Bob Dylan’s Famous Televised Press Conference After He Went Electric (1965)

in Music | January 13th, 2022

I don’t think I’m tan­gi­ble to myself. I mean, I think one thing today and I think anoth­er thing tomor­row. I change dur­ing the course of a day. I wake and I’m one per­son, and when I go to sleep I know for cer­tain I’m some­body else. I don’t know who I am most of the time. It does­n’t even mat­ter to me. – Bob Dylan, 1997 Newsweek inter­view

A too-cool-for-school rock star emerged from seem­ing­ly nowhere when Bob Dylan went elec­tric at New­port with his tour­ing band, the Band — a Dylan unrec­og­niz­able to the earnest folkies who fol­lowed Bob Dylan the Green­wich Vil­lage trou­ba­dour and protest singer. Where did the real Dylan go — the Dylan every singer/songwriter with an acoustic gui­tar tried to become, until the cof­fee shop scene sagged with thou­sands of Dylan-wannabees? Dont Look Back, warned D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 doc­u­men­tary on Dylan in his mid-six­ties hey­day.

“Don’t look back. Some­thing might be gain­ing on you,” said Satchel Paige, giv­ing Pen­nebak­er his title and Dylan a career out­look.  Those who stay stuck in the past — even the very recent past — would nev­er get it, like Mr. Jones in “Bal­lad of a Thin Man,” a song crit­ic Andy Gill described as “a furi­ous, sneer­ing, dress­ing-down of a hap­less bour­geois intrud­er into the hip­ster world of freaks and weir­does which Dylan now inhab­it­ed.” Those who looked for answers found them blow­ing in the wind, even when they went straight to the source.

Just above, see the only ful­ly tele­vised press con­fer­ence Dylan ever gave, for KQED, the edu­ca­tion­al TV sta­tion in San Fran­cis­co. In atten­dance were mem­bers of the local and nation­al press, reporters from sev­er­al high school papers, Dylan’s entourage, and famous friends like Allen Gins­berg and pro­mot­er Bill Gra­ham. It’s as much a per­for­mance as the next night’s show at the Berke­ley Com­mu­ni­ty The­ater would be. “The ques­tions,” notes Jonathan Cott, edi­tor of The Essen­tial Inter­views, “ranged from stan­dard straight press and TV reporters’ ques­tions to teenage fan club ques­tions to in-group per­son­al queries and put ons, to ques­tions by those who real­ly had lis­tened to Dylan’s songs.”

Dylan’s demeanor dur­ing the inter­view was per­fect­ly cap­tured by Cate Blanchet­t’s Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed per­for­mance of a char­ac­ter named “Jude Quinn” in Todd Haynes’ 2007 art-house biopic, I’m Not There. In scenes inspired by the KQED press con­fer­ence, Blanchett-as-Quinn toys with the press, just as Dylan threw labels like “folk rock” back at them and refused to get drawn into dis­cus­sions of phi­los­o­phy or pol­i­tics. “I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know,” he says in mock self-efface­ment, his gaze impen­e­tra­ble behind Ray-Bans and clouds of cig­a­rette smoke.

Dylan liked I’m Not There, a film that tells his sto­ry through six fic­tion­al char­ac­ters, played by six dif­fer­ent actors. (“Do you think that the direc­tor was wor­ried that peo­ple would under­stand it or not?” he said. “I don’t think he cared one bit.”) Unlike “Jude Quinn,” his post-folk man­i­fes­ta­tion in the mid-six­ties did not burn out and die in a motor­cy­cle acci­dent, and he did­n’t sneer at every ques­tion, though he did say he wrote “Bal­lad of a Thin Man” as a “response to peo­ple who ask me ques­tions all the time. You just get tired of that every once in a while.… I fig­ure a per­son­’s life speaks for itself, right?”

But pre­cise­ly what we do not find in Dylan’s music is biog­ra­phy. He keeps his inter­view­ers (includ­ing Gins­berg, at 33:00 and Gra­ham, at 25:31 ) guess­ing, often grasp­ing after a sound­bite that will sum up the new sound and image. Per­haps the most truth­ful one he gives them comes in response to the ques­tion, “What are you think­ing about right now?” Dylan stares down at his cig­a­rette, and the now-Nobel-prize-win­ning singer/songwriter says, “I’m think­ing about this ash… the ash is creep­ing up on me some­where — I’ve lost — lost touch with myself so I can’t tell where exact­ly it is.”

Read a full tran­script of the press con­fer­ence here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tan­gled Up in Blue: Deci­pher­ing a Bob Dylan Mas­ter­piece

Clas­sic Songs by Bob Dylan Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” & More

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

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Why the U.S. Photographed Its Own World War II Concentration Camps (and Commissioned Photographs by Dorothea Lange)

in History, Photography | January 13th, 2022

Dur­ing World War II, the Unit­ed States put thou­sands and thou­sands of its own cit­i­zens into con­cen­tra­tion camps. The wartime intern­ment of Japan­ese Amer­i­cans is a well-known his­tor­i­cal event, and also an unusu­al­ly well-doc­u­ment­ed one — not just in the sense of hav­ing been doc­u­ment­ed copi­ous­ly, but also with excep­tion­al pow­er and artistry. Much of that owes to the astute pho­to­graph­ic observ­er of ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca Dorothea Lange, who had already won acclaim for her Great Depres­sion-sym­bol­iz­ing Migrant Moth­er.

Pub­lished in 1936, Migrant Moth­er was tak­en under the aus­pices of the U.S. Reset­tle­ment Admin­is­tra­tion and Farm Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion. In 1941, Lange aban­doned a Guggen­heim Fel­low­ship to throw in with anoth­er gov­ern­ment orga­ni­za­tion, the War Relo­ca­tion Author­i­ty, and turn her lens on the interned. “After Japan’s bomb­ing of the U.S. navy base at Pearl Har­bor, a sur­prise attack that left over 2,000 Amer­i­cans dead, Japan­ese Amer­i­cans became tar­gets of vio­lence and increased sus­pi­cion,” says the nar­ra­tor of the Vox Dark­room video above. Fear­ing the emer­gence of a “fifth col­umn,” the gov­ern­ment arranged the relo­ca­tion of 120,000 Japan­ese Amer­i­cans who had been liv­ing on the west coast into remote camps.

“The Roo­sevelt admin­is­tra­tion want­ed to frame the removal as order­ly, humane, and above all, nec­es­sary.” Hence the cre­ation of the WRA, a depart­ment charged with han­dling the removal, “and more impor­tant­ly, doc­u­ment­ing it, through pro­pa­gan­da films, pam­phlets and news pho­tographs.” The project could hard­ly have made a more pres­ti­gious hire than Lange, who pro­ceed­ed to pho­to­graph “the rapid changes hap­pen­ing in Japan­ese Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ties, includ­ing Japan­ese-owned farms and busi­ness­es shut­ting down.” Her work (see var­i­ous exam­ples here) cap­tured the final days, even hours, of an estab­lished mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional soci­ety about to be dis­man­tled by the mass evac­u­a­tion.

The Army dis­ap­proved of the nar­ra­tive cre­at­ed by Lange’s can­did pho­tos, many of which were seized and impound­ed. The offend­ing images depict­ed armed U.S. sol­diers over­see­ing the removal process, “tem­po­rary pris­ons used while the con­cen­tra­tion camps were built,” food lines at the assem­bly cen­ters, and Japan­ese Amer­i­cans in U.S. mil­i­tary uni­form. Releas­ing Lange from the pro­gram after just four months, the WRA kept most of her pho­tos out of the pub­lic eye. They stayed out of it until a series of exhi­bi­tions in the 1970s, which revealed the true nature of the con­cen­tra­tion camps. That term is most asso­ci­at­ed with the Holo­caust, to whose sheer destruc­tion of human­i­ty the Japan­ese Amer­i­can intern­ment can­not, of course, be com­pared. But as Lange’s pho­tographs show, just hav­ing the moral high ground over Nazi Ger­many is noth­ing to brag about.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dorothea Lange Dig­i­tal Archive: Explore 600+ Pho­tographs by the Influ­en­tial Pho­tog­ra­ph­er (Plus Neg­a­tives, Con­tact Sheets & More)

478 Dorothea Lange Pho­tographs Poignant­ly Doc­u­ment the Intern­ment of the Japan­ese Dur­ing WWII

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

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

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japan­ese Car­toons Dur­ing WWII, Then Atones with Hor­ton Hears a Who!

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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 Face­book.

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How to Decode NASA’s Message to Aliens

in Astronomy, Science | January 12th, 2022

When NASA spent close to a bil­lion dol­lars on the Voy­ager pro­gram, launch­ing a pair of probes from Cape Canaver­al in 1977, its pri­ma­ry pur­pose was not to find intel­li­gent extra-ter­res­tri­al life. The pro­gram grew out of ambi­tions for a “Grand Tour”: four robot­ic probes that would vis­it all the plan­ets in the out­er solar sys­tem, tak­ing advan­tage of a 175-year align­ment of Jupiter and Sat­urn. A down­sized ver­sion pro­duced Voy­ager 1 and 2, each craft “a minia­ture mar­vel,” writes the Attic. “Weigh­ing less than a Volk­swa­gen, each had 65,000 parts. Six thrusters pow­ered by plu­to­ni­um. Three gyro­scopes. Assort­ed instru­ments to mea­sure grav­i­ty, radi­a­tion, mag­net­ic fields, and more. Design and assem­bly took years.”

Since reach­ing Jupiter in 1979, the two probes have sent back aston­ish­ing images from the great gas giants and the very edges of the solar sys­tem. “By 2030, Voy­ager 1 and 2 will cease com­mu­ni­ca­tions for good,” says Cory Zap­at­ka in the Verge Sci­ence video above, “and while they won’t be able to beam infor­ma­tion back to Earth, they’re going to con­tin­ue sail­ing through space at almost 60,000 kilo­me­ters per hour,” reach­ing inter­stel­lar unknowns their mak­ers will nev­er see. Voy­ager 1 was only sup­posed to last 10 years. In 2012, it left the solar sys­tem, to drift, along with its twin, “end­less­ly among the stars of our galaxy,” Tim­o­thy Fer­ris writes in The New York­er, “unless some­one or some­thing encoun­ters them some­day.”

As deep space detri­tus, the probes will make excel­lent car­ri­ers for an inter­stel­lar mes­sage in a bot­tle, the Voy­ager team rea­soned. The idea prompt­ed the cre­ation of the Gold­en Record, an LP fit­ted to each probe con­tain­ing a mes­sage from human­i­ty to the cos­mos. “Etched in cop­per, plat­ed with gold, and sealed in alu­minum cas­es, the records are expect­ed to remain intel­li­gi­ble for more than a bil­lion years, mak­ing them the longest-last­ing objects ever craft­ed by human hands.” Pro­duced by Fer­ris and over­seen by Carl Sagan and a team includ­ing his future wife, Ann Druyan, the Gold­en Record includes the work of Mozart, Chuck Berry, folk music from around the world, the sounds of waves and whales, and one of the most uni­ver­sal of human sounds, laugh­ter (like­ly that of Sagan him­self).

The Gold­en Record also includes 115 images, etched into its very sur­face. No, they are not dig­i­tal files. “There are no jpegs or tifs includ­ed on it,” says Zap­at­ka. After all, “The Voyager’s com­put­er sys­tems were only 69 kilo­bytes large, bare­ly enough for one image, let alone 115.” These are ana­log still pho­tographs and dia­grams that must be recon­struct­ed with math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­lae extract­ed from elec­tron­ic tones. The process starts with the dia­grams on the record’s cov­er — sim­ple icons that con­tain an incred­i­ble den­si­ty of infor­ma­tion. We begin with two cir­cles joined by a line. They are hydro­gen atoms, the most plen­ti­ful gas in the uni­verse, under­go­ing a change that occurs spon­ta­neous­ly once every 10 mil­lion years.

Dur­ing this rare occur­rence, the hydro­gen atoms emit ener­gy at wave­lengths of 21 cen­time­ters. This mea­sure­ment is used as “a con­stant for all the oth­er sym­bols on the record.” That’s an awful lot of back­ground knowl­edge required to deci­pher what look to the sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly untrained eye like a pair of tiny eyes behind a pair of odd eye­glass­es. But for space­far­ing aliens, “how hard could that be?” says Bill Nye above in an abridged descrip­tion of how to decode the Gold­en Record. We may nev­er, in a bil­lion years, know if any extra-ter­res­tri­al species ever finds the record and makes the attempt. But the Gold­en Record has become as much an object of fas­ci­na­tion for humans as it is a greet­ing from Earth to the galaxy. Learn more from NASA here about the images encod­ed on the Gold­en Record and order your own repro­duc­tion (on LP or CD) here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Carl Sagan Sent Music & Pho­tos Into Space So That Aliens Could Under­stand Human Civ­i­liza­tion (Even After We’re Gone)

NASA Lets You Down­load Free Posters Cel­e­brat­ing the 40th Anniver­sary of the Voy­ager Mis­sions

Carl Sagan Warns Con­gress about Cli­mate Change (1985)

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

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Toni Morrison Lists the 10 Steps That Lead Countries to Fascism (1995)

in History, Literature, Politics | January 12th, 2022

Note: Toni Mor­rison’s speech begins around the 38:30 mark.
The term fas­cism gets thrown around a great deal these days, not always with high regard to con­sis­ten­cy of mean­ing. Much like Orwellian, it now seems often to func­tion pri­mar­i­ly as a label for whichev­er polit­i­cal devel­op­ments the speak­er does­n’t like. Even back in the 1940s, Orwell him­self took to the Tri­bune in an attempt to pin down what had already become a “much-abused word.” Half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, the ques­tion of what fas­cism actu­al­ly is and how exact­ly it works was addressed by anoth­er nov­el­ist, and one of a seem­ing­ly quite dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty: Toni Mor­ri­son, author of The Bluest Eye and Beloved.

Fas­cism tends to come along with evo­ca­tion of Nazi Ger­many. In her 1995 Char­ter Day address at Howard Uni­ver­si­ty, Mor­ri­son, too, brought out the specter of Hitler and his “final solu­tion.” But “let us be remind­ed that before there is a final solu­tion, there must be a first solu­tion, a sec­ond one, even a third. The move toward a final solu­tion is not a jump. It takes one step, then anoth­er, then anoth­er.” She pro­ceed­ed to lay out a haunt­ing hypo­thet­i­cal series of such steps as fol­lows:

  1. Con­struct an inter­nal ene­my, as both focus and diver­sion.
  2. Iso­late and demo­nize that ene­my by unleash­ing and pro­tect­ing the utter­ance of overt and cod­ed name-call­ing and ver­bal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legit­i­mate charges against that ene­my.
  3. Enlist and cre­ate sources and dis­trib­u­tors of infor­ma­tion who are will­ing to rein­force the demo­niz­ing process because it is prof­itable, because it grants pow­er and because it works.
  4. Pal­isade all art forms; mon­i­tor, dis­cred­it or expel those that chal­lenge or desta­bi­lize process­es of demo­niza­tion and deifi­ca­tion.
  5. Sub­vert and malign all rep­re­sen­ta­tives of and sym­pa­thiz­ers with this con­struct­ed ene­my.
  6. Solic­it, from among the ene­my, col­lab­o­ra­tors who agree with and can san­i­tize the dis­pos­ses­sion process.
  7. Pathol­o­gize the ene­my in schol­ar­ly and pop­u­lar medi­ums; recy­cle, for exam­ple, sci­en­tif­ic racism and the myths of racial supe­ri­or­i­ty in order to nat­u­ral­ize the pathol­o­gy.
  8. Crim­i­nal­ize the ene­my. Then pre­pare, bud­get for and ratio­nal­ize the build­ing of hold­ing are­nas for the ene­my-espe­cial­ly its males and absolute­ly its chil­dren.
  9. Reward mind­less­ness and apa­thy with mon­u­men­tal­ized enter­tain­ments and with lit­tle plea­sures, tiny seduc­tions, a few min­utes on tele­vi­sion, a few lines in the press, a lit­tle pseu­do-suc­cess, the illu­sion of pow­er and influ­ence, a lit­tle fun, a lit­tle style, a lit­tle con­se­quence.
  10. Main­tain, at all costs, silence.

Like any good sto­ry­teller, Mor­ri­son stokes our imag­i­na­tion while turn­ing us toward an exam­i­na­tion of our own con­di­tion. Over the past quar­ter-cen­tu­ry, many of the ten­den­cies she describes have arguably become more pro­nounced in polit­i­cal and media envi­ron­ments around the world. A 21st-cen­tu­ry read­er may be giv­en par­tic­u­lar pause by step num­ber nine. Since the 1990s, and espe­cial­ly in Mor­rison’s home­land of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, most enter­tain­ments have only grown more mon­u­men­tal, and most plea­sures have only shrunk.

Lat­er in her speech, Mor­ri­son fore­sees a time ahead “when our fears have all been seri­al­ized, our cre­ativ­i­ty cen­sured, our ideas ‘mar­ket-placed,’ our rights sold, our intel­li­gence slo­ga­nized, our strength down­sized, our pri­va­cy auc­tioned; when the the­atri­cal­i­ty, the enter­tain­ment val­ue, the mar­ket­ing of life is com­plete.” Few of us here in 2022, what­ev­er our polit­i­cal per­sua­sion, could argue that her pre­dic­tions were entire­ly unfound­ed. Few­er still have a clear answer to the ques­tion what to do when we “find our­selves liv­ing not in a nation but in a con­sor­tium of indus­tries, and whol­ly unin­tel­li­gi­ble to our­selves except for what we see as through a screen dark­ly.”

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Yale Pro­fes­sor Jason Stan­ley Iden­ti­fies 10 Tac­tics of Fas­cism: The “Cult of the Leader,” Law & Order, Vic­tim­hood and More

Hear Toni Mor­ri­son (RIP) Present Her Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech on the Rad­i­cal Pow­er of Lan­guage (1993)

Why Should You Read Toni Morrison’s Beloved? An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

George Orwell Tries to Iden­ti­fy Who Is Real­ly a “Fas­cist” and Define the Mean­ing of This “Much-Abused Word” (1944)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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 Face­book.

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Maya Angelou Becomes the First Black Woman Featured on a U.S. Quarter

in Poetry | January 12th, 2022

The US Mint announced that it has “begun ship­ping the first coins in the Amer­i­can Women Quar­ters (AWQ) Pro­gram.” And it all starts with the out­stretched arms of poet Maya Angelou grac­ing the reverse of the quar­ter. The Mint writes:

A writer, poet, per­former, social activist, and teacher, Angelou rose to inter­na­tion­al promi­nence as an author after the pub­li­ca­tion of her ground­break­ing auto­bi­og­ra­phy, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Angelou’s pub­lished works of verse, non-fic­tion, and fic­tion include more than 30 best­selling titles. Her remark­able career encom­pass­es dance, the­ater, jour­nal­ism, and social activism. The recip­i­ent of more than 30 hon­orary degrees, Angelou read “On the Pulse of Morn­ing” at the 1992 inau­gu­ra­tion of Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton.  Angelou’s read­ing marked the first time an African Amer­i­can woman wrote and pre­sent­ed a poem at a Pres­i­den­tial inau­gu­ra­tion. In 2010, Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma award­ed Angelou the Pres­i­den­tial Medal of Free­dom, and she was the 2013 recip­i­ent of the Lit­er­ar­i­an Award, an hon­orary Nation­al Book Award for con­tri­bu­tions to the lit­er­ary com­mu­ni­ty.

Accord­ing to NPR, oth­er hon­orees in the series will include “astro­naut Sal­ly Ride; actress Anna May Wong; suf­frag­ist and politi­cian Nina Otero-War­ren; and Wilma Mankiller, the first female prin­ci­pal chief of the Chero­kee Nation. The coins fea­tur­ing the oth­er hon­orees will be shipped out this year through 2025.”

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Ursu­la K. Le Guin Stamp Get­ting Released by the US Postal Ser­vice

Flan­nery O’Connor to Grace New U.S. Postage Stamp

New Stamp Col­lec­tion Cel­e­brates Six Nov­els by Jane Austen

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How to Ride a Pterosaur, According to Science

in Science | January 11th, 2022

From the BBC: “Dur­ing the Late Cre­ta­ceous, winged pre­his­toric crea­tures called pterosaurs dom­i­nat­ed the air. They were the first ver­te­brates to mas­ter flight. They were not dinosaurs but close­ly relat­ed. Some were tiny, but some were the biggest crea­tures ever to have flown. We ask a ques­tion you’ve all been won­der­ing, could we ride one, and if so, how?” In the ani­ma­tion above, sci­ence pro­duc­er Pierange­lo Pirak explores some ideas Dr. Liz Mar­tin-Sil­ver­stone, a palaeon­tol­o­gist with a keen inter­est in bio­me­chan­ics. She runs the Palaeo­bi­ol­o­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ries, includ­ing the XTM Imag­ing Facil­i­ty for microCT scan­ning and imag­ing analy­sis, at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bris­tol.

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.

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via TheKidsShould­SeeThis

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er 200,000-Year-Old Hand & Foot­prints That Could Be the World’s Ear­li­est Cave Art

Ger­tie the Dinosaur: The Moth­er of all Car­toon Char­ac­ters (1914)

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

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Behold Medieval Snowball Fights: A Timeless Way of Having Fun

in Art, History | January 11th, 2022

You can’t get too much win­ter in the win­ter

– Robert Frost, “Snow”

Snowy win­ter then respond­ed with a voice severe:
May the cuck­oo not come, let it sleep in dark hol­lows.
He is accus­tomed to bring hunger with him.

– Anony­mous poem in Medieval Latin, trans­lat­ed by Heather Williams

Win­ter may starve and freeze, but in each place where snow accu­mu­lates, we also find depic­tions of infor­mal hol­i­days — snow days — and one of their most exu­ber­ant pur­suits. “Few sea­son­al activ­i­ties are as uni­ver­sal — across time, place, or cul­ture — as the snow­ball fight,” writes Pub­lic Domain Review. Some have even made it “into the annals of his­to­ry.… Accord­ing to what might be more fable than his­to­ry, the teenage Napoleon Bona­parte famous­ly orga­nized a ten day snow­ball fight at his mil­i­tary school, com­plete with trench­es, reg­i­mens, and rules of engage­ment.”

Snow­ball fights weren’t “con­fined to chil­dren either,” Arendse Lund writes. In the pages of illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval man­u­scripts, “peo­ple of all ages, men and women, can be seen heft­ing an icy ball.” Such images defy a “con­ven­tion­al topos” — “the threat of win­ter” found in Old Eng­lish poet­ry.

In one cal­en­dar poem, The Menologium, for exam­ple, “win­ter comes in like an invad­ing war­rior,” notes A Clerk of Oxford, “and puts autumn in chains, and the green fields which dec­o­rate the earth are per­mit­ted to stay with us no longer.… There are many, many exam­ples of win­ter as dan­ger and sor­row” in Medieval poet­ry.

The tra­di­tion of win­ter as a mar­tial invad­er con­tin­ues in mod­ern verse. In Robert Frost, snow forms “soft bombs.” Even when one is safe and warm at home, snow banked high around the walls out­side, win­ter threat­ens: the house is “frozen, brit­tle, all except this room you sit in.” But along­side these lit­er­ary scenes of unbear­able cold, we have the play­ful­ness and sub­lim­i­ty of win­ter, its abil­i­ty to ele­vate the ordi­nary, break up monot­o­ny, put a tem­po­rary end to dai­ly drudgery. Win­ter brings its own form of beau­ty, and its own fun: the soft bomb of the snow ball.

In one Mid­dle Eng­lish poem by Nico­las Bacon, titled “Of a Snow balle,” spring has noth­ing on win­ter even when it comes to love; the snow­ball fight becomes a pre­text for a roman­tic encounter:

A wan­ton wenche vppon a colde daye
With Snowe balles prouoked me to playe:
But the­is snowe balles soe hette my desy­er
That I maye calle them balles of wylde fyer.

In the delight­ful images here, culled from a num­ber of illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts (and one fres­co, at the top), see Medieval Euro­peans play, flirt, and scoff at win­ter’s warn­ing in light­heart­ed snow­ball fights of yore.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts of Medieval Europe: A Free Online Course from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado

Medieval Scribes Dis­cour­aged Theft of Man­u­scripts by Adding Curs­es Threat­en­ing Death & Damna­tion to Their Pages

Killer Rab­bits in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Why So Many Draw­ings in the Mar­gins Depict Bun­nies Going Bad

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

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An Introduction to the Painting of Caspar David Friedrich, Romanticism & the Sublime

in Art, History, Philosophy | January 11th, 2022

When Denis Vil­leneuve was announced as the direc­tor of the lat­est cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion of Dune, few could have object­ed on aes­thet­ic grounds. The blast­ed sand plan­et of Arrakis, with its storms and worms, demands a sense of the sub­lime; to a unique degree among film­mak­ers work­ing today, the auteur behind Arrival and Blade Run­ner 2049 seemed to pos­sess it. Though long since vul­gar­ized to mean lit­tle more than “high­ly enjoy­able,” sub­lime has his­tor­i­cal­ly denot­ed a rich­er, more com­plex set of qual­i­ties. The sub­lime can be beau­ti­ful, but it must also be in some way fear­some, pos­sessed of “a great­ness beyond all pos­si­bil­i­ty of cal­cu­la­tion, mea­sure­ment, or imi­ta­tion.”

That quote comes straight from the Wikipedia page on “Sub­lime (phi­los­o­phy),” which also promi­nent­ly fea­tures Cas­par David Friedrich’s paint­ing Der Wan­der­er über dem Nebelmeer, or Wan­der­er above the Sea of Fog. Com­plet­ed around 1818, it has become a famil­iar image even to those who know noth­ing of Friedrich’s work — work to which they can receive an intro­duc­tion from the new video above by Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer.

Friedrich, he explains, was “asso­ci­at­ed with Ger­man Roman­ti­cism, a ris­ing intel­lec­tu­al and artis­tic move­ment” of the late 18th and ear­ly 19th cen­turies “that sought to recon­nect human­i­ty with feel­ing and spir­i­tu­al­i­ty” after the Enlight­en­ment so desta­bi­lized human­i­ty’s Weltan­schau­ung.

Friedrich’s land­scapes, real­is­ti­cal­ly paint­ed if not nec­es­sar­i­ly faith­ful to real places, “rep­re­sent the pin­na­cle of this move­ment.” They do this by con­vey­ing “the feel­ing he has in the pres­ence of the land­scape, the stag­ger­ing encounter with the divin­i­ty he sees in it. This is the essence of the sub­lime,” which took on spe­cial urgency in an era “when sec­u­lar­ism was threat­en­ing the core of Chris­tian­i­ty.”  More than reli­gion, the Roman­tics thus began to regard nature as awe­some (in the orig­i­nal sense), hum­bling them­selves before the great­ness of land­scapes real and imag­ined. The wan­der­er loom­ing above the sea of fog is actu­al­ly an excep­tion in Friedrich’s work, most of whose human fig­ures are small enough to empha­size “the vast­ness of the ter­rain” — a sub­lime-evok­ing tech­nique that we can still feel work­ing two cen­turies lat­er, Puschak points out, in Vil­leneu­ve’s Dune.

You can pre-order Nerd­writer’s upcom­ing book Escape into Mean­ing: Essays on Super­man, Pub­lic Bench­es, and Oth­er Obses­sions here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Andrew Wyeth Made a Paint­ing: A Jour­ney Into His Best-Known Work Christina’s World

When Our World Became a de Chiri­co Paint­ing: How the Avant-Garde Painter Fore­saw the Emp­ty City Streets of 2020

Why Leonar­do da Vinci’s Great­est Paint­ing is Not the Mona Lisa

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

New Study: Immers­ing Your­self in Art, Music & Nature Might Reduce Inflam­ma­tion & Increase Life Expectan­cy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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 Face­book.

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Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten Updated to Reflect Our Modern Understanding of the Universe

in Astronomy, Film, Science | January 10th, 2022

We’ve expe­ri­enced some mind­blow­ing tech­no­log­i­cal advances in the years fol­low­ing design­ers Charles and Ray Eames’ 1977 film Pow­ers of Ten: A Film Deal­ing with the Rel­a­tive Size of Things in the Uni­verse and the Effect of Adding Anoth­er Zero.

Cryp­tocur­ren­cy…

Seg­ways…

E‑cigarettes…

And y’know, all sorts of inno­v­a­tive strides in the fields of med­i­cine, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and envi­ron­men­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

In the above video for the BBC, par­ti­cle physi­cist Bri­an Cox pays trib­ute to the Eames’ cel­e­brat­ed eight-and-a-half-minute doc­u­men­tary short, and uses the dis­cov­er­ies of the last four-and-a-half decades to kick the can a bit fur­ther down the road.

The orig­i­nal film helped ordi­nary view­ers get a han­dle on the universe’s out­er edges by tele­scop­ing up and out from a one-meter view of a pic­nic blan­ket in a Chica­go park at the rate of one pow­er of ten every 10 sec­onds.

Start with some­thing every­body can under­stand, right?

At 100 (102) meters — slight­ly less than the total length of an Amer­i­can foot­ball field, the pic­nick­ers become part of the urban land­scape, shar­ing their space with cars, boats at anchor in Lake Michi­gan, and a shock­ing dearth of fel­low pic­nick­ers.

One more pow­er of 10 and the pick­nick­ers dis­ap­pear from view, eclipsed by Sol­dier Field, the Shedd Aquar­i­um, the Field Muse­um and oth­er long­stand­ing down­town Chica­go insti­tu­tions.

At 1024 meters — 100 mil­lion light years away from the start­ing pic­nic blan­ket, the Eames butted up against the lim­its of the observ­able uni­verse, at least as far as 1977 was con­cerned.

They reversed direc­tion, hurtling back down to earth by one pow­er of ten every two sec­onds. With­out paus­ing for so much as hand­ful of fruit or a slice of pie, they dove beneath the skin of a doz­ing picnicker’s hand, con­tin­u­ing their jour­ney on a cel­lu­lar, then sub-atom­ic lev­el, end­ing inside a pro­ton of a car­bon atom with­in a DNA mol­e­cule in a white blood cell.

It still man­ages to put the mind in a whirl.

Sit tight, though, because, as Pro­fes­sor Cox points out, “Over 40 years lat­er, we can show a bit more.”

2021 relo­cates the pic­nic blan­ket to a pic­turesque beach in Sici­ly, and for­goes the trip inside the human body in favor of Deep Space, though the method of trav­el remains the same — expo­nen­tial, by pow­ers of ten.

1013 meters finds us head­ing into inter­stel­lar space, on the heels of Voy­agers 1 and 2, the twin space­crafts launched the same year as the Eames’ Pow­ers of Ten — 1977.

Hav­ing achieved their ini­tial objec­tive, the explo­ration of Jupiter and Sat­urn, these space­crafts’ mis­sion was expand­ed to Uranus, Nep­tune, and now, the out­er­most edge of the Sun’s domain. The data they, and oth­er explorato­ry crafts, have sent back allow Cox and oth­ers in the  sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty to take us beyond the Eames’ out­er­most lim­its:

At 1026 meters, we switch our view to microwave. We can now see the cur­rent lim­it of our vision. This light forms a wall all around us. The light and dark patch­es show dif­fer­ences in tem­per­a­ture by frac­tions of a degree, reveal­ing where mat­ter was begin­ning to clump togeth­er to form the first galax­ies short­ly after the Big Bang. This light is known as the cos­mic microwave back­ground radi­a­tion. 

1027 meters…1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Beyond this point, the nature of the Uni­verse is tru­ly unchart­ed and debat­ed. This light was emit­ted around 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Before this time, the Uni­verse was so hot that it was not trans­par­ent to light. Is there sim­ply more uni­verse out there, yet to be revealed? Or is this region still expand­ing, gen­er­at­ing more uni­verse, or even oth­er uni­vers­es with dif­fer­ent phys­i­cal prop­er­ties to our own? How will our under­stand­ing of the Uni­verse have changed by 2077? How many more pow­ers of ten are out there?

Accord­ing to NASA, the Voy­ager crafts have suf­fi­cient pow­er and fuel to keep their “cur­rent suite of sci­ence instru­ments on” for anoth­er four years, at least. By then, Voy­ager 1 will be about 13.8 bil­lion miles, and Voy­ager 2 some 11.4 bil­lion miles from the Sun:

In about 40,000 years, Voy­ager 1 will drift with­in 1.6 light-years (9.3 tril­lion miles) of AC+79 3888, a star in the con­stel­la­tion of Camelopardalis which is head­ing toward the con­stel­la­tion Ophi­uchus. In about 40,000 years, Voy­ager 2 will pass 1.7 light-years (9.7 tril­lion miles) from the star Ross 248 and in about 296,000 years, it will pass 4.3 light-years (25 tril­lion miles) from Sir­ius, the bright­est star in the sky. The Voy­agers are destined—perhaps eternally—to wan­der the Milky Way.

If this dizzy­ing infor­ma­tion makes you yearn for 1987’s sim­ple plea­sures, this Way­back Machine link includes a fun inter­ac­tive for the orig­i­nal Pow­ers of Ten. Click the “show text” option on an expo­nen­tial slid­er tool to con­sid­er the scale of each stop in his­toric and tan­gi­ble con­text.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan’s “The Pale Blue Dot” Ani­mat­ed

Watch Pow­ers of Ten and Let Design­ers Charles & Ray Eames Take You on a Bril­liant Tour of the Uni­verse

Watch Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Doc­u­men­tary Uni­verse, the Film that Inspired the Visu­al Effects of Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001 and Gave the HAL 9000 Com­put­er Its Voice (1960)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Laurie Anderson’s Hypnotic Harvard Lecture Series on Poetry, Meditation, Death, New York & More

in Art, Harvard, Poetry | January 10th, 2022

These days the term mul­ti­me­dia sounds thor­ough­ly passé, like the apoth­e­o­sis of the 1990s tech­no-cul­tur­al buzz­word. But per­haps it also refers to a dimen­sion of art first opened in that era, of a kind in which trend-chasers dab­bled but whose poten­tial they rarely both­ered to prop­er­ly explore. But hav­ing estab­lished her­self as a for­mal­ly and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly dar­ing artist long before the 1990s, Lau­rie Ander­son was ide­al­ly placed to inhab­it the mul­ti­me­dia era. In a way, she’s con­tin­ued to inhab­it it ever since, con­tin­u­al­ly press­ing new audio­vi­su­al plat­forms into the ser­vice of her sig­na­ture qual­i­ties of expres­sion: con­tem­pla­tive, artic­u­late, high­ly digres­sive, and final­ly hyp­not­ic.

Ander­son­’s com­mit­ment to this enter­prise has brought her no few hon­ors. Biogra­phies often men­tion her time as NASA’s first (and, it seems, last) artist-in-res­i­dence; more recent­ly, she was named Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty’s 2021 Charles Eliot Nor­ton Pro­fes­sor of Poet­ry. This posi­tion entails the deliv­ery of the Charles Eliot Nor­ton Lec­ture, a series meant to deal with poet­ry “in the broad­est sense,” encom­pass­ing “all poet­ic expres­sion in lan­guage, music, or the fine arts.”

Nor­ton lec­tur­ers pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture include Leonard Bern­stein, Her­bie Han­cock, and Jorge Luis Borges. “I am pret­ty sure that the Nor­ton com­mit­tee at Har­vard made an enor­mous mis­take when they asked me to do this lec­ture series,” Ander­son told the Har­vard Gazette, “and it was real­ly my own sense of the absurd that made me want to say yes.”

Few could seri­ous­ly have doubt­ed Ander­son­’s abil­i­ty to rise to the occa­sion. She did, how­ev­er, face a unique chal­lenge in the his­to­ry of the Nor­ton Lec­tures: deliv­er­ing them on Zoom, that now-ubiq­ui­tous video-con­fer­enc­ing appli­ca­tion of the COVID-19 era. Despite belong­ing to a gen­er­a­tion not all of whose mem­bers demon­strate great pro­fi­cien­cy with such tech­nolo­gies, Ander­son her­self appears to have tak­en to Zoom like the prover­bial duck to water. Such, at least, is the impres­sion giv­en by “Spend­ing the War With­out You: Vir­tu­al Back­grounds,” her six-part Nor­ton Lec­ture series now avail­able to watch on Youtube. Its sub­ti­tle hints at one fea­ture of Zoom of which she makes rich use — but hard­ly the only fea­ture.

Through­out “Spend­ing the War With­out You,” Ander­son also super­im­pos­es a vari­ety of vir­tu­al faces over her own: Sig­mund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Loni Ander­son, and even her musi­cal col­lab­o­ra­tor Bri­an Eno. This sort of thing would­n’t have been pos­si­ble even in the long­time fan­ta­sy she cites as an inspi­ra­tion for these lec­tures: host­ing a radio show at 4:00 a.m., “a time when real­i­ty and dreams just sort of merge and it’s hard to tell the dif­fer­ence between them.” That’s just the right head­space in which to lis­ten to Ander­son make her ele­gant­ly spaced-out way through such top­ics as her life in New York, tai chi and med­i­ta­tion, lan­guage as a virus, the death of John Lennon, the cul­ture of the inter­net, Cather­ine the Great, the com­bi­na­tion of sound and image, The Wind in the Wil­lows, non-fun­gi­ble tokens, and Amer­i­can cheese. Tak­ing advan­tage of her dig­i­tal medi­um, she also plays the vio­lin, explores vir­tu­al realms, and dances along­side her younger self.

The col­li­sion of all these ele­ments feels not unlike Good Morn­ing, Mr. Orwell, Nam June Paik’s tele­vi­sion broad­cast of New Year’s Day 1984. Ander­son also took part in that project, shar­ing with Paik an artis­tic will­ing­ness to embrace new media. “I’ve almost always been a wire­head,” she says in these lec­tures 38 years lat­er. “But it’s become a night­mare in some ways, with peo­ple attached now to their devices, with a death grip on their phones. At the same time, it’s the same machine that cre­at­ed celebri­ty cul­ture.” Look­ing back on a “humil­i­at­ing” clip of her­self and Peter Gabriel per­form­ing on Good Morn­ing, Mr. Orwell, she recalls her state of mind dur­ing the com­mer­cial and tech­no­log­i­cal onrush of the 1980s: “Every­thing was mov­ing fast, and I just was­n’t think­ing. That’s my excuse, any­way.” See the full lec­ture series here, or up top. The lec­tures will be added to our col­lec­tion: 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Lau­rie Ander­son Read from The Tibetan Book of the Dead on New Album Songs from the Bar­do

Lau­rie Ander­son Intro­duces Her Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Instal­la­tion That Lets You Fly Mag­i­cal­ly Through Sto­ries

Lou Reed and Lau­rie Anderson’s Three Rules for Liv­ing Well: A Short and Suc­cinct Life Phi­los­o­phy

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Nor­ton Lec­tures On Poet­ry (And Every­thing Else Lit­er­ary)

Her­bie Han­cock Presents the Pres­ti­gious Nor­ton Lec­tures at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty: Watch Online

Leonard Bernstein’s Mas­ter­ful Lec­tures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Record­ed at Har­vard in 1973)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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 Face­book.

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Jon Hamm Narrates a Modernized Version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Helping to Diagnose Our Social Media-Induced Narcissism

in Philosophy, Psychology, Technology, Television | January 10th, 2022

The Matrix gave a gen­er­a­tion or two rea­son to recon­sid­er, or indeed first to con­sid­er, Pla­to’s alle­go­ry of the cave. That era-defin­ing block­buster’s cav­al­cade of slick visu­al effects came deliv­ered atop a plot about human­i­ty’s hav­ing been enslaved — plugged into a colos­sal machine, as I recall, like an array of liv­ing bat­ter­ies — while con­vinced by a direct-to-brain sim­u­la­tion that it was­n’t. Here in real life, about two and a half mil­len­nia ear­li­er, one of Pla­to’s dia­logues had con­jured up a not-dis­sim­i­lar sce­nario. You can see it retold in the video above, a clip drawn from a form as rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry as The Matrix’s was of the late 20th: Legion, a dra­mat­ic tele­vi­sion series based on a com­ic book.

“Imag­ine a cave, where those inside nev­er see the out­side world,” says nar­ra­tor Jon Hamm (him­self an icon of our Gold­en Age of Tele­vi­sion, thanks to his lead per­for­mance in Mad Men). “Instead, they see shad­ows of that world pro­ject­ed on the cave wall. The world they see in the shad­ows is not the real world, but it’s real to them. If you were to show them the world as it actu­al­ly is, they would reject it as incom­pre­hen­si­ble.” Then, Hamm sug­gests trans­pos­ing this rela­tion­ship to real­i­ty into life as we know it — or rather, as we two-dimen­sion­al­ly per­ceive it on the screens of our phones. But “unlike the alle­go­ry of the cave, where the peo­ple are real and the shad­ows are false, here oth­er peo­ple are the shad­ows.”

This prop­a­gates “the delu­sion of the nar­cis­sist, who believes that they alone are real. Their feel­ings are the only feel­ings that mat­ter, because oth­er peo­ple are just shad­ows, and shad­ows don’t feel.” And “if every­one lived in caves, then no one would be real. Not even you.” With the rise of dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion in gen­er­al and social media in par­tic­u­lar, a great many of us have ensconced our­selves, by degrees and for the most part uncon­scious­ly, inside caves of our own. Over the past decade or so, increas­ing­ly sober­ing glimpses of the out­side world have moti­vat­ed some of us to seek diag­noses of our col­lec­tive con­di­tion from thinkers of the past, such as social the­o­rist Christo­pher Lasch.

“The new nar­cis­sist is haunt­ed not by guilt but by anx­i­ety,” Lasch writes The Cul­ture of Nar­cis­sism. “Lib­er­at­ed from the super­sti­tions of the past, he doubts even the real­i­ty of his own exis­tence” — won­ders, in oth­er words, whether he isn’t one of the shad­ows him­self. Nev­er­the­less, he remains “facile at man­ag­ing the impres­sions he gives to oth­ers, rav­en­ous for admi­ra­tion but con­temp­tu­ous of those he manip­u­lates into pro­vid­ing it,” and depen­dent on “con­stant infu­sions of approval and admi­ra­tion.” Social media has revealed traces of this per­son­al­i­ty, belong­ing to one who “sees the world as a mir­ror of him­self and has no inter­est in exter­nal events except as they throw back a reflec­tion of his own image,” in us all. It thus gives us pause to remem­ber that Lasch was writ­ing all this in the 1970s; but then, Pla­to was writ­ing in the fifth cen­tu­ry B.C.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear John Malkovich Read Plato’s “Alle­go­ry of the Cave,” Set to Music Mixed by Ric Ocasek, Yoko Ono & Sean Lennon, OMD & More

Two Ani­ma­tions of Plato’s Alle­go­ry of the Cave: One Nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles, Anoth­er Made with Clay

Plato’s Cave Alle­go­ry Ani­mat­ed Mon­ty Python-Style

New Ani­ma­tion Explains Sher­ry Turkle’s The­o­ries on Why Social Media Makes Us Lone­ly

The Case for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valu­able “Deep Work” Instead, Accord­ing to Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Cal New­port

A 1947 French Film Accu­rate­ly Pre­dict­ed Our 21st-Cen­tu­ry Addic­tion to Smart­phones

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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 Face­book.

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