Haruki Murakami Announces an Archive That Will House His Manuscripts, Letters & Collection of 10,000+ Vinyl Records

in Literature, Music | February 20th, 2019

Image by wakari­m­a­sita, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It has become the norm for notable writ­ers to bequeath doc­u­ments relat­ed to their work, and even their per­son­al cor­re­spon­dence, to an insti­tu­tion that promis­es to main­tain it all, in per­pe­tu­ity, in an archive open to schol­ars. Often the insti­tu­tion is locat­ed at a uni­ver­si­ty to which the writer has some con­nec­tion, and the case of the Haru­ki Muraka­mi Library at Toky­o’s Wase­da Uni­ver­si­ty is no excep­tion: Muraka­mi grad­u­at­ed from Wase­da in 1975, and a dozen years lat­er used it as a set­ting in his break­through nov­el Nor­we­gian Wood.

That book’s por­tray­al of Wase­da betrays a some­what dim view of the place, but Muraka­mi looks much more kind­ly on his alma mater now than he did then: he must, since he plans to entrust it with not just all his papers but his beloved record col­lec­tion as well. If you want­ed to see that col­lec­tion today, you’d have to vis­it him at home. “I exchanged my shoes for slip­pers, and Muraka­mi took me upstairs to his office,” writes Sam Ander­son, hav­ing done just that for a 2011 New York Times Mag­a­zine pro­file of the writer. “This is also, not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, the home of his vast record col­lec­tion. (He guess­es that he has around 10,000 but says he’s too scared to count.)”

Hav­ing announced the plans for Waseda’s Muraka­mi Library at the end of last year, Muraka­mi can now rest assured that the count­ing will be left to the archivists. He hopes, he said at a rare press con­fer­ence, “to cre­ate a space that func­tions as a study where my record col­lec­tion and books are stored.” In his own space now, he explained, he has “a col­lec­tion of records, audio equip­ment and some books. The idea is to cre­ate an atmos­phere like that, not to cre­ate a repli­ca of my study.” Some of Murakami’s stat­ed moti­va­tion to estab­lish the library comes out of con­vic­tions about the impor­tance of “a place of open inter­na­tion­al exchanges for lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture” and “an alter­na­tive place that you can drop by.” And some of it, of course, comes out of prac­ti­cal­i­ty: “After near­ly 40 years of writ­ing, there is hard­ly any space to put the doc­u­ments such as man­u­scripts and relat­ed arti­cles, whether at my home or at my office.”

“I also have no chil­dren to take care of them,” Muraka­mi added, “and I didn’t want those resources to be scat­tered and lost when I die.” Few of his count­less read­ers around the world can imag­ine that day com­ing any time soon, turn 70 though Muraka­mi did last month, but many are no doubt mak­ing plans even now for a trip to the Wase­da cam­pus to see what shape the Muraka­mi Library takes dur­ing the writer’s life­time, espe­cial­ly since he plans to take an active role in what goes on there. “Muraka­mi is also hop­ing to orga­nize a con­cert fea­tur­ing his col­lec­tion of vinyl records,” notes The Vinyl Fac­to­ry’s Gabriela Helfet. Until he does, you can have a lis­ten to the playlists, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, of 96 songs from his nov­els and 3,350 from his record col­lec­tion — but you’ll have to recre­ate the atmos­phere of his study your­self for now.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 3,350-Song Playlist of Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Per­son­al Record Col­lec­tion

A 96-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

A 26-Hour Playlist Fea­tur­ing Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Lat­est Nov­el, Killing Com­menda­tore

Stream Big Playlists of Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Per­son­al Vinyl Col­lec­tion and His Strange Lit­er­ary Worlds

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Became a DJ on a Japan­ese Radio Sta­tion for One Night: Hear the Music He Played for Delight­ed Lis­ten­ers

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.

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Documentary That Celebrates the 100th Anniversary of Germany’s Legendary Art, Architecture & Design School

in Architecture, Design | February 19th, 2019

This April 1st marks the 100th anniver­sary of the found­ing of the Bauhaus, the Ger­man art school that, though short-lived, launched an entire design move­ment with a stark, func­tion­al aes­thet­ic all its own. It can be tempt­ing, look­ing into that aes­thet­ic that finds the beau­ty in indus­try and the indus­try in beau­ty, to regard it as pure­ly a prod­uct of its time and place, specif­i­cal­ly a 20th-cen­tu­ry Europe between the wars search­ing for ways to invent the future. But as revealed in Bauhaus World, this three-part doc­u­men­tary from Ger­man broad­cast­er Deutsche Welle, the lega­cy of the Bauhaus lives on not just in the rep­u­ta­tions of its best known orig­i­nal mem­bers — Wal­ter Gropius, Paul Klee, Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy, and Josef Albers, among oth­ers — but in the cur­rent­ly active cre­ators it con­tin­ues to inspire in every cor­ner of the Earth.

“What do esca­la­tors in Medel­lín, Ara­bic let­ter­ing in Amman, sto­ry-telling fur­ni­ture from Lon­don, urban farm­ing in Detroit and a co-liv­ing com­plex in Tokyo have to do with the Bauhaus?” asks Deutsche Welle’s web site. They all draw from “the influ­ence that the phi­los­o­phy of the Bauhaus move­ment still exerts on the glob­al­ized soci­ety of the 21st cen­tu­ry,” a time that has its soci­etal par­al­lels with the year 1919.

To illus­trate those par­al­lels as well as the con­tin­u­ing rel­e­vance of Bauhaus teach­ings, “we meet archi­tects, urban plan­ners, design­ers and artists from around the globe who, in the spir­it of the Bauhaus, want to rethink and change the world.” True to its title, Bauhaus World’s jour­ney involves a wide vari­ety of coun­tries, and not just Euro­pean ones: dif­fer­ent seg­ments pro­file the work of Bauhaus-influ­enced design­ers every­where from Mex­i­co to Jor­dan, Colom­bia to Israel, the Unit­ed States to Japan.

It’s in Japan, in fact, that the first part of Bauhaus World, “The Code,” finds the out­er reach­es of the spread of Bauhaus that began with the exile of its mem­bers from Nazi Ger­many. The sec­ond part, “The Effect,” deals with the endur­ing influ­ence that has turned Bauhaus and its prin­ci­ples from a move­ment to a brand, one that has poten­tial­ly done more than its share to make us as design-obsessed as we’ve become in the 21st cen­tu­ry — a cen­tu­ry that, the third and final part “The Utopia” con­sid­ers, may or may not have a place for the orig­i­nal Bauhaus ideals. But what­ev­er Gropius, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, and the rest would think of what the Bauhaus they cre­at­ed has become over the past hun­dred years, over the next hun­dred years more and more design­ers — emerg­ing from a wider and wider vari­ety of soci­eties and tra­di­tions — will come to see them­selves as its descen­dants.

Bauhaus World will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Rad­i­cal Build­ings of the Bauhaus Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture: A Short Intro­duc­tion

An Oral His­to­ry of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Inter­views (in Eng­lish) with Wal­ter Gropius, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe & More

32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Avail­able Online by Har­vard Muse­um Web­site

The Female Pio­neers of the Bauhaus Art Move­ment: Dis­cov­er Gertrud Arndt, Mar­i­anne Brandt, Anni Albers & Oth­er For­got­ten Inno­va­tors

Down­load Beau­ti­ful­ly-Designed Bauhaus Books & Jour­nals for Free: Gropius, Klee, Kandin­sky, Moholy-Nagy & 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 or on Face­book.

How Obsessive Artists Colorize Old Photographs & Restore the True Colors of the Past

in Photography | February 19th, 2019

The art of hand-col­or­ing or tint­ing black and white pho­tographs has been around, the Vox video above explains, since the ear­li­est days of pho­tog­ra­phy itself. “But these didn’t end up look­ing super real­is­tic,” at least not next to their mod­ern coun­ter­parts, cre­at­ed with com­put­ers. Dig­i­tal col­oriza­tion “has made it pos­si­ble for artists to recon­struct images with far more accu­ra­cy.”

Accu­ra­cy, you say? How is it pos­si­ble to recon­struct col­or arrange­ments from the past when they have only been pre­served in black and white? Well, this requires research. “You now have a wealth of infor­ma­tion,” says Jor­dan Lloyd, a mas­ter dig­i­tal col­orist. “It’s just know­ing where to look.”

His­tor­i­cal adver­tise­ments, diaries, doc­u­ments, and the assess­ments of his­to­ri­ans and ethno­g­ra­phers, among oth­er resources, pro­vide enough data for a real­is­tic approx­i­ma­tion. Some con­jec­ture is involved, but when you see the amount of research that goes into deter­min­ing the col­ors of the past, you will most sure­ly be impressed.

This isn’t play­ing with fil­ters and set­tings in Pho­to­shop until the images look good—it’s using soft­ware to recre­ate what schol­ar­ship uncov­ers, the kind of dig­ging that turns up impor­tant his­tor­i­cal facts such as the orig­i­nal red-on-black logo of 7Up, or the fact that the Eif­fel tow­er was paint­ed a col­or called “Venet­ian red” dur­ing its con­struc­tion.

Unless we know this col­or his­to­ry, we might be inclined to think col­orized pho­tographs that get it right are wrong. How­ev­er, the aim of mod­ern col­oriz­ers is not only to make the past seem more imme­di­ate to us in the present; they also attempt to restore the col­ors peo­ple saw when pho­tographs from the 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­turies were tak­en.

The soft­ware may not dic­tate col­or, but it still plays an indis­pens­able role in how alive dig­i­tal­ly col­orized pho­tographs appear. Col­oriz­ers first use it to remove blem­ish­es, scratch­es, and the signs of age. Then they blend hun­dreds of lay­ers of col­ors. It’s a lit­tle like mak­ing a dig­i­tal oil paint­ing. Human skin can have up to 20 lay­ers of col­ors, rang­ing from pinks, to yel­lows, to blues.

With­out “an intu­itive under­stand­ing of how light works in the atmos­phere,” how­ev­er, these artists would fail to per­suade us. Col­or is pro­duced by light, as we know, and light is con­di­tioned by lev­els of arti­fi­cial and nat­ur­al light blend­ing in a space, by atmos­pher­ic con­di­tions and time of day. Dif­fer­ent sur­faces reflect light dif­fer­ent­ly. Cor­rect­ly inter­pret­ing these con­di­tions in a mono­chro­mat­ic pho­to­graph is the key to “achiev­ing pho­to­re­al­ism.”

Crit­ics of col­oriza­tion treat it like a form of van­dal­ism, but as Lloyd points out, the process is not meant to sub­sti­tute for the orig­i­nal arti­facts, but to sup­ple­ment them. The col­orized pho­tos we see in the video and at the links below are of images in the pub­lic domain, avail­able to use and reuse for any pur­pose. Col­oriza­tion artists have found their pur­pose in mak­ing the past seem far less like a dis­tant coun­try.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Russ­ian His­to­ry & Lit­er­a­ture Come to Life in Won­der­ful­ly Col­orized Por­traits: See Pho­tos of Tol­stoy, Chekhov, the Romanovs & More

Col­orized Pho­tos Bring Walt Whit­man, Char­lie Chap­lin, Helen Keller & Mark Twain Back to Life

The Open­ing of King Tut’s Tomb, Shown in Stun­ning Col­orized Pho­tos (1923–5)

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

An Interactive Map of the 2,000+ Sounds Humans Use to Communicate Without Words: Grunts, Sobs, Sighs, Laughs & More

in Language Lessons, Psychology | February 19th, 2019

When did lan­guage begin? The ques­tion is not an easy one to answer. There are no records of the event. “Lan­guages don’t leave fos­sils,” notes the Lin­guis­tic Soci­ety of Amer­i­ca, “and fos­sil skulls only tell us the over­all shape and size of hominid brains, not what the brains could do.” The scant evi­dence from evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy does not tell us when ear­ly humans first began to use lan­guage, only that they could 100,000 years or so ago.

How­ev­er, the ques­tion also depends on what we mean by lan­guage. Before the lin­guis­tic tech­nolo­gies of gram­mar and syn­tax, hominids, like oth­er mam­mals today and a good num­ber of non-mam­mals too, had a word­less lan­guage that com­mu­ni­cat­ed more direct­ly, and more hon­est­ly, than any of the thou­sands of ways to string syl­la­bles into sen­tences.

That lan­guage still exists, of course, and those who under­stand it know when some­one is afraid, relieved, frus­trat­ed, angry, con­fused, sur­prised, embar­rassed, or awed, no mat­ter what that some­one says. It is a lan­guage of feeling—of sighs, grunts, rum­bles, moans, whis­tles, sniffs, laughs, sobs, and so forth. Researchers call them “vocal bursts” and as any long-suf­fer­ing mar­ried cou­ple can tell you, they com­mu­ni­cate a whole range of spe­cif­ic feel­ings.

“Emo­tion­al expres­sions,” says UC Berke­ley psy­chol­o­gy grad­u­ate stu­dent Alan Cowen, “col­or our social inter­ac­tions with spir­it­ed dec­la­ra­tions of our inner feel­ing that are dif­fi­cult to fake, and that our friends, co-work­ers and loved ones rely on to deci­pher our true com­mit­ments.“ Cowen and his col­leagues devised a study to test the range of emo­tion vocal bursts can car­ry.

The researchers asked 56 peo­ple, reports Dis­cov­er mag­a­zine, “some pro­fes­sion­al actors and some not, to react to dif­fer­ent emo­tion­al sce­nar­ios” in record­ings. Next, they played the record­ings for over a 1,000 peo­ple, who rat­ed “the vocal­iza­tions based on the emo­tions and tone (pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive) they thought the clips con­veyed.”

The researchers found that “vocal bursts con­vey at least 24 dis­tinct kinds of emo­tions.” They plot­ted those feel­ings on a col­or­ful inter­ac­tive map, pub­licly avail­able online. “The team says it could be use­ful in help­ing robot­ic devices bet­ter pin down human emo­tions,” Dis­cov­er writes. “It could also be handy in clin­i­cal set­tings, help­ing patients who strug­gle with emo­tion­al pro­cess­ing.” The study only record­ed vocal­iza­tions from Eng­lish speak­ers, and “the results would undoubt­ed­ly vary if peo­ple from oth­er coun­tries or who spoke oth­er lan­guages were sur­veyed.”

But this lim­i­ta­tion does not under­mine anoth­er impli­ca­tion of the study: that human lan­guage con­sists of far more than just words, and that vocal bursts, which we like­ly share with a wide swath of the ani­mal king­dom, are not only, per­haps, an orig­i­nal lan­guage but also one that con­tin­ues to com­mu­ni­cate the things we can’t or won’t say to each oth­er. Read the study here and see the inter­ac­tive vocal burst map here.

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Where Did the Eng­lish Lan­guage Come From?: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Why We Say “OK”: The His­to­ry of the Most Wide­ly Spo­ken Word in the World

The His­to­ry of the Eng­lish Lan­guage in Ten Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

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

A New Collection of Official, Authorized Prince GIFs!

in Archives, Music, Web/Tech | February 18th, 2019

Tech entre­pre­neur Anil Dash, pod­cast­er, music his­to­ri­an, and advi­sor to the Oba­ma White House’s Office of Dig­i­tal Strat­e­gy, knows his way around Prince’s cat­a­logue.

Less than a year after the icon­o­clas­tic musi­cian left the plan­et, Dash cre­at­ed a guide to help new­bies and casu­al lis­ten­ers become bet­ter acquaint­ed with his oeu­vre:

The nice thing about Prince’s work is that there are no bad start­ing points; if you don’t like what you hear at first, he almost cer­tain­ly made a song in the com­plete oppo­site style as well.

He assem­bled playlists for the Prince-resis­tant, reel­ing ‘em in by cater­ing to var­i­ous tastes, from “riff-dri­ven rock tracks” and elec­tron­i­ca to “Prince for Red­bone fans.”

(Those playlists are also a great ser­vice to those of us whose atten­tion wan­dered in the decades fol­low­ing Prince’s 80’s hey­day.)

Dash has also now done us a sol­id and high­light­ed an offi­cial archive of high-qual­i­ty Prince GIFs, tak­en from his music videos.

Prince was noto­ri­ous­ly pro­tec­tive of his image, and wild as it is, the GIF archive, a col­lab­o­ra­tion with GIPHY, Pais­ley Park and Prince’s estate, col­ors with­in those lines by steer­ing clear of unflat­ter­ing reac­tion shots culled from inter­views, live per­for­mances, or pub­lic appear­ances.

There’s still a broad range of atti­tudes on dis­play, though best get out of line if you’re look­ing for an expres­sion that con­veys “lack of con­fi­dence” or “the oppo­site of sexy.”

The archive is arranged by album. Click on a song title and you’ll find a num­ber of moments drawn from its offi­cial music video.

Any cap­tions come straight from the horse’s mouth. No back­seat cap­tion jock­eys can has cheezburg­er with Prince Rogers Nelson’s image, thank you very much.

Begin your explo­rations of the Prince GIF Archive here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Prince Play Jazz Piano & Coach His Band Through George Gershwin’s “Sum­mer­time” in a Can­did, Behind-the-Scenes Moment (1990)

Read Prince’s First Inter­view, Print­ed in His High School News­pa­per (1976)

Hear Prince’s Per­son­al Playlist of Par­ty Music: 22 Tracks That Will Bring Any Par­ty to Life

Prince Plays Gui­tar for Maria Bar­tiro­mo: It’s Awk­ward (2004)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day always stood at the back of the line, a smile beneath her nose. Ayun is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City in Feb­ru­ary as host of  The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Famous Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci Celebrated in a New Series of Stamps

in Art, History | February 18th, 2019

No spe­cial occa­sion is required to cel­e­brate Leonar­do da Vin­ci, but the fact that he died in 1519 makes this year a par­tic­u­lar­ly suit­able time to look back at his vast, inno­v­a­tive, and influ­en­tial body of work. Just last month, “Leonar­do da Vin­ci: A Life in Draw­ing” opened in twelve muse­ums across the Unit­ed King­dom. “144 of Leonar­do da Vinci’s great­est draw­ings in the Roy­al Col­lec­tion are dis­played in 12 simul­ta­ne­ous exhi­bi­tions across the UK,” says the exhi­bi­tion’s site, with each venue’s draw­ings “select­ed to reflect the full range of Leonar­do’s inter­ests – paint­ing, sculp­ture, archi­tec­ture, music, anato­my, engi­neer­ing, car­tog­ra­phy, geol­o­gy and botany.”

The Roy­al Col­lec­tion Trust, writes Art­net’s Sarah Cas­cone, has even “sent a dozen draw­ings from Wind­sor Cas­tle to each of the 12 par­tic­i­pat­ing insti­tu­tions.” They’d pre­vi­ous­ly been in Wind­sor Castle’s Print Room, the home of a col­lec­tion of old mas­ter prints and draw­ings rou­tine­ly described as one of the finest in the world.

Now dis­played at insti­tu­tions like Liv­er­pool’s Walk­er Art Gallery, Sheffield­’s Mil­len­ni­um Gallery, Belfast’s Ulster Muse­um, and Cardif­f’s Nation­al Muse­um Wales, this selec­tion of Leonar­do’s draw­ings will be much more acces­si­ble to the pub­lic dur­ing the exhi­bi­tion than before.

But the Roy­al Mail has made sure that the draw­ings will be even more wide­ly seen, doing its part for the 500th anniver­sary of Leonar­do’s death by issu­ing them in stamp form.

“The stamps depict sev­er­al well-known works,” writes Art­net’s Kate Brown, “such as The skull sec­tioned (1489) and The head of Leda (1505–08), a study for his even­tu­al paint­ing of the myth of Leda, the queen of Spar­ta, which was the most valu­able work in Leonardo’s estate when he died and was appar­ent­ly destroyed around 1700. Oth­er stamps show the artist’s stud­ies of skele­tons, joints, and cats.”

While none of these images enjoy quite the cul­tur­al pro­file of a Vit­ru­vian Man, let alone a Mona Lisa, they all show that what­ev­er Leonar­do drew, he drew it in a way reveal­ing that he saw it like no one else did (pos­si­bly due in part, as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly post­ed about here on Open Cul­ture, to an eye dis­or­der).

Though that may come across more clear­ly at the scale of the orig­i­nals than at the scale of postage stamps, even a glimpse at the intel­lec­tu­al­ly bound­less Renais­sance poly­math­’s draw­ings com­pressed into 21-by-24-mil­lime­ter squares will sure­ly be enough to draw many into his still-inspi­ra­tional artis­tic and sci­en­tif­ic world. To the intrigued, may we sug­gest plung­ing into his 570 pages of note­books?

Note: If you live in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area, con­sid­er attend­ing the new course–The Genius of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: A 500th Anniver­sary Cel­e­bra­tion–being offered through Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies. Reg­is­tra­tion opens on Feb­ru­ary 25. The class runs from April 16 through June 4.

via Colos­sal/Art­net

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load the Sub­lime Anato­my Draw­ings of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Avail­able Online, or in a Great iPad App

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Bizarre Car­i­ca­tures & Mon­ster Draw­ings

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ear­li­est Note­books Now Dig­i­tized and Made Free Online: Explore His Inge­nious Draw­ings, Dia­grams, Mir­ror Writ­ing & More

The Doo­dles in Leonar­do da Vinci’s Man­u­scripts Con­tain His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries on the Laws of Fric­tion, Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er

New Stamp Col­lec­tion Cel­e­brates Six Nov­els by Jane Austen

Postage Stamps from Bhutan That Dou­ble as Playable Vinyl Records

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.

A Telecaster Made Out of 1200 Colored Pencils

in Music, Random | February 18th, 2019

A cou­ple weeks back, Burls Art dared to make a Stra­to­cast­er out of 1200 Cray­ola col­ored pen­cils. Now comes a Tele­cast­er-style gui­tar, which Fend­er first put into pro­duc­tion back in 1950. You can watch it get made, from start to fin­ish, in the 11-minute video above.

On a more seri­ous note, any­one inter­est­ed in the his­to­ry of the elec­tric guitar–particularly the Strat, Tele and Les Paul–should spend time with the new book by Ian S. Port, The Birth of Loud: Leo Fend­er, Les Paul, and the Gui­tar-Pio­neer­ing Rival­ry That Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll. It offers a pret­ty rich and live­ly account of the inven­tors and instru­ments who cre­at­ed a new mod­ern sound. If inter­est­ed, you can get The Birth of Loud as a free audio­book if you sign up for Audible.com’s free tri­al pro­gram. Find details on that 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:

A Fend­er Stra­to­cast­er Made Out of 1200 Col­ored Pen­cils

Behold the First Elec­tric Gui­tar: The 1931 “Fry­ing Pan”

Bri­an May’s Home­made Gui­tar, Made From Old Tables, Bike and Motor­cy­cle Parts & More

Oxford Sci­en­tist Explains the Physics of Play­ing Elec­tric Gui­tar Solos

Repair­ing Willie Nelson’s Trig­ger: A Good Look at How a Luthi­er Gets America’s Most Icon­ic Gui­tar on the Road Again

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

in Books, History, Libraries | February 15th, 2019

Kazuo Ishiguro’s nov­el The Buried Giant begins with an immer­sive depic­tion of what it might have been like to live in a Euro­pean vil­lage dur­ing the mid­dle ages. Or what it might feel like for us mod­erns, at least. The cou­ple at the cen­ter of the sto­ry spends sev­er­al pages fret­ting over the loss of a can­dle, their only one. With­out it, their nights are pitch black. In the day, they wan­der in a fog, unable to remem­ber any­thing. Though the cause of this turns out to be dark mag­ic, one can’t help think­ing that a smart­phone would imme­di­ate­ly solve all their prob­lems.

This was a time not only before mobile video, but when images of any kind were scarce, when every book was painstak­ing­ly copied by hand in care­ful, ele­gant script. Many of those rare, scrib­al copies were not illus­trat­ed, they were “illu­mi­nat­ed.” Their pages shone out into the dark­ness and fog. Most of the pop­u­la­tion could not read them, but they could, in rare instances when they might catch a glimpse, be deeply moved by the col­or­ful, styl­ized images and let­ter­ing.

For the intel­lec­tu­al class­es, illu­mi­na­tion con­sti­tut­ed a lan­guage of its own, fram­ing and inter­pret­ing med­ical, clas­si­cal, and legal texts, gospels and works by the church fathers. Not all books received this treat­ment but the “most lux­u­ri­ous,” notes the British Library, were “lit­er­al­ly ‘lit up’ by dec­o­ra­tions and pic­tures in bright­ly coloured pig­ments and bur­nished gold leaf.” For cen­turies, despite the explo­sion of image-mak­ing tech­nolo­gies of every kind, most of us, unless we were schol­ars or aris­to­crats, were in the same posi­tion vis-à-vis these stun­ning arti­facts as the aver­age medieval peas­ant. Medieval man­u­scripts were locked away in rare book rooms and seen by very few.

The sit­u­a­tion has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly as libraries dig­i­tize their hold­ings. Last Novem­ber, hun­dreds more rare, valu­able medieval man­u­scripts became avail­able to every­one when the British Library and the Bib­lio­thèque nationale de France launched a joint project, mak­ing “800 man­u­scripts dec­o­rat­ed before the year 1200 avail­able freely” online, as the BL blog announced in 2016. Both insti­tu­tions pro­vid­ed 400 man­u­scripts each for dig­i­ti­za­tion. Some of these are cur­rent­ly on dis­play at the wild­ly pop­u­lar, sold-out British Library exhi­bi­tion Anglo-Sax­on King­doms: Art, Word, War. Now they are also vir­tu­al pub­lic prop­er­ty, as it were, thanks to a grant from the Polon­sky Foun­da­tion.

That these frag­ile arti­facts have been so inac­ces­si­ble, kept under glass and well away from insects, thieves, and van­dals, now means they are in a con­di­tion to be dig­i­tal­ly copied and uploaded in high res­o­lu­tion for close view­ing, com­par­i­son, and care­ful study. Medievalists.net describes the com­ple­men­tary web­sites the two libraries have launched:

The first, France-Eng­land: medieval man­u­scripts between 700 and 1200, has been cre­at­ed by the Bib­lio­thèque nationale de France based on the Gal­li­ca mar­que blanche infra­struc­ture, using the IIIF stan­dard and Mirador view­er to make the images held by the dif­fer­ent insti­tu­tions inter­op­er­a­ble and enable them to be com­pared side-by-side with­in the same dig­i­tal library or anno­tat­ed. The sec­ond web­site, Medieval Eng­land and France, 700‑1200, is aimed at a wider pub­lic audi­ence, and has been devel­oped by the British Library to show­case a selec­tion of man­u­scripts as well as arti­cles, essays and video clips.

The French site has ports of entry accord­ing to theme, author, place, and cen­tu­ry, and many links to resources for schol­ars. The British Library site fea­tures curat­ed selec­tions, intro­duced by acces­si­ble arti­cles. Laypeo­ple with lit­tle expe­ri­ence study­ing medieval man­u­scripts can learn about legal, med­ical, and musi­cal texts, see how the writ­ings of the church fathers received spe­cial atten­tion in monas­tic cul­ture, and learn how man­u­scripts cir­cu­lat­ed before 1200. Those who know what they are look­ing for can con­duct advanced search­es at the Medieval Man­u­scripts site, and down­load a full list of all 800 man­u­scripts here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

Behold 3,000 Dig­i­tized Man­u­scripts from the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na: The Moth­er of All Medieval Libraries Is Get­ting Recon­struct­ed Online

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

Lucille Ball Demos a Precursor to Peter Frampton’s “Talk Box” (1939)

in Music, Technology | February 15th, 2019

Decades before Peter Framp­ton made the Talk Box come alive on songs like “Do You Feel Like We Do” and “Show Me the Way,” anoth­er leg­end, Lucille Ball, exper­i­ment­ed with its fore­run­ner, the Sonovox. Invent­ed by Gilbert Wright in 1939, the Sonovox “used speak­ers pressed into [a per­former’s] throat to pro­duce mechan­i­cal talk­ing sounds.” And the sounds could then be mod­u­lat­ed by the tongue and lips.  Above, in a 1939 news­reel clip called “Machine Made Voic­es!,” Ball puts the Sonovox on dis­play. This marked one of her ear­li­est appear­ances on film.

The Sonovox would lat­er fea­ture promi­nent­ly in radio sta­tion IDs and jin­gles. Bela Lugosi would use it to “por­tray the voice of a dead per­son dur­ing a seance.” And it would even make an appear­ance on The Who’s 1967 album, The Who Sell Out–all before the mod­ern Talk Box arrived on the scene.

via Boing­Bo­ing

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Only Sur­viv­ing Behind-the-Scenes Footage of I Love Lucy, and It’s in Col­or! (1951)

How to Use the Rotary Dial Phone: A Primer from 1927

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

10 Tips on How to Write a Great Screenplay from Billy Wilder: Pearls of Wisdom from the Director of Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity & More

in Film | February 14th, 2019

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

There’s an old sto­ry — Orson Welles called it “the great­est Hol­ly­wood one-lin­er ever made” — that when some­one attend­ing the 1958 funer­al of Har­ry Cohn, the fear­some pres­i­dent of Colum­bia Pic­tures, asked how it was pos­si­ble that such a huge crowd would show up for Cohn’s funer­al, Bil­ly Wilder quipped: “Well, give the peo­ple what they want.”

The sto­ry is almost cer­tain­ly apoc­ryphal. The line may have been spo­ken by some­one else, at a dif­fer­ent Hol­ly­wood mogul’s funer­al. But the fact that it is so often attrib­uted to Wilder says some­thing about his rep­u­ta­tion as a man with a razor-sharp wit and a firm grasp of the imper­a­tives of pop­u­lar movie-mak­ing. In films like Sun­set Boule­vard, Some Like it Hot, Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty and Sab­ri­na, Wilder used his for­mi­da­ble craft as a direc­tor to tell sto­ries in a clear and effi­cient way. It was an eth­ic he picked up as a screen­writer.

Wilder was born in Aus­tria-Hun­gary and moved as a young man to Ger­many, where he worked as a news­pa­per reporter. In the late 1920s he began writ­ing screen­plays for the Ger­man film indus­try, but he fled the coun­try soon after Adolf Hitler became chan­cel­lor in 1933. Wilder made his way to Hol­ly­wood, where he con­tin­ued to write screen­plays. He co-wrote a num­ber of suc­cess­ful films in the 30s, includ­ing Ninotch­ka, Hold Back the Dawn and Ball of Fire. In the ear­ly 40s he got his first chance to direct a Hol­ly­wood movie, and a long string of hits fol­lowed. In 1960 he won three Acad­e­my Awards for pro­duc­ing, writ­ing and direct­ing The Apart­ment.

Wilder was 90 years old when the young direc­tor Cameron Crowe approached him in 1996 about play­ing a small role in Jer­ry Maguire. Wilder said no, but the two men formed a friend­ship. Over the next sev­er­al years they talked exten­sive­ly about film­mak­ing, and in 1999 Crowe pub­lished Con­ver­sa­tions with Wilder. One of the book’s high­lights is a list of ten screen­writ­ing tips by Wilder. “I know a lot of peo­ple that have already Xerox­ed that list and put it by their type­writer,” Crowe said in a 1999 NPR inter­view. “And, you know, there’s no bet­ter film school real­ly than lis­ten­ing to what Bil­ly Wilder says.”

Here are Wilder’s ten rules of good film­mak­ing:

1: The audi­ence is fick­le.
2: Grab ’em by the throat and nev­er let ’em go.
3: Devel­op a clean line of action for your lead­ing char­ac­ter.
4: Know where you’re going.
5: The more sub­tle and ele­gant you are in hid­ing your plot points, the bet­ter you are as a writer.
6: If you have a prob­lem with the third act, the real prob­lem is in the first act.
7: A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audi­ence add up two plus two. They’ll love you for­ev­er.
8: In doing voice-overs, be care­ful not to describe what the audi­ence already sees. Add to what they’re see­ing.
9: The event that occurs at the sec­ond act cur­tain trig­gers the end of the movie.
10: The third act must build, build, build in tem­po and action until the last event, and then — that’s it. Don’t hang around.

Note: Read­ers might also be inter­est­ed in Wilder’s 1996 Paris Review inter­view. It’s called The Art of of Screen­writ­ing.

An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in August 2013.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ing­mar Bergman Names the 11 Films He Liked Above All Oth­ers (1994)

Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

Watch Ray­mond Chandler’s Long-Unno­ticed Cameo in Dou­ble Indem­ni­ty

Fritz Lang Tells the Riv­et­ing Sto­ry of the Day He Met Joseph Goebbels and Then High-Tailed It Out of Ger­many