When the World Wide Web made its public debut in the early nineteen-nineties, it fascinated many and struck some as revolutionary, but the idea of watching a film online would still have sounded like sheer fantasy. Yet on May 23rd, 1993, reported the New York Times‘ John Markoff, “a small audience scattered among a few dozen computer laboratories gathered” to “watch the first movie to be transmitted on the Internet — the global computer network that connects millions of scientists and academic researchers and hitherto has been a medium for swapping research notes and an occasional still image.”

That explanation speaks volumes about how life online was perceived by the average New York Times reader three decades ago. But it was hardly the average New York Times reader who tuned into the internet’s very first film screening, whose feature presentation was Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees. Completed in 1991 by artist David Blair, this hybrid fiction and essay-film offered to its viewers what Times critic Stephen Holden called “a multi-generational family saga as it might be imagined […]

The history of Rome is, more or less, the history of the modern world. But the Roman world seemed to shrink during the Neoclassical period, an Enlightenment-era movement to purify the arts. Where Rome once encompassed a global empire, it began to inhabit a narrow range of ideas, imposed by humanist scholars, French Jacobins, bourgeois revolutionaries in the North American colonies, and the courts of Louis XVI, George III, and Napoleon. Neoclassical art was an ennobling artifice in a time when European empires were swallowing up the globe. (It was later the favored style of Mussolini and, more recently, Donald Trump.) Academics and statesmen redefined the cultural boundaries of ancient Rome to suit the agendas of their age.

Elites of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th century, for example, believed there was no separation between themselves and ancient Rome. They called themselves Rūmī, Romans, inheritors of the Empire. Western Europeans, however, exclusively used the terms Ottomans or Turks, in rhetoric designed to evoke fears of dangerous, threatening others. Similarly, the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire, ruled from Constantinople by Constantine […]

By any measure, David Bowie was a superstar. He first rose to fame in the nineteen-seventies, a process galvanized by his creation and assumption of the rocker-from-Mars persona Ziggy Stardust. In the following decade came Let’s Dance, on the back of which he sold out stadiums and dominated the still-new MTV. Yet through it all, and indeed up until his death in 2016, he kept at least one foot outside the mainstream. It was in the nineties, after his aesthetically cleansing stint with guitar-rock outfit Tin Machine, that Bowie made use of his stardom to explore his full spectrum of interests, which ranged from the basic to the bizarre, the mundane to the macabre.

This suggests a good deal in common between Bowie and another high-profile David of his generation: David Lynch, long one of the most famous film directors alive. “There are many obvious, surface connections and intersections between Lynch and Bowie,” write film critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. “Both have dabbled in film and music, as well as painting, theatre and performance art. Both are actors — Bowie […]

Some founders rest on their laurels, build industries around themselves like a cocoon, and never escape or outgrow the big achievement that made their name. Some, like Dave Smith — the so-called “father of MIDI,” and one of the most innovative synthesizer pioneers of the last several decades – don’t stop creating for long enough to collect dust. You may never have heard of Smith, but you’ve heard his technology. Before pioneering MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), the digital standard that allows hundreds of electronic instruments to play nicely with each other across computer and software makers, Smith founded Sequential Circuits and built one of the most revered synthesizers ever made, the Prophet-5, invented in 1977 and essential to the sound of the 1980s and beyond.

Smith’s keyboards made appearances on stage, video, and albums throughout the decade. Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes used the Prophet-5 on the band’s first album and “virtually every record I have made since then,” he said in a statement. “Without Dave’s vision and ingenuity,” Rhodes went on, “the sound of the 1980s would have […]

There’s never been a bad time for a Kate Bush revival. Those who lived through the 1980s may always associate her biggest songs with their memories. Fans who only know the 80s by way of Netflix know it by proxy and don’t suffer from nostalgia. But whatever Kate’s big, reverb-soaked drums, big Fairlight synths, big hair, and enormous vocals evoke for audiences now, one thing is certain: Kate Bush’s music is timeless.

Rebecca Nicholson sums up the sentiment in a Guardian post on the renaissance Bush is now enjoying, thanks to the use of her 1985 hit, “Running Up That Hill (Deal With God)” in the new season of Netflix hit series, Stranger Things: “If any song can steel itself against over familiarity, it’s ‘Running Up That Hill.’ Whether it is for the first time or the 500th time, you still hear it now and think, what the hell was that? And then you play it again.”

Not to spoil, but the love of a perfect pop song after innumerable repetitions plays a significant role in the plot of Stranger Things‘ Season 4, […]