Even if we didn’t make it to a screening of Christopher Nolan’s big-screen adaptation this past summer — and indeed, even if we’ve never read Homer’s original epic at all — we know that the Odyssey tells the story of a ten-year-long journey back to Ithaca. The narrative’s urgency doesn’t arise from the fact that its protagonist, the king Odysseus, has classes at Cornell to teach. In fact, he may not even be trying to get back to the extant Greek island celebrated for bearing that same name. So, at least, argues a recent paper by two distinguished professors, Cambridge’s James Diggle and the University of Aberdeen’s John Underhill. You can read “Was Homer’s Ithaca an Island?” at the online journal Antigone.

Alternatively, you can watch the new video from classicist-novelist Honor Cargill-Martin above. The real Greek island of Ithaca, or Ithaki, with its picturesque hamlets and limestone monoliths, “actually doesn’t match, pretty much at all, the description that Homer gives us of Ithaca,” she says.

Having sailed there last summer, she can describe it as “an amazing place, so dramatic and so evocative, but in large part, that’s because the mountains essentially rise straight out of the sea”  — a direct contradiction to Homer’s lines about lowlands surrounding a single central peak. Did he just get it wrong? Or was he taking artistic license in order to imagine the kind of place from which a hero like Odysseus would come forth, despite the fact that he got his geography more or less right elsewhere?

In 2005, a management consultant called Robert Bittlestone put forth the argument that Homer’s Ithaca was actually Paliki, a peninsula on the western edge of Kefalonia. In order to test this theory, Bittlestone brought in Diggle and Underhill, his collaborators on the book Odysseus Unbound: The Search for Homer’s Ithaca. Now, a decade after Bittlestone’s death, the others have produced new geological and textual evidence for the Paliki hypothesis, not least that Homer never once explicitly calls Ithaca an island, or even describes it in terms he applies to known islands. Cargill-Martin finds their research “extremely convincing,” which makes you wonder: will Ithaca take down its statue of Odysseus in response? Probably not, but at least we’ll have something to talk about when we go stand before it.

via Boing Boing

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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.

The word zine, referring to a homemade magazine not distributed through the normal commercial channels, has a longer history than you might expect. Its earliest recorded uses date from 1946 in the world of pulp magazines, most often of the science-fiction variety. But just a year earlier, as it happens, one of the most historically notable zines avant la lettre concluded publication. The end of World War II had everything to do with it, since Het Onderwater-Cabaret, or The Underwater Cabaret, existed as a rebuke against the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Over its two-year run, it put out 96 issues, totaling over 1,700 pages full of art and poems — all created by one man in hiding in an attic.

Born to a Jewish family in Dortmund in 1908, Curt Bloch studied law with aspirations of becoming a judge. When Hitler rose to power, his plans changed: he first left for Amsterdam, and later, when Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, he had to keep moving until he ended up in the border town of Enschede.

The resistance network Group Overduin eventually placed him in the private home of an undertaker and a housekeeper who had already taken in two other Jews. Despite the lack of space and resources, he managed to produce Het Onderwater-Cabaret using supplies delivered along with the refugees’ food. Only one hand-assembled, thread-stitched copy of each issue existed, to be circulated between some 20 to 30 similarly hidden readers before being returned to the attic.

By the end of the war, Bloch resurfaced to freedom with every issue of Het Onderwater-Cabaret intact and in his possession. Bound into volumes in Amsterdam, they accompanied him when he emigrated to the United States, where he went on to raise a family. As the story is told in the History’s Secret Heroes podcast from the BBC above, only long after his death in 1975 did his daughter Simone properly discover and appreciate the contents of those volumes that had always sat on her father’s shelf. The confusing, even frightening cut-and-paste imagery and the poems she could only understand after learning German turned out to contain unrelenting attacks on the Third Reich and its leaders, the kind of material that could have led to summary execution if discovered. One issue even contained a poem Bloch wrote for his mother and sister, not knowing that they’d already died in the camps.

Now you can read all 96 issues of Het Onderwater-Cabaret online at Curt-Bloch.com, where they’ve been not just digitized but annotated with introductions and translations of the original German and Dutch texts. There are also recorded performances by actors, cabaret artists, and even other Holocaust survivors. It makes Bloch’s clandestine productivity all the more impressive to remember that zine culture as we know it didn’t exist at that time, let alone the instantaneous global distribution network on which you’re reading this post right now. No matter how tiny his readership, how meager his resources, or how dire the punishment for daring to write critically about the regime, he simply had to create, and he had to do it with a sense of humor. When coming up against frustrations in our own work, we’d do well to imagine Bloch running his one-man cabaret out of the attic, scissors and glue in hand, and ask ourselves what our excuse is.

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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.

As a young man, filmmaker Colin Levy got an opportunity of a lifetime. He got a one-on-one meeting with Martin Scorsese. After spending much of his time in high school making a five-minute short, Levy won the national YoungArts award — and, with it, the chance to chat with the guy who directed Goodfellas, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

After getting a personal tour of Scorsese’s office and editing bays by none other than legendary editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Levy met the man himself. “It was a defining moment in my path as a filmmaker,” he later wrote on his blog.

Martin Scorsese was intimidating, to say the least. But very jovial, very talkative, and he took me seriously. (Or convinced me, at least.) I pretty much kept my mouth shut. Every 30 seconds he would mention an actor, producer, director or film title I had never heard of before. I was stunned just to be in his presence. He liked my film, he said. “How did you do the little creatures?” I tried to explain how I figured out the basics of 3D animation. His eyes lit up and he started talking about the digital effects in The Aviator.

The juxtaposition of scales was overpowering. I felt like I was in a movie. Why he spent so much time with me I do not know, but it was amazing just to be in his presence. A few weeks afterwards I labored over a thank-you card, in which I expressed the overwhelming impression I had gotten that I don’t know enough about anything. I specially don’t know enough about film history and foreign cinema. I asked if he had any suggestions for where to start.

A couple of weeks later, Scorsese’s assistant sent him a handful of books and 39 foreign movies personally picked by the filmmaker. “Mr. Scorsese asked that I send this your way,” his assistant wrote to Colin. “This should be a jump start to your film education!”

Scorsese’s selections – which you can see above – are a fascinating insight into what influenced the filmmaker. Several movies are perennial film school classics: Italian neorealist masterpieces like The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D pop up on the list along with groundbreaking French New Wave works like The 400 Blows and Breathless. More unexpected are surprisingly strong showings of both Japanese post-war movies and New German cinema. Both Akira Kurosawa and Rainer Werner Fassbinder get three films each. And while there are some rather eccentric, unexpected inclusions in the list–Rocco and His Brothers? Il Sorpasso? Death by Hanging? – there are also some pretty striking omissions; big name art house figures like Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson and most surprisingly Federico Fellini didn’t make the cut. In any case, as Scorsese’s assistant writes, this list is a great place to start for anyone looking to learn more about foreign film.

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

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Jonathan Crow is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. 

The case of the copyright history of Fritz Lang’s influential sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis is as convoluted as the history of its film print. Lang’s vision and his original almost-three-hour cut were doomed to censorship right from the start. The Nazis took out its more socialist scenes. It’s been edited, colorized, put back together and restored. Wikipedia currently lists nine different versions. Similarly, ownership of the film shifted from distributors back to the public domain, then out of it again, once more of the original footage was rediscovered. And then came 2023, when Metropolis once again landed in the public domain, at least in America. Will we see as many legal battles as new remixes and re-scores? Probably a bit of both.

The film’s original orchestral score is available, but many fans also seek out a score more befitting its futurist origins. Something more electronic.

In fact, the four-minute clip above is YouTuber “KarmaGermany’s” 2009 fan-made edit using the music of Kraftwerk. If any band of the late 20th century was born to be paired with Lang’s technological vision, it’s the Fab Four from Düsseldorf. Their icy romantic melodies strike the right balance between Metropolis’ battle, then synthesis, of machinery and the human heart. And, look Kraftwerk even created a song called “Metropolis,” which becomes the actual score above. 

Like watching the Wizard of Oz while Dark Side of the Moon plays, Kraftwerk’s “Metropolis” seems written for the film, with its opening fanfare over the shots of the future city waking up, then how it switches to its motorik beat as the workers begin their alienating factory day. (We haven’t done a side-by-side of the extant cut of the film, so there very well may be some editing at play here.)

Now, while this is just a fan’s very well made use of the band’s full catalog (it dives back into the band’s spacier early work for the film’s more tender moment), others have gone a more official route. Kraftwerk contemporary and member of Cluster, Dieter Moebius recorded a four-part, 40-minute suite Musik für Metropolis. It was released posthumously in 2015, and it is one of his spookier works.

Prior to that, techno DJ and composer Jeff Mills (no relation) composed an hour-long score in 2000 that also had its own accompanying edit, and married his career in both ambient and futuristic electronic beats.

If the Kraftwerk re-edit whets your techno whistle, that clip was just the opening scene of the 90-minute fan edit from John McWilliam. His notes: “Originally two and a half hours long it has been reduced down to one hour 23 minutes to pace it up including removing the subtitle cards between shots and placing them over [the] picture instead.”

The last instruction from McWilliam could apply to whatever score you choose, as long as it’s for Metropolis: “Best watched on a big-ass TV hooked up to a big-booty sound system.”

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2022.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts.

We live in an age when you can describe practically anything you want to see in words, then see it almost immediately. Nobody will ever have laid eyes upon that particular sight before — and quite possibly, nobody ever will again. There we have both the upside and the downside of artificial intelligence-powered image generation. A constant flow of visual, aural, or textual novelty offers stimulation, to put it mildly, but it inevitably comes to feel insubstantial. However complexly derived from the work of humanity it may be, it lacks a direct connection to that work. Not so the results delivered by Arkivism, a new search engine that responds to descriptions by drawing on a collection of more than four million pieces of real art and photography.

You may need a “town at sunset,” a “colorful cake,” a “rocket ship blasting off,” a “Japanese woodblock print of a cat,” or something else besides. Arkivism will more than likely be able to come up with more than a few images to fit the bill, with sources at hand including the Library of Congress, the NASA Video and Image Library, the Rijksmuseum, and Japan’s National Diet Library. (I notice that its reach extends even to the Gongu Copyright Commission in Korea, where I live, which will make it my go-to site when next I need to evoke the Joseon Dynasty.) The chance of discovering a work of art you’d never heard of is always high, even if you search a big name like Rembrandt, Leonardo, Klimt, or Hokusai.

“Every work indexed here is CC0 or public domain,” says Arkivism’s about page. “Download it, adapt it, use it in client work — no permission needed, no strings.” Like all the best online services, this one was designed to answer the actual needs of its creator, “a designer and video creator who kept needing imagery that was genuinely safe to use — and kept losing afternoons to a dozen museum search boxes.” Even if your work has nothing to do with design or video creation, you never know when you’ll be looking for a picture of a castle, a painting of a feast, or a map of the world. Sure, you could always ask AI to generate one for you, and you’d get something more or less usable. Sometimes that’s what you need; other times, you’re ready to be led down a historical and cultural rabbit hole. Enter Arkivism here.

via Kottke

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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.

Over 100,000 people move to the San Francisco Bay Area each year. Their motivations for doing so no doubt vary, but these days, the ambition to make a fortune at the epicenter of the tech industry — especially amid the rapidly inflating AI bubble — is hardly unheard of. Unfortunately, that desire can be so all-consuming as to crowd out any interest in, or even curiosity about, the city itself, to say nothing of its wider region. Yet the San Francisco we know today is the result of a story at least 250 years long, very little of which has much to do with venture capital or GPUs. Now, anyone who does want to make a start on understanding it can do so at the new-and-improved platform DigitalSF, with its more than 80,000 historical items available to view and download.

An operation of the San Francisco Public Library, DigitalSF offers simultaneous access to multiple online historical archives. Search for the Golden Gate Bridge, let’s say, and the results will include hundreds of postcard photographs and other images capturing that iconic piece of infrastructure from a variety of angles and in a variety of decades, as well as — since this is the always climatically surprising San Francisco we’re talking about — under a variety of weather conditions.

The same exercise would prove equally illuminating for Chinatown, Pier 39, the Sutro Baths (which weren’t always ruins), and the Ferry Building (which wasn’t always a collection of pricey shops). Inevitably, this sort of virtual tourism becomes a form of time travel.

DigitalSF also offers countless glimpses of San Francisco’s important periods in twentieth-century American counterculture, when the city made everything seem possible: beatnik poetry, the Grateful Dead, a particular flavor of punk, the ascent of Harvey Milk. But even before then, San Francisco had already experienced a disproportionately intense amount of history during its relatively short existence: the earthquakes of 1868 and 1906, for example, or the Gold Rush of the late eighteen-forties from whose participants the local football team took its name. Those “forty-niners” who flooded in from all over the rest of the United States, turning San Francisco from a small port town into a relatively major city practically overnight, probably had scant fascination with local history themselves. After all, they were too busy making it. Enter the DigitalSF here.

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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.

In 1962, the animator Fyodor Khitruk made his directorial debut with Story of One Crime, a film that broke with a Soviet tendency to make imitations of Disney-style animations. The film, as The Guardian explained in its 2012 obituary for the animator, came as a shock. It was stylistically simple and dealt with themes that Disney films would never touch — like, why would a polite clerk murder two housewives with a frying pan?

Khitruk made other films that were packed with social commentary, often taking aim at abuses in the Soviet system. But, he also made straightforward animations for children, none more famous than his series of films based on AA Milne’s beloved Winnie the Pooh books.

Created between 1969 and 1972, Khitruk’s three films star a bear named “Vinni-Pukh” who looks nothing like the Winnie the Pooh that Westerners grew up with. (You can see the original illustrations of Pooh by E.H. Shepard here.) But viewers will certainly recognize the storyline and spirit of the original Pooh in the Soviet adaptations. For decades, these films have enchanted East European viewers, both young and old. And they still occasionally appear on Russian TV.

Above, you can watch the three animations online. They appear in the order in which they were released: 1) Winnie-the-Pooh (Винни-Пух, 1969), 2) Winnie-the-Pooh Goes on a Visit (Винни-Пух идет в гости, 1971); and 3) Winnie-the-Pooh and the Day of Concern (Винни-Пух и день забот, 1972).

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

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These are, perhaps, not the very best times for humanities majors. Seldom do we even hear the once-standard defense that, by pursuing a course of study in subjects of that kind, students “learn how to think.” Such a justification still points to real value, at least in the most demanding settings. Take Harvard’s course Humanities 10, whose digital device-free environment and syllabus covering everything from The Odyssey and Ulysses to Plato and James Baldwin — at a pace of one substantial book per week — recently drew the attention of the Wall Street Journal. Yet it’s always been true that you don’t have to major in anything to learn how to think, or in any case, to make a start of doing so.

Take the philosophy-and-literature YouTuber Jared Henderson, who in the video at the top of the post tells us how he began his self-directed study in high school. “I did what a lot of people would think is natural,” he says. “I went to a bookstore, and then I just found some books that I wanted to read.” The pieces of light reading he took home: Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and Martin Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics.

“If you know anything about philosophy, I think you know that that was probably not the ideal way to start.” But all the years of learning and teaching since have finally put him in a position of knowing how to begin, and in the span of half an hour, he lays out an intellectual roadmap for anyone in the same position as his teenage self, with stops in logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy.

That sequence reflects the reasonable assumption that, before we can evaluate arguments about how society ought to be arranged, we must learn to evaluate statements about how things are. We must, in other words, learn how to think — but also learn about the nature of reality itself, and how or whether we can know anything about it in the first place, questions relevant to both metaphysics and epistemology. That may seem like a daunting task, but Henderson frames all its stages in relation to one another, naming some of the most famous philosophers who have written in the relevant fields along the way. No single reading could give you mastery of their work, or even a full understanding of it, however clear the bigger picture might seem. But the attempt teaches the true first lesson of philosophy: in one area of knowledge or another, you’ll always be a beginner.

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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.

The old vaudeville phrase “Will it play in Peoria?” has its roots in the late 19th century, specifically in Horatio Alger’s novel Five Hundred Dollars; Or Jacob Marlowe’s Secret. Like all of the books Alger wrote extolling the virtues of thrift, study, grooming, industry, etc., this one articulates a middle American bootstraps philosophy and rags-to-riches mythology, while giving the entertainment industry a colorful way to sum up the small-town audiences who embraced Alger’s strait-laced ethic, and who needed to be pandered to or they wouldn’t get all those big-city jokes and references.

Peoria has been many places in the U.S.—from Tulsa to Boise—but whatever the test market, the assumptions have always been the same: the American mainstream is insular, middle class or aspiring to it, culturally conservative, unfailingly white, and fearful of everyone who isn’t. Such demographic dogma has persisted for over a hundred years. Even when it is shown to be outmoded or plain wrong, broadcasters and journalists continue to play to Peoria, genuflecting to a static, populist version of the U.S. that ignores large, rapidly changing segments of the population.

In the early eighties it took an Englishman with a very high profile to interrogate this state of affairs on the air. You may have come across the interview after David Bowie died, when social media filled with tributes and remembrances. One thread that got a lot of attention involved the transcript of a 1983 interview Bowie gave the fledgling MTV, in which he “turns the tables on reporter Mark Goodman,” writes Takepart’s Jennifer Swann, “to grill him about the youth-oriented network’s lack of ethnic diversity.”

“It’s a solid enterprise, and it’s got a lot going for it,” says Bowie. “I’m just floored by the fact there’s so few black artists featured in it. Why is that?” On the spot, Goodman reaches for a marketing term, “narrowcasting,” to suggest that the network is deliberately targeting a niche. But when Bowie keeps pushing, Goodman admits that the “narrow” demographic is the very same supposed mass market that existed in Alger’s day, when the only representations of black entertainers most white audiences in Peoria (or wherever) saw were in blackface.

We have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or the Midwest. Pick some town in the Midwest that would be scared to death by Prince, which we’re playing, or a string of other black faces, or black music. We have to play music we think an entire country is going to like, and certainly we’re a rock and roll station.

What do the Isley Brothers, asks Goodman, mean to a seventeen-year-old? To which Bowie replies, “I’ll tell you what the Isley Brothers mean to a black seventeen-year-old, and surely he’s part of America as well.” To the defense that it’s just the way things are, especially in radio, he gives a reply that might be derided by many in the ready-made terms that routinely pop up in such discussions these days. Bowie, who successfully crossed over into playing for black audiences on Soul Train in the mid-seventies, would have sneered at phrases like “SJW.” As he says in response to one young fan who ranted in a letter about “what he didn’t want to see” on MTV: “Well that’s his problem.”

The Peoria effect, says Bowie, “does seem to be rampant through American media. Should it not be a challenge to make the media far more integrated, especially, if anything, in musical terms?” The “lines are beginning to blur,” Goodman admits. At the end of that year, Michael Jackson’s John Landis-directed “Thriller” video debuted and “changed music videos forever,” breaking the primetime barriers for black artists on MTV, transforming the network “into a cultural behemoth,” as Swann writes, and giving the lie to the Peoria myth, one Bowie knew had little to do in actuality with the country’s culture or its tastes but with a narrow, archaic view of who the media should serve.

See Goodman’s full interview with Bowie just above.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

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

From roughly the mid-nineteen-fifties through the mid-nineteen-seventies, the availability of airtime on American television stations exceeded their capacity to fill it with high-quality original programming. This was especially true in the hours when relatively few viewers were awake to tune in, a condition that gave rise to the late-night movie show. Specializing in lesser Hollywood productions and the releases of by-then forgotten studios, these programs came to constitute home revival houses, and often eccentric ones. By its very nature, the repertoire of yesteryear’s “B movies” consisted mostly of genre pictures, and no genre proved as popular among this particular viewership as horror. Hence the eventual popularity of hosts like Vampira, Ghoulardi, and, later, the iconic Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

Widely recognized as having inspired generations of filmmakers, writers, and artists, the late-night movie show also provided ordinary viewers with glimpses of film history and culture they’d never get otherwise. And though its time may be long since over, you can still experience a version of it this Halloween, or on any other night, through sources like the Youtube playlist above.

It collects about 150 horror and suspense films that, whether frightening, kitschy, funny, or some combination of those qualities, could well have been locally broadcast to the willing insomniacs of 50, 60, 70 years ago. Revenge of the Zombies, The Monster Maker, Fangs of the Living Dead, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, Werewolf in a Girl’s Dormitory: with movies like these, the entertainment — and the enticement to stay tuned, no matter the hour — began right there in the title.

Not that this is a playlist of guilty pleasures alone. Silent pictures like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Golem, Nosferatu, and Häxan continue to be scrutinized by film-studies scholars as foundational to not just modern horror cinema but the visual language of cinema itself. However straitened their budgets, nineteen-sixties features like Carnival of Souls, Night of the Living Dead, The Innocents (a favorite of Martin Scorsese), and the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Masque of the Red Death are now credited with merits transcending their genre. But even the less retrospectively elevated likes of The Murder in the Museum, The Earth Dies Screaming, The Little Shop of Horrors, and The Psychopath luridly demonstrate that horror could be mixed with mystery, science fiction, comedy, and psychological drama. The power of that hybridity was what late-night movie shows impressed on their most discerning viewers — which is to say, their least discerning ones.

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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.

There’s a decent chance you’ve heard at least a couple of tracks from Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach. But when was the last time you put on Switched-On Rock, Switched-On Country, Switched-On Santa, or Switched-On Bacharach? More likely than not, you’ve never even heard of those other albums, which have nothing to do with Carlos and everything to do with the music-industry fad that her then-high-tech renditions of Bach set off in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies. That’s the subject of the new Bandsplaining video above, which covers the “awkward and glorious” releases that constituted the initial waves of electronic pop music.

Like so many cultural shifts, the rise of electronic pop took place thanks to a technological change. To be more specific, it was made possible by the invention of the voltage-controlled, modular synthesizer, itself dependent on two particular innovations. Voltage control permitted the pitch of the sounds being generated to be selected with a piano-style keyboard, a slide ribbon, a sequencer, or any other interface the creator’s electronics know-how would allow. In the context of synthesizers, a module is “a little box with an input and an output that did one thing and one thing only, either making a waveform or modifying it somehow,” as Robert Moog once described it, adding that multiple modules could be connected together with cables.

If the name Moog sounds familiar, that’s because the lines of synthesizers that bear it changed music forever. In fact, Carlos used an early Moog model to record Switched-On Bach, having custom-built it in collaboration with the inventor himself. Though the machine set up behind the Bach impersonator on that album’s cover may look unwieldy today, it represented a major improvement in convenience over the room-filling, musically unintuitive behemoths previously accessible only at certain universities and corporate R&D departments. So did the synthesizer invented by Don Buchla on the west coast, at about the same time Moog was building his on the east coast, though each man’s design expressed a different vision of how electronic instruments would adapt to music, or vice versa.

Indeed, up through at least the first few years of the seventies, it would’ve been impossible to say how or whether electronic sounds would find their place in mainstream records. The emergence of home hi-fi culture created a market for swinging “space age pop” by the likes of Les Baxter, Dick Hyman, and Juan Garcia Esquivel, the subject of Bandsplaining’s previous video. This one highlights such releases as Richard Hayman’s Genuine Electric Latin Love Machine and Gershon Kingsley’s Music to Moog By, whose track “Popcorn” would become a worldwide hit when re-recorded by Hot Butter in 1972, but not before the space-age composer Hyman got in on the action. “The Minotaur,” his piece of hypnotic psychedelia with an Indian drone and Greek melody, reached #38 on the Hot 100 57 years ago — and today, remains a thrilling eight-and-a-half-minute ride down one of the many roads electronic pop music didn’t take.

Related Content:

The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Hear Glenn Gould Celebrate the Moog Synthesizer & Wendy Carlos’ Pioneering Album Switched-On Bach (1968)

What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic Musician Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

How the Moog Synthesizer Changed the Sound of Music

Watch Composer Wendy Carlos Demo an Original Moog Synthesizer (1989)

The History of Electronic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Catalogues the Theremin, Fairlight & Other Instruments That Revolutionized Music

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.

What do Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, and Modest Mussorgsky have in common? They stand alone among their peers for their darkly humorous sensibilities, fascination with the grotesque, imaginative takes on cultural traditions, and a predisposition for the proto-surreal. Like the odd figure lurching through the first movement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, they are gnomic artists: enigmatic and ambiguous, given to the aphoristic in stories and tone poems of monstrous and marvelous beings. It’s easy to imagine the three of them, or their works at least, in cryptic conversation with each other.

We might imagine that conversation as we watch three works by these major European artists—all of which we’ve featured on the site before—animated via the painstaking pinscreen method pioneered by husband-and-wife, Russian-and-French duo Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker.

The two invented the technique in the 1930s. Dedicated to this extremely labor-intensive process, they made 6 short films over a period of 50 years, including adaptations of Kafka’s “Before the Law,” narrated by Orson Welles, Gogol’s “The Nose,” and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.

We know the Mussorgsky piece as a terrifying vignette from Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Seven years before that marriage of classical music and animation came out in 1940, Alexeieff and Parker released their version, at the top. Steve Stanchfield at Cartoon Research calls it “one of the most unusual and unique looking animated films ever created.” Its “delightful and at times horrifying imagery… challenge the viewer to comprehend both their meaning and the mystery of how they were created.” The same could be said of “The Nose” (1963), whose improvised soundtrack by Hai-Minh adds dramatic tension to the eerie animation.

Each of these films uses the same method, a handmade pinscreen device in which thousands of pins are pushed by hand outward and inward for each frame to create areas of light or dark. The pair intended to move beyond the flatness of conventional cel animation techniques and capture the depth and contrast of chiaroscuro. They achieved this through the most achingly slow process imaginable, yet “the illusion of dimensional drawing in animation has rarely been created better,” Stanchfield writes, not even in the most sophisticated computer-generated imagery.

Alexeieff and Parker’s “Before the Law,” from a parable in Kafka’s The Trial, takes a picture-book approach to the animation that would reward younger viewers. Welles’ narration anchors the production with even more than his usual gravitas. In 1972, they returned to Mussorgsky, in the short Pictures at an Exhibition, above. Here, after a prologue in French and the stylizations of the opening Prelude, the figure of “The Gnome” appears, a translucent homunculus hatching from an egg and dancing across the piano keys. I like to think Mussorgsky, Kafka, and Gogol would find this imagery irresistible.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.

Related Content: 

Kafka’s Parable “Before the Law” Narrated by Orson Welles & Illustrated with Pinscreen Art

Night on Bald Mountain: An Eery, Avant-Garde Pinscreen Animation Based on Mussorgsky’s Masterpiece

Nikolai Gogol’s Classic Story, “The Nose,” Animated With the Astonishing Pinscreen Technique (1963)

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

To get a sense of Sagrada Família’s popularity with YouTubers, you have only to take a look at the related Open Culture posts linked below. As will hardly escape your attention, most subjects that consistently draw the attention of the GoPro class are not nineteenth-century Catholic churches. But Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece, whose construction alone has survived him by a century now, transcends many boundaries of intellectual and cultural interest: history channels feature it, travel channels feature it, religious channels feature it, and, of course, architecture channels feature it. Most recently, Sagrada Família has appeared on The B1M, which is all about construction — the more ambitious, the better.

We’ve previously posted B1M videos on the Flatiron Building, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the extraterrestrially curving work of Zaha Hadid, and every generation of New York skyscraper. That selection only hints at the range of structures to which the channel’s creator Fred Mills has paid close attention, and yet it’s Sagrada Família that puts him at a loss. “There’s parts of this building where you can’t help but describe what you’re seeing,” he says as he stands in its stained glass-illuminated central nave. “There’s other moments where you don’t have the words; it’s just emotion.” Entering it feels, as he describes it, “less like you’re standing inside a building, and more like you’ve been transported to the threshold of heaven itself.”

How does Sagrada Família create this experience for its visitors, even in its incomplete state? Some will credit divine inspiration; others, Gaudí’s sheer architectural genius. Mills seeks out more concrete forms of explanation, right down to the very blocks of stone used to build its towers. Granted much more access than ordinary tourists, who now come at a rate of about 1,500 per hour, he goes all the way up to see the massive cross assembled on the church’s pinnacle, and all the way down to the basement workshop where intricate models test the myriad possible ways to realize Gaudí’s vision. For when he died in 1926, having been hit by a tram, the plans he left behind didn’t exactly explain all the details about how to finish what resembled no other building ever erected, religious or otherwise.

As Mills points out, subsequently developed technologies have helped keep Sagrada Família’s now 144-year-long construction proceeding apace. And though great celebration attended the topping-out of its central tower high above the streets of Barcelona this past February, more work remains to be done. Completing its interior, roofs, and side chapels, as well as the grand façade with its main entrance, should take another decade, depending on how the relevant disputes involving local residents and the city council play out. Still, it seems likely indeed that Sagrada Família will finally be finished within our lifetimes, which makes for the kind of drama that will keep attracting both large- and small-time documentarians. “I’m not sure we’re ever going to see anything else quite like it,” Mills says, which hints at another reason for all the content-creator fascination: though it may well be completed in our age, Sagrada Família could hardly be less of our age.

Related Content:

An Architectural Tour of Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s Audacious Church That’s Been Under Construction for 142 Years

The Incredible Engineering of Antonio Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia, the 137 Year Construction Project

The Japanese Sculptor Who Dedicated His Life to Finishing Gaudí’s Magnum Opus, the Sagrada Família

The Longest Construction Projects in History: Why Sagrada Família, the Milan Duomo, Greek Temples & Other Famous Structures Took Generations to Complete

How Designing Buildings Upside-Down Revolutionized Architecture, Making Possible St. Paul’s Cathedral, Sagrada Família & More

LEGO Lets You Build Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Its Largest Set Ever

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.

Maybe it’s the cloistered headiness of Rene Descartes, or the rigorous austerity of Isaac Newton; maybe it’s all the leathern breeches, gray waistcoats, sallow faces, and powdered wigs… but we tend not to associate Enlightenment Europe with an explosion of color theory. Yet philosophers of the late 17th and 18th centuries were obsessed with light and sight. Descartes wrote a treatise on optics, as did Newton.

Newton first described in his 1672 paper the “revolutionary new theory of light and colour,” the University of Cambridge Whipple Library writes, “in which he claimed that experiments with prisms proved that white light was comprised of light of seven distinct colours.” Scientists debated Newton’s theory “well into the 19th century.”

One early opponent famously illustrated his rebuttal. Poet, writer, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published Theory of Colors (see here), with its carefully hand-drawn and colored diagrams and wheels, in 1810. From Newton’s time onward, color theorists elaborated prevailing concepts with color wheels, the first attributed to Newton in 1704 (and drawn in black and white, above).

Newton’s wheel “arranged red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet into a natural progression on a rotating disk.” A few years later, two color circles—one with 7 colors and another with 12—appeared in a painting manual attributed to Claude Boutet (top), based on Newton’s theories. Artists, chemists, mapmakers, poets, even entomologists… everyone seemed to have a pet theory of color, generally accompanied by elaborate colored charts and diagrams.

The color wheel was one among many forms—which often presented contrasting theories, like that of Jacques-Fabien Gautier, who argued that black and white were primary colors. But the wheel, and Newton’s basic ideas about it, have endured almost unchanged. The wheel further up (third one from top) by British entomologist Moses Harris from 1766 shows Newton’s 7‑color scheme simplified to the 6 primary and secondary colors we usually see, arranged in the complementary and analogous scheme, with tertiary gradations between them. Another entomologist, Ignaz Schiffermüller, drew the 12-color wheel right above.

Color is always representative. Newton’s original wheel included “musical notes correlated with color.” By the end of the 18th century, color theory had become increasingly tied to psychological theories and typologies, as in the wheel above, the “rose of temperaments,” made by Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in 1799 to illustrate “human occupations and character traits,” the Public Domain Review notes, including “tyrants, heroes, adventurers, hedonists, lovers, poets, public speakers, historians, teachers, philosophers, pedants, rulers,” grouped into the four temperaments of humoral theory.

It’s a fairly short leap from these psychologies of color to those used by advertisers and commercial designers in the 20th century—or from the artists and scientists’ color theories to abstract expressionism, the Bauhaus school, and the chemists and photographers who recreated the colors of the world on film. (Goethe’s color wheel, below, from Theory of Colors, illustrates his chapter on “Allegorical, symbolic, and mystical use of colour.”) See more early color wheels, like Philipp Otto Runge’s 1810 Farbenkugel, as well as other conceptual color schemes, at the Public Domain Review.

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

Related Content:

The Woman Who Theorized Color: An Introduction to Mary Gartside’s New Theory of Colours (1808)

A 900-Page Pre-Pantone Guide to Color from 1692: A Complete High-Resolution Digital Scan

Goethe’s Theory of Colors: The 1810 Treatise That Inspired Kandinsky & Early Abstract Painting

How Technicolor Revolutionized Cinema with Surreal, Electric Colors & Changed How We See Our World

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

Even now, in this age when the very reading of literature is endangered — or so the articles tell us — Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) retains a notable ability to pick up new admirers. But even though he may have a decent readership by the standards of French novelists who died in the middle of the nineteenth century, one does wonder whether he still inspires the kind of devotion embodied by William Hobart Royce. A Brooklyn bookseller’s assistant first introduced to Les Cent Contes drolatiques as an impressionable (and duly scandalized) teenager on a trip to England, Royce became not just the early twentieth century’s foremost American expert on Balzac, but also a kind of clone of the man himself, right down to his appearance.

“In their long association, Royce has contracted several habits from Balzac,” writes the New Yorker’s Alva Johnston in a 1933 profile. “When working late at night or early in the morning, he combats fatigue, as Balzac did, by taking snuff, smoking Latakia tobacco, and drinking enormous quantities of coffee. These are not mere whims or idol-worshipping ceremonies on the part of Royce; they are practices which he adopted from Balzac after testing them and convincing himself that they were sound.”

Balzac himself explains the importance of these substances to the writing life — nothing less, to his mind, than life itself — in “Traité des excitants modernes,” or “Treatise on Modern Stimulants,” an essay he appended to Physiologie du goût, the celebrated text by the lawyer-politician-gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.

Known for drinking his own custom blend of beans from Martinique, coffee from Bourbon (now known as Réunion Island), and Mokha from the pot pictured above, Balzac also recommends to his fellow “men of excessive vigor” a “horrible, rather brutal method” involving “finely pulverized, dense coffee” prepared with as little water as possible and consumed on an empty stomach. In response, he promises in this partial English translation of the essay, “ideas quick march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up.”

In the case of Balzac, who created thousands of characters and deployed them across his body of work, that charge could have been a fearsome sight indeed. Yet he proved equal to it night after writing night, sitting down to his desk some time between midnight and 2:00 a.m., then producing manuscript pages with his quill at a typewriter’s pace until morning. After a nap, more work followed until 4:00 or so in the afternoon; soon thereafter would come an early-evening dinner, and thus the cycle would repeat. A commonly cited figure holds that Balzac drank as many as 50 cups of coffee per day, which even the most proudly caffeine-hooked laptop jockey today would struggle to touch. Nor would it be advisable to try, given that Balzac’s formidable coffee habit may have contributed to his death at age 51 — but then, it certainly played a part in the productivity that ensured his immortalité.

Related content:

Honoré de Balzac Writes About “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee,” and His Epic Coffee Addiction

Paul Giamatti Plays Honoré de Balzac, Hopped Up on 50 Coffees Per Day

Is Coffee Good for You?: A Coffee Connoisseur Reviews the Scientific Research

Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

The Case for Writing in Coffee Shops: Why Malcolm Gladwell Does It, and You Should Too

How Coffee Affects Your Brain: A Very Quick Primer

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.