Watch Conservationists Moving & Restoring an Exquisite Ancient Greek Mosaic

in Art, History, Museums | February 6th, 2023

Raise a glass to the city of Dion on the East­ern slopes of Mount Olym­pus, con­sid­ered by the ancient Greeks a divine loca­tion, where Zeus held sway.

And while we’re at it, raise a glass to Zeus’ son, Diony­sus the god of fer­til­i­ty and the­ater, and most famous­ly, wine:

…hail to you, Diony­sus, god of abun­dant clus­ters! Grant that we may come again rejoic­ing to this sea­son, and from that sea­son onwards for many a year. — The Home­r­ic hymn to Diony­sus 

In the sum­mer of 1987, archae­ol­o­gists work­ing at an exca­va­tion site near the mod­ern vil­lage of Dion unearthed a mosa­ic of thou­sands of stone tes­sarae depict­ng “ivy-crowned Diony­sus, the loud-cry­ing god, splen­did son of Zeus and glo­ri­ous Semele,” rais­ing a drink­ing horn as he rides nude in a char­i­ot pulled by sea pan­thers.

1800 some years ear­li­er, it had adorned the floor of a sump­tu­ous villa’s ban­quet hall.

The vil­la was destroyed by fire, pos­si­bly as the result of an earth­quake, but a lay­er of rich Dion mud pre­served the mosa­ic in aston­ish­ing con­di­tion for near­ly two mil­len­nia.

A roof was erect­ed over the redis­cov­ered mur­al, with a foot­bridge on the perime­ter afford­ing the pub­lic excel­lent views for over twen­ty years.

Expo­sure to the ele­ments inevitably start­ed tak­ing a toll, with indi­vid­ual tiles melt­ing into the earth and plants spring­ing up in the cracks.

Using funds from the Onas­sis Foun­da­tion, the mosa­ic was reha­bil­i­tat­ed and relo­cat­ed to a spe­cial­ly designed, envi­ron­men­tal­ly-secure build­ing. 

The Onas­sis Foun­da­tion’s nar­ra­tion-free video above pro­vides a peek at the process, reduc­ing what must, at times, have been a supreme­ly nerve-wrack­ing 2‑year endeav­or to a pleas­ant sev­en-minute med­i­ta­tion, punc­tu­at­ed by bird­song and calm, coor­di­nat­ed group effort.

For those who pre­fer a more spe­cif­ic blow by blow, Rion Nakaya’s The Kid Should See This breaks down the con­ser­va­tion team’s efforts to divide the mur­al along a grid using drills, flat steel blades, and adhe­sive fab­ric, before sand­wich­ing the sec­tions between steel and wood­en plates for trans­port to their new home.

(We found the moment when the pro­tec­tive fab­ric is steamed away to be a par­tic­u­lar­ly har­row­ing thrill. )

Those who’d like to explore Dion’s trea­sures in depth might enjoy Onas­sis Foundation’s exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue Gods and Mor­tals at Olym­pus: Ancient Dion, City of Zeus, edit­ed by the late arche­ol­o­gist  Dim­itrios Pan­der­malis, below.

Via The Kid Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Intro­duc­tion to Ancient Greek His­to­ry: A Free Online Course from Yale

Mythos: An Ani­ma­tion Retells Time­less Greek Myths with Abstract Mod­ern Designs

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

How The Parthenon Marbles Ended Up In The British Museum

in Architecture, Art, History, Museums, Politics, Travel | February 3rd, 2023

Last month, we delved into a pro­pos­al to use dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy to clone the 2,500-year-old Parthenon Mar­bles cur­rent­ly housed in the British Muse­um.

The hope is that such uncan­ny fac­sim­i­les might final­ly con­vince muse­um Trustees and the British gov­ern­ment to return the orig­i­nals to Athens.

Today, we’ll take a clos­er look at just how these trea­sures of antiq­ui­ty, known to many as the Elgin mar­bles, wound up so far afield.

The most obvi­ous cul­prit is Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, who ini­ti­at­ed the takeover while serv­ing as Britain’s ambas­sador to the Ottoman Empire from 1798–1803.

Pri­or to set­ting sail for this post­ing, he hatched a plan to assem­ble a doc­u­men­tary team who would sketch and cre­ate plas­ter molds of the Parthenon mar­bles for the even­tu­al edi­fi­ca­tion of artists and archi­tects back home. Bet­ter yet, he’d get the British gov­ern­ment to pay for it.

The British gov­ern­ment, eying the mas­sive price tag of such a pro­pos­al, passed.

So Elgin used some of his heiress wife’s for­tune to finance the project him­self, hir­ing land­scape painter Gio­van­ni Bat­tista Lusieri — described by Lord Byron as “an Ital­ian painter of the first emi­nence” —  to over­see a team of drafts­men, sculp­tors, and archi­tects.

As The Nerd­writer’s Evan Puschak notes above, polit­i­cal alliances and expan­sion­ist ambi­tion greased Lord Elgin’s wheels, as the Ottoman Empire and Great Britain found com­mon cause in their hatred of Napoleon.

British efforts to expel occu­py­ing French forces from Egypt gen­er­at­ed good will suf­fi­cient to secure the req­ui­site fir­man, a legal doc­u­ment with­out which Lusieri and the team would not have been giv­en access to the Acrop­o­lis.

The orig­i­nal fir­man has nev­er sur­faced, and the accu­ra­cy of what sur­vives — an Eng­lish trans­la­tion of an Ital­ian trans­la­tion — casts Elgin’s acqui­si­tion of the mar­bles in a very dubi­ous light.

Some schol­ars and legal experts have assert­ed that the doc­u­ment in ques­tion is a mere admin­is­tra­tive let­ter, since it appar­ent­ly lacked the sig­na­ture of Sul­tan Selim III, which would have giv­en it the con­trac­tu­al heft of a fir­man.

In addi­tion to giv­ing the team entry to Acrop­o­lis grounds to sketch and make plas­ter casts, erect scaf­fold­ing and expose foun­da­tions by dig­ging, the let­ter allowed for the removal of such sculp­tures or inscrip­tions as would not inter­fere with the work or walls of the Acrop­o­lis.

This implies that the team was to lim­it itself to wind­fall apples, the result of the heavy dam­age the Acrop­o­lis sus­tained dur­ing a 1687 mor­tar attack by Venet­ian forces.

Some of the dis­lodged mar­ble had been har­vest­ed for build­ing mate­ri­als or sou­venirs, but plen­ty of good­ies remained on the ground for Elgin and com­pa­ny to cart off.

In an arti­cle for Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine, Hel­lenist author Bruce Clark details how Elgin’s per­son­al assis­tant, cler­gy­man Philip Hunt, lever­aged Britain’s sup­port of the Ottoman Empire and anti-France posi­tion to blur these bound­aries:

See­ing how high­ly the Ottomans val­ued their alliance with the British, Hunt spot­ted an oppor­tu­ni­ty for a fur­ther, deci­sive exten­sion of the Acrop­o­lis project. With a nod from the sultan’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Athens—who at the time would have been scared to deny a Briton anything—Hunt set about remov­ing the sculp­tures that still adorned the upper reach­es of the Parthenon. This went much fur­ther than any­one had imag­ined pos­si­ble a few weeks ear­li­er. On July 31, the first of the high-stand­ing sculp­tures was hauled down, inau­gu­rat­ing a pro­gram of sys­tem­at­ic strip­ping, with scores of locals work­ing under Lusieri’s enthu­si­as­tic super­vi­sion.

Lusieri, whose admir­er Lord Byron became a furi­ous crit­ic of Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon mar­bles, end­ed his days believ­ing that his com­mit­ment to Lord Elgin ulti­mate­ly cost him an illus­tri­ous career as a water­col­orist.

He also con­ced­ed that the team had been “oblig­ed to be a lit­tle bar­barous”, a gross under­state­ment when one con­sid­ers their van­dal­ism of the Parthenon dur­ing the ten years it took them to make off with half of its sur­viv­ing trea­sures — 21 fig­ures from East and West ped­i­ments, 15 metope pan­els, and 246 feet of what had been a con­tin­u­ous nar­ra­tive frieze.

Clark notes that although Elgin suc­ceed­ed in relo­cat­ing them to British soil, he “derived lit­tle per­son­al hap­pi­ness from his anti­quar­i­an acqui­si­tions.”

After numer­ous logis­ti­cal headaches involved in their trans­port, he found him­self beg­ging the British gov­ern­ment to take them off his hands when an acri­mo­nious divorce land­ed him in finan­cial straits.

This time the British gov­ern­ment agreed, acquir­ing the lot for £35,000 — less than half of what Lord Elgin claimed to have shelled out for the oper­a­tion.

The so-called Elgin Mar­bles became part of the British Museum’s col­lec­tion in 1816, five years before the Greek War of Inde­pen­dence’s start.

They have been on con­tin­u­al dis­play ever since.

The 21st-cen­tu­ry has wit­nessed a num­ber of world class muse­ums rethink­ing the prove­nance of their most sto­ried arti­facts. In many cas­es, they have elect­ed to return them to their land of ori­gin.

Greece has long called for the Parthenon mar­bles in the British Muse­um to be per­ma­nent­ly repa­tri­at­ed to Athens, but thus­far muse­um Trustees have refused.

In their opin­ion, it’s com­pli­cat­ed.

Is it though? Lord Elgin’s ulti­mate moti­va­tions might have been, and Bruce Clark, in a bril­liant nin­ja move, sug­gests that the return could be viewed as a pos­i­tive strip­ping away, atone­ment by way of get­ting back to basics:

Sup­pose that among his mix­ture of motives—personal aggran­dize­ment, rival­ry with the French and so on—the wel­fare of the sculp­tures actu­al­ly had been Elgin’s pri­ma­ry con­cern. How could that pur­pose best be served today? Per­haps by plac­ing the Acrop­o­lis sculp­tures in a place where they would be extreme­ly safe, extreme­ly well con­served and superbly dis­played for the enjoy­ment of all? The Acrop­o­lis Muse­um, which opened in 2009 at the foot of the Parthenon, is an ide­al can­di­date; it was built with the goal of even­tu­al­ly hous­ing all of the sur­viv­ing ele­ments of the Parthenon frieze…. If the earl real­ly cared about the mar­bles, and if he were with us today, he would want to see them in Athens now.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Restores the Orig­i­nal Col­ors to Ancient Stat­ues

Robots Are Carv­ing Repli­cas of the Parthenon Mar­bles: Could They Help the Real Ancient Sculp­tures Return to Greece?

John Oliver’s Show on World-Class Art Muse­ums & Their Loot­ed Art: Watch It Free Online

Take a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

YouTube & Arizona State University Team Up to Offer Online Courses for Real College Credits

in MOOCs, Online Courses, YouTube | February 2nd, 2023

A recent Pew Research Cen­ter sur­vey found that near­ly one in five Amer­i­can teenagers is on Youtube “almost con­stant­ly.” Ten years ago, the fig­ure sure­ly would­n’t have been that high, and twen­ty years ago, of course, Youtube did­n’t exist at all. But today, no enter­prise direct­ed at teenagers can afford to ignore it: that goes for pop music and fash­ion, of course, but also for edu­ca­tion. Most kids just start­ing col­lege are on Youtube, but so are those about to start col­lege, those tak­ing time off from col­lege, and those unsure of whether they’re will­ing or able to go to col­lege at all. Hence Col­lege Foun­da­tion, a new exten­sion of Youtube chan­nel Study Hall, the prod­uct of a part­ner­ship between Ari­zona State Uni­ver­si­ty, YouTube and Crash Course.

Crash Course has long pro­duced video series that, both enter­tain­ing­ly and at length, cov­er sub­jects taught in school from his­to­ry to lit­er­a­ture to phi­los­o­phy and beyond. The Col­lege Foun­da­tion’s pro­gram will make it pos­si­ble not just to learn on Study Hall, but to earn real col­lege cred­its as well.

“Stu­dents who are inter­est­ed in for­mal course­work beyond watch­ing the videos may pay a $25 fee to enroll in an ASU online course that includes inter­act­ing with oth­er stu­dents and instruc­tors,” writes Inside High­er Edu­ca­tion’s Susan D’Agosti­no. Upon com­ple­tion of the course, “the stu­dent can decide whether they would like to pay $400 to record the grade and receive ASU cred­it.”

Enroll­ment is now open for the first four Col­lege Foun­da­tions cours­es, Eng­lish Com­po­si­tion, Col­lege Math, U.S. His­to­ry and Human Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, all of which begin on March 7th. (Those who sign up before that start date will receive a $50 dis­count.) “Once you’re in a course, you can con­tact a suc­cess coach via email to get help with assign­ments,” writes TechCrunch’s Aisha Malik. “You can com­plete your course­work when it’s con­ve­nient for you, but you will have week­ly due dates for most of the cours­es. If you want to access addi­tion­al sup­port, some instruc­tors hold option­al office hours.” This sort of learn­ing expe­ri­ence could become a bridge to Youtube life and col­lege life — the lat­ter being the sub­ject addressed, with char­ac­ter­is­tic Youtube direct­ness, in the exist­ing Study Hall course “How to Col­lege.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

A Crash Course in World His­to­ry

Crash Course Phi­los­o­phy: Hank Green’s Fast-Paced Intro­duc­tion to Phi­los­o­phy Gets Under­way on YouTube

Crash Course on Lit­er­a­ture: Watch John Green’s Fun Intro­duc­tions to Gats­by, Catch­er in the Rye & Oth­er Clas­sics

A Crash Course on Psy­chol­o­gy: A 30-Part Video Series from Hank Green

Crash Course Big His­to­ry: John Green Teach­es Life, the Uni­verse & Every­thing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

What People Named Their Cats in the Middle Ages: Gyb, Mite, Méone, Pangur Bán & More

in History, Poetry | February 1st, 2023

“The Nam­ing of Cats is a dif­fi­cult mat­ter,” declares the open­ing poem in Old Pos­sum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats by T. S. Eliot. But the pos­si­bil­i­ties are many and var­ied: “Peter, Augus­tus, Alon­zo or James”; “Pla­to, Adme­tus, Elec­tra, Deme­ter”; “Munkus­trap, Quaxo, or Cori­co­pat.” Things must have been  less com­pli­cat­ed in the Mid­dle Ages, when you could just call a cat Gyb and be done with it. “The short­ened form of the male name Gilbert, Gyb” explains Kath­leen Walk­er-Meik­le in Medieval Cats, dates as “a pop­u­lar name for indi­vid­ual pet cats” at least back to the late four­teenth cen­tu­ry.

In a slight­ly dif­fer­ent form, the name even appears in Shake­speare, when Fal­staff describes him­self as “as melan­choly as a gib cat.” Gyb’s equiv­a­lent across the Chanel was Tibers or Tib­ert; the six­teenth-cen­tu­ry French poet Joachim du Bel­lay kept a “beloved gray cat” named Belaud.

Legal texts reveal that the Irish went in for “cat names that refer to the ani­mal’s phys­i­cal appear­ance,” like Méone (“lit­tle meow”), Cruib­ne (“lit­tle paws”), and Bréone (“lit­tle flame”). Walk­er-Meik­le also high­lights Pan­gur Bán, a cat “immor­tal­ized in a ninth-cen­tu­ry poem by an Irish monk.” This hymn to the par­al­lel skills of human and feline begins, in Sea­mus Heaney’s Eng­lish trans­la­tion, as fol­lows:

Pan­gur Bán and I at work,

Adepts, equals, cat and clerk:

His whole instinct is to hunt,

Mine to free the mean­ing pent.

Fre­quent Open Cul­ture read­ers may be remind­ed of the twelfth-cen­tu­ry Chi­nese poet who wrote of being domes­ti­cat­ed by his own cats, vers­es we fea­tured here a few years ago. More recent­ly, we put up a list of 1,065 Medieval dog names, which run the gamut from Gar­lik, Nose­wise, and Hosewife to Horny­ball, Argu­ment, and Filthe. You’ll notice that the names giv­en to dogs in the Mid­dle Ages seem to have been more amus­ing, if less dig­ni­fied, than the ones giv­en to cats. Per­haps this reflects the strong, clear­ly cen­turies-and-cen­turies-old dif­fer­ences between the natures of the ani­mals them­selves, each with its own strengths and weak­ness­es. But what­ev­er our pref­er­ences in that area, who among us could­n’t do with a Pan­gur Bán of our own?

via Medievalists.net

Relat­ed con­tent:

A List of 1,065 Medieval Dog Names: Nose­wise, Gar­lik, Have­g­ood­day & More

Cats in Medieval Man­u­scripts & Paint­ings

Cats in Japan­ese Wood­block Prints: How Japan’s Favorite Ani­mals Came to Star in Its Pop­u­lar Art

T. S. Eliot Reads Old Possum’s Book of Prac­ti­cal Cats & Oth­er Clas­sic Poems (75 Min­utes, 1955)

In 1183, a Chi­nese Poet Describes Being Domes­ti­cat­ed by His Own Cats

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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 Brooklyn Public Library Gives Every Teenager in the U.S. Free Access to Censored Books

in Books, Current Affairs | January 31st, 2023

We have cov­ered it before: school dis­tricts across the Unit­ed States are increas­ing­ly cen­sor­ing books that don’t align with con­ser­v­a­tive, white-washed visions of the world. Art Spiegel­man’s Maus, The Illus­trat­ed Diary of Anne Frank, Alice Walk­er’s The Col­or Pur­ple, Toni Mor­rison’s The Bluest Eye, and Harp­er Lee’s To Kill a Mock­ing­bird–these are some of the many books get­ting pulled from library shelves in Amer­i­can schools. In response to this con­cern­ing trend, the Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library has made a bold move: For a lim­it­ed time, the library will offer a free eCard to any per­son aged 13 to 21 across the Unit­ed States, allow­ing them free access to 500,000 dig­i­tal books, includ­ing many cen­sored books. The Chief Librar­i­an for the Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library, Nick Hig­gins said:

A pub­lic library rep­re­sents all of us in a plu­ral­is­tic soci­ety we exist with oth­er peo­ple, with oth­er ideas, oth­er view­points and per­spec­tives and that’s what makes a healthy democ­ra­cy — not shut­ting down access to those points of view or silenc­ing voic­es that we don’t agree with, but expand­ing access to those voic­es and hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions and ideas that we agree with and ideas that we don’t agree with.

And he added:

This is an intel­lec­tu­al free­dom to read ini­tia­tive by the Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library. You know, we’ve been pay­ing atten­tion to a lot of the book chal­lenges and bans that have been tak­ing place, par­tic­u­lar­ly over the last year in many places across the coun­try. We don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly expe­ri­ence a whole lot of that here in Brook­lyn, but we know that there are library patrons and library staff who are fac­ing these and we want­ed to fig­ure out a way to step in and help, par­tic­u­lar­ly for young peo­ple who are see­ing, some books in their library col­lec­tions that may rep­re­sent them, but they’re being tak­en off the shelves.

As for how to get the Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library’s free eCard, their Books Unbanned web­site offers the fol­low­ing instruc­tions: “indi­vid­u­als ages 13–21 can apply for a free BPL eCard, pro­vid­ing access to our full eBook col­lec­tion as well as our learn­ing data­bas­es. To apply, email bo***********@**********ry.org.” In short, send them an email.

You can find a list of Amer­i­ca’s most fre­quent­ly banned books at the web­site of the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion.

Note: We first post­ed about this ini­tia­tive dur­ing the dog days of last August. But it seemed worth men­tion­ing this pro­gram while school’s in full swing. Hence why we’re flag­ging Books Unbanned again.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Texas School Board Bans Illus­trat­ed Edi­tion of The Diary of Anne Frank

Ten­nessee School Board Bans Maus, the Pulitzer-Prize Win­ning Graph­ic Nov­el on the Holo­caust; the Book Becomes #1 Best­seller on Ama­zon

The 850 Books a Texas Law­mak­er Wants to Ban Because They Could Make Stu­dents Feel Uncom­fort­able

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Why We All Need Subtitles Now

in Film, Technology, Television | January 31st, 2023

We live in an age of sub­ti­tles. On some lev­el this is a vin­di­ca­tion of the cinephiles who spent so much of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry com­plain­ing about shod­dy dub­bing of for­eign films and pub­lic unwill­ing­ness to “read movies.” Today we think noth­ing of read­ing not just movies but tele­vi­sion shows as well, even those per­formed in our native lan­guage. For an increas­ing pro­por­tion of at-home view­ers — includ­ing on-com­put­er, on-tablet, and on-phone view­ers — sub­ti­tles have come to feel like a neces­si­ty, even in the absence of any hear­ing dif­fi­cul­ties. Vox’s Edward Vega inves­ti­gates why this has hap­pened in the video above.

The chief irony of the sto­ry is that the intel­li­gi­bil­i­ty of film and tele­vi­sion dia­logue seems to have degrad­ed as a result of sound record­ing and edit­ing tech­nol­o­gy hav­ing improved. Back in the ear­ly days of sound film, actors had prac­ti­cal­ly to shout into bulky micro­phones con­cealed on-set or placed just off it. Today, a pro­duc­tion can keep a cou­ple of boom mics sus­pend­ed over­head at all times, but also rig each actor up with a few hid­den lava­liers. The upshot is that dia­logue almost always gets record­ed accept­ably, but it removes the pres­sure on per­form­ers to deliv­er their lines with the clar­i­ty they would, say, on stage.

For bet­ter or for worse, this has encour­aged a ten­den­cy toward unprece­dent­ed­ly nat­u­ral­is­tic dia­logue, man­i­fest though it often does as slur­ring and mum­bling. At the same time, says dia­logue edi­tor Austin Olivia Kendrick, film­mak­ers have come to believe that “if you want your movie to feel ‘cin­e­mat­ic,’ you have to have wall-to-wall bom­bas­tic, loud sound.” Yet a sound­track can be cranked up only so high, an explo­sion of the same loud­ness as a human voice won’t sound like an explo­sion at all: “you need that con­trast in vol­ume in order to give your ear a sense of scale.”

This need to pre­serve the sound mix’s “dynam­ic range” — just the oppo­site of the “loud­ness wars” in pop­u­lar music — thus keeps dia­logue on the qui­et side. You can still hear it clear as day in a the­ater equipped with up-to-date sur­round-sound facil­i­ties, but much less so when it’s com­ing out of the tiny speak­ers crammed into the back of a flat-pan­el tele­vi­sion, let alone the bot­tom of a cell­phone. Turn­ing the sub­ti­tles on and leav­ing them on has emerged as a com­mon solu­tion to this thor­ough­ly mod­ern prob­lem. Anoth­er would be to invest in a prop­er high-end ampli­fi­er and speak­er set­up, which, if wide­ly adopt­ed, would cer­tain­ly come as a vin­di­ca­tion for all the frus­trat­ed audio­philes out there.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Do Peo­ple Talk Fun­ny in Old Movies?, or The Ori­gin of the Mid-Atlantic Accent

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

David Lynch on iPhone

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

Adapting the Unfilmable Story of Pinnochio — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #143

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | January 31st, 2023

Your Pret­ty Much Pop A‑Team Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Bak­er dis­cuss the orig­i­nal 1883 freaky chil­dren’s sto­ry by Car­lo Col­lo­di and con­sid­er the recent rush of film ver­sions, from a new Disney/Robert Zemikis CGI take to Guiller­mo del Toro’s stop-motion pas­sion project to a heav­i­ly cos­tumed Ital­ian ver­sion by Mat­teo Gar­rone, which is the sec­ond to fea­ture Oscar win­ner Rober­to Benig­ni in a lead role. Benig­ni’s pre­vi­ous try was a 2002 ver­sion that is the most true to the beats of the orig­i­nal sto­ry and maybe because of this has a 0% on Rot­ten Toma­toes. Why do peo­ple keep remak­ing this sto­ry, and how has the orig­i­nal moral of “be a good boy and obey” changed over the years?

Read the orig­i­nal sto­ry. Some arti­cles going through the film ver­sions include:

• “The twist­ed his­to­ry of Pinoc­chio on screen” by Cindy White
• “Pinoc­chio: Top 10 Best Movie And TV Adap­ta­tions, Ranked by IMDb” by Olivia Hay­ward
• “Pinoc­chios, Ranked” by Bar­ry Levitt
• “The Trans­for­ma­tions of Pinoc­chio” by Joan Aco­cel­la
• “Pinoc­chio: The scari­est chil­dren’s sto­ry ever writ­ten” by Nicholas Bar­ber

Fol­low us @law_writes, @sarahlynbruck, @ixisnox, @MarkLinsenmayer.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop. Sup­port the show and hear bonus talk­ing for this and near­ly every oth­er episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

Medieval Mixed-Gender Fight Club: Behold Images from a 15th-Century Fighting Manual

in Art, Books, Gender, History, Sports | January 30th, 2023

Wel­come to Medieval Mixed-Gen­der Fight Club.

The first rule of Medieval Mixed-Gen­der Fight Club is: you do not talk about Medieval Mixed-Gen­der Fight Club.

The sec­ond rule of Medieval Mixed-Gen­der Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Medieval Mixed-Gen­der Fight Club!

Why?

The Pub­lic Domain Review’s man­ag­ing edi­tor, Hunter Dukes, wise­ly argues that it’s because we have so lit­tle to go on, beyond these star­tling images of “judi­cial duels” between men and women in Ger­man fenc­ing mas­ter Hans Tal­hof­fer’s illus­trat­ed 15th-cen­tu­ry “fight books.”

The male com­bat­ant, armed with a wood­en mace, starts out in a waist-deep hole.

The female, armed with a rock wrapped in a length of cloth, stands above, feet plant­ed to the ground.

Their match­ing uni­sex gar­ments wouldn’t look out of place at the Met Gala, and pro­vide for max­i­mum move­ment as evi­denced by the acro­bat­ic, and seri­ous­ly painful-look­ing paces Tal­hof­fer puts them through.

Dukes is not alone in won­der­ing what’s going on here, and he doesn’t mince words when call­ing bull­shit on those respon­si­ble for “hasti­ly researched arti­cles” eager­ly pro­nounc­ing them to be action shots of divorce-by-com­bat.

Such bru­tal meth­ods of for­mal uncou­pling had been ren­dered obso­lete cen­turies before Tal­hof­fer began work on his instruc­tion­al man­u­als. 

In a 1985 arti­cle in Source: Notes in the His­to­ry of Art, Alli­son Coud­ert,  a pro­fes­sor of Reli­gious Stud­ies at UC Davis, posits that Tal­hof­fer might have been draw­ing on the past in these pages:

I would sug­gest that no records of judi­cial duels between hus­bands and wives exists after 1200 because of both changes in the real­i­ty and the ide­al of what a woman could be and do. Before 1200, women may well have bat­tled their hus­bands. Women under­stood and defend­ed the impor­tance of their eco­nom­ic and admin­is­tra­tive roles in the house­hold. After the twelfth cen­tu­ry, how­ev­er, law, cus­tom and reli­gion made mar­i­tal duels all but unthink­able.

Why would Tal­hof­fer both­er includ­ing archa­ic mate­r­i­al if the focus of his Fecht­buchs was giv­ing less expe­ri­enced fight­ers con­crete infor­ma­tion for their bet­ter­ment?

We like the notion that he might have been seek­ing to inject his man­u­scripts with a bit of an erot­ic charge, but con­cede that schol­ars like Coud­ert, who have PhDs, research chops, and actu­al exper­tise in the sub­ject, are prob­a­bly warmer when reck­on­ing that he was just cov­er­ing his his­tor­i­cal bases.

For now, let us enjoy these images as art, and pos­si­ble sources of inspi­ra­tion for avant-garde cir­cus acts, Hal­loween cou­ples cos­tumes, and Valen­tines.

Explore more images from the 15th-cen­tu­ry Fecht­buchs of Hans Tal­hof­fer here and here.

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent 

What It’s Like to Actu­al­ly Fight in Medieval Armor

How to Get Dressed & Fight in 14th Cen­tu­ry Armor: A Reen­act­ment

Watch Accu­rate Recre­ations of Medieval Ital­ian Longsword Fight­ing Tech­niques, All Based on a Man­u­script from 1404

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

When Leonard Bernstein Turned Voltaire’s Candide into an Opera (with Help from Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker & Stephen Sondheim)

in Literature, Opera | January 30th, 2023

The sev­en­teen-fifties found West­ern civ­i­liza­tion in the mid­dle of its Age of Enlight­en­ment. That long era intro­duced on a large scale the notion that, through the use of ratio­nal­i­ty and sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge, human­i­ty could make progress. For the Enlight­en­men­t’s true believ­ers, it would have even­tu­al­ly become quite easy indeed to assume that we had nowhere to go but up, and would soon­er or lat­er attain a state of per­fec­tion. No such fan­tasies, of course, for Jean-Marie Arou­et, bet­ter known as Voltaire. Despite being an Enlight­en­ment icon, he pulled no punch­es in attack­ing what he saw as its delu­sions, most last­ing­ly in his 1759 satir­i­cal nov­el Can­dide, ou l’Op­ti­misme.

Two cen­turies lat­er, West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, and espe­cial­ly the fresh­ly formed civ­i­liza­tion of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, had entered a new age of rea­son. Or rather, it had entered an age of tech­ni­cal, indus­tri­al, and orga­ni­za­tion­al “know-how.”

The con­vic­tion that Amer­i­ca could be per­fect­ed through engi­neered sys­tems played its part in gen­er­at­ing a degree of pros­per­i­ty the world had nev­er known (and would have scarce­ly been imag­in­able in Voltaire’s day). But it also had grim­mer man­i­fes­ta­tions, such as McCarthy­ism and the House Un-Amer­i­can Activ­i­ties Com­mit­tee, whose pro­ce­dures ground away at the core of the anti-Com­mu­nist “red scare.”

In Can­dide, Voltaire takes to task a vari­ety of not just beliefs but insti­tu­tions, includ­ing the Por­tuguese Inqui­si­tion. The play­wright Lil­lian Hell­man, who’d been black­list­ed after appear­ing before the HUAC in 1947, “observed a sin­is­ter par­al­lel between the Inqui­si­tion’s church-spon­sored purges and the ‘Wash­ing­ton Witch Tri­als,’ fueled by anti-Com­mu­nist hys­te­ria.” So says the web site of Leonard Bern­stein, Hell­man’s col­lab­o­ra­tor on what would become a com­ic-operetta adap­ta­tion of Can­dide. With con­tri­bu­tions from lyri­cist John LaTouche, poet Richard Wilbur, and Algo­nquin Round Table wit Dorothy Park­er, their pro­duc­tion was ready to open in the fall of 1956.

Stripped in the eleventh hour of Hell­man’s most direct top­i­cal attacks, and even then crit­i­cized for over-seri­ous­ness, the orig­i­nal Broad­way pro­duc­tion of Can­dide end­ed after 73 per­for­mances. (Record­ings of the orig­i­nal pro­duc­tion can be pur­chased online.) Nev­er­the­less, there was cause for opti­mism about its future: the show would be revived in Lon­don with a revised book two years lat­er, with fur­ther new ver­sions to fol­low in the nine­teen-sev­en­ties and eight­ies, its lyrics sup­ple­ment­ed by no less a Broad­way mas­ter than Stephen Sond­heim. The two-and-a-half hour video above com­bines high­lights of two con­sec­u­tive per­for­mances in 1989, con­duct­ed by Bern­stein him­self in the year before his death. “Like its hero, Can­dide is per­haps des­tined nev­er to find its per­fect form and func­tion,” notes Bern­stein’s site. “In the final analy­sis, how­ev­er, that may prove philo­soph­i­cal­ly appro­pri­ate.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Voltaire: Enlight­en­ment Philoso­pher of Plu­ral­ism & Tol­er­ance

What Voltaire Meant When He Said That “We Must Cul­ti­vate Our Gar­den”: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Leonard Bernstein’s Mas­ter­ful Lec­tures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Record­ed at Har­vard in 1973)

Hear the Famous­ly Con­tro­ver­sial Con­cert Where Leonard Bern­stein Intro­duces Glenn Gould & His Idio­syn­crat­ic Per­for­mance of Brahms’ First Piano Con­cer­to (1962)

Leonard Bern­stein Awk­ward­ly Turns the Screws on Tenor Jose Car­reras While Record­ing West Side Sto­ry (1984)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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 Two Fridas: An Introduction to Frida Kahlo’s Famous Large-Scale Painting (1939)

in Art, History | January 27th, 2023

One can appre­ci­ate the art of Fri­da Kahlo while know­ing noth­ing of the art of her one­time hus­band, the Mex­i­can mural­ist Diego Rivera. But the expe­ri­ence of cer­tain of her paint­ings can be great­ly enriched by some knowl­edge of their rela­tion­ship, the clear­est exam­ple being The Two Fridas, which Kahlo paint­ed in 1939 after their divorce. The largest of her numer­ous self-por­traits, it presents the artist as a set of dop­pel­gängers set apart by their attire: one wears a Euro­pean dress, and the oth­er a tra­di­tion­al Mex­i­can one. The result­ing tableau could, on one lev­el, reflect her dual her­itage; it also, as Kahlo her­self put it, shows “the Fri­da Diego loved, and the one he did­n’t.”

The Two Fridas is the sub­ject of the video essay above from Great Art Explained. “The dark­er-skinned Fri­da on the right is the indige­nous Mex­i­can Fri­da that was adored by her hus­band,” explains its host, gal­lerist James Payne.

“The lighter-skinned Fri­da on the left is the Euro­pean Fri­da that he reject­ed.” Pre­sent­ing her­self in the for­mer fash­ion “sent a clear mes­sage of cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty, nation­al­ism, and fem­i­nism” — but it also con­cealed the “bro­ken body” that result­ed from a bus crash in her youth as well as var­i­ous oth­er phys­i­cal dis­or­ders lat­er in life. This por­trait, how­ev­er, expos­es the heart of “Mex­i­can Fri­da” in order to show that it “remains intact, sus­tained by the small por­trait of Diego” in her hand.

The heart of “Euro­pean Fri­da,” how­ev­er, is ren­dered as “dis­con­nect­ed from her beloved Diego,” and it “bleeds pro­fuse­ly onto her dress, a Vic­to­ri­an lace dress sim­i­lar to the one her moth­er wore.” The two Fridas are con­nect­ed through their exposed hearts by a sin­gle artery, one con­nect­ed to the por­trait of Rivera. Payne points out the par­tic­u­lar sym­bol­ic pow­er of a bleed­ing heart, a “fun­da­men­tal sym­bol of Catholi­cism” that “can also be seen as sym­bol­ic of Aztec rit­u­al sac­ri­fice,” in the case of a cul­tur­al­ly con­flict­ed artist such as Kahlo. In ret­ro­spect, The Two Fridas also seems to express the inevitabil­i­ty of Kahlo and River­a’s remar­riage, which would come the fol­low­ing year. They had “one of the most obses­sive and tumul­tuous rela­tion­ships in art his­to­ry,” as Payne puts it, but while both lived, they knew they could­n’t do with­out each oth­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Fri­da Kahlo: The Life of an Artist

A Brief Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life and Work of Fri­da Kahlo

The Inti­ma­cy of Fri­da Kahlo’s Self-Por­traits: A Video Essay

Home Movies of Fri­da Kahlo (and a Side Order of Roman­tic Entan­gle­ments)

Fri­da Kahlo: The Com­plete Paint­ings Col­lects the Painter’s Entire Body of Work in a 600-Page, Large-For­mat Book

Dis­cov­er Fri­da Kahlo’s Wild­ly-Illus­trat­ed Diary: It Chron­i­cled the Last 10 Years of Her Life, and Then Got Locked Away for Decades

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.