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Increasing Disabled/Other-Abled Representation in Media — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #83

in Podcasts, Politics, Pretty Much Pop, Television | February 24th, 2021

At least 20% of us have some sort of dis­abil­i­ty, yet such con­di­tions are reflect­ed by only tiny por­tion of TV and film char­ac­ter­i­za­tions, and what char­ac­ters are por­trayed typ­i­cal­ly get played by non-dis­abled actors. Depic­tions often focus on what it’s like to live with the con­di­tion. This can of course be social­ly ben­e­fi­cial, but we don’t want to essen­tial­ize peo­ple as their con­di­tions, so it’s even more use­ful to fea­ture dis­abled actors and char­ac­ters when the plot is not about their dis­abil­i­ty.

Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are joined by play­wright Kay­la Dryesse to talk about hur­dles to rep­re­sen­ta­tion, dis­abil­i­ty cul­ture, whether “dis­abil­i­ty” is even the right word, neg­a­tive stereo­types (no less than five James Bond vil­lains are in wheel­chairs!), and issues in por­tray­ing dis­abil­i­ty relat­ed to the­ater, com­e­dy, hor­ror, and super­heroes. Some shows men­tioned include Speech­less, Atyp­i­cal, Every­thing’s Gonna Be Okay, Break­ing Bad, Glee, The Stand, The Witch­es, and The Great British Bake-Off.

Learn more from these arti­cles:

Also, watch Stel­la Young’s TED talk, called “I’m Not Your Inspi­ra­tion, Thank You Very Much;” the episode of Drunk His­to­ry about 504 acces­si­bil­i­ty; and Ste­vie Won­der’s SNL par­o­dy of a cam­era com­mer­cial.

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.

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The Roman Roads of Gaul Visualized as a Modern Subway Map

in History, Maps | February 23rd, 2021

At a casu­al glance, some trav­el­ers may take the map above for a depic­tion of France’s envi­able inter­ci­ty high-speed rail net­work Train à Grande Vitesse, bet­ter known as TGV. In real­i­ty, its con­tent pre­dates that sys­tem’s inau­gu­ra­tion in the ear­ly 1980s — and by near­ly two mil­len­nia at that. This is in fact a map of Gaul, a region of Europe that, most broad­ly defined, includ­ed mod­ern-day France, Lux­em­bourg, and Bel­gium, as well as parts of Switzer­land, Italy, the Nether­lands, and Ger­many. Ruled by Rome for five cen­turies until the fall of the Roman Empire itself, Gaul was run through with a num­ber of Roman roads, a sub­ject of fas­ci­na­tion for many archae­o­log­i­cal­ly inclined his­to­ri­ans.

They’ve also become a sub­ject of fas­ci­na­tion for a young data sci­en­tist and graph­ic design­er by the name of Sasha Tru­bet­skoy. His work, much fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, includes maps of the Roman Roads of Britain, Italy, Spain and Por­tu­gal, as well as, at a larg­er scale, those of the entire empire.

“This was an inter­est­ing map to make, but I can’t say it was fun all the time,” writes Tru­bet­skoy. “Gen­er­al­ly I enjoyed the process, but it was far more chal­leng­ing than I had antic­i­pat­ed.” You can hear him describe some of the chal­lenges involved, and even show how solv­ing them played out in his design process, in his three-hour explana­to­ry live stream now archived on Youtube.

You can down­load Tru­bet­skoy’s Roman Roads of Gaul map from his site, and even buy a high-res­o­lu­tion file suit­able for print­ing as a poster (USD $9). “As far as I can tell, it’s done,” writes Tru­bet­skoy of the work, wise­ly — or from frus­trat­ing per­son­al expe­ri­ence — acknowl­edg­ing that, despite or because of the cen­turies of dis­tance between us and the rel­e­vant his­tor­i­cal and geo­graph­i­cal facts, those facts could still change. Just as ancient his­to­ry can­not both make its way to us and main­tain absolute­ly per­fect fideli­ty to the past, so the kind of prac­ti­cal visu­al design embod­ied in a sub­way map neces­si­tates a great deal of sim­pli­fi­ca­tion and approx­i­ma­tion to be use­ful. And speak­ing of the graph­ic arts, just imag­ine how use­ful this par­tic­u­lar map would’ve been to Aster­ix.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Rome’s Sys­tem of Roads Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

The Roman Roads of Britain Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map

All the Roman Roads of Italy, Visu­al­ized as a Mod­ern Sub­way Map

The Roman Roads of Spain & Por­tu­gal Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map: Ancient His­to­ry Meets Mod­ern Graph­ic Design

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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The 69 Pages of Writing Advice Denis Johnson Collected from Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, Stephen King, Hunter Thompson, Werner Herzog & Many Others

in Writing | February 23rd, 2021

The inter­net is full of inspi­ra­tional quo­ta­tions about writ­ing, many of them from accom­plished and respectable writ­ers. But what need could such writ­ers have of inspi­ra­tional quo­ta­tions them­selves? Sure­ly true lit­er­ary art flows from its authors with­out need of encour­ag­ing words, demand though it may sus­tained peri­ods of labor, frus­tra­tion, and even suf­fer­ing. These days, more than a few who seek to cre­ate such art spend time study­ing not just its past mas­ter­works but its liv­ing mas­ters. “Some years ago,” the nov­el­ist Karan Maha­jan recent­ly tweet­ed, “I was lucky to take a class with Denis John­son, who dressed like a card-shark, in flashy jack­ets and (unlike a card-shark) wept over sen­tences. He gave my class a 69-page list of writ­ing quotes he returned to fre­quent­ly.”

John­son’s list, which you can see in PDF form here, shows that at least one of our era’s most cel­e­brat­ed writ­ers swore by the kind of writ­ing advice most of us scroll past every day. Though some­what eccen­tri­cal­ly for­mat­ted, it rounds up a great deal of valu­able wis­dom from nov­el­ists, poets, and play­wrights — as well as philoso­phers, sculp­tors, film­mak­ers, and oth­er fig­ures besides — from dif­fer­ent lands and dif­fer­ent times.

In it you’ll find these reflec­tions on the art, craft, and life of writ­ing, among many oth­ers:

  • “In genius we per­ceive our own reject­ed thoughts, return­ing to us with a kind of alien­at­ed majesty.” — Ralph Wal­do Emer­son
  • Sim­plic­i­ty is not an end in art, but we usu­al­ly arrive at sim­plic­i­ty as we approach the true sense of things.” — Con­stan­tin Brân­cuși
  • The first and most obvi­ous char­ac­ter­is­tic of fic­tion is that it deals with real­i­ty through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tast­ed, and touched.” ― Flan­nery O’Con­nor
  • “Writ­ing, ide­al­ly, is rec­og­niz­ing your bad writ­ing.” — August Wil­son
  • “One is always seek­ing the touch­stone that will dis­solve one’s defi­cien­cies as a per­son and as a crafts­man. And one is always bump­ing up against the fact that there is none except hard work, con­cen­tra­tion, and con­tin­ued appli­ca­tion.” — Paul William Gal­li­co
  • “But what is art, real­ly, but a good instinct for stay­ing alive in your own alley?” — Hunter S. Thomp­son
  • There is a micro­scop­i­cal­ly thin line between being bril­liant­ly cre­ative and act­ing like the most gigan­tic idiot on earth. — Cyn­thia Heimel
  • “A writer is a per­son for whom writ­ing is more dif­fi­cult than it is for oth­er peo­ple.” — Thomas Mann
  • “I learned nev­er to emp­ty the well of my writ­ing, but always to stop when there was still some­thing there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.” — Ernest Hem­ing­way
  • “First thought best thought.” — Jack Ker­ouac
  • “The job boils down to two things: pay­ing atten­tion to how the real peo­ple around you behave and then telling the truth about what you see.” — Stephen King
  • “The impor­tant thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least, when a pro­fes­sion­al writer doesn’t do any­thing else but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out of the win­dow or stand on his head or writhe on the floor. But he is not to do any oth­er pos­i­tive thing, not read, write let­ters, glance at mag­a­zines, or write checks. Write or noth­ing.” — Ray­mond Chan­dler
  • “I know this, with a sure and cer­tain knowl­edge: a man’s work is noth­ing but this slow trek to redis­cov­er, through the detours of art, those two or three great and sim­ple images in whose pres­ence his heart first opened.” — Albert Camus
  • “Don’t look back.” – Bob Dylan

Over the course of these 69 pages, cer­tain themes emerge: the impor­tance of writ­ing with one’s “blood,” the unim­por­tance of crit­ics, the val­ue of sim­plic­i­ty, the dan­ger of adjec­tives (and oth­er excess descrip­tion), the neces­si­ty of let­ting noth­ing block the flow of the first draft. While many of these quo­ta­tions offer prac­ti­cal advice — much of it about con­sis­tent­ly putting in the hours, both con­scious and uncon­scious — some approach from a more oblique angle not just “writ­ing” as a pur­suit but the liv­ing of life itself. “To fail to embrace my dreams now would be a dis­grace so great that sin itself could not find a name for it,” writes Wern­er Her­zog in the diary he kept dur­ing the ago­nized mak­ing of Fitz­car­ral­do. If this inspired the author of Jesus’ Son and Tree of Smoke, it ought to inspire the rest of us as well.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

19 Quotes on Writ­ing by Gore Vidal. Some Wit­ty, Some Acer­bic, Many Spot On

Stephen King’s 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Tips on How to Write a Good Short Sto­ry

7 Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

Write Only 500 Words Per Day and Pub­lish 50+ Books: Gra­ham Greene’s Writ­ing Method

To Make Great Films, You Must Read, Read, Read and Write, Write, Write, Say Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Wern­er Her­zog

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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Anthony Bourdain Talks About the Big Break That Changed His Life–at Age 44

in Books, Food & Drink, Television | February 23rd, 2021

In 1999, Antho­ny Bourdain’s career seemed to have stalled. While his “prin­ci­pal voca­tion remained his posi­tion as exec­u­tive chef” at New York’s Les Halles, rest­less intel­li­gence and wan­der­lust kept him look­ing for oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties. “He was 43 years old, rode hard and put up wet,” writes Eliz­a­beth Nel­son at The Ringer, “a recov­er­ing addict with a num­ber of debts and a pen­chant for find­ing trou­ble in fail­ing restau­rants across the city.” He had fought for and won an unde­ni­able mea­sure of suc­cess, but he hard­ly seemed on the thresh­old of the major celebri­ty chef­dom he would main­tain until his death twen­ty years lat­er in 2018.

Then, “in the spring of 2000, his sub­li­mat­ed lit­er­ary ambi­tions sud­den­ly caught up with and then quick­ly sur­passed his cook­ing.” Bourdain’s mem­oir Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial “became an imme­di­ate sen­sa­tion,” intro­duc­ing his icon­o­clasm, acer­bic wit, and out­ra­geous con­fes­sion­al style to mil­lions of read­ers, who would soon become view­ers of his try-any­thing trav­el­ogue series, A Cook’s Tour, No Reser­va­tions, The Lay­over, and Parts Unknown, as well as loy­al read­ers of his sub­se­quent books, and even fic­tion like as Gone Bam­boo, a crime nov­el soon to become a TV series.

How did Bour­dain first get his win­ning per­son­al­i­ty before the mass­es? It all start­ed with a 1999 New York­er arti­cle called “Don’t Eat Before Read­ing This,” the pre­de­ces­sor to Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial and an essay that begins with what we might now rec­og­nize as a pro­to­typ­i­cal­ly Bour­dain­ian sen­tence: “Good food, good eat­ing, is all about blood and organs, cru­el­ty and decay.” In the inter­view clip above, from Bourdain’s final, 2017 inter­view with Fast Com­pa­ny, he talks about how the sto­ry led to his “huge break” just a cou­ple days after it ran, when a Blooms­bury edi­tor called with an offer of “the stag­ger­ing­ly high price of fifty thou­sand dol­lars to write a book.”

Every­one who loves Bourdain’s writing—and who loved his gen­er­ous, ecu­meni­cal culi­nary spirit—knows why Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial changed his life overnight, as he says. Yes, “food is pain,” as he writes in the book’s “First Course,” but also, “food is sex”—”the delights of Por­tuguese squid stew, of Well­fleet oys­ters on the half­shell, New Eng­land clam chow­der, of greasy, won­der­ful, fire-red chori­zo sausages, kale soup, and a night when the striped bass jumped right out of the water and onto Cape Cod’s din­ner tables.” Bourdain’s prose lingers over every delight, prepar­ing us for the escapades to come.

In Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial, the exhaus­tion, “sheer weird­ness,” and con­stant “threat of dis­as­ter,” that attend New York kitchen life (and life “inside the CIA”—the Culi­nary Insti­tute of Amer­i­ca, that is), becomes fleshed out with scenes of culi­nary deca­dence the likes of which most read­ers had nev­er seen, smelled, or tast­ed. Fans craved more and more from the chef who wrote, in 1999, just before he would become a best­selling house­hold name, “my career has tak­en an eeri­ly appro­pri­ate turn: these days, I’m the chef de cui­sine of a much loved, old-school French brasserie/bistro where… every part of the animal—hooves, snout, cheeks, skin, and organs—is avid­ly and appre­cia­tive­ly pre­pared and con­sumed.”

Read Bourdain’s New York­er essay here and see his full 2017 inter­view with Fast Com­pa­ny just above.

via @Yoh31

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Life Lessons from Antho­ny Bour­dain: How He Devel­oped His Iron Pro­fes­sion­al­ism, Achieved Cre­ative Free­dom & Learned from Fail­ure

Watch Antho­ny Bourdain’s Free Show, Raw Craft Where He Vis­its Crafts­men Mak­ing Gui­tars, Tat­toos, Motor­cy­cles & More (RIP)

Michael Pol­lan Explains How Cook­ing Can Change Your Life; Rec­om­mends Cook­ing Books, Videos & Recipes

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

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Bruce Springsteen & Barack Obama Release a New Podcast, “Renegades: Born in the USA”

in Podcasts | February 23rd, 2021

Yes­ter­day, Barack Oba­ma and Bruce Spring­steen unveiled the first two episodes of an 8‑part pod­cast called “Rene­gades: Born In The USA.”  The pod­cast (avail­able on Spo­ti­fy) is “a series of con­ver­sa­tions between Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma and Bruce Spring­steen about their lives, music, and endur­ing love of America—despite all its chal­lenges.” The con­ver­sa­tions were taped at Spring­steen’s home between July and Decem­ber of 2020. To hear the episodes, you will seem­ing­ly need to cre­ate a Spo­ti­fy account, if you don’t have one already.

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:

The 150 Best Pod­casts to Enrich Your Mind

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

Pres­i­dent Oba­ma Names His Favorite Books, Movies & Songs of 2018

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

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The Life & Death of an Espresso Shot in Super Slow Motion

in Food & Drink | February 22nd, 2021

Some YouTu­ber post­ed online a pret­ty nice clip of an espres­so shot being pulled from a La Mar­zoc­co FB80 espres­so machine at 120 frames per sec­ond. They rec­om­mend mut­ing the sound, then putting on your own music. I gave it a quick shot with the famous sound­track for Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I’ll be damned, it syncs up pret­ty well. Have a bet­ter sound­track to rec­om­mend? Feel free to let us know in the com­ments sec­tion below.

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:

An Espres­so Mak­er Made in Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Style: Raw Con­crete on the Out­side, High-End Parts on the Inside

Cof­fee Entre­pre­neur Rena­to Bialet­ti Gets Buried in the Espres­so Mak­er He Made Famous

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

The Hertel­la Cof­fee Machine Mount­ed on a Volk­swa­gen Dash­board (1959): The Most Euro­pean Car Acces­so­ry Ever Made

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: An Ad for London’s First Cafe Print­ed Cir­ca 1652

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Wired Co-Founder Kevin Kelly Gives 36 Lectures on Our Future World: Education, Movies, Robots, Autonomous Cars & More

in Education, Technology | February 22nd, 2021

Giv­en recent events, 2019 may now seem to us like the dis­tant past. But to those who were think­ing hard about the future the year before last, noth­ing that has hap­pened since has been whol­ly unex­pect­ed — and espe­cial­ly not to those who’d already been think­ing hard about the future for decades. Take Kevin Kel­ly, co-founder of Wired mag­a­zine and writer on tech­nol­o­gy as well as a host of oth­er sub­jects. It was in 2019 that state telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny Chi­na Mobile com­mis­sioned him to give a series of 36 short video lec­tures on the “Future of X”: not the future of the inter­net in Chi­na and the future of India in com­pe­ti­tion with Chi­na, but a range of top­ics that will sure­ly affect us all, no mat­ter our part of the world.

Self-dri­ving cars, vir­tu­al real­i­ty, 5G, robots: Kel­ly has giv­en con­sid­er­a­tion to all these much-dis­cussed tech­nolo­gies and the roles they may come to play in our lives. But the impor­tant thing about them isn’t to know what form they’ll take in the future, since by def­i­n­i­tion no one can, but to devel­op habits of mind that allow you to grasp as wide a vari­ety of their pos­si­bil­i­ties as you can right now.

The future, as Kel­ly frames it in his talk on uncer­tain­ties, con­sists of “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns.” Those last, bet­ter known as “black swans,” are events “com­plete­ly unex­pect­ed by any­body” that “change the world for­ev­er.” As exam­ples of pos­si­ble black swans to come he names World War Three, the dis­cov­ery of cheap fusion ener­gy, and, yes, a pan­dem­ic.

Soci­etal prepa­ra­tion for the future, to Kel­ly’s mind, will involve devel­op­ing “a very sys­tem­at­ic way of col­lect­ing these unknown unknowns and turn­ing them into known unknowns.” Per­son­al prepa­ra­tion for the future, accord­ing to his talk on schools and learn­ing, will involve cease­less acqui­si­tion and refine­ment of knowl­edge and under­stand­ing.

If we want to thrive in an uncer­tain future, he argues, we should “adopt a method of learn­ing called delib­er­ate prac­tice, falling for­ward or fail­ing for­ward,” in which we keep push­ing our­selves into unknown intel­lec­tu­al ter­ri­to­ry, always remain­ing “new­bies” at some­thing, assist­ed all the while by tech­nol­o­gy.

Just a cou­ple of decades into the 21st cen­tu­ry, we’ve already caught a glimpse of what tech­nol­o­gy can do to opti­mize our learn­ing process — or sim­ply to enable learn­ing where it would­n’t hap­pen oth­er­wise. “I don’t imag­ine that we’re going to go away from a class­room,” Kel­ly says, but we also “have the online video world, and more and more peo­ple today are learn­ing how to do an amaz­ing vari­ety of things, that we would­n’t have thought would work on video.”

Of course, since he spoke those words, one black swan in par­tic­u­lar has pushed much of human­i­ty away from the class­room, and we’ve found out a good deal more about what kind of learn­ing works (and does­n’t) over the inter­net. The future, it seems, is now.

You can watch the full playlist of videos, all 36 of them, below. We also rec­om­mend his very insight­ful book, The Inevitable: Under­stand­ing the 12 Tech­no­log­i­cal Forces That Will Shape Our Future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Tech­nol­o­gy Wants: Kevin Kel­ly @ Google

The Best Mag­a­zine Arti­cles Ever, Curat­ed by Kevin Kel­ly

What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civ­i­liza­tion?: Lists by Bri­an Eno, Stew­art Brand, Kevin Kel­ly & Oth­er For­ward-Think­ing Minds

Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Pre­dict­ing the Future

9 Sci­ence-Fic­tion Authors Pre­dict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asi­mov, William Gib­son, Philip K. Dick & More Imag­ined the World Ahead

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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De-Stress with 30 Minutes of Relaxing Visuals from Director Hayao Miyazaki

in Animation, Nature, Psychology | February 22nd, 2021

What does it mean to describe some­thing as relax­ing?

Most of us would agree that a relax­ing thing is one that qui­ets both mind and body.

There’s sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence to sup­port the stress-reliev­ing, restora­tive effects of spend­ing time in nature.

Even go-go-go city slick­ers with a han­ker­ing for excite­ment and adven­ture tend to under­stand the con­cept of “relax­ing” as some­thing slow-paced and sur­prise-free.

HBO Max is tout­ing its col­lec­tion of ani­ma­tion mas­ter Hayao Miyaza­ki’s films with 30 Min­utes of Relax­ing Visu­als from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, above.

Will all of us expe­ri­ence those 30 min­utes as “relax­ing”?

Maybe not.

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li fans may find them­selves gripped by a sort of triv­ia con­test com­pet­i­tive­ness, shout­ing the names of the films that sup­ply these pas­toral visions—Ponyo! Grave of the Fire­flies!! Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle!!! 

Fledg­ling ani­ma­tors may feel as if they’ve swal­lowed a stone—no mat­ter how hard I try, noth­ing I make will approach the beau­ty on dis­play here.

Sticklers—and there are plen­ty leav­ing com­ments on YouTube—may be irri­tat­ed to real­ize that it’s actu­al­ly not 30 but 6 min­utes of visu­als, looped 5 times.

Insom­ni­acs (such as this reporter) may wish there was more loop­ing and less con­tent. The select­ed scenery is tran­quil enough, but the clips them­selves are brief, lead­ing to some jar­ring tran­si­tions.

(One pos­si­ble workaround for those hop­ing to lull them­selves to sleep: fid­dle with the speed set­tings. Played at .25 and mut­ed, this com­pi­la­tion becomes very relax­ing, much like artist Dou­glas Gordon’s video instal­la­tion, 24 Hour Psy­cho. Leave the sound up and the lap­ping waves, gen­tle winds, and chuff­ing trains turn into some­thing wor­thy of a slash­er flick.

Final­ly, with so much atten­tion focussed on Mars these days, we can’t help imag­in­ing what alien life forms might make of these earth­ly visions—ahh, this green, sheep-dot­ted pas­ture does low­er my stress lev­el… wait, WTF was THAT!? Noth­ing on my home plan­et pre­pared me for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a mon­strous winged house com­prised of over­grown bag­pipes and chick­en legs lum­ber­ing through the coun­try­side!

We con­cede that 30 Min­utes of Relax­ing Visu­als from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li is a pleas­ant thing to have play­ing in the back­ground as we wait for COVID restric­tions to be lift­ed… but ulti­mate­ly, you may find these 36 min­utes of music from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li films more gen­uine­ly relax­ing.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Makes 1,178 Images Free to Down­load from My Neigh­bor Totoro, Spir­it­ed Away & Oth­er Beloved Ani­mat­ed Films

A Mag­i­cal Look Inside the Paint­ing Process of Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Artist Kazuo Oga

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Puts Online 400 Images from Eight Clas­sic Films, and Lets You Down­load Them for Free

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Paul Simon Deconstructs “Mrs. Robinson” (1970)

in Music | February 19th, 2021

There’s noth­ing like hav­ing a dead­line. When Simon and Gar­funkel were called on by direc­tor Mike Nichols to pro­vide music for his 1967 com­e­dy The Grad­u­ate, the film was already being edit­ed, and the duo were work­ing on the movie stu­dio clock. To hear Simon tell it in this inter­view with Dick Cavett (from the same inter­view we fea­tured ear­li­er this week), it was that crunch time that pro­duced one of their best songs, and their biggest hit, “Mrs. Robin­son.”

In fact, the song stitched togeth­er two unre­lat­ed sketch­es. The first was the gui­tar fill that starts the song, which was Simon just riff­ing over a chase scene. “But it wasn’t work­ing,” he says. The oth­er, the cho­rus, was a frag­ment: “And here’s to you Mrs. Robin­son, Jesus loves you more than you will know.”

“For no par­tic­u­lar rea­son, the words just came into my head,” Simon tells Cavett. The next line men­tioned Mrs. Roo­sevelt, and who knows where Simon might have gone with the song if Mike Nichols hadn’t told him to ditch any­thing polit­i­cal and keep with just the one char­ac­ter.

If you have the sound­track to The Grad­u­ate, you’ll notice that the ver­sion of “Mrs. Robin­son” only has scat singing in the vers­es, just mak­ing it up as they went along. There was no time to flesh out the track, and it fit in the movie bet­ter than any of the songs Mike Nichols had licensed already from the duo. It would be one of many pre­scient choic­es for the clas­sic com­e­dy, includ­ing cast­ing the unknown Jew­ish 30-year-old Dustin Hoff­man for the main role instead of the very white choic­es the stu­dio was try­ing to push on the direc­tor.

It was only three months after the film came out that Simon and Gar­funkel record­ed the full ver­sion with the lyrics in the vers­es. It became their sec­ond num­ber one sin­gle in 1968 and was the first rock song to win a Gram­my for Record of the Year. But true to the orig­i­nal sound­track ver­sion, it keeps its open­ing verse word-free.

And it’s an odd song. Simon describes the writ­ing as stream of con­scious­ness. Though Mrs. Robin­son is indeed a char­ac­ter in the film, played by Anne Ban­croft, the lyrics rarely ref­er­ence the film, except for “It’s a lit­tle secret just the Robin­son’s affair/Most of all you’ve got to hide it from the kids.” (And even here Simon seems to be singing about hid­ing pre­scrip­tion drugs). Instead Simon cre­ates an ellip­ti­cal nar­ra­tive for Mrs. Robin­son, plac­ing her at the cen­ter of a sto­ry set…at a san­i­tar­i­um, per­haps? The sto­ry jumps all around, but Mrs. Robin­son remains con­fused, out of sorts, suf­fer­ing the alien­ation of the sub­ur­ban wife, nos­tal­gic for an imag­i­nary past. It’s where Joe DiMag­gio comes in, called out like a sav­ior (“a nation turns its lone­ly eyes to you”) when the “Jesus loves you” exhor­ta­tions don’t work. Lat­er, Simon would explain the DiMag­gio ref­er­ence as, “I thought of him as an Amer­i­can hero and that gen­uine heroes were in short sup­ply.” (Simon was more of a Mick­ey Man­tle fan, but DiMag­gio had bet­ter syl­la­bles).

The good thing about writ­ing in this stream of con­scious­ness, Simon tells Cavett, is “You find out what was in your mind was rel­e­vant even though at the time it didn’t seem so.” The song sounds chip­per, but those lyrics are the sto­ry of a soci­ety about to come apart, which it would do sev­er­al months lat­er in 1968. Like The Grad­u­ate, with its satire about sub­ur­bia, loos­en­ing morals, hypocrisy, and “plas­tics” both as a career choice and a way of describ­ing soci­ety, the song is a rev­e­la­tion of a world to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Art Gar­funkel Lists 1195 Books He Read Over 45 Years, Plus His 157 Favorites (Many Free)

Watch Simon & Gar­funkel Sing “The Sound of Silence” 45 Years After Its Release, and Just Get Haunt­ing­ly Bet­ter with Time

Paul Simon Tells the Sto­ry of How He Wrote “Bridge Over Trou­bled Water” (1970)

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.

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4,000 Priceless Scrolls, Texts & Papers From the University of Tokyo Have Been Digitized & Put Online

in Archives, Art, Books, History, Libraries, Literature | February 18th, 2021

The phrase “open­ing of Japan” is a euphemism that has out­lived its pur­pose, serv­ing to cloud rather than explain how a coun­try closed to out­siders sud­den­ly, in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry, became a major influ­ence in art and design world­wide. Nego­ti­a­tions were car­ried out at gun­point. In 1853, Com­modore Matthew Per­ry pre­sent­ed the Japan­ese with two white flags to raise when they were ready to sur­ren­der. (The Japan­ese called Perry’s fleet the “black ships of evil men.”) In one of innu­mer­able his­tor­i­cal ironies, we have this ugli­ness to thank for the explo­sion of Impres­sion­ist art (van Gogh was obsessed with Japan­ese prints and owned a large col­lec­tion) as well as much of the beau­ty of Art Nou­veau and mod­ernist archi­tec­ture at the turn of the cen­tu­ry.

We may know ver­sions of this already, but we prob­a­bly don’t know it from a Japan­ese point of view. “As our glob­al soci­ety grows ever more con­nect­ed,” writes Katie Bar­rett at the Inter­net Archive blog, “it can be easy to assume that all of human his­to­ry is just one click away. Yet lan­guage bar­ri­ers and phys­i­cal access still present major obsta­cles to deep­er knowl­edge and under­stand­ing of oth­er cul­tures.”

Unless we can read Japan­ese, our under­stand­ing of its his­to­ry will always be informed by spe­cial­ist schol­ars and trans­la­tors. Now, at least, thanks to coop­er­a­tion between the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo Gen­er­al Library and the Inter­net Archive, we can access thou­sands more pri­ma­ry sources pre­vi­ous­ly unavail­able to “out­siders.”

“Since June 2020,” notes Bar­rett, “our Col­lec­tions team has worked in tan­dem with library staff to ingest thou­sands of dig­i­tal files from the Gen­er­al Library’s servers, map­ping the meta­da­ta for over 4,000 price­less scrolls, texts, and papers.” This mate­r­i­al has been dig­i­tized over decades by Japan­ese schol­ars and “show­cas­es hun­dreds of years of rich Japan­ese his­to­ry expressed through prose, poet­ry, and art­work.” It will be pri­mar­i­ly the art­work that con­cerns non-Japan­ese speak­ers, as it pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned 19th-cen­tu­ry Euro­peans and Amer­i­cans who first encoun­tered the country’s cul­tur­al prod­ucts. Art­work like the humor­ous print above. Bar­rett pro­vides con­text: 

In one satir­i­cal illus­tra­tion, thought to date from short­ly after the 1855 Edo earth­quake, cour­te­sans and oth­ers from the demi­monde, who suf­fered great­ly in the dis­as­ter, are shown beat­ing the giant cat­fish that was believed to cause earth­quakes. The men in the upper left-hand cor­ner rep­re­sent the con­struc­tion trades; they are try­ing to stop the attack on the fish, as rebuild­ing from earth­quakes was a prof­itable busi­ness for them.

There are many such depic­tions of “seis­mic destruc­tion” in ukiyo‑e prints dat­ing from the same peri­od and the lat­er Mino-Owari earth­quake of 1891: “They are a sober­ing reminder of the role that nat­ur­al dis­as­ters have played in Japan­ese life.” 

You can see many more dig­i­tized arti­facts, such as the charm­ing book of Japan­ese ephemera above, at the Inter­net Archive’s Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo col­lec­tion. Among the 4180 items cur­rent­ly avail­able, you’ll also find many Euro­pean prints and engrav­ings held in the library’s 25 col­lec­tions. All of this mate­r­i­al “can be used freely with­out pri­or per­mis­sion,” writes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo Library. “Among the high­lights,” Bar­rett writes, “are man­u­scripts and anno­tat­ed books from the per­son­al col­lec­tion of the nov­el­ist Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), an ear­ly man­u­script of the Tale of Gen­ji, [below] and a unique col­lec­tion of Chi­nese legal records from the Ming Dynasty.” Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Mak­ing of Japan­ese Wood­block Prints, from Start to Fin­ish, by a Long­time Tokyo Print­mak­er

Watch Vin­tage Footage of Tokyo, Cir­ca 1910, Get Brought to Life with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Down­load Clas­sic Japan­ese Wave and Rip­ple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japan­ese Artists from 1903

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

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

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