Nineteenth-century English Town Houses


Image by Cornell University Library
Collection: A. D. White Architectural Photographs, Cornell University Library
Accession Number: 15/5/3090.01015

Title: Nineteenth-century English Town Houses

Building Date: ca. 1800-ca. 1895
Photograph date: ca. 1865-ca. 1890

Location: Europe: United Kingdom; England

Materials: albumen print

Image: 7 1/4 x 8 1/2 in.; 18.415 x 21.59 cm

Style: Gothic Revival

Provenance: Transfer from the College of Architecture, Art and Planning

Persistent URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1813.001/5t4m

There are no known copyright restrictions on this image. The digital file is owned by the Cornell University Library which is making it freely available with the request that, when possible, the Library be credited as its source.

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Vicar’s Close, Wells


Image by Cornell University Library
Collection: A. D. White Architectural Photographs, Cornell University Library
Accession Number: 15/5/3090.00821

Title: Vicar’s Close, Wells

Building Date: 1363
Photograph date: ca. 1867-ca. 1895

Location: Europe: United Kingdom; Wells

Materials: albumen print

Image: 6 1/2 x 8 3/4 in.; 16.51 x 22.225 cm

Provenance: Gift of Andrew Dickson White

Persistent URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1813.001/5swn

There are no known copyright restrictions on this image. The digital file is owned by the Cornell University Library which is making it freely available with the request that, when possible, the Library be credited as its source.

We had some help with the geocoding from Web Services by Yahoo!

Into the night


Image by J. Paxon Reyes
This was at the University of St. Thomas’s observatory. We aimed to look into the very heart of space. Generations of dreamers of the past couldn’t have begun to imagine what we can now see with powerful telescopes. The stars, the galaxies, all of heaven was within reach. And there I was saying to myself, "Woah, look at that door!"

Exeter Cathedral Choir from West


Image by Cornell University Library
Collection: A. D. White Architectural Photographs, Cornell University Library
Accession Number: 15/5/3090.01062

Title: Exeter Cathedral Choir from West

Photographer: Carl Norman (British, active ca. 1870-ca. 1890)

Building Date: 1270-1369
Photograph date: ca. 1865-ca. 1885

Location: Europe: United Kingdom; Exeter

Materials: albumen print

Image: 11 3/4 x 9 1/2 in.; 29.845 x 24.13 cm

Style: Decorated Gothic

Provenance: Gift of Andrew Dickson White

Persistent URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1813.001/5t67

There are no known copyright restrictions on this image. The digital file is owned by the Cornell University Library which is making it freely available with the request that, when possible, the Library be credited as its source.

We had some help with the geocoding from Web Services by Yahoo!

Cinema went into its death throes on September 31, 1983. The instrument of its demise? The video remote control. When the “zapper” endowed the viewer with the ability to play, pause, stop, fast-forward, and rewind at will, the medium’s artists lost their absolute control over the rhythm, duration, and other chronological subtleties of the cinematic experience. Or so filmmaker Peter Greenaway claims in this lecture at UC Berkeley. Anyone fan enough to read all the interviews the director has granted — and I count myself in the group — will by now be familiar with, even weary of, Greenaway’s ideas about cinema’s technical and economic straitjacketing, its arbitrary aesthetic boundaries, and its squandered potential as a freestanding art form. Nowhere else, though, does he explain and elaborate upon these ideas in such detail, or in such an entertainingly oratorical manner.

“The death of cinema,” though? Really? Knowing how dramatic that sounds, Greenaway frames what’s happened in another way: perhaps cinema has yet to be born. What if the last century or so has offered only the prologue to cinema, and modern filmmakers must take it upon themselves to bring the real thing into the world? These may strike you as the thoughts of a crackpot, and maybe they are, but watch and listen as Greenaway recounts the stunted development of the art form in which he works. We’ve grown so accustomed to the limitations of cinema, so his argument goes, that we don’t even feel the pressure of the “four tyrannies” that have lorded over it since the beginning: the frame, the text, the actor, and the camera. Even if you loathe Greenaway’s films, can you help asking yourself whether the rarely questioned dominance of an elite class of essentially theatrical performers, following textually conceived instructions, viewed from one perspective at a time through a simple rectangle, holds the movies back?

Since his feature-length debut The Falls in 1980, Greenaway has struggled against what he sees as the barriers put up by cinema’s unhealthy entanglement with the narrative-driven forms of theater and literature. Trained originally as a painter, he wonders explicitly in public and implicitly through his work why films can’t enjoy the same freedom to explore the creative space at their disposal that paintings do. All his pictures, even the best-known like The Draughtsman’s Contract; The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; and 8½ Women, use settings, actors, images, words, and sounds like colors on a palette, applying them with infinitude of strokes, creating a whole from which no one element can be easily separated. In this lecture, Greenaway marshals footage from his projects conducted even farther out at the medium’s edge: his transformation of an actual Italian palace into one big non-narrative film, his collaborations with avant-garde composer David Lang, and, of course, his VJ-ing sessions.

Related content:

Darwin, A 1993 Film by Peter Greenaway

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Peter Greenaway Looks at the Day Cinema Died — and What Comes Next is a post from: Open Culture

Open Culture

In early 1964, Bob Dylan was at the apex of his journey as a socially conscious folk singer. The fleeting moment is preserved in this rare half-hour TV program, recorded on February 1 of that year. Within a week the Beatles would land in America. In a little over a month, Dylan would rent an electric guitar.

The television performance is from Quest, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series that ran between 1961 and 1964 and showcased a wide range of literary and performing arts. It was produced in Toronto by Daryl Duke, who went on to direct American television programs and feature films.

Dylan appears in his classic Woody Guthrie mode on a set made to look like a western bunkhouse. He plays six songs–half from The Times They Are a-Changin’, his third album released just a few weeks before, and half from his previous album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. In order of appearance:

1. The Times They Are A Changin’
2. Talkin’ World War III Blues
3. Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
4. Girl From the North Country
5. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
6. Restless Farewell

“The Times They Are a-Changin’,” as the program is titled, offers a unique glimpse of the early Bob Dylan, just before his music turned from social issues to personal ones, just before he put away the blue jeans and work shirts and began wearing Beatle boots and sunglasses. “Dylan’s appearance on Quest,” says writer and filmmaker Erek Barsczewski, “provides the closest approximation available of what his early performances in Greenwich Village would have looked and sounded like.”

The Times They Are a-Changin’: 1964 Broadcast Gives a Rare Glimpse of the Early Bob Dylan is a post from: Open Culture

Open Culture

Normalised steel


Image by CORE-Materials
DoITPoMS, University of Cambridge

A hypoeutectoid alloy steel, normalised, producing a microstructure of allotriomorphic ferrite nucleated on the prior austenite grain boundaries, with the remainder pearlite.

System
Fe-C-X

Composition
Fe, C 0.5 (wt%)

Reaction

Processing
Normalised

Applications

Sample preparation
Nital

Technique
Reflected light microscopy

Contributor
Dr R F Cochrane

Organisation
Department of Materials, University of Leeds

View micrograph in DoITPoMS website

Fe, C 0.55 (wt%) steel, slow quenched


Image by CORE-Materials
DoITPoMS, University of Cambridge

A medium carbon steel that has been slow quenched. It is possible to determine some Widmanstätten ferrite plates at high magnification.

System
Fe-C-X

Composition
Fe, C 0.55 (wt%)

Reaction

Processing
Slow quenched

Applications

Sample preparation
Nital

Technique
Reflected light microscopy

Contributor
Dr R F Cochrane

Organisation
Department of Materials, University of Leeds

View micrograph in DoITPoMS website