Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, the father of Baroque painting, shocked the upper class aesthetes of his day by drafting prostitutes and proletariats as models for his primarily Biblical subjects.
Ten years ago, under the direction of founder Ludovica Rambelli, eight members of the Italian company, Malatheatre, discovered first hand the insanely rigorous poses Caravaggio demanded of his models, creating 23 tableaux vivantsinspired by the master’s oeuvre.
The company sought less to reproduce the paintings than the scene Caravaggio would have gazed on from behind his easel.
The 13 stagings in the video above make one aware of the intense physicality evident in Caravaggio’s work.
All those extended arms and inversions are agony for a model. After 30 seconds or so, even a sharply inclined neck or bent back can serve up a small taste of what it’s like to be crucified.
The result is exquisite. The eight players are not just extraordinarily fit specimens, they have clearly devoted much thought to the emotional life of each character they embody, sustaining the moment with great focus and determination.
When not called upon to model, the performers become stage hands, helping each other to arrange the simple, well chosen props and flowing mantles.
(I enjoyed the small joke of a female Bacchus.)
Performed live to selections from Mozart, Bach, and Vivaldi, this company has settled on the Lux Aeterna section of Mozart’s Requiem to accompany their archival footage.
The next opportunity to see the show performed live will be in Naples on December 28.
Have a look at the video below, for some comparisons between the original paintings and the 13 tableaux vivants seenin the video:
Sixty years ago, Art Kane assembled one of the largest groups of jazz greats in history. No, it wasn’t an all-star big band, but a meeting of veteran legends and young upstarts for the iconic photograph known as “A Great Day in Harlem.” Fifty-seven musicians gathered outside a brownstone at 17 East 126th St.—accompanied by twelve neighborhood kids—from “big rollers,” notes Jazzwise magazine, like “Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Count Basie, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins and Pee Wee Russell to then up-and-coming names, Benny Golson, Marion MacPartland, Mary Lou Williams and Art Farmer.”
Sonny Rollins was there, one of only two musicians in the photo still alive. The other, Benny Golson, who turns 90 next year, remembers getting a call from Village Voice critic Nat Hentoff, telling him to get over there. Golson lived in the same building as Quincy Jones, “but somehow he wasn’t called or he didn’t make it.”
Other people who might have been in the photograph but weren’t, Golson says, because they were working (and the 10 a.m. call time was a stretch for a working musician): “John Coltrane, Miles, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman.” And Buddy Rich, whom Golson calls the “greatest drummer I ever heard in my life” (adding, “but his personality was horrible.”)
The next year, everything changed—or so the story goes—when revolutionary albums hit the scene from the likes of Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Ornette Coleman, and Charles Mingus. These records pushed experimental forms, leaving behind the confines of both swing and bebop. But Kane’s jazz class photo shows us, Matthew Kessel writes at Vulture, “a portrait of harmony, old and new guard alike peaceably intermingling. The photo suggests that jazz is as much about continuity and tradition as it is about radical change.” The photo has since become a tradition itself, hanging on the walls of thousands of homes, bookshops, record stores, barbershops, and restaurants. (Get your copy here.)
Originally titled “Harlem 1958,” Kane’s image has inspired some notable homages in black culture. In 1998, XXL magazine tapped Gordon Parks to shoot “A Great Day in Hip Hop” for a now-historic cover. And this past summer, Netflix gathered 47 black creatives behind more than 20 original Netflix shows for the redux “A Great Day in Hollywood.” The photo also inspired a documentary of the same title in 1994 (at whose website you can click on each musician for a short bio). At the Daily News, Sarah Goodyear tells the story of how Kane conceived and executed the ambitious project for a special jazz edition of Esquire.
It was his “first professional shooting assignment and, with it, he ended up making history by almost by accident.” Goodyear quotes Kane’s son Jonathan, himself a New York musician, who remarks, “certain things end up being bigger than the original intention. The photograph has become part of our cultural fabric.” For longtime residents of Harlem, the so-called Capital of Black America, and a spiritual home of jazz, it’s just like an old family portrait. See a fully annotated version of “A Great Day in Harlem” at Harlem.org, and at the Daily News, an interactive version with links to YouTube recordings and performances from every one of the 57 musicians in the picture.
This month, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the photo, Wall of Sound Gallery will publish the book Art Kane: Harlem 1958, a retrospective with outtakes from the photo session and text from Quincy Jones, Benny Golson, Jonathan Kane, and Art himself. “The importance of this photo transcends time and location,” writes Jones in his forward, “leaving it to become not only a symbolic piece of art, but a piece of history. During a time in which segregation was very much still a part of our everyday lives, and in a world that often pointed out our differences instead of celebrating our similarities, there was something so special and pure about gathering 57 individuals together, in the name of jazz.”
Many of the works we found—well, nobody knew they were there. Nobody knew anything about the artists. … They weren’t important, but rather beholden to their fathers, mothers, and husbands. They had no voice.
The paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures the late Jane Fortune refers to above were discovered in museum storage spaces throughout Florence.
Many of their female creators were acclaimed during their lifetimes. By the time Fortune set about restoring their work—and visibility —to the public view, they were virtually unknown, even to museum staff.
Saint Catherine with Lily by Plautilla Nelli
That may change as early as the fall of 2019, when A Space of Their Own, an illustrated online database of over 600 female artists working in the US and Europe between the 15th and 19th centuries, launches.
In preparation for their reintroduction, many of the works appearing on A Space of Their Own have undergone extensive restoration, courtesy of Jane Fortune’s nonprofit Advancing Women Artists.
David and Bathsheba by Artemisia Gentileschi
Interestingly, women make up the majority of art restorers in Florence. This professional dominance can be traced back to the mid-60s, when a catastrophic flood laid waste to millions of the city’s art treasures. “It was the first time women began wearing trousers in Florence,” Linda Falcone, AWA’s current director told artnet. “Women’s liberation in Florence is deeply linked to the art restoration effort.”
Many of the artists in the database were self-taught, barred from seeking formal training or studying anatomy on account of their gender. They could not hope to make a living from their talents when women were forbidden from issuing invoices. And then, of course, there are the demands of marriage and motherhood.
Small wonder they have been so underrepresented in museums and art history books.
As an American living outside America, I’m often asked how best to see my homeland by people wanting to visit it. I always suggest the same method: road-tripping, preferably across the entire continent — a way of experiencing the U.S. of A guaranteed to at once to confirm and shatter the visitor’s pre-existing perceptions of the country. But even under the best possible conditions, such road trips have their arduous stretches and even their dangers, a fact understood by nobody better than by the black travelers of the Green Book era. Published between 1936 and 1967, the guide officially known as The Negro Motorist Green Book informed such travelers of where in America (and later other countries as well) they could have a meal, stay the night, and get their car repaired without prejudice.
Though the Green Book ceased publication not long after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, interest in the America they reflect hasn’t vanished, and has in fact grown in recent years. Academia has produced more studies of Jim Crow-era travel over the past decade or two, and this Thanksgiving will see the wide release of Green Book, Peter Farrelly’s feature film about the friendship between black pianist Don Shirley and the chauffeur who drove him through the Deep South in the 1960s. “To flip through a Green Book is to open a window into history and perhaps to see, the tiniest amount, through the eyes of someone who lived it,” writes K Menick on the NYPL’s blog. “Read these books; map them in your mind. Think about the trips you could take, can take, will take. See how the size of the world can change depending on the color of your skin.”
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.
Though we can trace the history of paper aircraft back 2000 years to the Chinese and their kites, and into the 19th century with the French and their imaginary airships, the origin of the modern paper airplane is shrouded in mystery. A San Diego Reader article placed the birth somewhere in 1910. By 1915, most American kids were already tormenting teachers. And Jack Northrup used paper models to work on aerodynamics at Lockheed in the 1930s, but even that doesn’t do much to explain how such a ubiquitous object has continued to be so humble and ordinary while inspiring a recent upsurge of interest.
You can choose by difficulty level, whether or not you will need scissors, or sort by distance, acrobatics, time aloft, or purely decorative.
One of the reasons for the renewed interest in paper airplanes is the use of CAD (computer aided design) in constructing prototypes, and that in itself is a response to the challenge set by various Guinness world records.
The current distance record is 226 feet, 10 inches, set in March 2012 by a former college quarterback Joe Ayoob. The plane was designed by television producer John Collins, who used Ayoob’s throwing arm strength to break the previous record holder by nearly 20 feet.
The longest time a paper airplane has been in the air is currently 27.6 seconds, set in 1998 by Ken Blackburn at the Georgia Dome. He was breaking his own record for the third time.
Lastly, the record for largest paper airplane is 40 ft 10 inches, designed by students from the Technology University of Delft in 1995.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Since 2006, Dunkin’ Donuts has used the tagline “America Runs on Dunkin’,” presumably alluding to the coffee and donuts that get millions of Americans through each morning. But maybe, all along, they’ve had something more in mind. Above, Dunkin’ presents a tiny home powered by biofuel made from spent coffee grounds, a process masterminded by a company called Blue Marble Biomaterials. Working with luxury tiny homebuilder New Frontier Tiny Homes, they’ve created a process–notes a Dunkin’ press release–that works something like this:
Step 1: Extract excess oils in the spent coffee grounds. There can be natural oils left in spent coffee grounds, all depending on the coffee bean type and original processing methods.
Step 2: Mix and react. These oils are then mixed with an alcohol to undergo a chemical reaction known as transesterification. This produces biodiesel and glycerin as a byproduct.
Step 3: Refine. The biodiesel is washed and refined to create the final product.
When all is said and done, 170 pounds of used coffee grounds translates into one gallon of fuel. From 65,000 pounds of coffee grounds, you got enough juice to power a 275 square foot home, at least for a while.
The “biopic” has delivered dramatic retellings of famous figures’ lives since the very earliest days of cinema. We hunger, it seems, to see more-or-less-faithful approximations of our idols stride across the screen, enacting events witnessed by millions and those hidden away from everyone. In the case of popular musicians, these tend to involve epic alcohol and drug use, tumultuous love affairs, stadium-sized triumphs and the crushing defeats of falling out of cultural favor. Such scenes can prove difficult to recreate convincingly, especially the music and signature moves of world famous stars.
Condensing lifetimes into marketable narrative films that hit typical Hollywood beats also involves taking a fair amount of license. And as a spate of articles like “Everything Bohemian Rhapsody Got Wrong About Freddie Mercury’s Life” testify, the new biopic about Queen singer Freddie Mercury, played in the film by Rami Malek, twists or totally changes key events in Mercury’s life. The film re-imagines, for example, how Mercury met his bandmembers, his girlfriend Mary, and Jim Hutton, his longtime and final partner.
And, oddly, it imagines Mercury telling Queen about his HIV diagnosis during rehearsals for their 1985 Live Aid appearance, which it stages as a reunion, showing the band as having been on hiatus while members pursued solo projects. The truth, however, is that Mercury didn’t receive his diagnosis until 1987, and his bandmates weren’t fully aware of his illness until 1989. And when the band came together to perform at Live Aid, they had just toured the world in support of their 1984 album The Works.
Such distortions are a little perplexing given that Brian May and Roger Taylor served as creative consultants, sitting in on set during the production. The film has been also been accused of “straightwashing” Mercury’s sexuality and glossing over his roots and religion. You’ll have to evaluate the merits of these charges for yourself, but the case remains that if we want to know what Mercury’s life was really like, we need to supplant the entertaining fiction with the even more compelling truth.
The video above helps in some small part to fill gaps in our knowledge of Mercury’s last years, editing together interviews, TV clips, and performance footage. Although Mercury was very sick during this period, you would hardly have known it, and most of the people around him didn’t. He continued to write and record, working hard on Queen’s last album, Innuendo, released in the final year of his life.
We learn that his closest friends, colleagues, and bandmembers were in denial, “right up to the last minute,” as Brian May says, about the severity of his disease. “We sort of refused to know” how bad it was, May admits. Mercury himself pushed the knowledge away, immersing himself in his music to keep going. “The sicker Freddie got,” says Roger Taylor, “the more he seemed to need to record to give himself something to do, you know, some sort of reason to get up… so it was a period of fairly intense work.”
Mercury’s early death was tragic, but he met it heroically. And though his bandmates struggled to face the truth, they rallied around him in support, both in life and in death. When the tabloid press viciously slandered and attacked him, May and Taylor went on television to defend their friend. “He had a very responsible attitude to everyone that he was close to and he was a very generous and caring person to all the people that came through his life and more than that you can’t ask,” said May in a 1991 interview appearance after Mercury passed away. “I tell you we do feel absolutely bound to stick up for him,” added Taylor, “because he can’t stick up for himself anymore, you know?”
Often we get to know each other by talking which foods we like. Perhaps even more often, we get to know each other by talking about which foods we hate. Entertaining disagreements tend to arise from such discussions, usually around traditionally divisive comestibles like anchovies, cilantro, brussel sprouts, or the Japanese dish of fermented soybeans known as natto. But however many of us prefer to avoid them, these foods all look more or less conventional compared to the dishes curated by the Disgusting Food Museum, which the Washington Post’s Maura Judkis describes as “the world’s first exhibition devoted to foods that some would call revolting.”
“The exhibit has 80 of the world’s most disgusting foods,” says the museum’s official site. Adventurous visitors will appreciate the opportunity to smell and taste some of these notorious foods. Do you dare smell the world’s stinkiest cheese? Or taste sweets made with metal cleansing chemicals?” Judkis notes that “the museum’s name and its contents are pretty controversial — one culture’s disgusting is another culture’s delicacy.
That goes for escamoles, the tree-ant larvae eaten in Mexico, or shirako, the cod sperm eaten in Japan, or bird’s nest soup, a Chinese dish of nests made from bird saliva.” It all goes to emphasize the Disgusting Food Museum’s stated premises: “Disgust is one of the six fundamental human emotions. While the emotion is universal, the foods that we find disgusting are not. What is delicious to one person can be revolting to another.”
With interest in food seemingly at an all-time high — and not just food, but traditional food from all around the world — the cultural studies wing of academia has begun to get serious mileage out of that proposition. But the Disgusting Food Museum has taken on a less intellectual and much more visceral mission, placing before its visitors durian fruit, banned from many a public space across Asia for its sheer stinkiness; casu marzu, which the museum’s site describes as “maggot-infested cheese from Sardinia”; and hákarl, which Judkis describes as “a putrid shark meat dish from Iceland that the late Anthony Bourdain said was one of the worst things he had ever tasted.”
You can learn more about these and the Disgusting Food Museum’s other offerings from the Associated Press video at the top of the post, as well as at Smithsonian and the New York Times. If you’d like to see, smell, and even taste some of its exhibits for yourself, you’ll have to make the trek out to Malmö, Sweden. The project comes from the mind of Samuel West, a Swede best known for creating the Museum of Failure (previously featured here on Open Culture), whose half-American parentage has made him familiar with several items of U.S. cuisine that gross out non-Americans, from Spam to Jell‑O pasta salad (shades of James Lileks’ midcentury midwest-focused Gallery of Regrettable Food) to Rocky Mountain oysters. Despite being American myself, I’ve never known anyone who likes that last, a dish made of bull testicles, or at least no one has ever admitted to me that they like it. But if someone did, I’d certainly feel as if I’d learned something about them.
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.
Plot, setting, character… we learn to think of these as discrete elements in literary writing, comparable to the strategy, board, and pieces of a chess game. But what if this scheme doesn’t quite work? What about when the setting is a character? There are many literary works named and well-known for the unforgettable places they introduce: Walden, Wuthering Heights, Howards End…. There are invented domains that seem more real to readers than reality: Faulkner’s Yoknapatowpha, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex… There are works that describe impossible places so vividly we believe in their existence against all reason: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, China Miéville’s The City and the City, Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”….
What sustains our belief in the integrity of fictional places? The fact that they seem to act upon events as much as the people who live in them, for one thing. And, just as often, the fact that so many authors and illustrators draw elaborate maps of literary settings, making their features real to us and embedding them in our minds.
A new book, The Writer’s Map, edited by Huw Lewis-Jones, offers lovers of literary maps—whether in non-fiction, realism, or fantasy—the opportunity to pore over maps of Thomas More’s Utopia (said to be the first literary map), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Branwell Brontë’s Verdopolis (above), and so many more.
The book is filled with essays about literary mapping by writers and map-makers, and it touches on the way authors themselves view imaginative mapping. “For some writers making a map is absolutely central to the craft of shaping and telling their tale,” writes Lewis-Jones. For others, making maps is also a way to avoid the painful task of writing, which Philip Pullman calls “a matter of sullen toil.” Drawing, on the other hand, he says, “is pure joy. Drawing a map to go with a story is messing around, with the added fun of coloring it in.” David Mitchell agrees: “As long as I was busy dreaming of topography,” he says of his maps, “I didn’t have to get my hands dirty with the mechanics of plot and character.”
It may surprise you to hear that writers hate to write, but writers are people, after all, and most people find writing tedious and difficult in some part. What all of the writers featured in this collection share is that they love indulging their imaginations, making real their lucid dreams, whether through the diversion of drawing maps or the grind of grammar and syntax. Many of these maps, like Thoreau’s drawing of Walden Pond or Johann David Wyss’s illustration of the desert island in The Swiss Family Robinson, accompanied their books into publication. Many more remained secreted in authors’ notebooks.
There are many such “private treasures” in The Writer’s Map, notes Atlas Obscura: “J.R.R. Tolkien’s own sketch of Mordor, on graph paper; C.S. Lewis’s sketches; unpublished maps from the notebooks of David Mitchell… Jack Kerouac’s own route in On the Road….” Do we read a literary map differently when it wasn’t meant for us? Can maps be sly acts of misdirection as well as whimsical visual aids? Should we treat them as paratextual and unnecessary, or are they central, when an author chooses to include them, to our understanding of a story? Such questions, and many, many more, are taken up in The Writer’s Map, a long overdue survey of this longstanding literary tradition.
By now, even those of us who pay no attention at all to the art market have heard about Banksy’s latest art stunt: a painting called Balloon Girl that, when it sold for $1.4 million at auction, then immediately shredded itself. Assessments on the intent and impact of the piece’s self-destruction have varied: many have complained that, far from the bold statement against the economics of modern art it may have looked like (and many of Banksy’s fans may well have come to expect from his artistic persona), it could also be nothing more than a cynical publicity stunt to raise the speculative value of his work further still. And a counterpoint, in the words of economist Tyler Cowen, an expert on the economics of culture in his own right: “Banksy is a genius.”
As well as providing a brief primer on Banksy and the way his career has so far made its mark (often literally) on the world, the eleven-minute video gets into how his building a shredder into a picture frame and setting it off at the moment of sale fits into his body of work, art history, and the international art scene as it is today.
“There are many ways a work of art comes into being, be it an additive process, a subtractive process, one that must unfold in space and time, or one that’s immaterial and not existing until the moment it’s performed and then disappearing as soon as it’s over,” says Sarah Green. “Girl with Balloon was one artwork, and now it’s another that came into being through a public auction but which still very much has a material presence, because the object wasn’t destroyed — it’s only half-shredded — and since it was canvas going through, the remaining fringe is pretty stable.” In a sense, then, even this self-destructing artwork never really self-destructed. So what, in artistic terms, actually happened to it? We may continue arguing about it for years, but it will always come back to the shredding itself — an event relivable at any time in Banksy’s “director’s cut” video just above.
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.
It’s a fraught time to be an academic. Budgets have been slashed, departments decimated, political battles sensationalized by partisan opportunists, social media posts intensified into test cases for speech. Yet as corporatism and culture wars have pushed their way into academia in the past twenty plus years, more scholarship has seemed to make its way out into the mainstream, with books by academic historians like Eric Foner and Ibram X. Kendi, literary scholars like Stephen Greenblatt and bell hooks, sociologists like Robert Putnam, scientists like Richard Dawkins, economists like Thomas Piketty, legal scholars like Michelle Alexander, and so on, topping bestseller lists and winning National Book Awards.
Such books distill difficult ideas without dumbing them down, in accessible and often urgent prose. Their popularity speaks to how they address the pressing issues of their times, and undercuts the stereotype of academics as jargon-spewing, out-of-touch inhabitants of ivory towers. And they often have the power to not only radically alter public discourse, but to inspire mass movements and shift public policy.
Most of the more than 15,000 academic books published each year—by university presses or tiny independents—reach only “their core audience of disciplinary specialists.” A few resonate outside their fields yet still fail to find an audience outside higher education circles (nor are they really meant to).
But some books by scholars, like those by the authors named above, “enter the public consciousness,” writes The Chronicle of Higher Education, and thus deserve to be described as “influential” in a broad sense, “like On the Origin of Species or Das Kapital or The Interpretation of Dreams,” as Yale professor of psychology Paul Bloom writes (while also pointing out that none of these books’ authors were professional academics). Under the banner of forming a “New Canon,” the Chronicle asked Bloom and a number of other scholars—including Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics and author of several best-selling popular books—to name what they believed were the most influential scholarly books of the past 20 years.
Each respondent was asked “to select books—academic or not, but written by scholars—from within or outside their own fields.” Each wrote a brief defense of their choice and, in some cases, of their criteria for “influence.” You can read these blurbs at the Chronicle’s site, and just below, see a full list of the picks. Some of the books, the Chronicle concedes, fall “slightly outside our time frame, but we included them anyway.”
Some of them are typically academic works, like Mark Greif’s choice of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling, a book unlikely to inspire a Netflix documentary. Others, like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, an impetus for Ava DuVernay’s 13th, were written for the widest of readerships. Do these distinctions make books like Alexander more “influential” than those like Sedgewick’s? It all depends, I suppose, on what we mean by the word—and by what, or whom, or how, or why, or how many we think need to be influenced.
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