Pioneering Sci-Fi Author William Gibson Predicts in 1997 How the Internet Will Change Our World

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi, Technology | February 5th, 2019

“What’s the one thing that all great works of science fiction have in common?” asks a 1997 episode of The Net, the BBC’s television series about the possibilities of this much-talked-about new thing called the internet. “They all tried to see into the future, and they all got it wrong. Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: all, to some extent or other, wrong. And there’s another name to add to this list: William Gibson.” But then on strolls Gibson himself, fresh off the writing of Idoru, a novel involving a human who wants to marry a digitally generated Japanese pop star, to grant the interview above.

In it Gibson admits that computers hadn’t gone quite the way he’d imagined thirteen years earlier in his debut novel Neuromancer — but in which he also offers prescient advice about how we should regard new technology even today. “The thing that Neuromancer predicts as being actually like the internet isn’t actually like the internet at all!” Gibson says in a more recent interview with Wired. “I didn’t get it right but I said there was going to be something.” Back in the mid-1980s, as he tells the BBC, “there was effectively no internet to extrapolate from. The cyberspace I made up isn’t being used in Neuromancer the way we’re using the internet today.”

Gibson had envisioned a corporate-dominated network infested with “cybernetic car thieves skulking through it attempting to steal tidbits of information.” By the mid-1990s, though, the internet had become a place where “a really talented and determined fifteen-year-old” could create something more compelling than “a multinational entertainment conglomerate might come up with.” He tells the BBC that “what the internet has become is as much a surprise to me as the collapse of the Soviet Union was,” but at that point he had begun to perceive the shape of things to come. “I can’t see why it won’t become completely ubiquitous,” he says, envisioning its evolution “into something like television to the extent that it penetrates every level of society.”

At the same time, “it doesn’t matter how fast your modem is if you’re being shelled by ethnic separatists” — still very much a concern in certain parts of the world — and even the most promising technologies don’t merit our uncritical embrace. “I think we should respect the power of technology and try to fear it in a rational way,” he says. “The only appropriate response” is to give in to neither technophobia nor technophilia, but “to teach ourselves to be absolutely ambivalent about them and imagine their most inadvertent side effects,” the side effects “that tend to get us” — not to mention the ones that make the best plot elements. Seeing as how we now live in a world where marriage to synthetic Japanese idols has become a possibility, among other developments seemingly pulled from the pages of Gibson’s novels, we would do well to heed even these decades-old words of advice about his main subject.

via Big Think

How Chris Marker’s Radical SciFi Film La Jetée Changed the Life of Cyberpunk Prophet William Gibson

Cyberpunk: 1990 Documentary Featuring William Gibson & Timothy Leary Introduces the Cyberpunk Culture

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Ballard Predicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

Mark Twain Predicts the Internet in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Story, “From The ‘London Times’ in 1904”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Case for Why Ringo Starr Is One of Rock’s Greatest Drummers

in Music | February 4th, 2019

As far as I’m concerned, debate over whether or not Ringo Starr is a good drummer is over, done with, settled. How is it possible that some of the greatest recorded music of the 20th century, with some of the most distinctive rhythms, fills, and drum breaks in pop music, could have come from a mediocre musician? The standard response has been to allege that Starr’s best parts were played by someone else. In a handful of recordings—though I won’t argue over which ones—it seems he might have been replaced, for whatever reason. But Ringo could do more than hold his own. He was something rarer and more valuable than any studio musician. He remains one of the most distinctively musical drummers on record.

What does that mean? It means he intuited exactly what a song needed, and what it didn’t. He used what Buddy Rich called his “adequate” abilities (a compliment, I’d say, coming from Buddy Rich) to serve the songs best, finding ways to enhance the structures and arrangements with drum parts that are as uniquely memorable as the melodies and harmonies.

His humility and sense of humor come through in his tasteful, yet dynamic playing. I say this as a serious Ringo fan, but if you, or someone you know, needs convincing, don’t take my word for it. Take it from skilled drummers Sina and Brandon Khoo.

What are Sina’s credentials for making a pro-Ringo case? Well, for one thing, her father played in Germany’s biggest Beatles tribute band, the Silver Beatles. Also, she’s a very good musician who has memorized Ringo’s repertoire and can explain it well. Above, she demonstrates how his uncomplicated grooves complement the songs, so much so they have become iconic in their own right. (To skirt copyright issues, Sina plays along to convincing covers by her dad’s band.)

Ringo’s drum pattern for “In My Life,” for example, she says “is absolutely unique, nobody ever played this before. It’s truly original and the song won’t work with any other drum part.” If you were to write a new song around the drums alone, it would probably come out sounding just like “In My Life.” As Harrison remarks at the top, “he’s very good because he’ll listen to the song once, and he knows exactly what to play.”

Virtuoso drummer Brandon Khoo makes the case for Ringo as a good drummer, above, after a brief defense of much-maligned White Stripes drummer Meg White. He, too, chooses “In My Life” to show how “Ringo lays it down” with maximum feel and efficiency, deftly but subtly changing things up in nearly every phrase of the song. Conversely—in an exaggerated counterexample—Koo shows what a technically-skilled, but unmusical, drummer might do, namely trample over the delicate guitars and vocals with an aggressive attack and distracting, unnecessary fills and cymbal crashes. “A good drummer is a drummer who knows how to play, number one, for the music.”

If these clear demonstrations fail to sway, maybe some celebrity endorsements will do. Just above, in a video made by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to celebrate an exhibit of Ringo’s famous drum kit, see Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins, Stewart Copeland, Questlove, Tre Cool, Max Weinberg, Chad Smith, and more pay tribute. Grohl describes him as the “king of feel,” Smith talks about his “knack for coming up with really interesting musical parts that became rhythmic hooks.” In the span of just three minutes, we get a sense of exactly why the most famous drummers in rock and roll admire Ringo.

Millions of drummers have come and gone since The Beatles’ day, most of them influenced by Ringo, as Weinberg says. And not one of them has ever played like Ringo Starr. “You hear his drumming,” says Grohl, “and you know exactly who it is.” Hear how his style evolved right along with the band’s songwriting in Kye Smith’s chronological drum medley of Beatles hits below.

How Can You Tell a Good Drummer from a Bad Drummer?: Ringo Starr as Case Study

Isolated Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Greatest: Bonham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 32 ) |

The “Slave Bible” Removed Key Biblical Passages In Order to Legitimize Slavery & Discourage a Slave Rebellion (1807)

in Books, History, Religion | February 4th, 2019

Photo via the Museum of the Bible

In an 1846 speech to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Frederick Douglass summed up the twisted bond between slavery and religion in the U.S. He began with a short summary of atrocities that were legal, even encouraged, against enslaved people in Virginia and Maryland, including hanging, beheading, drawing and quartering, rape, “and this is not the worst.” He then made his case:

No, a darker feature is yet to be presented than the mere existence of these facts. I have to inform you that the religion of the Southern states, at this time, is the great supporter, the great sanctioner of the bloody atrocities to which I have referred. While America is printing tracts and Bibles; sending missionaries abroad to convert the heathen; expending her money in various ways for the promotion of the gospel in foreign lands, the slave not only lies forgotten, uncared for, but is trampled underfoot by the very churches of the land.

Douglass did not intend his statement to be taken as an indictment of Christianity, but rather the hypocrisy of American religion, both that “of the Southern states” and of “the Northern religion that sympathizes with it.” He speaks, he says, to reject “the slaveholding, the woman-whipping, the mind-darkening, the soul-destroying religion” of the country, while professing a religion that “makes its followers do unto others as they themselves would be done by.”

Douglass harshly condemns slave society in the U.S., but, perhaps given his audience, he also politically elides the extensive role many churches in the British Empire played in the slave trade and Atlantic slave economy—a continued role, to Douglass’s dismay, as he found during his UK travels in the 1840s. I’m not sure if he knew that forty years earlier, British missionaries traveled to slave plantations in the Caribbean armed with heavily-edited Bibles in which “any passage that might incite rebellion was removed,” as Brigit Katz writes at Smithsonian. But he would hardly have been surprised.

The use of religion to terrorize and control rather than liberate was something Douglass understood well, having for decades keenly observed slaveowners finding what they needed in the text and ignoring or suppressing the rest. In 1807, the Society for the Conversion of Negro Slaves went so far as to literally excise the central narrative of the Old Testament, creating an entirely different book for use by missionaries to the West Indies. “Gone,” Katz points out, “were references to the exodus of enslaved Israelites from Egypt,” references that were integral to the self-understanding of millions of Diaspora Africans.

Gone also were verses that might explicitly contradict the few proof texts slaveholders quoted to justify themselves. Especially dangerous was Exodus 21:16: “And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.” The typical 66 books of a Protestant Bible had been reduced to parts of just 14. How is it possible to publish a Bible without what amounts to the mythic origin story of ancient Israel? One answer is that this was a different religion, one whose aim, says Anthony Schmidt, curator of the Museum of the Bible, was to make “better slaves.”

The “Slave Bible” did not cut out the subject completely. Joseph’s enslavement in Egypt remains, but this is likely as an example, says Schmidt, of someone who “accepts his lot in life” and is rewarded for it, a story U.S. churches used in a similar fashion. Passages in the New Testament that seemed to emphasize equality were cut, as was the entire book of Revelation. The infamous Ephesians 6:5—“servants be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, in fear and trembling”—remained.

Whether or not the Bible really did sanction slavery is a question still up for debate—and maybe an unanswerable one given differences in interpretive frameworks and the patchwork nature of the disparate, redacted texts stitched together as one. But the fact that British and American churches deliberately used it as a weaponized tool of propaganda and indoctrination is beyond dispute. The so-called “Slave Bible” is both a fascinating historical artifact, a very literal symbol of a practice that was integral to the institution of slavery—the total control of the narrative.

Such practices became more extreme after the Haitian Revolution and the many bloody slave revolts in the U.S., as the planter class became increasingly desperate to hold on to power. One of only three extant “Slave Bibles,” the abridged version—called Parts of the Holy Bible, selected for the use of the Negro Slaves, in the British West-India Islands—is now on display at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, on loan from Fisk University. In the NPR interview above, Schmidt explains the book’s history to All Things Considered’s Michel Martin, who herself describes the text’s purpose in the most concise way: “To associate human bondage and human slavery with obedience to the higher power.”

via The Smithsonian

1.5 Million Slavery Era Documents Will Be Digitized, Helping African Americans to Learn About Their Lost Ancestors

The Atlantic Slave Trade Visualized in Two Minutes: 10 Million Lives, 20,000 Voyages, Over 315 Years

Cornell Creates a Database of Fugitive Slave Ads, Telling the Story of Those Who Resisted Slavery in 18th & 19th Century America

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Explore an Interactive Version of The Wall of Birds, a 2,500 Square-Foot Mural That Documents the Evolution of Birds Over 375 Million Years

in Biology, Museums, Nature, Science | February 4th, 2019

Now, this avian Vatican also has its own Michelangelo.

– Audubon Magazine

And the Class of Aves has its very own avian Pantone chart, created by science illustrator Jane Kim in service of her 2,500 square-foot Wall of Birds mural at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology.

The custom chart’s fifty-one colors comprise about 90 percent of the finished work. A palette of thirteen Golden Fluid Acrylics supplied the jewel-toned accents so thrilling to birdwatchers.

Along the way, Kim absorbed a tremendous amount of information about the how and why of bird feather coloration:

The iridescence on the neck and back of the Superb Starling comes not from pigment,

but from structural color. The starling’s outer feathers are constructed in a way

that refracts light like myriad prisms, making the bird appear to shimmer. The eponymous

coloring of the Lilac-breasted Roller results from a different kind of structural

color, created when woven microstructures in the feathers, called barbs and barbules,

reflect only the shorter wavelengths of light like blue and violet.

The primary colors that lend their name to the Red-and-yellow Barbet are

derived from a class of pigments called carotenoids that the bird absorbs in its diet.

These are the same compounds that turn flamingos’ feathers pink. As a member of

the family Musophagidae, the Hartlaub’s Turaco displays pigmentation unique in the

bird world. Birds have no green pigmentation; in most cases, verdant plumage is a

combination of yellow carotenoids and blue structural color. Turacos are an exception,

displaying a green, copper-based pigment called turacoverdin that they absorb

in their herbivorous diet. The flash of red on the Hartlaub’s underwings comes from

turacin, another copper-based pigment unique to the family.

Kim also boned up on her subjects’ mating rituals, dietary habits, song styles, and male/female differences prior to inscribing the 270 life-size, lifelike birds onto the lab’s largest wall.

She examined specimens from the center’s collection and reviewed centuries’ worth of field observations.

(The seventeenth-century English naturalist John Ray dismissed the hornbill family as having a “foul look,” a colonialism that ruffled Kim’s own feathers somewhat. In retaliation, she dubbed the Great Hornbill, “the Cyrano of the Jungle” owing to his “tequila-sunrise-hued facial phallus,” and selected him as the cover boy for her book about the mural.)

Research and preliminary sketching consumed an entire year, after which it took 17 months to inscribe 270 life-size creatures—some long extinct—onto the lab’s main wall. The birds are set against a greyscale map of the world, and while many are depicted in flight, every one save the Wandering Albatross has a foot touching its continent of origin.

Those who can’t visit the Wall of Birds (official title: From So Simple a Beginning) in person, can log some digital birdwatching using a spectacular interactive web-based version of the mural that provides plenty of information about each specimen, some of it literary. (The aforementioned Albatross’ entry contains a passing reference to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.)

Explore the Wall of Birds’ interactive features here.

You can download a free chapter of The Wall of Birds: One Planet, 243 Families, 375 Million Years by subscribing to Kim’s mailing list here.

Via Hyperallergic

What Kind of Bird Is That?: A Free App From Cornell Will Give You the Answer

Modernist Birdhouses Inspired by Bauhaus, Frank Lloyd Wright and Joseph Eichler

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. See her onstage in New York City February 11 for Theater of the Apes book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Dorothea Lange Shot, Migrant Mother, Perhaps the Most Iconic Photo in American History

in Photography | February 4th, 2019

When we visualize the Great Depression, we think first of one woman: Native American migrant worker Florence Owens Thompson. Few of us know her name, though nearly all of us know her face. For that we have another woman to thank: the photographer Dorothea Lange who during the Depression was working for the United States federal government, specifically the Farm Security Administration, on “a project that would involve documenting poor rural workers in a propaganda effort to elicit political support for government aid.”

That’s how Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, puts it in a video essay on Lange’s famous 1936 photo of Thompson, Migrant Mother. (For best results, view the video below on a phone or tablet rather than on a standard computer screen.) Reaching the migrant workers’ camp in Nipomo, California where Thompson and her children were staying toward the end of another long day of photography, Lange at first passed it by.

Only about twenty miles later did she decide to turn the car around and see what material the 2,500 to 3,500 “pea pickers” there might offer. She stayed only ten minutes, but in that time captured what Puschak calls the photograph that “came to define the Depression in the American consciousness” — it even heads the Great Depression’s Wikipedia page — and “became the archetypal image of struggling families in any era.”

Over time, Migrant Mother has also become “one of the most iconic pictures in the history of photography.” But Lange didn’t get it right away: it was actually the sixth portrait she took of Thompson, each one more powerful (and more able to “evoke sympathy from voters that would translate into political support”) than the last. Puschak takes us through each of these, marking the changes in composition that led to the photograph we can all call to mind immediately. “A lesser photographer would have milked the children’s faces for their sympathetic potential,” for instance, but having them turn away “communicates that message of family” without “taking away from the central face, or the eyes, which seem at last to let down their guard as they search the distance and worry.”

These and other actively made choices (including the removal of Thompson’s distracting left thumb in the darkroom) mean that “there is very little spontaneous in this iconic image of so-called documentary photography,” but “whether that diminishes its power is up to you. For me, being able to actually see the steps of Lange’s craft enhances her work.” Whatever Lange’s process, the product defined an era, and upon publication convinced the government to send 20,000 pounds of food to Nipomo — though by that point Thompson herself, who ultimately succeeded in providing for her family and lived to the age of 80, had moved on.

Yale Launches an Archive of 170,000 Photographs Documenting the Great Depression

Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Clem Albers & Francis Stewart’s Censored Photographs of a WWII Japanese Internment Camp

Found: Lost Great Depression Photos Capturing Hard Times on Farms, and in Town

The Captivating Story Behind the Making of Ansel Adams’ Most Famous Photograph, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico

“A Great Day in Harlem,” Art Kane’s Iconic Photo of 57 Jazz Legends, Celebrates Its 60th Anniversary

Edward Hopper’s Iconic Painting Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Introduction

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Monty Python’s Best Philosophy Sketches: “The Philosophers’ Football Match,” “Philosopher’s Drinking Song” & More

in Comedy, Philosophy | February 1st, 2019

From dead parrots to The Meaning of Life, Monty Python covered a lot of territory. Educated at Oxford and Cambridge, the Pythons made a habit of weaving arcane intellectual references into the silliest of sketches. A classic example is “Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion Visit Jean-Paul Sartre,” (above) from episode 27 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

The sketch features writing partners John Cleese as Mrs. Premise and Graham Chapman as Mrs. Conclusion, gabbing away in a launderette about how best to put down a budgie. Mrs. Premise suggests flushing it down the loo. “Ooh! No!” protests Mrs. Conclusion. “You shouldn’t do that. No that’s dangerous. Yes, they breed in the sewers, and eventually you get evil-smelling flocks of huge soiled budgies flying out of people’s lavatories infringing their personal freedom.”

From there the conversation veers straight into Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Roads to Freedom. It’s a classic sketch–vintage Python–and you can read a transcript here while watching it above.

Another classic is the “Philosopher’s Drinking Song,” shown above in a scene from Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl. The song was written and sung by Eric Idle. In the sketch, members of the philosophy department at the “University of Woolloomooloo” lead the audience in singing, “Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable; Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table…”

And one of our favorites: “The Philosophers’ Football Match” (above), a filmed sequence from Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, pitting the Ancient Greeks against the Germans, with Confucius as referee. The sketch was originally broadcast in 1972 in a two-part West German television special, Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus.

When you’re done laughing, you can dive deep into philosophy here with our collection of 75 Free Philosophy Courses online.

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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in November 2011.

John Cleese’s Philosophy of Creativity: Creating Oases for Childlike Play

John Cleese on How “Stupid People Have No Idea How Stupid They Are” (a.k.a. the Dunning-Kruger Effect)

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How the Clavichord & Harpsichord Became the Modern Piano: The Evolution of Keyboard Instruments, Explained

in History, Music | February 1st, 2019

Though different modern pianos may not sound exactly the same as one another, they all sound more or less like pianos to our ears. But the piano didn’t appear fully formed in the world of music as the instrument we know today: it has a variety of predecessors, not all of which sound very similar to the modern piano at all, and a few distinctive-sounding examples of which you can hear demonstrated in these videos from BaroqueBand. In the first, musician and educator David Schrader plays the first two: a replica of a German clavichord, “the oldest stringed keyboard instrument we know of,” dating from around 1600, and a harpsichord, built according to plans dating back to 1617.

The clavichord strikes its strings like a modern piano, but the harpsichord plucks them, using a series of “tiny little guitar picks” called plectrums. Schrader explains this while offering a look inside the workings of these instruments, just as he does with their descendants in the second video: a replica of an early Viennese piano built by Alton Walter, who in the 1780s built an instrument for a certain Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and a modern Steinway grand piano made in Hamburg.

The eight bars of one of Mozart’s piano sonata we hear on the Steinway sound good, especially performed by Schrader’s skilled hands, but the Viennese piano offers additional controls that enable the player to achieve a kind of “tone color” that modern pianos don’t.

Hence the interest some musicians and groups (such as the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment, recently featured here on Open Culture) have in playing classical music with the same instruments from the eras in which the pieces were composed. “Each of these historical instruments served the music of its own time best,” as Schrader puts it. “After all, you wouldn’t necessarily restore an old oil painting with acrylic paint. Even if you choose not to play the historical instruments, if you study them and how they work, it will modify your approach to make for a clearer, nicer performance on the modern instrument.” But of course, “those of us who choose to eat everything on the plate will play all the instruments” — and will enjoy a performing experience closer to that which the composer intended as a result.

Newly Discovered Piece by Mozart Performed on His Own Fortepiano

Hear Music Played on the Viola Organista, a Piano That Sounds Like a Violin, Which Leonardo da Vinci Invented, But Never Heard

Visit an Online Collection of 61,761 Musical Instruments from Across the World

Hear the Sounds of the Actual Instruments for Which Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Handel Originally Composed Their Music

How an 18th-Century Monk Invented the First Electronic Instrument

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

A History of the Entire World in Less Than 20 Minutes

in Animation, History, Technology | February 1st, 2019

Thanks for watching history. I hope I mentioned everything. — Bill Wurtz

Here at Open Culture, we happily acknowledge that learning is not a one-size-fits-all proposition.

The internet may be doing a number on our attention spans, but as the world has grown smaller, the educational buffet has grown richer, more varied, and vastly more affordable.

Take for example the History of the World.

Geography fans can approach the subject via Ollie Bye’s year-by-year animated map.

John Green’s playful Crash Course series offers a wonderful respite for any kid grinding their way through AP World History.

Those of a more traditional mindset, who prefer a statelier pace can lose themselves in 46 lectures by Richard Bulliet, professor of history at Columbia University.

And then there’s world history according Bill Wurtz, above, a creator of short, anachronistic-looking videos, whose YouTube fame was kindled by Vine, a now defunct app for sharing short-form videos.

Chafing at Vine’s 7‑second time constraints, Wurtz undertook a more ambitious project, a condensed History of Japan that would employ the same techniques he brought to bear in his shorter works: graphic text, clip art, and Microsoft Paint drawings. He zeroed in on the subject because he knew precious little about Japan, and looked forward to doing some virgin research.

Wurtz followed up the 9‑minute History of Japan, above, with History of the Entire World, I guess.

The nonchalance of the title is reflected in Wurtz’s offhanded narration. Any word or phrase over two syllables runs a risk of being transformed into an infomercial-worthy musical jingle: space dust, the moon, Egypt…

You may bridle at first, but stick it out. Its charms sneak up on you.

Time is not particularly relative in Wurtz’s compressed universe. Whether it’s 10 minutes passing before some major development or 500 million years, their passage is accorded equal heft.

Humans show up around the four minute mark, grabbing stuff, banging rocks, figuring out agriculture…

(Mesopotamia’s characterization as a “sweet dank valley” between the Tigris and Euphrates is a particular highlight.)

This is the rare history video where science plays a major role. It takes time out for weather updates—the floor is no longer lava, the entire world is now an ocean… it’s sobering to remember that ozone is what made it safe for multi-celled life forms to venture forth on land.

Empires rise and fall, unconquerable rulers are unseated and forgotten.

(That’s the Tamil Kings. Nobody conquers the Tamil Kings. Who are the Tamil Kings? Merchants probably and they’ve got spices…)

Of course the problem with a great overview such as this is the back end’s shelf life can prove rather short. It’s been a little over a year and a half since Wurtz posted the video, and thus far, his parting shots still feel pretty relevant: armed drones, 3d printing, plastic-choked oceans, and a seemingly unbridgeable gap between the desire to save the world and an actual plan for doing so.

Fried by 11 months of intensive research and labor on History of the Entire World, I guess, Wurtz is currently taking a leave of absence from history. These days, he’s pouring his energies into original music videos like “At the Airport Terminal.” He also devotes a bit of every day to answering fans’ questions, routinely turning in upwards of a dozen succinct humble, all-lowercase replies:

1.18.19 7:00 pm what inspired you to make “the entire world, i guess”? was it a project you already had in mind from before or did you start it when you saw you could do more than just japan

it’s always a nice idea to try to explain the whole world in one video. it’s surely something i’ve always wanted to do, but wasn’t confident/experienced/stupid enough to believe i could do it until after i had done japan which worked so well

1.18.19 12:53 am are you ever going to make anything else as in depth as history of japan or the world?

that would take so much time that by the time it was done you probably wouldn’t care anymore, but someone else will so i still might do it

Unsurprisingly, he’s the subject of a lively sub-reddit. One fan, reddit user n44m, was inspired to plot the timeline of History of the Entire World, I Guess, below.

To learn more about some of the civilizations, events and persons featured in History of the Entire World, I Guess, check out another fan’s annotated transcription here.

And rather than nitpick about certain critical bits of history that were left on the cutting room floor, try writing a script for your own history based animation:

The more you learn, the more you find out how much you’re gonna have to leave out. It’s like 99%. That was painful. — Bill Wurtz

A Crash Course in World History

The History of the World in 46 Lectures From Columbia University

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. See her onstage in New York City in February as host of Theater of the Apes book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Evolution of the Alphabet: A Colorful Flowchart, Covering 3,800 Years, Takes You From Ancient Egypt to Today

in History | January 31st, 2019

No matter our native language, we all have to learn a writing system. And whichever language we learn, its writing system had to come from somewhere. Take English, the language you’re reading right now and one written in Latin script, which it shares with a range of other tongues: the European likes of French, Spanish, and German, of course, but now also Icelandic, Swahili, Tagalog, and a great many more besides. The video above by Matt Baker of UsefulCharts explains just where this increasingly widespread writing system came from, tracing its origins all the way back to the Proto-Sinaitic script of Egypt in 1750 BCE.

As revealed in the video, or by the poster available for purchase from UsefulCharts, the letters used to write English today evolved from there “through Phoenician, early Greek and early Latin, to their present forms. You can see how some letters were dropped and others ended up evolving into more than one letter.”

The color-coding and direction dotted lines help to make clearly legible what was, in reality, an evolution that happened organically over about two millennia. Enough changed over that time, as Jason Kottke writes, that “it’s tough to see how the pictographic forms of the original script evolved into our letters; aside from the T and maybe M & O, there’s little resemblance.”

Baker’s design for this poster, notes Colossal’s Kate Sierzuputowski, “was created in association with his Writing Systems of the World chart which takes a look at 51 different writing systems from around the world.” All of the research for both those posters informs his video on the history of the alphabet, which looks at writing systems as they’ve developed across a variety of civilizations. You’ll notice that all of them respond in different ways to the needs of the times and places in which they arose, and some possess advantages that others don’t. (In Korea, where I live, one often hears the praises sung of the Korean alphabet, “the most scientific writing system in the world.”) But what the strengths of the descendant of modern Latin 2000 years on will be — and whether it will contain anything resembling emoji — not even the most astute linguist knows.

via Colossal/Kottke

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

CBGB’s Heyday: Watch The Ramones, The Dead Boys, Bad Brains, Talking Heads & Blondie Perform Live (1974–1982)

in History, Music | January 31st, 2019

There are, I guess, still many things people can do these days to tap into the legacy of CBGB, but I wouldn’t recommend going near most of them. The merchandising empire (do, however, new parents, get your tot a CBGB bib and onesie); the “thuddingly banal” 2013 film version, which… the less said about the better; yes, and CBGB, the restaurant, in the Newark Airport Terminal C—proceed at your own risk.

We must sadly also mention this past summer’s “Potemkin village from hell,” a pop-up “TRGT” shop for the grand opening of the East Village’s new Target at 14th St. and Avenue A. This abomination—which sold CBGB-styled “TRGT” shirts and proffered Target-branded Band-Aids (get it? Bands) sent “Vanishing New York” blogger Jeremiah Moss into “a state of confusion and dysphoria… to see the artifacts of my own life, my cultural and spiritual awakening, my home, displayed above the cash registers in a Target store.”

One cannot get too upset. The venue had been in a decline for a long time. The best of grassroots American culture all ends up in a Target or Starbucks eventually, gets green lit for a biopic and turned into an interactive gallery. At least the CBGB building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. Maybe a boost for the sales of John Varvatos who moved a store into the former club in 2007, the very same year CBGB’s founder Hilly Kristal died of lung cancer.

Ever-tasteful New York Post announced the takeover with the headline Hobo Goes Haute. “All of Manhattan has lost its soul to money lords,” said Dead Boys guitarist Cheetah Chrome. Twelve years later, the lament seems understated. But time moves on and so should we, the CBGB of the past was a moment in history never to be seen again, as fervid and fertile as late 19th century Symbolism or the Beats—movements that just happened to have very much influenced New York punk.

Like the life and work of Arthur Rimbaud or William S. Burroughs, the only way to commune with the legend of CBGB is through its primary sources. There is no shortage. Recordings, photographs, interviews, and much excellent live footage of the bands that made the T‑shirt famous in the years of punk rock’s glory: The Dead Boys and The Ramones in 1977, Bad Brains, inventing hardcore, in 1982, a very awkward Talking Heads and confident Blondie playing the Velvet Underground all the way back in 75….

Turning cultural moments into monuments and merchandise is shallow, of course, but it’s more than that—it’s impoverishing. It makes us think we understand something without ever having seen it. It’s not enough to know that it happened, we should know how it happened. How was the edgy electrified disco stomper “Psycho Killer” once a rickety, “tense and nervous” acoustic strummer? How did The Dead Boys’ Stiv Bators from Cleveland more or less invent the moves front men and women in punk almost universally adopted? How did Washington DC’s Bad Brains break every unspoken rule of punk—with complex breakdowns, tempo shifts, and shredding solos—yet still conquer every punk stage? How did the Ramones play entire live sets shorter than some of the single songs certain other bands played onstage at the time? How was it to witness Blondie as a killer live covers act? How was it to see The Ramones play “Judy is a Punk” in 1974?

Forget the graveyard of CBGB kitsch out there. If you’re interested in punk rock as a cultural phenomenon, you owe it to yourself to see as much of this historic footage as possible, and to listen to as many live recordings of far-too-often unsung CBGB bands like Television. And if you were there, condolences. Maybe you owe it to the rest of us to tell how it really was.

AC/DC Plays a Short Gig at CBGB in 1977: Hear Metal Being Played on Punk’s Hallowed Grounds

1976 Film Blank Generation Documents CBGB Scene with Patti Smith, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Real Locations of Ukiyo‑e, Historic Japanese Woodblock Prints, Plotted on a Google Map

in Art, History | January 31st, 2019

The undisputed last great master of ukiyo‑e was Utagawa Hiroshige. He is best known for the many series he created of bucolic landscapes, which offered collectors a chance to see parts of Japan they might never reach. The Japan of his early 19th century work holds a special place in Japanese hearts–a final look at an isolated and beautiful country just before the opening up of the ports to the West and, with it, industrialization.

Apart from Mount Fuji, the locations that Hiroshige drew have long gone, but “Computer science undergrad, martial artist, ukiyo‑e lover” and British resident George–he goes by the Twitter handle @Cascadesssss–has plotted the location of Hiroshige’s prints on an interactive Google map that has gone quickly viral.

The red circles represent the series “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo,” the blue circles “The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido” (one of five main routes in Edo Japan), and the green “Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces,” the most expansive series showing scenes all the way from the The Two-sword Rocks of Bo Bay to the north province of Dewa and Mount Gassan. Each location opens to a separate web page with location information, including latitude-longitude numbers. (Pull up a chair map-lovers, you might be here a long time.)

“The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido” was Hiroshige’s most popular series and unlike the other two depicted horizontal landscapes. The artist sketched these in 1832 as he rode in a procession from Edo (now Tokyo) to Kyoto and set to work on the prints once he returned home. The 55 prints (two extra drawings of the starting and ending points of the journey) sold like crazy, as they cost about the same as a bowl of soup for the common person.

“Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces” is different in that Hiroshige did not make trips to see all these beloved locations–instead he put his own spin on existing drawings found in guide books and other sources. The total series of 70 prints took four years to complete, from 1853 to 1856.

By the time the “Provinces” series was winding down, Hiroshige started work on his final series “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo,” which he worked on until his death. Again, though living in Edo, Hiroshige drew from the works of others from decades before. This is also the artist at his most adventurous–some landscapes are obscured by posts and bridge railings or even a carp streamer. One features what is rumored to be Hiroshige’s favorite geisha. These prints would go on to influence Western artists, especially Vincent van Gogh.

Hiroshige produced more series over his life–he died aged 61–and here’s hoping Cascadesssss plots more on his map soon.

via Spoon and Tamago

Download 2,500 Beautiful Woodblock Prints and Drawings by Japanese Masters (1600–1915)

The Evolution of The Great Wave off Kanazawa: See Four Versions That Hokusai Painted Over Nearly 40 Years

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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