Follow Cartoonist Lynda Barry’s 2017 “Making Comics” Class Online, Presented at UW-Wisconsin

in Comics/Cartoons, Creativity, Online Courses | September 8th, 2017

Pro­fes­sor Skeletor—aka car­toon­ist and edu­ca­tor Lyn­da Bar­ry—is at it again. Mak­ing Comics (& oth­er Graph­ic For­ma­tions), her fall offer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wisconsin’s Insti­tute for Dis­cov­ery is just get­ting under­way.

Those of us who can’t study in per­son with an edu­ca­tor whose depart­ment chair called her “the best class­room teacher” that he’s ever seen can hap­pi­ly fol­low along online.

As always, her hand­writ­ten home­work assign­ments will be post­ed to her Near­sight­ed Mon­key tum­blr account, along with in-class reflec­tions and inspi­ra­tional bits and bobs pulled off the Inter­net.

The first task, famil­iar to read­ers of her Syl­labus work­book, is to begin a dai­ly diary prac­tice, fill­ing in a tem­plate frame of Barry’s own devis­ing.

Begin by putting your phone on air­plane mode. “The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key ele­ments of dis­cov­ery: lone­li­ness, uncer­tain­ty and bore­dom,” she stat­ed last year, on a vis­it to NASA’s God­dard Space Flight Cen­ter. “Those have always been where cre­ative ideas come from.”

Amen.

Any one of the exer­cis­es will renew your pow­ers of obser­va­tion and sense of con­nec­tion with the world around you. Don’t be sur­prised if you find your­self get­ting up ear­ly or skip­ping some must-see TV in order to ful­ly com­ply with Pro­fes­sor Skeletor’s feel-good assign­ments. There are no wrong answers, pro­vid­ed you go at the assign­ments with ener­gy and a will­ing­ness to play. As Bar­ry said in an inter­view:

Because we tend to give up on the arts so ear­ly in life, I became real­ly inter­est­ed in what would hap­pen if we rein­tro­duce the arts with­out the thought of ‘you’re going to do this to become a great writer or painter,’ but rather that it might help peo­ple with the oth­er work in their field.

For added val­ue, com­plete your first dai­ly diary frame to an audio record­ing of Barry’s timed instruc­tion here. (Ignore the back­ground noise of your teacher’s life—her sneez­ing cat, her hap­py pet birds—or bet­ter yet, let her household’s zesty ener­gy seep into your work.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lyn­da Barry’s Illus­trat­ed Syl­labus & Home­work Assign­ments from Her New UW-Madi­son Course, “Mak­ing Comics”

Lyn­da Barry’s Won­der­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Syl­labus & Home­work Assign­ments from Her UW-Madi­son Class, “The Unthink­able Mind”

Join Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry for a Uni­ver­si­ty-Lev­el Course on Doo­dling and Neu­ro­science

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Map of Computer Science: New Animation Presents a Survey of Computer Science, from Alan Turing to “Augmented Reality”

in Computer Science, Science, Technology | September 8th, 2017

I’ve nev­er want­ed to start a sen­tence with “I’m old enough to remem­ber…” because, well, who does? But here we are. I remem­ber the enor­mous­ly suc­cess­ful Apple IIe and Com­modore 64, and a world before Microsoft. Smart phones were sci­ence fic­tion. To do much more than word process or play games one had to learn a pro­gram­ming lan­guage. These ancient days seemed at the time—and in hind­sight as well—to be the very dawn of com­put­ing. Before the per­son­al com­put­er, such devices were the size of kitchen appli­ances and were hid­den away in mil­i­tary instal­la­tions, uni­ver­si­ties, and NASA labs.

But of course we all know that the his­to­ry of com­put­ing goes far beyond the ear­ly 80s: at least back to World War II, and per­haps even much far­ther. Do we begin with the aba­cus, the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism, the astro­labe, Ada Lovelace and Charles Bab­bage? The ques­tion is maybe one of def­i­n­i­tions. In the short, ani­mat­ed video above, physi­cist, sci­ence writer, and YouTube edu­ca­tor Dominic Wal­li­man defines the com­put­er accord­ing to its basic bina­ry func­tion of “just flip­ping zeros and ones,” and he begins his con­densed his­to­ry of com­put­er sci­ence with trag­ic genius Alan Tur­ing of Tur­ing Test and Bletch­ley Park code­break­ing fame.

Turing’s most sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to com­put­ing came from his 1936 con­cept of the “Tur­ing Machine,” a the­o­ret­i­cal mech­a­nism that could, writes the Cam­bridge Com­put­er Lab­o­ra­to­ry “sim­u­late ANY com­put­er algo­rithm, no mat­ter how com­pli­cat­ed it is!” All oth­er designs, says Walliman—apart from a quan­tum computer—are equiv­a­lent to the Tur­ing Machine, “which makes it the foun­da­tion of com­put­er sci­ence.” But since Turing’s time, the sim­ple design has come to seem end­less­ly capa­ble of adap­ta­tion and inno­va­tion.

Wal­li­man illus­trates the com­put­er’s expo­nen­tial growth by point­ing out that a smart phone has more com­put­ing pow­er than the entire world pos­sessed in 1963, and that the com­put­ing capa­bil­i­ty that first land­ed astro­nauts on the moon is equal to “a cou­ple of Nin­ten­dos” (first gen­er­a­tion clas­sic con­soles, judg­ing by the image). But despite the hubris of the com­put­er age, Wal­li­man points out that “there are some prob­lems which, due to their very nature, can nev­er be solved by a com­put­er” either because of the degree of uncer­tain­ty involved or the degree of inher­ent com­plex­i­ty. This fas­ci­nat­ing, yet abstract dis­cus­sion is where Walliman’s “Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence” begins, and for most of us this will prob­a­bly be unfa­mil­iar ter­ri­to­ry.

We’ll feel more at home once the map moves from the region of Com­put­er The­o­ry to that of Com­put­er Engi­neer­ing, but while Wal­li­man cov­ers famil­iar ground here, he does not dumb it down. Once we get to appli­ca­tions, we’re in the realm of big data, nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing, the inter­net of things, and “aug­ment­ed real­i­ty.” From here on out, com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy will only get faster, and weird­er, despite the fact that the “under­ly­ing hard­ware is hit­ting some hard lim­its.” Cer­tain­ly this very quick course in Com­put­er Sci­ence only makes for an intro­duc­to­ry sur­vey of the dis­ci­pline, but like Wallman’s oth­er maps—of math­e­mat­ics, physics, and chem­istry—this one pro­vides us with an impres­sive visu­al overview of the field that is both broad and spe­cif­ic, and that we like­ly wouldn’t encounter any­where else.

As with his oth­er maps, Wal­li­man has made this the Map of Com­put­er Sci­ence avail­able as a poster, per­fect for dorm rooms, liv­ing rooms, or wher­ev­er else you might need a reminder.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es

How Ada Lovelace, Daugh­ter of Lord Byron, Wrote the First Com­put­er Pro­gram in 1842–a Cen­tu­ry Before the First Com­put­er

Watch Break­ing the Code, About the Life & Times of Alan Tur­ing (1996)

The Map of Math­e­mat­ics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Math Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er

The Map of Chem­istry: New Ani­ma­tion Sum­ma­rizes the Entire Field of Chem­istry in 12 Min­utes

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

Watch Steve Martin Make His First TV Appearance: The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1968)

in Comedy, Television | September 7th, 2017

“What if there were no punch lines?” asks Steve Mar­tin in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy Born Stand­ing Up. “What if there were no indi­ca­tors? What if I cre­at­ed ten­sion and nev­er released it? What if I head­ed for a cli­max, but all I deliv­ered was an anti­cli­max?” These ques­tions moti­vat­ed him to devel­op the dis­tinc­tive style of stand-up com­e­dy — in a sense, an anti-stand-up com­e­dy — that rock­et­ed him to super­star­dom in the 1970s. But before the world knew him as a ban­jo-play­ing fun­ny­man, Mar­tin worked for a cou­ple of his espe­cial­ly notable come­di­an-musi­cian elders: Tom and Dick Smoth­ers, bet­ter known as the Smoth­ers Broth­ers.

“We hap­pened to be walk­ing through the writer area of the show, and there he was, sit­ting at one of our writ­ers’ desks,” Tom says of Mar­tin on the 1968 broad­cast of The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour above. “Lat­er we found out that he actu­al­ly was one of our writ­ers. Since he has­n’t been paid for his work, we thought we’d let him come out tonight and make a few dol­lars.”

So intro­duced, the 22-year-old Mar­tin begins his tele­vi­sion debut by re-intro­duc­ing him­self: “As Tom just said, I’m Steve Mar­tin, and I’ll be out here in a minute. While I’m wait­ing for me, I’d like to jump into kind of a socko-bof­fo com­e­dy rou­tine.” With his prop table ready, he then launch­es into “the fab­u­lous glove-into-dove trick.”

Though the stu­dio audi­ence may look pret­ty square by today’s stan­dards (or even those of the late 1960s), The Smoth­ers Broth­ers Com­e­dy Hour had already built a rep­u­ta­tion for push­ing the enve­lope of main­stream tele­vi­sion com­e­dy. Still, it’s safe to say that its audi­ence had nev­er seen any per­former – and cer­tain­ly not any prop com­ic — quite like Mar­tin before. In this short set, he per­forms a num­ber of delib­er­ate­ly botched or oth­er­wise askew mag­ic tricks, using his tone to gen­er­ate the humor. “If I kept deny­ing them the for­mal­i­ty of a punch line,” as he writes more than 40 years lat­er in Born Stand­ing Up, “the audi­ence would even­tu­al­ly pick their own place to laugh, essen­tial­ly out of des­per­a­tion. This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laugh­ing at some­thing they chose, rather than being told exact­ly when to laugh.”

Watch­ing today, Mar­t­in’s fans will rec­og­nize his trade­mark sen­si­bil­i­ty more quick­ly than his appear­ance, since the clip pre­dates both the white suit and the white hair. Even then, he want­ed to per­form in a way that, in the words of The Guardian’s Rafael Behr, “would unnerve and alien­ate the audi­ence, but also, through self-dep­re­ca­tion, engage them in con­spir­a­cy against him­self.” Mar­tin seems to take a dim view of his own ear­ly tele­vi­sion work, hav­ing described him­self in a 1971 Vir­ginia Gra­ham Show appear­ance as “man­nered, slow and self-aware. I had absolute­ly no author­i­ty,” a qual­i­ty that he has since devel­oped in abun­dance, and of which “the art of hav­ing an act so bad it was good,” as Behr puts it, demands a sur­pris­ing amount.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steve Mar­tin Will Teach His First Online Course on Com­e­dy

Steve Mar­tin & Robin Williams Riff on Math, Physics, Ein­stein & Picas­so in a Heady Com­e­dy Rou­tine (2002)

Steve Mar­tin on the Leg­endary Blue­grass Musi­cian Earl Scrug­gs

Steve Mar­tin Writes a Hymn for Hymn-Less Athe­ists

Steve Mar­tin, “Home Crafts Expert,” Explains the Art of Paper Wadding, Endors­es Bob Ker­rey

Steve Mar­tin Releas­es Blue­grass Album/Animated Video

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

NASA Lets You Download Free Posters Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Voyager Missions

in Astronomy | September 7th, 2017

A quick fyi: Last year, NASA released 14 Free Posters That Depict the Future of Space Trav­el in a Cap­ti­vat­ing­ly Retro Style. Now, on the 40th anniver­sary of the Voy­ager mis­sions (Aug. 20 and Sept. 5, 1977), the space agency has issued three attrac­tive new posters to cel­e­brate our “ambas­sadors to the rest of the Milky Way.” All are free to down­load and print here. Writes Space.com: “One of the Voy­ager posters is an image of a star­ry night sky [see above], and anoth­er adver­tis­es the mis­sion using the flam­boy­ant design style of the 1970s, the decade when the probes launched. A third poster hon­ors the probes’ ‘grand tour’ of the plan­ets, on their way to the edge of the solar sys­tem.” Hap­py down­load­ing!

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Icon­ic 1968 “Earth­rise” Pho­to Was Made: An Engross­ing Visu­al­iza­tion by NASA

NASA Archive Col­lects Great Time-Lapse Videos of our Plan­et

Ray Brad­bury Reads Mov­ing Poem on the Eve of NASA’s 1971 Mars Mis­sion

NASA Presents “The Earth as Art” in a Free eBook and Free iPad App

NASA Sends Image of the Mona Lisa to the Moon and Back

Free Inter­ac­tive e‑Books from NASA Reveal His­to­ry, Dis­cov­er­ies of the Hub­ble & Webb Tele­scopes

Leonard Nimoy Nar­rates Short Film About NASA’s Dawn: A Voy­age to the Ori­gins of the Solar Sys­tem

The Best of NASA Space Shut­tle Videos (1981–2010)

The Planetarium Table Clock: Magnificent 1775 Timepiece Tracks the Passing of Time & the Travel of the Planets

in Art, Technology | September 6th, 2017

If you’re in Zurich, head over to the Bey­er Clock and Watch Muse­um, which presents the his­to­ry of time­keep­ing and time­keep­ing instru­ments, from 1400 BC to mod­ern times. On dis­play, you’ll find sun­di­als, water and tow­er clocks, Renais­sance automa­ta, and pen­du­lum clocks. And the Plan­e­tar­i­um Table Clock fea­tured above.

Made cir­ca 1775, the plan­e­tar­i­um clock keeps time … and so much more. Accord­ing to the Muse­um of Arti­facts web­site, the earth (look in the glass orb) “rotates around the sun in per­fect real time.” And the “oth­er five plan­ets rotate as well–they “go up, down, around, in rela­tion to the etched con­stel­la­tions of pre­cise­ly posi­tioned stars on the crys­tal globe, which if you are smart enough will reveal what sea­son it is.” This fine time­keep­ing piece was the joint cre­ation of Nicole-Reine Lep­aute, a French astronomer who pre­dict­ed the return of Hal­ley’s Comet, and her hus­band, Jean-André Lep­aute, who presided over a clock­mak­ing dynasty and became hor­loger du Roi (clock­mak­er to the king).

It’s hard to imag­ine that the Plan­e­tar­i­um clock did­n’t some­how inspire a more mod­ern creation–the Mid­night Plané­tar­i­um, an astro­nom­i­cal watch that shows the rota­tion of five plan­ets — Mer­cury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Sat­urn. It has a price tag of $220,000 (exclud­ing sales tax). See it on dis­play below.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Clocks Changed Human­i­ty For­ev­er, Mak­ing Us Mas­ters and Slaves of Time

An Ani­mat­ed Alan Watts Wax­es Philo­soph­i­cal About Time in The Fine Art of Goof­ing Off, the 1970s “Sesame Street for Grown-Ups”

Carl Sagan Presents Six Lec­tures on Earth, Mars & Our Solar Sys­tem … For Kids (1977)

What Is Freedom? Watch Four Philosophy Animations on Freedom & Free Will Narrated by Harry Shearer

in Neuroscience, Philosophy | September 6th, 2017

Grow­ing up in Amer­i­ca, I heard near­ly every behav­ior, no mat­ter how unpleas­ant, jus­ti­fied with the same phrase: “It’s a free coun­try.” In her recent book Notes on a For­eign Coun­try, the Istan­bul-based Amer­i­can reporter Suzy Hansen remem­bers singing “God Bless the USA” on the school bus dur­ing the first Iraq war: “And I’m proud to be an Amer­i­can / Where at least I know I’m free.” That “at least,” she adds, is fun­ny: “We were free – at the very least we were that. Every­one else was a chump, because they didn’t even have that obvi­ous thing. What­ev­er it meant, it was the thing that we had, and no one else did. It was our God-giv­en gift, our super­pow­er.”

But how many of us can explain what free­dom is? These videos from BBC Radio 4 and the Open Uni­ver­si­ty’s ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Ideas series approach that ques­tion from four dif­fer­ent angles. “Free­dom is good, but secu­ri­ty is bet­ter,” says nar­ra­tor Har­ry Shear­er, sum­ming up the view of sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher Thomas Hobbes, who imag­ined life with­out gov­ern­ment, laws, or soci­ety as “soli­tary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The solu­tion, he pro­posed, came in the form of a social con­tract “to put a strong leader, a sov­er­eign or per­haps a gov­ern­ment, over them to keep the peace” — an escape from “the war of all against all.”

But that escape comes hand in hand with the unpalat­able prospect of liv­ing under “a fright­en­ing­ly pow­er­ful state.” The nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher John Stu­art Mill, who wrote a great deal about the state’s prop­er lim­i­ta­tions, based his con­cept of free­dom in some­thing called the “harm prin­ci­ple,” which holds that “the state, my neigh­bors, and every­one else should let me get on with my life, as long as I don’t harm any­one in the process.” As “the seedbed of genius” and “the basis of endur­ing hap­pi­ness for ordi­nary peo­ple,” this indi­vid­ual free­dom needs pro­tec­tion, espe­cial­ly when it comes to speech: “Mere­ly caus­ing offense, he thinks, is no grounds for inter­ven­tion, because, in his view, that is not a harm.”

That propo­si­tion remains debat­ed more heat­ed­ly now, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, than Mill prob­a­bly could have imag­ined. But then as now, and as in any time of human his­to­ry, we live in more or less the same world, “a world fes­ter­ing with moral evil, a world of wars, tor­ture, rape, mur­der, and oth­er acts of mean­ing­less vio­lence,” not to men­tion “nat­ur­al evil” like dis­ease, famine, floods, and earth­quakes. This gives rise to per­haps the old­est prob­lem in the philo­soph­i­cal book, the prob­lem of evil: “How could a good god allow any­one to do such hor­rif­ic things?” Some have tak­en the fact that the wars, mur­ders, floods, and earth­quakes con­tin­ue as evi­dence that no such god exists.

But had that god cre­at­ed “human beings that always did the right thing, nev­er harmed any­one else, nev­er went astray,” we’d all have end­ed up “automa­ta, pre­pro­grammed robots.” Bet­ter, in this view, “to have free will with the gen­uine risk that some peo­ple will end up evil than to live in a world with­out choice.” Even so, the mere men­tion of free will, a con­cept no more eas­i­ly defined than that of free­dom itself, opens up a whole oth­er can of worms, espe­cial­ly in light of research like neu­ro­sci­en­tist Ben­jamin Libet’s.

Libet, who “wired up sub­jects to an EEG machine, mea­sur­ing brain activ­i­ty via elec­trodes on our scalps,” found that brain activ­i­ty ini­ti­at­ing a move­ment actu­al­ly hap­pened before the sub­jects thought they’d decid­ed to make that move­ment. Does that dis­prove free will? Does evil dis­prove the exis­tence of a good god? Does offense cause the same kind of harm as phys­i­cal vio­lence? Should we give up more secu­ri­ty for free­dom, or more free­dom for secu­ri­ty? These ques­tions remain unan­swered, and quite pos­si­bly unan­swer­able, but that does­n’t make con­sid­er­ing the very nature of free­dom any less nec­es­sary as human soci­eties — those in “free coun­tries” and oth­er­wise — find their way for­ward.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions on Ethics Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

47 Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain the His­to­ry of Ideas: From Aris­to­tle to Sartre

An Ani­mat­ed Aldous Hux­ley Iden­ti­fies the Dystopi­an Threats to Our Free­dom (1958)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Gustav Klimt’s Haunting Paintings Get Re-Created in Photographs, Featuring Live Models, Ornate Props & Real Gold

in Art, Photography | September 5th, 2017

Image by Inge Prad­er

Gus­tav Klimt paint­ed a glit­ter­ing, erot­ic, haunt­ing real­i­ty of his own, dis­tinc­tive even by the stan­dards of his artis­ti­cal­ly abun­dant envi­ron­ment of late 19th- and ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Vien­na. “Who­ev­er wants to know some­thing about me,” he once wrote in a com­men­tary on the self-por­trait he nev­er paint­ed, “ought to look care­ful­ly at my pic­tures.” Giv­en the lev­el of scruti­ny with which she’s no doubt had to look at his pic­tures, Klimt’s coun­try­woman Inge Prad­er must there­fore know every­thing about the painter there is to know.

Image by Inge Prad­er

A pho­tog­ra­ph­er with a wide vari­ety of cor­po­rate clients, Prad­er has drawn a good deal of atten­tion by shoot­ing recre­ations of Klimt’s can­vass­es made for Vien­na’s Life Ball, an AIDS char­i­ty event, using real mod­els, real cos­tumes, and real gold. That last has a par­tic­u­lar impor­tance, giv­en Prader’s focus on paint­ings from the “Gold­en Phase” that Klimt entered after becom­ing a suc­cess. “In 1903 Klimt vis­it­ed Venice, Ravenne and Flo­rence,” writes Kon­bini’s Don­nia Ghe­zlane-Lala. “It was his vis­it to the San Vitale basil­i­ca in Ravenne that struck him the most. Fas­ci­nat­ed by Byzan­tine mosaics, he decid­ed to inte­grate the colour gold into his work using gold paper and gold leaf. Also, fun fact, Klimt was the son of a gold­smith.”

Image by Inge Prad­er

Prader’s “care­ful­ly posed mod­els and intri­cate­ly craft­ed props dupli­cate some of Klimt’s most icon­ic mas­ter­works like Death and Life and Beethoven Frieze, mir­ror­ing the gold hued, high­ly dec­o­ra­tive and erot­ic aes­thet­ic the Aus­tri­an artist became best known for,” writes Design­boom’s Nina Azzarel­lo. “Rich­ly orna­ment­ed cos­tumes cloth­ing war­riors and women alike are sit­u­at­ed along­side semi-nude fig­ures and set against detailed mosa­ic back­drops.” These “par­adise-like con­di­tions” on the can­vas trans­fer sur­pris­ing­ly well to pho­tog­ra­phy, espe­cial­ly with the eye Prad­er has devel­oped in fash­ion and adver­tis­ing, two realms guar­an­teed to instill any­body with a pos­i­tive­ly Klimt-like appre­ci­a­tion for strik­ing com­po­si­tions, lux­u­ri­ous mate­ri­als, and beau­ti­ful women.

You can see more of Prader’s Klimt recre­ations at Kon­bi­ni and Design­boom.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Cre­ates Stun­ning Real­is­tic Por­traits That Recre­ate Sur­re­al Scenes from Hierony­mus Bosch Paint­ings

Flash­mob Recre­ates Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” in a Dutch Shop­ping Mall

How Famous Paint­ings Inspired Cin­e­mat­ic Shots in the Films of Taran­ti­no, Gilliam, Hitch­cock & More: A Big Super­cut

Name That Paint­ing!

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Earliest Known Appearance of the F‑Word, in a Bizarre Court Record Entry from 1310

in English Language | September 5th, 2017

Pho­to by Paul Booth

You val­ue deco­rum, pro­pri­ety, elo­quence, you trea­sure le mot juste and ago­nize over dic­tion as you com­pose polite but strong­ly-word­ed let­ters to the edi­tor. But alas, my lit­er­ate friend, you have the mis­for­tune of liv­ing in the age of Twit­ter, Tum­blr, et al., where the favored means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion con­sists of ready­made mimet­ic words and phras­es, pho­tos, videos, and ani­mat­ed gifs. World lead­ers trade insults like 5th graders—some of them do not know how to spell. Respect­ed sci­en­tists and jour­nal­ists debate anony­mous strangers with car­toon avatars and work-unsafe pseu­do­nyms. Some of them are robots.

What to do?

Embrace it. Insert well-placed pro­fan­i­ties into your com­mu­niqués. Indulge in bawdi­ness and rib­aldry. You may notice that you are doing no more than writ­ers have done for cen­turies, from Rabelais to Shake­speare to Voltaire. Pro­fan­i­ty has evolved right along­side, not apart from, lit­er­ary his­to­ry. T.S. Eliot, for exam­ple, knew how to go low­brow with the best of them, and gets cred­it for the first record­ed use of the word “bull­shit.” As for anoth­er, even more fre­quent­ly used epi­thet in 24-hour online commentary?—well, the word “F*ck” has a far longer his­to­ry, grant­i­ng its apt pub­lic use recent­ly by seis­mol­o­gist Steven Gib­bons an added author­i­ty.

Not long ago we alert­ed you to the first known use of the ver­sa­tile obscen­i­ty in a 1528 mar­gin­al note scrib­bled in Cicero’s De Offici­is by a monk curs­ing his abbot. Not long after this dis­cov­ery, notes Medievalists.net, anoth­er schol­ar found the word in a 1475 poem called Flen fly­ys. This was thought to be the ear­li­est appear­ance of “f*ck” as a pure­ly sex­u­al ref­er­ence until medieval his­to­ri­an Paul Booth of Keele Uni­ver­si­ty dis­cov­ered an instance dat­ing over a hun­dred years ear­li­er. Rather than with­in, or next to, a work of lit­er­a­ture, how­ev­er, the word appears in a set of 1310 Eng­lish court records. And no, it is decid­ed­ly not a legal term.

The doc­u­ments con­cern the case of “a man named Roger Fucke­bythenavele.” Used three times in the record, the name, says Booth, is prob­a­bly not a joke made by the scribe but some kind of bizarre nick­name, though one hopes not a descrip­tion of the crime. “Either it refers to an inex­pe­ri­enced cop­u­la­tor, refer­ring to some­one try­ing to have sex with a navel,” says Booth, stat­ing the obvi­ous, “or it’s a rather extrav­a­gant expla­na­tion for a dimwit, some­one so stu­pid they think that this is the way to have sex.” Our medieval gent had oth­er prob­lems as well. He was called to court three times with­in a year before being pro­nounced “out­lawed,” which The Inde­pen­dent’s Loul­la-Mae Eleft­he­ri­ou-Smith sug­gests exe­cu­tion but prob­a­bly refers to ban­ish­ment.

For the word to have such casu­al­ly hilar­i­ous or insult­ing cur­ren­cy in the ear­ly 14th cen­tu­ry, it must have come from an even ear­li­er time. Indeed, “f*ck is a word of Ger­man ori­gin,” notes Jesse Shei­d­low­er, author of an ety­mo­log­i­cal his­to­ry called The F Word, “relat­ed to words in sev­er­al oth­er Ger­man­ic lan­guages, such as Dutch, Ger­man, and Swedish, that have sex­u­al mean­ings as well as mean­ing such as ‘to strike’ or ‘to move back and forth’” (nat­u­ral­ly). So, in oth­er words, it’s just a word. But in this case it might have also been a weapon, Booth spec­u­lates, wield­ed “by a revenge­ful for­mer girl­friend. Four­teenth-cen­tu­ry revenge porn per­haps…” If that’s not evi­dence for you that the present may not be unlike the past, then maybe take note of the appear­ance of the word “twerk” in 1820.

h/t Rick Davis

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Young T.S. Eliot Writes “The Tri­umph of Bullsh*t” and Gives the Eng­lish Lan­guage a New Exple­tive (1910)

Steven Pinker Explains the Neu­ro­science of Swear­ing (NSFW)

Stephen Fry, Lan­guage Enthu­si­ast, Defends The “Unnec­es­sary” Art Of Swear­ing

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

Learn the Untold History of the Chinese Community in the Mississippi Delta

in History | September 5th, 2017

The word “nativist” always sounds odd to me giv­en that most of those to whom it applies descend from peo­ple who arrived in North Amer­i­ca one or two hun­dred years ago to find peo­ple who had been on the con­ti­nent for many thou­sands of years. But if we were, in defi­ance of his­to­ry, to con­fer native sta­tus upon the many waves of Euro­pean immi­grants who pop­u­lat­ed the coun­try before and after the Civ­il War, then we must also grant such sta­tus to the many Chi­nese immi­grants who did so, build­ing rail­roads and busi­ness­es all over the U.S., includ­ing on the west­ern fron­tier in Mis­sis­sip­pi.

Chi­nese immi­grants first arrived in the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta after the end of slav­ery, respond­ing to cot­ton planters’ need for a new­ly exploitable work­force. Chi­nese labor­ers, says the nar­ra­tor in the Al Jazeera video above, “were cheap, dis­pos­able, and polit­i­cal­ly voice­less.” But they were, at least, paid for their work, and free to leave it, as most of them did when they could, to build their own eco­nom­ic means—largely busi­ness­es “serv­ing the black com­mu­ni­ty when the white com­mu­ni­ty wouldn’t.” In an NPR pro­file of the Delta Chi­nese com­mu­ni­ty, Melis­sa Block inter­viewed Ray­mond Wong, whose fam­i­ly arrived some­what lat­er, in the 1930s. “We were in-between,” he tells her, “We’re not black, we’re not white. So that by itself gives you some iso­la­tion.”

Pho­to by Mar­i­on Post Wolcott/Library of Con­gress

That in-between-ness also grants a good deal of invis­i­bil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­ties that don’t fit into the bina­ry pat­terns of think­ing in South­ern cul­ture and his­to­ry or the over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tions of U.S. demo­graph­ic his­to­ry in gen­er­al. As his­to­ri­an David Reimers demon­strates in his book Oth­er Immi­grants, in addi­tion to native Amerindi­ans, Euro­peans, and enslaved African peo­ple, the coun­try has been inhab­it­ed by free Black, Caribbean, Asian, and Latin Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ties since the 16th cen­tu­ry and up to, and after, the harsh exclu­sion acts of the 19th cen­tu­ry. The U.S. would not be rec­og­niz­able with­out such com­mu­ni­ties. As far back as the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, he writes, “Penn­syl­va­nia and New York City, with their eth­ni­cal­ly diverse pop­u­la­tions, became mod­els for the Amer­i­can future, a plu­ral­ist soci­ety.”

In the South, non-Euro­pean immi­grant com­mu­ni­ties have been small­er minori­ties, like the Delta Chi­nese. Nonethe­less, as Mis­sis­sip­pi res­i­dent Frie­da Quon recalls of grow­ing up in seg­re­gat­ed Mis­sis­sip­pi, the Chi­nese immi­grants who set­tled from Mem­phis to Vicks­burg “real­ly filled a par­tic­u­lar need”—first for labor then for services—“because nobody else want­ed to do it.” Even after the com­mu­ni­ty endured many years of big­otry and legal dis­crim­i­na­tion dur­ing the exclu­sion acts, sev­er­al men dis­tin­guished them­selves among the 13,000 Chi­nese Amer­i­cans who served in the U.S. armed forces dur­ing World War II.

The 10-minute trail­er above for Hon­or and Duty, a three part doc­u­men­tary series about the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta Chi­nese com­mu­ni­ty, begins with a brief pro­file of the almost two hun­dred Chi­nese Amer­i­can sol­diers, marines, sailors, and air­men from the region. Direc­tor E. Saman­tha Cheng made the film as part of her larg­er mis­sion to tell Asian-Amer­i­can his­to­ry, which few Amer­i­cans of any descent know very much about. In fact, she took on her mis­sion after recov­er­ing from the shock of learn­ing as an adult about the U.S.‘s Japan­ese intern­ment camps dur­ing the war, some­thing she had nev­er been taught in New York City pub­lic schools.

Cheng was sur­prised dur­ing her film­ing to meet so many Chi­nese-Amer­i­cans with molasses-thick South­ern accents. “Even their Chi­nese accent has a South­ern twang to it,” she tells NBC. That’s because, though accent alone does not a “native” make, the Chi­nese com­mu­ni­ties in the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta are, as much as any­one else in the region, South­ern­ers.

The AJ video is part of a series on 150 years of Chi­nese cul­ture and cui­sine in the U.S. See Part One, on San Fran­cis­co, here, and the Part Two, cov­ers Los Ange­les, here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michio Kaku on Why Immi­grants Are America’s Secret Weapon: They Com­pen­sate for Our Mediocre STEM Edu­ca­tion & Keep Pros­per­i­ty Going

Albert Ein­stein Gives a Speech Prais­ing Diver­si­ty & Immi­grants’ Con­tri­bu­tions to Amer­i­ca (1939)

Ian McK­ellen Reads a Pas­sion­ate Speech by William Shake­speare, Writ­ten in Defense of Immi­grants

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

The 100 Funniest Films of All Time, According to 253 Film Critics from 52 Countries

in Comedy, Film | September 4th, 2017

Does com­e­dy come with an expi­ra­tion date? Schol­ars of the field both ama­teur and pro­fes­sion­al have long debat­ed the ques­tion, but only one aspect of the answer has become clear: the best com­e­dy films cer­tain­ly don’t. That notion man­i­fests in the vari­ety of cin­e­mat­ic eras rep­re­sent­ed in BBC Cul­ture’s recent poll of 177 film crit­ics to deter­mine the 100 great­est com­e­dy films of all time. Most of us have seen Harold Ramis’ Ground­hog Day at some point (and prob­a­bly at more than one point) over the past 24 years; few­er of us have seen the Marx Broth­ers’ pic­ture Duck Soup, but even those of us who con­sid­er our­selves far too cool and mod­ern to watch the Marx Broth­ers have to acknowl­edge its genius.

That top ten runs as fol­lows:

1. Some Like It Hot (Bil­ly Wilder, 1959)
2. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb (Stan­ley Kubrick, 1964)
3. Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)
4. Ground­hog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)
5. Duck Soup (Leo McCarey, 1933)
6. Life of Bri­an (Ter­ry Jones, 1979)
7. Air­plane! (Jim Abra­hams, David Zuck­er and Jer­ry Zuck­er, 1980)
8. Play­time (Jacques Tati, 1967)
9. This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Rein­er, 1984)
10. The Gen­er­al (Clyde Bruck­man and Buster Keaton, 1926)

The BBC have pub­lished the top 100 results (the last spot being a tie between the late Jer­ry Lewis’ The Ladies Man and Mar­tin Scors­ese’s The King of Com­e­dy) on their site, accom­pa­nied by a full list of par­tic­i­pat­ing crit­ics and their votes, crit­ics’ com­ments on the top 25, an essay on whether men and women find dif­fer­ent films fun­ny (most­ly not, but with cer­tain notable splits on movies like Clue­less and Ani­mal House), anoth­er on whether com­e­dy dif­fers from region to region, and anoth­er on why Some Like It Hot is num­ber one.

Though no enthu­si­ast of clas­sic Hol­ly­wood would ever deny Bil­ly Wilder’s gen­der-bend­ing 1959 farce any hon­or, it would­n’t have come out on top in a poll of Amer­i­can and Cana­di­an crit­ics alone: Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Dr. Strangelove wins that sce­nario hand­i­ly. “Intrigu­ing­ly, East­ern Euro­pean crit­ics were much more like­ly to vote for Dr Strangelove than West­ern Euro­pean crit­ics,” adds Chris­t­ian Blau­velt. “Per­haps the US and coun­tries that used to be behind the Iron Cur­tain appre­ci­ate Dr. Strangelove so much because it ruth­less­ly satiris­es the delu­sions of grandeur held by both sides. And per­haps Some Like It Hot is embraced more by Euro­peans than US crit­ics because, although it’s a Hol­ly­wood film, it has a con­ti­nen­tal flair and dis­tinct­ly Euro­pean atti­tude toward sex.”

Oth­er entries, such as Jacques Tati’s elab­o­rate moder­ni­ty-cri­tiquing 70-mil­lime­ter spec­ta­cle Play­time, have also been received dif­fer­ent­ly, to put it mild­ly, at dif­fer­ent times and in dif­fer­ent places. But if all com­e­dy ulti­mate­ly comes down to mak­ing us laugh, the only way to know your own posi­tion on the cul­tur­al comedic spec­trum is to sim­ply sit down and see what has that sin­gu­lar­ly enjoy­able effect on you. Why not start with Keaton’s The Gen­er­al, which hap­pens to be free to view online — and on some lev­el the pre­de­ces­sor of (and, in the eyes of may crit­ics, the supe­ri­or of) even the phys­i­cal come­dies that come out today?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Mak­ing Intel­li­gent Com­e­dy Movies: 8 Take-Aways from the Films of Edgar Wright

The Gen­er­al, “Per­haps the Great­est Film Ever Made,” and 20 Oth­er Buster Keaton Clas­sics Free Online

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 358 Film­mak­ers

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

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.