Drone Footage of San Francisco Set to the Music of Bladerunner 2049

in Random | September 10th, 2020

When real life and dystopi­an cin­e­ma become one and the same. You can com­pare side-by-side images of Bladerun­ner 2049 con­cept art and the San Fran­cis­co sky­line 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:

42 Hours of Ambi­ent Sounds from Blade Run­ner, Alien, Star Trek and Doc­tor Who Will Help You Relax & Sleep

Three Blade Run­ner Pre­quels: Watch Them Online

The Blade Run­ner Pro­mo­tion­al Film

How Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner Illu­mi­nates the Cen­tral Prob­lem of Moder­ni­ty

Watch the First Trailer for Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s Adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Classic Sci-Fi Novel

in Books, Film, Sci Fi | September 10th, 2020

It takes a fear­less film­mak­er indeed to adapt Dune. Atop its rich lin­guis­tic, polit­i­cal, philo­soph­i­cal, reli­gious, and eco­log­i­cal foun­da­tions, Frank Her­bert’s saga-launch­ing 1965 nov­el also hap­pens to have a plot “con­vo­lut­ed to the point of pain.” So writes David Fos­ter Wal­lace in his essay on David Lynch, who direct­ed the first cin­e­mat­ic ver­sion of Dune in 1984. That the result is remem­bered as a “huge, pre­ten­tious, inco­her­ent flop” (with an accom­pa­ny­ing glos­sary hand­out) owes to a vari­ety of fac­tors, not least stu­dio med­dling and the unsur­pris­ing incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty of the man who made Eraser­head with large-scale Hol­ly­wood sci-fi. The ques­tion lin­gered: could Dune be suc­cess­ful­ly adapt­ed at all?

Well before Lynch took his crack, El Topo and The Holy Moun­tain direc­tor Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky put togeth­er his own Dune adap­ta­tion. If all had gone well it would have come out as a ten-hour film fea­tur­ing the art of H.R. Giger and Moe­bius as well as the per­for­mances of Orson Welles, Glo­ria Swan­son, David Car­ra­dine, Alain Delon, Mick Jag­ger, and Sal­vador Dalí.

But all did not go well, and cin­e­ma was deprived of what would have been a sin­gu­lar spec­ta­cle no mat­ter how it turned out. At least one ele­ment of Jodor­owsky’s Dune has sur­vived, how­ev­er, in the lat­est attempt to bring Her­bert’s com­plex best­seller to the screen: the music of Pink Floyd, heard in the just-released trail­er for Denis Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune, star­ring Tim­o­th­ée Chalemet as the young hero Paul Atrei­des (as well as Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, and a host of oth­er cur­rent­ly big names), sched­uled for release in Decem­ber.

If a cred­i­ble Dune movie is pos­si­ble, Vil­leneuve is the man to direct it. His pre­vi­ous two pic­tures, Blade Run­ner 2049 and the alien-vis­i­ta­tion dra­ma Arrival, demon­strate not just his capa­bil­i­ties with sci­ence fic­tion but his sense of the sub­lime. Begin­ning with its set­ting, the desert-waste­land plan­et of Arrakis, Dune demands to be envi­sioned with the kind of beau­ty that inspires some­thing close to dread and fear. (The first direc­tor asked to adapt Dune was David Lean, per­haps due to his track record with majes­tic views of sand.) Vil­leneuve has also made the wise choice of refus­ing to com­press the entire book into a sin­gle fea­ture, pre­sent­ing this as the first of a two-part adap­ta­tion. And as a life­long Dune fan, he under­stands the atti­tude nec­es­sary to approach­ing this chal­lenge: “Fear is the mind-killer,” as Paul famous­ly puts it — so famous­ly that the trail­er could­n’t pos­si­bly exclude Cha­la­met’s deliv­ery of the line.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why You Should Read Dune: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Frank Herbert’s Eco­log­i­cal, Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci-Fi Epic

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles & Mick Jag­ger Nev­er Made

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Watch Dan Aykroyd & Bill Murray Goof Off in a Newly Unearthed Ghostbusters Promotional Film (1984)

in Film | September 10th, 2020

If you weren’t in the indie cin­e­ma exhi­bi­tion indus­try in the 1980s, you prob­a­bly haven’t heard of Show­est. But this was *the* con­ven­tion back then, a chance to trav­el to Las Vegas, shmooze with film dis­trib­u­tors and Hol­ly­wood stu­dios, smoke cig­ars, drink sin­gle malt Scotch, run up your company’s tab and have a dim mem­o­ry in the morn­ing of vis­it­ing a strip club. You know: Busi­ness, Amer­i­can Style!

And so what we have here is a pro­mo­tion­al film for an up-and-com­ing 1984 movie called Ghost­busters. Not the trail­er, you see, that’s for the gen­er­al pub­lic. Instead, this is two of the film’s lead actors, Dan Aykroyd and Bill Mur­ray, direct­ly address­ing atten­dees, implor­ing them to check out what could be the sci-fi com­e­dy of the sum­mer. “It’s gonna make E.T. look like Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Mur­ray quips.

There’s a few things appar­ent from this pro­mo film: Ack­royd and Mur­ray are com­plete­ly wing­ing it, and this prob­a­bly took as long to shoot as it takes time to watch. Also, per­haps: they’ve been “cel­e­brat­ing” if you know what I mean. Maybe. Alleged­ly. Either way, you can tell these guys are goof­ing about and mak­ing each oth­er laugh. And it also ends with a Ghost­busters theme that isn’t the Ray Park­er, Jr. clas­sic. It’s…well, it’s this, if you need to hear the whole thing.

And final­ly: there’s a few jokes that, if not total­ly “rapey” per se, do assume a woman-as-sex­u­al-favor vibe. To that I would posit: Ack­royd and Mur­ray knew their audi­ence (unfor­tu­nate­ly). (It was the Rea­gan era, and don’t for­get, the main vil­lain of Ghost­busters is the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency!)

But let’s not end on a down note. Instead, let’s just quick­ly add that as of this writ­ing, the *oth­er* Ghost­busters star, Rick Mora­nis, has just appeared after years in seclu­sion to appear with Ryan Reynolds in a cell­phone com­mer­cial. Yes, it’s also advance pro­mo for a Hon­ey I Shrunk the Kids reboot, but I’ll take what we can get these days.

P.S. If you’re won­der­ing what hap­pened to Show­est, the con­ven­tion arm of the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of The­ater Own­ers (NATO, for short, go fig­ure), you can read all about it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Zen of Bill Mur­ray: I Want to Be “Real­ly Here, Real­ly in It, Real­ly Alive in the Moment”

Bill Mur­ray Explains How He Was Saved by John Prine

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd Get Bri­an Wil­son Out of Bed and Force Him to Go Surf­ing, 1976

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.

David Lynch’s Popular Surrealism Considered on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #59

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | September 9th, 2020

Pret­ty Much Pop hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt–along with guest Mike Wilson–discuss the direc­tor’s films from Eraser­head to Inland Empire plus Twin Peaks and his recent short films. We get into the appeal and the styl­is­tic and sto­ry­telling hall­marks of his main­stays–Blue Vel­vet, Wild at Heart, Lost High­way, and Mul­hol­land Dri­ve–and also con­sid­er out­liers like Dune, The Ele­phant Man, and The Straight Sto­ry.

What’s with the campy act­ing and the weird atti­tudes toward women? Why make us stare at some­thing mov­ing very slow­ly for a long time? Are these films appeal­ing to young peo­ple inter­est­ed in some­thing dif­fer­ent but not on the whole actu­al­ly enjoy­able? Is there actu­al­ly a “solu­tion” to make sense of the sense­less, or are these wacky plots sup­posed to remain unas­sim­i­l­able and so not dis­mis­si­ble?

Some arti­cles we drew on includ­ed:

• “David Lynch Films Ranked from Worst to Best” by Swap­nil Dhruv Bose
• “The Remark­able Influ­ence of David Lynch” by Mike Mar­i­ani
• “David Lynch in the Beau­ti­ful World of Twin Peaks” by Sean O’Neal
• “David Lynch Responds to ‘Twin Peaks’ Fan The­o­ries: ‘We All See Some­thing Dif­fer­ent in a Sto­ry’” by Jude Dry
• “‘Twin Peaks’ and Beyond: The Best Shows Inspired by David Lynch’s TV Phe­nom­e­non” by Hanh Nguyen
• “Lost High­way Explained: The Mean­ing of David Lynch’s Mas­ter­piece” by Car­lo Affati­ga­to
• “Lau­ra Dern, Nao­mi Watts and Patri­cia Arquette Reveal What It’s Real­ly Like Work­ing With David Lynch” by Zack Sharf
• “Isabel­la Rosselli­ni Assess­es the Role that Haunt­ed Her” by Lau­rie Win­er
• “David Lynch Is Done With Film, and Promis­es 2006’s ‘Inland Empire’ Was the Last Movie He’ll Ever Make” by Matt Rourke
• “In Inland Empire, David Lynch Presents Female Suf­fer­ing as it Should Be – a Liv­ing Night­mare” by Clarisse Laugh­rey
• “Revis­it a Young David Lynch Being Inter­viewed About ‘Eraser­head’ back in 1979” by Jack What­ley

Also, read Roger Ebert’s reviews of Dune and Blue Vel­vet, and his sub­se­quent thoughts on the lat­ter. What did crit­ics say about “What Did Jack Do?” Watch “Twin Peaks Actu­al­ly Explained.”  Check out his short films if you can sit through them.

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. If you’re not sub­scribed to the pod­cast, then you missed last week’s aftertalk high­lights episode. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear 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

The Fall of Civilizations Podcast Engagingly Explores the Collapse of Civilizations & Empires Throughout History

in History, Podcasts | September 8th, 2020

Now the coun­try does not even boast a tree.

—Robert Brown­ing, “Love Among the Ruins”

Every empire seems to think (as much as empires seem to think) that it will be the one to out­last them all. And all of them have end­ed up more or less the same way in the end. This isn’t just a gloomy fact of human his­to­ry, it’s a fact of entropy, mor­tal­i­ty, and the lin­ear expe­ri­ence of time. If impe­r­i­al rulers forget—begin to think them­selves immortal—there have always been poets to remind them, though maybe not so direct­ly. Epic poet­ry often legit­imizes the found­ing of empires. Anoth­er form, the poet­ry of ruin, inter­prets their inevitable demise.

All the Roman­tics were doing it, and so too was an unknown 8th cen­tu­ry British poet who encoun­tered Roman ruins dur­ing the so-called “Dark Ages.” The poem they left behind “gives us a glimpse of a world of mys­tery,” says Paul Coop­er above in episode one of his Fall of Civ­i­liza­tions pod­cast, which begins with Roman Britain and con­tin­ues, in each sub­se­quent (but not chrono­log­i­cal) episode, to explore the col­lapse of empires around the world through lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture. “Every ruin,” says Coop­er in an inter­view with the North Star Pod­cast, “is a place where a phys­i­cal object was torn apart, and that hap­pened because of some his­tor­i­cal force.”

We are enthralled with ruins, though this can seem like the prod­uct of a dis­tinct­ly mod­ern sensibility—that of the poets who inhab­it­ed what nov­el­ist Rose Macaulay called in her 1953 study Plea­sure of Ruins “a ruined and ruinous world.”

But as our Old Eng­lish poet above demon­strates, the fas­ci­na­tion pre­dates Shake­speare and Mar­lowe. Coop­er would know. He has ded­i­cat­ed his life to study­ing and writ­ing about ruins, earn­ing a PhD in their cul­tur­al and lit­er­ary sig­nif­i­cance. Along the way, he has writ­ten for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, Dis­cov­er Mag­a­zine, and the BBC.

Coop­er also began pub­lish­ing one of the most intrigu­ing Twit­ter feeds in 2017, detail­ing in “sev­er­al nest­ed threads” var­i­ous “ruin-relat­ed thoughts and feel­ings,” as Shru­ti Ravin­dran writes at Tim­ber Media. His tweets became so pop­u­lar that he turned them into a pod­cast, and it is not your stan­dard infor­mal­ly chat­ty pod­cast fare. Fall of Civ­i­liza­tions engages deeply with its sub­jects on their own terms, and avoids the sen­sa­tion­al­ist clich­es of so much pop­u­lar his­to­ry. Coop­er “knew, for cer­tain, what he want­ed to avoid,” when he began: the “focus on grue­some tor­ture tech­niques, exe­cu­tions, and the sex­ca­pades of nobles.”

“His­to­ry writ­ers often don’t trust their audi­ence will be inter­est­ed in the past if they don’t Hol­ly­wood­ize it,” says Coop­er. Instead, in the lat­est episode on the Byzan­tine Empire he recruits the choir from the Greek Ortho­dox Cathe­dral in Lon­don, “and a num­ber of musi­cians play­ing tra­di­tion­al Byzan­tine instru­ments such as the Byzan­tine lyra, the Qanun and the Greek San­tur,” he explains. In his episode on the Han dynasty, Coop­er looks back through “ancient Chi­nese poet­ry, songs and folk music” to the empire’s rise, “its remark­able tech­no­log­i­cal advances, and its first, ten­ta­tive attempts to make con­tact with the empires of the west.”

This is a rich jour­ney through ancient his­to­ry, guid­ed by a mas­ter sto­ry­teller ded­i­cat­ed to tak­ing ruins seri­ous­ly. (Coop­er has pub­lished a nov­el about ruins, Riv­er of Ink, “inspired by time spent in UNESCO sites in Sri Lan­ka,” Ravin­dran reports.) There is “love among the ruins,” wrote Robert Brown­ing, and there is poet­ry and music and sto­ry and song—all of it brought to bear in Fall of Civ­i­liza­tions to “make sense about what must have hap­pened,” says Coop­er. Find more episodes, on fall­en civ­i­liza­tions all around the world, on YouTube or head to Fall of Civ­i­liza­tions to sub­scribe through the pod­cast ser­vice of your choice.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Lit­er­a­ture Pod­cast Takes You on a Lit­er­ary Jour­ney: From Ancient Epics to Con­tem­po­rary Clas­sics

Watch Ancient Ruins Get Restored to their Glo­ri­ous Orig­i­nal State with Ani­mat­ed GIFs: The Tem­ple of Jupiter, Lux­or Tem­ple & More

The His­to­ry of Lit­er­a­ture Pod­cast Takes You on a Lit­er­ary Jour­ney: From Ancient Epics to Con­tem­po­rary Clas­sics

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

IKEA Digitizes & Puts Online 70 Years of Its Catalogs: Explore the Designs of the Swedish Furniture Giant

in Business, Design | September 8th, 2020

The time­less mod­ernism of the IKEA cat­a­log, its promise of tidi­ness, clean, eco­nom­i­cal lines, and excel­lent val­ue belie a strug­gle ahead, an ordeal cus­tomers of the glob­al Swedish build-it-your­self jug­ger­naut know too well. Will the bulky, major­ly-incon­ve­nient­ly shaped box­es fit in the car? Will the rebus-like instruc­tions make sense? Will we assem­ble a bed with love and care, only to find our­selves in a pile of its bro­ken parts come morn­ing?

Clear­ly out­weigh­ing such tragedies are the many hap­py mem­o­ries we asso­ciate with buy­ing, build­ing, and liv­ing with IKEA prod­ucts. The com­pa­ny itself has built such mem­o­ries over the course of almost eight decades with an empire of Scan­di­na­vian design super­mar­kets.

“As of 2019,” Marie Pati­no writes at City­Lab, “IKEA boasts 433 stores across 53 coun­tries.” The IKEA cat­a­log is as wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ed as the Bible and Quran. The Swedish com­pa­ny with the quirk­i­ly named prod­ucts and leg­endary cafe­te­ria meat­balls defines fur­ni­ture shop­ping.

The lay­out of IKEA’s show­rooms may turn “retail into retail ther­a­py,” with cor­ri­dors filled with mono­chro­mat­ic visions of clut­ter-free liv­ing. In these times, of course, we’re far more like­ly to take refuge in those ven­er­a­ble cat­a­logs or the company’s always-improv­ing web­site. Now we can do both at once with a trip through sev­en decades of IKEA cat­a­logs, uploaded to the web­site for the 70th anniver­sary of the first 1950 release.

1951 “marked the first prop­er IKEA cat­a­log,” writes Pati­no, as well as the first icon­ic cov­er fea­tur­ing the first icon­ic design, the MK wing chair. Cov­ers became more elab­o­rate, with smooth mid-cen­tu­ry mod­ern liv­ing room lay­outs that tan­ta­lized, but the con­tents of the cat­a­log looked like gov­ern­ment order forms until the late 60s and 70s. It did not appear in Eng­lish until 1985. In these ear­ly lay­outs we can see just how dat­ed so many of these designs appear in hind­sight.

The company’s sig­na­ture busi­ness mod­el came togeth­er slow­ly at first. It start­ed in 1943, found­ed by Ing­var Kam­prad in Swe­den, as a mail-order busi­ness for sta­tion­ary sup­plies. The fur­ni­ture arrived soon after, but it would take anoth­er decade or so for the flat-pack idea to ful­ly emerge. The BILLY book­shelf, per­haps the most pop­u­lar IKEA design ever, debuted in 1979. Oth­er sta­ples fol­lowed, and in 2013, the orig­i­nal wing­back chair made a mod­i­fied come­back as the STRANDMON. Through it all, the cat­a­log has doc­u­ment­ed Swedish design trends in a glob­al mar­ket­place.,

The 21st cen­tu­ry has seen not only the return of the wing­back but of the mid-cen­tu­ry Scan­di­na­vian mod­ernism with which the com­pa­ny made its name in the 1950s and 60s. Maybe that’s why it’s easy to think of IKEA as con­sis­tent­ly embody­ing this trend, slight­ly updat­ed every few years. But brows­ing through these cat­a­logs shows how thor­ough­ly IKEA absorbed all sorts of Euro­pean influences—as well as the look of hotel room fur­ni­ture from Mia­mi Vice.

What kind of ther­a­py is this? Gaz­ing at dat­ed or retro-hip prod­ucts we are years too late to buy? It offers the same expe­ri­ence as all IKEA cat­a­log shopping—without the strug­gle and expense of trans­port­ing and assem­bling the results: the dis­trac­tion of a world with­out dis­trac­tions. Explore the new archive of IKEA cat­a­logs here.

via Bloomberg and Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mas­sive Har­rods Cat­a­logue from 1912 Gets Dig­i­tized: Before Ama­zon, Har­rods Offered “Every­thing for Every­one, Every­where”

The Bauhaus Book­shelf: Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books, Jour­nals, Man­i­festos & Ads That Still Inspire Design­ers World­wide

Meet the Mem­phis Group, the Bob Dylan-Inspired Design­ers of David Bowie’s Favorite Fur­ni­ture

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

MIT Presents a Free Course on the COVID-19 Pandemic, Featuring Anthony Fauci & Other Experts

in Biology, Current Affairs, Health, MIT, Online Courses | September 8th, 2020

Most of us use the terms “coro­n­avirus” and “COVID-19” to refer to the pan­dem­ic that has gone around the world this year. We do know, or can fig­ure out, that the for­mer term refers to a virus and the lat­ter to the dis­ease caused by that virus. But do we know the full name “severe acute res­pi­ra­to­ry syn­drome coro­n­avirus 2,” or “SARS-CoV­‑2” for short? We will if we take the online course “COVID-19, SARS-CoV­‑2 and the Pan­dem­ic,” which MIT is mak­ing avail­able to the gen­er­al pub­lic free online. We’ll also learn what makes both the virus and the dis­ease dif­fer­ent from oth­er virus­es and dis­eases, what we can do to avoid infec­tion, and how close we are to an effec­tive treat­ment.

All this is laid out in the course’s first lec­ture by Bruce Walk­er, direc­tor of the Ragon Insti­tute of Mass­a­chu­setts Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, MIT and Har­vard. Walk­er intro­duces him­self by telling us how he grad­u­at­ed from med­ical school when HIV was at its height in Amer­i­ca, tim­ing that placed him well for a career focused on dead­ly viral dis­eases.

The course’s com­plete line­up of guest lec­tur­ers, all of them list­ed on its syl­labus, includes many oth­er high-pro­file fig­ures in the field of epi­demi­ol­o­gy, immunol­o­gy, vac­cine devel­op­ment, and relat­ed fields: Har­vard’s Michael Mina, Yale’s Akiko Iwasa­ki, the Broad Insti­tute’s Eric Lan­der, and — per­haps you’ve heard of him — the Nation­al Insti­tute of Aller­gy and Infec­tious Dis­eases’ Antho­ny Fau­ci (find his ses­sion below).

“COVID-19, SARS-CoV­‑2 and the Pan­dem­ic” began last Tues­day, and its lec­tures, which you’ll find uploaded to this Youtube playlist, will con­tin­ue week­ly until Decem­ber 8th. Even if you have no back­ground in med­i­cine, biol­o­gy, or sci­ence of any kind, don’t be intim­i­dat­ed: as lead­ing pro­fes­sors Richard Young and Facun­do Batista empha­size, this course is meant as an intro­duc­to­ry overview.

And as Bruce Walk­er’s first lec­ture demon­strates, it’s not just open to the gen­er­al pub­lic but geared toward the under­stand­ing and con­cerns of the gen­er­al pub­lic as well. Tak­ing it may not reas­sure you that an end to the pan­dem­ic lies just around the cor­ner, but it will give you clear­er and more coher­ent ways to think about what’s going on. The virus and dis­ease involved are still incom­plete­ly under­stood, after all — but thanks to these and oth­er researchers around the world, get­ting bet­ter under­stood every day.

“COVID-19, SARS-CoV­‑2 and the Pan­dem­ic” will be added to our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Cours­es on the Coro­n­avirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic

Watch “Coro­n­avirus Out­break: What You Need to Know,” and the 24-Lec­ture Course “An Intro­duc­tion to Infec­tious Dis­eases,” Both Free from The Great Cours­es

Inter­ac­tive Web Site Tracks the Glob­al Spread of the Coro­n­avirus: Cre­at­ed and Sup­port­ed by Johns Hop­kins

Why Fight­ing the Coro­n­avirus Depends on You

Use Your Time in Iso­la­tion to Learn Every­thing You’ve Always Want­ed To: Free Online Cours­es, Audio Books, eBooks, Movies, Col­or­ing Books & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

A Medieval Metropolis Existed In What’s Now St. Louis, Then Mysteriously Disappeared in the 14th Century

in History | September 7th, 2020

In our cur­rent epoch of human his­to­ry, when pop­u­la­tions of major cities swell into the tens of mil­lions, an urban cen­ter of 30,000 peo­ple doesn’t seem very impres­sive. 1,000 years ago, a city that size was larg­er than Lon­don or Paris, and sat atop what is now East St. Louis. At its height in 1050, Annalee Newitz writes at Ars Tech­ni­ca, “it was the largest pre-Colom­bian city in what became the Unit­ed States…. Its col­or­ful wood­en homes and mon­u­ments rose along the east­ern side of the Mis­sis­sip­pi, even­tu­al­ly spread­ing across the riv­er to St. Louis.”

It is called Cahokia, but that name comes from lat­er inhab­i­tants who them­selves didn’t know who built the ancient metrop­o­lis, Roger Kaza explains, “We real­ly have no idea what the builders called their city.” Also, no one, includ­ing the peo­ple who set­tled there not long after­ward, knows what hap­pened to the city’s inhab­i­tants. Archae­ol­o­gists call these lost indige­nous soci­eties the Mis­sis­sip­pi­ans.

They occu­pied a ter­ri­to­ry along the riv­er of near­ly 1,600 hectares dur­ing what is called the Mis­sis­sip­pi­an peri­od, rough­ly between 800 and 1400 A.D. The soci­ety built mounds, “some 120,” notes UNESCO, who have des­ig­nat­ed Cahokia a world her­itage site. (See an intro­duc­to­ry video below from the Cahokia Mounds Muse­um Soci­ety and two artist recre­ations else­where on this page.) The largest of these mounds, Monk’s Mound, stands 30 meters high.

Cahokia is “a strik­ing exam­ple of a com­plex chief­dom soci­ety, with many satel­lite mound cen­tres and numer­ous out­ly­ing ham­let and vil­lages.” Size esti­mates vary. UNESCO’s is more con­ser­v­a­tive “This agri­cul­tur­al soci­ety may have had a pop­u­la­tion of 10–20,000 at its peak between 1050 and 1150,” they write—still, at any rate, a major city at the time. The Mis­sis­sip­pi­an civ­i­liza­tion left behind “pot­tery, cer­e­mo­ni­al art, games and weapons,” Kaza notes. “Their trade net­work was vast, stretch­ing from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mex­i­co.”

The mounds were a sym­bol of both earth­ly and reli­gious pow­er, and the city appears to have been a pil­grim­age site of some kind, with remains of what may have been a 5,000 square foot tem­ple at the top of Monk’s Mound and evi­dence of human sac­ri­fice on oth­er mounds. “A cir­cle of posts west of Monk’s Mound has been dubbed ‘Wood­henge,’ because the posts clear­ly mark sol­stices and equinox­es,” writes Kaza.

But the true strength of Cahokia, as in all great metrop­o­lis­es, was eco­nom­ic pow­er. As archae­ol­o­gist Tim­o­thy Pauke­tat of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois notes, “it just so hap­pens that some of the rich­est agri­cul­tur­al soils in the mid­con­ti­nent are right up against that area of Cahokia.” Corn grew plen­ti­ful­ly, pro­duced sur­plus­es, and the soci­ety grew rich. Then, seem­ing­ly inex­plic­a­bly, it col­lapsed. “By the time Euro­pean col­o­niz­ers set foot on Amer­i­can soil in the 15th cen­tu­ry, these cities were already emp­ty,”

One recent study sug­gests two nat­ur­al cli­mate change events sev­er­al hun­dred years apart explain both Cahokia’s rise and fall: “an unusu­al­ly warm peri­od called the Medieval Cli­mat­ic Anom­aly” gave rise to the region’s abun­dance, and an abrupt cool­ing peri­od called “the Lit­tle Ice Age” brought on its end. Cli­ma­tol­o­gists have found evi­dence show­ing how a drought in 1350 caused the pre-Columbian Mis­sis­sip­pi­an corn indus­try to implode.

Pauke­tat finds this expla­na­tion per­sua­sive, but insuf­fi­cient. Pol­i­tics and cul­ture played a role. It’s pos­si­ble, says arche­ol­o­gist Jere­my Wil­son, who coau­thored the recent cli­mate paper, that “the cli­mate change we have doc­u­ment­ed may have exac­er­bat­ed what was an already dete­ri­o­rat­ing sociopo­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion.”

Evi­dence sug­gests mount­ing con­flict and vio­lence as food grew scarcer. Cli­ma­tol­o­gist Brox­ton Bird argues that the Mis­sis­sip­pi­ans left their cities and “migrat­ed to places far­ther south and east like present-day Geor­gia,” Angus Chen writes at NPR, “where con­di­tions were less extreme. Before the end of the 14th cen­tu­ry, the archae­o­log­i­cal record sug­gests Cahokia and oth­er city-states were com­plete­ly aban­doned.”

We should be care­ful of see­ing in this con­tem­po­rary lan­guage any close par­al­lels to the sit­u­a­tion major cities face in the 21st cen­tu­ry. Just one link in the glob­al sup­ply chain that dri­ves cli­mate change today can employ 10,000–20,000 peo­ple. But per­haps it’s pos­si­ble to see, in the dis­tant indige­nous past of North Amer­i­ca, the not-so-future vision of a migra­to­ry future for the inhab­i­tants of many cities around the world.

via Art Tech­ni­ca and Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Native Lands: An Inter­ac­tive Map Reveals the Indige­nous Lands on Which Mod­ern Nations Were Built

Inter­ac­tive Map Shows the Seizure of Over 1.5 Bil­lion Acres of Native Amer­i­can Land Between 1776 and 1887

Two Ani­mat­ed Maps Show the Expan­sion of the U.S. from the Dif­fer­ent Per­spec­tives of Set­tlers & Native Peo­ples

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

Paul Schrader Creates a Diagram Mapping the Progression of Arthouse Cinema: Ozu, Bresson, Tarkovsky & Other Auteurs

in Film | September 7th, 2020

The dozens of film­mak­ers in the dia­gram above belong to a vari­ety of cul­tures and eras, but what do they have in com­mon? Some of the names that jump out at even the casu­al film­go­er — Andrei Tarkovsky, Jim Jar­musch, Pier Pao­lo Pasoli­ni, Ter­rence Mal­ick — may sug­gest a straight­for­ward con­nec­tion: cinephiles love them. Of course, not every cinephile loves every one of these direc­tors, and indeed, bit­ter cinephile argu­ments rage about their rel­a­tive mer­its even as we speak. But in one way or anoth­er, all of them are tak­en seri­ous­ly as auteurs by those who take film seri­ous­ly as an art form — and not least by Paul Schrad­er, one of the most seri­ous auteur-cinephiles alive.

Schrad­er first made his name as a film crit­ic, with his 1972 book Tran­scen­den­tal Style in Film: Ozu, Bres­son, Drey­er. In it he argues that the work of Yasu­jirō Ozu, Robert Bres­son, and Carl Theodor Drey­er have in com­mon a qual­i­ty that quite lit­er­al­ly “tran­scends” their dif­fer­ences in ori­gin.

This tran­scen­den­tal style in film “seeks to max­i­mize the mys­tery of exis­tence; it eschews all con­ven­tion­al inter­pre­ta­tions of real­i­ty: real­ism, nat­u­ral­ism, psy­chol­o­gism, roman­ti­cism, expres­sion­ism, impres­sion­ism, and, final­ly, ratio­nal­ism.” It “styl­izes real­i­ty by elim­i­nat­ing (or near­ly elim­i­nat­ing) those ele­ments which are pri­mar­i­ly expres­sive of human expe­ri­ence, there­by rob­bing the con­ven­tion­al inter­pre­ta­tions of real­i­ty of their rel­e­vance and pow­er.”

45 years on, Schrad­er revis­its this con­cept in the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val inter­view clip above. “Most movies lean toward you. They lean toward you aggres­sive­ly with their hands around your throat, try­ing to grab every sec­ond of your atten­tion.” But tran­scen­den­tal films “lean away from you, and they use time — and as oth­er peo­ple would call it, bore­dom — as a tech­nique.” They linger on the every­day, the unevent­ful, the repet­i­tive. Used adept­ly, this “with­hold­ing device” is a way of “acti­vat­ing” view­ers and their atten­tion. Then comes the “deci­sive action,” the moment in which the film does “some­thing unex­pect­ed”: the “big blast of Mozart” at the end of Bres­son’s Pick­pock­et, the “big blast of emo­tion” at the end of an oth­er­wise reserved Ozu pic­ture. “What are you going to do with it, now that he has total­ly con­di­tioned you not to expect it?”

In the new edi­tion of Tran­scen­den­tal Style in Film pub­lished in 2018, Schrad­er includes the dia­gram at the top of the post. It illus­trates the three major direc­tions in which film­mak­ers have depart­ed from tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive, rep­re­sent­ed by the N at the cen­ter. Ozu, Bres­son, and Drey­er all go off toward the med­i­ta­tive “man­dala.” Abbas Kiarosta­mi, Gus Van Sant, and the Ital­ian neo­re­al­ists start on path that leads to the “sur­veil­lance cam,” with its unblink­ing eye on an unchang­ing patch of real­i­ty. The likes of Ken­ji Mizoguchi, Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, and David Lynch point the way to the audio­vi­su­al abstrac­tion of the “art gallery.” Float­ing around these aes­thet­ic end points are the names of film­mak­ers known for the “dif­fi­cul­ty” of their work: Stan Brakhage, Wang Bing, James Ben­ning.

Their work resides well past what Schrad­er calls the “Tarkovsky Ring,” named for the auteur of Mir­ror, Stalk­er, and Nos­tal­ghia. When an artist pass­es through the Tarkovsky Ring, as Schrad­er put it to Indiewire, “that’s the point where he is no longer mak­ing cin­e­ma for a pay­ing audi­ence. He’s mak­ing it for insti­tu­tions, for muse­ums, and so forth.” With­in the Tarkovsky Ring appear a fair few adven­tur­ous direc­tors still work­ing today, like Hirokazu Kore-eda, Kel­ly Reichardt, Alexan­der Sokurov, and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Schrad­er has neglect­ed to include his own name on the dia­gram, per­haps leav­ing his exact place­ment as an exer­cise for the read­er. He cer­tain­ly belongs on there some­where: after all, some crit­ics have called his last fea­ture First Reformed his most tran­scen­dent yet.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Exhil­a­rat­ing Film­mak­ing of Robert Bres­son Explored in Eight Video Essays

How One Sim­ple Cut Reveals the Cin­e­mat­ic Genius of Yasu­jirō Ozu

Four Video Essays Explain the Mas­tery of Film­mak­er Abbas Kiarosta­mi (RIP)

Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals His Favorite Film­mak­ers: Bres­son, Anto­nioni, Felli­ni, and Oth­ers

Watch Online The Pas­sion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodor Drey­er (1928)

The 5 Essen­tial Rules of Film Noir

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Watch an Epic Drum Battle, Pitting a 9‑Year-Old Girl Against Foo Fighter Dave Grohl

in K-12, Music | September 7th, 2020

Foo Fight­er Dave Grohl, for­mer­ly of Nir­vana, and Nan­di Bushell, an Ipswich ele­men­tary school­er, have some­thing in com­mon besides their incred­i­ble com­mand of the drums.

By all appear­ances, both seem to have ben­e­fit­ed from being reared by ground­ed, encour­ag­ing par­ents.

Nan­di, at 10, like­ly has a few more years under her folks’ roof despite her grow­ing renown—she’s jammed with Lenny Kravitz, gone viral in last year’s Argos Christ­mas advert, and most recent­ly, matched Grohl beat for beat in an epic drum bat­tle, above.

Nan­di demon­strat­ed a nat­ur­al rhyth­mic ear at an ear­ly age, bob­bing along to the Tele­tub­bies while still in dia­pers.

Of course, every­thing she’s achieved thus far can be con­sid­ered to have occurred at an ear­ly age.

On the oth­er hand, it was half a life­time ago when her father, a soft­ware engi­neer and self-described “mas­sive music fan” intro­duced the then-5-year-old to “Hey, Jude,” as part of a week­ly tra­di­tion where­in he makes pan­cakes with his chil­dren while shar­ing YouTube links to favorite songs.

She was imme­di­ate­ly tak­en with Ringo Starr, and the joy he exud­ed behind his kit.

Short­ly there­after, she passed a math exam, earn­ing a trip to Toys “R” Us to pick out a promised treat. Her eye went imme­di­ate­ly to a £25 kid­die drum set.

The plas­tic toy was a far cry from the pro­fes­sion­al kit she uses today, but she’s shown her­self to be adapt­able in a recent series of video tuto­ri­als for Daniel Bedingfield’s “Gonna Get Through This,” encour­ag­ing view­ers who lack equip­ment to bang on whatever’s handy—colanders, pot lids, bis­cuit tins… She rec­om­mends kebab skew­ers tipped with cel­lo­phane tape for the stick­less.

Her YouTube chan­nel def­i­nite­ly reveals a pref­er­ence for hard rock.

Her father, John, dis­likes play­ing pub­licly, but occa­sion­al­ly accom­pa­nies her on gui­tar, hop­ing she’ll grow accus­tomed to play­ing with oth­er peo­ple.

Doc­u­ment­ing his daughter’s per­for­mances lies more with­in his com­fort zone as he told Drum Talk TV in a very glitchy, ear­ly-pan­dem­ic vir­tu­al inter­view. Asked by host Dan Shin­der to share tips for oth­er par­ents of young drum­mers, par­tic­u­lar­ly girls, he coun­sels expos­ing them to as many musi­cal gen­res as pos­si­ble, nur­tur­ing their desire to play, and resolv­ing to have as much fun as pos­si­ble.

It’s clear that Nan­di is hav­ing a ball twirling her sticks and whal­ing on the drum part of Foo Fight­ers’ hit “Ever­long,” in a video uploaded last month.

Grohl got wind of the video and the chal­lenge con­tained there­in.

He took the bait, respond­ing with an “epic” video of his own, play­ing a set of drums bor­rowed from his 11-year-old daugh­ter:

I haven’t played that song since the day I record­ed it in 1997, but Nan­di, in the last week I’ve got­ten at least 100 texts from peo­ple all over the world say­ing ‘This girl is chal­leng­ing you to a drum-off, what are you going to do?’

Look, I’ve seen all your videos. I’ve seen you on TV. You’re an incred­i­ble drum­mer. I’m real­ly flat­tered that you picked some of my songs… and you’ve done them all per­fect­ly. So today, I’m gonna give you some­thing you may not have heard before. This is a song called “Dead End Friends” from a band called Them Crooked Vul­tures… now the ball is in your court.

(Fast for­ward to the final thir­ty sec­onds if you want to see the ulti­mate in hap­py dances.)

The young chal­lenger calls upon the rock Gods of old—Bon­zo, Bak­er, Peart, Moon—to back her side for “THE GREATEST ROCK BATTLE IN THE HISTORY OF ROCK!!!”

(In addi­tion to drum lessons, and par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Ipswich Rock Project and  junior jam ses­sions, it looks like her act­ing class­es at Stage­coach Per­form­ing Arts Ipswich are so pay­ing off.)

Five days after Grohl threw down his gaunt­let, she’s back on her drum throne, clad in a pre­teen ver­sion of Grohl’s buf­fa­lo check shirt and black pants, her snare bear­ing the leg­end “Grohl rocks.”

That sen­ti­ment would sure­ly please Grohl’s moth­er, Vir­ginia, author of From Cra­dle to Stage: Sto­ries from the Moth­ers Who Rocked and Raised Rock Stars.

A born enter­tain­er in his mother’s opin­ion, Grohl didn’t take up music until he was around the age Nan­di is now, after which it monop­o­lized his focus and ener­gy, lead­ing to a dis­as­trous 6th grade report card.

Rather than freak­ing out about gen­er­al edu­ca­tion dips, Vir­ginia, a pub­lic school teacher, was sup­port­ive when the oppor­tu­ni­ty arose for him to tour Europe at 17 with the Wash­ing­ton, DC band Scream after the depar­ture of drum­mer Kent Stax.

Wise move. Her son may be a high school drop-out, but he’s using his fame to shine a spot­light on the con­cerns of teach­ers, who are essen­tial work­ers in his view. Check out his essay in The Atlantic, in which he writes that he wouldn’t trust the U.S. Sec­re­tary of Per­cus­sion to tell him how to play “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” if they had nev­er sat behind a drum set:

It takes a cer­tain kind of per­son to devote their life to this dif­fi­cult and often-thank­less job. I know because I was raised in a com­mu­ni­ty of them. I have mowed their lawns, paint­ed their apart­ments, even babysat their chil­dren, and I’m con­vinced that they are as essen­tial as any oth­er essen­tial work­ers. Some even raise rock stars! Tom Morel­lo of Rage Against the Machine, Adam Levine, Josh Groban, and Haim are all chil­dren of school work­ers (with hope­ful­ly more aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly reward­ing results than mine).

He’s also leav­ing time in his sched­ule for anoth­er drum bat­tle:

Ok, @Nandi_Bushell .…..you win round one.…but it ain’t over yet! Buck­le up, cuz I have some­thing spe­cial in mind…

Stay tuned, Dave https://t.co/THyApmHHep — Foo Fight­ers (@foofighters) Sep­tem­ber 4, 2020

Watch more of Nan­di Bushell’s drum and gui­tar cov­ers on her par­ent-mon­i­tored YouTube chan­nel.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Fun­da­men­tals of Jazz & Rock Drum­ming Explained in Five Cre­ative Min­utes

The Case for Why Ringo Starr Is One of Rock’s Great­est Drum­mers

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

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