NYC’s Iconic Punk Club CBGBs Comes Alive in a Brilliant Short Animation, Using David Godlis’ Photos of Patti Smith, The Ramones & More

in Animation, Life, Music, Photography | December 19th, 2022

Attention young artists: don’t let your day job kill your dream.

In the mid-70s, David Godlis kept body and soul together by working as an assistant in a photography studio, but his ambition was to join the ranks of his street photographer idols — Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander, to name a few.

As Godlis told Sergio Burns of Street Photography, “the 60’s and 70’s were great for photographers:”

The 35mm camera was kind of like the new affordable technology of the day. Like having an iPhone you couldn’t talk on. Cool to look at, fun to use. Photography was only just beginning to be considered an art form. Which left plenty of room for inventing yourself. The movie Blow-Up showed off the kind of cool lifestyle that could be had. Photography seemed both adventurous and artistic. There were obviously a million career paths for photographers back then. From the sublime to the ridiculous. But plenty of opportunities to experiment and find your own way.

Still, it’s a tough proposition, being a street photographer whose day job gobbles all available light.

Or rather, it was until Godlis blundered into New York’s late, great punk club, CBGB’s, and resolved to “take street pictures at night without a flash, and make all these people look as interesting as a Ramones’ song sounds.”

In brothers Lewie and Noah Klosters’ wonderful hybrid animation, Shots in the Dark with David Godlis, we see things fall into place as Godlis experiments with exposure times, darkroom chemical ratios, paper grade, and the streetlights lining the Bowery.

He wound up with a bracing personal style…and some of the most iconic shots in rock history.

The Klosters, who were granted full access to Godlis’ digital archive (a request Lewie Klosters likened to “asking the president for the nuke codes”), breathe extra life into this bygone scene by hand-cutting and puppeteering images of such stalwarts as The Ramones, Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell, Talking Heads, Alex Chilton, and Blondie.

Those who inhabited the scene in an offstage capacity are also given their due, from the door attendant and the bartender with the Dee Dee Ramone haircut to owner Hilly Kristal, his dog, and the cool kid patrons packing the legendarily filthy establishment.

This seems to be a reflection of the irrepressible, and endlessly curious Godlis’ world view. As Lewie, who had 16 hours of audio interview to draw from, told the Vimeo blog’s Ina Pira:

Ken Burns could make his next 20 hour documentary on Godlis alone. If you ever bump into him, and you will — he’s everywhere all at once in the Village, ask him about some of our favorite stories that hit the cutting room floor: Jager at the Revlon Bar, the bum pissing out the window, when he was held at gunpoint in Boston, about Merv and the Heinekens, and seeing Bob Dylan window shopping. Just to name a few.

The final moments of Shots in the Dark with David Godlis are bittersweet. The filmmakers’ subject sums it up best:

Nothing lasts forever, but you also have to know what will be of interest when it’s gone.

Patti Smith Plays Songs by The Ramones, Rolling Stones, Lou Reed & More on CBGB’s Closing Night (2006)

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

- 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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The Avant-Garde Animated Films of Walter Ruttmann, Still Strikingly Fresh a Century Later (1921–1925)

in Animation, Film | December 19th, 2022

Though regarded by many as near-impossibly difficult to judge, avant-garde art can be put to its own test of time: does it still feel new ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years later? Now that most of Walter Ruttmann’s short animated films have passed the century mark, we can with some confidence say they pass that test. A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture his Lichtspiel Opus 1, the first avant-garde animation ever made. Now, with this playlist, you can watch it and several of its successors, which together date from the years 1921 through 1925.

“A trained architect and painter,” writes Cartoon Brew’s Amid Amidi, Ruttmann “worked as a graphic designer prior to becoming involved with film. He fought in WWI, suffered a nervous breakdown and spent time recovering in a sanatorium.”

It was after that harrowing experience that he plunged into the still-new medium of animation, and he evidently brought the combined aesthetic refinement of architecture, painting, and graphic design with him. His four-part Opus series (top) shows us “how abstract animation doesn’t become dated as quickly as representational animation because its creation is not predicated upon the stylistic trappings of its era.”

This also holds true for Ruttmann’s advertising work, including the three-minute Der Sieger just above. Portraying “the struggles of a durable Excelsior tire that climbs entire buildings and wraps itself around the sun to protect it from triangular shapes with mean-looking faces,” as this summary of a talk by film scholar Michael Cowan puts it, the short “is a perfect example testifying to how a lot of avant-garde artists — contrary to popular belief — never lost sight for a certain applicability of their art in that their concepts of form also implied a certain idea of ‘forming’: the potential to take different shapes through morphing, to find ordering principles, or even to communicate the ideological impetus of forming a national body.”

That last holds especially true for Ruttmann’s “later work within the context of National Socialism”: an unfortunate-sounding context, though it must be noted that he displeased Adolf Hitler enough to be personally removed by the dictator from the project that would become Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. His artistic philosophy may have been compatible with selling tires, but it seems not to have served the much more bombastic and literal form of Nazi propaganda. That is, of course, to Ruttman’s credit, as is the freshness his early animations still exude these hundred or so years later. As Amid writes, “the graphic forms used in his film are the same building blocks — raw and unadorned — used by artists today.” But how many artists today use them with such elegance?

The First Masterpieces of Abstract Film: Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 (1921) & Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1924)

Optical Poems by Oskar Fischinger, the Avant-Garde Animator Despised by Hitler, Dissed by Disney

The Experimental Abstract Films of Pioneering American Animator Mary Ellen Bute (1930s-1950s)

Spheres Dance to the Music of Bach, Performed by Glenn Gould: An Animation from 1969

The Golden Age of Berlin Comes to Life in the Classic, Avant-Garde Film, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927)

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

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Behold Beautiful Original Movie Posters for Metropolis from France, Sweden, Germany, Japan & Beyond

in Design, Film | December 16th, 2022

Of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the critic Siegfried Kracauer wrote that “the Americans relished its technical excellence; the English remained aloof; the French were stirred by a film which seemed to them a blend of Wagner and Krupp, and on the whole an alarming sign of Germany’s vitality.” By Wagner, Kracauer of course meant the composer; Krupp referred to the arms manufacturer Friedrich Krupp AG. We must remember that Metropolis first came out in the Germany of 1927, and thus into a sociopolitical context growing more volatile by the moment.

But the film also came out in the golden age of silent cinema, and every serious moviegoer in the world must have been enormously eager for a glimpse of the spectacle of the elaborate dystopian future Lang and his collaborators had put onscreen.

And screen around the world that spectacle did, albeit in a version censored and otherwise cut in a variety of ways that Lang found terribly displeasing. However bowdlerized the Metropolis seen by so many back then, it proved to be so much of an attraction that its advertising materials became nearly as artistic as the film itself.

At Stephen O’Donnell’s blog Gods and Foolish Grandeur, you can see a selection of the posters for Metropolis put up during the late nineteen-twenties and early nineteen-thirties in the movie theaters of various countries, including Sweden, France, Japan, and Australia.

All are visually striking, but it probably comes as no surprise that the American ones — products, after all, of the culture that gave rise to Hollywood — get especially breathless with the accompanying text.

“FANTASTIC FUTURISTIC FATALISTIC,” promises one poster, but not without adding “IMAGINARY IMPRESSIVE IMPOSSIBLE” and “EROTIC EXOTIC ERRATIC.” Another sheet holds out to viewers a flight “HIGH INTO THE AIR!” Lest they suspect that wouldn’t give them their quarter’s worth of fantasy, it also promises them a plunge “DEEP IN THE EARTH!” A different tagline, also used in other English-speaking countries, declares of the film that “Everyone is talking about it, yet no one can describe it!”

That’s not for lack of trying, least of all by the distributor’s publicity department: another poster’s detailed paragraph boasts of a “mighty, surging love drama of the two worlds that work out their moiling destinies within the confines of a great city.” But over the generations — and after restorations — Metropolis has surpassed these claims with its value as a work of cinematic art, and indeed become as timeless as a question once used to promote it: “What’s the world coming to?”

via MessyNessy

Read the Original 32-Page Program for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

H. G. Wells Pans Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in a 1927 Movie Review: It’s “the Silliest Film”

Gaze at Global Movie Posters for Hitchcock’s Vertigo: U.S., Japan, Italy, Poland & Beyond

10,000 Classic Movie Posters Getting Digitized & Put Online by the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin: Free to Browse & Download

40,000 Film Posters in a Wonderfully Eclectic Archive: Italian Tarkovsky Posters, Japanese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

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

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Watch 80 Free Documentaries from Kino Lorber

in Film | December 16th, 2022

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NOTE: Some of the documentaries mentioned below are no longer being streamed online. To find Kino Lorber’s current list of free documentaries, please visit this list.

M. C. Escher, Hannah Arendt, Hieronymus Bosch, Hilma af Kint, Stanley Kubrick: if you’re a regular reader of Open Culture, you’re no doubt fascinated some or all of these figures. Now, thanks to film distributor Kino Lorber, you can watch entire films about them on Youtube. Having evidently put a good deal of energy toward expanding their Youtube channel in recent months, Kino Lorber has uploaded such documentaries as M. C. Escher: Journey to Infinity, Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt, Hieronymous Bosch: Touched by the Devil, Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Kint, and Filmworker (about Kubrick’s right-hand man, the late Leon Vitali) — all of them free to watch.

So far, Kino Lorber’s playlist of free documentaries contains 80 films, a number that may vary depending on your location. Some popular selections focus on music: that of Elvis Presley, that of Levon Helm and The Band, that of Greenwich Village in the nineteen-sixties and seventies.

But the documentary is a versatile form, able in the right directorial hands to contain a wide range of real-life subjects, from art (Louise Bourgeois: The Spider the Mistress and the Tangerine, The Jeff Koons Show) to food (Sushi: Global Catch, El Bulli: Cooking in Progress) to nature (More than Honey, The Woman Who Loves Giraffes) to religion (Brilliant Moon: Glimpses of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, The Last Dalai Lama?), to cinema itself (Captured on Films: The True Story of Marion Davies, Blank City).

All this gives only a hint of the sheer aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural variety of Kino Lorber-distributed documentaries. To get a fuller sense, you’ll have to explore the playlist itself, down to its most recent additions like Finding Fela, Nollywood Babylon, and Lina Wertmüller: Behind the White Glasses. Like all documentaries worth watching, these don’t just address subjects of interest, but leave their viewers with newly open avenues of curiosity to follow. Your journey may begin with films about Glenn Gould, Charlotte Rampling, Johnny Cash, or Maya Deren, but to what realm it will take you — that of the Ballets Russes, of Mexican lucha libre wrestling, of the female Buddhists of the Kathmandu Valley — cannot be foretold.

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Related content:

285 Free Documentaries Online

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

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Hear the Best of Angelo Badalamenti (RIP) from 1986–2017: Features Music from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks & More

in Film, Music | December 15th, 2022

The late Angelo Badalamenti composed music for singers like Marianne Faithfull and Nina Simone, for movies like The City of Lost Children and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and even for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. But of all his musical work, no piece is more likely to begin playing in our minds at the mention of his name than the theme from Twin Peaks, the ABC series that both mystified and enraptured audiences in the early nineteen-nineties. Looking back, one would expect anything less from a prime-time show co-created by David Lynch. And though Twin Peaks’ initial run would come to only three seasons, Lynch and Badalamenti’s collaboration would continue for decades thereafter.

It was with his work for Lynch, in fact, that Badalamenti first broke through as a film composer: 1986’s Blue Velvet may have established Lynch as America’s foremost popular “art house” auteur, but it also introduced its viewers the world over to the seductive and unsettling beauty of Badalamenti’s music.

That film’s song “Mysteries of Love” (with its Lynch-penned lyrics sung by Julee Cruise, who also died this year) comes early in the chronological best-of-Badalamenti Youtube playlist embedded above. Spanning the years 1986 through 2017, it also includes music from such motion pictures as Cousins, Holy Smoke!, The Beach, Cet amour-là, and The Edge of Love.

The bulk of the playlist’s selections, however, were composed for Lynch. You’ll hear music from Wild at Heart, The Straight Story, Mulholland Dr. (a film featuring a brief but memorable appearance by Badalamenti himself), and of course, Twin Peaks — not just the original series and the 1992 movie Fire Walk with Me, but also the 2017 continuation Twin Peaks: The Return, for which Badalamenti returned as composer. In all these eras, his work sounded distinctive, somehow traditional, unconventional, earnest, and ironic all at once — a mixture that could hardly have been better suited to the Lynchian sensibility. And so it is with a thoroughly Lynchian salute, in the middle of one of his daily weather reports, that the man himself sends Badalamenti off.

Get a First Listen to David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti’s Long-Lost Album, Thought Gang

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra

Hear the Music of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Played by the Experimental Band, Xiu Xiu: A Free Stream of Their New Album

David Lynch Creates Daily Weather Reports for Los Angeles: How the Filmmaker Passes Time in Quarantine

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

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Hear Neil Gaiman Read A Christmas Carol Just Like Charles Dickens Read It

in Audio Books, Literature | December 15th, 2022

In Christmases past, we featured Charles Dickens’ hand-edited copy of his beloved 1843 novella A Christmas Carol. He did that hand editing for the purposes of giving public readings, a practice that, in his time, “was considered a desecration of one’s art and a lowering of one’s dignity.” That time, however, has gone, and many of the most prestigious writers alive today take the reading aloud of their own work to the level of art, or at least high entertainment, that Dickens must have suspected one could. Some writers even do a bang-up job of reading other writers’ work: modern master storyteller Neil Gaiman gave us a dose of that when we featured his recitation of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” from memory. Today, however, comes the full meal: Gaiman’s telling of A Christmas Carol straight from that very Dickens-edited reading copy.

Gaiman read to a full house at the New York Public Library, an institution known for its stimulating events, holiday-themed or otherwise. But he didn’t have to hold up the afternoon himself; taking the stage before him, BBC researcher and The Secret Museum author Molly Oldfield talked about her two years spent seeking out fascinating cultural artifacts the world over, including but not limited to the NYPL’s own collection of things Dickensian. You can hear both Oldfield and Gaiman in the recording below. But perhaps the greatest gift of all came in the form of the latter’s attire for his reading: not only did he go fully Victorian, he even went to the length of replicating the 19th-century literary superstar’s own severe hair part and long goatee. And School Library Journal has pictures. The story really gets started around the 11:00 mark. Gaiman’s reading will be added to our list of Free Audio Books. You can find the text of Dickens’ classic here.

New York Public Library · Neil Gaiman Reads “A Christmas Carol”

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in December 2014.

Charles Dickens’ Hand-Edited Copy of His Classic Holiday Tale, A Christmas Carol

Hear Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol Read by His Great-Granddaughter, Monica

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

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The Museum of Wonky English, a Japanese Exhibition Dedicated to Hilarious Mistranslations

in Language Lessons, Museums, Writing | December 14th, 2022

I got hooked on Duolingo a few years ago. Since then, I’ve used it daily to practice languages like French, Spanish, Finnish, Chinese, and Japanese. But none of those courses is quite as popular with as many users as the one for English, which is widely spoken around the world — and, inevitably, almost as widely misspoken around the world. Even non-English-speaking countries tend to put up some English-language signage, sparse and strange though it can often be: a handwritten grocer’s sign warning customers not to “finger the peaches”; a notice mounted just above a urinal that urges visitors to “please urinate with precision and elegance.”

These examples come, unsurprisingly, from Japan, whose awkward but vividly memorable written English has long circulated in Western media. That made Tokyo the ideal location for the Museum of Wonky English, a pop-up collaboration between Duolingo Japan and creative agency UltraSuperNew that, as the latter’s site describes it, exhibits “sixteen of the best examples of wonky English found all over Japan.”

When “visitors look at the signs, menus, clothes, and other objects exhibited in the museum — objects that can make them chuckle, gasp, think, and reflect — they will notice there’s more depth to wonky English than they initially thought and become more emboldened to learn a foreign language.”

You can still see some of the Museum of Wonky English’s prized linguistic artifacts in the promotional video above (which provides the original Japanese phrases from which these odd translations sprang), as well as in the pictures accompanying this Japanese-language article. “Please do not eat children and elderly.” “When coffee is gone. It’s over.” “Crap your hands.”

Though unidiomatic at best, these phrases and others exert a kind of power over the imagination. When closely scrutinized, they also illuminate the mechanics of the underlying Japanese language and its differences with English. And though the Museum of Wonky English was open for only a week, a run that ended last week, I can assure you — living, as I do, in Korea — that wonky English itself remains in rude health.

via Spoon and Tamago

David Foster Wallace Breaks Down Five Common Word Usage Mistakes in English

“Weird Al” Yankovic Releases “Word Crimes,” a Grammar Nerd Parody of “Blurred Lines”

Steven Pinker Identifies 10 Breakable Grammatical Rules: “Who” Vs. “Whom,” Dangling Modifiers & More

What Are the Most Effective Strategies for Learning a Foreign Language?: Six TED Talks Provide the Answers

The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders: A Tokyo Restaurant Where All the Servers Are People Living with Dementia

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

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How to Get Dressed & Fight in 14th Century Armor: A Reenactment

in History | December 14th, 2022

For a medieval knight, physical combat in a full suit of armor could hardly have been a simple matter — but then, nor could the task of putting it on in the first place. You can see the latter depicted in the video above from Norwegian history buff Ola Onsrud. He describes the armor as a “detailed reconstruction based on the effigy of the Black Prince (1330–1376) in the Canterbury Cathedral, other relevant effigies, paintings in fourteenth-century manuscripts and late fourteenth-century armor displayed in The Royal Armories in Leeds.” If you’ve so much as glanced at such imagery, Onsrud’s armor should strike you as looking quite like the real deal.

But this is functional clothing, after all, and as such must be put to the test. Onsrud does so in the video just below, a demonstration of how the wearer of such armor would actually do hand-to-hand combat. “To make comments, the visor of my helmet is open through most of the video,” he notes.

“This will of course make my face an interesting target for my adversary.” In a real medieval battle, of course, the helmet would be closed, and thus the combatants wouldn’t simply aim for the face. As Onsrud explains, the idea is to use one’s sword “against the weak spots of the armor. After finding a weak spot, I can put all my body weight behind it and drive it in.”

Medieval suits of armor turn out not to be as impenetrable as they look. Onsrud runs down a few of their major weak points, including the insides of the gloves, the armpits, and — most wince-inducingly of all — the groin. The defense capability of armor also varied depending upon the weapons used; even the best-suited-up had reason to fear an enemy with a poleaxe. “But the absolute best way to take down an armored knight is by using a lance from a horse,” especially a horse “galloping up to 40 kilometers an hour” whose combined weight with its rider could reach 700 kilograms. Surely even the most committed reenactor won’t do that on Youtube.

What It’s Like to Actually Fight in Medieval Armor

How Well Can You Move in Medieval Armor?: Medievalist Daniel Jaquet Gives It a Try in Real Life

What’s It Like to Fight in 15th Century Armor?: A Surprising Demonstration

How Women Got Dressed in the 14th & 18th Centuries: Watch the Very Painstaking Process Get Cinematically Recreated

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Will AI Change the World?: A Captivating Animation Explores the Promise & Perils of Artificial Intelligence

in Animation, Artificial Intelligence, Technology | December 13th, 2022

Many of us can remember a time when artificial intelligence was widely dismissed as a science-fictional pipe dream unworthy of serious research and investment. That time, safe to say, has gone. “Within a decade,” writes blogger Samuel Hammond, the development of artificial intelligence could bring about a world in which “ordinary people will have more capabilities than a CIA agent does today. You’ll be able to listen in on a conversation in an apartment across the street using the sound vibrations off a chip bag” (as previously featured here on Open Culture.) “You’ll be able to replace your face and voice with those of someone else in real time, allowing anyone to socially engineer their way into anything.”

And that’s the benign part. “Death-by-kamikaze drone will surpass mass shootings as the best way to enact a lurid revenge. The courts, meanwhile, will be flooded with lawsuits because who needs to pay attorney fees when your phone can file an airtight motion for you?” All this “will be enough to make the stablest genius feel schizophrenic.” But “it doesn’t have to be this way. We can fight AI fire with AI fire and adapt our practices along the way.” You can hear a considered take on how we might manage that in the animated TED-Ed video above, adapted from an interview with computer scientist Stuart Russell, author of the popular textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach as well as Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control.

“The problem with the way we build AI systems now is we give them a fixed objective,” Russell says. “The algorithms require us to specify everything in the objective.” Thus an AI charged with de-acidifying the oceans could quite plausibly come to the solution of setting off “a catalytic reaction that does that extremely efficiently, but consumes a quarter of the oxygen in the atmosphere, which would apparently cause us to die fairly slowly and unpleasantly over the course of several hours.” The key to this problem, Russell argues, is to program in a certain lack of confidence: “It’s when you build machines that believe with certainty that they have the objective, that’s when you get sort of psychopathic behavior, and I think we see the same thing in humans.”

A less existential but more common worry has to do with unemployment. Full AI automation of the warehouse tasks still performed by humans, for example, “would, at a stroke, eliminate three or four million jobs.” Russell here turns to E. M. Forster, who in the 1909 story “The Machine Stops” envisions a future in which “everyone is entirely machine-dependent,” with lives not unlike the e‑mail- and Zoom meeting-filled ones we lead today. The narrative plays out as a warning that “if you hand over the management of your civilization to machines, you then lose the incentive to understand it yourself or to teach the next generation how to understand it.” The mind, as the saying goes, is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. The same is true of machines — and even truer, we may well find, of mechanical minds.

Experts Predict When Artificial Intelligence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writing Essays, Books & Songs, to Performing Surgery and Driving Trucks

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964: Artificial Intelligence, Instantaneous Global Communication, Remote Work, Singularity & More

Stephen Fry Voices a New Dystopian Short Film About Artificial Intelligence & Simulation Theory: Watch Escape

Stephen Hawking Wonders Whether Capitalism or Artificial Intelligence Will Doom the Human Race

Hunter S. Thompson Chillingly Predicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Coming Revenge of the Economically & Technologically “Obsolete” (1967)

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Disturbing Paintings of Hieronymus Bosch: A Short Introduction

in Art, History, Psychology | December 13th, 2022

Most casual viewers of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings must acknowledge his artistic skill, and many must also wonder whether he was completely out of his mind. But insanity, however vividly suggested by his imagery, isn’t an especially compelling explanation for that imagery. Bosch painted in a particular place and time — the Netherlands of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, to be specific — but he also painted within a dominant worldview.“He grew up in a time of deep religious anxiety,” says Youtuber Hochelaga in the video essay above. “Ideas about sin, death, and the devil were becoming more sophisticated,” and “there was a genuine fear that demonic forces lived amongst the population.”

Hence the analyses like that of Great Art Explained, which frames Bosch’s best-known painting The Garden of Earthly Delights as an expression of “hardcore Christianity.” But something about the triptych’s sheer elaborateness and grotesquerie demands further inquiry. Hochelaga explores the possibility that Bosch worked in a condition of not just fearful piety, but psychological affliction.

“There is a disease called St. Anthony’s fire,” he says, contracted “by eating a poisonous black fungus called ergots that grow on rye crops. Symptoms include sores, convulsions, and a fierce burning sensation in limbs and extremities,” as well as “frightening and overpowering hallucinations that can last for hours at a time.”

This psychoactive power is now “believed to be behind the many Dancing Plagues recorded throughout the Middle Ages.” This explanation came together when, “in the mid-twentieth century, it was discovered that when ergots are baked in an oven, they transform into a form of lysergic acid diethylamide, also known as LSD.” Did Bosch himself receive the bizarre visions he painted from inadvertently consuming that now well-known hallucinogenic substance? The many paintings he made of St. Anthony “may have been a form of devotional prayer, done so in the hopes that the saint would rid him of his debilitating illness.” Look at The Garden of Earthly Delights even today, and you’ll feel that if you saw these murderous bird-human hybrids around you, you’d try whatever you could to get rid of them, too.

A Digital Archive of Hieronymus Bosch’s Complete Works: Zoom In & Explore His Surreal Art

The Meaning of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Explained

Hieronymus Bosch’s Medieval Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights Comes to Life in a Gigantic, Modern Animation

New App Lets You Explore Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights in Virtual Reality

The Musical Instruments in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Horrible”

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Behold a 15th-Century Italian Manuscript Featuring Medicinal Plants with Fantastical Human Faces

in Art, Books, Health, History | December 12th, 2022

No matter where you may stand on herbal medicine as a viable 21st-century option, it’s not hard to imagine we’d have all been true believers back in the 15th-century.

In an article for Heart Views, cardiologist Rachel Hajar lists some common herbal treatments of the Middle Ages:

Headache and aching joints were treated with sweet-smelling herbs such as rose, lavender, sage, and hay. A mixture of henbane and hemlock was applied to aching joints. Coriander was used to reduce fever. Stomach pains and sickness were treated with wormwood, mint, and balm. Lung problems were treated with a medicine made of liquorice and comfrey. Cough syrups and drinks were prescribed for chest and head-colds and coughs.

If nothing else, such approaches sound rather more pleasant than bloodletting.

Monks were responsible for the study and cultivation of medicinal herbs.

You may recall how one of Friar Lawrence’s daily tasks in Romeo and Juliet involved venturing into the monastery garden, to fill his basket full “baleful weeds and precious-juicèd flowers.”

(The powerful sleeping potion he concocted for the young lovers may have had disastrous consequences, but no one can claim it wasn’t effective.)

Monks preserved their herbal knowledge in illustrated books and manuscripts, many of which cleaved closely to works of classical antiquity such as Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia and Dioscordes’ De Materia Medica.

These early medical texts can still be appreciated as art, particularly when they contain fantastical embellishments such as can be seen in Erbario, above, a handmade 15th-century herbal from northern Italy that was recently added to the University of Pennsylvania Library’s collection of rare books and manuscripts.

In addition to straightforward botanical illustrations, there are some roots, leaves, flowers and fruit (pardon the pronoun) of a decidedly anthropomorphic bent.

Fancying up drawings of plants with human faces and or dragon-shaped roots was a medieval convention.

Mandrake roots — prescribed as an anesthetic, an aphrodisiac, a fertility booster, and a sleep aid — were frequently rendered as humans.

Wired’s Matt Simon writes that mandrake roots “can look bizarrely like a human body and legend holds that it can even come in male and female form:”

It’s said to spring from the dripping fat and blood and semen of a hanged man. Dare pull it the from the earth and it lets out a monstrous scream, bestowing agony and death to all those within earshot.

Yikes! Can we get a spoonful of sugar to help that go down?

No wonder Juliet, preparing to quaff Friar Lawrence’s sleeping potion in the family tomb, fretted that it might wear off prematurely, leaving her subject to “loathsome smells” and “shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth.”

Methinks some chamomile might have calmed those nerves…

View a digitized copy of Erbario here, or at the Public Domain Review.