Requiem for a Dream: The Cast & Crew Reunite 20 Years Later
Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art: “Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream has only grown in stature since its explosive debut in 2000. His harrowing and influential visual depiction of addiction and dependency across four characters in Brooklyn is a film that’s still whispered about in tones of reverence.” To celebrate 20th anniversary, Aronofsky and actors Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans reunited to reconsider the film and its impact on cinema and culture. This virtual conversation was moderated by Rajendra Roy, the Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film. If you become a MoMA member, you will gain access to more special events along these lines.
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!
Read More...Charlie Chaplin & Buster Keaton Go Toe to Toe (Almost) in a Hilarious Boxing Scene Mash Up from Their Classic Silent Films
Coke or Pepsi?
Boxers or briefs?
Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton?
A difficult choice that usually boils down to personal taste…
In the case of the two silent screen greats, they evinced different personalities, but both were possessed of physical grace, a tremendous work ethic, and the ability to make audiences root for the little guy.
Their enduring influence on physical comedy is evident in the boxing scene mash up above, which pulls from Keaton’s star turn in 1926’s Battling Butler and Chaplin’s widely celebrated City Lights from 1931.
Even cut up and spliced back together in alternating shots, it’s a master class on building anticipation, defying expectations, and the humor of repetition.
Both films’ plots hinge on a mild fellow going to extraordinary lengths to prove himself worthy of the girl he loves.
Chaplin, besotted with a blind flower-seller, is drawn into the ring by the prospect of prize money, which he would use to cover her unpaid rent.
His opponent is played by Hank Mann, the brains behind the Keystone Cops period who went on to work with Jerry Lewis.
The pas de trois between the ref and the two boxers represents the pinnacle of Chaplin’s long affinity for the sport, following 1914’s Keystone short, The Knockout and 1915’s The Champion.
Battling Butler is built on a case of deliberately mistaken identity, after Keaton’s milquetoast rich boy impresses his working class sweetheart’s family by allowing them to think he is a famous boxer whose name he incidentally shares.
The fight scenes were filmed in LA’s brand new Olympic Auditorium, aka the Punch Palace, which went on to serve as a location for the more recent boxing classics Rocky (1976) and Million Dollar Baby (2004).
The editor who thought to score this mashup to Mariachi Internacional’s cover of Zorba El Griego is certainly a contender in their own right, but readers, what we really want to know is in this championship round between Chaplin and Keaton, who would you declare the winner?
Related Content:
Discover the Cinematic & Comedic Genius of Charlie Chaplin with 60+ Free Movies Online
A Supercut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amazing Stunts
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...The Story of the SynthAxe, the Astonishing 1980s Guitar Synthesizer: Only 100 Were Ever Made
What is the musical instrument most thoroughly of the 1980s? Many would say the “keytar,” a class of synthesizer keyboards shaped and worn like a guitar. Their relatively light weights and affordable prices, even when first brought to market, put keytars within the reach of musicians who wanted to possess both the wide sonic palette of digital synthesis and the inherent cool of the guitarist. This arrangement wasn’t without its compromises: few keytar players enjoyed the full range of that sonic palette, to say nothing of that cool. But in 1985, a new hope appeared for the synthesizer-envying guitarist and guitar-envying synthesist alike: the SynthAxe.
Created by English inventors Bill Aitken, Mike Dixon, and Tony Sedivy (and funded in part by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group), the SynthAxe made a quantum leap in the development of synthesizer-guitars, or guitar-synthesizers. Unlike a keytar, it used actual strings — not just one but two independent sets of them — that when played could control any synthesizer compatible with the recently introduced Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard.
As Guitarist magazine editor Neville Marten demonstrates in the contemporary promotional video at the top of the post, this granted anyone who could play the guitar command of all the sounds cutting-edge synthesizers could make.
Not that mastery of the guitar translated immediately into mastery of the SynthAxe: even the most proficient guitarist had to get used to the unusually sharp angle of its neck, its evenly spaced frets, and the set of keys embedded in its body. (“That is the point, it’s not a guitar,” as Aitken took pains to explain.) You can see Lee Ritenour make use of both the SynthAxe’s strings and keys in the 1985 concert clip above. Nicknamed “Captain Fingers” due to his sheer dexterity, Ritenour had been in search of ways to expand his sound, experimenting with guitar-synthesizer hybrid systems even in the 70s. When the SynthAxe came along, not only did he record a whole album with it, that album’s cover is a painting of him with the striking new instrument in hand.
So is the cover of Atavachron, the first album Allan Holdsworth recorded after meeting the SynthAxe’s creators at a trade show. No guitarist would take up the SynthAxe with the same fervor: Holdsworth, seen playing it with a breath controller (!) in the clip above, would continue to use it on his recordings up until his death in 2017. “People used to write notes on my amp, asking me to stop playing the SynthAxe and play the guitar instead,” he told Guitar World in his final interview that year. “But now people often ask me, ‘We’d love to hear you play the SynthAxe — did you bring it?’ I rarely play it onstage anymore because it’s too costly to take on the road and it requires a lot of equipment.”
The amount of associated gear no doubt put many an aspiring synthesizer-guitarist off the SynthAxe. (“It’s about as portable as a drum kit isn’t,” writes early adopter John Hollis.) So must the price tag, a cool £10,000 back in 1985. This didn’t put off guitarist Alec Stansfield, whose enthusiasm for the SynthAxe as was such that he joined the company, having “knocked long and hard on their door until they gave me a job as a production engineer.” Alas, he writes, “the instrument was never a commercial success and eventually the company ceased trading. Fewer than 100 instruments had been produced in total. In the final months I was paid with a SynthAxe system since cash was tight” — a system he shows off in the video above.
Stansfield sold off his SynthAxe in 2013, but what has become of the others? One of Ritenour’s SynthAxes eventually found its way into the possession of Roy Wilfred Wooten, better known as Future Man of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. “Over a period of time, he began modifying it into an almost entirely new instrument: the SynthAxe Drumitar,” writes Computer History Museum curator Chris Garcia. “This system, which replaced the strings as the primary triggering mechanism, allowed Wooten to play the ‘drums’ using the guitar-like device.” In the concert clip just above, you can behold Future Man playing and explaining this “SynthAxeDrumitar,” sounds like a drum kit but looks like a guitar — though rather vaguely, at this point. Call it SynthAxe-meets-Mad Max.
Related Content:
Behold the First Electric Guitar: The 1931 “Frying Pan”
Brian May’s Homemade Guitar, Made From Old Tables, Bike and Motorcycle Parts & More
Hear Musicians Play the Only Playable Stradivarius Guitar in the World: The “Sabionari”
The Nano Guitar: Discover the World’s Smallest, Playable Microscopic Guitar
How the Yamaha DX7 Digital Synthesizer Defined the Sound of 1980s Music
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...Restored Footage of 1896 Snowball Fight Makes It Seem Like the Fun Happened Yesterday
Early cinema is full of legends, but none as enduring as the legend of the Lumière Brothers’ Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat). The fifteen-second reel of a locomotive so startled audiences, allegedly, they scrambled from their seats. German film scholar Martin Loiperdinger calls the anecdote “cinema’s founding myth,” a story repeated over and over, for over 100 years, though there’s no evidence it actually happened. One film history text even titled a chapter “Beginning with Terror” to underline the seminal importance of the event.
If we think about it, the incident, however apocryphal, does mark an origin. Consider how many films afterward featured trains as a central scene of the action, from The Great Train Robbery to Strangers on a Train to Snowpiercer. There are magical trains and train heists in space. Trains are everywhere in the movies. If we think about it some more, isn’t cinema itself something like a train? Even films that play with time still move inexorably from beginning to end, following some sort of discernible through-line from one end to the other.
But, say we were to entertain an alternate film history, a Philip K. Dick-like version in which, rather than trains, the founding myth of cinema involved snowballs….
In 1896, the year after the supposed public shock of Arrival of a Train, the Lumières shot Bataille de boules de neige, “Snowball Fight,” which you can see in its original black and white, above (with added, faux-vaudeville music). A group of solid citizens pummels each other with snowballs, then a cyclist, unawares, rides into the fray, gets pelted, and hurries off for dear life. It’s a madcap verité gem. “The film was shot in Lyon, France using one of the duo’s all-in-one cinématographe creations,” notes Petapixel, “which was part camera, part projector, and part developer.” There were no reports of panics in the theater.
At the top of the post, you can experience the short in full color and HD, thanks to Joaquim Campa, “who used the AI-powered software DeOldify to upscale the footage to 1080p, interpolate additional frames for a smoother result, and colorize the old footage.” Despite appearances, it seems the film’s speed remains unchanged. Campa’s startlingly immediate version arrives in the midst of a debate over the trendy colorization of old films and photos. Rather than bringing us closer to history, the British Library’s Luke McKernan told Wired, digital processing “increases the gap between now and then.”
Colorized, cleaned-up, and upscaled images show us the past as it never actually existed, historians claim. But isn’t that what film and photography have always done? As media of technical invention and reinvention, they inevitably shape and alter the scenes they capture, both during and after shooting. When Georges Méliès saw the Lumière’s films, he was not interested in their realism but in their potential for creating fantasies. He went off to make his special-effects masterpiece, A Trip to the Moon, which screened in both black-and-white and garishly hand-colored prints in 1902.
“Sure, it can be argued that adding color, interpolating frames, and removing scratches is creating information that was never there and could ‘obscure the past instead of highlighting it,’” writes Petapixel. “But how many people (who aren’t film buffs) will have ever heard of ‘Bataille de boules de neige’ before today? And how many might discover a passion for filmmaking or history as a result?” Personally, I’d like to see more films that look like “Snowball Fight.”
Related Content:
Watch the Films of the Lumière Brothers & the Birth of Cinema (1895)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Learn the Stories Behind Iconic Songs: The Rolling Stones’ “Miss You,” REM’s “Losing My Religion,” Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” & More
There was a time when pop lyrics did not exactly spark curiosity, doo-lang doo-lang doo-lang.
They may have tapped into some universal teenage feelings, but rarely inspired further thought along the lines of “Hmm, I wonder what—or who—inspired that.”
Dutch station NPO Radio 2’s interview series Top 2000 a gogo lifts the veil.
Each entry reveals the origin story of a well known song.
The late Bill Withers, above, intimated that every woman he’d even been involved with thought “Ain’t No Sunshine” was about her, when really, the inspiration was the miserable alcoholic couple played by Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in the 1962 film Days of Wine and Roses.
“Dancing in the Moonlight,” the enduring, incredibly catchy hit for King Harvest, paints an endearing picture of carefree, cavorting youth, but as recounted by songwriter Sherman Kelly, the event that led to its creation is deserving of a trigger warning. Rather than leaning in to the darkness, he conjured a lighthearted scene far different from the one he had endured, a switcheroo that the universe saw fit to reward.
One need not be the songwriter to be at the center of a song’s hidden history. Gloria Jones, preacher’s daughter and eventual soulmate to T. Rex’s Marc Bolan, was a teenager when she recorded Ed Cobb’s “Tainted Love,” a song she disliked owing to the implications of “tainted.” The song became a hit in England, thanks to a series of misadventures involving a sailor swapping a .45 for ciggies—a development that could have had an impact on Jones’ career, had anyone bothered to inform her. All this to say, Soft Cell’s 1981 cover helped put MTV on the map, but it couldn’t have happened without the teenager who held her nose and recorded the original.
Top 2000 is unsurprisingly full of deep and touching revelations, but Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood’s refusal to take things seriously is also welcome. Talk to Mick Jagger if you want confirmation that “Miss You” concerns the frustrations of stardom. According to class clown Wood, and his straight man drummer Charlie Watts, the song was a solid attempt to go with the disco flow. The frustration arose from being caged in a Paris recording studio, barely able to duck out for escargot before task master Keith Richards cracked the whip to summon them back.
Bittersweet is not the adjective we’d choose to describe this historical moment, but it gave us all the feels to see Alan Merrill, whose “I Love Rock n Roll” was a response to the Stones’ “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll,” as well as a breakthrough hit for Joan Jett. Merrill died of complications from COVID-19 at the end of March.
Explore more songs—over 200—on Top 2000 a gogo’s YouTube channel.
Multi-linguists! Contribute translations to help make the videos available worldwide.
Related Content:
Tom Petty Takes You Inside His Songwriting Craft
How David Bowie Used William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unforgettable Lyrics
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Here latest project is a series of free downloadable posters, encouraging citizens to wear masks in public and wear them properly. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Foreign Exchange Students Debate Whether American Teenagers Have Too Much Freedom (1954)
The teenager was invented in the 1950s. Of course, the stages of physical development that characterize those years taking us from childhood to adulthood haven’t fundamentally changed as long as Homo sapiens has existed. But even though there were “teenagers” in, say, ancient Rome, they weren’t teenagers as we’ve known them over the past three or four generations. It happened amid the economic growth of the years after World War II, first in the United Kingdom and even more so the United States: adolescents, especially high-school students, turned from mere immature adults into a distinct demographic group with its own tastes, politics, spaces, mobility, and culture.
Before teenagers invaded the rest of the world, they must have struck visitors to America as by turns thrilling and troubling. So it was with the students in the video above, who came to the U.S. in 1955 — the year of Rebel Without a Cause — as participants in the New York Herald Tribune’s World Youth Forum.
This filmed discussion on the curious phenomenon of the American teenager features Minji Karibo of Nigeria, Nasreen Ahmad of Pakistan, Paik Nak-chung of South Korea, and Ava Leitenan of Finland, all of whom had just spent a few months visiting American schools. Leitenan begins on a positive note: “I didn’t know there would be so much smile,” she says. “I can just feel the friendliness flow against me.”
But as many a first-time traveler in America has discovered, that characteristic (and sometimes overwhelming) friendliness masks a more complex realty. Karibo criticizes American girls who “think it’s fashionable to tell lies about going on dates during weekends, when as a matter of fact they sat at home all the time.” After reminding everyone that “you cannot judge the amount of freedom the American children have by your standard,” Paik admits that “I see such an informality between the ages and between the sexes, I get rather shocked, but the fact that it is shocking does not necessarily mean it is not good for them.”
None of these exchange-student panelists shows more skepticism about America than Ahmad, whose glimpses of dating and education there have confirmed her preference for arranged marriage and sex-segregated schools. Maybe it works for American teenagers, but “if we were given suddenly this amount of freedom,” she says, “I’m afraid you would get fearful consequences.” However much the four disagree about the benefits and dangers of that freedom, they all seem to believe that Americans could stand to reflect on how to make better use of it than they do. “I think it is a lack of intellectual capacity to use their freedom properly,” says the young Paik, trying delicately to pin down the problem with American life.
After the World Youth Forum, Paik traveled the world before finishing high school in Korea. He would then return to the U.S. to study at Brown University before starting his career as a literary critic and public intellectual in his homeland. In 2018 he gave a speech at the University of Chicago on Korea’s “Candlelight Revolution,” and this past summer he published a new book on D.H. Lawrence, which Korean-speakers can hear him interviewed about here. He’s one of the success stories among the many participants in the World Youth Forum, more of whose 1950s discussions — on race, on social relations, the Middle-East conflict — you can watch on this Youtube playlist. 65 years later, no matter our age or nationality, we all have something of the American teenager about us. Whether that’s good or bad remains a matter for debate.
Related Content:
What Life Was Like for Teenagers in Ancient Rome: Get a Glimpse from a TED-ED Animation
Nigerian Teenagers Are Making Slick Sci Fi Films With Their Smartphones
In Japanese Schools, Lunch Is As Much About Learning As It’s About Eating
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...The 1937 Experiment in Distance Learning: When Chicago Schools Went Remote, Over Radio, During a Polio Outbreak
As all of us have noticed in recent months, living in a viral pandemic really messes with your sense of time. A few months feels like a decade. Time slows to a crawl. If you’re a parent, however, you have before you walking, talking, growing, complaining reminders that no matter what’s happening in the world, children still grow up just the same. They need new experiences and new clothes just as before, and they need to keep their brains engaged and try, at least, to build on prior knowledge.
Maybe we’re learning new things, too. (Adult brains also need exercise.) Or not. We have some control over the situation; kids don’t. “Learning loss” over inactive months is real, and the government still has the responsibility (for what the word is worth) to educate them. Online learning may feel like a bad compromise for many families, and its success seems largely dependent—as in regular school—on parent involvement and access to resources. But it’s better than eight months of the more mindless kind of screen time.
It may help to know that remote learning isn’t new, even if we’re still adjusting to technology that lets teachers (and bosses) into our homes with cameras and microphones. The challenges “may seem unprecedented,” Stanford professor Michael Hines writes at The Washington Post, but “educators may be surprised to learn that almost 100 years ago Chicago’s schools faced similar circumstances” during the polio epidemic and met them in a similar way. In 1937, an outbreak forced the city to close schools, and prompted “widespread alarm about lost instructional time and students left to their own devices” (so to speak).
Administrators were “determined to continue instructions for the district’s nearly 325,000 elementary age students” through the only remote technology available, radio, “still fairly new and largely untested in education in the 1930s.” According to Hines, a historian of education in the U.S., the program was very well organized, the lessons were engaging, and educators “actively sought to involve parents and communities” through telephone hotlines they could call with questions or comments. On the first day, they logged over 1,000 calls and added five additional teachers.
You might be wondering—given digital divide problems of online learning today—whether all the students served actually owned a radio and telephone. Katherine Foss, a professor of Media Studies at Middle Tennessee State University, notes that in the late 1930s, “over 80% of U.S. households owned at least one radio, though fewer were found in homes in the southern U.S., in rural areas and among people of color.” Those who didn’t were left out, and school authorities had no way to track attendance. “Access issues received little attention” in the media. School Superintendent William Johnson had no idea how many students tuned in.
The local program lasted less than three weeks before schools reopened. Some felt the instruction moved too quickly and “students who needed more attention or remediation struggled through one-size-fits-all radio lessons,” notes Hines. Educators today will sympathize with the overall sense at the time that those who benefitted most from the radio lessons were students who needed them least.
Learn more about the experiment in Hines’ history lesson (also see Foss’ recent article), and consider the lessons we can apply to the present. Remote education still has flaws, and parents still struggle to find time for involvement, but the technology has made it a viable option for much longer than three weeks, and maybe, given future uncertainties, far longer than that.
Related Content:
Dyson Creates 44 Free Engineering & Science Challenges for Kids Quarantined During COVID-19
Free Online Drawing Lessons for Kids, Led by Favorite Artists & Illustrators
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Why Do People Join Cults? An Animated Primer Explains
As much as we might like to think we make free choices as rational individuals, we are all more or less suggestible and subject to social pressures. Social media marketers aren’t under any illusions about this. Guides for how to exploit psychological vulnerabilities and influence behavior proliferate. (One of the top-selling business books on Amazon is a manual titled Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.) Such techniques form the basis of a massive, global ad-based industry that also happens to traffic in political propaganda and disinformation. None of this would be as wildly profitable and effective as it is if human beings could easily resist manipulation.
But there are degrees of influence and susceptibility. Not everyone who makes an easy mark for advertisers, for example, is liable to join a cult or an extremist group. What makes people subject to the inducements of a cult leader? What makes them—in the clichéd phrase callously drawn from the mass suicide at Jonestown—“drink the Kool-Aid”? The TED-Ed video above, scripted by cult expert Dr. Janja Lalich, professor emerita of Sociology at California State University, Chico, begins with some basic qualifications.
Not all cults are religious: some are political, therapy-based, focused on self-improvement, or otherwise.
Not all new religions are cults.
Lalich defines a cult as a “group or movement with a usually extreme ideology, typically embodied in a charismatic leader…. Most cults share some basic characteristics,” such as a “high-level of commitment from its members,” a strict hierarchy, and “claims to provide answers to life’s biggest questions.” Cults have little tolerance for dissent from either the inside or outside.
The distinctions between cults and religions can seem slight, but cults separate their members from the larger society and seek direct and total control over their lives, while most mainstream religions (which may have begun as cults) do not. Religions may proselytize, but cults use methods more akin to pyramid schemes to pressure recruits into personally identifying with the ideology and spreading it. By exploiting our desires for connection, comfort, meaning, and belonging, they create what the DSM‑V terms “identity disturbance due to prolonged and intense coercive persuasion.”
Cults “discourage critical thinking, making it hard to voice doubts when everyone around you is modeling absolute faith.” New recruits experience painful cognitive dissonance that, over time, they try to overcome by strengthening their devotion. The sense of sunk cost makes it increasingly hard for them to admit they have been lied to, manipulated, and used. Cults stunt their members’ “psychological and emotional growth,” which is “a particular problem for children” who are born or indoctrinated into them. Belief, Lalich’s lesson states, should not force a person to sacrifice their family, friends, personal morality, and money to an authoritarian leader.
Lalich herself understands cults not only as an academic researcher but as a former member of a political cult in which, she says, “you weren’t allowed to think for yourself at the same time as you were told to think for yourself.” Which brings us to the burning question that has been asked so many times over the past four years. Does the absolute, unwavering devotion to the current president constitute cult-like behavior? Is “Trumpism” a cult? An open letter on Lalich’s Cult Research site, signed by a number of prominent psychologists, psychiatrists, and other experts, advises, “We should look to the evidence, and there is evidence aplenty.”
Related Content:
Isaac Asimov Laments the “Cult of Ignorance” in the United States (1980)
Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...What Caused the Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe?: A Brief Investigation into the Poet’s Demise 171 Years Ago Today
Edgar Allan Poe died 171 years ago today, but we still don’t know why. Of course, we all must meet our end sooner or later, as the literary master of the macabre would well have understood. His inclination toward the mysterious would have prepared him to believe as well in the power of questions that can never be answered. And so, perhaps, Poe would have expected that a death like his own — early, unexpected, and of finally undeterminable cause — would draw public fascination. But could even he have imagined it continuing to compel generation after generation of urban-legend and American-lore enthusiasts, whether or not they’ve read “The Raven” or “The Fall of the House of Usher”?
Poe’s end thus makes ideal material for Buzzfeed Unsolved, a video series whose other popular episodes include the death of Vincent van Gogh, the disappearance of D.B. Cooper, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In 25 minutes, “The Macabre Death Of Edgar Allan Poe” summarizes the writer’s remarkably unlucky life and gets into the detail of his equally unlucky death, beginning on September 27th, 1849, when “Poe left Richmond by steamer, stopping the next day in Baltimore. For the next five days, Poe’s whereabouts are unknown.” Then, on October 3rd, he was found “delirious, immobile, and dressed in shabby clothing” in “a gutter outside of a public house that was being used as a polling place.”
“Rapping at death’s chamber’s door, Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital that afternoon.” (The narration works in several such references to his writing.) “Assumed to be drunk, the weak and weary Poe was brought to a special room reserved for patients ill from intoxication.” Alas, “Poe never fully regained consciousness to be able to detail what had happened to him,” and expired on October 7th at the age of 40. The hosts examine several of the theories that attempt to explain what happened (nineteen of which we previously featured here on Open Culture): did a binge trigger his known physical intolerance of alcohol? Did he have a brain tumor? Did he get beaten up by his fiancée’s angry brothers? Was he a victim of “cooping”?
Cooping, a “violent form of voter fraud that was extremely common in Baltimore at that time,” involved roving gangs who “would kidnap a victim and force him to vote multiple times in a variety of disguises.” This jibes with the location and state in which Poe was found — and because “voters were often given some alcohol after voting as a celebration,” it also explains his apparent stupor. But none of the major theories actually contradict each other, and thus more than one could be true: “Edgar Allan Poe may very well have been beaten and kidnapped in a cooping scheme, sent into a stupor with alcohol after voting, and unable to recover due to a brain tumor.” However it happened, his death became a final story as enduring as — and even grimmer than — many of his tales of the grotesque.
Related Content:
The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe’s Death: 19 Theories on What Caused the Poet’s Demise
Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? An Animated Video Explains
5 Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Stories Read by Vincent Price & Basil Rathbone
Download The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Stories as Free eBooks & Audio Books
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Read More...What Can Superhero Media Teach Us About Ethics: A Pretty Much Pop Culture Podcast (#63) Discussion with Philosophy Professor Travis Smith
Is there no end to the seemingly endless fascination with superhero media? Your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt are joined by Travis Smith, who teaches political philosophy at Concordia University, to discuss. Travis sees their resonance as a matter of metaphor: How can we do more with the abilities we have? His book Superhero Ethics: 10 Comic Book Heroes, 10 Ways to Save the World, Which One Do We Need Now? matches up heroes like Batman vs. Spider-Man for ethical comparison: Both “act locally,” but Batman would like to actually rule over Gotham, while Spider-Man engages in a more “friendly neighborhood” patrol. What philosophy should govern the way we try to do good in the world?
Lurking in the background is the current release of season two of the Amazon series The Boys, based on Garth Ennis’ graphic novels, which assumes that power corrupts and asks what regular folks might do in the face of corporate-backed invulnerability. This cynical take is part of a long tradition of asking “what if super-heroes were literally real?” that goes through Watchmen all the way back to Spider-Man himself, who faces financial and other mundane problems that Superman was immune to.
Given Travis’ book, we didn’t really need supplementary articles for this episode, but you can take a look at this interview with him to learn more about his comic book loves and the Canadian heritage that led him to start fighting crime (you know, indirectly, through ethical teaching).
Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus discussion that you can only hear by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. 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
Read More...Support Us
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
About Us
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
FREE UPDATES!
GET OUR DAILY EMAIL
Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
