A quick fyi: Masterclass is running a Buy One, Give One Free special until November 26 at 11:59:59 PM PST.
Here’s the gist: If you buy an All-Access pass to their 45 courses, you will receive another All-Access Pass to give to someone else at no additional charge. An All-Access pass costs $180, and lasts one year. For that fee, you–and a family member or friend–can watch courses created by Annie Leibovitz, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, David Mamet, Jane Goodall, Margaret Atwood, Helen Mirren, Martin Scorsese, Herbie Hancock, Alice Waters and so many more. If you’re thinking this sounds like a pretty good holiday present, I’d have to agree.
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Much of the recent scientific research into psychedelics has picked up where researchers left off in the mid-20th century, before LSD, psilocybin, and other psychoactive drugs became countercultural means of consciousness expansion, and then banned, illegal substances the government sought to control. Scientists from several fields studied psychedelics as treatments for addiction, depression, and anxiety, and end-of-life care. These applications were conceived and tested several decades ago.
Now, thanks to some serious investment from high-profile institutions like Johns Hopkins University, and thanks to changing government attitudes toward psychoactive drugs, it may be possible for psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” to get legal approval for therapy in a clinical setting by 2021. “For the first time in U.S. history,” Shelby Hartman reports at Rolling Stone, “a psychedelic drug is on the fast track to getting approved for treating depression by the federal government.”
As Michael Pollan has detailed in his latest book,How to Change Your Mind, the possibilities for psilocybin and other such drugs are vast. “But before the Food and Drug Administration can be petitioned to reclassify it,” Brittany Shoot notes at Fortune, the drug “first has to clear phase III clinical trials. The entire process is expected to take about five years.” In the TEDMED video above, you can see Roland R. Griffiths, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins, discuss the ways in which psilocybin, “under supported conditions, can occasion mystical-type experiences associated with enduring positive changes in attitudes and behavior.”
The implications of this research span the fields of ethics and medicine, psychology and religion, and it’s fitting that Dr. Griffiths leads off with a statement about the compatibility of spirituality and science, supported by a quote from Einstein, who said “the most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It’s the source of all true science.” But the work Griffiths and others have been engaged in is primarily practical in nature—though it does not at all exclude the mystical—like finding effective means to treat depression in cancer patients, for example.
“Sixteen million Americans suffer from depression and approximately one-third of them are treatment resistant,” Hartman writes. “Depression is also an epidemic worldwide, affecting 300 million people around the world.” Psychotropic drugs like psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA (which is not classified as a psychedelic), have been shown for a long time to work for many people suffering from severe mental illness and addictions.
Although such drugs present some potential for abuse, they are not highly addictive, especially relative to the flood of opioids on the legal market that are currently devastating whole communities as people use them to self-medicate. It seems that what has most prevented psychedelics from being researched and prescribed has as much or more to do with long-standing prejudice and fear as it does with a genuine concern for public health. (And that’s not even to mention the financial interests who exert tremendous pressure on drug policy.)
But now, Hartman writes, “it appears [researchers] have come too far to go back—and the federal government is finally recognizing it, too.” Find out why this research matters in Dr. Griffiths’ talk, Pollan’s book, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and some of the posts we’ve linked to below.
Alice’s Restaurant. It’s now a Thanksgiving classic, and something of a tradition around here. Recorded in 1967, the 18+ minute counterculture song recounts Arlo Guthrie’s real encounter with the law, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1965. As the long song unfolds, we hear all about how a hippie-bating police officer, by the name of William “Obie” Obanhein, arrested Arlo for littering. (Cultural footnote: Obie previously posed for several Norman Rockwell paintings, including the well-known painting, “The Runaway,” that graced a 1958 cover of The Saturday Evening Post.) In fairly short order, Arlo pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pays a $25 fine, and cleans up the thrash. But the story isn’t over. Not by a long shot. Later, when Arlo (son of Woody Guthrie) gets called up for the draft, the petty crime ironically becomes a basis for disqualifying him from military service in the Vietnam War. Guthrie recounts this with some bitterness as the song builds into a satirical protest against the war: “I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ’cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the Army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug.” And then we’re back to the cheery chorus again: “You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.”
We have featured Guthrie’s classic during past years. But, for this Thanksgiving, we give you the illustrated version. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who plans to celebrate the holiday today.
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If you stepped into a record store in the 1950s and 60s, you would likely be drawn almost immediately to a Blue Note release—whether or not you were a fan of jazz or had heard of the artist or even the label. “If you went to those record stores,” says Estelle Caswell in the Vox Earworm video above, “it probably wasn’t the sound of Blue Note that immediately caught your attention. It was their album covers.”
Now those designs are hallowed jazz iconography, with their “bold typography, two tone photography, and minimal graphic design.” Of course, it should go without saying that the sound of Blue Note is as distinctive and essential as its look, thanks to its founders’ musical vision, the faultless ear of producer and engineer Rudy Van Gelder, and the roster of unbelievably great musicians the label recruited and recorded.
But back to those covers….
“Their bold use of color, intimate photography, and meticulously placed typography came to define the look of jazz” in the hard bop era, and thus, defined the look of cool, a “refined sophistication” vibrating with restless, sultry, smoky, classy, moody energy. The rat pack had nothing on Blue Note. Their covers “have today become an epitome of graphic hip,” writes Robin Kinross at Eye magazine. (And lest we fetishize the covers at the expense of their contents, Kinross makes sure to add that they “are no more than the visible manifestation of an organic whole.”)
Flip over any one of those beautifully-designed Blue Note records from, say, 1955 to 65, the label’s peak years, and you’ll find two names credited for almost all of their designs: photographer Francis Wolff and graphic designer Reid Miles. Wolff, says producer and Blue Note archivist Michael Cuscuna in the Earworm video, shot almost every Blue Note session from “the minute he arrived.”
“One of the most impressive, and shocking things” about Wolff’s photo shoots, “was that the average success rate of those photos was really extraordinary. He was like the jazz artist of photography in that he could nail it immediately.” Once Wolff filled a contact sheet with great shots, it next came to Miles to select the perfect one—and the perfect crop—for the album cover. These saturated portraits turned Blue Note artists into immortal heroes of hip.
But Reid’s experiments with typography, “inspired by the ever present Swiss lettering style that defined 20th century graphic design,” notes Vox, provided such an important element that the lettering sometimes edged out the photography, such as in the cover of Joe Henderson’s In ‘n Out, which features only a tiny portrait of the artist in the upper left-hand corner, nestled in the dot of a lower-case “i.”
Miles pushed the exclamation point to absurd lengths on Jackie McLean’s It’s Time, which again relegates the artist’s photo to a tiny square in the corner while the rest of the cover is taken up with bold, black “!!!!!!!!!!!”s over a white background. It’s “startlingly getting your attention,” Cuscuna comments. On Lou Donaldson’s Sunny Side Up, Miles dispenses with photography altogether, for a striking black and white design that makes the title seem like it might up and float away.
But Miles’ type-centric covers, though excellent, are not what we usually associate with the classic Blue Note look. The synthesis of Wolff’s impeccable photographic instincts and Miles’ surgically keen eye for framing, color, and composition combined to give us the pensive, mysterious Coltrane on Blue Train, the impossibly cool Sonny Rollins on the cover of Newk’s Time, the totally, wildly in-the-moment Art Blakey on The Big Beat, and so, so many more.
Despite being fraught with production difficulties, an absent director, and a critical quibbling over its sexuality politics, Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic of Freddie Mercury and Queen, has been doing very well at the box office. And though it has thrust Queen’s music back into the spotlight, has it even really gone away?
The song itself, the 6 minute epic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” was the top of the UK singles charts for nine weeks upon its release and hasn’t been forgotten since. It’s part of our collective DNA, but with a certain caveat…it’s notoriously difficult to cover. It is so finely constructed that it can’t be deconstructed, leaving artists to stand in the shadow of Mercury’s delivery. Brian May, in the above video, gives credit to Axl Rose for getting close to the powerful high registers of Mercury, but even that was a kind of karaoke. And let’s not even talk about Kanye West’s stab at it.
So it’s a good time to check in with this 45 minute-long mini-doc on the making of the song, which took the band into the stratosphere. Produced in 2002 for the band’s Greatest Hits DVD, it features guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor. The first part is on the writing of the song, the second part on the making of the music video, and the third, the bulk of the doc, on the production.
Don’t expect any explanation of the subject matter of the song–as May says, Mercury would have shrugged off any interpretation and dismissed any search for depth. And while Mercury always took care over his lyrics, the power is all there in the music.
As for the video, that came about from necessity, as the band wanted to be on Top of the Pops and tour at the same time. By using their rehearsal stage at Elstree studios for the performance footage and a side area for the choral/close-up segments, they made a strangely iconic video. (Who doesn’t think of Queen’s four members arranged in a diamond when those vocals start up?). The two main effects were a prism lens on the camera and video feedback, all done live.
The last part is fascinating and a deep dive into the mix. Brian May, alongside studio engineer Justin Shirley Smith, play just the piano, bass, and drums from the song at first. Mercury was a self-taught pianist who played “like a drummer,” with a metronome in his head, says May.
The guitarist also isolates his various guitar parts, including the harmonics during the opening ballad portion, the “shivers down my spine” sound made by scraping the strings, and the famous solo, which he wrote as a counterpoint to Mercury’s melody. It’s geekery of the highest order, but it’s for a song that deserves such attention.
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.
“Dan Brown visited my English class,” remembers the New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman. “It happened in the spring of 1998,” five years before Brown hit the bigtime with The Da Vinci Code, a thriller best known for its colossal sales numbers. “None of us had heard of Brown, or of his book” — his debut novel, Digital Fortress — “and we were annoying, arty little snooty-snoots. Why would we want to talk with the author of a ‘techno-thriller’ about computer hackers?” But the class’ attitude didn’t stop Brown from sharing the writing wisdom he had to offer, delivered in the form of such guidelines (in Rothman’s memory) as “Set your story in an exotic location,” “Make your characters interesting people with secrets,” “Have lots of plot twists,” and “End each chapter with a cliffhanger.”
At the time, Rothman didn’t understand why Brown would come to his class to “give a bunch of arty high-school kids advice about how to write cheesy thrillers.” But now, as a professional writer himself, Rothman realizes “why Brown’s advice was so practical,” and what it had to teach them about the practical considerations, even rigors, of “how to write for a living.”
Though he doesn’t mention any of his classmates growing up to become the kind of novelists Brown is, a great many others dream of such a writing life, few of whom ever had the chance to benefit from a classroom visit by the man himself. But they can now enroll in “Dan Brown Teaches Writing Thrillers,” a new course from online education company Masterclass whose trailer you can watch above.
Any fan of Brown’s writing — or the blockbuster movies that have been made out of it — knows that, as far as exotic locations, characters with secrets, plot twists, and cliffhangers go, he has hardly abandoned his principles. His Masterclass covers all of those aspects in depth and more besides, from “The Anatomy of a Thriller” to “Creating Heroes and Villains” to “Creating Suspense” to “Protecting Your Process.” Brown also devotes two sections to research, which he once called in a Goodreads question-and-answer session “the most overlooked facet of writing a successful page turner.” If any living writer knows how to come up with a successful page turner, Brown does, and unlike in his novels themselves, he certainly doesn’t seem inclined to bury the secret under layers of history, symbolism, conspiracy, and murder. You can enroll in Brown’s new thriller-writing class (which runs $90) here. You can also pay $180 to get an annual pass to all of Masterclass’ courses.
FYI: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.
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 Facebook.
The Digital Comic Museum offers free access to hundreds of pre-1959 comic books, uploaded by users who often offer historical research and commentary alongside high-quality scans.
The site’s moderators and administrators are particularly careful to avoid posting non-public-domain comics (a complicated designation, as described in this forum thread). The resulting archive is devoid of many familiar comic-book characters, like those from Marvel, D.C., or Disney.
On the other hand, because of this restriction, the archive offers an interesting window into the themes of lesser-known comics in the Golden Age—romance, Westerns, combat, crime, supernatural and horror. The covers of the romance comics are great examples of popular art.
Interested in understanding how homefront American culture reflected fighting in World War II and Korea, and the anxieties of the Cold War? The archive is full of titles like “Fighting Yank” (or “Warfront”) that trade on true stories of past combat and present-day engagements. Many, like these “Atomic Attack” books from the early 1950s, have a distinctive Cold War flavor, with science-fictional imaginings of futuristic combat. (“See how the war of 1972 will be fought! The war that YOU, yourself, might have to take part in…”)
The museum holds some unexpected and forgotten titles, like the Mad Magazine knock-off “Eh.” Here you can see how looking at a comic that wasn’t successful enough to have a lasting legacy (and, therefore, a renewed copyright) can be enlightening in and of itself. What subjects did “Eh” cover that Mad might have avoided?
The DCM asks users to register and log in before downloading comic files. Registration is free, and—for now—there’s no limit on the number of titles you can download. You can enter the archive here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in March, 2013.
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Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaonion.
If you want to see the West as you’ve never seen it before, go to Japan. Since the end of the Second World War, there have been few big Western phenomena in which Japanese creators have not taken an interest, then turned around and made their own. One of the most powerful imaginations among those creators belongs to Keiichi Tanaami, who came of age surrounded by the likes of Mickey Mouse and Elvis after doing much of his growing up amid the chaos and devastation of war. Born in 1936 and still active today, he’s produced a body of work whose earliest pieces go back to the 1950s, and even the variety of media he’s used — illustration, graphic design, paintings, comics, animation — can barely contain his ever-expanding vision, a mixture of pop culture and and symbolic iconography drawn from America, Japan, and deep down in his own psyche.
“A magazine that is packed to the brim with human interests and desires bears a strong resemblance to who I am as a person,” Tanaami once wrote, a description reflected by his current work as well as that of previous eras. Take these short animated films, three of which come from the early 1970s — an auspicious time indeed for his brand of psychedelia to break through in the West.
In 1971’s Good-Bye Marilyn, Tanaami pays tribute to perhaps the most iconic woman America has ever produced; that same year’s Good-Bye Elvis and USA draws its inspiration from quite possibly America’s most iconic man. Tanami makes use of the imagery of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley in a way no other artist has, though he was hardly alone in his fascination with the very fascination those figures commanded: Andy Warhol, for instance, also got artistic mileage out of them.
It was Warhol who showed Tanaami how artists of their sensibility could make a career. Tanaami first saw Warhol’s work on a trip to New York City in 1967. “Warhol was in the process of shifting from commercial illustrator to artist, and I both witnessed and experienced firsthand his tactics, his method of incision into the art world,” Tanaami once recalled. “He used contemporary icons as motifs in his works and for his other activities put together media such as films, newspapers and rock bands.” In 1975, after becoming the first art director of the Japanese edition of Playboy, he returned to New York to visit the magazine’s head office and took a side trip to Warhol’s Factory and took in what Warhol and his collaborators had been up to with experimental film. But Tanaami had already been making serious inroads into that field himself, as evidenced by the two aforementioned shorts as well as his 1973 animation of John Lennon’s “Oh, Yoko!” — a kind of early music video — up top.
Few artists of any nationality have hybridized the thoroughly commercial and the deeply personal as Tanaami, who got his start in advertising and not long thereafter was designing the covers for Japanese editions of albums by Jefferson Airplane and The Monkees. But as he also said in a recent Hypebeast interview, “a lot of my work is driven by old memories of the past, especially the fear that I felt as a child during the several wars that took place. The fear I felt seeing a person dying. But then there’s also the good feelings I have from playing as a child. I integrate all aspects of my mind and memories into my work.” You can see other examples of it at Ubuweb, and Tanaami’s 2013 animation Adventures in Beauty Wonderland above shows how that integration has continued, taking as it does just as much from traditional Japanese symbols and design motifs as it does from the work of Lewis Carroll — a characteristically thrilling and elaborate aesthetic journey, all of it commissioned by the cosmetics company Sephora.
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 Facebook.
Book historians and rare manuscript librarians do not have the most glamorous jobs by the usual standards. They deal with weathered, tattered, fragmentary scraps of text in archaic languages and lettering. It’s work unlikely to receive the Hollywood (or Netflix) treatment unless wizards, witches, or occult detectives are involved. But the relative obscurity of these professions does not make the work any less valuable. Without dedicated archivists and preservationists, a slow collective amnesia, or worse, can set in.
One might call this attitude precious. Specialists are useful, art is great, but with sophisticated machine learning, we can make, store, and print copies of every historical artifact in the world, along with all of the accumulated knowledge about them. What need to dote on crumbling manuscripts? Why the special status of the original? The question, taken up by Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” comes down in part to something he called “aura.”
Take the case of four manuscripts, all of which recently appeared together at the British Library’s extensive exhibition Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War: The Vercelli Book, the Junius Manuscript, the Exeter Book, and the Beowulf Manuscript contain riddles, religious texts, elegies, and the oldest manuscript of the oldest known poem in English. These represent the sum total of extant original literary manuscripts in Old English, a tongue several centuries distant from our own but still embedded deep within the structure of every modern version of the language.
Each manuscript has what, as Benjamin wrote, “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking… its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Josephine Livingstone puts the matter more plainly at The New Republic.
Why are these four books so special? It has to do, I think, with the concept of the original—a concept we have almost entirely lost touch with. The Beowulf Manuscript… is not merely a representation of a story; it is the story…. The manuscripts confront us with a former version of our literary selves; identities that we barely recognize, and which estrange us from ourselves.
We can reproduce history infinitely, but the only way to experience the humbling otherworldliness that dwarfs our cramped ideas about it is through its physical remainders. Livingstone doesn’t clarify whom she includes in the phrase “our literary selves,” but we might as well say, at minimum, this means every speaker of English and everyone who has read English literature in translation or felt the influence of English words and phrases in other languages.
We acquire the language we hear and read from literary sources, however remote; they are constitutive, the threads that weave together cultural narratives into a larger pattern. The original work of art, Benjamin argued, like the relic, has religious significance. And where the relic grounds the cult, art grounds material culture in such a way, he thought, that it repels fascism’s aesthetic obsession with destruction.
Original artifacts “must restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses,” literary scholar Susan Buck-Morss elaborates, “for the sake of humanity’s self-preservation.” The statement may sound less grandiose in the context of Europe in 1936, or we might consider it just as relevant today (and expand it to include not only art but nature).
We can rely on the fact that, should the Beowulf Manuscript be destroyed, Livingstone grants, “the poem would still survive,” as would the image of the manuscript in very fine detail. That is “the hope contained in Benjamin’s dirge.” But what is lost can never appear in the world again. You can view most of these rare texts—The Vercelli Book, the Junius Manuscript, and the Beowulf Manuscript—in high resolution scans at the British and Bodleian Libraries.
The texts are a minuscule sampling of the number of cultural artifacts around the world worthy of preservation, and publicity. And they are a tiny sampling of the literary production of Old English. But on them rests a great deal of our understanding about the linguistic ancestors of the language, with more to learn, perhaps, as scanning technology becomes even more advanced, illuminating rather than replacing the original.
When we first checked in with artist and screenwriter Todd Alcott, he was immortalizing the work of stars who hit their stride in the 70s and 80s, as highly convincing pulp novel and magazine covers inspired by their most famous songs and lyrics. David Bowie’s “Young Americans” yields an East of Eden-like blonde couple reclining in the grass. Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime” becomes an erotically violent, or violently erotic, magazine that ain’t fooling around.
Next, we took a look at Alcott’s series of pulp covers drawn from the work of Mr. Bob Dylan, bona fide godfather of classic rock, a period that gets a lion’s share of covers in Alcott’s imaginative Etsy rack, alongside other new wave and punk bands like The Clash, The Smiths, and Joy Division. Looking at these devoted tributes to musical giants of yore, rendered in adoring tributes to an even earlier era’s aesthetic, produces the kind of “of course!” reaction that makes Alcott’s work so enjoyable.
After all, pulp magazines and books are perhaps as responsible for the counterculture as LSD, with their proudly sexy poses, overheated teen fantasies, and bondage gear. (Prince gets his own series, a true joy.) But Alcott has moved on to a crop of artists who first appeared in the 90s class of alternative bands—from PJ Harvey, to Fiona Apple, to Nirvana, to Neutral Milk Hotel, to, as you can see here, Radiohead, the most long-lived and innovative stars of the era.
How well does Alcott’s approach work with artists who hit the scene when pulp fiction turned into Pulp Fiction, appropriated in a winking, expletive-filled splatter-fest that didn’t, technically, require its audience to know anything about pulp fiction? You’ll notice that Alcott has taken a novel approach to the concept in many cases (reimagining PJ Harvey’s “This is Love!” as a 50s grindhouse flick, another genre that has been heavily Tarantino-ized).
He converts Radiohead’s “Kid A” into that most treasured publication for futon-surfing hipsters circa 2000, the IKEA catalog. “Videotape” manifests in literal fashion as one of the oughties’ many objects of consumer electronics nostalgia, the 120-minute VHS. And “Myxomatosis,” from 2003’s Hail to the Thief, appears as a 1970s cat book, an artifact many Radiohead fans at the turn of the millennium might treasure as both an ironic Tumblr goof and a poignant reminder of childhood.
The Radiohead series does not fully abandon the pulp look—“Karma Police,” for example, gets the detective magazine treatment. But it does lean more heavily on later-20th century productions, like the 70s sci-fi cover of “Paranoid Android,” clearly inspired by Michael Crichton’s Westworld. Moon-Shaped Pool’s “Burn the Witch,” on the other hand, looks like a classic 50s Hammer Horror poster, but with a nod to Robin Hardy’s 1973 Wicker Man. (Both Crichton and Hardy have likewise been re-imagined for audiences who may never have seen the originals.)
Perhaps the least interesting of Alcott’s riffs on the Radiohead catalog, “Jigsaw Falling into Place,” goes right for the obvious, though its idyllic, Bob Ross-like scene strikes a dissonant chord in illustrating a song that references closed circuit cameras and sawn-off shotguns. Speaking of obvious, maybe it seemed too on the nose to turn “Creep” into creepy pulp erotica. Still, I wonder how Alcott resisted. View and purchase in handmade print form all of Alcott’s songs-as-book covers, etc. at Etsy.
You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Or you could pay $0 to download it at MetPublications, the site offering “five decades of Met Museum publications on art history available to read, download, and/or search for free.”
But the Met has kept adding to their digital trove since then, and, as a result, you can now find there no fewer than 586 art catalogs and other books besides. Those sit alongside the 400,000 free art images the museum put online last year.
Since I haven’t yet turned to art collection — I suppose you need money for that — these books don’t necessarily make me covet the vast sweep of artworks they depict and contextualize. But they do make me wish for something even less probable: a time machine so I could go back and see all these exhibits firsthand.
Note: This is an updated version of a post that originally appeared on our site in March 2015.
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 Facebook.
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