Philosopher Portraits: Famous Philosophers Painted in the Style of Influential Artists

in Art, Philosophy | August 15th, 2019

Lud­wig Wittgenstein/Piet Mon­dri­an:

What do the Aus­tri­an-British philoso­pher Lud­wig Wittgen­stein and the Dutch painter Piet Mon­dri­an have in com­mon? For philoso­pher and artist Renée Jor­gensen Bolinger, the two have sim­i­lar beliefs about the log­ic of space.

“Many of Mon­dri­an’s pieces explore the rela­tion­ships between adja­cent spaces,” says Bolinger “and in par­tic­u­lar the for­ma­tive role of each on the bound­aries and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the oth­er. I based this paint­ing [see above] off of Wittgen­stein’s Trac­ta­tus, in which he devel­ops a the­o­ry of mean­ing ground­ed in the idea that propo­si­tions have mean­ing only inso­far as they con­strain the ways the world could be; a mean­ing­ful propo­si­tion is thus very like one of Mon­dri­an’s col­or squares, form­ing a bound­ary and lim­it­ing the pos­si­ble con­fig­u­ra­tions of the adja­cent spaces.”

An Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton, Bolinger stud­ied paint­ing a Bio­la Uni­ver­si­ty before mak­ing phi­los­o­phy her sec­ond major. “I actu­al­ly came to phi­los­o­phy quite late in my col­lege career,” Bolinger says, “only adding the major in my junior year. I was for­tu­nate to have two par­tic­u­lar­ly excel­lent and philo­soph­ic art teach­ers, Jonathan Puls and Jonathan Ander­son, who con­vinced me that my two pas­sions were not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive, and encour­aged me to pur­sue both as I began my grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion.”

Bolinger now works pri­mar­i­ly on the phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage, with side inter­ests in log­ic, epis­te­mol­o­gy, mind and polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. She con­tin­ues to paint. We asked her how she rec­on­ciles her two pas­sions, which seem to occu­py oppo­site sides of the mind. “I do work in ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy,” she says, “but it’s only half true that phi­los­o­phy and paint­ing engage oppo­site sides of the mind. The sort of real­ist draw­ing and paint­ing that I do is all about ana­lyz­ing the rela­tion­ships between the lines, shapes and col­or tones, and so still very left-brain. Nev­er­the­less, it engages the mind in a dif­fer­ent way than do the syl­lo­gisms of ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy. I find that the two types of men­tal exer­tion com­ple­ment each oth­er well, each serv­ing as a pro­duc­tive break from the oth­er.”

Bolinger has cre­at­ed a series of philoso­pher por­traits, each one pair­ing a philoso­pher with an artist, or art style, in an intrigu­ing way. In addi­tion to Wittgen­stein, she paint­ed ten philoso­phers in her first series, many of them by request. They can all be seen on her web site, where high qual­i­ty prints can be ordered.

G.E.M. Anscombe/Jackson Pol­lock:

Bolinger says she paired the British ana­lyt­ic philoso­pher Eliz­a­beth Anscombe with the Amer­i­can abstract painter Jack­son Pol­lock for two rea­sons: “First, the loose style of Pol­lock­’s action paint­ing fits the argu­men­ta­tive (and orga­ni­za­tion­al) style of Wittgen­stein’s Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions, which Anscombe helped to edit and was instru­men­tal in pub­lish­ing. Sec­ond, her pri­ma­ry field of work, in which she wrote a sem­i­nal text, is phi­los­o­phy of action, which has obvi­ous con­nec­tions to the themes present in any of Pol­lock­’s action paint­ings.”

Got­t­lob Frege/Vincent Van Gogh:

Bolinger paired the Ger­man logi­cian, math­e­mati­cian and philoso­pher Got­t­lob Frege with the Dutch painter Vin­cent Van Gogh as a tongue-in-cheek ref­er­ence to Van Gogh’s famous paint­ing The Star­ry Night and Frege’s puz­zle con­cern­ing iden­ti­ty state­ments such as “Hes­pe­rus is Phos­pho­rus,” or “the evening star is iden­ti­cal to the morn­ing star.”

Bertrand Russell/Art Deco:

Bolinger paint­ed the British logi­cian and philoso­pher Bertrand Rus­sell in the Art Deco style. “This pair­ing is a bit more about the gestalt, and a bit hard­er to artic­u­late,” says Bolinger. “The sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of form and reduc­tion to angled planes that takes place in the back­ground of this Art Deco piece are meant to cohere with Rus­sel­l’s locial atom­ism (the reduc­tion of com­plex log­i­cal propo­si­tions to their fun­da­men­tal log­i­cal ‘atoms’).”

Kurt Gödel/Art Nou­veau:

Bolinger paired the Aus­tri­an logi­cian Kurt Gödel with Art Nou­veau. “The Art Nou­veau move­ment devel­oped around the theme of mech­a­niza­tion and the rep­e­ti­tion of forms,” says Bolinger, “and cen­tral­ly involves a del­i­cate bal­ance between organ­ic shapes — typ­i­cal­ly a fig­ure that dom­i­nates the por­trait — and schema­tized or abstract­ed pat­terns, often derived from organ­ic shapes, but made uni­form and repet­i­tive (often seen in the flower motifs that orna­ment most Art Nou­veau por­traits). I paired this style with Kurt Gödel because his work was ded­i­cat­ed to defin­ing com­putabil­i­ty in terms of recur­sive func­tions, and using the notion to prove the Com­plete­ness and Incom­plete­ness the­o­rems.”

To see more of Renée Jor­gensen Bolinger’s philoso­pher por­traits, click here to vis­it her site.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site back in 2013.

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:

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times

Pho­tog­ra­phy of Lud­wig Wittgen­stein Released by Archives at Cam­bridge

180+ Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Legendary Protest Songs from Woodstock: Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & More Perform Protest Songs During the Music Festival That Launched 50 Years Ago This Week

in Music | August 14th, 2019

This year’s big event to cel­e­brate the 50-year anniver­sary of the most famous music fes­ti­val in the world has died an igno­min­ious death. As Vari­ety wrote in a scathing “obit­u­ary” last month, “Wood­stock 50 passed away today at the age of 7 months, fol­low­ing a brave and very, very long bat­tle with can­cel.”

Not a few peo­ple have said good rid­dance. What could the tribute—to take place not in Wood­stock but in Baltimore—have in com­mon with its name­sake, save a small hand­ful of the still-liv­ing orig­i­nal per­form­ers? The use of “Wood­stock” as a brand seems cyn­i­cal, but then again, we’ve also grown leery of the leg­end of Wood­stock 1. What was it about? Clas­sic rock stars on a farm? Stoned, naked hip­pies flail­ing in the mud? What jus­ti­fies the fifty years of hype?

Wood­stock was about much more than drug­gy flower chil­dren shag­ging in bedrag­gled tents, yet this stereo­type was prop­a­gat­ed from the start. The fes­ti­val “was a stri­dent­ly anti­war spec­ta­cle,” online his­to­ry project All About Wood­stock explains. “Its mes­sage was dilut­ed by the media. Rather than focus on the polit­i­cal state­ments made, main­stream cul­tur­al com­men­ta­tors talked about hip­pies, long hair, and nudi­ty.” A belat­ed wed­ding par­ty, Wood­stock sym­bol­ized “the merg­er and ambiva­lence of the coun­ter­cul­ture and protest.”

The mar­riage may be in sham­bles in the time of Wood­stock 50 but it held on for sev­er­al decades. Wood­stock “was the ‘com­ing out’ par­ty of the rock ‘n’ roll gen­er­a­tion,” writes NPR. Folk singer Richie Havens, the festival’s first per­former, remem­bers it as “the begin­ning of the world, as far as I was con­cerned.” Booked for a 20-minute set, Havens end­ed up play­ing for much longer when San­tana couldn’t be found, ad-lib­bing “Free­dom (Moth­er­less Child)” as his clos­er.

“The word ‘free­dom came out of my mouth because this was our real par­tic­u­lar free­dom,” he says in an inter­view with NPR’s Tony Cox. “We’d final­ly made it to above ground.” A few months lat­er, in Decem­ber, the decade closed on a much dark­er note, sym­bol­ized by the Rolling Stones’ bloody Alta­mont Free Con­cert. But for three days that year, August 15–17, 1969, it seemed like music fes­ti­vals might change the world.

Maybe they did. Wood­stock orga­niz­er Michael Lang thinks so. “I think Wood­stock proved the world that it was pos­si­ble for peo­ple to live peace­ful­ly,” he said in a 2015 inter­view. “It gave cre­dence to the posi­tions we as a young gen­er­a­tion took on per­son­al free­doms, end­ing a war we felt unjust, respect for the plan­et, the fight for civ­il rights, women’s rights, and human rights in gen­er­al. The impact on soci­ety con­tin­ues to this day.”

The fes­ti­val was also, of course, a mas­sive­ly star-stud­ded event filled with career high­light per­for­mances like Hendrix’s rad­i­cal, blis­ter­ing “Star-Span­gled Ban­ner.” Not every act showed up to make a state­ment. The Who were pret­ty sour about the gig, Lang remem­bers. “They were not part of the ‘hip­pie’ thing and Pete Townsend had to be talked into tak­ing the date.” But those who came to make a state­ment weren’t shy about it. Jef­fer­son Air­plane called for vol­un­teers for the rev­o­lu­tion in their anti-war anthem “Vol­un­teers.” Coun­try Joe and the Fish end­ed the sec­ond set on Sat­ur­day with their satir­i­cal “I‑Feel-Like‑I’m‑Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” an explic­it­ly anti-Viet­nam War song that asked, “what are we fight­ing for”?

Joan Baez, six months preg­nant at the time, sang tra­di­tion­al folk songs, Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” and Gram Parson’s “Hick­o­ry Wind.” Her clos­er, spir­i­tu­al “We Shall Over­come,” bridged the music of the Civ­il Rights move­ment with that of the anti-war move­ment, pro­claim­ing in her glo­ri­ous sopra­no, “We shall live in peace some­day.” The moment, fifty years ago this week, can nev­er be recre­at­ed, no mat­ter how much mon­ey orga­niz­ers throw at Wood­stock retreads. But we don’t need mil­lions to remem­ber what the orig­i­nal Wood­stock stood for. Sex, drugs, and mud got all the press, but the festival’s inten­tions were to protest war over­seas and hatred and mur­der at home with three days of peace and music—a vision, as Havens extem­po­ra­ne­ous­ly sang out, of anoth­er kind of free­dom.

The orig­i­nal fes­ti­val, “essen­tial­ly a mass move­ment pro­mot­ing peace,” gets yet anoth­er look in a new Amer­i­can Expe­ri­ence doc­u­men­tary, Wood­stock: Peace, Love and Music, which pre­miered last Tues­day on PBS. (Stream it free here.) With “nev­er-before-seen footage” and tes­ti­mo­ni­als from “those who expe­ri­enced it first­hand,” the film doc­u­ments the even­t’s highs and lows, includ­ing the many “near dis­as­ters” that “put the ideals of the coun­ter­cul­ture to the test.” Also see the New York Times arti­cle, “How to Relive Wood­stock From the Com­fort of Your Couch,” which fea­tures “six movies, 12 album col­lec­tions, two songs and 17 books that will take will­ing trav­el­ers back to August 1969.” This includes, of course, Michael Wadleigh’s icon­ic doc­u­men­tary, Wood­stock: 3 Days of Peace and Music.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jimi Hen­drix Live at Wood­stock: His­toric Con­cert Cap­tured on Film

David Cros­by & Gra­ham Nash at Occu­py Wall Street; Echoes of Wood­stock

Wattstax Doc­u­ments the “Black Wood­stock” Con­cert Held 7 Years After the Watts Riots (1973)

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

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #6: Why Adults Might Play Video Games

in Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Video Games | August 14th, 2019

Eri­ca Spyres, Bri­an Hirt, and Mark Lin­sen­may­er are joined by Ian Maio (who worked for mar­ket­ing for IGN and Turn­er in e‑sports) for our first dis­cus­sion about gam­ing. Do adults have any busi­ness play­ing video games? Should you feel guilty about your video game habits?

Ian gives us the lay of the land about e‑sports, com­par­ing it to phys­i­cal sports, and we dis­cuss the chang­ing social func­tions of gam­ing, alleged and actu­al gam­ing dis­or­ders, dif­fer­ent types of gamers, inclu­siv­i­ty, and more. Whether you game a lot or not at all, you should still find some­thing inter­est­ing here.

We touch on the King of Kong doc­u­men­tary, Grand Theft Auto, Over­watch, The Last of Us, Bor­der­lands, Super Mario, Cup­head, NY Times Elec­tron­ic Cross­word Puz­zle, and more. Be sure to watch the Black Mir­ror episode, “Strik­ing Vipers.”

Sources for this episode:

• “The eSports Phe­nom­e­non” by Jason Mok
• “For Men Who Hate Talk­ing On The Phone, Games Keep Friend­ships Alive” by Cecil­ia D’Anastasio
• “How Video Games Affect the Brain” by Han­nah Nichols
• “Sev­en Rea­sons to Play Com­put­er Games” by Ryan Ander­son
• “Play­ing Video Games Too Much Might Be Bad for Your Men­tal Health” by Jesse Hicks

This episode includes bonus con­tent that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Please go check out Mod­ern Day Philoso­phers at moderndayphilosophers.net and See You on the Oth­er Side at othersidepodcast.com.

Pret­ty Much Pop is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

Watch Animated Scores of Eric Satie’s Most Famous Pieces: “Gymnopedie No. 1” and “Gnossienne No. 1”

in Music | August 13th, 2019

In an NPR inter­view, Caitlin Hor­rocks, author of a nov­el about Erik Satie called The Vex­a­tions, remem­bers the first time she encoun­tered the composer’s work. “As a piano stu­dent, my teacher assigned me one of the ‘Gymnopiedies.’ And as a kid, I just imme­di­ate­ly loved it.” Yet when Hor­rocks dug deep­er into Satie’s cat­a­logue, “very quick­ly I was run­ning into things like ‘Flab­by Pre­ludes (For a Dog)’ or ‘Dried Embryos,’ one of which con­tains essen­tial­ly lines of dia­logue from the point of view of a sea cucum­ber. And as an aspir­ing pianist, I was annoyed. I was dis­ap­point­ed.”

Hor­rocks essen­tial­ly describes the way Satie has been remem­bered by pop­u­lar culture—as the com­pos­er of the extra­or­di­nar­i­ly pop­u­lar “Gymo­pe­dies” and “Gnossi­ennes,” and a lot of oth­er strange pieces of music few peo­ple care to lis­ten to. (The title of Hor­rocks nov­el comes from a Satie com­po­si­tion meant to be played 840 times in suc­ces­sion.) He wrote bal­lets, stage, orches­tral, and choral pieces, cham­ber music, and, sev­er­al com­po­si­tions for solo piano—and he would per­haps be a lit­tle annoyed by his lega­cy: music he com­posed in his ear­ly twen­ties has defined his entire career, though “Satie’s lat­er out­put… is arguably more ‘impor­tant,’” writes Meurig Bowen at The Guardian.

Satie was “a torch­bear­er for the avant-garde in his lat­er years.” Described by his con­tem­po­raries Rav­el and Debussy as a “precursor”–a label that fits per­fect­ly giv­en how much he came to influ­ence com­posers like John Cage–Satie did not fit in his time, and he does not fit in ours. The pref­er­ence for what Bowen calls “easy on the ear” music per­sists, and for good rea­son. We intu­itive­ly respond to melody and har­mo­ny, to music with nar­ra­tive-like struc­ture and stir­ring emo­tion­al con­tent. We so often come to music for exact­ly these qual­i­ties: to be lib­er­at­ed from think­ing and give our­selves over to feel­ing.

Satie under­stood this, and his genius in his most famous pieces was to make music that appealed to both the intel­lect and the emo­tions, not slight­ing one in favor of oth­er. The ani­mat­ed scores above for “Gymno­pe­die No. 1” and “Gnossi­enne No. 1” make this point vivid­ly, with col­ors and shapes illus­trat­ing the dura­tion and pitch of each note played by pianist Stephen Mali­nows­ki. These del­i­cate, abstract, short pieces may have reached the lev­el of “pop clas­sics” as Bowen writes, but our famil­iar­i­ty with them masks how rev­o­lu­tion­ary they were. “Gymno­pe­die No. 1,” is a “piece that relies heav­i­ly on how sym­pa­thet­ic a musi­cian you are,” Clas­sic FM explains, since “there are hard­ly any notes!”

The invent­ed names “Gymno­pe­dies” and “Gnossi­ennes” sig­nal that Satie is invent­ing new forms of music, most­ly with­out time sig­na­tures or bar divi­sions, and with some very eso­teric sources of inspi­ra­tion. Their haunt­ing, wist­ful qual­i­ties are evoked as much by the absence of musi­cal con­ven­tion as by the pres­ence of pleas­ing­ly melod­ic lines and chords. In these ani­mat­ed scores, the few notes Satie did write become bursts of flo­ral pat­terns and dec­o­ra­tive shapes, and the silences become neg­a­tive spaces, preg­nant, like the long shad­ows in Gior­gio de Chiri­co’s paint­ings, with inex­press­ible long­ings and gnos­tic mys­ter­ies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Vel­vet Underground’s John Cale Plays Erik Satie’s Vex­a­tions on I’ve Got a Secret (1963)

Hear the Very First Pieces of Ambi­ent Music, Erik Satie’s Fur­ni­ture Music (Cir­ca 1917)

Watch the 1917 Bal­let “Parade”: Cre­at­ed by Erik Satie, Pablo Picas­so & Jean Cocteau, It Pro­voked a Riot and Inspired the Word “Sur­re­al­ism”

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

Enjoy Dazzling & Dizzying 360° Virtual Tours of Los Angeles Landmarks

in Architecture, Photography, Travel | August 13th, 2019

Remem­ber when arm­chair trav­el meant a book, a mag­a­zine, a hand­ful of post­cards, or the occa­sion­al after-din­ner slideshow of the neigh­bors’ vaca­tion pho­tos?

Those were the days.

The throngs of trav­el “influ­encers”—both pro­fes­sion­al and aspirant—have tak­en much of the fun out of liv­ing through oth­ers’ vis­its to far-flung locales. The focus seems to have shift­ed from imag­in­ing our­selves in their shoes to feel­ing oppressed by their high­ly-staged, heav­i­ly-fil­tered Insta­gram-per­fect exis­tence.

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Jim New­ber­ry’s daz­zling, dizzy­ing 360° pho­tos of Los Ange­les, like the views of Echo Park, Chi­na­town, East L.A., and Down­town, above, offer arm­chair trav­el­ers trans­porta­tion back to those gid­dy pre-influ­encer days.

(Angeli­nos and oth­er LA-versed vis­i­tors will enjoy swoop­ing through City of Angels land­marks as if rotat­ing on the no-par­al­lax point, too.)

The Chica­go trans­plant admits that it took a while for him to find his Los Ange­les groove:

After being dis­abused of my Mid­west­ern, anti‑L.A. views, I’ve found that the city has much more to offer than I had imag­ined, but the gems of Los Ange­les often don’t reveal them­selves read­i­ly; it takes a bit of leg­work to seek out the best spots, and well worth it. Moun­tains, beach­es, vibrant urban life, tons of muse­ums, gor­geous nature.

While easy-to-use “one-shot” 360 cam­eras exist, New­ber­ry prefers the qual­i­ty afford­ed by using a high-res­o­lu­tion non-360 cam­era with a wide angle lens, mount­ed on a panoram­ic tri­pod head that rotates it in such a way as to pre­vent per­spec­tive errors.

With the equip­ment set up in the cen­ter of the room, he shoots four pho­tos, spaced 90° apart. Anoth­er shot is aimed direct­ly down­ward toward the floor.

Panoram­ic soft­ware helps to stitch the images togeth­er for a “spher­i­cal panora­ma,” giv­ing view­ers an expe­ri­ence that’s the dig­i­tal equiv­a­lent of swivel­ing their heads in awe.

Newberry’s rov­ing lens turns Lee Lawrie’s Zodi­ac Chan­de­lier, Dean Cornwell’s Cal­i­for­nia his­to­ry murals, and the dec­o­ra­tive ceil­ing sten­cils of the Cen­tral Pub­lic Library’s Grand Rotun­da into a gor­geous kalei­do­scope.

The Taoist Thien Hau Tem­ple in Chi­na­town is a more recent attrac­tion, found­ed in the 1980s in a for­mer Chris­t­ian church. Com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers raised funds to build the larg­er tem­ple, above, ded­i­cat­ing it in 2006 as a shrine to Mazu, the god­dess of the sea, pro­tec­tor of fish­er­man and sailors.

The Muse­um of Juras­sic Tech­nol­o­gy, a self-described “edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tion ded­i­cat­ed to the advance­ment of knowl­edge and the pub­lic appre­ci­a­tion of the Low­er Juras­sic,” served as Newberry’s point of entry, when man­age­ment okayed his request to shoot 360° pho­tos there:

It’s a very spe­cial place—my panoram­ic pho­tos are no match for an in-per­son vis­it. Unlike many oth­er muse­ums these days, the Muse­um of Juras­sic Tech­nol­o­gy does­n’t nor­mal­ly allow pho­tog­ra­phy, and there’s not many pho­tos of the place to be found. 

(In return for per­mis­sion to shoot the museum’s Fau­na of Mir­rors murals, rooftop court­yard, and Tula Tea Room, New­ber­ry agreed to main­tain its mys­te­ri­ous aura by lim­it­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of those pho­tos to his Panoram­ic Eye site. Feast your eyes here.)

The pho­tog­ra­ph­er is look­ing for­ward to work­ing with more muse­ums, cre­at­ing 3‑dimensional doc­u­men­ta­tion of exhibits.

His inter­est in the ephemer­al has also spurred him to cre­ate vir­tu­al tours of local land­marks on the verge of being torn down. Entries in the ongo­ing Lost Land­marks series include Los Feliz’s Good Luck Bar (RIP), Tom Bergin’s Pub (above, spared at the last minute when the Los Ange­les Con­ser­van­cy declared it an His­toric-Cul­tur­al Mon­u­ment), and the Alpine Vil­lage, cur­rent­ly for sale in neigh­bor­ing Tor­rance.

Begin your explo­rations of Jim Newberry’s Panoram­ic Eye 360° vir­tu­al tours of Los Ange­les, includ­ing the Grif­fith Park Obser­va­to­ry, the St. Sophia Cathe­dral, and the Every­thing Is Ter­ri­ble! store here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a 360° Vir­tu­al Tour of Tal­iesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Per­son­al Home & Stu­dio

Take a 360 Degree Tour of Minia­ture Mod­els of Famous Land­marks: From the Taj Mahal to The Great Wall of Chi­na

Five Cul­tur­al Tours of Los Ange­les

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the author of sev­en books, includ­ing No Touch Mon­key! And Oth­er Trav­el Lessons Learned Too Lateand the 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.

View/Download the Highest Resolution MRI Scan of a Human Brain, Revealing It as We’ve Never Seen It Before

in Neuroscience | August 13th, 2019

We all know what brains look like. Or in any case, we can pic­ture some­thing sym­met­ri­cal, a bit squishy, between pink and gray in col­or, and with a whole lot of folds. But until a team of researchers at the Lab­o­ra­to­ry for Neu­roImag­ing of Coma and Con­scious­ness did their recent ultra-high res­o­lu­tion MRI scan of a human brain, which took over 100 hours to com­plete in one of the world’s most advanced MRI machines, nobody had ever seen that many-splen­dored organ in the kind of detail — detail at a 100-microm­e­ter lev­el of res­o­lu­tion, to be pre­cise — shown in the video above.

“Thanks to an anony­mous deceased patient whose brain was donat­ed to sci­ence,” writes Sci­ence Alert’s Peter Dock­rill, “the world now has an unprece­dent­ed view of the struc­tures that make thought itself pos­si­ble.” After its extrac­tion and “a peri­od of preser­va­tion, the organ was trans­ferred to a cus­tom-built, air-tight brain hold­er made of rugged ure­thane, spe­cial­ly designed for the exper­i­men­t’s long-dura­tion MRI scan. The hold­er was placed in a cus­tomized sev­en Tes­la (7T) MRI scan­ner: a pow­er­ful machine offer­ing high lev­els of mag­net­ic field strength, and only approved by the FDA for use in the US in 2017.”

Such a machine could scan a brain still in use — that is, one inside the skull of a liv­ing, breath­ing human being — but only for a short peri­od of time. The great advan­tage of using an ex vivo brain rather than an in vivo is that it can stay inside, com­plete­ly unmov­ing, for as long as it takes to acquire the high­est-qual­i­ty scan yet seen. The team could thus record “8 ter­abytes of raw data from four sep­a­rate scan angles,” data they have released to the aca­d­e­m­ic com­mu­ni­ty in a com­pressed ver­sion, which you can view and down­load here.

“We envi­sion that this dataset will have a broad range of inves­ti­ga­tion­al, edu­ca­tion­al, and clin­i­cal appli­ca­tions that will advance under­stand­ing of human brain anato­my in health and dis­ease,” write the team, who are also prepar­ing their research for pub­li­ca­tion in a peer-reviewed jour­nal. But even non-sci­en­tists have expressed their won­der at the unprece­dent­ed­ly detailed visu­al jour­ney through the brain offered by not just the video here but the two oth­ers from two dif­fer­ent angles so far released as well. One hes­i­tates to use, but can’t quite avoid, the term “mind-bog­gling.”

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold an Anatom­i­cal­ly Cor­rect Repli­ca of the Human Brain, Knit­ted by a Psy­chi­a­trist

The “Brain Dic­tio­nary”: Beau­ti­ful 3D Map Shows How Dif­fer­ent Brain Areas Respond to Hear­ing Dif­fer­ent Words

The Sci­ence of Singing: New, High-Speed MRI Machine Images Man Singing ‘If I Only Had a Brain’

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

A Vin­tage Info­graph­ic of the Human Brain: The Won­ders With­in Your Head (1938)

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.

An Hour-Long Collection of Live Footage Documents the Early Days of Pink Floyd (1967–1972)

in Music | August 13th, 2019

Look­ing back on the Pink Floyd of the late 60s, the fledg­ling band first led by Syd Bar­rett can seem a bit like Britain’s answer to The Vel­vet Under­ground. Idio­syn­crat­i­cal­ly druidic, mys­te­ri­ous, and play­ful, but also inspired by lit­er­a­ture (though Bar­rett was much more Ken­neth Gra­ham than Del­more Schwartz), drawn to exper­i­men­tal film and hyp­not­ic stage effects, inspired to turn the expe­ri­ence of being on spe­cif­ic drugs into a dis­ori­ent­ing new way of play­ing music.

The com­par­i­son may seem odd, espe­cial­ly giv­en the Vel­vets rep­u­ta­tion as the most famous band no one heard of until after they broke up and Pink Floyd’s rep­u­ta­tion as one of the biggest-sell­ing bands of all time. But before they filled sta­di­ums, they were scrap­py and strange and psy­che­del­ic in the ear­li­est sense of the word.

Sad­ly depart­ed singer Chris Cor­nell remem­bers dis­cov­er­ing their first record, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in the mid-80s, and meet­ing a very dif­fer­ent Pink Floyd than the one he’d come to know: “It could almost have been a British indie-rock record of the time.” Indeed, Syd Barrett’s work, includ­ing the solo albums he record­ed after leav­ing the band, left a long, last­ing impres­sion on indie rock.

[T]he impor­tant thing about The Piper at the Gates of Dawn was the music’s strange jux­ta­po­si­tion – some­times whim­si­cal and pas­toral, but simul­ta­ne­ous­ly des­per­ate and sad. I don’t think I ever found anoth­er record which that type of dichoto­my worked so well. With Syd Bar­rett, it nev­er felt like an inven­tion.

The BBC’s Chris Jones put it a lit­tle more suc­cinct­ly: “this is Edward Lear for the acid gen­er­a­tion.”

If all of this sounds appeal­ing and if, some­how, like Cor­nell, you missed out of the ear­li­est incar­na­tion of Pink Floyd—with elfin savant Bar­rett first at the helm—you owe it to your­self to watch the hour-long com­pi­la­tion of footage above fea­tur­ing some of the ear­li­est live per­for­mances, first with Bar­rett, then a fresh-faced David Gilmour tak­ing over for their sec­ond album, A Saucer­ful of Secrets.

As Barrett’s spi­dery Tele­cast­er lines give way to Gilmour’s grit­ty Stra­to­cast­er riffs, you can hear a more famil­iar Floyd take shape. They clear­ly always want­ed to reach an audi­ence, but in their first sev­er­al years, Pink Floyd seemed total­ly uncon­cerned with fill­ing are­nas and sell­ing albums in num­bers mea­sured by pre­cious met­als. Songs like “Astron­o­my Domine” and “Set the Con­trols for the Heart of the Sun” are all about heady atmos­phere, not the gut-lev­el hooks and brevi­ty of pop.

Though they start­ed out in 1965 like every oth­er British clas­sic rock band, obses­sive­ly cov­er­ing Amer­i­can blues songs, Pink Floyd took their rock chops to anoth­er galaxy. “If you look back at some of the great psy­che­del­ic albums that came out that year”—writes Alex Gaby in an essay tour of the band’s entire cat­a­logue—The Piper at the Gates of Dawn “doesn’t quite sound like any of those…. It’s as if Pink Floyd were the piper and they are open­ing up the gates to a new dawn of psy­che­delia and music.” Watch the gates open live, on film, above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Psy­che­del­ic Scenes of Pink Floyd’s Ear­ly Days with Syd Bar­rett, 1967

Pink Floyd Plays With Their Brand New Singer & Gui­tarist David Gilmour on French TV (1968)

Watch David Gilmour Play the Songs of Syd Bar­rett, with the Help of David Bowie & Richard Wright

When Pink Floyd Tried to Make an Album with House­hold Objects: Hear Two Sur­viv­ing Tracks Made with Wine Glass­es & Rub­ber Bands

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

Manuscript Reveals How Medieval Nun, Joan of Leeds, Faked Her Own Death to Escape the Convent

in History, Religion | August 12th, 2019

“The time­worn image of clois­tered nuns as escapists, spurned lovers or naïve waifs has lit­tle basis in real­i­ty today,” wrote Julia Lieblich in a 1983 New York Times arti­cle, “The Clois­tered Life.” “It takes more than a botched-up love affair to lure edu­cat­ed women in their 20’s and 30’s to the clois­ter in the 1980’s.”

The devo­tion that drew women to clois­tered life in the fast-paced 80s, or today, also drew women in the mid­dle ages. But in those days, an edu­ca­tion was much hard­er to come by. Many women became nuns because no oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties were avail­able. “Con­vent offer­ings,” Eudie Pak explains at History.com, “includ­ed read­ing and writ­ing in Latin, arith­metic, gram­mar, music, morals, rhetoric, geom­e­try and astron­o­my.” Oth­er pur­suits includ­ed “spin­ning, weav­ing and embroi­dery,” par­tic­u­lar­ly among more afflu­ent nuns.

Those “from less­er means were expect­ed to do more ardu­ous labor as part of their reli­gious life.” Who knows what kinds of hard­ships 14th cen­tu­ry Bene­dic­tine Eng­lish nun Joan of Leeds endured while at St. Clement pri­o­ry in York? The tedi­um alone may have dri­ven her over the edge. Nor do we know why she first entered the convent—whether dri­ven by faith, a desire for self-improve­ment, a “botched-up love affair,” or a less-than-vol­un­tary com­mit­ment.

We know almost noth­ing of Joan’s life, except that at some time in 1318, she faked her death, left behind a fake body to bury, and escaped the con­vent to pur­sue what William Melton, then Arch­bish­op of York, called “the way of car­nal lust.” Joan’s sis­ters aid­ed in her great escape, as the arch­bish­op wrote in a let­ter: “numer­ous of her accom­plices, evil­do­ers, with mal­ice afore­thought, craft­ed a dum­my in the like­ness of her body in order to mis­lead the devot­ed faith­ful.”

The episode—or what we know of it from Melton’s register—struck Uni­ver­si­ty of York pro­fes­sor Sarah Rees Jones as “extraordinary—like a Mon­ty Python sketch.” Joan’s sto­ry has become a high­light of The North­ern Way, a project that “seeks to assess and ana­lyze the polit­i­cal roles of the Arch­bish­ops of York over the peri­od 1306–1406.” A num­ber of records from the peri­od have been dig­i­tized, includ­ing William Melton’s reg­istry, in which Joan’s escape appears (see the page of scrib­al notes above).

One of the arch­bish­op’s roles involved inter­ced­ing in such cas­es of run­away monks and nuns. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly,” Rees Jones remarks, “we don’t know the out­come of the case” of Joan. Often, as one might expect, escapes like hers—though few as picaresque—had to do with “not want­i­ng to be celi­bate…. Many of the peo­ple would have been com­mit­ted to a reli­gious house when they were in their teens, and then they didn’t all take to the reli­gious life.”

The arch­bish­op put mat­ters rather less char­i­ta­bly: “Hav­ing turned her back on decen­cy and the good of reli­gion,” he writes, “seduced by inde­cen­cy, she involved her­self irrev­er­ent­ly and per­vert­ed her path of life arro­gant­ly to the way of car­nal lust and away from pover­ty and obe­di­ence, and, hav­ing bro­ken her vows and dis­card­ed the reli­gious habit, she now wan­ders at large to the noto­ri­ous per­il to her soul and to the scan­dal of all of her order.”

Or, as we might say today, she was ready to embark on a new life path. So des­per­ate­ly ready, it seems, that we might only hope Joan of Leeds remained “at large” and found hap­pi­ness else­where. Learn more about The North­ern Way project here.

via The Guardian/Medieval­ist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Expe­ri­ence the Mys­ti­cal Music of Hilde­gard Von Bin­gen: The First Known Com­pos­er in His­to­ry (1098 – 1179)

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

Why Knights Fought Snails in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

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

Take a Virtual Tour of Jane Austen’s Library

in Books, Libraries, Literature | August 12th, 2019

Jane Austen read vora­cious­ly and as wide­ly as she could in her cir­cum­scribed life. Even so, she told her niece Car­o­line, she wished she had “read more and writ­ten less” in her for­ma­tive years. Her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh made clear that no mat­ter how much she read, her work was far more than the sum of her read­ing: “It was not,” he wrote in his 1870 biog­ra­phy, “what she knew, but what she was, that dis­tin­guished her from oth­ers.” What she was not, how­ev­er, was the own­er of a great library.

Mem­bers of Austen’s fam­i­ly were well-off, but she her­self lived on mod­est means and nev­er made enough from writ­ing to become finan­cial­ly inde­pen­dent. She owned books, of course, but not many. Books were expen­sive, and most peo­ple bor­rowed them from lend­ing libraries. Nonethe­less, schol­ars have been able to piece togeth­er an exten­sive list of books Austen sup­pos­ed­ly read—books men­tioned in her let­ters, nov­els, and an 1817 bio­graph­i­cal note writ­ten by her broth­er Hen­ry in her posthu­mous­ly pub­lished Northang­er Abbey.

Austen read con­tem­po­rary male and female nov­el­ists. She read his­to­ries, the poet­ry of Mil­ton, Wordsworth, Byron, Cow­per, and Sir Wal­ter Scott, and nov­els writ­ten by fam­i­ly mem­bers. She read Chaucer, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Spencer, and Woll­stonecraft. She read ancients and mod­ern. “Despite her desire to have ‘read more” in her youth,” write Austen schol­ars Gillian Down and Katie Halsey, “recent schol­ar­ship has estab­lished that the range of Austen’s read­ing was far wider and deep­er than either Hen­ry or James Edward sug­gest.”

Austen may not have had a large library of her own, but she did have access to the hand­some col­lec­tion at God­mer­sham Park, the home of her broth­er Edward Austen Knight. “For a total of ten months spread over fif­teen years,” Rebec­ca Rego Bar­ry writes at Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly, “Austen vis­it­ed her broth­er at his Kent estate. The brim­ming book­shelves at God­mer­sham Park were a par­tic­u­lar draw for the nov­el­ist.” In the last eight years of her life, Jane lived with her moth­er and sis­ter Cas­san­dra at Edward’s Chaw­ton estate, in a vil­la that had its own library.

Recon­struct­ing these shelves show us the books Austen would have reg­u­lar­ly had in view, though schol­ars must use oth­er evi­dence to show which books she read. In 2009, Down and Halsey curat­ed an exhi­bi­tion focused on her read­ing at Chaw­ton. Ten years lat­er, we can see the library at God­mer­sham Park recre­at­ed in a vir­tu­al ver­sion made joint­ly by Chaw­ton House and McGill University’s Bur­ney Cen­ter.

Called “Read­ing with Austen,” the inter­ac­tive site lets us to nav­i­gate three book-lined walls of the library. “Users can hov­er over the shelves and click on any of the antique books,” writes Bar­ry, “sum­mon­ing bib­li­o­graph­ic data and avail­able pho­tos of per­ti­nent title pages, book­plates, and mar­gin­a­lia. Dig­ging deep­er, one can peruse a dig­i­tal copy of the book and deter­mine the where­abouts of the orig­i­nal.”

These vol­umes are what we might expect from an Eng­lish coun­try gen­tle­man: books of law and agri­cul­ture, his­tor­i­cal reg­is­ters, trav­el­ogues, polit­i­cal the­o­ry, and clas­si­cal Latin. There is also Shake­speare, Swift, and Voltaire, Austen’s own nov­els, and some of the con­tem­po­rary fic­tion she par­tic­u­lar­ly loved. The Bur­ney Cen­ter “tried,” says direc­tor Peter Sabor, “to imag­ine Jane Austen actu­al­ly walk­ing around the library…. We’re basi­cal­ly look­ing over her shoul­der as she looks at the book­shelf.” It’s not exact­ly quite like that at all, but the project can give us a sense of how much Austen trea­sured libraries.

She wrote about libraries as a sign of lux­u­ry. In an ear­ly unfin­ished nov­el, “Cather­ine,” she has a furi­ous char­ac­ter exclaim in reproach, “I gave you the key to my own Library, and bor­rowed a great many good books of my Neigh­bors for you.” Austen may have feared los­ing library and lend­ing access, and she longed for a king­dom of books all her own. Dur­ing her final vis­it to God­mer­sham Park in 1813, she wrote to her sis­ter, “I am now alone in the Library, Mis­tress of all I sur­vey.”

Try to imag­ine how she might have felt as you peruse the library’s hap­haz­ard­ly arranged con­tents. Con­sid­er which of these books she might have read and which she might have shelved and why. Enter the “Read­ing with Austen” library project here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Jane Austen Fic­tion Man­u­script Archive Is Online: Explore Hand­writ­ten Drafts of Per­sua­sion, The Wat­sons & More

Down­load the Major Works of Jane Austen as Free eBooks & Audio Books

15-Year-Old Jane Austen Writes a Satir­i­cal His­to­ry Of Eng­land: Read the Hand­writ­ten Man­u­script Online (1791)

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

Hear Glenn Gould Celebrate the Moog Synthesizer & Wendy Carlos’ Pioneering Album Switched-On Bach (1968)

in Music, Radio, Technology | August 12th, 2019

Glenn Gould made his name as a pianist with his stark, idio­syn­crat­ic inter­pre­ta­tions of the music of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and espe­cial­ly Bach. He left behind not just a high­ly respect­ed body of work in the form of record­ed per­for­mances, but also a host of strong opin­ions about music itself and all that cul­tur­al­ly and com­mer­cial­ly sur­round­ed it. His enthu­si­asms weren’t always pre­dictable: in 1967 he went on CBC radio to lav­ish praise on the pop singer Petu­la Clark, and the next year he returned to the air­waves to make a hearty endorse­ment of a record for which not every­one in the clas­si­cal music world would admit to an appre­ci­a­tion: Wendy Car­los’ Switched-On Bach.

After voic­ing his dis­taste for com­pi­la­tion albums, com­par­ing them to Read­er’s Digest con­densed lit­er­a­ture, Gould informs his lis­ten­ers that “the record of the year — no, let’s go all the way, the decade — is an unem­bar­rassed com­pote of Bach’s great­est hits.” The whole record, he claims, “is one of the most star­tling achieve­ments of the record­ing indus­try in this gen­er­a­tion, cer­tain­ly one of the great feats in the his­to­ry of key­board per­for­mance,” and “the surest evi­dence, if evi­dence be need­ed, that live music nev­er was best.” Gould had retired from the “anachro­nis­tic” prac­tice of live per­for­mance four years ear­li­er, seek­ing his own kind of musi­cal per­fec­tion with­in the tech­no­log­i­cal­ly enhanced con­fines of the record­ing stu­dio.

On that lev­el, it makes sense that a metic­u­lous­ly, painstak­ing­ly craft­ed record­ing — not to men­tion one impos­si­ble, at the time, to repro­duce live — like Switched-On Bach would appeal to Gould. He also takes the oppor­tu­ni­ty on this broad­cast to intro­duce the Moog syn­the­siz­er, which Car­los used to pro­duce every note on the record. “The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, the Moog can be encour­aged to imi­tate vir­tu­al­ly any instru­men­tal sound known to man, and there are moments on this disc which sound very like an organ, a dou­ble bass or a clavi­chord,” Gould says, “but its most con­spic­u­ous felic­i­ty is that, except when cast­ing gen­tle asper­sions on more famil­iar baroque instru­men­tal arche­types, the per­former shuns this kind of elec­tron­ic exhi­bi­tion­ism” — a sure way of scor­ing points with the restraint-lov­ing Gould.

The broad­cast includes not just Gould’s thoughts on Switched On-Bach and the Moog but two inter­views, one with poet and essay­ist Jean Le Moyne on “the human fact of automa­tion, its soci­o­log­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions,” and one with Car­los her­self. Asked about the choice of Bach, Car­los frames it as a test of how the new tech­nol­o­gy of the syn­the­siz­er would fare when used to play not avant-garde music, as it then usu­al­ly was, but music with the most impec­ca­ble aes­thet­ic cre­den­tials pos­si­ble. “We’re just a baby,” Car­los says of the enter­prise of syn­the­siz­er-dri­ven elec­tron­ic music. “Although now we can see that the child is going to grow into a rather excit­ing adult, we’ve still got to take one step at a time. It will become assim­i­lat­ed. The gim­mick val­ue — thank god — is going to be lost, and true musi­cal expres­sion, and that alone, will result.”

via Syn­th­topia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Glenn Gould Chan­nel Mar­shall McLuhan and Cre­ate an Exper­i­men­tal Radio Doc­u­men­tary Ana­lyz­ing the Pop Music of Petu­la Clark (1967)

Watch a 27-Year-Old Glenn Gould Play Bach & Put His Musi­cal Genius on Dis­play (1959)

Lis­ten to Glenn Gould’s Shock­ing­ly Exper­i­men­tal Radio Doc­u­men­tary, The Idea of North (1967)

Glenn Gould Explains the Genius of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach (1962)

Wendy Car­los’ Switched on Bach Turns 50 This Month: Learn How the Clas­si­cal Synth Record Intro­duced the World to the Moog

How the Moog Syn­the­siz­er Changed the Sound of Music

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.