The received image of the Aztecs, with their savage battles and frequent acts of human sacrifice, tends to imply a violence-saturated, death-obsessed culture. Given that, it will hardly come as a surprise to learn of an Aztec musical instrument discovered in the hands of a sacrificed human body, or that the instrument has come to be known as the “death whistle.” Not that it was an especially recent find: the excavation in question happened in Mexico City in the late nineteen-nineties. But only over the past decade, with the creation of replicas like the one played by the late Xavier Quijas Yxayotl in the clip above, have listeners around the world been able to hear the death whistle for themselves.
“The sound of the death whistle is the most frightening thing we’ve ever heard,” writes Reuben Westmaas at Discovery.com. “It literally sounds like a screeching zombie. We can only imagine what it would be like to hear hundreds of whistles from an Aztec army on the march. We’re not entirely certain what the whistles were used for, however.”
Whatever its application, the distinctive sound of the death whistle is created by blown air interacting “with a well or ‘spring’ of air inside a rounded internal chamber, creating distortions,” as Dave Roos writes at How Stuff Works. In his analysis of the death whistle’s inner workings, mechanical engineer Roberto Velázquez Cabrera gives that component the evocative name “chaos chamber.”
That the death whistle would be used in war and human sacrifice certainly aligns with the reputation of the Aztecs, but the instrument has also inspired other historically informed speculations. In the video from Gizmodo just above, professor of Mesoamerican and Latino studies Jaime Arredondo even suggests that it could have had its therapeutic uses, as a tool to create a “hypnotic, sort of soothing atmosphere.” It could well have been designed to imitate the sound of the wind, given that the sacrificial victim had been buried at the temple of the wind god Ehecatl. And though the death whistle may seem the least likely tool of relaxation imaginable, put your mind to it and just hear it as sounding less like the screech of a zombie than like the fifteenth-century equivalent of a white-noise machine.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Since it came out this past November, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon has drawn a variety of critical reactions. Whatever else can be said about it, it certainly takes a different tack from past depictions of that particular French Emperor. It was, perhaps, Scott’s good luck not to have to go up against the Napoleon picture that Stanley Kubrick dreamed of making, but even so, there are plenty of other precedents dating from throughout cinema history. The most formidable must surely be Napoléon, from 1927, also known as Napoléon vu par Abel Gance (Abel Gance being one of France’s foremost silent-era auteurs), which depicts the protagonist’s early years over the course of, in at least one of its many versions, five and a half hours.
Like any good video essayist, Bond first provides context, framing Gance as a kind of early nineteenth-century Romantic artist working in the early twentieth, a descendant of Victor Hugo working in film rather than literature. But whatever this information may do to enrich your viewing experience, “many of the great works don’t hide their greatness away,” and Napoléon is one of the works in which that greatness is “visible from the moment you set your eyes to it.” Even its very first sequence, in which a young Napoleon leads his military-school compatriots in a large-scale snowball fight, is executed with the kind of camera moves and image dissolves that would only find their way into standard cinematic grammar decades later.
This technical and formal ingenuity continues throughout the film: “with the sheer breadth of techniques, and just how ostentatious they are, it’s difficult to pack everything Napoléon presents us into a cohesive package.” This makes Gance, who always had “a penchant for displeasing his producers due to his constant desire to disrupt film language,” look like a Nouvelle Vague filmmaker avant la lettre. It also reveals his understanding that cinema, far from the novelty entertainment some had dismissed in his time, “was to be the medium in which our next great Homeric epic will emerge.” With Napoléon, Gance and his collaborators created not just a movie but a “panorama of existence, which would entrance the viewers in an almost religious delirium” — an experience sure to be intensified, for those whose religious leanings tend toward the cinematic, by the restored seven-hour cut scheduled to debut next year.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
People come to know the world the way they come to map it—through their perceptions of how its elements are connected and of how they should move among them. This is precisely what the series is attempting by situating the map at the heart of cultural life and revealing its relationship to society, science, and religion…. It is trying to define a new set of relationships between maps and the physical world that involve more than geometric correspondence. It is in essence a new map of human attempts to chart the world.
If you head over to this page, you will see links (in the left margin) to five volumes available in a free PDF format. The image above, appearing in Vol. 2, dates back to 1534. Created by Oronce Fine, the first chair of mathematics in the Collège Royal (aka the Collège de France), the map features the world drawn in the shape of a heart. A pretty beautiful design. Below you can find links to the individual volumes available online.
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From Kurzgesagt comes the history of our planet in one hour. They write: “Earth is 4.5 billion years old — which is approximately the same amount of time it took us to create this video. We’ve scaled the complete timeline of our Earth’s life into our first animated movie! Every second shows about a million years of the planet’s evolution. Hop on a musical train ride and experience how long a billion years really is.” Below, you can find the timestamps for the geologic periods covered in the video.
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Many first-time visitors to the Louvre experience a letdown to discover how small the Mona Lisa is -just 21” x 30”.
Meanwhile, over in Amsterdam, visitors have been flocking to the Rijksmuseum, eager to lay eyes on the two smallest formal works in the museum’s collection.
Measuring slightly less than 8” tall, they are about as tall as the average retail banana as per US Department of Agriculture estimates.
It’s not just the matching oval portraits’ size that’s packing ’em in.
The recently rediscovered paintings have been identified as the work of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, the leading artist of the Dutch Golden Age.
Painted in 1635, the portraits feature Jan Willemsz van der Pluym, a wealthy 17th-century plumber and his wife, Jaapgen Caerlsdr, dressed in black with stiff white ruffs. The couple owned the garden next to the painter’s mother, and he was distantly related to them through a marriage on her side.
Their triple-great-grandchildren put the portraits up for auction in 1760, after which they passed through several private collections, before dropping entirely from public view following an auction in the summer of 1824.
Nearly two hundred years later, Jan and Jaapgen’s portraits weren’t making much of an impression on that winning bidder’s descendants.
As Henry Pettifer, an Old Master Paintings specialist at Christies, which conducted both the 1824 auction and the one last summer, where the portraits fetched 14.3 million dollars, told the Washington Post, “the family liked the pictures but were never certain that they were by Rembrandt and never really looked into that:”
The pictures were completely absent from the Rembrandt literature in the 19th and 20th centuries, which was extraordinary. They have intimacy about them, a dignity. They’re extraordinary… They’re unlike some of his grand, formal commissioned portraits, and they are something much more spontaneous and intimate. I think the reason for that is that the sitters were very closely connected to Rembrandt. They were very much from Rembrandt’s own inner circle. We should regard them as personal documents rather than formal commissions.
The most recent winning bidder is committed to keeping the paintings in the public eye with a long term-loan to the Rijksmuseum, where extensive research using X‑radiography, infrared photography, infrared reflectography, macro X‑ray fluorescence, stereomicroscopy and paint sample analysis confirmed their provenance.
Experts have also noted similarities in composition, color, and painting technique between these works and larger portraits Rembrandt executed during the same period.
Jonathan Bikker, the Rijksmuseum’s curator of 17th-century Dutch painting, describes the verification of provenance as “mindblowing:”
Totally unknown works hardly ever happen. We really wanted to be able to show them.
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Cast your mind, if you will, to the city of Ceuta. If you’ve never heard of it, or can’t quite recall its location, you can easily find out by searching for it on your map application of choice. Back in the twelfth century, however, you might have had to consult an image of the known world engraved on a 300-pound, six-and-a-half-foot wide silver disk — but then, if you had access to that disk, you’d know full well where Ceuta was in the first place. For it belonged to King Roger II of Sicily, who’d commissioned it from the geographer, traveler, and scholar Abū Abdallāh Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Abdallāh ibn Idrīs al-sharif al-Idrīsī — more succinctly known as Muhammad al-Idrisi — perhaps Ceuta’s most accomplished son.
“Al-Idrisi studied in Cordoba and traveled widely as a young man, visiting Asia Minor, Hungary, the French Atlantic coast, and even as far north as York, England,” writes Big Think’s Frank Jacobs. In 1138, Roger II “invited al-Idrisi to his court at Palermo, possibly to explore whether he could install the Muslim nobleman as a puppet ruler in the bits of North Africa under his dominion, or in Spain, which he hoped to conquer.” The project that resulted from this meeting, fifteen years of work later, was “a new and accurate map of the world.” In addition to knowledge gained on his own extensive travels, Al-Isidiri consulted ancient sources like Ptolemy’s Geography and “interviewed ship’s crews and other seasoned travelers, but retained only those stories on which all were in agreement,” leaving out the mythical tribes and fantastical creatures.
In addition to the grand disk, Al-Idrisi created an atlas consisting of 70 detailed, annotated maps called Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi’khtirāq āl-āfāq. That Arabic title has been variously translated — “the book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands,” “the excursion of the one who yearns to penetrate the horizons,” “the excursion of one who is eager to traverse the regions of the world” — but in Latin, the book was simply called the Tabula Rogeriana. Alas, writes Jacobs, “the original Latin version of the atlas (and the silver disk) were destroyed in 1160 in the chaos of a coup against William the Wicked, Roger’s unpopular son and successor.” Still, Al-Idrisi did manage to bring the Arabic version back with him to North Africa, where it became an influential example of scientific cartography for the Islamic world.
A glance at the Library of Congress’ German facsimile from 1928 at the top of the post reveals that Al-Idrisi’s world map looks quite unlike the ones we know today. He put south, not north, at the top, the better for Islamic converts to orient themselves toward Mecca. “His Europe is sketchy, his Asia amorphous, and his Africa manages to be both partial and oversized,” Jacobs notes, but nevertheless, he got a lot right, including such little-known regions as the kingdom of Silla (located in modern-day Korea) and calculating — approximately, but still impressively — the circumference of the entire Earth. We might consider paying tribute to Al-Idrisi’s achievements by making a trip to his hometown (a Spanish-held city, for the record, at the very tip of Africa north-east of Morocco), which seems like a pleasant place to spend a few weeks — and a promising starting point from which to penetrate a few horizons of our own.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
It was something of a Christmas ritual at Hunter S. Thompson’s Colorado cabin, Owl Farm. Every year, his secretary Deborah Fuller would take down the Christmas tree and leave it on the front porch rather than dispose of it entirely. That’s because Hunter, more often than not, wanted to set it on fire. In 1990, Sam Allis, a writer for then formidable TIME magazine, visited Thompson’s home and watched the fiery tradition unfold. He wrote:
I gave up on the interview and started worrying about my life when Hunter Thompson squirted two cans of fire starter on the Christmas tree he was going to burn in his living-room fireplace, a few feet away from an unopened wooden crate of 9‑mm bullets. That the tree was far too large to fit into the fireplace mattered not a whit to Hunter, who was sporting a dime-store wig at the time and resembled Tony Perkins in Psycho. Minutes earlier, he had smashed a Polaroid camera on the floor.
Hunter had decided to videotape the Christmas tree burning, and we later heard on the replay the terrified voices of Deborah Fuller, his longtime secretary-baby sitter, and me off-camera pleading with him, “NO, HUNTER, NO! PLEASE, HUNTER, DON’T DO IT!” The original manuscript of Hell’s Angels was on the table, and there were the bullets. Nothing doing. Thompson was a man possessed by now, full of the Chivas Regal he had been slurping straight from the bottle and the gin he had been mixing with pink lemonade for hours.
The wooden mantle above the fireplace apparently still has burn marks on it today.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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As far as narrators of documentaries that offer a hypnotically close view of nature, David Attenborough has long stood unopposed. But just this year, a relatively young challenger has emerged: the Icelandic musician-actress Björk Guðmundsdóttir, much better known by her given name alone. “The living world is connected by a vast kingdom of life we are only just beginning to discover,” she says, her distinctive accent and cadence recognizable at once, in the trailer above for the documentary Fungi: Web of Life. And she emphasizes that fungi — known or unknown, prevalent or at risk of vanishing altogether — are so much more than mushrooms.”
Nature documentaries exist in part to correct just such careless conflations, and other misconceptions besides. But Fungi: Web of Life has larger ambitions, following biologist Merlin Sheldrake “as he embarks on a journey through the ancient Tarkine rainforest of Tasmania,” writes Colossal’s Kate Mothes. “Timelapse cinematography reveals up-close details of rarely seen fungal phenomena, from the dispersion of spores to vast subterranean networks known fondly as the ‘wood wide web.’ ” Sheldrake “visits scientists and designers at the forefront of their fields, discovering never-before-seen species and learning from mycelium to create new, sustainable products and environmental solutions.”
The young, fungi-dedicated Sheldrake is the kind of protagonist for whom documentarians hope. And the participation of Björk in a project like this isn’t as much of a fluke as some may assume, given the presence of a standout track called “Fungal City” on her most recent album, Fossora. Its visuals, writes Ryan Waddoups at Surface, “paint a hyper-vivid portrait of Björk fully immersed in her mushroom era,” which began when “she returned to her hometown Reykjavik to record during lockdown” in the time of COVID. “To distract herself, she watched nature documentaries like Netflix’s Fantastic Fungi, becoming enamored with its magical time lapse footage of mushrooms slowly overtaking their surroundings” — not that she’s the first musician with avant-garde associations to develop such interests.
Björk’s participation in Fungi: Web of Life may also bring to mind that of Stevie Wonder in the now-obscure 1979 documentary The Secret Life of Plants. But Wonder provided only music to that film, not narration, while Björk seems to have done the opposite. It may be that her songs, which tend to have a certain psychedelic effect in themselves, would have distracted from the wonders of the fungal realm on display. If you seek admission to that realm, Mothes notes that “Fungi: Web of Life is currently showing in five theaters across North America, including IMAX Victoria at the Royal B.C. Museum, with numerous releases scheduled across the U.S. and the U.K. next year.” You can find a screening at the film’s web site — and why not schedule a dinner of champignons à la provençale thereafter?
Bonus: Below you can watch biologist Merlin Sheldrake eat mushrooms sprouting from his book, Entangled Life. Enjoy.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Netflix once delivered movies not by streaming them over the internet, but by literally delivering them: on DVDs, that is, shipped through the postal service. This tends to come as a surprise to the service’s many users under the age of about 35, or in countries other than the United States. What’s more, Netflix ended its DVD service only this past September, after 25 years, occasioning quite a few tributes from the generation of cinephiles for whom it played a major part in their film education. In this moment of reflection, many of us have looked around and noticed that something else seems to have gone away: cinema itself, if not as a medium, then at least as a major force in the culture. Who, or what, did away with it?
That’s the question movie Youtuber Patrick Willems investigates in his recent video “Who Is Killing Cinema? — A Murder Mystery.” Today, he says, “every major hit movie is a $200 million franchise installment aimed at thirteen-year-old boys, but a couple decades ago, right alongside those blockbusters were dramas and comedies aimed at different audiences, including adults, starring major movie stars.” Even if a drama like Rain Man — not just the winner of Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay, but also the highest-grossing film of the year — got the green light today, “it would be made for a fraction of the budget it had in the eighties, and would probably go straight to a streaming platform with a one-week limited theatrical run to qualify for awards”.
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From behind this sorry state of affairs Willems turns up a variety of suspects. These include Marvel, a synecdoche for the system of internationally marketed franchises based on known intellectual property that “put pleasing the fans as their top priority”; “the death of the movie star,” the presence of whom once got audiences into the theaters to see movies for adults; Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and other high-powered executives with no apparent interest in cinema per se; and attention-fracturing entertainment apps like Tiktok. Willems’ lineup even includes Netflix itself, which — despite its funding the work of auteurs up to and including Orson Welles — he calls “largely responsible for bringing the idea of ‘content’ to traditional media, of taking movies and TV and flattening them all into an endless sea of gray sludge they just dump more and more into every day.”
“Have you ever tried to take a moment and reflect on something you’ve just watched on Netflix, only to have the end credits instantly minimized in favor of some obnoxious ad for what to watch next?” Willems asks in the earlier video just above. “That’s content, baby.” The relevant shift in mindset occurred as services like Willems’ own platform, Youtube, “started prioritizing the steady stream of content over individual videos,” and “when Netflix started producing their own shows” in a manner geared toward binge-watchers. Once, “individual movies or TV shows mattered”; now, “the content mindset just drags traditional media down into a giant ugly pit, and it all becomes this homogeneous goop just waiting to be halfheartedly consumed and discarded.” (Witness the now-shabby reputation of “Netflix movies,” no matter how big-budgeted.)
Both of these videos include quotes from no less a cinematic icon than Martin Scorsese, a high-profile critic of the debasement of cinema into “content.” Though he’s been able to do serious work in the streaming era, Scorsese was forged well before, having emerged in the late sixties when, as Willems reminds us, “audiences had grown tired of overblown big-budget studio movies like Doctor Doolittle” and “a new breed of smaller movies made by younger, innovative, independent artists arrived, led by Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Easy Rider,” with the likes of The Godfather, The Deer Hunter, and Scorsese’s own Taxi Driver to come. “Audiences went nuts for them, and they ushered in this new golden age of American filmmaking.” That was the director-led “new Hollywood”; dare we twenty-first-century cinephiles, now that franchise blockbusters are showing signs of commercial frailty, hope for a new new Hollywood?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
You can hang onto the source of Rudolph’s shame and eventual triumph — the glowing red nose that got him bounced from his playmates’ reindeer games before saving Christmas.
Lose all those other now-iconic elements — the Island of Misfit Toys, long-lashed love interest Clarice, the Abominable Snow Monster of the North, Yukon Cornelius, Sam the Snowman, and Hermey the aspirant dentist elf.
As originally conceived, Rudolph (runner up names: Rollo, Rodney, Roland, Roderick and Reginald) wasn’t even a resident of the North Pole.
He lived with a bunch of other reindeer in an unremarkable house somewhere along Santa’s delivery route.
Santa treated Rudolph’s household as if it were a human address, coming down the chimney with presents while the occupants were asleep in their beds.
To get to Rudolph’s origin story we must travel back in time to January 1939, when a Montgomery Ward department head was already looking for a nationwide holiday promotion to draw customers to its stores during the December holidays.
He settled on a book to be produced in house and given away free of charge to any child accompanying their parent to the store.
Copywriter Robert L. May was charged with coming up with a holiday narrative starring an animal similar to Ferdinand the Bull.
After giving the matter some thought, May tapped Denver Gillen, a pal in Montgomery Ward’s art department, to draw his underdog hero, an appealing-looking young deer with a red nose big enough to guide a sleigh through thick fog.
(That schnozz is not without controversy. Prior to Caitlin Flanagan’s 2020 essay in the Atlantic chafing at the television special’s explicitly cruel depictions of othering the oddball, Montgomery Ward fretted that customers would interpret a red nose as drunkenness. In May’s telling, Santa is so uncomfortable bringing up the true nature of the deer’s abnormality, he pretends that Rudolph’s “wonderful forehead” is the necessary headlamp for his sleigh…)
On the strength of Gillen’s sketches, May was given the go-ahead to write the text.
His rhyming couplets weren’t exactly the stuff of great children’s literature. A sampling:
Twas the day before Christmas, and all through the hills,
The reindeer were playing, enjoying the spills.
Of skating and coasting, and climbing the willows,
And hopscotch and leapfrog, protected by pillows.
___
And Santa was right (as he usually is)
The fog was as thick as a soda’s white fizz
—-
The room he came down in was blacker than ink
He went for a chair and then found it a sink!
No matter.
May’s employer wasn’t much concerned with the artfulness of the tale. It was far more interested in its potential as a marketing tool.
“We believe that an exclusive story like this aggressively advertised in our newspaper ads and circulars…can bring every store an incalculable amount of publicity, and, far more important, a tremendous amount of Christmas traffic,” read the announcement that the Retail Sales Department sent to all Montgomery Ward retail store managers on September 1, 1939.
Over 800 stores opted in, ordering 2,365,016 copies at 1½¢ per unit.
Promotional posters touted the 32-page freebie as “the rollickingest, rip-roaringest, riot-provokingest, Christmas give-away your town has ever seen!”
The advertising manager of Iowa’s Clinton Herald formally apologized for the paper’s failure to cover the Rudolph phenomenon — its local Montgomery Ward branch had opted out of the promotion and there was a sense that any story it ran might indeed create a riot on the sales floor.
His letter is just but one piece of Rudolph-related ephemera preserved in a 54-page scrapbook that is now part of the Robert Lewis May Collection at Dartmouth, May’s alma mater.
Another page boasts a letter from a boy named Robert Rosenbaum, who wrote to thank Montgomery Ward for his copy:
I enjoyed the book very much. My sister could not read it so I read it to her. The man that wrote it done better than I could in all my born days, and that’s nine years.
The magic ingredient that transformed a marketing scheme into an evergreen if not universally beloved Christmas tradition is a song …with an unexpected side order of corporate generosity.
May’s wife died of cancer when he was working on Rudolph, leaving him a single parent with a pile of medical bills. After Montgomery Ward repeated the Rudolph promotion in 1946, distributing an additional 3,600,000 copies, its Board of Directors voted to ease his burden by granting him the copyright to his creation.
Once he held the reins to the “most famous reindeer of all”, May enlisted his songwriter brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, to adapt Rudolph’s story.
The simple lyrics, made famous by singing cowboy Gene Autry’s 1949 hit recording, provided May with a revenue stream and Rankin/Bass with a skeletal outline for its 1964 stop-animation special.
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