Free: Download Over 33,000 Sounds from the BBC Sound Effects Archive

in Archives | September 30th, 2024

There may be a few young peo­ple in Britain today who rec­og­nize the name Lud­wig Koch, but in the nine­teen-for­ties, he con­sti­tut­ed some­thing of a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non unto him­self. He “start­ed record­ing sounds and voic­es in the 1880s when he was still a child” in his native Ger­many, says the web­site of the BBC. After flee­ing from the Nazis, he set­tled in Eng­land, which cre­at­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty for the Beeb to acquire his col­lec­tion of field record­ings, using it to start build­ing its own library of nature sounds. Soon, Koch “became a house­hold name as a nature broad­cast­er,” and his “dis­tinct Ger­man accent and eccen­tric loca­tion record­ings became so well known that he was par­o­died by Peter Sell­ers.”

You can hear 168 of Koch’s field record­ings at the online archive of BBC Sound Effects, whose dig­i­tal hold­ings have in recent years grown to include over 33,000 dif­fer­ent sounds from var­i­ous sources, span­ning more than a cen­tu­ry.

“These include clips made by the BBC Radio­phon­ic work­shop, record­ings from the Blitz in Lon­don, spe­cial effects made for BBC TV and Radio pro­duc­tions, as well as 15,000 record­ings from the Nat­ur­al His­to­ry Unit archive,” says its About page. “You can explore sounds from every con­ti­nent — from the col­lege bells ring­ing in Oxford to a Patag­on­ian water­fall — or lis­ten to a sub­ma­rine klax­on or the sound of a 1969 Ford Corti­na door slam­ming shut.”

The BBC has made all these record­ings free for your own non-com­mer­cial use, as long as you cred­it where they came from. To put them into a com­mer­cial project, you can license them by click­ing “Show details,” and then the “Buy sound” but­ton that appears right below. The archive also offers a “mix­er mode,” which lets you “lay­er, edit and re-order clips from the archive to cre­ate your own sounds,” poten­tial­ly mash­ing up a wide vari­ety of times and places into a sin­gle sound­scape. A chac­ma baboon wield­ing a laser in a Bel­gian café, for instance, or a laugh­ing woman brew­ing a ket­tle of water at a bull­fight in Spain: hard­ly the sort of aur­al scenes that would be intro­duced by Lud­wig Koch, grant­ed, but here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, the only lim­it is your imag­i­na­tion. Enter the BBC Sound Effects Archive here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

NASA Puts Online a Big Col­lec­tion of Space Sounds, and They’re Free to Down­load and Use

How the Sound Effects on 1930s Radio Shows Were Made: An Inside Look

Down­load 1,000+ Dig­i­tized Tapes of Sounds from Clas­sic Hol­ly­wood Films & TV, Cour­tesy of the Inter­net Archive

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

Michael Winslow, the “Man of 10,000 Sound Effects”, Imper­son­ates the Sounds of Jimi Hendrix’s and Led Zeppelin’s Elec­tric Gui­tars with His Voice

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

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David Bowie’s Fashionable Mug Shot From His 1976 Marijuana Bust

in Music | September 30th, 2024


David Bowie always man­aged to look cool, even when he was being booked for a felony.

In ear­ly 1976, Bowie was on his “Iso­lar” tour, per­form­ing as the Thin White Duke, a per­sona he would describe as “a very Aryan fas­cist type — a would-be roman­tic with no emo­tions at all.” Bowie invit­ed his friend and some­time cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tor Iggy Pop to trav­el with him.

In the ear­ly morn­ing hours of March 21, after a con­cert at the Com­mu­ni­ty War Memo­r­i­al are­na in Rochester, New York, four local vice squad detec­tives and a state police inves­ti­ga­tor searched Bowie’s three-room suite at the Amer­i­cana Rochester Hotel. Accord­ing to reports in the Rochester Demo­c­rat and Chron­i­cle, the cops found 182 grams (a lit­tle over 6.4 ounces) of mar­i­jua­na there. Bowie and three oth­ers — Pop, a body­guard named Dwain Voughns, and a young Rochester woman named Chi­wah Soo — were charged with fifth-degree crim­i­nal pos­ses­sion of mar­i­jua­na, a class C felony, pun­ish­able by up to 15 years in prison.

Bowie and Pop were booked under their real names, David Jones and James Oster­berg Jr. The group spent the rest of the night in the Mon­roe Coun­ty Jail and were released at about 7 a.m. on $2,000 bond each. They were sup­posed to be arraigned the next day, but Bowie left town to go to his next con­cert in Spring­field, Mass­a­chu­setts. His lawyer appeared and asked for the court’s indul­gence, explain­ing the heavy penal­ties for break­ing con­cert engage­ments. He promised the judge that Bowie would appear the fol­low­ing morn­ing, March 23.

Bowie showed up for his arraign­ment look­ing dap­per in his Thin White Duke cloth­ing. It was then that his mug shot was tak­en — so we’ll nev­er actu­al­ly know what Bowie looked like when he was unex­pect­ed­ly dragged into jail at 3 a.m. The police escort­ed the rock star in and out of the court­room most­ly through back cor­ri­dors, shield­ing him from a crowd of fans who showed up at the cour­t­house. Reporter John Stew­art describes the scene in the next day’s Demo­c­rat and Chron­i­cle:

Bowie and his group ignored reporters’ shout­ed ques­tions and fans’ yells as he walked in — except for one teenag­er who got his auto­graph as he stepped off the esca­la­tor.

His biggest greet­ing was the screams of about a half-dozen sus­pect­ed pros­ti­tutes await­ing arraign­ment in the rear of the cor­ri­dor out­side the court­room.

Asked for a plea by City Court Judge Alphonse Cas­set­ti to the charge of fifth-degree crim­i­nal pos­ses­sion of a con­trolled sub­stance, Bowie said, “not guilty, sir.” The court used his real name — David Jones.

He stood demure­ly in front of the bench with his attor­neys. He wore a gray three-piece leisure suit and a pale brown shirt. He was hold­ing a match­ing hat. His two com­pan­ions were arraigned on the same charge.

The defense lawyer told the judge that Bowie and the oth­ers had nev­er been arrest­ed before. The judge allowed them to remain free on bond until a grand jury con­vened. Bowie and his entourage went on with their tour, and the grand jury even­tu­al­ly decid­ed not to indict any­one. The inci­dent was large­ly for­got­ten until an auc­tion house employ­ee named Gary Hess stum­bled on Bowie’s mug shot while sort­ing through the estate of a retired Rochester police offi­cer. Hess res­cued the pho­to from the trash bin, accord­ing to an arti­cle in Rochester Sub­way, and in late 2007 his broth­er sold it on eBay for $2,700.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Thin White Duke: A Close Study of David Bowie’s Dark­est Char­ac­ter

John Coltrane’s Naval Reserve Enlist­ment Mugshot (1945)

David Bowie Pre­dicts the Good & Bad of the Inter­net in 1999: “We’re on the Cusp of Some­thing Exhil­a­rat­ing and Ter­ri­fy­ing”

Watch David Bowie Per­form “Star­man” on Top of the Pops: Vot­ed the Great­est Music Per­for­mance Ever on the BBC (1972)

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How Kodak Invented the Snapshot in the 1800s, Making It Possible for Everyone to Be a Photographer

in History, Photography | September 27th, 2024

We still occa­sion­al­ly speak of “Kodak moments,” mak­ing con­scious or uncon­scious ref­er­ence to the slo­gan of the East­man Kodak Com­pa­ny in the nine­teen-eight­ies. Even by that time, Kodak had already been a going con­cern for near­ly a cen­tu­ry, fur­nish­ing pho­tog­ra­phers around the world with the film they need­ed to cap­ture images. Its very first slo­gan, unveiled in 1888, was “You Press the But­ton, We Do the Rest,” and it her­ald­ed the arrival of a new era: one in which, thanks to the com­pa­ny’s No. 1 box cam­era (loaded with the new medi­um of roll film), pho­tographs could be “tak­en by peo­ple with lit­tle or no pre­vi­ous knowl­edge of pho­tog­ra­phy.”

So says Vox’s Cole­man Lown­des in the new video above, which explains how this inven­tion changed the nature of pho­tog­ra­phy itself. Peo­ple began using Kodak cam­eras “to doc­u­ment their trav­els and their dai­ly lives at home”; they “took por­traits of each oth­er, but also can­did street scenes.” Such was the nov­el­ty of tak­ing a pic­ture so quick­ly and eas­i­ly — and well out­side a stu­dio — that it demand­ed a new word, or rather, the adop­tion of a word from anoth­er domain: snap­shot, which up until then had referred to “a quick shot with a gun, with­out aim, at a fast-mov­ing tar­get.” Before Kodak, a pho­tog­ra­ph­er sim­ply had no way to cap­ture the moment.

But it was only with the intro­duc­tion of the inex­pen­sive Brown­ie, “a sim­ple box cam­era made of card­board encased in faux leather,” that every­one — even a child — could become a pho­tog­ra­ph­er. “Take a Kodak with You,” sug­gest­ed anoth­er of the com­pa­ny’s slo­gans in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, and mil­lions took heed. Its posi­tion as both a cor­po­rate and cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion was­n’t seri­ous­ly threat­ened until the end of that cen­tu­ry, when Japan’s Fuji­film “had begun to eat away at the Amer­i­can pho­to giant’s mar­ket share,” and then dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy destroyed wide swaths of the film busi­ness at a stroke.

Iron­i­cal­ly, the first dig­i­tal cam­era was invent­ed in 1975 by a Kodak engi­neer, “but the com­pa­ny, which from the begin­ning had built itself on sell­ing and pro­cess­ing film rather than man­u­fac­tur­ing cam­eras, did­n’t make the change soon enough.” After final­ly enter­ing bank­rupt­cy in 2012, Kodak reor­ga­nized to “focus on dig­i­tal print­ing ser­vices rather than film devel­op­ment,” which has by now become “a some­what niche mar­ket of ded­i­cat­ed hob­by­ists.” Also doing its part to keep the com­pa­ny afloat is its line of logo-embla­zoned appar­el, which holds out a retro appeal all across the world — even to young­sters quick enough on the draw with their cam­era phones that every moment might as well be a Kodak moment.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Pho­tog­ra­phy in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes: From Cam­era Obscu­ra to Cam­era Phone

Vis­it a New Dig­i­tal Archive of 2.2 Mil­lion Images from the First Hun­dred Years of Pho­tog­ra­phy

How Film Was Made in 1958: A Kodak Nos­tal­gia Moment

Hen­ri Carti­er-Bres­son and the Deci­sive Moment

The Very Con­cise Sui­cide Note by Kodak Founder George East­man: “My Work is Done. Why Wait?” (1932)

Hunter S. Thompson’s Advice for Aspir­ing Pho­tog­ra­phers: Skip the Fan­cy Equip­ment & Just Shoot

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

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How Filmmakers Make Cameras Disappear: Mirrors in Movies

in Film, Television | September 26th, 2024

If you’ve nev­er tried your hand at film­mak­ing, you might assume that its hard­est visu­al chal­lenges are the cre­ation of effects-laden spec­ta­cles: star­ships duk­ing it out in space, mon­sters stomp­ing through major cities, ani­mals speak­ing and danc­ing like Broad­way stars, that sort of thing. But con­sid­er the chal­lenge posed by sim­ply cap­tur­ing a scene set in a bath­room. Almost all such spaces include a large mir­ror, mean­ing that most angles from which you could shoot will vio­late an impor­tant rule cit­ed by Youtu­ber Paul E.T. in the video above: “Don’t show the cam­era in the shot.”

Yet we’ve all seen major motion pic­tures and tele­vi­sion series with scenes not just in bath­rooms but oth­er mir­ror-equipped spaces, from rooms used for inter­ro­gat­ing sus­pects to rooms used for prepar­ing to come out on stage. What’s more, the cam­era often pass­es blithe­ly before these mir­rors with a vam­pire-like lack of a reflec­tion. The tech­niques used to achieve such shots are now mature enough that we may not even notice that what we’re see­ing does­n’t make visu­al sense. How they work is the sub­ject of Paul E.T.‘s inves­ti­ga­tion, begin­ning with an episode of Crim­i­nal: Unit­ed King­dom in which a cam­era some­how floats around a room with a one-way mir­ror, nev­er appear­ing in that mir­ror.

Anoth­er more famil­iar exam­ple comes from Con­tact, direct­ed by the visu­al-effects maven Robert Zemeck­is. In its ear­ly flash­back sequence, an ado­les­cent ver­sion of its astronomer pro­tag­o­nist runs toward the back­ward-track­ing cam­era and reach­es out to open what turns out to be a bath­room med­i­cine cab­i­net, into whose mir­ror we must have — yet can­not pos­si­bly have — been look­ing into the whole time. What we’re see­ing is actu­al­ly a seam­less fusion of two shots, with the “emp­ty” (that is, blue-screen-filled) frame of the cab­i­net mir­ror super­im­posed on the end of the shot of the young actress run­ning toward it. While not tech­ni­cal­ly easy, it’s at least con­cep­tu­al­ly straight­for­ward.

Paul E.T. finds anoth­er, more com­pli­cat­ed mir­ror shot in no less a mas­ter­work of cin­e­ma than Zack Snider’s Suck­er Punch, which tracks all the way around from one side of a set of dress­ing-room mir­rors to the oth­er. “What you’re actu­al­ly see­ing when the cam­era moves is the tran­si­tion­ing from one side of a dupli­cat­ed set to the oth­er,” he explains, “with an invis­i­ble cut spliced in there” — which involves looka­like actress­es lit­er­al­ly try­ing to mir­ror each oth­er’s move­ments. No such elab­o­rate trick­ery for Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure, which shoots straight-on into a bath­room mir­ror by build­ing the cam­era into the wall, then dig­i­tal­ly eras­ing it in post-pro­duc­tion.

While we do live in an age of “fix it in post” (an instinct with an arguably regret­table effect on cin­e­ma), mir­ror shots, on the whole, still require some degree of fore­sight and inven­tive­ness. Such was the case with that scene from Crim­i­nal: Unit­ed King­dom, which Paul E.T. sim­ply could­n’t fig­ure out on his own. His search for answers led him to e‑mail the episode’s B‑camera oper­a­tor, who explained that the pro­duc­tion involved nei­ther a blue screen nor dou­bles, but “a com­bi­na­tion of well-chore­o­graphed cam­era work and VFX.” The result: a shot that may look unre­mark­able at first, but on clos­er inspec­tion, attests to the sub­tle pow­er of movie mag­ic — or TV mag­ic, at any rate.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Art of Cre­at­ing Spe­cial Effects in Silent Movies: Inge­nu­ity Before the Age of CGI

This Is What The Matrix Looks Like With­out CGI: A Spe­cial Effects Break­down

How Film­mak­ers Tell Their Sto­ries: Three Insight­ful Video Essays Demys­ti­fy the Craft of Edit­ing, Com­po­si­tion & Col­or

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

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The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Digitized and Available Online

in Art, Books, History | September 25th, 2024

If you know noth­ing else about medieval Euro­pean illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts, you sure­ly know the Book of Kells. “One of Ireland’s great­est cul­tur­al trea­sures” com­ments Medievalists.net, “it is set apart from oth­er man­u­scripts of the same peri­od by the qual­i­ty of its art­work and the sheer num­ber of illus­tra­tions that run through­out the 680 pages of the book.” The work not only attracts schol­ars, but almost a mil­lion vis­i­tors to Dublin every year. “You sim­ply can’t trav­el to the cap­i­tal of Ire­land,” writes Book Riot’s Eri­ka Har­litz-Kern, “with­out the Book of Kells being men­tioned. And right­ful­ly so.”

The ancient mas­ter­piece is a stun­ning exam­ple of Hiber­no-Sax­on style, thought to have been com­posed on the Scot­tish island of Iona in 806, then trans­ferred to the monastery of Kells in Coun­ty Meath after a Viking raid (a sto­ry told in the mar­velous ani­mat­ed film The Secret of Kells). Con­sist­ing main­ly of copies of the four gospels, as well as index­es called “canon tables,” the man­u­script is believed to have been made pri­mar­i­ly for dis­play, not read­ing aloud, which is why “the images are elab­o­rate and detailed while the text is care­less­ly copied with entire words miss­ing or long pas­sages being repeat­ed.”

Its exquis­ite illu­mi­na­tions mark it as a cer­e­mo­ni­al object, and its “intri­ca­cies,” argue Trin­i­ty Col­lege Dublin pro­fes­sors Rachel Moss and Fáinche Ryan, “lead the mind along path­ways of the imag­i­na­tion…. You haven’t been to Ire­land unless you’ve seen the Book of Kells.” This may be so, but thank­ful­ly, in our dig­i­tal age, you need not go to Dublin to see this fab­u­lous his­tor­i­cal arti­fact, or a dig­i­ti­za­tion of it at least, entire­ly view­able at the online col­lec­tions of the Trin­i­ty Col­lege Library. (When you click on the pre­vi­ous link, make sure you scroll down the page.) The pages, orig­i­nal­ly cap­tured in 1990, “have recent­ly been res­canned,” Trin­i­ty Col­lege Library writes, using state-of-the-art imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy. These new dig­i­tal images offer the most accu­rate high-res­o­lu­tion images to date, pro­vid­ing an expe­ri­ence sec­ond only to view­ing the book in per­son.”

What makes the Book of Kells so spe­cial, repro­duced “in such var­ied places as Irish nation­al coinage and tat­toos?” asks Pro­fes­sors Moss and Ryan. “There is no one answer to these ques­tions.” In their free online course on the man­u­script, these two schol­ars of art his­to­ry and the­ol­o­gy, respec­tive­ly, do not attempt to “pro­vide defin­i­tive answers to the many ques­tions that sur­round it.” Instead, they illu­mi­nate its his­to­ry and many mean­ings to dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties of peo­ple, includ­ing, of course, the peo­ple of Ire­land. “For Irish peo­ple,” they explain in the course trail­er above, “it rep­re­sents a sense of pride, a tan­gi­ble link to a pos­i­tive time in Ireland’s past, reflect­ed through its unique art.”

But while the Book of Kells is still a mod­ern “sym­bol of Irish­ness,” it was made with mate­ri­als and tech­niques that fell out of use sev­er­al hun­dred years ago, and that were once spread far and wide across Europe, the Mid­dle East, and North Africa. In the video above, Trin­i­ty Col­lege Library con­ser­va­tor John Gillis shows us how the man­u­script was made using meth­ods that date back to the “devel­op­ment of the codex, or the book form.” This includes the use of parch­ment, in this case calf skin, a mate­r­i­al that remem­bers the anatom­i­cal fea­tures of the ani­mals from which it came, with mark­ings where tails, spines, and legs used to be.

The Book of Kells has weath­ered the cen­turies fair­ly well, thanks to care­ful preser­va­tion, but it’s also had per­haps five rebind­ings in its life­time. “In its orig­i­nal form,” notes Har­litz-Kern, the man­u­script “was both thick­er and larg­er. Thir­ty folios of the orig­i­nal man­u­script have been lost through the cen­turies and the edges of the exist­ing man­u­script were severe­ly trimmed dur­ing a rebind­ing in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.” It remains, nonethe­less, one of the most impres­sive arti­facts to come from the age of the illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script, “described by some,” says Moss and Ryan, “as the most famous man­u­script in the world.” Find out why by see­ing it (vir­tu­al­ly) for your­self and learn­ing about it from the experts above.

For any­one inter­est­ed in get­ting a copy of The Book of Kells in a nice print for­mat, see The Book of Kells: Repro­duc­tions from the man­u­script in Trin­i­ty Col­lege, Dublin.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Free Online Course on the Great Medieval Man­u­script, the Book of Kells

Dis­cov­er the Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script Les Très Rich­es Heures du Duc de Berry, “the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Cal­en­dar” (1416)

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

Killer Rab­bits in Medieval Man­u­scripts: Why So Many Draw­ings in the Mar­gins Depict Bun­nies Going Bad

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch the First Performance of a Mozart Composition That Had Been Lost for Centuries

in History, Music | September 25th, 2024

For most musi­cians, a long-lost song writ­ten in their teenage years would be of inter­est only to seri­ous fans — and even then, prob­a­bly more for bio­graph­i­cal rea­sons than as a stand­alone piece of work. But that’s hard­ly the case for Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart, who was com­pos­ing advanced music at the age of five, and indeed com­plet­ed the first act of his short life by ado­les­cence. Hence the guar­an­teed appre­cia­tive audi­ence for Ser­e­nade in C, a hith­er­to unknown piece recent­ly dis­cov­ered in the hold­ings of Germany’s Leipzig Munic­i­pal Libraries and first per­formed for the pub­lic just last week.

“Library researchers were com­pil­ing an edi­tion of the Köchel cat­a­log, a com­pre­hen­sive archive of Mozart’s work, when they stum­bled across a mys­te­ri­ous bound man­u­script con­tain­ing a hand­writ­ten com­po­si­tion in brown ink,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Son­ja Ander­son.

Com­posed in the mid-to-late 1760s, Ser­e­nade in C “con­sists of sev­en minia­ture move­ments for a string trio (two vio­lins and a bass).” Accord­ing to researchers, it “fits styl­is­ti­cal­ly” the work of that peri­od, “when Mozart was between the ages of 10 and 13”; a few years lat­er, he’d out­grown (or tran­scend­ed) this style of cham­ber music entire­ly.

You can see and hear Ser­e­nade in C in the video at the top of the post, per­formed ear­li­er this month, not long after its pre­miere, on the steps of the Leipzig Opera by Vin­cent Geer, David Geer, and Elis­a­beth Zim­mer­mann of the Leipzig School of Music’s youth sym­pho­ny orches­tra. Renamed Ganz kleine Nacht­musik, this “new” Mozart piece has been includ­ed in the lat­est Köchel cat­a­log with the num­ber K. 648. If you lis­ten to it in the con­text of Mozart’s artis­tic evo­lu­tion, you’ll also notice the ways in which it stands out in a peri­od when he wrote main­ly arias, sym­phonies, and piano music. As for the extent to which it pre­fig­ures things to come, it’s ear­ly enough that we should prob­a­bly leave that ques­tion to the Mozartol­o­gists.

via Smithsonian.com

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear the Evo­lu­tion of Mozart’s Music, Com­posed from Ages 5 to 35

New­ly Dis­cov­ered Piece by Mozart Per­formed on His Own Fortepi­ano

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

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Hear Moby Dick Read in Its Entirety by Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, John Waters, Stephen Fry & More

in Audio Books, Literature | September 24th, 2024

moby dick big read

Image of Moby Dick by David Austen.

In 2013, Ply­mouth Uni­ver­si­ty kicked off Moby Dick The Big Read, promis­ing a full audio­book of Her­man Melville’s influ­en­tial nov­el, with famous (and not so famous) voic­es tak­ing on a chap­ter each. When we first wrote about it here, only six chap­ters had been unveiled, but boast­ed actors like Til­da Swin­ton (read­ing chap­ter one below), author Nigel Williams, and poet and jour­nal­ist Musa Okwon­ga.

We’re glad to say the project reached its suc­cess­ful con­clu­sion. And they cer­tain­ly called on an impres­sive ros­ter of celebri­ty read­ers: Stephen Fry, Neil Ten­nant, Fiona Shaw, Will Self, Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch, Chi­na Miéville, Tony Kush­n­er, John Waters, Simon Cal­low, Sir David Atten­bor­ough, even for­mer Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron. Pulitzer Prize win­ning poet Mary Oliv­er fin­ish­es off the whole project, read­ing the Epi­logue.

All 135 chap­ters are avail­able to be lis­tened to in your brows­er, down­loaded on iTunes, or streamed on Sound­Cloud. How­ev­er, do check them out online, as each chap­ter comes with a work of art each cre­at­ed by 135 con­tem­po­rary artists such as Matthew Bar­ney, Oliv­er Clegg, and Matthew Bene­dict. (See David Austen’s work above.) The project is a mam­moth under­tak­ing befit­ting such a mon­u­men­tal book, and if you’ve nev­er read it this just might be the way to go.

Copies of Moby Dick can be found in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks. Mean­while, this big read­ing will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

Why Should We Read Melville’s Moby-Dick? A TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion Makes the Case

How to Mem­o­rize an Entire Chap­ter from “Moby Dick”: The Art and Sci­ence of Remem­ber­ing Every­thing

An Illus­tra­tion of Every Page of Her­man Melville’s Moby Dick

How Ray Brad­bury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956)

Orson Welles Reads From Moby-Dick: The Great Amer­i­can Direc­tor Takes on the Great Amer­i­can Nov­el

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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How Art Gets Stolen: What Happened to Egon Schiele’s Painting Boats Mirrored in the Water After Its Theft by the Nazis

in Art, History | September 24th, 2024

George Clooney may be bet­ter regard­ed as an actor than as a direc­tor, but his occa­sion­al work in the lat­ter capac­i­ty reveals an admirable inter­est in less­er-dra­ma­tized chap­ters of Amer­i­can his­to­ry. His films have found their mate­r­i­al in every­thing from the ear­ly years of the NFL to the racial strife in Levit­town to even The Gong Show cre­ator Chuck Bar­ris’ dubi­ous past as a CIA assas­sin. A decade ago, he direct­ed The Mon­u­ments Men, whose ensem­ble cast – includ­ing Matt Damon, Bill Mur­ray, John Good­man, and Clooney him­self — play Allied sol­diers tasked with recov­er­ing the many works of art stolen by the Nazis dur­ing World War II.

The Mon­u­ments Men is based, if loose­ly, on real events; hence the inclu­sion of a few of its clips in the new Great Art Explained video above. In it, gal­lerist-Youtu­ber James Payne gets into the sub­ject of how the Nazis plun­dered Europe’s cul­tur­al trea­sures through one paint­ing in par­tic­u­lar: one of dar­ing Expres­sion­ist Egon Schiele’s Boats Mir­rored in the Water series, whose where­abouts remain unknown.

Before the war, it had been in the art col­lec­tion of the Vien­na cabaret star Franz Friedrich “Fritz” Grün­baum. Unlike Schiele’s por­traits, none of the Boats Mir­rored in the Water were suf­fi­cient­ly offen­sive to be labeled “degen­er­ate art.” They were nonethe­less sub­ject to the orga­nized theft that the regime called “Aryaniza­tion.”

In 1956, long after the Nazis had sent Grün­baum and his wife to their deaths, 80 per­cent of their col­lec­tion came up for auc­tion in Switzer­land. How it got there, we don’t know, though it end­ed up dis­persed far and wide, to both insti­tu­tions and indi­vid­u­als. The Boats Mir­rored in the Water in ques­tion was record­ed as hav­ing been sold again, in 1990, to an uniden­ti­fied pri­vate col­lec­tor, and it has­n’t been seen since. That may not be a Hol­ly­wood end­ing, but the art-repa­tri­at­ing work of the real Mon­u­ments Men con­tin­ues today; not so long ago, a Ger­man court even award­ed a once-Aryanized por­trait by Schiele’s idol Gus­tav Klimt to the son of its orig­i­nal own­er. It’s not impos­si­ble that the miss­ing boat Schiele paint­ed in Tri­este over a cen­tu­ry ago will see the light of day once again.

Relat­ed con­tent:

New Dig­i­tal Archive Will Fea­ture the Com­plete Works of Egon Schiele: Start with 419 Paint­ings, Draw­ings & Sculp­tures

How Jan van Eyck’s Mas­ter­piece, the Ghent Altar­piece, Became the Most Stolen Work of Art in His­to­ry

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

The 16,000 Art­works the Nazis Cen­sored and Labeled “Degen­er­ate Art”: The Com­plete His­toric Inven­to­ry Is Now Online

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

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

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