114 years ago today (November 20, 1910), Leo Tolstoy—the author who gave us two major Russian classics Anna Karenina and War & Peace—died at Astapovo, a small, remote train station in the heart of Russia. Pneumonia was the official cause. His death came just weeks after Tolstoy, then 82 years old, made a rather dramatic decision. He left his wife, his comfortable estate, and his wealth, then traveled 26 hours to Sharmardino, where Tolstoy’s sister Marya lived, and where he planned to spend the remainder of his life in a small, rented hut. (Elif Batuman has more on this.) But then he pushed on, boarding a train to the Caucasus. And it proved to be more than his already weakened constitution could handle. Rather amazingly, the footage above brings you back to Tolstoy’s final days, and right to his deathbed itself. This clip comes from a 1969 BBC series Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark, and these days you can still find copies of Clark’s accompanying book kicking around online.
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Pierre-Joseph Redouté made his name by painting flowers, an achievement impossible without a meticulousness that exceeds all bounds of normality. He published his three-volume collection Les Roses and his eight-volume collection Les Liliacées between 1802 and 1824, and a glance at their pages today vividly suggests the painstaking nature of both his process for not just rendering those flowers, but also for seeing them properly in the first place. While Redouté’s works have long been available free online, the digital forms in which they’ve been available haven’t quite done them justice — certainly not to the mind of designer and data artist Nicholas Rougeux.
Hence Rougeux’s decision to undertake a restoration of Les Roses and Les Liliacées, an “opportunity to become intimately familiar with his techniques and develop a deeper appreciation for his efforts.” The project ended up demanding eleven months, only some of which were taken up by bringing the original colors back to Redouté’s paintings, which “not only depict the physical characteristics of the roses but also convey their delicate beauty and fragrance.” Rougeux also had to digitally re-create the reading experience of these books for the internet, custom-designing a digital gallery for viewing their roses and lilies as they pop out against their newly added dark backgrounds.
Placing all of Redouté’s flowers against those backgrounds entailed the real Photoshop labor, taking each image and “making the layer mask manually by carefully and slowly tracing along every edge” — for all 655 plates of Les Roses and Les Liliacées, as Rougeux writes in a detailed making-of blog post. “No matter the complexity, I traced every flower, every leaf, every stem, every root, and every hair to preserve all the details and ensure that Redouté’s hard work looked as good on a dark background as it did on a light one.” Translating art from one medium to another can be a supremely effective way to cultivate a full appreciation of the artist’s skill — and in this case, a no less full appreciation of his patience. See the online restoration of Les Roses et Les Liliacées here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In April, 1983, 50 million television viewers watched the illusionist David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear, straight into thin air. If you’re north of 50, you perhaps remember the spectacle. How did he do it? 40 years later, the YouTube channel Mind Blown Magic Illusion demystifies the large-scale magic trick, explaining how Copperfield distracted the audience, rotated the stage, and shifted Lady Liberty out of view. That’s apparently the gist of the illusion. However, in the comments section on YouTube, one commenter adds a little more important detail:
You missed the most important misdirection. He had a helicopter with a bright spotlight shining on the statue for a considerable length of time during which he apologized to the audience and said they were having “technical problems.” Eventually the curtain came across and the stage began to revolve imperceptibly slowly. However the helicopter moved in sync with the stage. The beam of light appeared to be stationary in relation to the stage. When the curtain was lifted they saw the helicopter in the same place but with no statue. The beam of light also helped black out the background. Otherwise the audience would have seen a different skyline. Pure genius!
For Open Culture readers, it’s worth mentioning that the legendary filmmaker Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It Happened One Night) played an unlikely role in the production. In an interview with Judd Apatow, Copperfield recalls how he enlisted Capra to help write the script for the episode:
So then I said [to myself] “Now the Statue of Liberty is going to disappear, but I’ve got to make this have more meaning.” So I went to visit Frank Capra, one of my idols, and did a kind of Judd Apatow interview with him. I said, “I’d like the Statue of Liberty to disappear, but I want to do it as a lesson in freedom, how valuable freedom is and what the world would be like without liberty.” And Frank Capra looked at me and said, “David, I love your idea, but here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to try and it’s not going to work; it’s not going to disappear.” And I said, “Mr. Capra, I can’t do that.” You know? [laughs] And I got to watch Frank Capra, in his eighties, in action.
You can watch some of the original 1983 footage below. Enjoy!
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There’s an eXodus taking place, and millions are finding a new home on Bluesky. In recent days, the decentralized social media platform has been gaining 10,000 new users every 10–15 minutes, or about 1 million new users per day. Open Culture is already there, sharing the cultural posts you once enjoyed on Twitter. We hope you will join us. Find us at @openculture.bsky.social, or just clickhere.
Bertrand Russell may have lived his long life concerned with big topics in logic, mathematics, politics, and society, but that didn’t keep him from thinking seriously about how to handle his own day-to-day relationships. That hardly means he handled every such relationship with perfect aplomb: take note of his three divorces, the first of which was formalized in 1921, the year he married his lover Dora Black. Possessed of similar bohemian-reformer ideals — and, before long, two children — the couple founded the experimental Beacon Hill School in 1927, intent on encouraging their young pupils’ development as not just thinkers-in-training but full human beings.
A few years later, Russell published his personal “ten commandments” in a culture magazine called Everyman, and you can read it in full in this 1978 issue of the Russell Society News. (Go to page 5.)
“Everybody, I suppose, has his own list of virtues that he tries to practice, and, when he fails to practice them, he feels shame quite independently of the opinion of others, so far at any rate as conscious thought is concerned,” he writes by way of introduction. “I have tried to put the virtues that I should wish to possess into the form of a decalogue,” which is as follows:
Do not lie to yourself.
Do not lie to other people unless they are exercising tyranny.
When you think it is your duty to inflict pain, scrutinize your reasons closely.
When you desire power, examine yourself closely as to why you deserve it.
When you have power, use it to build up people, not to constrict them.
Do not attempt to live without vanity, since this is impossible, but choose the right audience from which to seek admiration.
Do not think of yourself as a wholly self-contained unit.
Be reliable.
Be just.
Be good-natured.
In the full text, Russell elaborates on the thinking behind each of these virtues. “When you wish to believe some theological or political doctrine which will increase your income, you will, if you are not very careful, give much more weight to the arguments in favor than to those against”: hence the importance of not lying to yourself. When it comes to lying to others, not only should governments tell the truth to their subjects, “parents should tell the truth to their children, however inconvenient this may seem.” And families as in states, “those who are intelligent but weak cannot be expected to forego the use of their intelligence in their conflicts with those who are stupid but strong.”
Russell’s fifth commandment also applies to relationships between the old and the young, since “those who deal with the young inevitably have power, and it is easy to exercise this power in ways pleasing to the educator rather than useful to the child.” And by his eighth commandment, he means “to suggest a whole set of humdrum but necessary virtues, such as punctuality, keeping promises, adhering to plans involving other people, refraining from treachery even in its mildest forms.” Alas, “modern education, in lessening the emphasis on discipline, has, I think, failed to produce reliable human beings where social obligations are concerned.”
This “prescriptive emphasis — notably the stress placed on the merits of some humble virtues — may have been influenced then by his practical experience of progressive education,” writes The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell editor Andrew Bone. But Russell still revised his decalogue long after he left the Beacon Hill School in 1932, with world events of the subsequent decades inspiring him to use it in the service of what he regarded as a liberal worldview. One version broadcast on the BBC in 1951 includes such commandments as “Do not feel absolutely certain of anything,” “Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than passive agreement,” and “Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you” — all of which more of the last few generations of students could have done well to internalize.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Yes, the big animation studios (Warner Bros., Disney, etc.) dominate the list. But a few “indies” manage to squeak in there. Take for example Winsor McCay’s seminal 1914 creation “Gertie the Dinosaur.” Or Bambi Meets Godzilla. A student film created by Marv Newland in 1969, Bambi Meets Godzilla (above) runs only 90 seconds. Of which, 48 seconds are devoted to the opening credits, and 27 seconds to the closing credits, leaving only 12 seconds of “action,” which is mostly stillness. The timing is the funny.
The short film circulated in theaters across the U.S., shown before screenings of Philippe de Broca’s feature film King of Hearts. Over the years the publicly-available versions of Bambi Meets Godzilla became worn and faded. So, in 2013, Coda Gardner produced a frame-for-frame HD re-creation. You can watch it below.
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More than 120 years after the end of the Victorian era, we might assume that we retain a more or less accurate cultural memory of the Victorians themselves: of their social mores, their aesthetic sensibilities, their ambitions great and small, their many and varied hang-ups. Some of the most vivid representations of these qualities have come down to us through primary sources, which tend to be texts and works of visual art. Late in Queen Victoria’s reign came photographs, and at the very end, even the motion picture. But how can we be sure how her people really sounded?
Strictly speaking, the earliest process for mechanically recording the sound of the human voice dates back to 1860, not even halfway through the Victorian era. But the technology still had a long way to go at that time, and it wasn’t until the 1880s that Thomas Edison’s phonograph and the wax cylinders it played became commercially viable. So explains the King and Things video above, on the spread of audio recording and the earliest possibilities it opened for capturing the voices of what we now regard as the distant past. Those voices include that of a man introduced as “one of England’s most famous after-dinner speakers, Mr. Edmund Yates.”
That cylinder was recorded in 1888, at one of the London soirées held by an American Edison employee named George Gouraud. The son of French engineer François Gouraud, who had introduced daguerreotype photography to the United States in the 1830s, he took it upon himself to bring the phonograph to Britain. He did so in a top-down manner, inviting socially distinguished guests to his home for dinner so that they might thrill to the novelty of after-dinner speeches delivered by machine — and then record their own messages to Edison himself. “I can only say that I am astonished and somewhat terrified at the results of this evening’s experiments,” said one of Gouraud’s guests, the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan.
That astonishment aside, Sullivan also admitted that he was “terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever.” Many alive today would credit him with considerable prescience on that count. But he also understood that the phonograph would produce wonders, such as the recordings included in this video of such notables as four-time Prime Minister William Gladstone, Florence Nightingale, and Queen Victoria herself — at least according to the consensus of the scholars who’ve scrutinized the highly indistinct recording in question. Only long after Edison’s time would humanity develop a recording technology capable of being replayed again and again without degradation. But given our image of Victorians, perhaps it’s suitable that their voices should sound ghostly.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Burj Al Babas might have been constructed expressly to attract the attention of the internet. “Sitting near the Black Sea, the town is full of half-finished, fully abandoned mini castles — 587 of them to be exact,” write Architectural Digest’s Katherine McLaughlin and Jessica Cherner. Originally “planned as a luxurious, stately urban development offering the look of royal living for anyone willing to shell out anywhere from $370,000 to $500,000 for their own little palace,” it now stands as an unfinished ghost town. And though the project only broke ground a decade ago, it’s already settled into a veritably eerie — and highly photographable — state of decay.
This, of course, more than suits the sensibilities of an adventure-oriented YouTube channel like Fearless & Far. Its exploration of Burj Al Babas — one of severalsuchvideos currently available — offers on-the-ground views of what we can only call the town’s ruins. “This fantasy paradise land didn’t sell,” says its host. “Some blame the Turkish real estate crisis; some blame the kitschiness of it all. It’s all so strange. It’s all so fake.”
Indeed, write McLaughlin and Cherner, “as building the town got underway, locals became enraged with both the aesthetic of the homes and the business practices of the developers,” who subsequently declared bankruptcy, leaving the development in limbo.
Those who know their Middle Eastern languages will recognize the very name Burj Al Babas as a “nonsensical mashup of Arabic and Turkish,” as Ruth Michaelson and Beril Eski put it in an in-depth Guardian piece last month. Though located in Turkey, with an intent to take advantage of local hot springs, it was financed with money from Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Since its construction “abruptly stopped in 2016, the project has become a bizarre white elephant,” causing scandal, lawsuits, an attempted suicide, “and even a minor diplomatic incident between Turkey and Kuwait.” Anyone who’s seen Burj Al Babas up-close will have their doubts about its prospects for completion — but if they’ve got a YouTube channel of their own, they’ll hardly want demolition to start before they can pay it a visit themselves.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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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