“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost effective.” –Kurt Vonnegut
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the West responded with sanctions, arms shipments, and lots of moral support. But then it drew a line. Europe (particularly Germany) stills buys Russian gas and oil in vast quantities, effectively bankrolling Putin’s bloody military campaign. It shows no inclination to make hard sacrifices, including cutting fuel consumption or potentially putting jobs at risk. And forget about a No-Fly zone. All of this leaves some wondering about Europe’s real motivations and calculations. Above, writer and actor Stephen Fry lays out his skeptical take in a 14-minute video.
Attempts to broadcast color TV wouldn’t be made until the 1950s, with the first commercial broadcast made by CBS airing in 1951 on five stations. Hardly anyone could see it. When NBC broadcast the Tournament of Roses Parade in 1954, fewer than 8,500 American households owned a color TV set. By April 1961, an editorial in Television magazine argued that color “is still in the egg, and only skillful and expensive handling will get it out of the egg and on its feet.” Needless to say, the adoption of the new technology was exceedingly slow.
Ratings wars and advertising wars forced color to come of age in the mid-60s, and as a result “color TV transformed the way Americans saw the world, writes historian Susan Murray at Smithsonian, as well as the way “the world saw America.” Color television “was, in fact, often discussed by its proponents as an ideal form of American postwar consumer vision: a way of seeing the world (and all of its brightly hued goods) in a spectacular form of ‘living color.’” Color was explicitly talked up as spectacle, though sold to consumers as a truer representation of reality.
“Network executives pitched [color TV] to advertisers as a unique medium that would inspire attentiveness and emotional engagement,” writes Murray, “making [viewers] more likely to purchase advertised products, a growing myriad of consumer goods and appliances that were now available in a wider set of vibrant colors like turquoise and pink flamingo.” (Thanks, of course, to the advent of space-age polymers.) Such history provides us with more context for the puzzlement of newsman Bob Bruner in 1967 (above), introducing viewers to Iowa’s Channel 2 switch-over to color.
“I feel doubly honored to have been chosen to be the first one involved in our big change,” says Bruner after chatting with station manager Doug Grant, “because there are so many much more colorful characters around here than this report in the news.” That year, there were characters like Pink Floyd appearing for the first time on American Bandstand (see that footage colorized here), their psychedelic vibrancy muted in monochrome.
Bruner had already been upstaged nearly ten years earlier, when NBC’s WRC-TV in Washington, DC introduced its first color broadcast with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who extolls the virtues of the medium above, in the oldest surviving color videotape recording. Even so, only around 25% of American households owned a color TV in 1967. It would be another decade before every American household (or every “consumer household”) had one, and not until the mid-80s until the medium reached full saturation around the globe.
In recent decades, a medieval Persian word has come to prominence in English and other major world languages. Many of use it on a daily basis, often while regarding the concept to which it refers as essentially mysterious. The word is algorithm, whose roots go back to the ninth century in modern-day Greater Iran. There lived a polymath by the name of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, whom we now remember for his achievements in geography, astronomy, and mathematics. In that last field, he was the first to define the principles of “reducing” and “balancing” equations, a subject all of us came to know in school as algebra (a name itself descended from the Arabic al-jabr, or “completion”).
Today, a good few of us have come to resent algorithms even more than algebra. This is perhaps because algorithms are most popularly associated with the deep, unseen workings of the internet, a system with ever increasing influence over the things we do, the information we receive, and even the people with whom we associate.
Provided sufficient data about us and the lives we lead, so we’re given to understand, these algorithms can make better decisions for us than we can make for ourselves. But what exactly are they? You can get one answer from “Why Algorithms Are Called Algorithms,” the BBC Ideas video at the top of the post.
For Western civilization, al-Khwarizmi’s most important book was Concerning the Hindu Art of Reckoning, which was translated into Latin three centuries after its composition. Al-Khwarizmi’s Latinized name “Algoritmi” gave rise to the word algorismus, which at first referred to the decimal number system and much later came to mean “a set of step-by-step rules for solving a problem.” It was Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing who “worked out how, in theory, a machine could follow algorithmic instructions and solve complex mathematics. This was the birth of the computer age.” Now, much further into the computer age, algorithms “are helping us to get from A to B, driving internet searches, making recommendations of things for us to buy, watch, or share.”
The algorithm giveth, but the algorithm also taketh away — or so it sometimes feels as we make our way deeper into the twenty-first century. In the other BBC Ideas video just above, Jon Stroud makes an investigation into both the nature and the current uses of this mathematical concept. The essential job of an algorithm, as the experts explain to him, is that of processing data, these days often in large quantities and of various kinds, and increasingly with the aid of sophisticated machine-learning processes. In making or influencing choices humans would once have handled themselves, algorithms do present a risk of “de-skilling” as we come to rely on their services. We all occasionally feel gratitude for the blessings those services send our way, just as we all occasionally blame them for our dissatisfactions — making the algorithm, in other words, into a thoroughly modern deity.
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.
Much in Ukraine has been lost since the Russian invasion commenced this past February. But efforts to minimize the damage have been responding on all fronts, and not just geographical ones. The preservation of Ukrainian culture has become the top priority for some groups, in response to Russian forces’ seeming intent to destroy it. “Cultural heritage is not only impacted, but in many ways it’s implicated in and central to armed conflict,” says Hayden Bassett, director of the Virginia Museum of Natural History’s Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab, in the Vox explainer above. “These are things that people point to that are unifying factors for their society. They are tangible reflections of their society.”
This very quality made them a sadly appealing target for Russian attacks. As the video’s narrator puts it, Vladimir Putin “has made it clear that identity is at the ideological center of Russia’s invasion,” ostensibly an effort to reunify two lands of a common civilization. For Ukraine, the strategy to protect its own cultural heritage during wartime involves two phases of work.
Step two is to secure these cultural treasures, whether they be paintings, sculptures, buildings, or anything else besides. This requires the collaboration of “government agencies, militaries, NGOs, academics, museum institutions,” says Bassett, as well as of volunteers on the ground physically safeguarding the artifacts. This often involves hiding them whenever possible, and “if history is any indication,” says the narrator, “collections have moved underground or outside of major cities, or outside the country entirely.” So it was in Europe under the marauding of Nazi Germany, including, as seen in the France 24 segment above, with holdings of the Louvre up to and including the Mona Lisa. The state of world geopolitics today may have us wondering if we’ve truly learned the lessons of the Second World War, but at least the fight to save Ukrainian culture reminds that we haven’t forgotten them all.
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.
So, you want to play guitar like Mark Knopfler? I mean, who wouldn’t, right? His style has been “legendary in the guitar community for decades,” notes Ultimate Guitar. Seems everyone who’s picked up the instrument has harbored a secret or not-so-secret desire to knock out “Sultans of Swing,” flawlessly, no matter what kind of music they play.
According to the Internet, it’s easy. There are How-to guides, promising 5 Ways to play like Knopfler. At least one lesson admits, “imitating Mark Knopfler’s playing style is much easier said than done.” I’ve seen it done convincingly once, by a guitar prodigy, raised by musicians, who toured with Buddy Guy. Otherwise, I’m here to inform you that you cannot learn to play like Mark Knopfler in Five Minutes.
For one thing, it took Knopfler himself decades to hone his style, tone, and technique — years and years of listening to old records, learning Blind Willie Johnson, Chet Atkins, and everything in-between. “Even when I would be about 20 or so,” he says, “I was already steeped in a lot of early country blues and everything.” Then there were the “years of living hand to mouth as a gigging guitarist,” Jamie Dickson writes at Music Radar.
Knopfler also admits, modestly, to being a bit of a prodigy. “I could do Elmore James-style steel from the very, very beginning when I was just a kid. After I heard it, I could just kind of do it.” When Dire Straits released their huge-selling fifth album Brothers in Arms in 1985, it seemed like blues guitar was the last thing anyone wanted. The era was all about showing off. Synthpop, new wave, metal, and rap ruled. Dire Straits played clean, laid-back tunes with tasty, tasteful American licks.
Taking showmanship cues from big stadium acts (what he’s called “jackboot” rock bands), Knopfler adapted the folk blues styles he’d learned on acoustic and National resonator guitars to the red signature Stratocasters he became famous for playing, picking loud, electrified roots rock with his fingers and thumb. “I realized the pick was becoming redundant,” he tells Guitar.
So, if you want to play like Knopfler, you’ll have to lose the pick. Moreover, you might want to consider switching to your non-dominant hand. “I’m left-handed,” he says in his Guitar interview, “but I play right-handed. They tried to teach me violin at school for two or three years — right handed– so by the time I was 15, I was into the habit of playing that way round.” It’s a lot to ask of any guitar student.
But there are plenty of ways to start picking up Knopfler’s basics, then practicing them year after year as he did, and listening to all of his influences. Watch his whole appearance at the top, giving brief fingerpicking demonstrations — from Singing Nun syncopated bass lines to his trademark singing double and triple stops. Learn more about his “finger style finesse” at Premier Guitar and see how his sound developed around his favorite guitars in the short film above.
“I rang Nick up and said: ‘listen, I want to do this thing for Ukraine. I’d be really happy if you played on it and I’d also be really happy if you’d agree to us putting it out as Pink Floyd.’ And he was absolutely on for that.
In 2015, David Gilmour was scheduled to play a concert in London with the Ukrainian band BoomBox. As he explained in a recent statement, the band’s lead singer Andriy Khlyvnyuk had trouble with his visa, leaving the rest of the Boombox to back Gilmour on a version of “Wish You Were Here.” That song’s sentiments took on an entirely different kind of urgency last month after Russia invaded Ukraine.
“Recently I read that Andriy had left his American tour with BoomBox, had gone back to Ukraine, and joined up with the Territorial Defense,” said Gilmour. “Then I saw this incredible video on Instagram, where he stands in a square in Kyiv with this beautiful gold-domed church and sings in the silence of a city with no traffic or background noise because of the war. It was a powerful moment that made me want to put it to music.”
The song Khlyvnyuk sings is “Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow,” a “1914 protest song,” The Guardian reports, “written in honor of the Sich Riflemen who fought both in the first world war and the Ukrainian war of independence.” Gilmour decided to go further and use the “big platform” of Pink Floyd to release a single by the band – their first original song in 28 years. He called drummer Nick Mason and they recorded the track in Gilmour’s barn with bassist Guy Pratt and keyboardist Nitin Sawhney.
Released as “Hey, Hey, Rise Up” – with Khlyvnyuk’s approval (Gilmour says it took some doing to track him down) – the track’s proceeds will be donated to the Ukraine Humanitarian Relief Fund. It’s probably safe to say that this is not a Pink Floyd reunion. Gilmour insisted the band was done when keyboardist Richard Wright died in 2008. “This is the end,” he told the BBC, and there’s little reason to think he’s gearing up for a tour or a new Pink Floyd album now.
Instead, “Hey, Hey, Rise Up” is part of a larger protest by Gilmour, who writes of his Ukrainian daughter-in-law Janina, his grandchildren, and his “extended Ukrainian family” as a very personal connection to the news of the invasion. But he also wants to give young Ukrainians like Khlyvnyuk – who had no idea the world was watching – a larger voice and give voice to the shock and horror felt the world over as civilian deaths and atrocities mount. As he wrote in his statement:
We, like so many, have been feeling the fury and the frustration of this vile act of an independent, peaceful democratic country being invaded and having its people murdered by one of the world’s major powers… We want to express our support for Ukraine and in that way, show that most of the world thinks that it is totally wrong for a superpower to invade the independent democratic country that Ukraine has become.
Gilmour has pulled all his solo records and Pink Floyd’s catalogue post-1987 from streaming services in Russia. As for speculation that Roger Waters blocked the removal of earlier Pink Floyd material, or controversies over Waters’ statements to Russia Today and other outlets – “Let’s just say I was disappointed and let’s move on,” says Gilmour.
He’s more interested in talking about the war and Khlyvnyuk’s experiences. “He said he had the most hellish day you could imagine,” when Gilmour spoke to him and sent him the song — a day spent “picking up bodies of Ukrainians, Ukrainian children, helping with the clearing up. You know, our little problems become pathetic and tiny,” he says, “in the context of what you see him doing.”
See the English translation of the song just below:
In the meadow a red viburnum has bent down low
Our glorious Ukraine has been troubled so
And we’ll take that red viburnum and we will raise it up
And we, our glorious Ukraine shall, hey—hey, rise up—and rejoice!
And we’ll take that red viburnum and we will raise it up
And we, our glorious Ukraine shall, hey—hey, rise up and rejoice!
Admittedly jewelry is not one of our areas of expertise, but when we hear that a bracelet costs €10,000, we kind of expect it to have a smattering of diamonds.
Designers Lyske Gais and Lia Duinker are getting that amount for a wristlet comprised chiefly of five large paper sheets printed with high res images downloaded free from the Rijksmuseum’s extensive digital archive of Rembrandt drawings and etchings.
Your average pawnbroker would probably consider its 18-karat gold clasp, or possibly the custom-made wooden box in which it can be stored when not in use the most precious thing about this ornament.
An ardent bibliophile or art lover is perhaps better equipped to see the book bracelet’s value.
Each gilt edged page — 1400 in all — features an image of a hand, sourced from 303 downloaded Rembrandt works.
An illustration on the designers’ Duinker and Dochters website details the painstaking process whereby the bookbracelet takes shape in 8‑page sections, or signatures, cross stitched tightly alongside each other on a paper band. Put it on, and you can flip through Rembrandt hands, Rolodex-style. When you want to do the dishes or take a shower, just pack it flat into that custom box.
The Rembrandt’s Hands and a Lion’s Paw bracelet, titled like a book and published in a limited edition of 10, nabbed first prize in the 2015 Rijksstudio Awards, a competition that challenges designers to create work inspired by the Rijksmuseum’s collection.
But what about that special art loving bibliophile who already has everything, including a Rembrandts Hands and a Lions Paw boekarmband?
Maybe you could get them Collier van hondjes, Gais and Duinker’s follow up to the book bracelet, a rubber choker with an attached 112-page book pendant showcasing Rembrandt dogs sourced from various museum’s digital collections.
Pity the United States of America: despite its economic, cultural, and military dominance of so much of the world, it struggles to build cities that measure up with the capitals of Europe and Asia. The likes of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago offer abundant urban life to enjoy, but also equally abundant problems. Apart from the crime rates for which American cities have become fairly or unfairly notorious, there’s also the matter of urban design. Simply put, they don’t feel as if they were built very well, which any American will feel after returning from a trip to Amsterdam or Tokyo — or after watching the videos on those cities by Danish Youtuber OBF.
In Amsterdam, OBF says, “commuters will use their bikes to get to and enter transit stations, where they simply park their bikes in these enormous bike-parking garages. Then they’ll travel on either a bus, tram, or train to their final destination, but most of the time, the fastest and most convenient option is simply taking the bike to the final destination.”
Near-impossible to imagine in the United States, this prevalence of cycling is a reality in not just the Dutch capital but also in other cities across the country, which boasts 32,000 kilometers of bike lanes in total. And those count as only one of the infrastructural glories covered in OBF’s video “Why the Netherlands Is Insanely Well Designed.”
Tokyo, too, has its fair share of cyclists. Whenever I’m over there, I take note of all the well-dressed moms biking their young children to school in the morning, who cut figures in the starkest possible contrast to their American equivalents. But what really underlies the Japanese capital’s distinctively intense urbanism, literally as well as figuratively, is its network of subway trains. OBF takes the precision-engineered efficiency and the impeccable maintenance of this system as his main subject in “Why Tokyo Is Insanely Well Designed.” But enough about good city design; what accounts for bad city design, especially in a rich country like the U.S.?
OMF has an answer in one word: parking. Philadelphia, for example, supplies its 1.6 million people with 2.2 million parking spaces. The consequent deformation of the city’s built environment, clearly visible in aerial footage, both symbolizes and perpetuates the hegemony of the automobile. That same condition once afflicted the European and Asian cities that have since designed their way out of it and then some. While “some people might think it’s nearly impossible to implement these methods into other countries,” says OBF, they “can be replicated any place in the world if the people and leadership are willing to collaborate and listen to one another, and invest in infrastructure that is people‑, environment‑, and future-centered.” As an American living in a non-American city, I hereby invite him to come have a ride on the Seoul Metro.
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.
You remember it — one of the most heartbreaking scenes on TV. A man longs for nothing more than time to read, to be free of all those people Sartre told us make our hells. Finally granted his wish by the H‑Bomb, he then accidentally break his glasses, rendering himself unable make out a word. Oh, cruel irony! Not an optometrist or optician in sight! Surely, there are “Time Enough at Last” jokes at eye care conventions worldwide.
Morality tales wrapped in science fiction might make us think about all sorts of things, but one of the most obvious questions when we witness the fate of Mr. Henry Bemis, “charter member in the fraternity of dreamers,” might be, but what did people do before corrective lenses? Were millions forced to accept his fate, living out their lives with farsightedness, nearsightedness, and other defects that impede vision? How did early humans survive in times much less hospitable to disabilities? At least there were others to read and describe things for them.…
In truth, the Twilight Zone is not far off the mark. Or at least nearsightedness and reading are closely linked. “As long as primates have been around, there’s probably been myopia,” says professor of ophthalmology Ivan Schwab. But Schwab argues in his book Evolution’s Witness: How Eyes Evolved that the rise of reading likely caused skyrocketing rates of myopia over the past three hundred years. “Though genes and nutrition may play a role in nearsightedness,” Natalie Jacewicz writes at NPR, “[Schwab] says education and myopia seem to be linked, suggesting that when people do a lot of close work, their eyes grow longer.”
As the History Dose video above explains, the oldest image of a pair of glasses dates from a 1351 painting of Cardinal Hugh of Saint-Cher. The painting is an anachronism — spectacles, the narrator tells us, were invented 23 years earlier in Pisa, after the cardinal’s death. They “gradually spread across Europe and travelled the Silk Road to China.” (The oldest surviving pair of glasses dates from around 1475). So what happened before 1286? As you’ll learn, glasses were not the only way to enlarge small items. In fact, humans have been using some form of magnifying lens to read small print (or manuscript or cuneiform or what-have-you) for thousands of years. Those lenses, however, corrected presbyopia, or far-sightedness.
Those with myopia were mostly out of luck until the invention of sophisticated lens-grinding techniques and improved vision tests. But for most of human history, unless you were a sailor or a soldier, you “likely spent your day as an artisan, smith, or farm worker,” occupations where distance vision didn’t matter as much. In fact, artisans like medieval scribes and illuminators, says Neil Handley — museum curator of the College of Optometrists, London — were “actually encouraged to remain in their myopic condition, because it was actually ideal for them doing this job.”
It wasn’t until well after the time of Gutenberg that wearing lenses on one’s face became a thing — and hardly a popular thing at first. Early glasses were held up to the eyes, not worn. They were heavy, thick, and fragile. In the 15th century, “because… they were unusual and rare,” says Handley, “they were seen as having magical powers” and their wearers viewed as “in league with the devil, immoral.” That stigma went away, even if glasses picked up other associations that sometimes made their users the subject of taunts. But by the nineteenth century, glasses were common around the world.
Given that we all spend most of our time interacting with small text and images on handheld screens, it seems maybe they haven’t spread widely enough. “More than a billion, and maybe as many as 2.5 billion, people in the world need but don’t have glasses to correct for various vision impairments,” notes Livescience, citing figures from The New York Times. For many people, especially in the developing world, the question of how to get by in the world without eyeglasses is still a very pressing, present-day issue.
Jim Morrison didn’t fare particularly well, health-wise, in the last years of his life. Alcoholism took a heavy toll, as we know. “Images of him with the shaggy beard, hair receding at the temples, and excess flesh gathering around the armpits,” writes Rob Fischer at Rolling Stone, “can resemble, in retrospect, T.J. Miller more than Father John Misty. This is the out-to-seed drunkard that Val Kilmer portrays in Oliver Stone’s iconic film The Doors.” It is also an unfortunate caricature that leaves out the creative and intellectual energy still left in the artist once called “the first major male sex symbol since James Dean died and Marlon Brando got a paunch.”
There was always more to Morrison than that, and in the 1969 interview above, filmed over a week in L.A. with Rolling Stone’s Jerry Hopkins, he is still “remarkably sharp,” Fischer writes.
Even though the conversations included many rounds of whiskey, scotch and beer, his responses give the impression of a thoughtful and engaged artist struggling to realize the full extent of his already colossal powers of expression. He was reading widely, writing poetry, gravitating more towards filmmaking, all while longing to reconnect with the explosive energy that comes with playing small venues and clubs like the Whiskey a Go Go.
Morrison and the Doors were experimental artists, taking musical risks and selling them with sex. The Doors were the first rock band, for example, to use the new Moog synthesizer on an album. Even before Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach introduced popular audiences to the technology of audio synthesis in 1968, the band brought jazz musician Paul Beaver into the 1967 recordings sessions for Strange Days to use Moog for effects on several tracks and to distort Morrison’s voice.
Beaver, an early adopter of the synthesizer, produced two seminal Moog records in the late sixties: The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds (1967) with Mort Garson and double album The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music (1968) with Bernie Krause.
Therefore, when Morrison, in his astute analysis of American music, “predicts” the future of electronic music in 1969 during the course of his interview with Hopkins, he knows of what he speaks. He’s already seen it, and being the hip guy that he was, he had likely heard the work of electronic pioneers Silver Apples and maybe even of the band White Noise, a side project of BBC Radiophonic Workshop composer Delia Derbyshire that produced music far ahead of its time that very year — music made almost exactly the way he describes:
I can kind of envision one person with a lot of machines, tapes and electronics set up, singing or speaking while using machines.…
At the end of the brief clip at the top, we hear Hopkins ignore this idea and move Morrison back to talking about rock. But Jim had already moved on — and so had the culture, he knew. The music he describes was happening all around him, and we might imagine he was a little frustrated that other people couldn’t hear it. What Morrison brought to it, however — or might have, had he lived — was the lyrical, the sensual, the performative, the melodramatic, and the truly frightening, all qualities it would take new wave and goth acts like Echo and Bunnymen, Depeche Mode, and a host of Doors-influenced dark wave bands to bring to fruition in the electronic music of future past.
It’s apparently a tradition–Flea performing “The Star Spangled Banner” before the start of an LA Lakers game, accompanied by the bass, and only the bass. The recording above took place over the past weekend. You can also watch other performances from 2016 and 2014. Somewhere, Jimi is smiling.
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