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo aside, this can present a sizable casting challenge.
Robbins also felt that The Concert should be presented sparingly, to keep the jokes from becoming stale.
Individual companies have some agency over their costumes, but other than that, it is executed just as it was in its 1956 debut with the New York City Ballet.
Former NYCB lead dancer Peter Boal, who was 10 when he played Cupid in Robbins’ Mother Goose, has made The Concert part of Pacific Northwest Ballet’s repertoire. He revealed another side of the exacting Robbins in a personal essay in Dance Magazine:
He had the unique ability to become kid-like in the studio, giggling with others and often laughing robustly at his own jokes. He was certainly his own best audience for The Concert. How many times had he seen those gags and yet fresh, spontaneous laughter erupted from him as if it was a first telling.
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Join her Necromancers of the Public Domain: The Periodical Cicada, a free virtual variety show honoring the 17-Year Cicadas of Brood X. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...
When Was the Pinnacle of Saturday Night Live? A YouTuber Watches One Episode from Each Season & Reports Back
How do we evaluate a show like Saturday Night Live? And to what, exactly, can it be compared? Before its “lackluster” debut on October 11,1975, nothing quite like it existed on television, and since that debut, everything resembling SNL exists because of SNL. The show has launched a few dozen careers, but it has also been a veritable comedy graveyard. Co-founders Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol both quit at different times, both after begging NBC to move to pre-recorded content because SNL’s production schedule is so grueling. Whether or not its formula works during any given episode, it’s truly unlike any other show on television.
Given its unique, and in recent decades, socially vaunted, place in popular culture, we generally judge Saturday Night Live by comparing it to itself — or to earlier iterations of itself, when it was funner, edgier, less formulaic, pandering, or whatever the current criticism happens to be. Is this a fair standard? Are expectations for the show’s political relevance or comic consistency too high? The lack of any serious competition for the time slot means that SNL exists in a league of its own. The standards we apply to it are necessarily subjective, and subject to change given changing social climate and the show’s increasing topicality.
“So much of what Saturday Night Live wanted to be, or what I wanted it to be when it began, was cool,” says Ebersol. Try staying cool for 45 years. So why do we still care? Maybe because everyone born in the last few decades has nostalgic memories of a golden age of SNL that just happened to coincide with their adolescence. But nostalgia, says YouTuber Drew Gooden above, “is a drug that causes us to misconstrue our memories.” We want Saturday Night Live to be “good again,” by which we mean funny in ways it was. But measuring its goodness independently of memory proves difficult.
Rather than assuming, as so many viewers do, that the show peaked in the past (say the early 80s) and has steeply declined since then, Gooden hypothesizes that an accurate graph of its quality might just as well look like a jagged line full of peaks and valleys over the decades. Saturday Night Live, that is to say, has always been consistently full of great moments and terrible ones — within the same season and often the same episode. It’s in the very nature of live TV that some ideas work and others don’t on the day, and the sketches and characters we remember from our youth may not hold up well ten, twenty, thirty, even forty years later.
Gooden decided to withhold judgment on the overall quality curve of Saturday Night Live, his favorite show, before putting in the time and effort to watch at least one episode from every year in its run. See how the show comes out in his estimation after the experiment. He may not change anyone’s mind about the best, and worst, seasons, episodes, cast members, and hosts. But he does demonstrate an admirable willingness to dig into SNL’s history and give years of comedy positively antiquated by 21st century standards a fair shake.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Psychology of Video Game Engagement — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #94 with Jamie Madigan
Why do people play video games, and what keeps them playing? Do we want to have to think through innovative puzzles or just lose ourselves in mindless reactivity? Your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt are joined by Dr. Jamie Madigan, an organizational psychologist who runs the Psychology of Video Games podcast, to discuss what sort of a thing this is to research, the evolution of games, player types, motivation vs. engagement, incentives and feedback, as well as the gamification of work or school environments. Some games we touch on include Donkey Kong, Dark Souls, It Takes Two, Returnal, Hades, Subnautica, Fortnite, and Age of Z.
Some of the episodes of Jamie’s podcast relevant for our discussion are:
- Ep. 3 on psychological flow in games
- Ep. 6 on using psychology to craft user experiences
- Ep. 9 on how games differ from other media
Check out his books and articles too. Here are a couple of additional sources about engagement:
- “The Player Engagement Process– An Exploration of Continuation Desire in Digital Games” by Henrik Schoenau-Fog
- “Understanding Video Gaming’s Engagement” by Eric Gregory
The site Erica mentions about disabled modes in gaming is caniplaythat.com.
Hear more of this podcast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion that you can access by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.
Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.
Read More...What Is Contemporary Art?: A Free Online Course from The Museum of Modern Art
What is contemporary art? In this course from the Museum of Modern Art, you’ll explore this question through more than 70 works of art made from 1980 to the present, with a focus on art of the last decade. You’ll hear directly from artists, architects, and designers from around the globe about their creative processes, materials, and inspiration.
3D printed glass and sculptures made of fiber. Dance performed in the factory and the museum. Hacking into television and video games. Portraits made with paint or artificial intelligence. Intimate explorations of the body and collective actions.
In this course, you’ll learn about artworks in both traditional and surprising mediums, all drawn from the collection of MoMA. Each week students will look at contemporary art from a different theme: Media from Television to the Internet, Territories & Transit, Materials & Making, Agency, and Power.
You can take What Is Contemporary Art? for free by selecting the audit option upon enrollment. If you want to take the course for a certificate, you will need to pay a fee.
What Is Contemporary Art? will be added to our list of Free Art & Art History Courses, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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For a list of online certificate programs, visit 200 Online Certificate & Microcredential Programs from Leading Universities & Companies, which features programs from our partners Coursera, Udacity, FutureLearn and edX.
And if you’re interested in Online Mini-Masters and Master’s Degrees programs from universities, see our collection: Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Masters, Mini Masters, Bachelors & Mini Bachelors from Top Universities.
Read More...When Neil Young & Rick “Super Freak” James Formed the 60’s Motown Band, The Mynah Birds
At the height of Motown’s powers in the 1960s they were setting trends, not chasing them, but even that record company fell under the spell of the British Invasion. Sure, the jukebox R’n’B singles that made their way across the Atlantic were in the DNA of The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and the Who, but in the mid’60’s the label decided they needed a beat group of their own. That’s how one of the weirdest tales of pop music unfolded, and would have stayed a tiny footnote if it weren’t for the future fame of two of the Mynah Birds’ members: funk overlord Rick James and folk-rocker-noisemaker Neil Young.
Yes, for a brief period of time they were in the same band together in Toronto, Canada, part of an exploding beat group scene that was mostly all white. “I was an authentic R&B singer living in a city where white musicians were striving to play authentic R&B,” Rick James wrote in his autobiography quoted in Bandsplaining’s above video. “That added to my status. It also got me laid.”
James Ambrose Johnson Jr., had been in Canada for two years already, having escaped the Vietnam draft by fleeing north in 1964. Saved from a bar brawl by future members of The Band, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson, he entered the music scene and adopted the name Ricky Matthews, as a way to hide his identity. The Mynah Birds began in 1964 and even put out a single on Columbia that went nowhere. They tried (and failed) again in 1965, with an ever-changing line-up. Ricky Matthews though, remained the dynamic lead singer.
Enter Neil Young. As Rick James tells it, he was looking to change their sound and he saw Neil Young playing in a coffeehouse and asked him to join. (James’ recollection is in the above video.) However, Kevin Plummer in the Torontoist has a different version:
One day—most likely in the fall of 1965, but some say in early 1966—Young was walking down Yorkville Avenue with an amp on his shoulder. As he passed, Palmer struck up a conversation. The Mynah Birds were, once again, without a lead guitarist, so he asked Young to join—despite the fact that Young only owned the twelve-string acoustic. “I had to eat,” Young is quoted in John Einarson’s Neil Young: Don’t Be Denied (Quarry Press, 1992). “I needed a job and it seemed like a good thing to do. I still liked playing and I liked Bruce so I went along. There was no pressure on me. It was the first time that I was in a band where I wasn’t calling the shots.”
As Young and James were soon to share a basement apartment and a whole lot of drugs, the participants can be forgiven for their hazy memories.
The video also conflates their svengali (John Craig Eaton, a department store heir who bankrolled the band and gave them rehearsal space) with their manager (folk singer and fan Morley Shelman). Whether it was Eaton, Shelman, or just luck, within two months of having Young in the band, and a reputation for wild, amphetamine-driven concerts—the band had signed a seven-year contract with Motown, the first mostly-white act to do so.
Neil Young remembered the first album sessions in an interview with Cameron Crowe:
We went in and recorded five or six nights, and if we needed something, or if they thought we weren’t strong enough, a couple of Motown singers would just walk right in. And they’d Motown us! A couple of ’em would be right there, and they’d sing the part. They’d just appear and we’d all do it together. If somebody wasn’t confident or didn’t have it, they didn’t say, ‘Well, let’s work on this.’ Some guy would just come in who had it. Then everybody was grooving. And an amazing thing happened—we sounded hot. And all of a sudden it was Motown. That’s why all those records sounded like that.
Rick James was worried about entering the States and being arrested for avoiding the draft. But in Detroit he was safe. It was when he returned that the trouble began—he discovered that Shelman had apparently spent their advance on a fancy new motorbike and a not-so-fancy heroin habit. A fight broke out and Shelman retaliated by ratting James out. James turned himself in to the American authorities and the Mynah Birds’ career—at least the James/Young version—ended. Only four of the tracks recorded for the album were ever released, two at the time as a single, the other two in 2006 as part of a Rhino Records Motown retrospective. More are rumored to exist but they remain hidden away in a vault at best, destroyed at worst.
Young would move to California soon after and join Buffalo Springfield. James, once out of jail, would make his way back into the recording industry, ironically returning to Motown. Band members Goldy McJohn and Nick St. Nicholas would form Steppenwolf. And through it all, James and Young remained friends.
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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.
Read More...Download 1,000+ Beautiful Woodblock Prints by Hiroshige, the Last Great Master of the Japanese Woodblock Print Tradition
For 200 years, beginning in the 1630s, Japan closed itself off from the world. In its capital of Edo the country boasted the largest city in existence, and among its population of more than a million not a single one was foreign-born. “Practically the only Europeans to have visited it were a handful of Dutchmen,” writes professor of Japanese history Jordan Sand in a new London Review of Books piece, “and so it would remain until the mid-19th century. No foreigners were permitted to live or trade on Japanese soil except the Dutch and Chinese, who were confined to enclaves in the port of Nagasaki, 750 miles from Edo. No Japanese were permitted to leave: those who disobeyed did so on pain of death.”
These centuries of isolation in the Japanese capital — known today as Tokyo — thus produced next to nothing in the way of Westerner-composed accounts. But “the people of Edo themselves left a rich archive,” Sand notes, given the presence among them of no few individuals highly skilled in the literary and visual arts.
Such notable Edo chroniclers include Andō Hiroshige, the samurai-descended son of a fireman who grew up to become Utagawa Hiroshige, or simply Hiroshige, one of the last masters of the ukiyo‑e woodblock-printing tradition.
Hiroshige’s late “pictures of the floating world” are among the most vivid images of life in Japan just before it reopened, works that Sand quotes art historian Timon Screech as claiming “attest to a new sense of Edo’s place in the world.” For the historiographical view of the sakoku (or “closed country”) policy has long since come in for revision. The Japan of the mid-17th to late 19th century may not actually have been as closed as all that, or at least not as free of foreign influence as previously assumed. The evidence for this proposition includes Hiroshige’s ukiyo‑e prints, especially his late series of masterworks One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
Now, thanks to the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s digital collection, you can take as long and as close a look as you’d like at — and even download — more than 1,000 of his works. That’s an impressive number for a single institution, but bear in mind that Hiroshige produced about 8,000 pieces in his lifetime, capturing not just the attractions of Edo but views from all over his homeland as he knew it, which had already begun to vanish in the last years of his life. More than a century and a half on, the coronavirus pandemic has prompted Japan to put in place entry restrictions that, for many if not most foreigners around the world, have effectively re-closed the country. Japan itself has changed a great deal since the mid-19th century, but to much of the world it has once again become a land of wonders accessible only through its art. Explore 1,000+ woodblock prints by Hiroshige here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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