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For most of us, the title The Shining first calls to mind the Stanley Kubrick film, not the Stephen King novel from which it was adapted. Though it would be an exaggeration to say that the former has entirely eclipsed the latter, the enormous difference between the works’ relative cultural impact speaks for itself — as does the resentment King occasionally airs about Kubrick’s extensive reworking of his original story. At the center of both versions of The Shining is a winter caretaker at a mountain resort who goes insane and tries to murder his own family, but in most other respects, the experience of the two works could hardly be more different.
How King’s The Shining became Kubrick’s The Shining is the subject of the video essay above from Tyler Knudsen, better known as CinemaTyler, previously featured here on Open Culture for his videos on such auteurs as Robert Wiene, Jean Renoir, and Andrei Tarkovsky (as well as a seven-part series on Kubrick’s own 2001: A Space Odyssey). It begins with Kubrick’s search for a new idea after completing Barry Lyndon, which involved opening book after book at random and tossing against the wall any and all that proved unable to hold his attention. When it became clear that The Shining, the young King’s third novel, wouldn’t go flying, Kubrick enlisted the more experienced novelist Diane Johnson to collaborate with him on an adaptation for the screen.
Almost all of Kubrick’s films are based on books. As Knudsen explains it, “Kubrick felt that there aren’t many original screenwriters who are a high enough caliber as some of the greatest novelists,” and that starting with an already-written work “allowed him to see the story more objectively.” In determining the qualities that resonated with him, personally, “he could get at the core of what was good about the story, strip away the clutter, and enhance the most brilliant aspects with a profound sense of hindsight.” In no case do the transformative effects of this process come through more clearly than The Shining: Kubrick and Johnson reduced King’s almost 450 dialogue- and flashback-filled pages to a resonantly stark two and a half hours of film that has haunted viewers for four decades now.
“I don’t think the audience is likely to miss the many and self-consciously ‘heavy’ pages King devotes to things like Jack’s father’s drinking problem or Wendy’s mother,” Kubrick once said. Still, anyone can hack a story down: the hard part is knowing what to keep, and even more so what to intensify for maximum effect. Knudsen lists off a host of choices Kubrick and Johnson considered (including showing more Native American imagery, which should please fans of Bill Blakemore’s analysis in “The Family of Man”) but ultimately rejected. The result is a film with an abundance of visual detail, but only enough narrative and character detail to facilitate Kubrick’s aim of “using the audience’s own imagination against them,” letting them fill in the gaps with fears of their own. While his version of The Shining evades nearly all clichés, it does demonstrate the truth of one: less is more.
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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.
When first we start learning a new foreign language, any number of its elements rise up to frustrate us, even to dissuade us from going any further: the mountain of vocabulary to be acquired, the grammar in which to orient ourselves, the details of pronunciation to get our mouths around. In these and all other respects, some languages seem easy, some hard, and others seemingly impossible — those last outer reaches being a specialty of Youtuber Joshua Rudder, creator of the channel NativLang. In the video above, he not only presents us with a few of the rarest sounds — or phonemes, to use the linguistic term — in any language, he also shows us how to make them ourselves.
Several African languages use the phoneme gb, as seen twice in the name of the Ivorian dance Gbégbé. “You might be tempted to go all French on it,” Rudder says, but in fact, you should “bring your tongue up to the soft palate” to make the g sound, and at the same time “close and release your lips” to add the b sound.
Evidently, Rudder pulls it off: “Haven’t heard a foreigner say the gb sound right!” says a presumably African commenter below. From there, the phonemic world tour continues to the bilabial trilled africate and pharyngeals used by the Pirahã people of the Amazon and the whistles used on one particular Canary Island — something like the whistled language of Oaxaca, Mexico previously featured here on Open Culture.
Rudder also includes Oaxaca in his survey, but he finds an entirely different set of rare sounds used in a river town whose residents speak the Mazatec language. “For every one normal vowel you give ’em,” he explains, “they have three for you”: one “modal” variety, one “breathy,” and one “creaky.” He ends the video where he began, in Africa, albeit in a different region of Africa, where he finds some of the rarest phonemes, albeit ones we also might have expected: bilabial clicks, whose speakers “close their tongue against the back of their mouth and also close both lips, but don’t purse them.” Then, “using the tongue, they suck a pocket of air into that enclosed area. Finally, they let go of the lips and out pops a” — well, better to hear Rudder pronounce it. If you can do the same, consider yourself one step closer to readiness for a Khoekhoe immersion course.
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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.
The earliest known works of Japanese art date from the Jōmon period, which lasted from 10,500 to 300 BC. In fact, the period’s very name comes from the patterns its potters created by pressing twisted cords into clay, resulting in a predecessor of the “wave patterns” that have been much used since. In the Heian period, which began in 794, a new aristocratic class arose, and with it a new form of art: Yamato-e, an elegant painting style dedicated to the depiction of Japanese landscapes, poetry, history, and mythology, usually on folding screens or scrolls (the best known of which illustrates The Tale of Genji, known as the first novel ever written).
This is the beginning of the story of Japanese art as told in the half-hour-long Behind the Masterpiece video above. It continues in 1185 with the Kamakura period, whose brewing sociopolitical turmoil intensified in the subsequent Nanbokucho period, which began in 1333. As life in Japan became more chaotic, Buddhism gained popularity, and along with that Indian religion spread a shift in preferences toward more vital, realistic art, including celebrations of rigorous samurai virtues and depictions of Buddhas. In this time arose the form of sumi-e, literally “ink picture,” whose tranquil monochromatic minimalism stands in the minds of many still today for Japanese art itself.
Japan’s long history of fractiousness came to an end in 1568, when the feudal lord Oda Nobunaga made decisive moves that would result in the unification of the country. This began the Azuchi-Momoyama period, named for the castles occupied by Nobunaga and his successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The castle walls were lavishly decorated with large-scale paintings that would define the Kanō school. Traditional Japan itself came to an end in the long, and military-governed Edo period, which lasted from 1615 to 1868. The stability and prosperity of that era gave rise to the best-known of all classical Japanese art forms: kabuki theatre, haiku poetry, and ukiyo-e woodblock prints.
With their large market of merchant-class buyers, ukiyo-e artists had to be prolific. Many of their works survive still today, the most recognizable being those of masters like Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured Hokusai’s series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji as well as its famous installment The Great Wave Off Kanagawa. As Japan opened up to the west from the middle of the nineteenth century, the various styles of ukiyo-e became prime ingredients of the Japonisme trend, which extended the influence of Japanese art to the work of major Western artists like Degas, Manet, Monet, van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
The Meiji Restoration of 1868 opened the long-isolated Japan to world trade, re-established imperial rule, and also, for historical purposes, marked the country’s entry into modernity. This inspired an explosion of new artistic techniques and movements including Yōga, whose participants rendered Japanese subject matter with European techniques and materials. Born early in the Shōwa era but still active in her nineties, Yayoi Kusama now stands (and in Paris, at enormous scale in statue form) as the most prominent Japanese artist in the world. The rich psychedelia of her work belongs obviously to no single culture or tradition — but then again, could an artist of any other country have come up with it?
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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.
If you haven’t yet seen Wes Anderson’s new movie Asteroid City, I recommend doing so not just in the theater, but in a seat as close to the screen as you can handle. You’ll feel more enveloped by the desert landscapes (the Spanish desert, standing in for Arizona), but you’ll also be better placed to appreciate the detail of all the miniatures that fill it. Over his past two and a half decades of feature films, Anderson’s signature aesthetic has become ever more Andersonian. This has many aspects, one of them being an intensive use of models: real, physical models, as opposed to digital visuals created entirely by computer. In the new Vox video above, model maker and prop painter Simon Weisse, veteran also of Isle of Dogs and The French Dispatch, explains the how and the why behind it
Asteroid City opens with a train crossing a vast, parched expanse, passing alongside (or through) the occasional rock formation. Any viewer would assume the train is a miniature, though not every viewer would immediately think — as revealed in this video’s behind-the-scenes shots — that the same is true of the rocks.
In both cases, the “miniatures” are only so miniature: the relatively large scale offers a canvas for an abundance of painted detail, which as Weisse explains goes a long way to making them believable onscreen. And even if they don’t quite look “real,” per se, they conjure up a reality of their own, an increasingly central task of Anderson’s cinematic project, in a way that pure CGI — which once seemed to have displaced the art of miniatures entirely — so often fails to do.
The video quotes Anderson as saying that audiences pick up on artificiality in all its forms, whether digital or physical; the filmmaker must commit to his own artificiality, accepting its shortcomings and exploiting its strengths. “The particular brand of artificiality that I like to use is an old-fashioned one,” he adds (but needs not, given his undisputed reputation as the auteur of the retro). Christopher Nolan, a director of the same generation who has an entirely different sensibility from Anderson, also goes in for large, detailed miniatures: mostly buildings that blow up, it seems, but his choices still show an understanding of the kind of physicality that even the most advanced digital effects have never replicated. If he’s seen the alien spaceship that descends on Asteroid City (the mention of which no longer seems to count as a spoiler), he must have felt at least a touch of envy.
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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.
In Rome, one doesn’t have to look terribly hard to find ancient buildings. But even in the Eternal City, not all ancient buildings have come down to us in equally good shape, and practically none of them have held up as well as the Pantheon. Once a Roman temple and now a Catholic church (as well as a formidable tourist attraction), it gives its visitors the clearest and most direct sense possible of the majesty of antiquity. But how has it managed to remain intact for nineteen centuries and counting when so much else in ancient Rome’s built environment has been lost? Ancient-history Youtuber Garrett Ryan explains that in the video above.
“Any answer has to begin with concrete,” Ryan says, the Roman variety of which “cured incredibly hard, even underwater. Sea water, in fact, made it stronger.” Its strength “enabled the creation of vaults and domes that revolutionized architecture,” not least the still-sublime dome of the Pantheon itself.
Another important factor is the Roman bricks, “more like thick tiles than modern rectangular bricks,” used to construct the arches in its walls. These “helped to direct the gargantuan weight of the rotunda toward the masonry ‘piers’ between the recesses. And since the arches, made almost entirely of brick, set much more quickly than the concrete fill in which they were embedded, they stiffened the structure as it rose.”
This hasn’t kept the Pantheon’s floor from sinking, cracks from opening in its walls, but such comparatively minor defects could hardly distract from the spectacle of the dome (a feat not equaled until Filippo Brunelleschi came along about 1300 years later). “The architect of the Pantheon managed horizontal thrust — that is, prevented the dome from spreading or pushing out the building beneath it – by making the wall of the rotunda extremely thick and embedding the lower third of the dome in their mass.” Even the oculus at the very top strengthens it, “both by obviating the need for a structurally dangerous crown and through its masonry rim, which functioned like the keystone of an arch.” We may no longer pay tribute to the gods or emperors to whom it was first dedicated, but as an object of architectural worship, the Pantheon will surely outlast many generations to come.
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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.
No American who came of age in the nineteen-eighties — or in most of the seventies or nineties, for that matter — could pretend not to understand the importance of the mall. Edina, Minnesota’s Southdale Center, which defined the modern shopping mall’s enclosed, department store-anchored form, opened in 1956. Over the decades that followed, living patterns suburbanized and developers responded by plunging into a long and profitable orgy of mall-building, with the result that generations of adolescents lived in reasonably easy reach of such a commercial institution. Some came to shop and others came to work, but if Hugh Kinniburgh’s documentary Mall City is to be believed, most came just to “hang out.”
Introduced as “A SAFARI TO STUDY MALL CULTURE,” Mall City consists of interviews conducted by Kinniburgh and his NYU Film School collaborators during one day in 1983 at the Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island. Unsurprisingly, their interviewees tend to be young, strenuously coiffed, and dressed with studied nonchalance in striped T-shirts and Members Only-style windbreakers.
A trip to the mall could offer them a chance to expand their wardrobe, or at the very least to calibrate their fashion sense. You go to the mall, says one stylish young lady, “to see what’s in, what’s out,” and thus to develop your own style. “You look for ideas,” as the interviewer summarizes it, “and then recombine them in your own way, try to be original.”
One part of the value proposition of the mall was its shops; another, larger part was the presence of so many other members of your demographic. In explaining why they come to the mall, some teenagers dissimulate less than others: “It’s like, where the cool people are at,” says one girl, with notable forthrightness. “You’re fakin’ this all. I mean, you’re just tryin’ to meet people.” Kinniburgh and his crew chat with a group of barely adolescent-looking boys — each and every one smoking a cigarette — about what encountering girls has to do with the time they spend hanging out at the mall. One answers without hesitation: “That’s the main reason.” (Yet these labors seem often to have borne bitter fruit: as one former employee and current hanger-out puts it, “Mall relationships don’t last.”)
Opened just two months after Southdale Center, Roosevelt Field is actually one of America’s most venerable shopping malls. (It also possesses unusual architectural credibility, having been designed by none other than I. M. Pei.) By all appearances, it also managed to reconstitute certain functions of a genuine urban social space — or at least it did forty years ago, at the height of “mall culture.” Asked for his thoughts on that phenomenon, one post-hippie type describes it as “probably the wave of the future. Maybe the end of the future, the way things are going.” Here in that future, we speak of shopping malls as decrepit, even vanishing relics of a lost era, one with its own priorities, its own folkways, even its own accents. Could such a variety of pronunciations of the very word “mall” still be heard on Long Island? Clearly, further fieldwork is required.
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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.
We all know music when we hear it — or at least we think we do — but how, exactly, do we define it? “Imagine you’re in a jazz club, listening to the rhythmic honking of horns,” says the narrator of the animated TED-Ed video above. “Most people would agree that this is music. But if you were on the highway, hearing the same thing, many would call it noise.” Yet the closer we get to the boundary between music and noise, the less clear it gets. The composer John Cage, to whose work this video provides an introduction, spent his long career in those very borderlands: he “gleefully dared listeners to question the boundaries between music and noise, as well as sound and silence.”
The best-known example of this larger endeavor is “4’33”,” Cage’s 1952 “solo piano piece consisting of nothing but musical rests for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.” Though known as a “silent” composition, it actually makes its listeners focus on all the incidental sounds around them: “Could the opening and closing of a piano lid be music? What about the click of a stopwatch? The rustling, and perhaps even the complaining, of a crowd?”
A few years later, he implicitly asked similar questions about what does and does not count as music to television viewers across America by performing “Water Walk” — whose instruments included “a bathtub, ice cubes, a toy fish, a pressure cooker, a rubber duck, and several radios” — on CBS’ I’ve Got a Secret.
Many who watched that broadcast in 1960 would have asked the same question: “Is this even music?” This may have well have been the outcome for which Cage himself hoped. “Like the white canvases of his painting peers” in that same era, his work “asked the audience to question their expectations about what music was.” As he explored more and more deeply into the territory of unconventional methods of instrumentation, notation, and performance, he drifted farther and farther from the composer’s traditional task: “to organize sound in time for a specific intentional purpose.” Seven decades after “4’33”,” some still insist that John Cage’s work isn’t music — but then, some say the same about Kenny G.
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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.
Ryuichi Sakamoto was born and raised in Japan. He rose to prominence as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra, the most influential Japanese band in pop-music history. Last week, he died in Japan. But he also claimed not to consider himself Japanese. That reflects the dedication of his life’s work as a composer and performer to cross-cultural inspiration, collaboration, and synthesis. How fitting that the announcement of his death this past weekend should elicit an outpouring of tributes from fans and colleagues around the world, sharing his work from a variety of different stylistic and technological periods in a variety of different languages.
Fitting, as well, that the first documentary made about Sakamoto as a solo artist should have been directed by a Frenchwoman, the photographer Elizabeth Lennard. Shot in 1984, Tokyo melody: un film sur Ryuichi Sakamoto captures not only Sakamoto himself on the rise as an international cultural figure, but also a Japan that had recently become the red-hot center — at least in the global imagination — of wealth, technology, and even forward-looking imagination. It was in the Japanese capital that Sakamoto recorded Ongaku Zukan, or Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia, the album that showed the listening public, in Japan and elsewhere, what it really sounded like to make music not just in but of the late twentieth century.
Or perhaps it was music for the End of History. “Japan has become the leading capitalist country,” Sakamoto says in Tokyo Melody. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad. The season of politics is over. People don’t think of rebelling. On the other hand they have a real hunger for culture.” Then comes the footage of wax model food and obsessively ersatz nineteen-fifties-style greasers: clichéd representations of urban Japan at the time, yes, but also genuine reflections of the somehow refined mix-and-match retro-kitsch sensibility that had come to prevail there. “Mainstream culture has lost its authority,” Sakamoto adds. “There is a floating notion of values. Technology is progressing by itself. The gears move more and more efficiently. We feel possibilities appearing that exceed our imagination and our horizons.”
For nearly forty years therafter, Sakamoto would continue to explore this range of possibilities — sublime, bizarre, or even threatening — through his music, whether on his own releases, his projects with other artists, or his many film soundtracks for a range of auteurs including Nagisa Ōshima (for whom he also acted, alongside David Bowie, in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence), Brian De Palma, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Alejandro Iñarritu. In Tokyo Melody he reveals one secret of his success: “When I work with Japanese, I become Japanese. When I work with Westerners, I try to be like them.” Hence the way, no matter the artistic or cultural context, Sakamoto’s music was never identifiable as either Japanese or Western, but always identifiable as his own.
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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.
Wes Anderson has been making feature films for 27 years now, and in that time his work has grown more temporally and geographically specific. Though shot in his native Texas in the late nineteen-nineties, his breakout picture Rushmore seemed to take place in no one part of the United States — and even more strikingly, no one identifiable era. Few filmgoers had seen anything like Anderson’s clean-edged retro sensibility before, and in subsequent projects like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, it intensified considerably. Then, in 2012, came Moonrise Kingdom, which took the Andersonian aesthetic to a particular time and place: New England in the fall of 1965.
Since then, Anderson and his collaborators have told stories in their distinctive visions of Eastern Europe, Japan, and France — but always, explicitly or implicitly, in one period or another of the mid-twentieth century. Judging by its newly released trailer, the events of Anderson’s next film Asteroid City occur in perhaps the most mid-twentieth-century year imaginable, 1955, and in small-town America at that.
Or rather, very small-town America: Asteroid City itself appears to be located in the middle of the Arizona desert (though shot in Spain, in keeping with Anderson’s increasingly Europe-oriented production habits), and with nothing more exciting going on — apart from the occasional distant nuclear-weapons test — than an annual “junior stargazer competition.”
The film “tells the story of a beleaguered widower (Jason Schwartzman) who’s busy schlepping his four children across the country to see their grandfather (Tom Hanks) when their car suddenly breaks down,” writes The Verge’s Charles Pulliam-More. This strands the family in the titular town, with its “strange earthquakes that no one knows the true cause of, fears about whether aliens might be lurking among the humans living in Asteroid City, and multiple sightings of a celebrity (Scarlett Johansson).” As fans can already guess from this summary, the ensemble cast includes more than a few Anderson regulars, also including Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, and Bob Balaban. A case of COVID-19 kept Bill Murray from participating, but even so, nobody who sees the trailer can doubt that the viewing experience of Asteroid City will be highly Andersonian indeed.
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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.
In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the name of David Byrne’s band was Talking Heads — as the title of their 1982 live album perpetually reminds us. But their overall artistic project arguably had less to do with the head than the body, a proposition memorably underscored in Stop Making Sense, the Jonathan Demme-directed concert film that came out two years later. “Music is very physical and often the body understands it before the head,” Byrne says in a bizarre contemporary self-interview previously featured here on Open Culture. To make that fact visible onstage, “I wanted my head to appear smaller, and the easiest way to do that was to make my body bigger.”
Hence costume designer Gail Blacker’s creation of what Talking Heads fans have long referred to as the “big suit.” Byrne has always been willing discuss its origins, which he traces back to a trip to Japan. There, as he put it to Entertainment Weekly in 2012, he’d “seen a lot of traditional Japanese theater, and I realized that yes, that kind of front-facing outline, a suit, a businessman’s suit, looked like one of those things, a rectangle with just a head on top.”
A friend of his, the fashion designer Jurgen Lehl, said that “everything is bigger on stage.” “He was referring to, I think, gestures and the way you walk and what not,” Byrne told David Letterman in 1984. But he took it literally, thinking, “Well, that solves my costume problem right there.”
Though Byrne only wore the big suit for one number, “Girlfriend Is Better” (from whose lyrics Stop Making Sense takes its title), it became the acclaimed film’s single most iconic element, referenced even in children’s cartoons. New Yorker critic Pauline Kael called it “a perfect psychological fit,” remarking that “when he dances, it isn’t as if he were moving the suit — the suit seems to move him.” The association hasn’t been without its frustrations; he once speculated that his tombstone would be inscribed with the phrase “Here lies David Byrne. Why the big suit?” But now that Stop Making Sense is returning to theaters in a new 4K restoration, nearly 40 years after its first release, he’s accepted that the time has finally come to pick it up from the cleaner’s. Unsurprisingly, it still fits.
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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.
Ludwig van Beethoven died in 1827, a bit early to be subjected to the kinds of DNA analysis that have become so prevalent today. Luckily, the German-speaking world of the early nineteenth century still adhered to the custom of saving locks of hair from the deceased — particularly lucky for an archaeology student named Tristan Begg and his collaborators in the study “Genomic analyses of hair from Ludwig van Beethoven,” published just this month in Current Biology. In the video from Cambridge University just above, Begg introduces the research project and describes what new information it reveals about the composer whose life and work have been so intensively studied for so long.
“Working with an international team of scientists, I identified five genetically matching, authentic locks of hair and used them to sequence Beethoven’s genome,” Begg says. “We discovered significant genetic risk factors for liver disease and evidence that Beethoven contracted the Hepatitis B virus in, at the latest, the months before his final illness.”
And “while we couldn’t pinpoint the cause of Beethoven’s deafness or gastrointestinal problems, we did find modest genetic risk for Systemic Lupus Erythematosus,” an autoimmune disease. History remembers Beethoven as a not particularly healthy man; now we have a clearer idea of which conditions he could have suffered.
But this study’s most revelatory discoveries concern not what has to do with Beethoven, but what doesn’t. The famous lock of hair “once believed to have been cut from the dead composer’s head by the fifteen-year-old musician Ferdinand Hiller” turns out to have come from a woman. Nor was Beethoven himself “descended from the main Flemish Beethoven lineage,” which is shown by genetic evidence that “an extramarital relationship resulted in the birth of a child in Beethoven’s direct paternal line at some point between 1572 and 1770.” This news came as a shock to “the five people in Belgium whose last name is van Beethoven and who provided DNA for the study,” writes the New York Times‘ Gina Kolata. But then, Beethoven’s music still belongs to them — just as it belongs to us all.
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The Story of How Beethoven Helped Make It So That CDs Could Play 74 Minutes of Music
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.
Nearly a century after Claude Monet painted them, the Nymphéas, or Water Lilies, still impress as a vision of a seemingly minor subject realized at a grand scale. The paintings installed in a dedicated room at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris make an especially strong impact on their viewers — an impact surely not lost on Ai Weiwei, who has lately re-created another set of Water Lilies (a triptych whose original resides at the Museum of Modern Art) entirely out of Lego bricks. Titled Water Lilies #1, this 50-foot-long plastic homage will go on display at London’s Design Museum as part of Ai Weiwei: Making Sense, which opens on April 7th and runs until July 30th.
“Ai used 650,000 Lego bricks in 22 colors in his version of the famous Impressionist triptych,” writes ARTnews’ Karen K. Ho. Apart from simply replicating, brick by pixel-like brick, the brushstrokes with which Monet replicated the lily pond at his Giverny home, Weiwei also included “a dark area on the right-hand side. The Design Museum said it represents the underground dugout in Xinjiang province where Ai and his father, Ai Qing, lived in forced exile in the 1960s.” On one level, this is an unexpected addition; on another, it’s just the touch one might expect from the most famous dissident Chinese artist alive.
Image by Ela Bialkowska/OKNO Studio
Experienced in the medium of Lego, Ai has also used everyone’s favorite building blocks “to produce portraits of political prisoners. In 2017, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery exhibited 176 of these Lego artworks.” Making Sense will also include a new Lego piece called Untitled (Lego Incident), which, as the Guardian‘s Caroline Davies writes, “comprises thousands of Lego blocks donated by members of the public after Lego briefly refused to sell their products to him in 2014.” It seems that Lego had reservations about being associated with such a politically charged project. The statement made by Water Lilies #1 may be less direct, but — enriched by its large scale, its cross-cultural inspiration, and its materials that have long been a near-universal fixture of childhood — it won’t be any less powerful.
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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.
Before the Industrial Revolution, few had occasion to consider the impact of technology on their lives. A few decades in, however, certain segments of society thought about little else. That, in any case, is the impression given by the debate over what the English press of the early nineteenth century called the “March of Intellect,” a label for the apparently polarizing discourse that arose from not just the development of industrial technology but the dissemination of “useful knowledge” that followed in its wake. Was this sort of education an engine of progress, or simply of disorder?
The March of Intellect’s most vivid legacy consists of a series of newspaper cartoons published in the eighteen-twenties. They depict a world, as Hunter Dukes writes at the Public Domain Review, where “extravagantly dressed ladies window-shop for pastel finery and forgo stairwells in favor of belt-driven slides” while “a child is moments away from being paved into the road by a carriage at full gallop”; where “men gorge themselves on pineapples and guzzle bottles at the Champagne Depot” and “postmen flit around with winged capes”; where “even convicts have it better: they embark for New South Wales on a gargoyle zeppelin, but still have panoramic views.”
So far, so Victorian. One could argue more or less in favor of the world described above, as rendered by artist William Heath. But in the future as envisioned in the cartoon at the top of the post by Robert Seymour (now best known as the original illustrator of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers), the March of Intellect takes on a flamboyantly malign aspect.
In it “a jolly automaton stomps across society,” writes Dukes. “Its head is a literal stack of knowledge — tomes of history, philosophy, and mechanic manuals power two gas-lantern eyes. It wears secular London University as a crown.” It sweeps away “pleas, pleadings, delayed parliamentary bills, and obsolete laws. Vicars, rectors, and quack doctors are turned on their heads.”
Nearly two centuries later, most would side instinctively with the participants in the March of Intellect debate who saw the provision of technical and scientific knowledge to then-less-educated groups — women, children, the working class — as an unambiguous good. Yet we may also feel trepidation about the technologies emerging in our own time, when, to name a current example, “artificially intelligent chatbots have fueled ongoing anxieties about the mechanization of intellectual labor.” Every day brings new apocalyptic speculations about the rise of powerful thinking machines running roughshod over humanity. If no artist today is illustrating them quite so entertainingly as Heath and Seymour did, so much the worse for our time.
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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.
No French film of this century is more beloved than Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. Or rather, no protagonist of a French film in this century is more beloved than Audrey Tautou’s eponymous Amélie. Hence, no doubt, why the movie is best known by that short version of its title rather than by the long version, Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain. Now, more than twenty years after the release of Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, Jeunet has followed it up with La véritable histoire d’Amélie Poulain, which you can watch (with optional French or English subtitles) just above.
“After all this time,” Jeunet says in a brief introduction, “I felt the moment was right to tell you, at long last, the real story of Amélie Poulain.” She turns out, according to his voice-over narration that follows, not to be a simple Montmartre waitress who dedicates herself to surreptitiously enriching the lives of those around her.
In fact she works as a spy for the KGB, having first been recruited in childhood with the promise of candy bars. That may sound far-fetched, but Jeunet supports every detail of Amélie’s double life, and of the story of her re-entry into espionage after the fall of the Berlin Wall, using the very same scenes and involving the very same characters we remember from Amélie.
On one level, La véritable histoire d’Amélie Poulain testifies to the enduring playfulness that keeps Jeunet from taking his own work — even the work that became a global phenomenon — too seriously. (Indeed, that spirit is on display in the original movie’s exaggeration of whimsical-French-film tropes.) Much like the Hollywoodified Kubrick trailers we previously featured here on Open Culture, this new short also constitutes a demonstration of how the meaning and impact of cinema are created not by the images themselves, but rather by their context and juxtaposition. And so, with characteristic cleverness, Jeunet has reinvented Amélie as a Soviet agent by employing the principles of Soviet montage.
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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.
If you wanted to see a map of the world in the fourteenth century, you could hardly just pull up Google Earth. But you could, provided you lived somewhere in or near the British Isles, make a pilgrimage to Hereford Cathedral. There you would find the shrine of St. Thomas Cantilupe, the main attraction for the true believer, but also what we now know as the Hereford Mappa Mundi, a large-scale (64″ x 52″) depiction of the entire world — or at least entire world as conceived in the pious English mind of the Middle Ages, which turns out to be almost unrecognizable at first glance today.
Created around 1300, the Hereford Mappa Mundi “serves as a sort of visual encyclopedia of the period, with drawings inspired by Biblical times through the Middle Ages,” write Chris Griffiths and Thomas Buttery at BBC Travel.
“In addition to illustrating events marking the history of humankind and 420 cities and geographical features, the map shows plants, animals, birds and strange or unknown creatures, and people.” These include one “‘Blemmye’ — a war-like creature with no head, but with facial features in its chest,” two “Sciapods,” “men with one large foot,” and “four cave-dwelling Troglodites,” one of whom feasts on a snake.
Amid geography we would now consider severely limited as well as fairly mangled — Europe is labeled as Asia, and vice versa, to name only the most obvious mistake — the map also includes “supernatural scenes from classical Greek and Roman mythology, Biblical tales and a collection of popular legends and stories.” As such, this reflects less about the world itself than about humanity’s worldview in an era that drew fewer lines of demarcation between fact and legend. You can learn more about what it has to tell us in the Modern History TV video below, as well as in the video further down from Youtuber ShūBa̱ck, which asks, “Why are Medieval Maps so Weird?”
The intent of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, ShūBa̱ck says, is to show that “the Bible is right.” To that end, “east is on top, as that’s where they said Jesus would come from on the day of judgment. Jerusalem is, of course, at the center.” Other points of interest include the site of the crucifixion, the Tower of Babel, and the Garden of Eden — not to mention the locations of the Golden Fleece and Mount Olympus. You can examine all of these up close at the Hereford Cathedral’s site, which offers a detailed 3D scan of the map, viewable from every angle, embedded with explanations of all its major features: in other words, a kind of Google Medieval Earth.
via Aeon
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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.
Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot-spring hotel in the mountains of Japan’s Yamanashi Prefecture, has been in business for over 1,300 years, more than five times as long as the United States has existed. Nevertheless, it feels considerably more modern than the average American motel, to say nothing of the longer-established lodgings of England. “I assumed that I’d be staying in something like a living museum here,” says Youtuber Tom Scott, vlogging from his very own room at Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, “because that’s what I’ve come to expect from the sort of historical attractions you’ll find in Britain,” where preservation ideology holds that “everything must be held at a certain point in time, funded by tourists who want to visit the old thing and see history.”
Not so in Japan, whose notions of new and old have never quite aligned with those of the West. “There’s still tradition here,” Scott hastens to add. “It’s not a Western-style hotel. You sleep on futons; dinner is served at a low Japanese-style table.” But the actual complex in which guests now stay “has only been a hotel in the English sense for a few decades. Before that, it was just a place to stay and take the waters. Now there’s very fast wi-fi and, of course, a gift shop.”
The movement and replacement of its buildings over the centuries brings to mind Mie prefecture’s Ise Grand Shrine, freshly rebuilt each and every twenty years, or even the tendency of existing Japanese homes to be torn down rather than occupied by their buyers.
Though Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan has long shunned excessive publicity — its current president Kawano Kenjiro explains that the Emperor of Japan’s stay there, in his days as Crown Prince, was kept quiet for that reason — it has lately become irresistible to Youtubers. We’ve featured it before here on Open Culture, and just above you can see another take on it in the House of History video above, which explains how it has managed its continuity. Kawano, who’d worked at the hotel since the age of 25, chose not to go the standard route of being legally adopted into the family that had always owned the place. And so, instead of inheriting it, he created Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan Limited, a technically new corporate entity, but one that ought to be good for at least another millennia or two.
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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.
The documentary filmmaker and sports editor Paul Devlin has won five Emmy awards, but he may well be better known for not getting into Harvard — or rather, for not getting into Harvard, then rejecting Harvard’s rejection. “I noticed that the rejection letter I received from Harvard had a grammatical error,” Devlin writes. “So, I wrote a letter back, rejecting their rejection letter.” His mother then “sent a copy of this letter to the New York Times and it was published in the New Jersey section on May 31, 1981.” In 1996, when the New York Times Magazine published a cover story “about the trauma students were experiencing getting rejected from colleges,” she seized the opportunity to send her son’s rejection-rejection letter to the Paper of Record.
It turned out that Devlin’s letter had already run there, having long since gone the pre-social-media equivalent of viral. “The New York Times accused me of plagiarism. When they discovered that I was the original author and they had unwittingly re-printed themselves, they were none too happy. But my mom insists that it was important to reprint the article because the issue was clearly still relevant.”
Indeed, its afterlife continues even today, as evidenced by the new video from Letters Live at the top of the post. In it actor Himesh Patel, well-known from series like EastEnders, Station Eleven, and Avenue 5, reads aloud Devlin’s letter, which runs as follows:
Having reviewed the many rejection letters I have received in the last few weeks, it is with great regret that I must inform you I am unable to accept your rejection at this time.
This year, after applying to a great many colleges and universities, I received an especially fine crop of rejection letters. Unfortunately, the number of rejections that I can accept is limited.
Each of my rejections was reviewed carefully and on an individual basis. Many factors were taken into account – the size of the institution, student-faculty ratio, location, reputation, costs and social atmosphere.
I am certain that most colleges I applied to are more than qualified to reject me. I am also sure that some mistakes were made in turning away some of these rejections. I can only hope they were few in number.
I am aware of the keen disappointment my decision may bring. Throughout my deliberations, I have kept in mind the time and effort it may have taken for you to reach your decision to reject me.
Keep in mind that at times it was necessary for me to reject even those letters of rejection that would normally have met my traditionally high standards.
I appreciate your having enough interest in me to reject my application. Let me take the opportunity to wish you well in what I am sure will be a successful academic year.
SEE YOU IN THE FALL!
Sincerely,
Paul Devlin
Applicant at Large
However considerable the moxie (to use a wholly American term) shown by the young Devlin in his letter, his reasoning seems not to have swayed Harvard’s admissions department. Whether it would prove any more effective in the twenty-twenties than it did in the nineteen-eighties seems doubtful, but it must remain a satisfying read for high-school students dispirited by the supplicating posture the college-application process all but forces them to take. It surely does them good to remember that they, too, possess the agency to declare acceptance or rejection of that which is presented to them simply as necessity, as obligation, as a given. And for Devlin, at least, there was always the University of Michigan.
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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.
Jokes about “reality television” being a contradiction in terms go as far back in pop-culture history as the format itself. But the fact remains that, deliberately or otherwise, its programs do reflect certain characteristics of the societies that produce them. Before turning into one of the most globally successful franchises of this century’s reality-TV boom, the once-controversial strangers-in-a-house show Big Brother premiered in the Netherlands. It will be left as an exercise to the reader what that says about the Dutch, who have been tuning in to a very different kind of reality programming in the past month: De Nieuwe Vermeer, or The New Vermeer.
Aired in conjunction with the Rijksmuseum’s largest Vermeer exhibition ever staged, the show invites “two professional painters and dozens of amateur artists to compete to reinvent the lost works of the 17th-century master,” writes the New York Times‘ Nina Siegal.
“The results are judged by Vermeer experts from the Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum in Amsterdam, and from the Mauritshuis, a collection of old masters in The Hague.” The professionals face such tasks as faithfully reconstructing Vermeer’s lost works, whether they vanished centuries ago or in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft of 1990. The amateurs work in their own media, including “stained glass, printmaking and even Lego.”
All this has made The New Vermeer “an instant sensation in the Netherlands, with 1.3 million viewers (in a country of 17 million) tuning in for the first episode.” Like any successful reality TV show these days, it has also inspired a wealth of supplementary content, including a podcast and an online gallery showing all the artwork created by the contestants. “You can’t currently watch the series in the U.S., writes Artnet’s Sarah Cascone, “but the network is streaming a weekly YouTube ‘Masterclass‘” offering “step-by-step instructions on how to create your own Vermeer canvas.” At the moment, those videos are available only in Dutch, presumably on the assumption that The New Vermeer won’t travel well outside the Netherlands. But if, by some slim chance, it turned into a Big Brother-scale phenomenon, imagine the golden age of reality TV that would lie ahead.
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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.
That we spend much, if not most, of our lives working is, in itself, not necessarily a bad thing — unless, that is, we’re bored doing it. In the Big Think video above, London Business School Professor of Organizational Behavior Dan Cable cites Gallup polls showing that “about 70 percent of people are not engaged in what they do all day long, and about eighteen percent of people are repulsed.” This may sound normal enough, but Cable calls these perceptions of work as “a thing that we have to get through on the way to the weekend” a “humanistic sickness”: a bad condition for people, of course, but also for the “organizations who get lackluster performance.”
Cable traces the civilizational roots of this at-work boredom back to the decades after the Industrial Revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century, a shoe-shopper would go to the local cobbler. “Each of the people in the store would watch the customer walk in, and then they’d make a shoe for that customer.” But toward the end of the century, “we got this different idea, as a species, where we should not sell two pairs of shoes each day, but two million.”
This vast increase of productivity entailed “breaking the work into extremely small tasks, where most of the people don’t meet the customer. Most of the people don’t invent the shoe. Most of the people don’t actually see the shoe made from beginning to end.”
It entailed, in other words, “removing the meaning from work” in the name of ever-greater scale and efficiency. The nature of the tasks that result don’t sit well with a part of our brain called the ventral striatum. Always “urging us to explore the boundaries of what we know, urging us to be curious,” it sends our minds right out of jobs that no longer offer us the chance to learn anything new. One solution is to work for smaller organizations, whose members tend to play multiple roles in closer proximity to the customer; another is to engage in big-picture thinking by staying aware of what Cable calls “the why of the work,” its larger impact on the world, as well as how it fits in with your own purpose. But then, boredom at work isn’t all bad: a bout of it may well, after all, have led you to read this post in the first place.
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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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