The History of Europe from 400 BC to the Present, Animated in 12 Minutes

in Animation, History | September 4th, 2019

What does the future of Europe look like? Geopo­lit­i­cal times such as these do make one pon­der such ques­tions as, say, “In what shape (if any) will the Euro­pean Union make it through this cen­tu­ry?” But as any his­to­ri­an of Europe knows, that con­ti­nent has sel­dom had an easy time of it: Euro­pean his­to­ry is a his­to­ry of con­quests, rebel­lions, alliances made and bro­ken, and of course, wars aplen­ty — a major piece of the ratio­nale behind the cre­ation of orga­ni­za­tions like the Euro­pean Union in the first place. As a result, the divi­sion of Europe by the many groups and indi­vid­u­als who have laid claim to pieces of it has, over the past 2500 years, sel­dom held steady for long, as you can see on the ani­mat­ed map above.

The Roman Empire did man­age to paint the map red, lit­er­al­ly, in the sec­ond and third cen­turies, but dur­ing all eras before and after it looks as mul­ti­col­ored as it was polit­i­cal­ly dis­unit­ed. In ear­li­er times, Europe was home to peo­ples with names like the Gauls, Iberi­ans, Celts, and Scythi­ans, as well as empires like the Achaemenid and Seleu­cid Empire.

After the First World War, though — and the dis­so­lu­tion of such enti­ties as the Ottoman Empire, Aus­tria-Hun­gary, and the Pol­ish-Lithuan­ian Com­mon­wealth — the labels start to look more famil­iar. Most of us remem­ber the event marked by the last big change to this map, the end of the Union of Sovi­et Social­ist Republics. (Many of us even spent years there­after in class­rooms whose world maps still depict­ed the USSR as one mighty bloc.)

The map’s ani­ma­tion begins in 400 BC and ends in 2017 with Europe as a col­lec­tion of nation-states, each of which we now regard as not just polit­i­cal­ly but cul­tur­al­ly dis­tinct. But watch­ing the full two-and-a-half-mil­len­nia time-lapse reminds us that every coun­try in Europe has bro­ken off from, joined with, or oth­er­wise descend­ed from anoth­er place, indeed many oth­er places, most of which have long since ceased to exist. In the 21st cen­tu­ry, one often hears Europe described as essen­tial­ly unchang­ing, stuck in its ways, ossi­fied, and an after­noon spent watch­ing the pro­ceed­ings of Euro­pean Union bureau­cra­cy would hard­ly dis­abuse any­one of that notion. But then, would­n’t observers of Europe have felt the same way back in the hey­day of Rome?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Europe: 5,000 Years Ani­mat­ed in a Time­lapse Map

Watch World War I Unfold in a 6 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1914 to 1918

Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945

The Entire His­to­ry of Japan in 9 Quirky Min­utes

Watch the His­to­ry of the World Unfold on an Ani­mat­ed Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today

A His­to­ry of the Entire World in Less Than 20 Min­utes

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 or on Face­book.

The Wisdom of Ram Dass Is Now Online: Stream 150 of His Enlightened Spiritual Talks as Free Podcasts

in Podcasts, Religion | September 4th, 2019

Image by Barabeke, via Cre­ative Com­mons

“Over the course of his life, it would appear that Ram Dass has led two vast­ly dif­fer­ent lives,” writes Katie Ser­e­na in an All That’s Inter­est­ing pro­file of the man for­mer­ly known as Richard Alpert. By embody­ing two dis­tinct, but equal­ly influ­en­tial, beings in one life­time, he has also embod­ied the fusion, and divi­sion, of two sig­nif­i­cant cul­tur­al inher­i­tances from the 60s: the psy­che­del­ic drug cul­ture and the hip­pie syn­cretism of East­ern reli­gion Chris­tian­i­ty, Yoga, etc.

These strains did not always come togeth­er in the health­i­est of ways. But Ram Dass is a unique indi­vid­ual. As Alpert, the Mass­a­chu­setts-born Har­vard psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor, he began con­trolled exper­i­ments with LSD at Har­vard with Tim­o­thy Leary.

When both were dis­missed, they con­tin­ued their famous ses­sions in Mill­brook, New York, from 1963 to 1967, in essence cre­at­ing the lab­o­ra­to­ry con­di­tions for the coun­ter­cul­ture, in research that has since been val­i­dat­ed once again as hold­ing keys that might unlock depres­sion, anx­i­ety, and addic­tion.

Then, Alpert trav­elled to India in 1967 with a friend who called him­self “Bha­ga­van Das,” begin­ning an epic spir­i­tu­al jour­ney that rivals the leg­ends of the Bud­dha, as he describes it in the trail­er below for the new doc­u­men­tary Becom­ing Nobody. He trans­formed from the infa­mous Richard Alpert to the soon-to-be-world-famous Ram Dass (which means “ser­vant of god”), a guide for West­ern seek­ers who encour­ages peo­ple not to leave it all behind and do as he did, but to find their path in the mid­dle of what­ev­er lives they hap­pen to be liv­ing.

“I think that the spir­i­tu­al trip in this moment,” he said in one of his hun­dreds of talks, “is not nec­es­sar­i­ly a cave in the Himalayas, but it’s in rela­tion to the tech­nol­o­gy that’s exist­ing, it’s in rela­tion to where we’re at.” It might sound like a friend­ly mes­sage to the sta­tus quo. But Ram Dass is a true sub­ver­sive, who asked us, through all of the reli­gious, aca­d­e­m­ic, and psy­che­del­ic trap­pings he picked up, put down, and picked up again at var­i­ous times, to take a good hard look at who we’re try­ing to be and why.

Ram Dass’ moment has come again, “as the par­al­lels between today’s fraught polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment and that of the Viet­nam era mul­ti­ply,” writes Will Welch at GQ. “Yoga, organ­ic foods, the Grate­ful Dead,” and psychedelics—“all of them are back in fash­ion,” and so are Ram Dass’ talks about how we might find clar­i­ty, authen­tic­i­ty, and con­nec­tion in a dis­tract­ed, tech­no­crat­ic, polar­iz­ing, pow­er- and per­son­al­i­ty-mad soci­ety.

There are 150 of those talks now on the pod­cast Ram Dass Here and Now, with intro­duc­tions from Raghu Markus of Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remem­ber Foun­da­tion. You can stream or down­load them at Apple Pod­casts or at the Be Here Now Net­work, named for the teacher’s rad­i­cal 1971 book that gave the coun­ter­cul­ture its mantra. Ram Dass is still teach­ing, over fifty years after his trans­for­ma­tion from acid guru to… well, actu­al guru.

In a recent inter­view with The New York Times, he described “nos­tal­gia for the ‘60s and ‘70s” as a younger gen­er­a­tion show­ing “they’re tired of our cul­ture. They’re inter­est­ed in cul­ti­vat­ing their minds and their soul.” How do we do that? The jour­ney does resem­ble his in one way, he says. If we want to change the cul­ture, we first have to change our­selves. Fig­ure out who we’ve been pre­tend­ing to be, then drop the act. “Once you have become some­body,” he says in the talk fur­ther up from 1976, “then you are ready to start the jour­ney to becom­ing nobody.”

Learn much more about Ram Dass’ jour­ney and hear many more of his inspir­ing talks at the Be Here Now Net­work.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Med­i­ta­tion for Begin­ners: Bud­dhist Monks & Teach­ers Explain the Basics

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

The His­toric LSD Debate at MIT: Tim­o­thy Leary v. Pro­fes­sor Jerome Lettvin (1967)

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

Demystifying the Falsetto Obsession in Pop & Rock Music

in Music | September 4th, 2019

Though its name sounds deroga­to­ry, falset­to is not some kind of trick­ery but a tech­nique used by humans for as long as they have been singing. It has its his­to­ries in indige­nous, folk, and clas­si­cal music. Yet mod­ern ears prob­a­bly asso­ciate it most with pop music of all kinds—from the har­mo­nious vocal blends of Doo Wop to the oper­at­ic har­monies of Queen (espe­cial­ly Roger Tay­lor, below) to… well, vir­tu­al­ly every song from a male singer today.

Falset­to is dif­fer­ent from what’s called “head voice,” as many a vocal coach will point out. “Usu­al­ly found in the upper reg­is­ters of male and female singers,” writes one such coach, “the breathy qual­i­ty of falset­to” is often “used for effect to sound oth­er­world­ly and beau­ti­ful or young.” Need a fuller explo­ration of why falset­to has such pur­chase in pop­u­lar music? See the above Vox Ear­worm explain­er by Estelle Caswell, tack­ling “pop music’s falset­to obses­sion.”

Falset­to has had phas­es when women adopt­ed it to major­ly promi­nent effect (see the age of Julee Cruise and Mazzy Star). It has of late become a very clear trend among male pop stars, Caswell the­o­rizes: “Justin Bieber, The Week­nd, Bruno Mars, Drake, Char­lie Puth, Shawn Mendes, Adam Levine, Sam Smith… the list goes on and on and on.” What’s all this about?

Caswell decid­ed to “crunch the num­bers and quan­ti­fy” the use of falset­to in pop to see if her per­cep­tion of its cur­rent ubiq­ui­ty could be sub­stan­ti­at­ed. Enlist­ing the help of data sci­ence and detailed ana­lyt­ics from Pan­do­ra, she traced falset­to singing in pop­u­lar music from a yodel­er in 1911 to “the icon­ic voice of Thom Yorke.” The Bill­board Hot 100 is fed into the dataset, “fan­cy pro­grams” do their thing and humans try to cor­rect errors.

Opera singer Antho­ny Roth Costan­zo shows up to explain the dif­fer­ence between falset­to and vocal reg­is­ter, and we learn much more about what falset­to is, and isn’t, and how, and maybe why, it’s so pop­u­lar a style for male pop vocal­ists. Caswell also put togeth­er a Spo­ti­fy playlist of falset­to pop and rock, fea­tur­ing every­thing from the afore­men­tioned Queen and Radio­head to Cur­tis May­field, Frankie Val­li, the Bee Gees, and Child­ish Gam­bi­no.

What does the data say? Caswell is hon­est to a fault about the prob­lems with a sta­tis­ti­cal approach—there are too many hit songs miss­ing from the Pan­do­ra dataset, and the AI’s falset­to scor­ing sys­tem (yes, such a thing exists) has seri­ous flaws. Turns out it may take a human ear to rec­og­nize the tech­nique, and even then, there’s room for dis­agree­ment.

But to sum up: mil­len­ni­als might feel like they live in a gold­en age of falset­to male pop singers because it’s all they’ve ever known. But ask any­one who grew up hear­ing Queen, the Bee Gees, or Mar­vin Gaye, or The Four Tops, even the Stones’ “Emo­tion­al Res­cue,” or the yodel­er who had that hit in 1911….

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Mar­vin Gaye Sing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” A Capel­la: The Haunt­ing Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track

How to Sing Two Notes At Once (aka Poly­phon­ic Over­tone Singing): Lessons from Singer Anna-Maria Hefele

Hear Fred­die Mer­cury & Queen’s Iso­lat­ed Vocals on Their Endur­ing Clas­sic Song, “We Are The Cham­pi­ons”

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

Voice Actor Dee Bradley Baker (Clone Wars,American Dad) Defends Cartoons on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #9

in Animation, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | September 4th, 2019

Meditation for Beginners: Buddhist Monks & Teachers Explain the Basics

in Health, Psychology, Religion | September 3rd, 2019

In the app-rich, nuance-starved cul­ture of late cap­i­tal­ism, we are encour­aged to con­flate two vast­ly dif­fer­ent con­cepts: the sim­ple and the easy. Maybe no bet­ter exam­ple exists than in the mar­ket­ing of meditation—the sell­ing of an activ­i­ty that, in essence, requires no spe­cial­ized equip­ment or infra­struc­ture. What medi­a­tion does require is a good instruc­tor and encour­age­ment. It is sim­ple. But it is not easy. It’s true, you’ll hear teach­ers rue­ful­ly admit, they don’t print this on the brochures for retreat cen­ters: but sus­tained med­i­ta­tion can be dif­fi­cult and painful just as well as it can induce seren­i­ty, peace, and joy. When we sit down to med­i­tate, we “feel our stuff,” to para­phrase David Byrne.

Next to the host of phys­i­cal com­plaints and exter­nal stres­sors clam­or­ing for atten­tion, if we’ve got per­son­al bad vibra­tions to con­tend with, they will ham­per our abil­i­ty to accept the present and relax. This is why, his­tor­i­cal­ly, those wish­ing to embark on the Bud­dhist path would first take eth­i­cal pre­cepts, and prac­tice them, before begin­ning to med­i­tate, under the pre­sump­tion that doing good (or non-harm) qui­ets the mind. “It is true that med­i­ta­tion is impor­tant in the Bud­dhist tra­di­tion,” writes Tibetan teacher Yongey Mingyur Rin­poche at Lion’s Roar. “But in many ways, ethics and virtue are the foun­da­tion of the Bud­dhist path.”

Of course, there are non-Bud­dhist med­i­ta­tion tra­di­tions. And the mind­ful­ness move­ment has demon­strat­ed with great suc­cess that one can carve most of the reli­gion away from med­i­ta­tion and still derive many short-term ben­e­fits from the prac­tice. But to do so is to dis­pense with thou­sands of years of expe­ri­en­tial wis­dom, not only about the dif­fi­cul­ties of sus­tain­ing a med­i­ta­tion prac­tice over the long term, but also about med­i­ta­tion’s inher­ent simplicity—something those of us inclined to over­com­pli­cate things may need to hear over and over again.

Tibetan teach­ers like Mingyur (and teach­ers from every Bud­dhist lin­eage) are gen­er­al­ly hap­py to expound upon the sim­plic­i­ty and joy of medi­a­tion, with the good nature we might expect of those who spend their lives let­ting go of regrets and fears. Some­times their mes­sages are pack­aged for eas­i­er con­sump­tion, which is a fine way to get a taste of some­thing before you decide to explore it fur­ther. But the point remains, as Mingyur says in the video at the top from The Jakar­ta Poet, that “med­i­ta­tion is com­plete­ly nat­ur­al.” It is not a prod­uct and does­n’t require any acces­sories or sub­scrip­tions.

It is also not an altered state of con­scious­ness or a nihilist escape. It is allow­ing our­selves to expe­ri­ence what is hap­pen­ing inside and all around us moment by moment by tun­ing into our aware­ness. We can do this any­where, at any time, for any length of time, as the monk fur­ther up tells us. “Even three sec­onds, two sec­onds, while you’re walk­ing, while you’re hav­ing cof­fee and tea, while you’re hav­ing a meet­ing… you can med­i­tate.” Real­ly? Yes, since med­i­ta­tion is not a vaca­tion from your life but an inten­si­fied expe­ri­enc­ing of it (even the meet­ings).

We get a celebri­ty endorse­ment above from the man who plays the angri­est man on tele­vi­sion, Gor­don Ram­say. The chef takes a break from his abu­sive kitchen rages to meet with a Thai monk, who says of his deci­sion to enter the monastery, “I’ve been to many dif­fer­ent places, I’d trav­eled around, but the one place I hadn’t looked at was my mind.” West­ern­ers may hear this and think of far out states—and there are plen­ty of those to be found in Bud­dhist texts, but not much talk of them among Bud­dhist teach­ers. Gen­er­al­ly, the word “mind” has a far more expan­sive range here than the fir­ing of synaps­es: it includes move­ment of the stom­ach lin­ing, the ten­sion of the sinews, and the beat­ing of the heart.

One of the most trag­ic mis­un­der­stand­ings of med­i­ta­tion casts it as a men­tal dis­ci­pline, split­ting mind and body as West­ern thought is wont to do for cen­turies now. But the aware­ness cul­ti­vat­ed in med­i­ta­tion is aware­ness of every­thing: the sens­es, the body, the breath, the space around us, our cog­ni­tion and emo­tion. Every Bud­dhist tra­di­tion and sec­u­lar off­shoot has its way of teach­ing stu­dents what to do with their often-ignored bod­ies while they med­i­tate. The dif­fer­ences between them are most­ly slight, and you’ll find a good guid­ed intro­duc­tion to begin­ning med­i­ta­tion focused on the body just above, led by Mingyur Rin­poche.

The hap­pi­ness one can derive from a med­i­ta­tion prac­tice does arrive, accord­ing to med­i­ta­tors world­wide, but it is not a soli­tary achieve­ment, Bud­dhist teach­ers say, a prize claimed for one­self like a prof­it wind­fall. It is, rather, the result of more com­pas­sion, and hence of more humil­i­ty, bet­ter rela­tion­ships, and less self-involve­ment; the result of strip­ping away rather than acquir­ing. Bud­dhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who left a career in cel­lu­lar genet­ics in his twen­ties to study and prac­tice in the Himalayas, hasn’t shied away from mar­ket­ing as a way to teach peo­ple to med­i­tate. But he is also upfront about the impor­tance of ethics to begin­ning medi­a­tion.

In addi­tion to being a “con­fi­dante of the Dalai Lama,” notes Busi­ness Insid­er, Ricard is also “a viral TED Talk speak­er, and a best­selling author.” His mes­sage is the impor­tance of compassion—not as a goal to achieve some time in the future, but as the very place to start. “There’s noth­ing mys­te­ri­ous” about it, he says in an inter­view on Busi­ness Insider’s pod­cast. He then goes on to describe the basic prac­tices of “Met­ta, ”among oth­er things a way of train­ing one­self to have kind and lov­ing inten­tions for oth­ers in an ever-widen­ing cir­cle out­ward. In the video above, Ricard talks about the prac­tice, and the sci­ence, of com­pas­sion at Google.

Many peo­ple balk at this kind of sen­ti­men­tal stuff, even from a man Google describes as “the world’s best bridge between mod­ern sci­ence and ancient wis­dom.” But if we can hear any­thing in the ancient wis­dom dis­tilled by these Bud­dhist teach­ers, per­haps it’s a sim­ple idea fast-med­i­ta­tion apps and util­i­tar­i­an pro­grams gen­er­al­ly skip. No, you do not need to put on robes, become a monk or nun, or take on a set of ancient tra­di­tions, beliefs, or rit­u­als. But as Amer­i­can Bud­dhist teacher Jack Korn­field says below, “if you want to learn to be wise and present, the first step is to refrain from harm­ing your­self or oth­ers.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Watts Presents a 15-Minute Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion: A Time-Test­ed Way to Stop Think­ing About Think­ing

How Med­i­ta­tion Can Change Your Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Bud­dhist Prac­tice

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

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

The Greatest Cut in Film History: Watch the “Match Cut” Immortalized by Lawrence of Arabia

in Film | September 3rd, 2019

“I’ve noticed that when peo­ple remem­ber Lawrence of Ara­bia, they don’t talk about the details of the plot,” writes Roger Ebert in his “Great Movies” col­umn on the 1962 David Lean epic. “They get a cer­tain look in their eye, as if they are remem­ber­ing the whole expe­ri­ence, and have nev­er quite been able to put it into words.” Redun­dant though it may sound to speak of a “film of images,” Lawrence of Ara­bia may well mer­it that descrip­tion more than any oth­er motion pic­ture. Its vast images of an even vaster desert, as well as of the tit­u­lar larg­er-than-life Eng­lish­man who turns that desert into the stage of his very exis­tence, were shot on 70-mil­lime­ter film, twice the size of the movies most of us grew up with. To expe­ri­ence them any­where but in a the­ater would be an act of cin­e­mat­ic sac­ri­lege.

The small screen ren­ders illeg­i­ble many of Lawrence of Ara­bia’s most’s mem­o­rable shots: Omar Sharif rid­ing up in the dis­tance through the shim­mer­ing heat, for exam­ple. Oth­ers are such tech­ni­cal and aes­thet­ic achieve­ments that their appre­ci­a­tion demands full-size view­ing: take the assem­bly of two images that comes out of a search for “great­est cut in film his­to­ry.”

It invari­ably comes out along­side the bone and the satel­lite from Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Lawrence of Ara­bia’s famous cut more than makes up in sheer sub­lim­i­ty what it lacks in com­par­a­tive his­tor­i­cal sweep. It occurs ear­ly in the film, just after the young British army lieu­tenant Lawrence has received word of his impend­ing trans­fer from Cairo to the Arab Bureau. He lights a cig­ar for Mr. Dry­den, the diplo­mat who arranged the trans­fer, blows it out, and sud­den­ly the sun ris­es over the Ara­bi­an desert.

“If you don’t get this cut, if you think it’s cheesy or showy or over the top, and if some­thing inside you doesn’t flare up and burn at the spec­ta­cle that Lean has con­jured, then you might as well give up the movies,” writes The New York­er’s Antho­ny Lane in his remem­brance of the direc­tor. But Lean did­n’t con­jure it alone: the work of the cut was done by edi­tor Anne V. Coates, who died just last year. “The script had actu­al­ly called for a dis­solve, in which one scene slow­ly fades into anoth­er,” the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Travis M. Andrews writes in a piece on her edit­ing career in gen­er­al and this edit in par­tic­u­lar. “Today, that can be done quick­ly with edit­ing soft­ware. At the time, though, film­mak­ers and edi­tors had to cre­ate the effect by hand, order­ing extra neg­a­tives of the film, which was then often dou­ble exposed and over­laid with each oth­er.”

“We marked a dis­solve, but when we watched the footage in the the­ater, we saw it as a direct cut,” Coates told Justin Chang in Film­Craft: Edit­ing. “David and I both thought, ‘Wow, that’s real­ly inter­est­ing.’ So we decid­ed to nib­ble at it, tak­ing a few frames off here and there.” Ulti­mate­ly, Coates only had to remove two frames to sat­is­fy the per­fec­tion­ist direc­tor. “If I had been work­ing dig­i­tal­ly, I would nev­er have seen those two shots cut togeth­er like that,” she added, throw­ing light on the hid­den advan­tages of old­er edit­ing tech­nol­o­gy, not in terms of price or speed but how it made its users think and see. (Famed edi­tor Wal­ter Murch has writ­ten along the same lines about the ideas gen­er­at­ed by hav­ing to man­u­al­ly roll through many shots to find the right one among them, rather than dig­i­tal­ly jump­ing straight to it.)

Coates had also “con­vinced her boss to check out a cou­ple of these new-fan­gled nou­velle vague films, ‘Chabrol and that sort of thing,’ ” writes The Guardian’s Andrew Collins. “Rather than be affront­ed by their sub­ver­sive jump cuts, Lean was enam­ored, and embraced the French style.” And so it’s in part thanks to the rule-break­ing of the nou­velle vague — which, with Jean-Luc Godard­’s Breath­less released less than two years before, was cer­tain­ly nou­velle — and in part to the lim­i­ta­tions of the edit­ing process in the ear­ly 1960s that we owe this unim­prov­able exam­ple of what, in tech­ni­cal lan­guage, is known as a “match cut” — or more specif­i­cal­ly a “graph­ic match,” in which a con­nec­tion between the visu­al ele­ments of two shots masks the dis­con­ti­nu­ity between them. So is 2001’s sin­gle-frame jump over mil­lions of years of evo­lu­tion, of course. But Lawrence of Ara­bia’s immor­tal match cut is the only one that uses an actu­al match.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Shots in Cin­e­ma Over the Past 100 Years

A Mes­mer­iz­ing Super­cut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side

The Alche­my of Film Edit­ing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Han­nah and Her Sis­ters, The Empire Strikes Back & Oth­er Films

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

Lawrence of Ara­bia Remem­bered with Rare Footage

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 or on Face­book.

What Makes Guernica So Shocking? An Animated Video Explores the Impact of Picasso’s Monumental Anti-War Mural

in Art, History | September 2nd, 2019

What emo­tion did you feel the first time you saw Picas­so’s Guer­ni­ca? Per­haps curios­i­ty or fas­ci­na­tion, and maybe even sur­prise, giv­en how dif­fer­ent the paint­ing looks from every­thing else in a muse­um or an art-his­to­ry text­book. There was almost cer­tain­ly a dash of con­fu­sion as well, but you prob­a­bly did­n’t feel the kind of shock you would have if you had learned what many of its ear­ly view­ers did. Just what gave Guer­ni­ca its ear­ly impact is the cen­tral ques­tion of the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above, writ­ten by human­i­ties schol­ar Iseult Gille­spie. “How can we make sense of this over­whelm­ing image,” asks its nar­ra­tor, “and what exact­ly makes it a mas­ter­piece of anti-war art?”

Find­ing the answer requires going back to April 26th, 1937, when “Fas­cist forces bombed the Basque vil­lage of Guer­ni­ca in North­ern Spain. It was one of the worst civil­ian casu­al­ties of the Span­ish Civ­il War, waged between the demo­c­ra­t­ic repub­lic and Gen­er­al Franco’s fas­cist con­tin­gent.” For Picas­so, it sparked the “fren­zied peri­od of work” in which he cre­at­ed this 25-and-a-half-foot-wide mod­ernist mur­al named for the ruined vil­lage. Guer­ni­ca’s “mon­u­men­tal can­vas is dis­ori­ent­ing from the start, ren­dered in the abstract­ed Cubist style Picas­so pio­neered.” That style “afford­ed view­ers mul­ti­ple and often impos­si­ble per­spec­tives on the same object; a tech­nique con­sid­ered shock­ing even in Picasso’s domes­tic scenes.”

All great works of art unite form and sub­stance, and here Picas­so used a shock­ing tech­nique to ren­der shock­ing mate­r­i­al: “The style offers a pro­found­ly over­whelm­ing view of vio­lence, destruc­tion, and casu­al­ties. Mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives only com­pound the hor­ror on dis­play — send­ing the eyes hurtling around the frame in a futile hunt for peace.” But the eyes find only a horse run through with a spike, a scream­ing woman hold­ing a dead child, a vil­lager about to be con­sumed by flames, and the help­less­ly bro­ken stat­ue of a sol­dier. “Each of these fig­ures bor­der­ing the paint­ing are hor­ri­bly trapped, giv­ing the work an acute sense of claus­tro­pho­bia. And where you might expect the can­vas’ mas­sive size to coun­ter­act this feel­ing, its scale only high­lights the near­ly life-sized atroc­i­ties on dis­play. ”

A life­like depic­tion of such a scene would be more dif­fi­cult to look at, but the aes­thet­ic Picas­so used, which at a mod­ern view­er’s first glance might appear car­toon­ish and even humor­ous, makes Guer­ni­ca much more haunt­ing in the long term — a term that has exceed­ed 80 years now, dur­ing which the paint­ing’s con­sid­er­able pow­er has grown more sub­tle as the events of the Span­ish Civ­il War have grown dis­tant. “Like the bomb­ing of Guer­ni­ca itself, Picasso’s paint­ing is dense with destruc­tion. But hid­den beneath this sup­posed chaos are care­ful­ly craft­ed scenes and sym­bols, car­ry­ing out the painting’s mul­ti­fac­eted attack on fas­cism.” Yet it was also sim­ple enough to rile up the Gestapo, one of whose offi­cers barged into Picas­so’s apart­ment in occu­pied Paris, point­ed at a pho­to­graph of Guer­ni­ca, and asked, “Did you do this?” No, the artist replied, “you did.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Gestapo Points to Guer­ni­ca and Asks Picas­so, “Did You Do This?;” Picas­so Replies “No, You Did!”

Guer­ni­ca: Alain Resnais’ Haunt­ing Film on Picasso’s Paint­ing & the Crimes of the Span­ish Civ­il War

A 3D Tour of Picasso’s Guer­ni­ca

14 Self-Por­traits by Pablo Picas­so Show the Evo­lu­tion of His Style: See Self-Por­traits Mov­ing from Ages 15 to 90

A Clas­sic Video of Pablo Picas­so Mark­ing Art, Set to the Song, “Pablo Picas­so,” by Jonathan Rich­man & The Mod­ern Lovers

The Scan­dalous Paint­ing That Helped Cre­ate Mod­ern Art: An Intro­duc­tion to Édouard Manet’s Olympia

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 or on Face­book.

Harvard Students Perform Amazing Boomwhacker Covers of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin,” Toto’s “Africa” & More

in Creativity, Harvard, K-12, Life, Music | September 2nd, 2019

Short­ly before he died, Queen’s front­man, Fred­die Mer­cury, famous­ly remarked, “Do what­ev­er you want with my life and my music, just don’t make it bor­ing.”

Mis­sion accom­plished, thanks to the Har­vard Under­grad­u­ate Drum­mers, more com­mon­ly known as THUD.

The ensem­ble, which rehears­es week­ly, is will­ing to con­sid­er any­thing with per­cus­sive potential—plastic cups, chalk­boards, buckets—as an instru­ment, but is best known for its vir­tu­oso boomwhack­er per­for­mances.

A boomwhack­er, for the unini­ti­at­ed, is a light­weight, hol­low plas­tic tube, whose length deter­mines its musi­cal pitch. When smacked against hand or thigh, it pro­duces a pleas­ing­ly res­o­nant sound. Col­or-cod­ing helps play­ers keep track of which boomwhack­er to reach for dur­ing a fast-paced, pre­cise­ly orches­trat­ed num­ber.

In the­o­ry, boomwhack­ers are sim­ple enough for a child to mas­ter, but THUD takes things to a lofti­er plateau with cus­tom craft­ed sheet music sys­tem­ized so that no one play­er gets stuck with an impos­si­bly com­plex task.

“A lot of it real­ly comes down to feel and mus­cle mem­o­ry,” THUD’s assis­tant direc­tor Ben Palmer told The Irish Exam­in­er. “After play­ing the song enough and inter­nal­is­ing it, we have a sense of where our notes come in. Also, many times our parts will play off each oth­er, so we give each oth­er cues by look­ing at each oth­er just before we play.”

(That Ker­mit the Frog-like voice chim­ing in on THUD’s “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody” cov­er, which many view­ers have mis­tak­en for an obnox­ious audi­ence mem­ber get­ting a lit­tle too into the pro­ceed­ings, is actu­al­ly an ensem­ble mem­ber help­ing the oth­ers stay the course.

As seri­ous as the group is about rehearsal and pro­vid­ing local school kids with free inter­ac­tive music lessons, their live shows lean in to the silli­ness inher­ent in their cho­sen instru­ment.

This good humored self-aware­ness defus­es the snarki­er com­ments on their YouTube chan­nel (“So this is why Har­vard’s tuition is so expen­sive…”)

Check out more THUD per­for­mances on the group’s YouTube chan­nel, or help defray their oper­at­ing costs with a pledge to their Patre­on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pachelbel’s Chick­en: Your Favorite Clas­si­cal Pieces Played Mas­ter­ful­ly on a Rub­ber Chick­en

The Orig­i­nal Noise Artist: Hear the Strange Exper­i­men­tal Sounds & Instru­ments of Ital­ian Futur­ist, Lui­gi Rus­so­lo (1913)

The Health Ben­e­fits of Drum­ming: Less Stress, Low­er Blood Pres­sure, Pain Relief, and Altered States of Con­scious­ness

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 9 for anoth­er sea­son of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

How Marion Stokes, an Activist Librarian, Recorded 30 Years of TV News on 70,000 Video Tapes: It’s All Now Being Digitized and Put Online

in Archives, Film, Television | August 30th, 2019

“Noth­ing is more impor­tant than tele­vi­sion,” said J.D. Salinger (as imper­son­at­ed, that is, in an episode of Bojack Horse­man). A pas­sive, paci­fy­ing medium—“cool,” as Mar­shall McLuhan called it—TV has also long been an easy tar­get for pun­dit­ry, for many decades before the per­pe­tra­tor du jour, video games. Tele­vi­sion spread igno­rance, was “the drug of the nation,” said Michael Fran­ti, ped­dled fake heroes on “chan­nel zero,” said Pub­lic Ene­my, and would lead to an “elec­tri­cal re-trib­al­iza­tion of the West,” McLuhan pre­dict­ed (and fur­ther explained in this inter­view).

Mar­i­on Stokes set out to do more than any of the men above who made pro­nounce­ments about tele­vi­sion. She ded­i­cat­ed her life to pre­serv­ing the evi­dence, tap­ing tele­vi­sion news for over 33 years, from 1979 “until the day she died,” writes the Inter­net Archive, who now hold Stokes’ “unique 71k+ video cas­sette col­lec­tion” and intend to dig­i­tize all of it. Stokes “was a fierce­ly pri­vate African Amer­i­can social jus­tice cham­pi­on, librar­i­an, polit­i­cal rad­i­cal, TV pro­duc­er, fem­i­nist, Apple Com­put­er super-fan and col­lec­tor like few oth­ers.”

She “ques­tioned the media’s moti­va­tions and rec­og­nized the insid­i­ous inten­tion­al spread of dis­in­for­ma­tion…. Ms. Stokes was alarmed. In a pri­vate her­culean effort, she took on the chal­lenge of inde­pen­dent­ly pre­serv­ing the news record of her times in its most per­va­sive and per­sua­sive form—TV.” She also pre­served three decades of tele­vised cri­tiques of tele­vi­sion. She began mak­ing her archive at the begin­ning of the Iran Hostage Cri­sis on Novem­ber 14, 1979. “She hit record and nev­er stopped,” her son Michael Metelits says in Recorder: The Mar­i­on Stokes Project, “a new­ly released doc­u­men­tary,” reports Atlas Obscu­ra, “about [Stokes] and the archival project that became her life’s work.”

In one remark­able exam­ple of TV cri­tique, at the top, we see William Davi­don, pro­fes­sor of Physics at Haver­ford Col­lege, decry­ing tele­vi­sion for spread­ing igno­rance, social irre­spon­si­bil­i­ty, and pas­sive con­sump­tion, mak­ing peo­ple unable to par­tic­i­pate in the polit­i­cal process. The round­table dis­cus­sion took place on a 1968 episode of Input. A lit­tle over a year lat­er, writes the Inter­net Archive, Davi­don “would take an action of great social con­se­quence,” break­ing into an FBI field office with sev­en oth­ers and steal­ing the evi­dence that “revealed COINTELPRO.” (They were nev­er caught, and Davidon’s role only came out posthu­mous­ly.)

Then known as Mar­i­on Metelits, Stokes co-pro­duced Input, a local Philadel­phia Sun­day morn­ing talk show, with her future hus­band John S. Stokes Jr., and both of them appear on the pro­gram above (both cred­it­ed as rep­re­sent­ing the Well­springs Ecu­meni­cal Cen­ter). The con­ver­sa­tion ranges wide­ly, with Ms. Metelits and Davi­don spirit­ed­ly defend­ing “human poten­tial” against too-rigid sys­tems of clas­si­fi­ca­tion and manip­u­la­tion. There are a few dozen more episodes of Input cur­rent­ly at the Inter­net Archive, with pan­els fea­tur­ing aca­d­e­mics, activists, and cler­gy (such as the episode explain­ing, sort of, the “Well­springs Ecu­meni­cal Cen­ter.”)

It’s a hard-hit­ting, con­tro­ver­sial show for a local broad­cast, and it gives us a detailed view of a range of both pop­u­lar and rad­i­cal posi­tions of the time, includ­ing Stokes’, which we can learn more about in the jour­nals, notes, lists, news­pa­per and mag­a­zine clip­pings, pam­phlets, leaflets, hand­bills, and more she col­lect­ed since 1960, many of which have also been dig­i­tized at the Inter­net Archive. Stokes backed her views with action. She was “sur­veilled by the gov­ern­ment for her ear­ly polit­i­cal activism,” Atlas Obscu­ra writes, and “attempt­ed to defect to Cuba” with her first hus­band Melvin Metelits. She kept her record­ing project pri­vate, “eschewed Tivo” and “nev­er sent an email in her life.”

She also made a small for­tune in Apple stock, which fund­ed her project and “the mas­sive stor­age space she required as the sole force behind it.” Stokes left us no doubt as to why she doc­u­ment­ed thir­ty years of TV news. But those doc­u­ments get to speak for themselves—or they will, at least. Stokes record­ed far more than her own pro­gram, three decades more. And the Inter­net Archive is cur­rent­ly “endeav­or­ing to help make sure” the entire col­lec­tion “is dig­i­tized and made avail­able online to every­one, for­ev­er, for free.”

If tele­vi­sion had, and maybe still has, the pow­er ascribed to it by its many astute crit­ics, then Mar­i­on Stokes’ painstak­ing archive offers an invalu­able means of under­stand­ing how we got to where we are, if not how to change course. Stokes’ col­lec­tion, and the doc­u­men­tary about her life, show “how the news was going to evolve into an addic­tion,” as Owen Gleiber­man writes at Vari­ety. The project took over her life and frac­tured her rela­tion­ships. “Even if you’re obsessed with the inac­cu­ra­cy of TV news, it has still entrapped you, like a two-way mir­ror that won’t let you see the oth­er side.” If the medi­um is the mes­sage, the oth­er side might always be more tele­vi­sion.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Mar­shall McLuhan’s The Medi­um is the Mas­sage (1967)

5 Ani­ma­tions Intro­duce the Media The­o­ry of Noam Chom­sky, Roland Barthes, Mar­shall McLuhan, Edward Said & Stu­art Hall

New Archive Makes Avail­able 800,000 Pages Doc­u­ment­ing the His­to­ry of Film, Tele­vi­sion & Radio

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

The Scandalous Painting That Helped Create Modern Art: An Introduction to Édouard Manet’s Olympia

in Art, History | August 30th, 2019

Here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, only the most shel­tered among us could be shocked by the sight of a naked body. It would seem that the whole of human his­to­ry has at least that in com­mon with us: only cer­tain soci­eties at cer­tain times have con­sid­ered nudi­ty a force worth sup­press­ing. But then, has the prob­lem ever been nudi­ty in gen­er­al, or rather the con­text, the nature, and the impli­ca­tions of par­tic­u­lar instances of nudi­ty? It’s fair to say that Titian’s Venus of Urbino has scan­dal­ized prac­ti­cal­ly no one. Yet three cen­turies lat­er, Édouard Manet’s out­ward­ly sim­i­lar 1865 can­vas Olympia sent shock­waves through the Paris art world. Why?

The rules of the Paris Acad­e­my of Fine Arts at the time dic­tat­ed that “great art was sup­posed to con­vey a moral or intel­lec­tu­al mes­sage,” says the nar­ra­tor of Vox’s video essay on Olympia above. “All accept­able art fell into one of five cat­e­gories, ranked by their capac­i­ty to deliv­er those mes­sages.” The less­er of these were still lifes and land­scapes, in the mid­dle fell genre paint­ings, and the great­est were por­traits and his­tor­i­cal works. And “equal­ly impor­tant to what was paint­ed was how it was paint­ed,” with more points going to “idol­ized, pret­ti­fied visions of the world, smooth and beau­ti­ful with no body hair and flaw­less skin,” all paint­ed in a way “that fol­low the rules of depth and per­spec­tive, mean­ing it looks like it could exist in the real world.”

The Acad­e­my of Fine Arts would pay lit­tle regard, then, to the “stark and unnat­ur­al col­ors” of Olympia, its “rough and tex­tured” brush­strokes, and its much “flat­ter and less com­plex” look than the Renais­sance real­ism idol­ized in those days. That Manet would dare give his obvi­ous “homage” to the Venus of Urbino a title like Olympia, a com­mon nom de guerre for pros­ti­tutes in 19th-cen­tu­ry Paris, caused some seri­ous­ly ruf­fled feath­ers as well. So why did the Acad­e­my put Manet’s paint­ing on dis­play in the first place? “It prob­a­bly had some­thing to do with his grow­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty. You can see his influ­ence so clear­ly in what came next. He led the charge towards Mod­ernism in the late 1800s, start­ing with the Impres­sion­ists — Mon­et, Degas — who adopt­ed his pen­chant for mod­ern themes and lucent brush­strokes.”

A more 20th-cen­tu­ry read­ing of Olympia holds up the paint­ing as proof that “no one enti­ty gets to decide what art should look like.” An episode of the ArtCu­ri­ous pod­cast about Olympia goes fur­ther still, claim­ing for Manet’s sub­ject the sta­tus of a fem­i­nist icon. But even the paint­ing’s con­tem­po­rary detrac­tors saw some­thing impor­tant in it. Émile Zola at first seemed to dis­miss the work by writ­ing, “You want­ed a nude, and you chose Olympia, the first that came along.” But he also admit­ted that Olympia cap­tured some­thing more gen­uine than even the most glo­ri­ous­ly real­is­tic paint­ings could: “When our artists give us Venus­es, they cor­rect nature, they lie. Édouard Manet asked him­self why lie, why not tell the truth; he intro­duced us to Olympia, this fille of our time, whom you meet on the side­walks.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Édouard Manet Illus­trates Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in a French Edi­tion Trans­lat­ed by Stephane Mal­lar­mé (1875)

A Quick Six Minute Jour­ney Through Mod­ern Art: How You Get from Manet’s 1862 Paint­ing, “The Lun­cheon on the Grass,” to Jack­son Pol­lock 1950s Drip Paint­ings

The Most Dis­turb­ing Paint­ing: A Close Look at Fran­cis­co Goya’s “Sat­urn Devour­ing His Son”

Van Gogh’s Ugli­est Mas­ter­piece: A Break Down of His Late, Great Paint­ing, The Night Café (1888)

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 or on Face­book.