Released 40 years ago this week, New Order’s “Blue Monday” (hear the original EP version here) became, according to the BBC, “a crucial link between Seventies disco and the dance/house boom that took off at the end of the Eighties.” If you frequented a dance club during the 1980s, you know the song.
The original “Blue Monday” never quite won me over. I’m much more Rolling Stones than New Order. But I’m taken with the adaptation above. Created by the “Orkestra Obsolete,” this version tries to imagine what the song would have sounded like in 1933, using only instruments available at the time— for example, writes the BBC, the theremin, musical saw, harmonium and prepared piano. Quite a change from the Powertron Sequencer, Moog Source synthesizer, and Oberheim DMX drum machine used to record the song in the 80s. Enjoy this little thought experiment put into action.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
Barnaby Dixon’s incredible two-piece creations redefine the notion of hand puppets, by moving and responding in highly nuanced, realistic ways.
The pinkie and index finger of one hand slip into the creature’s arms, leaving the thumb free to operate the tiny controls that tilt head and mouth movements.
The pinkie and index finger of one hand slip into the creature’s legs, an attribute few hand puppets can claim.
A waistline magnet joins the puppet’s top half to its bottom.
His goal is for viewers to “forget the mechanisms and forget the process that’s gone into making it so they can just enjoy the motions.”
Each character has a unique set of motions and a custom-designed plastic, silicone and metal assembly, informed by many hours of anatomical observation and study. Their structures speak to Dixon’s early years as a stop motion animator, as do his fabrication methods.
His frustration with the glacial pace of achieving the end product in that realm spurred him to experiment with puppets who could be filmed moving in real time.
His first puppet, Dab Chick, below, holds a special place in his heart, and is also one of his mouthiest.
Dab Chick’s tiny head cocks on spectacle hinges and a hand-wound spring wrapped in silicone. The mechanism that opens and closes his beak is a miniature spin on bicycle hand brakes.
While many of Dixon’s recent puppets thrive in a Day-Glo, synth-heavy environment, Dab Chick is a crowd-pleasing curmudgeon, spouting opinions and repartee. He even plays drunk… a hard assignment for any performer to pull off, but Dixon nails it.
Phil the fish is operated with two rods. He performs best in water, appropriately enough, highlighting his talent for blowing bubbles, as well as Dixon’s for using physics to his advantage.
Many puppeteers match their breathing to that of their puppet’s in an effort to get into the zone. Dixon takes it to the next level by streaming real time video of his mouth to a tiny screen embedded below the nose of the puppet he is operating.
Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot-spring hotel in the mountains of Japan’s Yamanashi Prefecture, has been in business for over 1,300 years, more than five times as long as the United States has existed. Nevertheless, it feels considerably more modern than the average American motel, to say nothing of the longer-established lodgings of England. “I assumed that I’d be staying in something like a living museum here,” says Youtuber Tom Scott, vlogging from his very own room at Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, “because that’s what I’ve come to expect from the sort of historical attractions you’ll find in Britain,” where preservation ideology holds that “everything must be held at a certain point in time, funded by tourists who want to visit the old thing and see history.”
Not so in Japan, whose notions of new and old have never quite aligned with those of the West. “There’s still tradition here,” Scott hastens to add. “It’s not a Western-style hotel. You sleep on futons; dinner is served at a low Japanese-style table.” But the actual complex in which guests now stay “has only been a hotel in the English sense for a few decades. Before that, it was just a place to stay and take the waters. Now there’s very fast wi-fi and, of course, a gift shop.”
The movement and replacement of its buildings over the centuries brings to mind Mie prefecture’s Ise Grand Shrine, freshly rebuilt each and every twenty years, or even the tendency of existing Japanese homes to be torn down rather than occupied by their buyers.
Though Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan has long shunned excessive publicity — its current president Kawano Kenjiro explains that the Emperor of Japan’s stay there, in his days as Crown Prince, was kept quiet for that reason — it has lately become irresistible to Youtubers. We’ve featured it before here on Open Culture, and just above you can see another take on it in the House of History video above, which explains how it has managed its continuity. Kawano, who’d worked at the hotel since the age of 25, chose not to go the standard route of being legally adopted into the family that had always owned the place. And so, instead of inheriting it, he created Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan Limited, a technically new corporate entity, but one that ought to be good for at least another millennia or two.
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.
The documentary filmmaker and sports editor Paul Devlin has won five Emmy awards, but he may well be better known for not getting into Harvard — or rather, for not getting into Harvard, then rejecting Harvard’s rejection. “I noticed that the rejection letter I received from Harvard had a grammatical error,” Devlin writes. “So, I wrote a letter back, rejecting their rejection letter.” His mother then “sent a copy of this letter to the New YorkTimes and it was published in the New Jersey section on May 31, 1981.” In 1996, when the New YorkTimes Magazine published a cover story “about the trauma students were experiencing getting rejected from colleges,” she seized the opportunity to send her son’s rejection-rejection letter to the Paper of Record.
It turned out that Devlin’s letter had already run there, having long since gone the pre-social-media equivalent of viral. “The NewYork Times accused me of plagiarism. When they discovered that I was the original author and they had unwittingly re-printed themselves, they were none too happy. But my mom insists that it was important to reprint the article because the issue was clearly still relevant.”
Indeed, its afterlife continues even today, as evidenced by the new video from Letters Live at the top of the post. In it actor Himesh Patel, well-known from series like EastEnders, Station Eleven, and Avenue 5, reads aloud Devlin’s letter, which runs as follows:
Having reviewed the many rejection letters I have received in the last few weeks, it is with great regret that I must inform you I am unable to accept your rejection at this time.
This year, after applying to a great many colleges and universities, I received an especially fine crop of rejection letters. Unfortunately, the number of rejections that I can accept is limited.
Each of my rejections was reviewed carefully and on an individual basis. Many factors were taken into account – the size of the institution, student-faculty ratio, location, reputation, costs and social atmosphere.
I am certain that most colleges I applied to are more than qualified to reject me. I am also sure that some mistakes were made in turning away some of these rejections. I can only hope they were few in number.
I am aware of the keen disappointment my decision may bring. Throughout my deliberations, I have kept in mind the time and effort it may have taken for you to reach your decision to reject me.
Keep in mind that at times it was necessary for me to reject even those letters of rejection that would normally have met my traditionally high standards.
I appreciate your having enough interest in me to reject my application. Let me take the opportunity to wish you well in what I am sure will be a successful academic year.
SEE YOU IN THE FALL!
Sincerely,
Paul Devlin
Applicant at Large
However considerable the moxie (to use a wholly American term) shown by the young Devlin in his letter, his reasoning seems not to have swayed Harvard’s admissions department. Whether it would prove any more effective in the twenty-twenties than it did in the nineteen-eighties seems doubtful, but it must remain a satisfying read for high-school students dispirited by the supplicating posture the college-application process all but forces them to take. It surely does them good to remember that they, too, possess the agency to declare acceptance or rejection of that which is presented to them simply as necessity, as obligation, as a given. And for Devlin, at least, there was always the University of Michigan.
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.
From 2010 to 2012, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson released “Everything is a Remix,” a four-part series (watch here) that explored art and creativity, and particularly how artists inevitably borrow from one another, drawing on past ideas and conventions, and then turn these materials into something beautiful and new. In the initial series, Ferguson focused on musicians, filmmakers, writers and even video game makers. Now, a little more than a decade later, Ferguson has resurfaced and released a fifth and final chapter in his series, with this episode focusing on a different kind of artist: artificial intelligence. Responding to the rise of AI-generated art, Ferguson delves into the ethics of art generated by machines, particularly when they’re trained with human-created art. Is AI-generated art a form of piracy? Or is it another kind of creative remix? And what does AI mean for the future of art and creativity? These are just some of the weighty questions Ferguson tackles in his final installment. Watch it above.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Even if Florence didn’t represent the absolute pinnacle of human civilization at the end of the thirteenth century, it had to have been a strong contender for the position. What the city lacked, however, was a cathedral befitting its status. Hence the construction, which commenced in 1296, of just such a holy structure, in accordance with ambitious plans drawn up by architect Arnolfo di Cambio. But when di Cambio died in 1302, work came more or less to a stop for nearly half a century. Construction resumed in 1344 under Giotto, whose own death three years later left the project to his assistant Andrea Pisano, who was himself succeeded by Francesco Talenti, Giovanni di Lapo Ghini, Alberto Arnoldi, Giovanni d’Ambrogio, Neri di Fioravanti, and Andrea Orcagna.
None of these architects, however astute, managed to finish the cathedral: in 1418, it still had a gaping hole on top where its dome should have been, and in any case no viable design or engineering procedure to construct one. “So they had a competition, and everybody was invited to submit their projects,” says Youtuber Manuel Bravo, who tells the story in the video at the top of the post.
Enter the sculptor Filippo Brunelleschi, who declared, in effect, “I can do it. I can build you the dome. And what’s more, I can build you the dome without coins or earth.” That last was a reference to an earlier architect’s suggestion that the dome under construction be supported with a mound of dirt filled with money, so peasants would gladly volunteer to cart it away after completion.
Brunelleschi’s considerably more elegant idea was inspired by the ruins of antiquity, not least the Pantheon, which then boasted the largest dome ever built in Europe, discussed by Bravo in a previous video. In this one he breaks down the ingenious techniques Brunelleschi used to outdo the Pantheon, and without using a temporary supporting structure of any kind. Instead, he incorporated ring-like elements “tying the dome from outside, as if they were belts like the ones we wear,” as well as “a particular kind of brickwork, a pattern with a series of spiral ribs” which “allowed them to lock together the bricks that were placed horizontally.” The result, a structure “completely self-bracing in all its phases of construction,” has stood firmly since 1469 as, quite literally, a crowning glory: not just of the Duomo, but of Florence as well.
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.
“The word ‘connoisseur’ is not an attractive one,” writes Jancis Robinson in her memoir Tasting Pleasure: Confessions of a Wine Lover. “It smacks of exclusivity, preciousness and elitism.” Indeed, “connoisseurship is not a necessary state for wine appreciation. It is perfectly possible to enjoy wine enormously without really understanding it. But a connoisseur sees each individual wine in its historical, geographical and sociological context and is truly sensitive to its possibilities.” Those who drink wine too carelessly or too stringently, “those who will not meet a wine halfway, and who consistently ignore the story each wine has to tell, deprive themselves of a large part of the potential pleasure associated with each bottle.”
How best to experience that pleasure — or rather, how best to attain the state of connoisseurship that makes it accessible in the first place? One could do worse than starting with the works of Robinson herself, who’s not just one of the most respected wine writers alive today, but also onetime supervisor of the luxury wine selection on British Airways’ Concorde and advisor for the wine cellar of the late Queen Elizabeth II.
Since she began covering wine professionally nearly half a century ago, she has produced a great deal of work in print as well as for the screen. Among the latter, perhaps the most ambitious is Jancis Robinson’s Wine Course, whose ten episodes originally aired on BBC 2 in 1995 and are now available to watch on Robinson’s own Youtube channel.
With this $1.6 million production, Robinson was “set loose on the wine world, far too much of the time in full makeup, with freshly done hair and clothes subsidized by an official BBC budget.” Dedicating each episode to a different grape varietal “allowed us within a single program to visit more than one region — and therefore vary the scenery, architecture and climate. It also reflected my passionate interest in grape varieties and my conviction that coming to grips with the most important grapes provides the easiest route to learning about wine.” The yearlong shoot took her and her team around the globe, visiting winemakers wherever they could be found: France, Germany, Australia, Chile, and even northern California, where they managed an audience with auteur-vintner Francis Ford Coppola.
“The conflict between the New and Old Worlds of wine was coming nicely to a head at just the right time for our series, Robinson notes.” Those worlds have settled into a kind of relative peace in the decades since — as has the “Chardonnay boom” of the mid-nineteen-nineties, about which Robinson lets slip some frustration onscreen. Despite her vast knowledge and experience of wine, Robinson seldom shows any hesitancy to crack a joke, and surely her continued prominence as a wine educator owes something to that sense of humor, on display in the Talks at Google interview about her 2016 book The 24-Hour Wine Expert. More recently, she entered into another collaboration with the BBC, specifically the new BBC Maestro online education platform, to create the course “An Understanding of Wine.” In all pursuits, understanding is the basis of pleasure — but in wine, even more so.
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.
Everyone knows that Georges Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la GrandeJatte, or A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, resides at the Art Institute of Chicago. Or at least everyone who’s seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off knows it. The Art Institute appears as just one of the implausibly varied attractions of Chicago enjoyed by that film’s titular hooky-playing high-school senior and his friends — even the anxiety-ridden Cameron, drops from a moment out of his troubled life while transfixed by Seurat’s most famous painting. The closer he looks, the less discernible its genteel Parisian figures become, dissolving into fields of colored dots.
“George Seurat spent most of his adult life thinking about color,” says gallerist-Youtuber James Payne, “studying theories and working out systematically how one color, placed in a series of dots next to those of another, creates a whole different color when it hits the retina of the human eye.”
By the time of La Grande Jatte — which he meticulously planned, laboriously executed, and completed between 1884 and 1886 — “he made sure we saw color exactly how he wanted us to.” Payne tells the story of Seurat, his scientific, aesthetic, and philosophical interests, and the fruits of his intellectual and artistic labors, in the new video from his channel Great Art Explained at the top of the post.
Seurat first painted La Grande Jatte using not dots but dashes, “vertical for trees and horizontal for the water.” After further developing his color theory, he returned to the canvas and “added hundreds of thousands of small dots of complimentary colors on top of what he’d already done, which appear as solid and luminous forms when seen from a distance.” The final stage involved the addition of a colored border around the entire scene, and not long thereafter elaborate interpretations of the outwardly placid painting began to multiply. But “the lack of narrative means we really should look to the artist’s obsession with form, technique, and theory, which is practically all he wrote about, and not the meaning or subject manner.” We may enjoy talking about art’s content, but it is art’s form, after all, that truly captivates us.
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.
“A brush makes watercolors appear on a white sheet of paper. An everyday object takes shape, drawn with precision by an artist’s hand. Then two, then three, then four… Superimposed, condensed, multiplied, thousands of documentary drawings in successive series come to life on the screen, composing a veritable visual symphony of everyday objects. The accumulation, both fascinating and dizzying, takes us on a trip through time.” That’s how the Vimeo channel of Girelle Productions prefaces the animation “Grands Canons” (aka “Big Guns”) by French filmmaker Alain Biet. It’s a wild ride, a painstaking feat in experimental filmmaking. Enjoy it above.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Ancient Greece and Rome had plenty of literature, but practically none of it survives today. What exactly became of almost everything written down in Western antiquity is the subject of the video above by ancient-history Youtube channel Told in Stone, previously featured here on Open Culture for its investigations into everything from the Colosseum and the Pantheon to Roman nightlife and the explosion of Mount Vesuvius. But none of its past videos has quite as much relevance to this particular story as the one on the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
Described by narrator Garret Ryan as “the greatest of all ancient libraries,” the Library of Alexandria could have contained between 532,800 and 700,000 volumes in scroll form, all of them lost by the time Julius Caesar burned it down in 48 B.C..
Even so, “the loss of all but a tiny fraction of ancient literature was not brought about by the disappearance of a single library. It was, instead, the consequence of the basic fragility of texts before the advent of printing.” Papyrus, the pre-paper writing material first developed in ancient Egypt, certainly couldn’t stand the test of time: in relatively humid western Europe, “most papyri had to be recopied every century or so.”
Plus ça change: even, and perhaps especially, in our digital era, long-term data archival has turned out to necessitate regular movement from one storage medium to the next. But perhaps our civilization will prove luckier with the process than the Roman Empire, whose collapse meant that “the elites who had traditionally commissioned new copies all but vanished. Far fewer manuscripts were produced, and those that were tended to serve the particular purposes of religion, education, and the technical disciplines.” For these and other reasons, very few classics made it to the Middle Ages, and thus to the Renaissance. But even if you don’t have much to study, so the latter era gloriously demonstrated, you can more than compensate by studying it hard.
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.
With 26 lines and 472 stations, the New York City subway system is practically a living organism, and way too big a topic to tackle in a short video.
Architect Michael Wyetzner may not have time to touch on rats, crime track fires, flooding, night and weekend service disruptions, or the adults-in-a-Peanuts-special sound quality of the announcements in the above episode of Architectural Digest’s Blueprints web series, but he gives an excellent overview of its evolving design, from the stations themselves to sidewalk entrances to the platform signage.
First stop, the old City Hall station, whose chandeliers, skylights, and Guastavino tile arching in an alternating colors herringbone pattern made it the star attraction of the just-opened system in 1904.
(It’s been closed since 1945, but savvy transit buffs know that they can catch a glimpse by ignoring the conductor’s announcement to exit the downtown 6 train at its last stop, then looking out the window as it makes a U‑turn, passing through the abandoned station to begin its trip back uptown. The New York Transit Museum also hosts popular thrice yearly tours.)
Express tracks have been a feature of New York’s subway system since the beginning, when Interborough Rapid Transit Company enhanced its existing elevated line with an underground route capable of carrying passengers from City Hall to Harlem for a nickel fare.
Wyetzner efficiently sketches the open excavation design of the early IRT stations — “cut and cover” trenches less than 20’ deep, with room for four tracks, platforms, and no frills support columns that are nearly as ubiquitous white subway tiles.
For the most part, New Yorkers take the subway for granted, and are always prepared to beef about the fare to service ration, but this was not the case on New Year’s Day, 2017, when riders went out of their way to take the Q train.
(The massive drills used to create tunnels and stations at a far greater depth than the IRT line, were left where they wound up, in preparation for Phase 2, which is slated to push the line up to 125th St by 2029. (Don’t hold your breath…)
The designers of the subway placed a premium on aesthetics, as evidenced by the domed Art Nouveau IRT entrance kiosks and beautiful permanent platform signs.
Wyetzner also name checks graphic designer Massimo Vignelli who was brought aboard in 1966 to standardize the informational signage.
The white-on-black sans serif font directing us to our desired connections and exits now seems like part of the subway’s DNA.
Perhaps 21st-century innovations like countdown clocks and digital screens listing real-time service changes and alternative routes will too, one of these days.
If Wyetzner is open to filming the follow-up viewers are clamoring for in the comments, perhaps he’ll weigh in on the new A‑train cars that debuted last week, which boast security cameras, flip-up seating to accommodate riders with disabilities, and wider door openings to promote quicker boarding.
(Yes, they’re still the quickest way to get to Harlem…)
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
