Animated Maps Reveal the True Size of Countries (and Show How Traditional Maps Distort Our World)

The world maps we know all mis­rep­re­sent the world itself: we’ve all heard it many times before, but how well do we under­stand the nature of that mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion? “For many peo­ple, the Earth as they know it is heav­i­ly informed by the Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion – a tool used for nau­ti­cal nav­i­ga­tion that even­tu­al­ly became the world’s most wide­ly rec­og­nized map,” writes Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist’s Nick Rout­ley. But the Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion dates to 1569, and “the vast major­i­ty of us aren’t using paper maps to chart our course across the ocean any­more, so crit­ics of the Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion argue that the con­tin­ued use of this style of map gives users a warped sense of the true size of coun­tries.”

Some of the geo­graph­i­cal mis­con­cep­tions Ger­ar­dus Mer­ca­tor inad­ver­tent­ly instilled in human­i­ty to this day include exag­ger­a­tions of the size of Europe and North Amer­i­ca. “Visu­al­ly speak­ing, Cana­da and Rus­sia appear to take up approx­i­mate­ly 25% of the Earth’s sur­face” on a Mer­ca­tor map, “when in real­i­ty they occu­py a mere 5%.”

Fig­ures are one thing, but a fair few 21st cen­tu­ry car­tog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts have also used tech­nol­o­gy unavail­able and indeed unimag­in­able in Mer­ca­tor’s day to show us in a more imme­di­ate­ly leg­i­ble way exact­ly how his pro­jec­tion dis­torts land mass­es. Recent­ly, a cli­mate data sci­en­tist named Neil Kaye has used the form of the ani­mat­ed GIF to show what hap­pens when coun­tries shrink to their actu­al size on a Mer­ca­tor map, and when Mex­i­co and Green­land trade places.

As soon as Mex­i­co goes north and Green­land goes south, it becomes obvi­ous that both are real­ly of a sim­i­lar size, though we might have assumed the lat­ter to be much larg­er than the for­mer. And in fact, Mer­ca­tor pro­jec­tion makes all coun­tries far­ther from the equa­tor look larg­er in rela­tion to all coun­tries near­er to the equa­tor. We’ve point­ed out the impos­si­bil­i­ty of mak­ing a per­fect­ly faith­ful two-dimen­sion­al world map before here before on Open Cul­ture, an impos­si­bil­i­ty that has­n’t stopped car­tog­ra­phers from try­ing to come up with more and more accu­rate pro­jec­tions. But even they can’t sub­sti­tute for an acute aware­ness of how even the most pop­u­lar maps can be wrong, an aware­ness you can devel­op even more inten­sive­ly by view­ing the many oth­er car­to­graph­ic cre­ations Kaye has post­ed to the “Map Porn” sub­red­dit — anoth­er tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment Mer­ca­tor sure­ly could­n’t have fore­seen.

via Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The “True Size” Maps Shows You the Real Size of Every Coun­try (and Will Change Your Men­tal Pic­ture of the World)

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, the “Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever,” Now Free Online

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

A Rad­i­cal Map Puts the Oceans – Not Land – at the Cen­ter of Plan­et Earth (1942)

Why Mak­ing Accu­rate World Maps Is Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly Impos­si­ble

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Ten Greatest Films of All Time According to 358 Filmmakers

Every ten years, film jour­nal Sight and Sound con­ducts a world­wide sur­vey of film crit­ics to decide which films are con­sid­ered the best ever made. Start­ed in 1952, the poll is now wide­ly regard­ed as the most impor­tant and respect­ed out there.

And the crit­i­cal con­sen­sus for a long time was that the mas­ter­piece Cit­i­zen Kane by Orson Welles is the best of the best. The film topped the list for five decades from 1962 until 2002. Then in 2012, per­haps out of Kane fatigue, Alfred Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go mus­cled its way to the top.

That’s what the crit­ics think. But what about the film­mak­ers?

Begin­ning in 1992, Sight and Sound start­ed to poll famed direc­tors about their opin­ions. Peo­ple like Mar­tin Scors­ese, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, Mike Leigh and Michael Mann. So what is the best movie ever made accord­ing to 358 direc­tors polled in 2012? Kane? Ver­ti­go? Per­haps Jean Renoir’s bril­liant Rules of the Game, the only movie to appear in the top ten for all sev­en crit­ics polls? No.

Tokyo_Monogatari_1953

Instead, the top prize goes to Yasu­jiro Ozu’s Tokyo Sto­ry.

It’s a sur­pris­ing, an enlight­ened, choice. Ozu’s work is miles away from the flash of Kane and the psy­cho­sex­u­al weird­ness of Ver­ti­go. Tokyo Sto­ry is a gen­tle, nuanced por­trait of a fam­i­ly whose bonds are slow­ly, inex­orably being frayed by the demands of mod­ern­iza­tion. The movie’s emo­tion­al pow­er is restrained and cumu­la­tive; by the final cred­its you’ll be over­whelmed both with a Bud­dhist sense of the imper­ma­nence of all things and a strong urge to call your moth­er.

But per­haps the rea­son film­mak­ers picked Tokyo Sto­ry of all the oth­er cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­pieces out there is because of Ozu’s unique approach to film. Since the days of D. W. Grif­fith, almost every film­mak­er under the sun, even cin­e­mat­ic rebels like Jean-Luc Godard, fol­lowed some basic con­ven­tions of the form like con­ti­nu­ity edit­ing, the 180-degree rule and match­ing eye­lines. Ozu dis­card­ed all of that. Instead, he con­struct­ed a high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage revolv­ing around match cuts and rig­or­ous­ly com­posed shots. His film form was rad­i­cal but his sto­ries were uni­ver­sal. That is the para­dox of Ozu. You can see the trail­er of the movie above.

Cit­i­zen Kane does make num­ber two on the list but the film is tied with anoth­er for­mal­ly rig­or­ous mas­ter­piece – Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Next on the list is per­haps the best movie ever about mak­ing a movie – Fed­eri­co Fellini’s 8 ½. And Ozu’s film might be num­ber one, but Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la is the only film­mak­er to have two movies on the list – The God­fa­ther and Apoc­a­lypse Now. And that’s no mean feat.

You can see the full list below:

1. Tokyo Sto­ry — Yasu­jiro Ozu (1953)
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey – Stan­ley Kubrick (1968)
3. Cit­i­zen Kane – Orson Welles (1941)
4. 8 ½ — Fed­eri­co Felli­ni (1963)
5. Taxi Dri­ver – Mar­tin Scors­ese (1976)
6. Apoc­a­lypse Now – Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la (1979)
7. The God­fa­ther – Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la (1972)
8. Ver­ti­go – Alfred Hitch­cock (1958)
9. Mir­ror – Andrei Tarkovsky (1974)
10. Bicy­cle Thieves – Vit­to­rio De Sica (1949)

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

The 10 Great­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 Top Authors (Down­load Them for Free)

What Makes Yasu­jirō Ozu a Great Film­mak­er? New Video Essay Explains His Long-Admired Cin­e­mat­ic Style

The 10 Great­est Films of All Time Accord­ing to 846 Film Crit­ics

60 Free Film Noir Movies

The Top 100 Amer­i­can Films of All Time, Accord­ing to 62 Inter­na­tion­al Film Crit­ics

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preser­va­tion)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

An Animated Introduction to H.P. Lovecraft and How He Invented a New Gothic Horror

Howard Phillips Love­craft died in obscu­ri­ty at the age of 46, but he left behind a body of work for­mi­da­ble enough that even today’s read­ers approach it only with great trep­i­da­tion. They do so not so much because of its size, though Love­craft did man­age to write a fair bit, but because of what it dares to con­tem­plate — or rather, because of its deep roots in the things mere humans dare not con­tem­plate. Born in 1890, Love­craft grew up on hor­ror of the Goth­ic vari­ety. But by the time he began writ­ing his own in the year 1919, “World War I had cast a long shad­ow over the arts. Peo­ple had seen real hor­rors, and were no longer fright­ened of fan­tas­ti­cal folk­lore. Love­craft sought to invent a new kind of ter­ror, one that respond­ed to the rapid sci­en­tif­ic progress of the era.”

Those words come from the TED-Ed les­son above, “Titan of Ter­ror: the Dark Imag­i­na­tion of H.P. Love­craft.” Writ­ten and nar­rat­ed by Sil­via Moreno-Gar­cía, a writer of sci­ence fic­tion and edi­tor of sev­er­al books on Love­craft’s work, the video offers a four-minute primer on how this “weird fic­tion” per­ma­nent­ly upped the ante for all writ­ers who sought to instill fear and dread into the hearts of their read­ers.

“Like then-recent dis­cov­er­ies of sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles or X‑rays,” Moreno-Gar­cía says, “the forces in Love­craft’s fic­tion were pow­er­ful, yet often invis­i­ble and inde­scrib­able. Rather than rec­og­niz­able mon­sters, graph­ic vio­lence, or star­tling shocks, the ter­ror or ‘Love­craft­ian’ hor­ror lies in what’s not direct­ly por­trayed — but instead left to the dark depths of our imag­i­na­tion.”

Hence the cast of unspeak­able “dark mas­ters” beneath the placid New Eng­land sur­face of Love­craft’s sto­ries. Yog-Sothoth, “who froths as pri­mal slime in nuclear chaos beyond the nether­most out­posts of space and time”; “the blind, idiot god Aza­thoth, whose destruc­tive impuls­es are stalled only by the ‘mad­den­ing beat­ing of vile drums and the thin monot­o­nous whine of accursed flutes’ ”; and of course Love­craft’s “infa­mous blend of drag­on and octo­pus, Cthul­hu”: even those who have nev­er read Love­craft may well have heard of them. And as any­one who has read Love­craft knows, we who have only heard of them, these beings “who exist beyond our con­cep­tions of real­i­ty, their true forms as inscrutable as their motives,” should count them­selves lucky — far luck­i­er, cer­tain­ly, than the humans Love­craft puts face-to-face with them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

H.P. Lovecraft’s Mon­ster Draw­ings: Cthul­hu & Oth­er Crea­tures from the “Bound­less and Hideous Unknown”

H.P. Love­craft Gives Five Tips for Writ­ing a Hor­ror Sto­ry, or Any Piece of “Weird Fic­tion”

H.P. Love­craft High­lights the 20 “Types of Mis­takes” Young Writ­ers Make

H.P. Love­craft Writes “Waste Paper: A Poem of Pro­found Insignif­i­cance,” a Dev­as­tat­ing Par­o­dy of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1923)

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A Short Animated Film Explores the Fluidity of Gender in the Thought of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler

In hind­sight, it seems like a very dif­fer­ent world when I first read Judith Butler’s Gen­der Trou­ble in col­lege in the 90s. (Mash togeth­er all your stereo­types about col­lege cam­pus­es in the 90s and you’ve pret­ty much got the pic­ture.) For one thing, colum­nists in major nation­al news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines weren’t writ­ing con­tro­ver­sial, or sim­ply explana­to­ry, arti­cles about gen­der flu­id­i­ty. The con­cept did not exist in the main­stream press. It seemed both hip and rar­i­fied, con­fined to the­o­ry dis­cus­sion groups, aca­d­e­m­ic sem­i­nars, and punk zines.

As rad­i­cal as Butler’s ideas about gen­der seemed, she acknowl­edged that she did not orig­i­nate the cri­tique. She found it first artic­u­lat­ed in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Sec­ond Sex, in which the French exis­ten­tial­ist fem­i­nist wrote, “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one.”

In the short film above, Devenir (To Become), by French film­mak­er Géral­dine Char­p­en­tier-Basille, But­ler describes her reac­tion to read­ing the pas­sage. “I wrote some­thing about this prob­lem of becom­ing. And I want­ed to know: does one ever become one? Or is that to be a woman is a mode of becom­ing… that has no goal…. You could say the same of gen­der more gen­er­al­ly.”

As the images illus­trat­ing this extract from a 2006 inter­view with But­ler show, the goal­posts of fem­i­nine and mas­cu­line iden­ti­ties move all the time, from year to year, from cul­ture to cul­ture. Gen­der is a pas­tiche of rep­re­sen­ta­tions we inhab­it. It is pro­duced, per­for­ma­tive, But­ler thought, but we can nev­er get it “right” because there is no true ref­er­ent. The idea descends from the exis­ten­tial­ist insights of de Beau­voir, who wrote about and dra­ma­tized sim­i­lar prob­lems of the per­son­al and social self.

De Beau­voir extend­ed Sartre’s claim that “exis­tence pre­cedes essence” in her pio­neer­ing fem­i­nist work—we come into the world, then acquire iden­ti­ties through accul­tur­a­tion, social con­di­tion­ing, and coer­cion. But­ler extend­ed the argu­ment fur­ther. “For her, writes Aeon’s Will Frak­er, “gen­der wasn’t pre­de­ter­mined by nature or biol­o­gy, nor was it sim­ply ‘made up’ by cul­ture. Rather, But­ler insist­ed that gen­der resides in repeat­ed words and actions, words and actions that both shape and are shaped by the bod­ies of real, flesh-and-blood human beings. And cru­cial­ly, such rep­e­ti­tions are rarely per­formed freely.”

From our ear­li­est years, we are trained how to behave as a gen­der, just as we are taught to per­form oth­er identities—trained by the expec­ta­tions of par­ents, teach­ers, reli­gious lead­ers, adver­tis­ers, and the bul­ly­ing and social pres­sure of our peers. Hear But­ler explain fur­ther how gen­der, in her the­o­ry, func­tions as “a phe­nom­e­non that is pro­duced and is being repro­duced all the time…. Nobody real­ly is a gen­der from the start. I know it’s con­tro­ver­sial,” she says. “But that’s my claim.” It is one that pos­es com­pli­cat­ed ques­tions more broad­ly, notes Aeon, about “the pur­suit of the ‘authen­tic’ self” as a mean­ing­ful idea—questions West­ern philoso­phers have been ask­ing for well over half a cen­tu­ry.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The­o­rist Judith But­ler Explains How Behav­ior Cre­ates Gen­der: A Short Intro­duc­tion to “Gen­der Per­for­ma­tiv­i­ty”

Judy!: 1993 Judith But­ler Fanzine Gives Us An Irrev­er­ent Punk-Rock Take on the Post-Struc­tural­ist Gen­der The­o­rist

Simone de Beau­voir Explains “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in a Rare TV Inter­view (1975)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Stream Free Online 200 Films from Tribeca Film Festivals

FYI: The Tribeca Film Fes­ti­val is get­ting under­way today. And to mark the occa­sion, Kanopy is show­cas­ing a line­up of 200 titles from past fes­ti­vals and let­ting you stream them free online. Kanopy writes:

Kanopy’s selec­tion of Tribeca Film Fes­ti­val titles includes recent fes­ti­val favorites The Lovers, star­ring Debra Winger (An Offi­cer and a Gen­tle­man) & Tra­cy Letts (Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf?), and Back Roads star­ring Alex Pet­tyfer (Storm­break­er) and  Jen­nifer Mor­ri­son (House). A selec­tion of dynam­ic doc­u­men­taries such as Dior and I and Plan­et of Snail is avail­able along­side films with unfor­get­table female per­for­mances includ­ing Woman Walks Ahead, star­ring Jes­si­ca Chas­tain (Zero Dark Thir­ty) and Oscar-award win­ning short film The Phone Call, star­ring Sal­ly Hawkins (The Shape of Water). Sev­er­al Tribeca-win­ning films includ­ing the 2015 Best Direc­tor win­ner About Elly and the 2017 Audi­ence Award for Best Nar­ra­tive Film, The Divine Order are also avail­able.

You can find a com­plete list of Tribeca films here. As you may know, Kanopy offers a large col­lec­tion of award-win­ning films and doc­u­men­taries that are free to mem­bers of par­tic­i­pat­ing libraries. To see if your library is a par­tic­i­pat­ing mem­ber, vis­it this page on the Kanopy web­site.

Beyond the 200 films fea­tured in the Tribeca col­lec­tion, there are cur­rent­ly 30,000 films on the Kanopy ser­vice. Enjoy the shows.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

 

 

Freddie Mercury Reimagined as Comic Book Heroes

Pop cul­ture thrives on super­heroes, both fic­tion­al and real. This isn’t unique in human his­to­ry. Read most any col­lec­tion of ancient myth and lit­er­a­ture and you’ll find the same. The demigods and chief­tains beat­ing their chests and talk­ing trash in the Ili­ad, for exam­ple, remind me of macho pro­fes­sion­al wrestlers or char­ac­ters in the Mar­vel and DC uni­vers­es, cul­tur­al arti­facts indebt­ed in their var­i­ous ways to clas­si­cal leg­ends. One thread runs through all of the epic tales of heroes and hero­ines: a seem­ing need to immor­tal­ize peo­ple who embody the qual­i­ties we most desire. Heroes may suf­fer for their trag­ic flaws, but that’s the price they pay for uni­ver­sal acclaim or an iron throne.

The traits ascribed to late modernity’s fic­tion­al heroes haven’t changed over­much from the dis­tant past—power, wit, agili­ty, per­sis­tence, anger issues, spicy, com­pli­cat­ed love lives…. But when it comes to the real peo­ple we admire—the celebri­ties who get the super­hero treatment—creativity, style, and musi­cal tal­ent top the list. Why not?

David Bowie’s larg­er-than-life per­sonas sure­ly deserve to live on, trans­mit­ted not only via his music but by way of his posthu­mous trans­for­ma­tion into a series of pulp and com­ic heroes as imag­ined by screen­writer and design­er Todd Alcott, who has giv­en the same treat­ment to beloved musi­cal char­ac­ters like Prince and Bob Dylan.

Per­form­ing a sim­i­lar ser­vice for Fred­die Mer­cury, Brazil­ian artist Butch­er Bil­ly sat­is­fies the cul­tur­al crav­ing for demigods in his immor­tal­iza­tion of Fred­die Mer­cury as var­i­ous heroes like The Hulk, Super­man, and Shaz­am (or “Flash”); a con­tender for the Iron Throne; and him­self: rid­ing on Darth Vader’s shoul­ders, break­ing free in house­wife drag, and sport­ing Bowie’s Aladdin Sane light­ning bolt. What are the super­pow­ers of these super-Fred­dies? The usu­al smash­ing, punch­ing, and fly­ing, it seems, but also the essen­tials of his real-life power—an impos­si­bly big per­son­al­i­ty, huge stage pres­ence, per­son­al mag­net­ism, and a god­like force of a voice.

Add to these char­ac­ter­is­tics a unique tal­ent for writ­ing  lyrics punchi­er than your favorite Twit­ter feed, and we have the mak­ings of a mod­ern epic giant with abil­i­ties that seemed to sur­pass those of mere mor­tals, with the swag­ger and ego to match. This trib­ute to Mer­cury is unabashed hero wor­ship, turn­ing the singer into an arche­type. In the sim­ple, bold, col­or­ful lines of com­ic cov­er art we might just see that there’s a Fred­die Mer­cury in all of us, want­i­ng to break free, pump a fist in the air, and belt out our biggest feel­ings in cap­i­tal let­ters and giant excla­ma­tion marks.

See more “Plan­et Mer­cury Comics” below and at Butch­er Bil­ly’s Behance site.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

Clas­sic Songs by Bob Dylan Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” & More

Scenes from Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Com­pared to Real Life: A 21-Minute Com­pi­la­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in Vintage Recordings from the Early 1950s

J.R.R. Tolkien was not a big fan of his fan­dom. He had seri­ous doubts about whether any of the mil­lions of read­ers who adored The Hob­bit and The Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy under­stood any­thing about what he was try­ing to do. But none of them can be blamed, since he didn’t at first set out to write fic­tion at all—at least not when it came to The Lord of the Rings. The books, he said, were “an attempt to cre­ate a world in which a form of lan­guage agree­able to my per­son­al aes­thet­ic might seem real.”

The most famous fan­ta­sy series of all time began its life as a lin­guis­tic exper­i­ment, in oth­er words. “The inven­tion of lan­guages is the foun­da­tion,” said Tolkien. “The ‘sto­ries’ were made rather to pro­vide a world for the lan­guages than the reverse.” Of course, Tolkien fans know quite a bit about how per­son­al his sto­ries became, even as they incor­po­rat­ed more and more myth­i­cal ele­ments. How could we pos­si­bly under­stand these sto­ries the way Tolkien did?

Authors do not get to choose their read­ers, nor can they direct the inter­pre­ta­tions of their work. Still Tolkien may have been more mis­un­der­stood than oth­ers, and maybe more enti­tled to com­plain. The schol­ar­ly work of philol­o­gists like himself—academics who stud­ied the roots of lan­guages and mythologies—had been man­gled and mis­used by the Nazis. The fact caused Tolkien to con­fess to his son “a burn­ing pri­vate grudge against that rud­dy lit­tle igno­ra­mus Adolf Hitler” for “ruin­ing, per­vert­ing, mis­ap­ply­ing, and mak­ing for ever accursed” the his­to­ry Tolkien had made his life’s work. (He also penned a scathing reply to a Ger­man pub­lish­er who asked him for proof of his “Aryan” descent.)

He would also have been appalled that not long after his death, Mid­dle Earth became a “mer­chan­dis­ing jug­ger­naut,” as one stu­dent of his effect on pop­u­lar cul­ture puts it. Tolkien had stren­u­ous­ly resist­ed efforts by Dis­ney to buy the rights to his fic­tion, object­ing to what he saw as vul­gar, mer­ce­nary com­mer­cial­ism. The hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars poured into the Hob­bit and Lord of the Rings films, and the empire of games, action fig­ures, t‑shirts, etc., might have seemed to him the very image of pow­er-mad wiz­ard Saruman’s designs for world dom­i­na­tion.

This isn’t to say we should hear Tolkien scold­ing us as we pick up our box set of spe­cial edi­tion books, Blu-Rays, and LOTR tchotchkes. He was no stranger to mar­ket­ing. And he pro­duced the inspi­ra­tion for some of the most beloved adap­ta­tions with his own cov­er art designs and over a hun­dred draw­ings and paint­ings of Mid­dle Earth and its Eng­lish ref­er­ents. But per­haps it would repay fans of the many LOTR-themed con­sum­ables to attend to the cre­ator of the now-self-exis­tent world of Mid­dle Earth every now and then—to get clos­er, if not to Tolkien’s inten­tions, then at least to his mind and voice, both record­ed in his let­ters and his own read­ings from his work.

In the clips here, you can lis­ten to Tolkien him­self read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit, includ­ing a record­ing at the top of him read­ing one of the fan­ta­sy lan­guages he invent­ed, then cre­at­ed an entire world around, the Elvish tongue Quenya in the poem “Namarie.” Some of these YouTube clips have received their own cin­e­mat­ic treat­ment, in a YouTube sort of way, like the video below with a mon­tage of Tolkien-inspired media and a dra­mat­ic score. This may or may not be to your lik­ing, but the ori­gin sto­ry of the record­ing deserves a men­tion.

Shown a tape recorder by a friend, whom Tolkien had vis­it­ed to pick up a man­u­script of The Lord of the Rings, the author decid­ed to sit down and record him­self. Delight­ed with the results, he agreed to read from The Hob­bit. He liked the tech­nol­o­gy enough that he con­tin­ued to record him­self read­ing from his own work. Tolkien may not have desired to see his books turned into spec­ta­cles, but as we lis­ten to him read, it’s hard to see how any­one could resist the temp­ta­tion to put his mag­nif­i­cent descrip­tions on the big screen. Hear the sec­ond part of that Hob­bit read­ing here, and more Tolkien read­ings in the many links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

J.R.R. Tolkien, Using a Tape Recorder for the First Time, Reads from The Hob­bit for 30 Min­utes (1952)

Lis­ten to J.R.R. Tolkien Read Poems from The Fel­low­ship of the Ring, in Elvish and Eng­lish (1952)

J.R.R. Tolkien Reads From The Two Tow­ers, the Sec­ond Book of The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read From The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit

J.R.R. Tolkien Expressed a “Heart­felt Loathing” for Walt Dis­ney and Refused to Let Dis­ney Stu­dios Adapt His Work

J.R.R. Tolkien Snubs a Ger­man Pub­lish­er Ask­ing for Proof of His “Aryan Descent” (1938)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Hear Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky” Played on the Theremin

Pink Floyd is sure­ly the most quotable of psych-rock and pro­gres­sive bands. Every­one, no mat­ter their musi­cal tastes, knows lines like “we don’t need no edu­ca­tion, we don’t need no thought con­trol,” “I have become com­fort­ably numb,” and “we’re just two lost souls swim­ming in a fish bowl, year after year.”

The band’s first album with Syd Bar­rett was full of word­play and whim­sy. Lat­er song­writ­ing cut right to the heart of things, with razor-sharp obser­va­tions, heart­break­ing state­ments, sneer­ing jibes, and stri­dent pro­nounce­ments. In their finest iter­a­tions, they were a band with some­thing to say.

These qual­i­ties make it all the more strik­ing that one of their most mov­ing com­po­si­tions is a song with­out any words, unless we count the vocal sam­ples at the begin­ning from writer Mal­colm Mug­geridge. Smack in the mid­dle of Dark Side of the Moon, “The Great Gig in the Sky” show­cas­es a soul­ful impro­vi­sa­tion by guest vocal­ist Clare Tor­ry (who final­ly, right­ful­ly, received a writ­ing cred­it in 2004). Her voice pro­vides all the dra­mat­ic ten­sion the song needs, com­mu­ni­cat­ing more, in pure­ly emo­tion­al terms, than any lyric the band might have writ­ten.

Does the effect come through when her per­for­mance is replayed on a Theremin? You be the judge. The song made famous by its word­less inten­si­ty meets an instru­ment played with­out any touch—it’s a poet­ic kind of mashup, and a well-exe­cut­ed cov­er. Theremin play­er Char­lie Drap­er doesn’t only play Torry’s vocal, but also David Gilmour’s ped­al steel gui­tar parts, which are prob­a­bly bet­ter suit­ed to the instru­ment. As an added bonus, he plays over one of the ear­li­er instru­men­tal demos of the song with sam­ples from Apol­lo 17 astro­nauts, adding a few more words that serve only as more atmos­phere behind the melody.

The Theremin is often pegged as a nov­el­ty instru­ment, defin­ing the sound of B‑movie sci-fi, but it has a long and dis­tin­guished his­to­ry. First called the Ether­phone by Russ­ian inven­tor Leon Theremin, it became the pas­sion­ate instru­ment of choice for clas­si­cal play­er Clara Rock­more in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry. A sort of mini-Theremin revival has brought it back into promi­nence as a seri­ous inter­preter of clas­si­cal and mod­ern music. On his YouTube chan­nel, Drap­er demon­strates his appre­ci­a­tion for the Theremin’s range, play­ing Mozart, Grieg, Gersh­win, and the theme from the film First Man. Just above, Hank Green tells us all about the physics of the Theremin, in a SciShow crash course that could answer many of the ques­tions you might have had while watch­ing Drap­er play Pink Floyd on one.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear How Clare Torry’s Vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Made the Song Go from Pret­ty Good to Down­right Great

Watch Jim­my Page Rock the Theremin, the Ear­ly Sovi­et Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment, in Some Hyp­not­ic Live Per­for­mances

Meet Clara Rock­more, the Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Musi­cian Who First Rocked the Theremin in the Ear­ly 1920s

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

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