Download Digitized Copies of The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civil Rights Guide to Traveling Safely in the U.S. (1936–66)

in Books, History, Travel | November 9th, 2018

As an Amer­i­can liv­ing out­side Amer­i­ca, I’m often asked how best to see my home­land by peo­ple want­i­ng to vis­it it. I always sug­gest the same method: road-trip­ping, prefer­ably across the entire con­ti­nent — a way of expe­ri­enc­ing the U.S. of A guar­an­teed to at once to con­firm and shat­ter the vis­i­tor’s pre-exist­ing per­cep­tions of the coun­try. But even under the best pos­si­ble con­di­tions, such road trips have their ardu­ous stretch­es and even their dan­gers, a fact under­stood by nobody bet­ter than by the black trav­el­ers of the Green Book era. Pub­lished between 1936 and 1967, the guide offi­cial­ly known as The Negro Motorist Green Book informed such trav­el­ers of where in Amer­i­ca (and lat­er oth­er coun­tries as well) they could have a meal, stay the night, and get their car repaired with­out prej­u­dice.

You can learn more about the Green Book (which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture) from the Vox explain­er video above. Then, to get a fuller idea of the books’ con­tent, head over to the New York Pub­lic Library’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tions, where you’ll find 23 issues from the Green Book’s more than 30-year run.

Dig­i­tized by the NYPL’s Schom­burg Cen­ter for Research in Black Cul­ture, they’re free to read online and down­load. Data drawn from this archive and released into the pub­lic domain has also giv­en rise to projects like “Nav­i­gat­ing the Green Book,” where you can explore its rec­om­mend­ed places laid out on a map and even plot a trip between any two cities in Amer­i­ca accord­ing to the Green Book’s 1947 or 1956 edi­tions.

Though the Green Book ceased pub­li­ca­tion not long after the pas­sage of the Civ­il Rights Act, inter­est in the Amer­i­ca they reflect has­n’t van­ished, and has in fact grown in recent years. Acad­e­mia has pro­duced more stud­ies of Jim Crow-era trav­el over the past decade or two, and this Thanks­giv­ing will see the wide release of Green Book, Peter Far­rel­ly’s fea­ture film about the friend­ship between black pianist Don Shirley and the chauf­feur who drove him through the Deep South in the 1960s. “To flip through a Green Book is to open a win­dow into his­to­ry and per­haps to see, the tini­est amount, through the eyes of some­one who lived it,” writes K Menick on the NYPL’s blog. “Read these books; map them in your mind. Think about the trips you could take, can take, will take. See how the size of the world can change depend­ing on the col­or of your skin.” 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Negro Trav­el­ers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civ­il Rights Guide to Trav­el­ing Safe­ly in the U.S. (1936–66)

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

Robert Penn War­ren Archive Brings Ear­ly Civ­il Rights to Life

Vin­tage 1930s Japan­ese Posters Artis­ti­cal­ly Mar­ket the Won­ders of Trav­el

Food­ie Alert: New York Pub­lic Library Presents an Archive of 17,000 Restau­rant Menus (1851–2008)

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 Database of Paper Airplane Designs: Hours of Fun for Kids & Adults Alike

in Design | November 8th, 2018

Though we can trace the his­to­ry of paper air­craft back 2000 years to the Chi­nese and their kites, and into the 19th cen­tu­ry with the French and their imag­i­nary air­ships, the ori­gin of the mod­ern paper air­plane is shroud­ed in mys­tery. A San Diego Read­er arti­cle placed the birth some­where in 1910. By 1915, most Amer­i­can kids were already tor­ment­ing teach­ers. And Jack Northrup used paper mod­els to work on aero­dy­nam­ics at Lock­heed in the 1930s, but even that doesn’t do much to explain how such a ubiq­ui­tous object has con­tin­ued to be so hum­ble and ordi­nary while inspir­ing a recent upsurge of inter­est.

The data­base at Fold’n’Fly shows how much vari­ety there is beyond the basic “dart” style, and each air­plane comes with step-by-step fold­ing instruc­tions, a print­able pat­tern page, and a help­ful video.

You can choose by dif­fi­cul­ty lev­el, whether or not you will need scis­sors, or sort by dis­tance, acro­bat­ics, time aloft, or pure­ly dec­o­ra­tive.

One of the rea­sons for the renewed inter­est in paper air­planes is the use of CAD (com­put­er aid­ed design) in con­struct­ing pro­to­types, and that in itself is a response to the chal­lenge set by var­i­ous Guin­ness world records.

The cur­rent dis­tance record is 226 feet, 10 inch­es, set in March 2012 by a for­mer col­lege quar­ter­back Joe Ayoob. The plane was designed by tele­vi­sion pro­duc­er John Collins, who used Ayoob’s throw­ing arm strength to break the pre­vi­ous record hold­er by near­ly 20 feet.

The longest time a paper air­plane has been in the air is cur­rent­ly 27.6 sec­onds, set in 1998 by Ken Black­burn at the Geor­gia Dome. He was break­ing his own record for the third time.

Last­ly, the record for largest paper air­plane is 40 ft 10 inch­es, designed by stu­dents from the Tech­nol­o­gy Uni­ver­si­ty of Delft in 1995.

So, now you know what you’re up against. If you think you can do bet­ter, dive into this web­site and get fold­ing.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sci­ence of Beer: A New Free Online Course Promis­es to Enhance Your Appre­ci­a­tion of the Time­less Bev­er­age

NASA Puts 400+ His­toric Exper­i­men­tal Flight Videos on YouTube

NASA Releas­es a Mas­sive Online Archive: 140,000 Pho­tos, Videos & Audio Files Free to Search and Down­load

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The First House Powered by Coffee

in Food & Drink, Technology | November 8th, 2018

Since 2006, Dunkin’ Donuts has used the tagline “Amer­i­ca Runs on Dunkin’,” pre­sum­ably allud­ing to the cof­fee and donuts that get mil­lions of Amer­i­cans through each morn­ing. But maybe, all along, they’ve had some­thing more in mind. Above, Dunkin’ presents a tiny home pow­ered by bio­fu­el made from spent cof­fee grounds, a process mas­ter­mind­ed by a com­pa­ny called Blue Mar­ble Bio­ma­te­ri­als. Work­ing with lux­u­ry tiny home­builder New Fron­tier Tiny Homes, they’ve cre­at­ed a process–notes a Dunkin’ press release–that works some­thing like this:

• Step 1: Extract excess oils in the spent cof­fee grounds. There can be nat­ur­al oils left in spent cof­fee grounds, all depend­ing on the cof­fee bean type and orig­i­nal pro­cess­ing meth­ods.
• Step 2: Mix and react. These oils are then mixed with an alco­hol to under­go a chem­i­cal reac­tion known as trans­es­ter­i­fi­ca­tion. This pro­duces biodiesel and glyc­erin as a byprod­uct.
• Step 3: Refine. The biodiesel is washed and refined to cre­ate the final prod­uct.

When all is said and done, 170 pounds of used cof­fee grounds trans­lates into one gal­lon of fuel. From 65,000 pounds of cof­fee grounds, you got enough juice to pow­er a 275 square foot home, at least for a while.

Take a 360 degree inter­ac­tive tour of the tiny home here.

via New Atlas

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Make the World’s Small­est Cup of Cof­fee, from Just One Cof­fee Bean

A Rol­lick­ing French Ani­ma­tion on the Per­ils of Drink­ing a Lit­tle Too Much Cof­fee

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

David Lynch Directs a Mini-Sea­son of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japan­ese Cof­fee Com­mer­cials

J.S. Bach’s Com­ic Opera, “The Cof­fee Can­ta­ta,” Sings the Prais­es of the Great Stim­u­lat­ing Drink (1735)

“The Virtues of Cof­fee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethar­gy, Scurvy, Drop­sy, Gout & More

Freddie Mercury’s Final Days: Watch a Poignant Montage That Documents the Last Chapter of the Singer’s Life

in Music | November 8th, 2018

The “biopic” has deliv­ered dra­mat­ic retellings of famous fig­ures’ lives since the very ear­li­est days of cin­e­ma. We hunger, it seems, to see more-or-less-faith­ful approx­i­ma­tions of our idols stride across the screen, enact­ing events wit­nessed by mil­lions and those hid­den away from every­one. In the case of pop­u­lar musi­cians, these tend to involve epic alco­hol and drug use, tumul­tuous love affairs, sta­di­um-sized tri­umphs and the crush­ing defeats of falling out of cul­tur­al favor. Such scenes can prove dif­fi­cult to recre­ate con­vinc­ing­ly, espe­cial­ly the music and sig­na­ture moves of world famous stars.

Con­dens­ing life­times into mar­ketable nar­ra­tive films that hit typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood beats also involves tak­ing a fair amount of license. And as a spate of arti­cles like “Every­thing Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Got Wrong About Fred­die Mercury’s Life” tes­ti­fy, the new biopic about Queen singer Fred­die Mer­cury, played in the film by Rami Malek, twists or total­ly changes key events in Mercury’s life. The film re-imag­ines, for exam­ple, how Mer­cury met his band­mem­bers, his girl­friend Mary, and Jim Hut­ton, his long­time and final part­ner.

And, odd­ly, it imag­ines Mer­cury telling Queen about his HIV diag­no­sis dur­ing rehearsals for their 1985 Live Aid appear­ance, which it stages as a reunion, show­ing the band as hav­ing been on hia­tus while mem­bers pur­sued solo projects. The truth, how­ev­er, is that Mer­cury didn’t receive his diag­no­sis until 1987, and his band­mates weren’t ful­ly aware of his ill­ness until 1989. And when the band came togeth­er to per­form at Live Aid, they had just toured the world in sup­port of their 1984 album The Works.

Such dis­tor­tions are a lit­tle per­plex­ing giv­en that Bri­an May and Roger Tay­lor served as cre­ative con­sul­tants, sit­ting in on set dur­ing the pro­duc­tion. The film has been also been accused of “straight­wash­ing” Mercury’s sex­u­al­i­ty and gloss­ing over his roots and reli­gion. You’ll have to eval­u­ate the mer­its of these charges for your­self, but the case remains that if we want to know what Mercury’s life was real­ly like, we need to sup­plant the enter­tain­ing fic­tion with the even more com­pelling truth.

The video above helps in some small part to fill gaps in our knowl­edge of Mercury’s last years, edit­ing togeth­er inter­views, TV clips, and per­for­mance footage. Although Mer­cury was very sick dur­ing this peri­od, you would hard­ly have known it, and most of the peo­ple around him didn’t. He con­tin­ued to write and record, work­ing hard on Queen’s last album, Innu­en­do, released in the final year of his life.

We learn that his clos­est friends, col­leagues, and band­mem­bers were in denial, “right up to the last minute,” as Bri­an May says, about the sever­i­ty of his dis­ease. “We sort of refused to know” how bad it was, May admits. Mer­cury him­self pushed the knowl­edge away, immers­ing him­self in his music to keep going. “The sick­er Fred­die got,” says Roger Tay­lor, “the more he seemed to need to record to give him­self some­thing to do, you know, some sort of rea­son to get up… so it was a peri­od of fair­ly intense work.”

Mercury’s ear­ly death was trag­ic, but he met it hero­ical­ly. And though his band­mates strug­gled to face the truth, they ral­lied around him in sup­port, both in life and in death. When the tabloid press vicious­ly slan­dered and attacked him, May and Tay­lor went on tele­vi­sion to defend their friend. “He had a very respon­si­ble atti­tude to every­one that he was close to and he was a very gen­er­ous and car­ing per­son to all the peo­ple that came through his life and more than that you can’t ask,” said May in a 1991 inter­view appear­ance after Mer­cury passed away. “I tell you we do feel absolute­ly bound to stick up for him,” added Tay­lor, “because he can’t stick up for him­self any­more, you know?”

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Behind-the-Scenes Footage From Fred­die Mercury’s Final Video Per­for­mance

A First Glimpse of Rami Malek as Fred­die Mer­cury, Com­pared with the Real Fred­die Mer­cury Per­form­ing at Live Aid in 1985

What Made Fred­die Mer­cury the Great­est Vocal­ist in Rock His­to­ry? The Secrets Revealed in a Short Video Essay

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

The Disgusting Food Museum Curates 80 of the World’s Most Repulsive Dishes: Maggot-Infested Cheese, Putrid Shark & More

in Food & Drink, Museums | November 8th, 2018

Often we get to know each oth­er by talk­ing which foods we like. Per­haps even more often, we get to know each oth­er by talk­ing about which foods we hate. Enter­tain­ing dis­agree­ments tend to arise from such dis­cus­sions, usu­al­ly around tra­di­tion­al­ly divi­sive comestibles like anchovies, cilantro, brus­sel sprouts, or the Japan­ese dish of fer­ment­ed soy­beans known as nat­to. But how­ev­er many of us pre­fer to avoid them, these foods all look more or less con­ven­tion­al com­pared to the dish­es curat­ed by the Dis­gust­ing Food Muse­um, which the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Mau­ra Jud­kis describes as “the world’s first exhi­bi­tion devot­ed to foods that some would call revolt­ing.”

“The exhib­it has 80 of the world’s most dis­gust­ing foods,” says the muse­um’s offi­cial site. Adven­tur­ous vis­i­tors will appre­ci­ate the oppor­tu­ni­ty to smell and taste some of these noto­ri­ous foods. Do you dare smell the world’s stinki­est cheese? Or taste sweets made with met­al cleans­ing chem­i­cals?” Jud­kis notes that “the museum’s name and its con­tents are pret­ty con­tro­ver­sial — one culture’s dis­gust­ing is anoth­er culture’s del­i­ca­cy.

That goes for escamoles, the tree-ant lar­vae eat­en in Mex­i­co, or shi­rako, the cod sperm eat­en in Japan, or bird’s nest soup, a Chi­nese dish of nests made from bird sali­va.” It all goes to empha­size the Dis­gust­ing Food Muse­um’s stat­ed premis­es: “Dis­gust is one of the six fun­da­men­tal human emo­tions. While the emo­tion is uni­ver­sal, the foods that we find dis­gust­ing are not. What is deli­cious to one per­son can be revolt­ing to anoth­er.”

With inter­est in food seem­ing­ly at an all-time high — and not just food, but tra­di­tion­al food from all around the world — the cul­tur­al stud­ies wing of acad­e­mia has begun to get seri­ous mileage out of that propo­si­tion. But the Dis­gust­ing Food Muse­um has tak­en on a less intel­lec­tu­al and much more vis­cer­al mis­sion, plac­ing before its vis­i­tors duri­an fruit, banned from many a pub­lic space across Asia for its sheer stink­i­ness; casu marzu, which the muse­um’s site describes as “mag­got-infest­ed cheese from Sar­dinia”; and hákarl, which Jud­kis describes as “a putrid shark meat dish from Ice­land that the late Antho­ny Bour­dain said was one of the worst things he had ever tast­ed.”

You can learn more about these and the Dis­gust­ing Food Muse­um’s oth­er offer­ings from the Asso­ci­at­ed Press video at the top of the post, as well as at Smith­son­ian and the New York Times. If you’d like to see, smell, and even taste some of its exhibits for your­self, you’ll have to make the trek out to Malmö, Swe­den. The project comes from the mind of Samuel West, a Swede best known for cre­at­ing the Muse­um of Fail­ure (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), whose half-Amer­i­can parent­age has made him famil­iar with sev­er­al items of U.S. cui­sine that gross out non-Amer­i­cans, from Spam to Jell‑O pas­ta sal­ad (shades of James Lileks’ mid­cen­tu­ry mid­west-focused Gallery of Regret­table Food) to Rocky Moun­tain oys­ters. Despite being Amer­i­can myself, I’ve nev­er known any­one who likes that last, a dish made of bull tes­ti­cles, or at least no one has ever admit­ted to me that they like it. But if some­one did, I’d cer­tain­ly feel as if I’d learned some­thing about them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Muse­um of Fail­ure: A Liv­ing Shrine to New Coke, the Ford Edsel, Google Glass & Oth­er Epic Cor­po­rate Fails

Sal­vador Dalí’s 1973 Cook­book Gets Reis­sued: Sur­re­al­ist Art Meets Haute Cui­sine

What Pris­on­ers Ate at Alca­traz in 1946: A Vin­tage Prison Menu

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.

An Atlas of Literary Maps Created by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island & More

in Books, Literature, Maps | November 7th, 2018

Plot, set­ting, char­ac­ter… we learn to think of these as dis­crete ele­ments in lit­er­ary writ­ing, com­pa­ra­ble to the strat­e­gy, board, and pieces of a chess game. But what if this scheme doesn’t quite work? What about when the set­ting is a char­ac­ter? There are many lit­er­ary works named and well-known for the unfor­get­table places they intro­duce: Walden, Wuther­ing Heights, Howards End…. There are invent­ed domains that seem more real to read­ers than real­i­ty: Faulkner’s Yok­na­p­a­tow­pha, Thomas Hardy’s Wes­sex… There are works that describe impos­si­ble places so vivid­ly we believe in their exis­tence against all rea­son: Ita­lo Calvino’s Invis­i­ble Cities, Chi­na Miéville’s The City and the City, Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Ter­tius”….

What sus­tains our belief in the integri­ty of fic­tion­al places? The fact that they seem to act upon events as much as the peo­ple who live in them, for one thing. And, just as often, the fact that so many authors and illus­tra­tors draw elab­o­rate maps of lit­er­ary set­tings, mak­ing their fea­tures real to us and embed­ding them in our minds.

A new book, The Writer’s Map, edit­ed by Huw Lewis-Jones, offers lovers of lit­er­ary maps—whether in non-fic­tion, real­ism, or fantasy—the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pore over maps of Thomas More’s Utopia (said to be the first lit­er­ary map), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Trea­sure Island, J.R.R Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth, Bran­well Brontë’s Ver­dopo­lis (above), and so many more.

The book is filled with essays about lit­er­ary map­ping by writ­ers and map-mak­ers, and it touch­es on the way authors them­selves view imag­i­na­tive map­ping. “For some writ­ers mak­ing a map is absolute­ly cen­tral to the craft of shap­ing and telling their tale,” writes Lewis-Jones. For oth­ers, mak­ing maps is also a way to avoid the painful task of writ­ing, which Philip Pull­man calls “a mat­ter of sullen toil.” Draw­ing, on the oth­er hand, he says, “is pure joy. Draw­ing a map to go with a sto­ry is mess­ing around, with the added fun of col­or­ing it in.” David Mitchell agrees: “As long as I was busy dream­ing of topog­ra­phy,” he says of his maps, “I didn’t have to get my hands dirty with the mechan­ics of plot and char­ac­ter.”

It may sur­prise you to hear that writ­ers hate to write, but writ­ers are peo­ple, after all, and most peo­ple find writ­ing tedious and dif­fi­cult in some part. What all of the writ­ers fea­tured in this col­lec­tion share is that they love indulging their imag­i­na­tions, mak­ing real their lucid dreams, whether through the diver­sion of draw­ing maps or the grind of gram­mar and syn­tax. Many of these maps, like Thoreau’s draw­ing of Walden Pond or Johann David Wyss’s illus­tra­tion of the desert island in The Swiss Fam­i­ly Robin­son, accom­pa­nied their books into pub­li­ca­tion. Many more remained secret­ed in authors’ note­books.

There are many such “pri­vate trea­sures” in The Writer’s Map, notes Atlas Obscu­ra: “J.R.R. Tolkien’s own sketch of Mor­dor, on graph paper; C.S. Lewis’s sketch­es; unpub­lished maps from the note­books of David Mitchell… Jack Kerouac’s own route in On the Road….” Do we read a lit­er­ary map dif­fer­ent­ly when it wasn’t meant for us? Can maps be sly acts of mis­di­rec­tion as well as whim­si­cal visu­al aids? Should we treat them as para­tex­tu­al and unnec­es­sary, or are they cen­tral, when an author choos­es to include them, to our under­stand­ing of a sto­ry? Such ques­tions, and many, many more, are tak­en up in The Writer’s Map, a long over­due sur­vey of this long­stand­ing lit­er­ary tra­di­tion.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

12 Clas­sic Lit­er­ary Road Trips in One Handy Inter­ac­tive Map

Map of Mid­dle-Earth Anno­tat­ed by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

William Faulkn­er Draws Maps of Yok­na­p­ataw­pha Coun­ty, the Fic­tion­al Home of His Great Nov­els

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

Behind the Banksy Stunt: An In-Depth Breakdown of the Artist’s Self-Shredding Painting

in Art | November 7th, 2018

By now, even those of us who pay no atten­tion at all to the art mar­ket have heard about Banksy’s lat­est art stunt: a paint­ing called Bal­loon Girl that, when it sold for $1.4 mil­lion at auc­tion, then imme­di­ate­ly shred­ded itself. Assess­ments on the intent and impact of the piece’s self-destruc­tion have var­ied: many have com­plained that, far from the bold state­ment against the eco­nom­ics of mod­ern art it may have looked like (and many of Banksy’s fans may well have come to expect from his artis­tic per­sona), it could also be noth­ing more than a cyn­i­cal pub­lic­i­ty stunt to raise the spec­u­la­tive val­ue of his work fur­ther still. And a coun­ter­point, in the words of econ­o­mist Tyler Cowen, an expert on the eco­nom­ics of cul­ture in his own right: “Banksy is a genius.”

So how prop­er­ly to think about the Bal­loon Girl stunt, which has received no small amount of press but which remains some­thing of an unset­tled issue? Here to help clar­i­fy the mat­ter is a new and top­i­cal episode of The Art Assign­ment, John and Sarah Green’s web series pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.

As well as pro­vid­ing a brief primer on Banksy and the way his career has so far made its mark (often lit­er­al­ly) on the world, the eleven-minute video gets into how his build­ing a shred­der into a pic­ture frame and set­ting it off at the moment of sale fits into his body of work, art his­to­ry, and the inter­na­tion­al art scene as it is today.

“There are many ways a work of art comes into being, be it an addi­tive process, a sub­trac­tive process, one that must unfold in space and time, or one that’s imma­te­r­i­al and not exist­ing until the moment it’s per­formed and then dis­ap­pear­ing as soon as it’s over,” says Sarah Green. “Girl with Bal­loon was one art­work, and now it’s anoth­er that came into being through a pub­lic auc­tion but which still very much has a mate­r­i­al pres­ence, because the object was­n’t destroyed — it’s only half-shred­ded — and since it was can­vas going through, the remain­ing fringe is pret­ty sta­ble.” In a sense, then, even this self-destruc­t­ing art­work nev­er real­ly self-destruc­t­ed. So what, in artis­tic terms, actu­al­ly hap­pened to it? We may con­tin­ue argu­ing about it for years, but it will always come back to the shred­ding itself — an event reliv­able at any time in Banksy’s “direc­tor’s cut” video just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Banksy Shreds His $1.4 Mil­lion Paint­ing at Auc­tion, Tak­ing a Tra­di­tion of Artists Destroy­ing Art to New Heights

When Robert Rauschen­berg Asked Willem De Koon­ing for One of His Paint­ings … So That He Could Erase It

Watch Dis­ma­land — The Offi­cial Unof­fi­cial Film, A Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney Through Banksy’s Apoc­a­lyp­tic Theme Park

Banksy Cre­ates a Tiny Repli­ca of The Great Sphinx Of Giza In Queens

The Art Assign­ment: Learn About Art & the Cre­ative Process in a New Web Series by John & Sarah Green

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 Are the Most Influential Books Written by Scholars in the Last 20 Years?: Leading Academics Pick “The New Canon”

in Books | November 7th, 2018

It’s a fraught time to be an aca­d­e­m­ic. Bud­gets have been slashed, depart­ments dec­i­mat­ed, polit­i­cal bat­tles sen­sa­tion­al­ized by par­ti­san oppor­tunists, social media posts inten­si­fied into test cas­es for speech. Yet as cor­po­ratism and cul­ture wars have pushed their way into acad­e­mia in the past twen­ty plus years, more schol­ar­ship has seemed to make its way out into the main­stream, with books by aca­d­e­m­ic his­to­ri­ans like Eric Fon­er and Ibram X. Ken­di, lit­er­ary schol­ars like Stephen Green­blatt and bell hooks, soci­ol­o­gists like Robert Put­nam, sci­en­tists like Richard Dawkins, econ­o­mists like Thomas Piket­ty, legal schol­ars like Michelle Alexan­der, and so on, top­ping best­seller lists and win­ning Nation­al Book Awards.

Such books dis­till dif­fi­cult ideas with­out dumb­ing them down, in acces­si­ble and often urgent prose. Their pop­u­lar­i­ty speaks to how they address the press­ing issues of their times, and under­cuts the stereo­type of aca­d­e­mics as jar­gon-spew­ing, out-of-touch inhab­i­tants of ivory tow­ers. And they often have the pow­er to not only rad­i­cal­ly alter pub­lic dis­course, but to inspire mass move­ments and shift pub­lic pol­i­cy.

Most of the more than 15,000 aca­d­e­m­ic books pub­lished each year—by uni­ver­si­ty press­es or tiny independents—reach only “their core audi­ence of dis­ci­pli­nary spe­cial­ists.” A few res­onate out­side their fields yet still fail to find an audi­ence out­side high­er edu­ca­tion cir­cles (nor are they real­ly meant to).

But some books by schol­ars, like those by the authors named above, “enter the pub­lic con­scious­ness,” writes The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion, and thus deserve to be described as “influ­en­tial” in a broad sense, “like On the Ori­gin of Species or Das Kap­i­tal or The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams,” as Yale pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy Paul Bloom writes (while also point­ing out that none of these books’ authors were pro­fes­sion­al aca­d­e­mics). Under the ban­ner of form­ing a “New Canon,” the Chron­i­cle asked Bloom and a num­ber of oth­er scholars—including Deb­o­rah Tan­nen, pro­fes­sor of lin­guis­tics and author of sev­er­al best-sell­ing pop­u­lar books—to name what they believed were the most influ­en­tial schol­ar­ly books of the past 20 years.

Each respon­dent was asked “to select books—academic or not, but writ­ten by scholars—from with­in or out­side their own fields.” Each wrote a brief defense of their choice and, in some cas­es, of their cri­te­ria for “influ­ence.” You can read these blurbs at the Chron­i­cle’s site, and just below, see a full list of the picks. Some of the books, the Chron­i­cle con­cedes, fall “slight­ly out­side our time frame, but we includ­ed them any­way.”

Some of them are typ­i­cal­ly aca­d­e­m­ic works, like Mark Greif’s choice of Eve Kosof­sky Sedgwick’s Touch­ing Feel­ing, a book unlike­ly to inspire a Net­flix doc­u­men­tary. Oth­ers, like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, an impe­tus for Ava DuVernay’s 13th, were writ­ten for the widest of read­er­ships. Do these dis­tinc­tions make books like Alexan­der more “influ­en­tial” than those like Sedgewick’s? It all depends, I sup­pose, on what we mean by the word—and by what, or whom, or how, or why, or how many we think need to be influ­enced.

The Bet­ter Angels of our Nature, by Steven Pinker

Bowl­ing Alone: The Col­lapse and Revival of Amer­i­can Com­mu­ni­ty, by Robert Put­nam

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incar­cer­a­tion in the Age of Col­or­blind­ness, by Michelle Alexan­der

The His­to­ry Man­i­festo, by Jo Gul­di and David Armitage

Freaks of For­tune: The Emerg­ing World of Cap­i­tal­ism and Risk in Amer­i­ca, Jonathan Levy

What Art Is, by Arthur Dan­to

Homo Deus: A Brief His­to­ry of Tomor­row, by Yuval Noah Harari

Killing the Black Body: Race, Repro­duc­tion, and the Mean­ing of Lib­er­ty, by Dorothy Roberts

The Feel­ing of What Hap­pens: Body and Emo­tion in the Mak­ing of Con­scious­ness, by Anto­nio R. Dama­sio

Pay­ing for the Par­ty: How Col­lege Main­tains Inequal­i­ty, by Eliz­a­beth A. Arm­strong and Lau­ra T. Hamil­ton

A Brief His­to­ry of NeoLib­er­al­ism, by David Har­vey

Crit­i­cal Race The­o­ry: The Key Writ­ings That Formed The Move­ment, by Kim­ber­le Cren­shaw and Neil Gotan­da

The Rest­less Clock: A His­to­ry of the Cen­turies-Long Argu­ment over What Makes Liv­ing Things Tick, by Jes­si­ca Riskin

Touch­ing Feel­ing: Affect, Ped­a­gogy, Per­for­ma­tiv­i­ty, by Eve Kosof­sky Sedg­wick

Ella Bak­er and the Black Free­dom Move­ment: A Rad­i­cal Demo­c­ra­t­ic Vision, by Bar­bara Rans­by

Truth and Truth­ful­ness: An Essay in Geneal­o­gy, by Bernard Williams

War Pow­ers: How the Impe­r­i­al Pres­i­den­cy Hijacked the Con­sti­tu­tion, by Peter Irons

Age of Frac­ture, by Daniel T. Rodgers

Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Chore­og­ra­phy of Cit­i­zen­ship, by Daniel T. Rodgers

The Arg­onauts, by Mag­gie Nel­son

Read about all of the books at the Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 20 Most Influ­en­tial Aca­d­e­m­ic Books of All Time: No Spoil­ers

29 Lists of Rec­om­mend­ed Books Cre­at­ed by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers: Jorge Luis Borges, Pat­ti Smith, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, David Bowie & More

74 Essen­tial Books for Your Per­son­al Library: A List Curat­ed by Female Cre­atives

Umber­to Eco Explains Why We Make Lists

The Top 100 Foreign-Language Films of All-Time, According to 209 Critics from 43 Countries

in Film | November 6th, 2018

What qual­i­fies as a “for­eign-lan­guage film” is in the ear of the behold­er, even if the glob­al dom­i­nance of Hol­ly­wood effec­tive­ly makes the cat­e­go­ry refer to any film in a lan­guage oth­er than Eng­lish. The sheer cul­tur­al and lin­guis­tic diver­si­ty in world cin­e­ma can seem to ren­der the term too all-encom­pass­ing to be of much crit­i­cal use. From the point of view of cinema’s purest, ear­li­est aspirations—to be an inter­na­tion­al visu­al lan­guage that tran­scends lin­guis­tic barriers—emphasizing spo­ken lan­guage dif­fer­ences can seem to miss the point of filmic art.

On the oth­er hand, these days mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar pop­corn block­busters are cre­at­ed with inter­na­tion­al audi­ences fore­most in mind. But that impulse, too—purely, venal­ly, commercial—doesn’t begin to get at what makes film both a cul­tur­al­ly spe­cif­ic and a uni­ver­sal medi­um.

We go to the movies to be enter­tained, but also to be shocked, sur­prised, intrigued, to be let in on the lives of peo­ple we might nev­er meet. Inter­na­tion­al film, even in its most exper­i­men­tal devi­a­tions, respects the uni­ver­sal con­ven­tions that give audi­ences entry to those lives, no mat­ter what lan­guage they hear.

It is no emp­ty say­ing that “the lan­guage of film is uni­ver­sal,” as the BBC writes in the intro­duc­tion to its list of “The 100 Great­est For­eign-Lan­guage Films.” Nor is it con­tra­dic­to­ry to also point out that “the cin­e­ma of an indi­vid­ual nation is inevitably tied to its unique iden­ti­ty and his­to­ry.” The lat­ter qual­i­ty is what makes non-West­ern film chal­leng­ing, even for­bid­ding, for view­ers with more insu­lar per­spec­tives. The for­mer is what makes world cin­e­ma acces­si­ble to them nonethe­less.

If you’ve some­how avoid­ed see­ing some of the world’s great­est “for­eign-lan­guage films”—for rea­sons of sub­ti­tle-aver­sion or oth­er­wise, it’s nev­er too late to over­come your resis­tance and dis­cov­er how the cul­tur­al rich­ness of world cin­e­ma still speaks an inter­na­tion­al lan­guage. And you can hard­ly go wrong with the BBC list as a guide. Com­piled by 209 crit­ics from 43 dif­fer­ent coun­tries who speak a total of 41 dif­fer­ent lan­guages, the list seems about as inclu­sive as it gets, with some qual­i­fi­ca­tions.

“French can claim to be the inter­na­tion­al lan­guage of acclaimed cin­e­ma,” with 27 of the high­est-rat­ed films in that lan­guage, “fol­lowed by 12 in Man­darin, and 11 each in Ital­ian and Japan­ese.” A full quar­ter of the list of films come from East Asia—Japan, Chi­na, Tai­wan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. “If there’s any­thing dis­ap­point­ing about the final list,” the BBC notes, “it’s the pauci­ty of films direct­ed or co-direct­ed by women,” just four out of 100. But female crit­ics made up 45 per­cent of the respon­dents.

Just below see the first ten films on the list. Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, Aki­ra Kuro­sawa makes the top ten twice, with Sev­en Samu­rai at num­ber one and Rashomon com­ing in at num­ber four. Kuro­sawa “was loved by crit­ics every­where,” except, per­haps sur­pris­ing­ly, in Japan, where the six crit­ics who vot­ed “didn’t go for a sin­gle Kuro­sawa film between them,” a reminder that film may be uni­ver­sal but crit­i­cism is not. Or as the great John Car­pen­ter once put it, “In France, I’m an auteur. In Eng­land, I’m a hor­ror movie direc­tor. In Ger­many, I’m a film­mak­er. In the U.S., I’m a bum.”

You can dive into the full list of top 100 “for­eign-lan­guage” films at the BBC here.

1. Sev­en Samu­rai (Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, 1954)
2. Bicy­cle Thieves (Vit­to­rio de Sica, 1948)
3. Tokyo Sto­ry (Yasu­jirô Ozu, 1953)
4. Rashomon (Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, 1950)
5. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
6. Per­sona (Ing­mar Bergman, 1966)
7. 8 1/2 (Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, 1963)
8. The 400 Blows (François Truf­faut, 1959)
9. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
10. La Dolce Vita (Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, 1960)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 846 Film Crit­ics

The Top 100 Amer­i­can Films of All Time, Accord­ing to 62 Inter­na­tion­al Film Crit­ics

The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Cen­tu­ry (So Far) Named by 177 Film Crit­ics

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

Edward Gorey Talks About His Love Cats & More in the Animated Series, “Goreytelling”

in Animation, Books, Literature | November 6th, 2018

My child­hood dis­cov­ery of Edward Gorey proved rev­e­la­to­ry. I rec­og­nized my own bewil­der­ment in the blank expres­sions of his obses­sive­ly-ren­dered Edwar­dian chil­dren. His char­ac­ters, impris­oned in starched col­lars and stays, stared at the world through hol­low eyes, struck dumb by alter­nat­ing cur­rents of absur­di­ty and hor­ror. Every young­ster with bud­ding goth and New Roman­tic sen­si­bil­i­ties found them­selves drawn into Gorey’s weird worlds. Con­fessed Goreyphiles like Tim Bur­ton and Neil Gaiman took much from a style Steven Kurutz describes as “camp-macabre, iron­ic-goth­ic or dark whim­sy.”

He gave his read­ers per­mis­sion to be odd and haunt­ed, and to laugh about it, but he nev­er seemed to have need­ed such per­mis­sion him­self. He was as sui gener­is as he was mys­te­ri­ous, the scowl­ing old­er gen­tle­man with the long white beard assumed the role of an anti-San­ta, bestow­ing gifts of guilt-free, soli­tary indul­gence in dark fan­ta­sy.

But the man him­self remained shroud­ed, and that was just as well. Learn­ing more about him as an adult, I have been struck by just how close­ly he resem­bles some of his char­ac­ters, or rather, by how much he was, in work and life, entire­ly him­self.

A fash­ion­ably book­ish her­mit and Wildean aes­thete, a man to whom, “by his own admis­sion… noth­ing hap­pened,” Gorey orga­nized his life in New York around read­ing, see­ing films, and attend­ing George Balanchine’s bal­lets. (He rarely missed a per­for­mance over the course of three decades, then moved to his famed Cape Cod house when Bal­an­chine died in the mid-80s.) “Despite being a life­long Anglophile, he made just one brief vis­it to Scot­land and Eng­land,” writes Kurutz, “his only trip abroad.”

In a Proust Ques­tion­naire he answered for Van­i­ty Fair, Gorey wrote that his favorite jour­ney was “look­ing out the win­dow.” The supreme love of his life, he wrote: his cats. Those beloved crea­tures are the sub­ject of the third episode of Goreytelling, at the top, an ani­mat­ed web series con­sist­ing of short excerpts from an upcom­ing doc­u­men­tary sim­ply titled Gorey, direct­ed by Christo­pher Seufert, who spent sev­er­al years record­ing his con­ver­sa­tions with Gorey. The very Gorey-like ani­ma­tions are by Ben­jamin and Jim Wick­ey.

If you’ve ever won­dered what Edward Gorey sound­ed like, won­der no more. Hear his solid­ly Mid­west­ern accent (Gorey grew up in Chica­go) as he describes the tra­vails of liv­ing with adorable, frus­trat­ed preda­tors who destroy the fur­ni­ture and throw them­selves on his draw­ing table, ruin­ing his work. Fur­ther up, he tells the sto­ry of a mummy’s head he kept wrapped up in his clos­et, and just above he tells a sto­ry about The Loathe­some Cou­ple a 1977 book he wrote based a series of real-life mur­ders of British chil­dren by a mar­ried cou­ple. “A lot peo­ple,” he says, would tell him “this one book of yours, I real­ly find a lit­tle… much.”

Goreyphiles out there, and they num­ber in the mil­lions, will thor­ough­ly enjoy these ani­ma­tions. Gorey the doc­u­men­tary promis­es to bring us even clos­er to the cur­mud­geon­ly author and artist. His life makes for a quirky series of vignettes, but ulti­mate­ly Gorey was a “Mag­el­lan of the imag­i­na­tion,” says cul­tur­al crit­ic and biog­ra­ph­er Mark Dery. “He jour­neyed vast­ly between his ears…. So that’s where you have to look for the life. On the psy­chic geog­ra­phy of his uncon­scious,” and in the pages of his over 100 sat­is­fy­ing­ly unset­tling books.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Edward Gorey Illus­trates H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in His Inim­itable Goth­ic Style (1960)

Alfred Hitch­cock Med­i­tates on Sus­pense & Dark Humor in a New Ani­mat­ed Video

The Out­siders: Lou Reed, Hunter S. Thomp­son, and Frank Zap­pa Reveal Them­selves in Cap­ti­vat­ing­ly Ani­mat­ed Inter­views

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