The USGS Astrogeology Science Center has recently released a series of colorful and intricately-detailed maps of Mars. These colorful maps, notes USGS, “provide highly detailed views of the [plantet’s] surface and allow scientists to investigate complex geologic relationships both on and beneath the surface. These types of maps are useful for both planning for and then conducting landed missions.”
The map above lets you see Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system, which stands more than twice the height of Mount Everest. The USGS goes on to add: “Map readers can visualize the caldera complex more easily due to the detail that is available at the 1:200,000 scale and the addition of contour lines to the map. The map covers a region that is roughly the size of the Dallas-Ft. Worth metropolitan area and is a detailed look at the volcano’s summit that we have not seen before. This new view of the Olympus Mons caldera complex allows scientists to more easily compare it to similar features on Earth (known as terrestrial analogs) such as Hawaii’s Mauna Loa.”
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At the height of his fame, Charles Dickens could have commanded any illustrator he liked for his novels. But at the beginning of his literary career, it was he who was charged with accompanying the artist, not the other way around. His first serialized novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, better known as The Pickwick Papers, began as a series of comical “cockney sporting plates” by Robert Seymour. Honest enough to admit his ignorance of the cockney sporting life but shrewd enough to know an opportunity when he saw one, the young Dickens accepted the publisher’s request for stories meant to elaborate on the images.
Even then, Dickens possessed irrepressible talent as a popular storyteller, and it was his writing — which evidenced scant interest in adherence to the existing art — that made The Pickwick Papers into a great success, a mass-cultural phenomenon comparable to a hit sitcom avant la lettre.
187 years later there remains a whiff of scandal around this chapter of literary history, Seymour having committed suicide early in the serialization process the day after an argument with Dickens. Eventually the author found a permanent replacement for Seymour in Hablot Knight Browne, or Phiz, who would go on to provide the artwork for most of his novels.
You can see all of Phiz’s work for Dickens at the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery, a project of Michael John Goodman, whom we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for his Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive (and his collection of AI-generated Shakespeare art). “The world of Dickens illustration is beset with poor reproductions of the source material, so for this project I have searched out what I consider to be some of the best editions that feature the original illustrations printed to a decent quality,” Goodman writes on his project’s About page. These tend to date from the early twentieth century and come with “colored frontispieces (which the original novels did not have).”
One such frontispiece appears at the top of this post, depicting the first appearance of The Pickwick Papers’ most beloved character, the cockney valet Samuel Weller (who overtook the title character in popularity in much the same manner as Dickens’ writing overtook the illustrations). The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery contains numerous plates from that book, as well as from all the rest: Oliver Twist (a collaboration with not Phiz but George Cruikshank), A Christmas Carol (with John Leech), Bleak House (its grim atmosphere heightened by Phiz’s “dark plates”), even the never-finished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Today’s readers are likely to dismiss these illustrations, however well-rendered, as extraneous to the text. But we must bear in mind that most were seen and approved by Dickens himself, who knew what he wanted — and even more so, what his readers wanted.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Back in October, we featured the first of a planned series of videos on the “Black Paintings” created at the end of Francisco Goya’s life. Last week, the YouTube channel Great Art Explained completed the series and rolled them up into a 51-minute documentary, which you can watch above. It comes with this preface from curator James Payne:
In this full-length film, I look at Francisco Goya’s later works. At the age of 46, Goya suffered from a severe illness that caused loss of vision and hearing, tinnitus, dizziness, right-sides paralysis, weakness and general malaise. Although he recovered from a cerebral stroke which accompanied it, he went completely deaf. From this point on his work took a darker tone.
To understand Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings, we need to understand how he went from a popular well-loved royal portrait artist to painting deeply disturbing imagery on the bare walls of his house in total isolation.
His darker work was never really seen in his lifetime. His series of etchings known as Los Caprichos was withdrawn from public sale for fear of attack by the Inquisition, and his deeply pessimistic ‘Disasters of War’ was so gruesome and radical it had to wait until his death to be published. Even his masterpiece, The Third of May 1808, was censored by the king and hidden away.
His wife and most of his friends were dead and he had become isolated. He was 73-years old, sick, and completely deaf. His long life was coming to a close… BUT he wasn’t finished yet. The man who had once painted crucifixions, miracles, saints, and priests, now painted terrifying, demonic, raw and brutal works – works without even a hint of God.
His last years were spent in isolation secretly creating some of the most horrific images in Western art, The Black Paintings.
Using footage from my earlier short films, Goya Part 1 and Goya Part 2, I have added about 25 minutes of new footage to make this full-length film.
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Kurt Vonnegut is one of those writers whose wit, humanism and lack of sentimentality leave you hankering for more.
Fortunately, the prolific novelist was an equally prolific letter writer.
His published correspondence includes a description of the firebombing of Dresden penned upon his release from the Slaughterhouse Five POW camp, an admission to daughter Nanette that most parental missives “contain a parent’s own lost dreams disguised as good advice,” and some unvarnished exchanges with many of familiar literary names. (“I am cuter than you are,” he taunted Cape Cod neighbor Norman Mailer.)
No wonder these letters are catnip to performers with the pedigree to recognize good writing when they see it.
In addition to Slaughterhouse-Five, the board also consigned two other volumes on the syllabus — James Dickey’s Deliverance and an anthology containing short stories by Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck — to the fire.
Revisiting the event, the Bismarck Tribune reports that “the objection to (Slaughterhouse-Five) had to do with profanity, (Deliverance) with some homosexual material and the (anthology) because the first two rendered all of Severy’s choices suspect.”
A decade later, Vonnegut also revisited the school board’s “insulting” objections in the pages of the New York Times:
Even by the standards of Queen Victoria, the only offensive line in the entire novel is this: ”Get out of the road, you dumb m(———–).” This is spoken by an American antitank gunner to an unarmed American chaplain’s assistant during the Battle of the Bulge in Europe in December 1944, the largest single defeat of American arms (the Confederacy excluded) in history. The chaplain’s assistant had attracted enemy fire.
Word is Vonnegut’s letter never received the courtesy of a reply.
One wonders if the recipient burned it, too.
If that 50 year old letter feels germane, check out Vonnegut’s 1988 letter to people living 100 years in the future, a little more than 50 years from where we are now.
In many ways, its commonsense advice surpasses the evergreen words of those it namechecks — Shakespeare’s Polonius, St. John the Divine, and the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. The threat of environmental collapse it seeks to stave off has become even more dire in the ensuing years.
Vonnegut’s advice (listed below) clearly resonates with Cumberbatch, a vegan who leveraged his celebrity to bring attention to the climate crisis when he participated in the Extinction Rebellion Protests in London.
1. Reduce and stabilize your population.
2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
7. And so on. Or else.
Vonnegut, who died in 2007 at the age of 84, never lost his touch with young readers. Who better to recite his 2006 letter to his fans in New York City’s Xavier High School’s student body than the ever youthful, ever curious actor and activist, Sir Ian McKellen?
Cumberbatch is a wonderful reader, but he’d require a bit more seasoning to pull these lines off without the aid of major prosthetics:
You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.
Now if only these gents would attempt a Hoosier accent…
Many of us now in adulthood first came to know the nineteen-twenties as the decade our grandparents were born. It may thus give us pause to consider that it began over a century ago — and even more pause to consider the question of why its visions of the future seem more exciting than our own. You can behold a variety of such visions in the videos above and below, which come from The 1920s Channel on Youtube. Using a collection of print-media clippings, it offers an experience of the “futurism” of the nineteen-twenties, which has now inspired a distinct type of “retro-futurism,” between the “steampunk” of the Victorian era and the “atompunk” of America after the Second World War.
“Being in the modern age, futurism of the nineteen-twenties leans more towards atompunk,” says the video’s narrator. But it also has a somewhat dieselpunk flavor,” the latter being a kind of futurism from the nineteen-forties. “In America, the nineteen-twenties were similar to the nineteen-fifties, in that they took place in the immediate aftermath of a massive, destructive war, and both carried an optimism for the future. The only difference was that science fiction was not as mainstream in the twenties as it was in the fifties, so it didn’t quite fully develop a unique look that permeated society.” This gave twenties futurism a look and feel all its own — as well as a preponderance of dirigibles.
Apart from those helium-filled airships, which “only rose to prominence after the Victorian era, and their popularity ended in the nineteen-thirties,” its other elements of science fiction and (eventual) fact include moving walkways, personal helicopters, cities enclosed by glass domes and webbed by sky bridges, highways stacked ten levels deep, zero-gravity chambers, dream recorders, theremins, “light-beam pianos,” a tunnel under the English Channel, “aerial mail torpedoes,” and a curious technology called television. Longtime Open Culture readers may also spot the Isolator, a distraction-eliminating helmet invented by sci-fi publisher Hugo Gernsback — whose own magazine Science and Invention, the narrator notes, originally ran many of these images. Perhaps what our own decade lacks isn’t exciting visions of the future, but a Gernsback to commission them.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
By now, we’ve all heard of the recent technological advances that allow us to have plausible-sounding conversations with artificial-intelligence systems. Though near-science-fictionally impressive, such developments have yet to hone in on one particular world-changing application. In the meantime, those fascinated by its potential are trying to put it to all manner of different uses, some of them eminently practical and others less so. Far-fetched though it may seem, what if the “killer app” of such AI chatting turned out to be conversation with historical figures, even ones dead for millennia?
Such is the promise of the new site Character.AI, on which, writes the NewYorkTimes Cade Metz, “users can chat with reasonable facsimiles of everyone from Queen Elizabeth or William Shakespeare to Billie Eilish or Elon Musk (there are several versions).
Anyone you want to invoke, or concoct, is available for conversation.” Having learned from “reams of general dialogue as well as from articles, news stories, books and other digital text,” the system now comprises “a practically endless collection of bots that can imitate a practically endless collection of people, riffing on a practically endless number of topics.”
Right after signing up for Character.AI, a quick and free process, you’ll be ready to start chatting with Shakespeare yourself. When I tried it, old Will got straight to the point: “ ‘To be or not to be,’ do you think that that’s the question?” Before long, I had him explaining all of his artistic motivations: his use of “prince in a dilemma between suicide and revenge” represents “the struggle between life and death.” He had Hamlet communicate with the ghost of his father because “I wanted to show that he was caught in a world where death was everywhere.” With the question of “to be or not to be,” he meant “to show that life is full of suffering.”
So far, so undergraduate. More interesting was Shakespeare’s answer when I asked him to name his preferred Hamlet adaptation. “My favorite is the Hamlet directed by Kenneth Branagh!” he replied. “He has stayed true to the text while also showing how the prince of Denmark is struggling between life and death. In addition, he has given a lot of importance to the relationship between the prince and his father.” A filmmaker could hardly ask for a more credible endorsement, but then, we must bear in mind that it didn’t actually come from Shakespeare himself. As Character.AI’s ever-present warning puts it, “Remember: everything characters say is made up” — and often, alas, on the banal side.
This holds for every mind with whom you may want to have a dialogue on the site: philosophical ones like Socrates and Thomas Hobbes, scientific ones like Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, political ones like Karl Marx and Margaret Thatcher, literary ones like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Since I happen to be in the middle of reading through all of the latter’s novels, I asked his bot what I should bear in mind while doing so. “Wow!” it replied. “That is an amazing undertaking! I would encourage you to see patterns,” especially in “the things I do to create tension, and the kind of characters I create. Look at the stories through my eyes, and try to understand what I understand, the good and the bad.” The real Dickens might not have put it that way, but he surely believed something like it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Robespierre is an immortal figure not because he reigned supreme over the Revolution for a few months, but because he was the mouthpiece of its purest and most tragic discourse.
Cal Arts animation student Michelle Cheng’s character design primer, above, draws attention to the many hats an animator must be prepared to wear when bringing to life a figure who actually existed:
Was Robespierre the first modern dictator, icily fanatical, an obsessive who used his political power to try to impose his rigid ideal of a land of Spartan ‘virtue’? Or was he a principled, self-abnegating visionary, the great revolutionary martyr who, with his Jacobin allies, succeeded in leading the French Revolution and the Republic to safety in the face of overwhelming military odds?
Cheng believes an animator’s first job is to understand any given character’s role in the larger story, and her research suggests that “there is never just one story.”
In the end, animators make choices based on the narrative they wish to push, enlisting palettes and styles that will support their favored approach.
Cheng went into this assignment perceiving Robespierre to be “a prime example of situational irony, a fanatical dictator who had sent hundreds of people to the guillotine only to be guillotined himself in the end.”
This, she readily admits, is a two-dimensional understanding.
Though he only lived to thirty-six, the man evolved. Robespierre, the symbol of the Reign of Terror, is distinct from Robespierre the individual citizen.
This duality led her to concoct a range of Robespierres — evil, good, and neutral.
All three animated characters are garbed in the neoclassical fashion typical of a progressive gentleman of the period — shirt, breeches, stockings, waistcoat, coat, a lacy cravat, and a curled wig.
Cheng, in consultation with fellow Cal Arts animator Janelle Feng, equipped the “evil” version with an ominous, figure-concealing black cloak lined in blood red. Angles and points are emphasized, the face draws on his opponents’ sinister descriptions of his habitual expressions, and subtle nods to punk and Goth cater to modern sensibilities.
The “good” version employs rosy Rococo hues to lean into the Robespierre his friends and family knew — a poet who loved his pet pigeons.
History prevents Cheng from ditching his signature wig entirely, but she granted herself some leeway, softening it for a more natural look.
Between these two poles is the “neutral” Robespierre, perhaps the most challenging to depict.
Feng took the lead on this one, seeking to strike a balance between his reportedly unprepossessing appearance and his revolutionary fire.
She retained the striped coat of his most iconic portrait, but updated it to a cool green palette. His nickname — the Incorruptible — is embodied in his firm comportment.
The video draws to a close with a review of the various ways Robespierre has been depicted in art and film over the years, a vivid reminder of Cheng’s assertion that “there is never just one story.”
Note: With the passing of Jeff Beck, we’re bringing back a vintage post from our archive featuring the early years of the legendary guitarist. You can read his obituary here.
Art film and rock and roll have, since the 60s, been soulmates of a kind, with many an acclaimed director turning to musicians as actors, commissioning rock stars as soundtrack artists, and filming scenes with bands. Before Nicolas Roeg, Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese and other rock-loving auteurs did all of the above, there was Michelangelo Antonioni, who barreled into the English-language market, under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with a trilogy of films steeped in the sights and sounds of sixties counterculture.
Blowup, the first and by far the best of these, though scored by jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, prominently featured the Yardbirds—with both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. In the memorable scene above, Beck smashes his guitar to bits after his amp goes on the fritz. The Italian director “envisioned a scene similar to that of Pete Townshend’s famous ritual of smashing his guitar on stage,” notes Guitarworld’s Jonathan Graham. “Antonioni had even asked The Who to appear in the film,” but they refused.
In stepped the Yardbirds, during a pivotal moment in their career. The year before, they released mega-hit “For Your Love,” and said goodbye to lead guitarist Eric Clapton. Beck, his replacement, heralded a much wilder, more experimental phase for the band. Jeff Beck, it seemed, could play anything, but what he didn’t do much of onstage is emote. Next to the guitar-smashing Townshend or the fire-setting Hendrix (see both below), he was a pretty reserved performer, though no less thrilling to watch for his virtuosity and style.
But as he tells it, Antonioni wouldn’t let the band do their “most exciting thing,” a cover of “Smokestack Lightning” that “had this incredible buildup in the middle which was just pow!” That moment would have been the natural pretext for a good guitar smashing.
Instead, the set piece with the broken amp gives the introverted Beck a reason to get agitated. As Graham describes it, he also played a guitar specially designated as a prop:
Due to issues over publishing, the Yardbirds classic “Train Kept A‑Rollin’,” was reworked as “Stroll On” for the performance, and as the scene involved the destruction of an instrument, Beck’s usual choice of his iconic Esquire or Les Paul was swapped for a cheap, hollow-body stand-in that he was directed to smash at the song’s conclusion.
The scene is more a tantrum than the orgiastic onstage freak-out Townshend would probably have delivered. Its chief virtue for Yardbird’s fans lies not in the funny, out-of-character moment (which SF Gate film critic Mick LaSalle calls “one of the weirdest scenes in the movie”). Rather, it was “the chance,” as one fan tells LaSalle, “in the days before MTV and YouTube, to see the Yardbirds, with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.” Antonioni had seized the moment. In addition to firing “the opening salvo of the emerging ‘film generation,’” as Roger Ebert wrote, he gave contemporary fans a reason (in addition to explicit sex and nudity), to go see Blowupagain and again.
The Chrysler Building was once the tallest structure in the world — a heyday that ended up lasting less than a year. The loss of that glorious title owed to the completion of the Empire State Building, twelve blocks away, in 1931. But it was all in the spirit of the game, the Chrysler Building having itself one-upped its close competitor 40 Wall Street (then called the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building) by installing a non-functional spire atop its signature crown at the last moment. But however much of a triumph it represented, that moment was poorly timed: the very next day would bring the Wall Street Crash of 1929, harbinger of the Great Depression. The subsequent decade would inspire little public favor for extravagant monuments in the Big Apple.
Yet compared to the life of a tower, economic cycles are short indeed. By now the Chrysler Building has seen the United States of America through a fair few ups and downs, only gaining appreciation all the while. Removed from its immediate historical context, we can more keenly appreciate architect William Van Alen’s elaborate yet elegant Art Deco design.
In the Architectural Digest video above, architect Michael Wyetzner takes us on a tour of that design, explaining how each of its features works with the others to make an enduring visual impact. Some, like the gleaming oversized radiator-cap gargoyles, impress with sheer brazenness; others, like the Native American-derived patterns that repeat in various locations at various scales, take a more practiced eye to identify.
Despite having been surpassed in height over and over again, the Chrysler Building remains a sine qua non of understanding the New York skyscraper. Hence its appearance at the very beginning of “Why New York’s Skyscrapers Keep Changing Shape” from The B1M. We’ve previously featured that channel here on Open Culture for its investigation of why there are so few skyscrapers in Europe; in New York, however, the ambitiously tall building has become something like a force of nature, tamed only temporarily even by crisis or disaster. Some have used the COVID-19 pandemic to declare an end of the office building, even the end of the city, and much like early in the Depression, skyscrapers now under construction reflect the priorities of a previous reality. Yet the 92-year-old Chrysler Building continues to inspire us today, and to that extent, we still live in the world that made it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
That people wore clothes back in the Stone Age will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who grew up watching The Flintstones. That show, never wholly reliant on established archaeological fact, didn’t get too specific about its time period. But it turns out, based on recently published discoveries by a team of researchers from the University of Tübingen, the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, and Leiden University, that Stone Agers were dressing themselves as early as 300,000 years ago — over one hundred millennia earlier than previously thought.
“This is suggested by cut marks on the metatarsal and phalanx of a cave bear discovered at the Lower Paleolithic site of Schöningen in Lower Saxony, Germany,” says the University of Tübingen’s site. The location of such marks indicate that the bear was not simply butchered but carefully skinned.
A cave bear’s winter coat “consists of both long outer hairs that form an airy protective layer and short, dense hairs that provide particularly good insulation” — making it a fine winter coat for a prehistoric human being as well. Such a use of bear skins “is likely a key adaptation of early humans to the climate in the north,” where winters would be difficult indeed without warm clothing.
Though some residents of Bedrock did wear furs (made from the prized pelts of the minkasaurus), they seemed not to be essential to survival in that Stone Age equivalent of California. Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear proved much more realistic about this sort of thing, though its characters live and die between 28,000 and 25,000 BC, the relatively recent past compared to the Lower Paleolithic from which this particular cave bear dates. It was also in Schöningen that “the world’s oldest spears were discovered,” making it a prime location from which to understand more clearly the ways of humans from that distant period. If a foot-powered Stone Age car were one day to be unearthed, it would surely be unearthed there.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Robert van Embricqs, a designer based in Amsterdam, has created The Flow Wall Desk–a wooden decoration that “transforms from a piece of art on the wall into a functional desk by showing off its unique aesthetic.” On his site, he writes:
The Flow Wall Desk acknowledges the potential how to combine functionality with art. This results in creating a desk inside one’s indoor environment. And only with one twist, it becomes a true joy to have a separate working area when needed. It can be subscribed as a piece of functional art that builds on the design track record of transformations in space. However, this one offers a part of the interior that shifts with time: a cozy workspace during the day becomes a compact wall hanging after being used.
Inspired by recent global events and the longer-term trends that precede them, to devise a statement piece that lends dignity to the digital workspace through craft, warm textures, and durably engineered fastenings. The Flow Wall Desk is adaptable and with the contemporary design elements, it can be used throughout homes, libraries, hotels, and many other inside designations. During the design process, van Embricqs strove to merge the desk’s execution with its design formula by creating a cohesive whole.
Usability demands that an everyday object such as this should be created with a generalized user’s psychology in mind. Vertical element emerges from the wall like a caterpillar with the help of specifically placed hinges. These exposed brass hinges establish a visual rhythm and ensure that the form can follow its function. This led to the notion of a transformation in form and purpose achieved through a single, simple gesture that everyone can familiarize themselves with. With a single turn by hand around its axis, a tabletop is created and once in its horizontal position, the tabletop is supported by wooden slats, creating a more natural look and organic effect that also serves as a screen for more privacy.
The horizontal work surface is comfortable yet functional due to its depth and width for the seated user and making it perfect for typing and handwriting. Finally, a unique opportunity is created for a temporary work surface and ergonomically adjustable desk in a sunny corner which invites the user to fold that desk away when work is over.
With the finished design appearance, more sustainable material developments are being examined and analyzed for production. And when it comes to functionality, each part of the Flow Wall desk has been specifically engineered without losing the appeal to attract, just like a folding magic trick with a well-kept secret.
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