How the Ancient Mayans Used Chocolate as Money

in Economics, Food & Drink, History | October 8th, 2018

We’ve had hun­dreds and hun­dreds of years to get used to mon­ey in the form of coins and bills, though exact­ly how long we’ve used them varies quite a bit from region to region. Of course, some spots on the globe have yet to adopt them at all, as any­one who’s heard the much-told sto­ry of the Yap islanders and their huge lime­stone discs knows. But the his­to­ry of mon­ey is, in essence, the his­to­ry of bar­ter­ing — trad­ing some­thing you have for some­thing you want — becom­ing more and more abstract; now, with dig­i­tal cryp­to-cur­ren­cies like Bit­coin, it looks like mon­ey will ascend one lev­el of abstrac­tion high­er. But to imag­ine what a tru­ly non-abstract cur­ren­cy looks like, just look at the ancient Mayan civ­i­liza­tion, the mem­bers of which paid their debts with choco­late.

“The ancient Maya nev­er used coins as mon­ey,” writes Sci­ence’s Joshua Rapp Learn. “Instead, like many ear­ly civ­i­liza­tions, they were thought to most­ly barter, trad­ing items such as tobac­co, maize, and cloth­ing.” Thanks to the work of archae­ol­o­gist Joanne Baron, a schol­ar of murals, ceram­ic paint­ings, carv­ings and oth­er objects depict­ing life in the Clas­sic Maya peri­od which ran from around 250 BC to 900 AD, we’ve now begun to learn how choco­late took on a major, mon­ey-like role in the Maya’s econ­o­my.

Some images depict cups of choco­late itself, which the Mayans usu­al­ly enjoyed in the form of a hot drink, being accept­ed as pay­ment, and oth­ers show choco­late trad­ed in the coin-like form of “fer­ment­ed and dried cacao beans.” In many scenes, Maya lead­ers receive their trib­utes (or tax­es) most often in the form of “pieces of woven cloth and bags labeled with the quan­ti­ty of dried cacao beans they con­tain.”

Cacao beans even­tu­al­ly became such a valu­able cur­ren­cy “that it was evi­dent­ly worth the trou­ble to coun­ter­feit them,” writes Smith­son­ian’s Josie Garth­waite in an arti­cle about the ear­ly his­to­ry of choco­late (a sub­ject about which you can learn more in the TED-ed video above). “At mul­ti­ple archae­o­log­i­cal sites in Mex­i­co and Guatemala,” she quotes anthro­pol­o­gist Joel Pal­ka as say­ing, “researchers have come across remark­ably well-pre­served ‘cacao beans’ ” that turn out to be made of clay. “Some schol­ars believe drought led to the down­fall of the Clas­sic Maya civ­i­liza­tion,” Learn notes, and accord­ing to Baron, “the dis­rup­tion of the cacao sup­ply which fueled polit­i­cal pow­er may have led to an eco­nom­ic break­down in some cas­es.” That may sound strange­ly famil­iar to those of us who — even here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, among the many who have gone near­ly cash­less and may soon not even need a cred­it card — have break­downs of our own when we can’t get our choco­late.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mar­velous Health Ben­e­fits of Choco­late: A Curi­ous Med­ical Essay from 1631

Mak­ing Choco­late the Tra­di­tion­al Way, From Bean to Bar: A Short French Film

The Ups & Downs of Ancient Rome’s Economy–All 1,900 Years of It–Get Doc­u­ment­ed by Pol­lu­tion Traces Found in Greenland’s Ice

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Bit­coin, the New Decen­tral­ized Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cy, Demys­ti­fied in a Three Minute Video

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.

You’re Only As Old As You Feel: Harvard Psychologist Ellen Langer Shows How Mental Attitude Can Potentially Reverse the Effects of Aging

in Harvard, Health, Psychology, Science | October 8th, 2018

You’re only as old as you feel, right? The plat­i­tude may be true. In a sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly ver­i­fi­able sense, “feeling”—a state of mind—may not only deter­mine psy­cho­log­i­cal well-being but phys­i­cal health as well, includ­ing the nat­ur­al aging process­es of the body.

Har­vard psy­chol­o­gist Ellen Langer has spent decades test­ing the hypoth­e­sis, and has come to some inter­est­ing con­clu­sions about the rela­tion­ship between men­tal process­es and bod­i­ly aging. In order to do the kind of work she has for decades, she has had to put aside the thorny “mind-body” problem—a long­stand­ing philo­soph­i­cal and prac­ti­cal impasse in fig­ur­ing out how the two inter­act. “Let’s for­get about how you get from one to the oth­er,” she tells CBS This Morn­ing in a 2014 inter­view above, “and in fact see those as just words…. Wher­ev­er you’re putting the mind, you’re nec­es­sar­i­ly putting the body.”

What hap­pens to the one, she the­o­rized, will nec­es­sar­i­ly affect the oth­er. In a 1981 exper­i­ment, which she called the “coun­ter­clock­wise study,” she and her research team placed eight men in their late 70s in a monastery in New Hamp­shire, con­vert­ed to trans­port them all to 1959 when they were in their prime. Fur­ni­ture, décor, news, sports, music, TV, movies: every cul­tur­al ref­er­ence dat­ed from the peri­od. There were no mir­rors, only pho­tos of the men in their 20s. They spoke and act­ed as though they had trav­eled back in time and got­ten younger.

The results were extra­or­di­nary, almost too good to be true, she felt. “On sev­er­al mea­sures,” The New York Times report­ed in 2014, “they out­per­formed a con­trol group that came ear­li­er to the monastery but didn’t imag­ine them­selves back into the skin of their younger selves, though they were encour­aged to rem­i­nisce.” The “coun­ter­clock­wise” par­tic­i­pants “were sup­pler, showed greater man­u­al dex­ter­i­ty and sat taller…. Per­haps most improb­a­bly, their sight improved” as well as their hear­ing.  Giv­en the seem­ing­ly mirac­u­lous out­comes, tiny sam­ple size, and the unortho­doxy of the exper­i­ment, Langer decid­ed not to pub­lish at the time but con­tin­ued to work on sim­i­lar stud­ies look­ing at how the mind affects the body.

Then, almost thir­ty years lat­er, the BBC con­tact­ed her about stag­ing a tele­vised recre­ation of the monastery exper­i­ment, “with six aging for­mer celebri­ties as guinea pigs,” who were trans­port­ed back to 1975 by sim­i­lar means. The stars “emerged after a week as appar­ent­ly reju­ve­nat­ed as Langer’s sep­tu­a­ge­nar­i­ans in New Hamp­shire.” These exper­i­ments and sev­er­al oth­ers Langer has con­duct­ed over the years strong­ly sug­gest that chrono­log­i­cal age is not a lin­ear clock push­ing us inex­orably toward decline. It is, rather, a col­lec­tion of vari­ables that include psy­cho­log­i­cal well-being and some­thing called an “epi­ge­net­ic clock,” a mech­a­nism that UCLA geneti­cist Steve Hor­vath has dis­cov­ered direct­ly cor­re­lates with the aging process, and may show us how to change it.

But while Hor­vath has yet to answer sev­er­al press­ing ques­tions about how cer­tain genet­ic mech­a­nisms inter­act, Langer has put such ques­tions aside in favor of test­ing the mind-body con­nec­tion in a series of exper­i­ments, which engage the aging—or peo­ple with spe­cif­ic conditions—in stud­ies that stretch their minds. By cre­at­ing illu­sions like the monastery time machine, Langer has found that per­cep­tion has a sig­nif­i­cant effect on aging. If we per­ceive our­selves to be younger, health­i­er, more capa­ble, more vibrant, despite the mes­sages about how we should look and act at our chrono­log­i­cal age, then our cells and tis­sues get the mes­sage. Not only can a change in per­cep­tion affect aging, but also, Langer the­o­rizes, obe­si­ty, can­cer, dia­betes, and oth­er chron­ic or life-threat­en­ing con­di­tions. Much of her research here gets spelled out in her book, Coun­ter­clock­wise: Mind­ful Health and the Pow­er of Pos­si­bil­i­ty.

“Whether it’s about aging or any­thing else,” says Lager, “if you are sur­round­ed by peo­ple who have cer­tain expec­ta­tions for you, you tend to meet those expec­ta­tions, pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive.” The social expec­ta­tion for the aging is that they will get weak­er, less capa­ble, and more prone to dete­ri­o­ra­tion and ill­ness. Ignor­ing these expec­ta­tions and chang­ing our per­cep­tion of what chrono­log­i­cal age means—and doesn’t mean—Langer says, seems to actu­al­ly slow or par­tial­ly reverse the decline and to ward off dis­ease. Those psy­cho­log­i­cal changes can come about through inter­ven­tions like car­ing for chil­dren, plants, or ani­mals and using mind­ful­ness prac­tices to learn how to be atten­tive to change.

You can read more about Langer and Horvath’s spe­cif­ic find­ings on aging, psy­chol­o­gy, and epi­ge­net­ics at Nau­tilus.

Note: you can get Langer’s book–Coun­ter­clock­wise Mind­ful Health and the Trans­for­ma­tive Pow­er of Pos­si­bil­i­ty–as a free audio­book through Audible.com’s free tri­al pro­gram. Get more details on the free tri­al here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Bak­ing, Cook­ing & Oth­er Dai­ly Activ­i­ties Help Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness and Alle­vi­ate Depres­sion and Anx­i­ety

How Mind­ful­ness Makes Us Hap­pi­er & Bet­ter Able to Meet Life’s Chal­lenges: Two Ani­mat­ed Primers Explain

How the Japan­ese Prac­tice of “For­est Bathing”—Or Just Hang­ing Out in the Woods—Can Low­er Stress Lev­els and Fight Dis­ease

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

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

in Art, Comedy, Life | October 8th, 2018

The first time van­dals defaced his sculp­ture, Dirty Cor­ner, at Ver­sailles, artist Anish Kapoor wrote an essay in which he con­sid­ered his options:

Should the paint that has been thrown all over the sculp­ture be removed? Or should it remain and be part of the work? Does the polit­i­cal vio­lence of the van­dal­ism make Dirty Cor­ner “dirt­i­er”? Does this dirty polit­i­cal act reflect the dirty pol­i­tics of exclu­sion, mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion, elit­ism, racism, Islam­o­pho­bia?

The ques­tion I ask of myself is: can I, the artist, trans­form this crass act of polit­i­cal van­dal­ism and vio­lence into a cre­ative act? Would this not be the best revenge?

Some­times artists are the ones behind the van­dal­ism.

Ai Wei­wei starred in a 1995 black-and-white pho­to trip­tych that doc­u­ments his inten­tion­al destruc­tion of a Han Dynasty urn from his pri­vate col­lec­tion.

Broth­ers Jake and Dinos Chap­man pur­chased a mint con­di­tion set of Goya’s The Dis­as­ters of War, painstak­ing­ly re-ren­dered the vic­tims’ heads as grotesque­ly cute, col­or­ful car­toons, and exhib­it­ed the altered etch­ings under the title Insult to Injury.

Robert Rauschen­berg sought and received per­mis­sion to erase a draw­ing that his fel­low Abstract Expres­sion­ist Willem de Koon­ing had giv­en him, at his request.

Cer­tain­ly, artists of all stripes have been known to erad­i­cate their own work in fits of pique, pas­sion, and self-reproach.

But until last week, no artist had ever van­dal­ized their own work with such a dis­pas­sion­ate, pre-med­i­tat­ed sense of fun as Banksy, the anony­mous clown prince of street art and mas­sive scale pranks.

As you’ve like­ly heard by now, with­in sec­onds of his icon­ic Girl With Bal­loon (2006) sell­ing at Sotheby’s for £1,042,000—$1.4 million—the paint­ing began to self-destruct, thanks to a cus­tom-built shred­der the artist had pre-loaded into its frame.

No one seemed par­tic­u­lar­ly dis­tressed about it.

Auc­tion atten­dees quick­ly scram­bled to cap­ture the moment with their cell phones.

Auc­tion­eer Oliv­er Bark­er looks on in admirably mild con­fu­sion.

No self-appoint­ed hero rushed for­ward to jam the works with an umbrel­la or broom han­dle.

The as-yet-uniden­ti­fied buy­er was not in the room, no doubt to their ever-last­ing regret. Imag­ine los­ing out on those brag­ging rights!

While Sotheby’s and the buy­er ham­mer out their unprece­dent­ed next steps, some art experts have stat­ed that it would be pos­si­ble, giv­en the clean geom­e­try of the cuts, to restore the can­vas.

Though who would want to, giv­en the spec­u­la­tion that this stunt imme­di­ate­ly increased the val­ue of the work, any­where from 50% to near dou­ble the pur­chase price?

Per­haps the buy­er will choose to fin­ish the job and sell it off strip-by-strip.

Office sup­ply stores will see an uptick in shred­der sales to ven­dors sell­ing Banksy knock-offs sten­cilled on sub­way maps.

Sotheby’s senior direc­tor, Alex Branczik, insist­ed that no one there was in on the joke, but The New York Times smells a rat:

The frame would pre­sum­ably have been rather heavy and thick for its size, some­thing an auc­tion house spe­cial­ist or art han­dler might have noticed. Detailed con­di­tion reports are rou­tine­ly request­ed by the would-be buy­ers of high-val­ue art­works. Unusu­al­ly, this rel­a­tive­ly small Banksy had been hung on a wall, rather than placed by porters on a podi­um for the moment of sale. 

The fact that Girl with Bal­loon was the final item on the block is either a great piece of luck, or a bit of can­ny stage man­age­ment on the auc­tion house’s part. Recap­tur­ing the atten­dees’ atten­tion after that stunt would be an uphill bat­tle.

It’s doubt­ful that buy­ers will shy away from Sotheby’s as a place where high­ly val­ued art­work starts to devour itself the moment the gav­el comes down. That kind of light­ning strikes but once.

What may cir­cle back to bite the ven­er­a­ble firm in its well padded rear is the ease with which some­one in the crowd was able to acti­vate the may­hem, using a device con­cealed in his bag. What’s worse, lax secu­ri­ty or maybe lying about fore­knowl­edge of the prank? It’s hard not to raise those as pos­si­bil­i­ties.

The man with the bag was escort­ed out. Not even the con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists are peg­ging him as Banksy.

As for the steady-hand­ed fel­low anoth­er attendee caught calm­ly zoom­ing in on his phone from the per­fect angle… well, let’s just say the tabloids have picked up on his resem­blance to Robin Gun­ning­ham, oft thought to be Clark Kent to Banksy’s Super­man.

Banksy’s post-mortem, unlike Kapoor’s, does not sug­gest a man tor­tured by unre­solved ques­tions.

“A few years ago I secret­ly built a shred­der into a paint­ing, in case it was ever put up for auc­tion,” he wrote on his Insta­gram. “Going, going, gone.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Pat­ti Smith Presents Top Web­by Award to Banksy; He Accepts with Self-Mock­ing Video

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Octo­ber 15 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Emperor of Japan, Akihito, Is Still Publishing Scientific Papers in His 80s

in Science | October 5th, 2018

State Depart­ment pho­to by William Ng, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

On April 30, 2019, Emper­or Aki­hi­to of Japan will abdi­cate, and pass the throne to his son, Crown Prince Naruhi­to. What will he do in his retire­ment? Prob­a­bly the same thing he has done most of his life: make “tax­o­nom­ic stud­ies of gob­ies,” as the Min­istry of For­eign Affairs of Japan reports, “small fish found in fresh, brack­ish and marine waters.” Aki­hi­to has been a mem­ber of Japan’s Ichthy­olog­i­cal Soci­ety of Japan for decades and “pub­lished 30 papers in the society’s jour­nal between 1963 and 1989.”

Aki­hi­to ascend­ed the throne in 1989, at age 56, and yes, Japan still has an emper­or, though—since the post-war Con­sti­tu­tion of 1947—the con­sti­tu­tion­al monarch has no polit­i­cal pow­er and serves only a cer­e­mo­ni­al role. This has left Aki­hi­to with a lot of time to fill with sci­en­tif­ic pur­suits: to become an hon­orary mem­ber of the Lin­nean Soci­ety of Lon­don, Zoo­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Lon­don, and Research Insti­tute for Nat­ur­al Sci­ence of Argenti­na, and a research asso­ciate at the Aus­tralian Muse­um.

Emper­or Aki­hi­to remained an active sci­en­tist in his emper­or­ship, pub­lish­ing a his­to­ry of sci­ence arti­cle in Nature titled “Lin­naeus and tax­on­o­my in Japan” in 2007. In 2016, Aki­hi­to appeared as first author in a study pub­lished in Gene. The sec­ond author is his younger son, Crown Prince Fumi­hi­to Akishi­no, who stud­ied fish tax­on­o­my at St. John’s Col­lege, Oxford, then com­plet­ed a doc­tor­al degree in ornithol­o­gy. The prince now serves as the pres­i­dent of the Yamashina Insti­tute for Ornithol­o­gy and the Japan­ese Asso­ci­a­tion of Zoo­log­i­cal Gar­dens and Aquar­i­ums.

The family’s inter­est in sci­ence goes beyond the dab­bling of bored aris­to­crats or a sense of noblesse oblige. Fumi­hi­to intro­duced tilapia to Thai­land as an impor­tant food source and has helped Thai sci­en­tists expand their aqua­cul­tur­al research. The Emperor’s broth­er, Prince Masahi­to, is a can­cer researcher who has been rec­og­nized for mak­ing sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to the field, pub­lish­ing in jour­nals like Can­cer Research and the Jour­nal of the Inter­na­tion­al Union Against Can­cer.

The Impe­r­i­al fam­i­ly may rep­re­sent an out­mod­ed and archa­ic insti­tu­tion, one humankind can do just as well with­out. But it’s refresh­ing to see peo­ple with such vast resources and priv­i­lege use them for the pur­suit of intel­lec­tu­al inquiry and the bet­ter­ment of human and ani­mal life. You can read the first page of one of Emper­or Akihito’s papers, “Ear­ly Cul­ti­va­tors of Sci­ence in Japan” at Sci­ence in which he makes a case for the glob­al shar­ing of knowl­edge.

“Through my own study of ichthy­ol­o­gy,” Aki­hi­to writes, “I have come to feel strong­ly the impor­tance of inter­na­tion­al coop­er­a­tion in con­duct­ing sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies. I recall with a sense of grat­i­tude that behind each one of the papers I have pub­lished there has been the unspar­ing coop­er­a­tion of peo­ple abroad.”

via Sha­haf Peleg

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Entire His­to­ry of Japan in 9 Quirky Min­utes

How the Japan­ese Prac­tice of “For­est Bathing”—Or Just Hang­ing Out in the Woods—Can Low­er Stress Lev­els and Fight Dis­ease

After­math of the Tsuna­mi in Japan

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

“Lynchian,” “Kubrickian,” “Tarantinoesque” and 100+ Film Words Have Been Added to the Oxford English Dictionary

in English Language, Film | October 5th, 2018

Image via Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary

Get inter­est­ed enough in any­thing, and you soon dis­cov­er its lan­guage. Each sub­ject, pur­suit, and area of cul­ture has its own slang, its own jar­gon, even its own gram­mar: that goes as well for physics and fish­ing as it does for cook­ing and cin­e­ma. Though quite spe­cial­ized, the vast lex­i­con of that last has also con­tributed a great deal to Eng­lish as gen­er­al­ly used. The lat­est update to the ven­er­a­ble Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary has added more than 100 of these terms, from already well-known expres­sions like “edge-of-your-seat,” “not in Kansas any­more,” and “blink and you’ll miss it” to the less-com­mon likes of kai­ju (the Japan­ese bat­tling-mon­ster genre that gave us Godzil­la), and Foley (the art of adding inci­den­tal sounds to movies in post-pro­duc­tion), and gore­hound (an enthu­si­ast of the gorefest, a genre whose sen­si­bil­i­ty you can well imag­ine).

Many of the new entries have to do with par­tic­u­lar direc­tors and their styles. “The list runs through a range of gen­res and loca­tions, from the wide land­scapes of the Amer­i­can West evoked by For­dian to Swedish soul-search­ing with Bergmanesque,” writes the OED’s Craig Ley­land. The old­est, Keatonesque, “dates from 1921, near the start of an extra­or­di­nary run of suc­cess for the com­ic actor and film-mak­er, and typ­i­cal­ly refers to Keaton’s famous dead­pan expres­sion and pen­chant for phys­i­cal com­e­dy. The most recent is Taran­ti­noesque, first seen in 1994 – the year Pulp Fic­tion appeared in cin­e­mas,” which refers to qual­i­ties like “graph­ic and styl­ized vio­lence, cinelit­er­ate ref­er­ences, non-lin­ear sto­ry­lines, sharp dia­logue, and more – and is a reminder of the impact these films had on cin­e­ma in the 1990s.”

Oth­er auteur-spe­cif­ic addi­tions include Spiel­ber­gian (“fan­tas­ti­cal or human­ist themes or a sen­ti­men­tal feel”), Lynchi­an (“not­ed for jux­ta­pos­ing sur­re­al or sin­is­ter ele­ments with mun­dane, every­day envi­ron­ments”), and of course Kubrick­ian (“metic­u­lous per­fec­tion­ism, mas­tery of the tech­ni­cal aspects of film-mak­ing, and atmos­pher­ic visu­al style in films across a range of gen­res”). Sev­er­al terms denot­ing broad­er move­ments and styles have also made it in, includ­ing mum­blecore, “a style of low-bud­get film typ­i­cal­ly char­ac­ter­ized by nat­u­ral­is­tic and (appar­ent­ly) impro­vised per­for­mances and a reliance on dia­logue rather than plot or action” which emerged about a decade ago, and Ham­mer, denot­ing the hor­ror films made from the 1950s to the 70s by British pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny of that name, “still famous and loved for their lurid, melo­dra­mat­ic style.”

Mas­ter these words and you’ll sure­ly hold your own in casu­al cinephile con­ver­sa­tion. But you can only get so deep into talk­ing about movies if you can’t con­fi­dent­ly bring out terms like arc shot, diegetic, and mise-en-scène. As one of the most capa­cious art forms, cin­e­ma brings togeth­er a num­ber of lan­guages all at once, includ­ing the visu­al lan­guage as defined by direc­tors like Sovi­et mon­tage pio­neer Sergei Eisen­stein (he of Eisen­stein­ian) and the lan­guage the screen­play gives its char­ac­ters to speak (an espe­cial­ly dis­tinc­tive ele­ment in the case of film­mak­ers like Taran­ti­no). But those are essen­tial­ly soli­tary plea­sures, enjoyed in a dark­ened the­ater or liv­ing room. Isn’t one of the most endur­ing joys of film­go­ing talk­ing about the movies with oth­er peo­ple lat­er — and to sound as expert as pos­si­ble while doing so?

via OED/Indiewire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

Colum­bia U. Launch­es a Free Mul­ti­me­dia Glos­sary for Study­ing Cin­e­ma & Film­mak­ing

Vin­tage Film Shows How the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary Was Made in 1925

Ter­ry Gilliam on the Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick & Spiel­berg: Kubrick Makes You Think, Spiel­berg Wraps Every­thing Up with Neat Lit­tle Bows

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.

When Andy Warhol Made a Batman Superhero Movie (1964)

in Comics/Cartoons, Film | October 4th, 2018

Each of us has a favorite Bat­man movie. My own alle­giance still lies with the one Tim Bur­ton direct­ed in 1989, a pro­to­type of the mod­ern dark super­hero block­buster in which Jack Nichol­son made quite an impact as the Jok­er. But Heath Ledger made an even big­ger one in The Dark Knight, an espe­cial­ly beloved entry in Christo­pher Nolan’s acclaimed Bat­man pic­tures of the 21st cen­tu­ry. These days, with enough dis­tance, some even admit to enjoy­ing Joel Schu­macher’s ultra-campy takes on Bat­man from the late 1990s, or their spir­i­tu­al pre­de­ces­sor Bat­man: The Movie from 1966, an exten­sion of the self-par­o­dy­ing tele­vi­sion series star­ring Adam West. But before all of them there was Bat­man Drac­u­la, direct­ed by no less a vision­ary — and no less a Bat­man fan — than Andy Warhol.

Star­ring Warhol’s fel­low exper­i­men­tal film­mak­er Jack Smith in both title roles, Bat­man Drac­u­la pits the Caped Cru­sad­er of com­ic-book fame against the vam­pir­ic Tran­syl­van­ian count of leg­end, the mil­lion­aire vig­i­lante who seems to fear noth­ing but bats against the immor­tal recluse who spends much of his time in the form of a bat.

Smith may bear a faint resem­blance to Chris­t­ian Bale, Nolan’s Bat­man, but there all aes­thet­ic resem­blance to the “real” Bat­man movies ends. Shot in black and white on var­i­ous rooftops around New York and Long Island as well as in Warhol’s “Fac­to­ry,” Warhol’s unau­tho­rized approach to the mate­r­i­al seems to get as abstract and spon­ta­neous as most of the cin­e­ma put togeth­er by his coterie — or at least the sur­viv­ing footage makes it look that way. Though Warhol did com­plete Bat­man Drac­u­la, he only showed it at a few of his art shows before DC Comics called and demand­ed an imme­di­ate end to its screen­ings.

Nobody has found a com­plete print since, but you can watch a few min­utes of the sur­viv­ing footage cut to “The Noth­ing Song” by the Vel­vet Under­ground & Nico (a much more endur­ing prod­uct of the Fac­to­ry) in the video at the top of the post. Below that we have the LowRes Wün­der­bred video essay “Decon­struct­ing Andy Warhol’s Bat­man Drac­u­la,” which pro­vides more details on the mak­ing of Bat­man Drac­u­la and its con­text in the careers of Warhol and his col­lab­o­ra­tors. The Film His­to­ries video on Bat­man Drac­u­la just above gets into how the movie opened up a “Pan­do­ra’s box” of unau­tho­rized Bat­man and Bat­man-like movies, includ­ing The Wild World of Bat­woman and the Fil­ipino Alyas Bat­man at Robin. So many Bat­man projects, offi­cial and oth­er­wise, now exist, and so many more remain to be made. But will any of the mate­ri­al’s future stew­ards push its artis­tic bound­aries as much as Warhol did?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of Bat­man in Cin­e­ma: From 1939 to Present

City of Scars: The Impres­sive Bat­man Fan Film Made for $27,000 in 21 Days

Watch Nos­fer­atu, the Sem­i­nal Vam­pire Film, Free Online (1922)

Warhol’s Cin­e­ma: A Mir­ror for the Six­ties (1989)

The Uncen­sored Andy Warhol-Direct­ed Video for The Cars’ Hit “Hel­lo Again” (NSFW)

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.

Designer Creates a 3D-Printed Stamp That Replaces Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 Bill

in Creativity, Gender, History, Politics | October 4th, 2018

Above we have a very short video of a hand stamp­ing the face of free­dom fight­er and abo­li­tion­ist Har­ri­et Tub­man, aka Aram­inta Ross, over the stony mug of Andrew Jack­son, aka Old Hick­o­ry, “Indi­an Killer,” and slave­hold­ing sev­enth pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States who presided over the Indi­an Removal Act that inau­gu­rat­ed the Trail of Tears with a speech to Con­gress in which he con­clud­ed the only alter­na­tive to forc­ing native peo­ple off their land might be “utter anni­hi­la­tion.”

Hero to Amer­i­ca Firsters, Jack­son has fea­tured on the U.S. twen­ty-dol­lar bill since 1928. Iron­i­cal­ly, he was bestowed this hon­or under Calvin Coolidge, a pro­gres­sive Repub­li­can pres­i­dent when it came to Civ­il Rights, who in 1924 signed the Indi­an Cit­i­zen­ship Act into law, grant­i­ng all Indige­nous peo­ple dual trib­al and U.S. cit­i­zen­ship.

Any­way, you’ll recall that in 2016, Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Jacob Lew announced “the most sweep­ing and his­tor­i­cal­ly sym­bol­ic makeover of the Amer­i­can cur­ren­cy in a cen­tu­ry,” as The New York Times report­ed, “propos­ing to replace the slave­hold­ing Andrew Jack­son on the $20 bill with Har­ri­et Tub­man.”

Fur­ther­more, Lew planned to add his­toric fem­i­nist and Civ­il Rights fig­ures to the five and ten dol­lar bills, an idea that did not come to fruition. But as we await­ed the replace­ment of Jack­son with Tub­man, well… you know what hap­pened. Andrew Jack­son again became a fig­ure­head of Amer­i­can racism and vio­lence, and the bru­tal new admin­is­tra­tion walked back the new twen­ty. So design­er Dano Wall decid­ed to take mat­ters into his own hands with the cre­ation of the 3D-print­ed Tub­man stamp. As he shows in the short clip above, the trans­formed bills still spend when loaded into vend­ing and smart card machines.

Of course you might nev­er do such a thing (maybe you just want to print Har­ri­et Tub­man faces on plain paper at home?), but you could, if you down­loaded the print files from Thin­gi­verse and made your own Tub­man stamp. Wall refers to an exten­sive argu­ment for the legal­i­ty of mak­ing Tub­man twen­ties. It per­haps holds water, though the Trea­sury Depart­ment may see things dif­fer­ent­ly. In the British Muse­um “Curator’s Cor­ner” video above, numis­ma­tist Tom Hock­en­hull shows us a prece­dent for defac­ing cur­ren­cy from short­ly before World War I, when British suf­frag­ists used a ham­mer and die to stamp “Votes for Women” over the face of Edward VII.

The “delib­er­ate tar­get­ing of the king,” writes the British Muse­um Blog, “could be likened to icon­o­clasm, a direct assault on the male author­i­ty fig­ures that were per­ceived to be uphold­ing the laws of the coun­try.” It’s a prac­tice sup­pos­ed­ly derived from an even ear­li­er act of van­dal­ism in which anar­chists stamped “Vive l’Anarchie” on coins. The process would have been dif­fi­cult and time-con­sum­ing, “prob­a­bly car­ried out by a sin­gle per­son using just one set of indi­vid­ual alpha­bet stamps.” Thus it is unlike­ly that many of these coins were made, though his­to­ri­ans have no idea how many.

But the sym­bol­ic protest did not stand alone. The defaced cur­ren­cy spread the mes­sage of a broad egal­i­tar­i­an move­ment. The ease of mak­ing Tub­man twen­ties could spread a con­tem­po­rary mes­sage even far­ther.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pow­er­ful Mes­sages That Woody Guthrie & Pete Seeger Inscribed on Their Gui­tar & Ban­jo: “This Machine Kills Fas­cists” and “This Machine Sur­rounds Hate and Forces it to Sur­ren­der”

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

A Big Dig­i­tal Archive of Inde­pen­dent & Alter­na­tive Pub­li­ca­tions: Browse/Download Rad­i­cal Peri­od­i­cals Print­ed from 1951 to 2016

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

How Joan Jett Started the Runaways at 15 and Faced Down Every Barrier for Women in Rock and Roll

in Gender, Music | October 3rd, 2018

These are dark days for every­one who cares about equal­i­ty. After decades of painful progress and some hard-won vic­to­ries for women in the U.S., the guardians of patri­archy seem hell­bent on undo­ing moder­ni­ty and set­ting the clock back decades to keep pow­er. The misog­y­nis­tic spec­ta­cle is nau­se­at­ing. One rem­e­dy, Rebec­ca Trais­ter rec­om­mends in her new book of the same name, is to get “good and mad.” The voic­es of women resist­ing the cur­rent wave of polit­i­cal attacks can guide right­eous out­rage in con­struc­tive direc­tions, and we can learn much from women who pushed past the same bar­ri­ers in the past through sheer force of will.

Women like Joan Jett, who, in a recent inter­view with Court­ney Smith at Refin­ery 29 expressed her thoughts on the chal­lenges of the present (“I think it’s still very much the same as it was many years ago”). Her advice: con­quer fear.

“Peo­ple count on you being fear­ful,” she says, “as a woman or who­ev­er you are and what­ev­er you want to do. They count on that fear to keep them from forg­ing ahead and fig­ur­ing that out. It’s def­i­nite­ly fear-induc­ing, and it’s not a fear you want to face. But it is doable.” The rock icon direc­tor Kevin Ker­slake (who has just released a Jett doc­u­men­tary) calls a “fem­i­nist man­i­festo in the flesh” should know.

Jett her­self express­es some dis­com­fort with the label of fem­i­nism (“I’m for peo­ple being what they want to be”), but her career has served for decades as a mod­el for women seiz­ing pow­er in the music indus­try, and she’s nev­er had any patience with sex­ist dis­crim­i­na­tion. She “want­ed to be a rock­er ever since she got a hold of a gui­tar, even though she was told girls don’t play rock and roll. That didn’t stop her from form­ing The Run­aways despite the sex­ist road­blocks the band faced.” So goes the descrip­tion for Marc Maron’s recent inter­view with Jett on his WTF pod­cast. The ugli­ness women in rock faced in the 70s is depress­ing­ly famil­iar. Before she even learned to play, Jett was told by a gui­tar teacher, “girls don’t play rock and roll.”

Undaunt­ed, she quit lessons, taught her­self, and learned her favorite songs (Free’s “Alright Now” topped the list). Then, when her fam­i­ly moved to L.A., she sought out oth­er like minds to form an all-girl rock band. With no exam­ples to look to, Jett fig­ured it out on her own, find­ing a club that played glam rock for teenagers and find­ing her peo­ple. At fif­teen years old, with­out songs or a demo tape, she called pro­duc­er Kim Fow­ley, then start­ed assem­bling the Run­aways, start­ing with drum­mer Sandy West, then, after play­ing as a trio with Mic­ki Steele, recruit­ing lead gui­tarist Lita Ford, bassist Jack­ie Fox, and singer Cherie Cur­rie. “We went in the stu­dio right away,” she tells Maron.

The Run­aways were “try­ing to express our­selves the way we knew how,” Jett says in her inter­view with Smith. “Not much dif­fer­ent from what the Rolling Stones were doing. We didn’t want bar­ri­ers put up on what we were allowed to sing about, say, or play.” By 1976, they were signed to Mer­cury Records, releas­ing their debut album, and tour­ing with Cheap Trick, Van Halen, Talk­ing Heads, and Tom Pet­ty and the Heart­break­ers. The fol­low­ing year, they released Queens of Noise and quick­ly became asso­ci­at­ed with punk. Amer­i­can crit­ics sav­aged the band, and they faced vio­lence and sneer­ing con­de­scen­sion at home but were beloved super­stars in Japan (see them play “Cher­ry Bomb” live in Japan at the top).

When Cur­ry left The Run­aways that year, Jett took over as the lead singer, and when the band broke up in 1979, she put her­self back togeth­er, moved to New York, cre­at­ed her own label after a cou­ple dozen rejec­tions, and formed The Black­hearts. An unstop­pable musi­cal force, Jett still plays and tours and still refus­es to back down for any­one, even though, she tells Smith, “on some lev­el, it can be eas­i­er not to fight and to go along. That’s what women have to decide: do you want to go along, and maybe your life will be a lit­tle bit more com­fort­able if you don’t make waves?”

Her advice is as straight­for­ward as her path has been rocky—“stand up for your­self… You’ve got to resist that. Find some­one to sup­port you…. We’re still fight­ing the same issues that I was dis­cussing years ago. There’s a thing on a loop about what girls can achieve. When they come up, you’ve got to chal­lenge those assump­tions at every turn.” If anyone’s earned the right to give advice like that to young musi­cians, it’s Joan Jett. Check out the trail­er for her new doc­u­men­tary Bad Rep­u­ta­tion just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

Chrissie Hynde’s 10 Pieces of Advice for “Chick Rock­ers” (1994)

33 Songs That Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of Fem­i­nist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

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

Blondie Drummer Clem Burke and Scientific Researchers Show That Drumming Can Help Kids with Autism Learn More Effectively in School

in Music | October 3rd, 2018

Pho­to via the Clem Burke Drum­ming Project

Musi­cians from clas­sic bands take all sorts of unex­pect­ed paths in their late careers. We’ve seen Grate­ful Dead drum­mer Mick­ey Hart col­lab­o­rate with NASA, Talk­ing Heads front­man David Byrne take on—among a dozen oth­er roles—the man­tle of librar­i­an, and Bruce Spring­steen gui­tarist Steven Van Zandt become a cur­ricu­lum devel­op­er. Turn­ing musi­cal expe­ri­ence to con­scious­ness-expand­ing avo­ca­tion has pro­duced very admirable results—perhaps no more so than in the case of two musi­cians who have used the lat­est research on music ther­a­py to help kids with autism.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Cheap Trick bassist Tom Petersson’s “Rock Your Speech” project, inspired by his autis­tic son Liam’s pos­i­tive response to music. Now reports from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chich­ester describes how drum­mer Clem Burke of Blondie fame has invest­ed his celebri­ty into research on how drum­ming can help kids on the spec­trum improve learn­ing and enhance social inter­ac­tions. It must be not­ed that Burke has not come late­ly to the sci­ence. His Clem Burke Drum­ming Project (CBDP), an asso­ci­a­tion of aca­d­e­mics, drum­mers, uni­ver­si­ty part­ners, and hon­orary “Doc­tor of Rock” Burke, just cel­e­brat­ed its 10-year anniver­sary.

The project has pre­vi­ous­ly researched “the phys­i­cal demands of drum­ming; enhanced health and well­be­ing of drum­ming; enhanced brain struc­ture and func­tion fol­low­ing drum­ming prac­tice,” and oth­er drum­ming-relat­ed sub­jects, includ­ing a drum­ming video game for stress relief. The lat­est find­ings, from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chich­ester and Uni­ver­si­ty Cen­tre Hart­pury, show that “drum­ming for 60 min­utes a week can ben­e­fit chil­dren diag­nosed with autism.” The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chich­ester notes that pre­lim­i­nary results of a ten-week drum­ming inter­ven­tion com­pris­ing two 30-minute drum­ming ses­sions per week showed:

• A vast improve­ment in move­ment con­trol while play­ing the drums, includ­ing dex­ter­i­ty, rhythm, tim­ing.
• Move­ment con­trol was also enhanced while per­form­ing dai­ly tasks out­side the school envi­ron­ment, includ­ing an improved abil­i­ty to con­cen­trate dur­ing home­work.
• A range of pos­i­tive changes in behav­iour with­in school envi­ron­ment, which were observed and report­ed by teach­ers, such as improved con­cen­tra­tion and enhanced com­mu­ni­ca­tion with peers and adults

These sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits do not apply only to stu­dents with autism; “Rock drum­ming,” says lead researcher and CBDP co-founder Mar­cus Smith, can be “a potent inter­ven­tion for indi­vid­u­als expe­ri­enc­ing brain dis­or­ders” of all kinds, and can also improve dex­ter­i­ty, rhythm, and tim­ing (nat­u­ral­ly).

Although a num­ber of stud­ies over the years have made head­lines with sim­i­lar claims, the Clem Burke Project’s ten years of research into the effects of drum­ming on brain health and behav­ior give this study par­tic­u­lar weight. Still, as always in sci­en­tif­ic research, more evi­dence can help refine the appli­ca­tions. Anoth­er researcher in the study, Dr. Ruth Lowry, sounds both excit­ed and cau­tious­ly opti­mistic in her assess­ment of the find­ings, express­ing hopes that more research will “pro­vide fur­ther evi­dence that not only does rock drum­ming have pos­i­tive ben­e­fits in terms of changes in dex­ter­i­ty and con­cen­tra­tion but that wider social and behav­iour­al con­duct ben­e­fits can be observed.”

Maybe Dr. Clem Burke and his team should start a side project with Tom Peters­son, whose musi­cal inter­ven­tions in the lives of kids with autism seem to be find­ing exact­ly such wider ben­e­fits.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cheap Trick’s Bassist Tom Peters­son Helps Kids With Autism Learn Lan­guage With Rock ‘n’ Roll: Dis­cov­er “Rock Your Speech”

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

Steven Van Zandt Cre­ates a Free School of Rock: 100+ Free Les­son Plans That Edu­cate Kids Through Music

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

How Youtube’s Algorithm Turned an Obscure 1980s Japanese Song Into an Enormously Popular Hit: Discover Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love”

in Music | October 3rd, 2018

Spend time lis­ten­ing to 1980s hits, Japan­ese pop, or dis­co clas­sics on Youtube, and you’ll almost cer­tain­ly encounter Mariya Takeuchi’s addic­tive song “Plas­tic Love.” Though first released in 1985 in Japan, it remained almost entire­ly unknown in the rest of the world until a few years ago, when it all of a sud­den attained an enor­mous pop­u­lar­i­ty. Now, hav­ing racked up more than 20 mil­lion views, the song has quite a few peo­ple — even many of those who have put it into heavy rota­tion on their per­son­al playlists — ask­ing what it is and where it came from. The video essay above, by explain­er of ani­ma­tion and Japan­ese music Stevem, breaks down the his­to­ry of “Plas­tic Love,” both as an obscure 80s Japan­ese pop song and an inter­net-era phe­nom­e­non.

“Plas­tic Love” has become the best-known exam­ple of “city pop,” a genre we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture and one Stevem describes as “a type of music that was reflec­tive of the new, shiny, mod­ern Japan” that emerged as the coun­try’s rebuilt econ­o­my boomed in the 1970s and 80s. “Con­sid­er­ing Japan did­n’t, nor could they, have a mil­i­tary, some of this mon­ey was fun­neled into new tech­nol­o­gy: cas­settes, Walk­mans, VHSs, cars, TVs, video game con­soles.”

The sound­track to “the cos­mopoli­tan lifestyle in full swing” took “bits and pieces from New Wave, synth pop, dis­co, jazz, and what­ev­er else was rel­e­vant at the time and shoved them into a blender to make what could be some of the sharpest pop music to come out of the Land of the Ris­ing Sun.”

The young Mariya Takeuchi was one of the era’s first defin­ing pop idols. Scor­ing a num­ber-one album in 1980, she low­ered her pro­file over the next few years, mar­ry­ing the singer-song­writer Tat­suro Yamashita (now rec­og­nized as a city pop icon in his own right) and col­lab­o­rat­ing with him on an album called Vari­ety, with which she re-emerged in 1984, retak­ing the top spots on the Japan­ese charts. “Plas­tic Love” comes as its sec­ond track, lay­ing down a “shim­mer­ing hyp­not­ic groove, strik­ing you with its beat and nev­er let­ting go.” Not only “a med­i­ta­tion on heart­break, it real­ly speaks to the hol­low, plas­tic feel­ing of what peo­ple do to fill in the sor­rows of their life and lone­li­ness,” acts such as “buy­ing com­mer­cial goods in the hopes that they will make us feel more and avoid deal­ing with our own per­son­al anguish.”

What­ev­er the song’s musi­cal strengths, it took an algo­rithm to bring them to world­wide atten­tion. Youtube, which 80s Japan­ese pop enthu­si­asts dis­cov­ered ear­ly as a way of shar­ing their music,  has become a ver­i­ta­ble “record store in the dig­i­tal space, affect­ing how peo­ple define their taste in the mod­ern era, mass-pro­duc­ing the feel­ing of find­ing these obscure gems on your own in a way that feels nat­ur­al, doing it so well with the pup­pet strings that you don’t even see them.” “Plas­tic Love,” as Vice’s Ryan Basil puts it, “is a rare tune that doesn’t exact­ly need words to expert­ly describe a spe­cif­ic, defined feel­ing – one of lust, heart­break, love, fear, adven­ture, loss, all caught up in the swirling midst of a night out on the town.” Count­less music fans here in the 21st cen­tu­ry — liv­ing in Takeuchi’s home­land Japan, else­where in Asia as I do, in the West, or any­where besides — can now make the sur­pris­ing dec­la­ra­tion he does: “It is, at the moment, my favorite pop song in the world.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream Loads of “City Pop,” the Elec­tron­ic-Dis­co-Funk Music That Pro­vid­ed the Sound­track for Japan Dur­ing the Roar­ing 1980s

Every­thing is a Remix: The Full Series, Explor­ing the Sources of Cre­ativ­i­ty, Released in One Pol­ished HD Video on Its 5th Anniver­sary

Rita Hay­worth, 1940s Hol­ly­wood Icon, Dances Dis­co to the Tune of The Bee Gees Stayin’ Alive: A Mashup

Japan­ese Musi­cians Turn Obso­lete Machines Into Musi­cal Instru­ments: Cath­ode Ray Tube TVs, Over­head Pro­jec­tors, Reel-to-Reel Tape Machines & 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.