Courtesy of the Met Museum comes the 1984 documentary, In a Brilliant Light: Van Gogh in Arles, narrated by Edward Herrmann:
Near the end of his life, Vincent van Gogh moved from Paris to the city of Arles in southeastern France, where he experienced the most productive period of his artistic career. During his 444 days there, he completed over two hundred paintings and one hundred drawings inspired by the region’s light, wildlife, and inhabitants. This film presents the stories behind many beloved works alongside beautiful footage of daily life in Provence, as well as glimpses of rarely seen canvases held in private collections.
First came the album and tour in 2018. Then the Broadway show in 2019. And now the latest incarnation of David Byrne’s American Utopia–the concert film directed by Spike Lee. Debuting on HBO Max on October 17th, this Spike Lee joint shows David Byrne “joined by an ensemble of 11 musicians, singers, and dancers from around the globe, inviting audiences into a joyous dreamworld where human connection, self-evolution, and social justice are paramount.” If the movie is anything like the tour, it will be sublime. For now, we’ll whet your appetite with the sneak preview above.
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“Though eagerly embraced by a public in love with a handful of memorable images and spellbound by the thought of an artist who would cut off his own ear,” the authors argue, “Stone’s suicide yarn was based on bad history, bad psychology, and, as a definitive new expert analysis makes clear, bad forensics.” An expert analysis, you say? Yes. the world’s biggest posthumous art star has become an unsolved mystery, the subject of a Buzzfeed video above, part a series that also includes Edgar Allan Poe, JFK, Jimmy Hoffa, and Natalie Wood.
Van Gogh’s suicide seems accepted as a fact by the Van Gogh Museum, at least according to their website, evidenced by the morbid gloom of his late letters to his brother. But Van Gogh wrote “not a word about his final days,” Smith and Naifeh point out, and he left behind no suicide note, “odd for a man who churned out letters so profligately.” A piece of writing found on him turned out to be an early draft of his last letter to Theo, which was “upbeat—even ebullient—about the future.” He had every reason to be, given the glowing success of his first show. “He had placed a large order for more paints only a few days before a bullet put a hole in his abdomen.”
The story of how the hole got there involves a then-16-year-old Paris pharmacist named René Secrétan, who cruelly bullied Van Gogh during his 1890 summer in Auvers. (He also sat for some paintings and a drawing.) His involvement explains the “studied silence” the community maintained after Van Gogh’s death. No one mentioned suicide, but no one would say much of anything else either. Secrétan became a wealthy banker and lived to see Kirk Douglas portray the eccentric artist he mocked as “Toto.” He later admitted to owning the gun that killed Van Gogh, but denied firing the shot.
The new evidence surrounding Van Gogh’s possible murder has been in the public eye for several years now, but it hasn’t made much of a dent in the Van Gogh suicide legend. Still, we must admit, that story has always made little sense. Even scholars at the Van Gogh museum privately admitted to the artist’s biographers that they had serious doubts about it. These were dismissed, they claimed, as being “too controversial.” Now that Van Gogh has become a YouTube true crime unsolved mystery, there’s no shutting the door on speculation about his untimely and tragic demise.
The internet has given us a few new ways to watch things, but many more new things to watch. It’s not just that we now tune in to our favorite shows online rather than on television, but that our “favorite shows” have assumed forms we couldn’t have imagined before. Thirty years ago, if you’d gone to a TV network and pitched a program consisting of nothing but the process of antique restoration — no music, no narration, no story, and certainly no stars — you’d have been told nobody wanted to watch that. In 2020, we know the truth: not only do people want to watch that, but quite a lot of people want to watch that, as evidenced by the enormous view counts of Youtube restoration videos.
At Vice, Mike Dozier profiles the Swiss Youtube restoration channel My Mechanics. Its “videos don’t just appeal to people interested in antique restoration, which they surely do, but many viewers watch because they find the process relaxing.”
Some come for the techniques and stay for the “hypnotic quality — the sounds of clinking metal, the grinding of sandpaper and the whirring of a lathe populate each video. And watching something, like a rusty old coffee grinder, come back to life, shiny and looking brand-new, is uniquely satisfying.” This verges on the newly carved-out territory of “autonomous sensory meridian response,” or ASMR, a genre of video engineered specifically to deliver psychologically pleasing sounds.
In Korea, where I live, ASMR has attained disproportionately massive popularity — though not quite the popularity of mukbang, the style of long-form eating-on-camera video that has gone international in recent years. One theory of the appeal of mukbang holds that it offers vicarious satisfaction to viewers who are dieting, broke, or otherwise unable to consume enormous meals themselves. That may also be true, to a degree, of restoration videos. To bring a 19th-century screwdriver, say, or a World War II military watch back to like-new condition requires not just the right equipment but formidable amounts of knowledge and dexterity as well. Clicking on a Youtube video asks of us much less in the way of time and dedication. And yet, among the billions of views restoration videos have racked up, there are surely fans who have acted on the inspiration and built old-school skills of their own.
In our increasingly digital age — characterized by nothing more acutely than our tendency to spend hours clicking through increasingly specialized Youtube videos — skilled physical work has become an impressive spectacle in itself. As everywhere on the internet, subgenres have produced sub-subgenres: take the vintage toy restoration channel Rescue & Restore or art restorer Julian Baumgartner (who produces both narrated and ASMR version of his videos), both previously featured here on Open Culture. If those don’t absorb you, have a look at Cool Again Restoration, Iron Man Restoration, Hand Tool Rescue, MrRescue (a model-car specialist), Restoration and Metal, Random Hands… and the list goes on, given how much needs restoring in this world.
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
David Lynch’s weather report for Sunday September 13th: “Here in LA, grey. Again, smoke-filled sky. Very still right now. 61 degrees fahrenheit. Today I’m making a list of all the good things that are happening in the world. [Pause.] I’m still thinking… No blue skies, no golden sunshine today.”
Maybe David Byrne, creator of the “Reasons to Be Cheerful” web site, would have a better shot at filling out the page. Have your own list of good things happening in the world? Add them to the comments below…
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Many a parent who caught their kid watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the 1970s felt, as one 70s American dad proclaimed, that “it was the singularly dumbest thing ever broadcast on the tube.” Fans of the show know otherwise. The Pythons created some of sharpest satire of conservative authority figures and middle-class mores. But they did it in the broadly silliest of ways. The troupe, who met at Oxford and Cambridge, where they’d been studying for professional careers, decided they preferred to follow in the footsteps of their heroes on The Goon Show. What must their parents have thought?
But the Pythons made good. They grew up to be avuncular authorities themselves, of the kind they might have skewered in their younger days. After several decades of making highly regarded travel documentaries, Michael Palin became president of the Royal Geographical Society, an office one can imagine him occupying in the short-pants uniform of a Bruce. Instead, photographed in academic casual holding a globe, he was dubbed by The Independent as “a man with the world in his hands.”
Unlike fellow accomplished Python John Cleese, who can never resist getting in a joke, Palin has mostly played the straight man in his TV presenter career. He brings to this role an earnestness that endeared viewers for decades. It’s a quality that shines through in his documentaries on art for BBC Scotland, in which he explores the worlds of his favorite painters without a hint of the pretentiousness we would find in a Python caricature. Just above, Palin travels to Maine to learn about the life of Andrew Wyeth and the setting of his most famous work, Christina’s World.
Palin’s passion for art and for travel are of a piece—driven not by ideas about what art or travel should be, but rather by what they were like for him. Palin brings this personal approach to the conversation above with Caroline Campbell, Head of Curatorial at the British National Gallery. Here, he discusses “ten paintings which I cannot avoid when I’m going in the gallery. They always catch my eye, and each one means something to me.” Artists included in his “rather esoteric” collection include the late-Medieval/early-Renaissance pioneer Duccio, Hans Holbein the Younger, William Hogarth, and Joseph Mallord William Turner.
While these may be familiar names to any art lover, the works Palin chooses from each artist may not be. His thoughtful, perceptive responses to these works are not those of the professional critic or of the professional comedian. They are the responses of a frequent traveler who notices something new on every trip.
There’s a book-lined Knowledge Room in the late Prince Rogers Nelson’s Paisley Park, but the Prince-inspired faux-books that artist Todd Alcott imagines are probably better suited to the estate’s purple-lit Relaxation Room.
The Knowledge Room was conceived of as a library where the world’s most famous convert to Jehovah’s Witnesses could delve into religious literature, reflect on the meaning of life, and study the Bible deep into the night.
Alcott’s covers harken to an earlier stage in Prince’s evolution—one the star eventually disavowed—as well as several bygone eras of book design.
Alcott’s 1950s pulp novel treatment, above, is similarly graphic. Those skintight purple curves are a promise that even purpler prose lays within, or would, were there any text couched behind that steamy cover.
“When Doves Cry” makes for a pretty purple cover, too. In this case, the inspiration is a 1950s self-help book, enriched with some Freudian taglines from Prince’s own pen. (“Maybe you’re just like my mother, she’s never satisfied.”)
Alcott remembers Prince being “an incredibly liberating figure” when he burst onto the scene:
There was his flamboyant, outrageous sexuality, but also his musical omnivorousness; he played funk, rock, pop, jazz, everything. Purple Rain was the Sergeant Pepper’s of its day, a wall-to-wall brilliant album that everyone could recognize as a remarkable achievement. I remember when I first saw Purple Rain, at the very beginning of the movie, before the movie has even begun, the Warner Bros logo came up and you heard the sound of an expectant crowd, and an announcer says “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Revolution,” and the first shot is of Prince, backlit, silhouetted in purple against a dense mist, and he says “Dearly beloved, we have gathered here today to get through this thing called life.” And I was instantly, incontrovertibly, a fan for life. The confidence of that opening, the sheer audacity of it, adopting the tone of a priest at a wedding, in his Hendrix outfit and hairdo, the sheer gutsiness of that statement, alone, just blew me away. And then he proceeded to play “Let’s Go Crazy” which completely lived up to that opening. After that he could have run Buick ads for the rest of the movie and I’d still be a fan.
Decades later, I was sitting in a Subway restaurant at the end of a very, very long, tiring day, and was feeling completely exhausted and miserable, and out of nowhere, “When Doves Cry” came on the sound system. And I was reminded that the song, which was a huge hit in 1984, the song of the year, had no bass line. The arrangement of it made no sense. It was a song put together by force of will, with its metal guitar and its synth strings and its electronic drums. And in that moment, at the end of a long, tiring day, I was reminded that miracles are possible.
The image above may at first look like a plate from a Jules Verne novel, or perhaps a still from one of Georges Méliès’ more fantastical moving pictures. It does indeed come from fin de siècle France, a time and place in which Verne, Méliès, and many other imaginative creators lived and worked, but it is in fact a genuine underwater photograph — or rather, a genuine underwater portrait, and the first example of such a thing in photographic history. Taken in the 1890s (most likely 1899) by biologist and photography pioneer Louis Boutan, it depicts Boutan’s Romanian colleague Emil Racovitza holding up a sign that reads “Photographie Sous Marine,” or “Underwater Photography.”
Such an outlandish concept could hardly have crossed many minds back then, and fewer still would have dreamt up practical ways to realize it. To start with the most basic of challenges, there is, as David Byrne sung, water at the bottom of the ocean — but not a whole lot of light, especially compared to the burdensome requirements of late 19th-century cameras. This necessitated the development of what Petapixel’s Laurence Bartone calls a “crazy underwater flash photography rig,” one powerful enough that it “could easily double as a bomb. The creation involved an alcohol lamp on an oxygen-filled barrel. A rubber bulb would then blow a puff of magnesium powder over the flame, creating a flash.”
Photography enthusiasts will understand the magnitude of Boutan’s achievement (made with the help of his brother Auguste and a laboratory technician named Joseph David). Some have gone so far as to recreate it, an effort you can see in the Barcelona Underwater Festival video just above. Not only are there fish and other sea creatures swimming everywhere, a feature of the environment not visible in Boutan’s original shot, but the re-enactors face the pressure of curious passersby, young and old, who walk through a nearby transparent underwater tunnel, not a consideration for Boutan and his collaborators. That groundbreaking success in underwater portraiture came 54 years after a Philadelphia chemist named Robert Cornelius first turned his camera on himself. Has photographic history recorded how long it took humanity after Boutan’s famous picture to snap the first underwater selfie?
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
For more than 200 years between the mid-17th and mid-19th century, Japan closed itself to the outside world. But when it finally opened again, it couldn’t get enough of the outside world. The American Navy commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his formidable “Black Ships” in 1853, demanding that Japan engage in trade. Five years later came the Meiji Restoration, which consolidated Japan’s political system under imperial rule and encouraged both industrialization and Westernization. Or rather, it encouraged the importation of Western technology and ideas for use in Japanese ways, a combination known as wakon-yōsai, meaning “Japanese spirit and Western techniques.”
It is in the mindset of wakon-yōsai, says the Public Domain Review, that we should view these Japanese woodblock prints of Western inventors, scholars, and artists. Most likely dating from 1873 — a heady time for the mixture of Japanese spirit and Western techniques — they depict these figures facing a variety of challenges, some more plausible than others.
“The great naturalist John James Audubon battles with a mischievous rat who has eaten his work; the dog of historian and poet Thomas Carlyle has upset a lamp burning his papers; the wife of Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning-frame, smashes his creation; the developer of the Watt steam engine James Watt suffers the wrath of his impatient Aunt; pottery impresario Bernard Palissy has to burn his family’s furniture to keep his kiln’s fire going.”
Commissioned by the Japanese Department of Education, these schoolbook illustrations may bring to mind the 1861 Japanese history of America previously featured on Open Culture, with its tiger-punching George Washington and serpent-slaying John Adams. But the text that accompanies these mightily struggling Western luminaries, translations of which you can find along with the images at the Public Domain Review, “paints a slightly more positive picture, revealing the moral, something akin to ‘If at first you don’t succeed then try again,’ or ‘Perseverance prospers.’ ” In Japan’s case, perseverance would indeed make it one of the most prosperous nations in the world — if only after its defeat in World War II, by some of the very nations whose historical figures it had lionized less than a century before. Find more images at the Public Domain Review and the Library of Congress.
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Leonardo da Vinci didn’t really have hobbies; he had passionate, unpaid obsessions that filled whole notebooks with puzzles scientists are still trying to solve. Many of the problems to which he applied himself were those none of his contemporaries understood, because he was the only person to have noticed them at all. The amateur anatomist was the first, for example, “to sketch trabeculae,” notes Medievalists.net, “and their snowflake-like fractal patterns in the 16th century.”
These geometric patterns of muscle fibers on the inner surface of the heart have remained a mystery for over 500 years since Leonardo’s anatomical investigations, carried out first on pig and oxen hearts, then later, in hasty dissections in the winter cold, on human specimens. He speculated they might have warmed the blood, but scientists have recently found they enhance blood flow “just like the dimples on a golf ball reduce air resistance.”
Leonardo may have been wide of the mark in his trabeculae theory, not having access to genetic testing, AI, or MRI. But he was the first to describe coronary artery disease, which would become one of the leading causes of death 500 years later. Many of his medical conclusions have turned out to be startingly correct, in fact. He detailed and elegantly sketched the heart’s anatomy from 1507 until his death in 1519, working out the flow of the blood through the body.
As the Medlife Crisis video above explains, Leonardo’s studies on the heart elegantly brought together his interests in art, anatomy, and engineering. Because of this multi-dimensional approach, he was able to explain a fact about the heart’s operation that even many cardiologists today get wrong, the movement of the aortic valve. In order to visualize the “flow dynamics” of the heart’s machinery, without imaging machinery of his own, he built a glass model, and drew several sketches of what he saw. “Incredibly, it took 450 years to prove him right.”
The mind of this extraordinary figure continues to divulge its secrets, and scholars and doctors across multiple fields continue to engage with his work, in the pages, for example, of the Netherlands Heart Journal. His studies on the heart particularly show how his astonishing breadth of knowledge and skill paradoxically made him such a focused, determined, and creative thinker.
Some of my fondest memories are of hiking the Olympic National Forest in Washington State and the forests of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, seeking the kind of silence one can only find in busy ecosystems full of birds, insects, woodland creatures, rustling leaves, etc. This experience can be transformative, a full immersion in what acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton calls a “natural acoustic system,” the endless interplay of calls and responses that evolved to harmonize over millennia.
Tragically, human noise pollution encroaches on the acoustic space of such refuges, and climate change may irrevocably alter their nature. But they will be preserved, in digital recordings at least, thanks in part to the efforts of a project called Sounds of the Forest, which has been documenting the pregnant silences of forests around the world and has so far collected audio files from six continents, with western Europe most heavily represented.
The Sounds of the Forest library, accessible via its interactive map or Soundcloud page, “will form an open source library,” the project announces, “to be used by anyone to listen to and create from.”
Nature lovers can contribute their own recordings, helping to fill in the many remaining areas on the map without representation. “Visit a woodland,” the project recommends, “recharge under the canopy and record your sounds of the forest.” The site gives specific instructions for how to upload audio file submissions.
Sounds of the Forest came out of the annual Timber Festival, an international gathering in the UK’s National Forest, which is the “boldest environmentally-led regeneration project: the creation of England’s first new forest in a thousand years… an imaginative and ambitious statement of sustainable development.” When the pandemic scuttled plans for an in-person 2020 Timber Festival, organizers conceived of the sound files as a way to bring the world together in a virtual forest gathering. They are also foraging material for next year’s fest, in which “selected artists will be responding to the sounds that are gathered, creating music, audio, artwork or something else incredible.”
If you can’t make it to Timber Festival 2021 next summer, or to your forest refuge of choice this autumn, you can still immerse yourself in the restorative sounds of forests worldwide. Open thesound map, click on a file, close your eyes, and imagine yourself in Nelson Lakes National Park in New Zealand, Yasuni National Park at night in Ecuador, or Chernyaevsky Forest in Russia. Experiencing the busy silences of nature brings us back to ourselves—or to the ancient parts of ourselves that once also harmonized with the natural world.
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