An Oral History of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Interviews (in English) with Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe & More
Image by Detief Mewes, via Wikimedia Commons
The Bauhaus, which operated as an influential school in Germany between 1919 and 1933 but lives on as a kind of aesthetic ideal, has its strongest associations with highly visual work, like textiles, graphic design, industrial design, and especially architecture. But a good deal of thought went into establishing the kind of rationality- and functionality-oriented philosophical basis that would produce all that visual work, and you can hear some of the leading lights of the Bauhaus discuss it, in English, on the record Bauhaus Reviewed: 1919 to 1933, now available on Spotify. (If you don’t have Spotify’s software, you can download it here.) You can also purchase your own copy online.
“The bulk of the narrative is by [Walter] Gropius, an articulate and passionate advocate for this remarkable experiment in education,” writes All Music Guide’s Stephen Eddins. “Artist Josef Albers and architect [Ludwig] Mies van der Rohe also contribute commentary. [LTM Records founder] James Nice is credited with ‘curating’ the CD, and it must be his editing that gives the album such a clear and informative narrative structure — one comes away with a vivid understanding of the development of the movement, both philosophically and pragmatically.”
In between the spoken passages on the origins of the Bauhaus, form and totality, handling and texture, utopianism, and other topics besides, Bauhaus Reviewed 1919–1933 offers musical compositions by such Bauhaus-associated composers as Arnold Schoenberg, Josef Matthias Hauer, and George Antheil. You can hear some of the sound from the record repurposed in Architecture as Language, the short about Mies by Swiss filmmaker Alexandre Favre just below. In it that pioneer of modernism discusses the Bauhaus as well as his own individual work, all of it interesting to anyone with an inclination toward midcentury European-American architecture and design, none of it ultimately more relevant than the final words the master speaks: “I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.”
via Monoskop
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
Read More...20,000 Americans Hold a Pro-Nazi Rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939: Chilling Video Re-Captures a Lost Chapter in US History
Our country’s bipartisan system ensures that every election will give rise to a winning side and a losing side—and depressingly, a sizable group who refrained from casting a vote either way.
There are times when the divide between the factions does not seem insurmountable, when leaders in the highest positions of authority seem sincerely committed to reaching across the divide….
And then there are other times.
Earlier in the year, the Women’s March on Washington and its hundreds of sister marches gave many of us reason to hope. The numbers alone were inspiring.
But history shows how great numbers can go the other way too.
With many American high school history curriculums whizzing through World War II in a week, if that, it’s doubly important to slow down long enough to watch the 7 minute documentary above.
What you’re looking at is the 1939 “Pro-American Rally” (aka Pro-Nazi Rally) sponsored by the German American Bund at Madison Square Garden on George Washington’s 207th Birthday. Banners emblazoned with such slogans as “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian Americans,” “Wake Up America. Smash Jewish Communism,” and “1,000,000 Bund Members by 1940” decorated the great hall.
New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia—an Episcopalian with a Jewish mother—considered canceling the event, but ultimately he, along with the American Jewish Committee and the American Civil Liberties Committee decreed that the Bund was exercising its right to free speech and free assembly.
A crowd of 20,000 filled the famous sports venue in mid-town Manhattan to capacity. 1,500 police officers were present to render the Garden “a fortress impregnable to anti-Nazis.” An estimated 100,000 counter-demonstrators were gathering outside.
Police Commissioner Lewis J. Valentine bragged to the press that “we have enough police here to stop a revolution.”
The most disturbing moment in the short film comes at the 3:50 mark, when another security force—the Bund’s Ordnungsdienst or “Order Service” pile on Isidore Greenbaum, a 26-year-old Jewish worker who rushed the podium where bundesführer Fritz Julius Kuhn was fanning the flames of hatred. Valentine’s men eventually pulled them off, just barely managing to save the “anti-Nazi” from the vicious beating he was undergoing.
Reportedly he was beaten again, as the crowd inside the Garden howled for his blood.
The uniformed youth performing a spontaneous hornpipe in the row behind the Bund’s drum and bugle corps is a chilling sight to see.
Director Marshall Curry was spurred to bring the historic footage to Field of Vision, a filmmaker-driven documentary unit that commissions short films as a rapid response to developing stories around the globe. In this case, the developing story was the “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, which had occurred a mere two days before.
“The footage is so powerful,” Curry told an interviewer, “it seems amazing that it isn’t a stock part of every high school history class. But I think the rally has slipped out of our collective memory in part because it’s scary and embarrassing. It tells a story about our country that we’d prefer to forget. We’d like to think that when Nazism rose up, all Americans were instantly appalled. But while the vast majority of Americans were appalled by the Nazis, there was also a significant group of Americans who were sympathetic to their white supremacist, anti-Semitic message. When you see 20,000 Americans gathering in Madison Square Garden you can be sure that many times that were passively supportive.”
Field of Vision co-founder Laura Poitras recalled how after meeting with Curry, “my first thought was, ‘we need to put this film in cinemas,’ and release it like a newsreel.”’ The Alamo Drafthouse cinema chain screened it before features on September 26 of this year.
The Atlantic has photos of the “Pro-American Rally” and other German American Bund-sponsored events in the days leading up to WWII here. Also read an account that appeared in a 1939 edition of The New York Times here.
The International Socialist Review covers the counter-demonstrations in many eyewitness quotes.
via PaleoFuture
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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Hear 1,500+ Genres of Music, All Mapped Out on an Insanely Thorough Interactive Graph
If you are ready for a time-suck internet experience that will also make you feel slightly old and out of step with the culture, feel free to dive into Every Noise at Once. A scatter-plot of over 1,530 musical genres sourced from Spotify’s lists and based on 35 million songs, Every Noise at Once is a bold attempt at musical taxonomy. The Every Noise at Once website was created by Glenn McDonald, and is an offshoot of his work at Echo Nest (acquired by Spotify in 2014).
McDonald explains his graph thus:
This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1,536 genres by Spotify. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
It’s also egalitarian, with world dominating “rock-and-roll” given the same space and size as its neighbors choro (instrumental Brazilian popular music), cowboy-western (Conway Twitty, Merle Haggard, et. al.), and Indian folk (Asha Bhosle, for example). It also makes for some strange bedfellows: what factor does musique concrete share with “Christian relaxitive” other than “reasons my college roommate and I never got along.” Now you can find out!
Click on any of the genres and you’ll hear a sample of that music. Double click and you’ll be taken to a similar scatter-plot graph of its most popular artists, this time with font size denoting popularity and a similar sample of their music.
I’ve been spending most of my time exploring up in the top right corner where all sorts of electronic dance subgenres hang out. I’m not too sure what differentiates “deep tech house” from “deep deep house” or “deep minimal techno” or “tech house” or even “deep melodic euro house” but I now know where to come for a refresher course.
Spotify and other services depend on algorithms and taxonomies like this to deliver consistent listening experiences to its users, and they were attracted to Echo Nest for its work with genres. Echo Nest was originally based on the dissertation work of Tristan Jehan and Brian Whitman at the MIT Media Lab, who over a decade ago were trying to understand the “fingerprints” of recorded music. Now when you listen to Spotify’s personalized playlists, Echo Nest’s research is the engine working in the background.
McDonald says in this 2014 Daily Dot article this isn’t about a machine guessing our taste.
“No, the machines don’t know us better than we do. But they can very easily know more than we do. My job is not to tell you what to listen to, or to pass judgment on things or ‘make taste.’ It’s to help you explore and discover. Your taste is your business. Understanding your taste and situating it in some intelligible context is my business.”
If you’d like a more passive journey through the ever expanding music genre universe, there’s a Spotify playlist of one song from each genre (all 1,500+) above. See you in the deep, deep house!
via Kottke.org
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Eerie 19th Century Photographs of Ghosts: See Images from the Long, Strange Tradition of “Spirit Photography”
We might draw any number of conclusions from the fact that rats’ brains are enough like ours that they stand in for humans in laboratories. A misanthropic existentialist may see the unflattering similarity as evidence that there’s nothing special about human beings, despite our grandiose sense of ourselves. A medieval European thinker would draw a moral lesson, pointing to the rat’s gluttony as nature’s allegory for human greed. And a skeptical observer in the 19th and early 20th centuries might take note of how easily both rats and humans can be manipulated; the latter, for example, by pseudo-phenomena like Spiritualism, which encompassed a wide range of claims about ghosts and the afterlife, from seances to spirit photography.
One such skeptical observer in 1920, Millaias Culpin, even wrote in his Spiritualism and the New Psychology of the “’scientific’ supporters of spiritualism,” most of them “eminent in physical science.” They are easily convinced, Culpin thought, because “they have been trained in a world where honesty is assumed to be a quality of all workers. A laboratory assistant who played a trick upon one of them would find his career at an end, and ordinary cunning is foreign to them. When they enter upon the world of Dissociates, where deceit masquerades under the disguise of transparent honesty, these eminent men are but as babes—country cousins in the hands of confidence-trick men.”
Such adherents of Spiritualist beliefs were taken in not because they were naturally credulous or stupid, but because they had been “trained” to trust the evidence of their senses. So-called spirit photographs, like those you see here, allowed people to “show material evidence for their beliefs.” Photographers who created the images, Mashable explains, could “easily make two exposures on a single negative, manipulate the negative to create ghostly blurs, or overlap two negatives in the darkroom to produce an extra face within the resultant frame.”
The audience for this work was “vast,” and many fit Culpin’s generalizations. In 1921, for example, paranormal investigator Hereward Carrington wrote of “a number of ‘spirit’ and ‘thought’ photographs, the evidence for which seemed to me to be exceptionally good.” In describing other pictures as “obviously fraudulent” or “extremely puzzling,” Carrington made critical distinctions and appeared to use the methods and the language of science in the evaluation of objects purporting to prove the existence of ghosts.
It may seem incredible that spirit photography had widespread appeal for as long as it did. The photographs first began appearing in the 1860s, emerging “from a small Boston portrait studio” and first made by William H. Mumler, the genre’s inventor and “most prominent early proponent,” writes Mashable.
Mumler was neither a photographer nor a medium. He originally worked as a silver engraver, while dabbling in photography in the local studio of a woman named Mrs. Stuart. One day in 1861, in the midst of developing a self-portrait, Mumler reported that the dim figure of a young cousin who had died twelve years earlier emerged in the final print.
These ghostly images continued to appear—on their own, the story goes—and the studio’s receptionist, a part-time medium, helped popularize them. Soon Mumler “received visitors from across America, including the recently widowed Mary Todd Lincoln.” Most of these visitors did not work as scientists or professional paranormal investigators. They were ordinary people bereaved by the mass death of the Civil War and deeply motivated to accept physical confirmation of an afterlife. Moreover, before the rise of Fundamentalist Evangelicalism in the 1920s, Spiritualism was on the front lines of an earlier culture war: spirit photography was “a tangible symbol of the overarching argument of mysticism versus science and rationalism.”
The three images at the top of the post date from the earliest period of spirit photography, between 1862 and 1875, and they were all produced by Mumler in Boston and New York, where he moved in 1869, and where he was charged with fraud, then “acquitted of all charges because they could not be sufficiently proven.” (See many more of his photos at Mashable and the Getty Museum online archive.) Though his business suffered, spirit photography only grew more popular, particularly in Spiritualist circles in Britain, where Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the hyper-rational Sherlock Holmes, was one of the most ardent of Spiritualist believers.
Doyle supported a British photographer named William Hope, who began taking spirit photographs in 1905, founded a group called the Crewe Circle and later “went on to prey on grieving families,” writes River Donaghey at Vice, “who lost loved ones in WWI and desperately wanted photographic proof that their relatives were still hovering around in spectral form.” Even after Hope and his crew were exposed, Doyle continued to support him, going so far as to write a book called The Case for Spirit Photography. The four photographs above and below are Hope’s work (see many more at Vice and the Public Domain Review). They are seriously creepy—in the way movies like The Ring are creepy—but they are also, quite obviously, photographic fictions.
Even as viewers of photography became savvier as the century wore on, many people thrilled to Hope’s work until his death in 1933, maybe for the same reason we watch The Ring; it’s a fun scare, nothing more, if we suspend our disbelief. As for the true believers in spirit photography—they are not so different either from us 21st century sophisticates. We’re still taken in all the time by hoaxes and frauds, maybe because it’s still as easy to push the buttons in our brains, and because, well, we just want to believe.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Drone Footage Captures the US Postal Service Eerily Delivering Mail to Neighborhoods Razed by the California Fires
About 90 miles north of here, a series of fires, fanned by high winds, have destroyed 191,000 acres and left 31 people dead. In the town of Santa Rosa alone, the fires consumed more than 2,800 homes overnight, turning entire neighborhoods into cinders and ash. Captured by a drone, the footage above shows the complete devastation. It also adds a surreal touch–the US Postal Service dutifully delivering mail to empty street addresses.
If you would like to assist with the relief effort (monetarily or otherwise), please visit the Santa Rosa Fire Department website.
Read More...To Read This Experimental Edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, You’ll Need to Add Heat to the Pages
The Jan van Eyck Academie, a “multiform institute for fine art, design and reflection” in Holland, has come up with a novel way of presenting Ray Bradbury’s 1953 work of dystopian fiction, Fahrenheit 451. On Instagram, they write:
This week our colleagues from Super Terrain are working in the Lab as a last stop on their all-over-Europe printing adventures. They showed us this remarkable book they made “Fahrenheit 451”. —
Want to see how the novel unfolds? Just add heat. That’s the idea.
Apparently they actually have plans to market the book. When asked on Instagram, “How can I purchase one of these?,” they replied “We’re working on it! Stay tuned.”
When that day comes, please handle the book with care.
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!
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Read More...If You Drive Down a Stretch of Route 66, the Road Will Play “America the Beautiful”
If you find yourself in New Mexico, traveling down a stretch of Route 66, you can drive over a quarter mile-long rumble strip and your car’s tires will play “America the Beautiful.” That’s assuming you’re driving at the speed limit, 45 miles per hour. Don’t believe me? Watch the clip above.
As Atlas Obscura explains, the “Musical Highway” or “Singing Highway” was “installed in 2014 as part of a partnership between the New Mexico Department of Transportation and the National Geographic Channel.” It’s all part of an elaborate attempt to get drivers to slow down and obey the speed limit. “Getting the rumble strips to serenade travelers required a fair bit of engineering. The individual strips had to be placed at the precise distance from one another to produce the notes they needed to sing their now-signature song.”
You’ll find this particular stretch of road between Albuquerque and Tijeras. Here’s the location on Google Maps. Other musical rumble strips have popped up in Denmark, Japan and South Korea.
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!
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Read More...Napoleon’s Kindle: See the Miniaturized Traveling Library He Took on Military Campaigns
Every piece of technology has a precedent. Most have several different types of precedents. You’ve probably used (and may well own) an eBook reader, for instance, but what would have afforded you a selection of reading material two or three centuries ago? If you were a Jacobean Englishman of means, you might have used the kind of traveling library we featured in August, a handsome portable case custom-made for your books. (If you’re Tom Stoppard in the 21st century, you still do.) If you were Napoleon, who seemed to love books as much as he loved military power — he didn’t just amass a vast collection of them, but kept a personal librarian to oversee it — you’d take it a big step further.
“Many of Napoleon’s biographers have incidentally mentioned that he […] used to carry about a certain number of favorite books wherever he went, whether traveling or camping,” says an 1885 Sacramento Daily Union article posted by Austin Kleon, “but it is not generally known that he made several plans for the construction of portable libraries which were to form part of his baggage.” The piece’s main source, a Louvre librarian who grew up as the son of one of Napoleon’s librarians, recalls from his father’s stories that “for a long time Napoleon used to carry about the books he required in several boxes holding about sixty volumes each,” each box first made of mahogany and later of more solid leather-covered oak. “The inside was lined with green leather or velvet, and the books were bound in morocco,” an even softer leather most often used for bookbinding.
To use this early traveling library, Napoleon had his attendants consult “a catalogue for each case, with a corresponding number upon every volume, so that there was never a moment’s delay in picking out any book that was wanted.” This worked well enough for a while, but eventually “Napoleon found that many books which he wanted to consult were not included in the collection,” for obvious reasons of space. And so, on July 8, 1803, he sent his librarian these orders:
The Emperor wishes you to form a traveling library of one thousand volumes in small 12mo and printed in handsome type. It is his Majesty’s intention to have these works printed for his special use, and in order to economize space there is to be no margin to them. They should contain from five hundred to six hundred pages, and be bound in covers as flexible as possible and with spring backs. There should be forty works on religion, forty dramatic works, forty volumes of epic and sixty of other poetry, one hundred novels and sixty volumes of history, the remainder being historical memoirs of every period.
In sum: not only did Napoleon possess a traveling library, but when that traveling library proved too cumbersome for his many and varied literary demands, he had a whole new set of not just portable book cases but even more portable books made for him. (You can see how they looked packed away in the image tweeted by Cork County Library above.) This prefigured in a highly analog manner the digital-age concept of recreating books in another format specifically for compactness and convenience — the kind of compactness and convenience now increasingly available to all of us today, and to a degree Napoleon never could have imagined, let alone demanded. It’s always good to be the Emperor, but in many ways, it’s better to be a reader in the 21st century.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
Read More...John Coltrane Draws a Mysterious Diagram Illustrating the Mathematical & Mystical Qualities of Music
In a post earlier this year, we wrote about a drawing John Coltrane gave his friend and mentor Yusef Lateef, who reproduced it in his book Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. The strange diagram contains the easily recognizable circle of fifths (or circle of fourths), but it illustrates a much more sophisticated scheme than basic major scale theory. Just exactly what that is, however, remains a mystery. Like every mystical explorer, the work Coltrane left behind asks us to expand our consciousness beyond its narrow boundaries. The diagram may well show a series of “multiplicities,” as saxophonist Ed Jones writes. From the way Coltrane has “grouped certain pitches,” writes vibes player Corey Mwamba, “it’s easy to infer that Coltrane is displaying a form of chromatic modulation.” These observations, however, fail to explain why he would need such a chart. “The diagram,” writes Mwamba, “may have a theoretical basis beyond that.” But does anyone know what that is?
Perhaps Coltrane cleared certain things up with his “corrected” version of the tone circle, above, which Lateef also reprinted. From this—as pianist Matt Ratcliffe found—one can derive Giant Steps, as well as “the Star of David or the Seal of Solomon, very powerful symbolism especially to ancient knowledge and the Afrocentric and eventually cosmic consciousness direction in which Coltrane would ultimately lead on to with A Love Supreme.”
Sound too far out? On the other side of the epistemological spectrum, we have physicist and sax player Stephon Alexander, who writes in his book The Jazz of Physics that “the same geometric principle that motivated Einstein’s theory was reflected in Coltrane’s diagram.” Likewise, saxophonist Roel Hollander sees in the tone circle a number of mathematical principles. But, remaining true to Coltrane’s synthesis of spirituality and science, he also reads its geometry according to sacred symbolism.
In a detailed exploration of the math in Coltrane’s music, Hollander writes, “all tonics of the chords used in ‘Giant Steps’ can be found back at the Circle of Fifths/Fourths within 2 of the 4 augmented triads within the octave.” Examining these interlocking shapes shows us a hexagram, or Star of David, with the third triad suggesting a three-dimensional figure, a “star tetrahedron,” adds Hollander, “also known as ‘Merkaba,” which means “light-spirit-body” and represents “the innermost law of the physical world.” Do we actually find such heavy mystical architecture in the Coltrane Circle?—a “’divine light vehicle’ allegedly used by ascended masters to connect with and reach those in tune with the higher realms, the spirit/body surrounded by counter-rotating fields of light (wheels within wheels)”?
As the occult/magical/Kabbalist associations within the circle increase—the numerology, divine geometry, etc.—we can begin to feel like Tarot readers, joining a collection of random symbolic systems together to produce the results we like best. “That the diagram has to do with something,” writes Mwamba, “is not in doubt: what it has to do with a particular song is unclear.” After four posts in which he dissects both versions of the circle and ponders over the pieces, Mwanda still cannot definitively decide. “To ‘have an answer,’” he writes, “is to directly interpret the diagram from your own viewpoint: there’s a chance that what you think is what John Coltrane thought, but there’s every chance that it is not what he thought.” There’s also the possibility no one can think what Coltrane thought.
The circle contains Coltrane’s musical experiments, yet cannot be explained by them; it hints at theoretical physics and the geometry of musical composition, while also making heavy allusion to mystical and religious symbolism. The musical relationships it constructs seem evident to those with a firm grasp of theory; yet its strange intricacies may be puzzled over forever. “Coltrane’s circle,” writes Faena Aleph, is a “mandala,” expressing “precisely what is, at once, both paradoxical and obvious.” Ultimately, Mwamba concludes in his series on the diagram, “it isn’t possible to say that Coltrane used the diagram at all; but exploring it in relation to what he was saying at the time has led to more understanding and appreciation of his music and life.”
The circle, that is, works like a key with which we might unlock some of the mysteries of Coltrane’s later compositions. But we may never fully grasp its true nature and purpose. Whatever they were, Coltrane never said. But he did believe, as he tells Frank Kofsky in the 1966 interview above, in music’s ability to contain all things, spiritual, physical, and otherwise. “Music,” he says, “being an expression of the human heart, or of the human being itself, does express just what is happening. The whole of human experience at that particular time is being expressed.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...New Documentary on a Weird & Wonderful Dutch Library Now Free to Stream on Amazon Prime
BoingBoing recently ran a short profile on a new documentary that takes you inside the intriguing Ritman Library. Located in Amsterdam, the library houses 23,000 rare books from hermetic/esoteric/occult traditions–Alchemy, Hermetica, Cabala, Magic, Rosicrucianism, Mystic, Theosophy, Freemasonry, Pansophy and much more.
You can watch the trailer for the documentary above. But, even better, you can now stream the complete 90-minute film on Amazon Prime for free. If you have an Amazon Prime account, just click here to start watching. If you don’t, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial, watch the doc, and then decide whether to remain a subscriber or not. It’s your call. (Note: they also offer a similar arrangement for audiobooks from Audible.)
The same deal applies to other films we’ve featured during the past year. Jim Jarmusch’s new documentary Gimme Danger–his “love letter” to punk icons Iggy Pop and The Stooges. And also Long Strange Trip, the new 4‑hour documentary on the Grateful Dead.
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!
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Free Online Literature Courses
Read More...Support Us
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