Arts and Culture

Imagine owning Caligula’s coffee table — or, better yet, a coffee table made from the mosaic flooring that once covered the infamously cruel Roman Emperor’s party boats. Art dealer and Manhattanite Helen Fioratti owned such a table for 45 years, but she had no idea what it was until she happened to go to a 2013 book signing by author and Italian stone expert Dario Del Bufalo . There, a friend noticed her table in Del Bufalo’s coffee table book,  Porphyry , “about the reddish-purple rock much used by Roman emperors,” notes Gloria Oladipo at  The Guardian . Fioratti’s husband bought the piece from an aristocratic Italian family in the 1960s, then affixed it to a base and made into a table. “It was an innocent purchase,” Fioretti told The New York Times  in 2017 after Italy’s Nemi museum seized the artifact and returned it to its home country. Del Bufalo agreed, and it pained him to have to take it, but the artifact, he says in an interview above with Anderson Cooper, is priceless.

In its nearly eight-hour runtime Peter Jackson’s new documentary series The Beatles: Get Back offers numerous minor revelations about the world’s favorite band. Among the filmmaker’s avowed aims was to show that, even on the verge of acrimonious dissolution, John, Paul, George, and Ringo enjoyed stretches of productiveness and conviviality. Much else comes out besides, including that the catering at Apple Corps headquarters was miserable (amounting most days to toast and digestive biscuits) and that, even amid the excesses of the late 1960s, the Beatles dressed more or less respectably (apart, that is, from George’s occasionally outlandish choices of outer- and footwear). But it also lays bare exactly how they created a song. The Beatles went into these sessions with little material prepared. All they knew for sure was that they had to come up with a set of songs to be recorded live, without overdubs, in order to “get back” to the simplicity that had characterized their process befo

Now ramping up to a wide release is a film that will draw in no few fans of Haruki Murakami around the world: Drive My Car , adapted by filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi from Murakami’s short story of the same name. That name itself comes, of course, from the Beatles song, their knockout opener to Rubber Soul . It wasn’t the first time Murakami had borrowed a title from the Fab Four. The novel that made him a household name, in his homeland of Japan and subsequently the rest of the world, was called  Norwegian Wood . The Beatles’ albums have also provided him with inspiration, as evidenced by his story “With the Beatles,”  published in translation last year by  The New Yorker . It takes place in 1965, when the Beatles had become hugely popular in not just the West but Japan as well. “Turn on the radio and chances were you’d hear one of their songs,” says the narrator. “I liked their songs myself and knew all their hits,” but “truth be told, I was never a fervent Beatles fan. I never

Image via Wikimedia Commons We learn about intrepid Europeans who sought, and sometimes even found, trade and missionary routes to China and Japan during the centuries of exploration and empire. Rarely, if ever, do we hear about visitors from the East to the West, especially those as well-traveled as 17th-century samurai Hasekura Tsunenaga . Sent on a mission to Europe and America by his feudal lord, Date Masumune, Hasekura “set off on a quest to earn riches and spiritual guidance,” Andrew Milne writes at All that’s Interesting . “He circumnavigated the globe, became part of the first Japanese group in Cuba, met the Pope, helped begin a branch of Japanese settlers in Spain (still thriving today), and even became a Roman citizen.” Hasekura was a battle-tested samurai who had acted on the  daimyo ‘s behalf on many occasions. His mission to the West, however, was first and foremost a chance to redeem his honor and save his life. In 1612, Hasekura’s father was made to commit  seppuku  a

Make sure to watch the video above with the sound on. In it musicians from around the world all play a well-known composition: 4′33″ by John Cage. “I spent weeks asking strangers on the internet to send me their radically different interpretations, and boy did they deliver,” writes the video’s creator Sam Vladimirsky. “ My inbox filled with adaptations by an Austrian death metal band, a marimba player, a bunny rabbit, the Museum of Musical Instruments in Phoenix, a middle school music teacher, a version played on Guitar Hero and over Zoom.” Though originally composed for piano,  4’33”  is easily transposed to all these instruments and others, calling as it does for their players to do the very same thing: nothing. “Inspired by Zen Buddhism, the Dada movement and Cage’s strong distaste for the ubiquitous muzak of the time,” says Aeon , “ its score instructs performers not to play their instruments for the piece’s four-minute, thirty-three-second duration.” The result is not

Comedian Alasdair Beckett-King has a keen ear for entertainment tropes and subscribes to the belief that “putting too much effort into things makes them funnier.” The result is a series of one-minute videos in which he spoofs the conventions of a particular genre or long running series, with perfect visuals, meta dialogue, and faithfully rendered performance styles. Beckett-King put his  London Film School  training to use with this project during lockdown, spending “absolutely ages putting together something very tiny.” Witness his take on every episode of  Star Trek: The Next Generation ,  in which the captain of the ship, a Patrick Stewart doppelgänger and “vegetarian space socialist who is always right” negotiates with a “representative of a kind of iffy alien race not necessarily based on a specific human ethnicity.” As Beckett-King told  Eric Johnson , host of  Follow Friday  podcast: That one was very, very hard work because I had to do a CGI bald cap for myself bec

Ridley Scott is 83, and good on him for not slowing down. The Last Duel came and went, but it actually existed and was an original idea, based on a true historical event, and with a script from Nicole Holofcener , and featured a re-teaming up of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. And as of this writing, House of Gucci is set to open and give us some salacious scandal and murder among the hoity and toit, just in time for Oscar season. He’s even recently dropped some hot takes against the superhero movie factory of Hollywood. So Scott’s doing well. Then why does this latest announcement feel so underwhelming? According to a BBC interview on Monday, Scott is also developing a 10-episode limited series based on Blade Runner *and* a limited series based on Alien , this time set on earth. It’s not totally clear how much Scott is actively involved. “We [have already] written the pilot for ‘Blade Runner’ and the bible,” he says, referring to the master plan of the 10 episodes. “So, we’re alre

Many of us living in the parts of the world where marijuana has recently been legalized may regard ourselves as partaking of a highly modern pleasure. And given the ever-increasing sophistication of the growing and processing techniques that underlie what has become a formidable cannabis industry, perhaps, on some level, we are. But as intellectually avid enthusiasts of psychoactive substances won’t hesitate to tell you, their use stretches farther back in time than history itself. “For as long as there has been civilization, there have been mind-altering drugs,” writes Science ‘s Andrew Lawler. But was anyone using them in the predecessors to western civilization as we know it today? For quite some time, scholars believed that unlike, say, Mesoamerica or north Africa , “the ancient Near East had seemed curiously drug-free.” But now, “new techniques for analyzing residues in excavated jars and identifying tiny amounts of plant material suggest that ancient Near Easterners indul