Open Culture

When the Nobel Prize Committee Rejected The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien “Has Not Measured Up to Storytelling of the Highest Quality” (1961)

OC — Tue, 12 May 2026 09:00:54 +0000

When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid-1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews, an unsurprising reception given that nothing like them had been written for adult readers since Edmund Spenser’s epic 16th century English poem The Faerie Queene, perhaps. At least, this was the contention of reviewer Richard Hughes, who went on to write that “for width of imagination,” The Lord of the Rings “almost beggars parallel.”

Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison did find a comparison: to Sir Thomas Malory, author of the 15th century Le Morte d’Arthur — hardly misplaced, given Tolkien’s day job as an Oxford don of English literature, but not the sort of thing that passed for contemporary writing in the 1950s, notwithstanding the serious appreciation of writers like W.H. Auden for Tolkien’s trilogy. “No previous writer,” the poet remarked in a New York Times review, “has, to my knowledge, created an imaginary world and a feigned history in such detail.”

Auden did find fault with Tolkien’s poetry, a fact upon which critic Edmund Wilson seized in his scathing 1956 Lord of the Rings review. “Mr. Auden is apparently quite insensitive — through lack of interest in the other department,” wrote Wilson, “to the fact that Tolkien’s prose is just as bad. Prose and verse are on the same level of professorial amateurishness.” Five years later, the Nobel prize jury would make the same judgement when they excluded Tolkien’s books from consideration. Tolkien’s prose, wrote jury member Anders Österling, “has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality.”

The note was discovered recently by Swedish journalist Andreas Ekström, who delved into the Nobel archive for 1961 and found that “the jury passed over names including Lawrence Durrell, Robert Frost, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster, and Tolkien to come up with their eventual winner, Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić,” as Alison Flood reports at The Guardian. (The Nobel archives are sealed until 50 years after the year the award is given.) Ekström has been reading through the archives “for the past five years or so,” he says, “and this was the first time I have seen Tolkien’s name among the suggested candidates.” His name appeared on the list chiefly through the machinations of his closest friend and chief supporter, C.S. Lewis.

Lewis, “also of Oxford,” Wilson sneered, “is able to top them all” in praise of Tolkien’s books. From the first appearance of his Middle Earth fantasy in The Hobbit, Lewis promised to “do all in my power to secure for Tolkien’s great book the recognition it deserves,” as he wrote in a 1953 letter to British publisher Stanley Unwin. In what might be considered an unethical promotion of his friend’s work today, Lewis responded tirelessly to critics of the trilogy, going so far, after the publication of The Two Towers, to pen an essay on the subject titled “The Dethronement of Power.” Here, Lewis explains the prolix quality of Tolkien’s prose — that which critics called “tedious” — as a narrative necessity: “I do not think he could have done it any other way.”

Tolkien’s biggest fan also urged readers to spend more time with the books and promised that the rewards would be great. In defense of the second work of the trilogy, he concluded, “the book is too original and too opulent for any final judgment on a first reading. But we know at once that it has done things to us. We are not quite the same men. And though we must ration ourselves in our rereadings, I have little doubt that the book will soon take its place among the indispensables.” And so has all of Tolkien’s work, becoming the literary standard by which high fantasy is measured, with or without a Nobel prize.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

How John Coltrane Introduced the World to His Radical Sound with His Recording of “My Favorite Things” (1961)

OC — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:00:35 +0000

John Coltrane released “more significant works” than his 1960 “My Favorite Things,” says Robin Washington in a PRX documentary on the classic reworking of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway hit. “A Love Supreme” is often cited as the zenith of the saxophonist’s career. “But if you tried to explain that song to an average listener, you would lose them. [“My Favorite Things”] is a definitive work that everyone knows, and anyone can listen to, and the fascinating story of its evolution is something everyone can share and enjoy.” The song is accessible, a commercially successful hit, and it is also an experimental masterpiece.

Indeed, “My Favorite Things” may be the perfect introduction to Coltrane’s experimentalism. After the dizzying chord changes of 1959’s “Giant Steps,” this 14-minute, two-chord excursion patterned on the ragas of Ravi Shankar announced Coltrane’s move into the modal forms he refined until his death in 1967, as well as his embrace of the soprano saxophone and his new quartet. It became “Coltrane’s most requested tune,” says Ed Wheeler in The World According to John Coltrane, “and a bridge to a broad public audience.”

Coltrane’s take is also mesmerizing, trance-inducing, “often compared to a whirling dervish,” notes the Polyphonic video above, a reference to the Sufi meditation technique of spinning in a circle. It’s an unlikely song choice for the exercise, which makes it all the more fascinating. The Sound of Music, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s final Broadway collaboration, was an “instant classic,” and everyone who’d seen it walked away humming the tune to “My Favorite Things.” By 1960, it had become a standard, with several cover versions released by Leslie Uggams, The Pete King Chorale, the Hi-Lo’s, and the Norman Luboff Choir.

Hundreds more covers would follow. None of them sounded like Coltrane’s. The modal form—in which musicians improvise in different kinds of scales over simplified chord structures—created the “open freedom” in music explored on Miles Davis’ pathbreaking Kind of Blue, on which Coltrane played tenor sax. (It was Davis who bought Coltrane his first soprano sax that year.) Coltrane’s use of modal form in adaptations of popular standards like “My Favorite Things” and George Gershwin’s “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess was an explicit strategy to court a wider public, using the familiar to orient his listeners to the new.

The video essay brings in the expertise of musician, composer, and YouTuber Adam Neely, who explains what makes Rogers and Hammerstein’s classic unique among show tunes, and why it appealed to Coltrane as the centerpiece of the 1961 album of the same name. The song’s unusual form and structure allow the same melody to be played over both major and minor chords. Coltrane’s modification of the song reduces it to the two tonics, E major and E minor, over which he and the band solo, introducing a shifting tonality and mood to the melody with each chord change.

Neely goes into greater depth, but it’s overall an accessible explanation of Coltrane’s very accessible, yet vertiginously deep, “My Favorite Things.” Maybe only one question remains. Coltrane’s rendition came out four years before Julie Andrews’ iconic performance in the film adaptation of The Sound of Music, evoking the obvious question,” says Washington: “Did he influence her?”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

Why The Founding Fathers Were Obsessed with This Muslim Ruler

Colin Marshall — Mon, 11 May 2026 09:00:43 +0000

The writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America include many a reference to the likes of Cicero, Montesquieu, and John Locke. That the names Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan never appear may not sound like much of a surprise, even if you happen to know that they ruled the Indian region of Mysore, now officially called Mysuru, at the time. But history records that more than a few Americans, including Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, followed with great interest the struggles of that father and son against the British. Those struggles took place from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century — a time when the American colonies, of course, had their own conflict brewing with the motherland.

Hyder became the Sultan of Mysore in the seventeen-sixties: “a dangerous time to come to power in South Asia,” writes Blake Smith at Aeon, given that “the British East India Company was expanding its power throughout the Subcontinent.” Allying with France, much like the rebelling American colonists, Hyder “held off the British advance for another two decades, dying in 1782, just a year before the US triumphed in its own rebellion against Britain.”

America’s fascination with Hyder and his successor Tipu, who died in battle with the East India Company in 1799, remained for some time. “Mysore’s rulers became familiar references in American newspapers, poems and everyday conversation. Yet, within a generation, Americans lost their sense of solidarity with the Indian Subcontinent.”

You can learn more about this episode of history from the PBS Origins video above. It gets into detail about the life of Tipu, known as “the Tiger of Mysore,” a nickname the man himself did much to justify. He even “commissioned a nearly life-sized automaton of a tiger eating a British soldier,” says the video’s host, which “included a crank attached to a mechanism inside the tiger’s body that simultaneously lifted the dying man’s arm and produced noises imitating his final cries.” Though he and his army continued to fight in that spirit, Mysore’s situation became untenable after both the U.S. and France made their peace with Britain. Despite the recency of the hostilities, the new liberated colony soon became something of an ally in the maintenance of the British Empire’s remaining territories, India included — and would ultimately learn a lesson or two of its own about the global extension of power.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

Nearly 50 Years Later, WKRP in Cincinnati Becomes a Real Radio Station

OC — Mon, 11 May 2026 08:00:16 +0000

It took nearly 50 years. WKRP in Cincinnati is no longer just a TV sitcom. It’s now a real radio station in Cincinnati.

A Cincy-area FM station, known as “The Oasis,” has adopted the WKRP call letters after acquiring them from a nonprofit radio station in North Carolina. The Raleigh-based station put the call letters up for auction as part of a fundraising effort. And then The Oasis snapped them up.

To mark the official launch last week, the station played the TV show’s theme song for six straight hours. Moving forward, the station will continue playing classic rock from the ’60s through the ’80s — much like the music featured on the 1978–82 sitcom. As a bonus, Gary Sandy, who played program director Andy Travis, has recorded promos for the revived WKRP. If the original show was before your time, you can watch some episodes on YouTube. Enjoy…

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How a Volcanic Eruption Helped Unleash the Black Death in Europe in 1347

Colin Marshall — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:25:58 +0000

The flap of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world can cause a hurricane on the other, or so they say. If we take it a bit too literally, that old observation may make us wonder what a hurricane can cause. Or if not a hurricane, how about another kind of large-scale natural disaster? If new findings by researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe are to be believed, a volcano’s eruption helped lead to the outbreak and spread of the Black Death across Europe in the fourteenth century. In the video above, British history and environmental science specialist Paul Whitewick explains the evidence on a visit to one of the abandoned medieval villages stricken by that plague.

As Cambridge’s Sarah Collins writes, “the evidence suggests that a volcanic eruption — or cluster of eruptions — around 1345 caused annual temperatures to drop for consecutive years due to the haze from volcanic ash and gases, which in turn caused crops to fail across the Mediterranean region.” Desperate Italian city-states thus fell back on trading with grain producers around the Black Sea. “This climate-driven change in long-distance trade routes helped avoid famine, but in addition to life-saving food, the ships were carrying the deadly bacterium that ultimately caused the Black Death, enabling the first and deadliest wave of the second plague pandemic to gain a foothold in Europe.”

An important clue came in the form of “information contained in tree rings from the Spanish Pyrenees, where consecutive ‘Blue Rings’ point to unusually cold and wet summers in 1345, 1346 and 1347 across much of southern Europe.” Records of lunar eclipses and layers of sulfur locked into ice cores dating to about the same time further heighten the probability of volcanic activity. Key to tying these disparate pieces of evidence together are changes in trade routes: on a map, Whitewick traces “movement increasing along these corridors, grain imports to the maritime republics of Venice and Genoa from north of the Black Sea and beyond, in 1347.” According to written records, the Black Death came to Britain the following year, arriving in “a country already shaped by failed harvests, weakened communities, and rising movement of people and goods.”

Some communities weathered the plague and, in the fullness of time, even bounced back; others, like the village amid whose remains Whitewick stands, practically vanished altogether. “This was a global problem that became very much a local one,” he says, underscoring its revelation of the risk factors present even in the early stages of what we now call globalization. “A volcanic eruption thousands of miles away altered climate patterns, and that climate reshaped harvest and trade, and trade carried disease. And here, in the quiet English fields, the consequences have settled into the ground:” not quite as poetic an image as the butterfly and the hurricane, granted, but hardly less relevant to our own world for it.

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Buckminster Fuller Creates an Animated Visualization of Human Population Growth from 1000 B.C.E. to 1965

OC — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:00:01 +0000

Sit back, relax, put on some music (I’ve found Chopin’s Nocturne in B major well-suited), and watch the video above, a silent data visualization by visionary architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, “the James Brown of industrial design.” The short film from 1965 combines two of Fuller’s leading concerns: the exponential spread of the human population over finite masses of land and the need to revise our global perspective via the “Dymaxion map,” in order “to visualize the whole planet with greater accuracy,” as the Buckminster Fuller Institute writes, so that “we humans will be better equipped to address challenges as we face our common future aboard Spaceship Earth.”

Though you may know it best as the name of a geodesic sphere at Disney’s Epcot Center, the term Spaceship Earth originally came from Fuller, who used it to remind us of our interconnectedness and interdependence as we share resources on the only vehicle we know of that can sustain us in the cosmos.

“We are all astronauts,” he wrote in his 1969 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and yet we refuse to see the long-term consequences of our actions on our specialized craft: “One of the reasons why we are struggling inadequately today,” Fuller argued in his introduction, “is that we reckon our costs on too shortsighted a basis and are later overwhelmed with the unexpected costs brought about by our shortsightedness.”

Like all visionaries, Fuller thought in long spans of time, and he used his design skills to help others do so as well. His population visualization documents human growth from 1000 B.C.E. to Fuller’s present, at the time, of 1965. In the image above (see a larger version here), we have a graphic from that same year—made collaboratively with artist and sociologist John McHale—showing the “shrinking of our planet by man’s increased travel and communication speeds around the globe.” (It must be near microscopic by now.) Fuller takes an even longer view, looking at “the confluence of communication and transportation technologies,” writes Rikke Schmidt Kjærgaard, “from 500,000 B.C.E. to 1965.”

Here Fuller combines his population data with the technological breakthroughs of modernity. Though he’s thought of in some quarters as a genius and in some as a kook, Fuller demonstrated his tremendous foresight in seemingly innumerable ways. But it was in the realm of design that he excelled in communicating what he saw. “Pioneers of data visualization,” Fuller and McHale were two of “the first to chart long-term trends of industrialization and globalization.” Instead of becoming alarmed and fearful of what the trends showed, Fuller got to work designing for the future, fully aware, writes the Fuller Institute, that “the planet is a system, and a resilient one.”

Fuller thought like a radically inventive engineer, but he spoke and wrote like a peacenik prophet, writing that a system of narrow specializations ensures that skill sets “are not comprehended comprehensively… or they are realized only in negative ways, in new weaponry or the industrial support only of war faring.” We’ve seen this vision of society played out to a frightening extent. Fuller saw a way out, one in which everyone on the planet can live in comfort and security without consuming (then not renewing) the Earth’s resources. How can this be done? You’ll have to read Fuller’s work to find out. Meanwhile, as his visualizations suggest, it’s best for us to take the long view—and give up on short-term rewards and profits—in our assessments of the state of Spaceship Earth.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

How Yasujirō Ozu Learned to Use Color in His Masterful Films: A New Every Frame a Painting Video Essay

Colin Marshall — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:00:01 +0000

Yasujirō Ozu was born in 1903, and made films from the late nineteen-twenties up until his death in 1963. Though not an especially long life, it spanned Japan’s pre- and postwar eras, meaning that in many ways, it ended in a very different country than it began. Not that you’d know it from Ozu’s films, whose distinctive form and style must have changed less through the decades than those of any of his colleagues. For viewers only casually acquainted with his oeuvre, it’s easy to joke that if you’ve seen one of his pictures, you’ve seen them all. But true Ozu enthusiasts, whose numbers have steadily grown all around the world since the filmmaker’s death, understand that each phase of his career offers distinctive pleasures of its own.

In fact, Ozu persisted through sweeping changes in not just world history, but also the history of cinema. His first 34 films were silent, the next fourteen were sound in black-and-white, and his last six were in color. It is to the domestic master’s third act that Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos have devoted their latest Every Frame a Painting video essay.

As with most filmmakers, it took Ozu a few years to make color his own: in Equinox Flower, from 1958, “some of the scenes are so bright that it looks like an MGM musical,” owing to his studio’s desire to showcase the actress Fujiko Yamamoto. And it’s not just the hues of her kimono that dominate the images: so does the red of Ozu’s signature teapot whenever it finds its way into the frame.

Ozu’s next color film Good Morning makes use of a “much more natural, earth-toned color palette. The images feel more balanced, and there isn’t one visual element that sticks out from all the others.” In his project after that, Floating Weeds (itself a remake of his 1934 silent A Story of Floating Weeds), he worked with the acclaimed cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, who’d also collaborated with the likes of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. Using strong light and shadow, Miyagawa showed how, “by shaping the light, he could change how colors were perceived,” often in different scenes framed in exactly the same way. At this point, anyone doing an Ozu binge-watch will feel that color itself is being adapted to the rigorous objectivity of his work.

“His films are full of repetitions and small variations,” Zhou says. “He will show the same hallway again, and again, and again.” Seemingly minor elements in one scene match visually with elements in others. “As a result, Ozu’s movies rhyme. One shot will mirror another, one person’s behavior will be repeated,” across not just an individual picture, but his whole filmography. Watch through it, and “you’re struck by how similar two people can be, how often one place resembles another, how life itself is cyclical, and Ozu used color as another way to build these patterns.” Though subtly expressed, these themes would certainly have resonated with audiences in a society forced to reinvent itself after losing the Second World War. Whether Ozu suspected that they could draw even more attention from future generations far from Japan is a question not even his diaries, now the subject of a documentary themselves, can answer.

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1,000 Years of Medieval European History in 20 Minutes

Colin Marshall — Wed, 06 May 2026 09:00:56 +0000

More than a few medievalists object to the term “Dark Ages” as applied to the period in which they specialize. That can seem wishful in light of most comparisons between medieval times and the Renaissance that came afterward, or indeed, the era of the Roman Empire that came before. Consider the state of Europe as the fourth century began: “The great cities of antiquity were depopulated, some left in ruins,” says the narrator of the How So video above, telling the story of the continent’s political and linguistic fragmentation. “The Roman transportation system decayed, eroding communication and long-distance trade. Coins vanished, leaving no economic system to support professional armies. Literacy plummeted, crippling administrative systems. And most notably, peace and security were gone.”

But there’s plenty more history to come thereafter: about a millennium’s worth, in fact, which the video covers in a mere twenty minutes. Events of note in that grand sweep include Justinian I’s attempt to expand the Byzantine Empire of the east; the creation and spread of the Islamic caliphate; Charlemagne’s unification of most of western Christendom; invasions by Vikings, Magyars, and Muslim raiders; the rise of castles and the feudal system that they came to symbolize; the creation of the Holy Roman Empire; the flourishing of cities and universities; and the Norman Conquest of England, as seen on the Bayeux Tapestry. There’s also the unpleasantness of the Black Death, which swept through Europe from the mid-fourteenth to the early sixteenth century — but as with other medieval disasters, the plague held the seeds of a civilizational rebirth.

“For some survivors, the consequences of the plague were not so grim,” says the narrator. “As the population dropped, land became widely available, and the demand for labor rose dramatically.” Peasants demanded improved conditions and revolted against the rulers who refused; ultimately, they “gained new freedoms and opportunities, and workers enjoyed higher wages. Creativity and innovation in science and culture followed, creating the environment in which European scholars “defined the past millennium as ‘Dark Ages,’ and so positioned themselves as the transition between the medieval and modern world.” Some liken the current state of the world to the decline of the Roman Empire; if they’re correct, maybe we have another Renaissance to look forward to about 40 generations down the road.

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Confidence: The Cartoon That Helped America Get Through the Great Depression (1933)

OC — Wed, 06 May 2026 08:00:40 +0000

No more bummin’, let’s all get to work…

Actually, hold up a sec. We’ll all be happier and more productive if we take a moment to start our work day with Confidence, a peppy musical animation from 1933, starring newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Mickey Mouse precursor, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Few Americans—today we’d refer to them as the 1%—could escape the privations of the Great Depression. The movies were one industry that continued to thrive through this dark period, precisely because they offered a few hours of respite. No one went to the pictures to see a reflection of their own lives. Gorgeous gowns, glamorous Manhattan apartments and romantic trouble certain to be resolved in happy endings…remember Mia Farrow’s beleaguered waitress basking in the Purple Rose of Cairo’s reassuring glow?

Given the public’s preference for escapist fare, director Bill Nolan, the Father of Rubber Hose Animation, could have played it safe by glossing over the backstory that leads Oswald to seek out advice from the Commander in Chief. Instead, Nolan delivered his joyful cartoon animals into nightmare territory, the Depression personified as a cowled Death figure laying waste to the land. It’s weirdly upsetting to see those hyper-cheerful vintage barnyard animals (and a rogue monkey) undergo this graphic enervation.

Oh, for some oral history—I’d love to know how matinee crowds reacted as Oswald raced screaming before a spinning vertigo background, seeking a remedy for a host of non-cartoon problems. Irony is a luxury they didn’t have.

Unsurprisingly, the can-do spirit so central to FDR’s New Deal quickly turned Oswald’s frown upside down. As presidential campaign promises go, this one’s uniquely tailored to the demands of musical comedy. Witness Annie, in which the 32nd president was again called upon to Rex Harrison his way into audience hearts, this time from the wheelchair the creators of Confidence didn’t dare show, some forty years earlier.

The division between entertainment and nation-leading is pretty permeable these days, too.

Accordingly, what really sets this cartoon apart for me is the use of a Presidentially-sanctioned giant syringe as a tool to get Depression-era America back on its feet. A figurative injection of confidence is all well and good, but nothing gets the barnyard back on its singing, dancing feet like a liberal dose, delivered in the most literal way.

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

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Why Ancient Egyptian Honey Remains Edible After 3,000 Years

Colin Marshall — Tue, 05 May 2026 09:00:52 +0000

The global bee population comes up in the news every now and again. Sometimes we’re assured that the number is stable or rising; more often, we’re warned about collapsing colonies and the large-scale ecological disaster that could result. As with most high-stakes issues, it can be difficult to know what to believe. But even if you lack the time to invest in an understanding of the science behind the complex connections between apian and human welfare, you can easily come to appreciate the importance of bees if you learn just how long they’ve played a role in our civilization.

As Elana Spivack writes at History.com, “a cave painting in northeastern Spain depicting a human harvesting honey dates back 7,500 years to the Neolithic period, according to research published in 2021 in the journal Trabajos de Prehistoria.” Just last year, a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society confirmed that bronze containers discovered in an underground shrine in a sixth-century-BC Greek settlement not far from Pompeii contained a residue of honey. We’ve long known of hieroglyphs from ancient Egypt that depict bees and the keeping thereof; “according to a 2022 paper in the journal Animals, the use of honeybees in the Nile Valley can be traced to the earliest years of the Egyptian kingdom.”

Here in the twenty-first century, most of us regard honey as nothing more than a relatively healthy sweetener. In ancient Egypt, too, it was used to improve the taste of their bread and beer, but it was also put to important medical uses. “Because it’s so thick, rejects any kind of growth and contains hydrogen peroxide, it creates the perfect barrier against infection for wounds,” writes Smithsonian’s Natasha Geiling. “The ancient Egyptians used medicinal honey regularly, making ointments to treat skin and eye diseases.” They may not have been the first to do so, given that the earliest known uses of honey are recorded on Sumerian clay tablets, but they took respect for the stuff to a whole new level, describing honeybees as originating from the tears of their sun god Re (formerly known in the English-speaking world as Ra).

That particular piece of mythology is recorded on some Egyptian papyri; others reveal how much honey was rationed to workers, at least those employed directly by the Pharaoh. In those days, the substance’s golden color reflected its dearness, and it seems that common laborers and their families could go a lifetime without ever tasting a spoonful themselves. Today, of course, we take it for granted that we can go down to the supermarket and cheaply buy an economy-size tub of honey that never goes bad. But then, ancient Egyptian honey has never gone bad either: thanks to the very same chemical and biological properties that made it useful for healing, the sealed jars of it remain theoretically edible even after 3,000 years. Drizzle it on some genuine Greek yogurt, and you’ve got a large swath of the history of civilization in breakfast form.

via Boing Boing/Smithsonian

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When Francis Bacon Shocked the Art World: Viewers Were Horrified by His Paintings, But Couldn’t Look Away

Colin Marshall — Tue, 05 May 2026 08:00:45 +0000

A difficult childhood and adolescence, saturated with the feeling of being an outsider, may or may not contribute to becoming a great artist. Experiencing the social and cultural ferment of Berlin and Paris in the nineteen-twenties probably wouldn’t hurt one’s chances. Nor, surely, would formative exposure in such cities to films like Metropolis, Battleship Potemkin, and Abel Gance’s Napoleon, as well as to the paintings of Pablo Picasso. Going to art school may seem like the natural choice for any aspiring artist, but there’s also something to be gained from avoiding that academic system entirely.

These, as gallerist-Youtuber James Payne tells us in the new Great Art Explained video above, are all aspects of the life that produced Francis Bacon. As usual on that series, he proceeds from a single representative work, in this case Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, from 1953.

If you’ve seen that painting even once, you haven’t forgotten it, and indeed, you’ve probably seen it again in your nightmares since. To trace the source of its troubling power, Payne plunges into the history of Bacon’s harrowing life as well as that of the Irish, English, and European historical contexts in which he lived — often to its dangerous, chaotic fullest.

Not that any art historian can ignore the inspiration cited right there in the painting’s title. It is to that seventeenth-century Spaniard’s acclaimed portrait of that head of the Catholic Church (who pronounced the finished work “troppo vero”) that Bacon pays twisted, deconstructive homage. Yet despite having been to Rome, he never actually saw the original; that, as Payne explains, “would have meant facing its power directly.” Instead, he worked from a small, washed-out “copy of a copy,” all the better to allow for not just reinvention, but also the incorporation of other scraps of the rapidly expanding mass media of the twentieth century: the period, despite the out-of-time quality of so much of his art, to which Bacon so thoroughly belonged.

Francis Bacon on The South Bank Show: A Singular Profile of the Singular Painter

William Burroughs Meets Francis Bacon: See Never-Broadcast Footage (1982)

What Makes Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas One of the Most Fascinating Paintings in Art History

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Introductions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picasso & More

You Can Have Your Ashes Turned Into a Playable Vinyl Record, When Your Day Comes

OC — Mon, 04 May 2026 09:00:06 +0000

Even in death we are only limited by our imagination in how we want to go out. There are now ways to turn our corpse into a tree, or have our ashes shot into space, or press our ashes into diamonds–I believe Superman is involved in that last one. And now for the music lover, a company called And Vinyly will press your ashes into a playable vinyl record.

You like that punny company name? There’s more: the business lets the dear departed “Live on from beyond the groove.” Hear that groan? That’s the deceased literally spinning in their grave…on a turntable.

The UK-based company has been around since 2009, when Jason Leach launched it “just for fun” at first. But a lot of people liked the idea and have kept him in business.

It will cost, however. The basic service generally costs between £1000 and £3000 GBP, and it partly depends on how many vinyl records you produce. From what we can tell, you cannot use copyright-protected music to fill up the 18–22 minutes per side. So no “Free Bird” or “We Are the Champions,” unfortunately. But you can put anything else: a voice recording, or the sounds of nature, or complete silence. Get more information over at the company’s FAQ.

No doubt, the service can provide comfort and a memory trigger for those left behind. The above video, “Hearing Madge,” is a short doc about a son who took recordings of his mother and used And Vinyly to make a record out of them. It’s sweet.

“I’m sure a lot of people think that it’s creepy, a lot of people think it’s sacrilegious,” the man says. “But I know my mother wouldn’t have. She would’ve thought it was a hoot.”

Jason Leach, a musician and vinyl collector himself, talks of the immediacy of sound and what it means to many.

“Sound is vibrating you, the room, and it’s actually moving the air around you,” he says. “And that’s what’s so powerful about hearing someone’s voice on a record. They’re actually moving the air and for me that’s powerful.”

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Bronze Age Britons Turned Bones of Dead Relatives into Musical Instruments & Ornaments

Watch Carl Sagan’s “A Glorious Dawn” Become the First Vinyl Record Played in Space, Courtesy of Jack White

Death: A Free Online Philosophy Course from Yale Helps You Grapple with the Inescapable

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts.

Chuck Jones’ The Dot and the Line Celebrates Geometry & Hard Work: An Oscar-Winning Animation (1965)

OC — Mon, 04 May 2026 08:00:05 +0000

The animated short above, The Dot and the Line, directed by the great Chuck Jones and narrated by English actor Robert Morley, won an Oscar in 19656 for Best Animated Short Film. Based on a book written by Norton Juster, “The Dot and the Line” tells the story of a romance between two geometric shapes—taking the archetypal narrative trajectory of boy meets girl, loses girl, wins girl in the end (finding himself along the way) and injecting it with some fascinating social commentary that still resonates almost fifty years later. One way of watching “The Dot and the Line” is as a “triumph of the nerd” story, where an anxious square (as in “uncool”) Line has to compete with a hipster beatnik Squiggle of a rival for the affections of a flighty Dot.

The Line begins the film “stiff as a stick… dull, conventional and repressed” (as his love interest says of him) in contrast to the groovy Squiggle and his groovy bebop soundtrack. With the possible suggestion that this love transgresses mid-century racial boundaries, the Line’s friends disapprove and tell him to give it up, since “they all look alike anyway.” But the Line persists in his folly, indulging in some Walter Mitty-like reveries of heroic endeavors that might win over his Dot. Finally, using “great self-control,” he manages to bend himself into an angle, then another, then a series of simple, then very complex, shapes, becoming, we might assume, some kind of mathematical wiz. After refining his talents alone, he goes off to show them to Dot, who is “overwhelmed” and delighted and who “giggles like a schoolgirl.”

Here the subtext of the nerd-gets-the-girl storyline manifests a fairly conservative critique of the “anarchy” of the Squiggle, whom the Dot comes to see as “undisciplined, graceless, coarse” and other unflattering adjectives while the line—who proclaimed to himself earlier that “freedom is not a license for chaos”—is “dazzling, clever, mysterious, versatile, light, eloquent, profound, enigmatic, complex, and compelling.” I can almost imagine that George Will had a hand in the writing, which is to say that it’s enormously clever, and enormously invested in the values of self-control, hard work, and discipline, and distrustful of spontaneity, free play, and general grooviness. At the end of the film, our Dot and Line go off to live “if not happily ever after, at least reasonably so” in some cozy suburb, no doubt. The moral of the story? “To the vector belong the spoils.”

Watch “Geometry of Circles,” the Abstract Sesame Street Animation Scored by Philip Glass (1979)

Journey to the Center of a Triangle: Watch the 1977 Digital Animation That Demystifies Geometry

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

How Sylvester Stallone Rescued the First Rambo Film With a Radical Recut, Cutting It From 3½ Hours to 93 Minutes

Colin Marshall — Fri, 01 May 2026 08:36:53 +0000

About a year ago, a certain kind of cinephile took note of obituaries for Ted Kotcheff, a television-turned-film director who worked steadily from the mid-fifties to the mid-nineties. Even to readers only casually acquainted with movies, more than one title pops out from his filmography: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Fun with Dick and Jane, North Dallas Forty, Weekend at Bernie’s. The focus on genres, and their variety, suggests not an auteur but a journeyman, the kind of efficient, versatile problem-solver that used to keep Hollywood afloat. But occasionally, the work of a journeyman can achieve its own kind of transcendence: that moment came with First Blood, in Kotcheff’s case, which launched the Rambo series in 1982.

Those who remember Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo as a headbanded one-man army bent on re-fighting and winning the Vietnam War, one bout of ultra-violence at a time, will be surprised by the relative meekness of his first onscreen incarnation.

As First Blood’s story is summarized by the CinemaStix video above, Rambo drifts into a small Washington town after a search for his Vietnam comrades comes to a fruitless end. Hostilely ejected by the local sheriff, he nevertheless walks right back into city limits. Arrested and booked at the police station, he turns on the cops in a PTSD-triggered rage. When he makes his escape into the forest, the law pursues him, leaving him no choice — at least in his own mind — but to declare war on the police, the town, and perhaps the whole of American civilization.

This is a promising enough narrative for a post-Vietnam genre picture, as a variety of producers must have thought while David Morrell’s original novel was circulating through Hollywood. But only the star power of Stallone, with the first couple of Rocky pictures under his belt, could get it made. And indeed, he almost got it un-made: dismayed by its initial three-and-a-half hour cut, he decided to buy the rights and destroy the negative. The solution that ended up saving the movie wasn’t much less drastic, producing a 93-minute cut that excised most of Rambo’s dialogue. The result, as CinemaStix creator Danny Boyd explains, possesses the good kind of ambivalence, which lets the audience share not just the beleaguered protagonist’s perspective but also that of his increasingly frustrated pursuers, who escalate the battle out of all proportion to his actions. 44 years on, First Blood still offers surprises, not the least of which is that Rambo — for the last time in his career — never actually kills anyone.

Muhammad Ali Explains Why He Refused to Fight in Vietnam: “My Conscience Won’t Let Me Go Shoot My Brother… for Big Powerful America” (1970)

Mickey Mouse in Vietnam: The Underground Anti-War Animation from 1968, Co-Created by Milton Glaser

The Alchemy of Film Editing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Hannah and Her Sisters, The Empire Strikes Back & Other Films

How Editing Saved Ferris Bueller’s Day Off & Made It a Classic

Why Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel Made the Still-Shocking Un Chien Andalou (1929)

Colin Marshall — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:00:57 +0000

Under most circumstances, there’s nothing particularly shocking about cutting into an eye removed from a dead animal. Gratuitous, maybe, and surely disgusting for some, but certainly not psychologically damaging. I remember a man turning up one day to my first-grade classroom and showing us how to dissect a real sheep’s eye, which most of us found a fascinating break from our usual spelling and math exercises. But in education as in art, context is everything, and it is the context established by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel that has allowed their own act of eye-slicing to retain its visceral impact. It occurs, of course, in their short film Un Chien Andalou, from 1929, the subject of the new Nerdwriter video above.

The shot of Buñuel’s hand taking a razor to the disembodied eye of what he later said was a calf comes early in the picture. What gives it its power are the images that precede it: Buñuel sharpening a razor and gazing up at the moon, and the actress Simone Mareuil having her own eye opened up and the razor brought near. In extreme close-up, the calf’s eye obviously isn’t Mareuil’s, but no matter.

Cinema is so often about carrying the audience along with sheer momentum, and in any case, Un Chien Andalou is a work of surrealism. To the extent that any combination of shots makes sense, it fails on that movement’s terms. Dalí and Buñuel succeeded, possibly to a unique degree, in making a film in which nothing adds up. “The rule was to refuse any image that could have a rational meaning, or any memory or culture,” says Buñuel in a late interview clip included in the video.

Nerdwriter creator Evan Puschak lists a few of the images that made the cut: “A crowd surrounding a man poking a severed hand with a stick; a man dragging two Jesuit priests, one played by Dalí himself, as well as two pianos laden with two decomposing, oozing donkeys; a woman’s armpit hair suddenly appearing over a man’s vanished mouth.” The goal of assembling such grotesqueries into one disordered viewing experience? “Buñuel felt that mainstream cinema, so concerned with re-creating the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel, was trapping itself in the same insidious morality and limiting its creative potential. He and Dalí sought to liberate the medium and the audience, and that liberation was not designed to be pleasant.” Nearly a century on, Un Chien Andalou remains memorably troubling, but most of cinema still stubbornly refuses to be freed.

Two Vintage Films by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel: Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or

Watch Luis Buñuel’s Surreal Travel Documentary A Land Without Bread (1933)

The 10 Favorite Films of Avant-Garde Surrealist Filmmaker Luis Buñuel (Including His Own Collaboration with Salvador Dalí)

Salvador Dalí Goes to Hollywood & Creates a Wild Dream Sequence for Alfred Hitchcock

Filmmaker Luis Buñuel Shows How to Make the Perfect Dry Martini