A Digital Archive Features Hundreds of Audio Cassette Tape Designs, from the 1960s to the 1990s

in Archives, History, Music, Technology | September 4th, 2024

Audio cas­sette tapes first appeared on the mar­ket in the ear­ly nine­teen-six­ties, but it would take about a decade before they came to dom­i­nate it. And when they did, they’d changed the lives of many a music-lover by hav­ing made it pos­si­ble not just to lis­ten to their albums of choice on the go, but also to col­lect and trade their own cus­tom-assem­bled lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences. By the eight­ies, blank tapes had become a house­hold neces­si­ty on the order of bat­ter­ies or toi­let paper for such con­sumers — and just as with those fre­quent­ly replen­ished prod­ucts, every­one seemed to have their favorite brand.


Some pre­ferred tapes from Philips, which devel­oped the for­mat of the Com­pact Cas­sette in the first place. Oth­ers had their pick from Fuji, BASF, Sony, Radio Shack, Scotch (which also made tape of the sticky vari­ety), and a host of oth­er brands besides.

Even some mem­bers of post-cas­sette gen­er­a­tions rec­og­nize the old tagline “Is it live or is it Mem­o­rex?” or Max­el­l’s “Blown Away Guy” in his scarf and LC2. If you’re old enough to have done tap­ing of your own, you don’t need a logo to rec­og­nize your brand; you’ll know it as soon as you spot the design of the cas­sette itself in the online archive at tapedeck.org.


“I built tapedeck.org to show­case the amaz­ing beau­ty and (some­times) weird­ness found in the designs of the com­mon audio tape cas­sette,” writes the site’s cre­ator Oliv­er Gel­brich. “There’s an amaz­ing range of designs, start­ing from the ear­ly 60’s func­tion­al cas­sette designs, mov­ing through the col­or­ful play­ful­ness of the 70’s audio tapes to amaz­ing shape vari­a­tions dur­ing the 80s and 90s.” You can browse the ever-expand­ing col­lec­tion by brand, run­ning time, col­or, and even tape coat­ing: chrome, fer­ro, fer­rochrome, and met­al, by whose dif­fer­ences audio­philes set great store.


Some­what improb­a­bly, in this age where even home CD-burn­ing has been dis­placed by near-instan­ta­neous stream­ing and down­load­ing of dig­i­tal music, the cas­sette tape has made some­thing of a come­back. The near-mytho­log­i­cal allure of the mix­tape has only grown in recent years, dur­ing which artists both minor and major have put out cas­sette releas­es — and in some cas­es, cas­sette-only releas­es. This seems to be hap­pen­ing around the world: a few weeks ago, while strolling an art-school neigh­bor­hood in Seoul, where I live, I passed a cof­fee shop that offered its young cus­tomers rentals of both tapes and Walk­man-style play­ers on which to lis­ten to them. As anoth­er gen­er­a­tion-tran­scend­ing slo­gan has it, every­thing old is new again.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Home Tap­ing Is Killing Music: When the Music Indus­try Waged War on the Cas­sette Tape Dur­ing the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back

Lis­ten to Audio Arts: The 1970s Tape Cas­sette Arts Mag­a­zine Fea­tur­ing Andy Warhol, Mar­cel Duchamp & Many Oth­ers

The Beau­ty of Degrad­ed Art: Why We Like Scratchy Vinyl, Grainy Film, Wob­bly VHS & Oth­er Ana­log-Media Imper­fec­tion

Atten­tion K‑Mart Shop­pers: Hear 90 Hours of Back­ground Music & Ads from the Retail Giant’s 1980s and 90s Hey­day

A Free Dig­i­tal Archive of Graph­ic Design: A Curat­ed Col­lec­tion of Design Trea­sures from the Inter­net Archive

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

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Behold the First American Board Game, Travellers’ Tour Through the United States (1822)

in Games, History | September 3rd, 2024

Asked to name a clas­sic Amer­i­can board game, most of us would first think of Monop­oly, whose imagery and ver­biage — Park Place, Rich Uncle Pen­ny­bags, “Do not pass go” — has worked its way deep into the cul­ture since Park­er Broth­ers brought it to mar­ket in 1935. Despite that, it isn’t the old­est Amer­i­can board game: that hon­or goes to Trav­ellers’ Tour Through the Unit­ed States, which came out more than a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er, in 1822. Where­as Monop­oly teach­es its play­ers about real-estate val­ues in Depres­sion-era Atlantic City (as well as a thing or two about cap­i­tal­ism), the old­er game took a larg­er sub­ject for its edu­ca­tion­al ambi­tions: the whole of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca.

Of course, that whole was a lot small­er back in 1822, the year after Mis­souri became the 24th state. Trav­ellers’ Tour Through the Unit­ed States presents its two-to-four play­ers with the task of tra­vers­ing the young coun­try, begin­ning in Wash­ing­ton and end­ing in New Orleans. This is done by spin­ning some­thing called a “tee­to­tum,” a kind of hybrid between a top and a die, designed to hedge against the sin­ful asso­ci­a­tions of gam­bling. The play­er then moves ahead accord­ing to the dis­tance shown on the tee­to­tum, but must name the unla­beled city on which they’ve land­ed — and, in a more chal­leng­ing vari­a­tion, guess its pop­u­la­tion — in order to remain there.

As they move their pieces across the coun­try, play­ers can also read the includ­ed descrip­tions of each city, town, and region through which they pass. “Pro­mot­ing the val­ue of edu­ca­tion, the game high­lights insti­tu­tions of learn­ing,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Matthew Wynn Sivils. “Philadelphia’s ‘lit­er­ary and benev­o­lent insti­tu­tions are numer­ous and respectable.’ Prov­i­dence boasts ‘Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, a respectable lit­er­ary insti­tu­tion.’ ” Mak­ing their way south, “play­ers learn about Richmond’s ‘fer­tile back­coun­try’ and the ‘pol­ished man­ners and unaf­fect­ed hos­pi­tal­i­ty’ of the cit­i­zens of Charleston. Savan­nah ‘con­tains many splen­did edi­fices’ and Columbia’s ‘South Car­oli­na Col­lege … bids fair to be a valu­able insti­tu­tion.’ ”

As clear-eyed descrip­tions of the Unit­ed States in the ear­ly nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, these fall some­what short of Toc­queville — but then, they were writ­ten almost a decade before Alex­is de Toc­queville set foot in Amer­i­ca. Not only did the coun­try still have much expan­sion across the con­ti­nent left to do, it had amassed but a frac­tion of the pow­er and influ­ence it would go on to do in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. How­ev­er com­pelling a spec­ta­cle the U.S. had become to for­eign observers, it must have inspired among its own peo­ple an even stronger yearn­ing to under­stand its nature, and there­fore its future — a yearn­ing the mak­ers of Trav­ellers’ Tour Through the Unit­ed States clear­ly hoped would moti­vate sales. As a prod­uct, it seems not to have been suc­cess­ful, but as an idea, it lives on more than 200 years lat­er in the form of the great Amer­i­can road trip.

via My Mod­ern Met/Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Moth­er of All Maps of the “Father of Waters”: Behold the 11-Foot Traveler’s Map of the Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er (1866)

he Fiendish­ly Com­pli­cat­ed Board Game That Takes 1,500 Hours to Play: Dis­cov­er The Cam­paign for North Africa

The Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Board Game, Inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s Rol­lick­ing Nov­el

Watch a Playthrough of the Old­est Board Game in the World, the Sumer­ian Roy­al Game of Ur, Cir­ca 2500 BC

A Brief His­to­ry of the Great Amer­i­can Road Trip

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

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Browse 64 Years of RadioShack Catalogs Free Online … and Revisit the History of American Consumer Electronics

in Archives, History, Technology | August 30th, 2024

“I bet RadioShack was great once,” writes for­mer employ­ee Jon Bois in a much-cir­cu­lat­ed 2014 piece for SB Nation. “I can’t look through their decades-old cat­a­logs and come away with any oth­er impres­sion. They sold giant wal­nut-wood speak­ers I’d kill to have today. They sold com­put­ers back when peo­ple were try­ing to under­stand what they were. When I was a lit­tle kid, going to RadioShack was bet­ter than going to the toy store. It was the toy store for tall peo­ple.” Yet by the mid-twen­ty-tens, it had become a “pan­icked and half-dead retail empire”; in 2015, it final­ly filed for bank­rupt­cy.

Still, all those cat­a­logs live on, free to browse in the dig­i­tal archive at Radioshackcatalogs.com. The first vol­ume dates from 1939, by which time Radio Shack (as its name was orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten) had already been in busi­ness for sev­en­teen years. “This cat­a­log is intend­ed to serve as a com­pre­hen­sive and accu­rate list­ing of what we believe to be the essen­tial and unusu­al require­ments of the radio ama­teur, the ser­vice­man, lab­o­ra­to­ries, indus­tries, and schools,” declares its open­ing let­ter to the cus­tomer. “To boast of our ser­vice in any respect would be so much use­less ver­biage, ser­vice hav­ing been the fea­ture of our growth.”

Nei­ther ser­vice nor growth remained fea­tures of the com­pa­ny by the time Bois was work­ing there. But it had been a pret­ty glo­ri­ous run: to behold the first 50 years of RadioShack cat­a­logs is to behold noth­ing less than the evo­lu­tion of Amer­i­can con­sumer elec­tron­ics. At first direct­ed toward those with seri­ous tech­ni­cal know-how, the com­pa­ny’s offer­ings expand­ed over the decades to appeal to hob­by­ists, then to ordi­nary peo­ple look­ing to intro­duce a bit of elec­tron­ic — and lat­er, dig­i­tal — enrich­ment into their pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al lives.

Some Amer­i­cans found their way to RadioShack by build­ing crys­tal radios and sci­ence-fair projects in child­hood; oth­ers began fre­quent­ing its stores while build­ing their first real hi-fi sys­tem, com­po­nent by com­po­nent; oth­ers still got into per­son­al com­put­ing through the store-brand TRS-80 (or “Trash 80,” as more seri­ous com­put­er nerds called it). My own grand­fa­ther was such a habitué that, when he died ear­ly in the nineties, our house sud­den­ly filled up with inher­it­ed RadioShack-only prod­ucts, from Real­is­tic radios to Tandy com­put­ers. (I remem­ber spend­ing many hap­py hours with the Mod­el 100, a prim­i­tive lap­top grand­ly mar­ket­ed as a “Micro Exec­u­tive Work Sta­tion.”)

“This is a con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy busi­ness that is built to work per­fect­ly in the year 1975,” writes Bois. And indeed, the 1975 RadioShack cat­a­log offers page after won­drous page of remote-con­trolled stere­os (“the ulti­mate in lux­u­ry”) and “action radios”; fiber-optic dec­o­ra­tive light­ing fix­tures, eight-track car tape decks; cal­cu­la­tors promis­ing a “pock­et­ful of mir­a­cles”; and built-it-your­self inter­coms, pock­et lie detec­tors, and “col­or organs.” Alas, like so many com­mer­cial enter­pris­es that rode high in the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry, RadioShack failed to take advan­tage of the inter­net, and was ulti­mate­ly crushed by it — an iron­ic fate indeed for what had so long been the one-stop tech­nol­o­gy shop. Enter the archive of RadioShack cat­a­logs here.

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

IKEA Dig­i­tizes & Puts Online 70 Years of Its Cat­a­logs: Explore the Designs of the Swedish Fur­ni­ture Giant

A New Online Archive Lets You Read the Whole Earth Cat­a­log and Oth­er Whole Earth Pub­li­ca­tions, Tak­ing You from 1970 to 2002

Watch “Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum,” a Short Satir­i­cal Film About the Inven­tion of the Audio­phile (1959)

Nir­vana Plays in a Radio Shack, the Day After Record­ing its First Demo Tape (1988)

The First Cell­phone: Dis­cov­er Motorola’s DynaT­AC 8000X, a 2‑Pound Brick Priced at $3,995 (1984)

One Man’s Quest to Build the Best Stereo Sys­tem in the World

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

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Solving a 2,500-Year-Old Puzzle: How a Cambridge Student Cracked an Ancient Sanskrit Code

in History, Language | August 29th, 2024

If you find your­self grap­pling with an intel­lec­tu­al prob­lem that’s gone unsolved for mil­len­nia, try tak­ing a few months off and spend­ing them on activ­i­ties like swim­ming and med­i­tat­ing. That very strat­e­gy worked for a Cam­bridge PhD stu­dent named Rishi Rajpopat, who, after a sum­mer of non-research-relat­ed activ­i­ties, returned to a text by the ancient gram­mar­i­an, logi­cian, and “father of lin­guis­tics” Pāṇi­ni and found it new­ly com­pre­hen­si­ble. The rules of its com­po­si­tion had stumped schol­ars for 2,500 years, but, as Rajpopat tells it in an arti­cle by Tom Almeroth-Williams at Cam­bridge’s web­site, “With­in min­utes, as I turned the pages, these pat­terns start­ed emerg­ing, and it all start­ed to make sense.”

Pāṇi­ni com­posed his texts using a kind of algo­rithm: “Feed in the base and suf­fix of a word and it should turn them into gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect words and sen­tences through a step-by-step process,” writes Almeroth-Williams. But “often, two or more of Pāṇini’s rules are simul­ta­ne­ous­ly applic­a­ble at the same step, leav­ing schol­ars to ago­nize over which one to choose.” Or such was the case, at least, before Rajpopat’s dis­cov­ery that the dif­fi­cult-to-inter­pret “metarule” meant to apply to such cas­es dic­tates that “between rules applic­a­ble to the left and right sides of a word respec­tive­ly, Pāṇi­ni want­ed us to choose the rule applic­a­ble to the right side.”

That may not be imme­di­ate­ly under­stand­able to those unfa­mil­iar with the struc­ture of San­skrit. Almeroth-Williams’ piece clar­i­fies with an exam­ple using  mantra, one word from the lan­guage that every­body knows. “In the sen­tence ‘devāḥ prasan­nāḥ mantraiḥ’ (‘The Gods [devāḥ] are pleased [prasan­nāḥ] by the mantras [mantraiḥ]’) we encounter ‘rule con­flict’ when deriv­ing mantraiḥ, ‘by the mantras,’ ” he writes. ” The deriva­tion starts with ‘mantra + bhis.’ One rule is applic­a­ble to the left part ‘mantra’ and the oth­er to right part ‘bhis.’ We must pick the rule applic­a­ble to the right part ‘bhis,’ which gives us the cor­rect form ‘mantraih.’ ”

Apply­ing this rule ren­ders inter­pre­ta­tions of Pāṇini’s work almost com­plete­ly unam­bigu­ous and gram­mat­i­cal. It could even be employed, Rajpopat has not­ed, to teach San­skrit gram­mar to com­put­ers being pro­grammed for nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing. It no doubt took him a great deal of inten­sive study to reach the point where he was able to dis­cov­er the true mean­ing of Pāṇini’s clar­i­fy­ing metarule, but it did­n’t tru­ly present itself until he let his uncon­scious mind take a crack at it. As we’ve said here on Open Cul­ture before, there are good rea­sons we do our best think­ing while doing things like walk­ing or tak­ing a show­er, a phe­nom­e­non that philoso­phers have broad­ly rec­og­nized through the ages — and, like as not, was under­stood by the great Pāṇi­ni him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

Intro­duc­tion to Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course

Can Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Deci­pher Lost Lan­guages? Researchers Attempt to Decode 3500-Year-Old Ancient Lan­guages

Why Algo­rithms Are Called Algo­rithms, and How It All Goes Back to the Medieval Per­sian Math­e­mati­cian Muham­mad al-Khwariz­mi

How Schol­ars Final­ly Deci­phered Lin­ear B, the Old­est Pre­served Form of Ancient Greek Writ­ing

Has the Voyn­ich Man­u­script Final­ly Been Decod­ed?: Researchers Claim That the Mys­te­ri­ous Text Was Writ­ten in Pho­net­ic Old Turk­ish

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

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Frank Lloyd Wright Thought About Making the Guggenheim Museum Pink

in Architecture, History, Museums | August 28th, 2024

Image via The Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion Archives

Seen today, the Solomon R. Guggen­heim Muse­um, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, seems to occu­py sev­er­al time peri­ods at once, look­ing both mod­ern and some­how ancient. The lat­ter qual­i­ty sure­ly has to do with its bright white col­or, which we asso­ciate (espe­cial­ly in such an insti­tu­tion­al con­text) with Greek and Roman stat­ues. But just like those stat­ues, the Guggen­heim was­n’t actu­al­ly white to begin with. “Few­er and few­er New York­ers may recall that the muse­um, in a then-grim­i­er city, used to be beige,” writes the New York Times’ Michael Kim­mel­man. “Robert Moses thought it looked like ‘jaun­diced skin.’ ” Hence, pre­sum­ably, the deci­sion dur­ing a 1992 expan­sion to paint over the earth­en hue of Wright’s choice.

Not that beige was the only con­tender in the design phase. Look at the archival draw­ings, Kim­mel­man writes, and you’ll find “a reminder that Wright had con­tem­plat­ed some pret­ty far-out col­ors — Chero­kee red, orange, pink.”

The very thought of that last “leads down a rab­bit hole of alter­na­tive New York his­to­ry,” and if you’re curi­ous to see what a pink Guggen­heim might have looked like from the street, David Romero at Hooked on the Past has cre­at­ed a few dig­i­tal­ly mod­i­fied pho­tos. The result hard­ly comes off as being in taste quite as poor as one might expect; in fact, it could have fit quite well into the Mem­phis-embrac­ing nine­teen-eight­ies, and even the post­mod­ern nineties. The image above, show­ing the Guggen­heim imag­ined in pink, comes from The Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion Archives.

But as it is, “closed off to the city around it, the building’s anti­sep­tic, spank­ing-white facade, today is in keep­ing with the neigh­bor­hood.” That itself is in keep­ing with Wright’s ideas for trans­form­ing the Amer­i­can city, which he kept on putting forth until the end of his life. Attempt­ing to solve “the prob­lem of the inner city,” he con­ceived “fan­tas­ti­cal megas­truc­tures for places like down­town Pitts­burgh, Bagh­dad, and Madi­son, Wis­con­sin,” all of them “city-based but anti-urban projects, divorced from the streets.” Even work­ing in the Unit­ed States’ dens­est metrop­o­lis, Wright expressed a long­ing for the splen­did iso­la­tion of the Amer­i­can coun­try­side, where a man — at least as the lore has it — can paint his house any col­or he pleas­es.

via Messy Nessy/Hooked on the Past

Relat­ed con­tent:

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Broad­acre City (1932)

The Unre­al­ized Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright Get Brought to Life with 3D Dig­i­tal Recon­struc­tions

When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Plan to Turn Ellis Island Into a Futur­is­tic Jules Verne-Esque City (1959)

Build Wood­en Mod­els of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Great Build­ing: The Guggen­heim, Uni­ty Tem­ple, John­son Wax Head­quar­ters & More

Behold Ancient Egypt­ian, Greek & Roman Sculp­tures in Their Orig­i­nal Col­or

The Guggen­heim Puts 109 Free Mod­ern Art Books Online

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

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The 11 Censored Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Cartoons That Haven’t Been Aired Since 1968

in Animation, Film, History | August 27th, 2024

For decades and decades, Warn­er Bros.’ Looney Tunes and Mer­rie Melodies car­toons have served as a kind of default chil­dren’s enter­tain­ment. Orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived for the­atri­cal exhi­bi­tion in the nine­teen-thir­ties, they were ani­mat­ed to a stan­dard that held its own against the sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tions along­side which they would lat­er be broad­cast. Even their clas­si­cal music-laden sound­tracks seemed to sig­nal high­er aspi­ra­tions. But when scru­ti­nized close­ly enough, they turned out not to be as time­less and inof­fen­sive as every­one had assumed. In fact, eleven Looney Tunes and Mer­rie Melodies car­toons have been with­held from syn­di­ca­tion since the nine­teen-six­ties due to their con­tent.

The LSu­per­Son­icQ video above takes a look at the “Cen­sored Eleven,” all of which have been sup­pressed for qual­i­ties like “exag­ger­at­ed fea­tures, racist tones, and out­dat­ed ref­er­ences.” Pro­duced between 1931 and 1944, these car­toons have been described as reflect­ing per­cep­tions wide­ly held by view­ers at the time that have since become unac­cept­able. Take, for exam­ple, the black pro­to-Elmer Fudd in “All This and Rab­bit Stew,” from 1941, a col­lec­tion of “eth­nic stereo­types includ­ing over­sized cloth­ing, a shuf­fle to his move­ment, and mum­bling sen­tences.” In oth­er pro­duc­tions, like “Jun­gle Jit­ters” and “The Isle of Pin­go Pon­go,” the offense is against native islanders, depict­ed there­in as hard-par­ty­ing can­ni­bals.

At first glance, “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs,” from 1943, may resem­ble a grotesque car­ni­val of stereo­types. But as direc­tor Bob Clam­pett lat­er explained, it orig­i­nat­ed when he “was approached in Hol­ly­wood by the cast of an all-black musi­cal off-broad­way pro­duc­tion called Jump For Joy while they were doing some spe­cial per­for­mances in Los Ange­les. They asked me why there weren’t any Warn­er’s car­toons with black char­ac­ters and I did­n’t have any good answer for that ques­tion. So we sat down togeth­er and came up with a par­o­dy of Dis­ney’s Snow White, and ‘Coal Black’ was the result.” These per­form­ers pro­vid­ed the voic­es (cred­it­ed, out of con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tion, to Mel Blanc), and Clam­pett paid trib­ute in the char­ac­ter designs to real jazz musi­cians he knew from Cen­tral Avenue.

How­ev­er admirable the inten­tions of “Coal Black” — and how­ev­er mas­ter­ful its ani­ma­tion, which has come in for great praise from his­to­ri­ans of the medi­um — it remains rel­e­gat­ed to the banned-car­toons nether­world. Of course, this does­n’t mean you can’t see it today: like most of the “Cen­sored Eleven,” it’s long been boot­legged, and it even under­went restora­tion for the first annu­al Turn­er Clas­sic Movies Film Fes­ti­val in 2010. Some of these con­tro­ver­sial shorts appear on the Looney Tunes Gold Col­lec­tion Vol­ume: 3 DVDs, intro­duced by Whoopi Gold­berg, who makes the sen­si­ble point that “remov­ing these inex­cus­able images and jokes from this col­lec­tion would be the same as say­ing they nev­er exist­ed.” Grown-ups may be okay with that, but kids — always the most dis­cern­ing audi­ence for Warn­er Bros. car­toons — know when they’re being lied to.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Beau­ti­ful Anar­chy of the Ear­li­est Ani­mat­ed Car­toons: Explore an Archive with 200+ Ear­ly Ani­ma­tions

Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry Rock: The School­house Rock Par­o­dy Sat­ur­day Night Live May Have Cen­sored

Don­ald Duck’s Bad Nazi Dream and Four Oth­er Dis­ney Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons from World War II

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japan­ese Car­toons Dur­ing WWII, Then Atones with Hor­ton Hears a Who!

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

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

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How Marcel Duchamp Signed a Urinal in 1917 & Redefined Art

in Art, History | August 26th, 2024

Mar­cel Duchamp did­n’t sign his name on a uri­nal for lack of abil­i­ty to cre­ate “real” art. In fact, as explained by gal­lerist-Youtu­ber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above, Ducham­p’s grand­fa­ther was an artist, as were three of his sib­lings; he him­self attained impres­sive tech­ni­cal pro­fi­cien­cy in paint­ing by his teen years. In 1912, when he was in his mid-twen­ties, he could tran­scend con­ven­tion thor­ough­ly enough to bewil­der and even enrage the pub­lic by paint­ing Nude Descend­ing a Stair­case, which also drew crit­i­cisms from his fel­low Cubists for being “too Futur­ist.” From then on, his inde­pen­dent (and not entire­ly un-mis­chie­vous) streak became his entire way of life and art.

That same year, Duchamp, Con­stan­tin Brân­cuși, and Fer­di­nand Léger went to the Paris Avi­a­tion Salon. Behold­ing a pro­peller, Duchamp declared paint­ing “washed up”; what artist could out­do the appar­ent per­fec­tion of the form before him? Get­ting a job as a librar­i­an, he indulged in a stretch of read­ing about math­e­mat­ics and physics.

This got him think­ing of the pow­er of chance, one of the forces that moved him to put a bicy­cle wheel in his stu­dio and spin it around when­ev­er the spir­it moved him. This he would lat­er con­sid­er his first “ready­made” piece, delib­er­ate­ly cho­sen for being “a func­tion­al, every­day item with a total absence of good or bad taste” that “defied the notion that art must be beau­ti­ful.”

The famous uri­nal, enti­tled Foun­tain, would come lat­er, in 1917, after he had relo­cat­ed from Paris to New York. Tech­ni­cal­ly, he did­n’t sign his name on it at all, but rather “R. MUTT,” for Richard Mutt, a name par­tial­ly “inspired by the com­ic strip Mutt and Jeff, which Duchamp loved. And Richard is French slang for a rich showoff, or a mon­ey­bags.” Sub­mit­ted by a “female friend” and hid­den behind a cur­tain at the show at which it made its debut, the orig­i­nal signed uri­nal would nev­er be seen again. But it pro­voked a suf­fi­cient­ly endur­ing curios­i­ty that, near­ly half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, a mar­ket had emerged for care­ful­ly craft­ed sculp­tur­al repli­cas for Foun­tain and the oth­er ready­mades. The irony could hard­ly have been lost on any­one with a sense of humor — or a will­ing­ness to ques­tion the nature of art itself — like Ducham­p’s.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Icon­ic Uri­nal & Work of Art, “Foun­tain,” Wasn’t Cre­at­ed by Mar­cel Duchamp But by the Pio­neer­ing Dada Artist Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven

What Made Mar­cel Duchamp’s Famous Uri­nal Art–and an Inven­tive Prank

The Mar­cel Duchamp Research Por­tal Opens, Mak­ing Avail­able 18,000 Doc­u­ments and 50,000 Images Relat­ed to the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Artist

Hear the Rad­i­cal Musi­cal Com­po­si­tions of Mar­cel Duchamp (1912–1915)

Hear Mar­cel Duchamp Read “The Cre­ative Act,” A Short Lec­ture on What Makes Great Art, Great

When Bri­an Eno & Oth­er Artists Peed in Mar­cel Duchamp’s Famous Uri­nal

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

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Hear the Evolution of the London Accent Over 660 Years: From 1346 to 2006

in History, Language | August 23rd, 2024

Read a nov­el by Charles Dick­ens, and you’ll still today feel trans­port­ed back to the Lon­don of the eigh­teen-twen­ties. Some of that expe­ri­ence owes to his lav­ish­ly repor­to­r­i­al descrip­tive skills, but even more to his way with dia­logue. Dick­ens faith­ful­ly cap­tured the vocab­u­lary of the times and places in which he set his sto­ries, and for some par­tic­u­lar­ly col­or­ful char­ac­ters, went as far as to ren­der their dis­tinc­tive accents pho­net­i­cal­ly: that of The Pick­wick Papers’ beloved valet Sam Weller, for instance, with its swap­ping of “v” and “w” sounds that briefly over­took the East End. But it’s one thing to read the voice of a Lon­don­er of that time, and quite anoth­er to hear it.

No audio record­ings exist of Dick­en­sian Lon­don, of course, but we have the next-best thing in the video above from Youtu­ber Simon Rop­er — and specif­i­cal­ly the sec­tion that begins at about 11:30, when he per­forms the accent of a Lon­don­er in the year 1826. Most every­thing he says should sound quite intel­li­gi­ble to any Eng­lish-speak­er today, though few, if any, will ever have encoun­tered some­one who speaks in quite the same way in real life.

In this era, Rop­er adds in the onscreen notes, “you can hear the start of glot­tal rein­force­ment, where a glot­tal stop is insert­ed between a vow­el and a plo­sive con­so­nant at the end of a word.” What’s more, “non-rhotic­i­ty (r‑loss in most posi­tions) has caused vow­els that were orig­i­nal­ly fol­lowed by ‘r’ to become cen­ter­ing diph­thongs.”

Seri­ous stuff, for a man who describes him­self as “not a lin­guist.” Nev­er­the­less, Rop­er has in this video assem­bled an impres­sive tour of Lon­don accents over 660 years, with “twelve record­ings, all of men with sus­pi­cious­ly sim­i­lar voic­es, and each one is set 60 years after the last one, and each one is the grand­son of the pre­vi­ous one.” (When the video went viral, the New States­man pro­filed him for his achieve­ment.) The ear­li­est, set in 1346, will sound more famil­iar in cadence than in con­tent, at least to those who haven’t stud­ied Mid­dle Eng­lish. Com­pre­hen­sion does­n’t become a much sim­pler mat­ter for most of us mod­erns until about 1586, but Rop­er’s accent comes to sound ver­i­ta­bly transat­lantic by 1766. Per­haps not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, that was just before the Amer­i­cans broke off deci­sive­ly from the moth­er­land to do things their own way — but also to pre­serve a few of the old ways, includ­ing ways of speech.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Brief Tour of British & Irish Accents: 14 Ways to Speak Eng­lish in 84 Sec­onds

One Woman, 17 British Accents

Peter Sell­ers Presents The Com­plete Guide To Accents of The British Isles

A Tour of U.S. Accents: Boston­ian, Philadelph­ese, Gul­lah Cre­ole & Oth­er Intrigu­ing Dialects

Meet the Amer­i­cans Who Speak with Eliz­a­bethan Eng­lish Accents: An Intro­duc­tion to the “Hoi Toi­ders” from Ocra­coke, North Car­oli­na

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

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