Arts and Culture

http://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_029_1-16-20.mp3 What distinguishes the highly lauded 2019 film The Irishman within director Martin Scorsese's body of work? Frequent Open Culture contributor Colin Marshall joins Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to talk about what we do and don't connect with in Scorsese's work and how these films qualify as "art films" despite their watchability, not to mention the big budgets and stars. We cover CGI age alteration, the connection to The Joker , his comments about the Marvel franchise vs. him being a franchise unto himself, his use of music, and making films as an old guy. We hit particularly on Raging Bull , Taxi Driver , Bringing out the Dead , The King of Comedy , Goodfellas , Gangs of New York ,   The Departed , Casino , Silence , and Cape Fear . (There are no significant spoilers about any of these other films, just The Irishman .) Beyond just watching or re...

Recorded music history is filled with instruments that appeared for a brief time, then were never heard from again—relegated to the dustbin of too-quirky, heavy, awkward, tonally-unpleasant, or impossible-to-tune-and-maintain. Then there are instruments—once they assumed their basic shape and form—that have persisted largely unchanged for centuries. The Mellotron falls into neither of these categories. But it may in time transcend them both in a strange way. “Of all of the strange instruments that've worked the edges of popular music,” writes Gareth Branwyn at Boing Boing , “the Mellotron is probably the oddest. Basically an upright organ cabinet filled the tape heads and recorded tape strips that you trigger through the keyboard, the Mellotron is like some crazy one-off contraption that caught on and actually got manufactured.” First made in England in 1963, it appeared in various models throughout the seventies and eighties. It has reappeared in the nineties and 2000s ...

“The Mummy Speaks!” announces The New York Times in Nicholas St. Fleur’s story about Nesyamun, a mummified Egyptian priest whose voice has been recreated, sort of, “with the aid of a 3-D printed vocal tract” and an electronic larynx. Does the mummy sound like the monster of classic 1930’s horror? Scientists have only got as far as one syllable, “which resembles the ‘ah’ and ‘eh’ vowels sounds heard in the words ‘bad’ and ‘bed.'" Yet it's clear that Nesyamun would not communicate with guttural moans. This may not make the recreation any less creepy. Nesyamun, whose coffin is inscribed with the words “true of voice,” was charged with singing and chanting the liturgies; “he had this wish,” says David Howard , speech scientist at Royal Holloway, University of London, “that his voice would somehow continue into perpetuity.” Howard and his team’s 3-D printed recreation of his mouth and throat has allowed them to synthesize “the sound that would come out of his vocal tra...

What is the future of the book? Will it retain more or less the same basic paper-between-covers form as it has since the days of the Gutenberg Bible ? Will it go entirely digital, becoming readable only with compatible electronic devices? Or will we, in the comfort of our armchairs, read them on glass-screened microfilm projectors? That last is the bet made, and illustrated as above, by the April 1935 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics magazine. "It has proved possible to photograph books, and throw them on a screen for examination," says the article envisioning "a device for applying this for home use and instruction," exhumed by Matt Novak at Smithsonian.com . As The Atlantic 's Megan Garber writes , "The whole thing, to our TV-and-tablet-jaded eyes, looks wonderfully quaint. (The projector! The knobs! The semi-redundant reading lamp! The smoking jacket!)" But then, "what speaks to our current, hazy dreams of convergence more eloquently ...

We so often privilege individuals as the primary drivers of innovation. But what if technology is also self-organizing, developing as an evolutionary response to the environment? If we think of whistled language as a kind of technology, we have an excellent example of this self-organizing principle in the 42 documented whistled languages around the world. As we noted in a previous post , reports of whistled languages go back hundreds of years in cultures that would have had no contact with each other: Oaxaca, Mexico, northern Africa’s Atlas Mountains, the Brazilian Amazon, northern Laos, and the Canary Islands. These are “places with steep terrain or dense forests,” writes Michelle Nijhuis at The New Yorker , “where it might otherwise be hard to communicate at a distance.” Such is the case in the village of Ku?köy, in “the remote mountains of northern Turkey,” notes Great Big Story: “For three centuries” farmers there “have communicated great distances by whistling. It’s a l...

For nearly as long as mankind has tried to commit the perfect crime, mankind has tried to tell stories of the perfect crime. Both endeavors demand intensive planning, the story of the crime perhaps even more rigorously so than the crime itself. No less obsessive a teller and reteller of "perfect crime" stories than Alfred Hitchcock knew that well, and so he remains an icon of such storytelling in cinema. Hence the visual reference, albeit a vanishingly brief one, to the master of suspense in Korean blockbuster auteur Bong Joon-ho's Parasite , which has run victory laps around the world ever since winning the Palme d'Or last year . Or so Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter , tells it in his new video essay on  Parasite 's "perfect montage." This montage comes at the end of the film's first act, about 40 minutes in, at which point Bong has clearly established the plot, both in the sense of the sequence of events that sets the story in ...

Carl Jung’s Liber Novus , better known as The Red Book , has only recently come to light in a complete English translation, published by Norton in a 2009 facsimile edition and a smaller “reader’s edition” in 2012. The years since have seen several exhibitions of the book, which “could pass for a Bible rendered by a medieval monk,” writes art critic Peter Frank , “especially for the care with which Jung entered his writing as ornate Gothic script.” Jung “refused to think of himself as an ‘artist’” but “it’s no accident the Liber Novus has been exhibited in museums, or functioned as the nucleus of ‘Encyclopedic Palace,’ the survey of visionary art in the 2013 Venice Biennale.” Jung’s elaborate paintings show him “every bit the artist the medieval monk or Persian courtier was; his art happened to be dedicated not to the glory of God or king, but that of the human race.” One could more accurately say that Jung’s book was dedicated to the mystical unconscious, a much more nebulous and...